#and it feels like there is a glimpse to some preexisting character there! that I didn't even intend! and like! that's so neat to me

[cha1cedony]

I'm gonna ramble about fic writing (while taking a break from actually writing, but I'm making progress this time! I promise! woohoo. knock on wood). ANYWAY, one of my favorite things to consider as far as characterization goes is self-awareness. Because there's so many different ways and degrees to which a protagonist can be self-aware, and I just LOVE seeing how characters shift (not necessarily 'grow') over the timeline of a story. I love thinking about where a specific character would choose willful ignorance, where they would choose to come to terms with a harsh reality, where they would be entirely oblivious, where they're NOT oblivious but can't even verbalize it in their own internal monologue... chef's kiss. My favorite stuff to write

[its-all-papaya]

☀️🌈if u haven’t already!!

-> weather wip asks

☀️ Sun - What's your favorite part of your WIP?

answered here, but here's another: I kind of unintentionally started doing this thing where i give bits of lando lore at the start of some chapters. i love it partly because it's a lot of actual baby emma (like in her first eight months) that we don't obviously get in the real-time of the fic, but also bc EYE have all this lore stored in my head to help me make choices, and it's like giving y'all little glimpses of the whole backstory so you can understand everybody a little better.

🌈 Rainbow - What do you think makes your story unique / stand out?

AH answering this feels like insulting other ppl's writing for no reason 😭 there's not a ton of kidfic in the landoscar repertoire in general, though? and i think mine's a bit different in form too, because the two long landoscar kid fics i think of are both more ~baby acquisition-y (not derogatory why does it feel derogatory to differentiate my writing......).

anyway, lando is not learning how to parent in my fic. he's learning how to fall in love while parenting. like obviously emma is a big focus, and lando being a dad is essential to the narrative, but it's ultimately lando's love story. i think most existing kid fic uses the introduction of the child as the instigating event (either POV character acquiring baby or POV character realizing love interest has baby), whereas the kid is a preexisting circumstance for my POV character. i'm explaining this kind of poorly i think. lando is always already a dad; the story is focused on how he's learning to be other things at the same time.

that was like pulling teeth. if ur @zolica-ao3 or @nyoomfruits and ur reading this, i love ur kid fics NOBODY PLZ THINK I DON'T LOVE THEIR KID FICS !!!

[kremlinkumasunite]

Being a creator is about discovery, not invention

Hikaru Utada: When I make music, there isn't any sort of message I'm trying to communicate. Zero.

Naoki Urasawa: I'm the same. At the start of something new, I just imagine what the teaser would look like. Once I get a glimpse of a visual that feels good to me, I take that and continue exploring from there. Eventually, I'll find my way to that visual from my imagination. For example, some scene that would show up around chapter 20 could be an idea I had doodled in my notebook before starting anything. But when I did that drawing at the time, I didn't have an plan for where it would show up in the story. In the end, the story is being lived out by the characters in it, and it's got nothing to do with me.

As the characters' thoughts and actions unravel the story, the place for that initial doodle will reveal itself, to even my own surprise. It's precisely this process that makes me think it is impossible to create a story that revolves around a preexisting message. HU: It's the same for me, but with sound. I often begin the process with a chord, and I'll continue trying different sounds until I find one that makes me go, "This is it!"

The only thing I'm doing is making decisions whether this sound is "it" or "not it." I don't really know what the criteria is either, I just know if it is the sound I want or not. I keep making decision after decision, and when I get to the last spurt it's like I've established a connection with, like, some "god."

It's like finally opening a box that has been shut tight on humanity, whether interstellar or on earth. Like, "Yeeess! I've got it!" There is always this radical moment when I finish a song. From there, I proceed with writing lyrics to fit the music in a practical way.

NU: We're pretty similar. At the beginning of my process I will envision that prologue, and I'll start working through a story that practically fits that image in my head. People often ask, Why think about a prologue? To me, it's all about supporting the characters and going along with them for the ride. It's kind of like that feeling of trying to decipher a dream.

-translated excerpt from Utada Hikaru x Urasawa Naoki discussion Invitation magazine, May 2006

To be continued

[disghasting]

Is anyone else obsessed with how subtly important eye contact is in Goncharov?

Have you noticed how many times he says some form of “look at me” to katya? How, whenever andrey is in a scene his eyes seems to slowly maneuver from object to person to object, as if he’s scanning meaningless information, UNTIL goncharov is in the scene and suddenly his eyes follow him like he’s something worth studying? And what gets me most, how katya, the person who refuses to look at goncharov in the eye unless he all but begs, the woman who has never had the opportunity to yearn for a man because the men do all the yearning for her, looks at sofia like she’s hung the stars and moon, to the point sofia even says something!!! THE DIRECT PARALLELS BETWEEN GONCHAROV’S “look at me, why can’t you ever look at me” AND SOFIA’S “you can’t look at me like that, why do you insist on stopping my heart,” like yeah it was probably meant as a throwaway gag, the way it was said after sofia found katya drunk (don’t even get me STARTED on how katya hid the fact that she was prescribed medication for a preexisting condition from goncharov because she refused to be seen as weak but as soon as she sees sofia’s face in her weakest moment she collapses into her arms and sobs, like???) but that aside it paints such a lovely picture i can hardly stand it.

Heteronormative speculation in the film critic industry has always painted that scene as proof that katya really does care for goncharov because of the flashbacks to him in the middle of her talking to sofia and moments before The Kiss™️, i’ve seen the same take so many times “she was hallucinating that it was goncharov in front of her, not sofia,” but that makes literally no sense considering the way she acts around him for the rest of the film.

The flashbacks were all times that we’d already SEEN in the movie, except the beginning few which were of a younger goncharov, before the beginning of the movie, perhaps before they’d fled russia even. It showed a story, each change in memory was one of him mentioning her always being in her own head, or not paying attention, or even the one scene everyone knows and loves where he asks her what she’s thinking about. The way the first few were grouped together, then became broken up by glimpses of sofia, because the answer to the question “what are you thinking about,” changed as soon as sofia stepped into the picture. She used to dream of freedom from familial pressure, from her husbands line of work, from her countries political agenda, but recently freedom feels less like a pair of wings and more like long brown hair and warm eyes that she can’t help but stare into.

Katya’s character being so underdeveloped in favor of goncharov and andrey mentally fucking for a few more minutes is absolutely deplorable, all i want is for her to find gay peace!

(Btw if you remember any scenes that have to do with the importance of eye contact in the movie that i forgot to mention here, feel free to add on!)

[woozapooza]

Penny Dreadful: The Verdict

Okay so to start with, I watched the first four episodes of this show back when they first aired in 2014. I didn’t actively decide to quit watching, I just kinda...didn’t continue. I’m glad I decided to give it another try. It was pretty fun. Not great, but entertaining.

The concept is SO fantastic. I frequently found myself thinking that the execution felt a bit...first draft, but man, what a cool concept for a show.

This is probably an unpopular stance, but I think my favorite character would have to be Dorian. However, that may be due more to the actor than to the character. If either Dorian had been played by someone other than Reeve Carney, or if I did not have a preexisting attachment to Reeve Carney due to Hadestown, I doubt I would have cared about Dorian very much at all. But here we are. Dorian is hardly the most fleshed-out character on the show, and he often felt tacked-on rather than an organic part of the story, especially in the first two seasons. On the positive side, I love how he’s mostly a shallow, utterly amoral hedonist but occasionally betrays a lingering bit of humanity. Like in his awkward crush on Vanessa in s1, his “I care for who you are, not what you wear” line to Angelique in s2, or (in a weird way) his final scene with Justine in s3.

Ethan would have to be second. He’s cool, and, better yet, he’s ANGSTY, which is an automatic plus. I adore characters who are running from a  troubled, guilty past but can’t escape it because it lives within them. I really thought he was going to die for some reason (maybe just through analogy with a certain other American gunslinger fighting supernatural creatures in late Victorian England). I’m glad he didn’t. Side note, I was hoping for more of a reconciliation between him and Kaetenay :/ Side note to the side note, I was dying of laughter every time Kaetenay referred to Ethan as “our son” when talking to Malcolm. Imagine that from Malcolm’s point of view. Imagine you’re in a foreign country and this rando from yet another country comes up to you and is like “hey we share a child and he needs us to team up to save him.”

Best performances: Eva Green and Billie Piper, duh. Overall I would probably say Eva Green was the best, but the best performance in an individual scene might have to be Billie Piper’s monologue about Brona’s daughter in the second to last episode.

My biggest criticism of this show is probably that an awful lot of it felt like it was going for shock value. I’m not opposed to shocking things happening, but they have to feel earned and organic, and a lot of Penny Dreadful just...doesn’t. Like Vanessa’s conversion and death. That was not a very satisfying ending 😐

Speaking of unearned deaths, I don’t remember the last time I was so mad on behalf of a character as I was for Sembene. I kept waiting for him to have a purpose in the narrative aside from a pathetic excuse for an attempt at “diversity”...and then, after giving just a glimpse of what could be a fascinating backstory and after just beginning to establish a profound friendship with Ethan, he just gets killed off in the most pointless, insulting way. Come on. It’s comforting to know that after this show, Danny Sapani moved on to Harlots, a show where he got to play an actual character with personality traits and relationships and concerns of his own, not a glorified prop. God damn.

But on the topic of deaths, I do want to return to the subject of Dorian for a second and say—and this is almost certainly an unpopular opinion as well—that Justine’s death was honestly kind of...cool? Not her death itself, but the scene. The way that she and Dorian were basically all-out enemies, and it is entirely his fault that Lily is gone and the “revolution” or whatever is extinguished, and I expected one last fight between him and Justine...but what actually happens is that she pours her heart out to him and he takes mercy on her. It’s horrible but it’s weirdly tender. I never saw that coming and that’s why I liked it. It was shocking, but not in a cheap way. It was shocking in a way that deepened both their characters just for a moment.

I hate to say it but I cared about Victor. He sucks so hard but I cared about him for some reason. Same goes for Henry. By the way I LOVE the concept of Frankenstein and Jekyll being college buddies. That is genius. And I love the idea of Dr. Jekyll being the half-Indian child of an English lord. I wish he had more screentime/development. He was so interesting.

Uhhh I know there’s a lot of hugely important things I didn’t touch on here but this post is long so whatever. Fun show overall. Could have used another round of revisions.

Overall grade: B-

[davidmann95]

All-Star Superman #2

A scant year to the day since part 1!

All evidence to the contrary I actually have always wanted to go back to this, especially since I keep getting asked if I’ll do so and it stirs my omnipresent sense of guilt over my lack of productivity, and also the last year has not resulted in a mass turnaround of people realizing it’s a for-real good book and not just comfort food so this remains necessary. This isn’t going to be quite as in-depth as the first go-around - both that as the introductory issue and that as the introductory recap had a lot of groundwork to lay - but still plenty to cover, as this issue sets up Lois and Superman’s arcs for the series, which is rooted (amazingly, especially right off the bat, given the book’s reputation of being about how amazing Superman is) in how badly Superman’s let his fears and shortsightedness poison the most important relationship in his life.

If the first issue is the big classic Superman material - Superman saving the day from the monster! Lois and Clark and the rest of the Daily Planet crew! Lex Luthor’s sinister schemes! A ticking clock to doom! - this scales all the way down to the uncomfortably, stiflingly intimate. Classic archetypal Superman stuff gives way to the most Silver Age issue: casual huge ideas, relationship drama, misunderstandings, last-minute reveals that recontextualize the entire issue, and baaaarely latent psychodrama bubbling up at the edges. In service of that the visual framing here is not unlike a stage play, a limited set of physically connected locales as a pair of figures bounce off one another. Quitely and Grant’s work is therefore comparatively subdued next to issue #1, keeping to traditional panel layouts and wide or medium shots with a background color palate of mostly blacks and whites and grays with a handful of other colors popping out...until Lois starts to lose her shit at the end of the issue and we get close-ups and full black and white panels and eerie glowing and dutch angles and that unsettling abstract image of her clenched teeth, as the story starts to squeeze us like Lois’s gut.

She’s right to be unsettled for that matter; she’s alone on Superman’s turf (the one issue where that’s the case other than #6, and that one’s about how Smallville stopped being his home), the weird antiseptic alien lair of the ultimate super-hobbyist, and all the baggage of their relationship is spilling out into the open as she has less and less reason to think the best of this odd man who’s been lying to her for years. Unlike the Silver Age tales this is referencing, she’s absolutely on the money with her complaints about him: he’s been dicking around with her forever and thinks it can all be okay now (His little “What?” on the second page when she bursts his bubble says it all), and he’s awkwardly overcompensating trying to fix it.

While the Fortress tour serves to peacefully acclimate us to how utterly bizarre Superman’s world really gets past the traditional rescues (the little cubic starfield we don’t know the meaning of yet, trophies are floating rather than physically suspended, the glowing flowers in Lois’s room, “The Phantom Zone map room’s pretty dull unless you can see radio-negative anti-waves”), Superman himself is...humblebragging isn’t the right way of putting it, but it feels like he’s working way, way harder than he ever will again in this book to be cool and impressive and assuring. He’s a dope in love, but he can tell something’s up and that super-brain of his isn’t putting the obvious pieces together, or noticing that this is just putting her off further and further until, like Bluebeard’s wife before her, she stumbles through the threshold of the door she was never meant to, even of course in the end he’s still Superman and there’s a perfectly good reason. Not a good enough reason, however, for her accusations at dinner to not hit home - his mind may be expanding, but he’s still way up his own ass here in a genuinely unpleasant way that’ll be elaborated on momentarily. For now he’s left stammering that she should trust him and it’s limp and phony, especially compared to his big entreaty for someone to trust him in #10 (which’ll be right after he finally comes clean with her); while Superman may not be considered a savior figure by his friends in here the way he often is in the mainline comics Lois seems to be the only one who doesn’t look up to him at least a little bit, but that clarity means she’ll call him out where no one else will.

Across the next two pages it’s all laid out, and we get to the roots of where things have gone wrong between the two of them. Lois is paranoid, certainly, the panels are literally squeezing in on her, but with Superman seeming so out-there and alien like never before she would have every right to be even sans alien chemicals. But notably there remains throughout a part of her assuming the best of him wondering if maybe this is just another big misunderstanding or that he’s simply been mutated by the solar overexposure. And in her heart of hearts, she admits that maybe she wants this to be another big damn trick with a completely sensible justification, because the alternative is that this is the new normal and she has to accept that he’s a flawed mortal man. It’s ugly and it’s mean - especially since she likes Clark - and it’s human as hell in the worst, most understandable way. It’s not going to be until said mortality is staring her in the face that she’ll be able to accept it.

