#and if that isn’t at all how director’s commentaries go…

[bonus-links]

I got the notification the comic updated this morning like RIGHT as I had to start working! Needless to say, my excitement got me through the day (and had such good payoff omgg)! Thank you for sharing your work with the world, it brings such joy to so many people!

But directors commentary? 👀 I gotta say I love it equally as much as each update!

🎶two months without uploading they come back with a side conversation that takes up a whole update🎶 jokes aside uh. most of the rest of this chapter is going to be like this. sorry. bonus links is an excuse to have link legend of zelda philosophize at himself for 1000 pages probably at this rate

I rewrote this conversation a BUNCH. there are versions of it that are much longer, where they actually talk a bit abt the master sword— I really liked those versions, but I decided to save some of that for later. my goal was to create a convo where they both are sort of dancing around what they mean, but they come to an understanding anyway. I think Slate and Wake have a lot in common that they could bond abt.

Here’s an important note about Slate’s character: he does not lie. he says what he means. He will, however, prolifically dodge ur questions lolol

some notes from the script I left for myself abt Wake’s expressions, hope I was able to capture them lolol

Wolf playing with the kids! This was an important detail for me to include lolol tho I nearly left it out bc I was having trouble staging this update. I wanted to build more of a connection between him playing w the kids on the island and him playing with the kids in Ordon, but there’s just not time, and the last update already kind of covered that emotion. Wolf is a really quiet guy, so I’ve been doing my best to build up his character in the bg even if he hasn’t gotten center stage yet. A lot of ppl commented on how this is the happiest we’ve seen him so far, and that was the intention!

Just wanted to call attention to these cute lil faces.

Loft continuing his streak of falling asleep at every party he’s ever been to. alas, no partners to carry him home this time :-(

Lore abt the triforce mark has been inconsistent from game to game. Like usual, I’m sort of cobbling together my own interpretation from ideas I like— so, in this instance, the triforce mark isn’t just from having at one point handled the triforce or possessed a piece of it, and not everyone has it.

I am obsessed w the hero of time statue in wind waker. It is such a striking image, and that section of the game is one of my favorites from any Zelda game. I am also obsessed w how Wind Waker approaches itself as the aftermath of oot. I am really excited to put Wake and Mask in the same room lolol. as a side note, statues really are becoming a motif in this comic huh

That’s abt all I’ve got for now! Thanks for reading!! I really hope the chapter has been enjoyable so far. We’ve got a little while left to go, despite my best efforts to keep this chapter short 😩

[lutawolf]

My Stand-In Episode 10 Commentary

I received a special request to do this post, and as promised, here we go. To preserve authenticity, I have observed spoilers on both this site and TikTok; however, I have yet to view the show. Until now, that is.  

Here we go! Let's all take a moment to recognize the talent behind this show besides the actors. The build up to the scene and setting of the tone is gorgeous. We are apprehensive even before we see where the van pulls up to. Then the melody continues to convey depth as we enter into Joe’s old home. 

The artwork in Joe’s home! It gives you an idea of his depth, it really does. Joe is just circling and taking everything in, while Ming is just casually exposing himself. Presently, they are both so vulnerable, but unlike in the past, it's Joe trying to build walls while Ming is now showing patience.

Teary-eyed Joe as he looks out, while Ming cooks. Now they're in complete contrast. One is at peace while the other is in utter turmoil. 

“If you’re going to give me your all. Why not use our couple mugs? Oh, I forgot, a man like you wouldn’t use broken things.” He is trying to remind Ming of their class difference. But unlike before, Joe doesn’t get mad. The tables turned. He extends to Joe what Joe once extended to him, namely tolerance and consideration. He tells him, never mind that, I still have our couple’s pjs. 

“Come here.” It’s a clear command. A command that Joe responds to but half-heartedly. Yet, Ming knows this is not the time and with a sigh restrains himself and instead meets Joe halfway. Look at them communicating. Joe didn't mean to, he's just trying to keep that wall up, but rather than denying any accusations, Ming responds to Joe's distrust with open communication. 

When Ming discusses recognizing Joe within this body, it is evident that Joe reluctantly allowed a portion of his inner wall to fall. Ahhh, I could scream over all the communication but most importantly, Ming’s growth. Before he would have been an ass about Joe avoiding the kiss, but this time he handles it with understanding and resilience. Not resistance but resilience. What’s the difference? He isn’t forcing the issue, but is still capable of a capacity of recovery.

Ming isn’t the only one who has changed. I love Joe’s face as he realizes it is Tong calling. It becomes determined. Then that smile when Joe tells Tong he isn’t his servant! Also… YAY!!! I HATE TONG! Good on you, Joe.

Okay, so after Ming smiles and says, “Joe, I made you pan-fried eggs.” You see a quick smile from Joe. It’s so fast that I had to rewind to verify, but it’s there. This slight smitten smile.   

Ahh, look at all the communication. If it were before, Ming would have told Joe to mind his business, but not now. Now he is sharing it all, which Joe recognizes, you can tell by the forced harshness. He steels himself for Ming getting mad about him hanging up on Tong, but to his surprise, Ming doesn’t. Instead, he makes comments on how Joe has changed, but he says it with admiration. You can see the softening and then the sadness cover Joe’s face. He expresses his emotions to Ming, however, rather than expressing anger, we once again observe Ming's newly acquired skill of composed endurance.

Now, if you watch carefully. Ming hasn’t given up his Dominance, he’s just more selective about where he uses it. Such as the car and drawing the ketchup design. Joe said no, but this is where Ming shows resistance and determination. It’s just we are finally seeing him do it with fucking charm. 

The actor who plays Joe is fucking spectacular. The way you see Joe’s wall of resistance breaking. Just chefs kiss. I need to look up the director and see their other work because this is usually a sign of an outstanding director as well. Those little nuances take teamwork to create. 

The kitchen scene really showcases whose Dominant and whose submissive. I love mom and son’s relationship! Mom was scoping out the guy for him, I love it. How adorable. 

Oh, Ming, that was a smooth lie. Fuck, but I love Ming. I love a villain with a soft spot for their love. Those conniving bastards have a way of wiggling their way into my heart. And the way they're both so vulnerable and communicating. I’m not okay. 

Ahhh, and Ming comes in with the love making. Joe would have pushed him away had he come in strong, but he doesn’t. This is Ming making love to Joe. He weakens Joe until he can just push him down and take control, “You know you can’t stop me.” Notice that Joe doesn’t argue, but Ming needs to do this. It’s cementing some really necessary things. It’s showcasing his feelings for Joe and making a statement. Not only is he making love to him, but he is making love to him face to face. Proving to Joe that he has changed. Yet, notice, who holds the complete control during the entire love making session. Ming.

Joe telling him he’d have to marry him first is my favorite. Ming like, sure, no problem. Time and place? Love it! HAHAHA, I’m dead. First the blanket and then the curtains. Mom’s face is all of us. Like, come on now. The way Joe pulled him back to cover his boxers. OMG, I’ve laughed so hard at this scene. It’s going down as one of my favorites. 

The way that Joe smiles at Ming at the table. So cute! I love how the mom breaks everything open. I also love that Joe protects Ming in his own way. 

You know what I love the most. Ming is not a good person. He has made numerous mistakes with Joe, but unlike other shows, we are actually seeing character development that can give us hope for the future. Ming is giving honesty to Joe, even when he knows it could work against him. He isn’t shying away from the ugliness but using it as a stepping stone for communication. This isn’t who Ming normally is, but he’s becoming a better man for Joe and only Joe. 

Tong really doesn’t realize the thin ice he is skating on, does he. Look at Ming standing up for Joe to Tong. Say it with me peeps. Character development. Ming not Tong. Tong couldn’t even spell character, much less the rest. 

And Joe proves once again that he loves Ming, and so does Ming. “Joe, regardless of what body you are in. You are still Joe.” Now, Joe knows that Ming got into the entertainment industry so that he could get exposure to reach Joe. They are so cute again! Let me enjoy it for this brief moment. Soak it in for the second it’s going to last. 

Proud boyfriend moment. He wants their names on video. Oh! Ming was ready to throw down for his boy! You played with the wrong one, Tong. Tong, you are about to find out that Ming is a villain. You only think you are. It might not happen in this episode, but I promise, you will feel it and when you do, I’m gonna enjoy it. 

The communication!!!

I hate Ming’s family. Despite Ming not wanting to, he did let Joe go. He knows he has to solve this. In the past, he would have manipulated, but he doesn’t here. He is thinking of Joe and not himself. 

Tong who is a douchacanoe whose too stupid to see he has created a disaster for himself. Meanwhile, Ming is such a badass. Yes, he is. Hope in the next episode we see more of the badass Ming. 

[fencecollapsed]

I love musical theater. I may not be a theater kid stereotype, but I always found it as an interesting way to tell a story. But despite the fact I personally don’t think it’s that big of a deal, a lot of my relatives seem to take me as “the musical girl”. My mother made my 17th birthday musical themed. A lot of my Christmas presents were musical related, I’m sure you’d get it. A couple of weeks back though, my cousin in Michigan, who I don’t really know, suddenly sent me a DVD with blue sharpie on it, simply reading “The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals” in all capital letters due to how much of a mouthful that name is, I’m going to refer to it as TGWDLM for the rest of this. The DVD itself was rather normal looking. She didn’t send me the box it came in, which is probably the reason why it was labeled in sharpie, cause without it, god knows what it could be. It could be a musical or a gore video, so thanks to her for that.

As for the contents... Well, it was a Pro-shot of a musical! The story was about a man named Paul, a guy who... didn’t like musicals! The opening song seems to portray this as a huge deal but to be honest, it isn’t. One day, on the opening night of a Mamma Mia! production in the real-life ghost town of Hatchetfield, Michigan (but populated, obivously), a meteor hits, carrying alien spores of a musical hivemind. One interesting fact is that the zombies are the only ones who sing, and dear god, some of their songs are so camp, but I guess that’s the joke. Also, I can definitely see an influence from Invasion of The Body Snatchers, hell, they even reference it. The musical itself had more laughs than scares for me, but the curtain call gave me fucking chills. The unusual parts though, come from not the musical itself, but what comes after it. There’s a behind-the-scenes, with a lot of content. There were audition tapes, director's commentary, easter eggs... I personally found it as fascinating as the musical itself! There was some mentions of a earlier version of the script, with some interesting parts that weren’t in the original, for example; Paul, Ted, Bill, and Charlotte all worked at a review site similar to IGN or Buzzfeed, or that Alice, in a strange trance, spouts out a bible quote. I began to feel like these random people, from an obscure theater company, were people I knew. But as fun as the behind the scenes are, that is not why I’m here. After the behind-the-scenes, there was just... A black screen. For like, 4 or 3 minutes… Then a blue screen with white text, with a font that looks like those fonts in analog horror, with one word. “APOTHEOSIS”.

There’s more after this too. The following is a very different feeling compared to the behind-the-scenes. It appears to be the night the pro-shot was recorded. It shows footage of the curtain call, when Emma was dragged backstage. Then, it cuts to security footage backstage. Immediately Emma’s actress, who I think I’ll just call Lauren, since that’s her real name, goes out of character. The others don’t let go of her, instead ejecting her out of the crowd. She lands on her ass and says “Ow.” in a tone that says “What the fuck dude? Why’d you throw me?”. The others are silent. Lauren gets up and after a moment looking at the others, decides to take off her bandage, revealing a real scar underneath. Lauren seems unsettled by this, but it’s made worse when everyone else approaches her, talking to her as if she IS Emma Perkins, despite her insistence. They then got closer, and closer. Lauren tried to back away, but they got closer. Eventually, Lauren was completely surrounded, and they... I... I can’t say it. I just can’t. All I’ll say is that audience members found the room covered in blood and mysterious blue goo. The blue screen appears again, the text now saying “THEIR RETELLING SUCKED ANYWAYS.”

After whatever the fuck that was, I kinda had to dig deeper? I had this mix of morbid fascination, horror, and an urge to somehow bring all this to light. Well... That and how at first I assumed it was a performance act, only to find out via a google search that it was all real, Lauren Lopez was presumed dead, and the rest of the cast are missing to this day.

So I talked to people who were at the closing night show. When it was recorded. They reported being genuinely convinced in some segments, like when Emma quote unquote “Looked at Ted’s eyes in horror, like she saw nothing there” and praised the “practical effects”. They also said that the few who lingered after the curtain call heard screaming. Those who checked backstage saw... Well, you know.

I didn’t find much about it though. Only this weird cult website when searching for random tag words related to the musical. It was talking about “His singular voice” or whatever and was saying that, like, all voices needed to be eradicated, for His is the only one that should exist, or whatever. Weirdly enough, there was musical theming in there. And... A page about the musical. I can vaguely recall the contents but it’s really hard to. It had a synopsis of the musical kinda biased in the favor of the zombies, with the implications that He caused the musical apocalypse over there. Me and my friends looked at the site once in a discord call and laughed at it. But then I found the actors' faces and how they all were brought to an “apotheosis”. Like... Like in the fucking musical.

