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when-they-write-stuff · 4 years ago

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IT WAS UNFAIR, Stiles thought, that Derek Hale was so freaking hot.

It wasn’t just because it was a summer day and he swore, it had to be over a hundred degrees. It wasn’t just because the man had shed his shirt long ago, working alongside the betas as they started the paneling of the Hale house’s unfinished porch. And it wasn’t just because Stiles was a raging bisexual and Derek Hale was exactly his kind of dream guy.

Except maybe it was all of those things. Maybe it was because Derek Hale was so goddamn gorgeous, so very shirtless, and so freaking muscled, Stiles couldn’t wrap his head around it all. And— and shit. It wasn’t fair, Stiles thought.

It wasn’t fair that Derek Hale was so freaking hot.

Sighing, he took another long drink of his lemonade, protected by the shade of the trees from across the lawn. He’d started out the afternoon helping the others work on the Hale house, he really had. But Stiles was just human, okay? He wasn’t nearly as muscled or effortlessly tireless as the others. And he’d never admit this any other time, but he was totally okay with being the token human for the day while the others worked their werewolfy asses off.

Sitting next to him, strawberry-blonde hair whisping slightly in the faint breeze, Lydia looked like she felt exactly the same.

“I never thought I’d look at a handful of shirtless, sweaty boys and feel nothing,” she said, tilting her head thoughtfully. Stiles choked on his sip of lemonade and Lydia smirked, glancing over at him before her gaze drifted back across the lawn toward Derek. “Just like I’m sure you never thought you’d look at such a hot, shirtless Hale and feel so much.”

“Oh my god, Lydia, really?”

Lydia just hummed and Stiles desperately tried not to blush, dropping his eyes to the dirt. Because his worst nightmare was that one day Derek would overhear what Lydia voiced in ‘private’, and he might just have to throw himself off a cliff if that ever happened.

And he was too young to die.

“Please, just never say that again,” Stiles said. “Like, ever.”

“You know it’s true, though.”

Stiles shot her a sharp look, which the girl completely ignored. But if Stiles had anything to say about it, Lydia was definitely wrong. And— and even if she wasn’t, it wasn’t like he was that obvious about certain things, okay? He definitely wasn’t obvious.

In fact, Stiles would like to state for the record that he was the total and complete opposite of anything Lydia ever said.

Always.

Because Stiles had never tripped over his own feet after Derek flashed red eyes in his direction. And he’d never run face-first into a wall when the man had simply growled his name. He’d never accidentally spilled coffee down the front of his shirt when Derek had brushed a little too close and he’d never almost had a heart attack when Derek had shoved him into a wall after Stiles had spilled a certain... beverage all over the man’s shoes.

Okay, okay, maybe he had done these things before. Once. On the same day. But that was just once.

Just once.

And Stiles was pretty sure nothing like that would ever happen again. In that order, at least.

Yet, here he was, doing his best to pretend like a shirtless and sweaty Derek Hale wasn’t doing unseemly things to him. Unseemingly things like fixating only on the unseemly that he’d like Derek to be doing to him. Because, well, the things he’d let Derek do to him...

“Stiles,” Lydia said, interrupting his daydream. “You’re drooling.”

Stiles snapped back to reality, shaking his head, and automatically flushed at her smug look. “I am not.”

“You are. And it’s a bit pathetic.”

“Okay, you know what? You’re a bit pathe—” Lydia gave him a dangerous look and Stiles promptly snapped his mouth shut. “Never mind.”

“Wise choice.”

“But I wasn’t drooling.”

Smirking, Lydia gazed back toward the Hale house. Then, a devious look crossed her face and she glanced over at him before nodding toward where the others had stopped to take a break on the half-finished steps. “You know, you could be over there giving Derek a reason to drool over you.”

Stiles blinked. “Uh, you mean get all sweaty and gross too? No thanks.”

Lydia rolled her eyes. “I mean stop hiding over here and go get yourself worked up over there. Show those idiot wolves what Stiles Stilinski has to offer.”

“Okay, first of all, that is never going to happen,” Stiles said. “And seriously, Lydia, you’re a menace. Do you know what lies under all of this?” He gestured down at himself and accidentally sloshed lemonade over his hand, cursing. Point one for what Stiles Stilinski had to offer. “Absolutely nothing, that’s the answer. Nothing but pale skin, weak everything, and the proof that I’ve spent most of my life living off of curly fries and milkshakes instead of that green crap I make my dad eat.”

Lydia raised an eyebrow, looking slightly amused. Sighing, Stiles turned his gaze back across the lawn.

“What I would give for some werewolf abs, though.”

“I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“Oh, that's absolutely how it works,” Stiles shot back. “Trust me, I know. I’m the pack expert, remember? The packspert, if you will. And you all rely on me to know these things.”

“Hm.”

Stiles took another sip of his lemonade, eyes still on Derek. Because he definitely was the pack expert, thank you very much. And werewolves like Derek Hale were definitely hot— it was part of the package deal.

Stiles, on the other hand, was lacking hotness on many levels.

And that’s why he was here, sitting far away from where Derek and any of the other werewolves who could catch wind of his... thoughts, daydreaming about a grumpy-growly alpha who would never see him as more than ‘skinny, defenseless, Stiles’. And he was totally okay with that, Stiles told himself. He was.

He’d always been better at lying to himself than others.

Three months before Stiles graduated Beacon Hills High, the Hale house was finally finished.

He thought it was a little strange how four years ago, the first time he’d laid eyes on the old house it had been nothing but a skeleton, the remnants looking like they could collapse in on themselves at any moment.

It was all different now.

The Hale house looked a little bit like the ‘before’ pictures Stiles had once caught Derek studying— although there were also a few different things added on. Like the archery targets, for example. Or the giant porch that curved around to the back of the house, complete with a fire pit and a grill.

Stiles couldn’t wrap his mind around ever seeing Derek Hale grill.

And yeah, the house looked a bit like these pictures Stiles had once caught Derek studying. The man had slammed them down and given Stiles a red-eyed alpha look before he could get a good look, but Stiles had ducked back into the room much later, finding a picture left behind that showed the Hale family standing in front of the house before it burned.

The younger version of Derek Hale had been smiling. Stiles didn’t think he’d ever seen the older one look like that before.

He’d left the room feeling a bit conflicted.

Two weeks after that, Stiles swung by the fully finished house after school, the first one to arrive before the rest of the pack. The Camaro, he noticed, was parked near the trees, but the Hale house itself seemed quiet, the newly built porch so much more welcoming than it had been all those years ago.

Stiles hesitated before climbing out of his jeep, debating waiting for one of the others to show up. Scott would probably go to Allison’s first and Lydia would probably be at Jackson’s. Stiles had no idea what the other three betas were doing, but thinking too much about what they got up to outside of Derek’s supervision never ended well.

Stiles had learned that the hard way years ago.

Faintly, looking at the silent house, he wondered if it would look like this after the summer of graduation. Something about that made Stiles’s stomach clench and he shook his head, trying to banish any thoughts of Derek Hale being stuck in an empty house all alone when they were all gone.

Forcing himself out of the car, Stiles pulled his backpack over his shoulders and started toward the house.

It was eerily silent when Stiles stepped foot through the front door. He hesitated and craned his neck to glance up the stairs, then down the hall. But the house seemed completely empty.

“Uh, Derek?”

There was almost nothing in the house yet, so Stiles’s voice echoed off the empty walls. He moved through the house quietly, checking each empty room that he passed. But the big bad alpha of Beacon Hills didn’t seem to be anywhere around.

Stepping into the living room, Stiles paused. Sitting across the room was a single chair, facing where Isaac had stated the ‘necessary’ pack TV had to go. Behind it was a single picture frame on the wall and as Stiles moved closer, he realized it was the same one he’d seen weeks ago.

The glowing eyes that reflected back at the camera were only a little creepy.

“Stiles?”

“Shit!”

Stiles spun around so fast, he nearly tripped over his own feet. Derek stood in the doorway of the room, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jacket and a confused, if not a little concerned, look on his face. “What are you doing here?”

“I… thought we were all meeting here after school?”

Derek raised an eyebrow but didn’t offer an answer. Fishing out his phone, Stiles scrolled through his unread messages and— shit. There were a number of cancellations from the others, one after the other.

Stiles swallowed hard, glancing back up. “Okay, I might be wrong.”

Derek just continued to eye him. Stuffing his phone back into his pocket, Stiles glanced around the near-empty room and desperately wracked his brain, trying to think of a reason that he should not be around either. Because what was he even supposed to do now?

This was not going according to plan.

“Well then,” he said, avoiding Derek’s unnerving stare. “I should be going.”

The silence continued to reign and when Stiles glanced back up, Derek just shrugged, turning away. And Stiles didn’t know where the hell the werewolf had come from or where he was going now, but he was not going to wait around and see.

Things did not need to be any more awkward.

Gripping the straps of his backpack tighter, Stiles made for the back door instead— the quickest escape route. Though, he still paused at the doorway and glanced over his shoulder. Derek was gone now, but Stiles noticed a single empty plate on the table next to the single empty chair— the few things in the near-empty room

The house suddenly seemed even quieter than before.

Stomach twisting, Stiles swallowed hard and shook his head, ducking out the back door into the cool evening air. And he didn’t look back until he was in his jeep again, staring at the looming house.

He thought he saw movement in the highest window; the quickest flash of shadow. But when he blinked and looked again, the window was empty and the house stood still. Still, dark, and almost a little more menacing than before.

Stiles jammed the key into the ignition and drove away faster than was probably necessary.

Stiles thought his crush on Derek Hale started sometime after his freshman year.

After Derek stopped scaring the ever-living crap out of him and Stiles came to terms with his possible bisexuality, he realized that yeah, Lydia Martin was hot. But Derek Hale was hot too. And it was kind of hard to look at either of them without his heart skipping a beat or two, which Stiles figured probably meant something.

But his possible attraction to Derek didn’t matter, he’d decided. His sixteen-year-old self was sure that he’d be marrying Lydia Martin one day and with that picture in mind, he could just appreciate Derek for what he was— a hot guy.

But then sometime around his junior year, Stiles realized he probably wasn’t going to marry Lydia Martin. And that… that was fine too.

One year later, he was completely fine with how everything had turned out.

By the time the Hale house was fully furnished, the pack spent nearly every afternoon there. It was nice; close by and large enough for them all. And sometimes, when Stiles came through the front door and met Derek’s gaze, he thought he could remember this one strange feeling he’d had the very first time he’d laid eyes on the man. So many years ago.

Or maybe, that one time in the pool. Or the kanima incident at the sheriff’s station nearly three years ago.

Or the first time Derek had come through Stiles’s window looking for research help.

“Stiles? Bro, Earth to Stiles.”

Stiles snapped out of his thoughts as an elbow jabbed into his side. Yelping, he glared sideways at the offender; and Scott just grinned innocently back, nodding toward the others.

“We’re all gonna go see a movie tonight. You in?”

“A movie?”

“Yeah, man. They’re doing replays of Star Wars all weekend.”

Stiles raised an eyebrow. “You do realize there’s a TV here, right? One that Isaac literally said was a ‘life or death’ necessity.”

Sitting on the floor across the room, Isaac flushed. “It is.”

“So…”

“Yeah, but Star Wars,” Scott said. Stiles snorted.

“Dude, I literally own all of them. What about a movie night here? Oh, we could even get pizza!”

Scott exchanged a dubious look with Allison, who shrugged. Stiles glanced at Erica, where she was wrapped around Boyd on the couch. The girl hesitated, then cast a dreamy look upward, smacking her lips together. “Movie popcorn easily outweighs boxed pizza, Batman. I vote for the movie theater.”

“I second that,” Jackson said, smirking over at Stiles. Stiles glared at him.

“You don’t get a vote, lizard boy.”

Jackon’s eyes flashed gold. “Say that again, Stilinsksi.”

“Okay, okay, that’s enough,” Lydia said, giving Stiles a warning look. He just rolled her eyes and the red-haired girl considered for a moment, before shrugging. “I agree with Jackson.”

“Ugh,” Stiles groaned. “Don’t side with the snake.”

But the decision was already made up, apparently, as Scott jumped to his feet with a grin. “Sweet!” he said, pulling Allison up too. “Let’s get out of here then.”

Stiles didn’t even have a chance to protest before Erica was snatching the jeep’s keys off the coffee table and taking off toward the door, the holler of ‘shotgun!’ left in the air at her back. Groaning, he ran a hand through his hair and then slowly pushed himself up too.

It was only then that he noticed Derek hadn’t moved a muscle from his spot in the furthest corner of the room.

“Uh, hey, Sourwolf, you coming?”

Grey-green eyes lifted from his book and Derek gave him an unimpressed look. “No.”

“What? Why not?”

This time, Derek’s brows furrowed. And yeah, Stiles supposed the book and the whole grumpy-growly attitude Derek had going on was probably a pretty telling answer. But he still couldn’t squash a strange feeling of disappointment.

“Come on, dude, it’ll be fun! Movie popcorn! I’ll even buy.”

To his surprise, the furrow between Derek’s eyes actually seemed to soften a little. Well, maybe it did. Just a little bit. “No, Stiles. You go.”

That strange feeling of disappointment grew even more. Stiles frowned. “Seriously, dude?”

And just like that, the unimpressed furrow was back again. Along with a flicker of red. “Yes, Stiles. Go.”

And yep, that was the Alpha werewolf that used to scare the crap out of Stiles all those years ago. Sighing, he turned away and waved a hand over his shoulder in dismissal. “Fine, Sourbutt. But you’re missing out on a good time!”

Stiles didn’t get an answer. But he hadn’t really expected one.

The house was silent as he left.

The weekend before graduation, Lydia had a party.

Stiles had been looking forward to it for weeks. Mostly because, yeah, the last party Lydia had hosted ended up going horribly wrong, but weren’t things different now? They hadn’t faced a supernatural threat in months and Stiles was finally starting to remember what it felt like to be a normal teenager again.

So, he was pretty excited for Lydia’s party. And of course, if he had still been in love with her, this would have been the most nerve-wracking night of his life. But Stiles was all good now and he was ready to have fun, do a little dancing, and maybe get a bit drunk if he thought he could get away with it.

He didn’t get a little drunk.

Somehow, three hours after arrival, Stiles was pretty sure he was wasted.

Keeping up with the werewolves was hard, he quickly came to realize, even if they laced their drinks with wolfsbane for a little extra kick. One hour in, Scott, Allison, and Isaac were nowhere to be seen. Two hours in, Erica was doing her best to convince Boyd to go around scaring the shit out of other drunks with their flashing eyes. And three hours in, Stiles had no idea where Lydia had gone, but the entire room was spinning so fast, he was pretty sure he was either going to pass out or hurl. Whatever came first.

He didn’t actually do either.

Instead, somehow, Stiles ended up at the Hale house when the moon was high in the sky. It was dark enough that he could barely see the way to the front door, but that proved not to be a problem when he fell face-first out of his jeep the moment he managed to open the car door.

And shit, his dad was going to kill him if he ever found out about this.

Rolling onto his back, Stiles blinked up at the dark sky and groaned. He was pretty sure getting back up wasn’t an option, not unless he wanted to just go right back down. So maybe he’d just die here…

Except suddenly, a looming figure blocked his view and Stiles shrieked, kicking upward with all his strength. His foot connected with something solid and the figure grunted— and Stiles realized much too late what he’d done.

“Dammit, Stiles!”

“Oh my god,” Stiles said, voice barely a whisper. Half-bent over, Derek glared at him and Stiles mustered his best smile, desperately hoping that would keep him from getting his throat ripped out on the spot. “Er, hey there, Sourwolf. Fancy seeing you here.”

Red flickered through the man’s eyes. Stiles winced and after another long moment, Derek straightened up, giving him a look that held the promise of possible murder.

“What the hell are you doing, Stiles?”

Stiles blinked at the man. Then he shrugged, shifting a little in the dirt. “Resting.”

Derek’s expression tightened. The man leaned over again, sniffed deeply, and then his face twisted. “Are you drunk?”

“Only a little.”

“Dammit, Stiles!”

“Oh, please don’t ‘dammit Stiles’ me. I came here so I wouldn’t have to hear that exact statement from my dad tonight—”

But suddenly, Derek went rigid, his eyes flashing again. Stiles cut off, looking at the man in fear, and Derek gave him the most terrifying red-eyed look that Stiles had probably ever seen.

The man really looked like he could kill someone now. And Stiles was the only person around.

But then when Derek spoke, his words were so calm, so steady, Stiles thought that was even scarier.

“Stiles, did you drive here drunk?”

Oh, shit.

Stiles opened his mouth— then closed it again. Derek’s face was carefully blank now and Stiles was pretty sure if he could actually stand, sober him would be running right now. Because this was scarier than he’d ever seen Derek— even when the man had been that grumpy-growly “I’ll rip your throat out” asshole when they’d first met.

But before Stiles could even think of an answer, he was being scooped up. A sputtering noise of surprise left his mouth as Derek all but hauled him over his shoulder and then turned around, starting toward the Hale house.

Stiles’s head pounded. His stomach churned and as he watched the ground just a few feet away from his face, he wondered what would happen if he hurled all over Derek’s back.

As if the man could read his thoughts, Derek’s grip tightened. “Don’t you dare.”

Stiles did his best to keep everything down.

The dirt of the front driveway turned into the porch steps, and then the front door slammed as the ground Stiles was looking at became hardwood. Derek hauled him into the living room and dumped him on the couch, making Stiles groan loudly.

“Oh my god, dude, my head.”

Derek gave him a look of pure fury. Any more complaints dying on his tongue, Stiles shrank back.

“I mean, never mind. I’m completely fine.”

“No, Stiles, you’re not.” Derek’s eyes sparked red. “I can’t believe you would do something so stupid. So irresponsible. ”

“I… what?”

But Derek just shook his head and turned away, stalking from the room. Stiles stared into the darkness for a moment, his thoughts moving slowly, and he totally blamed it on the alcohol. Except, he really just didn’t know what to do with what was currently unfolding.

Derek had actually sounded upset. Concerned, even.

Stiles figured he was even drunker than he’d originally thought. In fact, maybe this was all just a spiked-punch induced hallucination. Just like last time Lydia threw a party.

Except, this definitely wasn’t a nightmare.

The sound of approaching footsteps pulled Stiles right back out of his thoughts and he blinked in surprise as Derek stepped closer with a trash can, a glass of water, and a white bottle of pills.

“Uh,” Stiles said, utterly dumbfounded. Derek scowled at him and he shrank back again.

“You throw up on my floor,” the man growled. “I’ll rip your throat out.”

Wordlessly, Stiles nodded. Derek shoved the glass forward.

“Drink.”

Stiles didn’t need to be told twice. He drained the water in a few seconds and Derek set the bottle of pills on the side table, giving Stiles another dark look as he took the empty glass back. “Don’t take any of those until morning.”

Again, Stiles nodded. Derek set the trashcan next to the sofa and turned away again, vanishing into the darkness once more.

This time, the silence lasted a little longer. But still, Derek came into the room after a few minutes, another glass of water in hand and a rolled-up blanket tucked under his arm. As Stiles stared, the man set the water next to the pills, then unrolled the blanket and draped it over him.

Stiles felt a little bit like a child.

He honestly didn’t know how to react.

Then, finally, finally, Derek stepped back and folded his arms over his chest, surveying the entire scene as if he was satisfied with his work. Stiles stayed stock-still, kind of worried that any sudden movements would mess everything up.

Whatever ‘everything’ was right now.

Catching him staring, Derek glared again. “I’m going back to bed. If you wake me up, I’ll kill you.”

“...Got it.”

The man gave the room one more once-over and then turned away, heading back for the hallway. But before he could vanish into the dark all over again, Stiles sat straight up, internally screeching as the blood rushed to his head.

“Derek?”

The broad-shouldered silhouette paused. Stiles swallowed.

“Thank you.”

He didn’t get a single response. Not even a nod.

Stiles blinked and Derek was gone.

Graduation came and went like it wasn’t even worth the hype.

Stiles had avoided going back to the Hale house since that night, but it was like it never happened. In fact, if he hadn’t woken up to an empty house with a cup of coffee next to the glass of water and pills, Stiles might have believed it hadn’t.

But it had, which meant he’d made a complete fool of himself. And as Stiles had dragged himself off the couch and toward the front door, he’d been pretty sure he could never face Derek again. It didn’t really help that he could barely remember anything that happened that night, because what if he’d said or done something totally dumb?

Dumber than usual, that is.

So he’d decided to avoid both Derek and the Hale house for as long as possible. He’d noticed his dad never said anything too, which meant Derek hadn’t dropped by to say a word of whatever the hell had happened.

Things were fine. It was all fine.

But then, when they were all hanging out after the graduation ceremony was over, Scott told him they were holding the graduation party at the Hale house.

“Oh,” Stiles said, his throat going dry. “Oh, that’s great. Great, great, great, dude. Absolutely great.”

Scott gave him a small look of concern. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, yeah, great, I’m just fantastic,” Stiles said. Then, sighing, he shook his head. “Okay, no, I'm not. Remember that one time I told you Lydia Martin was the only person I’d ever have feelings for? Like, ever?”

Slowly, Scott nodded. Stiles swallowed hard and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck.

“Yeah. I think I’m in love with Derek.”

In a moment, Scott’s eyes rounded twice their usual size. Stiles winced and almost instantly wished he could take back his words. Especially when Scott nearly shouted his next words.

“You’re in love with Derek?!”

“Oh my god, Scott,” Stiles swore, clapping both hands over Scott’s mouth. But the boy just ducked away and looked at Stiles like he’d grown two heads, mouth opening and closing a few times before he spoke again.

“What does that even mean?”

“Well, gee, Scott, I don’t know. What does being in love with someone even mean?”

“You... like him?”

“Seems we’re both coming to that gradual realization, yes.”

“Like, in a good way?”

Stiles stared at the boy. “Okay, please tell me you’re kidding right now.”

But Scott just continued to stare. Then, he glanced around and leaned closer, words hushed as if he was divulging his deepest secret. “Do you mean find him... attractive?”

Stiles pulled a face and gave the boy an incredulous look. “No, Scott, I don’t think werewolves who like to growl a lot and could probably crush me like a bug are attractive. And I definitely don’t think Derek is the hottest guy I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

Scott blinked. Then frowned. “Okay, but you’re not lying.”

“No, Scott, I’m not!”

If Stiles could go back about five minutes ago, he would probably punch his past self for ever thinking he could tell Scott something like this in public. The boy looked like he was still lost and Stiles mentally prepared himself for more questions— before Allison came out of the crowd and linked her arm through Scott’s own, giving Stiles a warm smile.

“Hey, the others are heading to Derek’s. You guys ready?”

Scott looked from Stiles, to Allison, then back. Stiles gave him a sharp, warning look, but the boy just winced apologetically and let Allison lead him away— with knowledge Stiles never should have provided.

Closing his eyes, Stiles took a few deep breaths and then trudged after the two of them, silently hating himself for every decision he’d ever made.

If he wasn’t fearing for some kind of inevitable doom, Stiles might have been amazed by how the Hale house looked in the darkness that night.

