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evenhisfacewasanalias · 4 months ago

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Remedy

Lady Jane Grey/Guildford Dudley

Rating: Adult

He shifts down, again allowing some of the warmth from his palms to seep into her skin before pressing against the tension there too. This time Jane leans into the motion, exhaling intentionally as she feels the intense pressure and subsequent release. Another hold and press, this time moving outward from her spine. The back of her day dress doesn’t leave much room for him to maneuver but he’s covering as much bare skin as he can with each touch.

“You don’t need to do this for me,” she automatically insists, though she doesn’t exactly try to halt him.

“I’m not,” Guildford retorts, not stopping either. “I’m doing it for me - you’ve barely turned a page in the last half hour and I can’t think when you’re over there groaning like a doddard.”

(Aka: Guildford offers Jane a backrub as they search for a cure together)

Jane can feel a particularly stubborn knot forming at the base of her skull from squinting at the faded ink of the codex in front of her - echoing the throbbing of her temples at trying to parse out the unfamiliar Greek dialect. There is also, of course, the ongoing issue of the tightness between her shoulder blades from spending evening after evening hunched over a pile of ancient manuscripts and her own notes. Her lower back isn't faring much better either. In fact, it might be safe to say her entire spine feels about as rigid and inflexible as the ones on these books. Her headache, however, may also be attributed to her research partner.

After eight failed cures for Ethianism, Guildford has taken it upon himself to help go over her notes. Unfortunately, this means he’s taken over her usual spot on her own bed, sprawling back against her headboard and claiming her pillows for himself while she is left to perch awkwardly on the other end trying to read Aeolic.

And this would be so much easier if Jane was a fan of Greek poetry instead of medicine and philosophy, which were mainly written in the Athenian dialects. She’s certain the loss of the η and the excess vowels sounded absolutely lovely when read aloud, but to her exhausted mind it just makes everything that much more difficult to translate. The fact that this writer, one Cadmus of Thessaly, uses far too many pronouns isn’t helping either. Αυτός without any definite article could mean ‘self’, but with one typically meant ‘this’ or ‘the same’. So was the αυτός described connected to or separate from the θηρίον, the wild beast? What did the “love” or “delight in” of φιληδεω translate to? Was Guildford supposed to ‘love’ his beast self? Was he to ‘delight in’ spending time with other horses? Was someone supposed to fall in love with him?

She looked over at the man arrogantly sprawled across her pillows, currently tossing aside her notes as if they were mere rubbish.

If that were the case, he’d be stuck as a horse forever.

Maybe he was supposed to get a horse to like him?

Jane couldn’t seem to stop her brain from asking the next question - was Guildford supposed to fuck a horse?

She grimaced at the invasive thought. Obviously not - for one thing, she knew the difference between φιλη and έρως - erotic love. And half the Ethians of her acquaintance weren’t even mammals.

Deciding she had had more than enough of Cadmus of Thessaly for one evening, she tosses the book aside, and tries to unfurl her spine.

“Gah! ” Ok, so that was a terrible plan. Her spine has clearly decided to take out its vengeance on her for her bad posture.

Guildford is looking at her strangely, and she realizes she probably looks like she managed to injure herself reading. At least the Duke of Leicester isn’t here to confirm his suspicions that the habit is too dangerous for young ladies.

“Someone should invent a more agreeable position for reading,” she says to no one in particular, but also very much to Guildford in order to explain her geriatric verbal eruptions.

“Well it’s certainly not going to be that hunchback posture you’re trying to perfect,” he tosses back, as if he’s not the one directly at fault for her awkward seating posture.

Jane will insist on pain of death that the sound that comes out of her mouth next is not a squawk.

“Well I wouldn’t need to hunch over if a certain someone hadn’t taken up the entire headboard of my own bed.”

“There’s more than enough room up here -” Guildford extends his arm to indicate the pillow next to him, only to bump against the pile of crumpled parchment at his side.

“Yes, I so dearly love sitting amongst the refuse of all my hard work.”

“I didn’t,” he starts, and then, perhaps thinking better of trying to deny it, “these are just the old pages, the ones we tried that didn’t work. Or things I’ve already tried myself. And I can move them, you know.”

She tries to wave him off, not exactly looking to wedge herself in next to him any more than she wants to be hunched over at the end of the bed. But apparently her shoulders are now joining in on the protest as well. She winces and lowers her arm back to a more neutral position.

“Look, just come up here,” he insists.

“It’s fine,” she sighs, “the damage is done, I might as well stay like this until we’re finished.”

“It’s not fine, if you get any more uptight about it you’re liable to break something. Just…here.”

He pushes aside all the parchment, making space just to the side of himself. And Jane doesn’t particularly want to sit that close to him but she’s also too tired and sore to argue about it. She shifts up toward him with as much dignity as she can, only wincing a little when she tries to straighten back.

Perhaps she winces a lot.

Whatever she does, it seems to inspire Guildford to step in and rearrange her. Only instead of arranging her back against the headboard, he turns her back towards himself, pushing aside her braid and lightly prodding at her neck and shoulders with his thumbs. A pained hiss from her has his thumbs immediately retreating. But his hands remain where they are, heavy and warm against the small amount of skin revealed by the back of her day dress.

“What are you doing?”

“You’re too tense, I need your muscles to warm up and acclimatize before I do anything.”

“And just what is it you..?”

She starts to ask but then he presses with his whole palm against the spread of her trapezius just below her neck, so that her question finishes instead with a surprised exhale. Whatever he just did burns hot along the strained nerves of her spine, but also feels sort of nice?

He shifts down, again allowing some of the warmth from his palms to seep into her skin before pressing against the tension there too. This time Jane leans into the motion, exhaling intentionally as she feels the intense pressure and subsequent release. Another hold and press, this time moving outward from her spine. The back of her dress doesn’t leave much room for him to maneuver but he’s covering as much bare skin as he can with each touch.

“You don’t need to do this for me,” she automatically insists, though she doesn’t exactly try to halt him.

Jane is definitely making noises now, as warm hands shift up to squeeze at the back of her neck.

“Mmh ,” she can’t help but hum as his lightly callused thumbs come back into the equation, stroking along the jut of tight muscle down her neck, gradually loosening it.

He pauses for a second at the sound, almost long enough for her to be embarrassed by the noise, but then he resumes, digging his thumbs a little deeper with each pass. Jane lets her head tip forward, the stretch of it no longer so painful.

Guildford has really nice hands, Jane realizes. Broad and strong, but surprisingly gentle, with agile fingers. In the privacy of her own mind she can admit that her eyes are often drawn to them. The night they met they were twirling around two stolen blades, expertly tossing them at the center of the dart board. The next time they met those self-same fingers were slipping a wedding ring around her own. She tries not to think about the ring itself too much, or the matching one around his own finger. Nor does she linger on the memory of him spinning her into his arms on their wedding night, only to humiliate her.

For entirely different reasons she skips over the memory of those strong hands pouring water across his bared physique in the stables. Far safer to think about his hands as he passes her a book - the broad expanse of them covering far more surface area than her own - or agile fingers twirling a quill, curled around a wine glass. Jane has apparently been thinking about his hands more than she had previously acknowledged.

She’s certainly paying attention now, as Guildford tilts her head to the side, cradling one side of her head in his deep palm while the other goes to work on her levator scapulae. She whines a little as he hits a particularly tender spot with his knuckles, switching instead to long broad strokes with the side of his hand, rubbing marvelous little circles right behind her ears. Jane feels some of her earlier headache start to ebb away as he tilts her head the opposite direction and repeats the motions.

Seemingly satisfied with her newly returned range of motion, he gently guides her head back to center, shifting his fingers upwards towards the base of her skull where the knot from earlier still existed - only to be thwarted by her hair.

“Can I take this out?”

“Mmhmm. ”

Jane has within her possession a quite extensive vocabulary - she’s a voracious reader, and a not-inexperienced conversationalist. Her mental lexicon stretches across seven fluent languages. But somehow a few small touches from Guildford’s skilled hands have reduced her to practically a single syllable.

She now discovers yet another one of Guildford’s skills, as he manages to free her hair from its braid in short order with barely a snag. He sets aside the pink ribbon that held it back and she’s oddly touched by the care he shows for it. But that is nothing compared to the feel of his fingers sliding into her hair, shaking it loose from its earlier tension. Every nerve in her scalp lights up at the soft scrape of blunt fingers, the shifting of her curls back into their natural wild state. He runs his hands through her hair a few more times to make sure every strand is freed before pressing his fingers upward against the base of her skull. He holds them in place, digging into the strain there for what feels like many minutes but is barely more than a few breaths, before releasing. Jane lets out another embarrassing noise at the exquisite release of tension, glad she doesn’t have to look Guildford in the face for this.

However awkward the sounds she’s making are, it doesn’t stop him from repeating the motion, gradually getting less and less response from her each time as the strain finally yields beneath his fingers. Jane feels half drunk on it by the time his fingers glide up to circle at her temples, freeing her from the last of her earlier headache. Even her earlier annoyance at him as the original cause of her cephalgia evaporates with the soothing press of his fingertips.

Jane is nearly at risk of tipping forward by the time he finally withdraws his hands. Figuring that was the end of whatever this was, she tried to pull herself mentally back together to face another round of research. But instead she feels his hands return again to her upper back. This time the work of his thumbs and knuckles dips a little below the edge of her dress.

“This would be a lot easier without all this boning in the way,” he murmurs against the curtain of her newly freed hair.

Part of her wants to declare that much in her life would be easier without restrictive bodices, but again all she manages is another “mhm”. Until she realizes what he’s implying.

“You want me to…?”

“Only if you want,” he interrupts, gently and a little hoarsely. And then a bit more teasingly, “I mean, I’ve already seen you in your shift. And if I remember correctly you’ve also seen me in far less.”

She blushes at the memory of just how much less he had been wearing at the time, thankful once again that he can’t see her face right now. But she can also hear the slight challenge in his voice, and she’s never been one to back down.

Her mind is still swimming a bit with the sensation of his fingers against her scalp, but she manages just enough coordination to tug at the laces tucked within the fore panel of her bodice. It takes a few moments to actually loosen them enough for their purposes, but then she’s pushing herself off the bed on shaking legs and slipping off her overdress and skirts. They pool at her feet with a heavy thud as she turns back to finally look at Guildford.

She expects to see one of his increasingly familiar expressions: either the standard rakish grin, or perhaps the oft-worn look of impatience with her - she is, after all, interrupting their research with the unfortunate consequences of her bad posture. What she doesn’t expect to turn and see are his eyes grown wide, mouth slightly parted in surprise. Jane quickly looks down to make sure she hasn’t accidentally removed her shift as well. But no, everything seems in place. She’s actually far more covered up than she had been on their wedding night.

Guildford schools his expression into some semblance of normality and clears his throat, “I only meant to ask you to loosen your bodice a little…”

Jane feels her face heating. Of course he hadn’t meant her to just strip off her dress in front of him like this. But he might have also said something earlier, before her dress was already on the floor. If she has to be embarrassed then so does he.

“Well I’m not putting it back on now,” she declares. “It’s past three anyway.”

She sits back on the bed with her back facing him, half daring him to continue as planned, and half hiding her own mortification.

“...this might be easier if you lie down,” his voice comes out huskier than normal from behind the curtain of her hair.

“Alright.”

Jane should feel embarrassed at how compliant she’s become after nothing more than a little rubbing of her scalp and neck, but she’s never faced anyone quite so adept at it. Her mother used to occasionally brush her tangled hair for her - an experience neither of them would ever want to repeat. Susannah was much gentler with it, and occasionally she’d rub circles into her back whenever Jane took ill. But none of it compares to the strong hands and clever fingers currently scraping weeks of tension from her upper body, leaving her head floating with the sensation of it. It seemed her nerves were so used to stress she could barely think without it.

So she moves without really thinking about it to help Guildford clear enough space for her to lie down next to him. She does note that he’s much more careful with the rest of her notes now, and tucks that thought away for when can do more than think “huh ” about it.

Jane stretches out across the newly cleared bedspread and sighs a little at the feeling of her spine uncurling just a fraction. She can feel the obvious difference between her head and neck, now relaxed in the cradle of her arms, and everything still coiled with tension below.

Guildford sits at her side, his hip pressed into the space just below her ribs, and she feels his hands sweep down her back, probing for knots and areas of tightness. She should probably just tell him her whole back is one giant knot, but she’s distracted by the teasing sensation of the lighter touches through the thin barrier of her shift. Even though her back still hurts, his touches feel nice in the same way his fingers in her hair did, and she’s surprised at the way her nerves light up all the way down to her front. She can feel her nipples tightening where they’re pressed against the bed, assuring herself it’s only an automatic reaction to the contrast between the heat of his hands and the apparent coolness of her exposed skin.

