#and also with the theme everywhere ELSE of Lost On The Infinite Sea

[stoportotouch]

also it is genuinely very sweet how clearly britten wrote pears' musical strengths and interests into the claggart! john claggart! arioso (or whatever you might call that).

[latin-dr-robotnik]

10 characters for 10 people

Thanks @beevean​ for tagging me!

1) Vector the Crocodile (Sonic The Hedgehog): My boy Vector doesn’t get enough love. He loves money, listening to some bangers on his headphones and taking on cases with his friends, who doesn’t love that? He also has to make ends meet, which makes him a lot more relatable than you’d think. And let’s not forget the fact that in IDW Sonic he is such a trooper, going out like a champ. Mad respect, my brother.

2) Rouge the Bat (Sonic the Hedgehog): “Fated not to be tamed // Watch me I never will lean upon you // I can go – by myself”

Rouge is a lot more than her “one polygon” or the sax guy in Sonic X going nuts every time she’s on screen, and it’s sad to see her character has gone to waste ever since -probably- Sonic ‘06, even if I kinda liked her in Forces. Rouge is a tough lass to deal with, she won’t stop until she gets what she wants, and that may lead her to push her luck a little too hard, but don’t let that take away from the fact that she also knows when to step down a bit and focus on other things, even if it hurts her ego quite a lot. She also has a soft side, and she managed to keep Team Dark together for a while now. That last point is what most fans have been pointing out over the years, so I don’t think it’s necessary to go in detail there.

She also has the best SA2 vocal theme, of course ;P

3) Rayla (The Dragon Prince): What can I say that hasn’t been said before? Even A:TLA comparisons have already been done to death (and the TDP fandom is frowning at me rn for mentioning it.) Rayla has done a lot, and she’s lost most of the ones she loved; but her determination to do the right thing and bring the Humans and Xadians conflict to an end has given her a lot of experiences, a new family and much more. There’s still lots to see from her in Season 4 and beyond, so I implore you to go watch TDP if you haven’t done so already.

4) Dracula (Netflix’s Castlevania): This is a more of a mellow, sad, tired and melancholic Dracula than I was used to (specially after coming from the old school Castlevania games), and I absolutely love it for that. The fucking Inquisition burned his wife, of course I would sympathize with him during his crusade against humanity; and now that those times are long gone, well... I miss him.

5) Iroh (Avatar: The Last Airbender): There’s not much else to say, he stood right by Zuko even when he turned his back on him, he wasn’t perfect, he learned some truly hard lessons in his life, but he ended up doing what he wanted to do the most: make others happy, serving them tea. This year I revisited Avatar for its 15th anniversary, and found myself crying a lot more than I remembered with Iroh’s moments. This show, man.

6) Theo (Celeste): I love Madeline to death, but Theo has struck me on a personal level. What seemed to be a happy-go lucky young man with a passion for selfies and Instagram (it’s actually real btw), turned out to be a man struggling to find a meaning in his life as he realized he kept hating the boring routine of the city life, and who isn’t going through something similar? His relationship with Madeline also reminded a lot of myself with my best friend, considering she also suffers from similar emotional struggles like Madeline. Celeste is so brilliant, and I’d love to hang out with Theo irl tbh.

7) Gaunter O’Dimm (The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt): The extended universe of The Witcher is in no shortage of fucking amazing characters, but there’s one character exclusive to the third game that’s just... well... it’s evil incarnated. The motherfucker that has its own song that children sing it in the game, that plays in every cutscene where he is present or his name is mentioned, and that, should you choose the “bad” ending of Hearts of Stone, will simply walk away whistling that very fucking song. Oh, and did I mention he’s, like, EVERYWHERE during HoS main quest?

“His smile fair as spring, as towards him he draws you

His tongue sharp and silvery as he implores you

Your wishes he grants, as he swears to adore you

Gold, silver, jewels - he lays riches before you”

8) Elizabeth (BioShock Infinite): Bruh, that Burial at Sea Part 2 ending. THAT. ENDING.

(Although overall I prefer the first BioShock over the rest, the first half of Infinite with Elizabeth being cheery is absolutely unforgettable for me.)

9) Soren (The Dragon Prince): Yeah, another repeat, but can we get some salutes in the chat for my boy Soren? A true trooper, he endured all the abusive shit he was getting from his father, decided to do the right thing™ by leaving him behind, and now he’s such a badass at it! I’m still pretty much worried about his sister, Claudia, but it makes me very happy to see my boy fighting for global peace.

10) Kass (The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild): I just love him a lot. I found myself several times spending north of 10 minutes just listening to him playing that accordion time and time again on different beautiful places.

