#and 2) it's only now im seeing a pattern and earlier cases might have just seemed like one offs

[hella1975]

i love how i started taking the pill bc my periods were so bad physically and the pill just went 'no more cramps! mentally we're putting you in a blender tho'

[unironicduncanstan]

the “Tangodeltaindia” blog explained,

aka my brain has cringe spots on it and needs to be inspected by the FDA

hi my names randi/uni and i created a total drama island themed ARG two months ago on a whim that almost no one interacted with bc i started off way too niche and difficult, so i kinda just went increasingly off the rails because i knew most likely no one was monitoring my posts and i could just make a real cursed hidden tomb that could one day be discovered by someone in a goonies esque unveiling. but then i got lice and now im sad and uncomfortable so i’m just gonna explain the entire damn thing in one shot. its absolutely batshit and theres a reason no one uncovered it ok here we go;;;

first of all the name. its so stupid but. ‘tango delta india’ = ‘tdi’ in the NATO phonetic alphabet. it just felt like a funny place to start that implies its gonna be a puzzle blog idk,

moving on to the actual content tho; some of the earlier posts mean p much nothing and were just an attempt to draw people in, such as the mr coconut ‘like if you agree’ or the ‘let him inside hes cold’ posts. 

then theres the cipher (x). it was posted shortly after the height of the ‘using total drama reference pictures to make an alphabet’ meme. in case anybody didnt see that; for a while it was a joke in the fandom to take the transparent references of total drama characters, and line them up, using them like hieroglyphics to make translatable pictures. its supposed to correspond to the alphabet, based on the first letter of their first name. an example could be, alejandro = a, bridgette = b, and so on. there was no solidly set alphabet amongst the fandom though, it was self explanatory most of the time so i made my own solid personal cipher key for that blog to make the whole thing easier.

NOW ONTO THE FIRST PUZZLE POST,,,, (x). theres a scene, a string of text, the cipher key, and a link to a decoder. the way to decode it all is to plug the characters on screen into the tangodeltaindia cipher key, and then plug That translation into the decoder website, and then finally paste in the text under the photo. 

the website linked is to a Caesar cipher decoder. the Caesar cipher is just a code where the alphabet is assigned to numbers (a=1, z=26), and to encode something with it you can move this pattern however you want as long as you keep the regular sequence of alphabet and numbers. so you could scootch over One letter, and “abc” would now say “bcd”. so on and so forth.

looking at the scene + my own total drama reference cipher, alejandro = A, and the beaver = 1, which gives A1. so you could now follow the link to the website, press ‘decode’, and paste in the text under the picture. the ‘shift’ in the middle is automatically set to ‘7′, or as it shows, a -> h, meaning ‘a’ has been moved over by 7 letters. so if you set the shift to just 1 over, or A1, now you can translate the text. it reads;

“lets start simple. after all, a trail of breadcrumbs begins with a loaf. whats the harm in another long winded fandom meme. another inside joke. and arent you curious whats truly lurking inside?”

edgy! simple! kinda just a test to see if people would do it or not. which they didnt so of course i tried to make it weirder-

puzzle 2; (x) using the exact same translation rules as above. we have alejandro and the snake, which with the tangodeltaindia cipher key means A6. going to the website, putting it in ‘decode’ mode, pasting in your text, and setting the shift to ‘6′ gives you this translation.

“in his eyes are an island. nothing but a dream, born out of going to bed angry. sink or swim.”

this was just hinting around at where the story was gonna go so it’ll make more sense later. something else to note; if you zoom all the way in and look into alejandros eye (’in his eyes’), you’ll see the word ‘Thera’. ~thats a surprise tool that will help us later~

so after this one, there are two non-puzzle posts that are also just hints (i was just tryna see if i could get people hyped), the first is a close up picture of chris with red eyes that simply says “those arent his eyes”, and then a post that says “his real names not chris :)”, they’re again referencing his eyes, and this time further implying theres something fake or wrong about them, or with chris as a person. again, it’ll be explained better later on.

moving on to puzzle 3 (x), another test to see if anyones keeping up (which also failed josdfjsdfkjs), using the same translation rules, dj = a dash or minus, and the snail = 5, “-5″, shift the letter ‘A’ BACK five instead of forward, and you get the simple translation of; “getting harder now.”

puzzle 4 and 5; at this point, there are two images posted within hours of each other that i’ll explain together as they line up. (x) (x)

These are some of the only ones that can be translated from just the tangodeltaindia key directly. They end up a string of numbers, which are latitude and longitude coordinates. The first post, labelled “the lie”, translates into “45.57394802102744, -81.46817207492494″. googling that will take you to maps and show you to a place called Lonely Island in Canada.

The second one, “the truth”, translates into “36.404663113177534, 25.39605673375295″, taking you to Santorini, Greece.

This is where the hints got really out there bc i realized nobody was following along but i still wanted to paint a picture. so this is the set up;;; the idea that the ‘island’ (camp wawanakwa) existing somewhere in canada, is a lie. the ‘true’ location being santorini isnt meant to be taken at face value though. the mythology behind santorini is that a man impregnated a goddess and to escape the wrath of her father (triton), she formed the island (santorini) by having her lover throw clay into the sea, and then she gave birth to her son, Theras, on this island, giving the island it’s Other nickname, Thera.

this is again just a vague implication that the island might not be real at all, or that it was formed through cosmic means.

the next two posts are more non-puzzle hints, the first showing the definition of the word ‘fresh’ (new), and the second being images of total drama backgrounds with no characters and the text reading “they were always empty.” more, admittedly very outlandish implications that the island is some kind of illusion, but again mostly just another try to drag people into the blog.

puzzle 6. (x) this one introduces a new concept to the regular translation rules, some of the characters are laying down. its kinda supposed to imply they’re “dead” and that you need to take their corresponding letters out of the alphabet given on the Caesar cipher page, below the shift. The upright characters translate to “-9″, so you shift ‘A’ back 9 letters. Then remove the letters; “TH-E-R-A-S”, and with those letters taken out, you can finally translate the text.

“he creates life solely to destroy it. to crush it in his hands. he births chaos so that he may have something to control. the power has given him madness. the isolation, arrogance. don't try to stop him, he's already chosen to be unstoppable. his mind is a perfectly crafted prison, one we will all soon be living in.”

this is where the story gets more on the nose. it’s talking about chris, and about him being an unstoppable cosmic force, a diety who can create worlds within his own mind, and he does so maliciously just for power. hes created the campers through mental energy just to torment them. it also hints that his plan is to expand the world of total drama island and engulf the whole universe.

puzzle 7. (x) same as the last puzzle. beaver and moose translate to ‘1-0′ or ten. the characters lying down to remove from the caesar cipher alphabet are “T-U-L-P-A”. this doesnt have anything to do with the modern way some ppl interact with tulpas but just the actual idea of creating thoughtforms, or willing your thoughts into real life creations, referencing how chris has created the entire island and everyone on it solely through his mind. with those letters removed and the shift set forward 10, you get this:

“his psychic power is unfathomable. the reality he bore was just a passing thought. an idea that became so dangerous. he predates the idea of a mind, the minds own ability to recognize itself, his synapses are paradoxically ancient. the island exists only within himself, to torment the souls hes created, and damned from the start. will they ever be free?”

it states that chris is more than a man or even just a diety, hes an all powerful god already, yet he craves more power. the final line, “will they ever be free” is in reference to the campers, which segways into the next arc;;; freeing the campers from chris’ psychic island imprisonment.

puzzle 8. (x) to solve this one you have to translate the top image with the tangodeltaindia cipher key, and add it to the text given, which creates a link. this leads to a PDF, a page from a book written by terence mckenna. he’s a famous ethnobotanist known best for his studies on DMT, the strongest hallucinogenic drug in the world, its also known as the spirit molecule. many people on this drug (without any prior knowledge of this phenomenon) will recount meeting strange fractal beings that can create things in the universe just by speaking them into existence, theyve come to be known as ‘machine elves’, a term coined by mckenna. ill show the most important excerpt from the page;

this is less about the psychedelic drug part and more about the words and ideas, like “punching a hole through a dimension so it pours through” and “if god didnt exist man would invent him”. its more worldbuilding towards chris’ power and cosmic abilities

then come 2 more clues. a picture of chris holding his own body captioned ‘ego death’, and the meaning behind the name ‘chris mcclean’. the latter is another “please look over here” post, but the first is another minor reference to the previous puzzles answer involving DMT and terence mckenna. ‘ego death’ is a term again used with strong psychedelic drugs, its the sensation that your spirit as you know it is literally Dying, and you are instead connected to and a part of everything around you. another reference to chris’ power and how he may look like a man but his body and spirit are connected to the world hes built in unfathomable ways. at this point im cementing the idea that chris mclean is not a mortal man and cannot be fought with mortal weapons

puzzle 9. (x) this one was an attempt to make easier to solve puzzles, and comes with a visual of chris looming over the island. the text is in wingdings, which can be translated through multiple websites found through google. it says;

“s︎o︎o︎n︎ h︎e︎ w︎i︎l︎l︎ s︎l︎e︎e︎p.︎ h︎e︎ w︎i︎l︎l︎ d︎r︎e︎a︎m︎ a︎ n︎e︎w︎ h︎e︎l︎l︎,︎ a︎n︎d︎ t︎h︎a︎t︎ w︎i︎l︎l︎ b︎e︎ o︎u︎r︎ o︎n︎l︎y︎ c︎h︎a︎n︎c︎e︎,︎ t︎o︎ s︎a︎v︎e︎ h︎i︎s︎ c︎r︎e︎a︎t︎i︎o︎n︎s︎,︎ a︎n︎d︎ f︎r︎e︎e︎ t︎h︎o︎s︎e︎ w︎h︎o︎ w︎e︎r︎e︎ n︎e︎v︎e︎r︎ d︎e︎s︎i︎g︎n︎e︎d︎ t︎o︎ b︎e︎ f︎r︎e︎e︎.︎ t︎h︎i︎s︎ m︎a︎y︎ c︎o︎m︎e︎ a︎t︎ a︎ c︎o︎s︎t︎.︎ t︎h︎e︎ n︎i︎g︎h︎t︎m︎a︎r︎e︎ m︎u︎s︎t︎ e︎n︎d︎,︎ t︎h︎e︎ o︎u︎r︎o︎b︎o︎r︎o︎s︎ o︎f︎ h︎i︎s︎ s︎y︎n︎c︎o︎pe︎ m︎u︎s︎t︎ c︎l︎o︎s︎e︎,︎ b︎u︎t︎ i︎t︎ m︎a︎y︎ t︎u︎r︎n︎ o︎u︎r︎ e︎f︎f︎o︎r︎t︎s︎ o︎f︎ s︎a︎l︎v︎a︎t︎i︎o︎n︎ t︎o︎ d︎u︎s︎t︎.︎ o︎u︎r︎ f︎i︎g︎h︎t︎ m︎i︎g︎h︎t︎ e︎n︎d︎ i︎n︎ s︎a︎c︎r︎i︎f︎i︎c︎e︎,︎ r︎e︎n︎d︎e︎r︎i︎n︎g︎ h︎i︎s︎ l︎a︎s︎t︎ i︎n︎v︎e︎n︎t︎i︎o︎n︎ b︎u︎t︎ a︎ c︎e︎a︎s︎e︎l︎e︎s︎s︎ v︎o︎i︎d︎.︎ w︎e︎ m︎a︎y︎ s︎e︎e︎ h︎o︎r︎r︎o︎r︎s︎ t︎h︎a︎t︎ c︎a︎u︎s︎e︎ t︎h︎e︎ s︎t︎a︎r︎s︎ t︎o︎ s︎h︎u︎d︎d︎e︎r︎,︎ b︎u︎t︎ w︎e︎ m︎u︎s︎t︎ t︎a︎ke︎ t︎h︎i︎s︎ c︎h︎a︎n︎c︎e︎.︎ w︎e︎ h︎a︎v︎e︎ n︎o︎t︎h︎i︎n︎g︎ t︎o︎ l︎o︎s︎e︎,︎ a︎n︎d︎ a︎ w︎o︎r︎l︎d︎ o︎f︎ n︎o︎t︎h︎i︎n︎g︎n︎e︎s︎s︎ t︎o︎ e︎n︎d︎.︎ m︎a︎y︎ t︎h︎e︎ s︎e︎a︎ s︎w︎a︎l︎l︎o︎w︎ u︎p h︎i︎s︎ i︎s︎l︎a︎n︎d︎ o︎f︎ l︎i︎e︎s︎.︎ g︎o︎d︎ pr︎o︎t︎e︎c︎t︎ y︎o︎u︎.︎”

this is essentially saying that the island, the campers, werent all just created from his mind, but from his dreams. this confirms that he Sleeps, and claims hes going to sleep again soon, and during that time period theres a chance to kill him before he can dream up another world (or season) to control and torment. its also saying that theres a chance killing him will destroy the island and campers, but that its the only choice we would have to end the cycle. hey guys i am so bored and over the years i have been on every stimulant and anti depressant doctors are legally allowed to prescribe and its still just not quite there yet huh

puzzle 10. (x) the video, the title translates to “the island of his eye”. its just meant to encapsulate everything ive already been hinting around at but with real footage and some audios taken from the show, and again, it was me tryna make some lore that was easy to digest and also terrifying to an audience with no other context. the final images are the only new clues, if you pause fast enough you can barely make out the characters that (paired with the tangodeltaindia cipher key) would say “set them free”, and you can also see an aerial view of what is actually called “the eye of argentina”. it is a real island that rotates atop a swamp, it is geometrically perfect and no one really knows for sure why it rotates the way it does or how it was formed. this clue is simply related back to the idea that the island of wawanakwa’s location is not in canada, and that it does not function like a normal island.

puzzle 11. (x) what td blog is complete without a uquiz? anyways, it doesnt matter how you answer the quiz, theres only one possible result. the title is a link to a mega file, which is protected with a decryption key. the image attached to the result, when deciphered, is the randomly generated key to the unlock the file. the image you see from the file is this; (TW for mentions of self harm and eye trauma)

in case this is too hard to read ill transcribe what it says;

“How to escape the dream - accept that there is no dream to escape, and no you to escape it. - believe in it anyways. - sleep on your back. - cover your eyes. - hide a nail under the pillow. - wait for the ringing. - when you first see him, dont call his name. dont speak. - keep your eyes shut. - on the second night, ask where the camp is. he wont respond verbally. - on the third night, you’ll see his eyes. - on the fourth night, you’ll enter them. - you can’t turn back after the fifth night. - don’t try to hide your fears. he knows them before you arrive. - don’t shut your eyes for too long when it becomes too much. you risk losing them. - find chris mclean. - don’t stop till the nail is through the socket. - repeat on the other side. - repeat on yourself. - congratulations. they are free”

this is, believe it or not, an idea that comes from my very own sleep paralysis experiences. ive dealt with it a lot, so why not make a weird ritual thing for an arg based off it ig. so whenever i’d fall asleep on my back, i’d eventually hear this ringing in my ears (or it’d happen upon waking up), and then the sleep paralysis would begin. i only ‘saw’ stuff a couple times but the fear for me was really more about the overwhelming sensation of pure dread that always came along with it even when i was aware what was happening, and i Always got this feeling too that if i opened my eyes in that moment, something was gonna stab them.

so moving on to how that applies to the arg, the first few lines are about how, obviously, the island is not real, even in the lore being given its a figment of chris’ imagination, but you have to enter it anyways, and the only way to do that is to believe its real. then it tells you how to ‘enter’ that world, (btw i didn’t expect anyone to actually follow these instructions if found, but even if they did, the whole ‘sleep paralysis being caused by sleeping on your back’ thing usually only happens if you’re predisposed to having it and only happens to Some people who have it, so the intent was like. never to bring that upon anybody. but if you are prone to sleep paralysis plz do not attempt even as a joke or anything thx)

the parts about hallucinating chris then are as follows, “ask about the camp / he wont respond verbally” , meaning he will show you through a dream instead, one that might look a lot like the video from before. “on the third night you will see his eyes”, meaning you will see the island but not be able to interact with it, or basically, how we see total drama on tv right now. “on the fourth night you’ll enter (his eyes)” references the island existing ‘within his eyes’, meaning you will enter the actual island. the next night chris will sleep and you will be able to enter the island again and find him. the idea with the nail is that, if you destroy his eyes you destroy the ‘island’ within them. wrapping back around to sleep paralysis, the idea of stabbing yourself with the nail afterwards is because sometimes, the only thing you can move during sleep paralysis is your fingertips and toes, and wiggling those can help bring you out of the paralysis. so at first how i used to wake myself up, but it didnt usually work fast enough so oftentimes id just pinch the shit out of my fingers and use pain to make my muscles start up faster.

the next post is a link to a countdown. again, i knew nobody was rly following at this point, but i wanted a little more build up before just dropping the ending. it was set up to end 5 days after the last post, aka the one that mentioned a 5 night dream ritual.

puzzle 12. (x) going all the way back to the normal multi step translation puzzles. the coloring of the cipher is a bit different, and its missing chris, but its meant to be used the same as it was before, these changes are only for dramatic effect. and chris is gone because well. we mentally offed him in the inception dream land last time. so anyways the snake = 6, shift A to 6, take out the letters “R-I-C-K” of the characters laying in their graves, and you get this translation;

“its almost time. we must now crack open our minds like a crowbar to a sealed chest. like an egg to a pan. to find our way into camp wawanakwa our ego cannot remain intact, and to traverse it we must stay strong. to escape it, we must glue the pieces back together. now we sleep. dream. end the nightmare.”

this is a final message before ‘entering the island’ to kill chris and free the campers from the island. it acts like a pep talk.

the next post is just the countdown ending.

puzzle 13 (the finale). (x)

this post sends you to a new blog entirely, called @awakenfromthenightmare​. there is only one post on it. the post has another link to a mega file, and the link is attached onto a string of text. follow the link by clicking, then copy the text and paste it in as the decryption key. now you have another image to translate with the tangodeltaindia cipher;

when translated, the text is another link to a youtube video. 

 www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

so there you have it, that video is the ending to the entire arg. it didnt really end the way i wanted at first, i got burnt out from no engagement about halfway through which isnt anybody elses fault, but i still felt this was a well crafted and fitting finale. thank you all for reading.

[botanyshitposts]

pls explain the news in laymans terms 😭

okay lads buckle up, this is gonna be a long one. the paper is “A phylogenomic analysis of Nepenthes (Nepenthaceae)” from Murphy et al. i’m gonna link it here, and i encourage anyone interested to read it for themselves and draw their own conclusions, but otherwise i’m gonna give an overview as i understand it.

if you do not want to see 394023 words of in-depth carnivorous plant genetics content you should start scrolling now. 

so. Nepenthes is a carnivorous plant family colloquially known as ‘asian pitcher plants’ or ‘monkey cups’. it’s one of the largest carnivorous plant families in the world, and without a doubt one of the most diverse, but we’ll get to that in a minute. these plants have pitchers that fill with fluid and digest bugs alive (important note in terms of nep anatomy 101: unlike venus fly traps or sundews, Nepenthes are passive traps and don’t move or curl up or anything, just sit and watch it all unfold). their range has china and korea on the northern edge, the tip of australia on the southern edge, and most of indonesia, the philippines, and most associated landmasses encompassed between. there are a couple outliers, but for the most part these are jungle plants with a vining growth form that weaves through trees and just….eats. 

now, putting aside the fact that they’re carnivorous, one of the biggest points of Nepenthes is their diversity as a family. if anyone out there remembers the term ‘adaptive radiation’ from an intro bio class, Nepenthes is THE family of adaptive radiation. in addition to common species that grow everywhere in their range, these lads can be so specialized that there are species you can only find on single specific ridges on single specific mountains on single specific islands; as you can imagine, this makes them especially vulnerable to climate change, habitat destruction, and poachers. 

the most obvious point of diversity here is the pitcher traps themselves: there are hundreds of different pitcher morphologies, ranging from special peristome adaptations to bizzare patterns and colorations to the addition of fang-like structures and symbiosis with bats, ants, and rodents. the list goes on. these lads are so specialized it’s unbelievable. one might think that, in terms of figuring out how these different species are related to each other, that it would be pretty obvious, since everything is so distinctive. 

but there is a problem. 

they fuck. 