It was just a rabbit hole I found myself in at the end of the day though. I easily tucked it into the back of my brain and went on with my life. But then stuff started getting weird. With me, I think. I’ve been more scatterbrained than usual, prone to zoning out for long stretches of time, wandering off conversations to talk about something else entirely, and I’m beginning to hate the sound of other people’s voices and I don’t know why, I was never a social butterfly but I didn’t hate other people talking... Everyday when I brush my teeth I notice my eyes getting... Bluer? I don’t know how, but my eyes have gone to a dark brown, to a light brown, to a hazel, to green, and now it’s getting closer and closer to blue. My friends online have been safe at the time from my sudden hatred of other voices but I can’t really go on voice chats anymore. And my fixation on musicals has only grown as of late. I can’t help but fight the urge to spontaneously sing a show-tune. I hate it.

I’d try to see a psychiatrist or something but I can’t bear to hear another voice, it’s so grating. And I know I should just grin and bear it but the last time I tried that I yelled at them. Not many people like me much anymore. I see why, I must’ve become an asshole to them, but they don’t get it. My eyes have become blue by now, and I think it’s glowing too.

I can’t help but play the songs over and over. I called it camp but I think it’s growing on me. I like Let It Out the most. I relate to Paul a lot right now. And then I noticed a split second shot of... His actor... Being... I can’t say it. I had to vomit. Why wouldn’t I? That was so fucking disgusting. And when I puked, I froze pale at what I just pushed out of my body.

It was blue, viscous sludge. It felt disgusting looking at it, even worse when you hold it. It smelled like ammonia. I ran out of the bathroom. I couldn’t stand to look at it any longer. And that’s when I decided to write this. I’m scared, to be honest, who wouldn’t be? I’ll most likely either be dead and have my corpse puppeteered, or go missing, for another poor soul to inevitably find the DVD and end up like me. I can hear the chimes and hymns of The Singular Voice. I know He wants me to become one with Him. He says it’s inevitable for me. And what choice do I have in the matter anymore?

I’m sorry, I lost.

[girl4music]

Now this is a very interesting piece of commentary from Lucy and Renee. Even though they knew their characters were in love with each other, through the whole show - until these last episodes - they did not ever play their characters as romantically attracted to one another but just always kept it about the unconditional love in their friendship - which I appreciated, of course. But Lucy says here that suddenly their characters in the script are written as explicitly out of the closet. Which they are. But then Renee says that she was still playing her character as straight because she just wanted to focus on the pain Xena was in rather than focus on any jealous feeling she had towards Akemi. So Renee wasn't playing Gabrielle in those moments as if she was jealous because she thought Gabrielle wouldn't put that over her love for Xena. Which we knew she wouldn’t anyway because all that’s happened in the past. There’d be no reason to be jealous now.

But then why the bloody hell was her reaction in 'The Debt'/'Forget Me Not' one so full of pettiness and vinctinctivness? Is she saying that Gabrielle learned from that experience so much that no matter what information was revealed about the past female lovers in Xena's life, she wouldn't make it about jealousy anymore because she knew what it would lead to would be something that she'd never ever want? It's just such an interesting conversation about their characters and the nature of their relationship going on here in regards to who Akemi was to Xena and that Gabrielle never made it about jealousy so Renee never played it as if Gabrielle was jealous but instead sharing Xena's pain at the loss of someone who she finds out was more than just a friend.

It's just so funny to me that as the episodes go on, Lucy and Renee become a little more aware that there's more that's going on there but everybody else - clearly the writers and directors - already play it like that because, yes, Season 6 especially is written as maintext but it's not necessarily portrayed as maintext. Well, now it makes sense why it isn’t. It's because Lucy and Renee chose not to play it like that. They just let their natural chemistry do its thing and translate to the screen as romance instead. I've always personally interpreted that in their portrayal of the characters but I NEVER knew that it was intentional. That's really interesting to me because regardless what you see on the screen here, if you read the script for that specific episode - it’s intentionally written as romantic. It's written as a queer love story.

That's honestly thrown me for a loop that Lucy and Renee did that because I never knew that at all. In all my years of being a fan I never knew that Lucy and Renee intentionally played straight characters even when the script was written as queer or "gay" as Lucy puts it. I knew that they didn't want to make a joke out of the relationship so never went too far with the lesbian subtext. I knew that they refused to water it down as some pandering kind of thing. But I never knew at all that even when they were aware that their characters were queer or "gay" that they played them as straight instead.

I'm not too sure how I feel about learning this new information. 🫤 I mean why would they ever need to play their characters as straight when they’re written as not? Especially in these last two episodes. And under the guise of a water transfer or not - these character kiss romantically. How can that be played as straight? I feel like I’m really misinterpreting this. What they’re saying here. What exactly do they mean?

Weigh in anyone - please. This will drive me insane.

[flameraven]

Very thoughtful commentary about artists, Neil Gaiman in particular, and parasocial relationships more generally. Excerpt:

1. Stop Idolizing Creative People. Creative people are easy to idolize because they create the art you love, and that gives you permission to feel things, and to see yourself and your desires reflected in that art. That is a powerful thing, and from the outside, it can feel like magic, and that the people who do it are tapped into something otherworldly and admirable. Plus, they often get to have cool lives and get to know other cool creative people. They do things that are removed from the day-to-day aspect of a “normal” life, and they’ll even post about them on social media where you can see them. Sometimes, independent of their art directly, they’ll speak about their life, or life in general, and they’ll seem wise and considered and kind. I mean, what’s not to like?

But please consider that this is all an extremely mediated experience of this person. The art is the edited and massaged result of hours and days and weeks and months of work, into which the work of many others is also added. My novels originate from me, but it’s not just me in there, nor is the final form of the novel an accurate statement of who I am as a person, not least of all for the simple reason that I am not trying to tell my story in my novels. I’m creating fictional characters, and the world in which they make sense, for the purpose of the story.

Despite how it might look from the outside, this is not sorcery. It’s years of experience at a craft. It’s not magic, just work. A completed novel (or any other piece of art) won’t tell you much about the specific, day-to-day life and inclinations of the individual who made it, other than a general nod toward their competence, and the competence of their collaborators. Likewise what you see of their lives, even from the illusorily close vantage of social media, is deeply mediated. Lives always look admirable at a distance, when you can only see the lofty peaks and not the rubble at the base — especially when your attention by design is pointed at those lofty peaks. There’s much you don’t see and that you’re not meant to see. The vast majority of what you’re not meant to see isn’t nefarious. It’s just not your business.

Now, before I was a professional creative person, I was an entertainment journalist who spent years interviewing writers, directors, movie stars, musicians, authors and other creative folks. Since I’ve been on the other side of the rope, I’ve likewise met a huge range of creative people from all walks of life. Please believe me when I assure you that creative people are just people. Richer and/or more famous? Sometimes (less often than you might think, though). Prettier and/or more charismatic? Especially if they’re actors or pop stars, often yes! But at the end of the day they are just folks, and they run the whole range of how people are. By and large, the day-to-day experience of getting through their life is the same as yours. Outside of their own specific field of work, they don’t know any more about life, have no more facility for dealing with the world, and have just as few clues about what’s going on in their own head, as anyone else.

They’re just people. Whose work is making the stuff you like! And that’s great, but that’s not a substantive basis for idolizing them. It makes no more sense to idolize them than to idolize a baker who makes cookies you like, or the guy who comes and trims your hedges the way you want them to be trimmed, or the plumber who fixes your clogged drain. You can appreciate what they do, and even admire the skill they have. But holding them up as a life model might be a bit much. Which is the point! If you’re not willing to idolize a plumber, then you shouldn’t idolize a creative person.

(“But a plumber doesn’t make me feel like a creative person does,” you say, to which I say, are you sure about that? Because I will tell you what, when my sump pump stopped working and the plumber got in there, replaced the pump and started draining out my basement which had an inch of standing water in it, that man was the focus of all my emotions and was my goddamned hero that day. My plumber that day did more for me than easily 90% of the great art I’ve ever experienced.)

Enjoy the art creative people do. Enjoy the experience of them in the mediated version of them you get online and elsewhere, if such is your joy. But remember that the art is from the artist, not the artist themselves, and the version of their life you see is usually just the version they choose to show. There is so much you don’t see, and so much you’re not meant to see. At the end of the day, you don’t have all the information about who they are that you would need to make them your idol, or someone you might choose to, in some significant way, pattern some fraction of your life on. And anyway creative people aren’t any better at life than anyone else.

Which brings up the next point:

2. Fuck idols anyway! People are complicated and contradictory and you don’t know everything about them! You don’t know everything even about your parents or siblings or best friends or your partner! People are hypocrites and liars and fail to live up to their own standards for themselves, much less yours! Your version of them in your head will always be different than the version that actually exists in the world! Because you’re not them! Stop pretending people won’t be fuck ups! They will! Always!

This sounds more pessimistic about humans than perhaps it should be. When I say, for example, that people are hypocrites and liars, I don’t mean that people take every single opportunity to be hypocrites and liars. Most people are decent in the moment. But none of us — not one! — has always lived up to our own standard of behavior, and all of us have had the moment where, when confronted with a situation that would become an immense pain in the ass if we stuck to our guns, or demanded the inconvenient truth, decided to just bail instead, because the situation wasn’t worth the drama, or we had somewhere else to be, or whatever. We all choose battles and we all make the call in the moment, and sometimes the call is, fuck this, I’m out.

Every person you’ve ever admired has fucked up, sometimes really badly. Everyone you’ve ever looked up to has secrets, and it’s possible some of those secrets would materially change how you think about them, not always for the better. Everyone you’ve ever known has things about them you don’t know, many of which aren’t even secrets, they’re just things you don’t engage with in your day-to-day experience of them. Nevertheless it’s possible if you were aware of them, it would change how you feel about them, for better or for worse. And now let’s flip that around! You have things about you that even your best friends don’t know, and might be surprised to learn! You have secrets you don’t wish to share with the class! You have fucked up, and lied, and have been a hypocrite too!

You are, in short, a human, as is everyone you know and every one you will know (pets and gregarious wild animals excepted). And all humans are, charitably, a mess. This doesn’t mean there aren’t good people or even exemplary people out there, since there are, along with the ones that are, charitably, a real shit show. What I am saying is that even the good or exemplary people out there are a mess, have been morally compromised at some point in their lives, and have not lived up to their own standards for themselves, independent of anyone else’s standard for them.

[wutheringmights]

Thank your for the chapter. This is me submitting my request for director's commentary.

Sorry this is very late.

But, you know.

*gestures wildly at the state of the world*

This is the first chapter in a long time where I was actively having fun writing more than 30% of it. Writing doesn’t always have to be “fun” for me to write it, but spending most of this year stuck on two chapters I absolutely hated did a number on me. 

I still didn’t get to everything I wanted in this chapter; I have been trying to get to the fallout for the Knights of Hyrule encounter for most of this year now (jfc!), but I’ve had to expand the plot points leading up to it. This entire Castle Town arc was planned to be one chapter. Past Frankie was insane for thinking that was possible. 

Pacing-wise, this chapter really did need to be on its own. The important plot points needed their own space to breathe; trying to shove all of this and the contents of the next chapter into one would have led to a lot of things being overshadowed. So even though everything is still moving along relatively slowly, the pacing is somewhat on purpose this time. 

As previously stated on this blog, I sorely neglected updating AO3 with the new chapter total. There is 6 chapters left (5 plot chapters, then an epilogue). Rest easy. This story will take me a while longer yet to complete. 

That being said, don’t be too surprised if I keep budgeting in more chapters. But if this story needs more than 40 chapters, I will abscond from society and become a sheep herder in, like, Iceland.  

(Sorry to front-load the housekeeping information; I usually keep this stuff for the end,  all of this provides context for my first bit about the actual chapter.) 

I am so happy that pre-heart connection stuff with Proxi got its own chapter, as opposed to being included with the post-connection drama of how Link starts clawing his way out of his depression. 

I mentioned last chapter that everything with the first Proxi meeting was an utter failure to me. While this chapter doesn’t erase the problems of the former, it nonetheless is an improvement and more in-line with how I wanted this Proxi storyline to go. 

Link’s depression baths is 100% me projecting-- I had a season of my life where everything in my life kinda fell apart and I became extremely depressed and anxious. One of my coping mechanisms was to constantly take showers. Like Link, I got up to around four showers a day before I was told to knock it off for the sake of the water bill. 

Depression causing a lack of hygiene and self-care is fairly well-represented in media at this point. I relate way more to depression causing a spurt of “good” habits (that are just maladaptive coping mechanisms in their own right) more, and I want to include more of them into my writing. Link seems like the kind of guy who would overcompensate like that too. 

The events of the chapter were condensed from my original vision. The party and the fireworks were going to be two separate incidents, but I wanted to cut down on the bulk of writing each chapter requires of me (more on this later). Luckily, the original idea for the fireworks also included celebrating a holiday (New Years), so the change was easy to pull off. 

