#and i know ill probably want to learn more about actual technical details and music theory and refresh my sight reading at some point

[eisthenameofme]

The piano. It is approaching.

[partnersatfazbear]

Fazbear Frights: What We Found Analysis

Here’s my analysis for What We Found, the third story in Gumdrop Angel. I wrote this as I read so it may be a little different than my previous analysis where I read the story first and went back.

If you’re a Michael Afton fan I highly recommend this. Also, there’s possibly some insight into William Afton, Mrs. Afton, and Henry too, so it’s worth a skim.

Pg 144 '...a place thirty-some years forgotten' Just reconfirming FNAF 3 is 30 years past *one* of the FNAF closings, presumably FNAF 2 location.

Pg 145 "The whole building was giving him [Hudson] a headache." FIX THE VENTILATION BRUH

Pg 148 '...they were able to use salvaged derelict equiptment original to the old pizzerias.' Another confirmation of something we heard from Phone Guy.

Pg 147 "How old are you?" "Twenty-three, same as you." I think this gives us Michael's age during FNAF 3.

EDIT: This kept me awake last night. Obviously this is impossible because he has to be alive for at least 10 years before 1983, BUT maybe its just reconfirming FNAF 3′s year? 2023?

Pg 149 "Hudsan's dad died and his mom married Lewis, a ridiculous balding man who wore plaid vests and smoked a pipe" Did... Did this book just seriously imply Mrs. Afton left William for Henry? Really? (Yes, there's differences; the husband is dead and the man wears plaid 'vests' but it seems very odd to include that detail. This could just have been the writer's own imagination, though.) I have seen this as a fan theory and 100% explains the jealousy aspect of William, but I can't help but kinda hate it. I think this is very important, though, and probably Scott's intention. "This horrible little man [Lewis]... would make Hudson's next ten years a living Hell" This REALLY intrigues me given the context I just went over. The text implies Lewis was fairly neglectful to our main character / Michael stand-in Hudson. Maybe I'm wrong and for some reason Mrs. Emily left and went to William? XD Haha, I'm reading too much into this page. Maybe I'll come back to this later. I figure it's more of Scott possibly including double-details (contradicting stuff with the same character that really applies to two, which has been something I heavily pointed out in previous anaylsis on this blog) Having said that, I'm going w/the former because I can't imagine Henry being abusive (neglectful yes, abusive no) and he's never been portrayed that way in official works like William has in the novels.

Pg 150 "Hudson began to screw up in class...a product of spending the night in fear that his stepfather [Lewis]... [would] beat him just for the fun of it." Ooof. Big confirm on William actually being abusive. Unless we stick with the Henry theory for Lewis (combined with Midnight Motorist Henry theory / alcoholic). "...near-daily beatings..." "his mom started taking pills to get through the day..." So, whoever Mrs. Afton is, she was definetly not paying attention. But then, most people married to serial killers either don't notice because of denial (like this) or because the killer is so manipulative / careful they can't notice.

"Barry, who had red hair and freckles..." Yo?! Is that a description of Fritz?! These friends in the story could be the other kids Michael knew's stand-in's, aka the two gravestones with names he used (Fritz and Jeremy), as shown in the checks for the games and FNAF 6. I've long figured Michael was probably friends with the victims--it makes them easier, although riskier, targets [for William]. The two friends are male, too, like Fritz and Jeremy. If you're curious about Duane's description (our stand in for Jeremy), it's "tight black shirt... muscles... black hair long enough for a glossy ponytail..." I'm not sure if this matches anything found in the novels or contradicts them, though. (The novels = TSE trilogy)

"And so it went... until the night of the fire." For context, this is before FF burns down. We're learning of Hudson's life from his close friends in childhood, his father's death, his mother remarrying, to his abusive stepfather, to his grades slipping to this line. This would be a new fire not seen/mentioned in the games...

Pg 151 "...go to Charlie's for a sundae..." Really. Really Scott. Just gonna use this name again. OK. I'm not even gonna discuss this because it's probably irrelevant. *This is confirmed on pg 158 to be an ice cream shop. No lore relevance aside the annoying name coincidences Scott loves to troll with.

"This is not... an advance into enemy territory, a fight with demons, or a descent into Hell..." Uh, what? What is Hudson talking about? XD I'm only noting it because it seems so out of place. He's probably talking about video games or something.

Another note, although I don't have a specific reference since it is mentioned off-hand many times, is that Hudson keeps referring to his "history" which is implied to have kept him from getting a well-paying job and a girl he's crushing on doesn't know this "history" which is good for him. Seems good old "Michael Stand-In" has done some jail time or something. Edit: On pg 154/155 the girl asks Hudson, "Did you do it?" Seems he may have killed his stepfather or been involved with something else just as bad. Edit 2: No, I was thinking too deep into it. This probably refers to Evan's death at Fredbear's. DUH.

Pg 156 describes an actual "prize corner" in FF! What am I even reading? IIRC this is in FNAF 3, too. So they just hand out these scary gift boxes to people that complete the attraction? (Hudson says he *would* have fun handing out the scary toys to kids when this location opens--kind of a bully thing to do, eh?)

"[Hudson] avoid[ed] glancing in any of the mirrors..." I'm only pointing this out because it could be reference to one of two things. 1) We know because of one of UCN's music tracks, William has a fear of his reflection. Michael probably shares this trait, especially since 2) after Ennard and all... and later on pg 157 it also says, "he never wanted to face: himself" Sounds like guilt, my guy.

Pg 157 "blonde hair... blue eyes..." Hudson shares an eye color with Michael. It's possible Michael had blonde hair as a child and it changed to brown (it's common, something I personally went through being technically blonde/ blue eyed myself)

"He [Hudson] knew from personal experience that toys could turn from fun...to torture ina heart-beat" Fairly self explanatory. Either Hudson's worked at a creepy location before or he doesn't like remembering Fredbear's.

*checks how much is left.* There's still 35 pages (not counting back/front) left of this... This is gonna be a lot of notes.

Pg 158 Hudson doesn't have a car. Poor Mike, probably having to walk everywhere. Especially as a corpse.

Pg 160 This page describes many physical issues Hudson has that prevents him from entering the Navy, all from the abuse of Lewis. Obvious paralell to Michael becoming an undead [because his father sent him to CBPR indirectly causing his condition]

Pg 161 "How's your granny, Hud?... ...Is she still alive?" "I don't think she can die." Does anyone in the Afton family really 'die'? XD

Pg 162 These few pages discuss Hudson's grandmother. She's described as "a seer who claimed to know the future... ...wore big men's plaid flannel shirts with baggy jeans" Um, more plaid / flannel? AGH. STAHP. Lowkey, I would totally headcanon my Aunt Jen like this, though.

Pg 163 "Hudson's mom... the way she was before Hudson's dad had died... never... particularly warm and fuzzy... but... effiencient and responsible..." More about Mrs. Afton, so that's kinda neat.

"Hudson's dad was fun and attentive." There's a good Dad in this series?

"Unfortunetly, he also struggled with mental illness." "invisible low points" (Pg 164) Kinda reminds me of how Henry is described after Charlotte's death in the books.

Pg 164 "When Steven got himself into a bad deal that cost him his small business... he'd taken his life." Oh, it is Henry! SMH. Way to use confusing paralells. So, from our understanding thus far, Hudson's real father, Steven, is our Henry stand-in. His step-father despite being described similar to Henry, is actually our William stand-in. Fair game, Scott.

Pg 164 "...he [Hudson] was locked into a supply closet..." Oh shit, you guys. So, let me go on a tangent here, because this IS important! I just watched a retrospective on Sister Location and FNAF 6 earlier and one theory for Midnight Motorist was the person in the chair was the mother and the kid was Michael. I think this little line may confirm that. In fact, the story may be the key to figuring things out. Obviously, the line is a paralell to FNAF 4's scene in which Crying Child was locked in the supply closet of Fredbear's. I know some people, including Matpat, believe[d] CC was Michael, and in this book's context, it sort of works. This does contradict Step Closer and 1000 other things that make Michael the older brother, but maybe it's hinting at MM? Abusive stepdad (possibly Henry... maybe William is gone at this point), checked out Mom (hey, grey couch lady with Foxybro's font). IDK, but its definetly something to think about.

Pg 165 Lewis is mentioned as calling Hudson "nothing" and saying "you're nothing" on several occasions on this page. Just more abuse, for those accurate fanfic writers like me. Also I kinda wanna watch Morel Orel again. Yall know my fav character is Clay. Yall know.

"You're smoke." <-- Lewis / The text later reads, "...there was some irony, given what eventually happened." BRUH. Why did your stepdad die in a fire? :V TELL ME.

"When his family's house burned down at the end of his senior year..." Huh. Is there a fire we don't know about in the game-verse? Could this explain what happened to the FNAF 4 house before MM house?!

"...it purged Hudson of Lewis and his mother." MRS. AFTON BURNED ALIVE, TOO? Bruh. I can't with this story.

The text later describes the fire is concluded to be man-made and Hudson was blamed for it. Can't say if this ties to Michael, but it IS interesting... TBF, there is a small paralell to draw between Henry in FNAF 6 and his history of suicide in the books, too.

Pg 166 "...this place's [FF] busted thermostat.." I just find this line funny.

Pg 167 "...after three weeks of keeping an eye on the place" Some more timeline context for FNAF 3. We know that Michael worked there a little while before we start playing the game thanks to one of the phone calls, IIRC, so this makes sense. If Michael was accused of [something] and also wanting to hunt down his father, then it makes perfect sense why he's working a dead end job at Freddy's over and over and over. Fun fun fun.

Pg 169 "He hated to think about a functional character [Foxy]" This line is in regards to Hudson not liking the set up of Pirate's Cove and Foxy's hook to scare people. Sounds familiar, don't it? (For Michael anyway.)

Pg 173 "Some big find is arriving tomorrow." SPRINGY BOI! COME ON BOOK, get on with the show?

Pg 176 "Granny was wearing a red-and-green plaid shirt and her baggy jeans." Nothing special, but it was specifically brought up twice. I'm kind of racking my brain trying to understand what the point of this character is outside of "woooo everything is haunted don't you know that" kind of character.

Pg 180 "...dropped the crate on the linoleum with a resounding thud." HEY. Poor Springtrap, just gettin' tossed around like the trash he is.

Pg 186 "If you weren't so stupid, I'd tell you more about it." Springtrap bringing the burn. =:)

"A voice with a burr-like rasp...hint of a Southern accent" I'm going to assume this is because it's Lewis probably in the suit in this story and not our old British lad.

"It's was Mr. Atkin's voice." THE MATH TEACHER? *goes back to check* 'The algebra teacher'. Okay...

Pg 190 Okay, so Hudson hear's Lewis' voice this time. Okay, I get it now. Springtrap in this kind of imbodies all of Hudson's old bullies, including the teacher. He also has PTSD, just FYI. IDK if anyone finds that important, but it's fairly obvious by the line "He wasn't in his bedroom. Lewis didn't just slam his head into a desk; his head had been slammed into the [arcade] game."

"Why did he hallucinate a scene from his childhood?" Oh, it's not PTSD, then. It's just the VENTILATION ERROR. lol Okay.

Just a note, as I'm reading through the more action-based stuff, I kind of feel bad for Michael if he had flashbacks like this guy. They're intense.

So, Lewis' voice finally comes out of Springtrap on Pg 213. There's that.

Pg 220 "You can just stay there [in his room]" Kind of a paralell to Midnight Motorist. Lewis is saying it to Hudson. I really feel like the kid in the MM game is Michael because of this story...

Pg 223 "Heat purges. Fire heals." I'm sure that's Henry's life motto.

The ending was stupid, but most in these stories are. Hudson is hallucinating and is implied to have burned himself alive in FF's oven. Meh? The first half of this one is A TRIP and a little insight into what I 100% believe is Michael's childhood. I think the saddest part of it all is that we never got Springtrap speaking to Michael in FNAF 3--and if it's ever remade I hope we get more of them interacting.

[gamespritearchive]

yes i like fullmetal alchemist brotherhood a normal amount (<- lying) this post is going to be long so open the readmore at ur own risk

ok this is genuinely going to be a mess because im really terrible at summarizing things and organizing my thoughts so if ur actually gonna read through this then good luck!

here are just some short thoughts before the longer paragraphs

- i absolutely LOVE the note that plays right after the alchemists clap their hands together that indicates that theyre abt to use alchemy. the sound of the clap + the note that plays is incredibly satisfying

- the strong and well-written female characters in this show was a really good touch and i loved how they brought them (izumi and olivier) together at the end :') also their beefy husbands together was super nice too

- my favorite part of the story was actually the part where ed and al go to briggs because thats wher they introduced olivier. it was super nice to see her talk about how strong-willed she is and her army and all of that

- lan fan is another example of a strong female character but a little less favorable since she serves ling yao. that doesnt make her any less cool though she was super badass and i definitely cried over her more than once

- the details in this show was really nice. alphonse's body being malnourished was something that seemed really obvious, but the fact that when ed got his right arm back it was noticeably less muscular and had longer nails than his left was such a good detail

- in the last episode there was a scene where alphonse made a dumb face that was animated just like how ed's faces looked and that made me really happy that we finally get to see al emote just like his brother :')

- im pretty sure i cried through the entirety of the last episode because being able to see the characters laugh and smile without feeling burdoned by anything after youve seen them go through repeated heartache and physical pain for 63 episodes is a super nice feeling

- "i'm a terrible father but i want to make you two proud" .

- "i'll give you half of my life and you give me half of yours" UGH

- also right after this when ed was laughing at how flustered winry got because normally hes the one who gets flustered :') that was so sweet

- i literally guessed that it was morse code whenever they showed selim banging on al's head because its like why would they put so much emphasis on that and let it go on for like 10 seconds without any music over it. this happened like multiple times too and i guessed it before they made it incredibly obvious bye im the smartest guy alive

ok heres where i talk more besties lets go

fmab was absolutely worth watching 64 episodes. i was convinced that i probably wont finish it because i have trouble finishing 12 episodes but as it may be obvious i got super invested. fmab being this long allowed there to be enough time to explain aspects of the story separately and to watch them all come together at some point. it also allowed for a ton of details that even though they're small, they're still important to the story. they rehash a lot of points because it was a simple detail that could get lost through the story but when its rementioned and you recall the time, it's such a nice feeling to have that click in ur mind.

also the character development was really good and ill get more in-depth about characters later but the length of this anime also allowed for a ton of really good character development. it ties into the whole thing where you learn about a characters backstory and you don't understand why it's important to the show until later on and then you're like ohhhh holy shit that makes sense now! also all that time for character development also lets you get attached to more than just the main characters and makes you care more about the role they play in the story.

roy mustang. at first i liked him, but when he started to speak about how he wanted to become the fuhrer president before he knew the military was corrupt, i assumed that he would just become as corrupt as bradley was ("starting wars for no reason"). i was convinced for the longest time that he would eventually just turn out to be the second bad guy and that nearly came true whenever he was trying to kill envy but riza helped him :) i loved the entirety of their relationship they're so sweet and compliment eachother so well. the scene where roy demonstrates the sheer amount of trust he has in riza's abilities by blindly (heh. he was blind during this if u didnt know.) following her directions and hitting their target ... it was just so good. also even though i didnt trust roy i thought he was super badass the sound of him snapping was always super satisfying as well

i almost want to rewatch fmab because it would be really nice to pick up on things that were later referenced in the anime. because of how long it is, its super easy to forget about things that happened early on in the anime (especially for someone with memory issues lol) so being able to watch back with the second half of the show still fresh on my mind would be almost an entirely different experience. the first thing that comes to mind is whenever we were shown kimblee in prison super early on. i know he had dialogue but i remember nothing about it because i was focused on thinking "literally who the fuck is this guy lol" but now i know. wow.

edward elric. im aware that this is going to be incredibly biased but i literally do not care. anyways. character development is always important and needed within a story but i genuinely feel like ed's character development was interesting to watch. it was never super obvious and his core values never changed. he did somewhat have a change in attitude when he nearly died to kimblee, but thats like expected you know ... being that close to death and all. i think that event was essentially the beginning of the end of his naivety. he was always consistent with the people he cared about though :) he never stopped calling them stupid and weird and he never stopped threatening to punch hohenheim whenever he was frustrated even if they were like in the middle of like a life or death situation. i just think he's neat

when ed destroyed pride('s vessel) i felt my heart well up with. pride LOL. that was his very first explicit win against someone who has been against him this entire time, and seeing him defeat pride with his own two hands was such a nice feeling. it wasnt technically his own win since he was only able to get to that point because of his friends and family around him

episode 60 was suuper good it was the part where the father was gonna swallow god because of the solar eclipse. its super hard to explain if uve never seen it but basically the scene was super cool simply because of how well the animation showed the sheer scale of what was happening. like this guy was literally reaching to the moon. theres a lot of unnatural things that are shown in fmab and although this scene didnt introduce any new concepts, it was still incredibly captivating because of how well the animation was

aand thats it i think! i regret not writing down how i feel during the earlier episodes but i think watching it with little to no distractions was a better experience. if u actually read this im giving u a kiss on the cheek rn ilu

[yellow-r-o-s-e]

NEURODIVERGENT

There’s definately something wrong with Roman. He just wants to know what it is

Word Count: About 4500

Warnings: lots of talk of assorted mental illnesses, including PTSD, depression, anxiety, and anorexia, pretty detailed description of a panic attack, self deprecating feelings, mentioned past abusive relationship, imposter syndrome, implied gaslighting, let me know if there’s anything else I need to put, I don’t know how to do this, there is a happy ending but please be safe

Notes: This is a fanfic of the wonderful “Love and Other Fairytales” by @tulipscomeinallsortsofcolors. It’s technically a Sanders Side fanfiction, but you don’t need to know anything about Sanders Sides for her story to make sense. It’s a really amazing modern fairy tale, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who somehow hasn’t read it yet. Also the story below probably won’t make any sense without the context.

In her story, a few of the main characters (Virgil and Logan) are autism coded, which I can relate to a lot with my ADHD, and I ended up projecting said ADHD on a different character, Roman Gage. It’s a bullet fic because it’s so long it would take me a week to write it all out, and also it’s very self-indulgent and I put my own self-insert OC in because noone can stop me from having fun. Not edited because we die like men. Enjoy!

————————————

It starts on what should be a perfect day. It’s early September, Logan is off at a “fairy” lesson with Virgil. It’s not too humid anymore, it’s cooled down just enough to be comfortable. And Roman thinks it would be a perfect day for hunting in the woods

Except as soon as he thinks about hunting, he thinks about h i m and he’s suddenly nauseous

But it’s fine, Roman’s fine, besides he has lots of people to talk about it with now. His bfs know and are supportive, and Mamaw knows too now. He doesn’t even miss Dee that much…

And oh mother gothel he does not feel good he needs to think about something else

He suddenly remembers that he is in fact currently having a picnic with Patton and he should focus on that

And he’s aware that Patton just asked a question but he doesn’t know what Patton asked, And he feels really bad but he just smiles and asks Patton to repeat himself

He wishes he could actually pay attention to his bf the first time but life hates him apparently, and Patton’s talking very slowly and carefully because his lessons are helping but he’s still afraid of hurting Roman. And heck if that doesn’t make Roman feel even worse

Anyways, Patton says he’s concerned that Roman hasn’t eaten anything, and offers to go somewhere else for food if Roman doesn’t want picnic

And Roman just laughs and says he’s fine, he just ate a big breakfast. Except. He didn’t eat breakfast at all. He doesn’t know why he said that but now he’s panicking inside as he continues to talk to Patton on the surface level. He’s not trying to not eat on purpose, he’s just really not hungry much

So he’s very worried about himself now as he realizes he’s been skipping meals like crazy recently. He knows he’s not anorexic because like, it’s not intentional. He just keeps forgetting his body needs food to survive??? Is that a normal thing to happen???

Ten minutes maximum pass before he’s spilling all of this to Patton because he’s Very Worried and they’re trying to be more open with each other anyways

And Patton, who’s already been worried about Roman since the whole ’planning to die to save his friends without telling anyone’ thing, is like “have you considered speaking to a doctor”

Roman’s like “Mamaw hates the physician” and then Patton reminds him he’s an actual adult and long story short a few days later he’s having a meeting with Dr. Sherwood

He’s being asked all the standard questions and he’s just realizing ‘oh no, there’s definitely something wrong with me’. He’s having trouble sleeping, trouble eating, trouble focusing, things that used to make him happy don’t anymore…. And Dr. Sherwood says he probably has depression

Which honestly makes a little too much sense after all the heartbreak and loss and isolation and abuse and whatnot

He gets officially diagnosed shortly after

There’s no therapist in Wickhills but Dr. Sherwood offers to prescribe antidepressants

But antidepressants can be very finicky and Roman’s not in immediate danger or anything so he figures he’ll just try Mamaw’s potions and whatnot for now and maybe change later

He’s very afraid to tell Mamaw but surprise, she’s not mad at all. Well, she’s a little upset that he thought he had to sneak away to go to the doctor

They talk, and depression treatment is a lot more complicated than just a quick spell but they agree to be more honest with each other when they’re having bad days (because May’s physical health is not doing great either)

He talks to the bf squad too, and he feels guilty telling them for some reason. He doesn’t want to be someone for them to take care of, y’know, he wants to be the one taking care of them

They’re all like “Roman shut up you’re beautiful and talented and amazing and we love you”. Patton reminds him that he literally planned the picnic they just had. And the entire summer he was like, stargazing or serenading or painting with one of them at least once a week

They remind him that it’s okay for the roles to reverse every once in a while. It's literally not healthy to never ask for help, even if you don’t have depression

He’s already been unofficially working with Patton’s parents for a while and he has a long talk with the Wallers about it and 1) it’s not like they could replace him if they wanted 2) they still want to keep an eye on their son’s bf and learn more about what he’s doing (He doesn’t actually let much slide but they can hope) and 3) they’re nice people

so they work on making his hours flexible but not too flexible so he can miss work if he’s not feeling good but he still feels needed and has responsibility. It’s a struggle but everyone’s doing their best

Plus the Wallers are practically trying to adopt Roman in their son’s absence so it’s not like they wouldn’t be doing this anyway

And Roman starts to feel, not great, but more in control of his life at least

And there are always the good days, it’s almost always good when he visits his bfs, he starts liking acting again more, he starts getting excited about musicals again

And now that he’s a knight and he’s making good memories with Virgil, the woods aren’t making him feel icky anymore

And all the squad talk to him and promise to not undercut his happiness when it’s there. They work to not overreact when he’s surprised to be happy, and tell him he’s never annoying, he’s always free to ramble about whatever he’s excited about

And soon he’s looking into theater college applications, and he’s hanging out with Thomas and Remy, and he sees some touring Broadway shows (Wicked, The Lion King and Mary Poppins) in Cleveland, and Bell and him and sometimes Virgil are hunting in the woods again, and he’s a knight which is amazing, and he has self-confidence again,

And Logan found a perfect college which Roman is very happy about, seeing as he’s the one who did THAT to get Logan a chance to go to college a while ago. And Logan invites Roman to go on his college visit with him (along with Thomas). And Roman does feel a bit guilty because he feels like the only reason he was invited is because of the whole fae deal

But it’s fine, he’s happy to be going with Logan anyways

Virgil says he’ll be fine with Patton, they manage to find a flight that won’t go over any rivers (they don’t know what would happen but they don’t want to risk it). They’re all packed up for a few days and Logan is so happy he’s glowing

Roman can’t stop smiling either tbh, he just nods and listens to Logan rambling about how cool the greenhouses are. And it’s perfect

Until suddenly,,, it’s not???

Because the airport is Too Loud, which he tries to ignore

And something deep inside of him is afraid of Logan being away for so long because he’ll miss him but he ignores that too, it’s just excitement probably, right?

And then the plane takes off, which makes Logan a bit nauseous but it’s super fun for Roman, it’s basically a rollercoaster, right? He gives lots of comforting forehead kisses and Thomas is jokingly like ‘ew affection’

But then?? The seat belt buckled signs are still on? And Roman cannot move?

He’s trapped in the seat, trapped in the plane

He

Cannot

Move

And it’s So Loud all of a sudden. And he doesn’t even realize he’s frozen until he’s calming down and Logan is Squishing him

And they talk about that a bit and claustrophobia is normal it’s fine

And the trip goes pretty well. Actually, no, it was better than pretty well. Logan found his college and it’s perfect and Roman needs to stop being so Selfish and judging the trips success by his own experience

But Roman is still just worried about Logan leaving, what if he ends up hating the school? What if he gets trapped?

And he’s having flashbacks to the college visit before that ended terribly. Because he still hasn’t really forgiven himself for how upset Logan was when he got locked out of Wickhills after brief freedom. And he Does Not want to hurt Logan again

And then the intrusive thoughts start coming and he can’t stop them. And he’s worried about a ton of things that would never happen

What if Dee’s curse is still there somehow and when they get back Logan’s locked out of Wickhills?

That doesn't even make sense, stop-

What if Logan doesn’t actually want to go to college and he’s just faking because he feels bad for Roman, and he’s going to be miserable here?

Logan can’t even lie and why would he do that?

What if- stop

What if- Stop!

And this has definitely been happening for a while, he realizes, it’s just been much harder to ignore on the trip, where he can’t just block out the thoughts by picking apples (not that that works very well either)

So he talks with Logan and Thomas on the plane ride home and then he does a few google searches while waiting for luggage when they get back

And he’s now 100 percent sure that he’s been having anxiety attacks and/or panic attacks, like, several times a day

And he sees the doctor very shortly after getting back into town

It takes him 20 minutes to get diagnosed with general anxiety

Dr. Sherwood asks ‘is this happening very frequently?’ and Roman asks how often frequently is and it’s about once a week apparently. Which is laughably low compared to Roman. So now he knows that he has both depression and anxiety

His family and bfs know and they’re doing their best to supportive

Roman has a whole bunch of exercises he can do

So now it should be better, he knows what’s going on, right?