An actual moan escapes her lips at the first deep press of his hands right above her shoulder blades, forcing the air from her lungs with a sound that comes out much more pleased than she intended. She hears what might be a scoff or a grunt from the man above her, but she’s having trouble finding it in herself to be embarrassed when the pressure of his weight against her stiff muscles, his warm hands molded to the skin of her back, feels this good. Still, she tries to hold the excess noises back as he works his way down her spine, feeling each vertebra tense and uncoil with the movement of his hands.

And then the work of unknotting her muscles begins, his fingers working as a fine toothed comb seeking out every tangle and working it loose. She cries out as his fingers dig below her shoulder blades, scooping away the sore muscles and setting them back in place raw but relaxed.

“Where did you even learn how to do this?” She mumbles into her arms, head feeling too heavy to turn more towards him.

A soft chuckle in response. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to.”

His hands slip below her linen shift to glide along her ribs, pressing forward along her sides and nearly to her front. Her nipples are definitely responding now, both at the sensation and as she catches the meaning of his words. Surely he doesn’t intend this as some kind of seduction?

But Guildford had made it perfectly clear he had no interest in holding her to any ‘marital obligations’, that he was only interested in her mind and not her body. And he had said himself that he was only doing this so they could actually get some work done. A traitorous part of her mind suggests that if he were trying to seduce her, he was doing an admirable job of it. She’s glad her arms and hair hide her blush from Guildford’s eyes.

In the privacy of her own thoughts she allows herself to imagine what would happen if Guildford were trying to seduce her. Where might he touch her next? The Guildford of reality had worked his way down to her lower back and was gently kneading the area around her spine through her shift. Perhaps he would convince her a massage there would be more effective without this barrier between them, ask her to remove her shift as he had her dress, leaving her fully naked beneath him? She determinedly ignores the fact he hadn’t actually asked her to remove her dress, and that nothing more than a few small touches had apparently turned her into some kind of brazen hussy.

Though what would he do if she removed her shift now on her own? She had thought she might have seen something in his expression earlier when she had removed her dress, a darkness to his eyes that showed interest rather than mere surprise. But perhaps it was just wishful thinking, brought on by the strange arousal his touch was causing. Aside from perhaps a little excess of time spent combing out her hair, and the slightly indecorous touches below her shift, Guildford had been almost clinical in his technique thus far. But as Jane had so little experience with any kind of touch, everything took on a more sensual aspect to her long dormant nerves. To Guildford, however, this was probably just another Tuesday evening.

The thought of it cools her imagination a little, and she tries to return herself to reality. Only to find that Guildford has made his way down to the base of her spine, pressing deep into the tissue just above the swell of her ass. She can feel herself tensing back up - both at the sensation and the location of his touch.

And suddenly Guildford is no longer at her side.

But he’s merely shifting to straddle her thighs, not putting any of any real weight onto her, but she can feel his leather-clad knees press to her outer thighs.

“This part might hurt a little,” he breathes out from above her.

And then a firm knuckle is digging in the nerve center of her right gluteal muscle, and she nearly cries out at the sharp sensation of it. But how ever much she tenses and twitches against the pressure he holds steady until her body starts to relax into it. It’s finally starting to feel nice and then he’s finding another nerve point and digging in.

He swats lightly at her opposite hip. “Stop tensing up.”

“I can’t help it,” she mumbles into her arms.

“Just relax.”

“If I could do that, we wouldn’t be in this position,” she reminds him.

And accidentally reminds herself of the position they’re in - him practically on top of her with his hands on one of the more intimate parts of her. The sharp edge of pain and pleasurable release of tension all seem to read the same to her torrid mind. She can feel herself growing damp and aching between her thighs as he manhandles this newfound erogenous zone. Jane really hopes there’s no way he can sense this, even as she clenches her thighs more tightly together.

And of course this is a mistake, only enhancing the pressure coiling there. She tries to shift her legs again, attempting to find a position that will keep her from making a mess of her shift but also not add any friction against her overheated core.

Apparently, Guildford notices the small movements. “Are your legs bothering you as well?”

Yes, she thinks, but not for the reasons he’s probably guessing. Still, she nods her head, hoping the shift down to a less sensitive part of her body will solve both her problems.

Jane is rarely wrong, but in this case she is very much so. Even though Guildford is now down at her feet, slightly rough hands squeezing at her heels, it’s no easier to ignore the heat that spreads beneath her skin, pooling at her center and spiraling into an exquisite ache. The digging of his thumbs into the arch of one foot has her gasping at the way her nerves light up. She hisses a little as his calloused fingers circle her ankles, the skin there a little too delicate. He returns to her arches.

“Do you have anything to ease the way? Oil or something?” He offers, and she waves an arm vaguely in the direction of the water basin.

She feels the bed shift as he goes to retrieve it, the small bottle filled with her own mixture of oils. The scent of rosehip and rosemary fills the air and she knows he’s found the right one. She mainly uses the oil to soften her skin and repel the bugs that plague her herb garden, but the scent is also supposed to help with stress. Jane hopes it will calm her down a little.

It doesn’t. The combination of the oils and the scent of warm leather and outside that cling to Guildford hits her full force as he returns to her bed. He once again moves to straddle her legs, and she finds herself strangely wishing he’d press more of his weight down on to her, curious at what it might feel like. But the long, smoothe glide of oiled hands up the back of her calves is distraction enough. She sighs at the relaxing feel of it even as the movement does nothing to soothe the ache between her thighs. Guildford spreads her legs slightly so that he can work at each calf individually, and she can feel an answering pulse of moisture as one of his own legs settles between them. With each slow stroke she can feel herself dripping against her shift, the agonizing tease of her mons pressing into the mattress and nipples tightening against the bedspread below. She wishes she had some excuse to slip a hand beneath her, to press into where she needs it the most. Or better yet, an excuse for Guildford’s own clever hands to press higher…

Jane gasps at the feeling of his slick hands at the back of her knees, working higher with each pass. He’s already turned both her calves to jelly and now he’s attempting to do the same at the base of her hamstrings. Her breathing goes a little unsteady as the hem of her shift is pushed up a mere few inches by the work of his hands, and she notices that Guildford doesn’t sound much better - though he is the one doing all the hard work, and she’s supposed to be relaxing. But a deep press of his hands into the backs of her thighs finally manages to grind her clit into the damp fabric of her shift and she shivers at the barely there pressure. Guildford, unaware of this, just keeps going, pressing higher and higher until his hands are under her shift and halfway up her thighs. Just a few more inches and he’d realize exactly what he was doing to her. She can feel herself rocking back into the pressure of his palms, and then down again against the not enough tease of the fabric below, but he doesn’t complain even though she knows she’s tensing up again and undoing all of his hard work. Each press brings more tension instead of releasing it, muscles wound tight and aching.

All it takes is one more long stroke of heated palms to just below the curve her ass and she’s shuddering against his hands, an unexpected syrupy heat spreading out along her nerves.

Jane forces herself to still, not entirely sure what’s just happened. She’s not a complete novice - she knows what an orgasm is. But there wasn’t nearly enough stimulation for that to have happened. And this felt different - smaller, though still nice. Her muscles don’t completely relax after, as they would if she had truly climaxed, but they still feel tingly and pleasant.

Jane realizes that Guildford has stilled too, hands still beneath her shift but no longer moving along the back of her thighs. Neither one of them makes any sort of move as her breathing slowly returns to normal, her body untensing now that Guildford is no longer applying any real pressure to her body. Eventually, his hands slip from beneath her hem.

“I'll get your arms next time,” his voice comes out more evenly than she expects her own might at just this moment.

Jane’s mind gets stuck on the idea of a next time, despite her lingering embarrassment and the regrettable loss of Guildford’s hands on her.

“Your turn now?” She offers, still half-blissed but feeling strangely energized.

He chokes at the question. “I’m fine, and it’s too near dawn anyway, I should really…”

“We still have nearly an hour, don’t you want to…?” let her return the favor? At least try another cure?

“Don’t want to cut it too close, we can try again tomorrow.”

And with that he abruptly sets out for the stables, not once looking back at her. Only the scent of rose and leather still lingering in his absence.

However, the oil sparks her memory of another possible cure. Tomorrow morning they’ll try again. And if she works off a little of the lingering tension herself while he’s away all day, she’s certain he’ll never find out about it.

#save my lady jane #my lady jane #janeford #lady jane grey #guildford dudley #banter #massage #my fics #my writing #fanfiction

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epic-sorcerer · 4 months ago

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How gay people were actually precived in medival times

Ok so even after years of obsessive research, it sitll took me until recently to finally grasp a medival point of view on homosexuality. I’m assuming I’m not alone in my not understanding of it so I figured I might as well break it down for my fellow Merlin fans.

So basically, there was no consept of heterosexuality and homosexuality. There was only “female attraction” or “male attraction.” If a man possessed the same sexual attraction as a woman would, he would have a female attribute.

For this reason, they were considered “hermaphrodites.”

Unfortunately I’m going to have to keep saying this word, because modern ones jsut don’t make sense here. But please know that it is widely considered a slur among intersex people and originates from a Greek myth where hermaphrodite gets his body murjed with a woman who wants to rape him. So. Don’t call people that, please.

Anyways. Hermaphrodites were considered a medical condition and had to pick a gender to be, as they couldn’t simply exist as a third gender. This of course carried a lot of shame amongst the people who were concidered hermaphrodites. The gender was often chosen based on what sex characteristics were most prominent.

So, assuming the only “female traits” a male has is his homosexuality, they would likely stay as a man unless they really did not want to be. And even then, they would have to do it in secret because any deviation from their strict idea of gender was considered a threat to society. Witch is why hermaphrodites had to live as one male *or* female in the first place

I think this puts in to a lot of perspective on how I write Arthur especially. I originally would write Arthur as feeling very emasculated by being queer from a perspective of toxic masculinity.

But looking at it now, is that not gender dysphoria? Of course he doesn’t want to have female sex characteristics. When I’m a guy, I don’t either!

I’ve done lots of research and sighlent lurking on intersex spaces for a while now just because. But I think now I’ll start using that knolage to my advantage to my writing because it’s more realistic. I think murjing my experience as a queer person and intersex people’s experiences would make the sotry make a whole lot more sense.

I would recommend anyone to simply just follow the #intersex tag. But yk….if you’re not intersex you should probably stay silent unless you have a question or something. They get talked over a lot.

I am thankful that I have a direct tie from my hyoerfixation to intersex because while I have done my own research without it, it’s still difficult to do just about anything if it’s not about Merlin. Perhaps some other people reading this struggle in the same way.

I hoped this helped you guys, here’s my main source that really helped me. And you can ask me questions if you’d like.

#from my own little galaxy world #merlin #bbc merlin #merlin bbc #I’m trying to name every gay ship I can think of #merthur #merwaine #merlance #arlance

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littlemourningstarr · 1 month ago

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Effigy

Astarion can't resist riling Wyll up a bit- after all, a warning, for him, is just a challenge.

Kinktober 2024, Day 15: "Blowjobs / Cock Worship"

Read below or on AO3!

Pairing: Astarion x Wyll

Tags: blowjobs, fluff, kinktober, kinktober 2024

The sunlight was dappling along Astarion’s bare back, filling him with a comforting warmth, as it speckled through the large tree he was beneath. He wasn’t sure how he had convinced his little blade to come out and play in the morning sun, but he was ever glad for it. Wyll’s pension for keeping night time activities just that was cute, if the vampire was honest- but he wanted to feel the sun as much as he could, before it was taken from him.

He pressed a kiss to Wyll’s bare stomach, along the ridge of a heavy, old scar. Far too old for a man this young. Wyll was leaning with his back against the thick tree trunk, watching with his hellish eye, somehow able to fill it with softness, as if it wasn’t a mirror of a hellflame.

So many things about this man just didn’t make sense to Astarion. Perhaps the first being why he was so bloody tantalizing to the vampire.

He dragged his mouth lower, until he hit Wyll’s belt. He let his teeth clank against it, a little noise to keep Wyll alert, before his hands were moving up, unbuckling it. Once he had it open he began plucking at the lacing of Wyll’s pants, as the man reached for his hair- still nothing but soft, bedridden curls- and stroked them back from his forehead. “You don’t have to do this,” he offered, “I’d be happy for a thousand years if you came up here and just kissed me.”

Astarion paused, a plethora of emotions welling in him. A relief, that this man expected nothing from him, yes- but also a frustration because gods he was doing this because he wanted to. This desire was his and his alone, not dictated by his master or anyone else.

“Wyll,” he said, not lifting his head but his eyes, staring up at the too handsome man that was looking at him far too kindly. “If you don’t want me-”

“I didn’t say that,” the warlock was quick to interject, a bit of heat, color rising up on his cheeks. It made Astarion smirk, show off the tips of his fangs.