I did lose an aspect of that scene I really liked though: Link knowing he was experiencing a trigger deciding to hide in his cellar, all the while congratulating himself for reacting normally while Proxi is like hiding in a cellar isn’t coping, Link!!!!

Fireworks being a trigger is a bit of a cliche, and a part of me really wishes I found something more unique to trigger Link with. But fireworks is a really effective shorthand, partly because it’s so prevalent in real life, and partly because contrasting a celebratory activity with war trauma is so evocative. 

It’s also very silly how significant events in Link’s life keep coinciding with holidays and birthdays. I want to acknowledge both for the sake of world building, but going through the effort of developing them is only worth it if there’s a plot point attached.

But who hasn’t had moments of great revelations while at the family Thanksgiving party?

I like the idea of various holidays/feasts in Hyrule having different levels of importance depending on your tribe or what region you live in, as well as them being celebrated differently depending on your culture. 

Both the Sheikah and the Hylians would place heavy significance on the feast since Hylia is one of their main goddesses, but they would be celebrated differently. I brushed a bit on the idea of the religious ceremonies being different, but I cut back on sharing more of my ideas for the specific celebrations. 

Very specifically, I wanted the Sheikah to have a tradition of performing theatrical plays of significant cultural moments (basically a kabuki-theater version of a nativity play) (can you tell I was raised catholic?). 

I have plans to do something involving a kabuki play next chapter, so I won’t elaborate more on what the play was supposed to be. However, the play did get cut because I planted Link in the banquet hall with no care to move him from that spot. 

I like the idea of moms who are flawed moms in really normal ways. The way Ayane’s mother is very sweet to Link while having these rigid standards for Ayane is very real to life, in part because it’s based on how a lot of mothers I know act to their child’s friends versus their actual child. 

In a similar vein, I’m also fascinated by mothers who fail their children in such specific ways that it would only be a failure to their child-- like a mother giving too much independence to a child who needs more help, etc. That’s my design for these slow (and hopefully subtle) reveals of how Link struggles with his mother’s memory. On one hand, it’s obvious that he was made to feel like a failure of a child, and he probably knows that was wrong of her. On the other, she was a good parent overall and she’s dead. If you have never experienced that particular cocktail of guilt, let me just say that it messes you up. 

The kids who were doing the snowball fight are Ayane’s friends, which is why one of them remarked that Link was going to yell at them again (see: when Link yelled at Ayane the first time he picked her up from school). Katsuki is the only friend of Ayane’s I’ve consistently named-dropped, so I hope that cued you in to who these kids were.

Speaking of which: I stole that name from Bakugo from My Hero Academia. I was watching the show at the time, and I like the character. Ergo, I stole his name.

Link being very aware that he had been triggered during the fireworks show-- I have a very specific gripe about the way people write PTSD that bleeds through this sequence that I cannot explain in a sentence or two. But what’s important is that I have experienced that moment when your body is triggered but your brain isn’t-- so you can start to feel yourself freaking out while in your mind you know there is no threat, yet the body’s reaction starts to cloud your mind, causing a spiral of anxiety and panic. 

Proxi visiting the fairy fountain in Kakariko is one of my favorite scenes. I just like how simple it is, and how it gives a glimpse into what Proxi’s life is like outside of Link.

I did momentarily freak out after posting because I was worried I didn’t make it clear before this chapter that while there is magic lingering at the fountain it can’t heal. But no one has mentioned it yet, so I think I’m safe to wait until a future chapter to clarify that.

Fairies being too small to have more than one emotion is of course taken from Peter Pan. As a long-time lover of fairies (my childhood hyperfixation), it’s a whimsical idea that I just adore. I originally wanted to use that idea as justification for Proxi mirroring Link’s emotions without Link mirroring hers. 

There would be scenes where he is utterly calm while she’s freaking out or crying because he’s good at covering his feelings, but she can’t. I thought this would rid her of too much agency, so I changed it to a mutual sharing of emotions so that Proxi has more space to her own person while still being his “translator.”

I also like the idea of Link being able to gather the ability to talk, but only in relation to comforting Proxi. That’s development, baby. 

I do wish I rewrote that last scene where he feels Proxi’s joy for the first time, as I really like the idea that he would feel a sense of helplessness and horror to be controlled by another person like that. What’s there now is fine, but it could be better.

Now, onto the present-day section: 

It is very, very obvious that I meant to end the last chapter with that conversation between Warriors and Lincoln. Like I said, the original version really sucked (or at least, my original prose describing what the Chain’s arrival at the castle was like). It makes more sense for Lincoln to drop the information about Lionel in the same chapter Lionel is name-dropped.

Lionel was originally going to be Lincoln’s name, but I picked Lincoln since it has the more obvious tie to the Link-Linkle naming pattern. 

Also, this chapter includes a much needed discussion about the ethics of blaming all of the nation’s problems on a single ethnic group. On one hand, it is stupidly effective to utilize bigotry to gather power, and it’s a rhetorical technique even a more morally-upstanding Warriors would use. On the other hand, that’s an objectively terrible thing to do oh my god. 

So I kinda had to go in and cover my bases of having the characters talk and acknowledge what the implications of Warriors’s plan is. The big glaring issue of this conversation is that it also implicates Lincoln and rids him of his moral superiority. 

Personally, I kinda struggle to think of a real-world equivalent to the dynamic I established in the story, where the institution of the Sheikah does a lot of harm while the people within the institution are experiencing the social-consequences of being associated with it. The best I can come up with is Mormoms. 

Either way, I live in fear someone is going to tell me that this is actually about an underprivileged group I am not aware of currently, and I am contributing to their oppression by not critically analyzing Link and Lincoln’s plans correctly. Which would be a valid criticism to make, but one I could avoid if I had just worked out in advance what the hell is this is an accidental allegory for, educated myself, and then fixed the issue. 

If you guys can think of something, let me know so that I can get started on educating myself and such.

The Castle Town arc’s recurring theme is just bureaucracy, which does not make for exciting storytelling. But I do think it’s fitting for Warriors, who used to benefit from the system, to realize all the ways it’s not made to actually help people. I also think he’s the kind of person to realize he doesn’t have the time or ability to rehaul it entirely and has to settle on trying to work within it.

I can finally reveal my “Midna is a fantastic public servant” agenda. My girl was explicitly stated to be a good and dedicated ruler in Twilight Princess, and I will not let anyone else forget it. 

I really wish that this was more of an ensemble story so that I can write about Hyrule and Sky’s adventures in the Castle Town nightlife

If there is one thing I don’t really like about this chapter, it’s the sequence from Warriors talking to Lana about Cia to the end of Icarius’s capture. Reading it back, it really comes off as very corny and very carelessly written.

I initially planned for Icarius to be captured during the bell ringing in the lead up to Warriors trying to draw the Master Sword

I was imagining a scene where they are watching the news about the invasion be announced and, as Warriors is cursing the bad luck of it all, Spirit would just scrunch his brow and say, “Captain.” And Warriors, who is unfortunately drift compatible with him, would be like “go ahead.” And then Spirit would motion for Linkle to follow, and the two of them would reappear after the Master Sword rejected Warriors with Icarius already tied up.

The problem was that would block Spirit off from understanding the whole Master Sword rejection thing, and I really needed him to carve up Warriors’s hand. 

So I punted this whole ordeal with Icarius off to another chapter, and I have been scrambling trying to find another spot for him.

Ultimately, I do think this worked out because I have no idea what the hell the would have done with Icarius during the networking scenes.

After being disappointed with how this version of the capture scene turned out, I was very tempted to cut it and just have Spirit and Linkle haul Icarius into Warriors’s office, but I didn’t want to cut out a scene of Linkle being a bit of a badass. 

And let’s talk about Icarius, because it’s been a while since we’ve thought about him.

First off, you can tell that I was having a lot of fun this chapter trying to find ways to let them have a conversation with Icarius when he can’t speak verbally and they don’t know his sign. The dictionary combined with the gesturing seemed like a fun but logical solution.

Though, in the back of my brain, I kept remembering how stupid I thought that bit in Iron Flame about the translation was. So when I wrote about Warriors translating Faovarian with just a dictionary, I was sitting there feeling like the biggest idiot in the world. 

This scene also reminded me how tragic it is that Icarius can’t speak, because I know how hilarious this man would have been with sassing his captors. 

I also got a chance to put forth the core tenant of Icarius’s feelings for Warriors: mainly, that he thinks Warriors is both insanely handsome but ultimately stupid as all fuck. 

When I first made it clear that the House of Nephus was a reflection of Warriors, Time, and Spirit, I totally thought someone would put together that Icarius, as the Spirit-equivalent, was trying to save Philo. No one ever remarked on it, so maybe it was too obvious to mention. 

(If I were to ever do another one-shot side story in the style of Smoke the Pipe, I would probably do one about Icarius’s life before the events of the plot, if only because I have a lot of ideas of how Faovaria works and how Icarius and Nephus got to where they are now; though I doubt anyone would be as interested in my silly OC’s as I am). 

I also thought someone would figure out Philo was related to the whole Fused Shadow plotline when, in his introductory scene, he used Midna’s powers. I thought it was obvious. 

I also like the idea of the Dark Interlopers having different legacies outside of Hyrule; generally, I’ve just had a lot of fun taking different bits of canon Hyrule lore and figuring out how they could fit into a greater world. My favorite (not in this chapter) example is when Nephus referred the the Three Goddess as oracles mistaken for goddesses. We know Din and Nayru appeared as oracles outside of Hyrule, and Nephus’s line implies that they are still important folk figures in Faovaria, just not goddesses. 

Spirit’s snarky good luck being the nice version of his thoughts is exactly the kind of bullshit I would pull as a socially-inept kid; he realized what he originally wanted to say was too mean so he wanted to convey some kind of recognition that he understood Icarius’s thought process but still wanted to warn him how hard it was going to be. He really, genuinely thought good luck would be the nicest way of conveying that. He’s so bad with people. I love him. 

And, god. Time. Poor guy has walked around his entire life feeling like there has only ever been one person who ever cared for him, only for that one person to turn around and be like yeah I regret helping you. 

Then there’s Warriors who is starting to learn to not let himself get tangled up in fights against Spirit, who is so wrapped up in trying to stop this war that he doesn’t even have the energy to entertain Spirit’s bullshit right now.

Which leaves Spirit alone, with only Warriors to cling on to. 

His conversation with Warriors in the hallway is another favorite of mine, if only because it sounds really natural. I think my dialogue is too on the nose sometimes, so I’ve been trying to let the characters talk around themselves way more. 

Hot tip: if you are writing about men, make sure you mention their facial hair and shaving habits. As a long-time lover of facial hair, I love hearing about characters growing stubble or having to remember to shave in the morning. It’s a little detail that gets overlooked in fiction a lot, and I’m so bitter about it. 

Oh, the newspaper article. Let’s chat about that now. 

Public opinion plays a big role in political intrigue, which I never see enough stories taking advantage of. I knew from the beginning that I wanted Warriors to get exposed in the newspaper after he was well into cleaning up his act, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. 

As many of you know, one of my most infamous cuts from the story is an original character who was a journalist during the war producing propaganda about Warriors. In the present day, this journalist would have felt so guilty for the role they played that they would have been on the pursuit of writing a story about what really happened back then. They would have been a neutral to antagonistic force in Warriors’s life. 

You can probably guess that this expose was supposed to be their work-- a decision to finally report truthfully despite being asked to lie once more for the greater good. I really wanted to juggle with the ethics of propaganda, and to have a moment where Warriors straddles that moral line by wanting to utilize propaganda for the greater good (but for real this time). 

I cut the character because a) there were too many bozos in this story already, and b) I didn’t think that a plotline about propaganda would be the most useful in a story about a kingdom where the people’s opinion does not matter (in retrospect, that’s a misconception on my part about what propaganda is used for). 

In some ways, I think it did hurt the story a bit to not have a specific character attached to the article. However, I ultimately like having no specific journalist attached to it since it places the blame more squarely on Impa. 

Writing the full article out was most definitely not the best use of my time or the best use of space, but I was worried that if I did not, readers would be really confused as to what the general public did and did not know. 

Stylistically, the article is meant to be more of an profile/investigation piece over a straight-informative blurb. The best example I can find is this article from the Cut on Usha Vance.

(I have spent the past month deep in the anti-Vance think pieces. Fuck both of them. I can’t believe I am going to have to keep hearing about these bastards probably for the rest of my life.)

As you can see, there is the occasional use of first person and more storytelling techniques used alongside facts. I chose this style mostly to make sure the article wasn’t too boring to read. 

I also struggled picking good numbers for the article that would sound severe, without being over the top. I think I picked some realistic stats. But if I messed up, it would be very funny and would invalidate all of my bitching about Fourth Wing’s bad numbers. 

At least I got to use this as an opportunity to drop some new info on you, such as...

Marigold was 19 when she gave birth to Warriors. Yeah, there’s a bit more to the Marigold story that is still left to be uncovered. There is a thematic reason to why Warriors does not seem to acknowledge how young she was when she became his mother.