But he doesn’t feel any better At All. In fact, it seems to be getting worse by the day

And a lot of Roman’s panic attacks are just him being afraid he’ll have a panic attack and then be a burden. Which is so dumb and cyclical and he knows his bfs won’t be mad but that doesn’t stop it from happening

At least Logan and Thomas know how to deal with panic attacks and help him. And the bf squad all learns they can tell him when he’s being unreasonable. But the trouble is sometimes he absolutely knows he’s being unreasonable and he keeps doing it

He tries to go on meds for a cool minute but he doesn’t get better he just gets exhausted. And May’s potions are more personally suited to him anyways. Not that he’s good about taking those either

But it’s fine he’s strong he can handle it it’s fine it’s okay

Cut to a few months later around late winter

There’s a bright moon, the woods are all quiet, and it’s honestly just so soft and relaxing. And Roman’s enjoying being a knight and chilling with Bell and Virgil

There’s not even anything bad happening that they need to deal with, or anything to hunt down, they’re just kind of chilling in the woods on horseback

Bell’s catching Virgil up on fairyland happenings that he missed because he pays more attention to Patton than the actual court; Roman’s catching him up on what Logan and Elliot are up to

And then, it’s such a small thing, it shouldn’t ruin there night or even pause it, But as they’re laughing and Roman playfully punches Bell and Virgil rolls his eyes

This absolutely harmless garter snake rubs against Roman’s leg

And he’s just instantly Not Okay At All

And Virgil notices immediately and just glares back to see what hurt Roman, thinking some idiot fae with a death wish played a trick on him

Virgil’s really angry but trying to look calm for Roman and he meets eyes with Roman for half a second

Roman sees something incredibly familiar in his eyes and now he’s Even Worse

Virgil takes a very limp and frozen Roman who’s smiling a little too blankly and agreeing with everything V says back to fairyland and is talks to him soothingly but it takes Roman a very long minute before he’s even talking

And Virgil’s just a complete mess

And when he finds out that it wasn’t someone hexing Roman or anything, it was just his a snake that wanted to move and V’s stare, he just switched to exhausted

There might be a bit of crying on both of their parts but don’t tell anyone

And Roman wants to talk more but his voice isn’t working and he’s stuttering a lot

And every question Virgil asks about his comfort (do you want me to call the others? Do you want me to take you home?) makes Roman even more stressed so eventually he ends up snuggling with Roman in that bed for the night

And Bell checks in on them later and is very obviously a part of the Kill Dee Again squad

It had been like 2 months since Roman had the nightmares and he’s never had panic attacks like this before, he doesn’t know what’s happening

He doesn’t know why Dee’s still haunting him? What did he do wrong when he tried to forget him?

He has nightmares but Virgil’s afraid to wake him up, he might completely break down again, and Virgil doesn’t even know what he’d say anyways

He doesn’t think breaking down sobbing again would help

Roman wakes up in the morning just exhausted and starts crying again anyways

He tries to talk but it goes badly so he ends up communicating with Virgil through writing, which is much easier, though his hand is shaking and the paper is tear stained

And Virgil’s just absolutely heartbroken by how helpless Roman looks

Roman tried to apologize for not being able to talk but Virgil points out that he and Logan have trouble talking without thinking first for fae reasons and so does Patton, Roman isn’t going to be a burden on the group by being the same as everyone else

And Logan comes in lead by Bell

And he’s the calm that the other two need right now

He’s stressed too obviously but he translates his stress into logical thinking

And the word PTSD comes into the conversation for the first time

So guess who gets another diagnosis? Our boy

He finds out that PTSD symptoms often take a while to show up, he hopes it will disappear again but who knows

Not him

And the symptoms cross over (avoidance, sluggishness, panic) so it ends up replacing the other two diagnoses

So that means that he doesn’t have depression and anxiety after all??? It was just PTSD?

And Roman blindly agrees because these appointments are becoming habitual

But it doesn’t feel right?

Because there’s still something about him that feel distinctly Not Normal that PTSD itself can’t explain

Because some of his restlessness, unhappiness, recklessness, has existed since before he made the deal

So he feels like he might be faking PTSD because it can’t possibly ALL be caused by Dee

And be feels like he’s being unfair to Dee and heck if that’s something he can just say to his bfs without them getting on his case

He knows it’s dumb so it shouldn’t be a problem anyways

Hahahahaha

On a different note he’s still not sleeping anywhere near a normal amount

Dizzy says it’s because “Night Roman” screwed up his sleep schedule

Then there’s also the nightmares

And the lingering feeling that he’s slacking off while sleeping, he should be working on something else

So he talks to Dizzy and does research and he’s not sure if it counts because of his strange specific situation, but he decides he has insomnia in some way or another

And that’s an easy fix with potions (it’s not, they don’t work for long)

And then, before he can blink, he’s in college, and school is a thing

And he Loves acting, he Loves all the literature, he Loves picking his own classes and making new theater friends and speaking other languages with people

But then, during the “actual classroom classes” it’s not good all the time

There is something deeply uncomfortable about being stuck in a chair for multiple hours

Where you have to be somewhat quiet and pay attention to what the teacher is talking about

Like, you have to go at Their Speed, not yours

And he realizes that maybe it’s been like that for a while

Maybe it was his year off that made him realize it, maybe Wickhills is just that different

But he doesn’t like doing his general ed classes

Which is weird because he loves learning

And he’s super focused most of the time, but sometimes he just can’t hear the teachers?

And he remembers homework perfectly UNLESS he writes it down

And he can’t convince himself to do math and science homework no matter how hard he tries but he doesn’t tell anyone just pretends he’s purposely ignoring it

Oh and also whenever people criticize his acting or essays it’s physically painful but that’s probably not a big deal

Oh and schedule changes are the literal worst thing to ever happen in his life

So he thinks he might have hearing problems which is why he misses that they have homework or can’t hear people talking no matter how hard he tries

So he’s tested for hearing loss, tested for tinnitus and nothing

And then he realizes he sometimes struggles to read and write the correct way? He loves literature but he finds out that to other people, the words are not usually messed up like that

So he tries dyslexia, vision problems, dysgraphia, and still just nothing fits quite right

And maybe he’s making excuses and he’s actually just too dumb to be in advanced literature?

So he starts worrying that maybe he just wants to be special

Maybe he doesn’t have any mental illnesses, except just hypochondria

Except as soon as he starts considering hypochondria, OCD comes up

Because he feels incredibly, obsessively worried about everything

And there are times when he just has to do something other than pay attention and maybe those are compulsions

But maybe he’s wrong because the compulsions aren’t usually about fears, he just wants to wiggle around, click his pens, etc.

And that’s when he starts considering Tourettes

But that doesn’t work either because it’s not that severe, he’s way more able to resist impulses than he should be

And Tourettes wouldn’t explain enough anyways

So we’re like halfway through Roman’s freshman year and he’s just very confused?

Is he neurotypical? Does he have every mental illness ever? He doesn’t know

He still has a PTSD diagnoses but hasn’t been triggered as badly as that first time again, so he’s not even sure if he had That

And then Logan comes home for winter

And he’s very happily explaining how college is going in Maine

They already know lots but it’s fun to hear it in person

And Roman asks if anyone suspects he’s a fairy and if that’s causing problems and Logan says most people probably just think he’s autistic

And Roman is confused because that doesn’t seem at all?? related???

But Logan and Virgil start explaining autism and it does make a lot of sense and

Wait a minute is that what he is??????

So Roman just doesn’t freaking sleep for a week after Logan goes back to school because he’s researching autism nonstop

And it doesn’t feel right but he doesn’t know if it’s because of stigma or something else

It doesn’t feel like a bad word when he uses it to describe Logan but that could just be self deprecation he doesn’t know

And the ice cream bar model makes it really hard to tell because there’s so many options

And some of the symptoms are other mental illnesses

So he decides to just go with it for now, try it out as a label in his own head

He doesn’t tell anyone because that makes it more real and stressful and he’d feel guilty if he was wrong

But he starts using headphones to block out noise, gets himself some fidget toys to use in class, he learns that he likes certain stimuli and dislikes others (that’s not proof though that’s every single person, isn’t it?)

he starts getting better at writing conversations down first, bringing index cards actually makes him look smarter, not useless like he feared

So he still feels guilty because he’s pretty sure he’s not actually autistic and he doesn’t tell the boys

He can actually lie unlike some of the squad

And they’re all so used to getting “the world is too loud” from V and L that they don’t even realize something is different

Because remember, they’ve been hanging out with Roman for years, he’s always been restless and argumentative, and outside the college the main difference they see is he’s happier

So cut to a few months later

In some general ed class which Roman despises but that’s life

He’s partnered with the “smart girl” of the class, Serena Miller, on a group project

Which is very lucky because he has no idea what the heck is going on it’s way too theoretical for him

And she’s super patient, and they actually really click and they’re becoming good friends from they’re meetings

They’re hanging out more and more after school and she happily explains mathematical paradoxes and knot theory and he talks about the plots of different musicals

And they both just nod along half the time because they don’t completely understand, but the human interaction is very nice

And anyways Roman has this sudden realization that maybe she’s flirting with him and she’s just doing all of this with the expectation that they’re going to date

He just freaking blurts out “I’m gay and also taken” because God gifted him with chivalry, not subtlety, okay?

She’s confused and pauses for a second

Like “good for you but what does that have to do with three dimensional coordinate systems”

And he’s very awkwardly like “oh sorry I was afraid you were flirting with me”

She’s like “lol sorry for freaking you out, I just really like math, and I tend to latch onto other ADHD people because they’re just so much easier to talk to”

And Roman’s like what did you say???

So after a very long and repetitive conversation he realizes she’s ADHD and also 100 percent convinced he’s ADHD too

He says “wait a minute I don’t have ADHD?” and she’s not even like “oh you don’t?” she’s like “oh, you didn’t know?”

She’s still writing out math problems for the research as this is going on BTW she’s a fidgety girl

So, long story short they head off to a cafe to talk more without being in the middle of a library

And they meet up with a bunch of Serena’s friends, a lot of which Roman knows from theater

There’s Jaclyn Steele who played his love interest when their college did Footloose (they were Ren and Ariel)

And Aïsha Pérez who did a Romeo and Juliet monologue with him a while ago

And Gabriella Clay who’s absolutely going to be on Broadway soon, she already was on it as young Nala in the Lion King when she was thirteen, noone has any doubts that she’s going back

They talk about ADHD, how it’s not actually being unable to focus

ADHD people are actually very good at focusing on things a lot of the time, it’s just difficult to switch tasks

And they can experience sensory overload too

He finds out about RSD, which is a side effect of ADHD basically translates to “misinterpriting wjat people say to think they hate you” disorder, and that explains so many things

And it also has side effects of not being able to speak very well when stressed, so that explains a lot to

And he finds out that literally All of These Girls have ADHD???

No wonder they were so easy to hang out with?

They’re all on the same wavelength

He’s really afraid that having ADHD means he’s broken for a second, but Aïsha explains that it’s not even a mental illness, it’s just a neurodivergence

“Your brain doesn’t work worse than other peoples’ brains, it just works different”

And yeah, they agree it’s a lot like autism

Gabriella was actually misdiagnosed with autism when she was little so she talks a lot more with him about how similar they are

They end up having a sleepover in Serena and Gabriella’s dorm room

(Roman callshome to let Virgil and May know not to worry about him)

They’re all spread out on the floor with blankets, watching the office bloopers on a cracked Ipad until 5am and it’s the best Roman’s felt in weeks

And it’s not like he’s “cured” now but it feels so so so good to know he’s not alone

He ends up talking to Dizzy (who’s supportive but doesn’t understand exactly why Roman cares so much), then Mamaw (who’s happy for him if a bit confused by his excitement, he didn’t really tell her too much about the Search for a label), then the bf squad who’re mostly like ‘heck yeah none of us are at all normal’

And Patton’s not in desperate need of a diagnoses but he says he’s def not neurotypical, and he’s probably not allistic

Roman’s afraid of visiting the doctor again for fear of being denied a diagnosis

He doesn’t know what he’d do if he was told he was wrong

But Patton talks to Emile (with permission of course), and Emile gets help from his own Psychology professors and ends up doing 90% of the paper work and helping Roman with the exact criteria for diagnosis, so Roman has no doubts by the time he walks in to the hospital

Emile is also like oh that’s cool me too so that’s how Roman finds out that Emile is ADHD too

Eventually Roman does get an actually diagnosis and medication that works WITH his ADHD, not against it

And it turns out ADHD isn’t exclusive of the other things he considered, he probably did have actual PTSD and depression and anxiety and maybe more, but at least he has the root cause of so much of what makes him different

Emile also mentions there are a few other weird towns and offers to help get Roman a therapist who wouldn’t freak out about Wickhills

A few months later he ends up video conferencing Dr. Aaliyah Dixon from New Orleans and she doesn’t bat an eye at his talks about making a deal with the fae and having his memories magically separated

So he’s not “cured” by any means, but he knows who he is now, his boyfriends know how to help, he has college friends to bond with, and he’s absolutely not alone

[marsixm]

nobody asked but heres some random youtuber recs:

plumbella aka jesse mcnamara is 100% my fave sims youtuber, shes iconic in every way and her voice is constantly narrating things in my head with memes spoken in all her northern glory, i love how chaotic she is and shes also genuinely talented as a simmer but also entertaining enough that i’d watch her play games i have zero interest in. she also twitch streams a lot if youre into that

swell entertainment aka amanda gorka: shes recently become a youtube algorithm chosen channel which propelled her videos, mostly of reviews of internet-based products and events, into the spotlight after many years of lets say modest success. shes got good things to say and ive left her most recent videos discussing her successes with youtube and how they happened feeling extremely inspired- i also enjoy technical youtuber accounts and the insights they give

the financial diet but specifically chelsea fagan: tfd is a financial advice web brand and one of the co founders often posts conversational advice listicles that are helpful albeit repetitive if you watch enough of them over the years, but i think theyre the best content on the channel which does sometimes fall into an unrelatable yuppie trap. her rants are especially good and the one posted most recently is great. i sort of think of her as a sensible older sister lol

im also gonna give a partial rec to hannah smokey glow, a haul/makeup/drama channel because she does seem to have very sensible takes on things and she has also recently posted some advice videos for creators that i found very helpful but she does have a very large consumerist/materialism streak which im not a huge fan of but i dont usually watch those videos of hers, although sometimes ill listen to her discuss makeup just for background noise even though idk anything about makeup

also ill go ahead and rec jackie aina even though i havent been watching her as much because i also find her videos good background noise that do leave me remembering some makeup tips for whenever i want to do that, plus she seems to know skincare and i found her night routine video helpful with understanding skincare. if youre into makeup or specifically are black/dark skinned and into makeup/watch gurus you’ve probably already heard of her. again though as a makeup influencer shes probably a bit more consumerist than i prefer but its a consequence of the genre.

i should also probably mention “what ive learned” since i watched him so much last year, he posts extremely detailed researched pieces about nutrition and science that actually explains the research and understandings involved with things like food and fitness in a way that is both extremely complex but also makes a lot of issues easier to understand. though obviously since the channel discusses things like food, diets, fitness, weight, and may sometimes imply losing weight is inherently healthy (iirc) theres a content warning there.

and while im posting youtube recs even since i never do, shout out to danny gonzalez and drew gooden, the commentary boys you probably already know, notably danny for his music and drew for his actual analysis of media- also jarvis johnson does some good work and i enjoy his skits and the effort he puts in.

also special shout out to james turner aka the sim supply because i havent watched him in a while but hes an incredible sims builder and one of the first sims channels i watched, this is dan bell who makes really cool videos exploring abandoned buildings whom id like to watch more of again after a while of not, and jack saint who ive seen a couple of great video essays from that id like to watch more of some time... ALSO NAKEYJAKEY! i havent watched him in a Minute but i love his stuff... ALSO SIMPLY NAILOGICAL HOW COULD I FORGET

[thegayfromrulid]

Frkm 1 allll the way to 99. Also, the next SAO game eugeo lives as a sword and not die (thank GOD)

@2. chocolate bars or lollipops?

Chocolate bars- I will not eat lollipops. 

3. bubblegum or cotton candy?

Cotton candy! I actually get super bad headaches from bubblegum.

4. how did your elementary school teachers describe you?

Probably lonely genius...

5. do you prefer to drink soda from soda cans, soda bottles, plastic cups or glass cups?

Soda bottles!! I feel so fancy!! And old-timey.

6. pastel, boho, tomboy, preppy, goth, grunge, formal or sportswear?

I guess tomboy even though I’m a boy??

7. earbuds or headphones?

Aren’t these the same thing? I think I prefer over-ear headphones, but I don’t really like either. 

8. movies or tv shows?

Depends on the genre I guess. But as a main rule, live action- movies, animated- TV shows.

9. favorite smell in the summer?

Potato salad.

10. game you were best at in p.e.?

Frankly, I wasn’t good, but I was really good at pissing all the jocks off-

11. what you have for breakfast on an average day?

I make myself these homemade egg mcmuffins. I enjoy them a lot. I am very picky about breakfast.

12. name of your favorite playlist?

I only have one and it’s very generic: The Gay From Rulid’s Playlist. Yes it’s on Spotify. Yes, it’s 99% anime openings and endings and maybe Bet On It from HSM2. Be ashamed of me. Go on.

13. lanyard or key ring?

Lanyard! Mine is a BNHA one I bought from an artist at Nekocon!

14. favorite non-chocolate candy?

Either Sweet Tarts or Nerds. 

16. most comfortable position to sit in?

I usually have one leg tucked up under me and the other stretched out.

17. most frequently worn pair of shoes?

A black and white pair of Skechers. They look like shit. They almost never are replaced by another shoe. Not even in the gross muggy heat.

18. ideal weather?

When it’s just warm enough to wear a t-shirt and sit in the sunshine, but cool enough that I’m not hot, and a little breeze is going. I think of this weather quite often. 

19. sleeping position?

On my belly kinda spread out like a shounen protagonist.

21. obsession from childhood?

J.R.R. Tolkien. Have always been obsessed with him and his works. 

22. role model?

Redundant, but Tolkien again. Linguist and writer. Living my dream. 

23. strange habits?

I unplug things like microwaves, lamps, and TVs when I am done using them. Very little remains plugged in at my place. The modem, the fridge, and the clock. That is it.

24. favorite crystal?

Amethyst. It’s my sister’s middle name. And I especially like the purple ones.

25. first song you remember hearing?

Blue by Eiffel 65. I don’t know why that song sticks out so much in my memory but it’s nostalgic for me. Tiny AJ hyperfixated on this song before anything else ya’ll. 

26. favorite activity to do in warm weather?

Curl up in the sun on a blanket and nap. 

27. favorite activity to do in cold weather?

Hot cocoa blanket cuddles. 

28. five songs to describe you?

Uhhhh...I’m not very musically literate. Let’s go with Born This Way (the first person I came out to sent me that song so it feels special!), I’m Free to Be Me by Jamie Grace, Praying by Kesha, Shake It Off by Taylor Swift ( @delicateeuphorias​ would you believe it xD), and right now thinking about someone dear to me who’s been gone See You Again is stuck in my brain.

30. places that you find sacred?

Arboretums or big botanical gardens where I can get lost in the plants for a moment and take in how pretty they all are. And old monuments/big things people of the past built. A lot of things were built by people with no rights/freedom and I think about them and how despite the fact that they had nothing, they made such a lasting impact on our world. 

31. what outfit do you wear to kick ass and take names?

*slips on my Owari no Seraph cosplay* I will kick ass in this sweet ass cape-

33. most used phrase in your phone?

My phone seems to think it’s “Kirito’s ass” and I want it to not think that.

34. advertisements you have stuck in your head?

O-O-O-O’REILLYYYYYYYYYY’S...Autooo PARTS.

35. average time you fall asleep?

I’m an insomniac it could be 10 pm it could be 3 am who knows I sleep for an hour I’m up again...

36. what is the first meme you remember ever seeing?

Fucking CAN I HAS CHEEZBURGR cats. 

37. suitcase or duffel bag?

This all boils down to how much I’m packing. Going for a sleepover? Duffel. Going to con? My giant suitcase with room for all the bells and whistles of cosplay.

38. lemonade or tea?

Tea!

39. lemon cake or lemon meringue pie?

Oh cruel I looooove lemon. The pie!

40. weirdest thing to ever happen at your school?

In high school here- so, aside from me being the resident weirdo (I DID come to school dressed as the TARDIS), my senior class decided to squirt hundreds of bottles of chocolate syrup on the sidewalks. We were an open campus so it’s all in front of our classroom doors- we had no hallways. And then they. They fucking EGGED ALL THE DOORS. The whole campus smelled like...ick.

41. last person you texted?

My father and mother in a group text to cry about customers treating me poorly. 

42. jacket pockets or pants pockets?

I prefer the jacket pockets because I still haven’t found a way to get men’s pants under the radar of my ever-watchful parents and women’s jeans pockets are SHITTY. Women gotta boycott this shit it is UNACCEPTABLE-

44. favorite scent for soap?

Peppermint...peppermint ^-^ I like to smell like...mint.

45. which genre: sci-fi, fantasy or superhero?

Fantasy!

46. most comfortable outfit to sleep in?

Recently I was reminded I live alone and my new favorite sleeping outfit...is...just some boxer shorts. Suck it dysphoria. Manly nightwear.

47. favorite type of cheese?

Pepper jack, Swiss, or ricotta. 

48. if you were a fruit, what kind would you be?

Strawberry :3

50. what made you laugh the hardest you ever have?

I’m gonna sound so gay but when @disasterbikirito​ started laughing about a certain GIF and his laugh was so infectious I couldn’t help but laugh too. 

51. current stresses?

Are you shitting me it’s everything. Every. Single. Thing. I cannot breathe. I am having meltdowns. Someone fucking save me I cannot deal with COVID well.

52. favorite font?

Garamond for writing in my free time, Doulous SIL for all the linguistics IPA symbols my greedy heart desires. 

53. what is the current state of your hands?

Smooth but my fingertips have been gnawed on. I am stressed, okay?

54. what did you learn from your first job?

Gosh, lots of things. But the most important takeaway is that a good boss will genuinely care about you. I miss that man. He was so wonderful and so caring and taught me so much about theater. Technical things and artistic things and historical things. Sometimes I wish I could have made a career out of working under him. 

55. favorite fairy tale?

Beauty and the Beast (AH...AH...I SEE YOU ROLLING YOUR EYES BECAUSE I’M TRANS. I KNOW. I *KNOW*.)

56. favorite tradition?

It’s a family tradition kinda unique to my household. Each year, we draw a name from a hat, and that name comes with a lot of words that describe us and what we liked over that year. We then each take a $20 bill and we go to a little hobby shop with cheap things in it and use that $20 bill to fill a Christmas stocking. We then hang them back up and empty the stocking full of candies and random silly things and have a good laugh and guess who filled whose stocking. 

57. the three biggest struggles you’ve overcome?

The first one is coming to terms with knowing my dad has a severe illness. It really shook my family up, and it’s terrifying us right now with everything going on, but after a while, I learned that he was smiling, so I could smile, too.

The second one is my mother coming back from her tour in the Middle East on top of the murder of my godmother. Two very stressful things happened at once. My mother got very violent from her PTSD and her best friend died in a horrible way. It was an adjustment for everyone, and it kind of ripped my family to pieces. I can say, though, that my parents are still married and are getting better, and my sister and I are coming back to the family to be more open and healthy.

The third, and maybe some of my followers are aware, was getting rid of my ex-fiance. He was a man who sexually assaulted me repeatedly and I won’t go into details beyond that. It took me 5 years to get rid of him and accept what happened, but I am a much happier person now and while I work through the trauma that caused me, I have the most wonderful partner by my side and if you had told me back then I’d find someone as kind and patient and loving as him, I would have laughed and thought you were insane. 

59. if you were a video game character, what would your catchphrase be?

Probably what I put on all my fanfic updates: “I know. I’m an asshole.”

60. if you were a character in an anime, what kind of anime would you want it to be?

Some kind of shoujo romance but it’s bi also I want a sword.

61. favorite line you heard from a book/movie/tv show/etc.?

There was nothing more smartass than Alice Synthesis 30 in SAO 18 asking a reporter to open up his head and prove he was human I’m sorry like OOF-

63. five songs that would play in your club?

Get in losers, we’re playing Steppin’ Out by FLOW, Elle me dit by Mika, Blue by Eiffel 65, ADAMAS by LiSA, and Touch Off by UVERworld.

64. favorite website from your childhood?

I was on Webkinz more than I want to admit. 

65. any permanent scars?

Yup. I have one on my toe where I split the skin in half. I tripped. I have three surgical scars from when I had my appendix removed. And...the mystery scar. I was supposedly born with a scar it’s at the part where my foot meets my leg on my left side and you can see how it’s stretched over the years if you run your finger over it. The joke is that the doctor taking out my mom’s appendix scratched me in the womb. 

67. good luck charms?

Not really a charm but I do have a little Kirito keychain I carry everywhere I go that I fiddle with when I’m nervous.

68. worst flavor of any food or drink you’ve ever tried?

Artificial bubblegum. Disgustiiiing.

70. left or right handed?

I am right-handed.

71. least favorite pattern?

Zig-zags. 

72. worst subject?

History...I am ashamed. It’s interesting, I just suck at it.

73. favorite weird flavor combo?

Gingerbread and marshmallow. I am a bit picky about mixing foods and flavors, so this was the weirdest I could think up. 

74. at what pain level out of ten (1 through 10) do you have to be at before you take an advil or ibuprofen?

Can you hear that? It’s my hysterical laughter. 12 on a scale of 10. I get up there pretty frequently. Thank you, chronic crippling pain. 

75. when did you lose your first tooth?

I...I don’t remember...I don’t even remember...I think I had to be like what...kindergarten? 

76. what’s your favorite potato food (i.e. tater tots, baked potatoes, fries, chips, etc.)?

THIS IS CRUEL I LOVE ALL POTATOS I LOVE THEM ALL SO MUCH-Au gratin.

77. best plant to grow on a windowsill?

Aloe!

78. coffee from a gas station or sushi from a grocery store?

Coffee from a gas station. Mark my words...I will never get grocery store sushi. Ever. Again. My stomach has not forgotten. What a mistake. That was. 

79. which looks better, your school id photo or your driver’s license photo?

So, my driver’s license hasn’t had an updated photo since I was 15 and just had a learner’s so I look like I want to murder a man but my school ID I had just run about a mile in the cold because the bus wasn’t running that day and my face is red and I look like I’m crying...probably the school ID...

80. earth tones or jewel tones?

Jewel tones~~

81. fireflies or lightning bugs?

I am from the South and we call ‘em lightnin’ bugs.

82. pc or console?

Errrrr console. I’m not a gamer by any means but there’s way fewer things to press on a console controller. 

84. podcasts or talk radio?

Neither...what...no...neither...they will put me to sleep...I will be out in seconds...the most dangerous things...people talking...and then I’m out...

84. barbie or polly pocket?