Superman, meanwhile...someone could write a thesis on these panels as an articulation of the Superman/Clark dynamic. The Mirror of Truth is actually preexisting, centerpiece of a Jerry Siegel/Curt Swan joint in Action Comics #269 that was later adapted into the Superman newspaper strip where Lois uses it to figure out Superman is Clark Kent until he tricks her into believing the mirror can lie, after which he tosses it in a volcano; here it’s survived, and curiously shows him as Superman rather than Clark, when in the original tale it displayed Kent even though that was fully the era of Clark as a disguise. In here too it’s Superman who’s the ‘true’ identity of the two and which this time is reflected in the mirror, yet as in #1 it’s Clark who says what he’s truly feeling. In that light, the final panel of the abandoned glasses reads like nothing so much as Superman using the mirror as affirmation that the truth of the solemn, steadfast Superman identity gives him licence to deny the uncomfortable emotions his squishy human farmboy side is dredging up, ‘lying’ to him in a way he had to fake in the source material. Those emotions however knock right on the door of what he can’t grasp here: Clark’s so wrapped up in his own head trying to do the ‘right’ thing that he’s overlooking how his attempts at self-sacrificing selflessness are hurting the people around him. Throughout the series he’ll come to rely on others, first at his lowest points with Jimmy and the Bizarros, until at last he comes to invest true trust in Lois, and the Kandorians, and Leo Quintum, and even Lex.

For now though Lois is deep in a hole, a brief but memorable meeting with the Unknown Superman of 4500AD - everything Superman seems to be becoming to her even before she wonders if it’s literally him, cryptic and masked and with a big ‘ol question mark right on his chest instead of the familiar comforting logo, even his gutbuster of a question reinforcing his distance from a recognizable human experience - leading her all the way to reimagining her Silver Age ideal happy ending of marriage and family with Superman as a Cronenbergian horror. It’s still a Superman story, it turns out he had the very best reason possible for wanting to keep her in the dark, but right through to the end he remains just a little condescending in his reassurance, and his gift of essentially bringing her up to his ‘level’ isn’t going to solve the problem. While the next issue lets us see the two of them properly in love, it won’t be until the elephant in the room comes out that they can come to terms.

Additional notes

* God Quitely is so good. Look at the way the seatbelt curves in the first panel! Lois’s bemused little disbelieving smirk!

* Pages 2-3: Aurora Borealis?!

* Lois is the only character other than Superman who gets to have actual narration (in both cases as looks at their in-text writing), the only one whose viewpoint is thus privileged in the same way as his.

* The key is the realization of this series’ aesthetic in a nutshell: the old-school idea in a sleek, shiny, clever new way that doesn’t take away from the fantastical toyeticness of it all. For that matter, the key is the centerpiece of a later bit with Superman that could be fairly described as the long-term goal of the book book as Morrison’s hoped-for perennial: “One day some future man or woman will open that door, with that key. When they do, I want them to know how it felt to live at the dawn of the age of superheroes.”

* This is A. The first note of a larger DC universe existing offscreen, something that I’ll go into more when discussing #8, B. A brilliant, concise, fun little summation of his place in Superman’s world, and C. Absolutely hilarious given Morrison suggested in his exit interview that this could be seen as much later on in the same universe as All-Star Batman & Robin The Boy Wonder, which entirely rewrites the tone of that moment.

* Already discussed the key but the muscles in Superman’s hand tensing a bit at picking it up is another great detail.

* The glimpse of the Fortress here is excellent: the statues of his friends and enemies instead of pictures because he does things bigger with the yellow electric something crackling at the end of it, the off-model but curious-looking robot appearing to glance at Kandor (are it and the bigger robot with the seats on top of it trophies, or Superman Robots with different designs tasked for specific purposes?), the classic Bad Penny Good For One Crime, the Legion time bubble that establishes his time-traveling credentials for later, the Titanic where he and Lois will dine when their relationship hits a proverbial iceberg, and most strikingly the space shuttle Columbia, his apparent rescue of which I have to imagine is a reference to Astro City’s Superman analogue Samaritan debuting by averting the Challenger disaster.

* It’s next issue that has my actual favorite Superman/Lois moment of all time, but “When we’re married fifteen years, when I’m sagging and he looks just the same, will he still meet me and say things like...” “These are for you. I picked them on Alpha Centauri 4.” is right up there.

* The technological aesthetic of the Fortress is so different than P.R.O.J.E.C.T., sleek and solid and cleanly-lit and antiseptic, beautiful and advanced but a little cold in its own way. As stuffed with wonder as this place may be, there’s something hauntingly empty about it, suiting both the tone of the issue and as a physical embodiment of Superman’s emotional state. The one part that goes against it is the forbidden room, it even has beakers and test tubes to sell the mad scientist vibe...though if you were to stretch it, it much more close resembles the human technology seen at P.R.O.J.E.C.T., and this is meant as a gift for one.

* The cosmic anvil made it along with the key into the CWverse, Lois used it in Elseworlds! I may not be expecting All-Star quality from the upcoming Superman and Lois, but it’s good to know the powers that be are using it as a reference point (beyond how it inspired Supergirl’s take on Cat Grant, a connection I discussed in a post that seems to have vanished into thin air). The whole page is perfect, Superman at his most joyfully benign and beautiful and godlike; it’s the one bit where Lois’s skepticism cracks a touch watching him feed his adorable little Lovecraftian abomination from beyond the stars.

* While he never appears physically aside from a statue Brainiac hovers over this series from beginning to end in name and deed, the ominous ultimate enemy of Superman’s past, the great trial overcome even as the scars forever remain. Morrison mentioned in the exit interview that he didn’t appear in here because he and Quitely already used him as the villain of JLA: Earth 2, but that if he had it would have borrowed Superman: The Animated Series’ take on him as a Kryptonian AI gone rogue. Personally I like his place in here as-is, a little totem parallel to the Justice League references indicating the breadth of Superman’s history between putting on the cape and Luthor’s final scheme.

* A pair of minor notes: Lois points at Superman with the pointy fork when asking him pointed questions, and while it’s not immediately clear on first read she does in fact ask the Unknown Superman exactly 3 questions (“Kal Kent?” “Will Superman and I ever marry and have children?” “What do you mean?”) before he replies with his own, as promised.

* “Oww.” and “Tickles.” literally could not be more perfect Superman moments.

* Worth taking a moment to marvel at just how many future plot elements are seeded here. There’s the obvious bit of Superman thinking about having a partner setting up the next issue, but we also for issue #6 have our first look at Kal Kent and Lois wondering “What if (the Unknown Superman) was really (Superman)?” when Clark will indeed pose as him, for #10 we get our first look at Qwewq, and for #11 not only is the Sun-Eater introduced but so is Robot 7′s malfunction as a result of Luthor’s tampering.

* The structure of the series according to Morrison is a solar cycle, beginning and ending at midday with nightfall in the center. If last issue was the sun at its brightest we begin the descent here, with Superman remaining larger-than-life and ultimately trustworthy but with his classic persona and habits held to an additional, unflattering degree of scrutiny.

[autopotion]

of course i know that so much of the concept art is changeable and lots of characters will be cut or changed so significantly during development until they’re unrecognizable. here’s the thing though: i was making concrete theories about dragon age 4 before a single trailer ever dropped because i like to theorize about narrative development. it’s fun! it’s engaging! dragon age has clear narrative structure across its games, from companion personalities to classes to overarching questlines, and i like to wonder and imagine at what the next game will be like, and how it will follow up on any narrative hooks established previously. and i do this with every piece of media i’m engaged with!

so when the devs release a trailer that is a fun and flirty little glimpse into the less-than-concrete mood of the game they’re still imagining, of course i am going to analyze the details. even if they end up never being important or relevant! even if i come up with some grand theory that either never sees the light of day, or is so completely the opposite of what they were going for! while not all the concept art is relevant, it’s also very fun to track how it changes and why, what they scrapped, what they kept. i like to use this information to build on my own preexisting theories i have already held for a very long time, and tweak as necessary as we get more and more information. we have so little to work with already, but i find that exciting tbh. it titillates the imagination.

i think PW is trying to avoid the fallout of upsetting people if characters or ideas in this early concept art never see the light of day. honestly that’s so understandable. fans have a tendency to act really weird about early development things and act as though devs broke promises if early things never make it to the end. but that’s just how storytelling works. concept art isn’t a promise, it’s a tiny little window into the process, and the editing after is rigorous.

also, in general, fans have a terrible understanding of narrative and narrative structure, in my experience, as well as the sheer amount of time and resources it takes to make a game. they get up in their own heads about their own feelings without an iota of understanding of the process.

so i get what PW is saying and why, but it’s not going to stop me from looking at the concept art, pointing at it, and saying “wow i wonder if this thing is x thing i was theorizing about. i wonder what they meant by this? i wonder what their plans are for this one, should they make it to the end, let me imagine!”

all this to say: if i see a concept of a character who looks like they might be a dwarven mage that i have theorized could be a companion ever since i completed the descent dlc, for example, then i’m gonna talk about it. even if it never makes it to the end. because i think that’s exciting, and that’s how i interact with media i care about.

(and there are recurring themes in the concept art, which says to me they have some ideas they are more certain about than others, and i like to see if i can pick out which ones they might keep and which they might discard. it’s fun!)

[thecomposerthatwaspromised]

The song’s slow and lilting melody was written by Ramin Djawadi, the composer for all of Thrones’ music, including the thrumming title theme and the string-laden episodic scores. Only a few other examples of lyrical (and diegetic) tunes have shown up previously on Thrones: “The Rains of Castamere,” the Lannister war song, and “The Bear and the Maiden Fair,” a bawdy drinking tune. I met with Djawadi last year for a glimpse at his process, and after hearing the new song—as well as its haunting cover by Florence and the Machine—I spoke with him again, this time about the musical material heard thus far in Thrones’ final season. This conversation has been edited.

Spencer Kornhaber: Tell me about your assignment for “Jenny of Oldstones.”

Ramin Djawadi: That came together like some of the other songs we’ve done in the past, like “Rains of Castamere.” The song was written into the show, so they needed this piece before they were shooting. Normally I come in after the episodes were shot. But this one, they gave me the lyrics and said, “Write us a song.”

Kornhaber: How do you approach writing a song with lyrics when most of your music is instrumental?

Djawadi: It’s definitely different because I already have something preexisting. I try to find the rhythm within the lyrics and put a melody to it where, when you sing the song, it just feels natural. A lot of times, you’d think the song comes first and then you put lyrics to it, but there are definitely occasions—Elton John being a very famous example—where the lyrics exist before.

Kornhaber: So you read the lyrics and hear music in them. How would you describe the mood, the tone, that you felt the words called for?

Djawadi: Definitely something somber. Obviously it’s the night before the big expected battle. It’s haunting and lonely. Those things that go on in your head when you think, Are we going to die? That’s what I was going for.

Kornhaber: Florence Welch said it reminded her of “a Celtic folk song.” When you’re writing a song that’s supposed to exist within the world of the show, do you look to any historical sources or styles of music that seem like what they’d be singing in Westeros?

Djawadi: Not really. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We’ve done it with the score as well: I try to stay away from something that you might expect from a medieval time. Obviously it can’t be a song that’s so contemporary in terms of harmony and melody that it feels completely out of place. But also I don’t want to write it specifically, stylistically, for medieval times. I just try to come up with a melody that is hummable and memorable.

I love [Welch’s] version of it. It’s beautifully performed. The version I sent to her was very stripped down, and she did an amazing interpretation.

Kornhaber: What did you think of the voice of Daniel Portman, the actor who plays Podrick?

Djawadi: I was really impressed. His version is very toned down and, in fact, the harmonies in that version I simplified even more from how I originally had written the song. I almost wanted him to sing it a cappella. Florence’s version is like I originally wrote it, with more chord changes.

Kornhaber: Do you think the lyrics are reflecting anything going on in the show, or is this just the song that happened to come into Podrick’s mind?

Djawadi: That’s open to interpretation, right? Clearly the relationship dilemma with Jon and Daenerys you could relate to Duncan and Jenny. Now that [Jon] knows who he is, and Dany knows who he is, you can draw a comparison to the conflict or the decision to come.

Kornhaber: The other powerful musical moment in that episode came with Brienne’s knighting. What are we hearing in that scene?

Djawadi: That is actually a theme that we had used for Jaime and Brienne before: the “Honor” theme. We’ve used it in other moments when somebody does something honorable, [like] when the Hound buries the bodies in that house [in Season 7, Episode 1]. It’s one of my favorites. It’s such a beautiful and emotional theme we don’t get to use as much.

Kornhaber: So it’s a theme tied not to a character but rather to an abstract concept. What are the show’s other themes like that?

Djawadi: One we had kind of became the Littlefinger theme. We called it the “Conspiracy” theme. In the early seasons, there was a lot of backstabbing going on—I guess it’s the opposite of the “Honor” theme.

Kornhaber: Jon and Daenerys have their “Love” theme, which came out in the dragon-riding portion of the season premiere.

Djawadi: That was just a fun scene. It’s playful in a way, but also very powerful because he’s learning to ride the dragon. The arrangement was big, with percussion. There’s a hint of danger.

What was interesting in Episode 1 was that a lot of the themes had callbacks to Season 1. For example, when Bran and Jaime meet at the very end of the episode, that definitely is a callback to the original, from their first interaction. Jon and Dany arriving at the beginning with their army was a callback to the king’s arrival from Season 1. Obviously the footage is very similar—how everybody in Winterfell was lined up—so we drew similarities to the original cue there.

Kornhaber: Did you write any other original songs for this last season?

Djawadi: Every season, I’ve developed existing themes, and there’s always been room to write some new material and new themes. We definitely have that as well this season. I can say that much.

Kornhaber: Have any of those new themes shown up in these two episodes?

Djawadi: I don’t think so. It’s coming.

[choicesatnight]

To Do List

Title: To Do List

Pairing: MC (Vivian) x James

Rating: NSFW.