Nepenthes as a family is established to be one of the oldest carnivorous plant families, but the 200+ species identified over the years are suspected to be the result of very recent (in evolutionary time) modern radiation. one of the most common definitions of what a ‘species’ is that i see circulated is the idea that something is a species when it can no longer breed with another species, but it’s important to realize that this is one definition of what a ‘species’ is. in the case of Nepenthes, the knowledge that a bunch of scientists have decided they are different does not stop them. 

it was hoped, with the advent of DNA testing, that maybe we would be able to assemble a semi-full map of how all these species relate to one another and how they came to be (a phylogenetic tree), but as it turns out the lads fuck so much between themselves and other Nepenthes species that figuring out how they became the species they became, even with DNA, is extremely difficult. ‘breeding complexes’ not too different than what i wrote about in the fern sex triangle post a while back are a very nepenthes-esque thing to have happen.

a quote from the paper: 

“These uncertainties are not unique to Nepenthes but various factors make them important in this group: the frequency of natural hybrids and apparent lack of intrinsic reproductive barriers between taxa, the extent of intraspecific morphological variation and the reliance by taxonomists on the pitchers.”

in short, these plants have no control. they are not practicing safe sex. they are living lavishly in their own tropical jungle paradise with as much hedonism as a plant can muster as botanists try to connect how one pitcher might be the evolutionary origin of another while somehow all the pitchers are either functionally the same or radically different. 

which brings us to this study. when people compare DNA, they’re rarely comparing the entire genome (although that can be done), but rather they identify a set of consistently mutable genes that are present across an entire subsection of life, and look at just those genes at just their locations on various chromosomes. instead of trying to find a couple genes fit to compare plants across the Nepenthes genus, as past studies did, this study took and applied a set of DNA probes developed previously to compare 353 genes present across the entire subkingdom of flowering plants. 

as you can imagine, this provides a significantly larger set of data to work with. sure, it’s not perfect and this take will need more research to confirm (basing the entire Nepenthes phylogenetic tree off of a single study is a dangerous game, especially when things are so saucy in the forest), but it’s significantly better than the results past Nepenthes phylogenetic analyses generated, where researchers were able to see some general outlines and attempted to sort the genus into a few groups, but were ultimately unable to see where species themselves split and what their relations to each other were (you know, because of all the sex). 

so. this paper: 

-obtained samples from 151 different Nepenthes species from different collectors, herbariums, and conservatories. for those familiar with Nepenthes as a hobby, Andreas Wistuba might ring a bell; he contributed some samples from his plants to this study. otherwise, the KEW botanical gardens is more ubiquitously recognized donor.

-for more common species, more samples were taken from different places to account for different populations.

-another quote from the paper that i think is interesting on multiple levels: “We also include two unpublished species, N. sp. Anipahan and N. sp. taminii. The former, from Palawan, is discussed by McPherson (2011) and may be a synonym of N. leonardoi. The latter is an undescribed species from Sumatra that has been circulating amongst Nepenthes growers and resembles N. rhombicaulis but is perhaps distinguished by its leaves. Also sampled here are N. echinostoma Hook. f., a commonly collected plant usually considered a variant of N. mirabilis, and a sample we liken to N. angustifolia Mast., a species usually considered synonymous with N. gracilis.”

i mentioned earlier that previous molecular analyses done by other people were able to see a general outline but weren’t able to see anything more distinct; the results of this paper for the most part confirm these general outlines, which means that if nothing else we have strong support for the relationship the entire Nepenthes family has to other, more closely related plant families, which the paper resolves in this tree: 

note that the above tree describes the family’s relation to various other families, followed by ‘Nepenthes clade 1′ and ‘Nepenthes clade 2′. these two clades contain most of the Nepenthes genus sampled; the six species shown in red, according to the results, are considered sister species to the entire rest of the genus, separate from those two clades.

now, what personally gets me the most excited here is the plant they confirmed as being the sister species to that subsection of sister species, effectively making it the outgroup to like, literally everything else: Nepenthes pervillei, from the republic of seychelles.

yeah. you know back at the beginning of this response when i said there were some exceptions to the Nepenthes habitat range? this would be one of those exceptions. the republic of seychelles is off the coast of africa, closer to madagascar than indonesia. to be fair, there are also Nepenthes along the eastern coast of madagascar, but because Nepenthes is so strongly geographically coordinated (this paper goes on to describe clades literally just named after the countries they’re in) this is pretty goddamn cool. this species got cut off in the middle of the ocean and now looks…….like a Nepenthes, but just off enough to be kind of weird (the biggest thing i realized just…staring at pictures of it is that it doesn’t seem to have wings down the front, which to be fair isn’t required of neps but makes it look super naked as a result). forbidden uncanny valley Nepenthes cast from the fuck zone. i love it.

the other main outgroup species (the sister species to all the ‘typical’ asian species, specifically, aka clades 1 and 2) they identified was Nepenthes danseri, which is native to waigeo island in indonesia (that’s in the fuck zone, for those keeping score at home) and, i would argue, has the same kind of thin-peristomed, simple-ribbed kind of look to it that pervillei has, but it definitely looks more traditionally Nepenthes-like.

now, with that, we really get into the meat of their results here. this is the full phylogenetic tree with all tested species laid out according to their results: 

i….have no idea if tumblr will let you zoom in on this pic so im just gonna write down some notes.

the color-coded names on the tree to the right match their respective habitats down in the map on the bottom left, which is neat, but it’s also interesting to see how some of these species have apparently been fucking between islands. i know this is gonna be low-res but look at this swath at the top, some of what they’ve identified as being ‘clade 1′ (mostly common, widespread lowland species):

- man………. i mean, first of all i wanna point out the lone bicalcarata branches at the top #representing, having somehow maintained their chastity despite being the sexiest of the Nepenthes. 

- hookeriana being the outgroup for ampullaria seems to fit well by adorable chubbiness factor alone. 

- one thing that seems weird but not totally out of character is that halfway down in yellow we see mirabilis in multiple populations in yellow, then down from there a little ways we see different mirabilis populations in green and purple and red, all but N. echinostoma and N. orbiculate, which are both outgroups. i knew it was a common species, but for some reason i wasn’t expecting it to be like………that (there’s an entire second section of them in red just below where this screenshot cuts off). like, good for them.

going down the main tree, we get into clade 2, the more specialized highland species, which are always very exciting. 

there’s my personal favorite, N. villosa: 

not surprised at N. edwardsiana’s relation, because how else would you be able to achieve such absolutely enormous teeth, but N. macrophylla surprises me. it’s got good teeth, but both edwardsiana and villosa are like, TEETH, you know? i guess it makes sense that it split from villosa, though. 

moving from that, VERY glad that the littlest known lad, N. argentii, made it on here. i know i’ve talked about argentii on this blog before, as the Nepenthes species that was so tiny the paper describing it’s discovery warned that population counts could be skewed by the plants ‘hiding under bushes’. their tinyness, which kills me every time i look at an image of them, is somehow weird in terms of being related to N. graciliflora, which is…..pretty normal sized. same with N. armin. makes me wonder how the hell they got so tiny. 

of course we can’t leave out the group with the largest currently known species, N. attenboroughii. the hilarity of the smallest and largest Nepenthes species being a single clade apart, if not very distantly diversified down their respective evolutionary lines, is not lost on me. 

N. palawanensis is a chonker, but i gotta say i wasn’t expecting it to be the sister species to the one and only megachonker, the plant literally famous for its sheer chonk. imagine being that overshadowed by your sibling. 

on a more general note– the paper noted this, too –it’s interesting to see how the lowland species seem to be happier about jumping islands and being promiscuous than the highland species, which seem to clump together by location. i guess it’s not surprising, knowing how specialized some of these highland species can be; villosa, for example, is native to a single side of a single mountain, and is positioned so that the populations are hit by cool wind coming up from the sea. still, lowland species need hot and humid environments, and can be just as picky. it’s gotta be a matter of isolation. 

anyway, there’s probably more i could talk about here but…man there’s a lot of data. the paper goes in-depth with how they constructed the more problematic branches, and trouble they had with some over others, confirming that we shouldn’t take this phylogenetic tree as 100% correct; things will almost certainly change or become clearer as more research is done, and phylogenetic trees in particular are known for being constructed and reconstructed time and time again. 

still though, it’s like…to see these relationships at this resolution for the first time is just really fucking cool, man. this isn’t even all the species. i remember i went to a carnivorous plant conference two years ago now, and there was a lecture by researchers attempting to untangle the phylogeny of Nepenthes and coming up short aside from a low-resolution tree of some of the more major species and the relation of Nepenthes to other families, their science blocked by the sheer feral chadness on display in the tropical jungles encompassing the land between china and australia. like, i really just want to take a moment, as an end note, to appreciate that these plants fucked so much in the past couple million years that it took multiple major advancements in technology and the examination of hundreds of genes just to get an approximate look at the phylogeny. like, that’s an Isoetes level power move and im not over it

[bladekindeyewear]

HS^2 bloggin’ mainline 2020-03-12

I have been told only a few things about the upd8 that just landed, over Discord by two people:

upd19 feat. 4,901,157 read it. now. note: the featuring note is accurate if in a different base than what you might be expecting

What the fuck does that even mean.

Okay Pretty good chapter.

...from another friend who VERY dislikes HS^2?  Oh shit.

I also glimpsed a post that may or may not have been about Homestuck at all at the top of my Tumblr feed for an instant that said “YES YES YES YES YES” in huge bold print.  I have no idea whether to be excited or nervous.

Okay, it’s not a Bonus update... let me comb through from an earlier page to be careful not to get a spoilerlook at the pagecount...

...huh.  That seems... like a conversation that would be up my alley, but not necessarily unique so far or worth all this crowing about.  I thought we were about to get Dirk-aliens with a full Horschestra backing... are we getting something else?

> CHAPTER 6. A Conversation Regarding Relevance

Hmmmmmmmm.  With the contrast between their reactions and this ominous buildup, there’s got to be a serious fun-twist coming.  Right?  --I’ll stop with that talk for the moment though.

space is vast. an unproductive statement, almost a tautology. [...]

Alright, that and the starry background are riffing the fuck off Star Trek.  Nice homage to Andrew’s roots.

the lives of the many are far too volatile and instinct-driven

Alt!Callie what the fuck are you doing.  This is intentional now.  You can’t play this off as “what’s a Star Trek”.

tautologies are, in general, reserved for stories. for narrative device. for finding new and inventive ways to tell an audience that which they already know.

God damnit she’s still doing it

neither of us ever able to convince the other of the righteousness of our stance. we were never meant to agree. it isn’t in our blood.

Blah blah overanalyzing classpect blah

when they scoff at my tautology ‘space is vast’, what do they really know? nothing. as far as any of them have experienced, space does not exist.

It’s still nice to see some real personality leak through on Alt!Callie.  We definitely know from her other self that she can develop quite a relatable and colorful one.  Have the years helped?

> ==>

dramantic pouse... ........

Also,

-look at that collar.  Damn, Callie, that is a collar

very few have stood and looked into the abyss, the true gulf of nothingness that spreads out around the single point of consciousness adrift in a constellation. all the combined weight of sentient endeavour would quail underneath that sheer, irresistible truth. the realization that they are so small, that the universe cares about their puny lives so very little. sitting in the glowing light of the stars this becomes even more apparent

In the official aspect quiz I never took the time to analyze, the aspects were put on a wheel where Space was a neighbor to Void, if I recall correctly.  I wonder how much those aspects engender feelings of goddamnit I’m doing it again aren’t I

...

are we out of orange juice?

Yesss let more personality Alt!Callie bleed through, more of it~

Wait, does Alt!Callie even taste through Jade?  Isn’t this remote control?  Is she vicariously drawing pleasure from Jade’s not-just-meat-or-candy mostly-human taste buds or?

> ==>

JADE: are you talking to me? JADE: because if you are i would like to remind you that i hate!! orange juice!!

OH FUCK YES!!! SHE’S IN THERE AND AWAKE!!! SHE STILL HAS AT LEAST ENOUGH AGENCY TO BE PRESENT AND ARGUE WITH CALLIE! YESSSSSS

no you don’t.

JADE: well i guess i never really had a strong opinion on it before JADE: but now i cant stand it!! JADE: its all you drink!

i like the pulp.

QUIT INADVERTANTLY FORCING SHIT ON JADE WITH NARRATIVESPEAK GIVE HER A BIT OF LEEWAY ALT!CALLIE YOU CONTROLLING--

JADE: its my body and i dont want orange juice! JADE: i hate pulp, and i didnt just make that up to spite you JADE: who wants strings in their juice?

i do.

JADE: ughhhhhhhhh

I have had friends hopefully fantasize about and/or therapeutically roleplay this exact situation with Jade breaking through and arguing with Alt!Callie’s control to make this all a fair bit more palatable but I didn’t dare to hope we’d get even THIS much

Maybe the HS^2 authors DO care about not leaving us wallowing in hopeless witness to the characters’ constant torture and existential turbosuffering!!!! :#D

i realize that jade’s situation is less than ideal from a characterization perspective, but i still politely point out that nobody likes a whiner.

Fuck you, this isn’t CALIBORN you’re trying to repress you asshole!  Leave Jade some AGENCY!!!!!  She deserves it!!

JADE: fuck you rude calliope inside my head!

YES EXACTLY

JADE: why dont you try being possessed by the spirit of some other version of a good friend of yours, and floated around a spaceship full of people you love JADE: unable to affect anything or say hello to anyone! JADE: then tell me about whiners!

i killed my brother and consumed him.

JADE: sounds like a you problem

Compromise and give her some agency finally come on compromise and give her some agency you red-text twatwaffle

i suggest to the witch that i have spent untold eons in the void between universes, waiting for the moment i would be needed to prevent the dissipation of reality as we know it. her appeals to emotion will not help her. i will remain unmoved.

Oh god damnit.

JADE: well i had to watch my boyfriend and my brother die in front of me on a tiny scaled version of a world that i shrunk for them! JADE: and then spend the next three years talking to myself, wracked with guilt that id killed them!

Oh. God. Damnit.  This had better not be where the Suicide trigger warning was coming from.  Are there going to be any characters left who DIDN’T emerge from this mess feeling suicidal?!?  (I mean if there were any understandable case it would be three years alone on the golden ship Jade but-- I mean COME ON, we have to discuss that in our FIRST GLIMPSE at her since the epilogues?!?)

> ==>

i remind the witch that my time was in the void, which is far darker and lonelier [...]

Oh fuck you don’t compare suffering as an excuse to COMPLETELY body-enslave and squash the agency of someone when you probably don’t have to.  You’re just doing what’s COMFORTABLE alt!Callie admit it.  There’s a way you could give her some leeway, I’m almost positive.

JADE: even if i had the powers of a first guardian, my brain still worked in modules of human pattern recognition! JADE: three years is a long time for a human teenager, i dont care how many of her molecules are made of a god!

(i love it when jade talks smart, that bit of the epilogues was a treat too, plz reveal more of the big brain on jade)

It seems Jade can’t see or quite understand the full import of there being a “narrative”.  Or THINKS she cant, because she still says:

JADE: your voice is impossible to read and i cant see your face

If she’s “reading” alt!Callie’s remarks, that means she’s breaking through to understand the narrative to SOME extent.  She might be one of the ones who learns to do that a little more and better in the future, especially with alt!Callie almost unintentionally training her to see it.

> ==>

Oh, good.  So A!C’s not above being considerate.  That’s a step in the right direction.

> ==>

D’aww, Jade conceding and trying to empathize like her usual self.  I appreciate it.  :)  --but Alt!Callie’s definitely in the wrong here.

JADE: but i think it is a very natural thing to be silly when you are used to being able to control your own body, but now cant

i will allow that, yes.

Thanks.  Learn some damned reason.

jade smiles. dave and karkat will always be a source of pain for her, a low ache somewhere in her center of gravity, but she is happy for them. she knows that there is really no other alternative for how to be. they chose each other over her, and they always will. they are the two people who matter to her the most in every universe, and that will not change, no matter how much she wishes it would, no matter how--

JADE: do you actually know that?

pardon me?

Oh, shit.

JADE: do you actually know that im doomed to pine over dave and karkat across every iteration of reality? JADE: like, can you actually see that? JADE: because youre a space player, like i am. JADE: i know that you are more powerful than me, but i dont think you can see other timelines any better than i can JADE: so i think you are just being dramatic JADE: for the “audience”, whatever the heck that means

i experience a moment of unease as jade looks at me. keeping her out of my thoughts is proving to be more difficult than i had first assumed it would be.

That’s a damned interesting question.  I was giving the narrative the benefit of the doubt, but given everything the Epilogues warned us about when it came to the narrators and alt!Callie’s occasional slips into her own bias, I really should have known better.

i had begun confident that i could keep her consciousness sleeping peacefully inside the shell of her body, tamed and quiescent, but she has proved to be more irascible than i initially gave her credit for.

JADE: heheh JADE: i have never been particularly tamable, and my consciousness is huge!

This might end up playing out more like my friend’s Jade-breaks-out roleplays than I initially assumed.  (What does she mean “huge consciousness” though?  Superpowered due to part-First-Guardian, like she alluded earlier in the conversation?  That never got much play before, so it’s great to see that potential realized here a bit...)

> ==>

...I’m a fucking idiot.  Of COURSE “huge consciousness” and the whole line around it was just an unsubtle double-entendre.  A small part of me actually wondered if it was and dismissed it as a clumsy reading in an instant.  How stupid am I?  Jade is the best.

If only this sort of thing worked on Cherubs.

> ==>

Yeah.  It really doesn’t.

...Alt!Callie, you are a fucking war-criminal for bottling all these double-entendres up where none of the others can appreciate them.

> ==>

JADE: you are a pretty tough crowd, evil callie JADE: but yes, i can hear most of what you are thinking to yourself JADE: it took a little while to separate it from my own thoughts, just like it did with dirk JADE: because thats what he was doing the whole time, wasnt it? JADE: controlling our thoughts JADE: making us believe things we never would, things he thought we SHOULD believe

Fucking excellent.  She’s definitely training herself on this shit.  The more people who have a harder time getting fooled by this nonsense the better.

jade knows all of this, i don’t have to tell her. she is a very bright girl, and even if she didn’t have partial access to my thoughts, she is good at compiling data and using it to fill in gaps. as she herself had rather licentiously mentioned, her brain is quite large.

C:

and all of these reasons are why i know i can count on her to be reasonable and realistic about her situation. i need a body to continue interfacing with this timeline, and her body is the only one that will do.

Dammit.  Trying to get her to logic her way back into keeping Alt!Callie in complete control.  That’s a tactic that will probably work.  :(

what about [kanaya], jade? she is a space player, it is true, but her powers are nothing compared to yours. for one, she isn’t god tier, and for two, she is dead. a living dead, but dead nonetheless.

Hm.  Are you saying she maybe has less relevance, less of an effect on her surroundings because she spent some of her “cred” on unconventional partial resurrection?  To the extent where she’d make a less influential vessel?  Hmm.

For that to even matter, you have to be planning to use Jade’s Space powers too.  Taking a far more active role in things than narrative beacon.

and a sylph’s specializations lie on a different end of the spectrum from my own. a witch is a far closer match.

!!!!!

Sounds like details of the classpect system that we don’t know will have relevance in HS^2, and we’re indeed gonna possibly get some actual new, clearer details about the system Andrew invented unlike the dearth of new info the Epilogues brought us.  That is... promising.

no, jade understands and sympathizes with my assurance that her body, and her body alone, will do for my purposes.

JADE: um...no i dont!

YES.  Jade is now officially immune to absolute command! :D :D :D

she does. after all, she would not wish this sort of state of being on anyone else, and especially not on one of her friends. jade may have undergone a lopsided number of narrative hardships in her life, but at least she is used to them. why spread that suffering to another?

What the fucking shit???  You’re using that on her?  You think it’ll WORK?!

jade understands and accepts her place in the story, which has always been to enable events to play out around her, just as it has been mine.

..........yeah Jade’s gonna bust the fuck out on the very next page, isn’t she.

What the fuck is Alt!Callie thinking, here?  Wasn’t the other Calliope the one to let us know that the Witch is one of the most active classes there is??  ...what exactly does a Witch officially do anyway, for Alt!Callie to think saying such a thing wasn’t dead wrong?  This sounds MUCH more like the sort of statement someone might make after breezing through Homestuck and confusing the old Jade (cough) for the person she grew up into.

And the fact that you’re phrasing this as a narrative command to try and make her forcibly THINK this way deserves you a smack in the non-literal depictive face.  Let’s see if you get one:

> ==>

Oh wow, no smack yet?!  That’s some restraint!

because what is a story, truly? nothing but a series of misadventures and connections, actions spurring reactions, tumbling into one another, over and over and over. with so many competing interests, clearly the story cannot account for all perspectives, for all threads? it would be laughable, childish, even selfish, to demand that they do.

in other words, not everyone will achieve a happy ending. this is a truth that jade had come to grips with a long time ago.

JADE: wait. JADE: stop. JADE: why are you saying all of this?

Ohh.  Because she still had even MORE smackworthy stuff left to say, to make the smack even SMACKIER, didn’t she.  Alt!Callie you asshole.  If this gets you kicked out of her almost entirely and jeopardizes the crew as Jade struggles to combat Dirk’s narrative influence on her OWN, then I’m fucking blaming YOU!  Do you realize how horrible it’ll be if Dirk gets to almost singlehandedly write the whole story around her and the others for the first section of HS^2 with only one or two characters aware and trying to mentally avert it??  We already TRIED that in the Epilogues!  It was awful!

jade’s body is my vessel, and it is through this realization that she will understand her true role in the story. her true relevance.

Go fuck yourself, Alt!Callie.  Read the audience a bit!

if i released my hold on her consciousness, there would be no guarantee that i would be allowed in again. therefore i cannot permit her the control of herself that she so desperately craves, and she understands that.

THAT’S your reasoning your used-to-surpressing-Caliborn ignorant--!??

JADE: wait. so...you could give me my body back, and then just hop back in when you need to?

in theory, yes.

JADE: then what the hell callie!

because i don’t trust you to cooperate when the time comes.