How do I put this? There’s an irony in him knowing that he was failed by being made responsible for the kingdom at 17, and then not realizing that Marigold was also failed in a similar way. I think people generally have a problem realizing that the problems they see in the world are more widespread than they are, and that they take on multiple forms. And when one thing is wrong in the world, it usually is reflected elsewhere in an unexpected way. 

Warriors believes that Marigold had a responsibility to take care of him because she was his mother despite her age. Warriors had a responsibility to be the hero, despite his age. He understands that just because society at large saw this as his duty, it doesn’t mean it was right. He doesn’t realize this wasn’t Marigold’s duty either to take care of him.

I explored this idea earlier in the story with the use of child soldiers being contrasted with Kat’s underage prostitution. 

Also, Anders Brecht. His last name is a reference to Bertold Brecht, the playwright.

It’s nice to get his story out of Warriors’s perspective of my friend betrayed me and into this is a well-educated activist who was executed for trying to make positive change in the world. To this day, it surprises me how many people were not sympathetic to the turncoats in this story.

Another thematic point: both Anders and Marigold were the Hyrulean-equivalent of leftists. Despite having their influence on him, Warriors still turned out far more moderate than them, and far more prone to causing harm. Insert rant here about how just because you surround yourself with good people doesn’t mean you will turn out like them, etc. 

Spirit being ashamed about the article-- Spirit is definitely someone who understands that just because someone knows you went through some shit, it doesn’t mean they will really give you the validation you want. He’s what happens when the vitamin fantasy doesn’t yield the acknowledgement you thought you were going to get. 

And, finally, Warriors gets put into a corner and manages not to resort to using Spirit to his advantage. I enjoy that Warriors’s determination to not use Spirit as a pawn to sway public opinion back into his favor comes at the cost of, well, being on the verge of losing the goddamn fight. Oh Warriors, you can be a better person now but being a good person doesn’t win wars. 

While the opening conversation between Lincoln and Warriors would have 100% worked better at the end of the last chapter, I do think it’s nice that their conversations are bookends. 

I do think it’s kinda silly that celebrities have to apologize for doing something wrong to the general public, and a part of me wanted to use this story as a means to point that out. But I also have to admit that there is a social reason why we expect it, and I have come out on the side of pro-apology. 

This is the first time in-story that Lincoln hugs Warriors. 

Warriors really needed someone to tell him that they were proud of him and, I won’t lie, I also kinda needed it at the moment of writing. As much as Warriors still has a lot to learn and improve on, it feels good to see him get some of the praise he desperately needs. 

Warriors’s character arc really is just him realizing that while he has to do his heroic duties, he would much rather be living a quiet domestic life with his family. Well, he always knew he wanted that. He just went about it wrong with Spirit and Time. He’s just getting to start over with a better perspective and less coercion. 

And finally, the Knights of Hyrule are arriving. I’m not lying when I say that I have spent most of this year trying to get to this stupid plot point. I thought the trip to Castle Town to now was going to be one chapter. That was back in March. It’s November now. Ugh. 

So yeah. That’s the chapter. 

You might have noticed that my style is a bit different this chapter. Looking back on old chapters, I can see myself overwriting in a lot of places, especially in the narration the explore’s Warriors’s thought process. I’ve been trying to cut that back in order to both clean up my writing and cut down on the sheer bulk of words every chapter requires.

I think it’s working out so far, but I won’t blame anyone for thinking the chapter is a little underwritten, or it seems like I’m putting in less effort into the story. 

Ideally, I would like to get two more chapters out by the end of the year-- one for each month. I have no idea how that will work out when I am as busy as usual and the holidays are coming up. But I will try my best. 

(I also just realized that there is three weeks left to the month and I have not started the new chapter yet. Oof.)

(If I keep up the chapter a month pace, the story will end around April, aka: CTB’s next birthday.)

Thank you to everyone who has kept up with this story for so long. I love writing long stories, but there’s always a point where readership peters out (not surprising; comes with the art form). CTB has long hit this point (taking a four month break this year did not help), so I appreciate everyone who has kept up so far and everyone who has recently given this story a shot. Hopefully the next chapter will worth all the time and dedication you have shown this story so far <3

[scary-grace]

For the director's cut, 🌟 for kairos and/or the barduil bride shop au (if ya have anything to talk about them)!!

🌟 I feel like I yap about Kairos all the time and yet I somehow never run out of things to yap about. Today I’m thinking mainly about the role of the Arkenstone Ghost-hunting Society in the narrative, so you’re going to hear a little bit about that.

I recently realized that I love setting up contrasts/parallels in my fics, and it’s on display really obviously here with the AGS and the Barduil family unit. Prior to their arrival, Bard and Thranduil are each other’s parenting foils, and Thranduil feels very inadequate compared to Bard. Once AGS arrives, however, they’ve got Dis in the mix, and she’s a much better foil character to both Bard and Thranduil than they are to one another.

The big contrast between Bard and Dis is how they handle the matter of their haunted houses. Dis went for full disclosure with her kids, while Bard went in the opposite direction, and both approaches had consequences. While it doesn’t show much in the narrative, Bard’s guilt for concealing the truth about the house extends past Thranduil and includes his kids. The way she handles the horror makes Bard question how he’s handled it the entire time, and whether things would have been different if he’d believed from the beginning.

For Thranduil and Dis, the contrast is in how they handle their grief over their lost spouses. Neither of them are doing a great job. Dis is much more open about what happened to her husband than Thranduil is about what happened to Riro, but at the same time, her openness also results in displacing her feelings outward. In addition, there’s someone Dis blames for what happened to Edden — someone who, for various reasons, she will not allow herself to be angry with. Fili and Kili observe her grief, but the three of them aren’t able to grieve together, which has had consequences, particularly for Dis’s relationship with Fili.

On the other hand, Thranduil has kept his grief almost entirely to himself. When it shows, it shows in his actions, none more so than his intent to withdraw entirely from life in the move to Eryn Lasgalen. Obviously this wasn’t good for the kids, and neither is never talking to them about their feelings — but even when Thranduil refuses to talk, he leaves Legolas and Tauriel space for their emotions and doesn’t try to force them to feel how he feels. While it’s still self-destructive, Thranduil’s approach to his grief does a lot less damage to his kids.

In canon, Dis is one of those characters who I would have loved just a few more crumbs of information about. The quest for Erebor ends in a massive personal tragedy for her and brings the direct line of Durin completely to an end, unless she chooses to have more children. What was it like for her to learn that she was truly the last of them? How did she move on? Did she ever forgive Thorin for taking her sons along on the quest? What did she do for the rest of her life, after so much of her life living by the dreams of her brother?

That brings me to one final parallel between Dis and Bard: They’ve both lived life in the shadow of an immensely powerful supernatural force. For Bard, it’s the house, and his feelings about it are clear and unambiguous. But although Dis grew up inside a haunted house, the force her life has pivoted around isn’t the house, but Thorin. She’s been Thorin’s protector for as long as she can remember, but his impact on her life is impossible to overstate, and she couldn’t escape it even if she wanted to. Dis’s feelings about the course of her life are complex. It’s easy to know how to feel about something that’s caused you pain. It gets harder when the thing that’s causing you pain is something you love.

thanks for the ask!

send me a 🌟and the title of a fic and I’ll do some director’s commentary.

[charmwasjess]

director's commentary on that truly homoerotically loaded sparring scene in... i wanna say Sitting? but i am not entirely sure and i can't go to check bc ao3 is down again :')

but i am sure u know the one

OH I KNOW ODDLY-EROTIC-YET-PLATONIC FIGHT SCENE

It’s a sparring scene, but in the context of the fic, Dooku has had his shit rocked hard on a mission, he’s still recovering, his lightsaber is damaged so he’s using a borrowed blade, and his confidence in himself is shaken. But he gets Sifo-Dyas up in the middle of the night because he’s going crazy without being able to spar. It’s got to be Sifo-Dyas because Dooku is too embarrassed for anyone else to know how weak he really is. It’s really too soon, but he needs this, he half begs Sifo into it, who goes on to very tenderly kick his ass. 

I wrote it before I ever shipped him with Dooku, so I couldn’t figure out why their dialogue and all was coming out so …suggestive. I chalked it up to Sifo-Dyas’s personality - okay, he’s a playful troublemaker, he’s a bitch, he’d probably flirt with a cardboard box. But I think it’s this mixture of rawness and intimacy, need and response, and the physical play of their bodies and their lightsaber forms. It felt 100% more like writing a sex scene than a sparring scene. And I’d keep that dynamic when I eventually paired them: Dooku is uncomfortable around the idea of sex, not always sure of what he wants or his relationship to his own pleasure, and he relies on Sifo-Dyas taking the initiative to get out of his own head and enjoy their shared physicality. It's a top Sifo/bottom Dooku scene without anybody taking off their clothes.

---

“So exactly how long has it been? Just how wound up are you?”

Dooku turned and gave him a look.

“Oh. That bad?” Sifo-Dyas whistled softly. He passed his own saber from hand to hand and smiled. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

Dooku moved to take his place across from him, trying to make himself go slow, not rush into it. “I am far from capable of that just now.”

“Oh, good.” His friend sounded cheerful, if a little tired. “We’ll finally be an equal match for once.” Without further ceremony, he fired up the blue of his saber, and brought it into Soresu's opening brace-ready stance, one arm extended, the blade parallel to his cheek. His features took on a cast of half shadow, half ice.

“Don’t be like that. It isn’t true,” Dooku frowned. “And it isn’t kind.”

“All right, you’ll still win as usual, but this time I might make it last a bit longer for you.”

He rolled his eyes. “I meant it isn’t kind to you. You are a strong sword.”

“Thank you for the compliment. I was trying to make you smile.”

“I smile,” Dooku said, not smiling.

[positivexcellence]

‘Walker’s Jared Padalecki Shares a Look at What’s to Come in Season 4

Collider: You’re four seasons into this TV series now, which isn’t the 15 seasons that Supernatural was on the air, but it’s a very respectable amount of time.

JARED PADALECKI: Thank you so much. Hopefully, we’ll have 40 more. But Season 4 is certainly bizarre and amazing and incredible, and I’m grateful and flattered and love the journey these characters have gone through.

What are you loving about Season 4 and about the Cordell Walker of Season 4? What are you most enjoying about this point of the journey?

PADALECKI: With Supernatural, we would flip between maybe the big bad guy and then the problems at home or with the brothers. But in the case of Walker, we will go from big bad guy to family stuff to bad guy of the week to family stuff. Just like life is, it gets big sometimes and it gets small sometimes, but there’s always some issue. And so, what I love about Season 4 is having a serial killer out there that is from our past and that haunted us back then and is sure to haunt us again this season, as The Jackal does, and also, there’s so much drama at home. Cordell has a daughter who’s a freshman in college and a son who’s a senior in high school. Mom and dad are trying to figure out what to do. His brother is trying to figure out what to do. It’s just that feeling that we all get, as humans and as adults, where it feels like, “Can’t just one part of my life calm down?” And sure as hell, it never does.

It feels like this show was originally brought back to television because there was a real hole in this type of programming at that time, and I’m glad the series is still on because it still feels like it’s really needed in that space.

PADALECKI: Agreed. What’s funny is that I grew up in Texas. I grew up in San Antonio. I’ve lived in Austin for 15 years. I grew up watching Walker, Texas Ranger with Sir Chuck Norris, himself, so that was a part of my childhood. For those who’ve seen the original and seen ours, this is obviously a very different show. I’m certainly a fan of action movies and action shows and action books and action stories, but I found myself, after 15 years on Supernatural, which was very much based in family as well, wanting something that anybody of any age could watch. I wanted something that wasn’t just about cutting off vampires’ heads, or killing God or the devil and everything in between, but was more like, “How can we make this as realistic as possible to what’s going on right now, and what has gone on in the past, and what is sure to go on in the future?” The commentary is oftentimes about how people have seen the original and love the re-imagining that we Walker put together. But more often than not, I love that I’ve had parents come up to me and talk about how Walker, though the situation is different because he’s a widower, is going through life and trying to figure out his kids while they’re changing, and he has to go to work because he has a job. There’s something universal about that struggle and that experience that seems to have really communicated and landed with people, no matter what their job is and what their family situation is.

Is it challenging to make this series with a shortened episode count, or does it feel like you can really just pack more into every episode?

PADALECKI: I get both. There’s a quote I heard one time about actors and writers and directors and producers and whatnot, and they used it in the form of an actor. They said, “If you give an actor three years to prepare, it’ll take three years. If you give him three months to prepare, it’ll take three months. If you give him three days, it’ll take three days. If you give him three minutes, it’ll take three minutes.” It’s one of those things where life imitates art. We’ve found such wonderful stuff, and kudos to our great writing team for making it possible, but it feels very like life. It feels very much like Cordell’s life would be. You find out sooner than you would’ve hoped, “Hey, this is coming up,” or “You’ve gotta do this or that.” While it’s certainly been different, if you could give me 30 days to do an episode, it’ll have its challenges. If you give me one day to do an episode, it’ll have its challenges. I think that goes from top to bottom, cast and crew alike. We’ve had a great time. Because of cross-boarding some episodes, we might be doing episodes one and two, and even if a character is only in episode two, since we will shoot two together, I still get to catch up with that human being during the filming, which is wonderful.