Barbie, she’s a LOT easier to dress. Those rubber clothes. SMH.

86. cookies or cupcakes?

Cookies but they gotta be the soft ones.

87. your greatest fear?

Being swallowed in the ocean. By a fish or a whale. I don’t play. Church kid don’t play with big things in the ocean with big mouths.

88. your greatest wish?

To make enough of a difference in someone’s life that they learn to love themself.

89. who would you put before everyone else?

Such a selfish thought...gosh...the mere thought of prioritizing someone troubles me. 

90. luckiest mistake?

Telling a cute guy sending me dog pictures was an excellent flirting technique as he sent me pictures of his puppy. I immediately thought “oh god I’ve fucked up bad” and at present we’re kinda head over heels for one another so maybe just be stupidly blunt once and a while you might find true love. 

91. boxes or bags?

Boxes. My cat didn’t force me to say that. Not at all. Sock, buddy, off the keyboard-

92. lamps, overhead lights, sunlight or fairy lights?

Sunlight. I like the sun. The sun is my friend. It is warm and would never betray me.

93. nicknames?

Sister calls me “spoony” when she’s being ridiculous. No, I don’t know what that means. Mama calls me “cakes.” I had friends who called me “Deku” because I’m a crybaby. Had a few people DM me and straight up call me “Eugeo” or “Eug.” AJ is technically a nickname. 

94. favorite season?

Springtime!!!!! It’s...HERE!

95. favorite app on your phone?

I use like three apps...so Discord.

96. desktop background?

It’s. It’s Kirito and Eugeo. What did you expect.

97. how many phone numbers do you have memorized?

Mama’s, dad’s, mine, and my parents’ house number. And does the emergency 911 count (pahahaha). 

(I answered the others in delicateeuphoria’s ask!)

[mariellewritesalot]

Notes on the Romantic Narrative

As an homage to my favorite film of all-time “Silver Linings Playbook” finally being on Netflix, and a coping mechanism to everything I’ve been feeling as of late: I am writing to you about some musings I’ve been making and breaking for the past few months. About love, or lack thereof, in my life. 

First, to give you an image of how I pay attention to detail in life and movies, I will start with a few reasons why I love this gem despite the huge changes they made on screen vis-à-vis the novel: 1) It portrayed mental illnesses in a way that didn’t feel pushy or overly-romanticized: healing is not linear, 2) Pat’s character development throughout the film was the epitome of his motto (and mine), “Excelsior”, 3) I love how the story sort of revolved around the Eagles and football to anchor the heaviness of the entire plot line, 4) The casting!!! I mean, wow, and 5) It makes you believe in silver linings, even in the safest sense of the idea, not too grand and definitely not perfect. Safe. Who could forget that scene where Pat runs after Tiffany with his letter? The relief we all felt knowing that her hard work and feelings were not for naught? If you haven’t seen it, I hope you have the time to. It’s a moving film, honestly.

Anyway, I digress. I am going to go personal in this bit and I might not like it, too. I am stating the obvious when I say that I am a hopeless romantic and that I tend to look at life in rose-colored glasses. Some probable reasons are because my parents have the kind of love story that really makes you believe in fate and second chances, plus the fact that I grew up with romantic films, songs, and books. I was sold to the fairy tale idea of happily ever afters despite the proof that it doesn’t apply to everyone in real life. I wanted my own story to tell. After all, I am a writer. I live for the things worth telling.

Nowadays, I also spend a lot of my time online where my timeline is bombarded with couples or romantic gestures, as if the algorithm is working against the realist in me. I can’t say I hate it, because one thing I get from this mindset is the tendency to highlight the good things, both in people or situations. The “too kind for my own good” complex. The only downside is that I may get disappointed more times than I should. It’s a tricky predicament if you think about it in my context: I grew up with mostly men in the house, in my own bubble, going through life thinking that somebody is going to sweep me off my feet, backed up by High School Musical films and the media pushing love teams down our throats...but then it hits me in real life as I grow older: movie moments do happen in real life, but they aren’t as common as they make it out to be, they’re the exception to the rule. They are as rare as they come. 

Some of us aren’t as lucky.

In reality, when the hurt runs too deep, it feels almost impossible to rise above it. The hopeless romantic dies out and is replaced by a semi-angry realist, tired of how the world consistently proves that it moves in circles. They become someone who occasionally relapses into that romanticized haze every once in a while because it gets lonely. When you’ve fallen in love a few times in life, it’s hard not to expect yourself to fall into a trap, any moment now. The withdrawals grow stronger just when you’re starting to get the hang of things. It’s an exhausting ordeal, if you ask me, turning numb but knowing that you can’t shake off the romantic within when it resurfaces in the most inappropriate of moments.

I used to think that I’d be one of the lucky ones who meet the love of their life early on; someone who’s capable of being in a long-term relationship in college or maybe even after...and I still think I am, but maybe I haven’t met him yet. Maybe I have, but the timing is off or we just don’t know it until a little further down the road. Now I’ve been single for too long, and there is nothing wrong with it, just the fact that the trauma I went through has really soiled my chances of healing fast; more from the events than the actual person who did the hurting. Being here though, I am able to see how I am in a generation where #hugot culture is the norm, relationships are only as good as they are on social media, and 80% of young people are desperate to find love or at least a semblance of it. It’s nauseating, accidentally giving into the “sana all” culture and thinking I am incomplete if I don’t have someone who’s technically obligated to care for me, vice versa. I am not a fan of it, but it’s not exactly easy to exclude myself from a narrative I have been in for years. I wish it didn’t feel so off.

Because...hey, there are pros to being single. For starters: I am young. I don’t have to worry about it yet at least for the next ten years or so. I am not supposed to have the same timeline as other people. I can go to bed without worrying about somebody else. I don’t have to ask for anyone’s approval. I have more time for the things I love doing. I am not being emotionally abused or taken for granted or cheated on, which were common themes in my past relationships. It’s a treat, until I am once again hooked by the media I consume and made to think that there’s more to life than being alone.

Maybe it’s the fact that I spent half of this year trying to get over the one I thought was the love of my life, or how I’m spending the other half denying to myself that I may be having feelings for a person and consciously running away from them through various coping mechanisms I never thought I’d use. Love is a gray area right now because I don’t see myself being in a relationship anytime soon, but if I ever do, I’d want something serious. I love meeting new people right now, but at the same time, my comfort zone feels good. I find that it helps tone down my anxiety when I am in control. I’m proud of myself for choosing to navigate through life by my own right now, turning down people who want to become a part of it for my sake and theirs. I just have a lot on my plate. Although I do believe that I’ll never be ready. No one ever is, but I want to put my faith in timing. I just have to learn the ropes here first. I hate that everyone around me is rushing because I feel like I’m that person being squeezed into the middle of the crowd in a mosh pit. I am choosing to make sure I am a better person than I was first before I dive into it, head first.

So yeah. Lloyd Dobler is not going to blast In Your Eyes by Pete Gabriel on a boombox outside my bedroom window (though I’d love Closing Time by Semisonic more). Dylan Harper is not going to organize a flash mob to tell me he made a mistake. Patrick Verona is not going to hack into the school speakers and sing to me at the football field. Troy Bolton is not going to show up outside my window to apologize, armed with Margherita pizza and chocolate covered strawberries. Ted is not going to steal a blue french horn for me. Johnny Castle is not going to dance with me in front of everybody to prove our love. Chuck Bass is not going to buy me a ring and carry it around even when we aren’t together anymore, hoping for the chance to get me back. Augustus Waters is not going to show up with orange tulips and a trip to Amsterdam. Pat Soltano is not going to run after me with a love letter he wrote a week ago...and I’m okay with it. I don’t want to buy into the notion that I need saving, or that I can be swayed by gestures that can so easily be just a move to win me over with no follow-through. I don’t want to be put on a pedestal, anyway. Also...sometimes, it’s in the little things. We fall in love with the way people remember something we said to them months ago, the way they show up after a long day, and the way even the tiniest gestures feel so big it fills up everything else.

I feel like one day I’ll be given the love I deserve and I don’t have to yearn for movie scenes like the art geek I am. You see, what makes love stories unique is the fact that it happens when you least expect it. Grand romantic gestures are welcome, but they aren’t really the basis of how deep love could be. I could only hope to be with someone who speaks my love language or at least tries to understand it. Until then...I’ll keep relearning everything until I make sense of what I truly want out of love and its intricate mess of a web.

I’ll love; even without pretense, without hope or agenda, without expecting the universe to give me back everything like it owes me.

[khrsecretvalentine]

sunset reset (for lighteningdancer)

from: @trilies to: @lighteningdancer / Ginger Pairing: Byakuran/Shoichi

Note: Hey there, Ginger! You’re quite the familiar name to me at this point, so I got really excited when I pulled your name. Then you gave me so much freedom and so many liberties that I sort of short-circuited on what to write at first, lmao! However, per your advice, I did go with something that I don’t really write a lot of, both re: characters and, like… tone? Subject matter? I was apparently in A Mood (tw) when I began writing. I do hope that this end result is something that you find any sort of enjoyment in at all. If not, just let me know, because there’s plenty of other stuff that I’d love to make for you. Relatedly, let me know if you have an AO3, because I’d love to put it on this on there properly gifted to you! Unless you don’t want your name attached, which is also valid. 

Content Warnings: Time Travel Fuckery, Alternate Universe Fuckery, Character Death that debatably counts, Suicide, a short Sex Scene, attempts at Stockholm Syndrome, Kidnapping, non-detailed Torture, general Abuse, the intense and vaguely defined set of mental issues that come when your brain just gets overloaded with being Yourself but hundreds of times with hundreds of slightly-to-extremely different memories in slightly-to-different worlds aka “byakuran’s mental state must be a fucking trip" 

——

Once a human tastes food for the first time, they always end up hungering for more, whatever "more” might mean for that particular individual. Maybe they look to be sated, content and full and warm. Maybe they look for a taste that can’t be beat, by their estimate. Maybe they simple look for something new, something interesting- a change in palate. On some level… He thinks Shoichi Irie is like that for him.  Byakuran doesn't need him. Of course he doesn’t. But if he’s being completely and utterly technical, he doesn’t need a lot of the things that he takes for himself, because none of it actually matters in the end. It’s all just a game, something he does because it's interesting. That would be easy enough for anyone to understand, right? Sometimes you turn on a game counsel and feel the need to get all the achievements, and other times you do it because you want to see how far you can strain the system until it shatters completely. It really all depends, and sometimes, they’re both the same thing. One day, in one universe, he’ll complete the Tri-Ni-Sette, and that will be that. In terms of gaming, he supposes that would be the end all for the main objective. Very fittingly, he comes to learn that it is the most difficult task, no matter how much he prepares and plans. Well, it would be a boring game otherwise.  It comes as quite a surprise that what would be a simple side quest any other game is almost just as difficult.