Okay, that was a lie. He was still amazed.

Lights had been strung through the rafters of the porch and multi-colored garden lanterns were stuck in the ground all around the lawn. Stiles smelled barbeque before he even stepped out of the car and almost instantly zeroed in on his dad behind the grill, looking like he was the happiest person on the planet.

Except, Derek stood beside him, laser-focused on whatever the hell the Sheriff was grilling. And Stiles was pretty sure they were talking.

“Oh no,” he whispered.

But before Stiles could rush over and intercept what he could only imagine was not a very promising conversation, there was a hand on his sleeve and he was being pulled across the lawn instead. Stiles spun around, cursing, and nearly stumbled over his own feet to see Erica looking at him with a sharp grin. One that made his blood run cold.

Yeah, this might be worse.

“So, Stiles, ” the girl said, letting go of his sleeve only when they were at the very edge of the lawn, far away from the sound of music. “You’re in love with our alpha?”

Stiles froze. Then groaned. “I swear to god, I’m going to kill Scott.”

Erica barked out a laugh. “Oh, Batman, your puny little werewolf friend didn’t have to tell me a thing.”

Stiles blinked. Erica’s grin turned sharper.

“You spent the night here,” she said smugly. “Last weekend.”

“Last weeken... oh my god.”

Crossing her arms, Erica gave him a triumphant look. And Stiles didn’t even know where to begin before the girl was speaking again. “So you’re totally head over heels for Derek then? I mean, clearly you two bange—”

“Woah, no, stop!” Stiles said, waving his hands through the air. Erica narrowed her eyes but closed her mouth, and Stiles took a deep breath, rubbing a hand over his forehead. “I did not sleep with Derek.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I didn’t,” he hissed. “It was after Lydia’s party and I was drunk. I needed somewhere to crash.”

Erica raised an eyebrow. Stiles sighed.

“I almost passed out in the driveway and then nearly threw up all over him. Trust me, you menace, that’s about as far away from sleeping with Derek that I can possibly get.”

“Okay, then,” Erica said, studying him. “But you're definitely in love with him.”

Stiles opened his mouth to protest, then snapped it shut. And the beta’s face lit right back up as she laughed.

“Oh, I knew it! I am so going to win this bet.”

“Wait, what?”

“I mean, Boyd didn’t think it would happen until the end of summer,” Erica continued, completely ignoring him now. “And Isaac clearly has his head up his ass because he didn’t think it was going to happen at all—”

“Hold up,” Stiles said, cutting her off. “What are you talking about? What bet?”

Erica straightened. Then, she grinned.

“Nothing. No bet.”

“Oh, hell no,” Stiles said, shooting a look over his shoulder. Thankfully, no one seemed to have noticed them yet and he was going to get answers out of her before anyone could interrupt. Because if this was another one of the beta’s stupid pranks— “Erica, I swear to god, I’ll skin your little wolfy ass. Talk, now.”

“Well, see, it all started at the beginning of the summer…”

But suddenly, Erica’s eyes lit up and she trailed off, brushing around him. Protests already rising on his tongue, Stiles spun around after her. Only to freeze.

Derek stood a few feet away, hands behind his back as he glanced between them. Stiles was pretty sure his heart skipped at least two beats.

“Oh, alpha of mine,” Erica said, approaching Derek and giving him a sharp grin. “So good to see you. Also, I’m gonna go now.”

Derek raised an eyebrow and watched her move around him, head tilting slightly. Then he turned to look toward Stiles, who was starting to feel like he could be sick. “Er, yeah. Hey, Derek.”

“Was I interrupting?”

“Absolutely not.”

Stiles probably spoke too quickly because Derek’s eyebrows climbed even higher. Flushing, Stiles dropped his gaze and silently cursed himself.

“I mean… no. You weren't.”

When he finally glanced up again, Derek still didn’t look very convinced. Biting down on his tongue, Stiles searched for any other kind of conversation diversion.

“So. Grilling.”

Derek’s expression turned even more incredulous, though his lips twitched a little. Stiles winced, turned his gaze downward again.

“I saw you and my dad earlier.”

“Oh. Yeah." Derek said thoughtfully. As if that wasn't disturbing news. "He offered me a position at the station two weeks ago. Deputy. I thought it was time I gave him an answer.”

Stiles’s head snapped back up so fast, he swore he heard something crack. “What?”

Derek slipped his hands into his pockets. “I’m taking it.”

“You’re— I— what?”

Derek didn't look too bothered by the fact that Stiles was nearly having a heart attack. But Stiles’s head spun and he felt a little bit confused, a little bit shocked, and kind of betrayed all at the same time. Because two weeks ago? That was plenty of time for his dad to at least mention something about possibly hiring Derek Hale.

“Now the house is built, I’m going to need to do something,” Derek said, studying him. “Over the summer and afterward.”

“Why?”

The moment the word left Stiles’s mouth, he felt like an idiot. Because, duh, they were all going to be spread out across the state pretty soon. Except for Lydia, of course, who was going multiple states away. But all this time, Stiles had imagined Derek being lonely and isolated in the Hale house when they were gone…

And just like that, he felt like an even bigger idiot.

Oh.

Looking at Derek with new eyes, Stiles suddenly remembered the past few months a little bit differently.

Derek, working alongside his betas on the new house— all amused looks and soft smiles. Then, that one picture on the wall, right next to the lone chair that soon sat right alongside the rest of the furniture; with enough space for the rest of the pack to be right next to him. And even beyond that, the contented silence when they all went off to do their own thing. Like he knew they were going to be back, no matter what.

A lump formed in Stiles's throat and he stared at the man, feeling like an idiot. “You’re not lonely here."

Derek tilted his head. “No.”

“It’s home.”

Once more, Derek’s lips twitched. Stiles swallowed hard.

“Last weekend…”

“You’re lucky I hadn’t taken the job offer yet.”

Oh.

So, Stiles hadn’t made a fool out of himself that night. But maybe he’d been making a fool out of himself long before then, and ever since. He’d found it so easy to look at Derek Hale and think about all those years ago, like the man was still a part of the past. But maybe Stiles was still the one living back then, not Derek.

“Stiles?”

Glancing across the lawn, Stiles watched the others for a moment. Music floated through the air and he didn’t see a single person other than him and Derek standing apart from the crowd. And they were all different now, weren’t they? It’d been years.

Stiles took a small breath and glanced back toward the man. They were all different now.

“Do you want to dance?”

Derek’s eyes flickered and after a moment, the man nodded. Hands trembling nervously, Stiles followed him away from the edge of the lawn, back toward the others. Gaze drifting a little ways further, Stiles's stomach flipped to see Erica watching with a wide smirk and a wad of cash in hand.

And then, like the entire world thought this was amusing too, the music slowed.

Stiles froze, looking back at Derek. But the man just raised an eyebrow and Stiles thought that maybe he could die on the spot. Because there was nothing even hot about that look. No, Derek Hale was drop-dead gorgeous and Stiles couldn’t believe he was standing literally inches away from the man that he had somehow fallen in love with. And he hadn’t even done anything stupid yet.

Then Derek stepped closer, Stiles’s heart stopped, and he promptly tripped over his own feet, spilling right into the man.

Someone barked a mocking laugh to the side; it sounded suspiciously like Jackson. Wincing, Stiles pulled himself back up and slowly met Derek’s gaze again.

“Sorry.”

“Let me.”

Fingertips brushed against his own and Stiles’s heart hammered against his chest as Derek took his hands. And shit, how many months ago had he been drooling over Derek like a teenager? Grey-green eyes danced in the glowing lights and Stiles remembered Lydia’s words faintly, flushing a little despite himself.

Give Derek something to drool over.

“You know, it's kind of unfair,” Stiles mumbled. “That you’re so freaking hot.”

“Oh, really?”

Stiles chewed on his lower lip, trying to avoid Derek's full-on gaze. “You know. Like, in a ‘I might be kind of in love with the big bad alpha of Beacon Hills’ way.”

Derek suddenly paused and Stiles’s throat tightened.

“Only if that’s okay.”

Beyond them, the music had changed again, turning into something more lively. But Derek still didn’t move and Stiles forced himself to meet the man’s eyes once more, trying to expect literally anything— he didn’t even know what to hope for anymore.

Derek’s brows were furrowed. His expression was a little quiet, a little gentle.

“Derek?”

“It’s about time.”

And Stiles blinked, mouth dropping open. But before he could even say a word, even wrap his mind around what had just been said, Derek was leaning forward and Stiles closed his mouth right back shut as warm lips brushed against his own.

In an instant, some part of his mind screeched. Some part logged off and logged back on again. And one more part replayed that one time he’d run into a wall after Derek had simply growled his name.

Then, Stiles fell right into the kiss and thought what had he even been feeling again?

So much.

But when Derek kissed him for the first time that night, the first time since they'd met, all soft and warm with the Hale house lit up behind them and the smell of barbecue in the air, Stiles realized he only felt one thing right now.

Full.

It kind of felt like the future. Kind of felt like home.

There was another picture hanging on the living room wall after Stiles went off to college, right next to the one of the Hale family. In it, some eyes glowed kind of creepily, some eyes didn't. Some people were holding each other tightly, some weren't. But they were all side by side, and they were all smiling. Older Derek Hale was smiling, just like all those years ago.

Standing next to him, eyes glowing for completely non-werewolf-related reasons, Stiles Stilinski was too.

- -

A/N: so I kind of mixed and matched prompts for this and it ended up being waaay longer than I expected. But I hope it turned out alright? I adore you both @wolfile & @pickosita5stwin !

#sterek #teen wolf #sterek fanfic #teen wolf fanfic #eternalsterek #stiles stilinski #derek hale #stiles x derek #ficlet #6k+#stiles stilinski x derek hale #prompts

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halion-halion-aito · 3 years ago

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oh hello!! *pulling out notes i’d had ready for like weeks* i’m very very glad you asked!

so, alright, let’s start from the fact that, clearly, geoff johns didn’t know his characters at all when he started writing teen titans. so, even if he didn’t do this retcon (which, just as a side fact, was actually a theory he’d formulated and written to DC in a letter when he was twenty-one), he would’ve probably completely failed at writing kon.

which he did, retcon or not, since you can absolutely tell conner is so not the same guy as the kon we met in young justice and superboy.

but, going back to the retcon itself.

(putting a keep reading sign here because it turned out longer than expected, lol)

the thing it really does, in my opinion, is to really shake away what was kon’s greatest issue, the core of his character and what really started all the insecurities, if you want to call them that way, he showed in superboy.

(side side note: all this stuff is from his solo, which may seem like a fun read but is a rollercoaster of pain. but it’s 100% worth the read imo)

initially, kon was only created from the human dna samples of A Guy, whose name is paul westfield and was the scientist, 100% human, in charge of the superboy project. kon was then modified so that he could emulate suoperman’s powers through his ttk (take note: no superstrenght, no flight, no immunity to bullets or anything; just the ttk he can use in different ways) (it was also said at some point that there was a chance he might develop actual kryptonian powers, because they fucked with his dna that much, but there wasn’t any warranty about this)

now, there’s somehting that really is not obvious in the sense that they never really say it, but it’s something that probably comes to mind if you think about it enough aka all day long instead of studying like i do, lmao:

he is superboy, but there’s nothing “super”, nothing of krypton about him.

now, i wonder. who wouldn’t feel like a fraud, in his situation? who wouldn’t feel like they need to work twice as much to actually be worth the S they bring on their chest?

what’s so interesting about the superboy solo is kon’s process of aknowledgement (i will come back on this point later). at first he feels he’s entitled to have the name and the S – hell, he was literally born from this! he can do everything superman can!

but then it starts hitting him, through failures and other conversations. kara had taken the S away from him, after knockout’s issue – which was a little bit harsh and unfair of her, since he’d bee n manipulated and abused at that point, but that’s not the point. the point is that kara has all the right to take the S away from him. she’s a real super, she’s a kryptonian. she’s what kon really will never be, as a matter of fact.

and all the times he failed at saving people, and worse, the time people died because of him, indirectly or not. (the whole issue 92 is about this. it is agonizing to read, i’m not gonna lie to you.)

keep in mind that he also had no name other than superboy at the time. (also project 13, but uuuuh.) so, like. yeah alright i was born to be superman. now what do i do to be what i’m supposed to be? – ofc, you do what superman does. – okay. – and what does superman do? – well, he saves people. he is popular. he is an icon for everyone. he does good for people. – okay, and? – and what? – what else?

there wasn’t much else, if you asked him. that was all he needed to be superman – how can i say, to exist. without these things, he’s a useless human like any other.

this is also why he literally cried tears of joy when he finally got a name. the name is the first level of identity. in history, everytime someone was to be deleted as a person, his name was cancelled from everywhere; when their dignity was to be taken away, their name was replaced with a number; in romeo and juliet, during the balcony scene, when he says he’s willing to renounce to his name to be with juliet, he’s essentially telling her he’s willing to let go of all himself to be with her, to become nothing but love; in the odyssey, when odysseus says he’s “nobody”, he’s essentially saying he’s willing to let go of his whole dignity as a person in order to survive this.

literary note aside, he’s finally being told he’s more than just a superman copycat, a boy playing superman. he’s given the honor to actually be a super, with a kryptonian name, despite not being born that way.

but then again. friends die, he can’t save anyone, people die because of him (we’d all love to say it wasn’t his fault, and it isn’t, but indeed he was a dangerous catalyst; and if he can’t control what he has, he will inevitably lead to people being hurt and worse). he’s right back at square one. if he can’t save people, he can’t be a super, and if he can’t be a super he isn’t even meant to exist. this thinking process gets to the point where he’s literally suicidal, filled with self-loathing and just wishing he could disappear.

narratively speaking, i liked how the superboy solo went on a crescendo, it was literally tearing him apart issue after issue, and at the end there’s a softening, there’s the last pages that say it’s not okay at all, but it will be, say that he’s finally starting a healing process, at the kents farm.

(which we didn’t see anything about, anyway. i think i would’ve liked to see not only his mental health deteriorating, but also him facing his demons and winning on them. i remember that at the end of graduation day, he tried to tell cassie it wasn’t their fault. even just trying to say it, he assured me he was making some process. oh baby boy. i wonder how he felt when he was alone again, though, and when he realized that donna attacked the android to save dick, but dick attacked it to save kon. i’m in tears okay.)

now, let’s skip to tt03.

and, let’s say the retcon specifically.

first off, i really want to tell you – it’s bland. like, wow! the child of a superhero and his nemesis! how original! (didn’t they do this already with bart, only that they gave off more dramatic and interesting vibes? i’m just asking.)

but, if we want to ignore this point and my personal opinion.

do you see how everything we said about his heritage is suddenly waste paper? he does have krypton dna, he’s got all the rigths to be a super. they basically said, fuck his character development of the last ten years and all the basis of his whole character.

also, the conflict is pointless if you think of kon. like, oh okay, so i have lex luthor’s dna, cool. that’s more of a personal thought, but i don’t think kon would’ve gone down that way of doubt. this guy is extremely self-aware, even too much for his own good, especially at the point in life where he was there.

i’m not saying he would’ve shrugged it off. but there are different ways he would’ve dealt with it.

and i’m also not again going on the way all of his traumas and issues and past were magically wiped away, like you could read tt03 and you wouldn’t say ¾ of the people he loved died, some of them because of him, he was manipulated by older women because they were interested in his body and his popularity, he’s looking for himself somewhere inside him, he’s terrified of being alone, he’s seen the one girlfriend he had a very problematic relationship with but was the most stable one die in front of him twice, and all of this in less than a year of life.

oh, an important note. i’m not saying tt03 conner is absoulte shit, even if it may look like it. he would’ve been a cool character if he was a different dude. he’s the definition of himbo, a little too much of a clark II to be notable, but anyway. a fun dude. looks like a cinnamon roll, is a cinnamon roll. looks like his super strong arms were bulit just to hug you.

but it’s absolutely horrible that a complex and original to the unforgettable character like kon was transformed into something that was anything but him. they are two different characters, and it’s the fact that they’re actually the same person that makes me angry, if that makes sense.

i think i’m done? anyway, my point is that geoff johns ruined what could’ve been a great character, and who could’ve been a true inspiration for many, like me if you believe i’m making a weird discourse.

thank you so much for your ask!! i had been thinking about making this post for a while but i didn’t find the occasion to <3

ALSO ALSO. if something wasn’t really clear, may i add as an exlpanation

i’d use this beatles albums to describe the difference between the two characters. alternatively – pre-tt03 kon was nirvana/marina and the diamonds; post-tt03 conner was the smiths/twenty one pilots. thank you for your attention. yes i’m a music person. kon was a music person. superboy was a music comic. they took the music dimension away from him isn’t this horrible.

#reuploaded this from scrap bc it is. genuinely my best post ever #i poursed my heart and soul into it and i think it really shows #shoutout to fandomvents again!! thank you for giving me the opportunity to share this <3 #dc comics #superman #justice league #supes #superboy #superboy 1994 #teen titans 2003 #kon el #conner kent #young justice #young justice 1998 #og young justice #helene.txt

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blackswaneuroparedux · 3 years ago

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Anonymous asked: You are one of the more thoughtful and intelligent conservative blogs I’ve come across and I am in awe of your wide learning and your takes on culture. I notice that you shy away from wading into controversial hot button topics in the US (I respect that because it’s not the purpose of your blog I know!) but how would you briefly characterize the impact of wokeness in our culture and society?

Briefly?

Too brief?

Okay, let me clarify a little.

‘Wokeness’ is political correctness on steroids. It aims may be sincere but its method is pure madness. It associates itself with breaking away from any kind of rationality and logic and the complete subjugation of truth and the self to emotions. Its hatred towards of everything that has been carefully built up through long established truth and tradition is an act of moral vandalism.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Take your eyes off your Twitter stream or better swtich off your social media and look around. It’s important to take a breath.

Hard as it may be in the echo chambers of the left and the right to understand, ‘wokeness’ is only a thing in the Anglo-American world. It has made negligible impact elsewhere so far (yes, it’s making inroads into Europe but not as much as Americans might think). Even in France, the country that gave birth to the very ideas upon which the foundations of the ideology of wokedom rests (the ideas of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze that traveled to the Californian campuses since the 1970s), ‘wokedom’ hasn’t taken root. Indeed even France’s leftist intellectuals (many of them direct disciples of Foucault and Derrida) are horrified at how mangled and misunderstood their masters’ ideas have permeated into the rot of American intellectual discourse that’s now being drip fed into the cultural mainstream.

I sometimes wish I could take some of these white and black SJWs with me and show them the world (I’m pretty sure they’re don’t travel or engage seriously with other cultures or even learn their languages). To show them how the world they inhabit is so shallow and inconsequential.

Go to Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, or the Far East, and many just have no idea what ‘being woke’ is. More importantly, they do not care. Their struggles and challenges are a world away from the skin deep victimhood fueled tantrums of the Anglo-American millenial middle classes.

Those that do know (the ones who travel to the West) are shocked. For my Chinese friends in both mainland China and Hong Kong, they look at ‘Cancel culture’ and how it is used to destroy people, publicly humiliate them just like intellectuals were during the Cultural Revolution in China. There is no grace, no forgiveness, just sadistic pleasure in personal annihilation. They worry that the West - whom they respect and admire in many ways - is on a self-inflicted path to catastrophic destruction.

Some say that ‘wokeness’ is the new religion of the aimless white middle class millenials and ‘social justice’ is its new god. I can see the analogy except in one crucial and important aspect. Unlike Christianity which grew from the ground up through the truly marginalised - women and slaves - to change the world, wokeness has always been a top down movement, just like all the ill-fated and blood soaked ‘isms’ of the past (jacobinism, socialism, and communism).

False gods will always fall.

Let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with political activism per se, it is a mark of an engaged citizen and a good neighbour to stand up for things that are unfair and unjust. But when political activism is based on destructive emotions, we all lose.

I certainly don’t hate leftist wokeists because hate is such an unhelpful emotion. I have my fair share of ‘woke’ friends so of course I don’t hate them. I really do listen to them before I forensically chip away at their flawed reasoning; however, when your whole identity is based on emotional reasoning rather than a rational or empirical one then that is hard going.

Nor do I blame the woke left. That would be too easy. I blame the rest of us because we as a collective have lost sight of inherited history, cultural traditions, and unique national heritage. In short, we in the West have lost faith in our own ideals.

This is as brief as I can be....

Thanks for your question.

#ask #question #wokeness #society #civilisation #western society #ideas #ideology #christianity #truth #emotions

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jostepherjoestar · 4 years ago

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An Educational Favour VII

ENDING!

NOTsfw // FEM! reader & pronouns

warnings/notes: 18+ content, minors dni, risotto x reader alone finally, interc0urse, soft, romantic, intimate, face riding, scent kink? a little, squirting (kind of), ris is a service top don’t @ me, aftercare with ris, u can read into what risotto is trying to say/do readers 👀

part 1- 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7

PART VII: 🖤Risotto🖤

It took some time to finally assess what you’d learned over the span of time since starting your educational adventure with your colleagues. After every session you had been left with your own thoughts, albeit in a haze, but it gave you time to relax and reflect. Illuso taught you to be confident and ask for what you want and shy Pesci made you put those communication skills to good use as you received one of the most intense orgasms you’d ever experienced. Damn that man has some great skills; it still makes you shudder to think back to your thighs clamped around his face, trembling in pleasure. Ghiaccio showed you how fun it could be to be hammered into the mattress while also desperately trying to make your capo feel good. Unlike Formaggio, who let the slow tempo take over and took his time to make you feel amazing. Then Melone who wasn’t afraid to get involved with Risotto as well, to let inhibitions go and indulge together. And your last, Prosciutto, showing you what it takes to handle being an obedient sub, which may or may not have gone just as rough as you had hoped. It had been very educational to say the least but it also made you realise how much you appreciated Risotto’s care. He’d been there the whole way through, getting his needs met in a different way, building up even more patience and strength. Maybe that’s what he’d taught you: sometimes the wait is worth it. And oh God did you want the wait to be over! It had been a month since your last lesson, the roughest so far, and you ached to be intimate again. This time with the very man you’d been craving since the start: Risotto.

For a while you pondered if you should just ask one of your teammates to help satiate that yearning, but it felt unfair. Everyone’s had their fun with you, except Risotto. So you remained patient, sure that your broody capo was very busy and trying to find the right time to squeeze you into his packed schedule. But the days kept dragging on, every call for a meeting squashing your hopes and desires when its subject was merely a new hit.

Over the few weeks you had been waiting you tried your very best to go the extra mile; willingly taking on a big chunk of paperwork so Risotto didn’t have to work such long nights, cleaning up his office, bringing him drinks and snacks throughout the day. It didn’t go unnoticed or unappreciated but his thanks were never more than just the word and a nod. He tried to hide his usual broody manner from lifting when you were around. His shoulders would relax and the tight grip on his pen would ease up, that little crease knitting his lovely brows together becoming ever so slightly less dented as he could breathe a soft sigh of relief with you near. Of course he won’t tell, or rather show you just how much he appreciates all you do for him; at least not yet.