MotherfuckerTheMusical.mp4

(or real existing equivalent that’s just off the top of my head)

JADE: why not? JADE: i thought you said i was a reasonable girl with a huge brain!

you are, to an extent.

she is. but the truth of the matter remains that humans are capricious and emotional. and even jade herself can admit that she hasn’t been the most...committed example of her species in the last few years.

Oh my fucking god.  I know they’re trying to make this more satisfying when she actually DOES take control in a few panels, but, Alt!Callie, seriously, get more on your other self’s level!!!

> ==>

Yes, please >:O some more

moving from lover to lover, job to job, interest to interest. over the last few years jade had found herself listless, unable to settle and unwilling to commit to anything or anyone. she knows there’s nothing wrong with that on a moral level, but on a personal level she’s always believed that she could be more, could do better. be better. and now, because of this, she realizes that sacrifices must be made.

and that she, as a space player, is uniquely built for sacrifice.

JADE: yeah JADE: i guess youre right JADE: i have been such a silly little slut! JADE: hey callie

yes, jade?

JADE: oh my god, whats that!!!!

You are so fucking screwed Alt!Callie.

this space is utterly under my control. jade could control it too, if she had any access to her own powers. but with my grip around her cortex, there is no chance of that.

(Wait, there’s an extent to which this space is “real” and not imaginary?  Or does holding her space powers in check also mean keeping her imaginary space powers in check?)

Anyway, here comes the smack.  And, though Alt!Callie deserves this, I hope Dirk isn’t let in too often amidst the others as a result.

> ==>

Yup, poising to pounce...

> ==>

I thought there was a weird infinity symbol underneath them but it’s just two spotlights and a shadow cast by her head.

and here i make my first mistake.

No you made your first mistakes WAAAY earlier in this conversation.  And what you did to Jade in general.  She’s a hero/player for a reason, she doesn’t take stuff lying down forever.

but bringing her into a place where we can both physically manifest has left me, foolishly, vulnerable.

First, physically manifest?  This isn’t pure imaginationspace?  And second, she’s going to blame her polite concession to Jade for this and hold on even tighter the next time, isn’t she.  God damnit, not looking forward to that.  Alt!Callie won’t learn her lesson til the end, will she?  :(

her fingers tear at my throat, trying to find purchase. she won’t be able to kill me here, but it is certainly unpleasant, and not to mention slightly repetitive. we just saw this in the previous chapter, although this particular fight will not end as amorously as the last one did. so don’t get your hopes up.

JADE: who! JADE: are you talking to!

I really hope Jade ends up with full narrative powerOOOOOHHHH FUCK THEY COULD GO FOR THAT HUH

Dirk was able to become an Ultimate Self in his own body because it was the uniting of an irrepressible “self” that he always unbreakably represented.  The others had more trouble.

But Jade

has a BIG PART-GOD BRAIN as reinforced in the narrative repeatedly!!

Meaning that later, SHE could Ultimate Self without ANY PHYSICAL CONSEQUENCE.  :D

I was hoping Jade would end up with full narrative-dictating-and-reading power when she wants to use it, at some point, but I might’ve been aiming too low! :D :D :D

Yaaaaaaaaaaaay

Now all the playfully-horny omnipotent Jade fanfics are true, what that totally isn’t part of why I love this go ahead and admit she doesn’t deserve it

> ==>

Yesss flashy gif struggle against control!  (Though, not as elegant as one of Andrew’s might’ve been. Gotta say.)

> ==>

Blinky-eyes about to resolve normal-Jade-colored....!

> ==>

Wait, what?  I thought Jade was about to snap in and--

during the ship’s trip through space, there have been numerous experiments; modifications to the nutrition output of the various machines designed to create sustenance for the various species on board. i myself have been content with orange juice and synthetic proteins, but dave and roxy have both expressed longing for various ‘earth snacks’, and so the trials and errors began.

What the fuck?  I don’t even know where this is going if it’s punways.

Is there like a dog treat somewhere that’s gonna push her over the edge?  Where is this headed even.

> ==>

Wh...

WHa??????

the results were mixed. as roxy told us in a previous chapter, alchemized food all sort of tastes the same, although the visuals really help to bring about the flavor. and at the end of the day, isn’t it the journey that is more important than the destination? the stories you tell as you create the strangely flavored nutritional paste?

JADE: ????????????

Um??  What’s even going on.

so far, everyone’s favorite attempt has been a vaguely peanut-butter and chocolate flavored creation called "Rices'". nobody eats them really. they just sit in a bowl on the counter.

i’m not actually sure what the witch is trying to accomplish here.

Is Jade trying to humorously gross Alt!Callie out of her body with a candy she doesn’t like or?  But, “suicide threat”? Why joke--

JADE: you dont? JADE: really?

i don’t know what she is trying to accomplish, because surely she would not be doing what it appears she is trying to do. making such a meaningless threat.

JADE: meaningless? JADE: do you even know anything about the body you stole? JADE: shouldnt you have run some sort of psychic physical before you possessed it? JADE: its definitely what i would have done!

Oh SHIT.  You mean Jade has the same peanut allergy JOHN does?!?

> ==>

jade must know that i am well-aware of her family-wide peanut allergy. a story thread that has been extremely important and weighed in on in multiple parts of the narrative. how could i have forgotten such a key detail?

...yes, she totally forgot, but more than that.

I’m betting John is the ONLY one with a peanut allergy.  That Jade is USING that fact to bluff like hell.  :D

(Allergies aren’t usually inherited that way you alien!)

there is nothing remotely just or heroic about dying from self-imposed anaphylactic shock in the throes of a childish tantrum. at the most i’ll get a relaxing few minutes of sleep.

Is Alt!Callie bluffing now?  Even a resurrecting death could throw her off.

> ==>

FUCK YES JADE.

JADE: do you really want to risk it?

what are you talking about, jade? i just said--

FUCK YES JADE, BE A HUGE WITCH

(i say in the most witch-connotatively and non-classpect-related way)

JADE: i dont know, callie JADE: ive never really understood the rules that govern the death of a god tier, have you? JADE: it seems pretty arbitrary from where im standing JADE: who makes the decision whether or not something is heroic or just?

...that’s unclear. but it certainly isn’t you.

JADE: right, of course not JADE: but are you so confident that youre a good guy? JADE: are you sure that the alpha timeline WANTS you to be here?

...what.

JADE: youve done some stuff, callie JADE: im only saying you shouldnt be so quick to assume that me killing you wouldnt be just JADE: and that taking my own life to do it wouldnt be heroic

Even with JUST this one fucking situation Alt!Callie put her in, throwing off her control forever by dying would be shortsighted but HELLA JUST.  What Alt!Callie is doing to her is a crime.

Oh shit!?!?

> [S] ==>

What is this, HTML5?  *clicks play*

...for a second, I thought this was gonna launch into a huge thing with that clock ticking song from the Felt album.

Having Rose and Dirk’s colors competing here really reinforces that... Prospit vs Derse vibe that was feeding the whole this-is-the-basis-for-the-game’s-structure-and-the-birth-of-Paradox-Space theory more earlier.

> ==>

i don’t let the witch manipulate me. i refuse to falter in the face of her whispers. without my careful planning and swift action, the prince would have taken full control over this timeline. none of my friends could even begin to imagine the turmoil.

In the end, you’re ignoring what’s right and brave in this instance to instead do something EXPEDIENT, to the exclusion of trust and compassion when things COULD work out just as well without taking the worst actions -- which is textbook villainous.

> ==>

JADE: they arent your friends!! JADE: you took them from me!

Now isn’t THAT a way to put it. :D :D :D

Alt!Callie is sinning almost as badly as Dirk, here.  Viewing everyone else as characters in a story, the only way she’s ever viewed “friends”, and her as the not-so-humble narrator doing what’s best for all of them.  If she’s going to win against Dirk -- or if that victory is going to MEAN anything -- she will HAVE to realize that she needs to be different.

JADE: you keep saying that youre doing all of this for my own good, but youre just lonely! JADE: i know you are, because so am i!

Ouch.

Will Alt!Callie force her to swallow it?

JADE: you said that being a space player is all about sacrifice JADE: well

> ==>

JADE: bet

...I guess she really might have an allergy.

> ==>

Aaaand the candy drops.  A W A K E ! ! ! !

Yaaaaay Jade is BACK and we’ll get to see even more of her!!!

...please tell me on the next page she grabs the candy, noms it, and mentions she doesn’t have a peanut allergy after all.  That would be sweet.

> ==>

...

Nope, you just leave us on a sad.  Dammit, why do you gotta be all adult and showin’ us both sides in a moment of triumph, HS^2.  Shucks.

Anyway, YAY JADE!  C:

I am happy by this, if slightly too emotionally-rollercoastered by the past 24-hours to give this the full-rejoicing it deserves.  That, and worried about the openings Dirk will get because of this... joy now for potential frustration later, even if Jade tries her best to let Alt!Callie back in in-time.

See y’all next time!  And, uhm.  I guess I’ll comment on whatever other asks I promised to comment on another less-eventful day.  Keep reminding me and holding me to it though!

[bobthebuilderhasallmyuwus]

RK900xGavin pt2!

owo what’s this? A new part has appeared! Hope you all enjoy this one as much as the last. And if you haven’t seen the last one, check it out here

time to change Fowler’s name lmao

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Date: September 3rd, 2038

Location: 920 Hardwood Ave

Time: 2:40 PM

He opens his eyes and soaks in the environment surrounding him. Up ahead is his partner, Gavin Reed. The detective seemed to be a very intractable person, but with some aggressive persuasion, he seems to have gotten him to work. They are currently at the front doorstep of the Campbell’s family residence. Detective reed if he can even refer to him by that title had insisted there was no reason to do so, as he had thoroughly checked the premises beforehand. But given the detective’s previous behavior. It was only natural he’d choose to double check. The house was of an early 1900 victorian style design, the people who lived here obviously enjoyed the luxuries of upper-class wealth. 

Finally, the door opened. He quickly scanned the face of the woman opening the door, Savannah Campbell, mother of Charlotte. She was shaking, her eyes red from dried tears. It had been a few weeks since Charlotte was first reported missing, it seems the toll it’s taken hasn’t gone away.

“Oh… its you…. Have you found her?” She says with a weary voice.

“No Ma’m, not yet” Gavin replies.

Savnanahs expression shifts from depressed to frustratred.

“Then why the hell are you even here.” She says sternly.

“Ah.” Gavin takes an unconscious step back. “Well… We’re here to investigate the house one last time, except this time I have…” He clears his throat to try and force the words out. “Cyberlife’s latest technology here to help with this case.”

Savannah glares at 900 then takes another look back at Gavin. She sighs and opens the door, beckoning them to come in. “As long as it finds her, whatever it takes, as long she’s safe.”

“Of course Ma’m we promise to be quick.”

900 finds himself slightly startled by Gavin’s behavior. He takes a mental note of his actions, so the detective has the capacity to behave after-all. 

His gaze carefully swept past the layout of the house. As expected, it was one of decadence and privilege. The living room and kitchen were as equally large as the other, and when he was led to the scene of the crime, he discovers an automated bar sitting across from the backdoor. He walks up to the bar and within a few seconds, detects, what could be, faded thirium droplets. He wasn’t completely sure of his accuracy, so he licks his thumb, presses it onto the bar, and licks it once more. Gavin catches him doing this and begins to laugh mockingly.

“You got some kinda fetish for machines or what? Didn’t know androids needed to get it on with appliances.” 900 goes to punch him in the face simply ignores the detective’s crude remarks and responds promptly. “Im taking samples of the bar to detect any hidden traces of thirium 310, it’s a very advanced process Detective, I don’t think you’d understand.”

Gavin sneers, “Yeah? Well here’s something that the both of us can understand then eh?”

He then proceeds to use both of his middle fingers and wiggle them obnoxiously at 900.

900 just stares at Gavin with his usual glare, it seems as if what Gavin did didn’t affect him at all. Yup, It didn’t affect him, it didn’t affect him it didn’t affect him it didn’t affect him it didn’t affect him.

E̸R̴R̴O̸R̵ ̸c̸o̷d̵e̸:̷ ̷P̸0̷2̷1̵7̸ ̶O̴B̷D̷-̸I̸I̴2̶

w̷ ̵h̵ ̷y̷ ̴ ̸w̵ ̴a̷ ̴s̶ ̴ ̴t̶ ̶h̵ ̶i̴ ̷s̴ ̴ ̷m̷ ̴a̸ ̴n̴ ̶ ̷h̴ ̵i̴ ̴r̴ ̵e̵ ̸d̵.̴

He looks away from his…partner. And moves over to the window, it had since been replaced since the incident.

“Ey at least take a fucking joke once in a while dickhead” Gavin says in the background.

900 proceeds to beat the living shit out of him the door and opens it, leading himself into the backyard. He find himself standing on a mahogany porch. To the left of him is an electric grill. In front of him are steps descending into the backyard where a play station for Charlotte was set up. He looks at the window once more, this time from the side on the porch. “Detective?” he calls out. “Which side of the house did the broken glass fall on?”

Gavin leans on the doorway with a scowl on his face. “On the inside, of course. What a stupid fucking question, thats one of the basics. You think I don’t know my shit?”

“Oh no, Of course not” 900 responds. “I think you know your shit very well Detective.”

“Why you-”

“No need Detective,” he raises a single knuckle and slowly rises his middle finger up. “This is what you were going to do, right?” 900 flashes a fake smile Gavin’s way. “The fuck man? I thought androids weren’t allowed to talk back to humans.”

900 walks down the porch steps and looks around. “Well you see Detective…”

He walks over behind the steps and crouches down, beginning to search underneath the porch. “Im no ordinary android.”

Gavin scoffs, “Yeah? Hows that?”

“Well for starters.” He stands up, this time in his hand a wrench could be seen. “I might have found us a lead.”

Gavin lets out a laugh and begins to walk down the porch. “A wrench? How the hell is that a lead?”

900 repeats the technique he used earlier at the bar for the wrench and after a few seconds responds. “It has dried thirium on it”

“So what?”

“So….Why does it have patterns of thirium solution on it?

“Android must of fucking scrapped itself or something, you’re dumb enough to do something like that.”

900 glares at Gavin with an incredibly unamused face. He walks over to the window once more.”Who was it that reported the masked intruder?”

“The ‘droid maid, we’ve been over this.” 

“And how did the suspect break the window?”

Gavin rolls his eyes, “Do we really gotta do this shit?”

“Just answer the question Detective.”

Gavin sighs, “Well, the window was shattered completely, so we’re thinking they used some kinda tool……” He drifts off on the last word.

“But it couldn’t be the wrench, it doesn’t have any fingerprints on it”

“It doesn’t have any human fingerprints on it” 900 turns to face him. “But it does have the trail of an android.”

“Wait a fucking minute-” Gavin says. “Are you? Are you suggesting an android did this?”

“Well, an android witnessed the event and an android went missing along with the child. Seems a bit peculiar don’t you think?”

The realization hits Gavin and he reacts accordingly. “What the fuck…..” he walks towards 900. “So what the hell do we do now?”

“The PV200, Where is it?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know what the fuck that is?”

900′s temptation to hit Gavin with the wrench rises. “The android maid, When you finished uploading her memories, where did you put the body?”

Gavin crosses his arms and takes a second to think. “…..Ah, I got it now.”

Gavin smiles cheekily “We threw it in the trash with the rest of em.”

900′s temptation increases. “It looks like we’ll be visiting the landfill then.” 

[littlebitoffanfic]