The very first time- if anything can even be called a ‘first’ at all when it’s all happening together, at the same time ,and yet completely separate- he decides to lay a claim to Shoichi Irie simply because it feels as though it’s what he should do. Another thing to check off the list. Besides, there’s a little fondness to it, he supposes. That’s not too surprising. Everyone always has that brief bit of fondness to the first character in a RPG that is kind to them, or makes the first move. He can remember playing a game with a female PC, and being charmed despite himself when a male knight almost immediately gave him a gift. Nothing special, nothing exciting or edgy, but amusing enough.  Shoichi Irie isn’t a knight in any meaning of the word. Byakuran’s impression of him at his young ten-years-younger self is that of a typical awkward nerd, although he has to admit that one’s first impression probably isn’t reliable when it involves time travel panic. Yet that doesn’t change the most important part of their meeting, and it’s that he owes everything to that young flustered teenager who had run into him in the street. He hadn’t given him a rose or sweet words, but rather something so much more valuable.  There are numerous jokes to be made about the tropes and cliches which are so prevalent in otome games, but Byakuran has found they aren’t exactly wrong in some cases. The Shoichi Irie he finds in this timeline fits so neatly in so many little boxes when he meets him for a second impression, watching him play at a seedy bar in a grubby dark side of town. Gone is the frantic nervousness, wore down into something much more exhausted that weighs down underneath his eyes and leaves just a little too much room underneath his shirt. Just a passing glance is enough to tell that the bassist is down on his luck, probably not helped by the fact that he’s not really fantastic at his instrument of choice. Judging by the way his bandmates are either in no better position or spit quiet words out at him with narrowed eyes, Byakuran can tell that they no doubt owe a lot of money from having all their nice equipment. For types like that, just like in all of the little romances he’s played through a screen, it doesn’t take much but a little bit of attention and kindness to draw Shoichi in. He doesn’t even need to do it that often, to his amusement, able to spend plenty of time building up this iteration of the Millefiore while attending to Shoici on the side.  He’s successful with his Millefiore. Of course he is. Having cheatcodes to the universe makes it so very easy. Bit by bit, he lavishes care onto his little side quest, first bringing him in with compliments and indepth conversations even Byakuran is pleasantly surprised to find he enjoys. Then come the casual outtings, treating him to coffee or lunch, the two of them so absorbed that it reminds Byakuran of how fun these minor little things can be as a detour. He makes sure Shoichi never has to pay, the ill-gained money in his pockets always being more than enough. Sometimes it’s a fight to make it happen, of course. Despite his situation, Shoichi always seems to want to be self sufficient, and there’s a fire in his eyes that tugs at the interest of Byakuran’s heart. So down on his luck, and yet he still tries to struggle like this. How cute. Still, Byakuran manages to convince him one way or the other.  Yet the game can’t merely stop at pampering a “love interest”…  He makes the offer at the backstage of one of the many trash bars Shoichi plays at, his back against the wall while his arms have wound lazily about Shoichi’s body. A year of pampering has lead him to looking better than he did before, and a few minutes of Byakuran grinding his thigh inbetween his legs has lead him looking even better. Forget the nervous teenager that awoke him to all of this, forget the dead eyed man he’d seen on stage once. There’s that brilliant flickering fire behind Shoichi’s contacts, brow stubbornly crumpled, skin flushed so vividly it looks as though it should hurt, and his lips slick from every heavy breath that rushes out of him as he digs his fingers into Byakuran’s shoulders to weather the ride. Even when his entire body shudders, nails digging in past cotton, he still tries to press a bruising kiss to the side of Byakuran’s neck. Of course he can’t let Byakuran control the whole situation that easily.  (His first clue, and one he ignores for longer than he would admit.)  “You’re so cute, Sho-chan,” he murmurs into his ear, dragging his fingers down along his spine. Against his leg, he can feel Shoichi’s arousal straining painfully in tight denim and, almost better, the way he shivers when the warmth of his voice rushes through his ear.  He can barely speak, so wound up in lust as he is, but Shoichi pushes through. “Who’s ever heard of a bassist being cute?” he rasps. There’s a ragtag sort of afterparty happening in the bar proper, drowning out the sounds of their rutting, so he does his best in keeping quiet. All that does is make his voice low and husky, drawing Byauran’s eyelids halfway down. That’s more than good enough, he thinks, and he eases up on the pressure. Shoichi blinks up at him, dazed and aroused, unable to stop Byakuran as he adjusts himself until he’s sliding down the wall and inbetween Shoichi’s legs. Understanding hits him quick enough, and he braces one arm against the wall. It doesn’t escape Byakuran how his breathing only gets all the harder.  “I want to keep you,” he says, his own voice low, possessive, and he can almost see the way it drops right through Shoichi’s gut. His fingers make quick work of popping open the button to his jeans. “Will you let me, Sho-chan?” Using the very tip of his tongue, he flicks up the zipper and takes it between his teeth, eyes staying locked on his precious interest’s own gaze the whole time as he drags it down slowly.  “That’s…” The words are choked in his throat, and he tosses his head back as Byakuran slides his aroused cock out into the open air. “You’ve given me so much… and now you’re asking me that?” “But I want to hear it, Sho-chan.” Grinning slyly, he drags his tongue up from the very base of Shoichi’s cock and flicks tip against tip. Satisfaction pools in his stomach at how the hips in his hands jerk. “Let me keep you, or else I won’t let you come even a little bit.” He nuzzles his way back down, hot breath ghosting along sensitive skin, until he can wrap his lips around his balls. It’s harder to watch Shoichi like this now, buried into his hips, but he can still hear the way his hand slaps across his mouth, muffling the harsh gasp he makes. In contrast to the quiet his interest is desperately trying to maintain, Byakuran lives to shatter that. Underneath the yells and laughter and pounding music of the bar, he sloppily licks and sucks along the aching arousal that’s right at his face, every sound an obscene prayer. He knows it works up Shoichi, too. It’s hard not to pick up on it, feeling how his legs shake and his hips tremble from the effort of holding back.  There’s not even any reason to edge him for long. Soon enough, Shoichi is gasping and keening over his head, squirming desperately into Byakuran’s mouth. “Dammit- dammit, Byakuran- take me! I want you…. Nn-” He glances up at that, pleased at what he sees: Shoichi looking down at him, teeth digging into a finger from where his hand isn’t quite covering his mouth, arousal twisting his expression so desperately. “I want you… to take me. Keep me. Please-!"  At the end, when Shoichi is slumped against him and drifting down the tides of post-orgasm, Byakuran indulgently curls his fingers into his hair to keep his face pressed into his shoulder. "No takebacks,” he purrs, ignoring the soreness along his back. “I’ll keep you forever now, Sho-chan. Even across universes.” Blissfully unaware of threat and lie alike, Shoichi laughs breathlessly against his shirt. “Romantic.” When Byakuran says it, he says it as a lie. But what do you call a lie that becomes a truth when you never meant for it to be? Never one satisfied with leaving a side quest partially forgotten or abandoned the first time through, Byakuran pushes all the way. He helps pay off his debt, convinces him out of a band he’s clearly miserable in. With the money he’s so quickly managed to accumulate, there’s no question of how easy it is to get Shoichi to live with him. Free of any real obligation, Byakuran watches in faint interest but mostly amusement as his interest begins to relax. He’s really, truly, unbelievably still nothing impressive with a bass, but at least he seems more content as he fiddles with it and all the other songs he tries to write. What’s more relevant to Byakuran is how Shoichi gets back into what he dismissively calls his “old hobby”. Byakuran had always wondered how a bassist’s teenage self could end up time traveling… and the answer, he realizes with every idle computer program and toy Shoichi makes, is because Shoichi Irie is in fact incredibly intelligent. So intelligent that it seems a waste that he ever became a musician, a fact that he makes sure to pass along to his many other selves. This intelligence comes back to bite him when he returns to his high rise apartment after a nice long trip dealing with a minor emergency. It was nothing serious, just some minor complications one Federico Ferrino left behind in his death. Truly the Vongola had a lot of resources, to be such a bother even in death. Yet he finds them to be less of a bother than the sight that greets him once he steps into his apartment. Shoichi is curled up in an armchair that’s been forcibly turned so that it’s facing in the direction of the front door, knees digging against his chest. He jolts a little at the sound of the door, eyes going to Byakuran faster than a gunshot.  Now now, what could have happened, he wonders? Byakuran rolls the question in his mind even as he carelessly drops his bags to the side, already making his way over to his interest like a good boyfriend would. “Stomach again?” he asks, reaching out to sweep his fingers up into Shoichi’s bangs. It’s been a while since the bassist has had to deal with his infamous stomach aches, brought out whenever he’s too tense, too nervous, too stressed. “Sho-chan, I didn’t realize you would miss me that much!” His hand is grabbed before he can fully pull it away, musically calloused fingers folded almost delicately around his own. Byakuran blinks, eyebrows raising, before he looks properly into Shoichi’s face. All the expressions which would normally be there- sulking aggravation, taut anxiety, restless worry- are completely absent. Instead, his brow is wound tight together, and there’s something… new to his eyes. Dark green is focused fully on him, steeled in a way he can’t quite recall ever viewing before. “Byakuran,” he says, desert grave quiet, “what do you do for a living?” Everyone makes mistakes on their first blind run, of course. Byakuran has made a couple, despite his various connections that are all to himself, and he generally doesn’t worry about it. This particular mistake is that he’s left Shoichi alone, guarded for but not watched, for far too long. With all the things Byakuran is getting up to, well, he doesn’t have full and complete of the world yet. News anchors will talk, radio personalities will gossip, and the internet churns so quickly with facts and facts that are twisted and facts which only have the name but not the definition. Shoichi has been busy. He’s been paying attention. It’s all he’s been able to do.  Lying doesn’t really have a point here, not with how much Shoichi has pulled together. Besides, Byakuran has never really lied to him, has he? Shoichi doesn’t react well to that statement, but it’s true. He’s only been vague, never giving the whole story , only bits and pieces. Maybe he could do damage control, if he really tried. Byakuran doesn’t. It’s so much more fascinating to watch his interest yell and demand and accuse, arm sweeping out in scythe sweep of a gesture.  Shoichi has never burned so bright, not in this universe, and Byakuran is enraptured by this glitch he’s made happen.  They sleep in separate rooms for a while after that- Byakuran taking the lavish and comfortable master bedroom, Shoichi self-exiling himself to a sterile guest room that’s never once been touched. It only takes a couple of days before he breaks the barrier he’s erected, settling himself gingerly onto the couch besides Byakuran one evening. None of the lights are on yet, with only the setting sun illuminating Shoichi’s back from where he sits, eyes on him. “I’m sorry,” he tells him. “It was a lot to take in,” he says. “Can you just promise me that you’ll be honest with me from now on?” “Of course, Sho-chan,” Byakuran tells him, while promising no such thing. This, too, is a lie.  Shoichi must know it as well. He promises nothing either, and he writes I’m sorry once again on a letter he leaves on the counter in their darkened home when Byakuran returns again one day. A surprising amount of his things are left behind, with only the most sensible of clothing that’s been taken, along with all the basic necessities of a healthy human such as toiletries. When Byakuran checks one of his bank accounts, he’s not surprised to find a lot of money withdrawn. While he could pursue his interest, he doesn’t. Instead, he carries out the end of this particular life, his particular run, all the while quite aware of how the patches of rebel forces which never cease to defy him are granted a sudden boost in knowledge. It doesn’t really matter, in the end. This reality is a bust, and he toys with the different ways to end it.  Somewhere, out in the rebel hideouts that he systematically quashes, he’s certain Shoichi Irie dies… but he dies far away from Byakuran, out of his sight.  It’s a “Bad End” if your love interest betrays you and dies. Byakuran passes along the message to Byakuran of everything he’s gone through. It would be embarrassing if this was the side quest that he missed, after all.  Probably the problem Byakuran ran into, Byakuran muses to himself as he thinks over this particular set of alternate memories, is that Shoichi was a civilian kept in the dark for so long. Sure, he had been running around in all sorts of seedy bars in that universe, but being in the same vicinity as some two-bit thugs isn’t anything like dating a powerful mafia don who had blood soaked up to his knees. If he intervenes a little earlier… That sounds right. A slightly earlier intervention, nudging those morals a little further in the right direction, and Byakuran thinks that might finally help complete this little sub-plot. He just needs to get a little creative in when they meet. How they meet.  When he meets Shoichi Irie, he’s not the flustered teenager that gave him this opportunity and he’s not yet the boneworn bassist who played in side alley bars. Instead, he’s seventeen and clearly frustrated with the world, or perhaps merely his place in it. Byakuran only needs a day to see how people take advantage of him. It's  nothing so crass as outright bullying, not most of the time. Instead, they merely pile on expectations and requests onto him, disregarding his interests, disregarding anything else he might have on his plate. In a different way to that time in the bar, it’s easier than anything to slide his way into a friendship with him. Nudging him along towards what Byakuran wants for him… It’s a little more difficult to get the subtleties of that exactly right, and he spends a couple of lives dealing with that. It’s not a complete waste; he’ll need such skills for other people who aren’t Shoichi.  The best way, he finds, is simply phrasing things as harmless pranks in high school, things to tease those who frustrate him so much, things he can build upon so steadily. Shoplifting is a little harder, not something that his Sho-chan really has the hand dexterity for, but it’s easier when he can frame their targets as absolute bastards who deserve it… or detach them so neatly from his life that they don’t really matter.  What his real interest is, however, would be what he told himself from dating that tired and beaming bassist. It’s a waste to keep him as a petty thief, even if there is a kind of casual amusement in throwing stolen candy into Shoichi’s hair while he does his best to scowl instead of laugh. The good news is that he has dozens, hundreds, thousands of other selves knowledge at hand. It’s child play to talk tech with Shoichi, to convince him to stretch his intelligence right past the digital defenses of so many organizations and countries. From high school, to college, to them with degrees spilling out the secrets of the richest and most influential or sometimes holding it over their heads. It hardly takes anything at all to convince Shoichi to join his Gesso, this slowly budding and blossoming Millefiore. This should be it, he thinks. It took a try or four, but he’s finally got this route down.  He thinks that all the way to the day he triumphantly comes back from his meeting with that little Giglio Nero heiress, satisfied from the box he has in his hands. “Ta daaaaa!” he sings as he enters the office where Shoichi is waiting. His interest looks pretty good in mafia black, he has to say, even when he’s clearly fiddled his tie right out of place and jumps what seems like a solid foot into the air. “The meeting went great, Sho-chan.” “I feel like you’d say that no matter what actually happened…” Still, he moves out of the way, letting Byakuran flop loosely into his chair. Shoichi slides his hands into his pockets, trying to seem calm, before he moves them out again to rub his palms against his legs. “Were you able to resolve things mostly peacefully?” Gamma’s fingers broke, one by one, feeling surprisingly like nothing for how long they’d clutched to his pool stick. Genkishi had to be skewered to the wall, bloody dripping from his mouth, simply to keep him out of the way. When Aria had finally conceded, she’d closed her eyes for a brief moment with a box keeping their hands joined together, and a smile had crept onto her face. “Oh, the things that will happen,” she’d said, eyes too blue, too strange. For a second, she’d almost looked human.  “Mhm,” Byakuran says, because that’s the easy answer, and they have the Giglio Nero- what remains- on close watch. He won’t make a rookie mistake again, making it easy for Shoichi to stumble onto such a dark little thing. Setting the box down onto his desk, he flicks open the latch. The second Shoichi turns his back, Byakuran plans on getting nothing less than the absolute best replicas that he possibly can for the Mare Rings… but for now, there’s no harm in keeping them right in front of him. He has no idea when these were last touched, even by their mistresses, but the Mare Ring have a crystal clear shine to them that’s so smooth that not even water would stick. He’d slipped the Sky Ring back into its place after reveling in its quickly comfortable warmth, and it almost seems to glow again at his presence. In fact, it even seems to glow all the brighter than before. His eyelids dip just a little lower. “Amazing, right…?” He can feel Shoichi’s arm brush against his chair, nudging it a little bit. “All that worry, for some rings…” His voice isn’t into the disregarding tone it tries for, however. It’s even… dazed. Byakuran’s first thought is that he’s coming down from his anxiety high. That impression lasts for all of a single second before Shoichi’s hand reaches over from the side, drawn to the box, and Byakuran realizes that the Mare Sky Ring wasn’t glowing any brighter than it did when he first saw it.  Yellow blends into orange so well. Shoichi burns bright yet again.  The knowledge hits him like a bullet train, a feeling that he passes along the second he has the time to spare for it, and he almost doesn’t care that, in this world too, Shoichi once again slowly turns again, once again pokes his nose into something he shouldn’t have. It’s fine to lose that particular sidequest this time around, because he’s gotten a key bit of information that can potentially help in all the others. At the same time, it only makes what was once a silly little romance route gain so much more prominence to the main story that Byakuran can’t help but marvel as the flow of it.  The Mare Rings can’t speak, can’t communicate, and yet Byakuran can’t help but feel as though they’re the most people-like things he’s dealt with ever since Before. Their preferences in wielders tend to be specific, although they can be flexible if no better choice presents itself. The Rain Ring tends to lean towards bright and malicious, people who can demonstrate a sense of mocking humor before they clean away the filth of the battlefield. In contrast, those with any sort of commendable patience draw in the Cloud Ring, and the Storm favors anyone with a shimmering energy beneath an otherwise… passive facade.  The Sky Ring is his forever, in every single iteration of the universe that can possibly exist.  The Sun longs for Shoichi. Every time. Without fail.  Byakuran can understand why. Anyone would understand, he’s fairly sure, if they’d ever seen the way his eyes steel in resolution or the energy that burns from his body or the sheer brilliant gold of his flame. In worlds where he forgets, or where he slips up,  or where there’s merely a spot of bad luck, the Arcobaleno Curse seeks  out Shoichi for the intensity of his Flame.  That happens rarely.  Byakuran laid claim upon him first, after all.  In one life, Byakuran decides to go for a change of pace. Not every romance route can be won through simple kindness. Sometimes, you have to get a little bit creative, or you have to push for a certain event to go off. Sometimes, a Good End is reprehensible in the cruelty it takes to get there. At least, for normal people.  He draws the Gesso up as soon as he’s able, throws all of himself into making them a strong Family as quick as possible. Quick enough to have someone watching over Shoichi, make sure that he doesn’t drift too far from where Byakuran can see him. He goes through a fairly standard dull life, the few times Byakuran takes the time to check in on him- a brief flirt with paying a bass, graduating top of his class. Nothing to pay attention to. It’s after Shoichi’s first year of college that he instructs some of his people to kidnap him one night, when he’s on his way home from a concert of a band he likes and not expecting for a car to stop right besides him. It’s quick, silent, and completely professional. More than a few of his own must be wondering what Byakuran is doing… but that’s the case in every life he lives.  All they have to do is listen to him as he plays a game so long and expansive that they can’t even begin to imagine it.  There’s no reason to go straight into the harshest form of cruelty, not right away, not in this life. There are a lot of ways to twist a will, to shatter it and pull it together in some other shape entirely. Byakuran starts off with the kind of lodgings that would be perfect, if one were merely willing to ignore all the ways in which it’s a cage: sinfully soft furniture, nice lighting that can go from comfortably dim to softly warm, a bathroom large enough to be another bedroom, no windows, one entrance and exit, hidden cameras in more places than the obvious. Byakuran follows the advice of another life, and makes sure that there isn’t a kitchen or access to the outside world via electronics.  Shoichi Irie, in every bit of his incarnations that Byakuran can remember, is always devilishly clever, after all. Even when he had been a bassist who’d skipped college, trapped in a cycle of debt and unfulfilling gigs.  He’s also incredibly attractive, even now, disheveled in last night’s clothes, hair falling in a mess around his face, glasses askew on his face. One hand is curled against his stomach, a warning of the stomach aches that are to come, and his expression is twisted in such alarm that it stirs a heat inside of Byakuran’s chest. This isn’t one he’s indulged in yet. Not for the first time, he appreciates the ability to play with such a purposefully destructive game. “What do you want with me!?” Shoichi asks, sharp, panicked, and yet going right to the point. He doesn’t ask who Byakuran is, which is almost a shame. There are some amusing answers he could give there. And yet, he supposes this question is more important. At least, for someone in Shoichi’s position.  “Now now!” He laughs, draping himself in one of the armchairs that are around. He practically sinks into it. Really, he hopes Shoichi comes to appreciate that much in the time that he keeps him here. “I’m not going to torture you or anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Not in this timeline, at any rate. “Let me introduce myself. I’m Byakuran Gesso, and it’s nice to meet you properly here. I’d like you to work for me.” Shoichi draws one leg up cautiously, foot digging into the mattress. What he’s prepared to do is anyone’s guess, only that he feels the need to be a little… steadier, perhaps, in case he needs to do something. The hand not clutching his stomach does similar. “This isn’t… exactly the normal way to get someone to work for you,” he says stiffly, and Byakuran’s heart flutters. There’s that Sun brilliance, hardening his eyes and burning him up from the inside out. He hardly had to push at all for it to appear, even in a situation like this. “What do you want me to work on, exactly?” “Oh, nothing that you aren’t already going to college for, Sho-chan.” The nickname makes him twitch a little bit, unaware as he is of how intimate they are long before he was born and long after he dies and even here in the present. They’re completely and utterly bound. He simply doesn’t know it. He will probably never know it, at least in most lives. “I’d like to pick your mind for the treasure trove of ideas I’m sure you have in there when it comes to technology. If you simply go along with it, you’ll find your time here to be quite nice!” Byakuran tilts his head to the side. “And if you cooperate, Sho-chan, then you’ll be out of here in no time at all. I’m positive we can work something out, don’t you agree?” The wary pull of his eyebrows downwards says Shoichi doesn’t believe him, which he shouldn’t. “I’m getting the impression that I don’t have a particular choice,” he says, still not easing up even the slightest. “Do I at least get the dignity of asking some questions…?” Byakuran crosses his legs and let his hands flow to the side in gesture. “All you like, Sho-chan!” He doesn’t promise he’ll tell the truth.  “Then… Why me? I haven’t even- I don’t have a degree of any sort. I’m not even close to graduating.” The hand at his stomach moves upwards, digging into his chest. “Why kidnap a college student who’s probably not even knowledgeable enough for the kinds of things you might ask for? Aren’t there smarter technicians and engineers who could do what you want?” There aren’t. Byakuran knows this for a fact, knows that he would have stumbled upon them a long time ago if anyone had that ability. Yet no one had done what Shoichi had. No one had gone through time, no one had broken it so thoroughly as he had. Byakuran can’t even claim that honor yet, as much as it would amuse him to. No, he merely flows across the many timelines, the many universes where he exists.  Shoichi is the one who reached out where he shouldn’t have, and Byakuran knows for a fact, after listening to him speak in the kinder timelines, that he can break even more if he really tries.  The trick is to get him to really try.  “I have utter faith in your potential,” is the answer Byakuran gives, grinning and flashing a wink to Shoichi. “But you don’t have to worry. Ask for anything, and I’ll make sure to provide it for you. Just knock, okay, Sho-chan?” He’s kept for a while longer, listening to question after question that Shoichi fumbles to pull out from his mind, and he’s not surprised when he almost immediately calls through on that 'knocking’ thing to start pulling in book after book to his room.  Despite it being a simple non-answer, the line about 'potential’ is also fairly true. Byakuran passes along all sorts of little tasks for Shoichi to do, starting subtle at first with computer programs on an isolated channel that Shoichi never gets to keep. Then, various little quizzes, seeing if he can outdo what they already are using in the Gesso and Millefiore. Byakuran rarely delivers them himself. Why would he? That’s something for those far lower on the ladder who have nothing better to do, or at least nothing more important than Byakuran’s pursuit of this sidequest. Instead, Byakuran likes to visit Shoichi in the middle of his time. Sometimes it’s while he’s working through the latest task he’s been given, papers sprawled out all over the floor and a pile working up on the desk Shoichi does his best to remember to use. It’s a nice change of pace from the repetitive motions of running a mafia empire. Shoichi doesn’t take to it well at first. “Of- what? Of course I’m not,” Shoichi says, honesty stuttering out before he can stop himself the first time Byakuran outright asks. “I know your name and literally nothing else, and you’re just- is this a test?” His mouth screws up, eyes narrowed over them. “To check if I’m… I don’t know, cheating or something as I work on this?” When Byakuran bursts out laughing at him, a lobster of a blush spreads over his face in a heartbeat.  “I told you before, didn’t I?” Byakuran says when he’s calmed down, sprawled out in an armchair. His head lolls to the side, lazy smile still in place. “I have full confidence in your abilities and potential, Sho-chan.” “Shoichi,” he mutters quietly, not really stopping the nickname.  “The only reason I’m here is because I’m bored. Besides, you haven’t asked for a rubber duck yet. I thought it might help to bounce your stress off something~.” “Rubber ducks should be a little cuter,” Shoichi mumbles into his shirt, already ducking back down into his work while still a little bit red. It takes a little while for him to eventually start reciprocating Byakuran’s attempts at conversation, but what are a few visits in comparison to the eternity that Byakuran has? The multiple visions of eternity, in fact. So it doesn’t feel long at all before Shoichi begins to speak back to him, gesturing to a paper here and there as he spills out his train of thought or his frustrations on a certain aspect of his latest project. When he finally does that, the other visits Byakuran takes begin to go a little more smoothly as well instead of Shoichi sitting awkwardly in a chair as far away from Byakuran as possible while Byakuran does all the talking. He knows it’s not only his imagination when Shoichi begins to show a little more warmth in response to his visits.  There aren’t many other options for him down in this windowless room, where time doesn’t feel real, where he can’t even sense time, and Byakuran is his only constant person. There’s a certain thrill in indulging in such a thing, at least for this life. One day, Shoichi doesn’t fight against the way Byakuran presses up behind him while he’s reading, white-clad arms lazily winding around him. He only glances up at him from the corner of his eyes, thumb worrying at the page in the book he’s been working through. “I don’t exactly have to point my room is bugged, right?” he says stiffly, a little bit of red burning at his ears. “Is there any shame at all that your- everything is being recorded while you’re doing this?” “When you’re the kind of person I am, you end up being watched all the time anyway, Sho-chan,” he laughs, directly into Shoichi’s ear as to watch him shudder. He’s not the only person in the world who has such a reaction, and yet Byakuran can’t help feeling more satisfied when Shoichi does it. That’s the thrill of having a favorite character, he supposes. Everything he does, Byakuran can’t help but hyperfocus on. “Now, what kind of things are you thinking of that would get you so worked up about being watched? And in relation to me as well?” The tone of his voice says everything that doesn’t get a word ascribed to it. The blush spreads from his ears to the rest of his face quicker than the heartbeat it takes to provide that much blood. Byakuran never stops the cameras from recording… He only goes back once he’s done indulging in Shoichi’s body to cut those particular parts out and save them for his own records.  More interested in this indulgence than the rest of the videos, and relaxed in what has to be his victory this time, Byakuran misses the little things that will give Shoichi away in other universes. The way he begins to sleep more reliably in his bed instead of falling asleep by accident anywhere else. How his hands duck underneath his pillows, still so “absentminded” as to be holding his glasses inbetween his fingers. Byakuran learns later how the sound of his apparent snoring hid the sharpening of his glasses frames against metal frames. Byakuran had made sure they were metal, so that Shoichi couldn’t use the wood chips of such a frame for whatever his brilliant mind could come up with. A pity that ingenuity works with everything at its disposal no matter the material.  In one universe, he punctures his own throat, slides the needle inbetween the rows of his own lungs, and chokes on his blood before medical services can pull him back from the brink. In one universe, he breaks through the system keeping the door shut and makes a break for it. He succeeds, or he fails, or he does both in the end, but it’s a loss on Byakuran either way. “All you have to do is give yourself to me,” he says one day, one universe, popping open a bag of gummy bears. It wasn’t his first choice, but the little gas station he’d stopped at before getting here hadn’t had any marshmallow treats, and, well, as long as it’s sweet, maybe he doesn’t care as much as some might think. The same could be said for how Shoichi has been forcefully tied to a plain metal chair, handcuffs biting into his wrists and rope binding his legs. To keep him from doing anything reckless, a gag keeps his mouth pried open. Tears and spit alike drip down his face, splatter against his pants…  His eyes are still so very stubbornly burning. A sort of fondness warms his veins, and Byakuran pops one gummy bear into his mouth before he reaches downwards. Fingernails catch along knots in Shoichi’s hair, curls always so thick when he’s first woken up in the morning and hasn’t had a chance to compose himself yet. Byakuran is intimately familiar with all the little quirks like that which make up Shoichi Irie. It’s a consequence of playing the same route, over and over and over again. For all the bad ends he’s steadily accumulating, Byakuran doesn’t regret it.  “Although I am curious,” he continues, drifting his hand downwards until he can curl his fingers around the back of Shoichi’s head and guide his gaze up to him. “What made you change your mind like this, Sho-chan? What made you so desperate that you’d want to risk killing yourself, or run away from here? I like to think I’ve been taking care of you so well that there can’t possibly be a problem. You can have just about everything you’d ever ask for.” It’s only the two of them in the room, all guards dismissed without a second thought. They’d only protest if they saw Byakuran reach down and undo the gag keeping Shoichi so quiet. Free of the obstruction, Shoichi takes a quick second to cough and catch his breath. Trapped in this place, at the end of the rope, he’s clearly lost some of that quaint politeness which he’d grown up with, because he turns his head slightly to the side and spits to clear his mouth. Byakuran supposes he should marvel that it wasn’t directed right at him. “Isn’t it obvious?” he says, voice a little raspy, unused. “You brought me here in the first place because… I’m so smart, right? That’s what you told me. And… did you think I wouldn’t put everything together? Realize what all my work was adding up to, even if you never showed me the final product, or the result?” He gives a hard swallow, head bumping against Byakuran’s palm once again. “It’s not like I want to believe it…. but what else am I supposed to think, when you keep me trapped in here?” Teeth grinding against each other, he grits out, “I don’t even know if my own family is alive!” They aren’t. That thought idly occurs to Byakuran right as Shoichi says it, because he vaguely remembers glancing at a report he’d gotten of a little bit of a scuffle against Hibari-Kai over in Japan which had taken out a good dozen of lives or more, and he’d seen the Irie family listed among the deceased. It hadn’t occurred to him that it was anything important. It still isn’t, he supposes. What’s the point of saying it here and now? Idly, he scrapes his nails along the back of Shoichi’s scalp and watches him go utterly still. “And would you return if you got a brief chance outside, Sho-chan?” he asks, amused. Shoichi’s silence is an answer all its own, and Byakuran moves on without really giving him a moment to spare for a potential lie. “You really need to go with the flow, ha. I think you’d find you would have a much easier time of things if you did."  Shoichi swallows again, throat bobbing. His stare doesn’t waver. "Your flow."  Byakuran tilts his head to the side and smiles. "It’s the same thing in the end.” “If I refuse?” “Then I’ll just have to persuade you otherwise.” Persuasion, in this instance and a few others, meaning that he spends some of his time breaking Shoichi where he can. Sometimes physical. Sometimes mental. He already has a good deal of factors on his side for it all, really, from the oppressive atmosphere of never even knowing what time it is and having not known for a great deal of time, to the nice little case of Stockholm Syndrome he’s nestled right into Shoichi’s chest. That latter part he makes sure to especially cultivate. Every broken limb, he helps nurture back to full and proper health again. Every sickness Shoichi catches, whether purposefully encouraged or which comes along as a side effect of all the stress, he takes care of. Even when he threatens to drown Shoichi, serene moments where he holds him down by the throat and watches his mouth work helplessly with every bubble of hair that works upwards, he’s the same person who tends to him in the aftermath. He dries him off, checks that his lungs are still working right, work that a medical professional could be proud of. Pain and pleasure are two things that are so closely related. Fear and hatred and love and obsession, Byakuran thinks, are probably very much the same. If they are, then maybe he’ll be able to make this work as he’s been trying to across multiple lives.  It takes him around a year to look down into Shoichi’s dull eyes and realize that he’s broken him and, unlike so many other things in the world, there’s no possibility of pulling this back together into something whole again.  The Mare Sun Ring longs to be on Shoichi’s fingers. Byakuran thinks he can relate, wanting a thing that continues to not want you back.  Spoiled kindness isn’t working, and neither does abject cruelty. If that’s how it is, than Byakuran can’t possibly imagine what he’s doing wrong in this area. Still, in the end, it’s only a sidequest. A very important sidequest, but not a necessary one. The Mare Sun Ring might want Shoichi Irie out of every other pawn in the current world it exists in, but it knows how to settle for things, too. Shoichi might be its type, might have the most brilliantly burning Sun Flame anyone could imagine, but there are others who, while not the ideal personality, have a Flame that can satisfy the conditions of a Mare Ring.  He’s not giving up or anything. That would be embarrassing for someone who’s playing the game so determinedly like he is. Rather, he’s… merely taking a break.  Of course, it seems like even when he’s taking a break to focus on other aspects of the game, he still ends up paying attention to Shoichi whenever he ends up crossing his path. Even if the route is harder than expected, Byakuran can still enjoy some aspects of it, especially when it’s not so pressing on his overall run. Shoichi is still surprisingly pleasant to indulge, especially when he’s so early on in the stage of things that the criminal aspect of everything aren’t so obvious. It’s easiest to enjoy Shoichi then, trading food and sharing earbuds to the same music and talking about how fragile and sturdy the world is in equal measure. When it’s only theories, it’s easier to get Shoichi to play along with it. In a way that Byakuran is slowly starting to get used to across his many lives, he inevitably turns on him sooner or later.  Sometimes a country’s government- usually Japan, occasionally Italy, America when it’s not a trashfire- will rope him in as an agent to keep track of him. Byakuran has to admit those lives are a little bit amusing, and he can never help playing up the cliche of it all when he can. The powerful mafia boss playing cat and mouse games with the determined cop, or secret agent, or general law enforcement… While he takes some time to relax in how he’ll next properly approach the Shoichi situation, he doesn’t worry about the end result, and merely enjoys the journey. There’s something to be said for an approach like that, especially when Byakuran uses Shoichi’s own handcuffs against him to pin him against the wall, teasing him about the lengths they’ve gone through with each other, and the sexual tension is thick enough for a chainsaw.  Other mafia Families clue in to the sheer skill that Shoichi Irie actually possesses, once every few lives, especially when the world begins to advance technologically so quickly that they have to start paying attention to engineers and those who are up and coming. Those realities are sometimes a little bit disappointing, because the destruction of the rest of the Families, especially those who have connections to the Vongola, are always the first ones he crushes underneath his heel. It’s a pity that he doesn’t get more of a chance to to with Shoichi in those lives.  Oh well. He’ll always have other rounds, other lives, other realities. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter.  Then there are the timelines where Shoichi takes things into his own hands.  