You’re kicking off this season with a lot of storylines happening for these characters. He’s stepped up his romance, his daughter is not coping well with things, and there’s a serial killer. I love that there’s really this balance where you have the romance and there are some good things on the horizon for the family, but then there’s also the dark and deadly aspect of a serial killer. What sort of balance will we see this season between the light and the dark? Will we get to a point where things get more dark and more intense, as things play out with The Jackal?

PADALECKI: You certainly will. Given what happened with the strikes, over the last 12 months, it didn’t make sense to do a direct pickup after Season 3. So much time has passed between the end of Season 3 and when Season 4 will air that it just didn’t make a lot of sense for our viewers and our lovely and wonderful loyal watchers. Kale [Culley] just turned 18 in May, and he’s almost my size now. If we picked up Season 4, episode one, directly after Season 3, the final episode, it wouldn’t make sense. You’d be like, “Oh, I guess August grew four inches overnight.” Our writers were very aware of that and tried to make every bit of that as real and human as possible. We certainly do see, as characters and as viewers, how this Jackal that haunted Captain James and Ranger Walker back in the day, five years ago, still has a stranglehold on them, and just how deep and dark they go while trying to keep all the other plates spinning in the other aspects of their lives.

It’s certainly never great to keep secrets from people you care about, especially when they’re big secrets. And on a TV series, those secrets are bound to come out, and likely at the worst possible time.

PADALECKI: Yep, that’s what our sadistic writers try to do. Teasing, teasing, teasing. No, they do it in such a wonderful way. Going back to before even the pilot, one of the things that Anna Fricke and I talked about before we’d even staffed the room and cast the characters and hired the crew was that we want this to be as real as possible. Although in a different arena, with Walker being a Texas Ranger and a widow, we want this to have universal problems and issues that every person goes through on different scales as they navigate this life.

Jensen Ackles directed an episode of the series. Do you think he’ll do that again?

PADALECKI: I sure hope so. Now and always, I will work with Jensen, wherever, whenever. He’s obviously a busy man. He’s got a wife and three kids of his own. He’s here, there, and everywhere. He’s been in Toronto, he’s been in Vancouver, and he’s been in New Mexico. He’s a very busy guy. He and I see each other a lot, obviously, with Supernatural conventions, and we text often. He certainly is up for it. It’s just like life and like Cordell Walker, trying to figure out when things will work out.

Do you see yourself directing an episode?

PADALECKI: Not to speak for Jensen, but to try to speak for Jensen, directing is something that he was always really passionate about, and producing is something that I was always really passionate about. I have a deep respect for directors, and the door is not closed. If the opportunity arises and I think, “Man, I really wanna direct,” then I will. But over 24 years in the industry, I’ve worked with so many talented directors who deserve the episode more than I do. Obviously, as the executive producer and the guy in the poster, I could probably make a phone call and say, “Hey, I want an episode,” and they might say, “Okay, you get one.” That’s not what Jensen did.

From day one, he was like, “Hey, I wanna direct some day.” That’s not where I was. And so, I don’t wanna take an episode away from a really deserving, talented director. I really love my job as an actor and as a storyteller, and as an executive producer, I help guide the storyline and help in the casting and help with the editing. So, I’m a pretty happy cat right now, where I stand. I love that puzzle. The director puts the puzzle pieces together. I like getting the puzzle pieces and figuring out how they can work even better. I think a lot of artists go, “Hey, I wanna guide this.” For me, I love the puzzle of acting and scene breakdown and story breakdown, and just trying to figure out how to make what’s already great on the page and great on the set, even better if I can.

You and Jensen Ackles have both talked about having interest in a possible revival of Supernatural. Is that something you’ve seriously considered doing? Have you had any real conversations about that, or are you just having conversations about having conversations?

PADALECKI: It’s not that I have seriously considered doing it, my single answer is yes. It’s timing. It’s availability. Jensen and I feel so strongly about our show that we had for 15 years together that we don’t wanna just do it just to do it. We don’t wanna go, “Hey, I have two weeks off in June. Let’s go ahead and shoot 10 pages a day, just so we can have some more content.” If and when Supernatural comes back, it’s going to be a labor of love, and we’re gonna put every hour in to make sure that it’s as true to the cannon and to the fandom and to the story and to the characters as possible. So, my short answer is it’s not a consideration, the answer is yes. I just don’t know when I’m available. I don’t know when he’s available. But again, my answer is yes.

Have you thought about all the different possibilities of what it could be, as far as whether you’d do a shortened season, whether you’d want to do a movie, or if none of it works, whether you’d do an animated series?

PADALECKI: Yeah. Honest to God, I don’t think about the medium in which it would air. I think about the story that I care about. If Jensen and I talk about where we would like to see Sam and Dean appear on screens again, and we think, “Cool, we like this, and we like this arc, and we like this conclusion,” then let’s do it. If they make it into a movie, great. If they make it into a limited series, great. If they make it into a flip book that’s available on Amazon, great. But at this point in time, I feel so protective of Supernatural that if the story’s fine, then I don’t care how it gets into the world.

Eric Kripke has also always made it known that he’d love to have you on The Boys anytime you were available. Would you like to make an appearance over there? Have you actually spoken to him about that? Would you even want to be in that world?

PADALECKI: Yeah, he has reached out to me and my response to him 90% of the time is, “Dude, I’m 41 now with three kids. I’m not 25 and working out three hours a day. I know you’re going to fucking make me get naked, so give me a heads up. I’m in, but let me get a nutritionist and a trainer and get in the hyperbaric chamber for eight months before you make me show up.” But yeah, it would obviously be a lot of fun to see Kripke again and to work on that show, which is a great show that I’m a fan of.

It certainly seems like a little wild break of fun.

PADALECKI: A little wild? Have you seen the show?!

Yes, and I love it very much. But I also have a sick sense of humor.

PADALECKI: I do, too. I love watching it, but imagine putting yourself in it. I’ve got kids. My mom and dad are still alive. I’ve got grandparents that are alive. I don’t know how to just unplug their electricity when the show airs.

collider

[brian-in-finance]

Orlando Bloom /The Cut

Orlando Bloom And Sean Ellis Talk About Star’s Transformation Into Past-His-Prime Boxer In ‘The Cut’: “He Was Willing To Have His Nose Broken” – Toronto Film Festival

Sean Ellis’s sixth feature, following the deliriously atmospheric 19th-century vampire movie Eight for Silver (2021), is yet another curveball from the criminally underrated British director. Titled The Cut, it is the story of a past-his-prime boxer who goes behind his wife Caitlin’s back to accept a lucrative comeback fight in Las Vegas. But this is not yet another Rocky-style underdog story, the kind that culminates in the ring. Instead, it is a sometimes-shocking psychological thriller, a sort of boxing procedural that details the extreme lengths that cornered fighters will go to. On paper, it sounds like Southpaw, but in reality, it has a little more in common with this year’s Cannes hit The Substance, a visceral body-horror movie about a fading starlet (Demi Moore) and her desperate drive to maintain her fame.

Sean Ellis / Getty Images

In The Cut it is actor Orlando Bloom’s turn to defy expectations. As the boxer, the former Pirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings star is a revelation. He’s not entirely unrecognizable as the matinee idol of the 2000s, but, thanks to the magic of prosthetics, he certainly looks like he’s been through the wringer, and his return to professional boxing is not a sure thing. In fact, the most suspense in the film is generated by the initial weigh-in, which will determine whether he even gets to fight in his own title category at all. Caitlin (Caitríona Balfe), his wife and his trainer, can only get him so far, and when the team gets to Vegas, the boxer meets the charismatic Boz (John Turturro). Boz hooks into the boxer’s insecurities, drawing him into an increasingly dangerous training and weight-loss routine.

With the film about to make its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Deadline sat down with Ellis and Bloom to discuss the film and its themes.

DEADLINE: Where did the project start? Who was attached first?

ORLANDO BLOOM: I’d worked with our producer, Mark Lane, some years ago on a movie for Tea Shop Productions. We did a movie together in London called Retaliation, but it was released as The Romans. It was another small, British independent movie production. It was brutal, and I loved the brutality of it. One day Mark said, “I’ve got another one for you,” and he pitched me The Cut. We talked about it, and I loved it immediately. I loved the idea — the premise of a boxing movie without the boxing, where the focus of the fight wasn’t the boxing match itself but rather the fight within the character, who just happened to be a boxer. I thought that was really fascinating, an interesting commentary on the way masculinity operates within that space.

We worked on the script for about a year or two with [screenwriter] Justin Bull, who was fantastic. And then we were just over the moon when Sean read it and responded to it exactly as you’d hope a director with his kind of vision would. He said, “Yeah, I see this.” [To Sean.] Right, Sean? That’s the long and short of it, isn’t it?

SEAN ELLIS: Yeah, that was pretty much it. The first time I read it, actually, was over the Christmas period [in 2022]. Mark had sent it to me, and I was interested because I’d been looking to do a boxing movie. But how do you do a boxing movie? I mean, it’s become almost a genre in itself. They’ve become so clichéd. Like submarine movies: You’ve got to have a scene with one person trapping themself in the air lock and drowning, as they tap away at the little porthole.

With boxing, you’ve got to have an impossible match that they’re not going to win, and then they either do or they don’t. And I thought The Cut was just a really interesting take on that. It was the about the preparation that an athlete goes through, and the drama of that. I thought that was so much more interesting than anything we’ve already seen in a boxing movie. I called Mark back, and I said, “It’s great.” I mean, it grabs you and it doesn’t let go. And it really delivers. It doesn’t let you down, and it really takes you right through to the end. And as OB was saying, it’s pretty brutal.

BLOOM: It’s an assault on the senses — which was kind of what it was like for me, physically.

ELLIS: Yeah. But I love cinema like that. I love it when it grabs you and shakes you. I think that’s what cinema should do.

DEADLINE: Orlando, how much did you weigh when you started the process?

BLOOM: I was about 185 pounds. [Laughs.] Sorry to use pounds and not stone!

DEADLINE: Same as the character?

BLOOM: Give or take.

DEADLINE: How did you lose the weight?

BLOOM: We worked with a great nutritionist called Philip Goglia. He started me on a program about three months prior to filming, and I tiered down from there. I was eating more food than I’d expected, in order to maintain the muscle but drop the weight. There was a sort of science to how much and how often I was eating, like having a spoonful of honey at night, things like that, to hold the muscle but lose the fat. This was three months prior to filming, so when I landed in London to start — which was about three and a half weeks before filming started — I would say I weighed about 170 pounds. I’d dropped quite a lot of weight before I came to the UK, and then in that three-week period I was basically eating five tiny meals a day. A lot of it was tuna and cucumber, and nothing else. I dropped to 152 pounds for the weigh-in scene. We shot that at the beginning of the movie, and then we shot the whole movie backwards.

DEADLINE: Why was that?

BLOOM: Philip, the nutritionist was like, “He’s not going to have any brain function or energy to make the movie.” [Laughs.] He said, “You’ve got to start with the weight loss and then feed him through the movie.” So, we shot the movie in reverse. I remember, I had this massive drop [in weight], because I was sitting at about 163 pounds for what felt like forever. And the training regime was a lot. It was two hours of cardio every day, an hour in the morning and again at night, and then boxing, and then weights, and a very limited amount of food.

I’d already started training — I’d been doing boxing training in America before I came over — and then I dropped 10 pounds of water weight in one night, which was crazy. Philip had told me about this routine that boxers do — they have a hot Epsom-salt bath. I don’t know whether it’s down to osmosis or just some weird body science, but it worked. I had a photo of myself, and I sent it to my partner and my mates, who were tracking me through this wild experience. I sent it to Sean. And then I sat in this space of that weight for about two and a half weeks before we started filming. [Pause] Is that right, Sean? I have to say, my brain is very scrambled…

ELLIS: Yeah, he came to us at his lightest weight because you can’t lose weight and work. It’s almost impossible — you can’t remember your lines or anything else. So, Phil said, “He has to come to you at his lightest, and then you need to allow him to start eating again. But that means you have to shoot the movie in reverse chronological order.” Now, chronological order is a nightmare at the best of times. But reverse chronological order is a total Rubik’s cube. We only had 25 shooting days, and, obviously, Orlando was putting weight on as we were reaching the end of the shoot, which was actually the beginning of the film. But when you edit it in reverse, he starts off heavy and then goes to his lightest point. It was a big jigsaw puzzle, but we got there.

DEADLINE: How did you feel about him losing all that weight? Did you ever feel guilty?