If Risotto was truthful to himself, the wait wasn’t a planned one. Work kept piling up and your tired capo needed every bit of rest he could grasp. Knowing how good and obedient you had been with Prosciutto, Risotto knew you could handle it; well at least a bit. Your dark eyed superior wasn’t planning on anything as extreme as the former session, quite the opposite actually. He needed it to be perfect: the right day, the right mood and the right time.

And if your capo was being even more truthful to himself, his thoughts were starting to turn on him. He would be your last lesson. And the last of his men that had already quite successfully showed you how well they could indulge that eager curiosity. The final. The pressure of having to somehow top all other orgasms, top all other deep thrusts and caresses… it nagged at his mind. Pulling at the smallest insecurities that he’d freeze up when he finally had you all to himself. That he won’t be as amazing as your depraved fantasies had conjured him up to be. Even your lovely smile, your eyes that glimmered and had fireworks sparking behind them with every quick glance could only ease his mind so much.

The great Risotto Nero doubted his own expertise. The imposing, brooding, domineering capo fighting his very own powerful battle under that silly little jingly hat. Oh, what have you done to him?

For once you weren’t busy, lounging on the couch in the shared living room resting next to Melone. He’s become a bit of a confidant since your night with him, lending his ears so you could air any of your worries and more than gladly airing his own to you. Along with lots of jokes and talks late into the night, the whole ordeal had brought you closer to the usually more emotionally distant man. He’d opened up a lot more which you greatly appreciated since he’d already known so much about you.

At the moment you were just enjoying your rest, the tv in the background offering ambient noise as you nearly drifted off from the relaxed atmosphere, still a bit tired from your previous hit that strained your body. Melone idly talked about anything and nothing, the cadence of his smooth voice bringing you closer and closer to sleep. Your eyes fluttered shut for what felt like mere seconds but as it turns out you’d been taking a nap for a little while.

You were roused from the comfort of slumber by strong arms holding you close to their owner’s chest which felt well built and defined. They felt somewhat familiar in your haze, not sure if it was Melone. Too tired to really care you mumbled some indiscernible babbling, trying to thank whoever it was that so kindly laid you down on your bed.

Wait. This wasn’t your bed, the covers felt satiny, too soft and slippery to be your own thick comforter you liked to huddle in. It smelled completely different too. It smelled like… Risotto. You turned and breathed into the soft pillow, moaning in satisfaction as his smell engulfed your senses making your head feel even foggier. If you could bathe in it, you gladly would. Drenched in the most wonderful essence that clouded your thoughts in a hazy bliss.

“Mhh Ris? S’that you?” you mumbled sweetly as you came up for air, slowly opening your eyes again to assess the room you were currently in. You sat up a little, supported on your elbows, blinking at the darker hues of his surprisingly monochromatic interior. Furniture remained a dark stained wood, nearing a cool black while the walls were kept a light grey offering a lighter feel to the heavier placements of his blocky closet and bed. It was simple and straightforward, offering a seeming simplicity that contained more than it let on.

The room only lit by the soft light of the setting sun that streamed through his thinly veiled windows. As you scanned the room for any sign of him you felt a large figure loom right next to you, a little ways past the square bedside table. “Oh there you are.” A small smile gracing your lovely features, eyes meeting his darker ones that glistened with a certain excitedness you hadn’t seen before. Risotto was getting easier to read as time went on, small hints becoming clearer to his mood and thoughts, leading you to connect the dots on your own.

“All my meetings got cancelled for the day. Our boss had a sudden personal emergency.” his voice rang out even deeper than usual, the sound shivering through your core and straight into the slick building between your thighs. There was a certain relieved salacious hint to his tone, indicating it was finally time to get ravished. The long wait was finally over.

Heat rushed to your cheeks in abandon as the realisation set in. Risotto moved from his previous spot to cage you in his form, denting the mattress further with his added weight. His domineering figure offered no way out from under him, a dark gaze glued to yours as he drank in your expression. So cute and flustered, eyes wide in anticipation, a single touch could melt you. Risotto’s previous anxieties and insecurities were hushed and silenced by your innocent little stare, reminded of just how much he wanted you. Somehow you had still retained a sliver of chasteness, even after your trail of debauchery.

You swallowed thickly, too intoxicated and mesmerised by the realisation of the situation to initiate any further action. Even now you’d gladly wait for your patient capo to strike. “Wh-what are we doing today, Risotto?” Throat starting to feel dry under his continued glare, afraid to lick your plump lips to wet them again.

Risotto inched closer, his beautifully angular jaw relaxed of any previous stress moving ever closer to meet you just a breath away. Lingering over your lips he breathed in gently, as if sniffing his favourite cabernet sauvignon, basking in its essence but only for it to be yours. The one he’s smelled over and over but could never fully take in, for it was never yours alone, there was always another muddling your true essence.

“So sweet…” he mumbled, his breath tickling your lips that ached to meet his, to finally get engulfed by the man you’d craved for so long. Deciding to take a sip, sampling his sweet summer wine, his lips finally met yours. They were soft, softer than expected. Even more unexpected is how carefully he moved them against yours. For a moment he roamed cautiously as if to make sure this was really happening. You were glad he kept his pace slow, his deep kiss nearing a full short circuit of all your brain functions.

Never had you felt this before, an act so common making you feel like you’d entered the gates of heaven itself to be engulfed by anything you’d ever dreamed of. You matched his tempo, letting his tongue linger between your lips, offering a way in if he so liked. And he did, moving it with similar care and motivation, tenderly taking the lead but only to please you further. A moan escaped into his mouth, vibrating through him while your hand reached up to caress the side of his face, into his hair. He’d already forgone his usual hat, letting his silvery locks roam free. He leaned into your touch, gently rubbing a small thumb across his cheekbones and jawline. Mapping out his features in case you’d ever forget.

It made him break his kiss, slowly letting your head fall back into the pillow, admiring how plump your lips had gotten and how he’d love for them to never leave his again. No words were needed to communicate, your bodies told stories and iliads by themselves like they had been doing it for ages.

You both regained your breaths, continuing to drink up each other's flustered expressions. He looked so at ease, so at home, it made you wish he could feel like this forever. As if you weighed nothing more than a feather, he curled his arms beneath you and hoisted you up into him, cradling you and letting you wrap your legs around his hips.

To your surprise he fell onto his back, returning to his lustrous dark satin sheets with you resting on his hips. He never for a moment looked smaller or any less in charge, leading the way of your movements, knowing just what to do and how it could please you. You felt yourself get more and more excited as time went by. Your core feeling ready to explode before much was even done. You rested your hands on his chest, feeling his large length strain against his trousers, a reminder of your final challenge.

Your cheeky streak never left you, not even in this thick heavy fog of desire that seemed to permeate your very beings. You shifted in your seat to rub your clothed wetness against his aching length. The movement alone made him slightly hitch his breath, eyebrow twitching up in a playful manner to ask if you knew what type of game you’d gotten yourself into. You smirked back to let him know just how ready you’ve been to start, commencing once again with a snap of your hips. The move itself making you shiver out a moan as his girth slid perfectly between your folds, rubbing deliciously against your sore clit.

It was as if the sound awakened a new sense of hunger in the man underneath you, his eyes glazed over in lust knowing that his cock made you mewl so sweetly. That only he could truly satisfy that hunger you’ve been trying to satiate with his teammates. The thought alone made his cock twitch, springing him back into action with a great need to hear you whimper out his name.

He lifted himself up to meet your cute little face again, a sit up so casual like it caused his muscled core no effort. You couldn’t help yourself, bringing your lips back to his for a hurried kiss, a quick one to settle the craving. “Get undressed, you’re riding my face.” he demanded, kissing your jaw. His voice so closely against your neck sending yet another jolt of pleasure straight through you. Walls clenching around nothingness and awaiting his tongue.

You quickly undressed, discarding your clothes as fast as possible while trying not to look all too desperate, which was quite difficult because of his previous order to ride his face. He took off his top slow and deliberate, letting you gawk at his muscled arms and torso as they contorted. Risotto bathed in the attention, normally not one to overtly want people to stare or to crave others’ attention that much. But watching your eyes rake over his torso, your eager little glint shining brighter than any light in the room only made him want to indulge you more.

For now he’d keep his trousers on, taking in your lovely form that sat on his hips. Your plush thighs spilling over him so invitingly, the curve of your sides leading the way to your breasts that lay sweetly against your ribcage, nipples stiffened from all the excitement. He wanted to cherish every single bit of you, give every patch of soft skin the attention it deserved. If he was lucky enough he’d get the time today, and many times after to complete that wish.

It didn’t feel embarrassing to let him stare at you, his crimson eyes were so gentle when they took you in, engraving every curve and mound into his memories. Surprised that there could be even more appreciation for you than previously thought.

Risotto’s large hand reached for your hip, taking in your shape and giving it a soft knead, as if to feel how pliable you were. His touch made your skin tingle, heated sparks spreading in pools around his digits. His other hand moved parallel, assessing the very handles he’ll be holding onto in a minute. “Come on then.” he smirked up at you, his dimple presenting itself so cutely. You felt like you could pass away at how adorable his smutty request was and how casual it felt to talk to your capo in such a way. Any shame or embarrassment just simply not invited to this party.

You did as you were told, positioning yourself right above his face, caging in his head like you’d done before to dear Pesci. Maybe today you’d writhe and moan in such pleasure again, the naughty thoughts sinking you down without Risotto even needing to guide you. It made him chuckle deeply into you as his mouth met your dripping folds, the ripples of his voice tickling you.

He began to lap at you, drinking up all of your sweet essence like it was his last glass of beloved cabernet. His tongue moving with the same care as before, tracing around your clit before giving it a suck with his lips, the aching bud of nerves already hardened with pleasure. You moaned at his ministrations, clamping your thighs while he worked you, bucking your hips rhythmically; setting a comforting pace. Risotto moved in tandem, holding onto your hips like before but gripping them tighter with his large palms, fingers digging into your gorgeous form. Hot breaths swiped at your mound, a dragon breathing steam out of his nose while he softly grunted into you. You felt even more slick trickle down, glad to hear him let go like he has before and not be afraid to be heard. You loved hearing how much he was enjoying himself.

Just like many times before, heat started rising, orgasm near and bringing in tsunamis of pleasure that crashed wildly at your insides, your head reaching new heights of haziness. “Fuck Risotto-” you got out the words between ragged pants and mewls, feeling your walls tighten around his tongue that would dip in from time to time to skillfully work inside. “M gonna come sh-it!” you hunched over to grasp at the sheets for any semblance of support, no place to hold onto the bed frame since it was just out of reach. As you snapped your hips a few more times, Risotto focussing all his attention on working you into a dizzying orgasm, you came on his face. A new sensation washing over you along with the pleasure of your peak, a gushing of sorts that made you moan out his name even louder while your legs trembled around his head.

The silken fabric was too soft, not giving you any grip whatsoever, having to support yourself on your hands while sparks rippled through every crevice of your being. And Risotto had no plans of stopping, keeping up his pace and gladly licking up all your juices, having felt him growl into you when you gushed over his face. You had stopped rocking now, too focused on remaining seated; panting and trying your best not to collapse into the mattress as he kept eating you out.

Risotto ingrained every single bit of your movements and the way he could make you squirm and tremble under his attention. How you yelped out his name during worn breaths, how your thighs and core were overheating from pleasure. He was making you feel this way and no one else for once. At this moment his only job was to make you come again, knowing how quickly you could be urged into your next orgasm if he just kept going. You weren’t the only one learning stuff on this educational favour.

With another strong swirl and suck on your overstimulated clit, your second orgasm was brought on. It made you fall onto the mattress, twitching as you lifted your hips away from his face to catch your breath. The cool air offering some sort of relief while your walls anxiously clasped around empty space. Risotto could finally breathe properly again, not that he wished to be doing anything other than servicing you, cursing his lungs for needing air. His chin and mouth were completely covered in your abundant slick; something he took in pride.

You slowly moved off of him completely, chests both rising and falling deeply. The only sound filling the room was that of your combined heavy breathing. For a moment laying there, relishing in the ambience of pleasure, realising that you were getting what you had wanted. You felt relieved, thankful that he’d made you wait because somehow it made it all the better. And getting in some experience certainly helped too.

“Please fuck me.” you plainly said, reminded of the first time you’d asked him and how nervous you felt, all of that gone now. You heard him breathe out a chuckle, making you turn your head to see why he thought it so amusing of you to ask such a thing. “What’s so funny Risotto?” you asked, smiling at his glistening lower face, wiping off the remainder with his sheets. You’ll just wash them later.

“You still think I’ll just fuck you.” he replied as casually as you’d asked. His facade did not let on any sort of humouring which made your stomach sink and eyes widen. What? Was he not going to fuck you? Your thoughts started spiralling into a panic, propping yourself up to question him further. But you couldn’t even do so, with one swift move he was back on top of you, caging you underneath him with that crimson glare boring through yours.

“I won’t just fuck you gattina.” he intoned, delicately moving a strand of hair back in place while speaking. He leaned back in close now, lips ghosting over the shell of your ear as he breathed out. “We’re going to make love. It’s your last lesson.” he purred, starting a trail of soft wet kisses from your jawline all the way down to your neck and collarbones. You still remained shocked, at least glad that he didn’t mean to reject you.

You were stumped. All that was somehow still a very smooth move despite scaring the actual shit out of you. You huffed out a relieved laugh now too. “You scared me for a second, Ris!” He was steadily working his way down to your chest, letting him take one of your breasts into his hand to knead it and sucking on the pert nipple of the other. His grip was strong but still careful, making sure to massage them just enough to hear your breath hitch. “I’d never leave you hanging high and dry. Unless you’d want me to.” you could feel him smile against your skin; the mischievous bastard. You playfully tugged at his silver locks, dark eyes shooting you a gorgeous smile that pierced right through you and melted your heart. He really was a bastard!

Your heart had settled back into its place, ready to continue and forget all about the short little panic he’d caused you. Guess that was just a bit more payback for testing his patience and strength throughout the sessions.

Risotto halted his succession of pecks right above your ribs, planting a trail where your bra usually made its home and planted a few more wet kisses over the indents that still marked your skin. Like his lips would make them fade and replace them with a loving memory of his touch. You could only stare at his deliberate movements, enamoured by the way he gently held onto your sides while he kissed you sweetly. You were squirming under him, trying your best to not ask him again to plow you into the mattress because by now you knew better; he’ll get to it. Eventually.

You sighed in satisfaction when he stopped, his thick fingers now moving downwards just above your mound. He ghosted over the area, digits barely felt which made goosebumps rise all over, a small yelp leaving your lips at the soft graze. He moved further down, dipping between your soaking folds carefully, avoiding any touch to your overworked bud which still ached to be stimulated again. A single finger slid inside your amply drenched hole now, pumping in and out of you at a slow pace.

Risotto looked up at you, meeting that expression he so loved to see. Lips slightly parted, a soft wet sheen over your forehead from your orgasms, cheeks that remained heated and puffy from arousal. With every thrust he heard a soft moan escape, eyes crinkled shut while he hit further and deeper inside of you with every push. The way your eyes shot open again as he entered another finger, the thickness of them stretching you open further. It felt amazingly tender to have him take all the time he needed - you needed- to adjust to his size.

Your soaked walls clenched and squelched around him, accepting more and more, ready for the precise thing you had been waiting to receive. He hadn’t been paying your sensitive clit any mind, the only focus on working you open. But the way his fingers curled, now three of them joined inside, tickling the most pleasurable spot nestled in your walls you let go and groaned loudly as he made you near another orgasm, head heavy and lost in a thick fog. He didn’t let you come however, feeling how your walls had quickened their grasp on his fingers and how your chest heaved and how those moans and groans sounded so desperate.

He moved himself out of you slowly, creeping up closer over you again and letting his coated fingers rest on your lips. Your eyes met again, glazed over in lust and a deeper craving to be even closer to him, those dark ones so trained on every small contortion and crease of your expression. You opened your mouth to receive them, suckling at the digits and lapping up your own juices with determination. Even propping yourself up a little to better your licks and sucks, eager to work him clean.

Risotto felt like he could burst, your tongue working with a focus that you couldn’t offer last time you had your mouth wrapped around him; too busy being fucked into oblivion on both ends. Satisfied with your cleaning he took them out of your mouth and kissed you again. Deeply and tenderly, tasting each other and your essence on his lips as tongues danced around. It was enrapturing to indulge so much but you were both ready to finally have his large leaking cock inside of you. He promptly discarded his trousers, his leaking head and impressive shaft bobbing as he got ready for you. The image alone never failed to surprise you, making your mouth water in anticipation.

“I’ve waited for this so long. Please don’t hold back, Ris.” you sighed as he kept you on your back, legs being spread open and moved up and wide with your knees bent closer to your chest. More than enough room to accommodate the man and his daunting length, the air no longer fresh or cooling; too heavy with the scent of lust and the heat of the moment. Risotto clasped both of your wrists in one of his hands, his large palms comfortably holding them and reaching them above your head where he held them pressed into the mattress. He leaned over you now, once again capturing you under him in a way that felt so protective and safe, the place where he’d take care of you and cherish every single moment pleasing you.

The familiar tip of his leaking member grazing just outside your hole, leaning at the entrance. Somehow the feeling made you tremble, the fires burning between your thighs lapping flames against him. “Oh I won’t hold back, you’re going to feel every single inch of me.” his wordiness surprised you, the way his deep voice carried making you weak.

His other hand supported his weight beside your head, letting his hips do all the work of carefully pressing deeper into you. The intrusion made you gasp, his head welcomed by your previously stretched walls. Wailing as he slowly inched further and further. He stopped every couple seconds, groaning deeply between heavy breaths, so vocal in how good you fit around him; so warm and inviting. “Cazzo you feel so good-” he muttered under his breath, starting to pump in and out of you, not even fully sheathed yet.

Being so stretched out, hitting every single spot and hidden pleasure-centers made you see stars, eyes pinched shut and squirming under his firm grasp on your wrists. It felt even better than you could ever imagine. He was perfect, made just for you and you for him. The final puzzle piece clicking in place.

When he finally buried himself inside of you, a thrust paced and calculated as to not hurt you in any way, his tip brushed against your cervix sending shivers down your body as you yelped at the sensation. He paused again, letting you pulse around him, feeling every contortion of your core. “Please keep going Risotto, please-” you whimpered, opening your eyes again to beg with a pleading gaze. Of course he can’t deny you, he’s never been able to.

Set back in action he started a steady rhythm, hips rolling his cock inside you with ease. Every single thrust brushing against your g-spot sending wave upon wave of pleasure through you. At this point no one was being quiet, much to your delight. His deep grunts and moans awakening a need to hear them on repeat every single day of your life. It only egged him on to hear you wailing, tears starting to prick the corners of your eyes while he continued. Completely lost in ecstasy, not a single thought in either of your heads other than this moment.

You felt your orgasm earn footing again, his cock reaching so deep and right. Feeling you clasp around him so often only made him twitch, getting close too and all too focused on making you come again before he can spill. “Touch yourself, I want to feel you come on my dick- You’re so beautiful.” He groaned desperately when you clenched even harder around him, his words affecting you greatly. He freed your wrists, letting his other hand support himself as well, letting him deepen his thrusts even further with the added grip.

You toyed your clit with vigour, your folds soaked with your slick letting you increase your pace. Desperate for your orgasm to wash over you while Risotto increased his speed as well. Chasing your peaks together, you reached it first. You could only mumble something that vaguely resembled Risotto’s name at this point, over and over like a mantra that lead your orgasm on. You felt yourself gush over his length again, dripping down onto his already soiled sheets. As you pulsed and writhed riding the waves of it to shore, Risotto followed suit. With a loud guttural groan you felt him tense up and twitch, releasing inside of you with languid spurt of his warm come. His thrusts slowed and sputtered as he kept coming. For a man of his expertise and experience, this was the first time someone had made him come this hard. Well, it was the first of many things he’s experienced with you.

Both breathing heavily as he stopped, resting above you and eyes opening again to adoringly stare at each other's satisfied faces. His eyes held a certain emotion he hadn’t let himself show before; he needn’t use words. You smiled back at him, that goofy satisfied one he always looked forward to seeing after a session, communicating back that you shared his sentiment.

As soon as he pulled out you felt so dreadfully empty again but never have you felt more full on a different level. That hunger that gnawed at you before now finally satiated (even if just for tonight). You had gotten what you wanted and so much more. The look on Risotto’s face told you much the same for him as he laid down next to you, pulling you into his arms where you nuzzled his sweaty chest. You placed tired kisses on him, basking in his soft caresses over your shoulders and into your neck where he gently massaged your scalp. You melted into his touch, sighing deeply and feeling your sleepiness settle in again. “Thank you Risotto. For everything. I… I really appreciate all you’ve done for me.” you admitted, listening to his heartbeat settle with your head pressed against it, drawing circles into his biceps with your finger.

“I wasn’t sure at first but I’m glad we did it. All of it. It might be strange to say but-” he sighed as he planted another kiss on the crown of your head. “I’m proud of you.” he felt relief wash over him for finally having said what he’d wanted to for so long. It may have been such an unusual thing to have gone through together but he really was proud of you. For always being open minded and learning along the way, for getting what you wanted and even bringing the squad closer together since commencing the journey.

Sat between his legs, enjoying the warmth of the water and letting small bubbles fizz at your skin while you let Risotto massage your scalp. He worked the shampoo through your locks with care and purpose as you sat there, eyes closed, head tilted back, fully enjoying the moment. Having him with you as you regained your senses felt so wonderful, usually doing it by yourself as Risotto retreated in the past. But now was his turn to take care of you like he’d wanted. He washed your limbs, running the washcloth soaked in your favourite scented body wash over every plane of skin. Giggling as he paid extra attention to your breasts. “They need cleaning too.” he mumbled playfully. It was like you’d opened up a whole other side to your capo, finally showing slivers of his more vulnerable side, not afraid to let you in.

In return you washed his hair too, scratching and circling every spot that made him putty in your hands. You don’t think he’s ever been this relaxed before. You traced the lines of his muscles, mapping out dividing routes and connecting them again only to break off and discover new ones.

Perhaps staying in the bath a bit too long as you both pruned up, digits crinkled like raisins. Dressed back in the most comfortable clothes you owned, Risotto and you went out into the shared headquarters again. You felt renewed and somehow a bit changed since last walking through these halls. Everyone was seated at the long dinner table that faced the kitchen, talking loudly and passing plates and scooping up helpings of pasta and sauce. Their noise dissipating once you and Risotto entered, eyes now pointed towards your direction and following as you both took your usual seats.

You remained quiet, a smirk gracing your lips as you tried to contain your laughter at the curious stares of your colleagues. “Good nap?” Melone quipped, a salacious smile covering his face, he knows he’ll get all the details later on. “Uhu!” you nodded happily as you held out your plate for Illuso to fill it with pasta, who did as asked with a quirked eyebrow. “Learned enough?” Formaggio asked next, wolfing down his food and basking in the moment of openness. “One can never stop learning.” you replied politely, watching as your plate got handed to Pesci who had turned as red as the sauce he was ladling onto your plate. “Got good grades?” Prosciutto asked, letting himself join in on the questioning with a minuscule smile curling the corner of his mouth upwards. “Top of her class.” Risotto interjected, letting his dimple return as he started his meal. “I might do some extra credit, just in case.” and with that you began your dinner, happily twirling the pasta around your fork and letting your colleagues figure out how you will ever be satiated.