Word count: 2,435

My disclaimer: This character is owned by PB, I just enjoy some elaboration. I’ve never written with any other intention than to write about sex. In this story, I attempted to make the story about more than sex. Forgive me if it sucks. I am a work in progress. And trust me, sex is still the focal point. Lol. I’m still me. I really love James Ashton and I love Choices fanfics, especially nasty ass stuff but there isn’t much featuring my original bae, James Ashton from The Freshman series.

So, I decided to put my amateur ass talent to work and write with James being the *star of the story*

A/N: Lots of use of Daddy, some male dominance, female submission.

James has routine appointments with his barber to keep his facial hair groomed. The clean, masculine look he gets with a manicured patch on his chin completes his overall look and well, as the saying goes, "if it ain't broke then don't try to fix it." He's dedicated to his current look and will only deviate from it with Vivian's endorsement. Though massive blocks of time are aptly used between working on both a new play and a new book causing him to miss his last two appointments.

Sitting across James' legs as the both relax on the couch, Vivian scratches the hair on James' face that has become a full chin strap; connecting to his usually groomed sideburns, "I gotta get used to this." She doesn't love the look though isn't going to tell him for fear of offending him. What if he likes it? She thinks. "No, you don't. I gotta get to my barber. I've been busy working. Writing." He leans to the right reaching for his idle laptop. Vivian places her hand on his bicep to stop him

"Babe. No more working."

"Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Okay." He pushes the laptop further away and settles his hand on her thigh, taking a deep breath as if to clear the stress away.  

"Alright. I'm yours."

She laughs in a slightly dismissive way, knowing that work is still on his mind.

"Let me help you. We both write. Let's combine our genius" Smiling at Vivian, he pulls her to him until they are as close as possible and kisses her lips. She then kisses his chin, nose, forehead, and both cheeks.

"I don't know if this is helpful, but I do love kissing you."

"Oh, it helps. You spark creativity in me. Especially with your kisses." They kiss again, this time a little deeper before Vivian pulls away.

"We’re gonna sit at the laptop together later. I gotta go downstairs right now, though." She turns her head toward two tied bags sitting by the door.

"What's that? Laundry?"

"Yup. Undies, blankets, sheets – you know, bed stuff"

"Ooo sexy laundry" he slips his hand under her shirt attempting to slyly graze her breasts when she stands up, forcing his hand to withdraw.

"We'll both get stuck right here if you touch me there, and you know it." She straightens her top.

"What are you about to do?"

"Taking these bags downstairs for you, then I'll shower."

"I don't need your help. I got this." Vivian picks up both bags, holding them above her head as to show strength.  “See? Super strength.”

"Okay." He takes the bags from her and walks out the door.

By the time she catches up to him, he's already set both bags on top of the front-loading machines.

"You're such a gentleman.  Carrying my bags even after I deny help," he can sense the underlying anger in her tone.

"You shouldn't have to drag OUR laundry down here by yourself if I'm here. No matter how light in weight. I strive to do everything I can for you, but if you really don't want me to help, make it clear. Seriously clear."

"James, come here" she asks, although she doesn't wait for him to step toward her, grabbing his hand and gently pulling his arm encouraging him to come close enough to hold. Once he's close enough, she wraps her arms around him "I don't wanna fuss. I'm happy you do these things. I'd probably complain if I had a boyfriend who didn't help." He doesn't lean to kiss her, so she stands on the tip of her toes to reach his lips and kiss him. He kisses her back, though the kiss remains a short peck.

His silence isn't comforting. "Baby are you really mad at me?" her voice has a slight quiver to it as she waits in nervous anticipation for his response. He can't be mad; it was just a little attitude in a sentence, and she's tried to ease the tension.

"No, of course not. Why do you think I'm mad?"

"Silence."

"Oh. I was just listening to you. There's nothing to be mad about. I know how to handle your attitude."

Reluctantly believing him, she responds, "Okaay…" in a sing-song tone

Sensing her reluctance, "What can I do to assure you?"

"Why didn't you lean into my kiss? I know you knew I was going to kiss you."

"Vivian, you're turning nothing into something. I'll kiss you now. I'll kiss you all over."

"The lips will suffice."

He raises an eyebrow, "which set?"  She pushes his shoulder and he laughs, "Okay, but you walked right into that." She shares his laughter before their lips meet, for longer than the little peck they previously shared.

"Okay. I'm convinced. You still love me."

"I'll always love you" he kisses her again. "Even when you wanna be startin' somethin' for no reason"

"Closed mouths don't get fed."

"All you gotta do is give me that look, and I'll feed your mouth"

Smiling, "You're so damn nasty James" she reaches to push his chest although misses as he takes a step back, out of her reach. "You know what I meant, though."

"Yeah, you were explaining why you like to start sh-" she covers his mouth with her hand and interrupts him, "why I like to clarify things. I was explaining why I like to clarify things."

He laughs. “Okay. I stink, and those do too" pointing at the dirty laundry "I'll get clean while you wash those"

"Deal. Next time I'll see you with clean clothes in hand."

"And my body will be clean. Until then." He makes his short trek back upstairs to begin his shower.

 Though once inside the apartment, he plops on the couch and opens his laptop for only a moment before he shuts it, remembering Vivian's "No more work" decree. I can't even go against a simple thing; she probably wouldn't even get mad he thinks to himself as he stands up and heads into the bathroom.

He reaches under the sink for the Norelco shaver that Vivian bought for him. He shaves the top layer of his facial hair, leaving clean stubble for his barber to finish off. At least most of the hair is gone he thinks.

Stepping out of his clothes, he realizes he could've given his underwear to Vivian for washing.

"Damnit! Oh well." Realizing he says this loudly, he begins laughing, recognizing no one else is even around to hear him.

He's become visually aware of where to turn to the shower knob for the temperature that he and Vivian love to feel.  

Although the temperature is perfect, he feels stings as the water hits his back, particularly his shoulders. Causing him to remember when Vivian dug her nails deeply into his shoulders the last time he fucked her. The pain feels good, though. It invokes such a pleasant memory James is finding himself thoroughly aroused, but his girlfriend is downstairs doing laundry. His brain loaded with thoughts of her and memories of their sex, he wraps a hand around his stiff member and moves in a jerking motion back and forth. Though James does not usually moan, there's no one around. "Ohhh" he moans louder than intended, eager to release but hasn't gotten himself there yet. The sting of the water hurts so good he increases the speed of his jerking motions with one hand as the other roam his chest "Vivian. Fuck." He caresses his balls the way Vivian usually does before he abruptly stops. "I need her" he speaks before rushing to turn the shower off, pull on some basketball shorts and head downstairs to the laundry room.

Although he doesn't run, he jogs quickly enough that it seems as though he teleports to the laundry room staring at Vivian folding a freshly cleaned sheet. He's silent, admiring the back view of her body, visualizing what he's about to do to her. Turning to grab the bag of dirty delicates, she finally set eyes on James.

"James!" placing a hand on her chest, "You scared me. What are you doing here?"

There he stood. Topless and damp for rushing out of the shower. His intentions made evident by the bulge in his shorts.

"You already know." James is right. She knows. She immediately removes her top. Sticking a finger in a preexisting hole causes her leggings to rip until they're completely off as he bends her over the dryer. "Fuck, I need you Vivian "dropping his shorts and pushing himself into her from behind. His thrusts are rapid and her moans short in staccato with every thrust.

"Yes! Yes, James. Ohhh" he doesn't slow his pace. He's lost himself in the warm comfort of her pussy, and all else ceases to matter.

"There's a couple in there…you know"

In between Vivian's moans, James is able to hear the outside world when he realizes he didn't close the door! He can't stop now. Vivian has to finish. He pulls out of her and kicks the door shut when he gets on his knees to taste her from behind.

"Daddy, don't stop" He kisses her pussy the way he would her lips, and although he cannot see, her eyes begin to twitch as she continues to moan.

"Yes, James that feels so damn good" feeling his tongue stretch to her lips as he reaches to caress her tit.

The door burst open when James jumps up pulling his shorts with him. Vivian grabs a sheet to cover her naked body and stands up getting a glimpse of Shaun before fixating her eyes on the entryway.

Toolbox in hand, it's obvious that Shaun had recently worked in someone's apartment, and his tone of voice makes it clear that he's ready to go.

"You two were seen fornicating in here. I need you back in your apartment to avoid further action."

Vivian hugs the sheet to her body as she dashes out the door, briefly viewing Shaun's figure as she races out. James swiftly grabs the laundry bags and speeds out the door to catch up with his lover to no avail as she is already at their apartment door. He watches her walk in as he ascends the stairs to meet her.

"Damn babe, you left me pretty easily." But where is she? He looks around in the bedroom and does not see her. Closing the door behind himself, Vivian surprises him by walking, nude, out of the bathroom and pushing him up against the closed door to gather him into a deeply passionate, hungry kiss.  She moans as they're tongues dance together and he attempts to pull her closer, never feeling enough of her. Satisfied to be feeling her nipples erect against his skin, he allows his fingers to roam to her center, feeling warmth before immersing his them into her pool. Rubbing her pussy and down, drenched by her wetness, she can't help but to pull away from the kiss.

"Daddy…," she whispers, savoring the feeling of his fingers manipulating her insides. James kisses her body as he fingers her pussy, and she pushes his shorts down to the ground letting his length spring free.

"My pussy is salivating for your dick."

"I can feel it. I wanna taste it."

Walking her backward toward the bed until she falls to her back on the mattress, he crawls on top of her pushing her legs wide apart. In a matter of seconds, his tongue explores the inside of her walls, pushing his tongue in as deep as possible – flicking her clit in repetition.  Vivian feeling overwhelmed by this pleasure, wanting desperately to stay in this bliss tries to convince herself Don't cum yet, don't cum yet, don't cum yet. Her mantra proves no match for James' tongue, and she cannot fight her climax.

He growls, tasting her flow inside his mouth. "Mmmmm…. baby. I don't think I can stop." He licks her pussy lips

"Daddy you don't have to" she speaks in a soft moan, still enjoying James.  

He looks up at her "No?" and continues his makeout session…with her pussy.

She responds in moans, groaning gradually louder as he threatens to make her cum again.  But he stops. "Damn baby, your pussy tastes amazing.  Everyone needs that. Too bad I'm a stingy man, though.  That pussy is mine… Oh, and yours."

She's always loved his selfishness with her. It makes her feel wanted and belonged. Like a union. As she is a significant part of making something complete.

"Bring that ass to me."

She refrains from correcting him ("It's mine, I just share with you") by smiling, scooting to the edge of the bed and presenting her ass.

"Arch your back a little more baby, you know I'm tall. I'm tryna get deep in that pussy"

No words or sounds at all, she arches her back and excitedly anticipates the moment she will feel him. The anticipation doesn't last too long as she almost immediately feels the pressure of his entrance. She spreads her knees a little wider, feeling James' rapid thrust.

"Daddy, yes!" she screams in falsetto as he holds on to her shoulders – maintaining his position, pushing himself deeper into her. The slapping sound of their bodies meeting resonates in the room, fueling Vivian's' passion. She loves the soundtrack of their sex, and her enthusiasm shows when she starts to move back and forth, controlling his repeated entrance.

James loves it when she takes control though he'd never admit that. He's bouncing around in excitement in his mind. He has to play it cool though – at least that's what he tells himself.

He ceases movement to feel only her moving back and forth on his dick. "Throw that pussy back, girl" he encourages her to continue. Moving faster back and forth, her moans grow louder until she's screaming "DADDY" over and over. "Fuck, this pussy is so fuckin' good" his pushes himself deeper into her and with one last scream, she allows herself to fall on her stomach, forcing James' dick out of her in the process.

Catching her breath, "Amazing." She looks at James, who sits beside her on the bed and burst out laughing.

"What's so funny? I'm telling you that sex was amazing."

"Baby. We got caught" he laughs again, though this time she joins him in laughter.

"Yeah, yeah we did."

"And by that stupid ass maintenance man who's always looking at you. Now he'll know. Ha-ha!"

"Maybe he's looking at you, James"

"Either way. He knows we belong."

She kisses James lips, "Yup. He knows James. He knows…"

[plussizeingenue-blog]

RomCom Recipe

Excited to have written a new story, this time with a preexisting fictional character. I have a lot of ideas for turning this into a series, so please let me know if there is any interest in this!

Also follow me on instagram @plussizeingenue, for writing snippets and prompts as I come up with them.

Pairings: disabled female reader x Bucky Barnes

Description: Reader has cerebral palsy and is invited by Tony Stark to come interview to work with the Avengers. But the reader ends up seeing Bucky every time she goes to the tower, and things...well....develop.

You remembered your first day in the Avengers tower, and the way everything smelled. It had that obsessively-cleaned smell mixed with that fresh, out-of-the-box anti-staleness that you couldn't quite describe, but that everyone universally understood. The place was taken care of. You had moved yourself up to the receptionist desk on the first floor, which was, unfortunately, nowhere near wheelchair height. You sighed, resigning yourself to be happy that there were several wheelchair enrances and exits in the tower, which was more than could be said for most places. "Hi, I have a meeting with Tony Stark?" The woman at the desk, a slender brunette woman with hair like a flight attendant, graciously stepped out from behind the counter to address you directly. "Ah, Miss Y/L/N, yes? Mr. Stark has been waiting for you." You had been your own kind of superhero up to this point. While your cerebral palsy affected a lot of the motor function in your legs, your upper half was pretty strong. You'd been out on the streets, in the car your brother had designed. It was the size of a Smart car, if not smaller, and tailored to work with your wheelchair. It gave you extra speed, and helped disguise the wheelchair in case you made any enemies. There was a full working computer, top of the line facial recognition software and police scanners. All the weapons were non-lethal as well, and there was a one-person seat behind yours in case you had to drop anyone off to the police. Plus, the top came down so you had the pleasure of personally punching bad guys when you could get close enough. Your brother was currently interning for Stark, and was the one who had brought your alter ego to his attention. "Mr. Stark, I think you'll like this guy. They're really efficient at research and ass-kicking, which are two very important things for a team of superheroes..." It had taken Stark time to decide to bring you in, mostly because he had lots of other potential new teammates. But, ultimately, you were the only one who presented something unique that no one else could offer. You were not jaded, like everyone else in the tower. You were happy, and thriving, and most importantly...you were kind. The flight attendant lady led you to an elevator that she rode on with you. You saw her daintily press the button for the penthouse, and you went up, up, up into the sky. "Mr.Stark has told me so much about you!" Flight attendant lady offered. "He says you're stronger than everyone else on the team." You smiled fondly to yourself. "I work hard, when I can. I'm humbled by his noticing me." When you finally reached the top, flight attendant lady stayed on the elevator and went straight back down to her post. You pushed the joystick on your chair forward, marvelling at the look of the place. Everything was red and sleek and modern. The room you ended up in first was a large common area, and in that area were two people: Bucky Barnes and Captain America. Cap was watching some old cartoons on the television, and laughing at them. You chuckled to yourself at the display. When you looked over at Bucky, he was sitting, curled up, reading. You felt a tightness in your chest as you looked at him. He was magnificent, with long, dark hair and a creased brow, indicative of his being lost in whatever story he was reading. You blushed when you realized you'd stared far too long, and cleared your throat to get their attention. Cap was the first one up. "Oh, hi there! Are you Y/N? We were waiting for you!" Steve put out a hand for you to shake, and you grasped it firmly. You smiled as he shook it. "Yes, I'm really excited to be here. I'm really excited to be given a proper chance." Steve nodded warmly. "Aboslutely. We're happy to have you. This is Bucky!" He turned towards Bucky, who had just approached. You turned your eyes to him and almost forgot to breathe as he extended a hand. Your shake was a bit weaker this time, but no less friendly. "Nice to meet you Bucky." you finally managed. He gave you a little smile. "You too, doll." "Steve clapped his hands together, breaking the tension. "Let me get you to your meeting with Tony, then. See you later, Bucky!" You were sad to leave Bucky, but followed Steve anyway. You didn't see Bucky's eyes trail after you.