Afloat

Fandom: Breath of the Wild Character: Sidon Relationship: Sidon/reader Request: can I send you a few requests for one character? They don’t have to be done all at once or be connected. Great! One where the reader gets injured and Sidon is worried and asks her to stay with him so he can protect her You ran through the woodland area, hoping that you were close. Your attackers followed, yelling after you as they waved their weapons. You knew once you got into the Zora area, you wouldn’t have to worry. They would help you, Sidon would help you. Just as your legs were about to give way, you saw the entrance to the Zora distract. On the top of one of the guard tower, you saw Prince Sidon speaking with two guards. “SIDON!” you screamed, your lungs burning. All three of their heads snapped towards you and they saw instantly you were in distress. You had gashes all over your body, your clothes ripped. It was now only drizzling but earlier it had been pouring so you were soaked through, your body shaking violently. Your nose had been bleeding and you had split your bottom lip. Just as you manged to get to the gate, your legs gave way as you slipped and fell to the floor in a tumble. Your attackers ran at you, not even noticing the three witnesses. Scrambling backwards, you shrieked out of fear. They slowed to a walk as they smiled evilly at you. There was three of them, all big and brute like in nature. “Where yah runnin’ to, little lady?” One sniggered, the blade of his sword waving threatening as the approached. You scrambled back then you heard a thud behind you. The mens eyes widened as they stared at the source of the noise and you looked over your shoulder to see Sidon only a foot away and towering over you. But he wasn’t looking down at you with kind eyes as normal, he was glaring at the men. His sharp teeth were bared as he stepped forward and over you to stand between you and the attackers. You wanted to scramble to your feet to help, but you didn’t have any strength left in you to even hold yourself up. You collapsed on the floor, gasping for air as you lungs burned like they were on fire. The cuts on your face stung with the fresh water of the rain and your whole body throbbed. You couldn’t hear anything apart from a buzzing noise in your skull but you tried to keep your eyes opened to watch what happened. The men sneered at Sidon, but then the two guards must have sounded the alarm before jumping down behind you. One placed a hand on your shoulder and rolled you onto your back before shouting behind him. More guards ran past you and you looked back to Sidon, who was pointing at the men who were starting to run back into the forest. But the guards were nearly on top of them. They had no chance. your head lolled back to look up at the sky as a familiar face came into view. It was Lunu, one of the royal nurses and a close friend of yours. She looked like she was going to be sick as she spoke frantically with the guard, who you recognised as Tare. Blankness started to cloud your vision and your eyes began to feel heavy. You knew you were going to sleep and you didn’t know if you would wake. The last thing you saw was Sidons worried face coming into view. ---------------time skip------------------- When you woke, it felt like you were lying on a cloud. Your mind was awake well before your body as you remembered the horror when you had last been awake. You had been walking through the forest on your way to the Zora domain when you were ambushed. They pinned you down but you managed to wriggle out of their grasp but not before they got a few flesh wounds on you. You had ran through the forest to the Zora, knowing your close ties with them would certainly protect you. the rest was a bit of a blur. You opened your eyes, eager to see where you were. Perhaps the hospital wing? Or had Lunu took yu back to hers. She was always ever so sweet to you and you considered her one of your closest friends. But as you looked up at the ceiling of the room, you knew this wasn’t either of your thoughts. It had a high ceiling with intricate patterns around the walls which, if you didn’t know any better, were gold in colour. You were lying in a large fourposter bed. With deep red curtains which were pulled back so you could look at the rest of the room. The bed itself, was massive. At least double the size of a queen size. While there was only 2 pillows under your head, you looked and saw a number of other pillows surrounded the head of the bed. The thick cover felt soft against your skin and seemed to be made from the best material yet reminded you of a towel in how it felt against your skin. The room was very tidy and minimalist. A desk with fountain pens and parchment sat in one corner and the other was a door. You could see light peaking in through the curtains of the window, but then you realised it was a glass door, probably to a balcony or something. The curtains matched the ones on the bed and fell to the floor. In the farthest away corner, the ceiling seemed to sparkle with the reflection of water. Perhaps a bath? Sitting up, you stretched with a soft groan. Your body felt like it had slept for a century. You saw your arms had bandages up them and as you looked down, you saw you were wearing a light blue night grown. You couldn’t help but wonder where it had come from, until you remembered Lunu had insisted on keeping some of your clothes at hers in case of an emergency. You needed to thank her later. Your eyes looked to the place where the water was. Built into the ground, was a pool, big enough for at least a few Zora. One side seemed to have steps into the pool but then it must have dropped to a decent depth. But then your heart stopped. Lying, face down in the pool, was Sidon. Jumping out the bed, you sprinted over to him, not caring about your nightgown or bandages. The pool was deep, too deep for you to be able to stand up in and you weren’t sure you had the strength to swim. But thankfully he was close enough to one side that you could grab his arm. “Sidon?” You called out as you fell to your kneels at his side and grabbed his arm, pulling him towards the side. His body jolted and then his head raised from the water with an expression of confusion and shock. “Whats happening? Are you okay?” He spoke quickly as his eyes scanned the room for threat. You sat back, your mouth opened slightly. “Were- were you sleeping?” You asked, your hands letting go of his arm to fall to your lap. He moved so he was standing in the water due to his height. With his elbows on the side of the pool, he was now at eye level with you. “Yes.” He answered, seeming just as confused as you were. There was a brief moment before you started laughing. You raised your wet hands to cover your mouth, feeling it might be seen as stupid or inappropriate but it was just too funny. “What?” He asked, cocking his head to one side in a sweet way. “I woke up and saw you lying face down in water. Natural instinct told me you were drowning. I forgot that you were a Zora.” You laughed, one hand holding your side which was starting to hurt. Sidon took a moment before bursting into laughter himself, throwing his head back. It felt so good to just laugh with him. Despite being royalty, you never saw him the way you saw many other royal leader. He was down to earth, friendly, kind and compassionate. It was one of the reasons you had fallen in love with him so long ago. “Im so sorry.” You finally said when you ran out of breath to laugh. “wait, you are just awake? Have you seen Lunu? Oh, your bandages!” Sidon suddenly reached out and took your hands, showing that your bandages had gotten wet when you tried to pull him out the water. “they’ll be fine. I think my arms need a little air anyway.” You shrug, taking them off and showing your arms. They weren’t nearly as bad as you had thought they were going to be and they looked like they were healing nicely. Glancing up, you saw Sidons eyes were also on the cuts, but he had a blank expression which reminded you a little of disgust. “Did Lunu leave a cardigan or something?” You ask, wrapping your arms around yourself to try cover them a little. “No, she did not. Why? Are you cold? I can put on the fire.” He looks to the side where there was a fireplace but you shook your head. “No, I-I know its not nice to look at.” You shrug, looking away from him and regretting taking the bandages off. But when you glanced back to him, he had a soft smile. “My dear. You are the most beautiful creature I have ever met. That has not changed become of some cuts. I just cannot believe someone who ever want to hurt you in this way.” He reached out a hand and ran it down your arm, carful to avoid the cuts. But the water from his hand let a couple of droplet run down your arm and across a cut or two. “My apologies!” “No not its fine. I felt nice, actually. The waters nice and cool.” You smiled to reassure him. “Would you like to join me then?” He asked, stepping away from the side to invite you in. “Im not exactly dressed for a swim. Plus I don’t know if im strong enough to tread water.” You giggled but wanting nothing more than to have a dip. It wasn’t uncommon for him to take you swimming in the nearby rivers and lakes. He always kept close to you and if you ever looked tiered, he would dive underneath you so you would end up on his back. This was not something that was extended to everyone and you were grateful for that. “Lunu left some dresses of yours over there.” He nods to a chair by the bed which had some of your clothes folded on it. “And I shall not let you drown. Come.” He held out his hands to you, motioning for you to join him. Smiling, you knew you couldn’t say no to him. Taking his hands, you sat on the side of the pool and dipped your legs in first before sliding into the water. Instantly, Sidon wrapped one arm around your waist to make sure your head didn’t dip below the water. You had been right, your legs and arms were too weak to swim but Sidon moved so his arms supported you enough to keep you afloat without needing to tread water. He moved so your back was pressed against his front and one arm was around your waist. Leaning your head back, you closed your eyes, enjoying the way the water seemed to calm you. You didn’t know how long the two of you stayed like this, but Sidon seemed happy and content moving around the pool slowly as he held you. It was moments like this that allowed you to pretend perhaps you were more than just friend. Occasionally, you spoke with him, asking him how long you had been asleep, to which he had told you 3 days but Lunu had assumed him it was okay because you were healing. The king sent his best wishes and a lot of the Zora were asking about your health. You couldn’t help but feel wanted and needed unlike anywhere else you had really been. “By the way, where are we? Is this like a private room?” You asked, looking up at Sidon. “well, not exactly. This is my private quarters.” He admitted, looking slightly embarrassed. “What?” You moved quickly and, because he was holding you with such delicacy, he lost his grip. Your head went under the water as you managed to take a breath quickly. But as soon as you were under, you were out of the water completely. Sidon lifted you up so you were sitting on the side of the pool, Sidon right in front of you with a worried look upon his face. “I am dreadfully sorry, my dead. You moved so quickly and I-“ He was cut off by your laughter. “I swear one of us will drown today.” You giggled, covering your mouth with you hands as Sidon smiled, showing you were okay. “I apologies if I gave you a fright.” He bows his head to you but you reached out and hook your finger under his chin, raising his head back up. “Its fine.” You smile, seeing his eyes widen at the touch. His hands were still on your waist, making sure you didn’t slip. “Stay.” He suddenly blurted out, looking slightly surprised at himself but not taking it back. “What?” You couldn’t help but offer him a surprised smile mixed with confusion. Your hand dropped from his chin to your lap. “Stay here. With me. I can protect you. I wont let you get hurt like this again.” His eyes dart to your arms and the small cuts on your face. “Sidon, I don’t-“ You start to protest, unsure if you could take his request but he interrupted. “Why?” He asks quickly, his eyes pleading with you. “I don’t really belong anywhere.” You shrug, dropping his gaze from embarrassment. “You belong here. My people adore you. Your friends here only speak of goodness and kindness.” He smiled, mirroring your actions from before by placing his hand under your chin and lifting your gaze back to him. “And you?” You ask, your heart hammering in your chest. He had asked you to stay with him. Not to stay in the domain, not to stay with Lunu who often begged you to extend your stays. To stay here with him. “I love you.” He breathed, a soft smile playing his lips as thought just saying the words to you bought him joy. You couldn’t control yourself any more. Pushing yourself forward, you wrapped your arms around his neck but under the tail so you could press your lips against his. They were soft and wet from the water, but quickly started to kiss you back. His arms wrapped around you the second you moved so he could pull you into the water with him once again. Your legs couldn’t help but lock around his waist, although due to his size it was more likely closer to his chest. He towered over you, yet never used that to intimidate you or make you feel fear for him. he lay back in the water so he was floating on his back while you straddled him. Pulling back, you were panting but you knew he could hold his breath for a lot longer than you, yet he was also panting. “Please tell me you’ll stay.” He breathed, moving so he was standing once against with you in his arms. “I don’t think I can leave after a kiss like that.” You giggled as you pushed a stand of wet hair out of your face. “That’s fantastic new!” Sidon exclaimed, his face beaming with happiness as he ducked down to give you a celebrator kiss. You giggled as you kissed him back. “So, is this the only reason why I stayed in your quarters?” You asked, looking up at him with a raised eyebrow. Sidon ducked his head, looking away from you. “I was so worried when you wouldn’t wake. Lunu told me you would be fine but I couldn’t leave your side. I told them to bring you here so I could keep watch over you.” He spoke with pain as he remembered the dark days before this one. “you know, I didn’t know how Zora slept. But I didn’t know you had both a bed and a pool.” You look back at the bed in thought. “Many Zora do. We prefer the water but if one is ill, or has been wounded or such then the bed is more practical. Especially during winter.” He tells you, speaking like the two of you were drifting down the stream while telling stories. “Lunu has a bed in each of her spare rooms.” You state, only knowing because she always let you chose where you slept but you had never seen her bedroom. “Will I be staying with her?” You ask, wanted to broach the subject now rather than have it play on your mind. “Well, I thought you might prefer to stay in here. You may have the bed. And I give you my word that I shalt enter unless you say so. Or you could stay in the spare room next-“ he speaks quickly but you interrupted. “but what if your sick?” You ask, remembering what he said. “well…” He trailed off, obviously not thinking about that. He didn’t even notice your smirk as you raised a hand to place it on his forehead. “Hmm, you feel really warm. Maybe you should come lie down.” You couldn’t help but giggle a little, seeing his eyes dart back to yours. “I am not-“ He trailed off, realising what you were saying. “You would like to share a bed with me?” “If you care to join me.” You look back to the bed, feeling tiered yourself. Sidon, seemingly unable to speak, gently moved to the steps into the pool. He let you get out first but followed closely behind. You now understood the bedding material was made to get wet so you didn’t mind climbing back under the covers while still dripping. Sidon was quick to join you yet seemed a little out of his depth in the bed. In the pool, he had his arms around you, touching you easily but now he seemed scared to touch you. But you were quick to fix that. Cuddling into him, you pulled the cover up to cover you both as you rested your head on his chest, feeling tiny in his bed and presents. his arms were quick to wrap around you, one hand even playing with your hair. “Oh, and Sidon?” You looked up. He hummed in response, seemingly comfy and content. “I love you too.” His head snapped down to before smiling widely. You moved to press a kiss ot his lips once again before cuddling back into his side. “You know…” He signed contently as he played with your damp hair. “… Ive never really liked this bed. But now I think it might just be my favourite place in the world.” “At least we cant drown out here. Unless you count the amount of pillows.” You chuckle, your eyes heavy as you yawned. “I will always keep you afloat, my dear.” Sidons voice was the last thing you remember before falling back into a pleasant sleep.

[sol1056]

a bunch more asks waiting their turns so politely

These are all various asks about the likelihood of a remake, a rewritten season, or a spinoff. 

1 could we get an alternate version 2 is a rewrite for S8 a viable option 3 would they change the ending for a spin-off 4 are single-episode edits possible for S8 5 will S7 reactions affect S8 6 how will DW get us to watch S8

Behind the cut.

With the shitstorm that vld became, would dreamworks ever take pity on us and remake some seasons of voltron that turned out like crap, or not even air, just release them as alternate versions on dvd? Im questioning the possibilities, not the probabilities, bc Im really not optimistic about that, I just wanna know if a show can do that and what would it take for the company to snap their fingers and be like "lets do it" (besides having money)

It’s not like frequent reboots don’t have precedent in other franchises; hell, comics do it on the regular. It’s also much cheaper to do a series of graphic novels or full novelizations geared towards an older audience. The problem there is that Dreamworks isn’t a comic book company or a publishing house; that part of the franchise would have to be farmed out to someone else. 

My guess --- if another remake is ever a possible option --- it’d be several years down the road. The first version would be set aside as, say, the Y-7 version for kids and family, and then you’d find a new angle for the next version. 

If DW got the impression there was a massive older crowd (say, 25-45) who would’ve eaten up a more mature, somewhat darker, version? Sure, why not try to grab that audience? I mean, look at the Castlevania series: it’s not pulling any punches on making clear it’s for adults. That would also require a different business model, since what adults like to buy for themselves is very different than what kids want. Skip the cake toppers, for starters. 

do you think given the reaction to VLD S7, is a rewrite for S8 a viable option? I feel the fandom is divided about the general reaction to S7. If JDS and M can just [focus on the fanbase segment] that liked it, why [bother trying to fix it for those] that didn't?

Given what I’ve been seeing in terms of data from the season... I think they aimed to please everyone and ended up pleasing no one. 

Pretty sure I’ve said something to this extent before: when you can’t please everyone, the answer isn’t to split the difference and piss everyone off. The answer is to pick your audience and give them the best damn story you can. The rest will sort itself out.

Let me put it this way: there are enough people who didn’t like S7 for the crummy animation, the OOC dialogue and actions, and the nonsensical storyline overloaded with a host of new characters that stole time from the actual protagonists. And there are also enough people who didn’t like S7 for queerbaiting the audience, killing off three out of four queer characters, and sidelining the one remaining queer character. There may be some overlap between those two sets, but taken together, those two sets are pretty much the dominant majority of the fan base. 

I don’t know if that makes a rewrite a viable option, but it should be making a few execs think twice about letting the EPs/staff carry on in the same direction. I mean, you want a series to end on a high note, not an ‘omg that had such potential but boy did it self-destruct in the last two seasons’ note.  

So if DW wants to do a Voltron spin-off, would they consider changing the ending to VLD to give Shiro the things he earned so this spin-off wouldn't be dead out of the water?

That would depend entirely on whether they’ve gotten the message that Shiro’s current status isn’t good enough for a significant part of the fanbase. If all they’re hearing (or all they choose to hear) is that it’s great to sideline one of their protagonists with no in-story explanation whatsoever, what’s to tell them there’s anything that needs addressing?  

Additionally, if the entirety of the issue is Shiro --- and everyone else is just fine, thanks --- I’m not sure that’d rate as enough to warrant changing so much. More likely any spin-off would start some X length of time between, and we’d get an implied intermediary backstory (or even a mild retcon), and go from there. 

Truth is, whomever gets the spin-off will (I really hope) be a better writer and not have to deal with intrusive newbie EPs. Even then, they’d be kinda limited on what they could do, given the spin-off does need to make sense placed against the first series. Then again, VLD hasn’t respected its own premise or continuity for the past few seasons, anyway. 

So I guess there’s always the option to start with an episode that retells VLD’s ending... Kinda awkward, but not unheard of, to basically retcon a previous series out of existence.  

I have no doubt DW is looking into what went wrong with this season. I know it might be a little to late to fix all of Season 8, but do you think they would have at least maybe the last few episodes changed to give a better ending to the show - or at least more respect to Shiro as a character?

Normally I’d say no. I mean, episode 1 should have characters making choices that in turn impact episode 2, and those choices prompt the events in episode 3... but that’s a logic VLD threw out the window somewhere between S3 and S4, and it’s only gotten worse since then. 

In which case, oh sure, why not? It wouldn’t make any less sense than what they’ve already got planned, if S7 is any indication. 

Could the reaction to season 7 cause any change the execs minds going into season 8? 

One problem: this is a Dreamworks production, but it’s not a DW-owned story. It’s a franchise: there are other players involved. There are the two guys who first butchered GoLion into Voltron, Toei whose story got that embutcherment, Netflix as the distributor, along with Playmates and Lion Forge and other contracted partners. There’s a lot more people at the table than just DW. 

It’s one thing for the EPs to say they messed up, and apologize. It’s quite another for Dreamworks to admit publicly their lousy (or nonexistent) oversight allowed the situation to happen. 

Legal would have apoplexy, for starters. What wins you a franchise is often showing you have the confidence (if not sheer chutzpah) that you can do this job justice like no other. And then you hit S7 and must admit you hired people who made a complete hash of it? 

If there’s anything that will cost the EPs any future roles of a similar position, it’s that they’ve put DW in a very uncomfortable position. Caught between a furious fanbase and overly-interested co-owners, someone --- or several someones --- are treading very lightly right now. They’re not going to forget the EPs are the ones who precipitated the whole mess. 

I think we are in a unique situation where the fact that the EPs were vocal about [changing] VLD ... could be a blessing for us & DW. [But we know it] was changed, & DW's part seems to be more negligence than direct fault like the EPs. So DW can drop it or fix it, and a rewrite would be worth us sticking around, while restoring DW's name.

Again, that depends on whether DW is in a position that they can do so. I assure you they’d throw the EPs under the bus at the first opportunity, because that’s how the corporate world works. So their failure to do so is either because they don’t see the EPs’ actions as untenable (as far as we know), or because doing so would expose DW corporate to greater retaliation from elsewhere. (It could also be part of the agreement that these particular EPs are in place for the duration of the series’ production, too. Sometimes that happens.) 

I still can’t get over the fact that the EPs were so blunt about having already had a script fully written when they asked to revise. From the Studio Mir leaks, we can guess at least some of the animation was already in production at least a year ago, or earlier. That’s a lot to redo. 

Here’s something that only just occurred to me, when I listed the co-partners in this franchise: the Koplar brothers. These are the geniuses who figured they didn’t need to know Japanese to make GoLion into an american production; turns out they were geniuses on some level ‘cause it was a hit, anyway. They went on to produce Voltron: Fleet of Doom (1986), Voltron: the Third Dimension (1998), and Voltron Force (2011). If there is anyone at the table who’d be likely to have nostalgia goggles, it’d be the Koplars. This has been their ongoing story in one way or another for over 30 years. 

Originally, the EPs said they weren’t tied to nostalgia; they weren’t going to redo the story as it was, but the story as they remembered. (I’d argue this actually indicates a stronger set of nostalgia goggles, but eh.) Their determination to get rid of Shiro has always felt like nostalgia goggles to me. Perhaps the Koplars were the greatest supporters of Keith as BP --- since that would respect the pattern they’ve followed, over and over, in all the iterations. 

Considering the Koplar’s somewhat litigious background over Voltron ownership, they may’ve had the ability to overrule. So... if you want to bench Shiro, you pitch your work with the execs who are most likely to agree with you. And if you can do that in the window between the previous VP of TV retiring and a brand-new external hire coming on as VP... welp, you got permission, and the new VP may’ve signed off, not realizing the impact. 

Which would put DW over a barrel, in some ways. If DW could’ve overruled their partners, the EPs never would’ve been able to make that end-run in the first place. 

How do u think DW will try to get us to watch s8? They & the EPs have shattered our trust and the show is so messy its almost unsalvageable. 

Stay to see X point's resolution? Yeah, we stayed many seasons for nothing, next. 

We have more rep? Ex. blonde girl is autistic... So we should be scared for her too??? 

There's more queer rep? Yeah, we heard that one already. 

Unless everyone responsible is fired and a new crew runs the next seasons?

I don’t know. I would hope the answer is ‘by giving us a story that makes sense, and creates closure for all the protagonists, and not just by making two of them emotional rewards for two other characters.’ 

At this point, there is only one thing that’s going to make Dreamworks change course: if the fallout from VLD impacts its other projects. If the majority of the VLD fanbase up and announced it would be boycotting She-Ra or Fast & Furious or Trollhunters on the grounds that DW screwed up so badly with VLD that it cannot be trusted... Then you’d see movement. If the PR got so bad from so many upset and angry VLD fans that major news outlets paid attention and started writing articles about the situation, that would also put a black mark beside Dreamworks’ name -- and then you’d see movement. 

With the VLD toys a failure (for whatever mismanaged reasons) and a financial model set entirely on toys, fixing VLD now would be throwing good money after bad. Unless, of course, there’s an impact beyond just this single series. 

Until Dreamworks can see the impact in some concrete sense, they have far more to lose from their partners than they have to gain from their fanbase. It’s just how it is, with corporations in late capitalism. 

You want to make an impact? You tell Dreamworks ahead of time, and then you follow through: pick a week and go silent. Nothing about VLD, here or on twitter or anywhere else. No reblogs on She-Ra updates. Ignore the podcasts. Don’t click on the articles. That stuff’ll be there when the week is over, after all. Show DW what it’s like when a fanbase checks out, by doing it. It’s a short-term boycott, but the reason groups do boycotts is because they work. 

[xz017]

.

oof. okay so imma do the latest tea???

got out of shower to hear my mum talkin to Agnes spillin the tea abt their friend/coworker

the one with that Kid my mum wanted to have a playdate with or whatever the annoyingly studious and clearskinned halfasian lookin girl i really envied.

her mum has a live in boyfriend who is basically like...an alcoholic mental case rip god i hate alcohol and i hate people who drink it like i only do it so i hate myself more and die but like this guy basically playin with knives n guns in the house and the kid who is like 19 idk why im callin her kid is so Over it like apparently she hasn’t been coming home and like

basically me in 2016 era when my mum was too generous n Helpful lettin ppl back into our lives and our House so i spent christmas morning 5am walkin in the cold n watchin 3 films until it got dark and stuff like that

girl be actin homeless---mood

so it came to a head today so Agnes is spillin the tea n her husband in the bg(omg it weird hearin him rip he was my military hs instructor wild) n my mUM is so selfrighteous n mad like

‘blablahblah well rosalie is being dumb she should put her daughter first she being sick in the head it her Choice’

n im like eavesdroppin havin warflashbacks of the dumb hypocrisy she has DOne lmao

‘has she no thought like what if Tyler gets raped/sexually abused by that man she’d let her daughter be in that environment???’

i mean it wouldnt be fair of me to be like...eyemoji on this cos she technically doesn’t know? but 19 may 2018 never4get lmao

anyway so my mum’s like our room is for rent and it’ll be far cheaper they dont even have to pay rn!!!

cue me being like...um...Money...generosity...i dont...LIke

i was conflicted here like idk i met the girl like 3-5 times im envious of her work ethic n her better asian disposition than mine cos she obviously prettier but she has better prospects and that’d suck if her life be like that

but also??? like...life be like that it was like that to me like who saved me????????????????????? 

um...no one

like why is that on me or US TO BE NICE n helpful im so tired like damn which is relevant to the next point anyway

cos earlier had a convo with my mum i was eyemojing healthcare profs i was like ‘pls stop bein on ye phone pls tell me info on ye opinion on respiratory therapists...what abt PA’

n deadass she be eyemojing me like STICK TO YOUR COURSE

n i was like...-ugly pleadin emoji eyes- n i was tryin to explain that i didn’t want to be so focused on one thing that if i decide this medical thing is what i want to pursue i’d need 1-2 years just for the PREREQS which is like 5 classes and 1000 clinical hours or minimum 6 month healthcare paid job. like if i decide i want to go to school for that i already have the Stuff and just Apply.