ELLIS: Mark Lane said, “Look, he’s really committed to this. Have a call with him and see if you guys jell,” and I did, instantly. But more than that, what I saw in OB was a huge commitment to make this right. And he was willing to do anything. I think at one point we even spoke about him going to the dentist and having his teeth filed and recapped. There was also the idea that he was willing to have his nose broken. [Laughs.] I was like, “I’m not sure we have to go that far.” But Orlando’s a good-looking bloke, and we were thinking, “How do we convince the world that he’s a professional boxer and make him look like a professional boxer?”

[British makeup artist] Mark Coulier came in and did a lot of work on his face. Mark got an Oscar nomination for Elvis. I’ve worked with him on a couple of movies and he’s just amazing. He took a head-sculpt of Orlando and then showed us what he would be able to do with him. A broken nose; fake ears that were more like cauliflower ears from the fighting; a change of the jawline — there were these “plumpers” that went into his mouth — and the teeth. The eyes as well: Mark gave him a droopy boxer’s eyelid.

I remember when I saw him sitting in the makeup chair. He had the haircut and everything, and I thought, “I buy this guy as a professional fighter.” At that point, he didn’t actually look like Orlando, strangely enough. In fact, I remember when we were shooting, there were two girls in the hotel we were using — just were members of the public — and they were waiting for the elevator to go down. Orlando was down the other end of the corridor, in his pants, and one of them nudged the other one. She whispered, “That’s Orlando Bloom.” The other one looked up and said, “Nah,” and then they got in the lift. I was laughing, because they didn’t recognize him.

DEADLINE: Were you surprised by his dedication?

ELLIS: Even from that first call with him, it was obvious that he was just so committed to this film and was willing to immerse himself. We were referencing [Irish featherweight and lightweight champion] Conor McGregor for a while, to the point where we started talking about the character being Irish, and we loved that idea. Then we cast Caitríona [Balfe], who’s Irish as well, and it made even more sense. It felt like the journey from Ireland to Vegas was bigger, because in the original script he was American, I think. Those changes came about from just me and Orlando talking about the character. I love his accent in it. Honestly, he’s not giving us an Orlando that we’ve seen before, and I love that. I love the change.

DEADLINE: Why did you want Caitríona?

ELLIS: I’d seen her in a couple of movies, Belfast and Ford v Ferrari, and her TV show Outlander. And at the point when we were having these discussions about Orlando playing Irish, I was like, “Well, let’s find an Irish actress.” So, I spoke to Jamie Dornan about Caitríona, because he’d worked with her on Belfast, and I said, “What’s she like? Is she nice? I love her movies. Is she good to work with?” And he was like, “Oh, she’s the best.” So, I got that endorsement, we offered it to her, and, luckily, she said yes. [To Bloom] It was just the three of us a lot of the time, wasn’t it?

DEADLINE: How did her casting affect the script?

ELLIS: A lot of her character was really born out of a lot of the discussions that the three of us had about the relationship that the two characters had. How their past dictated their relationship, and how it was going to dictate their future. So, it was really lovely just to work with both Orlando and Caitríona on finding those characters and really giving them life without really having to spell it out. Boz has more of a visual background, because you see him in flashbacks, but what I love about Caitríona’s character is that there’s a lot of subtext in her performance. It’s not overwritten, but you still get a sense of her life and what’s happened to her in the past.

BLOOM: I remember a conversation I had with her when we first spoke. I called her up. In the early drafts, the script was really centered on this transformation that the boxer goes through, the inner torment and the fight. And I said to Caitríona, “Look at the script as a blueprint, because there’s so much more between the lines than there is in the lines.” I really wanted the authenticity of this relationship to play. Because I think he can’t live without her. He can’t function, he can’t operate without her.

DEADLINE: In the middle of these two you have John Turturro as his trainer, Boz. It’s a very interesting part, almost like a kind of sadistic Jiminy Cricket…

ELLIS: We had many conversations about the script before John actually came on board, but I think John wanted to reassure himself that he was right about how he was going to do it. Because when John turned up — am I right, OB? — he’d fully formed that character. You said, “Action,” and John just did it. There was no, “What do you think?” He’d decided how Boz was going to be.

BLOOM: Can I jump in, Sean? What was on the page for that character was completely different to what John brought to the film. I remember sitting next to him in the makeup chair, and I was in and out of consciousness, in terms of how I felt emotionally. I was paranoid as hell. It was a really weird time, because of my mental state: I wasn’t having any food. Or sleep. I wasn’t sleeping because you don’t sleep when you’re not eating — you keep waking up.

And then he said to me, “It’s love.” And I was like, “What?” He said, “It’s a love story.” And my mind exploded. Sean was like, “Yeah, of course it’s a love story.” But his part wasn’t really written like that. He was written as a pretty straightforward character, like a drill sergeant, very aggressive. And then when he told me that, it became this love triangle in my mind. Boz was seducing me, in a way, into his web. Like, “You’re my guy now.”

Obviously, I’ve been huge fan of the man and the actor for years, and everything he’s ever done. That part could have been so generic in the hands of anyone else, but he just knew what to do. He was sprinkling magic dust all around us. I think we had that conversation on the second day of filming because we were all a bit thrown to begin with. Do you remember that, Sean? I was, certainly. I was like, “Wait, what’s going on?”

ELLIS: I remember Mark coming up to me and saying, “So, is that how we want Boz to be?” Because Boz was very much on the page as a character like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket. I remember saying to him, “That’s John Turturro, and he’s giving you Boz. It might not be the Boz you saw on the page, but it is a Boz, and he’s absolutely made it his own.” As OB said, he’s sinister, he’s conniving, and he’s also kind of a groomer, because he understands his victim and he knows how to take control. So, he really pulled himself into this in a very insidious way, which I find very creepy and just brilliantly executed.

BLOOM: Yeah, he totally transformed what the movie could have been.

DEADLINE: You’ve got the Toronto premiere coming up. What kind of reactions are you hoping for?

ELLIS: Well, I hope they don’t throw eggs at the screen. [Laughs.] Listen, I’m incredibly proud of the film and I’m incredibly proud of the performances that the actors have given. It was just such a privilege to record them, and be present, and see them craft those characters. That’s the thing I’m most proud of when I look at it. I think it’s very strong, and it’s a drama with very strong characters.

DEADLINE: Orlando?

BLOOM: Yeah, it’s funny, when I was at drama school, I remember working on The Seagull, the Chekhov play, and there’s a moment at the end where the audience goes silent, because it’s just so uncomfortable. And I think this movie has a similar impact. It’s such an assault on the senses. And, to his credit, Sean never takes his foot off the gas. You can’t hide at any point in this movie. It’s like we strap you into a rocket, and you’re off. And there’s a lot of commentary on the way athletes — male athletes in particular — operate. Obviously we haven’t taken this from a true story, it’s fictitious. But I think it deals with very real ideas about self-worth. It’s about what people will do to fill the void that’s in their stomach, or in their soul. It’s about the lengths they will go to.

Deadline

Remember… (about Caitlin, Caitríona’s character) I really wanted the authenticity of this relationship to play. Because I think he can’t live without her. He can’t function, he can’t operate without her. — Sean Ellis

[not-freyja]

Hey, so the 'scene breakdown' ask game is long gone but does that matter? If you're up for another I have a request. 💜

In one of your answers you covered the scene where Wars talks to Malon and is perceived. You mentioned him checking on Legend was a response to that.

So I want that scene. Wars finding Legend by the pond, scars on display and fighting off the curse by inches instead of just letting it hit him all at once.

Did this take forever? Yes. Apologies. But here go go, director’s cut on two emotionally constipated boys talking about feelings. Text of the fic in brackets [like this] with commentary beside it.

[And seeing it, the Captain gets it.

There’s an angry healed burn between his shoulder blades, so reminiscent of Wild’s… well, Wild’s everything. Angry jagged fractal lines spread in all directions from it, just like Sky, climbing over his shoulder, down his arms (the long sleeves make sense now), around his waist. There’s other scars. Raised white lines that can only be from swords and spears and a patch around his right forearm that looks like it was torn apart, and a matching area of raised skin on his opposite hip.] So we have a very fast inventory of a few notable times Legend got his shit rocked in the games. The LA lightning strike. General combat wounds. A rabbit in a predator’s jaws. A kid pinned down by a search dog.

[All of that is easy to ignore in favor of the three evenly spaced, perfectly round patches of deep scar tissue, in an awkward diagonal across the small of his back. Warriors looks at that, and the visual comes to mind without his bidding, of Legend skewered on the end of a pronged spear, pinned down so small and alone under something so much larger than him.] ALTTP Ganon fight. There are several hints throughout Adjuration that Legend barely made it out of that first final boss fight alive, including a flash back to a fairy mid battle. It’s about setting the tone, you know? This is a man who has been barely hanging on to survival for years. He is tired.

[His mind conjures the image, and he can’t help the gasp.] Wars is not thinking about Legend. He is thinking about Mask, and the little kid that Legend used to be, and he is picturing his baby run through by a giant trident.

[Legend drops the cloth and flinches, turning his head sharp to the side, only tensing further when he sees Wars. “Go away,” the Vet hisses.

He shouldn’t have gasped. “Legend, I—”

“GO AWAY!”]

Okay so Legend is immediately playing the “emotional repression game” and this normally works super well on Wars but unfortunately for him Warriors literally just had an intervention.

[Warriors doesn’t move, doesn’t break eye contact. He slowly, deliberately takes a step forward.] Yes we are in fact approaching our brother like a startled prey animal. Not inaccurate. But still. [What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” Legend rolls his eyes and picks the cloth back up, dipping it into the pond and wincing as he wrings it out.

Honestly, the Captain isn’t entirely sure.] Because it is ridiculous. This whole situation is ridiculous but we had to go here. I had to address the whole “how do you take a bath with an H2O just add water curse” okay? I had to. [There… there’s a bath up at the house?”

“Not an option.” The pink haired ball of rage] LOL get read for filth, Leggy boy [seems to have decided to accept his presence, now scrubbing in small angry motions a few inches below the earlier spot. All the while his mouth is pinched like he’s holding something unpleasantly hot.

Realization strikes sudden, and hard.

“Is this about the fish thing?”] So perceptive, Cap.

[Legend sighs, tilting his head back to look up at the heavens as if in a silent plea for salvation. “Yes, Captain. This is about the ‘fish thing.’”] I think that literally any other phrasing would have elicited less rage, but here we are.

[“Oh.” He risks coming closer, almost within arms reach. “How so, if you don’t mind?”

Legend’s eyes flick back down and the force of his glare communicates that he does, in fact, mind. But there’s something else there, some other unspoken pain behind the unexplained physical discomfort and Warriors, well…

He knows how to manage that kind of expression. Mask was a damned Farore-forsaken mess.] Okay some fun unspoken backstory: Baby Time was not good. He was a disaster child. He was traumatized and scared and abandoned and hurt and suddenly thrown into a warzone. Wars had to work very very hard to earn that kid’s trust. He knows how to appear non threatening to someone having a Bad Time.

[“How are you holding up?” He asks, pivoting. “After Red, I mean. Everything happened so fast, none of us really… None of us have had the time.”

The small part of Legend’s face that was expressive shuts down. There it is. He’s got him.] Because Legend and Time are actually very similar people, despite how they outwardly behave. Wars is seeing one brother while standing next to the other.

[“I’m fine, Wars. Really.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really!” Legend stops scrubbing and shakes out his arm, rubbing it on the bunched fabric around his waist before starting on another spot, only inches away from the last. “People die. I’m used to it.”] Oh Legend, darling. You shouldn’t be.

[“You’re in pain,” Warriors says, pointing to the wet cloth. “It’s hurting you.”] Decision to deflect. To make Legend think that they are talking about the thing he is comfortable talking about: a physical problem.

[“Fighting back the curse hurts, Captain. It hurts like a fucking bitch, but I can manage, as long as it’s a little at a time.” Legend sighs, and repeats his little process. Stop, shake, rub dry, start again. “But too much water at once, and there’s nothing I can do.”] This my friend, is what we call a thinly veiled metaphor. Curse, grief, it’s the same conversation. Pain is pain.

[“Makes sense.” In a way, it does. Warriors understands the concept of tipping points. The physical and the emotional. The magical can’t be all that different. “When you changed back, last time, that… that hurt you, didn’t it?”

Legend shoots him a blank expression.

He pushes. “Did it hurt more than this? This… bath of a thousand little burns you’re powering through?”] Again, metaphor. Is bottling up all that sorrow actually helping you, Legend?

[The Vet sighs, shaking his head. “What does it matter to you?”] It isn’t. It isn’t helping. But what does it matter to Wars, right? He isn’t Legend’s keeper… no one is.

[“I think sometimes, holding back what’s going to hurt us actually hurts more than just letting it happen.” Wars smiles, trying to look as non-threatening as possible as he takes another step closer, into Legend’s personal space. “I think that you’re in pain, and trying to act like you’re not is only going to do more damage in the long run. I think that you’re a stubborn bastard, and that you should knock it the fuck off long enough to actually feel all that hurt you got rolling around in you before it drowns you, fish boy.”] And the metaphor is now so thinly veiled it may as well not exist.