This world has already been broken, shattered, vast expanses of ruined cities beyond the walls of his little fortresses where he experiments with his little civilization games. Here, people either submit, or they risk the destruction beyond that doesn’t deal kindly to those trying to carve out a life there. So with that said, he really has to marvel at the underground labs which Shoichi has created for himself. In the places where his people haven’t stormed through, covering the floor in dirt and dust of debris coating the walls, it’s impeccably clean. One of the few, perhaps the only, places where the grimy destruction of the world hasn’t seeped in. Befitting of such a brilliant engineer and technician, a defiled treasure trove of equipment fills the sparse amount of rooms that make up the shelter, and one has already completely self destructed with its remains utterly destroyed beneath the rubble. If they can recover enough, Byakuran has no doubt that the impact on numerous worlds would be immense. “If”… being the key word in that sentence. Shoichi is a genius in any of the worlds that bear his beautiful existence. For all that he can create, he knows exactly how to destroy it again. Almost more than Byakuran, Shoichi Irie has the perfect ability to completely destroy things, and yet he so rarely does it, save in moments like these where it’s to deny him everything he possibly can. His men corner Shoichi in a room that could, in some cases, be arguably titled as a bedroom. Byakuran has a closet that’s bigger. The mattress on the floor barely offers any substantial protection between the body on top of it and the hard ground beneath. The body on top of it has pressed himself back up against the wall with guns pointed at his face giving him no real option, and his hands are held up with the knuckles bumping into plaster. This one looks a real mess, Byakuran marvels, and he takes his time slowly looking over the engineer who’s been tirelessly and fruitlessly attempting to undermine him from beneath his very nose. A life of living outside of civilization has clearly taken its toll on Shoichi. What clothes are out here are basically as good as trash, and that includes the denim jacket on him that’s at least two times too big with more holes in it than Shoichi’s hopes must have by now, and the loose black tank top beneath it is hardly any better. That his actual pants and boots manage to fit, for all their worn nature, is quite impressive. Figuring out glasses in the wastelands has apparently not been a priority for Shoichi, because he’s squinting hard towards the armed men who can very easily take his life. It’s an action that almost makes him look more defiant than tired, than worn down to the very bone. He’s even disregarded scissors, possibly the most hilarious thing, because a good portion of his hair (definitely not all of it) has been pulled into a very lopsided ponytail near the right side of his head.  Lazily, Byakuran raises up a hand to dismiss his men. “Go look over the technology here,” he orders them, voice deceptively airy. Maybe it’s because of that which has them hesitate. Byakuran doesn’t, not when he levels them with a cold gaze full of threat, and that gets them moving again a hurry. He waits patiently  for the sound of heavy bootsteps to be as much in the distance as they can get before he steps forward to take up the whole doorway. “Hey there, Sho-chan. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” With the absence of armed guards, Shoichi collapses back a little bit, although his hands stay right where they are. It would be a gesture of anyone else in the same situation. “Yeah,” he says, voice following the same slump of his spine. “Yeah, it has. Years.” It didn’t take much for this particular world to crumble apart, after all. And yet, still he struggles to preserve it. The defiance is in more than the glare, now, and Byakuran marvels at it.  Hands in his pockets, Byakuran inclines his head to his old friend. “The offer is still on the table,” he reminds him. “Don’t you think that would be so much more appealing, Sho-chan?” He even laughs a little bit. “You’d be able to have a shower and everything! Maybe see things more clearly, hm?” Shoichi is filthy, thinner than in most timelines, and clearly has worked so hard that he’s not had the chance to sleep often. Even with every bit of that weighing down on him, he still slumps his shoulders with an annoyed huff. “Was that… an actual joke about my eyeglasses? At a time like this…” Even when everything is going at it’s absolute worst, he can still get that kind of reaction out of him. Byakuran laughs once more. “Well, it’s the truth, too!” Tilting his head ever so slightly to the side, Byakuran puts about the same amount of effort into the way his eyelids dip. “It’s all the truth,” he says, which is a lie. “The Sun Ring would be perfect on your finger,” he says, which is the truth. He’d left it back in the hands of the Sun Guardian he’d chosen for this world, once it had become clear that he would not accomplish his goal in this reality either. That meant, technically, there was no reason to make a claim on Shoichi in this world either. What purpose could he serve, besides potentially passing along more information to Byakuran in another world? And yet still he wants it. Wants Shoichi. Again and again, he’s courted and broken and threatened countless Shoichis, all for naught. Even if this world is useless…. He can only imagine the rush of satisfaction that would drown him if he managed to successfully capture one of the few individuals in all of his many existences who fascinates him so. Sometimes, in some places, he even almost ponders if Shoichi Irie is more his Player 2 than a love interest whose Good End he’s tirelessly chasing across numerous different realities.  Only a thought experiment in the end, that sort of thing. There’s a reason he ponders it more in the late night while some version of him drifts off to sleep, or turns over the idea while his body runs through the motions of a shower. If there is actually a Player 2 against his campaign in one of the many worlds, he’s yet to meet them, for one thing, and he’s fairly certain that there would be more of a fight than all of Shoichi’s desperate struggles.  Surely he must know it too, but all Shoichi does is let out a slow exhaled that scrapes up against lung and throat alike. Typical for someone who has dared to live out here in desolated wastelands. “I bet it would,” he says, a cough forcing a pause into existence. It’s too much for a body that’s become so thin and weak. “But my answer hasn’t changed, you know.” “So stubborn, Sho-chan.” It hardly takes a step before he’s within the room, and filling up a good portion of the space. A mattress can barely fit in here, so even with so little movement he’s already right between Shoichi’s legs. “It might be better for you over all if you just went along with it.” Smiling, he tilts his head to the side. He has no doubt that it’s as empty as he feels. “Everyone has a lot of questions for you back at my base that they’ll get out of you one way or another.” “Do threats actually ever help to convince anyone to do anything?” They don’t, and they never would with Shoichi. His lives have connected well enough that he is well aware of how Shoichi will stay true, even when he’s bleeding out, slow, alone. There’s always something beautiful about the way that fire burns right to the final ember of his existence. Byakuran thinks he could watch it for an eternity, if only he didn’t have the main story to get through first. Regardless, he leans down and forwards until he can pull Shoichi up effortlessly to his feet. Even with his clothing, he hardly weighs a thing, especially in comparison to Byakuran with immeasurable power behind him that could still grow so much bigger. “I thought you should at least know when you’re making a mistake,” he says, watching as Shoichi’s hands finally swing downwards. His fingers shake, quietly but violently. More from anxiety than ever any fear, Byakuran suspects, and always more exhaustion than anxiety. “We’re friends, Sho-chan, so, really, this is the least I could do!” This close, and Shoichi doesn’t really need to squint anymore to see Byakuran clearly. Weariness draws them a little further open, yet his gaze doesn’t shy away from Byakuran’s. In the world above them, in the world at large, so much has been dragged into ash and filth until brown and gray cover it as thick as any blanket. Even in places far away from civilization, the color seems to stick thicker than smog. Here, Shoichi’s eyes are still a deep green, so deep as to be untarnished jade, an oasis refusing impossible odds, poison that has burrowed past skin and flesh and blood and into Byakuran’s bones. “Friends, huh,” he says, voice a breath, an invitation.  “At the very least,” Byakuran murmurs before he accepts it, before he leans in and sweeps up those lips in a long slow kiss. Shoichi doesn’t push him away or, considering the atrophy of his body, make so much as an attempt. No struggle, no kick, no protest, not even so much as a bite. If anything, he actually leans in, palms pressing against the wall as if he’s chasing something, too. Only a centimeter keeps them separated when their lips finally part. Against all odds, the fire in Shoichi’s eyes seems to burn all the harder. Byakuran know the answer even before he wastes any breath on its opposite. “It’s still waiting for you."  He’s still waiting for him.  A kiss has hardly done anything for Shoichi’s chapped lips, the breath which rustles out from between them drying that brief wet respite. It’s hardly done anything for that look in his eyes, either. "Well, it’ll probably have to keep waiting.” Byakuran watches the muscles in his throat stick and bob, struggling for even a simple swallow. “There’s nothing else for me to do in this world. There’s no point.” On the technical aspect, he’s right, of course. The Tri-ni-sette cannot be completed in this world, even if he were to include Shoichi’s perfect brilliant flame to the Mare set. Everything Byakuran does in this particular world is only for his own amusement right now, even if that means dismantling society chunk by chunk, or seeing how far a group of people can be pushed before they shatter into pieces. Even Shoichi isn’t different from this. If he were to finally complete his route in this world, of all worlds, what would he do then? If this was Shoichi the bassist, he could have kept him sweet and separate from the dirty business of a world collapsing in on itself with his goading, could have ducked into their not-so-little apartment and played a more domestic game.  If this was Shoichi the student, he could fill his spare time molding him into something else, treat him customizable, put together all the pieces of a broken man until he wasn’t quite whole but certainly together.  If this was Shoichi the criminal… If he had stayed…  Well. There’s no world where Shoichi has ever stayed by Byakuran’s side as he’s reworked the world into something entirely different. It’s simply not a part of the route.  Byakuran accepts this easily, because he’s had to dozens of times before, in dozens of other incarnations. All he does is chuckle a little bit. “So pessimistic, Sho-chan!” “Optimistic, actually.” That’s certainly a surprise, and Byakuran has to pause, still smiling but with his eyebrows raised a little bit now. Shoichi grins at him, with just enough teeth to be a threat. He’s never felt threatened in all of his lives now, not since he was a kid in some life forgotten a long time ago, and yet that doesn’t take away the intent. “How long do you think you can keep this going, Byakuran-san? How many worlds do you think you can completely dominate?” “Ha. Well, Sho-chan, I think the answer should be fairly obvious, shouldn’t it?” He inclines his head back towards the door, hands preoccupied with Shoichi’s weight. “If I can do this much to this kind of world, then I doubt there are many others that will be as much of a challenge.” The real challenge is in completing everything, in putting together the exact right variables that will give him all of the Tri-Ni-Sette.  The real challenge is in completing everything, including finally keeping Shoichi Irie at his side.  Despite this fact, Shoichi doesn’t stop grinning, although some strength has drained from it. All his fire can’t give him the energy that his physical body lacks from little sleep and about as much food. “Well,” he says, “we’ll see about that. But nothing lasts forever, Byakuran-san. No one does.” And he grits his teeth together… and something cracks.  Later on, his doctors and researchers will marvel at the fake tooth layered over one of his real ones that had laid within Shoichi’s mouth. Such a thing would be delicate and tricky work even as a mere piece of art, yet Shoich had gone somewhere a little deeper. Literally, he’d gone deeper, apparently digging into old forgotten Estraneo strongholds and the secrets that had been abandoned a long time ago. An interesting invention- one of many, across many worlds, many mistakes- had been research into warping the body with the use of Sun flames via a set of specialized modified fangs. Creating a whole new jaw would have been impossible for even Shoich’s genius, at least with everything else he’d stacked up on top of his plate, and, considering the layout of the world, he’d probably never be able to get the necessary requirements for giving his body such base animalistic characteristics… But he didn’t need to.  All Shoichi Irie had needed was the base concept, the base technical aspects that could help active a Sun Flame within his body without the use of a Ring and change some internal trigger.  Sun Flames are activation. The Sun is energy. Too much energy, heart beating so fast as to burst, lungs quicker than the air they can absorb, mind falling apart from energy and crashing in on itself…  They’ll marvel at it all, the people he sends to investigate this, and a few will ponder if they can use this sort of technology to keep a tight rein on anyone beneath them, even if there will have to be obvious changes depending on the kind of Flame that one primarily has. Byakuran will let them ponder and experiment, because of course he will. In a world without any real goal, any real meaning to continue this particular save, he might as well, right? Yet he’ll never go on to use their findings, not in the way they intend, not even in other worlds. In the moment, in that underground bunker where Shoichi Irie lived out his last days frantically working on something that could never possibly have any meaning, Byakuran can only watch the way he jolts suddenly with an exhale so sharp that he breathes out blood… and then he goes limp.  Byakuran doesn’t smile. He can’t even act surprised. All he can really do, after a quiet moment of staring at a corpse, is lower it slowly back down onto the mattress he’s slept on for who knows how long.  Next time, then. If nothing else, he’ll always have next time.  “Byakuran-san, please, pay attention, I need you to have full understanding of the Merone Base, okay?” “I am paying attention,” he says, lips lilting up in a smile. It’s not wholly a lie. He’s always listened to Shoichi in multiple realities, even if he hasn’t listened to him on some occasions. So he’s intimately familiar with many ideas that Shoichi has brought up, some of them more solid in most realities than others.  The best realities for this sort of thing are the handful where Shoichi’s life has him meet someone born on an entirely different little island, separated from Japan by an entire continent. Byakuran doesn’t really mess with the workers on the lower end of things, which Spanner definitely qualifies as despite his own mechanical genius, but he keeps an eye on anything that is prone to influence Shoichi. In the universes where Shoichi Irie and the aptly dubbed “Spanner” meet, Shoichi almost always  comet collides into his talent with technology. Whether those are universes where Shoichi temporarily joins him… That’s a little more in the air. A coin flip, honestly, one of those things that is practically prayed to like the RNG in a gacha phone game.  That such existences are also the ones where Shoichi falls in love with another, where he burns so bright in a different direction, is something Byakuran is pretty sure he’s not jealous about. Why would he be? That happens in the occasional RPG, where your companions fall for each other if you never make a move towards them. Byakuran thinks of such occurrences, of such lives he’s lived with different lovers himself, and then stops thinking of them.  For this existence? This one in particular has Spanner working deep in the machinations of the Millefiore, not inclined to a leadership position that would take him away from the robotics that he loves so much. And Shoichi, in this one…  “Could you at least look at me when trying to feed me that lie?” Byakuran laughs again, shoulders shaking a little, before he rolls his head back along the couch to look at him upside-down. Shoichi the the Right Hand Man, the inevitable betrayer, stares right back at him before heaving out a sigh. Theoretically, he’s supposed to be clad in Millefiore lily white at all times, especially when dealing with official business here in Byakuran’s very own expansive office. Yet it’s a testament to the privilege Shoichi possesses that he can be half out of it already, revealing not a slick suit or combat ready tank top but one of his any ratty and worn band tees. If any of their subordinates caught sight of Shoichi in such a state, it would likely only further fuel the rumors Byakuran knows are out there, that Shoichi Irie slipped into his bed long before he slipped into one of the Millefiore uniforms. In some ways, they might almost be right, just never in the way they’d ever think to think.  If only Shoichi would want him enough to try and seduce him, and more than the simple fact that such a thing would be a hilarious experience. No matter the many different worlds, there’s always some… core to these characters. And it is a core part of Shoichi Irie that he’d never really be what one could call “seductive”.  “I’m looking,” he drawls, long and low, and something about all of it clearly has something to do with the way Shoichi jolts and his mouth twists. He doesn’t blush, apparently old enough to have restraint in some area even if not all of them, but Byakuran can recognize the little things like that. The Cheshire Cat smile on his face only widens. “What, Sho-chan?” “Byakuran-san, you’re…” A huff pops out of him and he strides over closer. “You know what, nevermind.” “Now now!” Byakuran laughs, reaching behind him to pull Shoichi closer once he’s in reach until his arms are folding over his shoulders and he can better see the schematics his supposed right hand is fiddling with. Still he keeps his fingers slipped through those reddish brown curls. They’re soft, comforting. A reminder that, at this stage in the game, he can still enjoy the little occurrences. Those are the kinds of things which help keep a person playing over and over again. “I encourage complete and total honesty in my subordinates, Sho-chan. It’s not good to bottle things up inside, either!” For all of Byakuran’s power- the physical where he’s become steadily good enough in close combat, the political and social where he could destroy a person’s life with a single message, the flames of his which burn through the barriers of separation and the barriers of flesh- For all of that, Shoichi in every iteration never seems to falter enough. He always manages to drum up a look of faint unimpressed exasperation, regardless of his situation. Byakuran likes the one Shoichi is wearing right now, the type where his fondness softens all of the harder edges until his affection bleeds through. If it ever becomes a dam, Byakuran suspects that will be one of the times when he’s won. “You only say those sorts of things,” Shoichi mutters, “because you find it funny when I get pissed off about things such as Glo Xinia and get petty.” “I don’t say it only because of that!” he says, even as he laughs. He laughs because it’s true, and he laughs at the ways it’s not, and because he’ll enjoy these moments where he can be with Shoichi with the Mare Sun Ring on his finger almost fake enough to make him think that this is a perfect run.  But he’s still waiting for that inevitable betrayal. There is always some core part, isn’t there?  Shoichi’s core has never made him take the final step into staying by Byakuran’s side.  Shoichi the Double Agent is a new one, although that only makes things a little more interesting. It also explains a lot, honestly, from how Shoichi had insisted on being able to take care of this younger Vongola with no reinforcements, to how he had kept their block against the Ten Year Bazooka’s effects so close at hand. Byakuran has to hand it to him- he could have been a world class actor in another world. Opposing him outright, or a heel turn at the last moment, those are the choices he’s used to. Yet he’d forgotten, in his apathy, that there was indeed a third option when it came to Shoichi Irie. There was nothing ever stopping him from going along with Byakuran’s plans while readying a knife for his back the whole while.  Faintly, he wonders if he would have bothered to stop any bit of Shoichi’s plot, at least in this world.  Probably not. All of his selves need to ignore at least one thing or go along with one plot if only to see how that might affect the timeline relevant to a completely different self.  It’s enlightening, too, listening to Shoichi explain the entire situation for the benefit of the younger Tsunayoshi Sawada’s group. While he likes to torment his many opponents with his supposed omniscience, Byakuran knows his abilities far better than anyone else. Certainly, he’s far closer to the very concept of omniscience than any other human would normally be… but he’s not quite there yet. If he knew everything, if he had the walkthrough guide to the game of his life, then he would have accomplished his main goal a thousand lifetimes ago instead of having it vex him so much. No, he only knows as much as any aspect of himself knows and shares with the rest of himself. He can’t be in multiple places at once, or, rather, he can, but they’re so detached as to something have no bearing on one another. Every life is its own, even as every life is him.  So, up until this point as he patiently takes in the meeting of his foes and Shoichi, he can’t ever have imagined that Shoichi the Underground Engineer had been thinking of this when he had questioned Byakuran’s ability to continue the game. It’s a brilliant play, a reality breaking move to match his own… and all he can do is smile, smile, smile. The inclusion of a love interest for the main character can really drag a game down, or raise it up to something so popular as to be overwhelming. A rushed and poorly thought out romance can dock a point or two from a review, while a truly heartbreaking or varied one can be the main reason why anyone even touches it.  Once upon a time, he had thought that Shoichi Irie had been just a minor side quest. Enjoyable enough on its own, sure, but no more than delving into a cave during a fantasy game for some quest or another. Entertaining in a mindless fashion. Yet even now, even without the Mare Sun’s quiet intense longing for a finger that won’t ever slip into it, he thinks that was foolish of himselves. Shoichi was never so simple as a minor side quest.  He was as vital a part of the main storyline as any party member, as any guiding NPC, as any fridged lover.  Byakuran wonders how he’ll die this time. Shoichi Irie doesn’t die.  Oh, he certainly does a lot of things that would logically lead to the death of most other people who attempted to do the same. He volunteers to be on the frontlines, despite lacking box and Ring both, staring Byakuran straight in the eyes as he says it. He helps control a moving tank of a headquarters to defend himself even when he’s being shot at. He removes himself from that tank, despite the metal being the best object of defense available to him, and forces exhausted legs to keep moving. He looks at the most powerful person in all of existence and makes demands of him despite the fact that he can’t even get up on his own two fee without assistance. All the while, he burns. Byakuran basks in it, even as he refuses to let this particular part of  the game go on any longer and denies all Shoichi would want for. This has always been a game between them, more than even the Vongola that so often seem to have a tendency of being his biggest obstacle in so many worlds. So, more than Tsunayoshi Sawada, more than the one of two remaining Arcobaleno in the world, more than anyone else, he savors the look of desperate frustrated outrage on Shoichi’s face. Out of his list of things he wants the most in the world, it’s not at his highest shelf, only perhaps in third place, and yet that’s more than good enough. Having that burning and sheering brightness focused on him alone will always place even when not in first.  Of course…. When first rolls around… When Yuni reveals herself, reveals that very puzzle Byakuran has been tearing over in so many places and times and lives, well, every gamer wants to get first place. Byakuran forgets him, save for the briefest flicker of a thought that he ought to thank him in one life or another for helping make this to be the run that finally succeeds. Loss is a new feeling, in more ways than one.  He’s lost his battle, and his war, fire stripping away flesh from bone, bone from existence. He’s lost the game.  He’s even, and especially, lost his sense of self as those flames do more than be rid of the physical. They sever him, completely, utterly, the changing of one blood red sky to something softer and quieter, and he’s never released how much was bearing down on his mind until it’s all been stripped away from him. In the last few seconds where he still exists- only himself, this self, this Byakuran Gesso who has lead this Millefiore family to where it is today in this very moment- there’s so much space to simply… think.  On a lot of things. On the very Player 2 that the Cervello once told him about, that Aria knew about with those amused deep eyes of hers, that a starving man in a lab cleaner than he was plotted so hard to bring into creation. On if perhaps this was perhaps a tester’s way of playing the game, but not how it was to be played. On if he had only been wistful when he’d seen a face twisted in quiet despair from beyond their little arena.  Next time. He wonders if there’ll be a next time.  “Just…. don’t? Alright? Can we please just, stop? I would appreciate it if you could stop. Just… stay in bed and don’t start a fight with the three other absurdly powerful people that are in this hospital.” Shoichi (the teenager, the young genius, thrice lived) tucks Byakuran into the hospital bed so securely like he thinks cotton will be enough to stop really anyone from doing anything. Byakuran lets him, and only partially because he’s surprisingly wore out. This, too, is a new experience, different from the many memories that still overwhelm him from other lives he knows but hasn’t lived. Then again, none of the lives that he’d lived had ever focused on anything but that one, singular goal. He’s never gotten to experience what it’s felt like to be shot at with full strength by one of the Arcobaleno, or seen just how much power the Vindice had been hiding beneath their dark coats for so long.  Not in many lives has he gotten to be so close to Shoichi like this, watching a face much younger than what he’s used to crumple up in an exhausted exasperation that apparently never aged a single bit since the day he was born.  It’s a brand new hospital room that he’s been moved to, now, and it’s completely empty save for the two of them. Everyone else who’d been present, those who would have been his Millefiore in another life, another future, have been looped into clean up efforts on account of the fact that none of them are so gravely injured like he is. Even Bluebell, although he’s fairly confident that she’ll do more playing than helping alongside the new friend she’d made as she’s been steadily absorbed into the Giglio Nero. That’s been slowly happening with all of them, he’s noticed quietly, and that’s probably for the better. He might not have the walkthrough guide for life- perhaps never had it- but he’s seen enough clips to know that they’d find nothing and neither would he if they stuck with him in the same path that he went down in one future that’s now ceased to exist for himself. The person at his bedside right now must know this as well, and yet.  “I don’t make any promises,” he tells Shoichi, smiling as the teenager slumps into a chair. He doesn’t look as bad as he could be, because Byakuran has seen him go through the full spectrum of destroyed and devastated and depressed…. but he does look dead tired, bags under his eyes better suited for the grave and his hair messy from lack of sleep or care. The frames of his glasses smack into his knuckles when he reaches up beneath them to rub at his eyes.  “I really wish you would.” Hands dropping down to his lap, he shifts awkwardly in his seat and glances back toward the closed door where armed guards are waiting just outside. For all his effect on the various aspects of reality, for the sheer potential of what he can do, Byakuran is always being watched. Yuni has accepted his assistance for this latest disaster, of course, but she’s surprisingly clever. That’s how she’d waited so patiently in another future, getting the Cervello into the perfect position to grant her access to the exact right place at the exact right time. Similarly, she’d agreed and complied with the Vongola when they’d requested surveillance on him. Byakuran doesn’t blame them. He’s not sure he’s still entirely attached to a lot in the world to do things like levy blame at anyone for just about any reason.  Shoichi is a direct contrast in that he doesn’t even remotely belong here, and everyone knows it. Everyone on Tsunayoshi Sawada’s side is a part of the Vongola officially now, with even the actual toddler being related to another mafia Family. The Varia, well, they don’t need any introduction to those who are a part of this life. The same can be said for Mukuro Rokudo’s lot, all criminals in their own right, and every single one of the Arcobaleno are wanted for their skills in both ways that can mean. Shoichi Irie is only a middle schooler at a good school whose family has been told that he was going to a tutor who could refer to him a good college while, the last some nights, he’s been involved in the life and death battles of overpowered criminal organizations and helping build a giant super robot that most college students could only dream of. If he wanted to wash his hands of everything, then he would have at least a 50% chance of success with how soft hearted the Vongola, Giglio Nero, and Cavallone could all be.  Yet here he is, one heel bobbing up and down through the air down to the floor while his hand remains loosely curled over his stomach. “I’ve killed you, you know,” Byakuran says casually, stretching his fingers along the too-clean sheets of his bed. From the corner of his eye, he can see Shoichi’s leg promptly freeze its jiggling. “In a lot of different timelines.” Even if it wasn’t directly, well, his hand was always buried deep in that particular pie.  It takes a long few seconds before Shoichi remembers to breathe. With his exhale, the invisible strings keeping his body upright seem to vanish and he slumps forwards. His hands curling into that curly hair are a sight Byakuran is intimately familiar with. “I know, Byakuran-san,” he says, polite even after all of this, across multiple realities. Polite even he sounds as though he would rather be having anything but this kind of conversation, preferably in a bed of his own somewhere.  Well, with how their first meeting in this particular universe had involved Shoichi yelling at everyone else about how he wasn’t to be trusted, it’s sort of a given that he knows. Regardless. “I thought you might need a reminder,” he replies, head falling back a little further into his pillow. Despite how long people can end up staying, hospital pillows really are garbage, he’s come to find. Even when the mafia is involved. And a little bit of the yakuza.  Shoichi’s fingers keep sliding further backwards, catching tangles and tugging free of them until he can rest them curved over the back of his neck. “Thanks for that,” he deadpans. As with many worlds, Byakuran seems to have a talent for getting rid of that patience, even in the times where Shoichi never holds it against him. With that, his head drops, glasses threatening to bounce right off of his face.  It occurs to him, then, that there might be something else responsible for the darkened skin under Shoichi’s eyes and the weight dragging his spine ever further down towards irreparable back pain. It’s something that he’s had to deal with for…. something that feels like years, but which he knows, by the way people quantify time, hasn’t actually happened. Yet that realization only makes Shoichi’s choice to be here over anywhere else in even this whole building alone a… puzzling mystery. His smile shifts a little bit, not as bright and careless, and he finally asks the question he’s been wondering for days and days now. “Why are you here, then, Sho-chan?” That gets Shoichi to looks up at him again, blinking a few times in pure befuddlement. “What?” “I’ve killed you a lot of times,” Byakuran answers patiently, still looking straight at him. This young, and his eyes seem a little darker than the brilliant green he has so many memories of. “I could kill you in this universe, too. So why are you still here taking care of me, Sho-chan? There are others you could get to do this.” Shoichi breathes in slowly again, and removes his hands from his neck with about the same speed. “I’ve been wondering that myself,” he admits. “But, Byakuran-san… You haven’t killed me yet.” …Huh. That actually wipes the smile from his face. When all Byakuran does is stare, head flopping to the side too quickly to be called a 'curious tilt’, Shoichi promptly flusters a nice red and jerks his shoulders up. “I know!” he snaps, which would be an overreaction if they didn’t know each other so well. Have known each other so well even without ever having met before in this lifetime before a little over a week ago, maybe. “I know the, the yet is kind of a, it’s a pressing point, there’s nothing guarantee that you won’t just…. do the same terrible horrible things all over again!” Every ounce of stillness is gone from him now. Free from their anchor along his own skin, Shoichi’s hands start to go flying everywhere as he gestures wildly. “I- I remember the kinds of things you can do, I know for a fact, and you’ve definitely proved that you can just… You’re not any weaker from that point in time, as far as I can tell! But I just-” He draws one hand back, raking it a lot more harshly through his hair than before. “I can remember you dying.” Brows drawn tight together, his eyes… They’re not burning, not in the way that Byakuran has become so accustomed to, and yet they’re an altogether different kind of intense that has him forgetting to even blink.  Shoichi says nothing more on that, says nothing on what was going through his mind as he watched even Byakuran’s very bones turn to ash on the wind. He doesn’t need to. In every lifetime of his that Byakuran has ever seen, his goal has always been to oppose him eventually, inevitably.  It’s simply never been a goal, he realizes then, that he’d ever reach with any element of personal happiness attached.  A single shuddering breath breaks the silence, and Shoichi continues with a trembling voice that’s only barely calmer than his frantic explanation from a second before. “But you haven’t killed me yet,” he repeats, like a spell. “Whatever will happen in the future, or any other futures, it just… It hasn’t happened yet. So I’m just going to deal with the now, with what we’ve actually done, before anything else.” That phrasing tips him off to what’s going on in that brain of his, and Byakuran eases back into his pillows a little bit more. “Hey, Sho-chan,” he says, making sure that he’s snapped out his own brain before continuing. When he’s sure he’s gotten his attention, Byakuran smiles. “You remember two different lives, hm?” His flinch says it all. Most of those who were tightly bound with that one particular future were, to his understanding and one way or the other, given some memories of the event. Byakuran’s knowledge of it is incomplete, admittedly, on account of that self being dead by that point, but he can extrapolate enough. The latest battle demonstrated well enough the combined abilities of the world’s greatest scientist, the unparalleled abilities of the Millefiore’s once-own professional Gola Mosca engineer, and everything that Shoichi Irie is. That sort of thing would have been easy enough for them to do, to the embarrassment of no doubt many other scientists in the world.  Yet there’s a problem with that. For all the others- the tenth generation of the Vongola, the reclusive and violent lot under Mukuro Rokudo, the Varia- they’d only remember the memories of that single time, perhaps an entire lifetime depending on what adjustments had been made for individuals such as Xanxus and Dino of the Cavallone. Yet even before he had died, Byakuran had learned enough to know that Shoichi Irie wasn’t anything like the rest of those who would remember that future, and in a way that had nothing to do with his favoritism for the other. Shoichi had been able to do what he’d done because a future version of himself had trapped a younger version of himself in his future long enough to suppress his memories of time travel, implant sleeper memories of that entire future along with plans to stop Byakuran, and then send him back into the past with the hopes that would stop something. Anything. By the time Captain Shoichi Irie of the Millefiore, double agent, had prepared his machine to let the Vongola’s tenth gen go back to their own time, he'd already been carrying the memories of an entirely different life and future around with him.  When Shoichi Irie the simple teenager had gotten those memories again, he’d remembered not just one other life, but two entirely separate ones, layered on top of the memories he has of his own life in this universe now.  Forcing himself to relax to what Byakuran finds to be mixed success, Shoichi leans forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands holding onto himself. “How… How do you deal with it?” he asks softly.  Byakuran jazz hands towards himself.  Shoichi squeezes his eyes shut in accompaniment to the scrunching of his mouth. “Alright, I- nevermind. I take back that question. It’s obvious how youdealt with it.” “Ha ha.” “Stop that.” Reaching up, he drags one hand down his face. “Please. Ugh, I think I’m going to be sick again…” “You’ve picked no better place for it, Sho-chan!"  "Please, just…. stop that too.” Sneakers scruffing against linoleum, he slumps backwards into his seat and delegates one hand to wrap around his stomach again. His other hand stays right where it is up against his face. “Okay, if you can’t… promise that you won’t get into a fight with the other super-powered forces of nature also being treated in this hospital, can you…” He falters, for a moment, no doubt remembering so many promises that Byakuran failed to keep. “…Just don’t do that again. Alright? Don’t… try any of those timelines again.” There’s a lot Byakuran could say about that, how he’s clearly lost so many rounds that he can at least gracefully step back from the controller, that he’s honestly become sort of tired after so many different livetimes where he worked so hard for something that he couldn’t get past…. But he doesn’t. That’s a conversation that can, maybe, come at a different time. For now, he only continues to smile slightly in Shoichi’s direction. “There are other things I want to do now, Sho-chan,” he answers, which isn’t really false in any way. It’s only simplified.  Shoichi takes what reassurance he can squeeze out of that response, nodding his head as if it’s made of lead. “Okay,” he says, quietly. “Okay. So I guess that’s… taken care of for now. I guess.” Even with armed guards, it’s good to see that even Shoichi is aware that Byakuran is only really contained when he wants to be. “Now all we have to do is just… focus on the present.” He whistles a breath out between his teeth. “Easier said than done.” While Byakuran’s own case far outdoes just about anyone else’s situation, well, that doesn’t change the fact that they’re both in the same boat of remembering more lives than 99.9% of the planet. How are they to move on so neatly, “live in the present”, when their minds are tied up in so many knot of other futures, other experiences, that they can barely stay put together? Byakuran nudges his hand a little closer to the metal railing of his bed, the failed purpose of which is to keep him in place. “Taking over the world is still an option, Sho-chan. And I’d still make you my Number 2, even.” The expression directed his way would be alarmed, if it wasn’t weighed down with so much exasperated annoyance instead. “Byakuran-san, what did I just say.” Prying his hand away from his face, Shoichi huffs. “Maybe Yuni-san would know… Even if I feel bad about bothering a little girl about this sort of thing. She wanted to talk with me anyway sometime this week…” Consider Byakuran’s interest stirred. “Oh, Yuni-chan wanted to talk with you? About what?” Rolling his head back, Shoichi is too exhausted to even look at him this time. “She wasn’t clear. Just that she wanted to talk with me and… Daisy-san…?” The sudden laughter that bursts forth from Byakuran’s mouth has Shoichi snap up in surprise. “What? What’s so funny!?” Grinning widely, Byakuran wipes away a tear of mirth from his eye with the heel of his hand. “Nothing big, Sho-chan,” he says, which is so transparent a lie that he doesn’t feel bad about it. Once again, he suspects he’s been outmaneuvered by a child, although the women of the Giglio Nero are so strange and otherwordly that perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised. He has a suspicion of what exactly she aims to speak to Shoichi about.  Which leaves all the burden of effort on him now, doesn’t it? He allows his eyes to slide shut, comfortable exactly where he is. This entire time, perhaps he’s been playing the game all wrong, gotten the objectives all mixed up. Perhaps this isn’t even the game he thought it was. If that’s the case…  “I think I want to try things your way, Sho-chan.” And, for the first time in so many lifetimes, he feels a light touch at his own hand in return. 