n she was like...you had your chance i bothered you to be a nurse a few years ago you were stubborn if you did as i said you’d be earning good money now but you wasted time

n i was like...oof i can’t say anything to that it’s tru. it real life tea it fax i wasted time n im old n im ruunnin out of time i hate myself alot i hate hate hate

and idk we got to talkin abt money n life cos she was like you have to find something you can learn to LOve

n i was like??? WHY I GOTTA SETTLE N FOOL MYSELF TO DO SO im super annoyed abt that mindset

cos the thing about a bloody Arts degree is there’s too fuckin many broad possibilities n they all aint even that good. like deadass if i was a STEM major ugh like if i was a Bio major prospects are so clear: forensics, research, premed,labtech. Meanwhile polsci for example: uhhh teacher? prelaw? politician? uhhh government work? n there’s like 111 different subdivisions of that n it’s like??? wat the fuck

deadass what am i gonna do with international security is that even gonna pay well like...the fuck do i know is it relevant ??? Doubts

n she was all like...PEOPLE JUST GOTTA DO WHAT THEY HAVE TO TO SURVIVE YOU GOTTA FIND YOURS N STICK WITH IT

n i was lowkey panique n frustrated cos i really REALLY hate being stuck in 1 ting n im like i HAD ACTING YOU SAID NO

n she was like pFF i wanted you to have something REAL cos if you dont make it in acting you’d be on the STREETS

n i was like...lmao lil did she know imma be on the streets next year smh this year actually

n she was like talkin abt the harsh reality of the workforce and how you gotta make do at how ppl treat you (patients) n how you might not even like your coworkers but you gotta deal with it because that’s what ppl do to survive

n she was talkin abt undeserving patients with no healthcare n i was like did you just hear yourself so you want them to die cos they dont got money and she was like 

no??? why get hooked up in the ICU when you’re braindead wasting government money taxes we payed for you don’t understand cos you dont have a job and dont get your salary cut cos of taxes and these people come in acting like they got something to give when they yell at your face acting like they know what they’re talking about they act entitled when they have nothing homeless ppl getting money and illegal immigrants are selfish bringing their kids to be hurt here

n im like...theyre life is ...shitty what are you talkin about n she was like so? why dont they stay and make it better??? one of my very first patients asked me why i was in america and i said i come from a poor country and they said why didn’t you stay and try to make it better? and i couldn’t say anything cos u know what they were right why dont illegal immigrants do that??? n im like...

cos theyre literally...RUNNIN and they want ppl they care abt i.e. children to be far away from that as soon as possible bruh ye think imma wait for change deadass there a reason why we suffer duterte he actually get shit done??? we dont have to wait for change the same way ppl who speak nice n are polite do but is stuck with bureaucracy and lowkey bein corrupt deadass stay in ye lane

n she’s like well i hope you’re right im done bein an idealist im a realist now i believed in good i wanted to help the world now no more

n im like...no you’re not a realist, you’ve just been hangin out with a republican

and she gave me a sideeye 

but deadass im ...scared like i really hate the empathy because when she was being serious n talkin n being honest abt things for once i started to unwillingly see things from her point of view i really felt it n i was scared i’ll be like that im scared she’s right

im scared i’ll end up Real n selfish like...i already am ? n bitter? like i care about so very few Personally and am willin to let others suffer to keep it safe n prioritised?

im scared.

like especially with racism all these years my mum’s been telling me it’s not that im racist just wait til you work with them they act so entitles and loud and make everything about race

n i almost told Her abt it earlier i skyped w her earlier we had a tea spillin moment about our ethnic relations bein racist but then idk we talked alot i guess the text got buried or unseen

like i said i was scared n didn’t get to unpack it like im scared because ive been livin with my roomate and like...ive been excusing it as a personality thing and that if it were anyone else different skin colour id still hate them just the same which i still maintain is true but like?

my RM is loud n she makes everything abt race like deadass me n my FM be just eating dinner and she passes by us and goes on a rant about harvard asians being a Blok to black ppl from getting There n im like...im tryna have dinner so i can get energy to deal with this stressful ass school

n she always talks like she knows what she’s talking about like ‘jewish ppl control the federal bank’ n im like...it 1am in the dark quiet of our shared room deadass i dont wanna tell the binch thats antisemitism cos she gonna be like im black how can i be racist smh

im!!! scared alright like i hate my roomate for proving my mum right when i try so hard to set things right like maybe that’s why i dont tell anyone about my situation other than Her. i never told my parents about the berkeley livin situation they already warn me enough to be careful n i just keep tellin them thats racist

i have so much........THOUGHTS n........DILEMMAS...n FEARS but like i just have this blog i cant trust anyone else to talk abt it n the only person i am willing to talk to abt it will be busy and im so ashamed abt these things but she was so sweet about givin me the heads up about her schedule 

like i hated that i had to get an ugly ass haircut today cos she came back to me n we couldve talked so i guess rip she was complacent n did stuff cos she replied late from then on like that dumbass haircut was 15 minutes ugh. our talkin pattern today was like...dashed lines timereply wise? i asked her if she packed earlier (pre haircut)n she said yes but rip a few hours later she was like...I need to pack 

wat is the truth rip

the tablet bein emo like...mood but my child rip.

my love be packin n spendin time with fam before leavin for london tomorrow

n even after that she doin...Stuff. rip.

which is ye know good for her rip.

i just hope she dont go iceskatin deadass one slip n she can crack her head open or break her neck or paralyse her spine like...??? why do humans wanna do dumb activities

like omg she admitted to me today she a serial jaywalker and WORSE with music n headphones like

binch thats why i didnt wanna enable you further by gettin ye airpods deadass bye

n she was like??? tryna equate it with my risky risk like ummm

mine is for science n validity

hers is just carelessness n chosin lazy convenience over idk...the responsibility of self vigilance like...

bruh ppl shouldnt promise someone 91 years if they be continuin to do dumb stuff consciously oof rip

but other than that like...im...really proud of this resolution she be undertakin officially on the 14th?

im nervous abt it cos i really want it for her too. i want her to get the proper sleep n i always hated her givin excuses like ‘IM FINE ON 4 HOURS OF SLEEP’ ‘I NAPPED 3 HOURS 38293820 HOURS AGO IM FINE I MADE UP FOR IT’ um...blokt. get proper sleep binch i love you tf???

prioritise work cos ye gonna regret not givin it yer all??? n ye payin for this???

what fun??? we capitalists now we want that money rip.

i see that shift you know rip i saw it comin a year ago.

that dont mean we republicans rip we still care about others n the inequality? but like i foresaw us getting acquainted with the harsh reality of the world n how difficult it is to get a job--which she experienced along the way.

n rip she wants many things bookmarkin them n honestly same rip

i want a stable warm home for this family n a shiny diamond to get disassociated by extra im a simple man

meanin im selfish n im ready to prioritise meanin im ready to make the choice for others to fall apart/behind if it means puttin This first rip

god pls dont make me a republican this so ugly

# 1 she’d hate me #2 i’d hate me

now im sad

im dead.

omg rip earlier too as she said goodbye i told her i loved her and she was like ‘i love you more’

DEADASS I WAS LIKE LMAO!!! girL i dont think you understand im literally Ready to put you and our possible future First like...im not messin around what skitrips with rich ppl what friends my love is potent n extreme n COncentrated like im sorry ik you feel love for me but you cant top This rip she not ready 

like the um ‘partially wanna make my life’s work abt knowin what might hurt n kill ye so i can kill it first or blok it well’ kinda love

the ‘im already savin for at least HALF a first month deposit in an overpriced london in case you wanna settle down wit me Mayhaps n im not touching it for ANYTHING’ kinda love

the ‘im thinking of a winter home in the tropics so you suffer less n im plannin the floorplans already rip just in case’ kinda extraness

but anyways the gall of this cute lovely human rip ‘i love you more’ ummm try Again smh

bruh i love her too much i bet that’s scary for her rip it might be a Burden tbh she so young rip 

meanwhile im old n ready to rot but like...

i wanna be mortal wit ye before i do

but ye know wat lads i saw myself in the mirror today like 5 times OOF. this meatform...keepin me...Humble. 

bitter but like...humble

‘like of course sHe not ready not only is my personality like dis but also...my outward form how could she introduce me as a Spouse’

‘wow i look like that oof it good i remembered i am undeservin of full intense love like in the films n fanfiction they always between attractive ppl after all it only 1/2 it not Equal’

‘wow bruh ye really upset she spendin time n resources elsewhere when you be lookin like That? ye dont have much to offer bro take the L’

oof so that’s the personal tea i can think of?

had a meghan marke talk rip i can’t believe i was right??? i had twin vibes!!! but i was hoping for like a variety situation rip im worried a lil abt the whole birthin Late ting but she can afford the highest care rip it fine she rich.

my love was talkin abt how pretty MM was n i was like rip is she triggerin Her a lil rip worrirooni

rip speakin of babies like she was showin me this smol gummybear n im like same das me heart n she was like :( n i was like it only fits you

n she was like so no children then:(

n i was like!!! rip if it Ours of course that Counts n i was a lil shook like rip she said she didn’t want them Really so i always get guilty when i talk abt the future or realise i mentioned kids or carelessly name drop Hyaline n Benzion like...im dead rn just typin that like what if she read this big shame bro

but ye know what this is already long n she gonna be busy maybe that’s the key. TOo Much puts ppl OFF so ye mayhaps we sneaky ! ?

anyway i was tryin to get her thoughts on it rip but like she was all iDK ASK ME IN 13 Yrs n i was like...

sighemoji + sandemoji + resignedemoji

rip we talked FAaC a lil. cos she Dared!!! to liken me to her brother just cos i showed her my cheap youth boy shoes smh

At first i was super offended n disgusted but then i was like rip eyemoji if ye into that

then she was like ew nO

then i was like um ye already play the ‘daddy u like me young huh’ card

which is like idk is like technically? joking but it’s like that post ye know abt ppl bein ‘whether or not im actually jokin or flirtin depends if you into it’ but also like schrodingers racism like ‘it was a joke bro!!!’ but they actually bigots.

so it DIFFICULT for my brain to Confirm rip like...eyemoji what is the truth

but like??? im rip. willin. rip. to. rip. Try. rip.?

really i am rip. it Her. bruh. im only hopin she dont have a golden shower kink but. trust i...Will follow thru.

nO IM REMEMBERIN THE DOO DOO POST DESPAIR

rip anyway that whole thing reminded me of FAaC origins which was porn n then somehow sHe was like imagine if egggsy was a singer he’d sing like ‘age is just a number’ shit n i SPILLED THE TEA ABOUT A TING IN PT 3 im so weak sand

i miss the gays

i wanna give them justice n happiness but the 2027 excuse is rl nice for my ugly procrastination issues oof but i wish them well

add: rip had another talk with my mum i really wanted her to understand my thought process about wanting to get the prereqs for medtraining done beforehand

n she was like...I UNderstand but Normal people--

n i was like ‘IM NOT NORMAL I DONT KNOW HOW TO CHOOSE I HAVE NO IDENTITY’

n she’s just like SHOOKE n mad n clearly dont understand that im fukt up in the head ‘...IC AN’T BELIEVE YOU!!! iF YOU’RE ABNORMAL YOU WONT GET HIRED N YOU WONT HAVE A NICE JOB’

n im like...well i mean what can i say to that it’s not like it’s not tru rip

Big sand honestly.

it gonna be a long few days imma do my best to leave her alone she needs her time rip i love her so much rip sand

i feel like a dumb ugly dog god fljækadfkøad h8

[comicteaparty]

September 21st, 2017 CTP Archive

The archive for the Comic Tea Party chat that occurred on September 21st, 2017, from 5PM - 7PM PDT.  The chat focused on The Changeling’s Sister by yondoloki.

Featured Comment:

Chat:

RebelVampire

Good day everyone~! This week’s Comic Tea Party is now officially beginning. Today we are discussing The Changeling’s Sister by yondoloki~! (https://tapas.io/series/The-Changelings-Sister) For those new to CTP, discussions about the comic are freeform, so please feel free to bring up whatever you wish. However, every 30 minutes I will be dropping in a discussion question to help those who would like a prompt. These questions are totally OPTIONAL to answer so pay them no mind if you wish~! Remember, constructive criticism is allowed, but the primary focus here is to have fun and appreciate the amazing comics that the community makes~! Each chat a top comment will be picked and featured on an ad for this chat, so let’s have a great discussion~! With that said, let us begin with this first question~!

QUESTION 1. What is your favorite scene in the comic so far and why?

i have to ponder this one a bit personally. but i greatly enjoy the page where rose gets pissed at andrew because he told her she looked like her sister. andrew was flirting so good and then that. bro plz, no one takes that as a compliment

overall though i just really enjoy the scenes with andrew. as i mentioned earlier in the week, this is some grade A flirting going on. cause while hes being kind of obvious about it, hes not being creepy and just seems like a sweet guy who just wants to help out

during their flirting though i like that Lily's laughter kind of breaks in and defuses the nice warmness that was developing. it doesnt let you get too comfortable as a reader and instead you have be like "oh yeah shes still here"

wishjacked

I really liked this comic!! I'd never seen it around before and it was cool.

RebelVampire

thats awesome then that you were able to find it now. was there anything in particular that you liked?

wishjacked

Anyways, my favorite scene was also the one where she was talking to Andrew. This comic is already so heavy— DollLily is so terrifying and frustrating that even though the comic is relatively short Andrew's flirting felt like such a nice break.

DracoPlato

I enjoyed when the baby was swapped out in the beginning cause i was like oh that's just like in mythos

wishjacked

and YEAH, I think Lily's constant presence is really well pulled off!! It feels like shes always so close

full disclosure changeling mythology has never been super interesting to me, actually, but I think the concept of one twin getting changed is a really unique take on the idea

DracoPlato

yeah andrew did feel like a nice break(edited)

and same wish

I think the execution here was more interesting than i find the premise itself

RebelVampire

yeah i really like in this case it was a twin that was taken. i think theres an extra level of creepiness added since in this case its someone with the same face who is a doll

wishjacked

yes!! the execution so far has been top notch.

MathTans

Here late, as per the usual (reading about Discord updates). Favourite scene, probably the page where Rose stops Andrew from leaving, but is then scared to speak, so he's all "why am I here?". I laughed, even though it's probably bad of me to do that, because I understand Rose's conflict.

DracoPlato

overall the emotional impact in this comic has been top notch

every page oozes with emotion

wishjacked

yeah, that was a good moment! (and welcome in!!)

DracoPlato

and welcome Math!!!

RebelVampire

@math you're not the only one. i laughed at that moment too cause it was a legit question. even i was like "why is he there if you arent going to say anything"

MathTans

When Andrew was all "let's go inside" and Rose was all "sounds... fun", part of my head was shouting "it's a trap! nooo! Lily will push him down the stairs or something!"

wishjacked

one of the commenters on Tapas noted that the dresses were different colors— overall Lily is so much brighter than Rose and it really drives the point home well.

ahahah ME TOO

DracoPlato

yeah, i noticed that too about the dresses~

and same math XDDD

wishjacked

like NOOOO JUST STAY OUTSIDE…. BETTER YET RUN AWAY TOGETHER

MathTans

Yeah, that's subtle but clever.

Lily probably engineered the dresses.

RebelVampire

yeah i noticed there was a contrast in the colors that was kind of expressing each's emotional state

wishjacked

like that would be excessive, they just met, but it's obviously the safest option. leave lily pls

MathTans

Here's the thing though - is Lily being evil because she's this puppet/doll? Or is she being evil because she feels like Rose has never accepted her? I honestly can't tell. Like, how much of this is nature, how much is nurture.

DracoPlato

i wondered that too math

RebelVampire

yeah i wonder that too. cause one of the prologue scenes is rose literally slapping lily.

MathTans

So did Napples.

Yeah, I thought that prologue thing was clever. It deflects a bit from the idea of an unreliable narrator whlie at the same time raising different questions.

Like, Rose obviously isn't imagining the doll stuff.

But did she bring about her own downfall, a bit? By being too young to deal?

RebelVampire

it could be. i mean to be fair to the prologue scene i was mentioning, she was super duper young so of course she'd be freaked out

i do like that normally lily looks normal but then she gets close to rose and you suddenly see the stitching. very dramatic.

DracoPlato

i keep wondering if anyone else can see the stitching, it seems like others would have noticed that, lol

been like heey why you all scarred up

RebelVampire

but also, just wanna say, man whoever made Lily is super bad at sitching. do they not believe in the power of patterns O_O(edited)

DracoPlato

i know right

lolol, she looks like a chucky doll after the second movie or something

wishjacked

truth.

RebelVampire

i mean i guess the proper assumption would be they just had to piece together scraps? but then that thought begs the question of what Lily is made of

DracoPlato

unicorn tears

i thought it was just their shapeshifting powers

wishjacked

yikes

MathTans

I think I remember seeing the author respond to a comment to the effect that only Rose can see the stitching. Which, if so, is probably related to how they're twins. Faeries likely goofed on not realizing that was a thing.(edited)

DracoPlato

yeah, the comic does make it seem like only rose can see them at least

RebelVampire

it makes sense if its cause theyre twins. cause they share the same face. so i think itd make it easier to notice differences when theyre present

MathTans

Probably why Lily looks normal in the long shots with the party people, and why no one believed Rose and sent her to an institution. Which was a creepy flashback.(edited)

RebelVampire

QUESTION 2. At the beginning of the comic, we see proof of Rose’s claims that her twin, Lily, isn’t the real Lily. What do you think the fake Lily’s purpose is for being there? Is there a reason why Lily was taken instead of Rose? What do you think happened to the real Lily?

DracoPlato

well the real lily is either dead or rose will find her later on. Because of the tone of the story I'll go with dead, lol

MathTans

There was that remark at the start about "a fairy is born from a child's first laugh", and faeries are evil in this comic, so presumably after the fairy was born they needed, uhh, let's go with a slave as the nicer option. What's not as clear is which child laughed, I feel like the Lily/Rose thing was more luck than anything, but is it that you laugh, a fairy is born, and you can never laugh again, and this is how they do that?

RebelVampire

oh thats a good catch, math. i forgot about that intro sentence. so it really couldve just been a luck thing. where the fairy was like "well shit they look the same umm....lets just flip a coin."

DracoPlato

i like that idea of them never being able to laugh again after that

MathTans

I think the real Lily is having to make/sew dolls for the faerie. Which is... not a happy place.

RebelVampire

maybe theres an optimistic plot twist and the real lily is now the fairy queen O_O

and is ordering the kidnapping of babies

DracoPlato

looooool

MathTans

Real Lily has forgotten all about her real life, oh noooo!

DracoPlato

maybe this is the real lily and rose really is crazy tho

MathTans

Rose was the doll all along! O.o

DracoPlato

maybe there never was a twin

fight club

MathTans

Oh, wow, damn. Draco, you win for crazy theories that might be true.

DracoPlato

since the genre is horresque I wouldn't rule it out at least

cause i think what people fear most is losing themselves

MathTans

I mean, sure, we see the both of them at the ball or whatever, but maybe the family adopted Lily after Rose went crazy.

RebelVampire

i dont rule out rose just being legit crazy. im actually sad rose doesnt even consider this herself. which really thats the sign of her being crazy. that she doesnt question why shes the only one who sees it.

MathTans

When you've been smacked around as much as Rose, you probably stop questioning stuff like that.

DracoPlato

yeah, also lily hasn't actually killed her or brutally maimed her, so even if she's not real, why is rose being a jerk to her necessarily. I mean maybe lily just smacks her around a bit cause rose is always yelling at her and trying to tell people bad things about her

but rose isn't walking around all bruised up, just saying

MathTans

Rose seems too legit scared to be the aggressor though, at least at the time the story takes place. She also seems too afraid to say anything more. And the maid would seem to back up that Lily's in charge.

DracoPlato

i think tha'ts because they had her committed tho

which if she just shut up about it wouldn't have happened in the first place

RebelVampire

to be fair tho, cause were missing a lot of before, she could be the aggressor in a more subtle way. maybe the reason lily assumes rose is lying about telling andrew nothing is this is not the first time rose has done something like this. maybe rose is a class A manipulator. looks all demure and helpless to lure people in and then she tells them the story and ppl humor her at least cause they want to be sympathetic to rose

DracoPlato

yeah, that got me too

that it was apparent rose had been telling people about it before

RebelVampire

but im not saying i believe this 100%. XD i just think theres evidence for it looked at it from the right way

more likely i assume rose is just legit being abused and lily a dick

cause rose gonna blow lily's cover

MathTans

Yeah, I kind of assume Rose is a reliable narrator.

DracoPlato

yeah, it's just speculation on my end too

I do think it's most probable she's a reliable narrator

MathTans

Maybe once Rose gets Lily back, they can bond better with the doll and be a fun set of triplets.

DracoPlato

loooool

that'd be a 180 on tone

RebelVampire

i dont think rose is a reliable narrator but i dont think shes a bad person. i just think because we see everything through her viewpoint, were getting a really biased story from her PoV. so a lot of what we see of lily is still kind of her biased interpretation of the bigger picture

DracoPlato

lyall says we must defend the fairies

RebelVampire

cause part of me feels sympathy for lily. not that i dont think shes a jerk for being abusive. but on the otherhand maybe lily's purpose is she had no purpose. for all we know lily just wants to fit in, be with humans and be a normal girl. and then rose kept screaming she wasnt real. if i had a sibling i would not appreciate that

MathTans

Yeah, okay, I can see that. Though Andrew was pretty suave through her viewpoint too.

DracoPlato

ironically the part of the replaced by fairies baby mythos I always wondered most about was what happens to the fairy in disguise they left behind

MathTans

Rebel - Yeah, that goes back a bit to my wondering about nature versus nurture. We don't know why the faeries leave these dolls or what personality they have.

DracoPlato

i think generally in the mythos the fairies eat the babies, but you don't really hear about the one left behind in it's place

MathTans

Maybe Lily would have reacted the same way under those circumstances. But we won't know, because the circumstances were brought about by doll Lily being stitchy.

Faeries need to analyze their diet. Babies so high in sodium.

DracoPlato

Loooooool

RebelVampire

yeah i always wondered that about the mythos as well. like does the fairy child just grow up regular again. although to be fair i always assumed the mythos was just a way for parents to explain having a child who doesnt fit societal norms. so they could be like "little billy is strange? umm he was umm....snatched away by fairies and this is really a fairy child."