#it is done my dearies!! i hope you enjoy because i had a lot of fun doing it #jjba x reader #risotto x reader #la squadra x reader #risotto nero x reader #risotto imagine #jojo smut #jjba smut #jojo x reader #minors dni #notsfw #jjba fic #jojo's bizarre adventure #risotto nero #la squadra

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pynkhues · 4 years ago

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Hi, I’m curious what your thoughts are on what Manny and Adelfa posted just because of what you tagged on that post about his hands. I agree with both of them. I think that they’re probably right about the majority of the people caught up in this boycott of the film haven’t actually seen it and I agree that cancel culture is awful. Side note you are my favourite author in the GG fandom, I stay up so late reading and re reading all your fic. Next one I’m most excited about is the parents group AU

Hi! And oh gosh, thank you, anon! Your side note made me grin so much. I say it a lot, but I really do mean it when I say that people re-reading my fics is something that makes me the happiest. We live in a world with SO MUCH content! The fact that you’d choose to come back and repeat an experience of mine is just extremely magic. I’ve been loving writing the parents group AU too, so fingers crossed I pull it together enough to actually post soon too!

And okay!

Onto your question!

Honestly, I have really mixed feelings on Manny and Adelfa’s posts, and I also have very mixed feelings on the movie Cuties, which their posts were about. And I say that as someone who’s watched it! I saw it last week actually because - - I mean, I watch a lot of movies generally, as I think people here probably know at this point, haha, but also I try to watch most things that are available with a woman director to, y’know, rep, haha.

But yes! Let’s break my mixed feelings down!

Manny & Adelfa’s posts and ‘Cancel Culture’

SO, for those who haven’t seen it, Manny and Adelfa both made Instagram posts on a French film, Cuties, yesterday, which is a movie that’s currently at the centre of a pretty heated controversy. I’ll get to Cuties specifically later on, and what I think about their posts as they relate to the movie, but for now, let’s just talk about their comments specifically:

Here’s Manny’s post:

And Adelfa’s:

So just to get something quickly off my chest:

Cancel culture does not exist.

Name one person who, or one piece of content that has been successfully ‘cancelled’ entirely. You can’t! Woody Allen’s still making movies! Louis CK is touring again! Hell, there are still people out there devoted to protecting the legacies of men like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, despite their crimes and their convictions.

The idea that something or someone can be universally decided against is fundamentally false.

That said, I do think outrage culture is alive and well.

When you boil that down to it’s most basic tenets - namely calling something harmful out - I think that can be great! I think that it can highlight issues or focus public cultural conversations.

I just also think outrage culture as it actually exists can form a sort of echo chamber where people become so fixated on what someone or something gets wrong, or the optics of something, that the content itself is removed from it’s context, and the whole thing actually falls by the wayside. It’s usually doubled down on by the people making an argument surrounding themselves with people who agree with them, and not truly engaging in a meaningful way with other opinions, and frequently those other opinions go on to do the same. It results in a lot of discourse, but not a lot of actual conversation or engagement.

In that sense, I do agree with what Manny and Adelfa are saying here. I think people should experience content in context before forming an opinion. I think people should think crtically about that content, about the arguments for and against aspects of that content, and ultimately make up their own minds on it.

That said, this particular conversation - and this particular film - isn’t as black and white as these two posts imply that it is.

A personal aside

Speaking of context, before we talk about Cuties, I should clarify that I work as a freelance writer in a range of fields, but about four years ago, I (very accidentally haha) fell into the world of child safety, and since then have worked extensively as a policy and procedure writer in the field across government, clubs, theatre and TV.

A lot of this involves research, conversation, case studies, workshops, deep dives, etc, so that I can be pretty informed on the ways children can be exploited and hopefully write good procedures and tackle risks to children in proactive ways.

As I’m sure you can imagine, that means it can also often be harrowing work, and it also means that I know a lot about what some adults do to children, and with content of children, so that really does inform my feelings about this topic overall.

Cuties

Which brings us to Cuties.

The premise of the film is both simple and compelling. An 11-year old girl chafes against her family’s conservative, muslim culture, and gravitates towards a group of girls who seem to be taking ownership of their bodies. The girls wear revealing clothes and dance provocatively and try to take photos of boys at the urinals. They’re also a tight-knit group that symbolise a type of acceptance for our protagonist, Amy. Together, they form a proper dance troupe, enter a competition, and - - well. They dance.

It’s a coming of age story that looks at the way girls are constantly exposed to hypersexualised images, and how that can in turn compound in a way that leaves vulnerable young girls in dangerous situations.

There was a lot I really liked about Cuties. I thought the performances of the girls were terrific, I thought Maïmouna Doucouré’s script was pretty well paced and that she landed most of the tonal and emotional beats of the film. There was a great energy to the movie overall, interesting relationhships - both to others and the self - and I think that Doucouré had something to say.

That said, I don’t think the outrage is wrong.

The girls in the dance troupe are supposed to be 11, the actresses ranging in age from 12-14. There are repeated, long, gratuitous crotch shots, ass shots, images of girls with their fingers in their mouths, gyrating against the floor. You see them in nothing but their training bras as they get changed, you see them flash their underwear while they try to do the splits, while they’re pantsed. When the lead kicks her new, grown up undies off to take a photo of her vagina.

Some of these shots are even in slow-mo.

At the end of the day Doucouré wanted to make a movie about the exploitation and sexualisation of children, and she did. But she also made a movie that ultimately became a part of the problem, because the content of the film itself exploits and sexualises the bodies of children.

What are you getting at, Sophie?

Right, sorry, haha.

What I’m saying is that Cuties is both a film that, to me, has artistic merit, and is fundamentally problematic. I think Doucouré has something to say about these issues, about the sexualisation of girlhood, about the essential lie of empowerment via male gaze, but I also think she creates a product that intrinsically enables the exact thing she’s trying to commentate against.

There are ways to tell stories about these things without - - y’know - - showing the thing.

Ultimately though, this is a really complicated conversation about a lot of different issues, because in a case like this it’s about child exploitation and paedophilia (because having worked in this field now for years, I can guarantee you that clips of this film are on child pornography websites), how, when and if we should censor art - and what it means when we do - and how we conduct complex conversations like this in public forums.

It’s something that requires a lot of nuance, which just generally doesn’t seem to be happening.

Instead it’s basically manifested in this outrage that’s unfair to the film that Doucouré’s made, but at the same time, resulted in responses like Manny and Adelfa’s that go too far the other way too, and that end up placing the art above the issue, meaning they minimise the exploitation of children’s bodies for art, in a way that’s unfair too.

Art, after all, doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

It’s in response to, and responded to, broadly.

On cultural, social, political and personal levels.

And to be fair to Doucouré, she does seem to have made it in response to her own experiences, but in doing so, she has created something that puts five little girls in vulnerable positions, because at the end of the day, she cast real children, shot them in a way that was sexualised, and - -

Well.

Nobody gets to choose their audience.

Pretending that everyone who watches this film will be, as Adelfa says in her post, ‘uncomfortable’ by the exploitative shots of these girls is false. There are plenty of people who won’t be, and a number who will be the exact opposite of uncomfortable. Netflix absolutely pandered to that audience specifically with the way they initially promoted the film too - Manny and Adelfa were right on that front - but, again, ignoring the fact that these are real little girls’ bodies on screen is not something I personally feel we should be doing either, because they’re the ones who will be dealing with the ramifications of this for years to come.

It’s a massive topic, honestly, and it’s one I don’t think the team behind Cuties was prepared for (at least not in terms of the scope).

Anyway! This got long, haha. Basically I don’t disagree with Manny and Adelfa’s posts, but I think they also gloss over the fact that the debate that’s happening right now is about more than just a viewer’s comfort, but about the very real bodies of child actresses on camera, and the ethical lines of art.

I’d love to know other people’s thoughts too! Like I said, it’s a very complex conversation.

#cuties #manny montana #welcome to my ama #Anonymous

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ny-watcher · 3 years ago

Text

#LCDLF - Here we have the 16 ( La Casa De Los Famosos ) Housemates

This is a Late Post but I'm adding it here for Reference

La Casa de Los Famosos -aka- Big Brother VIP Premiered August 24, 2021 on Telemundo Exactly 3 Weeks ago as of this Writing. 2 Housemates have already been Evicted but there is alot more Game to go since the Show will Last 3 Months.

The Showrunner for this Edition is Pablo Alonso the same Person who Produced Gran Hermano USA in 2016 - 5 Years ago - So this is his 2nd attempt at bringing a Latin Big Brother Edition to the USA Audience. The 1st Attempt Gran Hermano USA was riddled with Controversy for allegedly being Scripted and Rigged and therefore considered a Failure by the Public - Which made it Last for only 1 Edition and was Quickly Cancelled.

However, I didn't get my hopes up too High for this Edition since I knew once it was going to be on the Telemundo Network and Pablo was involved this lead me to expect that History would repeat itself. Pablo and the Rest of the Production Team don't understand what this format is about - they treat it like like the are doing a Tele-Novela instead of a Reality Show and it's Sucks.

For Example: The Nomination System

The Housemates Nominate 2pts one Housemate 1pt the Second -After all the Voting is done and Tallied the 3 Housemates with the Most Votes go on the Chopping Block go up for Eviction - Simple Right? Wrong!

The Leader of the House wins the Power to Save one of the Nominated Housemates in Danger of being Evicted - So whats the Problem? Once the 3 Housemates are Officially up for Eviction - They Open the Voting Lines for the Public to start Voting one of the 3 Housemate out of the House - However the Leader doesn't Save the Housemate he or she wants before they open the Voting Lines he or she does it the Next Day after the Public have already been Voting for a Full Day - Suspicious isn't it?

The Day after Nominations in the Next Gala Show the Host tells the leader to Save 1 of the 3 Housemates up for Eviction who were already being Voted upon by the Public - So once the leader Saves one of the 3 Housemates all the Votes against that Person are Null in Void and the Public who were Voting for that Person find out they have wasted all their Time Voting for nothing. Then it leaves 2 Housemates up for Eviction and Show Bosses have the Nerve to ask the Public to continue Voting as if the Public who already wasted their Time and effort would even care to Vote again. Stupid System.

So whats Really Wrong with this System? Simple - Not only does it Rob the Public of getting someone out of the House if they were Voting in Mass amounts for the same Person the Leader Saved but it also reveals the Biggest Manipulation Gimmick to date when it comes to Evictions - While the 3 Housemates up for Eviction are being Voted upon by the Public- The Production Team can see which Housemate is in Danger of being Evicted - This gives them the opportunity to Manipulate the Outcome by calling the Leader into the Diary Room and convincing them on who they should Save - So if the Production Team has a FAV Housemate on the chopping Block who they want to remain in the House, they now have an Extra way to remove them from Danger and can Blame the Leader for making the Choice when Secretly it was them manipulating the Game behind the scene. This only Benefits the Show not the Public. It's an Nefarious Rigging Tactic which is Very Unfair to the Public.

Then there is the Issue regarding Rule Breakers in the House - They Give the Housemates Warnings but Don't Enforce the Rules or Punish the Rule Breakers - Instead if they continue repeating the same things over and over and the Show Bosses seem to give up and let them get away with it until they get enough pressure from the Public to do something about it - As if the problem was going to correct itself on its own or they were trying to hide it. They forget about Social Media - We see everything and then some. It's also as if they are Afraid to Ruin their Show Script or too Lazy to Discipline the Housemates for Fear it will cause a Backlash - This only causes them to lose Credibility with the Public and be disrespected by the Housemates - It's a Black eye for the Show and only reveals how people running this Edition Like Pablo and Executive Producer Cisco Suarez don't have an Idea what a REALity Big Brother Show is all about. They think they do but they really don't.

Anyway with only 3 Weeks into the Show - The Bosses are already starting to Ride the Train off it's Tracks - So a Train Wreck is now Eminent - It's Still early and they have a chance to pull the Track Switching Lever but if they don't out of arrogance and don't listen to the Public then over the Cliff or Bridge they Go! Anyway I'll keep you posted on Twitter so Follow me there @NY_Watcher Cya Later ;-)

#LCDLF #LaCasaDeLosFamosos #Big Brother VIP

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ahouseoflies · 4 years ago

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The Best Films of 2020

I can’t tell you anything novel or insightful about this year that has been stolen from our lives. I watched zero of these films in a theater, and I watched most of them half-asleep in moments that I stole from my children. Don’t worry, there are some jokes below.

GARBAGE

93. Capone (Josh Trank)- What is the point of this dinner theater trash? It takes place in the last year of Capone's life, when he was released from prison due to failing health and suffered a stroke in his Florida home. So it covers...none of the things that make Al Capone interesting? It's not historically accurate, which I have no problem with, but if you steer away from accuracy, then do something daring and exciting. Don't give me endless scenes of "Phonse"--as if the movie is running from the very person it's about--drawing bags of money that promise intrigue, then deliver nothing in return.

That being said, best "titular character shits himself" scene since The Judge.

92. Ammonite (Francis Lee)- I would say that this is the Antz to Portrait of a Lady on Fire's A Bug's Life, but it's actually more like the Cars 3 to Portrait of a Lady on Fire's Toy Story 1.

91. Ava (Tate Taylor)- Despite the mystery and inscrutability that usually surround assassins, what if we made a hitman movie but cared a lot about her personal life? Except neither the assassin stuff nor the family stuff is interesting?

90. Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins)- What a miscalculation of what audiences loved about the first and wanted from the sequel. WW84 is silly and weightless in all of the ways that the first was elegant and confident. If the return of Pine is just a sort of phantom representation of Diana's desires, then why can he fly a real plane? If he is taking over another man's soul, then, uh, what ends up happening to that guy? For that matter, why is it not 1984 enough for Ronald Reagan to be president, but it is 1984 enough for the president to have so many Ronald Reagan signifiers that it's confusing? Why not just make a decision?

On paper, the me-first values of the '80s lend themselves to the monkey's paw wish logic of this plot. You could actually do something with the Star Wars program or the oil crisis. But not if the setting is played for only laughs and the screenplay explains only what it feels like.

89. Babyteeth (Shannon Murphy)- In this type of movie, there has to be a period of the Ben Mendelsohn character looking around befuddled about the new arrangement and going, "What's this now--he's going to be...living with us? The guy who tried to steal our medication? This is crazy!" But that's usually ten minutes, and in this movie it's an hour. I was so worn out by the end.

88. You Should Have Left (David Koepp)- David Koepp wrote Jurassic Park, so he's never going to hell, but how dare he start caring about his own mystery at the hour mark. There's a forty-five minute version of this movie that could get an extra star from me, and there's a three-hour version of Amanda Seyfried walking around in athleisure that would get four stars from me. What we actually get? No thanks.

87. Black Is King (Beyonce, et al.)- End your association with The Lion King, Bey. It has resulted in zero bops.

ADMIRABLE FAILURES

86. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (Cathy Yan)- There's nothing too dysfunctional in the storytelling or performances, but Birds of Prey also doesn't do a single thing well. I would prefer something alive and wild, even if it were flawed, to whatever tame belt-level formula this is.

85. The Turning (Floria Sigismondi)- This update of The Turn of the Screw pumps the age of Miles up to high school, which creates some horny creepiness that I liked. But the age of the character also prevents the ending of the novel from happening in favor of a truly terrible shrug. I began to think that all of the patience that the film showed earlier was just hesitance for its own awful ending.

I watched The Turning as a Mackenzie Davis Movie Star heat check, and while I'm not sure she has the magnetism I was looking for, she does have a great teacher voice, chastening but maternal.

84. Bloodshot (David Wilson)- A whole lot of Vin Diesel saying he's going to get revenge and kill a bunch of dudes; not a whole lot of Vin Diesel actually getting revenge and killing a bunch of dudes.

83. Downhill (Nat Faxon and Jim Rash)- I was an English major in college, which means I ended up locking myself into literary theories that, halfway through the writing of an essay, I realized were flawed. But rather than throw out the work that I had already proposed, I would just keep going and see if I could will the idea to success.

So let's say you have a theory that you can take Force Majeure by Ruben Ostlund, one of the best films of its year, and remake it so that its statement about familial anxiety could apply to Americans of the same age and class too...if it hadn't already. And maybe in the first paragraph you mess up by casting Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, people we are conditioned to laugh at, when maybe this isn't that kind of comedy at all. Well, don't throw it away. You can quote more--fill up the pages that way--take an exact shot or scene from the original. Does that help? Maybe you can make the writing more vigorous and distinctive by adding a character. Is that going to make this baby stand out? Maybe you could make it more personal by adding a conclusion that is slightly more clever than the rest of the paper?

Or perhaps this is one you're just not going to get an A on.

82. Hillbilly Elegy (Ron Howard)- I watched this melodrama at my mother's encouragement, and, though I have been trying to pin down her taste for decades, I think her idea of a successful film just boils down to "a lot of stuff happens." So in that way, Ron Howard's loss is my gain, I guess.

There is no such thing as a "neutral Terminator."

81. Relic (Natalie Erika James)- The star of the film is Vanessa Cerne's set decoration, but the inert music and slow pace cancel out a house that seems neglected slowly over decades.

80. Buffaloed (Tanya Wexler)- Despite a breathless pace, Buffaloed can't quite congeal. In trying to split the difference between local color hijinks and Moneyballed treatise on debt collection, it doesn't commit enough to either one.

Especially since Zoey Deutch produced this one in addition to starring, I'm getting kind of worried about boo's taste. Lot of Two If by Seas; not enough While You Were Sleepings.

79. Like a Boss (Miguel Arteta)- I chuckled a few times at a game supporting cast that is doing heavy lifting. But Like a Boss is contrived from the premise itself--Yeah, what if people in their thirties fell out of friendship? Do y'all need a creative consultant?--to the escalation of most scenes--Why did they have to hide on the roof? Why do they have to jump into the pool?

The movie is lean, but that brevity hurts just as much as it helps. The screenplay knows which scenes are crucial to the development of the friendship, but all of those feel perfunctory, in a different gear from the setpieces.

To pile on a bit: Studio comedies are so bare bones now that they look like Lifetime movies. Arteta brought Chuck & Buck to Sundance twenty years ago, and, shot on Mini-DV for $250,000, it was seen as a DIY call-to-bootstraps. I guarantee that has more setups and locations and shooting days than this.

78. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (David Dobkin)- Add Dan Stevens to the list of supporting players who have bodied Will Ferrell in his own movie--one that he cared enough to write himself.

Like Downhill, Ferrell's other 2020 release, this isn't exactly bad. It's just workmanlike and, aside from the joke about Demi Lovato's "uninformed" ghost, frustratingly conventional.

77. The Traitor (Marco Bellochio)- Played with weary commitment by Pierfrancesco Favino, Tomasso Buscetta is "credited" as the first informant of La Cosa Nostra. And that sounds like an interesting subject for a "based on a true story" crime epic, right? Especially when you find out that Buscetta became a rat out of principle: He believed that the mafia to which he had pledged his life had lost its code to the point that it was a different organization altogether.

At no point does Buscetta waver or even seem to struggle with his decision though, so what we get is less conflicted than that description might suggest. None of these Italian mob movies glorify the lifestyle, so I wasn't expecting that. But if the crime doesn't seem enticing, and snitching on the crime seems like forlorn duty, and everything is pitched with such underhanded matter-of-factness that you can't even be sure when Buscetta has flipped, then what are we left with? It was interesting seeing how Italian courts work, I guess?

76. Kajillionaire (Miranda July)- This is another movie so intent on building atmosphere and lore that it takes too long to declare what it is. When the protagonist hits a breaking point and has to act, she has only a third of a film to grow. So whispery too.

Gina Rodriguez is the one to inject life into it. As soon as her motormouth winds up, the film slips into a different gear. The atmosphere and lore that I mentioned reeks of artifice, but her character is believably specific. Beneath a basic exterior is someone who is authentically caring but still morally compromised, beholden to the world that the other characters are suspicious of.

75. Scoob! (Tony Cervone)- The first half is sometimes clever, but it hammers home the importance of friendship while separating the friends.

The second half has some positive messaging, but your kids' movie might have a problem with scale if it involves Alexander the Great unlocking the gates of the Underworld.

My daughter loved it.

74. The Lovebirds (Michael Showalter)- If I start talking too much about this perfectly fine movie, I end up in that unfair stance of reviewing the movie I wanted, not what is actually there.* As a fan of hang-out comedies, I kind of resent that any comedy being made now has to be rolled into something more "exciting," whether it's a wrongfully accused or mistaken identity thriller or some other genre. Such is the post-Game Night world. There's a purposefully anti-climactic note that I wish The Lovebirds had ended on, but of course we have another stretch of hiding behind boats and shooting guns. Nanjiani and Rae are really charming leads though.

*- As a New Orleanian, I was totally distracted by the fake aspects of the setting too. "Oh, they walked to Jefferson from downtown? Really?" You probably won't be bothered by the locations.

73. Sonic the Hedgehog (Jeff Fowler)- In some ways the storytelling is ambitious. (I'm speaking for only myself, but I'm fine with "He's a hedgehog, and he's really fast" instead of the owl mother, teleportation backstory. Not everything has to be Tolkien.) But that ambition doesn't match the lack of ambition in the comedy, which depends upon really hackneyed setups and structures. Guiding Jim Carrey to full alrighty-then mode was the best choice anyone made.

72. Malcolm & Marie (Sam Levinson)- The stars move through these long scenes with agility and charisma, but the degree of difficulty is just too high for this movie to reach what it's going for.

Levinson is trying to capture an epic fight between a couple, and he can harness the theatrical intensity of such a thing, but he sacrifices almost all of the nuance. In real life, these knock-down-drag-outs can be circular and indirect and sad in a way that this couple's manipulation rarely is. If that emotional truth is all this movie is trying to achieve, I feel okay about being harsh in my judgment of how well it does that.

71. Beanpole (Kantemir Balagov)- Elusive in how it refuses to declare itself, forthright in how punishing it is. The whole thing might be worth it for a late dinner scene, but I'm getting a bit old to put myself through this kind of misery.

70. The Burnt Orange Heresy (Giuseppe Capotondi)- Silly in good ways until it's silly in bad ways. Elizabeth Debicki remains 6'3".

69. Everybody’s Everything (Sebastian Jones and Ramez Silyan)- As a person who listened to Lil Peep's music, I can confidently say that this documentary is overstating his greatness. His death was a significant loss, as the interview subjects will all acknowledge, but the documentary is more useful as a portrait of a certain unfocused, rapacious segment of a generation that is high and online at all times.