The next time you arrived at the tower, it was for your first mission. You and Natasha were partnered together for a simple recon, as a sort of training mission to see how you worked. You glided into the common area, this time empty, and waited for Natasha to gedt you so you could be briefed. As you waited, you flipped on the television and channel surfed until you found a dumb romantic comedy. It happened to be one of your guilty pleasures to watch those types of movies. They made you hope for a happy ending of your own. "I love that one." came a voice from behind you. You whipped your head around to see Bucky there, in sweats and a t-shirt, looking very handsome. "Oh, uh...yeah, I watch them occasionally. Sometimes I'll even pay attention." Bucky laughed, and the sound was breathtaking. "I probably pay attention too much. I just like their...the way they're the same. You know what's going to happen." You nodded, turning your chair slightly so you could get a better glimpse of him. "Predicatability is the safest, most soothing thing in the world. It's like a drug." He took a seat next to you, on the end of one of the couches. "Have you seen this one before?" You shook your head. It was completely unfamiliar. "Well, this one's all about a woman who lost a child, and her husband leaves her, and she thinks she'll never be happy again. But that guy..." he pointed to the conventionally attractive man on the screen. "He changes her mind." "Seems like a heavy plot for a romcom." Bucky seemed confused. "Rom...com?" You giggled. "It's short for romantic comedy." His eyes widened in wonder. "Oh wow. Never heard that before. I'll have to add it to my list." You couldn't help yourself. "You have a list?" "Yeah..." he rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. "A list of stuff I missed. Being....away for so long." Just then Natasha came in. "Y/N! Sorry I'm late. We should get started." And so you left Bucky there once again, but this time you looked back and saw that he was doing the same thing. You had ventured in and out of the tower several times over the weeks, and every time you had bumped into Bucky somehow. Whether it was on your way to a briefing, in the common area, or grabbing a botle of water from the fridge, he would pop up somehow. Most times you were in a rush and could only say hi, but other times...Other times you would forget you had to be somewhere and you and Bucky would get lost in conversation, only for Wanda or Sam to find you, huge grin on their faces, and lead you back to what you had to do. But worse than those times were the times Bucky was in on the meetings. Then you had to struggle to focus, and not marvel at his adams' apple, or his hair or the way his eyes lit up. It was complete torture. As you were leaving the tower one Saturday, chatting with Wanda about your brothers' latest developments with your car and if you'd had any progress on picking a name for yourself, a hand tapped gently on your shoulder. Wanda was quicker to turn around, and she smiled knowingly at who she saw. You turned your head, and Bucky stepped into view. "I'll let you two talk..." she said, sauntering away. "Hi Bucky. Is anything wrong?" Not that something needed to be wrong for Bucky to talk to you. Right? He was totally your friend...You hoped... Bucky looked around, waiting for the leftover Avengers to disperse. When he appeared to feel comfortable, he looked you dead in the eye. His dark brown eyes were full of unidentified emotion. "Y/N..." he started. "I think you're a wonderful person." He took a step forward and grabbed one of your hands, stroking the back of it. You involuntarily tensed. While you lived a happy, fulfilling life, there were always those people who felt they needed to distance themselves from you because of your cerebral palsy. As if it was something that made you worth less. And you never let any of those people get to you, because the majority of the people in your life were nothing like that. But Bucky being one of those people? You didn't know if you could take that. "Buck-" "Please, Y.N...will you go out with me tonight? On a proper date?" You were so floored by the question you didn't have time to formulate a response. Bucky seemed to take your silence negatively, and began drawing away. You finally broke from your stupor and tightened your grip on Bucky's hand just as he was about to pull away. "I...wasn't expecting that. But I would love to go out with you. Truly." Bucky's smile was wide and you couldn't help but give him a big one back.

[l-l-kristofferson]

My Depression Struggles

***DISCLAIMER! IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR HELPFUL TIPS OR INSIGHT ABOUT DEPRESSION, PLEASE READ CAREFULLY. BUT IF YOU ARE EASILY DEPRESSED AND SENSITIVE TO THESE TOPICS, STOP READING NOW. THANK YOU IN ADVANCE!***

For those that know me personally, they know that I suffer from ADHD and bipolar disorder. Mostly because these are the only two conditions I talk about openly. I also suffer from anxiety disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), gender dysphoria, and depression. My other four disorders carry more stigma than the first two. I'm not as excited to talk about these topics in fear of judgment. That being said, I usually only talk about these things to a therapist or doctor. But with depression becoming more and more common, I feel that it should be talked about.

Here are some basic facts. In the US, about sixteen million (16,000,000) suffer from depression. That is estimated at almost seven percent of our population. It can be and is linked to a lot of disabilities in the world. It effects both men and women, at times effecting children from a young age. Those who are more likely to suffer from depression are girls and women. My mother, at one point in time, suffered from the condition. Worldwide, it effects three hundred and fifty million (350,000,000) people. It can stem from a lot of things such as loss and grief, personal or professional dilemmas, a preexisting medical condition, or all of the above. There are many other causes but everyone has a different experience.

What a lot of people don't know is that depression is just the general term for a lot of subgroups. There is major depression, premenstrual depressive disorder (PMDD), stress depressive disorder, manic depression, and post pardom depression. All have their separate causes and affect different people. Another thing that people don't get is that it can be linked to other conditions over the course of time. So here is my experience.

From a young age, I was always sad in some way. This probably started when my father separated from my mom when I was two years old. From then, he was in and out of my older bother's life as well as mine. Even now, I only interact with my father if I have to due to him leaving my mother and leaving us to struggle. Around seven or eight years old, I started to say to a lot of my adult "friends" at school that I would be better off dead. This caused concern and they brought my mother in about the issue, asking her if there were any changes at home. My mom explained what had happened years earlier and they suggested that I be put in therapy. From what I remember of those sessions with my therapist, Dr. Berman, she would always ask me how I was doing as I played with some toys. I would tell her about my day, about my brother and my mom, and about times I would see my dad. Every time I would go to a session, I would pick out a felt board with characters you can lay on top and make up a story. I would usually pick out a man and dress him in a knights costume, at times accompanied by a maiden or princess.��After a while, she asked me why I would always do the same thing when I would visit her. I said that I didn't know. At the time, I had little idea of what it all meant because I didn't really think anything was wrong. I understood (in some sense) that my dad wasn't going to live with us ever again and that I wouldn't really get to see him. But looking at it now, I realize that all I was doing... was wishing someone would protect me like my father used to.

Eventually, I stopped going to therapy with Dr. Berman and "got over" what I was going through. I was okay until I was twelve. It started with the death of someone I was really close to... I lost her to suicide. It was the first girl I ever fell in love with and I never got to tell her how I felt. For months, I didn't know what to do. I would cry and cry and cry, not feeling any relief. This was my first glimpse into depression that I was aware of at the time. But soon, it turned into numbness and anger. Why did she leave me? She told me we'd be together forever. She abandoned me. This would coincide with my lesbian identity, something I was unaware of. When that got out in junior high, girls didn't want to come near me, which caused me to feel like an outcast. I was alienated by most of the girls, except a couple who remained friends with me (one I'd known since kindergarten and the one non English speaker who thought I was really nice). The boys thought I was awesome and welcomed me. For the next two years, I was able to make it through. I thought high school would be more accepting. I was so wrong.

When it got out that I was a lesbian nerd, I was constantly picked on by boys and girls. One time, someone said that a girl named Samantha thought I was cute and wanted to get to know me, maybe go on a date. Hearing this, I was so happy. It was awesome. A girl found me worth her time. I had seen her and thought she was pretty. Naturally, I wrote her a loving note and had her read it. Little did I know it was a joke and everyone was laughing at me. I went to the bathroom, cried, and had a fit. I even tossed my journal, bending the metal ring binding. As for the boys, they would toss me down stairs, throw me against walls, push me, physically assault me, hold me in dark closets, and trap me in the guy's room. Between struggling with my identity and being bullied until the age of sixteen, I was constantly depressed. I wouldn't sleep, I'd barely eat, and I wouldn't talk to anyone unless they spoke to me first. I was isolating myself to protect myself from rejection and ridicule. But that worked to my advantage. I kept my head in the books, excelled in class, and kept my GPA high. Friends came later like my best friend Odd, my friends Vachon, his brother Chris, my really good friend (and ex-girlfriend) Natalie, my shop friends Clyde and Erik, and other good friends (you know who you are guys). As I got to graduation, I won a scholarship for college, was in the top ten percent of my class, and surrounded by friends. I wanted to do better. For Jane...

From eighteen to now, it was alright. I kept my head in the books and tried to keep my GPA in the black. But from August to early November of this year, was my lowest point. I was fighting with my mental health facility to get my medication approved and in that fight, had no medication to fall back on. So I spiraled out of control. I couldn't sleep worth a damn, I had little motivation to do much of anything except watch YouTube and forget about it all, I wasn't eating any real food, I shut myself away from the rest of the world, I wouldn't shower for days (sometimes for almost a week), and my anxiety was awful. The only time I seemed to find joy was in the company of other people or on the phone with someone. I didn't feel alone then. But every day was a fight just to get out of bed. I thought of suicide and hurting myself a lot. I would take a lot of painkillers or drink half of a bottle of cough syrup to ease my pain and numb me from thinking. I was grateful for sleep... Because that was the only time I didn't feel any pain. I was mostly at peace. But after five weeks, I started having nightmares, one to three a night. I would be too scared to sleep and sought someone to talk to. Mind you, this was usually between two and four in the morning, when normal people are asleep. But that entire time, I was honest with three people, my best female friend, my therapist, and my regular doctor. Otherwise, no one knew that I was suffering. Not my friends at school, not my coworkers, not my classmates, not my family, not the customers I served. I didn't want them to know. I felt ashamed.

As of the fourteen of November, I have been getting better. It's easier to get out of bed, it's easier to talk to people about my pain, it's easier to eat, it's easier to do my work, it's easier to smile, and I can be more of myself. Some days can still be tough but I keep busy to stay out of those negative thoughts. The one thing I'm glad I did was not give up. I kept going. Through the pain, through the mental bouts and torment, through the anxiety and voices telling me to end it, I stood alive.

Some helpful tips I have are to 1) seek help, 2) be honest, 3) find a positive (and safe) way to deal with your struggles, 4) admit to yourself that you are in need, 5) remind yourself that it gets better, 6) drink tea (I do!), and 7) SMILE!

There are days that I get upset and want to get angry. But I try to keep calm and smile. It can be difficult at times because I'm under a lot of stress as I near the end of my academic career. I am currently doing two internships, a lot of schoolwork, participating in class, volunteering and helping friends, and holding a part time job. How am I alive? A lot of tea (HA HA!). I am grateful for my family, my friends, and those around me. They are one of few reasons I live.

I know it isn't easy for everyone and that there are those suffering much more than me. For those of you who are struggling, keep your head up and smile. If this is rock bottom, there is only one way to go from here: up. I hope that this post was helpful. If you ever need advice or need to talk, my Instagram is lame_dude_20 (my profile picture is of Roxas) and my Kik is Kingsebastianisdead (my profile is a picture of Ventus and the username is The Roxas Joker). I hope I can be the Merlin to your Arthur.

Thank you so much for listening. Write again soon.

[bakechochin]

The Book Ramblings of June and July 2019

In place of book reviews, I will be writing these ‘book ramblings’. A lot of the texts I’ve been reading (or plan to read) in recent times are well-known classics, meaning I can’t really write book reviews as I’m used to. I’m reading books that either have already been read by everyone else (and so any attempt to give novel or insightful criticisms would be a tad pointless), or are so convoluted and odd that they defy being analysed as I would do a simpler text. These ramblings are pretty unorganised and hardly anything revolutionary, but I felt the need to write something review-related. I’ll upload a rambling compiling all my read books on a monthly basis. Well, not really monthly, but you know what I mean.