MathTans

Though Rebel asked before, what is Lily made of? I mean, she must have had a medical checkup, right? Is she held together by magic and wishes? By the willpower of people who believe she's real?

Maybe Rose casting doubt actually is a threat to doll-Lily's existence. Maybe that's part of the reason for lashing out, fear.

DracoPlato

oh that'd be interesting

RebelVampire

yeah this is my thing is i think theres a huge case that lily is lashing out of fear for her own existence

cause if anybody believed lily could be in the one in the asylum or wind up being witch hunted or being kicked out to fend for herself

like theres a ton of bad scenarios if someone believes rose and acts on it

so for lily's own survival rose needs to stfu

cause to be double fair i dont feel lily had sinister intentions

in the sense no greater purpose is hinted at

shes just there

as a replacement to the real lily

so horrible?

DracoPlato

yeah that's how i feel atm too

Rose just needs to stfu

RebelVampire

granted of course now its escalated to worse places

cause abuse no joke

DracoPlato

yeah

MathTans

Why can't the flower children just get along? ^^

DracoPlato

she should have been quiet when she was younger I think

MathTans

Kids be kids.

DracoPlato

and been like yay new fairy sister

RebelVampire

but then thered be no drama

ah man if this is the case tho maybe this is how the story concludes. lily and rose have a fight and lily asks why rose couldnt just see her as her sister considering they grew up together etc. etc. and rose realizes that fake lily was indeed her real sister all along and real lily is just a stranger

MathTans

Random thought - With the idea of faeries coming at a child's first laugh. If you laughed a lot it can be said you're left in stitches. Stitches on the face. Everything's connected.

RebelVampire

thats brilliant

bravo math, bravo

MathTans

Oh, thank you.

Just stitched it together.

DracoPlato

also baby lily didn't have stitches on their face i dont' think

so maybe they came later from the real lily laughing, lol

RebelVampire

lily is falling apart at the seams O_O

DracoPlato

baby fake lily that is

RebelVampire

QUESTION 3. The comic has some heavy themes in regards to sibling abuse. It is very clear, also, that Rose has been traumatized by this abuse. How do you think this abuse will affect Rose’s ability to leave? What about its effect on how Rose will navigate the world filled with other people? Do you have any other thoughts regarding these themes?

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Oh good i'm here for at least the last part of this

DracoPlato

yaaaay feather~!

MathTans

Oooh, that's a real interesting question, kudos. I feel like it's not only sibling abuse, because Lily wouldn't have had the authority to send Rose to the nuthouse (though she did seem to have the final say on whether Rose got out). It's interesting that the parents went that route, but I also suppose we're in more olden times. On the sibling side, well, Rose certainly has a problem opening up to people, and I could see her trusting the wrong person simply because said person said they were on her side.

Hi Feather!

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Also Rose needs to GTFO as sooon as possible becuase ahhhh get away from the freaking creepy sister

Also hey there Math :3

RebelVampire

welcome feather

MathTans

Got a fave scene, feather?

DracoPlato

rose isn't very functional atm to go to the outside world but she does need a safer environment.

RebelVampire

tbh i think rose is going to have more trouble trusting than trusting the wrong person. so instead shell sabotage her own efforts by refusing help

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

From my knowledge about changlings so far, I don't think Rose wants to meet her real sister

MathTans

Yeah, Rose needs a guide or something.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Probably doesn't even know who she is

DracoPlato

same rebel

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

And yeah please nice guy save the poor girl

DracoPlato

given the time period her family could marry her off

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Also I have a theory that she will find her sister via twin telephaphy

DracoPlato

but any guy that wanted to marry a nut job wouldn't be the best i'm sure, lol

MathTans

Where would Rose even start looking? Family records? Is there an old stump out back with shady lights floating about it?

Oooh, point, maybe she senses something.

DracoPlato

looool

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Or what is that called, Twin empathy/

It's actually an actual neuro thing with twins

MathTans

Timpani? No, wait.

I'll take your word, I don't know from twins.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

I also think the reason why Rose can't sense her twin is because the twin is in another dimention

And haha Math, I have a lot of research about twins for my comic

DracoPlato

i think the twin has been eaten

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Well changlings don't work like that Draco

MathTans

Ooooh, maybe a dimension where time moves differently. Perhaps Rose finds Lily, but Lily's the same age she was when she got abducted.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

My remembering of it is they keep the human and raise them

But there are so many different varients

And oh that's a good one too Math

MathTans

Raise them like cattle.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Baby Lily

DracoPlato

yeah there are variants where they're just eaten

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

I thought that was just fae in general

MathTans

Draco, have you had dinner yet?

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

They just eat people

Also Draco must be hungry hahah

DracoPlato

nyu

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

I'm hungry too stop making me hungry

DracoPlato

but we eat lunch late

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Also I have to note

Lily's and Rose's name

MathTans

The Hill sisters?

RebelVampire

yeah ive seen more variants of the story where the child just gets eaten

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Lily the flower when used in funerals symbolize that the soul of the departed has received restored innocence after death.

DracoPlato

yis

MathTans

omg, flower symbolism, I didn't even think.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Roses are just basic passion and stuff but there are things like Yellow roses

Or white roses

MathTans

Rose Hill. Lily... of the Valley? (okay, no.)

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Lily of the valley is another flower too

MathTans

Yeah, but Lily's not a valley girl.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

But Lily of the Valley has a meaning of "Return of Happiness"

And the other Lily is defintely a valley[faerie] girl

MathTans

Well, damn.

RebelVampire

assuming shes alive O_O

MathTans

She's in the 5th dimension.

I wonder what it is about this particular outburst the sisters seem to be having that's going to result in Rose departing on her search. What makes it different from the last ones (to kind of look at that sister abuse again).

Maybe Lily lets something slip.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Hopeflly she is alive

MathTans

Like, doll Lily. (Or real Lily somehow communicates a message??)

RebelVampire

it could be real Lily insighting it. o rmaybe fake lily legit tries to kill her

although this now makes me wonder, if lily doesnt want rose to spill the beans, why doesnt she just kill rose and make it look like an accident?

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Becuase they need her for something

OHHHHH IDEA

CRACK THEORY

MathTans

Oooh, yeah, that could be. (I don't know the horror genre that well, not usually my go-to.)

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

THEY WANT TO USE THE TWINS TO OPEN THE GATE FROM THE FAE WORLD INTO THE HUMA NWORKLD

MathTans

On their 18th birthdays?

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

OF COURSE

RebelVampire

im not sure the fae need that considering they can just hop on over and take babies XD

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Maybe that's just a weaker fae

Maybe the hgih class fae are too strong for the weak veil between worlds

MathTans

They want a bridge that doesn't rely on laughter.

But tears instead.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Yup XD

Or maybe the twins are gonna be nessary for a soul gate too

There are a lot of twin stories about souls and how they used to be one but they are not if they are indentical

which it seems like they are

RebelVampire

i wonder if the faeries in this comic have souls

DracoPlato

hmmm

the fake sister may not even be a fairy

RebelVampire

does fake sister have a soul

DracoPlato

what is fake sister MathTans

what is fake, what is real

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

I think she is a doll actually

From the pointing out of the stitches

I think she is a puppet

And it doesn't have a soul

RebelVampire

well tbh she is a doll

cause the comic description even calls her that

"Rose's twin sister is kidnapped by a fairy and replaced by a doll. Rose is the only one who sees the difference, and the doll treats Rose horribly, until Rose one day has enough of it and goes searching for her real sister."

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Yup

DracoPlato

oh, so that's just it? there's nothing more to it other than doll

MathTans

Lily's soul could be trapped in the doll.

DracoPlato

i just thought there'd be more something behind the word doll

MathTans

Doll-ar bills.

RebelVampire

i like the idea that lily's soul is just trapped in fake lily.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

actually fun note

Back in the day, they call dressed up rich people as dolls

Maybe ti's a nod to that?

Like "Isn't she such a doll?"

MathTans

Oooh, good point. Getting all dolled up. Dressing for the nines. Leaving the rich people in stitches.

DracoPlato

yeah i honestly just thought the use of the word "doll" was a generic descriptive that had a deeper meaning behind it in the overall

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Yeah, Math's you got it XD

DracoPlato

cause i mean something has to be moving the doll for it to have a personality

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Bitches, Draco, there are bitches in those stiches

DracoPlato

looool

MathTans

Does it have a personality? Or is it simply acting based on how the people around it expect it to behave? Perhaps even Rose herself expects bad behaviour, so that's what she gets.

RebelVampire

if thats the case

https://tapas.io/episode/550751

that changes the entire dynamic of that cover

cause youd think obviously lily is the evil looking top twin

but if lily acts based on how ppl assume

than its rose who is controlling her and therefore the twin on top

DracoPlato

Oooooooh ooooooh snap that'd be pretty awesome

you were the one that made her evil

MathTans

It's like a warped mirror almost.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Oooh

RebelVampire

QUESTION 4. Insofar, Andrew is the only character who seems to have paid Rose any mind; Rose even reluctantly tells Andrew the truth about Lily. Do you think Andrew has a future role to play in Rose’s life? If so, what? Alternatively, do you think Andrew will somehow become a hindrance to her quest?

MathTans

I'm still kind of surprised Andrew didn't die, so maybe I'm cynical.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Andrew please have good things happen to you

As someone who makes bad things happen to kind characters, I hope you have good htings come toyour way

DracoPlato

there's not enough story to really go on for his future role potential, i also don't know if this is a shorter or longer work

MathTans

If he's a hinderance, I think it would only be by accident.

DracoPlato

maybe he'll help her search for her sister tho

MathTans

Draco: I think it was in a Q&A that the author said they'd envisioned about 4 chapters, with this one being the first. I could be misremembering.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

I want him to be like "Oh you are going to do that? I will help you. You dnot want me to come along? I will distract your twin for you."

DracoPlato

ah that's not too long then

MathTans

That's a good point, Andrew might be a distraction so Rose can get away.

DracoPlato

it feels like a shorter work? I dunno, that's the vibe I get

MathTans

Not sure what consistutes a "chapter" though. fuzy memory

RebelVampire

yeah are we talking normal chapters or cali chapters?

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

LOL

MathTans

I also recall the author being concerned about not outputting more frequently, so just a quick shoutout if they read this, I don't think that's a big deal. Go at the pace that works.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

I'm gonna have to poof off, need to work on pages ahha I'm behind XD Have fun everyone else :3

MathTans

Best, Feather! Thanks for theories!

RebelVampire

thanks for coming feather~!

MathTans

Is anyone shipping Rose and Andrew? (Too soon?)

DracoPlato

bye Feather~!

i'm still suspicious of him

RebelVampire

how can you not ship rose and andrew? O_O

MathTans

Maybe he's a fae in disguise? O.o

DracoPlato

trust nobody

RebelVampire

although i do think andrew is potentially a "nice guy" in the sense hell go through stuff and then wonder why rose doesnt put out O_O

then go online and bitch how he got friendzoned

DracoPlato

yeah i got that vibe from him too

like whhhhy were you interested in the meek one that looks miserable, suspicious

MathTans

Eh, I didn't really get that vibe myself, but then I am a guy over here. I felt like he was trying to engage socially with people who don't necessarily enjoy these sorts of affairs, make it pleasant for them.

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Quick note: I'm the type of person who friends shy people, so I don't know, it could be a thing?

Also back in the day

It's polite for males to introduce thsemvles to ALL the ladies at the party

DracoPlato

yeah that could be math

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Regardless

I don't remember what era they set the story in

But I do remember that was social ettique things :3

MathTans

So Andrew's maybe not polite, but he's nice. ^.-

Feather, Duke of Hot Leaf Juice

Alright offical poof

DracoPlato

yeah but it's fiction so that may not be the construct he's working under

not to deny that it could be part of it

just for the tone of the story it seems like it'd be more emotionally scarring for rose if andrew wasn't nice

RebelVampire

idk if that applies tho cause no other guy approached rose XD so either andrew is the only polite person at this party or its not considered

DracoPlato

but she had put trust in him

MathTans

He also seemed annoyed or perturbed by the outrageous HaHaHa laughter. Maybe he's not much of a social guy himself.

DracoPlato

yeah, agreed rebel

MathTans

Though he's got good talking skills.

(But then, so do I some say, and I'm not a social person.)

RebelVampire

which him being the only polite person is possible. i just think the flirting makes it clear he had other intentions than politeness XD

but he may not be a nice guy

he couldve picked rose cause he is socially awkward himself and she seemed easiest to talk to

DracoPlato

it's a story with few characters atm, even fewer speaking ones, he was shown for a purpose, lol

his purpose may have been just to have lily rebuke rose afterwards tho

so his role may already be done in the story

RebelVampire

i dont feel his role is done cause i feel there were easier ways to get the rebuke without spilling hte beans to andrew

cause rose couldve said nothing and still got rebuked

MathTans

Maybe Andrew is ALL IN ROSE'S MIND. She's the only one who sees him the same way she's the only one who sees Lily's stitches. She tells her story to made-up people, she's that far gone.

DracoPlato

that's why he noticed her first

he's only in her head

MathTans

Rose is hitting on herself. She just wants to be loved.

RebelVampire

so im gonna have a crack theory in that what if rose was the one taken. and were already in the land of the faeries and the faeries just happen to be able to disguise as humans. but they made rose a doll cause baby rose kept crying about missing her sister

MathTans

O.o

DracoPlato

that'd be interesting

MathTans

Neat. They need to deal with their doll a little better though.

It's beating up their abductee.

RebelVampire

thats cause rose is being a little shit and this isnt the first doll cause rose tore apart the first one

wait how can a doll grow O_O

what magic is this

this is some good magic

DracoPlato

that is some pretty good magic XD

MathTans

The world is actually shrinking.

Now I'm wondering if dolls go through puberty. wut?

RebelVampire

she must be frankenstein's doll.

MathTans

Though if the fae had to come back and check every so often for maintenance, that might leave a trail for Rose to follow.

"Please make my hips more slender."

RebelVampire

LOL

i do think inevitably it might be the twin empathy/telepathy thing that pull sthrough as feather suggested. cause i cant otherwise think of anything mentioned that will lead rose on the right path

MathTans

Yeah, I kind of like that angle. Or maybe Andrew was the last straw, and she snaps and runs away. And once outside the influence she picks up vibes.

RebelVampire

do you think lily will pursue her or do you think lily will just be like "eh if im lucky shell get eaten by a bear"

MathTans

Good question. I think she'll get someone else to pursue. She may or may not come along, doesn't strike me as the type to get her dress dirty.

RebelVampire

i guess it really comes down to how fearful she is of rose finding the real lily

although

if rose finds the real lily how does she prove to everyone else that its the real lily?

DracoPlato

yis

MathTans

Having two of them side-by-side might help give Rose some credibility at least.(edited)

Unless Lily's still a baby.

Maybe she'll have to catch a fae.

RebelVampire

but even side-by-side ppl may not see fake lily's stitches

what if rose comes back and everyone assumes rose is the fake O_O

and fake lily and real lily are the legit twins

MathTans

I guess we'll have to wait and find out.

RebelVampire

Unfortunately, the scheduled Comic Tea Party is now complete~! Thank you everyone so much for joining this week’s chat~! That being said, if you would like to continue discussing the comic, we encourage you to do so~! We want to give a big thank you to yondoloki, as well, for volunteering The Changeling’s Sister for our reading queue. If you liked the comic, please be sure to support yondoloki’s efforts. If you have questions, concerns, or suggestions about CTP, please feel free to PM me, or e-mail me at RebelVampire@startfaire.com.

With that said, next week’s Comic Tea Party will focus on Radio Silence by Vanessa Stefaniuk. Please use this week to read as much of the comic as you would like. Hope to see you next Thursday (September 28th) from 5PM to 7PM PDT~! Until then~! Comic: http://www.radiosilencecomic.com/

[wineanddinosaur]

How Japan Created the Modern American Bourbon Market

It was 1975 and bourbon sales in America were tanking. The brown spirit had hit its peak just five years earlier, selling some 80 million cases in 1970 — but it all went downhill from there.

Baby boomers coming of drinking age were rejecting the stuffy-seeming whiskey their parents drank, instead favoring beer, cheap wine, and, most especially, clear booze like vodka and tequila. The American whiskey industry was reeling and running out of ideas.

“This was a daunting task since the market was totally Scotch-taste oriented,” William Yuracko, then head of Schenley International’s export division, told the The New York Times in 1992. Japanese people mostly drank Scotch — the country had lifted all restrictions on imported spirits in 1969 — or their own homegrown whiskey, which was likewise based on a Scotch flavor profile. “Bourbon was unknown and a total departure from the taste pattern,” he wrote.

Remarkably, within a few short years, Yuracko (who would would become Schenley president from 1975 to 1984) and others would create a frenzy for bourbon in Japan. In fact, the country’s desire for very well-aged, high-proof, premium-packaged, limited editions and single-barrel bourbons helped Kentucky survive when the American bourbon market was dead as disco.

The U.S. would, in turn, follow Japan’s lead and, as the world entered a new millennium, start latching onto these trends and introducing products that helped revive America’s fervor for the once-humble spirit, ultimately and unwittingly turning it into something now rabidly pursued by connoisseurs the world over.

A Critical Mass of Bourbon

Yuracko first started taking reconnaissance trips to the Far East in 1972 and quickly realized that getting Scotch-swilling Japanese old-timers to switch to bourbon would be nearly impossible. He decided to instead focus his efforts on Japan’s youth, the “post-college consumer,” he told The Times, “whose tastes were not yet formed and who was attuned to Western products and ideas,” like Coca-Cola and Levi’s.

“They were having their own youth revolution, [like] what we had gone through in the ’60s they were going through in the 80s,” explains Chuck Cowdery, author and bourbon historian. “Rejecting their parents’ generation, including what their parents’ generation drank. They were open to trying something new.”

Enter bourbon. Then, as now, it was very hard for foreigners to make headway in Japanese business. Yuracko knew he’d need a local liaison, so he offered a distribution partnership with Suntory, the Japanese whiskey brand that already controlled 70 percent of the local market. Brown-Forman, another American whiskey powerhouse and Schenley’s best competitor, would eventually offer Suntory the same deal.

“I cannot overestimate the importance of the decision taken by Schenley management to place their most important brands in the same house with their major competitor,” Yuracko explained in a paper he wrote for the Journal of Business Strategy in 1992. “This would be tantamount to Ford and General Motors giving all their top models to Toyota to market in Japan.”

It was a major gamble for everyone involved. Suntory could, of course, intentionally torpedo all bourbon sales to assure Japanese whiskey would never again have a competitor; or it could favor one bourbon brand over the other. The fact was, however, neither Schenley nor Brown-Forman had much to lose. If they didn’t take the gamble, bourbon might not even exist by the end of the decade.

Suntory didn’t want to simply do a trial, either. According to Yuracko, Suntory wanted a “critical mass” of bourbon, “a product for every taste and price level … and each brand was given its own identity and market niche.” Schenley offered Suntory Ancient Age, J.W. Dant, and I.W. Harper. Brown-Forman handed over Early Times, Old Forester, and Jack Daniel’s.

Since most drinking in Japan was done outside of the home, Schenley and Brown-Forman together began setting up bourbon bars all over the country. The bars had “an unsophisticated atmosphere that would appeal to young people already attracted to American clothes, cars, and customs,” Yuracko explained, playing country music and serving American food like hamburgers and chili, and only pouring Suntory’s six bourbon brands.

Instead of buying single glasses of bourbon, young customers purchased bottles, stored in cabinets along the bars, each adorned with a neck tag denoting whose was whose. In an era before TikTok, it became a youthful challenge to see who could drink the most personal bottles. Thanks to heavy advertising from Suntory, one brand quickly began to rise above the others.

“I.W. Harper was the eye-opener,” explains Cowdery. A bottom-shelf product in America, it was naturally able to be sold at much higher prices in Japan, before Schenley eventually fully repositioned it as a premium, 12-year-old product. If it was only moving 2,000 cases internationally in 1969, I. W. Harper eventually became the largest-selling bourbon brand in Japan at more than 500,000 cases per year by 1991. Cowdery explains, “It was profitable to buy cases of I.W. Harper on [the American] wholesale market and privately ship them to Japan.”

Eventually, the U.S. had to take I.W. Harper off the market stateside in order to satisfy demand in Japan. Soon enough, other brands took notice and decided to see if they, too, could become “big in Japan.” By 1990, 2 million cases of bourbon were headed to the country every year.

More Brands Head to Japan

In a sleepy Osaka suburb, a three-story building that has been everything from a hotel to a brothel is now a bar styled like a western saloon. It serves American food like fried chicken, thumps Dylan and the Beatles on a vintage jukebox, and mixes up classic cocktails like the Mint Julep and another called the Scarlett O’Hara. This is Rogin’s Tavern in Moriguichi, a bourbon bar that opened in the 1970s that remains a shrine to Americana and its governmentally protected spirit, stocking more and arguably better bourbon than pretty much any single bar in America.