68. The Witches (Robert Zemeckis)- Robert Zemeckis, Kenya Barris, and Guillermo Del Toro are the credited screenwriters, and in a fascinating way, you can see the imprint of each figure on the final product. Adapting a very European story to the old wives' tales of the American South is an interesting choice. Like the Nicolas Roeg try at this material, Zemeckis is not afraid to veer into the terrifying, and Octavia Spencer's pseudo witch doctor character only sells the supernatural. From a storytelling standpoint though, it seems as if the obstacles are overcome too easily, as if there's a whole leg of the film that has been excised. The framing device and the careful myth-making of the flashback make promises that the hotel half of the film, including the abrupt ending, can't live up to.

If nothing else, Anne Hathaway is a real contender for Most On-One Performance of the year.

67. Irresistible (Jon Stewart)- Despite a sort of imaginative ending, Jon Stewart's screenplay feels more like the declarative screenplay that would get you hired for a good movie, not a good screenplay itself. It's provocative enough, but it's clumsy in some basic ways and never evades the easy joke.

For example, the Topher Grace character is introduced as a sort of assistant, then is re-introduced an hour later as a polling expert, then is shown coaching the candidate on presentation a few scenes later. At some point, Stewart combined characters into one role, but nothing got smoothed out.

ENDEARING CURIOSITIES WITH BIG FLAWS

66. Yes, God, Yes (Karen Maine)- Most people who are Catholic, including me, are conflicted about it. Most people who make movies about being Catholic hate it and have an axe to grind. This film is capable of such knowing wit and nuance when it comes to the lived-in details of attending a high school retreat, but it's more concerned with taking aim at hypocrisy in the broad way that we've seen a million times. By the end, the film is surprisingly all-or-nothing when Christian teenagers actually contain multitudes.

Part of the problem is that Karen Maine's screenplay doesn't know how naive to make the Alice character. Sometimes she's reasonably naive for a high school senior in 2001; sometimes she's comically naive so that the plot can work; and sometimes she's stupid, which isn't the same as naive.

65. Bad Boys for Life (Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah)- This might be the first buddy cop movie in which the vets make peace with the tech-comm youngs who use new techniques. If that's the only novelty on display here--and it is--then maybe that's enough. I laughed maybe once. Not that the mistaken identity subplot of Bad Boys 1 is genius or anything, but this entry felt like it needed just one more layer to keep it from feeling as basic as it does. Speaking of layers though, it's almost impossible to watch any Will Smith movie now without viewing it through the meta-narrative of "What is Will Smith actually saying about his own status at this point in his career?" He's serving it up to us.

I derived an inordinate amount of pleasure from seeing the old school Simpson/Bruckheimer logo.

64. The Gentlemen (Guy Ritchie)- Look, I'm not going to be too negative on a movie whose crime slang is so byzantine that it has to be explained with subtitles. That's just me. I'm a simple man. But I can tell you that I tuned out pretty hard after seven or eight double-crosses.

The bloom is off the rose a bit for Ritchie, but he can still nail a music cue. I've been waiting for someone to hit "That's Entertainment" the way he does on the end credits.

63. Bad Hair (Justin Simien)- In Bad Hair, an African-American woman is told by her boss at a music video channel in 1989 that straightening her hair is the way to get ahead; however, her weave ends up having a murderous mind of its own. Compared to that charged, witty logline, the execution of the plot itself feels like a laborious, foregone conclusion. I'm glad that Simien, a genuinely talented writer, is making movies again though. Drop the skin-care routine, Van Der Beek!

62. Greyhound (Aaron Schneider)- "If this is the type of role that Tom Hanks writes for himself, then he understands his status as America's dad--'wise as the serpent, harmless as the dove'--even better than I thought." "America's Dad! Aye aye, sir!" "At least half of the dialogue is there for texture and authenticity, not there to be understood by the audience." "Fifty percent, Captain!" "The environment looks as fake as possible, but I eventually came around to the idea that the movie is completely devoid of subtext." "No subtext to be found, sir!"

61. Mank (David Fincher)- About ten years ago, the Creative Screenwriting podcast spent an hour or so with James Vanderbilt, the writer of Zodiac and nothing else that comes close, as he relayed the creative paces that David Fincher pushed him through. Hundreds of drafts and years of collaborative work eventuated in the blueprint for Fincher's most exacting, personal film, which he didn't get a writing credit on only because he didn't seek one.

Something tells me that Fincher didn't ask for rewrites from his dead father. No matter what visuals and performances the director can coax from the script--and, to be clear, these are the worst visuals and performances of his career--they are limited by the muddy lightweight pages. There are plenty of pleasures, like the slippery election night montage or the shakily platonic relationship between Mank and Marion. But Fincher hadn't made a film in six years, and he came back serving someone else's master.

60. Tesla (Michael Almereyda)- "You live inside your head." "Doesn't everybody?"

As usual, Almereyda's deconstructions are invigorating. (No other moment can match the first time Eve Hewson's Anne fact-checks something with her anachronistic laptop.) But they don't add up to anything satisfying because Tesla himself is such an opaque figure. Driven by the whims of his curiosity without a clear finish line, the character gives Hawke something enigmatic to play as he reaches deep into a baritone. But he's too inward to lend himself to drama. Tesla feels of a piece with Almereyda's The Experimenter, and that's the one I would recommend.

59. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)- I can't oversell how delicately beautiful this film is visually. There's a scene in which Vitalina lugs a lantern into a church, but we get several seconds of total darkness before that one light source carves through it and takes over part of the frame. Each composition is as intricate as it is overpowering, achieving a balance between stark and mannered.

That being said, most of the film is people entering or exiting doors. I felt very little of the haunting loss that I think I was supposed to.

58. The Rhythm Section (Reed Morano)- Call it the Timothy Hutton in The General's Daughter Corollary: If a name-actor isn't in the movie much but gets third billing, then, despite whom he sends the protagonist to kill, he is the Actual Bad Guy.

Even if the movie serves up a lot of cliche, the action and sound design are visceral. I would like to see more from Morano.

57. Red, White and Blue (Steve McQueen)- Well-made and heartfelt even if it goes step-for-step where you think it will.

Here's what I want to know though: In the academy training sequence, the police cadets have to subdue a "berserker"; that is, a wildman who swings at their riot gear with a sledgehammer. Then they get him under control, and he shakes their hands, like, "Good angle you took on me there, mate." Who is that guy and where is his movie? Is this full-time work? Is he a police officer or an independent contractor? What would happen if this exercise didn't go exactly as planned?

56. Wolfwalkers (Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart)- The visuals have an unfinished quality that reminded me of The Tale of Princess Kaguya--the center of a flame is undrawn white, and fog is just negative space. There's an underlying symmetry to the film, and its color palette changes with mood.

Narratively, it's pro forma and drawn-out. Was Riley in Inside Out the last animated protagonist to get two parents? My daughter stuck with it, but she needed a lot of context for the religious atmosphere of 17th century Ireland.

55. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael (Rob Garver)- The film does little more than one might expect; it's limited in the way that any visual medium is when trying to sum up a woman of letters. But as far as education for Kael's partnership with Warren Beatty or the idea of The New Yorker paying her for only six months out of the year, it was useful for me.

Although Garver isn't afraid to point to the work that made Kael divisive, it would have been nice to have one or two interview subjects who questioned her greatness, rather than the crew of Paulettes who, even when they do say something like, "Sometimes I radically disagreed with her," do it without being able to point to any specifics.

54. Beastie Boys Story (Spike Jonze)- As far as this Spike Jonze completist is concerned, this is more of a Powerpoint presentation than a movie, Beastie Boys Story still warmed my heart, making me want to fire up Paul's Boutique again and take more pictures of my buddies.

53. Tenet (Christopher Nolan)- Cool and cold, tantalizing and frustrating, loud and indistinct, Tenet comes close to Nolan self-parody, right down to the brutalist architecture and multiple characters styled like him. The setpieces grabbed me, I'll admit.

Nolan's previous film, which is maybe his best, was "about" a lot and just happened to play with time; Tenet is only about playing with time.

PRETTY GOOD MOVIES

52. Shithouse (Cooper Raiff)- "Death is ass."

There's such a thing as too naturalistic. If I wanted to hear how college freshmen really talked, I would hang out with college freshmen. But you have to take the good verisimilitude with the bad, and good verisimilitude is the mother's Pod Save America t-shirt.

There are some poignant moments (and a gonzo performance from Logan Miller) in this auspicious debut from Cooper Raiff, the writer/director/editor/star. But the second party sequence kills some of the momentum, and at a crucial point, the characters spell out some motivation that should have stayed implied.

51. Totally Under Control (Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, Suzanne Hillinger)- As dense and informative as any other Gibney documentary with the added flex of making it during the pandemic it is investigating.

But yeah, why am I watching this right now? I don't need more reasons to be angry with Trump, whom this film calmly eviscerates. The directors analyze Trump's narcissism first through his contradictions of medical expertise in order to protect the economy that could win him re-election. Then it takes aim at his hiring based on loyalty instead of experience. But you already knew that, which is the problem with the film, at least for now.

50. Happiest Season (Clea Duvall)- I was in the perfect mood to watch something this frothy and bouncy. Every secondary character receives a moment in the sun, and Daniel Levy gets a speech that kind of saves the film at a tipping point.

I must say though: I wanted to punch Harper in her stupid face. She is a terrible romantic partner, abandoning or betraying Abby throughout the film and dissembling her entire identity to everyone else in a way that seems absurd for a grown woman in 2020. Run away, Kristen. Perhaps with Aubrey Plaza, whom you have more chemistry with. But there I go shipping and aligning myself with characters, which only proves that this is an effective romantic comedy.

49. The Way Back (Gavin O’Connor)- Patient but misshapen, The Way Back does just enough to overcome the cliches that are sort of unavoidable considering the genre. (I can't get enough of the parent character who, for no good reason, doesn't take his son's success seriously. "Scholarship? What he's gotta do is put his nose in them books! That's why I don't go to his games. [continues moving boxes while not looking at the other character] Now if you'll excuse me while I wait four scenes before showing up at a game to prove that I'm proud of him after all...")

What the movie gets really right or really wrong in the details about coaching and addiction is a total crap-shoot. But maybe I've said too much already.

48. The Whistlers (Corneliu Porumboiu)- Porumboiu is a real artist who seems to be interpreting how much surveillance we're willing to acknowledge and accept, but I won't pretend to have understood much of the plot, the chapters or which are told out of order. Sometimes the structure works--the beguiling, contextless "high-class hooker" sequence--but I often wondered if the film was impenetrable in the way that Porumboiu wanted it to be or impenetrable in the way he didn't.

To tell you the truth, the experience kind of depressed me because I know that, in my younger days, this film is the type of thing that I would re-watch, possibly with the chronology righted, knowing that it is worth understanding fully. But I have two small children, and I'm exhausted all the time, and I kind of thought I should get some credit for still trying to catch up with Romanian crime movies in the first place.

47. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Jason Woliner)- I laughed too much to get overly critical, but the film is so episodic and contrived that it's kind of exhausting by the end--even though it's achieving most of its goals. Maybe Borat hasn't changed, but the way our citizens own their ugliness has.

46. First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)- Despite how little happens in the first forty minutes, First Cow is a thoughtful capitalism parable. Even though it takes about forty minutes to get going, the friendship between Cookie and King-Lu is natural and incisive. Like Reichardt's other work, the film's modest premise unfolds quite gracefully, except for in the first forty minutes, which are uneventful.

45. Les Miserables (Ladj Ly)- I loved parts of the film--the disorienting, claustrophobic opening or the quick look at the police officers' home lives, for example. But I'm not sure that it does anything very well. The needle the film tries to thread between realism and theater didn't gel for me. The ending, which is ambiguous in all of the wrong ways, chooses the theatrical. (If I'm being honest, my expectations were built up by Les Miserables' Jury Prize at Cannes, and it's a bit superficial to be in that company.)

If nothing else, it's always helpful to see how another country's worst case scenario in law enforcement would look pretty good over here.

44. Bad Education (Cory Finley)- The film feels too locked-down and small at the beginning, so intent on developing the protagonist neutrally that even the audience isn't aware of his secrets. So when he faces consequences for those secrets, there's a disconnect. Part of tragedy is seeing the doom coming, right?

When it opens up, however, it's empathetic and subtle, full of a dry irony that Finley is already specializing in after only one other feature. Geraldine Viswanathan and Allison Janney get across a lot of interiority that is not on the page.

43. The Trip to Greece (Michael Winterbottom)- By the fourth installment, you know whether you're on board with the franchise. If you're asking "Is this all there is?" to Coogan and Brydon's bickering and impressions as they're served exotic food in picturesque settings, then this one won't sway you. If you're asking "Is this all there is?" about life, like they are, then I don't need to convince you.

I will say that The Trip to Spain seemed like an enervated inflection point, at which the squad could have packed it in. The Trip to Greece proves that they probably need to keep doing this until one of them dies, which has been the subtext all along.

42. Feels Good Man (Arthur Jones)- This documentary centers on innocent artist Matt Furie's helplessness as his Pepe the Frog character gets hijacked by the alt-right. It gets the hard things right. It's able to, quite comprehensively, trace a connection from 4Chan's use of Pepe the Frog to Donald Trump's near-assuming of Pepe's ironic deniability. Director Arthur Jones seems to understand the machinations of the alt-right, and he articulates them chillingly.

The easy thing, making us connect to Furie, is less successful. The film spends way too much time setting up his story, and it makes him look naive as it pits him against Alex Jones in the final third. Still, the film is a quick ninety-two minutes, and the highs are pretty high.

41. The Old Guard (Gina Prince-Bythewood)- Some of the world-building and backstory are handled quite elegantly. The relationships actually do feel centuries old through specific details, and the immortal conceit comes together for an innovative final action sequence.

Visually and musically though, the film feels flat in a way that Prince-Bythewood's other films do not. I blame Netflix specs. KiKi Layne, who tanked If Beale Street Could Talk for me, nearly ruins this too with the child-actory way that she stresses one word per line. Especially in relief with one of our more effortless actresses, Layne is distracting.

40. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Aaron Sorkin)- Whenever Sacha Baron Cohen's Abbie Hoffman opens his mouth, the other defendants brace themselves for his dismissive vulgarity. Even when it's going to hurt him, he can't help but shoot off at the mouth. Of course, he reveals his passionate and intelligent depths as the trial goes on. The character is the one that Sorkin's screenplay seems the most endeared to: In the same way that Hoffman can't help but be Hoffman, Sorkin can't help but be Sorkin. Maybe we don't need a speech there; maybe we don't have to stretch past two hours; maybe a bon mot diffuses the tension. But we know exactly what to expect by now. The film is relevant, astute, witty, benevolent, and, of course, in love with itself. There are a handful of scenes here that are perfect, so I feel bad for qualifying so much.

A smaller point: Daniel Pemberton has done great work in the past (Motherless Brooklyn, King Arthur, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.), but the first sequence is especially marred by his sterile soft-rock approach.

GOOD MOVIES

39. Time (Garrett Bradley)- The key to Time is that it provides very little context. Why the patriarch of this family is serving sixty years in prison is sort of besides the point philosophically. His wife and sons have to move on without him, and the tragedy baked into that fact eclipses any notion of what he "deserved." Feeling the weight of time as we switch back and forth between a kid talking about his first day of kindergarten and that same kid graduating from dentistry school is all the context we need. Time's presentation can be quite sumptuous: The drone shot of Angola makes its buildings look like crosses. Or is it X's?

At the same time, I need some context. When director Garrett Bradley withholds the reason Robert's in prison, and when she really withholds that Fox took a plea and served twelve years, you start to see the strings a bit. You could argue that knowing so little about why, all of a sudden, Robert can be on parole puts you into the same confused shoes as the family, but it feels manipulative to me. The film is preaching to the choir as far as criminal justice goes, which is fine, but I want it to have the confidence to tell its story above board.

38. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Turner Ross and Bill Ross IV)- I have a barfly friend whom I see maybe once a year. When we first set up a time to meet, I kind of dread it and wonder what we'll have to talk about. Once we do get together, we trip on each other's words a bit, fumbling around with the rhythm of conversation that we mastered decades ago. He makes some kind of joke that could have been appropriate then but isn't now.

By the end of the day, hours later, we're hugging and maybe crying as we promise each other that we won't wait as long next time.

That's the exact same journey that I went on with this film.

37. Underwater (William Eubank)- Underwater is a story that you've seen before, but it's told with great confidence and economy. I looked up at twelve minutes and couldn't believe the whole table had been set. Kristen plays Ripley and projects a smart, benevolent poise.

36. The Lodge (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala)- I prefer the grounded, manicured first half to the more fantastic second half. The craziness of the latter is only possible through the hard work of the former though. As with Fiala and Franz's previous feature, the visual rhymes and motifs get incorporated into the soup so carefully that you don't realize it until they overwhelm you in their bleak glory.

Small note: Alicia Silverstone, the male lead's first wife, and Riley Keough, his new partner, look sort of similar. I always think that's a nice note: "I could see how he would go for her."

35. Miss Americana (Lana Wilson)- I liked it when I saw it as a portrait of a person whose life is largely decided for her but is trying to carve out personal spaces within that hamster wheel. I loved it when I realized that describes most successful people in their twenties.

34. Sound of Metal (Darius Marder)- Riz Ahmed is showing up on all of the best performances of the year lists, but Sound of Metal isn't in anyone's top ten films of the year. That's about right. Ahmed's is a quiet, stubborn performance that I wish was in service of more than the straight line that we've seen before.

In two big scenes, there's this trick that Ahmed does, a piecing together of consequences with his eyes, as if he's moving through a flow chart in real time. In both cases, the character seems locked out and a little slower than he should be, which is, of course, why he's facing the consequences in the first place. To be charitable to a film that was a bit of a grind, it did make me notice a thing a guy did with his eyes.

33. Pieces of a Woman (Kornel Mundruczo)- Usually when I leave acting showcases like this, I imagine the film without the Oscar-baiting speeches, but this is a movie that specializes in speeches. Pieces of a Woman is being judged, deservedly so, by the harrowing twenty-minute take that opens the film, which is as indulgent as it is necessary. But if the unbroken take provides the "what," then the speeches provide the "why."

This is a film about reclaiming one's body when it rebels against you and when other people seek ownership of it. Without the Ellen Burstyn "lift your head" speech or the Vanessa Kirby show-stopper in the courtroom, I'm not sure any of that comes across.

I do think the film lets us off the hook a bit with the LaBoeuf character, in the sense that it gives us reasons to dislike him when it would be more compelling if he had done nothing wrong. Does his half-remembering of the White Stripes count as a speech?

32. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe)- This is such a play, not only in the locked-down location but also through nearly every storytelling convention: "Where are the two most interesting characters? Oh, running late? They'll enter separately in animated fashion?" But, to use the type of phrase that the characters might, "Don't hate the player; hate the game."

Perhaps the most theatrical note in this treatise on the commodification of expression is the way that, two or three times, the proceedings stop in their tracks for the piece to declare loudly what it's about. In one of those clear-outs, Boseman, who looks distractingly sick, delivers an unforgettable monologue that transports the audience into his character's fragile, haunted mind. He and Viola Davis are so good that the film sort of buckles under their weight, unsure of how to transition out of those spotlight moments and pretend that the story can start back up. Whatever they're doing is more interesting than what's being achieved overall.

31. Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg)- It's definitely the film that Vinterberg wanted to make, but despite what I think is a quietly shattering performance from Mikkelsen, Another Round moves in a bit too much of a straight line to grab me fully. The joyous final minutes hint at where it could have gone, as do pockets of Vinterberg's filmography, which seems newly tethered to realism in a way that I don't like. The best sequences are the wildest ones, like the uproarious trip to the grocery store for fresh cod, so I don't know why so much of it takes place in tiny hallways at magic hour. I give the inevitable American remake* permission to use these notes.

*- Just spitballing here. Martin: Will Ferrell, Nikolaj (Nick): Ben Stiller, Tommy: Owen Wilson, Peter: Craig Robinson

30. The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell)- Exactly what I wanted. Exactly what I needed.

I think a less conclusive finale would have been better, but what a model of high-concept escalation. This is the movie people convinced me Whannell's Upgrade was.

29. On the Rocks (Sofia Coppola)- Slight until the Mexican sojourn, which expands the scope and makes the film even more psychosexual than before. At times it feels as if Coppola is actively simplifying, rather than diving into the race and privilege questions that the Murray character all but demands.

As for Murray, is the film 50% worse without him? 70%? I don't know if you can run in supporting categories if you're the whole reason the film exists.

28. Mangrove (Steve McQueen)- The first part of the film seemed repetitive and broad to me. But once it settled in as a courtroom drama, the characterization became more shaded, and the filmmaking itself seemed more fluid. I ended up being quite outraged and inspired.

27. Shirley (Josephine Decker)- Josephine Decker emerges as a real stylist here, changing her foggy, impressionistic approach not one bit with a little more budget. Period piece and established actors be damned--this is still as much of a reeling fever dream as Madeline's Madeline. Both pieces are a bit too repetitive and nasty for my taste, but I respect the technique.

Here's my mandatory "Elisabeth Moss is the best" paragraph. While watching her performance as Shirley Jackson, I thought about her most famous role as Peggy on Mad Men, whose inertia and need to prove herself tied her into confidence knots. Shirley is almost the opposite: paralyzed by her worldview, certain of her talent, rejecting any empathy. If Moss can inhabit both characters so convincingly, she can do anything.

26. An American Pickle (Brandon Trost)- An American Pickle is the rare comedy that could actually use five or ten extra minutes, but it's a surprisingly heartfelt and wholesome stretch for Rogen, who is earnest in the lead roles.

25. The King of Staten Island (Judd Apatow)- At two hours and fifteen minutes, The King of Staten Island is probably the first Judd Apatow film that feels like the exact right length. For example, the baggy date scene between a gracious Bill Burr and a faux-dowdy Marisa Tomei is essential, the sort of widening of perspective that something like Trainwreck was missing.

It's Pete Davidson's movie, however, and though he has never been my cup of tea, I think he's actually quite powerful in his quiet moments. The movie probes some rare territory--a mentally ill man's suspicion that he is unlovable, a family's strategic myth-making out of respect for the dead. And when Davidson shows up at the firehouse an hour and fifteen minutes in, it feels as if we've built to a last resort.

24. Swallow (Carlo Mirabella-Davis)- The tricky part of this film is communicating Hunter's despair, letting her isolation mount, but still keeping her opaque. It takes a lot of visual discipline to do that, and Claudio Mirabella-Davis is up to the task. This ends up being a much more sympathetic, expressive movie than the plot description might suggest.

(In the tie dispute, Hunter and Richie are both wrong. That type of silk--I couldn't tell how pebbled it was, but it's probably a barathea weave-- shouldn't be ironed directly, but it doesn't have to be steamed. On a low setting, you could iron the back of the tie and be fine.)

23. The Vast of Night (Andrew Patterson)- I wanted a bit more "there" there; The film goes exactly where I thought it would, and there isn't enough humor for my taste. (The predictability might be a feature, not a bug, since the film is positioned as an episode of a well-worn Twilight Zone-esque show.)

But from a directorial standpoint, this is quite a promising debut. Patterson knows when to lock down or use silence--he even cuts to black to force us to listen more closely to a monologue. But he also knows when to fill the silence. There's a minute or so when Everett is spooling tape, and he and Fay make small talk about their hopes for the future, developing the characters' personalities in what could have been just mechanics. It's also a refreshingly earnest film. No one is winking at the '50s setting.