Phew! That took a lot longer than I anticipated. Now I tag @skull001​ @xsailormobian​ @isakthedragon​ @imilenium​ @isakthedragon​ and... and... well, I give up, anyone else that wants to do it please go ahead and have fun!

[dream-love210]

In 1933, Prince Charles was eighteen and Disa, Duchess of Payn, five. The allusion is to Nice (see also line 240) where the Shades spent the first part of the year; but here again, as in regard to so many fascinating facets of my friend’s past life, I am not in the possession of particulars (who is to blame, dear S.S?) and not in the position to say whether or not, in the course of possible excursions along the coast, they ever reached Cap Turc and glimpsed from an oleander-lined lane, usually open to tourists, the Italianate villa built by Queen Disa’s grandfather in 1908, and called then Villa Paradiso, or in Zemblan Villa Paradisa, later to forego the first half of its name in honor of his favorite granddaughter. There she spent the first fifteen summers of her life; thither did she return in 1953, “for reasons of health” (as impressed on the nation) but really, a banished queen; and there she still dwells.

When the Zemblan Revolution broke out (May 1, 1958), she wrote the King a wild letter in governess English, urging him to come and stay with her until the situation cleared up. The letter was intercepted by the Onhava police…

Eventually he managed to inform her that he was confined to the palace. Valiant Disa hurriedly left the Riviera and made a romantic but fortunately ineffectual attempt to return to Zembla…She flew back to her perch in a mood of frustration and fury (mainly, I think, because the message had been conveyed to her by a cousin of hers, good old Curdy Buff, whom she loathed). Several weeks passed and she was soon in a state of worse agitation owing to rumors that her husband might be condemned to death. She left Cap Turc again. She had traveled to Brussels and chartered a plane to fly north, when another message, this time from Odon, came, saying that the King and he were out of Zembla, and that she should quietly regain Villa Disa and await her further news. In the autumn of the same year she was informed by Lavender that a man representing her husband would be coming to discuss with her certain business matters concerning property she and her husband jointly owned abroad. She was in the act of writing a letter...She looked up--and of course no dark spectacles and make-up could for a moment fool her.

Since her final departure from Zembla he had visited her twice, the last time two years before, and during that lapse of time her pale-skin, dark-hair beauty had acquired a new, mature and melancholy glow. In Zembla, where most females are freckled blondes, we have the saying: belwif ivurkumpf wid snew ebanumf, “A beautiful woman should be like a compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony.” And this was the trim scheme nature had followed in Disa’s case. There was something else, something I was to realize only when I read Pale Fire, or rather reread it after bitter hot mist of disappointment had cleared before my eyes. I am thinking of lines 261-267 in which Shade describes his wife. At the moment of his painting that poetical portrait, the sitter was twice the age of Queen Disa. I do not wish to be vulgar in dealing with these delicate matters but the fact remains that sixty-year-old Shade is lending her a well-conserved coeval the ethereal and eternal aspect she retains, or should retain, in his kind noble heart. Now the curious thing about it is that Disa at thirty, when last seen in September 1958, bore a singular resemblance not, of course, to Mrs. Shade as she was when I met her, but to the idealized and stylized picture painted by the poet in those lines of Pale Fire… I trust the reader appreciates the strangeness of this, because if he does not, there is no sense in writing poems, or notes to poems, or anything at all.

She seemed also calmer than before; her self-control had improved. During the previous meetings, and throughout their marital life in Zembla, there had been, on her part, dreadful outbursts of temper. When in the first years of marriage he had wished to cope with those blazes and blasts, trying to make her take a rational view of her misfortune, he had found them very annoying; but gradually he learned to take advantage of them and welcomed them as giving him opportunity of getting rid of her presence for lengthening periods of time by not calling her back after a sequence of doors had slammed ever more distantly, or by leaving the palace himself for some rural hideout.

In the beginning of their calamitous marriage he had strenuously tried to possess her but to no avail. He informed her he had never made love before (which was perfectly true insofar as the implied object would only mean one thing to her), upon which he was forced to endure the ridicule of having her dutiful purity involuntarily enact the ways of a courtesan with a client too young or too old; he said something to that effect (mainly to relieve the ordeal), and she made an atrocious scene. He farced himself with aphrodisiacs, but the anterior characters of her unfortunate sex kept fatally putting him off. One night when he tried tiger tea, and hopes rose high, he made the mistake of begging her to comply with an expedient which she made the mistake of denouncing as unnatural and disgusting. Finally he told her than an old riding accident was incapacitating him but that a cruise with his pals and a lot of sea bathing would be sure to restore his strength.