“Then sit back,” he said, fingers getting his pants open, “and just let me,” he slipped a hand in, very carefully freeing Wyll’s cock from his clothing, “suck your cock.”

Wyll bit his lip- an action that Astarion could only catalog as cute- and oh he hated how it made his belly fluttery and warm- as the vampire turned, placed a kiss along his shaft. Wyll’s skin was warm, warmer then it had to have been, before Mizora took her pound of humanity from him, for sparing Karlach.

Astarion had mixed feelings on that, now. After all, he was quite fond of the tiefling, and frankly, he found Wyll’s devilish attributes nothing but loin stirring-

But there was still an anger, in him, about this man being selfless. Again. Always again.

Astarion pressed a kiss down by the base, allowing Wyll’s cock to brush his cheek. The man was still beneath him, not bucking his hips, simply still playing with Astarion’s curls. Astarion mouthed his way back up his shaft, opened his mouth, took just his head in- and let the points of his fangs just brush his shaft beneath it.

Wyll gasped, his hips giving the faintest buck, a twitch really- but it was enough for Astarion. He pulled off, leveled a glare up at Wyll.

“Bloody hells Wyll if you’re going to enjoy this then bloody well enjoy it.” Wyll looked slightly alarmed at the outburst, and Astarion huffed. “I’m not interested in worshiping a statue with my mouth. If that was the case I’d just head into the city limits and make a spectacle of myself with any one of the damn godly effigies.”

There was a faint twitch to Wyll’s schooled face, and Astarion beamed over it.

“Oh? Not a fan of that idea?” He bowed his head again, placed a rather tender kiss to Wyll’s cockhead. “Don’t like the idea of me being the divine, lavish whore for the city to see?”

“Astarion.” His name was a warning, but Astarion’s problem was, as always, that he took a warning as a challenge.

And he really liked to pull reactions from the stoic blade.

“Which god do you think would be the most fun? Tyr seems too… old for my liking. Although I suppose he would call me a good boy for my efforts.”

“Astarion.” His name again, firmer now.

“There is Mystra- her cunt must taste like pure magic, untouched Weave. Best not tell Gale if I’m dallying with his former lover.” Wyll was frowning, but there was something in his eye, the hellfire burning brighter. It made Astarion’s stomach tight.

And he didn’t miss the fact that the man’s cock was leaking now, even harder than when he’d freed him minutes ago.

“Perhaps Helm-”

“Astarion!” The vampire paused, glanced up, and Wyll reached for him, grasped his chin roughly and pulled him up, until his mouth was melting beneath his little hero’s. Astarion gave a breathy little whimper as Wyll pushed his tongue into his mouth, stole any words he had been forming about how he could lavish his affections on a statue of the watcher himself.

When Wyll finally released his mouth, it was only so he could breathe- and Astarion took full advantage of the fact that he didn’t need to. He wrapped a hand around Wyll’s cock, stroking him slowly. “Don’t fret, pet. The divine have nothing on you. However,” Astarion leaned in, pecked Wyll’s lips- far more affectionately than he had meant- “it would be nice if you would let yourself enjoy this.”

Wyll swallowed, and after a moment gave a single, small nod.

“Good.” Astarion lowered himself back down, still stroking Wyll slowly, and moved to grasp at his base, stroke only there so he could pepper kisses along his cockhead. This time Wyll gave a little groan, and Astarion heard the sound of his horns hitting the tree, as his head leaned back.

Better.

He opened his mouth, took in Wyll’s cockhead again, swirling his tongue around it. Wyll got his fingers back in his hair, but his hips did lift this time, trying to dive further into Astarion’s mouth. The vampire grasped at his thighs, squeezing, keeping him down as he suckled softly, mouth filling with the salty taste of Wyll’s precum.

Wyll’s other hands reached down for his curls, both working them back from his forehead, as if he wanted to hold the vampire’s hair back. It was affectionate, and despite himself Astarion felt his chest going tight. He couldn’t chastise Wyll for this bit of tenderness- not when it made him feel so pleasantly warm.

He pulled back slightly, ran his tongue down Wyll’s shaft, let his cock rest against his face so he could get the tender underside. Gods he could lay this man out and do nothing but kiss this pretty cock until the sun set.

Astarion mouthed his way back up, flicked his tongue teasingly against the head, before he lifted a hand to wrap around him again, stroking slowly as he took his cockhead back into his mouth for the countless time, now teasing at Wyll’s slit with his tongue, curling the tip just into it. Wyll gasped, shoulders pushing back with force against the tree, baring his chest as he began panting. Astarion dared to lift his other hand from Wyll’s thigh, reach up and grab a handful of muscle and scars, the points of his nails puckering- but not puncturing- skin.

Finally, he eased his mouth lower, taking Wyll’s cock over his tongue, until it was pushing at his throat, forcing his jaws open wide enough that they burned. So few could pull that feeling from his well learned mouth, it made Astarion’s body tight, buzzing with arousal.

Wyll groaned, rocked his hips up, and Astarion let him now, let Wyll thrust into his mouth, over his wriggling tongue. He could feel each throb of his cock, as the warlock’s fingers danced through his hair, a dichotomy of the tender touch and yet what could have been a bruising force as Wyll took more, and more, and more.

It was Astarion’s name, sweet as honeyed wine, that fell from his lips when he found release, found nirvana in the space of Astarion’s mouth. The vampire took him as deep as he could, let his cum flood against his throat, let Wyll feel him swallowing it down, as the man pulled his head closer with his hold on his hair, yet not a single spark of pain shot through Astarion at the touch.

Even when taking, Wyll could be gentle.

Astarion stayed with Wyll’s cock in his mouth, a pleasing weight atop his tongue, as his lover caught his breath. When Astarion finally lifted his head, Wyll’s hands moved from his hair, slipped beneath his arms and hoisted him up into his lap. Astarion fell against him, hands pressed flat to the man’s firm chest, looking at him with eyes that were a bit too wide, a bit too adoring.

He couldn’t help it. He’d once said Wyll was the type of man he’d dreamed of marrying when he was just a boy- he hadn’t lied. Even now, he couldn’t help but be in awe of him, despite all of his provoking bravado.

Wyll let one hand splay on Astarion’s back, directly over his scars, rough palm and fingertips warming it. His other tipped Astarion’s chin up slightly, so he could kiss him, slow and sweet. Astarion melted into it, couldn’t find a single fiber of his being that wanted to object. Despite his goading, deep in his gut, in the hidden bits of his terrified soul, he lived for Wyll’s sweetness.

#baldur's gate 3 #wyllstarion #astarion #wyll #astarion ancunin #wyll ravengard #kinktober #kinktober 2024

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indiaalphawhiskey · 1 year ago

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i was just wondering do you think there really is a chance that harry might be less popular when he comes back (whenever that will be) and not be at his career peak anymore? i find it really hard to imagine him not playing stadiums/ being extremely popular etc anymore tbh for me it obvs won‘t make any difference i will always love him just the same (and wouldnt mind annyoing tiktok stans and fans who only like him bc hes „trendy“ to leave lol) i just wanted your thoughts on that :)

Okay, so I’m not a music industry buff. What I know, and what I’m about to say is based entirely on my general knowledge of pop culture (that’s heavily influenced by American pop culture, btw) so if I make any leaps, or if there’s an alternative view from a non-America-centric perspective, please forgive me.

But, for all intents and purposes, if you look at Harry’s profile as an artist and compare it to other artists of a similar profile (super popular boyband member + teen heartthrob turned solo pop star), historically you don’t really have many examples of successful solo careers, and even less of career longevity.

If you compare it to The Beatles, for example, they weren’t a traditional boyband (and arguably, neither was One Direction after TMH, but still), and if I’m not mistaken, though John Lennon and Paul McCartney both went solo, (and Paul obviously has the longevity down), their individual work still wasn’t comparable in popularity to their work while they were in The Beatles.

More modern examples, like George Michael, Robbie Williams, and Justin Timberlake, have a similar story in that while they were all able to launch solo careers, they all had a relatively short shelf life because pop music (and their fan bases) are very synonymous with youth, and they all eventually “aged out” of that marketing bracket.

So, really, the only example I can think of, of someone who was more popular solo than he ever was in a band and still managed to hold such a wide and devoted fanbase over multiple career eras, is Michael Jackson. And that’s like, music legend level.

I think Harry has already currently surprised people on many counts by being able to equal and arguably surpass his success and popularity in One Direction as a solo artist, especially without having to drastically rebrand or pivot his genre of music. He’s managed not only to hold on to what people thought was a very age-specific fanbase, but also broaden it massively. That’s beyond rare in pop music, and if you add that to the fact that a lot of people still attribute a big part of his success to his looks, the music industry is expecting him to age out soon, and therefore, for the steep decline in his popularity to start. That’s why people think it’s crazy that he’s taking a break because the industry is constantly pumping out new young artists and so, there’s always going to be a ticking clock.

Personally, I think Harry is a once in a generation performer, and has everything it takes to get to that legend level. But it’s something that is so rare and impossible to predict or orchestrate because so many factors have to go into making that happen, and the pressure of setting that as the ultimate goal of creating music could very, very easily break a person. I think he’s much more content to take a break, cultivate his connection to music, and just let those dice fall where they may.

#iaw ask #iaw anonymous #Harry’s career #Harry’s popularity #iaw thoughts

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zsakuva · 10 months ago

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saku! i have two questions:)

i’m p sure mentioned your favorite book was lotr, but do you have any other recommendations? oh or maybe an anime/manga you really like? anything is fine hehe

my second one is, what inspires you to write? i’m sure it’s something you’ve been doing for a long time, but in general, it seems like whether it’s through your videos or your degree, you’re always trying to tell some sort of story? it’s amazing to me how you treat your characters as real people, if that makes sense? it’s almost like you’ve met them and they’re not just words on paper. i know a couple of artists treat their characters/work as such, but i’ve never really seen it like i have with you. i’m just a bit curious about what exactly makes you tick? please ignore this ask if it’s too personal haha i’m just genuinely interested:)

have a good day with many crumpets, tea, and cat cuddles!!!!

My favourite film trilogy is LotR, but I don't read! I'm in the middle of reading The Fellowship of the Ring, but reading makes me tired so I seldom do it! Unfortunately, that means I can't recommend any books or manga, and I haven't watched anime in a long time either~

Everything inspires me to write! It's a way of escapism for me, and for as long as I can remember, I've loved creating fictional stories. Characters themselves are the vessels in which the story is being told, and they drive everything. There is so much in a life that occurs which defines one's sense of self, and it's ever-changing. I love exploring internal conflicts, the tug-of-war over nature vs nurture, and the long-lasting effects many of us carry.

Almost all of the characters I've made have attributes of someone I know, a fictional person, or myself. It's also through this medium where I can test decisions some people might make in intense situations. A prime example would be Isaac Rhoades, a man traumatised by a past that dictates his every decision until he learns how to loosen the reins--if only by a little. The listener challenges his beliefs while also providing him a way to confront what it means to love, to trust, and to hope.

Another would be Alex (a taboo name for many of you, I know haha). The events of his past fuel his insecurities of the present, and that powers his decisions for the future. A lot of my characters act this way because I believe many of us are the same. His listener is no different. One has dealt with their trauma in one way, the other in another way, and then they clash. Sometimes, it's easy to put the pieces together, but not always. And that's why I like to base actions on character because humans themselves are contradictive, stubborn, and in many cases, illogical.

Then, there are other characters who I use to explore certain themes, such as Niall. His story is heart-breaking yet relatable; I wanted to delve more into his self-perception which was crafted by bullying and homophobia, and how he could possibly shift towards a positive direction.

Audio roleplays are great for my creativity, but they only scratch the surface in terms of how I would normally develop characters and their potential arcs. Novel formats are more my forte, but I do enjoy the platform that I have to fan the flame of angst, fluff, and everything in between!

#audio roleplay #boyfriend audios #sakuverse #zsakuva #isaac rhoades

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from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras · 4 months ago

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Hihi I don’t know where to find more about this (and frankly want your opinion more lol) so what are the genes like in Rohan? Is it possible there’d be darker browns and almost Numenorean blacks? And red-heads? I mean, could you specify with like percentages lolol and I would sooo love if you include like regional differences omggg

Well, race in Middle Earth is a topic that a lot of ink has already been spilled on, and by people who are much smarter and better qualified to opine than I am. So, up top, I encourage people to seek out those smarter voices.* But I guess I’ll say that my general take is that it is simultaneously true that a) Tolkien trafficked in some harmful race-based tropes and imagery and he used ideas about genetics (the high/middle/low man hierarchy he created) that are gross; but ALSO b) despite what some loud and hateful chuds would have you believe, there’s no real canonical evidence to support the claim that the people in the various communities of Middle Earth were all of one particular race or another. So there could and should be a whole variety of appearances and traits.