I'm tempted to write, "If Andrew Patterson can make this with $1 million, just imagine what he can do with $30 million." But maybe people like Shane Carruth have taught us that Patterson is better off pinching pennies in Texas and following his own muse.

22. Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello)- At first this film, adapted from a picaresque novel by Jack London, seemed as if it was hitting the marks of the genre. "He's going from job to job and meeting dudes who are shaping his worldview now." But the film, shot in lustrous Super 16, won me over as it owned the trappings of this type of story, forming a character who is a product of his environment even as he transcends it. By the end, I really felt the weight of time.

You want to talk about something that works better in novels than films though? When a passionate, independent protagonist insists that a woman is the love of his life, despite the fact that she's whatever Italians call a wet blanket. She's rich, but Martin doesn't care about her money. He hates her family and friends, and she refuses to accept him or his life pursuits. She's pretty but not even as pretty as the waitress they discuss. Tell me what I'm missing here. There's archetype, and there's incoherence.

21. Bacurau (Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles)- Certain images from this adventurous film will stick with me, but I got worn out after the hard reset halfway through. As entranced as I was by the mystery of the first half, I think this blood-soaked ensemble is better at asking questions than it is at answering them.

20. Let Them All Talk (Steven Soderbergh)- The initial appeal of this movie might be "Look at these wonderful actresses in their seventies getting a movie all to themselves." And the film is an interesting portrait of ladies taking stock of relationships that have spanned decades. But Soderbergh and Eisenberg handle the twentysomething Lucas Hedges character with the same openness and empathy. His early reasoning for going on the trip is that he wants to learn from older women, and Hedges nails the puppy-dog quality of a young man who would believe that. Especially in the scenes of aspirational romance, he's sweet and earnest as he brushes his hair out of his face.

Streep plays Alice Hughes, a serious author of literary fiction, and she crosses paths with Kelvin Kranz, a grinder of airport thrillers. In all of the right ways, Let Them All Talk toes the line between those two stances as an entertaining, jaunty experiment that also shoulders subtextual weight. If nothing else, it's easy to see why a cruise ship's counterfeit opulence, its straight lines at a lean, would be visually engaging to Soderbergh. You can't have a return to form if your form is constantly evolving.

19. Dick Johnson Is Dead (Kirsten Johnson)- Understandably, I don't find the subject as interesting as his own daughter does, and large swaths of this film are unsure of what they're trying to say. But that's sort of the point, and the active wrestling that the film engages in with death ultimately pays off in a transcendent moment. The jaw-dropping ending is something that only non-fiction film can achieve, and Johnson's whole career is about the search for that sort of serendipity.

18. Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee)- Delroy Lindo is a live-wire, but his character is the only one of the principals who is examined with the psychological depth I was hoping for. The first half, with all of its present-tense flourishes, promises more than the gunfights of the second half can deliver. When the film is cooking though, it's chock full of surprises, provocations, and pride.

17. Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittmann)- Very quickly, Eliza Hittmann has established herself as an astute, empathetic director with an eye for discovering new talent. I hope that she gets to make fifty more movies in which she objectively follows laconic young people. But I wanted to like this one more than I did. The approach is so neutral that it's almost flat to me, lacking the arc and catharsis of her previous film, Beach Rats. I still appreciate her restraint though.

GREAT MOVIES

16. Young Ahmed (Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne)- I don't think the Dardennes have made a bad movie yet, and I'm glad they turned away from the slight genre dipping of The Unknown Girl, the closest to bad that they got. Young Ahmed is a lean, daring return to form.

Instead of following an average person, as they normally do, the Dardenne Brothers follow an extremist, and the objectivity that usually generates pathos now serves to present ambiguity. Ahmed says that he is changing, that he regrets his actions, but we never know how much of his stance is a put-on. I found myself wanting him to reform, more involved than I usually am in these slices of life. Part of it is that Idir Ben Addi looks like such a normal, young kid, and the Ahmed character has most of the qualities that we say we want in young people: principles, commitment, self-worth, reflection. So it's that much more destructive when those qualities are used against him and against his fellow man.

15. World of Tomorrow Episode Three: The Absent Destinations of David Prime (Don Hertzfeldt)- My dad, a man whom I love but will never understand, has dismissed modern music before by claiming that there are only so many combinations of chords. To him, it's almost impossible to do something new. Of course, this is the type of thing that an uncreative person would say--a person not only incapable of hearing the chords that combine notes but also unwilling to hear the space between the notes. (And obviously, that's the take of a person who doesn't understand that, originality be damned, some people just have to create.)

Anyway, that attitude creeps into my own thinking more than I would like, but then I watch something as wholly original as World of Tomorrow Episode Three. The series has always been a way to pile sci-fi ideas on top of each other to prove the essential truths of being and loving. And this one, even though it achieves less of a sense of yearning than its predecessor, offers even more devices to chew on. Take, for example, the idea that Emily sends her message from the future, so David's primitive technology can barely handle it. In order to move forward with its sophistication, he has to delete any extraneous skills for the sake of computer memory. So out of trust for this person who loves him, he has to weigh whether his own breathing or walking can be uninstalled as a sacrifice for her. I thought that we might have been done describing love, but there it is, a new metaphor. Mixing futurism with stick figures to get at the most pure drive possible gave us something new. It's called art, Dad.

14. On the Record (Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering)- We don't call subjects of documentaries "stars" for obvious reasons, but Drew Dixon kind of is one. Her honesty and wisdom tell a complete story of the #MeToo movement. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering take their time developing her background at first, not because we need to "gain sympathy" or "establish credibility" for a victim of sexual abuse, but because showing her talent and enthusiasm for hip-hop A&R makes it that much more tragic when her passion is extinguished. Hell, I just like the woman, so spending a half-hour on her rise was pleasurable in and of itself.

This is a gut-wrenching, fearless entry in what is becoming Dick and Ziering's raison d'etre, but its greatest quality is Dixon's composed reflection. She helped to establish a pattern of Russell Simmons's behavior, but she explains what happened to her in ways I had never heard before.

13. David Byrne’s American Utopia (Spike Lee)- I'm often impressed by the achievements that puzzle me: How did they pull that off? But I know exactly how David Byrne pulled off the impish but direct precision of American Utopia: a lot of hard work.

I can't blame Spike Lee for stealing a page from Demme's Stop Making Sense: He denies us a close-up of any audience members until two-thirds of the way through, when we get someone in absolute rapture.

12. One Night in Miami... (Regina King)- We've all cringed when a person of color is put into the position of speaking on behalf of his or her entire race. But the characters in One Night in Miami... live in that condition all the time and are constantly negotiating it. As Black public figures in 1964, they know that the consequences of their actions are different, bigger, than everyone else's. The charged conversations between Malcolm X and Sam Cooke are not about whether they can live normal lives. They're way past that. The stakes are closer to Sam Cooke arguing that his life's purpose aligns with the protection and elevation of African-Americans while Malcolm X argues that those pursuits should be the same thing. Late in the movie, Cassius Clay leaves the other men, a private conversation, to talk to reporters, a public conversation. But the film argues that everything these men do is always already public. They're the most powerful African-Americans in the country, but their lives are not their own. Or not only their own.

It's true that the first act has the clunkiness and artifice of a TV movie, but once the film settles into the motel room location and lets the characters feed off one another, it's gripping. It's kind of unfair for a movie to get this many scenes of Leslie Odom Jr. singing, but I'll take it.

11. Saint Frances (Alex Thompson)- Rilke wrote, "Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us." The characters' behavior in Saint Frances--all of these fully formed characters' behavior--made me think of that quotation. When they lash out at one another, even at their nastiest, the viewer has a window into how they're expressing pain they can't verbalize. The film is uneven in its subtlety, but it's a real showcase for screenwriter and star Kelly O'Sullivan, who is unflinching and dynamic in one of the best performances of the year. Somebody give her some of the attention we gave to Zach Braff for God's sake.

10. Boys State (Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine)- This documentary is kind of a miracle from a logistical standpoint. From casting interviews beforehand, lots of editing afterwards, or sly note-taking once the conference began, McBaine and Moss happened to select the four principals who mattered the most at the convention, then found them in rooms full of dudes wearing the same tucked-in t-shirt. By the way, all of the action took place over the course of one week, and by definition, the important events are carved in half.

To call Boys State a microcosm of American politics is incorrect. These guys are forming platforms and voting in elections. What they're doing is American politics, so when they make the same compromises and mistakes that active politicians do, it produces dread and disappointment. So many of the boys are mimicking the political theater that they see on TV, and that sweaty sort of performance is going to make a Billy Mitchell out of this kid Ben Feinstein, and we'll be forced to reckon with how much we allow him to evolve as a person. This film is so precise, but what it proves is undeniably messy. Luckily, some of these seventeen-year-olds usher in hope for us all.

If nothing else, the film reveals the level to which we're all speaking in code.

9. The Nest (Sean Durkin)- In the first ten minutes or so of The Nest, the only real happy minutes, father and son are playing soccer in their quaint backyard, and the father cheats to score on a children's net before sliding on the grass to rub in his victory. An hour later, the son kicks the ball around by himself near a regulation goal on the family's massive property. The contrast is stark and obvious, as is the symbolism of the dead horse, but that doesn't mean it's not visually powerful or resonant.

Like Sean Durkin's earlier film, Martha Marcy May Marlene, the whole of The Nest is told with detail of novelistic scope and an elevation of the moment. A snippet of radio that mentions Ronald Reagan sets the time period, rather than a dateline. One kid saying "Thanks, Dad" and another kid saying, "Thanks, Rory" establishes a stepchild more elegantly than any other exposition might.

But this is also a movie that does not hide what it means. Characters usually say exactly what is on their minds, and motivations are always clear. For example, Allison smokes like a chimney, so her daughter's way of acting out is leaving butts on the window sill for her mother to find. (And mother and daughter both definitely "act out" their feelings.) On the other hand, Ben, Rory's biological son, is the character least like him, so these relationships aren't too directly parallel. Regardless, Durkin uses these trajectories to cast a pall of familial doom.

8. Sorry We Missed You (Sean Durkin)- Another precisely calibrated empathy machine from Ken Loach. The overwhelmed matriarch, Abby, is a caretaker, and she has to break up a Saturday dinner to rescue one of her clients, who wet herself because no one came to help her to the bathroom. The lady is embarrassed, and Abby calms her down by saying, "You mean more to me than you know." We know enough about Abby's circumstances to realize that it's sort of a lie, but it's a beautiful lie, told by a person who cares deeply but is not cared for.

Loach's central point is that the health of a family, something we think of as immutable and timeless, is directly dependent upon the modern industry that we use to destroy ourselves. He doesn't have to be "proven" relevant, and he didn't plan for Covid-19 to point to the fragility of the gig economy, but when you're right, you're right.

7. Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen)- swear to you I thought: "This is an impeccable depiction of a great house party. The only thing it's missing is the volatile dude who scares away all the girls." And then the volatile dude who scares away all the girls shows up.

In a year short on magic, there are two or three transcendent moments, but none of them can equal the whole crowd singing along to "Silly Games" way after the song has ended. Nothing else crystallizes the film's note of celebration: of music, of community, of safe spaces, of Black skin. I remember moments like that at house parties, and like all celebrations, they eventually make me sad.

6. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution (Nicole Newnham and James Lebrecht)- I held off on this movie because I thought that I knew what it was. The setup was what I expected: A summer camp for the disabled in the late '60s takes on the spirit of the time and becomes a haven for people who have not felt agency, self-worth, or community anywhere else. But that's the right-place-right-time start of a story that takes these figures into the '80s as they fight for their rights.

If you're anything like my dumb ass, you know about 504 accommodations from the line on a college syllabus that promises equal treatment. If 2020 has taught us anything though, it's that rights are seized, not given, and this is the inspiring story of people who unified to demand what they deserved. Judy Heumann is a civil rights giant, but I'm ashamed to say I didn't know who she was before this film. If it were just a history lesson that wasn't taught in school, Crip Camp would still be valuable, but it's way more than that.

5. Palm Springs (Max Barbakow)- When explaining what is happening to them, Andy Samberg's Nyles twirls his hand at Cristin Milioti's Sara and says, "It's one of those infinite time-loop scenarios." Yeah, one of those. Armed with only a handful of fictional examples, she and the audience know exactly what he means, and the continually inventive screenplay by Andy Siara doesn't have to do any more explaining. In record time, the film accelerates into its premise, involves her, and sets up the conflict while avoiding the claustrophobia of even Groundhog Day. That economy is the strength that allows it to be as funny as it is. By being thrifty with the setup, the savings can go to, say, the couple crashing a plane into a fiery heap with no consequences.

In some accidental ways, this is, of course, a quarantine romance as well. Nyles and Sara frustratingly navigate the tedious wedding as if they are play-acting--which they sort of are--then they push through that sameness to grow for each other, realizing that dependency is not weakness. The best relationships are doing the same thing right now.

Although pointedly superficial--part of the point of why the couple is such a match--and secular--I think the notion of an afterlife would come up at least once--Palm Springs earns the sincerity that it gets around to. And for a movie ironic enough to have a character beg to be impaled so that he doesn't have to sit in traffic, that's no small feat.

4. The Assistant (Kitty Green)- A wonder of Bressonian objectivity and rich observation, The Assistant is the rare film that deals exclusively with emotional depth while not once explaining any emotions. One at a time, the scrape of the Kleenex box might not be so grating, the long hallway trek to the delivery guy might not be so tiring, but this movie gets at the details of how a job can destroy you in ways that add up until you can't even explain them.

3. Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell)- In her most incendiary and modern role, Carey Mulligan plays Cassie, which is short for Cassandra, that figure doomed to tell truths that no one else believes. The web-belted boogeyman who ruined her life is Al, short for Alexander, another Greek who is known for his conquests. The revenge story being told here--funny in its darkest moments, dark in its funniest moments--is tight on its surface levels, but it feels as if it's telling a story more archetypal and expansive than that too.

An exciting feature debut for its writer-director Emerald Fennell, the film goes wherever it dares. Its hero has a clear purpose, and it's not surprising that the script is willing to extinguish her anger halfway through. What is surprising is the way it renews and muddies her purpose as she comes into contact with half-a-dozen brilliant one- or two-scene performances. (Do you think Alfred Molina can pull off a lawyer who hates himself so much that he can't sleep? You would be right.)

Promising Young Woman delivers as an interrogation of double standards and rape culture, but in quiet ways it's also about our outsized trust in professionals and the notion that some trauma cannot be overcome.

INSTANT CLASSICS

2. Soul (Pete Docter)- When Pete Docter's Up came out, it represented a sort of coronation for Pixar: This was the one that adults could like unabashedly. The one with wordless sequences and dead children and Ed Asner in the lead. But watching it again this week with my daughter, I was surprised by how high-concept and cloying it could be. We choose not to remember the middle part with the goofy dog stuff.

Soul is what Up was supposed to be: honest, mature, stirring. And I don't mean to imply that a family film shouldn't make any concessions to children. But Soul, down to the title, never compromises its own ambition. Besides Coco, it's probably the most credible character study that Pixar has ever made, with all of Joe's growth earned the hard way. Besides Inside Out, it's probably the wittiest comedy that Pixar has ever made, bursting with unforced energy.

There's a twitter fascination going around about Dez, the pigeon-figured barber character whose scene has people gushing, "Crush my windpipe, king" or whatever. Maybe that's what twitter does now, but no one fantasized about any characters in Up. And I count that as progress.

1. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman)- After hearing that our name-shifting protagonist moonlights as an artist, a no-nonsense David Thewlis offers, "I hope you're not an abstract artist." He prefers "paintings that look like photographs" over non-representational mumbo-jumbo. And as Jessie Buckley squirms to try to think of a polite way to talk back, you can tell that Charlie Kaufman has been in the crosshairs of this same conversation. This morose, scary, inscrutable, expressionist rumination is not what the Netflix description says it is at all, and it's going to bother nice people looking for a fun night in. Thank God.

The story goes that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, when constructing Raiders of the Lost Ark, sought to craft a movie that was "only the good parts" with little of the clunky setup that distracted from action. What we have here is a Charlie Kaufman movie with only the Charlie Kaufman moments, less interested than ever before at holding one's hand. The biting humor is here, sometimes aimed at philistines like the David Thewlis character above, sometimes at the niceties that we insist upon. The lonely horror of everyday life is here, in the form of missed calls from oneself or the interruption of an inner monologue. Of course, communicating the overwhelming crush of time, both unknowable and familiar, is the raison d'etre.

A new pet motif seems to be the way that we don't even own our own knowledge. The Young Woman recites "Bonedog" by Eva H.D., which she claims/thinks she wrote, only to find Jake's book open to that page, next to a Pauline Kael book that contains a Woman Under the Influence review that she seems to have internalized later. When Jake muses about Wordsworth's "Lucy Poems," it starts as a way to pass the time, then it becomes a way to lord his education over her, then it becomes a compliment because the subject resembles her, then it becomes a way to let her know that, in the grand scheme of things, she isn't that special at all. This film jerks the viewer through a similar wintry cycle and leaves him with his own thoughts. It's not a pretty picture, but it doesn't look like anything else.

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ambidextrousarcher · 4 years ago

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Sarcastic StarBharat Reviews-Episode 22: In which horny deer rishis set off a chain of events.

Hello everyone! I’m back after a VERY long hiatus, had some real life issues to deal with, along with the aggravation of changing an url and some online drama too. And I’m right in time for Diwali, too, yay! Happy Diwali, people! Also Happy Children’s day!

Tagging my usual taglist: @ambitiousandcunning @medhasree @shaonharryandpannisim @hermioneaubreymiachase @hindumyththoughts @chaanv @ratnas-musings @whydoyoucareaboutmyusername @justahappyreindeer @milesbianmorales @allegoriesinmediasres @pratigyakrishnaki @iamnotthat @adishaktis @ratnas-musings. Enjoy your day, everyone!

Review is under the cut.

PS: Nila updates- The Sarcastic StarBharat review of episode 18 is missing from my blog for some reason, I’ll reupload it. Also, for anyone who’s listening to my song covers, the next items are Karam Ki Talwar from Arjun the Warrior Prince, Moh Moh Ke Dhage from Dum Laga Ke Haisha and Jo Beji Thi Dua, from Shangai.

Okay. Rehash is in order, along with some new nicknames. Till the last episode, Madri has reached Hastinapur, the precap of the last episode makes it clear that this is the episode with horny deer rishis.

I had made a numbering mistake in counting the number of canon fails, my bad, so, as of now, we’re at canon fail #49.

Here’s the nickname rehash and additions to be made-

1. Bhishm-Mr. Paragon of Perfection

2. Dhritrashtra- Mr. Drama Queen (Honorary mention-DisasterRashtra, courtesy of @iamnotthat)

3. Pandu-Honey Boy/Lord of Cheesy Lines

4. Gandhari-Ms. Always Patnidharma

5. Shakuni-Mr. Ominous Music/Mr. Annoying Poseur

6. Karn-Mr. Glitterwash

7. Kunti-Ms. Melodrama/Lady of Cheesy Lines

8. Amba (deceased)-Psycho Princess

9. Satyavati-Psycho Mum

10. Vichitraveerya (deceased)-Drunk Kid

Here are the new additions:

11. Vidur (finally)- Picking the line where he likens himself to a thorn during Pandu’s coronation, he’s Mr. Weepy Thorn.

12. Madri-Ms. Smarmy Tears

13. Krishn-(Parody version, anyway, also, FINALLY) Mr. Excess Gyaandaan.

Now, let’s get to business.

Alright, so, last episode, Gandhari was told that Drama Queen wants her in his chambers. Being the aadarsh, Ms. Always Patnidharma that she is, she goes immediately, and that’s where today’s episode of choice begins.

She stumbles in and stutters out her usual ‘Husband?’ (International viewers, please note, Hotstar has rolled out the English subtitles for your most unfavorite show. It translates ‘Arya’ as Lord, but I’m keeping the ‘husband’ variation, because no.)

Anyway. He shushes her. ‘Don’t say anything, Gandhari, just listen. The mind is so weird, isn’t it?’ Okay…why this sudden volte face? Ah, he’s trying to apologise, I guess? He says that he was absorbed in his negative emotions of hurt, grief and jealousy, but when no news of Honey Boy came from the battlefield, he realized that he still worries and cares for his little brother, and that he was merely unfortunate, not conspired against, concluding that he was unjust to Honey Boy. O…kay? Should I count this as a canon fail? Canon Dhritrashtra can be two-faced, so eh, leave it.

Ms. Patnidharma is shaking her head next to him, because of course, she’s that much of a doormat. ‘I was unfair to you too. I had rejected you, Gandhari, but if I realise my mistake, will you accept me?’ Ah. I see what this is. Anvil-shadowing. Just before Pandu ‘loses’ his ability to ‘be a husband’ Drama Queen and Patnidharma make up with each other. Newsflash, writers: Nothing is this clean cut.

Of course, that was precisely the opening Ms. Patnidharma was waiting for, so she feels her husband up as they hug. Drama Queen’s heart, apparently, very anomalously, is overflowing with happiness, now that he has unloaded his weakness onto Patnidharma, or so he says. Don’t believe him, though, don’t be the naïve idiot Patnidharma is, because that weakness of his wreaks bloody wrecking ball havoc in the future.

‘So what if I don’t become the King?’ Excuse me. I just choked on my water. What’s up with this volte-face? Just what? ‘I have more respect here than the King himself!’ I think I’m gonna count this as canon fail #50 because nah, he ain’t gonna say this in any adaptation that’s sane. And of course, since he’s randy too, it seems, he goes ‘When you give me a son, he’ll be the eldest son and King after Pandu. I’ll also get the pleasure of being a King. Will you give me the gift of such a talented son?’ Ah. So that’s what the volte-face is for. Canon fail #50 cancelled. Drama Queen would say anything at all to get his way, that’s right. Patnidharma, predictably, goes all gushy. ‘Yes, husband, for your sake, I’ll go to the portals of Yamlok themselves!’ Ah, sheesh, sometimes, watching this show makes me think that I should projectile-yeet myself to Yamlok.

He laughs. ‘When the time comes,’ he says, ‘we’ll go to the portals of death together, Gandhari.’ Well, that, at least, is true. He continues that they still have many happy moments to experience. She nods, melting into his embrace.

Scene changes to a green vista, the whickering of horses heard. Madri, henceforth known as Ms. Smarmy Tears, is laughing, Ms. Melodrama being stony faced and stoic. (That’s a change, though the music manages to make even THAT dramatic) The camera focuses on a deer, and Smarmy asks Honey Boy to stop, because it’s a beautiful deer. Okay…I know what’s coming up next. Anvil-shadowing, anyone? I realise it was very long ago when we were introduced to Ms. Melodrama, but I’ll give you a short rehash. She was introduced saving a deer from hunters. Anyone got the hint? It’s an obvious ‘Madri is an evil witch!’ gambit. Please do not take it. I know that in canon, Kunti and Madri probably had a fractious relationship given the whole fracas over the boon, but I refuse to believe Madri would be this transparently biatch-y.