[rpgmgames]

September’s Featured Game: Ghost Hospital

DEVELOPER(S): Lev, Kip, Rose, Tredlocity, C, Bittersweet ENGINE: RPGMaker MV GENRE: Adventure, RPG WARNINGS: Anxiety, Body horror, Implied child harm SUMMARY: Ghost Hospital is a game about anxiety, depression, despair, mental rock bottoms, and, of course, ghosts. You play as Robin, a twelve-year-old girl who has an anxiety disorder and is very much alive in this hospital meant for beings that are not alive. Frankly, her anxiety was already bad enough before she landed in a hospital full of dead people, the still-shambling shells of ancient ghosts who try to take her down for a sweet taste of life, and the hospital directors hellbent on keeping her contained, and more importantly, away from the reason she's REALLY there. Thankfully, you have your new friends Jay and Sarcastic Ghost- Jay is a ghost about your age, and still a very new arrival to the hospital, and Sarcastic Ghost…well, he's an amorphous blob of a ghost, who talks a lot despite not having a mouth.

Download the demo here!

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! Lev: Hey, my name is Lev! I'm an artist and storyteller, and though I've wanted to make games for a long time, this is my first serious attempt! Most of my work is about my experiences in mental illness. Kip: I'm a freelance artist being allowed to write cheap jokes in ghost form. Rose: I'm a freelance writer and editor for the game! I also work on dialogue and story drafting. Tredlocity: My name is Tredlocity! I do some character designs and writing in the game! C: c / ghoul is a character designer, comic artist and Halloween enthusiast. They're currently apart of several indie game teams and are writing the webcomic, This Dark Forest of Ours. Bittersweet: I'm Kendall (AKA Bittersweet), and I'm the resident music person (one of two, technically, but the other left the project unfortunately.) This is my first (and thus far only) major soundtrack composition project, but thus far, it's been a satisfying one!

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially? *Lev: Ghost Hospital is a game about anxiety, and the game was born out of an idea to put someone in the shoes of someone with clinical anxiety and depression without going for the prototypical 'horror game' or 'walking simulator', giving more game-friendly, practical narrative and gameplay examples of how it effects people.

How long have you been working on your project? *Lev: The game started development in late 2016 as a thesis project for college. At its inital completion, it was more of a beta or proof of concept than a demo- in its current state, it's far closer to what we have envisioned for the final project.

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Lev: Absolutely! The biggest influences are OFF, Yume Nikki, and Sweet Home, and a lot of Gameboy Color graphics and aesthetics- namely, Pokemon GSC and the GBC Zelda Games.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them? *Lev: RPG Maker is a versatile engine, but still fairly restrictive, so getting all the effects I wanted to work was challenging. Mental illness and real life have been taking a toll on development time, too. Getting things to work took teaching myself some javascript, and after being in serious development for this long, I've found ways to motivate myself to keep working. Having other people checking in on you helps, too.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Lev: In its very first inital pitch, it was much closer to Yume Nikki, being more atmospheric and serious. At some point in character and world development, though, I couldn't bear to make it a stoic adventure, and with most of the stuff I already take inspiration from, it's hard for me to not put jokes into the media I make, anyway.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *Lev: At the beginning, it was just me working on everything. The first people I brought on board were my concept artist, Kip, my writer, Rose, and my musician, Bittersweet. I can't do music on my own, and I knew from word go that I wanted this to be the kind of game with a strong story and a lot of unique NPCs.

What is the best part of developing the game? *Lev: Call me biased, but the most fun part is making the art for it. It's hard for me to motivate myself to keep working if I'm just using default placeholder sprites, I have to make new NPCs to keep myself interested. It's not the most convenient, but it's fun to do, and it actually really does help with my workflow.

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *Lev: Oh, absolutely. RPG Maker games have a bad reputation for being very cut-and-paste, and there's a lot of those out there. But it just takes a bit of effort to make yourself and your game stand out, and it can be done absolutely beautifully! The latest one I've played was Hylics, completely surreal and wonderful.

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *Lev: Robin is a sort of proxy character for myself, so...I'm a bit biased on her. I love Jay a lot, too, he's kinda the friend I wish I had in elementary school when all this first showed up, haha. *Tredlocity: As someone who faces anxiety on a daily basis, I relate to Robin a lot. Though I would say my favorite character is Jay, since he can shoot plasma and has blue hair. *C: I'm partial to Coop [upcoming character], not just bc I designed them but bc I love big sister types. *Rose: I also relate to robin and jay! i try to control my anxiety while remaining positive and hopeful about situations. *Bittersweet: As an anxiety-riddled person, I relate immensely to Robin. However, my favorite character by far has to be Carna. (There's another character I'm particularly looking forward to when the full version of the game is released, though~)

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Lev: Honestly, there's a few things I wanted the game to be able to do at the start that I wasn't able to make happen. I spent a LOT of time trying to get it to work without having to go in and code it myself, and I wish I'd been able to take a step back, remind myself that this is my first serious project, and just stop worrying so much about what, in the end, would've been a minor detail, anyway.

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore the game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Lev: Chances are I'm gonna leave it alone, but if I go back, I HAVE had a bit of a 'Ghost College' AU where they're exploring a haunted old library on their college campus instead of being trapped in a ghost hospital. It'd probably be cool as a point-and-click adventure, but it wouldn't exactly be a canon exploration of the postgame.

What do you look most forward to upon/after release? *Lev: I'm actually working on a few other projects, so being able to work on those more freely would be great, especially considering I'm really bad at keeping my own limits in mind, haha.

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *Lev: Mostly, I'm afraid that making a game about a subject like this, as a minority and with other people in my team that would be considered minorities, that releasing this game to the mainstream public would get me a lot of negative attention from people who think that people like us don't belong in the gaming sphere. It's pretty nerve-wracking, but after the positive reception of games like Undertale and SLARPG, it's getting easier to convince myself that I should be more afraid of people just generally not liking the game, haha.

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Lev: Have someone to work with! DEFINITELY have someone to work with. Even if it's just a friend to bounce ideas off of or someone to ask if you've been working on the game, having someone else involved helps a lot. And specifically for RPG Maker- if you can, replace your default font with a different one. It's a minor detail, but it goes a long way towards making your game feel more original. *C: Always have a backlog of different projects. I have about four or five ideas constantly on rotation so I don't burn myself out on just one. *Tredlocity: My advice for any creatives is to start small, and just get it out. Feedback is a great motivator, and the only way to get better at something is to keep doing it! *Rose: I think some good advice is to write a few drafts of whatever it is you're working on in order to see which version you'd like to continue! let your work have different scenarios and situations based on various elements you insert or take out of a story, game, or other piece. *Bittersweet: Don't pressure yourself to a dead-set deadline. I know, you want to get this project out eventually, and if you're on a roll with development then all the power to you, but if you're struggling, don't let it burn you out. That's just unhealthy.

Question from last month's featured dev @toxicshroomswamp: How do you feel about your main character(s)? What piece of life advice would you give them? *Lev: I love my main characters, I love them like my own children. I would probably tell Robin that she'll learn to handle everything, it won't be so scary forever. I'd tell Jay that stopping for a minute and thinking is way more important than it seems. I'd tell Sarcastic ghost to shut up.

We mods would like to thank Lev, Kip, Rose, Tredlocity, C, and Bittersweet for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out Ghost Hospital if you haven’t already! See you next month! 

- Mods Gold & Platinum

[gwentoryfics]

okay thank you all for bearing with me this week 💕 i’m going to do a little summary of my adventures & the nct 127 concert after the cut (don’t want to take up too much blog space with this stuff since this is technically a pentagon blog). i should be pretty much back on track on monday, since i’m going to be traveling again this weekend.

if you don’t want to read below the cut: i’ve driven 24+ hrs for the sake of kpop and have 13 more to go, the concert was awesome AND i got offered the job that i’ve wanted.

yes, you read that right 24+ hours of driving. i moved to wisconsin about six months ago, but my best friend still lives in pennsylvania (where i’m from). so yes, i could have gone to the nct concert in chicago, but i drove all the way to pa (13 hours) so that i could take my friend to the concert in new jersey (which was another 4 hour drive). FRIENDSHIP.

she & i got to newark like 30 minutes before the concert started, got to the prudential center like 3 minutes before the concert started, and stood outside for like 10 minutes waiting for the freaking mobile tickets to load on my phone. cricket wireless sucks lmao but lesson learned: always load up your tickets at the hotel BEFORE you get to the venue.

thankfully we didn’t miss anything because they started about 10 minutes after 8pm. we had pretty good seats too, directly across from the stage and not too far back. i think they were technically p3 seats? i don’t remember.

the boys opened with cherry bomb, and each member got a little introductory dance break throughout the song. i don’t remember the rest of the song order, but they had a fantastic set list. there was a portion of the concert that was ballads & more mellow songs, and i nearly cried when they sang “no longer.” it’s not one i listen to very often, but i’ve never witnessed such heartfelt, vulnerable vocals live. it was so powerful and doyoung & taeil just simply amazed me with their talent (the other boys too, of course, but the two of them particularly stood out to me with the raw strength of their live vocals). 

they also premiered three new songs from their upcoming album and i’m so stoked for the new music to come out next month!! “jet lag,” “highway to heaven,” and “superhuman.” it was so cute - after “jet lag,” they paused to talk a little, and haechan said something to the audience to the extent of “that was so nice, didn’t it almost feel like we went on a date together?” and all of the other guys were like SDLKFJINIO STOP IT HAECHAN. 

after two hours, they wrapped up and said “we have just two songs left!” but of course everyone knows there’s going to be an encore. still, i saw people leaving after the boys left the stage, which was crazy to me. because once the boys came back, they premiered “highway to heaven” and “superhuman,” and i think they did some other songs too? WAIT after they did “superhuman” the oldest members went to get changed again while the younger members talked with us about the album. then the younger members changed while the older members did a contest to see who we thought was the coolest member lmao basically the whole encore added an extra 45-50 minutes of content. SO DON’T MISS IT.

anyway, the concert was incredible and nct 127 is so so talented and they all did such a good job with their english, too. they clearly put in a lot of work for this concert and i appreciate their dedication so much. 💕

after the concert my friend and i drove through the sketchiest part of newark to try to go to ihop, but ended up not eating there because it seemed so unsafe lmao probably the most stressful part of the trip.

yesterday after we left our hotel, we made a short trip to NYC even though we tell ourselves every single time that we’re not going to go into the city again. BUT there’s a kpop store and i wanted albums mwahaha (and also i needed more face powder from innisfree). i purchased the new stray kids & the new pentagon albums, and i’ll probably post some photos/videos of genie:us later. i’m so in love with it lol

got back to my house last night, and i have to drive another 3 hours today to get my friend back to her home. then i’m going to spend some quality time with my parents tomorrow, and on sunday my boyfriend, dog, and I are all piling into the car and making the 13 hour drive back to wisconsin. 

WAIT AND I FORGOT THE BIGGEST NEWS

I GOT THE JOB

AHHHHHH

there’s this healthcare software company that i applied to work for back in november. they had a technical writer position open (basically someone who writes documentation, nothing creative). i applied and got rejected after a phone interview. okay, whatever.

end of january, i decide to try applying again. i had added some freelance writing experience to my resume and i hoped that might help my chances. this time i was invited on-site for an interview. i think that happened towards the end of february? they said “we’ll let you know one way or the other in two weeks.”

two weeks passes, then another week, and another week. i kept getting in touch with my hr contact about it and she said over and over “i’m so sorry, we don’t have an answer yet but i’ll let you know as soon as we do.” okay, cool. i’ll be patient.

in the mean time, i took a job doing copy writing for a small marketing company. the healthcare software company finally got back to me at the beginning of april, saying that it’s a no this time. 

then last week, my roommate (my bf and i live with one of our friends) said he’s basically being forced to move to dubai for work, which means he can’t help us out with rent anymore, which means that my copy writing job will no longer be sustainable. i freaked out because now i have less than a month to get something figured out before he moves.

so i emailed my hr rep at the healthcare software company, saying ‘hey you considered me for a quality assurance position too, is there any chance that could work out since the writing position is a no go?’

and she got back to me this past monday saying ‘oh hey we actually just got approval to bring on more writers and we were talking about offering you the job. can i call you to chat about the details?’

UH YES OF COURSE YOU CAN

she offered me the technical writing job that afternoon, and i accepted wednesday morning. i’ll be making more than enough to support me and my bf (who can’t work right now due to a yet-to-be-diagnosed mystery illness - that sounds sassy but i swear it’s not, he’s actually very sick). i can actually afford rent and food for both of us and it’s like a huge weight has been lifted off of my shoulders.

i don’t start until the beginning of june, but i am so so so excited. i can’t believe that i can actually make a living wage doing something with writing. 

this ended up being way longer than i intended, and i don’t expect any of you to actually read this brain dump. i just wanted to share all of the fantastic things that are happening right now 💕

[oscopelabs]

3D, Part 2: How 3D Peaked At Its Valley by Vadim Rizov

I didn’t expect to spend Thanksgiving Weekend 2018 watching ten 3D movies: marathon viewing is not my favorite experience in general, and I haven’t spent years longing to see, say, Friday the 13th Part III, in 35mm. But a friend was visiting, from Toronto, to take advantage of this opportunity, an impressive level of dedication that seemed like something to emulate, and it’s not like I had anything better to do, so I tagged along. Said friend, Blake Williams, is an experimental filmmaker and 3D expert, a subject to which he’s devoted years of graduate research and the bulk of his movies (see Prototype if it comes to a city near you!); if I was going to choose the arbitrary age of 32 to finally take 3D seriously, I couldn’t have a better Virgil to explain what I was seeing on a technical level. My thanks to him (for getting me out there) and to the Quad Cinema for being my holiday weekend host; it was probably the best possible use of my time.

The 10-movie slate was an abridged encore presentation of this 19-film program, which I now feel like a dink for missing. What’s interesting in both is the curatorial emphasis on films from 3D’s second, theoretically most disreputable wave—‘80s movies with little to zero critical respect or profile. Noel Murray considered a good chunk of these on this site a few years ago, watching the films flat at home, noting that when viewed this way, “the plane-breaking seems all the more superfluous. (It’s also easy to spot when these moments are about to happen, because the overall image gets murkier and blurrier.)” This presumes that if you can perceive the moments where a 3D film expands its depth of field for a comin’-at-ya moment and mentally reconstruct what that would look like, that’s basically the same experience as actually seeing these effects.

Blake’s argument, which I wrestled with all weekend, is that these movies do indeed often look terrible in 2D, but 3D literally makes them better. As it turns out, this is true surprisingly often. Granted, all concerned have to know what they’re doing, otherwise the results will still be indifferent: it turns out that Friday the 13th Part III sucks no matter how you watch it, and 3D’s not a complete cure-all. This was also demonstrated by my first movie, 1995’s barely released Run For Cover, the kind of grade-Z library filler you’d expect to see sometime around 2 am on a syndicated channel. This is, ostensibly, a thriller, in which a TV news cameraman foils a terrorist plot against NYC. It features a lot of talking, scenes of Bondian villains eating Chinese takeout while plotting and/or torturing our ostensible hero, some running (non-Tom Cruise speed levels), and one The Room-caliber sex scene. Anyone who’s spent too much time mindlessly staring at the least promising option on TV has seen many movies like these. The 3D helps a little: an underdressed TV station set takes on heightened diorama qualities, making it interesting to contemplate as an inadvertent installation—the archetypal TV command room, with the bare minimum necessary signifiers in place and zero detail otherwise—rather than simply a bare-bones set. But often the camera is placed nowhere in particular, and the resulting images are negligible; in the absence of dramatic conviction or technical skill, what’s left is never close enough to camp to come back out the other side as inadvertently worthwhile. I’m glad I saw it for the sheer novelty of cameos from Ed Koch, Al Sharpton and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa—all doing their usual talking points, but in 3D! But it’s the kind of film that’s more fun to tell people about than actually watch.

But infamous punchlines Jaws 3-D and Amityville 3-D have their virtues when viewed in 3D. The former, especially, seems to be the default punching bag whenever someone wants to make the case that 3D has, and always will be, nothing but a limited gimmick upselling worthless movies. It was poorly reviewed when it came out, but the public dug it enough to make it, domestically, the 15th highest-grossing film of 1983 (between Never Say Never Again and Scarface) and justify Jaws: The Revenge. Of course I was skeptical; why wouldn’t I be? But I was sucked in by the opening credits, in which the familiar handheld-underwater-cam-as-shark POV gave way to a severed arm floating before a green “ocean.” Maybe flat it looks simply ludicrous, but the image has a compellingly Lynchian quality, as if the limb were detached from one of Twin Peaks: The Return’s more disgusting corpses, its artifice heightened and literally foregrounded, the equally artificial background setting it into greater relief.

The film’s prominent SeaWorld product placement is, theoretically, ill-advised, especially in the post-Blackfish era; in practice, it’s extremely productive. The opening stretches have a lot of water-skiing; in deep 3D, the water-skiers serve as lines tracing depth towards and away from the camera over a body of water whose horizon line stretches back infinitely, producing a greater awareness of space. It reminded me of the early days of the short-lived super-widescreen format Cinerama, as described by John Belton in his academic history book Widescreen Cinema (recommended). The very first film in the format, This is Cinerama, was a travelogue whose stops included Cypress Gardens, Florida’s first commercial tourist theme park (the site is now a Legoland), which has very similar images of waterskiiers. Cinerama was, per the publicist copy Belton quotes from the period, about an experience, not a story: “Plot is replaced by audience envelopment […] the medium forces you to concentrate on something bigger than people, for it has a range of vision and sound that no other medium offers.” Cinerama promised to immerse viewers, as literalized in this delightful publicity image; Belton argues that “unlike 3-D and CinemaScope, which stressed the dramatic content of their story material and the radical new means of technology employed in production, Cinerama used a saturation advertising campaign in the newspapers and on radio to promote the ‘excitement aspects’ of the new medium.” There’s a connection here with the earliest days of silent cinema, short snippets (“actualities”) of reality, before it was decided that medium’s primary purpose was to tell a story. It didn’t have to be like that; in those opening stretches, Jaws 3-D’s lackadaisical narrative, which might play inertly on TV, recalls the 1890s, when shots of bodies of water were popular subjects. This is something I learned from a recent presentation by silent film scholar Bryony Dixon, and her reasoning makes sense. The way water moves is inherently hypnotic, and for early audiences assimilating their very first moving images, water imagery was a favorite subject. It’s only with a few years under its belt that film started making its drift towards narrative as default; inadvertently or not, Jaws 3-D is very pure in its initial presentation of water as a spectacular, non-narrative event.

If this seems like a lot of cultural and historical weight to bring to bear upon Jaws 3-D, note that it wasn’t even my favorite of the more-scorned offerings I saw that weekend, merely one that makes it easiest for me to articulate what I found compelling about the 3D immersion experience. I haven’t described the plot of Jaws 3-D at all, which is indeed perfunctory (though it was nice to learn where Deep Blue Sea cribbed a bunch of its production design from). I won’t try to rehabilitate Amityville 3-D at similar length: set aside the moronic ending and Tony Roberts’ leading turn as one of cinema’s most annoyingly waspish, unearnedly whiny divorcees, and what’s left is a surprisingly melancholy movie about the frustrations, and constant necessary repairs, of home ownership. There’s very little music and a surprising amount of silence. The most effective moment is simply Roberts going upstairs to the bathroom, where steam is hissing out for no apparent reason and he has to fix the plumbing. The camera’s planted in the hallway, not moving for any kind of emphasis as the back wall moves closer to Roberts; it doesn’t kill him and nothing comes of it, it’s just another problem to deal with (the walls, as it were, are settling), made more effective by awareness of how a space whose rules and boundaries seemed fixed is being altered, pushing air at you.

Watching a bunch of these in sequence, some clear lessons emerge: if you want to generate compelling depth by default, find an alleyway and block off the other half of the frame with a wall to present two different depths, or force protagonists to crawl through ducts or tubes. This is a good chunk of Silent Madness, a reasonably effective slasher film that, within the confines of its cheap sets and functional plotting, keeps the eye moving. It’s an unlikely candidate for a deep-dive New York Times Magazine article from the time period, which is well worth reading in full. It’s mostly about B-movies and the actresses trying to make their way up through them, though it does have this money quote from director Simon Nuchtern about why, for Bs, it’s not worth paying more for a good lead actress: “If I had 10,000 extra dollars, I’d put it into lights. Not one person is going to say, ‘Go see that movie because Lynn Redgrave is in it.’ But if we don’t have enough lights and that 3-D doesn’t pop right out at you, people are going to say, ‘Don’t see that movie because the 3-D stinks.’” Meanwhile, nobody appears to have been thinking that hard while making Friday the 13th: Part III, which contains precisely one striking image: a pan, street morning, as future teen lambs-to-the-slaughter exit their van and walk over to a friend’s house. A lens flare hits frame left, making what’s behind it briefly impossible to see: this portion of the frame is now sealed off under impermeable 2D, in contrast to the rest of the frame’s now far-more-tangible depth. The remainder of the movie makes it easy to imagine watching it on TV and clocking every obvious, poorly framed and blocked 3D effect, from spears being thrown at the camera to the inevitable yo-yo descending at the lens. (This is my least favorite 3D effect because it’s just too obvious and counterproductively makes me think of the Smothers Brothers.)

Friday the 13th was the biggest slog of the 3D weekend, and the one most clearly emulating 1981’s Comin’ at Ya! I am not going to argue for that movie, either, which is generally credited with kicking off the second 3D craze; it’s a sludgy spaghetti western that delivers exactly as its title promises, using a limited number of effects repeatedly before showing them all again in a cut-together montage at the end, lest you missed one in its first iteration. It’s exhausting and oddly joyless, but was successful enough to generate a follow-up from the same creative team. Star Tony Anthony and director Ferdinando Baldi (both veterans of second-tier spaghetti westerns) re-teamed for 1983’s Treasure of the Four Crowns, the movie which (two screenings in) rewired my brain a little and convinced me I should hang around all weekend. This is not a well-respected film, then or now: judging by IMDb user comments, most people who remember seeing it recall it playing endlessly on HBO in the ‘80s, where it did not impress them unless they were very young (and even then, perhaps not). Janet Maslin admitted to walking out on it in her review; then again, she did the same with Dawn of the Dead, and everyone loves that.

An unabashed Indiana Jones copy, Treasure begins strong with a lengthy opening sequence of tomb raider J.T. Striker (Anthony) dropping into a cave, where he’s promptly confronted not only with a bunch of traps but, for a long stretch, a small menagerie’s worth of owls, dogs, and other wildlife. There are a lot of animals, and why not? They’re fun to look at, and having them trotted out, one after another, is another link back to silent cinema; besides water, babies and animals were also popular subjects. The whole sequence ends with Striker running away from the castle above the cave, artifact retrieved, in slow-motion as Ennio Morricone’s score blares. There is, inevitably and nonsensically, a fireball that consumes the set; it unfolds luxuriously in detailed depth, the camera placed on a grassy knoll that gives us a nice angle to contemplate it looking upwards, a nearly abstract testament to the pleasures of gasoline-fueled imagery. Shortly thereafter, Striker is in some European city to sell his wares, and in every shot the camera is placed for maximum depth: in front of a small city park’s mini-waterfall, views of streets boxed in by sidewalks that narrow towards each other, each position calibrated to create a spectacular travelogue out of what’s a fairly mundane location. There’s an expository sequence where Striker and friends drop into a diner to ask about the whereabouts of another member of the crew they need to round up. Here, with the camera on one side of a bar encircling a center counter, there are something like six layers of cleanly articulated space, starting with a plant’s leaves right in front of the lens on the side, proceeding to the counter, center area, back counter, back tables and walls of the establishment. Again, the location is mundane; seeing it filleted in space so neatly is what makes it special.

The climax finally convinced me I was watching forgotten greatness. This is an elaborate heist sequence in which, of course, the floor cannot be touched, necessitating that the team perform all kinds of rappelling foolishness. At this point I thought, “the only way I could respect this movie more is if it spent 10 minutes watching them get from one side of the room to another in real time.” First, the team has to gear up, which basically means untangling a bunch of ropes—clearly not the most exciting activity. The camera is looking up, placed below a team member as they uncoil and then drop a rope towards the lens. This is a better-framed variant of the comin’-at-ya principle, but what made it exciting to me was the leisurely way it was done: no more whizzing spears, but a moment of procedural mundanity as exciting as any ostensible danger. Basic narrative film grammar is being upended here: if a rope being dropped is just as exciting as a big, fake rip-off boulder chasing our hero down the cave, then all the rules about what constitutes narrative are off—narrative and non-narrative elements have the exact same weight, and even the most mundane, A-to-B connective shot is a spectacular event.

This isn’t how narrative cinema is supposed to work, and certainly not what James Cameron’s conception of good 3D proposed. The movie keeps going, building to a bizarrely grim climax involving a lot of face-melting, scored by Morricone’s oddly beatific score, which seems serenely indifferent to the grotesqueness of the images it’s accompanying. (This is a recurring trait in the composer’s ‘80s work; the score for White Dog often seems to bear no relation to the footage it’s accompanying.) That would make the movie oneiric and weirdly compelling even on a flat TV, but everything preceding convinced me: 3D can be great because it’s 3D, not because it serves a story. I’ve spent the last decade getting more angry about the format than anything, but that was a misunderstanding. Treasure of the Four Crowns is, yes, probably very unexceptional seen flat; seen in all three dimensions, it’s a demonstration of how 3D can turn banal connective tissue and routine coverage into an event. The spectacle of 3D might never have been its potential to make elaborate CG landscapes more immersive, something I still haven’t personally been convinced of; as those 19 non-CG shots in Avatar showed (undermining Cameron’s own argument!), 3D’s renderings of the real, material world and objects have yet to be fully explored. 3D’s ability to link film back to its earliest days is refreshing, in the way that any rediscovery of forgotten parts of film language can be, while also encouraging thought about all the things narrative visual language hasn’t yet explored, as if 3D could take us forwards and backwards simultaneously. In any case, I’m now won over—ten years after Avatar, but better late than never.