As to my personal opinion of Rohan…there are people of all kinds in the world, and so I imagine Rohan to similarly have people of all kinds. I know that’s not as specific an answer as your question posed, but I try to leave my writing open enough (like, I usually go very sparse on character physical descriptions) that a reader can picture people in a bunch of different ways, and if some people see Wídfara (for example) as Black and others as Asian or indigenous American or white or etc., I think that’s all valid and good. The more Wídfaras in the world, the better, as far as I’m concerned.

One of the things I like best about fandom is that we aren’t stuck with any one particular conception of anything. Lots of people have their own ideas about Rohan, and those different Rohans can exist side-by-side in the fanfic and fan art spaces so that we have a wealth of alternatives to like and admire. Some of my fave Rohan fan art has been pieces that imagine the Rohirrim as being of Mongolian heritage or that mix Rohirrim culture from the books with traditional Japanese elements, and I love that those exist alongside the art that hews closer to the Anglo-Saxon/Norse aesthetic that tends to show up most often in visual representations. (I would love to link to some of this art, but the Tumblr search function is not my friend and isn’t allowing me to easily pull it up now. One that I can put my hands on, though, is the work of Leia Ham, which is amazing and imagines Rohan (and other parts of Middle Earth) in an ancient Chinese context.)

So I guess what I’m saying is that I think anything is possible, and that’s a good thing.

*Mallorn, the journal of the Tolkien Society, has actually done a good job of giving space to those voices in the last few years, a positive development I attribute to the good influence of its editor Luke Shelton, who is to all appearances a Good Dude.

#answered asks #meta

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laf-outloud · 1 year ago

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I’ve been thinking. After reading about people’s reactions to Jared and the discussions about CE needing to enforce their own rules, and rude fans, something really stands out for me.

Jared truly gets the most extreme reactions from the SPN fandom, both positive and negative, and the “reasons” are just as extreme.

You have the people who “hate” him, or say they do. Some even go out of their way to be rude to his face. But, their reasons for hating him are actually insane. They hate him because he’s the lead (instead of Jensen), because he was “in the way” of destiel, (blocking Jensen and Misha’s characters from baging 🙄), or because they attribute beliefs or actions to him that are contradictory to how he actually behaves. And they take everything he says in bad faith, attributing the worst intentions possible to the things he says. In short, most people’s reasons for “hating” Jared are either jealousy-based or fabricated. It’s pathetic really, especially how vehement some are about hating him when it’s not even the real him, or it’s for something that isn’t his fault (he didn’t force the writers to have Dean impaled on rebar). Finally, people who claim to hate him for his actions (pranks, the arrest, “mean” jokes) excuse the same or similar actions in Jensen snd Misha.

People who have more “legitimate” reasons for disliking him (maybe his personality irritates them, or they don’t like his acting style or shows/movies), are generally not insane about it. They are more apathetic about him. This is fair enough because not everyone vibes with everyone. But it’s funny that for people who maybe just aren’t fans for non/fandom wank reasons probably don’t actually hate him. They’re just ignore him.

Then you have the people who love him. They love him for his mental health campaigns. They love him for how sweet he is to fans: listening intently, hugging tight, going that one extra step to make them feel special. Many of these people go up to him with stories of how he has done something to actively make their lives better or help give them strength, etc. The thing is, the love is based on his actual actions. We obviously don’t really know him (he could be a huge asshole behind the scenes, though I doubt it), but the things people like him for are actual things he has done, or it’s because of who he appears to be.

It’s just so crazy to me that he gets the most vitriolic hate (out of the SPN crew), when it’s mostly for things that aren’t even in his control. It’s wild.

Anyway, I have “met” Jared a few times at cons. I’ve never told him I love him, and I probably never will, because that’s not a term I can throw around lightly. And I don’t actually know him on any personal level. But what I can say is that my “worst” interactions with him were him seeming tired and subdued, while my best have been … so good that they still brought me little moments of happy for weeks after they happened.

I guess my point to almost this ramble was, I hate that he gets people treating him crappy on occasion, but I’m thankful that Jared also get huge amounts of very genuine appreciation from fans, too. And I’m sure for him, the good far outweighs the bad.

I’m sorry this got so long.

What was your impression of Jared at Fan X? Did anything stand out for you?

Thank you for sharing! I think it's crazy how people hate him for the dumbest things that he's not at all responsible for (like the writing on SPN), or really weren't that big a deal (like his bar fight).

I actually see the apathetic fans much like I do Jared fans, i.e., people who consider Jared as a human being and then determine whether the like him or not.

As for my experience, I'm not really an emotional person, so I tend to look at things from a more analytical point of view. I found Jared to be extremely smart in the way he approaches people. He gets down on their level, he looks them in the eye and speaks to each person directly, and I suspect (based on his comments on my jacket in both ops), that he finds something unique about each person that he can focus on to help him remember them (at least, for a little while).

He's also really great at adapting to different people; whether they need humor or empathy, he can pull those reactions out of his hat on a dime. All if this, of course, personalizes and elevates each person's experience with him.

My photo op experience was pretty much as I expected, he was very friendly and very welcoming (with his huge smile), said that my jacket was his favorite, and thanked me for coming.

(I'll be keeping my jacket forever and if Jared ever comes back to Salt Lake, it's going right back on!)

As for my auto experience, I was so focused on telling him how much I appreciated and loved both yeehaw shows this last year (particularly Windy) that I didn't really give him a chance to get a word in. LOL! He did promise to pass along my love, though!

Gen's line was much shorter so I had a chance to ask about the different kinds of animals they now have at home and at the ranch. (It was actually smaller than I thought with goats, donkeys, chickens, and dogs, but they are getting a few Highland cows soon.)

What's funny, is that when thinking of what I could talk to Jared about, it wasn't a very long list (all of the question I disregarded would have required a M&G). But I had many more questions I could have asked Gen if we had the time! She was absolutely delightful and very approachable.

I think the highlight of my day was the panel. Jared and Gen were so comfortable on stage, joking with each other, joking with the audience, keeping the conversation moving... I know Jared's been doing this for a while, but Gen was right there with him. She was much more animated than what I'd previously seen of her at JIB. I really hope they continue to do panels together.

#ask box #anti jared haters #jared padalecki appreciation #fanx 2023 #my first convention #jared photo ops story #jared auto story #gen auto story #long post

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sizzlingpatrolfox · 1 year ago

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TH had almost more streams in Thailand than they have active Spotify users. Does that sound organic? 20% of Slow Dancing’s entire day one streams came from Thailand. 20%. Almost a quarter of his streams came from one country, a country that has a small Spotify user base. US has the largest amount of Spotify users. I think like 80mil? Whatever it is, it’s a lot. SD got like, 380k streams from the US and then dropped off the charts day two. The US is the biggest music market, with the highest number of Spotify users, and he couldn’t even stay on the charts more than a day, with a debut lower than Jimin’s b-side.

And let’s not act coy and pretend like a lot of SEA fans aren’t widely known as monster streamers. It’s not a big deal. A lot of ARMYs appreciate and rely on those streaming methods for good debuts and longevity, and obviously it’s not all or even most SEA fans. All fans are equally valuable and appreciated. But if we’re having a conversation about how successful TH’s debut was, I think it does matter that he underperformed in the biggest music markets, and it’s relevant the bulk of his streams came from places known for their aggressive streaming methods, and that a third of his albums came from a single country known for bulk buying.

Also longevity? Dropping a whopping 4million streams on day 8 aside, Taehyung’s debut just showed he completely failed to break outside of the ARMY bubble (which is the same for most of them tbf). And actually, I wonder if all those loyal tkkrs are even watching his ‘super amazing’ tiny desk performance looking at the views. Literally no one outside of ARMY cares about his “live” performances because no one is even watching them, so what does that have to do with longevity? And maybe the fact that the majority of his fans are shippers could explain why his music seems to have tanked on all relevant charts. And I hate billboard and I wish it didn’t matter because they suck and this competition with numbers is stupid. But it’s what the company is paying attention to, aggressively marketing towards, and obviously BTS cares. Remember how they reacted to their first #1? The way they flexed all the #1s that followed? TH did fine, but he definitely didn’t gain any substantial achievements that made his debut stand out. And if you’re going to talk about album sales, then you better be saying that Stray Kids and Seventeen are bigger than BTS.

And Jimin will be just fine. He gained so much prestige and clout from that bb#1, as well as his big and surprising success in the UK and other charts. And the way he did that without major company push? Just the bare bones rollout they all got (with the expedition of JK)? For an album that was more of a personal project for him than anything else, with just a small in-house team from BH? Yeah. And then look at the kind of impact he had on their stocks, an impact that was directly attributed to him. No one cared about the stupid encore outside of kpoppies who all have LC on their playlists anyways, or antis who are always desperately looking for things to drag. Now every time Jimin does something he has that highly coveted bb#1 artist attached to his name, and that’s a huge boon for him and his solo career, as stupid and obnoxious as billboard is. Not to mention how incredibly pleased his fans were by his music and performances, which is the most important aspect. I’m sure there are TH stans who really love his music but… well… we all saw the ARMY reception to SD vs LC. TH's music is divisive at best, and no, that doesn’t mean he has more artistry or whatever you want to say. Because Indigo was also more alternative and niche, but had a completely different and more positive reception. Also R&B is an incredibly popular genre.

And let’s not even get into a conversation about artistry. Taehyung’s lyrics literally had no depth, he didn’t have a single credit on his album, and he didn’t even have choreography to add any layers to his performances. His MVs were pretty, but weren’t even interesting. One of his gimmicks was literally having his dog walk out on the stage? It was very cute and I love how much he loves Yeontan, but artistry? When we were decoding German poetry and talking about philosophy, gender identity, escapism, psychology? Interpreting lyrics and choreography and even the name of the album and the promo material? It’s not even close. Tell me what was Layover even about? What was the story? What in there was personal or meaningful to him? Nothing wrong with just doing fun, shallow music sometimes, it can be awesome and I hope JM dabbles in that, but KTHs are the ones trying to spin this whole narrative about artistry to put down other members and feel better about an album that got a lukewarm reception and actually has little to no depth. It’s just surface and visuals and aesthetic. Not to mention the actual music aspect where JM tried and explored different genres, experimented with his voice, and pushed himself as an artist... All my respect to TH who did just fine, who did amazing by any non-BTS ML standard, all that should matter is if you like the music at the end of the day, but let’s not pretend his debut was something it wasn’t.

I'll just post this because you wrote so much 😅 but it really shouldn't have been turned into such a big deal because it wasn't. Like crazy also gets "bots streams" accusations and I'm surprised a Taehyung fan wouldn't know that, since it was actually them who spent years saying pjms bought streams for Jimin.

And one more thing I'll say is that I live in a 3rd world country. We've had more than 100% inflation rate this year so far, and the year isn't even over. A dollar costs 70 times more than our money, and Spotify cashes us in our local money, but it's the equivalent to the price in dollars. Add to that the government taxes, which is the price in dollars + 65% of it in taxes only. It ends up being a lot. I only have one family premium Spotify account that I share with my cousins and siblings.

So I didn't take their pity party seriously because 1) they were rude for no reason instead of trying to have a conversation about it 2) I obviously never meant it that way and I would never make fun of underdeveloped economies since I'm literally living in one lmao

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demigodofhoolemere · 5 months ago

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My personal thoughts on the controversial animation for The Celestial Toymaker, now that I’ve seen it for myself.

~~~~~

I really wasn’t expecting to enjoy this, and bought the DVD out of a combination of the sheer curiosity to see it with my own eyes and the desire to have the escape room feature at my fingertips. The animation style left me very apprehensive as I prefer the 2D and this looked very janky and awkward, and I lean far more into purist territory and am not a big fan of taking more liberties than necessary, which anyone could see from the trailer alone that this production did unreservedly. I wanted to go into it with an open mind but I was pretty positive this was just going to be a train wreck. And there certainly are things about it that I don’t like, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was still kind of enjoying myself.

~~~~~

To get the negatives out of the way:

- The animation itself is obviously the thing everyone is talking about. The 3D motion capture approach is not something I want from these animations. It is definitely janky in places, especially with the movement of mouths. There are a lot of times it’s not synced very well, as well as the fact that they often don’t open as wide as they should, and sometimes I caught mouths not even moving at all when they should be. The expressions are also quite limited, and granted, none of these animations are ever going to perfectly capture the kind of things that folks like Patrick Troughton can do with their faces, but I’ve definitely seen better emotion from the 2D ones — it’s not that they couldn’t be expressive in this, but it’s not as wide a range as it probably should be and you certainly don’t get any particular emotion out of scenes like Steven panicking that Dodo is going to freeze. I’ve always thought his voice and the production pictures we have of that were quite moving, but you don’t really get that here, even with the audio being the same.