And…bingo! Smarmy says that the deer is absolutely unique, and follows it up with a request for its skin. Melodrama, of course, is having none of it. She passionately launches into defence of the deer’s children who’d be orphaned, basically echoing her very first piece of dialogue on this show. Do you think there’s a chance that they dubbed it in? I mean…I wouldn’t be able to say that twice with a straight face. But, whatever gives, I guess. Fawn get orphaned often, goes Smarmy. It’s not like I’m asking you for the position of the Queen, can’t you do this much for me? Since StarB has a thing of making women either bitches or doormat ditches, its Honey Boy who cuts in. ‘Speak of good things alone.’ Did this guy get a theology class between the ‘war’ and this moment? ‘I’ll get the deer for you, the rest of you please stay here.’ And then the show takes yet another opportunity to set Melodrama as good and Smarmy as bad, as Melodrama tries to give Smarmy a moral lesson about abstaining from killing for no reason, and Smarmy going all casteist (not sure if that’s the right word, since afaik Kunti’s maternal family are also Kshatriyas? Yadava is not one family. It’s an entire dynasty.) And here’s canon fail #50 and #51. #50 is the fact that Pandu, in canon, hunts the deer because he wants to. Madri has nothing to do with it in the text. #51 because the jibe about Yadavs being shepherds that Madri makes smacks of a misconception about politics in the MBH. The idea of ‘Yadavas’ being shepherds is present because of the lore of Krishn and Balaram in Gokul. While I’m sure there might be some branches of the family that may dabble in those pursuits, typically, considering the social structure of that time, Kunti’s family is of quite royal pedigree.

The scene switches to Honey Boy looking for deer, listening attentively to the rustling leaves. Really, this question goes for canon too, haven’t these guys learnt a thing at all from the whole Dashrath/Sravan Kumar fracas? That it is TOTALLY not a good idea to just randomly shoot in a random forest, anyone? At least sight the prey a little, no?

Regardless, he shoots an arrow, the tell-tale thunk is heard, followed by a human scream (the typically serial-ish ‘nahi, nahi!’ aka ‘no, no!’). Alarmed, he sets off in pursuit of the sound. The camera focuses on a bloody arrow then showing us a rishi and a rishin. ‘Maharishi Kidam?’ exclaims Pandu. ‘It was you?’ ‘What have you done? You shot an arrow without recognizing me! I was dallying (read: deer hanky-panky-ing) with my wife in the form of a deer, and you shot an arrow without considering that the grace and the form of the deer could only mean it is such?’ Okay, for all that I want to call this canon fail #52, I’ll be honest…because such a scene, at least one of Pandu killing Kidama when he’s in sexual congress with his wife in the form of a deer does happen. Sometimes, *sigh* canon itself is quite strange.

But…in the whole of this thing, I have an observation to make, a few questions to ask, in the context of this serial:

1. Madri saw only one deer? What was the deer rishi doing, a deer mating ritual of some sort? Where was the wife then?

2. Does what he said mean that there might be…other rishis doing deer hanky panky?

3. Kidama was a rishi, right? He’d have figured out Pandu wants the ‘deer’ when he saw them and vanished? He could have, IDK, sprinted off real quick, or turned back into human, or just vanished once more. Why escalate it this much?

Honey Boy is very contrite and begs for forgiveness. Canon fail #53. In canon, he basically goes, well, Kings hunt deer, why cry about it? (That is, the dialogue given to Madri to establish her as ‘bad’) The deer rishi brings up the Dashrath point I gave above and says that Honey Boy’s crime can’t be pardoned, that he shouldn’t have killed a man in congress with his wife, so he curses him that he’ll die the moment he’ll have congress with any woman. Canon fail #54. The original curse specifies ‘his loved one’ not any random woman.

Cue dramatic panoramic shot and dramatic title bgm. Honey Boy is in tears. The rishi dies.

Scene changes and we’re back in Hastina, where the court fool is entering. He says he has a lot of questions. Mr. Weepy Thorn prompts him to ask his questions. So there’s this long drawn out riddle session that’s set up to predict that Gandhari is pregnant, and Drama Queen will be experiencing the love of a son soon. There’s happiness all round, lots of hugs too. Of course, this show takes no rest from anvil shadowing either, so exactly at this moment enters Honey Boy with his wives. Honey Boy is welcomed with joy and immediately apprised of the news. In his head, the dying deer rishi’s words echo, even as his wives smile by his side. (Ah, apparently, there’s anvil juxtaposition, too! Whee!)

Anyway. Satyavati notices he ain’t looking happy and she asks him if he got what she said. He manages to sponge her off, hug his brother and congratulate him. When he does that, Annoying Poseur closes his eye.

As he ascends the throne, deer rishi’s words come back to him, asking what kind of a King he is. Honey Boy refrains from climbing the final stair, turning. He says that he has something of great importance to announce, confessing that he has killed Kidama and is no longer worthy of being a King.

His announcement is met with shock all around, as he renounces the throne of Hastina. Cue dramatic title bgm again. Camera focuses on Satyavati (who’s quite less psycho nowadays), then panning one by one to Drama Queen, Paragon of Perfection, Smarmy, Melodrama, Patnidharma, Ambika, Ambalika, a grinning Poseur (both eyes open), back to Honey boy and Mr. Paragon as he drops his angvastr limply.

Scene changes as Mr. Perfection walks inside Honey Boy’s chambers and they have an argument about his responsibilities. Honey Boy puts forward that for all that Satyavati wants a worthy King, he is no longer worthy, that even Indra renounced heaven for the killing of a sage and meditated for eons, that mere charity and abstinence as suggested by Mr. Thorn and Kripacharya won’t be enough. He continues that the duty of a King, the man who holds the royal scepter is to dispense justice to his people. He asks who would mete justice out on a King? The camera pans out to Mr. Perfection, standing mute, ending the episode.

Alright, this whole thing is canon fail #55. Pandu does not go back to Hastina, he sets out immediately to atone. Also #56, his wives know everything as he does. He doesn’t keep it hidden from them.

Precap: ‘But the crime was ours’ says Smarmy. ‘the punishment, however, has to be borne by our yet unborn children!’ ‘You can’t ever have children.’ Announces Honey Boy, going on to inform them of the curse.

#sarcastic starbharat reviews #scribbler scribbles #nila writes #nila rants #nila gets salty #pandu #aka honey boy #kunti #aka ms melodrama #dhritrashtra #aka drama queen #gandhari #aka ms always patnidharma #madri #aka ms. smarmy tears #bhishm #aka paragon of perfection #diwali update

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sondepoch · 5 years ago

Text

Day 5

10 Days (Jumin Han x Reader)

You didn't expect to find yourself locked in an engagement to Chairman Han, but with your own mother forcing you into it, you have no way of denying her. But as time continues and things change, you begin to develop affections for your fiance's son: Jumin Han. But the sad truth is that there's nothing either of you can do to stop the marriage, and you only have these 10 days before your future becomes reality. 10 days with Jumin Han.

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8 | Day 9 | Day 10 | ✔

MASTERLIST

How much time passes before you understand what's happening? How long is it before a thought finally finds it way back into your stupid, foolish head, and you realize the consequences of kissing the son of the man you're engaged to?

Too much time.

You're on top of Jumin, straddling him with two legs on either side of him. His kisses are slow. Passionate. Lips trailing down to your neck, he sucks on the skin ever-so-gently, and it's only when you hear the lewd sound of your own moan that reality hits you.

You stiffen.

And Jumin notices.

"(Y/N)...?" Jumin asks, raising his eyes to yours.

"We can't do this," You murmur breathlessly. "We can't. I'm engaged. To your father."

With those final words, Jumin's eyes widen the slightest—as if he too had forgotten the fact—and you pull yourself off him. But he pulls your wrist before you can leave the couch.

"That can change."

The man's eyes are earnest, as if he genuinely believes what he's saying. But he doesn't know the truth. "We're meeting your mother tomorrow, no, today. In twelve hours, she'll be here, and you'll be free of your engagement and we can..."

You turn to Jumin. "We can what? What is there for us to do?"

"This," Jumin murmurs, stealing a chaste kiss from your lips. You let the moment linger, basking in its tranquility, before pulling away.

"My mother won't let me cancel the engagement, Jumin." You cast your eyes low on the ground. "My personal desires don't matter. I can't go against her wishes."

"You can." Jumin encourages.

"No, Jumin. I can't." You stand up, brushing past him to get to your room, ignoring even Elizabeth's innocent meow in your haste to hide your tears. Only when you get to your room do you allow them to fall, whimpering softly over your own inability to control your fate.

You press your back to the door and slide down it, trying your hardest to keep your cries quiet.

It's not fair.

Your whole life, you've been the perfect daughter. Even your mother had struggled to find excuses to take her anger out on you, until your father had sacrificed his life to save you from being hit by a car. From that moment onward, she had only needed one reason to hurt you: the fact that you were even alive.

Pitiful, isn't it?

It was a drunk driver who ruined your life so.

But your mother was still furious.

She loved Father, you realize bitterly. After that whole escapade with Jumin, you had your first taste of what a true relationship would feel like—if only it weren't forbidden to you—and you'd come to realize that whatever your mother felt for your father was akin to your feelings for Jumin.

It's not fair. You think, choking back a sob. It's all so unfair. Why must you pursue Chairman Han when you would be so much happier with someone else? You bite your lip as your mind automatically fills in the blank. Why must you pursue Chairman Han when you would be so much happier with Jumin?

The media would love it. The corporate heirs of BC-Sonic and C&R uniting in holy matrimony to pave the way not only their families but the enterprising future of their companies.

And Jumin's actually my age, you think, scoffing at the fact that he's still older than you.

You sigh.

You've stayed with Jumin barely five days, and he's already been the perfect gentleman. The perfect husband. And from those kisses, it's obvious that he wouldn't be opposed to a relationship with you.

Your heart feels a little bit lighter when you think about the prospect of a future with Jumin. It would be a future free of everything you'd been chained down to since your adoption.

It would be a perfect future.

But it's a future I can't have, you think bitterly, before dragging yourself to bed.

And that thought lurks in your mind for the rest of the night, through early morning, and during breakfast when you and Jumin sit opposite each other, separated only by the extravagant sea of dishes prepared by his private chef.

He sits across from you, already handsome and ready in suit and tie, despite it still being early morning. He cuts into an onion and cheese omelet, expression calm and controlled.

Even when he doesn't try, he's perfect.

And I can't have him.

"(Y/N)..." Jumin trails off, interrupting the silence. "We should speak. About last night."

You bite your lip. On the list of the many things that kept you up last night, this impending conversation was ranked high.

"Last night was a mistake, Jumin. We can't let it happen again."

"You expect me to believe you truly desire my father over me?"

"I expect you to understand that I have to desire your father over you."

You hate the bluntness of your voice, and how stern your responses are to Jumin's gentle questions, but you have to be firm. Because even a moment of weakness may lead to a recap of yesterday's events. And you can't let that happen.

Breakfast passes by quickly.

Too quickly, for your liking.

By lunchtime Mother will be here, you realize with a start. And for the first time since your arrival in this apartment, time seems to fly by. You do everything in your power to make things feel slower, the most mundane of tasks that make minutes feel like hours. But nothing works.

For the first time, as you close BC-Sonic's feedback logs, you find that the four hours you spent reviewing department productivity rates flew by and you have scarcely fifteen minutes before your mother's expected arrival.

And she's never late.

So all you can do it wait.

Jumin tries to maintain a facade of calmness, but you can tell by the way he's constantly straightening his tie that even he's nervous to meet your mother. Is he regretting inviting her here?

He should, you think, memories of childhood abuse flooding through your mind. The sheer thought prompts your hand down, where you massage the damaged skin on your outer thigh before you forcefully move it away.

The past is the past. And after this meeting, it will be behind me.

In another room, Jumin's grandfather clock chimes twelve times.

Midday. Noon. 12 o'clock.

Twelve hours ago, you'd been on this same couch, arms wrapped around Jumin without a care in the world. Now, all your thoughts are of the diamond ring on your finger and a single knock.

Your mother.

She only ever knocks once, too certain of her status to ever bother with more. It's an insult that I even have to knock, she'd told you once when you asked her why.

Your eyes dart up to Jumin, who instantly gets up and walks to open the door.

"Hello, Mrs. (L/N)." His tone is courteous, charming even, and your mother glances at him, eyes wary and cigarette in hand. You can see the distrust in her eyes, but she finally responds with a polite nod, her voice laced with only a thin tone of superiority.

"You were very discreet over the phone, Jumin," Your mother says as she places her purse on the couch opposite you, seating herself. Even with Jumin in the room, you can't help but feel like the same seventeen-year-old girl you'd been the last time she'd hurt you.

So much time has passed since then.

But only the exterior scars had healed. Inside, you're just as frightened now as you were then.

"I was wondering if we could discuss the details of (Y/N)'s engagement to my father over lunch," Jumin states calmly, and you try your best not to let your terror show on your face.

"Oh?" Your mother turns to Jumin, and you're relieved that she's not directing her question at you. Your palms as already sweaty and you can feel your threadbare thoughts loping into knots as you try to calm yourself. "And what could there be to discuss about two people in love?"

Jumin swallows, evidently not prepared for your mother's show of ignorance. A moment of silence passes before he speaks.

"I think that's the matter to discuss itself: whether these two people are indeed in love."

"It's very bold of you to make these claims, Jumin." Your mother says, smiling and taking a puff of her cigarette. Her smile is empty, though, and you can hear the hissing snake of accusation in her words. "What do you have to say about this, (Y/N)?"

Your mother turns to you, and her (e/c) eyes have never been so intense as they are now. Her gaze is penetrating as she stares you down, challenging you.

"W-well," You stutter, trying to hide the tremble in your voice. "I think...that love...is a very strong word."

"Do you doubt that Chairman Han loves you?" Your mother states.

"N-not at all. I never mea—"

"Then it's only right that you should return his feelings wholeheartedly." Your mother offers you a smile, and her expression is prideful. I win, you can almost hear her say.

You can't bring yourself to say anything else. All you've said to her for the past two and a half decades has been in agreement with her. You'd been trained to tell her "Yes Mother" and "As you wish" without any hint of resistance.

Even if you knew what to say to her, you doubt you'd have the courage to.

Thankfully, Jumin steps in.

"For the sake of my father, I think that it'd be wiser to postpone the engagement until a time when (Y/N)'s feelings are more...developed. If such a time should come, then I think all parties involved would be pleased to watch her and my father partake in the marriage."

"If such a time should come? Jumin, are you doubting my daughter's feelings for your father? That's quite rude, I must say. If I were you, I'd apologize to (Y/N) at once for such a callous comment."

A fire lights inside you, at your mother's rudeness to Jumin. His eyes are round in surprise as he looks at you, and you fear that your mother's words have already gotten to him, so you speak before he can.

"Mother, Jumin is right."

The moment those words leave your lips, it's as if the apartment has dropped ten degrees. It feels like winter, and the chill rage radiating off your mother is truly terrifying. Her glare is ice cold, and you pull your eyes away. Instead, you look at Jumin who offers you a nod of encouragement for what you're about to say.

"I don't want to marry Chairman Han."

With those words, Jumin smiles at you. You can tell that he's proud you finally mustered up the courage to tell your mother the truth...but the moment you turn your gaze back upon your mother, you quickly realize that the truth isn't going to be enough.

"You think I don't already know that, (Y/N)?" Your mother drops her cigarette on the ground, lighting a new one before taking a sharp puff. "Very well. It seems I have to remind you why you obey me. Jumin, lock the door."

No...

"Pardon? The chef will be in with appetizers any moment now, so—"

"Lock the door."

Not in front of Jumin...

"(Y/N), strip."

Please don't...

"Now."

But your body betrays you, and you're no longer a proud businesswoman in her twenties. You're back to being the same foolish child your mother spent years abusing, and your fear won't let you do anything but obey.

With shaking hands, you remove your top.

"(Y-Y/N)!" Jumin sputters out, his temporary shock overridden by the sight of you actually meeting your mother's absurd request. "This is madness, don't—"

"This is the real world, Jumin." The snake that had been hiding behind your mother's words had finally come to play, and it was a hissing monster, vicious as it was cruel. "You made the decision to get in the way of my relationship with my daughter, so now you will see the consequences of your actions. Very good, (Y/N). Stand up."

Now wearing nothing more than your delicate (f/c) panties and a bra, you force yourself to stand, ignoring the vigor at which your legs are shaking. You keep your eyes fixated forward, unable to look at your mother or Jumin or anything else that might make your tears fall.

Your mother approaches you, ignoring Jumin and his attempts to stop her.

Even then, as he stands in front of your mother, telling her how ridiculous she's being, he doesn't understand the severity of the situation. For such a shrewd businessman, he still doesn't realize what's happening.

Your mother approaches you, drawing the cigarette from her lips.

And then you see the realization dawn on Jumin's face. He figured it out. Why you'd been terrified of your mother, why you were marrying Chairman Han at her request, why you had begged him to cancel today's meeting.

Child abuse.

At least, it had been child abuse. Once you turned eighteen, your mother decided that she had enough power over you to free you from the shackles of pain, and your skin had begun to heal, the burns fading into scars.

Until today.

Your mother twists your neck painfully and forces you to look her straight in the eye as she presses the hot end of the cigarette down against the familiar spot on your thigh. The scars had just begun to fade, you think helplessly as tears ran down your cheeks, the pain familiar but excruciating nonetheless.

You stood paralyzed before her as she continued to dig the hot stub into your upper thigh, bringing back years of memories from when you'd stood before her just like this with no escape before her merciless hands.

But Jumin steps in.

"Mrs. (L/N)!" He practically shouts, all but yanking your body away from your mother to pull your smaller form into his. Now he, too, is trembling, but he wraps his arms protectively around you. "Security! SECU—"

"Jumin," Your mother interrupts, a threatening glare on her face. She drops the cigarette she was holding onto the floor and pulls a lighter from her purse. With a single flick of the thumb, a flame has appeared. She holds it dangerously close to your skin. "Call your guards, and I will make certain that (Y/N) here endures much worse than anything she's had to handle with me. You both need to accept the truth. (Y/N) will marry Chairman Han. That is final."

Your mother returns to her seat on the couch, acting as if nothing had just happened, casually lighting another cigarette.

"Mrs. (L/N)," Jumin pleads. "Why are you doing this? I am the corporate heir to C&R, a marriage with me would be far more beneficial than o-"

"Oh? You want to marry each other? You two children are in love, is that it?" Your mother's smile is unamused. "Yes...I was in love with (Y/N)'s father before she ruined everything. Whatever affair you have going on here makes no difference. The press statement was released yesterday. I've already spoken to Chairman Han. He wishes to wed you immediately, (Y/N)."

"How immediate?" Jumin voices your thoughts, and you're so relieved that at least he has the courage to speak. The last of your strength sizzled with the cigarette your mother drove into your thigh.

"More immediate than you'd think. If I were you, I'd give your father a call. It seems that C&R is in some serious trouble," Your mother smiles pleasantly, confident once more in her power over you. "And he wishes to tie the knot with BC-Sonic down as quickly as possible to minimize damage. There's nothing either of you can do to change that."

Your mother stands up, confident that with her decision, this 'meeting' is concluded. "Do not call me again, Jumin. Apart from seeing (Y/N) at her wedding, I do not wish to see either of your faces ever again."

Your mother doesn't bother bidding either of you farewell, simply taking her leave. She's finished what she came here for and reasserted her power over you in the process with that cigarette.

Your eyes drop to the familiar spot on your thigh where the old scars have been further uglified by the fresh mark. At the very sight of the burned skin, you lose the last strength in your legs. If not for Jumin's quick reaction, you would have collapsed.

"(Y/N)?" He murmurs, holding you up. He uses his thumb to wipe your tears away. "Shit. Please don't cry, (Y/N), please." Jumin cradles you, and you let out a distressed sob.

You'd thought you were finally free, but your mother just demonstrated that it doesn't matter how far you flee or who you're with—the abuse will never end.

"Everything will be okay," Jumin murmurs, picking you up and carrying you bridal style. You continue to cry into his chest. Nothing will be okay. If your future had been sealed before, now it's airtight. Your mother won't let you do anything to change that.

You whimper as Jumin sets you down on the cold countertop in the kitchen, still half-naked. You tremble when he momentarily steps away, but Jumin is quick to pull you back into his arms once he has an ice cube in his hand. The kiss of the ice is biting as he rubs circles into your thigh, but it's still nothing compared to the pain of when she was actively harming you.

"Everything will be okay," Jumin repeats.

No, it won't, you want to scream at him, but your current state renders you unable to do anything more than tremble in his arms.

Before you register it, Jumin has carried you to what you imagine is his bedroom, lying you delicately under the several blankets. He never releases you, never halts his ministrations with the ice, never stops wiping your tears away.

He doesn't leave your side, not even for a second.

"I'm so sorry, (Y/N)" Jumin murmurs once your cries have died down. "If I'd known that she'd...I wouldn't have...it's my fault. I'm so sorry."

You offer Jumin a weak smile, hating the expression of guilt he's wearing. He looks better when he's smiling.

"Don't blame yourself," You finally manage to say. "It's over. She's gone, and I won't need to see her for a long time."

At the back of your mind, you recall her words about Chairman Han. He wishes to wed you immediately.

"The future might be set in stone, but we have the present, don't we?" You say weakly, smiling up at Jumin.

"Don't think like that," He protests, pulling you up so he can look you directly in the eyes. "I'll get you out of this. You don't need to marry my father. You can marry...someone different."

"Someone like you, you mean?" You respond. The very thought brings a smile to your face. "I can't. I'm destined to be with your father. It's...it's for the best."

"Best for who? If you marry my father, only he gets happiness, and that's if you manage to convince him that you're genuinely in love with him. That's one person. But if we were to be together," Jumin brings a hand to cup your cheek. "Then the two of us are happy."

"When I wed your father, it won't just be him who's happy. It'll be the whole world. And the media. Everyone in C&R. And...and I think it'll make my mother happy."

Jumin instantly frowns when he hears that last part. "How could you compromise your own happiness for hers? She's abusive, (Y/N). She just burned you with a ci—"

"She's my mother," You say firmly.

"Adoptive mother."

"Exactly. She chose me because she wanted me to bring her happiness...and I stole her happiness when Father protected me from that car and sacrificed his life for mine. If I can give her even a little bit of it back..."

"Don't do this," Jumin whispers. "Don't let yourself get trapped in the guilt."

You sigh.

"I don't have any other choice, Jumin. If I displease Mother, you know what will happen."

"I'd protect you," Jumin murmurs, his voice getting desperate. "I'd do everything I could for you."

But you can't accept his love.

"I know you would, Jumin." You tell him, leaning your forehead against his as you did just last night. Only this time, the atmosphere is gloomy and miserable, both your minds heavy with the knowledge that your futures lies not in each other, but along separate paths.

And no amount of love, passion, or desire will be able to change that.