[Legend’s eyes narrow, flashing in sudden violet aggression. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

“Your brother,” Warriors feels his smile slip into a smirk. “And the man who’s seeing right through your bullshit.”]

THIS IS IT! This is the exact moment that Wars starts seeing Legend as his brother. Not his brother in arms, but his brother. This is the tipping point. This is the moment that leads Wars to the decision to trade his own life for Legend.

[With that, he takes the last quick step forward, raising his arms and pushing Legend as hard as he can sideways into the pond. About a minute later, Legend’s forehead and eyes poke back above the surface, and if looks could kill, well…

“I’m going to go get you some soap!” He yells as he skips backwards, a not entirely false smile spread across his lips. “Take your time, Ledge! Really soak it all in!”] Soak in the water, and the sloppy therapy.

[“Fuck you!”

“That’s the spirit! Let it out!” Wars laughs to himself and turns, jogging back towards the house.] They’re brothers, your honor. For real, this time.

*sobbing about the Legend&Warriors dynamic to the day*

[gothicprep]

i have a little bit of time off, and i want to use it to catch up on award season movies. the problem is, of course, that the golden globes is sort of a fake award show. the people who vote on these awards aren’t part of a guild or anything. they’re just guys and dudes. the other problem is that a lot of the nominations don’t hit wide release until well after the awards air.

this is an aside but I love how they have a “cinematic box office achievement” category that’s just shit like alien: romulous, beetlejuice beetlejuice, deadpool & wolverine, gladiator 2, inside out 2, the wild robot, twisters, and wicked pt 1. it’s like saying “we will give a movie you actually watched some laurels so you can tolerate three hours of us giving awards to anora and the brutalist.”

a couple of thoughts outside of that:

I’m happy that the substance has gotten as many nominations as it has. the main issue I had with it when I first saw it was that it was just… so french while ostensibly being commentary on hollywood usa. I’m not going to spoil anything, but near the end of the movie, there’s a nye party that includes a topless kickline. this is DISTRACTINGLY FRENCH. we’re too prudish for that over here! but, the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I love how deliberate the camera work is in it. it deserves a best cinematography or best director oscar nom for this. it isn’t coralie fargeat’s fault that she’s french and this carries into her work. she has a very clear vision and is able to execute it well.

I don’t love conclave getting a best drama nomination. there are very few movies that I watch and think to myself, “this would have worked better as a miniseries”. this was one of them. I don’t know how to talk about this one without spoiling the ending, but the last 15 minutes of it are so cheesy. it’s a slab of brie for dinner. i saw some people compare a speech at the end to aaron sorkin’s writing, but i walked out being a bit offended on sorkin’s behalf.

my wife (theology nut) saw this with my friends and me, and she went off on how disinterested it was in its catholic universe. it hints at a divide between cardinals in the global north and global south, but it doesn’t do much with this. it doesn’t address doctrinal beef at all. and the ending really skates over what the implications would be for the Catholic Church. someone in the theater we all saw this in loudly said “WHAT?” during the last scene. adrienne suggested that it was a bizarrely nested Trump thing because of how negligent it was in this aspect. a relatively progressive pope dies, and there’s a power struggle involved. liberal cardinals are going against an italian who longs for a pope who speaks latin, makes an event of being racist towards the african cardinal, and rails against muslims during the subplot of this movie where bombs are going off outside the church. this is a real thing in the movie that is never explained. i sort of see what she’s getting at. trump has been an inescapable anti-muse in art and it’s really difficult to not interpret this stuff through that lens. the more I thought about this one, the more of a mess i thought it was.

anyway, those are some golden globes hot takes. I don’t know what else to do with my time right now.

[st0rmyskies]

⭐⭐⭐ do you have any director's commentary for The Brave?

Other than the endless screaming about how the climax just isn't writing itself at all?

I could do a commentary for that entire damn fic, but at 66k and with so little brain today, I think I'll focus on one of my favorite characters in the entire story: Dark.

Dark is simultaneously my perfect narrative foil, my ugly little scrumblo, my dumbass a can, and the smartest character in the entire story. He's the only one who sees the whole plot from start to finish for what it is, and yet Time has his head so far up his own ass that Dark couldn't clue him in even if he wanted to. But really, can you blame Time? Their reintroduction in this story didn't go so hot.

“Well well well! If it isn’t the legend himself." [...] Dark moved to set his boot on the tabletop next to Time. The cuff of his jeans rode up to display the chunky plastic bracelet around his ankle. “Say, how’s that cute little redhead of yours? What was her name, Molly?” Time stared at the tabletop directly in front of him. The air pressure in the room seemed to drop. Dark leaned in close so that the others wouldn’t hear. “Does she still do that incredible thing with her—”

I mean, aside from running his mouth like a moron, Dark has zero concept of personal space.

Many things changed throughout writing that story, from focusing on Twilight's relationship with Midna to realizing that Champion's emergence would be a more interesting major arc to follow. But Dark's importance to the narrative remained, especially as an antagonist-turned-ally. He's surprisingly trustworthy, as proven when he and the Deity eventually have their throwdown and Dark doesn't hurt him once he has Time restrained, although he has plenty of valid reasons to want to.

“Do you think I always looked like this,” [Dark] went on, “that I was born looking like this??” Time tilted his face away slightly as Dark leaned in further, lifting his chin. From this angle, he could appreciate the pale lines beneath Dark’s nostrils and at the point of his chin.  Scars. “I hate having your fucking nose,” Dark spat, finally backing off.

The most fun I have with Dark, though, is how much his characterization opposes Time's. Where Time has to answer to others and keep up appearances for the sake of his work, Dark lives by his own rules. Where Time stretches himself thin looking after others, Dark has a self-centered philosophy on life. As soon as he can get the hell out of this whole circus, Dark is gone, and he has the personal freedom to do so.

Moreover: deep down, Time hates having to live up to the expectations of others but he does it because he thinks it's the right thing to do. And he hates how happy Dark is living by his own rules, unorthodox though they might be, because even when he was under constant surveillance, Dark was arguably freer than Time is throughout this story.

[dirtbra1n]

directors commentary about Impulse in the shape of Today you are a girl.... and surrounding scene of course.... i love you and peace and love on planet prevpreshanzashiro

hi it’s november 27th and I’m back here again. mindmelding between friends @aranarumei Hi kiri. is something that can be so personal. I’ll go in extra deep on still-unnamed tashiro post current events’ Side note this is why you don’t leave asks out to dry for four calendar months. close side note. extra deep on today you are a girl paragraph when we get there. I love you guys so much by the way did you know this.

speaking to you from the future: I started back on this thing at work, maybe an hour before we closed. that would make this about three hours now.

I’m putting this under a cut.

tashiro’s phone pings with a message from shirahama that reads, If you do anything to screw up your hair I’m shaving it all off your head

ping. And making you eat it

ping. Keep one foot on the ground at all times if you do anything insane I’m really gonna do it

first thing is that shirahama’s here again. everyone say hi shirahama :) he’s a few hours from getting the anxious shakes with no known cause (he was responsible for tashiro’s hair for the girlification competition). shirahama’s here again because he does an excellent job at carrying tashiro through the days and nights, and because the advice to keep one foot on the ground at all times if you do anything insane I’m really gonna do it. is topical always but especially now. he’s also here again because you have to identify a chance at comedic timing and lunge for it hungry with both hands:

tashiro purses his lips. glances out the open window; first floor.

the picture he takes of his feet, hovering as he sits on the windowsill and clad in black crew socks—he left the shoes somewhere else, he figures miyano will chase him down about them later—is waiting to be sent with incomplete text suck i when he spots someone out the very corner of his vision.

set-up is happening here. black crew socks highlighted as a reference to the black sailor uniform option from tashiro girlification poll 2023 as drawn by You 🫵 sunnfish. tashiro’s shoelessness as a cog is working steadily to do its part for a theme that was accidental, clocked, and left in. tashiro almost finishes typing suck it to send shirahama before pausing the action entirely—shirahama watches the typing bubble linger. uh-oh shirahama—because of

the very corner. an unmistakable figure at the edge of the crowd, staring over the living mass of strangers, right into tashiro stood in the window, until he isn’t anymore.

funny thing about crossdressing, see, is the worldview shift. that broad back looks broader, a piece-of-work senpai haunting his memory like a grief-hallucination.

that was him though. there are only so many people tashiro could recognize from the moon and he’s one of them. how many people in the world could possibly look like that.

relative to the rest of the thing, this scene was brand new; I’d written it a few days before tashiro’s birthday, when I posted the lot of it, because Creative process keeps me in a rock tumbler mostly. this matters really only because It was that evening, july third, when it really slotted into place in my mind exactly how prev prez should exist in the context of river. incidentally Neither your asks nor this post is about it obviously but the bathhouse scene and the others related to it are also “new” in this way, for the same reason.

anyway prev prez. from the start it was my understanding as wielder of the authorial godhand that he is, you know. functionally and narratively dead. if hanzawa masato is an active haunter straddling the line between Wanting to live and Being just so so sick of Various things, prev prez is about as passive a dead guy as the average dead guy can be. except for the fact that he is, in some way, to tashiro specifically, an exceptional (adj. unusual; not typical) person. an unmistakeable figure that tashiro could recognize from the moon. unrelated to anything right this second I think somewhere along the way I mindlinked tashiro to hanako tbhk. hmm. Okay well moving on. tashiro has a real certainty on that figure having been prev prez, because prev prez lives, in a very real way, in tashiro’s mind. he’s also a massive Haha. catalyst for the most prominent #tashirogirlification here; his gravity, the masculinity of him, works in tandem with the sailor uniform makeup and done-up hair.

because tashiro is crossdressing as a girl, he feels like a girl. because tashiro is crossdressing as a girl, prev prez (who is already recalled by tashiro in a super masculine way—it’s important to me as usual that Love & Passion is told by tashiro, seen through his eyes, because it says, to me, that those fucking photos of prev prez are also as tashiro saw him. this is present elsewhere in tashiro post, ideas of memory and recollection) Okay that was a long parenthetical let me restart. because tashiro is crossdressing as a girl prev prez Already looking the way he does. looks even more that way. okay great now the crown jewel:

it’s a second of stirring in his stomach that bridges the space between shoujo manga and violent murder. his feet are back on the ground but they might as well be dangling out the window; an impulse in the shape of today you are a girl has him gripped by the shoulders, nearly chasing after a living ghost and using strangers as stepping stones to do it.

hi killing point. first point of discussion is that this scene’s cinema is one of the most vivid ones I see; hands braced on the windowsill, head out the window, feet twitching where they stand on the floor. look up and watch yourself bound over still water stepping stone by stepping stone, grace and beauty completely hallucinated where the fantasy, in reality, is exactly as clumsy and cruel as you’d expect it to be. hup! out the window onto the heads and shoulders of strangers, clammer over the shifting tides of the dense crowd—great turnout!—and emerge worse for wear, but very quick, on the other end to continue the pursuit. this fantasy is only mostly completely hallucinated, in that tashiro really nearly goes through with it. this paragraph I just wrote explains nothing.