You also get some jerky movements at times, particularly in the legs. I will say however that the mocap is a massive improvement upon The Web of Fear, and you do get quite used to it over the course of four episodes. It felt almost normal by the end. It’s definitely got problems, but it’s also not the end of the world that a lot of us assumed it was.

- Likenesses. They’re not terrible, and I’d say Dodo and the Toymaker are the better ones, but none of them are great either. Though I don’t want to attribute this problem solely to this particular animation, because you can certainly get varying levels of accuracy in the others as well — just ask Jamie. But it is a bit uncanny valley. I also wish they could get something as simple as eye color right. This isn’t the first time something official has incorrectly colored Bill’s eyes blue and I’m sure it won’t be the last but it gets increasingly silly each time. And in the opposite direction, surely you can look at pictures of Peter to know that his eyes are blue and not brown? (And this is more of an overall design choice as opposed to relating strictly to his likeness, but I couldn’t stop noticing that Steven’s teeth often showed way too much when he speaks and I found it distracting).

- Liberties in visuals. I get why it would be enticing to play around and make things as grand as you want, and if this were its own story it would look great that way, but I’m more of a purist so I wish they’d be truer to the original. If you pretend it’s not based on something else, it all looks fantastic and lots of fun, and despite myself I did get caught up in enjoying it, but because I know what it was supposed to look like and have loved that for years, that’s what I wanted to see and I do feel cheated out of an animated version that represents the actual sets and visuals.

In the behind the scenes feature the producer talks about how it’s kind of sad to look at the original sets because they didn’t have the budget to match the high concept, and as a result it feels claustrophobic because they’re just small sets when it should be big and expansive, but honestly I feel the opposite way. I think the fact that these spaces feel closed in help add to the discomfort of feeling like they’re trapped in there and won’t get out unless they win, and to the eeriness of feeling like this is a real place that you could really find yourself in. I see the appeal of the surreality and vast openness, but I actually find it less imposing than feeling like you’re in a more real, physical space with walls and everything. I also just don’t think it feels as cramped as he was acting like it is anyway.

The expansiveness is also often to the detriment of things that should be more grounded — the “make your last move” scene is largely black space, with the Toymaker and the Doctor being quite small in the middle of the screen and you can’t see their faces. That completely detracts from the incredibly dynamic shot we have from the existing episode, where things are up close and personal and this is an intimate battle of wits that we’re right in the middle of. I was shocked that they made that moment — of all moments, too! — so impersonal. I think they definitely sacrificed too many things in favor of scope.

There are also things like the blind man’s bluff game, which I found very Escher-like and over the top (though again, fun on its own), and one very bizarre sequence in episode three as they’ve entered the room with the dancing floor. I can’t do justice to the trippiness of those visuals by trying to explain them, but I have no idea why they did that. They’re certainly fascinating, and I generally like that kind of thing, but they were just so jarring and out of place, only to stop as suddenly as they’d started. It was also quite jarring at the end of episode one when Clara and Joey lose the game; rather than going limp and then reverting to dolls and having Dodo look back disturbed, which I find to be a very evocative and unsettling idea that really sells the horror aspect of this story, they just sort of… fall into a void, or something, and it jump cuts to Steven and Dodo already opening the cupboard door and exclaiming that it’s empty, as if the audience even knew it was there for them to step into at all before that very second. They hadn’t shown the TARDIS cupboard appearing because they were so focused on the spectacle. I found these kinds of choices pretty awkward.

- Liberties with audio. Piggybacking off of what I just said about altering a scene, there are a number of times they mess with the audio track. Thankfully there aren’t too many other examples of them actually removing something from the audio (though I’m baffled by them removing Dodo’s use of Steven’s name before she says that she’s frightened near the end of episode one; just why?), but there are a number of additions to the track. And I do get why, it makes sense to want to add car noises to their booth-turned-toy-car and things like that, and it’s not like these are a massive irritant or anything, but I just don’t see the need and prefer that it be left untouched. I don’t need icy noises to sell the fact that Dodo is freezing and I don’t need electricity noises to convey the electric floor.

- Liberties with character design. This will also be listed as a positive, just because it is otherwise a very interesting thing they’ve done, making the guest cast all be different kinds of toys, but from the perspective of wanting a recreation and not a total reimagining, this is a big drawback. I want to see these people actually be people, and I think they’re far more intimidating that way. It would be easy to depersonalize your interactions with a tiny rag doll or people literally made of cards, but it’s far harder to feel detached from what is clearly a person right in front of you, which makes their determination to beat you more alarming. It also makes it far more terrifying when they do revert to being a doll or a playing card — this item sitting there was someone you were just talking to, someone who’s been punished for losing by having their freedom taken away again. The whole world of the Toymaker is far more horrific to me when you lean into the fact that these really are other people; Clara and Joey stop being funny when they realize they’re likely to lose because they’re so scared of what will befall them when they do, the king and queen are trying to win so they can reclaim their liberty and not spend eternity as cards, and Mrs. Wiggs and Sergeant Rugg are absolutely terrified of the Toymaker when he comes to berate them for their failure. These are real victims, real people who have been trapped here, and that doesn’t come across the same way when you’re not looking at an actual person the whole time who only later becomes a doll again as a terrible consequence. I think this is a critical aspect of the story and it really gets lost in translation here — and it clearly ended up getting very lost on Peter Purves, because in the commentary he kept going on about the toy designs really selling these characters as purely being toy creations of the Toymaker and not real people, which is the exact opposite point of original serial. Dodo is supposed to be right, their opponents really are alive and have their own agency outside of the Toymaker, they do human things, and it really is an awfully sad place because of what’s happened to these people here. That feeling does not carry over at all when you only show them being dolls the whole time in the first place.

- Decisions that go against dialogue. This is tied into the previous point, because it kept happening in regard to choices they made with character design. Specifically, it kept making both Steven and Dodo look incredibly stupid. When Dodo suggests that Steven should recognize the king and queen and he says that they do look familiar, and Dodo has to tell him they’re playing cards, that makes Steven look like an idiot who can’t recognize a very obvious literal playing card when it’s right in front of him lol. It also makes for an odd moment when Dodo is told to touch the king’s arm to confirm that they’re just as real as them, and she is indeed convinced by this, even though in this version she’s just touching paper. Both of these moments really only work when you have real people here that are merely dressed as the characters on the cards. You also then have her comment later that Cyril was the Jack they saw earlier, which makes no sense in light of the Jack having been made of card and looking nothing like the porcelain Cyril, and Steven’s reply that all of the Toymaker’s creations look alike to him just sounds insane considering the sheer variety they encounter in the animation. To top it all off, having Cyril be made of porcelain really makes Dodo’s decision to check on him baffling, as if she could think a being made of porcelain might be bleeding. It wasn’t her wisest moment to begin with, but I find it forgivable because she’s usually quite perceptive (far more than people give her credit for) and only fails in moments like that when her kindness overrides her better judgment — it’s a silly human decision, just like everyone else in the story. But you really can’t justify it here when he can’t possibly be bleeding. Both she and Steven have too many of these moments that are suddenly outrageously questionable in the context of the character design choices in the animation.

~~~~~

However. I was surprised to find that it was actually still enjoyable regardless, and I’m happy that I actually have positives to talk about.

- I want to reiterate that the motion capture is much improved. Not to say it’s not awkward in places, but it’s miles ahead of The Web of Fear, and honestly you do get used to it. At some point it becomes quite easy to roll with, and I eventually even came to the point where I… kinda liked it? There are also things that I’m not sure how well they could have gotten away with it in 2D, such as all the jumping around in the hopscotch game. I do have to admit that the 3D lends itself to a level of mobility that the 2D models have had a hard time with. I would not want this on any other story, but it just about works here and it is actually to the advantage of scenes like the jumping from place to place, or dancing together. (And yet it’s also apparently still not enough to help animate a hug, because when they reunite with the Doctor, Dodo just kind of… walks up to him and puts her hands on his arms after a moment). I also want to give credit for the animation of the Toymaker’s characters, because I felt they were a lot more fluid and good-looking than the human ones. I think the painted look of the human skin can be to its detriment, but the non-human designs do look rather good because the materials they’re made of don’t have that same problem and they’re not trying to mimic exact human movement in the same way.

- A plus just as much as a minus, the character designs. As much as I’m against them on principle for the reasons I mentioned before, they honestly did work very well for a reimagining. Clara is a weirdly cute little rag doll, the card designs looked great, Sergeant Rugg and Cyril make good porcelain dolls, and my standout favorite, Mrs. Wiggs is absolutely adorable crocheted out of yarn. I couldn’t stop looking at her, I genuinely could have kept watching her forever lol. As its own thing, these really were very good character designs. It’s only hampered by the fact that I can’t make myself not think about how they shouldn’t look like this. This all goes the same for the set designs and the choices regarding the level of surreality. All of these things were actually great on their own, it’s just in the context of the original story it’s trying to serve that I think it fails, and that I’m a purist at heart.

- Having anything that moves at all for the first three parts. It may be inaccurate, but there’s still something satisfying about watching ANY moving version of these episodes, and I’ve often found that, even though recons are and forever will be my go-to and I will swear by them until the day I die, watching the animations tends to help me process and retain things better from that point onwards — for example, my memory of The Faceless Ones is a lot stronger now for having seen “footage” of the missing parts, and it then helps make the recon even easier to follow than before. This one is no exception. My memory is good for The Celestial Toymaker anyway, but there’s just something about movement that roots it in your brain that much better. I’m not one who struggles with recons — obviously, since I still love and choose them over animations — but it still helps to have these additional aids to cement it more firmly. Whatever problems this animation has, I still feel like it helps to have “watched” these episodes in whatever way possible.

- Plain and simple, it manages to have a sort of charm to it, in spite of me. Even while I criticized it for different things the whole time, I somehow still had a good time. I’m sure it’s in part down to the fact that I’ve always loved this story, and it would also just be hard for me to be in a bad mood watching Classic Who, but there’s something about this that still made me happy even in the face of my issues with it. I dislike their choices but I nevertheless found it hard to dislike the whole thing itself. I don’t know what it is.

- bonus: you can tell in the commentary that this animation made Peter so happy and I can’t be too mad at it when I hear how thrilled that darling man is with it.

~~~~~

Despite the fact that I went on considerably longer for the cons than pros, I did nevertheless enjoy this, to my surprise. I’m much more of a purist and want as-faithful-as-realistically-possible recreations rather than all-out reimaginings, so on principle I’m still against many of the choices they made, and I really wish this were just a fascinating and ambitious fanmade production rather than the official one because it means I’ll never get a more accurate version out of them, but I can’t bring myself to hate this. It’s kind of like when you watch a movie that’s objectively a bad adaptation of the source material but still entertaining as its own movie. Honestly, I would watch this again and have a good time. I just hope that they do NOT get it into their heads that this is the right style to keep using going forwards, because this absolutely would not work for anything else, and only halfways works for this to begin with.

I do recommend giving this release a shot despite the animation, but your mileage may vary. This is definitely something that you could either love or hate and honestly I think both reactions are valid, because I’m clearly quite conflicted myself. You can really only know if you watch it for yourself.