The Late Mr Shakespeare - Robert Nye I felt a further hankering for this sort of content after finishing Falstaff, and I had relative faith that this book would deliver. My feelings, however, were slightly mixed when considering what was different than Nye’s first book. Unlike Falstaff, this text isn’t written from the perspective of the text’s focus; we instead get a mediator in the form of Pickleherring, who gives us a retrospective and mythologised account of Shakespeare as told through anecdotes and spurious half-remembered tales. Without wanting to just quote huge chunks of the text’s postulating on the subject of men being shaped by the stories that are told about them, I’ll simply say that it’s all fucking great stuff, for while the book does come across as something of a cock-and-bull story with the amount of backtracking and reiterating and rewording of the same points, all of the reiterating and rewording is fantastically eloquent. What I enjoyed about Falstaff is still here, in that a fun larger-than-life world is evoked through a multitude of story snippets and accounts of events that border on folk tales, all, within the context of this book, meticulously stored away in a hundred black boxes over the years, and now shared with us as a testament to the multitude of stories told (in the context of the story) about the famous playwright, and as a big satisfied middle finger towards historical accuracy and the accounts of fuddy-duddies. This is in many ways a book for Shakespeare scholars; there’s a lot of the sort of shit in here that you’d learn as a Shakespeare academic, from attribution studies to dogmatic arguments about Shakespeare’s life and play participation (given undeserved credence here by the authoritative voice of one who knew him personally), and I’m not sure if this at all contributes to making the book good, given both my preexisting dislike for such nonsense (compared to the actual content of Shakespeare’s work) and the fact that not much is done with the information within this book. Nye seems to be reciting facts, slotting them in wherever he can, just to prove that he knows them, and in many cases his statements about Shakespeare’s life seem to all be along the lines of ’this thing was fleetingly referenced in one of his plays, and thereby it must have been contributory to one of his formative experiences'. (Plus, Shakespeare studies is, surprisingly, still a burgeoning field and a victim to changing times, and thus some of the assertions about Shakespeare and his works in this book are undermined by more recent contradictory research). No, this book’s compelling content lies elsewhere. When I first started reading I was concerned as to how compelling our narrator Pickleherring would be; he’s not so old as to be a doddering fool (which would have least given his narration some spice), and not so interesting a character archetype to be able to stand alongside Shakespeare and friends, and despite his assertions that he is a merry prankster full of mirth, this tends to only surface in the occasional moments of weird, sometimes crass erotica. This shit came up in Falstaff as well, again missing the point of sex within the context of farce or country peasant comedy by playing it entirely straight, and thus I am left with no choice but to assume that Nye has got a thing for such shite. Like Falstaff, this book’s blurb purports to answer a number of as-yet-unanswered questions about its titular character, and just fucking like Falstaff, what is revealed is not even that interesting. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: PROBABLY, YEAH, BUT ONLY IF YOU’RE LIKE, REALLY INTO SHAKESPEARE

My Papa and the Maid of Orleans and The Unruly Bridal Bed and Other Grotesques - Mynona I was fully geared up to return to the topic of over-intellectualising, a topic I haven’t touched since Kharms, when I caught a glimpse at the introduction to the first of these books that I read. My introduction to Mynona was the two of his stories featured in Tales of the German Imagination, little snippets of madness that seemed right up my alley, and yet, like Kharms, I’d be hard-pressed to state in scholarly terms exactly what it is that makes these stories work, or indeed if their success even has a scholarly explanation. I skimmed over the introductions in each of my tiny (and stupidly overpriced) books, and concluded that I would probably be alright for the most part. The tentative swipes that the introductory passages make in the direction of academia seem to just be quantifying what a grotesque is in terms of Mynona’s writings, which is all interesting shit. At its worst, the nonsense that the introductions spout about the inherent messages of Mynona’s own ‘creative indifference’ philosophies can be happily ignored in favour of simply enjoying the stories as odd and occasionally morbid little tales. Truthfully there really isn’t too much to say about these stories; the two collections that I have are the third and fourth of such that Mynona produced, meaning they’re not exactly his collected best works and the stories can be a tad hit or miss, but overall they’re very enjoyable quick reads. Both the blurb(s) and the attempts made to describe the events of the stories make them seem a lot darker than they actually are, for they often deal with bizarre or taboo themes, but this seems to me like false advertising, for when you’re reading said stories you don’t stop for a second to consider the fucked-up nature of some of the stories’ content. The tone carries it in such a way as to negate critical study, and thus I beseech anyone who tries. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: YES, IF YOU’VE GOT A DAY TO KILL AND CAN FIND THE STORIES FOR CHEAPER THAN THE NINE FUCKING QUID I PAID FOR EACH OF THEM

The Moving Toyshop - Edmund Crispin Many a time have I walked into Waterstone’s and spared a fleeting glance at the frankly ridiculous quantity of crime books there, stopping only to briefly laugh at some of the more on-the-nose titles (my favourite of which will always be Fielden’s A Quarter Past Dead). Golden Age crime fiction has always been a possibility of a genre I might want to delve into, but never an especially pressing one. My purchase of this book was something of an impulse buy in the Folio Society summer sale, and indeed my decision to purchase this book was dependant mostly on the assertions that the book was unlike other crime fiction texts. To elaborate, this is a very funny book, and I’ve been led to believe that it’s rather difficult to slot humour into a serious crime novel about murder and whatnot. It does so with a cast of eccentric and incredibly memorable characters, a plot driven mostly by chance and farce, and a fantastic aversion to seriousness, with characters often getting drunk and passing the time with such games as ‘naming unreadable books’ before venturing forth to the next slapstick shenanigans. Without wanting to, yet again, go off on a tangent about how I always seem to read ‘book B inspired by book A’ before I’ve read ‘book A’, this book is very much in the vein of Adams' Dirk Gently (with the eccentric intellectual types pursuing investigations way out of their jurisdiction) and Fforde's Thursday Next series (with rapidly escalating storylines and fourth wall breaks and hilarious set pieces, right down to the protagonist’s needlessly flamboyant car). Everything seems to be very much entwined with the humour, be it the characters or the plot, and it has proven difficult for me to say exactly what else it is about this book that made it so enjoyable to read. I blazed through it so quickly that I didn’t think about it too strongly; ultimately, a lot of the books I’ve been reading lately are like this, which makes it increasingly difficult to write rambles about them, considering that these rambles were originally intended to allow for a bit of extra academic flexing. I’m not here to break down the components of farce or slapstick or the effectiveness of literary references when constructing a story or comedy. All I can really talk about is, how does this book compare to other crime fiction? We uncover the story’s mystery slowly throughout the course of the book, with new characters coming into the fray and bringing new light to the situation, but the book’s mystery is eventually revealed to be a tad too small and too restrictive to allow for any grand revelations as to who indeed dunnit. Every now and then the book displays some fun meta-knowledge of the genre when the characters are deciding what move they are going to make next, though this does lead to a rather anticlimactic twist at the end when a promising lead is revealed to be a red herring seemingly just because the genre demands one, and the characters shrugging their shoulders to say ‘well, that’s how these sort of things go’ wasn’t quite enough to offset the feeling that things didn’t really lead to anything. The final roundup of events, and eventual reveal of the one tiny detail that answers all other questions of the mystery, is of course not really dependent on anything exciting (as I’d probably expect from the genre), but I reckon that when it comes to revealing the small but significant detail that is the crux of everything, a lot of books have a more interesting crux than this book does. But perhaps I am merely nitpicking. In any case, my feelings towards the book upon completion were overwhelmingly positive, if not because of a wholly satisfying ending than certainly because I know I’ve got a shit load more of these books to be getting on with. Therefore, it seems unlikely that my attempts to breach this new genre will lead to any further exploration for a while yet; I’ve got to read all of Crispin’s stories first. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: HELL FUCKING YES

Nightmare Abbey and Crotchet Castle - Thomas Love Peacock I heard of Peacock some time ago in a romanticism lecture as a great and criminally underrated author, I picked up this book after skimming the blurb and introduction and learning that Peacock’s writing took inspiration from a superstar lineup of my sort of authors (Aristophanes, Rabelais and Voltaire to name a few), and started reading it recently because I was craving a Gormenghast fix but had sworn not to start any more giant fucking novels until I’d finished Barchester Towers. It makes sense that this book would be recommended to me by an old academic chap, because this seems to be a book mainly for old academic chaps; a Peacockian staple, as the introduction so refers to it as (I suspect as a means of justifying it), is that the narrative often stops dead to allocate large chunks of the story to men of various fields of academia discussing various smart affairs (in the words of Peacock himself, ‘discussing everything and settling nothing'), written in a form more resembling a drama text than prose. It’s fast and easy reading, and it’s fun to revel in the general vibe of Regency era learned men lounging in a club speaking listlessly on trifling matters over their booze. While there is humour to be found (both explicitly and quietly in Peacock’s writing style), and while I am not entirely ignorant on the era and characters within that this book is good-naturedly satirising, this book requires some background knowledge to get the most out of it. Nightmare Abbey parodies the ‘mordancy of contemporary literature’, with characters reflecting the romantic poets (all with absolutely fantastic Gormenghast-tier names) lolling around and bemoaning the times and customs and pontificating incomprehensibly on transcendental subjects and generally revelling in operating on various tiers of melodramatic morose being. The conversations that they have are often rather dense, and thus the humour tends to come from the ridiculous characters’ voices and attitudes (or occasionally the farcical antics that they get up to). Crotchet Castle is significantly more all over the shop, being a general clusterfuck of ideals and philosophies (the primary conflict being between common sense and rationality, with all the supernumerary other characters slotting in to lend their voices in pummelling the rationalist into the fucking dirt) pitted against each other; it is on occasion rather accessible, given the simplicity of the characters and their chosen philosophies to spout, but I’m really coming in on the bottom floor when it comes to rationality and political economy, so a lot of the nuance, while often enjoyable enough considering its delivery of light-hearted sarcasm, was totally fucking lost on me. Most of the characters are just mouthpieces for philosophies, some of the characters are parodies of pre-existing personages who I didn’t fucking know and didn’t care to learn about, and some of the characters are enjoyable enough because they slot into the story in other ways (such as in the trite but necessary romance subplots, forgotten about and reinstated as soon as a hackneyed conclusion is needed) or otherwise stand out on their own (such as Peacock’s stand-in, the Reverend Dr Folliott, who couldn’t give a blot about anything save his own dinner and booze, or indeed my aligned character, the deteriorationist and medieval buff Mr Chainmail, who remains ‘out of reach of [everyone’s] arguments’ from his own fortress of beef and ale (as the introduction describes), which I can fully relate to). The aforementioned romance subplots might give the reader of this ramble the impression that these stories are rather confused as to what they want to be, but the confusion (if confusion it be, and not just a juggling of ideas (hardly skilful juggling, but roll with it)) really only extends as far as the eclectic array of things within the novels. The overall intention of these pieces is to be escapism, or a conversation piece (given that much of the text is dominated by conversations), and in that regard it does its job well enough. I will say, however, that the aforementioned ‘inspiration’ that these texts take from such authors as Aristophanes and Rabelais is really just limited to occasionally quoting them, and considering that I don’t speak Greek or French, this became more of a pain in the arse than a pleasure, having to keep looking at the back for the necessary translations. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: YES TO NIGHTMARE, POSSIBLY TO CASTLE

Seven Men - Max Beerbohm I’m afraid that you’ll have to excuse the fact that I was only able to read about the titular seven men in this book, and not the promised ‘Two Others’ in the book’s re-release; I read this online on Gutenberg, dissatisfied with the prices and conditions of the physical copies of this book (as well as the fact that I couldn’t really be putting too many eggs in this basket, since I started this book on a whim after it was fleetingly mentioned in Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop), and subsequently my reading experience was a rather fragmented one, scrounging all of the individual stories in this publication together and reading them as one overall book. Let this book stand as another title in my guilty list of attempts to dip my toe into the pool of postmodernism, for the stories within it are less about seven men (well, technically six, since Beerbohm himself is the seventh) and more about stories told about them or stories that shape them. Men tell stories about themselves, find themselves shaped by their works or the rules of their works, are forgotten as soon as their works fade from public interest, etc., from everything to formally written pieces of dubious quality to spun yarns over dinner. Supernatural influences are occasionally added to facilitate some of the dafter ideas, but everything is played entirely straight, with our focal point Beerbohm, having interpolated himself into the stories, providing everything with a sense of… if not verisimilitude, than certainly seriousness. Characters find themselves entwined within their stories, sad that their works of writing will be all that remains of them (or deluded into thinking that such a legacy would be a thing to be proud of), ‘ghosts caught in a fiction solemnly protesting their reality’ to paraphrase a quote from Lawrence Danson’s 1982 piece. It all makes for a very fun read, with each story providing a different reading experience that keeps you guessing as to what to expect. Finding myself with not much else to say, permit me to give a special mention to my favourite story in the collection, ‘Savonarola Brown’. The word ‘story’ is a tad misleading, but just as I find myself calling this text a short story collection or novel for lack of a better term, a story ‘Savonarola Brown’ must be, when in reality it is mostly comprised of a deliberately atrocious farcical tragicomedy script, written, in the context of the story, by the titular Brown, who did so over the course of eight years by throwing himself into the character of his beloved Savonarola and writing the story as the characters within it determined it to be written, leading to a rambling and capriciously-changing text that never failed to make me (if only as a great fan of early modern theatre, however trite or shoddy) laugh my arse off. WOULD I RECOMMEND?: HELL YEAH

Other shit I read that I couldn’t be arsed to ramble about: The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh (an absolutely amazing and very McDonagh play that I bloody wish I could have seen and would recommend to everyone (especially if they like fucked-up shit), The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth (a very entertaining and informative book (as to be expected from my favourite etymologist) that I resisted reading for a while because I figured that Forsyth was at his best when retelling historical events, and was pleasantly surprised to see that he manages to squeeze in a shit load of interesting history shit in here as well (my favourite example of which being the story of the two main faces behind the OED)), Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (a fucking incredible book that I resisted writing a review on because a) it’s a rather serious book with some hard-hitting stuff that’s difficult to make funny and b) there are only so many ways that I can say ‘it’s good’), The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher (a bloody amazing essay with some incredible content in it, made me very envious of Fisher for being able to contrive a means of writing about exactly what he wants to write about even when it is of passing or no relevance to the essay as a whole), and Swan Song by Edmund Crispin (another Crispin novel, so I didn’t bother rambling about it when it would just be the same points as my Moving Toyshop ramble, not as funny as Toyshop for the most part and focusing on a field of study that I know very little about but a very easy and enjoyable read nonetheless).

[ethanalter]

‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Postmortem: Samira Wiley Takes Us on a Tour of Jezebel’s

Elisabeth Moss as Offred in Hulu’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ (Credit: George Kraychyk/Hulu)

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the “Jezebels” episode of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Although a litany of horrors is described within its pages, The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t a conventional horror tale. There are no nightmarish monsters or masked serial killers stalking our heroine, Offred, as she navigates her daily existence in Gilead. What does place Margaret Atwood’s novel in the horror tradition, though, is the way she transforms familiar environments into alien territory. Because Gilead has been constructed on an existing world — repurposing preexisting public and private spaces instead of tearing them down and building on the bones — its citizens have to confront the eerie disconnect between the world that was and the world that is now on a daily basis.