[parttimestorier]

Interview with d Marie Licea

Recently, I had a chance to talk with d Marie Licea, developer of Us Lovely Corpses, about the creative process behind this fascinating “surreal-horror-romance” visual novel. Us Lovely Corpses is a VN I considered reviewing for this blog when I read it, but I struggled to write a review that would be interesting and accessible—explaining the parts that most impressed and resonated with me would mean spoiling it completely. But I encourage anyone who can handle some disturbing content in service of a great story and heartfelt message to try it out. This interview will start with some more general questions, and it includes a warning farther down before any spoilers for Us Lovely Corpses appear.

Question: Did you always plan for the story of Us Lovely Corpses to be a visual novel, or did you consider other mediums as well?

Answer: In its earliest stages, Us Lovely Corpses was actually planned as a comic! I came up with the original idea somewhere around 2014-2015—it was going to be about 10 pages, and would just cover the scene that ended up being the game's finale. Alex and Marisol (who weren't named yet) were very different—they were much younger, Alex wasn't really "a witch," and Marisol was originally a boy!

I sat on the idea a while, and the longer I did so the more I wanted to explore the history of these characters, which made for a longer and more unwieldy comic. Then in 2015, when I started learning about visual novels, it hit me that the concept could work really well in that format, especially when the "exploration" element came in.

Q: Were there any particular visual novels that influenced you?

A: Yes! The reason why I started getting into visual novels specifically in 2015 was that because that was the year We Know The Devil came out!

We Know The Devil totally shifted my viewpoint as to what a visual novel could be—no diss to dating sims, but before WKTD, I, like most people, just saw VNs as dating sims and occasionally something like the When They Cry series.

WKTD totally changed that for me—a short, incredibly contained story that also managed to be about so, so much, in a surreal, horror-inspired atmosphere . . . it really blew me away! Not only was it the game that got me into visual novels, but you can definitely see a lot of its influence on Us Lovely Corpses.

Besides WKTD, there was also Her Tears Were My Light, a fairly minimalist love story that used the "rewind" function in Ren’Py as part of the story. Utilizing mechanics as part of the narrative was a really cool idea to me that also ended up in ULC. (side note: I met and hired Alex Huang to do the music for Us Lovely Corpses because I loved the soundtrack for HTWML so much!)

Finally, I was really into the original Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney) trilogy when I was younger, and the evidence gathering segments were a big part of those games. I originally envisioned the "rose clipping" segments of ULC like those parts, where you'd have to select each rose before cutting it, but sadly that was a little too complex for me at the time, and I eventually decided to go for something more simple in order to complete the game. But that initial idea was a big part of what made me try Us Lovely Corpses as a game, so it ended up still being a big influence in the end!

Q: Besides technical things like those mechanics and the exploration element, do you find that you have a different style of writing in visual novels as opposed to the stories you've done in other formats, like twine and comics?

A: I'm not sure if this is always the case for visual novels, but I find I have to format my writing differently when writing for VNs—specifically, in length of sentences and paragraphs. I've found my writing worked a lot better in Us Lovely Corpses the more I broke everything up into smaller fragments—larger ones or paragraphs didn't work as well, which can be a problem for me because my writing can tend to get a bit wordy!

This has to do a lot with the pacing of visual novels and how the player/reader is a big part of that. Control over pacing is a big part of why visual novels appeal to me, but you also have to think differently to get the best result.

Technical stuff aside, I found that, at least for ULC, my actual writing style remained pretty much the same. I think this has the benefit of making the writing in Us Lovely Corpses seem unique, but has the disadvantage of posing a problem for a certain something I didn't see coming at all: Let’s Players!

A few people have made videos of their playthroughs of Us Lovely Corpses, which is incredibly exciting, but when I watch them, I can't help but feel bad for them because they always read everything out loud . . . which means, with my somewhat wordy style, they have to do a LOT of talking!

I haven't actually gotten complaints about this or anything, but I still hope people who make videos of their playthroughs of ULC keep some water nearby!

Note: the next part of the interview contains spoilers for Us Lovely Corpses, as well as discussion of mental illness.

Q: As the story progresses, it becomes explicitly clear that the “monster” is Marisol’s bipolar disorder. Did you ever think about leaving the metaphor more ambiguous, and if so, what made you decide to be so direct instead?

A: I'd say if the "monster" was one specific thing, it would her Ocular Rosaceae, as it's the one specific thing that gives a physical form to Marisol's thoughts and unhealthy behaviors. But even that, in a way, is not taking into account her bipolar disorder and depression, her jealousy towards Alex, her self-loathing and introversion . . . "the monster" is all of those things, because at its core, the monster is mental illness. And mental illness is never just one thing, but many things and factors interacting at once to create something much bigger than a single diagnosis.

All that said, it's not incorrect to say that Marisol's bipolar disorder is the monster; it's just more accurate to say it’s part of Marisol's monster. Back when ULC was still a comic, I wasn't going to talk about specific diagnoses, but as the story grew I realized I wanted to talk more explicitly about mental illness. I don't exactly remember where the idea came about, but early on in the writing process I got that idea in my head of Alex finding that fake corpse and finding that doctor's diagnosis. In retrospect, it was a really, really weird scene, especially as it comes right off the heels of realizing what you thought was a dead body was just a weird joke, but I do like what it represents—in the middle of this surreal trip into a house filled with talking flowers, the story suddenly halts as you soak in this very blunt reminder that, magic aside, this is a world that is representative of the real world. Marisol may have a magical disease and be best friends with a witch, but she's a very real girl, so to speak.

So that harsh reminder is part of why I wanted to be so direct. I guess the other part would be that I just wanted to make no bones about it. Some things you want to leave up to interpretation, and some things you don't. From the very, very beginning the story was always about mental illness, so it just felt right to me to be upfront about it.

Q: One thing I noticed that I thought showed a lot of attention to detail in ULC was that in one of the rooms you explore there are two famous paintings that both have connections to suicide (Millais’s Ophelia and van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows). Are there any other little symbolic details like that you added to the story that some readers might have missed?

A: Ah, I'm glad you caught that! If I had stuck with the more Ace Attorney style of gameplay I would have liked to put more small details like that in. As it stands, the big example is probably pretty obvious—Alex's notes about each rose are fairly close to the standard "flower language" of different rose colors in real life. The fact that yellow roses can mean "jealousy" or "friendship" depending on what source you use actually ended up working very well with the story.

The last names of Alex and Marisol are probably pretty obvious: de Rosa ("of the Rose") and Flores ("Flowers"). Something that's probably less apparent is Marisol, a name that originally comes from a contraction of "Maria de La Soledad" ("Our Lady Of Solitude"), one of the titles given to the Virgin Mary.

Q: Was the flower language the reason you used roses rather than any other flower, or were there other inspirations for that as well?

A: There were a number of reasons! One being that Revolutionary Girl Utena was a big influence on my style and particularly on several parts of the game. There's also the whole dichotomy with roses/thorns. And there's also the simple fact that I have fun drawing roses!

Q: For my last question, are you working on any other visual novels right now?

A: I am as a matter of fact! I'm working on a visual novel set in Japan about some high school kids who explore a strange house. It's still in fairly early stages, but I think if I give it my all I will actually have a demo ready in time for Halloween, which would be great!

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing that demo—even more so after learning about all of the serious thought d Marie Licea puts into the details and themes of her work. If you’re as excited as I am about updates on her upcoming projects, you can follow her on itch.io or twitter, and considering supporting her patreon. Thanks for reading!

[markrichardson]

My Year in Spotify Listening

Like a lot of people I checked out the Spotify year-end summary thingy, and since Spotify is only a certain percentage of my listening, the results were surprising, and I tried to figure out what it meant. In general, I listen to new music via iTunes, if I am sent promos. That only encompasses a certain amount of new music of course, but if I’m sent a download, I tend to use that for my listening all year long. Often, I’m “done with” an album more or less by the time it comes out, but sometimes I’ll keep listening (as w/ DJ Koze this year) and I do that with my promo files. My Spotify listening tends to be a mix of things I stick on a few different playlists based on mood or genre, and they could come from anywhere (but they aren’t usually new). 

In terms of my favorite artists (Bill Evans wound up in my top spot, somehow, followed by Joni Mitchell) it was hard to figure out how it’d happened, because I didn’t spend the year obsessed with either. Then I looked at my 100 most played songs, and that did bring back a few things. I’m not sure if the whole list is in order, but the first 5 songs in the playlist are the 5 listed when Spotify gave me my most-listened-to tracks of the year, so I think so? Anyway, that’s what I am going with here. This is how my Top 10 songs show up on the playlist, in order, with one exception: in the middle of the list was Bow Wow Wow’s “See Jungle,” which I already wrote about on Tumblr 8 years ago (and about which I have very little to say now, except that yes I do still listen to this song a fair amount), so I’ve omitted that and included No. 11. 

Wussy: “Runaway” This was my favorite song of the year, it has 600 plays on Youtube and 5,400 on Spotify, which makes me a little sad. Technically it’s not from this year—Wussy put this out on a small-release tape or CD-R a few years ago—but I’m still counting it. This is the rare case where the streaming media playcounts tend to match the responses of folks I’ve talked to about this song—I mentioned to 4 or 5 people, and in each case they said “Yeah that’s kind of nice I guess...why do you like it so much?” I’ll try to answer that here.  

First I should say that I have no real interest in or knowledge of Wussy. They’re an indie rock band from Ohio, most notable at this point for the fact that Robert Christgau loves them, and has written rapturous reviews of their work over the years, which surely has helped them to achieve whatever small amount of notoriety they have. I checked them out here and there but they didn’t make much of an impression on me. I wish I could remember how I came across this particular song, but I can’t, probably either Twitter or a streaming media algorithm. But I loved it immediately, like, stop-what-you-are-doing-and-listen kind of loved. It just clicked. 

The first thing that comes to mind is the chorus: “I love you, let’s run away.” That’s the theme of so many of my favorite songs, I mean, the first album I bought in my life was “Born to Run,” and if you could sum up the first three Springsteen albums in in 6 words, “I love you, let’s run away” wouldn’t be bad. And I think I liked that this song didn’t try for poetic phrasing, just said it in the simplest way possible.

But the romance of a song like this has a shade of darkness to it, and that draws me in even more. Escape is never a long-term strategy. Eventually you have to figure out how to make life work when you’re in the thick of it. So while it’s such an appealing dream to exit the world with someone you’re crazy about, there is a shelf life to that sort of gesture. I relate to this idea of being fed up with everything in the moment and wanting to jump in the car with the only person who gets you, but eventually, the car is is going to need gas. What then? 

I didn’t know when I first heard this song that it was a cover, so the immediate impact of it was as a Wussy song. But I learned that it was written and recorded by another Ohio artist that people in the band had known, a woman named Jenny Mae. She died last year. Pitchfork did a news story on her passing. She was 49. And when I found that it was her song, I listened to her version and I loved it almost as much (but not quite), though her take also made my Spotify Top 20. I did think enough of her version to order the 7-inch, which was her first release. When I read about Jenny Mae’s life, the song took on another layer of meaning. She suffered from mental illness and self-medicated with alcohol. And she was described by people who knew her as brilliant and creative and hilarious but also impulsive and self-destructive. Which for me gives a sentiment like “No one likes us anyway / I hate my job / Sweet, sweet are the innocent / I love you, let’s run away” and “40 ounce between your legs/ Shakin up my heart / Turn around and look at me / Light another smoke” a different tint. These are the kinds of things you say when in the throes of a rush of feeling, but they’re not impulses you can safely follow for a lifetime, even though goddammit, sometimes I want to.

Bo Diddley: “Nursery Rhyme” In Richmond early this year I bought an old Bo Diddley album called The Originator. I saw it in a used bin, it was $20, and, it was pure instinct, I had a feeling it was interesting. For me, buying used records, $20 is a fair amount of money, I don’t pay that for something I’ve no idea about, typically. But something compelled me to pick it up. I was intrigued that it had none of the hits I knew. And I took it home and when I put it on a short while later it blew my mind. This surprised me because on the one hand it sounds so much like the idea of “Bo Diddley” I keep in my brain, the one rhythm we know from the song he named after himself, but this was just so controlled, so well rendered, with so much atmosphere. The whole thing is brilliant. I became particularly obsessed with this cut from the record, and then I started exploring the “Bo Diddley” beat in general, reading whatever I could about it and listening to examples. This kind of random deep-dive is the best thing about the internet era for a music fan. 

Mulatu Asatke: “Tezeta (Nostalgia” At nights when I hang out with my Mom at her condo in Michigan I play music over a Bluetooth speaker I bought a year ago. My Mom’s default has for a while been to put the television on, but at some point I asked her about playing music instead so we could talk or just hang out, and she grew to like it. Sometimes we’ll chat about stuff, and sometimes she will play Candy Crush on her iPad while I do things on my phone, which sounds distant but is actually very comforting to me. One of the things I’m doing on my phone during these evenings is finding songs to play. It’s quite fun (and interesting) for me to say to myself “What is a playlist that would make my Mom happy?” and then try and figure out what that might be on the fly. She was never really a music person so I don’t have a lot to go on, mostly her age, a story or two about a song she liked, and a vague knowledge of what she might have heard on the radio in my lifetime. 

In September, my Dad died, and I stayed with my Mom in her condo for a number of days that month. I felt a strange mix of feelings. On the one hand, he was father, I missed him, I thought about never being able to talk to him again, to not be able to share the things in my life. I thought about the fact that I wouldn’t be able to learn more about his life, my knowledge of which is pretty sketchy. There were all the usual things a person would be sad about. But then there was the fact that he had a severe and debilitating case of Parkinson’s disease for the last eight years, and at times he suffered so terribly. I remembered how on a few occasions he called me while he was delusional, he would tell me that he was sure he was going to die. One time, he told me that he saw someone in the driveway who was going to kill him. Another time, he said that it was hard to explain but that he had been split into two people, and he couldn’t take it, he was terrified. I told him that it would be better tomorrow and he yelled, “I’m going to be dead by tomorrow!” I would get calls like this while I was walking to work in Brooklyn 700 miles away, and I would feel so helpless. And so when he passed, I thought about him during situations like that, and also felt like maybe not he had some peace. 

A night or two after my Dad died I was sitting with my Mom, talking, and playing music. She dug out some old photos and we were looking at them, pictures from her in high school that I had never seen. I wanted to see everything, learn every detail. And over that Bluetooth speaker I was playing some random playlist I had found called something like “Jazz for late night.” I wanted background music. And while we were hanging out and talking, this song came on, “Tezeta” by the Ethiopian jazz bandleader Mulatu Astatke. And man, it’s hard to describe, but the mood of this song so perfectly captured the exact feeling I had. The phrase that comes to mind is “bombed out,” that’s the way it seemed, like I’d been beaten up and thrown in a ditch and my ears were ringing and now I was trying to reorient myself after all that had happened. There was a feeling of weariness and sadness but also a feeling that life continues, that we have to gather our memories and keep on. And this impossibly beautiful song captured every bit of that, the one-chord riff moving ahead, in spite of it all, while the sax line captures all the sadness dripping off everything at the same time. I listened to it constantly in the weeks afterward.  

Galaxie 500: “Fourth of July” (live) One of my favorite songs by one of my favorite band in my favorite version. This song is indicative of how (as with all songs on this list) when I’m in the mood I can listen to one track over and over. On a couple of occasions in 2018, I listened to this maybe 8 or 9 times in a row, immediately hitting “back” when it had finished. And the thing I was typically listening to was Naomi Yang’s bassline, which to me holds the lion’s share of the song’s feeling. Her bass playing in Galaxie 500 is so incredibly emotional to me, and it was never more so than here. 

Pusha T: “Infrared” The one truly “new” song on here.” I didn’t have an advance of this record so I listened on Spotify when it came out and I loved it. And this song in particular seemed so perfect, the carefully constructed rap, executed as if it’s coming off the top of his head, the sample—I listened to this many times in a row on a few occasions, and it also sent me to revisit Clipse, which brought me a lot of joy. 

Joni Mitchell: “Carey” Another song about freedom, but here it’s real. Blue is a perfect record but I probably revisit this one more than any other single song because I’m so in love with the production—that bass, that hand percussion...sonically, an album recorded almost 50 years ago simply cannot be improved upon. I remember hearing this one on AM radio when I was very young. It was a single, b/w “This Flight Tonight,” one hell of a 7-inch. I’ve always thought the picture it painted was so incredibly romantic—”Maybe I’ll go to Amsterdam, maybe I’ll go to Rome / And rent me a grand piano and put flowers 'round my room.” Hey, why not! And if Carey is indeed keeping her in this tourist town, we know it’s only for another hour, another day, another week, whenever she’s ready, she can’t be tied down. But then, that’s the future: this night, now, is a starry dome, and we’re alive, inside it. 

Arthur Russell: “That’s Us/Wild Combination” Sometimes w/ my favorite Arthur Russell songs you can hear the strain as he creates a new genre trying to get a particular unnamable feeling across. But not this one. Sitting in a room with his friend Jennifer Warnes he made a song that feels as natural as a breath. 

Carole King: “Pleasant Valley Sunday” I’m in awe of Carole King’s ability to write songs that sound perfect on the radio. Even if her prime hitmaking years only lasted a bit over a decade, the number of her songs with her name on them that left a huge mark on culture is staggering. Her demo for the Monkees hit “Pleasant Valley Sunday” shows how perfect everything was before the artist who would bring the song to the public got anywhere near it. I found this one on Youtube 8 or 9 years ago and it’s been in regular rotation since. 

Hank Williams: “The Angel of Death” In February and March I was doing research my Pitchfork Sunday Review on Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska. It’s one of my favorite records, and I’ve wanted to write something long on it for years, so spending time w/ it as the winter wound down was an intense pleasure. It’s common knowledge that Springsteen was listening to a lot of Hank Williams when he was writing the album, and when I came across this song, I became obsessed with it. One, the melody sounds right off Nebraska, and “My Father’s House” (another song I listened to a lot this year) especially seems directly modeled on it. But this song has so much going for it on its own. It’s about death and the moment of judgement, but Hank’s melody and phrasing don’t sound frightened. It’s hopeful, a prayer instead of an admonishment. 

Guided by Voices: “Motor Away” I’ve loved this song for years but I listened to it intently around the same time I was playing the Hank Williams, when I was thinking about leaving Pitchfork. I’ve never been a big fan of Robert Pollard’s lyrics (though I love many of his tunes), but he second line here is the one I couldn’t put out of my mind: “When you free yourself from the chance of a lifetime.” That’s where I felt I was. Editing this music magazine that I cared so much about was the culmination of a dream that took a long time, a ton of work, and a fair amount of luck to realize. When the chance of a lifetime comes along, you’re supposed to hold on to it as tightly as possible for as long as possible, until someone finally pries it away, which will happen eventually. I knew that. And yet, deep down, I knew that after 11 years, I wanted to try something else. Run away, motor away, drive away. Sometimes a song can give you the tiniest push.

[voidfishersong]

Fallane and Eliza Fate, please

Alright, these two are from different ‘verses just fyi. so any supernatural elements are very, very different, as well as social situations.

WARNING: Fallane’s contains reference to some things that might be triggering. nothing in-detail, but please be advised.

Full Name: Fallane

Gender and Sexuality:

 male-ish but with a rising intonation and a hand-wiggly gesture. sexuality is definitely just a hand-wiggly gesture, we think he has a slight preference for men but tbh no one cares

Pronouns:

 he/him. if you used other ones he probably wouldn’t object but if you asked he’d say ‘he/him’

Ethnicity/Species:

 Egyptian. and he’s like,,, vaguely a demon but not actually. he’s

supposed

 to be one of the generals/servants/sextoys/whatever of AN ASSHOLE who reincarnates every 30 years or so, possesses a young girl, and makes everyone’s life hell but he said ‘nope that’ and (mostly) left. so he’s not actually a demon but that’s what his kind got characterized as by various mortals and usually he doesn’t correct people

Birthplace and Birthdate:

 like literal ancient egypt in like 2,700 bc or smth

Guilty Pleasures:

 I don’t think he’s guilty about any of his pleasures.

that came out way more sexual than I intended

I just meant that he likes things and he’s not ashamed of it

Phobias:

 ahhhh this ‘verse is so dark help. I’d say sexual assault is pretty high on the list. I think he’s also a bit claustrophobic. more than a bit. he’s very claustrophobic he just doesn’t get into many situations like that

What They Would Be Famous For:

 he could be a model? like actually. he wouldn’t but he

could

. he’s got a wicked fashion sense and is really good at makeup. ooh he could model makeup too

What They Would Get Arrested For:

 can u get arrested for smoking indoors? he would. or shoplifting. he likes petty crime because either a) ‘this shouldn’t be privately owned and private ownership is just a social construct’ or b) ‘haha what are u gonna do, catch me?’

OC You Ship Them With:

 Sam!! Sam Reeve x Fallane is best ship. you could also ship him with Kai but Sam is most perfectest. I made a ship name for them but it’s lame and I’m not sharing unless u dm me. I also ship Fallane with a healthy lifestyle but that’s never gonna be canon so

OC Most Likely To Murder Them:

 does Nara canonically murdering him count? there r a lot of ppl who want to murder Fallane so I feel like this is an unfair question. Kai genuinely hates him for a large part of the story. ahaha Kai canonically kills him too jesus christ Fallane you’ve been killed three times you gotta chill. but I think Nara would be more likely to succeed than Kai so. the answer I pick is Nara. in a sarcastic way tho it’d be Mista, who is so done with his shit and she’s the type to say ‘im going to murder you’ when he like, puts his feet on the table or something

Favorite Movie/Book Genre:

 mystery? anything he can sarcastically criticize the plot of, tbh. maybe horror

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche:

 if he’s a horror fan, then it’d be where any time someone says ‘dont do this’ the person does it and dies. I think he definitely dislikes the ‘aliens are always technological experts’ cliche like what if the explorers are anthropologists with no clue how their ship works?? did you ever think of that?? no you didn’t

Talents and/or Powers:

 his main talent is sarcasm. he’s very gifted with picking up languages and accents, and he has a high appreciation for all forms of art. in the supernatural realm, he’s got a lot. he’s a natural low-level empath, and then he got powers on top of that, which made him nigh immortal, gave him rly cool wings, and magical charisma (which is like subconscious suggestion, except,, magic) which he mostly uses to convince people he’s paid for shit he

hasn’t

 paid for. in the name of disabling capitalism, of course, and not because he just wants the pillow. then he’s also got some extradimensional abilities which are often interpreted as a kind of telekinesis but isn’t technically. and his empathic abilities get turned up to eleven until he can project so hard he can accidentally (or purposefully) kill someone

Why Someone Might Love Them:

 if you’re about grey moralities, ambiguity, and anti-heroes, you’ll probably love Fallane. he’s also very protective, and a single dad of energetic twins so there’s no shortage of relatability, either. but I think a lot of his charm comes from his interactions with other characters, because he feels very strongly and brings many things other characters are afraid to say. there’s a weighty sense of honesty with him, and a real desire to do right by the world and help the downtrodden. he also struggles with trauma and mental illness and he’s really, really messed up but he

tries

 and sometimes he fails and I think people will find a surprising amount to identify with. Fallane is my ultimate walking contradiction, but I think it works.

Why Someone Might Hate Them:

 I feel like he’s a character people would be just indifferent toward UNTIL people started being apologists and saying he does nothing wrong and then he’d be one of those characters that the fandom just splits on, as polarizing ends get increasingly more argumentative. he can be manipulative too and I think people might take issue with things like that, but I feel like most people who would actively hate him would be misinterpreting him. he’s not supposed to be a paragon of good morality

How They Change:

 in the first few waves of this ‘verse Fallane was a definite villain, if a hero-aiding anti-villain. then I decided villains were overrated and now there’s no villains, just a complicated mess of varying degrees of grey morality. in canon, this is reflected. he goes from a certain ‘I can’t do anything substantial about it so I just won’t bother’ to someone who

acts

 on his desire to combat discrimination and abuse. he also gets his family back, and gains a little sister, and he’s constantly learning how to love (in every way) and how to

live

.

Why You Love Them:

honestly?

because

 he’s learning how to live. much of Fallane’s backstory (and his role-switch from anti-villain to anti-hero) came from when I got over being suicidal, so he’s sometimes a comfort character. ngl, I also love his aesthetic. I’m also a bit biased because he has ocd and I have ocd and that’s relatable too and it makes his aesthetic

extra

 relatable. he’s also incredibly emotional and that’s always an adventure to write. I really love Fallane guys.

also this ao3 tag is like the greatest descriptor of him:

Full Name: Eliza Fate

Gender and Sexuality:

female, bisexual

Pronouns

: She/Her

Ethnicity/Species:

English. and she’s a vampire so uh yea

Birthplace and Birthdate:

England and uh….. like…. idk….. a long time ago

Guilty Pleasures:

both slow and fast jazz music. also she’s surprisingly good with children - I like to think that sometimes, she volunteers at daycare-like-places in the shadier parts of town where there’s too many kids and not enough workers and she just helps out these toddlers and teaches them to jazz dance, the way you teach little kids anything, which is hold them and pretend they’re following anything you’re saying

Phobias:

I don’t think she’s phobic of anything, but she’s afraid of losing her family. they’re very important to her and I think her deepest fear is that someday she’s going to wake up completely alone. she’s not afraid of any one person leaving (obviously she’d be upset), it’s just the idea that

everyone

 could disappear

What They Would Be Famous For:

she’s kind of famous within the criminal underworld because she’s like a mob boss, and she’s mostly famous for having a very large family, and for being independent. she went almost two centuries without a right-hand man/woman/etc which, especially as a woman, was quite unique

What They Would Get Arrested For:

I mean she already murders ppl and runs a mafia so that

could

 get her arrested, but if she ever got caught it’d probably be something like she murdered a child abuser or something really,

really

 violently and not well-planned

OC You Ship Them With:

 Itsuki, who’s her canon boyfriend, and Andrea, who’s her canon girlfriend. she’s poly and her relationships are usually open relationships, including with those two. I also ship her hardcore with Katsumi, although that’s a very different dynamic (1960s lots of drugs and alcohol and free sex and it’s about pushing each other further and further and not always healthy but they know that and it’s okay). I feel like Eliza would be really great for romance fanfic because you can go with many time periods!