Verdict: against all odds and my own criticisms, I actually liked this. It’s not what I would have wanted for it at all, nor do I want them to ever do this again for anything else, but somehow despite myself I did like it in its own weirdly charming way.

~~~~~

Bonus: special features

- Great commentaries as always on all four animated episodes as well as a separate one for the existing episode four.

- Optional reconstructions as per usual. I haven’t watched these yet so I can’t say whether they’re on par with Loose Cannon or not.

- There’s a making-of for the animation, though it’s much shorter than I expected since they’ve typically been longer on other releases. Still interesting but not much going on there.

- Very nice to include the VHS intro by Sylvester McCoy. I love that they tend to add things like that.

- They have an old audio interview with Carmen Silvera. I haven’t listened to this yet but I’m looking forward to it.

- Photo gallery as always. There were actually a few I’d never seen before, as well as larger extended versions of things I’m familiar with as being more zoomed in. Always exciting when they can still surprise you with something.

- Comes with the standard informative booklet, which I always love.

- And of course, the gem I largely bought this thing for, the escape room with Maureen O’Brien, Peter Purves, and Lisa Bowerman. I’m thrilled to say it’s everything I was hoping for, and if you’re like me and could watch the Classic Who family do pretty much anything, this feature alone is worth the purchase. You’re following them through this thing the entire time and it was such a joy for me. So many things cut down the runtime of stuff like this — I remember during the Infinity War press tour they had some of the cast in an escape room that had a time of 40 minutes or so, but the actual video we got was maybe 10 minutes tops and I felt robbed of all the material we could have been seeing, because I could have happily sat there for the whole length of what they actually did. This is not a problem here in the slightest, because as usual, the people making these fun features for Doctor Who releases care about me and know what I want. What I wanted was to see these three’s entire experience in there, and I received. There are moments in it where being much more knowledgeable about Who than them is painful because you’re screaming at them to get it right, but most of the time it’s just a ton of fun watching them try to work everything out and to see their different personalities try to take control of the situation at different times. There’s one surprise in particular that had me absolutely grinning from ear to ear, and if you’re planning on getting this release, I won’t spoil what it is, but oh my gosh. Forget this feature alone being worth it, that segment alone is worth it. Could not believe what I was seeing, it was great. Overall I can’t speak highly enough of this and how much I enjoyed the crud out of it, and I am very much looking forward to the rest of them that they’ll be putting out for the other Classic eras.

#classic who #the celestial toymaker #missing episodes #review #dw escape room

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triniteevee · 2 years ago

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A Hero and A Reader - Part I

(arven x reader)

(warnings: mentions of death, violence)

( !! notes: kinda confusing but these brackets [ ] show text that is only visible to arven, scenarios are based on prev games/regions with names from different languages)

prologue | part ii

“Never meet your heroes,” was a phrase Arven heard countless times.

With both his parents being highly regarded in the academe, he’s seen that crumbling broken expression on the faces of his parents’ fans when they realize their heroes are no more than science dorks. The disappointed, “oh,” that leaves their lips when they realize that the oh-so-cool pokémon professors are, quite frankly, cringe. Lower your expectations, always, he’s learned.

Looking at you, that same tone of, “oh…,” escapes him.

Don’t get him wrong. This is still the coolest thing to ever happen in his life. Not only is he meeting his hero, he’s meeting The Hero. Up until then, he never thought his favorite character in his favorite novel would be in his world, in the flesh.

Yet, he’s reminded of the many times he’s yelled at the book in frustration. If there was one thing he despised about you… well it would be your lack of self-preservation, but a close second? Your reaction to unexpected situations.

Right then, Arven finds a razor claw propping up his chin. Your eyes are steely, as you stare him down. He knows you’re perfectly capable of ending his existence then and there.

The heat that flows through his face and body couldn’t be helped. Not when you’re studying him so intently. It doesn’t help that he’s had a crush on The Hero his whole life, way before he even met you. If he wasn’t so preoccupied with his safety at the moment, he would be kicking, screaming, crying at how he’d conjured you up in his head perfectly.

“H-hey now.” He tries to talk you down. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”

It’s no use.

He’s read the book. He knows what you’re doing.

Aura reading.

You want to know if he’s a threat.

His mind feels like jelly, and there is a presence that feels like fingertips sliding along the edges. The way other characters have described the sensation does not prepare him for the unease he feels. It feels like those nightmares where he wakes up naked in the school cafeteria, but instead of wanting to cover up his body, he so desperately wants to cover up his mind, heart and soul.

All of a sudden, an image — much like a pop-up textbox on his computer — manifests in his head.

[ User Profile

Name: Arven

Role: Support

Attribute: Sole Reader

Personal Skill: Loading�� ]

He doesn’t have time to process what he’d just read, because all at once, you let out a gasp and fall on the ground. Your hands are clenching your head, and you’re screaming in excruciating pain. He rushes to you, but immediately you’re hissing at him, and waving the damn razor claw around.

[ Personal Skill: Fourth Wall (Lv. 9) activated. ]

“Who the hell are you?”

He raises his arms up, showing that he has no weapons on him, nor any intention to call out his pokémon. If the look you gave him earlier was one of suspicion, this was pure contempt. The slight quiver in your lip however suggests some sense of trepidation.

“I’m just a normal trainer, I swear.”

You scoff, and turn your head to the side. The side profile revealing more cuts and bruises Arven had missed earlier.

“I didn’t ask what it is you do. I asked who you are.”

When his own name leaves his lips, Arven is once again reminded of how surreal this entire situation is. “Arven.” Your head immediately snaps up at him. “My name is Arven.”

The expression on your face would soon start to haunt Arven’s nightmares. Your eyes started glistening, on the verge of tears. Your mouth drops open, repeating his name in disbelief. Right when you’ve crawled down on the ground enough to close the distance and grab his hand, your eyes roll to the back of your head, leaving only the whites visible, and you drop down unconscious.

Arven does the only thing he can think of.

He screams into the abyss.

[ Rewriting Scenario 9, Run 3, Chapter 1… ]

The clear blue skies mock him. He knows full well that your presence here meant Paldea is in danger. Other characters in the book have called you the Harbinger. They mistake you for bringing danger with you wherever you go, unaware that the Banished has bound you to repeatedly deal with grave catastrophes.

The Original One had blessed you (though, you’ve repeatedly refuted it as a curse) with the ability to “regress.” Even if you encounter an enemy or an obstacle so severe, it didn’t matter if it killed you. You would simply reset the scenario with more knowledge on how to best it.

A scenario is like a story arc. In the book, you were faced with 9 great catastrophes. Each one a threat to all life, the world, and the greater universe.

If you died, then you died.

Back to the start of the scenario, you go.

Rinse and Repeat. Just another Run.

The world resets with your life, and you are the only person to see the world you’ve seen. Thus, you are the only one equipped with the knowledge to make things right.

Gwandong, the first scenario you’ve faced, took you twenty-six regressions to complete. You were only ten years old then, but you’ve had to live out that scenario twenty-six times, each run lasting about a year. By the time you’ve perfected the run and managed to defeat Sakaki and save the region, your own mother turned you away, because you had changed far too much. Your face was still the same, baby fat and all. But your eyes, she whispered, you look like you’d gone to war.

You had no time to rebuild your relationship with her, or with the injured neighbor boy you couldn’t manage to keep away from Miothu. Soon as you had tied up loose ends with a few Tým Raket grunts, the Space Deity whisked you off to Dzhoto to deal with a loose red Gyarados wreaking havoc on innocent townspeople.

One scenario after another.

Based on the injuries you’ve sustained, and the Ho-Oh that brought you here, you’ve just barely managed to put a stop to Eternatus in San-Graal… no, if you were real, it meant that you had come from Galar, its real world counterpart.

You’re at Scenario 9.

[ Rewriting Scenario 9, Run 3, Chapter 1… ]

In the book, Scenario 9, Run 3 was endgame.

He cried for weeks at your permanent death.

Summoming his Rotom phone, Arven is immediately bombarded with breaking news reports of the arrest of the Macro Cosmos President. His eyes nearly pop out of his head as he sees the picture of Chairman Rose — the spitting image of how he had pictured Chairman Shehroz of the book to look like.

What exactly is going on?

Your head is cushioned on mountains of fluff, and your body is wrapped in silk.

Memories of your third landing in Paldea come back to you in wisps. Have you regressed already? No. If you recall correctly, your first two times in Paldea had been relatively safe before the paradox pokémon encounter in the Asado Desert. What changed?

You feel something warm touch your forehead, and it takes your mind a second to register it as the back of somebody’s hand. The gentle light streaming in from the sunset rouses you back to the land of the living.

A gentle voice says, “Easy there.”

Luscious blonde and brunette locks frame a sweet face. His smile is strained, but the concern in his eyes is genuine.

Arven.

This 3rd turn’s anomaly — probably the biggest anomaly you’ve encountered in all of your scenarios. A part of you is relieved at his existence, but you know better than to hope this solves everything.

Soft hands help you as you sit up. The scent of freshly cooked eggs and bacon waft from the tray he’s set beside the bed. And is that freshly squeezed orange juice?

He truly is a kind person.

This is your first time to actually meet him. Now you understand why you had mourned him during both previous regressions. Sada and Turo had told you of their child’s good-hearted nature before. Being around Arven was overwhelming, his presence so abundantly warm and comforting.

You’re glad to see he’s alive.

You’re just not sure how.

“Where are your parents?”

Arven could feel his eye twitch at such a question.

It’s not your fault. You didn’t know. You’re probably just concerned about privacy or something. Though, the fact you’ve brought them up reminds him once again that he’s just plain old Arven. Just another trainer. With parents. Famous and talented parents.

He fakes a laugh. “I’m not a child. What makes you think I’d still be living with them?”

An honest expression of surprise is on your face. It may be the most vulnerable he’s seen you so far. “Oh, I didn’t mean to offend— I just didn’t want to impose any more—“

There it is.

Any other person would have mistaken this for politeness, or a sense of finesse. Having read the book— your life story? — Arven knows that you’re not used to accepting favors from anyone. He figures you’d just have to deal. With him around, you’re gonna have to get used to it.

“I need your help.”

He knows the best way to offer his help to you is to make it sound like you’re the one helping him.

You don’t even bother to pry further. Your heroic nature shining through. “Whatever you need, Arven.”

[ You have joined The Hero’s party. ]

[ The Hero has taken on a new companion. ]

[ Scenario 9, Run 3, Chapter 1 has been successfully updated. ]

[ Continue to Scenario 9, Run 3, Chapter 2?

YES | NO ]

#pokemon scarlet and violet #arven #arven x reader

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co-mixed · 5 months ago

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Fantastic Origin (Reed Sucks)

Let’s do it, let’s kick off the Fantastic Four review journey.

The first ever run of Marvel’s first family aka the team I had been actively avoiding until recently.

Most of Lee/Kirby books are extremely different from what we see in the comics today. You could easily attribute that to the days of yore or just the fact that these books have served as stepping stones towards bigger and more complex stories. Or you could take them for what they are.

Right away I will have to get misogyny out of the way. It’s there and it’s ugly. These books are filled with ridiculous stereotypes and absolutely unacceptable degrading behavior towards women. It’s all the more upsetting when you get to read fan letters from women, they hint at that constantly.

I gotta say, it worked too because when Crystal became a part of the team, she was relatively badass and was treated with more respect than Sue. But dammit, poor Sue. You can try and convince me that Reed is a good husband but that won’t help a bit. In a world where literal supervillains exist, he is definitely not the worst human being but since he’s being portrayed as a hero, I’m gonna accept the fact that he’s trash.

Of course, I see what the creators were going for: Reed was supposed to be a hyper-focused, single-minded, science-obsessed team leader with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He was supposed to be flawed but sympathetic.

Especially compared to his beloved Sue who was supposed to be a loving and caring homemaker with her invisibility power being a reflection of her relationship with Reed. As in he only sees her when she’s in danger.

The way it looks now, 60 years after the cosmic rays incident, is very different.

Sue is a young woman, seemingly younger than Reed, who somehow stumbled into a relationship with a man who treats her as a status symbol. She’s a tag-along, something pretty to walk with, have at home, and look at when it pleases him. Because she’s younger (bear with me, I’m only assuming this based on the Lee/Kirby age), she is very susceptible to his influence and opinions, there’s a power misbalance and she doesn’t really know that things could or should be better. Which is kind of easy to assume, considering her mother was dead and her father was in jail. She also had a brother in high school to take care of and Reed was successful and rich.

Then after she got powers, she kind of got permanently stuck with him, and that trauma bond became even more dysfunctional. She did assume the role she probably saw in the media at the time, overly caring about everyone but herself, and she accepts material substitutes for actual comfort, such as shopping, because that’s what’s been said and taught to her.

Her relationship with Reed is passionless too, hence when Namor shows up, she entertains the idea of him. Although, let’s not forget that he keeps kidnapping her and trying to convince her to become his queen of the seas or whatever. Maybe if he was less straightforward and didn’t try to kill her brother in the process… who knows?

But he does, meanwhile, Reed is putting that good-for-nothing brother of hers through school, so she chooses Reed. She even marries him, entrapping herself in a loveless marriage. And after two years of horrible home life with barely any time to get to know whatever she’s been wed to, she gets pregnant. All in all, at this point, at that time, it’s over for her. And as a reader you know she doesn’t escape that. It’s pretty tragic.