She had recently lost both parents and had no real friend to turn to for explanation and advice when the inevitable rumors reached her; these she was too proud to discuss with her ladies in waiting but she read books, found out all about our manly Zemblan customs, and concealed her naive distress under a great show of sarcastic sophistication. He congratulated her on her attitude, solemnly swearing that he had given up, or at least would give up, the practices of his youth; but everywhere along the road powerful temptations stood at attention. He succombed to them from time to time, then every other day, then several times daily--especially during the robust regime of Harfar Baron of Shalksbore...Curdy Buff--as Harfar was nicknamed by his admirers--had a huge escort of acrobats and bareback riders, and the whole affair rather got out of hand so that Disa, upon unexpectedly returning from a trip to Sweden, found the Palace transformed into a circus. He again promised, again fell, and despite the utmost discretion was again caught…

What had the sentiments he entertained in regard to Disa ever amounted to? Friendly indifference and bleak respect. Not even in the first bloom of their marriage had he felt any tenderness or excitement. Of pity, of heartache, there could be no question. He was, had always been, casual and heartless. But the heart of this dreaming self, both before and after the rupture, made extraordinary amends.

He dreamed of her more often, and with incomparably more poignancy, than his surface-life feelings for her warranted; these dreams occurred when he least thought of her, and worries in no way connected with her assumed her image in the subliminal world as a battle or a reform becomes a bird of wonder in a tale for children. These heart-rendering dreams transformed the drab prose of his feelings for her into a strong and strange poetry, subsiding undulations of which would flash and disturb him throughout the day, bringing back the pang and the richness--and then only the pang, and then only its glancing reflection--but not affecting at all his attitude towards the real Disa.

Her image, as she entered and re-entered his sleep, rising apprehensively from a distant sofa or going in search of the messenger who, they said, had just passed through the draperies, took into account changes of fashion; the Disa wearing the dress he had seen on her the summer of the Glass Works explosion, or last Sunday, or in any other antechamber of time, forever remained exactly as she looked on the day he had first sold her he did not love her. That happened during a hopeless trip to Italy, in a lakeside hotel garden--rose, black araucarius, rusty, greenish hydrangeas--one cloudless evening with the mountains of the far shore swimming in a sunset haze and the lake all peach syrup regularly rippled with pale blue, and the captions of a newspaper spread flat on the foul bottom near the stone bank perfectly readable through the shallow diaphanous filth, and because, upon hearing him out, she sank down on the lawn in an impossible posture, examining a grass culm and frowning, he had taken his words back at once; but the shock had fatally starred the mirror, and thenceforth in his dreams her image was infected with the memory of that confession as with some disease or the secret aftereffects of a surgical operation too intimate to be mentioned.

The gist, rather than the actual plot of the dream, was a constant refutation of his not loving her. His dream-love for her exceeded in emotional tone, in spiritual passion and depth, anything he had experienced in his surface existence. This love was like an endless wringing of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an infinite maze of hopelessness and remorse. They were, in a sense, amorous dreams, for they were permeated with tenderness, with a longing to sink his head onto her lap and sob away the monstrous past. They brimmed with the awful awareness of her being so young and so helpless. They were purer than his life. What carnal aura there was in theme came not from her but from those with whom he betrayed her--prickly-chinned Phrynia, pretty Timandra with that boom under her apron--and even so the sexual scum remained somewhere far above the sunken treasure and was quite unimportant. He would see her being accosted by a misty relative so distant as to be practically featureless. She would quickly hide what she held and extend her arched hand to be kissed. He knew she had just come across a telltale object--a riding boot in his bed--establishing beyond any doubt his unfaithfulness. Sweat beaded her pale, naked forehead--but she had to listen to the prattle of a chance visitor or direct the movements of a workman with a ladder who was nodding his head and looking up as he carried it in his arms to the broken window. One might bear--a strong merciless dreamer might bear--the knowledge of her grief and pride but none could bear the sight of her automatic smile as she turned from the agony of the disclosure to the polite trivialities required of her. She would be canceling an illumination, or discussing hospital cots with the head nurse, or merely ordering breakfast for two in the sea cave--and through the everyday plainness of the talk, through the play of the charming gestures with which she always accompanied certain readymade phrases, he, the groaning dreamer, perceived the disarray of her soul and was aware that an odious, undeserved, humiliating disaster had befallen her, and that only obligations of etiquette and her staunch kindness to a guiltless third party gave her the force to smile. As one watched the light on her face, one foresaw it would fade in a moment, to be replaced--as soon as the visitor left--by that impossible little frown the dreamer could never forget. He would help her again to her feet on the same lakeside lawn, with parts of the lake fitting themselves into the spaces between the rising balusters, and presently he and she would be walking side by side along an anonymous alley, and he would feel she was looking at him out of the corner of a faint smile but when he forced himself to confront that questioning glimmer, she was no longer there. Everything had changed, everybody was happy. And he absolutely had to find her at once to tell her that he adored her, but the large audience before him separated him from the door, and the notes reaching him through a succession of hands said that she was not available; that she was inaugurating a fire; that she had married an American businessman; that she had become a character in a novel; that she was dead.