“I tasted my first bourbon in the basement bar of the Rihga Royal Hotel, a famous old place in Osaka,” claims Seiichiro Tatsumi, Rogin’s owner since 1977. He quickly became obsessed, reading everything he could about bourbon via literature provided by the American Cultural Center in Osaka. He finally visited Kentucky for the first time in 1984 and fell in love, driving its country roads, stopping at off-the-beaten path liquor stores, and acquiring numerous dusty bottles to bring back to Japan. He now owns a second home in Lexington.

Over the years, Tatsumi claims, he has probably “self-imported” some 5,000 bourbons from America back to his bar. “I stop at every place I pass, and I don’t just look on the shelves,” he says. “I ask the clerk to comb the cellar and check the storeroom for anything old. I can’t tell you how many cases of ancient bottles I’ve found that way.”

It wasn’t only Tatsumi. Japan gave these old bourbon brands a new lifeline. For example, Four Roses had long fallen out of favor with American drinkers by the 1970s. In 1967, Seagram’s turned the once-venerable brand into a dreaded blended whiskey, cut with grain neutral spirit and added flavoring.

“[B]y the time the ‘90s rolled around it was just an average blended whiskey,” the late Al Young, Four Roses’ former senior brand ambassador who worked at the company for 50 years, told VinePair contributor Nicholas Mancall-Bitel last year. But in Japan it was legitimate straight bourbon whiskey, packaged in sleek Cognac-style bottles with embossed silver roses, and it was a big hit. Just as Schenley and Brown-Forman had partnered with Suntory, in 1971 Four Roses struck up a partnership with Kirin, Japan’s top beer brand.

If brands like I.W. Harper, Four Roses, and Early Times were saved by Japan, others were specifically created for it. Blanton’s, for example, was spawned in 1984 by two former Fleischmann’s Distilling execs, Ferdie Falk and Bob Baranaskas. The two had acquired the Buffalo Trace distillery (then known as the George T. Stagg Distillery), as well as Schenley’s key bourbon, Ancient Age. Believing, like Yuracko, that the future of bourbon was overseas, they called their new company Age International.

“[T]he brand chased the profitable high-priced segment,” writes Fred Minnick in his book “Bourbon: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American Whiskey.” In this case, that meant introducing the world’s first commercial single-barrel bourbon, specifically designed for Japan, and packaged in a now iconic grenade-shaped, horse-stoppered bottle.

Blanton’s was such a hit in Japan that by 1992 Japanese company Takara Shuzo had purchased Age International for $20 million. It immediately flipped the actual distillery to Sazerac, while retaining the brand trademarks for Blanton’s.

Aged Bourbons Claim a Price

Accustomed to Scotch, once Japanese consumers “moved onto other types of whiskey, they already had these expectations built in for 12-, 15-, 18-year age statements,” explains John Rudd, an American who formerly lived in Japan and runs the Tokyo Bourbon Bible blog.

Bourbon in America had typically been released after about four years — it got too oaky if it aged much longer, it was believed at the time — and few consumers particularly cared about lofty age statements. Not so in Japan and, luckily, the glut in America allowed many bourbon distilleries to unload what they thought was over-aged junk.

“With a depressed market in America, lots of bourbon, especially extra-aged bourbon, was shipped to Japan where it could command a higher price,” Rudd says.

There was Very Old St. Nick, specially created in 1984 for the Japanese market, some as old as 25 years. There was Old Grommes Very Very Rare Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, which in the late 1980s started sending Japan bottles as old as two decades. A.H. Hirsch, aged 15, 16, and eventually 20 years, landed in Japan as early as 1989, and is still some of the most coveted bourbon of all time (so much so that Cowdery wrote an entire book about it).

Heaven Hill, today the largest family-owned and operated distillery in the U.S., specifically bottled an Evan Williams 23 for the Japanese market and created new brands like Martin Mills 24 Years.

“Japan considered bourbon a prestigious, highly coveted consumer good,” says Jimmy Russell, Wild Turkey’s master distiller who started visiting Japan in the 1980s. Every year he returned with special bottlings from his company, some as old as 13 years, a lofty age that never existed in America. “Back then, you’d see private bottle programs at prestigious bars where high-level executives would have their own bottles of bourbon designated ‘my bottle.’”

Rogin’s Tavern, for one, started tapping distilleries for its own private, cask-strength bottlings. Willett provided a 25-year-old labeled “Rogin’s Choice.” Julian Van Winkle III, scion of the soon-to-come Pappy dynasty, offered a 12-year bottling. Van Winkle III, in particular, kept his nascent company afloat in the mid-1980s and onward by providing special bottlings, many under a name you could easily now call the entire Japanese whiskey marketplace: Society of Bourbon Connoisseurs.

Van Winkle III first released Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 20 Year in America in 1994; by the mid-2000s, Pappy had become the most coveted whiskey in the country, regularly selling for thousands of dollars per bottle.

“Bourbon became popular here [in America] again,” explains Rudd. “And people quit thinking it needed to be young.”

The American Bourbon Revival

America’s bourbon malaise would last nearly three decades, reaching its nadir in 2000, when a mere 32 million cases were moved stateside. Of course, it’s always darkest before the dawn, and, thanks to Japan’s example, things were already being put into place for bourbon’s homeland revival.

Like at Four Roses, where Jim Rutledge took over as master distiller in 1995 and made it his mission to get the company to start letting American consumers finally taste the high-quality bourbon Japan had been enjoying for decades. As Mancall-Bitel explained, however, “The bourbon was performing too well overseas and the company didn’t want to rock the boat — until it was rocked from within the company.”

Seagram’s collapsed and started selling off its assets. Rutledge convinced Kirin to buy Four Roses, and the eventual Japanese CEO, Teruyuki Daino, moved his offices from Tokyo back to the distillery in Lawrenceburg, Ky. By 2002, once again, Four Roses bourbon was sold in America. Today it’s one of the bourbon world’s most revered brands, introducing geek-friendly products like Single Barrel in 2004 and the Small Batch series in 2006.

Japan proved that well-aged, premium bourbon actually had a place in the world. Bourbon didn’t have to be Scotch’s economical, bottom-shelf brother. Blanton’s, when it was finally sold in America, was priced at $24 a bottle — then a massive price point — and was advertised in such upscale places as The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Ivy League alumni mags. Around the same time, Japanese drinkers were gladly paying $115 per bottle.

Bourbon’s rebirth in America has caused many brands to pull back their products from the Japanese market and raise prices on the little still sent there. Japan’s taste for bourbon has dwindled. At the same time, American tourists were heading to Japan to clear shelves of old stock.

“It all corresponded with the American bourbon boom getting out of hand,” explains Rudd. He believes Japan is no longer the bourbon oasis that it once was, even as recently as 2014, when he lived near a liquor store that stocked rare bottles like Society of Bourbon Connoisseurs, gold wax A.H. Hirsch, Van Winkle 1974 Family Reserve 17 Year, and Buffalo Trace Antique Collection offerings from the early aughts.

Rudd says he’d buy a few bottles here and there, always resting assured that more would be there any time he returned. “Then one day, I went back to the store and nothing was left,” he says. “I asked the owner what happened and he told me, ‘Some American guy named Alex came by and purchased all of it.’”

The article How Japan Created the Modern American Bourbon Market appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/japan-created-american-bourbon-market/

[johnboothus]

How Japan Created the Modern American Bourbon Market

It was 1975 and bourbon sales in America were tanking. The brown spirit had hit its peak just five years earlier, selling some 80 million cases in 1970 — but it all went downhill from there.

Baby boomers coming of drinking age were rejecting the stuffy-seeming whiskey their parents drank, instead favoring beer, cheap wine, and, most especially, clear booze like vodka and tequila. The American whiskey industry was reeling and running out of ideas.

“This was a daunting task since the market was totally Scotch-taste oriented,” William Yuracko, then head of Schenley International’s export division, told the The New York Times in 1992. Japanese people mostly drank Scotch — the country had lifted all restrictions on imported spirits in 1969 — or their own homegrown whiskey, which was likewise based on a Scotch flavor profile. “Bourbon was unknown and a total departure from the taste pattern,” he wrote.

Remarkably, within a few short years, Yuracko (who would would become Schenley president from 1975 to 1984) and others would create a frenzy for bourbon in Japan. In fact, the country’s desire for very well-aged, high-proof, premium-packaged, limited editions and single-barrel bourbons helped Kentucky survive when the American bourbon market was dead as disco.

The U.S. would, in turn, follow Japan’s lead and, as the world entered a new millennium, start latching onto these trends and introducing products that helped revive America’s fervor for the once-humble spirit, ultimately and unwittingly turning it into something now rabidly pursued by connoisseurs the world over.

A Critical Mass of Bourbon

Yuracko first started taking reconnaissance trips to the Far East in 1972 and quickly realized that getting Scotch-swilling Japanese old-timers to switch to bourbon would be nearly impossible. He decided to instead focus his efforts on Japan’s youth, the “post-college consumer,” he told The Times, “whose tastes were not yet formed and who was attuned to Western products and ideas,” like Coca-Cola and Levi’s.

“They were having their own youth revolution, [like] what we had gone through in the ’60s they were going through in the 80s,” explains Chuck Cowdery, author and bourbon historian. “Rejecting their parents’ generation, including what their parents’ generation drank. They were open to trying something new.”

Enter bourbon. Then, as now, it was very hard for foreigners to make headway in Japanese business. Yuracko knew he’d need a local liaison, so he offered a distribution partnership with Suntory, the Japanese whiskey brand that already controlled 70 percent of the local market. Brown-Forman, another American whiskey powerhouse and Schenley’s best competitor, would eventually offer Suntory the same deal.

“I cannot overestimate the importance of the decision taken by Schenley management to place their most important brands in the same house with their major competitor,” Yuracko explained in a paper he wrote for the Journal of Business Strategy in 1992. “This would be tantamount to Ford and General Motors giving all their top models to Toyota to market in Japan.”

It was a major gamble for everyone involved. Suntory could, of course, intentionally torpedo all bourbon sales to assure Japanese whiskey would never again have a competitor; or it could favor one bourbon brand over the other. The fact was, however, neither Schenley nor Brown-Forman had much to lose. If they didn’t take the gamble, bourbon might not even exist by the end of the decade.

Suntory didn’t want to simply do a trial, either. According to Yuracko, Suntory wanted a “critical mass” of bourbon, “a product for every taste and price level … and each brand was given its own identity and market niche.” Schenley offered Suntory Ancient Age, J.W. Dant, and I.W. Harper. Brown-Forman handed over Early Times, Old Forester, and Jack Daniel’s.

Since most drinking in Japan was done outside of the home, Schenley and Brown-Forman together began setting up bourbon bars all over the country. The bars had “an unsophisticated atmosphere that would appeal to young people already attracted to American clothes, cars, and customs,” Yuracko explained, playing country music and serving American food like hamburgers and chili, and only pouring Suntory’s six bourbon brands.

Instead of buying single glasses of bourbon, young customers purchased bottles, stored in cabinets along the bars, each adorned with a neck tag denoting whose was whose. In an era before TikTok, it became a youthful challenge to see who could drink the most personal bottles. Thanks to heavy advertising from Suntory, one brand quickly began to rise above the others.

“I.W. Harper was the eye-opener,” explains Cowdery. A bottom-shelf product in America, it was naturally able to be sold at much higher prices in Japan, before Schenley eventually fully repositioned it as a premium, 12-year-old product. If it was only moving 2,000 cases internationally in 1969, I. W. Harper eventually became the largest-selling bourbon brand in Japan at more than 500,000 cases per year by 1991. Cowdery explains, “It was profitable to buy cases of I.W. Harper on [the American] wholesale market and privately ship them to Japan.”

Eventually, the U.S. had to take I.W. Harper off the market stateside in order to satisfy demand in Japan. Soon enough, other brands took notice and decided to see if they, too, could become “big in Japan.” By 1990, 2 million cases of bourbon were headed to the country every year.

More Brands Head to Japan

In a sleepy Osaka suburb, a three-story building that has been everything from a hotel to a brothel is now a bar styled like a western saloon. It serves American food like fried chicken, thumps Dylan and the Beatles on a vintage jukebox, and mixes up classic cocktails like the Mint Julep and another called the Scarlett O’Hara. This is Rogin’s Tavern in Moriguichi, a bourbon bar that opened in the 1970s that remains a shrine to Americana and its governmentally protected spirit, stocking more and arguably better bourbon than pretty much any single bar in America.

“I tasted my first bourbon in the basement bar of the Rihga Royal Hotel, a famous old place in Osaka,” claims Seiichiro Tatsumi, Rogin’s owner since 1977. He quickly became obsessed, reading everything he could about bourbon via literature provided by the American Cultural Center in Osaka. He finally visited Kentucky for the first time in 1984 and fell in love, driving its country roads, stopping at off-the-beaten path liquor stores, and acquiring numerous dusty bottles to bring back to Japan. He now owns a second home in Lexington.

Over the years, Tatsumi claims, he has probably “self-imported” some 5,000 bourbons from America back to his bar. “I stop at every place I pass, and I don’t just look on the shelves,” he says. “I ask the clerk to comb the cellar and check the storeroom for anything old. I can’t tell you how many cases of ancient bottles I’ve found that way.”

It wasn’t only Tatsumi. Japan gave these old bourbon brands a new lifeline. For example, Four Roses had long fallen out of favor with American drinkers by the 1970s. In 1967, Seagram’s turned the once-venerable brand into a dreaded blended whiskey, cut with grain neutral spirit and added flavoring.

“[B]y the time the ‘90s rolled around it was just an average blended whiskey,” the late Al Young, Four Roses’ former senior brand ambassador who worked at the company for 50 years, told VinePair contributor Nicholas Mancall-Bitel last year. But in Japan it was legitimate straight bourbon whiskey, packaged in sleek Cognac-style bottles with embossed silver roses, and it was a big hit. Just as Schenley and Brown-Forman had partnered with Suntory, in 1971 Four Roses struck up a partnership with Kirin, Japan’s top beer brand.

If brands like I.W. Harper, Four Roses, and Early Times were saved by Japan, others were specifically created for it. Blanton’s, for example, was spawned in 1984 by two former Fleischmann’s Distilling execs, Ferdie Falk and Bob Baranaskas. The two had acquired the Buffalo Trace distillery (then known as the George T. Stagg Distillery), as well as Schenley’s key bourbon, Ancient Age. Believing, like Yuracko, that the future of bourbon was overseas, they called their new company Age International.

“[T]he brand chased the profitable high-priced segment,” writes Fred Minnick in his book “Bourbon: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American Whiskey.” In this case, that meant introducing the world’s first commercial single-barrel bourbon, specifically designed for Japan, and packaged in a now iconic grenade-shaped, horse-stoppered bottle.

Blanton’s was such a hit in Japan that by 1992 Japanese company Takara Shuzo had purchased Age International for $20 million. It immediately flipped the actual distillery to Sazerac, while retaining the brand trademarks for Blanton’s.

Aged Bourbons Claim a Price

Accustomed to Scotch, once Japanese consumers “moved onto other types of whiskey, they already had these expectations built in for 12-, 15-, 18-year age statements,” explains John Rudd, an American who formerly lived in Japan and runs the Tokyo Bourbon Bible blog.

Bourbon in America had typically been released after about four years — it got too oaky if it aged much longer, it was believed at the time — and few consumers particularly cared about lofty age statements. Not so in Japan and, luckily, the glut in America allowed many bourbon distilleries to unload what they thought was over-aged junk.

“With a depressed market in America, lots of bourbon, especially extra-aged bourbon, was shipped to Japan where it could command a higher price,” Rudd says.

There was Very Old St. Nick, specially created in 1984 for the Japanese market, some as old as 25 years. There was Old Grommes Very Very Rare Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, which in the late 1980s started sending Japan bottles as old as two decades. A.H. Hirsch, aged 15, 16, and eventually 20 years, landed in Japan as early as 1989, and is still some of the most coveted bourbon of all time (so much so that Cowdery wrote an entire book about it).

Heaven Hill, today the largest family-owned and operated distillery in the U.S., specifically bottled an Evan Williams 23 for the Japanese market and created new brands like Martin Mills 24 Years.

“Japan considered bourbon a prestigious, highly coveted consumer good,” says Jimmy Russell, Wild Turkey’s master distiller who started visiting Japan in the 1980s. Every year he returned with special bottlings from his company, some as old as 13 years, a lofty age that never existed in America. “Back then, you’d see private bottle programs at prestigious bars where high-level executives would have their own bottles of bourbon designated ‘my bottle.’”

Rogin’s Tavern, for one, started tapping distilleries for its own private, cask-strength bottlings. Willett provided a 25-year-old labeled “Rogin’s Choice.” Julian Van Winkle III, scion of the soon-to-come Pappy dynasty, offered a 12-year bottling. Van Winkle III, in particular, kept his nascent company afloat in the mid-1980s and onward by providing special bottlings, many under a name you could easily now call the entire Japanese whiskey marketplace: Society of Bourbon Connoisseurs.

Van Winkle III first released Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 20 Year in America in 1994; by the mid-2000s, Pappy had become the most coveted whiskey in the country, regularly selling for thousands of dollars per bottle.

“Bourbon became popular here [in America] again,” explains Rudd. “And people quit thinking it needed to be young.”

The American Bourbon Revival

America’s bourbon malaise would last nearly three decades, reaching its nadir in 2000, when a mere 32 million cases were moved stateside. Of course, it’s always darkest before the dawn, and, thanks to Japan’s example, things were already being put into place for bourbon’s homeland revival.

Like at Four Roses, where Jim Rutledge took over as master distiller in 1995 and made it his mission to get the company to start letting American consumers finally taste the high-quality bourbon Japan had been enjoying for decades. As Mancall-Bitel explained, however, “The bourbon was performing too well overseas and the company didn’t want to rock the boat — until it was rocked from within the company.”

Seagram’s collapsed and started selling off its assets. Rutledge convinced Kirin to buy Four Roses, and the eventual Japanese CEO, Teruyuki Daino, moved his offices from Tokyo back to the distillery in Lawrenceburg, Ky. By 2002, once again, Four Roses bourbon was sold in America. Today it’s one of the bourbon world’s most revered brands, introducing geek-friendly products like Single Barrel in 2004 and the Small Batch series in 2006.

Japan proved that well-aged, premium bourbon actually had a place in the world. Bourbon didn’t have to be Scotch’s economical, bottom-shelf brother. Blanton’s, when it was finally sold in America, was priced at $24 a bottle — then a massive price point — and was advertised in such upscale places as The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Ivy League alumni mags. Around the same time, Japanese drinkers were gladly paying $115 per bottle.

Bourbon’s rebirth in America has caused many brands to pull back their products from the Japanese market and raise prices on the little still sent there. Japan’s taste for bourbon has dwindled. At the same time, American tourists were heading to Japan to clear shelves of old stock.

“It all corresponded with the American bourbon boom getting out of hand,” explains Rudd. He believes Japan is no longer the bourbon oasis that it once was, even as recently as 2014, when he lived near a liquor store that stocked rare bottles like Society of Bourbon Connoisseurs, gold wax A.H. Hirsch, Van Winkle 1974 Family Reserve 17 Year, and Buffalo Trace Antique Collection offerings from the early aughts.

Rudd says he’d buy a few bottles here and there, always resting assured that more would be there any time he returned. “Then one day, I went back to the store and nothing was left,” he says. “I asked the owner what happened and he told me, ‘Some American guy named Alex came by and purchased all of it.’”

The article How Japan Created the Modern American Bourbon Market appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/japan-created-american-bourbon-market/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/how-japan-created-the-modern-american-bourbon-market

[isaiahrippinus]

How Japan Created the Modern American Bourbon Market

It was 1975 and bourbon sales in America were tanking. The brown spirit had hit its peak just five years earlier, selling some 80 million cases in 1970 — but it all went downhill from there.

Baby boomers coming of drinking age were rejecting the stuffy-seeming whiskey their parents drank, instead favoring beer, cheap wine, and, most especially, clear booze like vodka and tequila. The American whiskey industry was reeling and running out of ideas.

“This was a daunting task since the market was totally Scotch-taste oriented,” William Yuracko, then head of Schenley International’s export division, told the The New York Times in 1992. Japanese people mostly drank Scotch — the country had lifted all restrictions on imported spirits in 1969 — or their own homegrown whiskey, which was likewise based on a Scotch flavor profile. “Bourbon was unknown and a total departure from the taste pattern,” he wrote.

Remarkably, within a few short years, Yuracko (who would would become Schenley president from 1975 to 1984) and others would create a frenzy for bourbon in Japan. In fact, the country’s desire for very well-aged, high-proof, premium-packaged, limited editions and single-barrel bourbons helped Kentucky survive when the American bourbon market was dead as disco.

The U.S. would, in turn, follow Japan’s lead and, as the world entered a new millennium, start latching onto these trends and introducing products that helped revive America’s fervor for the once-humble spirit, ultimately and unwittingly turning it into something now rabidly pursued by connoisseurs the world over.

A Critical Mass of Bourbon

Yuracko first started taking reconnaissance trips to the Far East in 1972 and quickly realized that getting Scotch-swilling Japanese old-timers to switch to bourbon would be nearly impossible. He decided to instead focus his efforts on Japan’s youth, the “post-college consumer,” he told The Times, “whose tastes were not yet formed and who was attuned to Western products and ideas,” like Coca-Cola and Levi’s.