Reed is a scumbag. Yelling at Susan is just part of it, he also acts like he’s the boss of everyone (which I do get when it comes to Johnny and Ben, who are let’s just say irresponsible.)

He constantly sticks his nose into things like the negative zone, causing meanies like Annihilus to show up. He keeps using Ben or The Thing when he needs and then swears he’ll turn him back. It gets repetitive and no one can really trust him. He pretends to act like a hero after causing a problem and keeps trying to sacrifice himself forgetting his wife and eventually son. Bro, you got responsibilities over there!

I believe that’s the intention but Reed is not that different from Doom, except Doom actually has a sob story to explain his obsession with science and the occult. Reed… at this point in the run we don’t know if he does or where his assholery comes from. All we do know is he’s an equally terrible leader, husband, and friend. Bet he’s not much of a father either.

But hey, at least he’s putting that good-for-nothing Johnny through school.

Ben is irritating. We’ve discussed it at length with several people, how so many people can relate to him and consider him their favorite character. But Ben Grimm is awful. You know what? I think the unstable version of him that was around for a brief moment when he could switch into The Thing and back, that version is the real Ben Grimm. If anything, his insecurity is holding him back in that anger. When he gets both strength and his human appearance, that’s when you gotta run for the hills and summon the Hulk to put him down.

Ben went from petty, insecure, and angry to overcompensating and calling himself pretty and lovable. All the while his paranoia regarding Alicia and her love for him is growing more and more bizarre. He really doesn’t trust her when she says that she likes him as The Thing, he claims he wants to be Ben for her but hey, she’s pretty uncomfortable with Ben so there’s that.

He did act better than Reed would’ve when he thought Alicia had chosen Silver Surfer but then he ghosted her and threw a tantrum every time Surfer popped up. Have some self-respect, Ben.

What pissed me off the most is the way he treated Franklin seconds before he found out his middle name was Benjamin. Like, seriously? You’re taking it out on a baby? Besides, neither Sue nor Reed owes you anything. Well, maybe Reed does. But it doesn’t help that Ben keeps getting into fights with that good-for-nothing Johnny.

Johnny is good for nothing. He’s an ok kid I suppose but he doesn’t attend school and somehow ends up in a university (which even managed to piss off one fan! Seriously, don’t ignore the fan mail if it’s there!) Then he spends exactly one semester, meets a friend who participates in his whacky adventures for like a week, and forgets this friend exists. He also forgets the school exists.

Johnny is either acting out at home, fixing his car, or chasing after girls. Until he meets Crystal and immediately becomes obsessed with her, which no one really cares about. Then Crystal gets stuck under a dome with her merry Inhuman family, and he broods and throws tantrums. They are torn apart and brought back together, and then are torn apart and then brought together, it’s a whole X-men level soap. I actually liked that.

And out of all the villains I’m only gonna focus on Doom. Don’t get me wrong, Galactus is forever the star, but let’s talk Doom.

He’s an interesting fellow but I don’t get the massive fan base. Dude’s a literal dictator of the worst kind. He experienced dictatorship on his own skin since childhood and he grew up and enslaved his whole country. I would understand if he brought prosperity and happiness to them but that? I was actually pretty impressed by the Latverian arc, in which the FF went to Latveria and were depowered and treated like Doom’s dear guests. It was a creative way to draw a little image of what this kinda system is and how it functions from within. Doom rules by fear and they experienced that fear, they even almost lost hope. I would’ve done this arc a little differently but hey, I’m here 60 years later.

But at least Doom hadn’t killed that good-for-nothing Johnny.

The Stories

That’s what we’re really here for – the silly early villains and the bizarre tactics that save the day. We obviously have some baddies that stood the test of time and a few that didn’t. But Reed’s approach throughout everything is pretty much “let’s throw them into space and hope they don’t come back.” They do, Doom’s been to space twice and even made a trip to the microverse. He’s well-traveled now.

In the beginning, it’s a very repetitive scheme: one issue = one arc, Ben argues with that good-for-nothing Johnny, Sue is there, Reed saves the day. But the arcs stretch to two and more issues and the stories become more and more entertaining. At some point, even Sue gets to save a few hours. Not the day though.

Crystal gets her shining moments, and like I said before, she does very well and almost without Reed’s misogynistic crap.

There are a few stories I liked, Galactus, of course (behold!), the would-be gamer The Thinker, Latveria visit, and the arc in which whatshisface scientist turned himself into The Thing. That’s pretty much the first time in this run when a one-issue baddie realized the error of his ways and made the ultimate sacrifice. Before that, the antihero role was pretty much Namor’s. Speaking of Namor, how’s his “movie” career? That arc was truly wild and smelled a lot like Golden Age comics.

Now if you’re thinking you’d like to read this run, do. But if you just want to know the origins and main encounters, just watch the 90’s show. Not only it covers most of the pivotal stories, but season one has a fantastic! intro song. You’re gonna love it and if you don’t, it’s gonna haunt you till you do.

I’m positive the stories are gonna get better. I was promised they’re gonna get better but I have a hell of a road ahead of me, 300 issues before I get to more modern days, and even more after that. I’m all in.

#comic books #comics #marvel #marvel comics #marvel universe #comics reviews #fantastic four #reed richards #susan richards #johnny storm #ben grimm

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mangle-my-mind · 1 year ago

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Todd Haynes on Velvet Goldmine and Fandom (and Gender, and Yaoi, and Slash Fic)

Source: "Something that is Dangerous and Arousing and Transgressive: An Interview with Todd Haynes," Julia Leyda.

Edits and emphases my own :) The whole interview is fascinating, and while I kept most of the Velvet Goldmine stuff in this post, there are more bits to read about it, as well as conversation around Todd Haynes' other films. This is gonna be a really long post, with screencaps throughout, so find it below the cut!

JL: You've done several movies that are very clearly woman's films, but the movie that I am most fascinated with in terms of gender is Velvet Goldmine, which is not usually interpreted in that context.

TH: No, except it's probably gotten the strongest female fan base of any of my films. And what's wonderful for me is to see new generations of young women, even as we think we progress as a society and there are new options available to each new generation that seem to be catering to that market more acutely, still Velvet Goldmine offers that market something that they’re not getting elsewhere. I always love it when girls come up to me at festivals and that’s the one, that’s the movie that really turned them around.

JL: I’m interested in how you use the trope of playing with dolls in Superstar and Velvet Goldmine as a way to figure gender, embodiment, desire, identification. You said in an interview that playing with dolls is what you’re doing in Velvet Goldmine, using it as a metaphor for the filmmaking process, to play with the characters of the idols more than making an actual biopic about bisexual pop stars. So what about the female characters in Velvet Goldmine? Fans, rock and roll girls like Mandy — talk a bit about them.

TH: Interesting question... I don’t know if [the role of the rock-n-roll girl and the role of Angela Bowie in glam] relates directly to doll-playing except that it really might be the last time that you see an active female figure freely utilizing artificial terms of self-expression and persona in an unembarrassed, unabashed, almost radical way. That was in a way the fascinating counterpart to the more aloof, silent, objectified figure that Bowie assumed as Ziggy Stardust. Of course, there was also that hardcore influence from the American music that he loved — the Stooges, the MC5, and the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed — as the final ingredient to give it that kind of duality, the cross between English musical traditions and this American hardcore, a direct assault. He needed both of those, but there was still a kind of passivity and object-ness of that figure that seemed more quiet, and more comfortable being an image, an idealized beautiful façade that people could project onto; whereas Angela Bowie was active, pulling the strings and moving the levers — in that way, I think, making him up so that he was the doll that she was playing with. So a lot of that energy and that fire and fearlessness I think could be attributed to her.

JL: In the doll-playing scene in Velvet Goldmine, the girls are like Mandy, manipulating them and fantasizing about them. So that trope of little girls playing with dolls scene really gets at the way the movie is about bisexuality and a kind of less bordered sexual identity, that is based in play, in fantasy —

TH: — is fluid, is mutable, is conducive to all kinds of voices and all kinds of players pulling the strings. But one thing that Velvet Goldmine kind of misses is how strongly and passionately young women were the driving desiring consumers of this very unique moment in popular culture history. That has continued, too: the androgynous male object is something that still attracts a really passionate, active female spectatorship. That’s so fascinating to me, and you can see it played out in so many different ways: the tradition of the Japanese comics of the ’70s, what’s it called again?

JL: The subgenre of manga with the boy lovers and its girl fans, yaoi.

TH: Exactly. The boy lovers and the girl fans, really directed at girl consumers, and it’s this androgynous, starry-eyed princes and pretty boys who have sparkly eyes for each other.

JL: I wondered if you were aware of yaoi or not. When I was working on a conference paper about the girl fans in Velvet Goldmine some of my colleagues said, Hey that’s just like yaoi! And I said, Wow, it really is, but I have no idea if that’s part of what he was thinking or if it’s just a coincidental, cross-cultural parallel.

TH: It was a tangent that I learned about in the process of research, but I don’t remember when exactly. I was certainly aware of how there was a particular Japanese following with a passionate attachment to the Bowie phenomenon, glam rock, T. Rex; Japan made up a major part of their market. But I think it’s an interesting counter-argument to the classic Laura Mulvey idea of a limited female spectatorship and if anything it only further underscores — although I think this is all embedded in that, and though I haven’t read those articles in some years — that marginalized subjects, such as gay subjects and women, have to find a more dexterous and nuanced way of reading culture and finding their way into all kinds of content that is not designed for them. I think there’s this ability to transform and to enter into all kinds of different subject positions of which this is one amazing and fascinating example: the glam rock thing with young girls’ driving interest in it.

JL: When I was a teenager I was a huge Bowie fan, and my mother was confused because I was always trying to look like Bowie; she would say, “You’re attracted to him, you have a crush on him, why do you want to look like him? When I was younger I loved Jean-Paul Belmondo, but I didn’t want to look like him.” But in the ’70s, and in my case the ’80s, and still today I think, girls of all sexual orientations experience that overlapping between desire and identification — it’s there in the Arthur character, too, but I’m thinking of in the opening sequence with the glam girls rampaging.

TH: Right, they’re absolutely rampaging, terrorizing the town in utter desire. And we all know that the passion that we see displayed there, the intensely sexual display of female spectatorship probably started with Valentino, Sinatra, the Beatles, and Elvis.

JL: It’s almost hysterical.

TH: Yes. There was in these cases an androgynous, feminine element to the actual performance; in a way, just for the star to be up on stage, just to be objectified, is to arguably be feminized. These artists in their unique and shaded ways capitalized on that, and the result among female spectators is something that society is still startled by: that radical emotional response that it engenders... Each generation has its own variant on that. It does call into question all sorts of assumptions about opposites attracting, the whole simplistic reductive ideas of what drives desire —

JL: — and the borders of identity.

TH: Yes, and the female subjects, spectators, consumers, maybe because they’ve had to learn how to occupy different subject positions in dominant patriarchal culture, have revealed the ways that desiring has narcissistic or self-reflexive aspects. On the other hand, maybe male spectatorship has just been so much more catered to and delineated in solid terms, and thus hasn’t been able to explore the margins as thoroughly, but women and gay people and African Americans, for example, all have to find different ways of entering mainstream cultural production.

JL: I love that the girls with the dolls in Velvet Goldmine are storytellers, they are controlling the narrative, in a sense, and that you say that that’s what you were doing as a director.

TH: I think that’s how we all begin to externalize our desires: through storytelling. Dolls are a tool that lends itself to that; they are supposedly made for little girls, and I loved dolls when I was a kid. The Barbie doll became a multiply useful subject in the Karen Carpenter film, and that was the internal nod that I was making in Velvet Goldmine, but it was so relevant it didn’t feel like a detour or a private joke — it felt like it was getting to the core of the intense effect that is felt by these kinds of characters in popular culture. That free-floating desire in the little boy-romance that the little girls are constructing is about as sweet and tender as anything in the film.

JL: That kind of storytelling, the freedom in play, helps the characters, but also the rest of us, decide who we are and how we want to tell our own stories.

TH: It’s the story and the engine of the film. It is really the fan’s point of view — the Arthur character, obviously — but it’s really the theme and the whole motor of it. I always knew I wasn’t really interested in getting inside the closed doors of these famous subjects and that’s why a fictionalization of this unique period made sense. We all already fictionalize and fill in and fantasize. And we see it too in the whole slash fiction phenomenon, which I didn’t even know about until Velvet Goldmine, and in which Velvet Goldmine has itself become a category.

JL: That’s the cool thing about Velvet Goldmine — it is itself a sort of slash fiction, and there’s this ongoing spin-off slash fiction community carrying the stories forward — it’s a perfect loop.

TH: Yes. To ignite that little flame that makes people want to respond actively and creatively and participate. It reminds me of a girl… I was scared of Bowie when I was in junior high school, and I remember I was aware of him, but it was all just too freaky. There was a girl in a lip sync show in seventh grade who picked his song “Changes.” She was this beautiful girl and she imitated him, as many girls did, right, because he was so pretty... [S]he just did the perfect lightning bolt like Aladdin Sane, and she got her hair just right — I forgot if she wore a wig. But she performed “Changes,” and I remember hearing and thinking, “Oh, this isn’t so scary . . .” because I expected it to be really hardcore music and I would be put off by it. But it was so pretty.