No such qualms disturbed him as he sat now on the terrace of her villa and recounted his lucky escape from the Palace. She enjoyed his description of the underground link with the theater and tried to visualize the jolly scramble across the mountains… But when he began to discuss the political situation (two Soviet generals had just been attached to the Extremist government as Foreign Advisers), a familiar vacant expression appeared in her eyes. Now that he was safely out of the country, the entire blue bulk of Zembla, from Embla Point to the Emblem Bay, could sink in the sea for all she cared.) That he had lost weight was of more concern to her than that he had lost a kingdom. Perfunctorily she inquired about the crown jewels; he revealed to her their unusual hiding place, and she melted in girlish mirth as she had not done for years and years. “I do have some business matters to discuss,” he said. “And there are papers you have to sign.” Up in the trellis a telephone climbed with the rose. One of her former ladies in waiting, the languid and elegant Fleur de Fyler (now fortyish and faded), still wearing pearls in her raven hair and the traditional white manilla, brought certain documents from Disa’s boudoir. Upon hearing the King’s mellow voice behind the laurels, Fleur recognized it before she could be misled by this excellent disguise. Two footmen, handsome young strangers of a marked Latin type, appeared with the tea and caught Fleur in mid-curtsey. A sudden breeze groped among the glycenes. Defiler of flowers. He asked Fleur as she turned to go with the Disa orchids if she still played the viola. She shook her head several times not wishing to speak without addressing him and not daring to do so while the servants might be within earshot.

They were alone again. Disa quickly found the papers he needed. Having finished with that, they talked for a while about nice trivial things, such as the motion picture, based on a Zemblan legend, that Odon hoped to make in Paris or Rome. How would he represent, they wondered, the narstran, a hellish hall where the souls of murderers were tortured under a constant drizzle of drake venom coming down from the foggy vault? By and large the interview was proceeding in a most satisfactory manner-though her fingers trembled a little when her hand touched the elbow rest of his chair. Careful now.

“What are you plans?” she inquired. “Why can’t you stay here as long as you want? Please do. I’ll be going to Rome soon, you’ll have the whole house to yourself. Imagine, you can bed here as many as forty guests, forty Arabian thieves.” (Influence of the huge terracotta vases in the garden.)

He answered he would be going to America some time next month and had business in Paris tomorrow.

Why America? What would he do there?

Teach. Examine literary masterpieces with brilliant and charming young people. A hobby he could now freely indulge.

“And, of course, I don’t know,” she mumbled looking away, “I don’t know perhaps if you’d have nothing against it, I might visit New York--I mean, just for a week or two, and not this year but the next.”

He complimented her on her silver-spangled jacket. She persevered: “Well?” “And your hairdo is most becoming.” “Oh what does it matter,” she wailed, “what on earth does it matter!” “I must be on my way,” he whispered with a smile and got up. “Kiss me,” she said, and was like a limp, shivering ragdoll in this arms for a moment.

He walked to the gate. At the turn of the path he glanced back and saw in the distance her white figure with the listless grace of ineffable grief bending over the garden table, and suddenly a fragile bridge was suspended between waking indifference and dream-love. But she moved, and he saw it was not she at all but only poor Fleur de Flyer collecting the documents left among the tea things. (See note 80).

When in the course of an evening stroll in May or June, 1959, I offered Shade all this marvelous material, he looked at me quizzically and said: “That’s all very well, Charles. But there are just two questions. How can you know that all this intimate stuff about your rather appalling king is true? And if true, how can one hope to print such personal things about who, presumably, are still alive?”

“My dear John,” I replied gently and urgently, “do not worry about trifles. Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive. A poet’s purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor.”

“Sure, sure,” said Shade. “One can harness words like performing fleas and make them drive other fleas. Oh, sure.”

“And moreover,” I continued as we walked down the road into a vast sunset, “as soon as your poem is ready, as soon as the glory of Zembla merges with the glory of your verse, I intend to divulge to you an ultimate truth, an extraordinary secret, that will put your mind completely at rest.”