Supermarkets where families once did their weekend shopping are now filled with Handmaids silently pushing their shopping carts through the aisles. A centuries-old wall (which Atwood has confirmed is intended to be the wall that encircles Harvard University) is used as a gallows, where dead bodies are displayed for passers-by. And, in one of the book’s most famous sections, which now forms the basis of the eighth episode of Hulu’s serialized adaptation, a blandly corporate hotel becomes an after-hours brothel named Jezebel’s where Offred comes face to face with an actual ghost from her past: Moira.

Adding to the haunted house feel in the novel is the way Atwood describes Offred’s dawning realization of the place that Jezebel’s used to be. Ushered in through the back entrance, and then escorted by the Commander through a maze of corridors, she eventually ends up in the central lobby where she observes, a “round fountain [sprays] water in the shape of a dandelion gone to seed,” and “oval-shaped glass elevators slide up and down the walls like giant mollusks.” It’s at once both the same place she knows, and a world she’s never seen — an unsettling in-between feeling that accounts for why she processes an ordinary elevator as a giant mollusk.

Samira Wiley as a pre-Gilead Moira in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu)

The episode’s director, Kate Dennis, can’t directly translate such beautifully creepy turns of phrase to the screen, but she does visualize Offred’s entrance into Jezebel’s in a way that evokes horror movie classics like The Shining and Carnival of Souls. Walking through hallways that grow progressively more shadowy, Offred and Fred (Elisabeth Moss and Joseph Fiennes) emerge in a dimly-lit waiting area, where she can only glimpse fragments of forbidden images through the gloom: a topless woman wearing a Handmaid’s cap, other women sporting makeup and lingerie. (The only discordant note in this hallucinatory sequence? The fact that it’s scored to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” a song that’s in desperate need of a five-year moratorium.)

But those sights pale in comparison to the bigger shock awaiting her when she lays eyes on Moira (Samira Wiley) from across the lobby; the bold woman who took it upon herself to bust loose of the Red Center is now just another working girl in Jezebel’s. “I walked onto that set and felt the line between creepy and eerie,” Wiley says. “It’s sort of like a circus, and it’s kind of gross! In a good way, though. A lot of these moments in our show are meant to make people feel uncomfortable, and not hide anything that the book presents. So it was gross, but also awesome, because we’re really telling the story that was meant to be told.”

Offred and Fred (Joseph Fiennes) in Jezebel’s (Credit: George Kraychyk/Hulu)

That said, there are some subtle, but significant differences between Offred and Moira’s reunion in the series versus the novel. In both cases, Moira took a similar route to Jezebel’s, one that involved a thwarted flight out of the country and a choice between a temporary stay in the brothel or permanent exile to the colonies. As a result of that experience, the Moira that Offred encounters now is sapped of her will to fight back — the very thing that turned her into a symbol of hope for her friend. In the book, Offred tries to revive some of Moira’s steeliness as she recounts her story of escape and capture second-hand. “I’ve tried to make it sound as much like her as I can,” she says, straining to preserve some of Moira’s wry sense of humor and determination even in these tragic circumstances.

Wiley, on the other hand, doesn’t shy away from presenting Moira as a vulnerable, broken woman, which adds an added layer of fear to their reunion in the series. Not only is this hotel a place Offred no longer recognizes, her friend has changed almost beyond recognition as well. “In the book, we see Moira portrayed as such a rock; she’s immovable and determined,” Wiley explains. “Up until the end, she’s the person who is never going to give up. And that makes her someone that Offred looks up to in order to help her survive. Her memory of Moira really bolsters her. The thing that I wanted to try and explore that’s not so apparent on the page are those moments where Moira is vulnerable. Because as much as a hard-ass we want to be, we all have our breaking point. So I wanted to show moments where Moira melts, where she cannot be June’s rock.”

Wiley points to a flashback scene in the third episode, where June and Moira attend a protest rally only to be fired on by the soldiers who will soon enforce the rules of Gilead, as an early example of where the writers tried to chip away at her character’s stony exterior. “Jezebels” takes that further, with Moira melting into June’s arms, weeping, as they sit in the brothel’s overcrowded dormitory. And, in another reversal, June is the one who insists that her friend’s fight isn’t over yet. “We’re going to find a way to get you out of here,” she says, pointing to Luke as an example of a successful escape. (That’s more courage than she can muster than in the book, where her only encouragement is a half-hearted: “You don’t mean that.”) “This may not be how people instinctively think about [Moira’s] character,” Wiley says. “She’s definitely broken, and to see her in a position of defeat is unfamiliar. But there are still glimmers of who she is at her core. I wanted to make sure that I got all of Moira in that scene, and I hope I did a good job walking that line.”

Adding further resonance to the Jezebel’s section in the novel is the fact that Offred tells us she never sees Moira again after their clandestine reunion. But Wiley reveals that this isn’t her last episode, which does blunt some of the emotional impact their encounter carries on the page. “There’s a lot of things in the book that, as an actor, I question about why we’re making that choice — what does it give us to change that,” Wiley admits. “And over and over again, the writers explain it to me in a way that makes complete sense. We’re making an adaptation for television, and TV is about having a heightened portrayal of the story. In the beginning, there was a part of me that thought maybe [that choice] took something away, but now I see how much it adds. In the book, we see the whole story from Offred’s perspective. [In the show], we’re taking advantage of all these wonderful actresses who are so amazing and use their talent in ways we never saw before.”

Wiley also trusts the writers to decide whether or not they want to explicitly address a subject that’s flown under the radar all season long: whether any existing racial prejudices have found their way into the brave new world of Gilead. In Atwood’s original telling, the republic’s founders rid their community of other races, exiling them to certain death in the wastelands of the colonies. But series creator Bruce Miller made the conscious choice to make this version of Gilead a more inclusive society, operating under the assumption that a fertility crisis would give people cause to set old hatreds aside. Strangely enough, the lack of any pronounced racism within Gilead is the one utopian aspect of what’s otherwise one of TV’s most vividly realized dystopias.

At the same time, it’s hard to imagine that racism has been completely purged from this world, and a place like Jezebel’s — where men are invited to act out their darkest fantasies — would seem a place where it would rear its ugly head. “It’s not something that has been explored so far,” Wiley says. “But I do think the opportunity is there because of the choices Bruce has made. [The show] is reflecting a world we live in today; you can’t really escape the diverse world we live in, and to portray that in a dystopia is a very interesting choice. What’s most important in this world is continuing the human race. That trumps every single other thing.” (Let’s also not forget that, in the bigger picture, Gilead’s embrace of multiculturalism allows Miller to cast such terrific actors as Wiley and O-T Fagbenle, who wouldn’t have had the chance to be part of the ensemble in a more traditional adaptation of the book. Speaking with Yahoo TV last week, Fagbenle echoed Wiley’s sentiments that the show’s inclusiveness is more reflective of the modern world, while also adding, “Oftentimes, these prejudices are underlined and do find their way to the surface.”)

Moira and Offred in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (Photo: George Kraychyk/Hulu)

With two episodes left before the end of the first season, Wiley advises viewers to keep an eye on how the ramifications of June’s eerie first visit to Jezebel’s reverberate for all the characters, including Moira. “This encounter makes her see how much she needs to double down and live in this world without resistance,” the actress teases. “Up until now, she’s retained the essence of who she is, but in the next episode, she’s sort of made a complete transition.” Even as the bond between these two women strains, it never breaks. “There are so many people I met in college who are some of my best friends today,” Wiley says of the real-life analogues she draws on to depict June and Moira’s sisterhood. “What we went through in those years, becoming adults, we did that together. College is where June and Moira first met, and they bonded in a way that they’ve been each other’s rocks. Moira is strong in her convictions, and it takes a special person to be able to be by her side.”‘

The Handmaid’s Tale releases new episodes every Wednesday on Hulu.

Read more from Yahoo TV: Summer TV Preview: The Scoop on 21 New Shows Summer TV Preview: What’s Next For 17 Returning Shows Kathy Griffin’s Offensive Trump Photo and the Fox News Snowflakes

[delicadenza]

The Long Way Home: On Love, Departures, and What Detroit Means to Me

(What originally started off as a little thought-seed about the Very Specific way I imagine my precanon Phichuuris turned into a grossly long-winded ramble about the nature of love???? I don’t know how to explain, omg. I’m so sorry.)

The fourth episode of Yuri!!! on Ice was a pivotal episode for me for many reasons. Prior to that my investment in the series’ early episodes was always tempered by a kind of caution—I’d been enjoying the push-and-pull between Yuuri and Victor as Yuuri struggled to come to terms with the fact that his idol had taken any degree of interest in him and Victor attempted to draw him out of his shell, and seeing the seed of what would eventually develop into a complex dynamic between him and Yuri Plisetsky, partly admiration, partly rivalry, partly a care and concern that neither of them quite knew how to express. But likewise I’d made it a point to be a little guarded—to hang back and wait until fuller character arcs for the protagonists and for the people in their world began to emerge before I gave the series my heart and soul. (I was a little scared, do you see? I didn’t want things to just turn out like another carrot-and-stick game between the shy anxious boy and the hot foreign guy he’d idolized forever who had taken a sudden and inexplicable interest in him. It didn’t help matters that at the time all the conspiracy theories floating around were that Victor was evil, or that he was dying. But anyway.)

All of that reserve flew out the window by the fourth episode, which essentially took the little hints the earlier episodes had been making at the characters’ hidden depths and cranked them up to eleven. There’s so much wonderful insight that comes out of this episode—from the by-now iconic “When I open up, he meets me where I am,” to the way Victor challenges Yuri to put together his own free skate as a way to build his confidence. The conversation they both have with Yuuri’s former coach, Celestino, is especially telling of Yuuri’s personal challenges and what he needs in order to grow: Victor asks, “Why didn’t you let Yuuri choose his own music?” to which Celestino replies that he chooses the music for his skaters unless they tell him that they’d like to pick their own. He proceeds to add that Yuuri only brought him a piece once, but that he’d gone back on it when asked if he believed he could win skating to it: “Please choose the music for me after all, Coach.”

In a sense, this conversation with his former coach reveals to Victor how past!Yuuri failed a kind of test—one that had to do with his capacity to trust his own choices—and that present!Yuuri now needs to face and surmount a similar test before he can move on. The difference is, of course, that Victor’s not going to let him give up on himself. Where Celestino withdraws and lets Yuuri fold, Victor insists on pushing. I also like how this short conversation is illustrative of the fact that, for all that it didn’t work out between them, and for all that his methods differ from Victor’s, Celestino knows Yuuri and has his best interests at heart, and understands what he needs in order to succeed, even if it’s not something he can help Yuuri with at this point.

Suffice to say that there’s a lot to like about this episode, a lot to love, but the real kicker for me came a little under ten minutes in, when Yuuri’s slumped at his desk at a loss as to what to do with his program, and he’s scrolling through his Instagram feed. He sees a friend of his is practicing in Thailand—and right then and there, he calls this friend. Yuuri, who’s anxious and overthinky and shy and has such a hard time opening up to people, just calls up this random boy from Instagram in the middle of the night, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. He greets him with “Sawasdee krab.” Cue me bringing my hand to my mouth in dismay—He has a Thai friend and he’s greeting him in Thai, oh my god. I felt the axe hovering above my head about to drop.

Suffice to say that it was love at first sight for me, as far as Phichit Chulanont was concerned. From his very first appearance as a smiley image on Yuuri’s phone screen, he exudes a natural warmth and an effervescence that it’s difficult to look away from, and that have proceeded to endear him to the fandom surprisingly thoroughly for a supporting character without too much screentime/internal monologue time/poignant backstory reveal time. But more than that, it was the ease with which I saw him and Yuuri talk to each other that intrigued me, and the idea of their shared past—“Detroit’s boring now that you’re gone!” he said, and I felt the axe smash me right down into extrapolation hell, because cute former rinkmate? Cute former rinkmate whose wiki entry later told me was also a former roommate? Look at all the fanfic waiting to happen.

(Spoiler: Happen it did, and then some.)

I think one of my favorite things about fanfiction—possibly my favorite thing—is that you never start from zero. There’s a joy to be derived from building upon the foundations of a preexisting universe—taking the characters and fleshing them out in ways that canon doesn’t get to, dropping them into entirely new scenarios or even entirely new worlds, exploring “what if” scenarios. In other words, the act of filling in gaps.

I love visiting other people’s worlds to play. Add to this the fact that I’m the kind of person who enjoys thinking a lot about how our pasts shape who we eventually become, and who can get pretty obsessive about going back over my own memories with a fine-toothed comb and trying to trace how the various people I used to be might have been built, brick by brick, experience by experience, into the person I am now. So maybe it only stands to reason that I’d latch on to the idea of Yuuri’s time in Detroit, that long formative period in his life that’s talked about in canon but we never actually get to see except in the tiniest glimpses, and turn that strange obsessiveness of mine toward extrapolating the life out of it. Or, well, extrapolating the life into it, I guess I should say—making it real, trying my best to build it into a world of its own. I’ve never been to Motor City myself, but in the process of all this extrapolation I’ve looked at so many maps of the city, so many long lists of shops and restaurants, so many photos in particular of the Detroit River and of Ambassador Bridge, that it kind of makes my head spin. The imaginative exercise has made Phichit and Yuuri’s Detroit so real to me that sometimes I think I can almost smell the air. It’s honestly kind of weird when I stop and think about it, but that’s what the imagination can do if you take it and run with it.

Yuuri leaves home at eighteen, and spends the next five years in Detroit. He trains under Celestino, goes to college, makes it to his first Grand Prix Final. It’s never established in canon how many of those years he spends living with Phichit—usually I go with around two, on the assumption that Phichit moves to the US at eighteen, as Yuuri does, though this varies depending on who you ask—and how they come to be such good friends, different as they are. In other words, lots of gaps to fill in. Lots of room to play, and to extrapolate.