JL: So she turned you on to Bowie.

TH: She really helped...

JL: I’m trying not to let my brain explode with that idea! I remember that scene in Velvet Goldmine where they’re reporting on the news, saying something like, “Girls everywhere are wearing glitter makeup,” and that conveyed the society’s sense of fear, of what are all those girls up to? The idea that they’re going to need to be controlled again somehow because they’re getting a little too weird or too powerful.

TH: The glitter girls, as they were sometimes called, especially the LA version of the glitter girls, that’s another thing I really remember from junior high. As I read later when I studied this period, they were a force to be reckoned with — extremely precocious, among some of the youngest, most adventurous and not violent, but persevering, fearless, active fans. They peopled the Rodney Bingenheimer English Club on Sunset Boulevard —

JL: Like the Runaways.

TH: Yes, they gave birth to the Runaways. I think it was one of those girls who ended up in Roman Polanski’s house, who was fifteen or however old she was, but that’s why it’s very hard to examine that infringement outside of its cultural context and what was happening at the time in Los Angeles. Glitter girls scared the shit out of me when I was a kid — they were tough, and girls were already ahead of boys at that age, but they were miles ahead. It was intense. I can absolutely picture those kinds of girls, and they were intense, in their platform shoes and glitter makeup.

JL: With Arthur, I thought you did such a great job developing that character as a kind of giddy, exuberant, awkward young guy. You’ve said that Velvet Goldmine was your most affirmative film, even though the ’80s scenes are so dark, it provides the character of Arthur with this memory to cherish even in the middle of the awful ’80s.

TH: Totally. I don’t know if there’s a more joyful moment in any of my movies than that little passage that I’ve been showing as a clip in a couple of festivals and retrospectives of Arthur getting the record, and making his brother agree to lend him the money taking it home, opening it up, and that cherished —

JL: Fetishized!

TH: — fetishized record. And then he leaves the house, stashing his coat and just prancing proudly with his badges down the street with the song playing, and yet still being met with this higher echelon of socially superior kids who look down on him, and the pretty boy who scowls at him for his presumption to even be in their company. But still I think every kid has some version of that: his awkwardness, his passion, his vulnerability, and his strength, too, are all embodied in that ability to fall in love.

That beautiful sequence ends with him turning the page one more time to the page with the image of Curt and Brian kissing. And I remember feeling that, a kind of recoiling, confusion — like it’s tapping something exact, absolutely precise, but just too many membranes down to be able to be freed up, able to be voiced or affirmed. But it’s something you’re bookmarking for the future, that feeling you’re going to return to when you have a little more strength, a little more perspective. It’s touching something that you know you’re going to have to get back to because it’s something that is dangerous and arousing and transgressive. Christian's performance is so amazing because that sequence starts with him in the classroom, where he really looks all of a sudden like he’s fourteen years old, with his ruddy cheeks —

JL: — and his really bad bangs. I identified with him utterly and painfully in that scene. And his flailing dancing scene. My God, that character is so beautiful.

TH: He did such a beautiful job. He really was so committed and so profoundly inside that guy. I remember when we wrapped and he put away the Arthur clothes and he came back and said, “I just put away the Arthur clothes and cried a little bit.” And I don’t know if I cried but I sure felt like I could’ve. I think despite all the beautiful, fancy guys in that movie, I think my heart belonged to Arthur.

JL: Of course, because Arthur’s us.

TH: He is.

JL: When he takes that coat off and starts walking down the street it’s just: yes! We were all there. I like the way that film gives a few different positions over to that kind of fandom: audience member, fan, young person who’s still working things out, still trying to figure out who they are, and who they want, and who they want to be. The girls as well as Arthur.

TH: It’s also why the whole package of bisexuality, a kind of performative, made-up, dressed-up sense of identity and self, and coupled with this sense of being extraterrestrial, speaks so directly to adolescent instability and to that moment of uncertainty. It couldn’t have been a more total package for the mutability of that time, touching all the nerves and also the freedoms that dressing up allows you, and imagining different kinds of love objects that aren’t necessarily the ones you’re supposed to have. But even that is blurry, unfixed.

JL: Tommy Stone’s star image shows the other side of that dressing-up, right? If you can change yourself that radically, you can also change yourself into a horrible, plastic thing.

TH: Right, and a kind of converse example. The female fan who comes up to Arthur in that final scene at the bar who is so ecstatic about Tommy Stone because that’s all that generation has. That’s what they got — it’s not their fault that the same desire, the same need for something special is expressed, but it’s just not radical, or progressive, or culture-changing. But it’s what they’ve got, and I didn’t want to blame them because they are part of a culture that had to clamp down around categories once again, resume control of those categories that were seeping into each other so surprisingly for a brief time.

JL: Exactly. That limited world that she inhabits and Arthur’s wistful smile as he gives her the press pass, seeing her giddiness.

TH: Just as the emerald pin is the ultimate token of passing on heritages and opportunities or insights or ways of radically inverting a person’s destined experience. That’s how that scene is framed with him passing on the press pass to her and Curt passing on the pin to Arthur. There’s a nice sense of camaraderie among generations and different stations.

#velvet goldmine #25yearsofvelvetgoldmine #velvetgoldmine25th

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stranger-rants · 2 years ago

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This is why I do not vibe with these ''Steve was neglected by his parents'' ''Eddie was abused by his father'' ''Mike and Nancy were abused/neglected by their parents'' arguments because the majority of the time they are used in false equivalences and comparison situations. We literally have no canon evidence to suggest or make the argument that Steve's parents abused or neglected him. But in order to make Steve ''more interesting'', the fans constantly come up with the idea that Steve is neglected or abused, then they are using that headcanon argument to prove that Steve is abused/neglected but did not turn out bad when they compare him to Billy. Same with the Eddie stans arguing that he has been abused by his father, despite there not being evidence of this in canon. Do not even get me started on all the tragic headcanon stories the fans have for the Wheeler family as if the Wheelers aren't the most privileged characters on the show. Yet, the fans come up with constant headcanons to portray Ted and Karen as abusive and malicious parents to their kids to uplift Nancy and Mike. Despite there being no actual evidence to suggest that Mike and Nancy are neglected/abused in a malicious way.

All of those are bullshit arguments. The fact is that because Billy had no one, he was still being constantly abused without anyone supporting him, you cannot use those sorts of (headcanon) arguments to compare those characters' situations to Billy's. Billy's situation and abuse/neglect were shown on screen for everyone to see. That had an actual basis in canon with the obvious lines and on-screen portrayal. Also, harsh truth may be for some fans-- but using trauma/neglect/abuse arguments to bring down another character is nonsensical when those arguments are largely based on headcanons and made-up stuff that you came up with to attribute to your fan-favorite characters who have not even suffered in any way similar to Billy. the Wheeler family fans, Eddie stans, and Steve stans really should suck it up when it comes to this tbh.

I remember someone arguing that Mike is who we wish Billy was or whatever, which, what the fuck? …but they reasoned that Mike was a closeted kid in an abusive conservative household. Like, what? Yes, The Wheelers love Reagan. Sure, By/ler is a popular ship and I’m sure the fans have loads of headcanons about Mike’s family being homophobic but none of that is canon. What is canon is that Billy was called a f*gg*t by his homophobic father before being slapped around.

Get with the program people. Headcanons about trauma especially do not get to cancel out canon trauma. It pisses me off when people not only do this but “steal” Billy’s canon experiences for their fanworks while still treating Billy like The Devil. These people want their favorites to be the innocent victim so bad but don’t want to deal with what trauma actually does to people. I’m never going to respect headcanons that were built off of hatred of survivors like Billy. I will laugh at how ridiculous they are every time.

#asks

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44gamez · 8 months ago

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GTA Online’s community is in limbo while hype builds for GTA 6

Grand Theft Auto Online started as a mere side attraction in Grand Theft Auto 5 earlier than it expanded into its personal colossal beast. GTA Online has since made billions of dollars and is commonly up to date with sizable new chapters that embrace cameos from real-world celebrities like Dr. Dre. The sport is now an MMO in its personal proper, serving as a alternative for the single-player DLC chapters that Rockstar used to launch. However with Grand Theft Auto 6 on the distant horizon, GTA On-line gamers are beginning to sweat a bit. My buddies and I've all sunk over a decade into GTA On-line; I’ve personally performed on and off since round 2013. All of us began as humble drug sellers, choosing up packages from the Southside and making a number of hundred bucks at a time. Now, we’re all multimillionaires, rolling round in tremendous automobiles, proudly owning nightclubs, arcades, and splendid residential suites. If we wish a change of tempo, we are able to go pull a heist on a on line casino or crime lord’s personal villa, or choose some missions from our huge underground bunker. Few dwell on-line video games have been trucking for this lengthy. For each Warframe or World of Warcraft, there are a dozen video games which have both quietly entered upkeep mode or shut down totally. GTA On-line is even nonetheless being up to date. Nevertheless, Rockstar hasn’t come near saying any particulars on a web-based recreation mode for the subsequent recreation, and we’re nonetheless a 12 months out from even getting the core marketing campaign of Grand Theft Auto 6. (Polygon has reached out to Rockstar for clarification and can replace if we obtain a response.) The result's that gamers of each GTA On-line and personal role-play servers need to sit, wait, and speculate. In some methods, it’s an thrilling proposition — the leap between the physics and graphics of GTA 5 and Pink Lifeless Redemption 2 was large, and presumably we’ll see much more enhancements within the subsequent GTA. However the query stays: What occurs to all of the progress that gamers have at present earned in GTA On-line?

Picture: Rockstar Video games “I’ve been taking part in GTA On-line for years, and between Prime unlocks and grinding, I’ve gotten a lot of the great things,” says Norrin, a GTA On-line fan I spoke to by way of Discord. “I’m OK with saying goodbye to companies and automobiles, however I’ve spent extra time with my on-line man than I've with Michael or Trevor. I need that to imply one thing.” A serious distinction between GTA On-line and its rivals is that all the things takes place within the state of San Andreas. It has a big map to discover, from the town of Los Santos as much as the quieter communities of Sandy Shores and Paleto Bay. Whereas different video games take the participant to new fantasy continents or realms, Rockstar unlocks extra of the map for the participant once they purchase shell firms, actual property, and legal enterprises. That is the usual life cycle of a MMO character; you begin as a bit man, and finally turn out to be a strong determine aboard a flying motorbike with heat-seeking missiles. Sometimes, an MMO ends attributable to financial or improvement elements. However GTA On-line, each default and modded, is so wildly standard that the lights are nonetheless on and content material remains to be coming. “I totally count on a wipe, and I don’t actually care,” says OneTwoZero, one other fan who boasts a playtime of hundreds of hours. “I wiped my progress shifting between consoles earlier than, I’ve misplaced progress to bugs and server points. For me, the technological enhancements that we’re going to see with 6 outstrip any sort of loss I may take.”

Picture: Rockstar Video games “I like Rockstar’s map design and world-building, clearly. I’ve spent lots of of hours in San Andreas,” Artie, one other GTA On-line role-player, instructed Polygon. “However for me, an important factor is the folks I play with and the tales we inform. I don’t care what occurs with the sequel so long as I can hold utilizing it for role-play.” The Grand Theft Auto franchise is at all times topic to leaks — actual and imaginary — which helps create an air of uncertainty across the subsequent recreation. Even the sport’s modded neighborhood, taking part in exterior Rockstar’s sandbox, has trigger for concern. Rockstar Video games acquired Cfx.re, the crew behind Grand Theft Auto’s hottest mod, in 2023. Cfx.re runs FiveM, a platform that enables gamers to launch into customized role-play servers which can be curated by neighborhood groups, each hobbyist and for revenue. Rockstar stated on the time that the funding would “assist them discover new methods to help this unimaginable neighborhood and enhance the companies they supply to their builders and gamers.” “I’m excited for the technical upgrades and what that may imply for role-play,” says Artie. “I feel it’ll be simpler to get folks into the interest, and there’ll be extra actions we are able to arrange in recreation. However I fear that Rockstar will cost for entry. Need to play a Motorbike Membership? Pay $15 for the belongings. Need to begin a detective company? Pay Rockstar to allow it in your server. We’ll all need to restart our tales for Vice Metropolis every time the FiveM server for that's prepared, however I’m afraid that it’ll have a subscription charge or a price ticket connected.” The potential of restarting recent isn’t unprecedented; Rockstar has wiped participant progress earlier than whereas migrating between platforms. Different MMORPGs have needed to cope with resets. Most famously, Closing Fantasy 14 burned the previous version of the game down with a magical apocalypse. However the state of Los Santos is a bit more mundane, regardless of the flying bikes and nuclear bunkers, and that sort of magic-bullet resolution is a bit trickier to move off. How do you keep the funding, monetary or emotional, that gamers have put into the sport whereas carrying over into a brand new entry within the franchise? Rockstar might want to thread the needle after Grand Theft Auto 6 is launched, and failure to take action may sink an enormously worthwhile and profitable spinoff. “All I hope is that my man will get a great send-off,” says Norrin. “After he’s brought on a lot chaos, he deserves to go down swinging.” Source link Read the full article

#builds #Community #GTA #Hype #Limbo #Onlines

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