OC Most Likely To Murder Them:

 Rin. boi Rin has wanted to murder her since he met her probably, he just hated her on principle and then Eliza went and decided she liked Itsuki so Rin hated that and

then

 she started dating Katsumi too and so she’s in love with both his roommates and that pisses Rin off. it’s funny.

actually it’s often really depressing because they end up blaming each other for Katsumi’s death and just about everything else and I think Rin might actually wish she had never existed but

usually it’s a sarcastic ‘I would murder you right now Eliza I swear’

Favorite Movie/Book Genre:

 slice of life. I think she likes the variety and the normalcy of it all, and she usually thinks the couples are cute. her least favorite genre is probably mystery

Least Favorite Movie/Book Cliche:

 love triangles. they’re way, way overdone. also they invalidate the possibility of poly or open relationships. on a less serious note, she hates any mystery story that ends with like ‘the detective was the culprit all along!’ there’s not really a reason why she hates that but. she does. I made her I make the rules

Talents and/or Powers:

 powers: well, she’s a vampire. talents: charisma. she is very good at getting people to understand her viewpoint, when she puts her foot down on something, which is rare. she’s also good at dancing. and very good at sex too apparently. she’s good with children too! but only really smol ones, once they get above like 5 they’re usually assholes

Why Someone Might Love Them:

 she’s strong, and independent, and I think she’s over all a good person. she doesn’t take shit from people, but she doesn’t assume that people

are

 giving her shit. she’s quite easy-going, all-in-all. she’s also really loving to her family, and in many ways she fulfills feminine roles, but the way she does them and the way she thinks about them are empowering, I think

Why Someone Might Hate Them:

 when Eliza was first conceptualized in mid high school, I was terrified that people would see her as bad representation because she’s not morally straight

and

 I worried that making her bi and poly would make people angry. but I think I’ve mostly gotten past that? idk. but I definitely think people might dislike her for her constant relationships - she doesn’t do well if she doesn’t have at least one datemate, and people might see that as too dependent or needy. she sometimes comes across as needy, so there’s that. I think there’d definitely be Eliza Fate stans and Eliza Fate haters

How They Change:

 you get to see her progression from the civil rights era to present day, and she does change a bit, but overall she’s one of the most stable characters in this ‘verse. she really learns to accept rejection, and since she adopts a literal child (Nayeli) into her family and doesn’t raise Nayeli with any expectations of her joining the Family, I think she learns to work with people during their formative adolescent years, too

Why You Love Them:

Eliza is a character from the second wave of this ‘verse, so she’s quite old to have changed so little. I also love how she can differ depending on the time, so her roles change depending on the context. her personality doesn’t really change between any of them, but she’s a very complex character (a side effect of having been in my head for at least 5 years) and you can actually

see

 all her facets. also she’s a mob boss mom??? like that’s cool idk she’s super suave and i’m gay

[applegelstore]

Hey! Just wanted to drop by and say I really love your art and seeing your content! Along with the ideas you speak of sometimes. It's so nice to see because it looks like you enjoy what you do. It's an inspiration, really. I also wanted to ask, what's your inspiration? And what keeps you motivated? And this next one might be a bit personal, but do you have moments of self doubt? How do you deal with it?

Hi! First of all, thanks a lot for the ask, I don’t get personal questions about my art very often, so it’s very cool to see that some people are actual people and not porn bots, and are actually interested in the things I post!

Now for the actual ask, which I’ll totally have to divide into parts. I’ll also set a cut because it got hella long. Now, let’s go!

I have a very bad habit of word vomiting whenever I post art. It’s not only ever since I’ve started binge drawing Zesty fanart, I’ve pretty much always been like this ever since I started posting art on the internet about… 12 years ago at the very least?It used to be a lot of musing about the art itself (like, “what do you think, should I have tried this or that?” or “I had trouble with this thing” or “I actually like how whatever turned out”), which is probably due to the fact that teenage me had still a lot to learn and wasn’t afraid to admit that and ask for advice. I mostly posted my art online to get some peer advice.Nowadays, I am still aware of my shortcomings, but I don’t talk about the technical aspects of my art that often anymore. Nowadays, I have two reasons for posting art online: 1) I’m trying to make a living out of this shit, so naturally I’m trying to make as many people as possible aware of the fact that I exist. 2) I just wanna talk about the thing ™. Honestly. Never underestimate either of these points. That’s why there’s very often so much text and ranting in the tags. Because. I. want. to. talk. about. the. thing. I have an unholy amount of sticky notes on my desktop with ideas of things I’d either like to do because I think it would be subjectively cool, or because it might be a good addition to my portfolio. (spoilers: the former usually gets done like a decade earlier)I’m very glad that the sparks fly over and it shows that I love the things I love! ♥The result is novel-length descriptions for single sketches and tag vomit, though, lol.

“I also wanted to ask, what’s your inspiration?”

There’s no easy answer to that. First of all, it sounds a bit as if I was actively looking for inspiration. Which I am not. As I said, I rather have too many ideas and end up scrapping an unholy amount because even if I only do doodle shitpost sketches there’s no way I can do it all in a lifetime. I don’t know whether you had been implying that I actively look for inspiration or not, but if you did, let me tell you that I don’t. If you didn’t mean to imply that, no harm done.However, that doesn’t mean I don’t GET any. Because of course I get my inspiration from all kinds of places. I don’t watch a lot of movies, but I love going to the cinema and hearing the sounds and get eye candy (I love epic shots with the camera panning over landscapes and cool action scenes. Also, go watch The Secret of Kells, everyone). I always come out of blockbuster movies feeling like I wanna do something epic, too. I always listen to a whole lot of music, too, and there’s way too many songs that make me want to tell stories, and that plant pictures in the cinema in my head.(there was a time before Tales of Zestiria when I did original art and most of my paintings had some kind of musical inspiration lol. My stories, too).

Then there’s style and subject matter.Style first. I stopped aiming for a specific style pretty early on (like, late teens), and just accepted what came to me and works for me. The result is the weird anime not quite anime semi realism mixture that I have going, and the ratio usually varies depending on what I currently want to do. If I gave you a list of my favorite artists, you’d probably be surprised how little my own art has in common with theirs.Subject matter? WELLLLLL my original stuff comes from what I told you above, additionally, I studied medieval literature for a reason, and I loved mythological tales from my teenage years onwards. I’m much less enthusiastic about them now, but it used to influence my original art for quite a few years.…Also, I obviously like to do fanart. Like, a lot.

Also spoilers: I obviously love Zesty a tiny bit too much, because for no other fandom the streak of fanart has ever been holding up for two years and still counting without an end in sight, and I’ve never come up with any AUs, either. Usually my ideas went straight into original material, and this original material usually got top priority, but here it’s different, and I’m not sure whether it’s a good or a bad thing, haha. So basically don’t wait for my original stories* until I’m either a) done with the Zesty fandom or they’ve united and kicked me out or b) I’ve actually drawn at least four more full scale elaborate illustrations, have created the four or five AUs that I keep doodling for and ranting about, and I have finally run out of steam. Bets are up what happens first.

If you want specifics, it’s always easier to determine inspiration for a particular piece than in general. It can be so many different things.

* Although I still very, very much like some of my ideas and would actually love to do them. I just love to do low-effort Zesty fanart more XD. Shocking! But honestly, I am as surprised as anyone else that my muses shifted as much as they have, and mid-twenties me would never have guessed she’d fall into this rabbit hole in no time…

“And what keeps you motivated?”

I never… really needed to push myself to be motivated. It’s always been intrinsic. I had pictures in my head, I wanted them out. So I had to learn how, and do it. I have ideas in my head. I want to share them. I very much like this thing others have made. I want to tell the entire world how much I love it, so I do by drawing fanart. Simple as that.Positive responses (and asks like this!!) are a great motivator to POST art, but not to DO the art. The latter is intrinsic.Actually, probably TOO intrinsic. Because I keep drawing the things I WANT to draw and not those which would teach me new skills and thus help with “make money with art” thing. So I guess it’s a bit of a mixed bag, haha.I started drawing daily instead of just regularly at some point during my master’s studies, so roughly 8-5 years ago? Whenever I’m on the road or beaten by illness or bad feelings, I sometimes only manage very simple, super bad sketches, but it’s better than nothing. Luckily, it’s not like that every day (still more often that I’d like to, though).

If you’re wondering:Yes, I’ve had artblocks. Usually not in the sense of “I don’t have ideas”, but VERY MUCH in the sense of “I don’t feel like any of the ideas I have right now” and also “nothing I touch turns out the way I want it to turn out”. To all artists out there: it goes away. Believe me. Your stupid period will be over next week (to the guys out there: that’s not a joke. It DOES affect my general condition). It will be better the moment YOU feel better from whatever you’re currently suffering from.Yes, I’ve also scrapped ideas not because I didn’t like them after all, but because I tried and just failed repeatedly at executing them. Yes, I’ve had such bad times in life that I didn’t want to do ANYTHING. That included art. I just. didn’t. want. to. do. anything. Sometimes I still have these phases, but at least it no longer lasts for months straight without break.

“And this next one might be a bit personal, but do you have moments of self doubt?”

Pfft. Of course. Show me an artist who hasn’t. I’ve learned by now that you can acquire every skill you want. The question is whether you have the time and the will for it. If I had started drawing daily much earlier in life, and if I’d practiced more of the things I’m not good at instead of doodle shitposting, I’d be at an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT level than I am now. Even if I had STILL studied what I studied as I did (as I said, medieval literature, nothing art related). I’ve been drawing ever since I could hold a pencil and my parents have always been supportive, so that wasn’t a problem, I just wasn’t aware all these years that it could be something future me might want. Past me couldn’t have KNOWN. It’s okay, in a way. I can do the things I WANT to do by now. Not always as majestically as the ideas deserve, but it does the job. I don’t need to be able to do hyper realistic portraits, or hyper detailed interiors of space ships, for example. (it would be cool to be able to draw musical instruments tho. I’d love to learn 2D animation, too, but WHEN??) In short, am I aware that I’m not god and that my skills are limited in comparison to many other artists? Yes. Is that a problem? No.Do I doubt whether I can do my job, though? Very much yes. Because successful freelance artists don’t only need skill, they need to sell themselves, and I suck at that most epically. Do I miss the times when I didn’t even think about becoming better but simply drew for fun? Pretty much, yeah. Do I miss the times when I still had the ability to concentrate on elaborate, large paintings? Yes, I do. But I can’t turn my brain back to 10 year old. So I’ll have to deal with what I have now.

If you’re wondering whether I had moments of self doubt about my ideas, then, yes, very super much yes. I am convinced that the things you produce should be what YOU want to see. I want to draw what I want and tell the stories I WANT TO SEE AND READ. As I said, I’m doing it because I want these things to exist. Does it still hurt if nobody else likes these ideas? Yes, yes it does very much. It’s not even that I start thinking my ideas were bad, but that I start thinking “Nobody understands me and nobody will ever be able to like me because they don’t like my ideas, and my ideas are part of me”. Which is true, but it is ALSO true that you do not have to like every single idea some other person has to like them or be friends with them, I am aware of that, but if I may be honest here, it’s still a thought that I can’t quite get rid of, and still gets me angsty whenever I share some of my story ideas with anyone.

“How do you deal with it?”

I don’t. Ahem. Truth be told, I never really developed a proper coping mechanism for failures, and I don’t exactly like that about myself, but I still haven’t found a proper solution. As much as I stress that I do the things I do because I actually want to, I also told you that it scares me to see people disagreeing. It’s not only art related, whenever I feel I messed something up (school ie. marks, socialisation, whatever), it eats at me for days or even weeks until something positive happens (like, better marks, a compliment, anything). I don’t really like it, mostly because it starts a vicious cycle, but that’s how it is. I had surprisingly little problems with that during my university years because I had good marks, but I still mess up at least 50% of all the social interaction I do. It’s not always that easy with art, either.Story time.I remember one conversation with an artist who’s teaching art classes at my (ex) university, like, portrait drawings and flower paintings. So at some point when I started trying to live on art, I asked her whether she’d be interested in offering classes for other art styles as well, like comic drawing classes. She said she’d be interested, so I wanted to talk to her in person, but she never replied to that email reply. I decided to be bold for once, grabbed my portfolio, and went to her after one of her classes to show her what I’m doing. Put on the spot, she admitted that she didn’t reply any further because she didn’t like what I was doing. It was good from a technical aspect, but it seemed dull and uninspired to her, like something she had seen too many times already.I was devastated.I’ve always had to deal with underwhelming responses from peers and friends, too, but I also got some really sweet reactions and genuine support, so it was kind of a mixed bag, overall. I wasn’t used to that kind of harsh rejection of who I am.

Am I also very, VERY petty and jealous? Hell, yes. I get VERY jealous whenever I see people whose art is on my level or below but they still manage to make money with it, and have 10-100 times the amount of followers I have and/or get more enthusiastic responses online. It just makes me angry. The only way of coping I’ve ever found is stay the fuck away. I KNOW that it’s not these people’s fault if I’m jealous, and goddamn, freelance artist life is hard enough as it is. We don’t need to tear other apart. Surely they worked their asses off to be where they are. Heck, I’m friends with some. I keep away from those people so I can calm down and stop being angry, before I start lashing out at artists just because they get the attention they need and deserve. It’s not THEIR fault that I need money and also reassurance.

The only thing that ever worked for me to overcome any of these issues is just continue nevertheless. Keep doing what you’re doing. Remember what you love and why and JUST KEEP DOING IT. Even if you don’t see the point right now. Chances are you will see that point again. Maybe you never will. But IF you ever do, you want to make damn sure that you didn’t drop the ball in the meantime. There’s that saying that you can lose if you fight, but you can’t win if you never fight. It’s true. Be stubborn and show the world your middle finger.Spoilers: I’m teaching comic style drawing classes for the “rivaling” institute now. Always only in super small groups and it’s badly paid, so I don’t know for how long I’ll be able to keep it up, but it’s a start, right?

I hope that answered your questions!

Last remark: always remember, kids: you HAVE to produce the content you want to see yourself. Nobody is gonna do it for you unless you pay them. So. I’m doing it. Against better judgment, lol.…and watch The Secret of Kells.

[troubleblurose-blog]

My Dumbass 5SOS Experiance // Part Uno

I know exactly what you’re thinking. I know, because well, I am one of you. The 5SOSFam that is; I made it sound like we’re our own separate alien race. But look at the people we stan... It makes a little too much sense, doesn’t it? Not even a paragraph in, and I’m already unraveling a conspiracy theory like Shane Dawson. You know him- “You look so fucking something, in my underwear while she wearing them! There’s my poop stain, on her butt.” Yeah, that funny motherfucker. 

You’re probably thinking- ‘Oh, just another fan who really wants the same thing I do.’

I’m not gonna pretend, or lie to make my situation seem special. You’re fucking right, that is exactly who I am. We all have our bumps in the road, after all, we’re all human. Or aliens, I don’t really know anymore. It’s not only science that has gone too far at this point, I am now a contributing factor to the random things that make you question what the fuck this world is becoming.

I’m not about to level with you, or give you a sob story. It could seem that way, but every detail I write is a detail I wouldn’t ever erase. Every problem I’ve encountered, or dumb ass decision I’ve written is something that made me the well rounded person I am today. These are past events, though I am currently handling some of the debris of them. I’m still coping with illness, and things like that. When I write these events, just know, while they are awful I am used to them. That sounds bad, but I don’t know any different. They do hurt greatly at times, but that’s just building more character and strength in the end. 

-Trigger/Graphic Event Warning-

Let’s start out simple and #relatable; I struggle(d) with:

Bi-Polar Depression (Mood swings between extremely jolly, and devastatingly upset.) 

Anxiety (Having a hard time staying composed in times of little stress, or in many social situations.) 

Insomnia (Getting little to no sleep/getting no well-rested sleep at night.) 

Self-Harm (Hurting yourself in ways such as eating disorders, or various forms of mutilation.)

Suicide (Trying to end your own life.)

Those are the things this is somewhat covering, but by no means are they the point I’m trying to make. They aren’t what make up me, and they aren’t what make up this letter. 

To understand the substance of the seemingly overused words on your screen, you need to know a bit about who I am first. Otherwise this could seem like every generic fanfiction. You know what I’m talking about. Eyes are always called orbs. Every meeting involves someone spilling something on someone else. Dicks are always refferred to as members. Calum is usually an asshole with a tragic life story. Mikey is usually a bad boy; who gets a soft spot for the main girl for some unknown reason. Ashton is either super sweet in his old dad way, or a complete arrogant prick. Luke, well he always bounces between popular and nerdy often. Have I made my point?

I’m gonna get relatable again when I say, there isn’t a lot I’m good at. When I am good at something, it has no use in my daily life. I can’t divide fractions, but I can hit every note in guitar hero. I can’t socially interact, but I can make bomb-ass Turkey Bacon Cojacks. I don’t know where all the states are, but I can rap Migrane. My skills are only useful to me, basically. My point being, I was practically useless in class. When I was staying home from school on the normal, from avoiding my problems and lack of motivation, I felt so useless. Like as useless as a newspaper is to a teenager. 

We all have some activity that makes us feel important, though. To Donald Trump, it’s putting down anyone who isn’t a straight white male. To Bo Burnham, it’s making people laugh with his odd perspective and unique means of comedy. Me? It’s always been when I’m on stage. I love hearing my voice being amplified to bring together people from all walks of life. When I’m writing lyrics, I feel like every syllable can make a difference in someone’s life. There’s just something thrilling about worrying you’ll sing the wrong lyric, and doing so because you were worrying about it. 

I’m not gonna say this was always my passion; when I was younger I made a very motivational speech about wanting to be a mermaid. “I WILL be a mermaid, and I WILL live under the sea.” If you think that’s odd, I know of a kid who wanted to be a trash compactor. After I discovered I couldn’t grow a tail, and I ended up not being a fan of swimming in a casino, I wanted to preform. That’s been my dream since I can remember. I’ve always been pretty witty, like I’d have to leave my wit behind   before boarding a plane it’s so sharp. I learned I get more happiness when making others smile, than I do by making myself smile.

A stage is the one place I’m not useless, and being a musician is what I was born to do. I will look anyone in the eye and tell them I'm gonna be so famous one day, because that's exactly what I believe. I know I'm not where I want to be, so it's as simple as I'm gonna move. You need to remember that the only way you can fail is if you give up. It's pretty annoying how bad I am at that. I don't only try to achieve my goals, I try to over-achieve them. I live off my intuition, I'm definitely the ride-or-die type of person in EVERYTHING I do. Making a fool of myself? I'll record it so people can hold it against me for the rest of my life. Dissapointing my parents? Well I am going to Uni for music with no back up plan. Meet 5sos? Well... That's where this fiasco begins.

Welcome to the jungle my fellow fam.

Let’s go back to the first weekend of May 2017. Yes, I really did start this journey on a weekend in May. Yes, I really did it just so I can make that reference. Maybe I started a bit before that, but I committed to it on that first Saturday. At that time I had been in the fam for a couple of months, and  I did go through the phase when I couldn’t tell Lucifer and Ashtonio apart. I however didn’t assume Calcium was Asian, I assumed he was Hispanic. I mean have you seen the ‘Hey Everybody!’ video? That was rhetorical, of course you have. He walked dogs, he was practically Ceasar911! 

Well at this time I was still self-harming, I was still suicidal, and music is very influential to me. I tend to form bonds with songs because music tends to be my main comfort. Music has always been there when no one ever was. There's just such an intense bond for me, with listening and creating it. When I write I don't just think about lyrics, I can hear the chord progressions and melodies. Unfortunately I don't have enough experience with intstruments yet to share the finished product of my own music. 

With 5SOS however, that connection was a lot different. I  appreciate the artists always, though I never tend to feel anything more than that. I didn't feel that at all, I felt a boner. I'm kidding, I just really wanted to say that. Usually with musicians, since I am a fellow musican, I tend to idolize the ones who make music I enjoy. Yes, I know I'm stating the obvious. The thing is, after the whole initiation of binging keeks, interviews, funny moments, and the movie- I didn't once feel like they were above me in any way. Not even in a sexual dream  enduced by falling asleep to Aerosmith. No, that wasn't too specific of a scenario.

They just made me feel understood in a way no one has. Not just because I'm so proud about being a gigantic dork. We were in the same boat, we had the same oar, we wanted  to get to the same island that appearantly no one has heard of, we had the same belief that it exists, and the same thing  about not being satisfyed with any of the millions of already existing islands. That was quite the metaphor, hehe. It's chalked down to similar situations, interests, humor, personalities, and  impeccable music taste. It could also be that we are close in age, but then I'd be connected to millions of other people. That doesn't sound possible for me at the moment, but wait a couple years.

So I was chilling, laughing at Calcium crossing the border with his homie Mike, when I had the thought- What if I met them? In my mind, I thought there would be at least a year before they come to Illinois again, so I had time to save money. It became a goal for me, one I was quite sure would never happen. As we discussed, I'm an over achiever with all of my goals. So what did I do? Well it would be so easy to say I wrote each of them a letter. I can't do anything that simple, I'm far too creative for that simplicity. 

From then to now, in almost a years time, so much happened from there. I met one of my closest friends who happens to be an Aussie; all because of a 5sos meme post, and her lack of ability to use Instagram properly. My family fell apart, and I'm not keen on going into detail. Let's just say I've gotten to consider the 5SOSFam as my only real family. I love you guys, you're a wonderful group of humans with a trail mix variety of nuts. Thank you for existing, and for reading this far. 

Over the time I worked, I wrote and drafted maybe 500 different letters? As of late, I actually haven't gotten any letters finished. I made 4 bracelets, not a giant accomplishment. I'm 4/5 the way done with a poster I designed for Calcium. I made Lucas a fetus 5SOS wooden box, and a 5SOS money jar. I wrote Mikey a novel about him as a superhero, with a fan-art for it. That's kind of big actually cause I've never finished writing a longer story before. There's more things, but I don't want to get too technical with it.

I think I have to say the thing that I put most my effort in was a large journal for Ashton. That's because it's filled with art, tumblr posts, and lyrics. I'm a perfectionist when it comes to all of those things. At this point it has some holes because I've drafted the entire 100 or 200 pages over at least 8 different times. Nothing in it is original to the day I started, I made so many mistakes early 2017 for myself and that journal. I was working on the journal when I decided to attempt suicide for the second time.

It's completely crazy, but I've been through a lot with that journal. All of that started with the smallest idea. From the time I started to right now, I've changed so fucking much. I know how to handle my illness, I'm clean of self-harm, I lost a family and gained a new one, I failed at dying and learned how to live, I made an amazing friend, I got closer with my already existing amazing friend, I got a drum-kit, I somehow became a good lyricist, I found my music sound, my singing voice matured unbelievably, I got and lost pets, I got and lost relationships, I'm now in Uni, I'm more independent... I'm finally at the point where I can believe it does in fact get better.

That seems crazy given I've gone through more in 2017-2018 than I did when I came out about my depression, but maybe that's because I know how to spin it. I know how to handle life. Now everytime I'm scared to do something, I do it. Cause that is how you live, that's how you write, that's how you learn. I wouldn't recognize myself. I've gone from broken, bullied, and suicidal to seeing the beauty in my missing pieces, realizing I deserve better, and actually getting out of bed.

I think it might be because of the journal... 

Hear me out, hear me out. I'm not saying it made me who I am, there's a difference between knowing and believing. Just like the difference between reading and comprehending. The difference between seeing and feeling. When I started that I could only talk the talk. Hell, when I started I had a case of putting them on a pedestal. It was never intentional, at the time I didn't even think I was worth anything. Now I see them as equals in most ways, cause when I see them be how they are I feel like I belong somewhere. I mean, I've always strayed from the majority just because I'd rather be myself and be disliked than be liked for being someone I'm not. I never saw the appeal in fitting in other than having someone to sit with at lunch. I didn't need to belong, even though it would have been nice to feel at home somewhere.

That's what I got when I found the dorks. I don't have to play a part to feel like I belong around them. I can be me, and still feel like I fit in. Not conformity, but genuine compatibility. Before them I was made fun of for being weird. I was made fun of for having my own style, for the song references no one understood, for how much I giggle. I was made fun of for my a many ambitious, none of which being realistic. But I still do all of these things. I still sing louder than everyone else. I still air drum and head bang to songs like Careless Whisper because it's really funny in contrast. I still play games, randomly balance objects on my head, dance in public because I don't give a shit about what people think when I'm having fun. 5SOS just helped me realize that girl who I wished I wasn't for most of my life, is actually the only person I'd ever want to be. Unless I could be Will Smith as Deadpool, then I immediately trash my last statement. 

This is gonna get a bit heavy for a moment, but during that last attempt, as I was losing life I was legit thinking about them. How messed up is that? My life was so shitty my dying thoughts were about four idiots from Sydney. But that's how it was, they were my coping skill. I couldn't hold onto life for me after that, so I held on for them. Not because they'd know the difference if I was gone, let's be real, they wouldn't. If they knew of me then maybe, but I was so low on life's food chain at that point. I held onto the idea of making this epic stuff, and handing it to them. 

I'm not even done with the journal!

I had a history of putting too much of myself into things and then being let down and loosing that part of me. So I don't do it, but it became something I did without realizing it. I don't know what I thought would happen. Maybe they'd like who I was, and would want to have a conversation. Maybe I'd be thrown into the fanfic life and get to hang out. Like a beach bonfire filled with laughter, various awesome people, classic rock, teasing, and knowing me, lots of dick jokes accompanying many innuendos. Maybe I'd end up in LA, and get signed to a rock label. I know I'm saying it like it's simple, trust me, I know all too well the effort it takes.

I gained some real maturity, and became even more well rounded. Though I was always the mature one who made a few mistakes here and there. That's one of the reasons I didn't fit in, I was like a 30 year old when I was 13. I'm not gonna say it wouldn't be cool to end up being their home diggle, but now I'm living for me. I saved myself, and they influenced me to. They leant me a helping hand. It would be epic to chill, or to collab on a song. Hell, if I got an opportunity to get signed to Hi or Hey I'd take it in a heartbeat. A small part of it is because I think the dorks are cool in their own odd way, but mostly because the company itself is an awesome fit for me. It produces the same sound I'd like to make, and it sends the same message-