I’ll concede: solid alliteration with s in the first half of the first sentence leads cleanly into two sets of four quarter notes; the killing point, to borrow Words, shou-jo man-ga (kiss) and vio-lent mur-der (kill). next sentence in both of its semicoloned halves continues the yet-unstated not-quite run-on capital f Feeling where tashiro’s mind is running 10 miles a minute, but the first half embodies the feeling of Having a Body, the sensation of gravity contrasted by the tantalizing appeal of swinging your feet out the window, void calling as a siren would, and the second half (the first half of it) has impulse (personified) grabbing tashiro by the shoulders (not, by any metric, narrow these days) and nevertheless speaking into him the refrain Where’s your girlish whimsy? the second half of the second half, as we went through just a second ago, has tashiro watching himself (in spirit, haha) doing the worlds least considerate parkour, and closes with another instance of solid s alliteration. I want to put on the record that the alliteration was not intentional but I think in retrospect that it is neat. hit the button and call it time!

one foot on the ground with his hands braced on the sill, he hears, “tashiro.”

sky still looks like rain. indistinct collective murmur hangs over the crowd outside like smog. a metal rod’s pang clefts clean through his forehead, up between his eyes. taiko drums. dwarfed by encroaching shadow miyano calls again, “tashiro,” from down the hall. tashiro’s shoes dangle limply from his hands.

thundering resonance. tashiro croaks, “what?”

continuing on to what I’ll call the second point of discussion: where the camera was—tashiro facing out the window—shifts to lead into I think THE most vivid cinematic scene I see. tashiro in the foreground, caught, miyano in the background, catching. tashiro’s name throughout the whole piece has this cleaving quality I think, where it cuts through where you were to bring you where you are, and here it cuts through delusion fantasy and reckless daze to remind you that tashiro is someone who is more sensible than this. which is why, following “tashiro” the word (ice cold water poured down his back), tashiro the person suddenly sees feels and hears all that he’d been unconsciously tuning out.

prev prez just has that effect on him.

the second time around miyano’s voice is just miyano’s voice, bouncing off the walls a little with the way he projects it, more than a little concerned. by separating the information extra attention is drawn to tashiro’s shoes in his hands, words dangle and limply doing exactly what they were meant to, once I realized something. tashiro’s shoelessness as a cog is working steadily to do its part for a theme that was accidental, clocked, and left in. <- You know chekhov? TFW you accidentally liken tashiro’s impulsively wanting to jump like a girl that chases her first love, shoelessly, to jumping in a way that kind of feels a little like. river…y. in a suicidal way. you see why this is the scene I see the best and most frequently.

well anyway. As for the other things this bit is doing. the atmosphere merges a little with the water. in a lot of ways that cold water reality check description of the scene works just as well to describe the Fucking River, because I can’t ever leave it alone. because it can’t ever leave me alone. miyano is here and real but shadow works as a cloth backdrop behind him, upon which he stands stark and separate from the Fucking River because, even now, Nobody’s told miyano about whatever the hell tashiro and hanzawa senpai have got going on. all he sees is his friend, needed elsewhere, shoeless, about to jump out of the goddamn river, and all he has are his goddamn shoes. tashiro, caught, embarrassed kind of, with blood roaring in his ears, could only say, “what?” bonus points for my use of cleft when grammatically speaking it would be cleave. I have the conch, and I say grammar be damned.

anyway as I finally close this out, I’ll say Speaking of river,

see the tweet in the middle. there was a point on the third of july where I thought really hard about whether I wanted tashiro’s girlification to itself exist in dream time, as a dream, because tashiro post took forever and we’d all seen harusono’s own third year culture festival by then. ultimately I decided otherwise, but I really thought about it really hard. in any case I’m glad I didn’t do that because as I found out that friday following tashiro’s birthday. as we ALL found out that friday following tashiro’s birthday. harusono shou was on exactly the same page as me as far as One Thing in particula

aaaaand scene.

[isabeljkim]

What the hell is going on with Day Ten Thousand:

Day Ten Thousand was weird enough that I felt like it deserved directors commentary, even though I’ve stopped explaining myself mostly except when I do.

Here’s a disclaimer before we begin: don’t read too much into it. I've noticed our culture wants to explain young womens’ art as some sort of public confessional booth and our current culture has a fetish for the autobiographical. Fuck that. I didn’t write three different POVs and three interlocking nonlinear narratives about the nature of storytelling as a psychic technology to be told that my writing isn’t a calculated Craft with a capital C. Now whether it is good Craft is a decision for you, not for me. 

Anyway. 

Day Ten Thousand is a satire of an Isabel story by way of Vonnegut pastiche. We’ll come back to this. 

I called Day Ten Thousand “psychoanalysis bait” on twitter so I shall put all my cards on the table so that your psychoanalysis is at least accurate. Note that these are only my cards, because other people deserve their privacy. I guess you could probably Google all of this but like, jeez. Don’t.

I had a pretty regular time in college except for the tangential deaths. 

When I was twenty, I was the opinion editor for my university newspaper and a girl who was a friend of a friend killed herself by walking in front of a subway. There was then a sort of a small suicide bubble which was a little bit public because we were an Ivy, and one of my opinion columnists was kinda suicidal, and I, without any training, ended up in charge of writing a front page editorial about the mental health crisis on campus on account of the dead kids, etc, and talk to administration about the dead kids. 

I hate talking about dead kids. Don’t ask me about it, or about the reporting. I don’t want to talk about it. 

The whole thing sucked shit and it’s why I’m a lawyer now and not a reporter. 

If this was a story that would be the only fact, but this is reality so I have to mention that a couple years later a guy I knew got literally hate crimed and murdered in a forest. I found out about that because I saw his friend crying in public and didn’t stop to ask what was wrong. Later I heard about this in the news, and realized my acquaintance had been Literally Fucking Murdered. A few months ago I had been arguing with him in the literary magazine editors meeting about whether a poem was good or not. I think he won that argument. Then he was murdered for being gay. 

These were my introductions to the specific emotion of “sometimes people die and you don’t feel like you get to feel bad about their deaths and you still think about it a couple times a month seven years later.” 

You can probably guess where the subject material of this story came from.

Day Ten Thousand was a story about inevitable deaths, and the difference between a death in a story and a death in reality, and about…the way a death marks a narrative and a real life and how it becomes fictionalized over time. I also saw a clean way to finally do my deep time / far future story, which was something I had been thinking about on and off for a couple of years (the original version was about a shaman in the deep-time era who has a vision about having to do a murder re: preserving genetic material for the future, but it never really gelled in a way that made sense). 

I had also been wanting to write something a little metafictional, because I felt like I was writing the same story over and over (if you’ve noticed my stuff getting weirder, that’s why. I was on a bit of an experimentalist kick late last year and early this year). 

So it’s a satire of an Isabel story. I’m self-aware enough to note my obvious recurring motifs: time travel, dead people, grief, people who have a weird relationship to each other, a third-act twist, the tendency to punctuate with in-universe facts to imply emotion, to tell x in order to show y, egregious and blatant use of the second person. And then there’s the stuff that you wouldn’t know, but I do: I dislike writing in the first person, I wanted to do something nonlinear, I think a lot about stories about stories, about the idea of a story as a technology, I find myself dropped into recursive fate-like thought patterns. So a lot of this story is both my self-deprecating poking fun at myself and my habits, and also my thesis statement about…what is the point of fiction if not to make sense of the past and the future, I suppose.

The reason it is a Vonnegut pastiche is because I like Vonnegut a lot and I was trying to do something Slaughterhouse-5-ish with drastically less fucked source material. Sorry Kurt. 

There are three stories happening in Day Ten Thousand, and a secret fourth story. Each story is a suicide loop. The protagonist is trying to break a specific loop by telling a story. This story is about accepting what you have to, and changing what you can. This is a story about letting go and also not letting go. The emotional range of each narrative affects the other psychically, because by changing the vibe of the metanarrative, the individual narratives are allowed to change. 

The story in the archaic is a story that is being told postmortem, it is all hypotheticals based on fact. The story in the future is a singular narrative happening in real time until it isn't. And the story in the present is a guy telling the story about the future, which requires him to tell the story about the past as well, and mostly what Dave is doing here is avoiding the question, but it reflects how Dave thinks about the girl dying in front of the train. 

Does that make sense? No? That’s fair. That’s a postmortem explanation of what actually happened. What actually happened is that I rewrote Day Ten Thousand six times, each time more frustrating than the last, each time with the neutral-ish narrator taking up more and more air. And over time the narrator became a participant, and that’s what created the secret fourth story between “you” and the narrator. 

I had thought there were only three loops that needed to be escaped - the past (archaic, pinned story), and the future (space station, mutable fact), and that the present (the narrator’s world) was something that was static (pinned fact). After all, the girl’s already dead. She’s already stepped in front of the train. 

But the narrator isn’t doing so hot. The narrator is also Dave. And the narrator is telling the story to someone. Somewhere between version one and version six, I realized the only version of this story that makes sense is the one where the story is a conversation, and that you and I, as the narrator and the person at the other end, were also in a loop. 

So. That's whats happening.

I’m not sure if I love the ending. But I rewrote it six times and this one felt as final as it is going to get. I am done reinventing the fucking wheel. You know how it is with spaghetti. Promise I’ll write you something normal next time, I think I’ve gotten the avant- garde out of my system for a few months. 

And hey, I know I said all cards on the table but people deserve their privacy and that includes the kid i used to be when I was twenty, sitting in the shitty little windowless opinion column office, writing about suicide. 

Anyway. Day Ten Thousand is about stuff and things. Themes. So it goes. 

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you later. 

If that was too depressing for you, here are some fun facts: 

The main character is Dave after 2001: A Space Odyssey because I had wanted to make a “I’m sorry Dave I can’t do that” joke, but I couldn’t shove it in :( 

I just thought that phlebotomist was a funny word but I also fucked myself because I misspelled it every time. 

I reread half of Slaughterhouse Five to write this but then my copy got returned to the library automatically so I didn’t finish it. (yes, I’ve read it before, like three times)  

I took one single evolutionary anthropology course in college and it shows.  

I did end up looking at the wikipedia page for “the wheel” for this and then wondering exactly what I was doing with my life. 

About half the facts in this are real, and I read a couple of papers for a couple of things in it (that I promptly then ignored), but the rockets-rome-horse’s ass thing is specifically a story that my friend Max H. likes to tell. 

[callsign-rogueone]

Hey honey! Hope you’re feeling better today 💗💗 I’m adoring the directors cuts. We know you put so much thought and planning into your stories, and it’s so fun to get a glimpse of where your head was at when you were writing!

Can you give us some commentary on Dain and Love? She seems to be becoming a fan fave, and we the people need to know more about them!

Love you!

-fw-gt

this is so late but here it is!! I’m gonna kinda do a general overview for this one!! no quotes, just broad thoughts because I’ve been itching to unpack all my thoughts about Dain for months. here’s a few of them for now — there will be much more Dainposting from me in the future, that’s guaranteed.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again — Dain wants a princess* that he can be the knight in shining armor for, and Violet isn’t that, so that’s (one of the reasons) why they didn’t work.

*Not a literal princess, but he wants a girl that’s going to let him protect her, let him play that masculine role and make the decisions, because he’s maybe a little bit insecure in that regard and also maybe a little old-fashioned, being from a military family with traditional values.

Love is kinda that girl, but she’s also very much not that girl. You said this perfectly in the discord the other day: Love is a good balance of what Dain wants, and what Dain needs.

She’s a lot of things that he wants — she’s beautiful and razor-sharp-smart, and kind and caring and so many amazing things (because she’s you all!). She wants to be cared for and doted on, (total daddy’s girl, first of all) and she knows her worth / what she deserves — besides her parents, Brennan and Duchess are her role-model example of how a relationship should be. so she’s got Standards.

However, comma, she’s still very much her own person, and that clashes with his personality quite a bit. She alters her uniforms to look more flattering and wears impractical shoes. She’s not afraid to laugh during formation or other serious situations. She memorizes her textbooks instead of studying them, and half the time she sleeps during optional training sessions. She’s a wild-child, playful and always down for a shenanigan. They’re going to have several more arguments about her putting herself in danger — she agreed to cut out the jumping-off-her-dragon stunt, but she’s not going to roll over for him every time just because he says so.

She’s not a damsel in distress, either. She can defend herself (guess who taught her to fight 👀) and she’s smart in tactical situations, as her dad was one of Fen’s tacticians, but she’s a bit of a wild-child, impulsive and ruled by her emotions, rather than the codex — though she does have the codex memorized. so she gets to play lawyer on behalf of the marked kids and finds ways to keep her shenanigans within the lines. the professors are sick of her shit, but also very impressed.

Dain is included in that category — alternating between awe and irritation. but he needs to be challenged, to be softened a little and learn to relax for once. he doesn’t go with the flow at all. ever. he’ll learn, though. he has to, if he wants this to work — which he does, but he’s still conflicted.

he’s got the pressure and disapproval from dear old dad, and the propoganda he’s been taught about her fam being traitors… and then there’s her absolutely terrifying older brother, who is the son of the “lead traitor” and absolutely despises him… but she’s so pretty and so nice to him, even though she shouldn’t be. and he feels bad for her, knowing what she’s been through. she’s slowly changing his perspective, and that’s uncomfortable at first. there’s gonna be turbulence.

and… SPOILERS FOR THEIR STORY BELOW, but most people know this already, and I’ve already said it multiple times;

they’re having a kid in Onyx Storm.

Dain and Love started as a one-shot request, part of the family, (which will eventually be re-written to change some things!!) but the more I thought about it, the more I was like… hmm. this could work, actually. fuck it, why not?

the idea of Dain, the self-proclaimed “responsible one”, becoming a young dad (22-23) is definitely unexpected — giving him a little reality check, and breaking the “graduation -> marry a nice girl from a good family -> have 2.5 kids -> get promoted as high as you can, in that order” model that he’s undoubtedly been taught to follow.

He has some shit to unpack regarding his upbringing and his relationship with his dad, and his mom not being in his life (headcanon of mine). and while Love is gonna help with that, as well as some of his other issues, it’s really going to be their baby girl that speeds things up and gets all this done and dusted.

but also, him having to unpack all the shit his father did, unlearn it, and then learn how to…

be a parent without his own parents there to help him, nor hers

raise a kid that won’t turn to hate you and help lead a revolution against you

make them feel safe and loved and meet their emotional needs, not just physical needs…

deal with the idea of Love being in danger now that there’s a baby in the mix

and some other things I won’t spoil hehe

so yeah. he’s got some stuff to figure out. I’m forcing him to have the character development he deserves in canon 😌 and these three are gonna love each other so much and be such a cute lil family, happily ever after, so help me god.

thank u for the excuse to ramble about them. ily 💗