In the Detroit that I imagine, Yuuri and Phichit go to school and train together. They do the groceries and the laundry. They explore the city. They get hamsters. Somewhere in the middle of everything, Phichit gets his driver’s license, which means long late-night drives in Celestino’s car. Sometimes they go to parties. Sometimes they dance. They eat and watch TV and clean up their apartment and study together, and eventually they push their beds together so they can sleep next to each other too. Probably in that shared space they talk more and more deeply with each other than they ever have with anyone else. (Needless to say I was happy beyond words to see that little flashback in episode 11, where Phichit tells Yuuri about his dream to skate to “Shall We Skate?” at a major competition, and how important it is that Yuuri be there too when it finally happens. Needless to say at least three friends who saw it before I did were kind enough to tweet me a warning that the episode was going to kick my ass. Shout-out to my friends. I love my friends.)

In my imagination, all of this leads to them falling in love, though weirdly enough that’s almost beside the point—secondary to the fact that, somehow, they come to love each other. More on the difference between those two things in a bit.

Yuuri tanks at the Grand Prix Final in December. He returns home to Hasetsu in March of the following year. In the intervening months you can imagine him as caught in a kind of downward spiral—how depressed he must be from what he imagines is the worst performance of his life, how lost he probably feels. The competitive season has ended early for him, and he’s right about to finish his college degree, so in a lot of ways he’s at a crossroads, and there are a lot of things he’s unsure about. Should he leave Detroit or stay? Should he keep skating, or start trying to imagine a life where he does something different? Can he see himself taking over the family business, even?

What little we learn from canon about Yuuri’s eventual decision to leave Detroit is zeroed-in on Yuuri to the exclusion of everything else. All we know is that he doesn’t think that what he’s doing is working anymore, so the only decision that makes sense to him in this time of intense personal crisis is to seek a change of scenery. We learn that he’s trying to recover the love for skating that he’s somehow lost along the way, and the way he’s decided to do it is to make his way back to his origins. We see him return to Hasetsu, his hometown, and skate Victor’s “Stay Close to Me” program for his childhood friend Yuuko, a nod back to when they were little and fell in love with skating copying Victor’s iconic performances. We’re not told anything about what he’s chosen to walk away from, what he’s decided to leave behind.

Detroit City is one of those things. Celestino is one of those things, as is Phichit, as is the skating club they practice at, and the place where they live, and the hamsters. And it’s possible from here to spin out versions of this story that are sad and painful and poignant especially with regard to Phichit’s place in this quite complicated order of things—to look at it from bittersweet pining Phichit angles and I’m-sad-I-couldn’t-help-you-love-skating-again angles and I-know-you-don’t-love-me-like-I-love-you angles, and from here it makes sense that in some imaginative spaces this develops into a deep undercurrent of helpless sadness that those Phichits carry with them into the canon timeline, sometimes past it, sometimes forever. And I get the place those Phichits grow from, I do. I know what it’s like to love someone you’re scared you can’t help because you don’t completely understand what they’re going through, and how easy it is to feel like you failed them, and to carry that with you so long it starts to feel like part of you—but that’s another story for another time, and the bottom line is that, with all the respect due the imaginations of others, my particular imagination always gives me back something different.

My imagination hits a wall whenever it tries to imagine Phichit wishing that Yuuri might stay when he knows he’s not happy, or that he isn’t growing. I can’t see Phichit looking at Yuuri and feeling like he’s the one that got away. In some versions of this story, sad!Phichit exists, but mine isn’t one of them. It can’t be, just because my imagination—the tiny, not-so-significant-for-all-its-obsessive-extrapolations little theater of my mind—doesn’t play it out that way for me. I’ve already told you that I’ve watched them fall in love; now I see them not so much fall out of love as decide that it might not be good for them to be in love anymore if they’re going to be apart in such a big way, and that this decision is just one of the many things Yuuri has to set in order if he’s going to go home. And he needs to go home, if he’s going to move forward with his life. I’d like to imagine that, not only does Phichit know this, but he commits wholeheartedly to helping him. Because, any way you want to slice it, he loves him.

Phichit knows that Yuuri needs to go—and yes, this knowledge is a sad thing, but that’s not all it is. I want to think it’s also a decision that makes sense to him. For one, he’s a skater himself and knows how ephemeral their existence as professional athletes is and how tumultuous lifestyle setups can be when your craft necessitates you shuttle back and forth all over the world. In addition to that, though, there are certain things I imagine someone like him—someone who by every token seems to be such a giver, such an emotionally generous and caring and other-directed person—would probably understand about the nature of love.

It’s easy to see the act of letting someone go, of ending a relationship, as essentially black and white. If you really loved this person, you would never have left them, or if you can’t make someone you love stay with you, then you’ve failed them and yourself. But the thing is, a lot of the time it’s not like that. It’s entirely possible to love someone a lot and still need to recognize that your time together has run its course, at least for now. It’s a loss that needs to be grieved, for sure, and it can feel like your whole world has been turned on its head because suddenly you’re missing an important presence, so many routines have fallen through, certain places look weird to visit now without them beside you. I know.

But the sad thing about getting stuck on what-might-have-beens and if-onlys is that you miss the possibility of something good coming out of that necessary separation—which you probably can’t think of at all in that moment, I know. It’s hard. Sometimes you can’t even imagine what life would be like after you let someone go, because naturally human beings find comfort in consistency, resist change because the unknown is frightening. If you let someone go, how can you be sure you’ll ever reencounter each other? How do you know you’ll ever be happy again?

On the flipside of that, we talk all the time about how love is wanting the best for the other person. I think what we talk about less often is that part and parcel of wanting the best for someone you love is giving up control over them and their decisions—trusting the other person to know what’s best for themselves, to do what’s best, to make their way back to you eventually in the ways that are best. Or maybe not, if life happens and leads them so far away it doesn’t make sense to reconnect; that’s the risk you take. But if you do find your way back to each other, after you’ve had the chance to be apart and grow up a little bit and become essentially new versions of yourselves, how can the chance to pick up again be anything but a gift?

There’s a very specific nuance here to the act of letting go. It needs to be total. You don’t let go halfheartedly, while still partially clinging, still wanting to hold on. You don’t let go kind of hoping to be vindicated somehow for your selflessness. You let go with grace, in good faith, and trust the process that may or may not bring you and the one you love back around. (The feelings are running high at the moment, so let me pass you briefly to Maya Angelou, one of my favorite poets, who captures the idea of true unconditionality better than I ever could: “I am grateful to have been loved and to be loved now and to be able to love, because that liberates. Love liberates. It doesn’t just hold—that’s ego. Love liberates. It doesn’t bind. Love says, ‘I love you. I love you if you’re in China. I love you if you’re across town. I love you if you’re in Harlem. I love you. I would like to be near you. I’d like to have your arms around me. I’d like to hear your voice in my ear. But that’s not possible now, so I love you. Go.’” The last words are gratitude and acceptance. That imperative she ends on is really, really important. She said Go.)

One of the things that makes Yuuri such a compelling protagonist is that all throughout his narrative the biggest, most frightening, most important struggles are against himself. His greatest battle is the battle to recognize himself as a person of worth, and so much of that has to do with how he learns to recognize love—to recognize himself not just as someone who’s capable of immense love but as someone who is loved. It’s a battle you see him begin to win in (again!) episode four—which practically deserves an Oscar just on its own, IMO—and it’s a thing of joy to see him work at it, sometimes mastering his demons, sometimes folding under them, but always coming back a little stronger each time.

It can be terrifying, paralyzing to realize that you are loved. Often it makes people push others away—don’t look at me, don’t care for me, I’m not worth your time or attention, direct it at someone or something more worthy—but I like to think it can be inspiring too, and that there’s so much strength to be gained from resting securely in the love of others. And I don’t mean this in the sense that you have to constantly depend on others to build you up because you can’t do it for yourself; rather that sometimes it’s enough to recognize that you’re not alone, to draw strength from that and to become, in turn, a more loving person. Yuuri starts off utterly unable to imagine what Victor sees in him—which, if you think about it, dovetails entirely too well with his difficulties with accepting support from anyone else in his life—but everything is changed by the fact that Victor insists, continuously, that it doesn’t matter. He won’t be beaten down by Yuuri’s stubbornly deep-rooted poor opinion of himself. Instead, it becomes a challenge: Try to see in yourself what I see in you. Try. Try your hardest. Use your imagination.

I haven’t spoken a lot about Victor in this rambly, weirdly convoluted little essay, I realize. Part of it is because I never quite feel like I need to—so many wonderful things have already been said about his and Yuuri’s relationship, and about how important they are to each other’s journeys toward becoming more loving people and learning to own what they do and who they are. Part of it is also because I’m looking at him right now as a link—albeit a singularly important one—in a chain of events that precedes his and Yuuri’s relationship and spirals incessantly beyond it. And that’s one other really wonderful thing about love, I think—that love in the true sense doesn’t close the world. Instead, it opens up the world; it makes everything look more whole.

In light of all these things, I find it so compelling that so much of what Yuuri learns, through Victor and everyone else, is retrospective—that not only is he loved and supported and believed in now, but that he always has been. Victor helps him see something that’s existed all along—that love has passed from person to person and from place to place and that never for a moment has Yuuri been without it. For one reason or another he hasn’t always felt it, recognized it for what it was—anxiety, terror, the impossible standards to which he holds himself—but it’s an idea we see him grow into little by little, with help. And by the end, when he’s running down the sidewalk in St. Petersburg toward Yuri and Victor and thinking “We call everything on the ice ‘love,’” he knows. Suddenly it makes sense now how everything that came before had a hand in bringing all of us here to each other; suddenly it makes sense that all of us are meeting here, where we are.

Let me wax extra self-indulgent for a bit and talk about one imaginary scene I always go back to whenever I think about Yuuri and Phichit. Whenever I think about Yuuri leaving Detroit, I always think about Phichit taking him to the airport. Twice now I’ve written out that scene in a fic, Phichit behind the wheel of Celestino’s car (legally borrowed, this time, because it’s an Important Day), Yuuri in the passenger’s seat playing the music as he’s done on so many similar drives that I’ve imagined. Except this drive is a little different, because it’s the last for the foreseeable future. They see the end coming; they’re moving together towards it.

It took me a while to figure it out well enough to get it down in words (instead of, you know, emotional keysmashing) but now I know why I always imagine things this way. I understand why I need to put Phichit where I do, right on the knife’s edge of that departure, carrying him all the way to the last possible moment before the separation happens. I think at the heart of things it’s me trying to emphasize something to myself about goodbyes—that yes, they’re sad, and they hurt, and for a long time you’ll inevitably miss the person or place or thing you’ve let go of. Sometimes deeply, sometimes for a long time, like an arm or a leg or a chunk of your heart. Of course you will. But then I think about Phichit and Yuuri in that moment I imagine, idling in the airport driveway—and part of my mind is already flashing forward some months later, to that first Skype call and Phichit’s smiling face on Yuuri’s phone screen, forward still to Beijing and Phichit turning up by chance in the very hotpot place Yuuri and Victor have decided to eat at—and I can’t help wanting to believe that that’s not all there is.

I want to imagine Phichit smiling at Yuuri across the car, maybe squeezing his hand for courage and good luck. I want to imagine in that moment things are as simple as they’ve always been between them—that while it’s not easy, because departures never are, these two silly boys rest secure in the knowledge that they’ll always have each other even when they’re not side by side, that it won’t be impossible to pick up again anytime they get the chance to. That’s how much I want to believe they trust each other, how important they are to each other—and how much I want to think that holds, no matter where they go and what they choose to do.

A couple of days ago a friend of mine pointed out that in Japanese the expressions mata ashita and mata ne, which mean see you again, are so much more common than sayonara, which signals a more permanent, or at least a more long-lasting kind of goodbye. I think about how in my native Tagalog the word for goodbye—paalam—has its roots in the verb alam, which means “to know.” When you say goodbye to someone—pamamaalam—you’re letting them know something, and somehow in my imagination that act of telling someone that you’ll be leaving works to make the absent person even more present. Weirdly enough it helps me remember the idea of returns.

I love these boys too much—and I want to believe that they love each other too much—to keep them stuck on the idea that they’re losing each other. (Is such a thing is even possible?) I much prefer to put them in the space of “see you again,” of “catch you when I do,” like it’s not a big deal at all, even if at the same time it is. Imagine Phichit laughing and saying, “Text me when you get home,” which is something most of us have said to our friends at one point or another before parting. Never mind that home is across the sea, on the other side of the world, fourteen hours away. Imagine how strongly he’d need to believe that the two of them have the power to collapse that distance, make it feel like nothing. Imagine that Yuuri, for all the things he’s afraid of in that moment, kind of believes it too.

There’s a tiny amount of actual footage from the show to go on, so maybe I’m making mountains out of molehills here, but from the very first moment I ever saw Yuuri and Phichit interact, I’ve been struck by how simple things seem to be between them. I love that. I love that it’s uncomplicated, that the only way they seem to know how to be with each other is just tender and joyful and pure. I really love the idea that it’s possible to be that way with someone that you may have loved differently in the past, and that you can acknowledge how important it was to you without necessarily wanting to bring it back again, because that would take away from the integrity of what you share now. And while you can remember the then as something beautiful, so is the now in its own way—and that it’s okay, you’re here, you can be happy now with what you have.

Even if you don’t imagine them as having been in love before, look at how present with each other these two are, in the instances that they have to reconnect. They’ve been apart and come back together, attentive to how much they’ve grown but also to how little certain aspects of their relationship have changed. One of them can call the other in the middle of the night and greet him in his native language, like it’s the most natural thing in the world. They smile at each other on the phone. They bump into each other in a foreign country and sit down, organically, for hotpot. They allow themselves to be proud of each other, to cheer each other on in competition: He’s giving everything he has to this season, too.

In all instances, they’re still them, only grown-up enough now to stay in each other’s lives by choice. That’s what holds, regardless of where they end up or what they do or how much time passes in between. The next time I catch up with you, we’ll probably be totally new people, but I know that over and above everything else these moments are a chance to rediscover you, again and again. Even with the people you know best in the world there’s always something new to learn—and I choose to keep learning. That’s how much you mean to me.

I don’t want this to be a utopic scenario, something that’s thought of as unrealistic or too good to be true. It’s real and it can happen, and it’s worth all the work.

The tenth episode shows us a pair of photos of Phichit and Yuuri at the Detroit Skating Club, taken at an unidentified point in their shared past. The first is a selfie at the entrance, where they have their thumbs up, and they’re laughing. The second is of them posing on the bleachers while Celestino sits in the background, looking away, thoroughly unamused.