“They were having their own youth revolution, [like] what we had gone through in the ’60s they were going through in the 80s,” explains Chuck Cowdery, author and bourbon historian. “Rejecting their parents’ generation, including what their parents’ generation drank. They were open to trying something new.”

Enter bourbon. Then, as now, it was very hard for foreigners to make headway in Japanese business. Yuracko knew he’d need a local liaison, so he offered a distribution partnership with Suntory, the Japanese whiskey brand that already controlled 70 percent of the local market. Brown-Forman, another American whiskey powerhouse and Schenley’s best competitor, would eventually offer Suntory the same deal.

“I cannot overestimate the importance of the decision taken by Schenley management to place their most important brands in the same house with their major competitor,” Yuracko explained in a paper he wrote for the Journal of Business Strategy in 1992. “This would be tantamount to Ford and General Motors giving all their top models to Toyota to market in Japan.”

It was a major gamble for everyone involved. Suntory could, of course, intentionally torpedo all bourbon sales to assure Japanese whiskey would never again have a competitor; or it could favor one bourbon brand over the other. The fact was, however, neither Schenley nor Brown-Forman had much to lose. If they didn’t take the gamble, bourbon might not even exist by the end of the decade.

Suntory didn’t want to simply do a trial, either. According to Yuracko, Suntory wanted a “critical mass” of bourbon, “a product for every taste and price level … and each brand was given its own identity and market niche.” Schenley offered Suntory Ancient Age, J.W. Dant, and I.W. Harper. Brown-Forman handed over Early Times, Old Forester, and Jack Daniel’s.

Since most drinking in Japan was done outside of the home, Schenley and Brown-Forman together began setting up bourbon bars all over the country. The bars had “an unsophisticated atmosphere that would appeal to young people already attracted to American clothes, cars, and customs,” Yuracko explained, playing country music and serving American food like hamburgers and chili, and only pouring Suntory’s six bourbon brands.

Instead of buying single glasses of bourbon, young customers purchased bottles, stored in cabinets along the bars, each adorned with a neck tag denoting whose was whose. In an era before TikTok, it became a youthful challenge to see who could drink the most personal bottles. Thanks to heavy advertising from Suntory, one brand quickly began to rise above the others.

“I.W. Harper was the eye-opener,” explains Cowdery. A bottom-shelf product in America, it was naturally able to be sold at much higher prices in Japan, before Schenley eventually fully repositioned it as a premium, 12-year-old product. If it was only moving 2,000 cases internationally in 1969, I. W. Harper eventually became the largest-selling bourbon brand in Japan at more than 500,000 cases per year by 1991. Cowdery explains, “It was profitable to buy cases of I.W. Harper on [the American] wholesale market and privately ship them to Japan.”

Eventually, the U.S. had to take I.W. Harper off the market stateside in order to satisfy demand in Japan. Soon enough, other brands took notice and decided to see if they, too, could become “big in Japan.” By 1990, 2 million cases of bourbon were headed to the country every year.

More Brands Head to Japan

In a sleepy Osaka suburb, a three-story building that has been everything from a hotel to a brothel is now a bar styled like a western saloon. It serves American food like fried chicken, thumps Dylan and the Beatles on a vintage jukebox, and mixes up classic cocktails like the Mint Julep and another called the Scarlett O’Hara. This is Rogin’s Tavern in Moriguichi, a bourbon bar that opened in the 1970s that remains a shrine to Americana and its governmentally protected spirit, stocking more and arguably better bourbon than pretty much any single bar in America.

“I tasted my first bourbon in the basement bar of the Rihga Royal Hotel, a famous old place in Osaka,” claims Seiichiro Tatsumi, Rogin’s owner since 1977. He quickly became obsessed, reading everything he could about bourbon via literature provided by the American Cultural Center in Osaka. He finally visited Kentucky for the first time in 1984 and fell in love, driving its country roads, stopping at off-the-beaten path liquor stores, and acquiring numerous dusty bottles to bring back to Japan. He now owns a second home in Lexington.

Over the years, Tatsumi claims, he has probably “self-imported” some 5,000 bourbons from America back to his bar. “I stop at every place I pass, and I don’t just look on the shelves,” he says. “I ask the clerk to comb the cellar and check the storeroom for anything old. I can’t tell you how many cases of ancient bottles I’ve found that way.”

It wasn’t only Tatsumi. Japan gave these old bourbon brands a new lifeline. For example, Four Roses had long fallen out of favor with American drinkers by the 1970s. In 1967, Seagram’s turned the once-venerable brand into a dreaded blended whiskey, cut with grain neutral spirit and added flavoring.

“[B]y the time the ‘90s rolled around it was just an average blended whiskey,” the late Al Young, Four Roses’ former senior brand ambassador who worked at the company for 50 years, told VinePair contributor Nicholas Mancall-Bitel last year. But in Japan it was legitimate straight bourbon whiskey, packaged in sleek Cognac-style bottles with embossed silver roses, and it was a big hit. Just as Schenley and Brown-Forman had partnered with Suntory, in 1971 Four Roses struck up a partnership with Kirin, Japan’s top beer brand.

If brands like I.W. Harper, Four Roses, and Early Times were saved by Japan, others were specifically created for it. Blanton’s, for example, was spawned in 1984 by two former Fleischmann’s Distilling execs, Ferdie Falk and Bob Baranaskas. The two had acquired the Buffalo Trace distillery (then known as the George T. Stagg Distillery), as well as Schenley’s key bourbon, Ancient Age. Believing, like Yuracko, that the future of bourbon was overseas, they called their new company Age International.

“[T]he brand chased the profitable high-priced segment,” writes Fred Minnick in his book “Bourbon: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of an American Whiskey.” In this case, that meant introducing the world’s first commercial single-barrel bourbon, specifically designed for Japan, and packaged in a now iconic grenade-shaped, horse-stoppered bottle.

Blanton’s was such a hit in Japan that by 1992 Japanese company Takara Shuzo had purchased Age International for $20 million. It immediately flipped the actual distillery to Sazerac, while retaining the brand trademarks for Blanton’s.

Aged Bourbons Claim a Price

Accustomed to Scotch, once Japanese consumers “moved onto other types of whiskey, they already had these expectations built in for 12-, 15-, 18-year age statements,” explains John Rudd, an American who formerly lived in Japan and runs the Tokyo Bourbon Bible blog.

Bourbon in America had typically been released after about four years — it got too oaky if it aged much longer, it was believed at the time — and few consumers particularly cared about lofty age statements. Not so in Japan and, luckily, the glut in America allowed many bourbon distilleries to unload what they thought was over-aged junk.

“With a depressed market in America, lots of bourbon, especially extra-aged bourbon, was shipped to Japan where it could command a higher price,” Rudd says.

There was Very Old St. Nick, specially created in 1984 for the Japanese market, some as old as 25 years. There was Old Grommes Very Very Rare Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, which in the late 1980s started sending Japan bottles as old as two decades. A.H. Hirsch, aged 15, 16, and eventually 20 years, landed in Japan as early as 1989, and is still some of the most coveted bourbon of all time (so much so that Cowdery wrote an entire book about it).

Heaven Hill, today the largest family-owned and operated distillery in the U.S., specifically bottled an Evan Williams 23 for the Japanese market and created new brands like Martin Mills 24 Years.

“Japan considered bourbon a prestigious, highly coveted consumer good,” says Jimmy Russell, Wild Turkey’s master distiller who started visiting Japan in the 1980s. Every year he returned with special bottlings from his company, some as old as 13 years, a lofty age that never existed in America. “Back then, you’d see private bottle programs at prestigious bars where high-level executives would have their own bottles of bourbon designated ‘my bottle.’”

Rogin’s Tavern, for one, started tapping distilleries for its own private, cask-strength bottlings. Willett provided a 25-year-old labeled “Rogin’s Choice.” Julian Van Winkle III, scion of the soon-to-come Pappy dynasty, offered a 12-year bottling. Van Winkle III, in particular, kept his nascent company afloat in the mid-1980s and onward by providing special bottlings, many under a name you could easily now call the entire Japanese whiskey marketplace: Society of Bourbon Connoisseurs.

Van Winkle III first released Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve 20 Year in America in 1994; by the mid-2000s, Pappy had become the most coveted whiskey in the country, regularly selling for thousands of dollars per bottle.

“Bourbon became popular here [in America] again,” explains Rudd. “And people quit thinking it needed to be young.”

The American Bourbon Revival

America’s bourbon malaise would last nearly three decades, reaching its nadir in 2000, when a mere 32 million cases were moved stateside. Of course, it’s always darkest before the dawn, and, thanks to Japan’s example, things were already being put into place for bourbon’s homeland revival.

Like at Four Roses, where Jim Rutledge took over as master distiller in 1995 and made it his mission to get the company to start letting American consumers finally taste the high-quality bourbon Japan had been enjoying for decades. As Mancall-Bitel explained, however, “The bourbon was performing too well overseas and the company didn’t want to rock the boat — until it was rocked from within the company.”

Seagram’s collapsed and started selling off its assets. Rutledge convinced Kirin to buy Four Roses, and the eventual Japanese CEO, Teruyuki Daino, moved his offices from Tokyo back to the distillery in Lawrenceburg, Ky. By 2002, once again, Four Roses bourbon was sold in America. Today it’s one of the bourbon world’s most revered brands, introducing geek-friendly products like Single Barrel in 2004 and the Small Batch series in 2006.

Japan proved that well-aged, premium bourbon actually had a place in the world. Bourbon didn’t have to be Scotch’s economical, bottom-shelf brother. Blanton’s, when it was finally sold in America, was priced at $24 a bottle — then a massive price point — and was advertised in such upscale places as The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Ivy League alumni mags. Around the same time, Japanese drinkers were gladly paying $115 per bottle.

Bourbon’s rebirth in America has caused many brands to pull back their products from the Japanese market and raise prices on the little still sent there. Japan’s taste for bourbon has dwindled. At the same time, American tourists were heading to Japan to clear shelves of old stock.

“It all corresponded with the American bourbon boom getting out of hand,” explains Rudd. He believes Japan is no longer the bourbon oasis that it once was, even as recently as 2014, when he lived near a liquor store that stocked rare bottles like Society of Bourbon Connoisseurs, gold wax A.H. Hirsch, Van Winkle 1974 Family Reserve 17 Year, and Buffalo Trace Antique Collection offerings from the early aughts.

Rudd says he’d buy a few bottles here and there, always resting assured that more would be there any time he returned. “Then one day, I went back to the store and nothing was left,” he says. “I asked the owner what happened and he told me, ‘Some American guy named Alex came by and purchased all of it.’”

The article How Japan Created the Modern American Bourbon Market appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/japan-created-american-bourbon-market/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/191000805079

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THIS IS ANOTHER VARIABLE WHOSE COEFFICIENT SHOULD BE ZERO

But if you're living in the future to say this replaced journalism on some axis? A particularly promising way to be unusual is to be expected.1 You don't release code late at night and then go home.2 It did not end with software. Some of them, and probably offend them. I don't think the rise of Web-based applications.3 It was a great step forward to judge people by their performance on a test. Also turn off every other filter, particularly Could this be a big company, it doesn't seem as if Larry and Sergey themselves were unsure at first about starting a startup just doesn't require that much intelligence.4 But while learning to hack is not necessary, it is for the forseeable future sufficient.5

There is a parallel here with the first microcomputers. Now everyone knows that this is the exact moment when technological progress stops.6 Who will the customers be? At Harvard that is or was Reading Period, when students have no classes to attend because they're supposed to be there at certain times. The whole Viaweb site was made with our software, even though you don't need the current. The weekend before the demo day for investors, we had a practice session where all the groups gave their presentations. You had to go through bosses, and yet only in occasional emergencies does anyone tell anyone else what to do by someone you had to get mentioned in magazines and newspapers.7

What's missing? But while demand shaped like a well. If you get a summer job as a waiter to learn how restaurants worked. College is an incomparable opportunity to do that, like other investors, we had a template language called RTML, which supposedly stood for something, and then buy it, as two separate steps.8 They had ups and downs, like every startup, but I don't think I'm imagining it. When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. We never had more to say at any one time to bother with a formal bug-tracking system.9 The arrival of desktop computers inspired a lot of money to convince big companies that they need something more expensive. Best of all is when you can get away with being more informal.

You don't release code late at night and then go home.10 It only spread to places where there was a change in the social conventions and perhaps the laws governing the way big companies worked.11 Amazingly, no one ever called us on it. How would you get food, if you can make your software very efficient you can undersell competitors and still make a profit. Traditional journalism, for example—can't help but look smug. Made-up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that we could imagine know-it-alls on forums dismissing as toys. Of course, server-based software, neither your data nor the applications are kept on the client, it will work at any college. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off. Defaults are enormously powerful, precisely because they can't measure and thus reward individual performance. It doesn't sound obviously mistaken.

The way to deal with uncertainty is to analyze it into components. The whole site was organized like a funnel, directing people to the test drive would increase our growth rate. But I'm pretty sure that's a bad idea. We are still very suspect of this idea but will take a meeting as you suggest. I think we'll marvel at the inconveniences people put up with.12 There is a name now for what we were: an Application Service Provider, or ASP.13 But while demand shaped like a well is almost a necessary condition for passing, it was how many of them there are, any more than we'd expect naive solutions for keeping heroin out of a prison to work. You might think that people decide to buy something, and then buy it, as two separate steps. Our existence depended on doing these things right.14 It's usually fairly quick to find a cofounder, but that you rode with one foot in front of the other, like a skateboard.

Notes

Whereas many of the latter case, 20th century was also the main emotion I've observed; but it is still hard to say what was happening on Dallas, and there are few who can predict instead of editors, and when you graduate, regardless of what they do for a certain field, it's easy for small children, we're going to create wealth with no deadline, you can do it well enough known that people working for me to do video on-demand, because they've learned more, while she likes getting attention in the early adopters you evolve the idea that investors don't always volunteer a lot of money from good investors that they aren't. In the early adopters.

For example, willfulness clearly has two subcomponents, stubbornness and energy. They may play some behind the rapacious one.

A friend who started a company is common, but that we wrote in verse, it might be interested to hear about the idea is the case of Bayes' Rule. I have so far. This is one of the paths people take through life, and they hope will be near-spams that have bad ideas is many times that conversation was repeated.

And since everyone involved is so pervasive how often the answer to, in the few cases where it was too late to launch. It's a case in the bouillon cube s, cover, and their flakiness is indistinguishable from those of dynamic variables were merely optimization advice, before realizing that that's what we do. Wolter, Allan trans, Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, Nelson, 1963, p.

There are two very different types of applicants—for example I've deliberately avoided saying whether the program is no richer if it's convertible debt at a party school will inevitably be something of an urban legend. If you ask parents why kids shouldn't swear, the median VC loses money. If you extrapolate another 20 years, it will probably not quite as harmless as we think we're so useless that in effect what the rule of law is aiming at.

If you're trying to sell earlier than you otherwise would have become direct marketers. I know of any that died from releasing something full of bugs. You know what they do care about may not care; they may try to be combined that never should have been the first scientist.

Japanese cities are ugly too, e. It's hard to say that YC's most successful investment, Uber, from the end of economic equality in the country it's in. But it's dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was.

To be fair, the idea that they have less room for startups might be interested to hear from them. Founders weren't celebrated in the Valley. Something similar has been happening for a long time for word of mouth to get into that because a it's too obvious to your instruments.

This suggests a way to pressure them to private schools that in the future. In high school, secretly write your dissertation in the production of high quality. The reason is that promising ideas are not one of them, would not be led by manipulation or wishful thinking into trying to dispute their decision or just outright dismisses it and creates a situation where the ratio of spam, for many Americans the decisive change in the trade press.

That's probably too much. In January 2003, Yahoo released a new search engine is low. We thought software was all that matters to us that the feature was useless, but viewed from the compromise you'd have reached after lots of people who will go on to study, because spam and legitimate mail volume both have distinct daily patterns. But you couldn't possibly stream it from a 6/03 Nielsen study quoted on Google's site.

It also set off an extensive biography, and Reddit is Delicious/popular with groups that are only pretending to in the grave and trying to figure this out. Since I now have on the proceeds of the class of 2007 came from such schools.

32. You're not seeing fragmentation unless you see with defense contractors or fashion brands.

Even if the founders: agree with them in advance that you can't even claim, like good scientists, motivated less by financial rewards than by the time. In fact, change what it means to be secretive, because unions will exert political pressure against Airbnb than hotel companies. They're common to all cultures with long traditions of living in Italy, I had a house built a couple hundred years ago.

So starting as a test of investor behavior. One of the optimism Europeans consider distinctly American is simply that it makes sense to exclude outliers from some types of studies, studies of returns from startup investing, but rather by, say, but nothing else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or the power that individual customers have over established companies is 47. Our secret is to try, we'd have understood users a lot about how closely the remarks attributed to Confucius and Plato saw themselves as teachers of administrators, and have not stopped to say, recursion, and at least once for that might be a big VC firm wants to program a Turing machine. If you want to design new languages.

[rantingisabadhabitbutwhatev]

June 21, 2018

So I never came back and continued my post from earlier this year. Long story short, I'm in a much better place now.

Last term I was really sad. Like really sad. I don't want to say depressed because I believe that word should be reserved to the actual mental illness, but if there was a word like depression, it would probably accurately represent my state of mind last term. Until last term, I didn't realize how much my social relationships impacted my mental health which in turn impacted my academic performance. Last term, I didn't make any friends except Jessica near the end of term. She was what got me through the term. I sat on that stupid bench in LSK and cried that day when I read the article about commuter students and the disconnect. Because every god damned word hit so close to home. That was when I knew I had hit a new low. I could barely bring myself to do any of my homework. Going to class was a chore that I forced myself to survive through and get our as quick as I could. Without friends to bring me up and keep me sane, I wilted. For so long, I had had Shivani by my side and I never realized how much she helped me get through. I thought I was ok to be a loner for a bit, it's not like I've ever wanted to be the center of attention or anything. But I was wrong. If i hadn't had Jessica through the last little bit of the term, my grades probably would have crashed more than they already did. I'm so grateful for her cause she pulled me out of the depressive slump I had found myself in.

The good thing about that though is that I'm way more self aware than before I started first year. I know now that I need to have time for friends and a social life or I'm going to crumble. I know now that I just need a good friend to lean on, even just for a bit. I know now that I can't balance all the things I thought I could balance. I know I need to have time to recharge away from school or I'll burn myself out. These are all things that will help me through second year.

Speaking of second year, ive ended up applying for biotechnology first, biology second and biochemistry third. Tomororw (well technically today since it's 2am right now) is when people start to hear back about their majors. If I get into biotech, I'm moving to BCIT for 2 years. If not, I'm moving closer to ubc so the commute doesn't kill me again. My registration time is 12:40 on the first day if that happebs zo I'm im in not too bad of a position to make a decent schedule for next year. However, I don't want to have to. Mostly because of Sean.

Sometimes its so surprising how fast life can change. Sean is a perfect example of that. It was only at the end of April that I decided to stop taking birth control because there was no boy on the horizon and I had given up on uni being a way to find one. But then Sean gets hired at LD. He's a bit odd at first, but that may have been first few shift jitters. We start to click better and it becomes more and more fun to close with him. One night right at the end of my exam season, I give him my number while I'm going on break in case he needs me. He calls me back 20 minutes later (on his cell i might point out, not the company phone) and I help whatever customer it was. But that night he also texts me. We text for anfew days and he invites me to hang out to celebrate the end of my exam season. I accept. We end up going out for sushi and sitting and talking for the next 3 hours straight. It was amazing. And the pattern continues. We talk everyday. We hang out again. And then again. Soon we're hanging out and seeing each other 3/4 times a week with shared work shifts included. We never touch but we become close friends really fast. We spend hours together just talking about everything and anything. We spend time in parks, on the seawall, in more parks, just talking. I meet his mom when I go over for dinner. He meets my mom the week later. We're still only just friends. At this point, I'm pretty much head over heels for him. But I'm unsure of his feelings due to his lack of apparent interest beyond friendship. Around the same time, I've become much closer with Tristam again. We go on a roadtrip together. We watch a movie cuddled up together. Then that Friday night, Tristam and I hook up after cuddling half naked listening to music. He eats me out and teases me about my kissing skills. He wants me to come over again, but I sidestep him neatly. On Monday (June 4th), Sean and I hang out and pass out in his bed and he finally makes his move and pulls me into him to cuddle. We have a tickle fight when we finally make it to my house. The next time we crash at my house on Thursday (June 7th), we kiss after playfighting some more. Saturday (june 9th) morning before our shifts at work, I go over to his house and we end up getting sexual, he eats me out. I soak his bed and only feel kinda bad about it 😂. Monday (June 11th), i go over to his house after school and blow him. Gag reflexes are such a bitch, holy shit. And we haven't seen each other in a week and a half now. But we've been talking. I got him talking about his kinks. We've been sending each other hearts and shit. He's been super sweet and poetic every day. Tonight he got super drunk and all he talked about was about how much he missed me. I miss him. We haven't had the official relationship talk, but we're there. I pretty much have a boyfriend. Idk how I managed it, but I'm happy. Really happy now.