I look at Yuuri in these pictures—take in his smile and his silliness and how comfortable he looks in his own skin—and I can’t bring myself to think of those days as any less real than the days leading up to his departure. It’s easy to conceive of Detroit as the place Yuuri chooses to walk away from, the place he needs to leave so his story can begin. But it’s also a place with stories of its own, and even if canon never reveals them to us, it’s not difficult to imagine the ways Yuuri himself is touched by them even as he moves on.

I think this could be true for him as it’s probably true for many of us: you need Detroit to make it, in the end, to St. Petersburg, that wonderful faraway ending-place that you probably thought existed only in your dreams. You may not be in Detroit anymore, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was a false start or a waste of time, or that it was never important—in fact, it’s precisely because you aren’t there now that you can maybe now begin to comprehend what it did for you, looking back over your shoulder in memory at all the places you’ve been and seeing with a clarity you didn’t have before just how far you’ve come from where and who you used to be.

On the one hand, of course you remember how hard things used to be. But maybe, just maybe, as you sift through all the things you remember, you’ll find that in more instances than you might originally have thought, you were happy too.

You don’t need to go back to Detroit, even. In a way, you never left—you carry that truth with you. You were happy then. You are happy now. All of it is real.

[not-so-secret-nerd]

New Beauty and the Beast and one of the few things I’d like to see changed

Okay, so does it really come as a surprise I went to see the new BatB movie the night before it opened? No. No its does not because you all know I have an unhealthy love for this movie and it was fucking Emma Watson and I was gonna go see it come hell or high water. I guess the first bit of business to get underway is telling you all whether or not I liked it. I like it. There, first part done.

I liked it more than I thought I would, BUT there were a few glaring problems with the plot. Yes, this movie did address some of the questions we were left with from the original animated feature. Who was Belle’s mother? Why wasn’t she in the picture? Why didn’t the townsfolk know they had a massive fucking castle a mile from their village? Who the Beast’s parents were and what happened to them (though we STILL don’t know what happened to dear old dad). That sort of thing. And these questions were answered in due part throughout the film along with a few added (and welcome) twists.

But regardless of Disney pouring a metric fuck-ton of money into this film and getting A-list actors to fill the roles, there were still a few glaring problems with the plot, and one that (had the writers merely taken a step back and pondered a little) could have been fixed early on in pre-production that would have made things MAKE SO MUCH MORE SENSE and strengthened the plot substantially!

                                CAUTION! SPOILERS BELOW

I won’t go into massive detail. We all know the generic plot for the film. The town is poor. It’s provincial. Belle wants out. We get the gist. But along the way, there are a few twists about the town thrown in, mainly that the town, like the castle (or at the very least the people in it) were cursed to forget the castle and the prince who ruled there. Nice touch there, writers. That nicely explains why the townsfolk didn’t remember anything about a castle or the monarchs who taxed them near to death (something I’m sure they were thankful for in their magical-amnesia-state). But while this explains a small question we fans had with the original tale, this also opens up some problems. Mainly towards the climax of the movie, when Belle gallantly (and she really was fucking gallant riding into town in her famous yellow ballgown like a total BAMF) returns to her father’s side to keep him from being locked into the loony-bin. The plot falls apart for a brief moment, but it’s a moment that kills the lead-up to the ultimate ending.

In the original animated feature, Gaston uses the magic mirror to incite a terror response from the town so he can ride off and “kill the beast”, the only creature on this planet keeping him from taking Belle (forcibly) as his wife, without people catching on to his original intentions. Somehow, as kids and later as adults, we just kind of swallow this plot point and moved on. Gaston was the bad guy. Of course he was going to do that, but seeing it played out in live action changes something. You almost want more of a realness to shine through. Kind of expect it because this is an adult movie, or at least, it’s a more grown-up version of an animated movie. Anyway, we needed a better excuse than “this is a bad beast, let’s go kill it so that I can distract you all from the real reason I’m killing this creature, which is so I can force a woman to marry me!”.

But even in the live action, the ultimate confrontation between Belle and Gaston fell remarkably flat. His insistence she was as crazy as her father held little merit because earlier in the film it was shown (through glimpses in the tavern scene and “My What a Guy” song) that the townsfolk don’t really think all that highly of Gaston. He’s pretty, but he’s got issues. Issues Lefou “helps” him through on screen, painting Gaston as the actual lunatic. So yeah, when you add that into the mix, when you give the townsfolk reasonable doubt in Gaston and his mental stability, it seems kind of stupid they would blindly follow this man on a hunt for a magical beast, even with the mirror in hand. And, speaking of the mirror, Gaston uses the whole “this is dark magic! Will we let this abomination roam free?!” line leaving the viewer like....buddy....where has anyone in this town expressed any phobia towards magic of any kind? How is that going to scare anyone, and that’s where we come to my point and fix. 

So, what would have fixed this, you ask? Two very simple, very short scenes. In fact, the whole sequence where Belle discovers (through magical means) how her mother died could have been completely omitted for this plot fix, keeping the film on schedule time-wise (the movie was 2:04 minutes long). The fix is this: make the townsfolk inherently skittish around magic of ANY KIND. That’s it. That’s all the writers had to do, and I’ll explain why this works

The townsfolk were cursed with forgetting the prince and his castle. As we come to find out, there are people in the castle with family members in the town (nice twist) so these townsfolk could have had an inherent dislike/fear of magic because they were victims of it. It would have made total sense these people would view anything even remotely magical as bad. So you add in a scene where this fear and intolerance is shown to the viewer. A prime example of a scene that could have worked is your typical townsperson screaming at someone, “she’s a witch because she cures illnesses unreasonably fast! Don’t trust her! She’ll steal your soul!” This is a poor provincial town. People are supposed to be a bit backward and stupid. This would have been an excellent point where Belle could stand up for someone “this isn’t magic! They are using herbs. They’re using plants to heal people. That’s medicine, not magic!”

Obviously, this would piss a few townsfolk off, but Belle sticks to her guns and the people eventually leave the person alone. Belle’s a hero. Person is saved. Viewer is shown the townsfolk don’t like anything attributed to magic. Win, win.

A second scene could have been added where Belle is seen teaching a young girl how to read. “A woman’s place is not reading! Once she starts reading she’ll read anything, and that’s how trouble begins. You get curious and you invite all kinds of devils into your life!” Belle could have retorted, “Teaching people to read isn’t inviting anything into their life other than education. A world without knowledge is a frightening place!” To which a rebuttal could be made, “If a woman has questions about the world she should ask her father or husband. They will show her the answer. There’s no point in trying to find the answer yourself when greater minds have already thought it through.”

Oh look, feminist issues AND a fear of magic and devils done all in one stroke. Go me! 

So how does this translate into a cleaner ending? Simple. When Gaston takes the mirror and shows the townsfolk he’s showing them EXACTLY what they are afraid of. He’s showing them the seed of their curse, the reason for their fear of magic. And that rallies the people around him. They’re terrified of this monster because it’s obviously a creature born of dark magic, something that cannot be tolerated and therefore must be wiped out.

That’s all the writers had to do. That’s it, and it kind of blows my mind they completely missed this opportunity to really strengthen the BatB plot. It’s one of the main gripes I have with the BatB plotline as a whole and one of the driving forces behind my own adaptations. The people who wrote this script hinged everything on the audience's preexisting familiarity with the plot. Therefore they didn’t feel the need to really make the relationship between the characters or the subplot all that deep. The story was already written for them. They just had to sit back and “let the magic happen”, but there’s a fine line between a good story and one that leaves the audience in awe. Beauty and the Beast could have done that had the writers merely taken the time to look over their work and sought to solidify the plot rather than relying on lazy storytelling.    

[ricky-rampage]

Favorite Movies 2016

Ah, 2016. Honestly, the less said about it, the better. But I’m a sucker for making lists and I think I’ll always have a compulsivity to make my top ten movies list of the year until the day cinema ends (which will hopefully be never). This wasn’t a particularly great year for film; there was a lot of “okay,” plenty of “meh,” but not too much “holy effing shit where’s the bottom of my jaw?!” However, there thankfully were ten movies that tickled my fancy. They are:

10. MIDNIGHT SPECIAL--This one surprised me. It lacks a true heart, or the heart keeps bouncing around between different characters while never fully latching on, but I still found myself enthralled. The way little bits are revealed here and there always felt natural and smooth, never forced. Jeff Nichols is skilled in nuance, which has been hit or miss for me with his past work. This is the first time I really got what he was going for. Now he just needs to inject some heart into his stories and he’ll be a master (I’m hoping Loving accomplishes this).

9. THE NICE GUYS--While it’s no Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, it’s still a worthy entry into the buddy cop mystery movie. Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling’s chemistry sparkles. The dialogue is original and hilarious. There’s a star turn from young Angourie Rice. It kind of devolves into standard shootout flare by the end, but the journey up to that point was pure entertainment.

8. MANCHESTER BY THE SEA--Though I wish I was more emotionally affected by this film, it’s still a very well done and well acted take on grief. It’s one of those movies where not a lot really happens, but everything happens. Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams and Lucas Hedges are all amazing, and the dialogue is some of the most realistically funny writing I’ve seen uttered on screen in a long time.

7. CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR--I think this is the most thematically resonant entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, especially in this sudden era of fake news. We believe the story with which we’re being presented, even when we don’t have all the facts. It’s about perspective. When it comes to clashing perspectives, communication is key; having a dialogue about issues insures a healthy debate and hopefully a satisfying compromise. When it’s superheroes having the debate, though, dialogue is tough and everyone ends up brawling at an airport hangar. Don’t forget this is popcorn fodder, but it was my favorite popcorn fodder of the year.

6. KUBO & THE TWO STRINGS--a visually astounding work of art. Watching this film just gave me a sense of joy that other animated films didn’t give me this year (I’m looking at you, Finding Dory, you and your pointlessness). This is a tale about a storyteller who finds himself in one of his own stories, becoming the hero he never knew he was born to be. A lot of it is silly, but most of it is fun, and all of it is beautiful.

5. THE WITCH--Funny story, I went to go see this a week or two after it came out with my friend, Sean, but we only stayed in the theater for about thirty minutes because of the worst film audience I’d ever experienced. Someone behind us was translating the whole film to his friend from English to Spanish, a mentally disabled man in front of us kept laughing at inappropriate times and shaking his head violently back and forth, and overall, your run-of-the-mill talking and cell phone usage from everyone else. Months later, I watched the movie on Amazon, and it was great. The end.

4. ARRIVAL--The thinking person’s alien invasion movie. This doesn’t have to rely on special effects or big action. This is a story about understanding one another that just happens to have aliens and special effects in it. Amy Adams gives an understated performance as a linguist caught in the middle of a mystery that almost everyone else sees as having a cut-and-dry solution. Jeremy Renner and Forrest Whitaker are just kind of there, but who cares? This is Adams’ story. A story of her character understanding her past, present, future, and herself. And it has aliens.

3. MOONLIGHT--So rarely does a movie come along that feels so un-Hollywood. Something that just comes off as HUMAN and never becomes melodramatic or dull. Moonlight pulls it off in strides. The story of a boy, then an adolescent, and then a man, and what it means to be all of them, sometimes all at once (I guess that only really applies for the last one, but it’s still there). Chrion is a character caught in the middle of too many worlds and I felt his uncertainty as he does his best to explore who he really is. Never exploitative, always real, Moonlight is kind of amazing.

2. LA LA LAND--This movie should not have been as remarkable as it is. It’s a fairly standard story, it’s a cheesy musical, and it’s not based on any preexisting material, which in this day and age, we know is a big no-no *barfs and dies*. But somehow, everything in this movie is near perfection. The songs: catchy and wondrous. The direction: Damien Chazelle, you are a god among insects. The performances: nothing flashy from Emma Stone or Ryan Gosling here, but I believed everything they did, including breaking into song and dance. All at once, La La Land is a tribute to classic cinema, a glimpse into where cinema is heading, and a time-honored tale of pursuing your dreams and the sacrifices that come along with that pursuit.

1. A MONSTER CALLS--This happens every year: my two favorite movies come down to what affects me emotionally and what wows me with its sheer filmmaking prowess. And like every year, the emotional film takes the cake. A Monster Calls caused me to suppress literal howls in a crowded theater, and I know I’m not the only one who experienced such a sensation. Ugly, ugly tears, and I’m grateful for every single one. Even if you haven’t experienced the tragic loss of a loved one, A Monster Calls is incredibly effective thanks to its beautiful performances from Felicity Jones, Sigourney Weaver and young stand-out Lewis MacDougall. It hooked me, reeled me in, and continues to squeeze me tightly in a comforting embrace (you know, like you usually do with fish). That’s why it’s my favorite film of the year.

Movies I didn’t manage to see in time: Silence, Sing Street, Hell or High Water, 20th Century Women, The Founder, Hunt For the Wilderpeople.

Favorite performances of the year: Hailee Steinfeld in The Edge of Seventeen, Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Nocturnal Animals, Lucas Hedges in Manchester By the Sea, Emma Stone in La La Land, Dan Fogler in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.

Special Jury Prize: Paint It Black. I’m not sure when this will get an official release, but I saw it at the Mill Valley Film Festival and it’s a disturbing treat.

Now for five movies that kind of stunk. Well, more than kind of. A few of them burned my sinuses away.

-1. X-MEN: APOCALYPSE--Out of the near two and a half hour runtime, I’d say there’s barely ninety minutes of actual story here. The rest is plodding, (not very good) effects-driven schlock and fan service. It lacks purpose; it’s just sort of there.

-2. THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN--Hitchcock you are not. Even Gone Girl you are not. Shit, you’re barely Hollywood Homicide (how’s that for a reference?).

-3. BATMAN V. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE--Can anyone tell me what this movie was about besides franchise building? No? Moving on then.

-4. SUICIDE SQUAD--Is this film the perfect example of A) studios interfering with a director’s vision, B) a film believing it can get by on massive hype while remaining limp and unnecessary, or C) just pure dumbness? I’ll go with D) all of the above.

-5. INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE--I’ll quote from my review from last summer because I don’t want to waste any more brain power coming up with new ways to shit on this piece of shit: “...a slapdash string of CGI vomit, shoehorned references to the first film for nostalgia’s sake, and not a lick of emotional depth whatsoever.” So. Fucking. Worthless.

Please be good, 2017. Pretty please. All the cherries on top.