MASTERLIST

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 7 | Day 8 | Day 9 | Day 10 | ✔

Word count: 3.5k

Notes: Woohooo! My hand has (mostly) healed and I am back in action! All the ideas have been stacking up - you're going to get so much content from me these next few days. :D And this series will officially begin updating on Saturdays AND Wednesdays! Whooopeeee! (sorry im so happy to finally be able to write again)

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Next Update: 4/29/20

I do not own the rights to Mystic Messenger or any of the characters within it.

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x--daughters-of-darkness--x · 4 years ago

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Will the real Taylor Momsen please stand up?

Think you know Taylor Momsen? Think again. After years of personal turmoil and soul-searching, The Pretty Reckless singer is back with a new album and a brand new outlook on life

On the cover of The Pretty Reckless’ upcoming album Death By Rock And Roll, lead singer Taylor Momsen lies naked on a grave. White hair flowing beneath her, gone are the eyeliner-rimmed raccoon eyes. Instead, it’s a stripped back image, one that radiates vulnerability rather than her usual defiance.

Shot by Danny Hastings, who was also responsible for 2013 album Going To Hell's more provocative cover, Momsen is proud of what it communicates. “It’s an untouched photograph," she tells Louder over the phone from her home in Maine.

"That was my intent, trying to show complete purity and baring myself. I wanted to express that you come into this world with nothing but your soul and that’s all you leave with, too.” She pauses. “I’m pretty proud of it, if I’m being honest.”

That vulnerability seems to be something Momsen is starting to feel comfortable with after a lifetime in the spotlight. Now just 27, she started a modelling career aged just two. She later became known as Jenny Humphrey, the Gossip Girl character audiences loved to hate, before leaving to focus on her music career, forming The Pretty Reckless and releasing their first album in 2010. She must be exhausted, we motion. “I don’t know if I feel older or younger," she replies. "I have experienced a lot. I feel like I have lived a billion lives. Some days I feel like I’m two years old and sometimes I’m 107. It depends on the day."

Speaking carefully but freely, Momsen’s answers are peppered with small, shy laughs. She’s spent the last several months locked down, leaving only briefly to film a music video for recent single 25. “I feel like I’ve been handling it relatively well, but I’ve certainly had my moments. I think everyone has their breaking point. It’s a lot! It’s a really fucked up year!” She pauses, before finding her way to a bright side. “I think this is a really humanising time.

"Everyone��s lifestyle is different, and where you come from and how you’re handling the situation is different, but we are still all in essentially the same space and point in time together.”

The peace in Momsen’s voice is hard won after a painful couple of years for her and her band. The first blow came in 2017, when The Pretty Reckless landed a spot supporting childhood hero Chris Cornell. He died by suicide on the tour, shaking Momsen to the core: “After we were on that Soundgarden tour and we played the last show – when I woke up to the news the next morning I was beyond devastated. I still don’t have words to express how crushing that was. I couldn’t handle it. I wasn’t in a good place to be public. I removed myself from the public eye. I cancelled everything. I needed to go home and reflect on what had happened.”

She fell into a deep hole, spiralling and cancelling any upcoming shows. In 2018, feeling ready to rebuild her life, the band started speaking to their friend and longtime producer Kato about the next step. Just as they had pulled themselves together, they got another tragic phonecall: “He’d died in a motorcycle accident. That was the fucking nail in the coffin I guess, for lack of a better term."

“I just went so, so down into this hole of depression and substance abuse. I was a train-wreck and I didn’t know how to get out of it, I didn’t know if I would get out of it. I didn’t care. I had kinda given up on everything. I was like, I don’t even know if I want to do anything ever again.”

Eventually, Momsen had to make a decision: “It was either death or move forward. Luckily I chose to move forward, but it was tough there for a while.” She’s candid about how much she struggled: “I was not well. I returned to music because it was the only thing I knew how to do. It’s the only thing in my entire life that’s always been there and supported me. I started listening to records that I love and started from the beginning again.” She sat down to write, finding that it took no effort – Death By Rock And Roll poured out of her, in part inspired by Kato.

The album is named for a song, the first single, that Kato suggested ten years ago: “He said “write a song called ‘Death By Rock and Roll,’” and we started it and never finished it and nothing came of it. When he passed it became very relevant again, and so we finished it.”

The song starts with his footsteps walking down the hall. She’s insistent that it isn’t morbid, but an homage and an optimistic battlecry: “I have one life and I’ll live it the way I want.” The band wondered whether they could even work without Kato – “the hole and loss was so grand”. They chose to, eventually finding a kindred spirit in the producer Jonathan Wyman. “He is the sweetest, kindest soul on the planet, a great engineer and producer, an amazing friend. We called him up and made the record in Maine,” she says, adding that it was the first album she and bandmate Ben co-produced. “He allowed us to be the train-wrecks that we were at the time and let us go through all the range of all the emotions and was so supportive throughout the entire thing. He really helped us to accomplish something.”

The album itself is classic Pretty Reckless: big guitars, old school rock'n'roll influences, with touches of jukebox Americana. But there’s something different, too, and maybe it’s the feeling of “complete rebirth” that she wanted to imbue it with. Around the middle there’s a turning point, with more vulnerable, personal touches. On 25, Momsen breathily sings of her disbelief that she made it this far: 'and all through my teens, I screamed that I may not live much past 21, 22, 23, 24.'

It’s an honest declaration: “We recorded it right as I turned 25. It’s very much just an autobiographical song of me at my lowest reflecting on my life and trying to put that into music somehow. I’m really proud of that song. I’m proud of the whole record, but I think that song was a shift in my writing.” She calls 25 the first “stepping stone towards that light.”

Those moments of tenderness and reflection are wrapped up, of course, in the in-your-face rock and roll that Taylor Momsen has always loved. Cynics and critics have questioned her authenticity, and that of The Pretty Reckless. But ten years into her music career, it’s pretty clear rock runs through her veins. She’s dorky and obsessive, running through rock'n'roll history from the 60s through the 90s, sheepishly apologising when she hasn’t heard of a newer artist I mention. “I don’t pay attention to new stuff. It’s bad, I should,” she laughs. She references music with an ease that only comes to a true nerd, gushing about rock: “It’s ballsy and cooler than everything else. If you’re not afraid of it, you find the freeing aspect of it. Nothing beats it.” True to its word, Death By Rock And Roll is full of heavy guitars and snarling vocals. A true catharsis.

In the last two years, Momsen feels like she’s aged ten. “They were extraordinarily hard. To the point where I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through them. I think there’s no way to go through that tragedy and trauma and not come out, if you make it through, not as a different person but with a new perspective,” she tells me. Her fight with her mental health is ongoing, but she’s learned to manage it: “If you don’t, it’s very easy to take a wrong turn and that can be hard to come back from.”

She’s found that music has been her one grounding stone, holding her down to earth: “I can listen to music and it brings me back, almost like meditation. It brings me to reality and completely takes me away, too.”

Momsen is reflective, reckoning with thoughts she had long held. Starting her music career as a 17-year-old girl, she was often indignant about the idea that misogyny impacted her possibilities. With time, though, she’s reconsidered: “I was so in denial for so long about sexism, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realised it exists. Misogyny is a real thing, and it’s unfortunate that it is, but it is. There are a lot of shitty things in life but we have to deal with them, and hopefully we progress as a society and this becomes a topic we don’t ever have to discuss again,” she laughs.

“I’ve recognised it more as I’ve gotten older that there is a boys’ club when it comes to rock'n'roll and it is a struggle to break into that and be accepted and treated with the same respect as if you were a man.”

Recently, Momsen appeared on Evanescence’s Use My Voice, a song Amy Lee wrote when inspired by assault victim Chanel Miller. Momsen is open in her adoration of Lee, who took The Pretty Reckless’ on their first big tour, telling me that Amy’s perspective on misogyny in rock is far “more developed” than hers. “I love Amy, she’s just the kindest person and so talented. We really learned a lot from that experience in so many ways. I have the utmost respect for her, I love her.” She adds that she was impacted by seeing Evanescence when she was nine: “It was very cool to have that be our first proper tour, suddenly I was opening for a band that I had gone to see with my dad. It was very full circle.”

Understandably, after a lifetime of scrutiny, Momsen is at times reticent to answer certain questions, aware of how things can get twisted. She avoids the internet, finding that, “maybe it’s because of how I grew up, but it can get very toxic very quickly.” But she indulges more annoying questions with patience and grace. I ask her, is the 'Jenny died by suicide' line in Death By Rock and Roll a sly reference to her Gossip Girl character Jenny Humphrey? She laughs: “I’ll leave that to the listener’s interpretation.”

She’s willing to explain, however, in far greater depth, why she feels that way: “I think it’s unfair to the listener when the artist explains things directly, I think it takes away from the magic.”

“Once you put the music out into the world, it’s so exciting, but on the other hand it’s almost sad. The body of work you’ve been slaving over is so precious and it’s so yours and so intimate, and suddenly it doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to everyone else,” she pauses, “I think that’s the beauty of music but it’s a strange thing because it doesn’t matter what the song means to me, it matters how it connects to you and whatever you relate to it." She says that hearing Roger Waters elaborate on Pink Floyd lyrics that meant a lot to her once spoiled the magic: “Since then I’ve been very cautious to not over-explain. I really do think that it’s unfair to the listener. It’s not about me, it’s about you, it’s about the audience.”

Death By Rock and Roll is, conversely, a commitment to life. After a year relaxing at home and three years attempting to recover from a constant succession of blows, Momsen is aching to get back out on the road and see her fans again. “I get to go on stage every night in front of an audience who care and connect to music that I slaved over and worked over and hypothetically move them and give them the experience of a lifetime,” she laughs, calling it the “greatest job on the planet.”

“I really miss it. There’s nothing else like it, that high that you get from playing a show, that adrenaline, that feeling. It’s the best drug on the planet. I feel like an addict and I’m going through withdrawal.”

The last few years have taken it out of Momsen, but she has come out of the other side with peace and an enriched perspective. That growth is audible as she speaks, and it’s woven into the fabric of Death By Rock And Roll.

“You can’t beat that feeling of complete rebirth,” she tells me. Maybe for once, she doesn’t seem either two years old or 107, but a very wise 27.

#Taylor Momsen #the pretty reckless #2020 interviews

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stillellensibley · 4 years ago

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Looking at the history of emptiness in modern art I am often reminded of Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise. Zeno imagined a race, in which Achilles would generously grant the tortoise a head start of say 100 metres, and each would move at a steady, unchanging speed. His conclusion was that Achilles would never be able to catch up with the tortoise, because every time he came close, the tortoise would have had time to move a little further, so that the distance between them would endlessly decrease to a few yards, a few metres, one metre, 0.1 metre, 0.01 metre, etc. In the same way, every time the audience of modern and contemporary art is led to believe that the avant-garde reduction of the artwork to a minimal, barely perceptible form can go no further, along comes another artist who creates another even more minimal, even less perceptible, artwork.

Thus, it seemed that the history of modern art had reached its zero point when Marcel Duchamp presented a glass pharmacy phial filled with Paris air to an American collector in 1919, or when Kazimir Malevich painted his White on White composition in 1918, and two years later filled a room with, as one person noted, empty canvases ‘devoid of colour, form and texture’ on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in Moscow. Yet in a 1968 article, critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler could only observe that ‘the artist… has continued to make something of “nought” 50 years after Malevich’s White on White seemed to have defined nought for once and for all. We still do not know how much less ‘nothing’ can be.’ Thirty-five years later, Gabriel Orozco’s sole contribution to the Aperto exhibition at the 1993 Venice Biennale consisted of an empty shoe box, eight years before Martin Creed notoriously won the Turner Prize partly for his installation Work No. 227: The lights going on and off at regular intervals. Nearly ten noughty years down the line, and shortly after a museum survey entitled Voids: a Retrospective presented visitors with nine perfectly empty rooms, we are still none the wiser about ‘how much less “nothing” can be’.

Year after year, decade after decade, however, one thing doesn’t seem to change: if we haven’t walked through, on, or past the artwork without noticing it, our reactions to this kind of barely perceptible, almost nothing, practice will predictably range from puzzlement and laughter to anger and indignation. Even before Malevich’s 1920 exhibition, a French cartoonist had imagined in 1912 that the empty canvas would be the next avant-garde prank visited on its baffled public. In the caption, the artist presenting his blank canvas explains in a pun on the then-current Futurist movement: ‘It’s the most futurist picture of all – so far it is only signed, and I’ll never paint it.’ As the emptiness and reduction of blank canvases, of white or black monochromes and of Duchampian readymades were extended to silent concerts and empty galleries in the second half of the twentieth century, the question remained: are all these forms of emptiness so many variations on the same provocative joke?

The first documented entirely empty exhibition, Yves Klein’s The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State Into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility – better known as The Void – at the Galerie Iris Clert in Paris in 1958, certainly had all the trappings of an elaborate PR stunt. Not only did Klein empty the exhibition space and paint the remaining walls and cases white, he also posted two Republican Guards in full uniform at the entrance of the gallery, served blue cocktails especially ordered from the famous brasserie La Coupole and had even planned to light up the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde with his brand of International Klein Blue. While the last event was cancelled at the last minute, an estimated 3,000 visitors did show up on the night of the opening, filling the streets around the gallery as they waited to enter the exhibition space through blue curtains, one small group at a time. The crowd was finally dispersed by the police called in by disgruntled visitors who had felt swindled after paying their entrance fee to be shown an empty gallery. In some ways, the succès à scandale of The Void has obscured Klein’s very idiosyncratic brand of showmanship and mysticism. His interest in the immaterial was genuine, inspired by his exploration of monochrome painting and his belief, influenced by Rosicrucianism, that humans must strive to liberate themselves from flesh and matter.

If some artists since Klein have embraced such spiritual readings of the void, a more general preoccupation with the invisible seems to account for many empty exhibitions in the past 50 years or so. Maria Eichhorn, a German artist whose early work includes white texts written on white walls, speaks for many artists when she explains: “There is such a fixation in our Western culture on the visible, which explains why we think that… a room is empty… because there is nothing visible. But I’ve never thought that an empty room is empty.” In the late 1960s Robert Barry had already pointed to the imperceptible forces that literally surround us by introducing radio waves as well as magnetic currents into the gallery space. American artist Maria Nordman has tried to focus viewers’ attention on the light falling through an empty gallery’s windows at different moments of the day and of the year. More prosaically, other artists have invited visitors simply to contemplate the architecture of the gallery. Arriving in 1993 at the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, originally a house designed by Mies van der Rohe, British artist Bethan Huws felt she could not add anything to the beauty of the modernist building. Instead, she distributed a poem to visitors and let them admire the gallery for itself.

In the 1970s American artist Michael Asher pioneered strategies through which to reveal the architectural structure of the gallery. At the Clare Copley Gallery in 1975, for example, he simply removed the wall separating the empty exhibition space from the art dealer’s office. By opening up this space, the artist was not only inviting visitors to consider its architectural features: he also reminded them of the Business transactions taking place behind the walls of commercial galleries. After Asher, other artists have explored the invisible networks of art business and institutional presentations that frame the art we view. Maria Eichhorn used the budget allocated to her show at the Kunsthalle Bern to tackle the institution’s debts and fund much-needed refurbishments of the building (Money at the Kunsthalle Bern 2001), while in their 2005 Supershow – More than a Show, the collective Superflex used theirs to give each visitor two Swiss Francs instead of asking them to pay an entrance fee to see empty spaces adorned only by texts stating the physical properties of each room (surface, wall colour, maximum number of visitors, etc). Museum surveillance is alluded to in Roman Ondák’s 2006 More Silent than Ever, which warns visitors that hidden listening devices are installed in the room.

Presented with invisible elements such as Ondák’s listening devices or Barry’s magnetic fields, we are left wondering whether to believe the artists’ claims since, after all, there is no adequate way to confirm them. We come to realise that our relation to the work is predicated on knowledge, presuppositions and some form of trust in the authority of artists and art institutions. British artist Ceal Floyer traces her interest in minimal displays back to her experience as a gallery invigilator while she was an art student. ‘I watched a lot of art being seen. And a lot of art being not seen,’ she remembers. ‘That was a training in itself. I discovered that presumption is a medium in its own right.’ As with Creed’s The lights going on and off , Floyer’s plastic buckets and black rubbish bags casually sitting in the gallery certainly reveal to us our prejudices and expectations as to what art is or should be. Gabriel Orozco says he actively seeks to disappoint his viewers. Is my irritation at being presented with an empty shoe box or lights going and off ultimately good for me?

The veiled hostility directed by the artist at the viewer situates such attitudes in the context of more radical declarations against art and its institutions. When presenting her empty exhibition at the Lorence-Monk Gallery in New York in 1990, American artist Laurie Parsons went so far as to refuse to include her name on the invitation to the opening and to remove all reference to the show from her CV. Four years later, she ceased to produce works altogether, thus following a line of artists before her who deliberately decided, as part of their practice, to give up, or take a break from, the profession. From this perspective, the empty gallery is less an artwork than a gesture – of provocation, dissent and critique. As Brian O’Doherty has shown in his well-known study of the modern “white cube” gallery, such a gesture ‘depends for its effect on the context of ideas it changes and joins’. For the gesture to succeed, its timing, place and audience have to be just right. Sometimes it can be understood only retrospectively, as it becomes historicised.

It would be unfair, however, to reduce all explorations of emptiness, nothingness and the invisible to the rhetoric of the gesture. To return to Orozco’s Empty Shoe Box: when it was first shown in 1993, it certainly poked fun at the Venice Biennale’s frenzy of publicity and consumption, but it also served as a memorable image of the container or vessel that is a leitmotif in the artist’s work. ‘I am interested in the idea of making myself – as an artist and an individual – above all a receptacle,’ stated Orozco. Playing with contrasts between empty and full, his work as a whole exemplifies a sensitivity to reciprocal spatial relations. In a notebook, he compares discarded pieces of chewing gum on a pavement with the stones placed on a board in the Asian strategy game of Go. Like Empty Shoe Box, the Go stones and the spat-out blobs of gum occupy and cut out space, demarcating a territory according to very specific patterns of chance and intention.

Many artists have similarly been interested in the space between objects. Both the Belgian Joëlle Tuerlinckx and the Brazilian Fernanda Gomes often present arrangements of small, discrete everyday objects scattered around otherwise vacant gallery spaces. Tuerlinckx describes the exhibition space as ‘a kind of parcel, a packet of air’ that she is invited to open and explore through her work; Gomes says she never comes to the gallery with a pre-defined plan. In these installations, the empty gallery becomes a blank page to be inscribed (as in Tuerlinckx’s spatial drawings), or the pregnant void that surrounds objects in paintings such as Giorgio Morandi’s (in Gomes’s three-dimensional still-lifes).

Painting is also a surprising reference for the performances staged by Marie Cool/Fabio Balducci, during which Cool stands in an empty room as she enacts a series of repetitive, extremely precise gestures using flimsy everyday materials such as paper, tape, or thread. The French- Italian duo has claimed that the image of a figure hovering in an undefined yet meaningful space was inspired by early Renaissance religious painting such as Simone Martini’s Annunciations. The empty gallery as a stage for action has also been effectively used by Martin Creed, when he asked runners to sprint down the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain, one by one at regular intervals, in 2008, or by British-German artist Tino Sehgal, who in 2010 choreographed two continuous scenarios, involving three actors, in the spiral rotunda at the New York Guggenheim Museum.

Placed in vast expanses of void, both bodies and objects appear more vulnerable. On the one hand, such installations provide an alternative to the spectacular displays encouraged by increasingly large-scale museum and gallery spaces. By celebrating the commonplace, the barely noticed, as well as frailty and precariousness, artists thus seem to be actively resisting the pressure to create ever-bigger, glossier, more awe-inspiring works. On the other hand, however, such minimal mises en scène can create new forms of spectacle – as when Maurizio Cattelan places his miniature self-portrait, a resin figurine hanging from a clothing rack, in a corner of the empty gallery in order to emphasise his apparent failure to take on the revolutionary role of 1970s artists such as Joseph Beuys (to make the point, the Cattelan mini-me is clad in Beuys’s signature felt suit).

While such formal devices are often little more than simple gimmicks, works that effectively stage their own weakness and vulnerability can raise questions about the institutional and social conditions that guarantee their existence as art. In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes, a naked emperor is persuaded by his tailors that his fine clothes are visible only to intelligent people; his subjects, afraid like him to admit that they cannot see them, applaud his outfit until a small child in the crowd finally blurts out the truth – ‘But he’s got nothing on!’ Though above all a cautionary tale against the deceptive powers of flattery, vanity and sycophantism, the story also provides an image of the willing suspension of disbelief required by most forms of art. After all, the artist’s deception, like the cheating tailors’, could never work without our participation. In his 2002 work Lament of the Images, Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar mobilises this kind of community of believers by presenting us with two dark, apparently empty rooms. In the first, we come across three small backlit text panels relating real stories about invisible or impossible images, such as the fact that the United States Defence Department purchased the rights to all available satellite images of Afghanistan during the 2001 air strikes so that the global media could not publish them. The second room houses a single, brightly lit, empty screen. Blinded by its light, we are reminded of our own blind spots – our complicity in the invisibility of certain images and in the existence of many an emperor’s new clothes.

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missbugaboo · 5 years ago

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Cataclysmed (1)

"I promise you we'll get our powers back, Cat Noir. And I will heal you," she said, wholeheartedly believing it to be true. She kept her word - she uttered the spell. Only it clearly didn't work this time.

Adrienette/Marichat/LadyNoir with eventual reveal.

fanfiction.net / AO3

Chapter 1: Stupid Black Cat’s Luck

Adrien Agreste sneaked back into the classroom with a combination of cautiousness and haste that he did not think he could achieve in his civilian form, having taken it as a skill reserved solely for his masked alter ego. He closed the door as quietly as possible, careful not to catch the attention of his friends who still remained on the other side, and who, hopefully, had yet to find out about his current location – and sighed deeply, glad to see that at least this one scheme had gone well that day.

Of course, he realised how wrong of him it was – how unfair to trick them in this way, when all they wanted to do was to help him with whatever he’d been struggling with. He didn’t need superhero powers to know that they deserved to be given more than the fake assurances of his good condition he’d been giving them all day or to see the worried glances they exchanged when they thought he wasn’t looking.

Then again, how could he explain any of it to them?

He sighed again and set towards his seat, ignoring the sharp pain that shot through his body once more. It really was getting worse by the day, those little seizures taking place more and more frequently, growing in duration as well as in strength, until they could be called little no more; and still, there was nothing he could do about it, though certainly not for the lack of trying. Oh, he had tried – and he had failed splendidly.

For six days now, he’d done nothing but search, looking for all kinds of medicine and treatments known to mankind, in the vain hope of finding one applicable to his undoubtedly unusual case. Looking for hints, for suggestions, anything that could help him get rid of that cursed, dull ache that had only seemed to increase with the passing of time, that was now also accompanied by the already mentioned strokes of a more violent pain. He’d read every ad, every article, from the leaflets given away in front of the pharmacies to online advice on treating said pain with poems and songs, trying to somehow pick clues in the ocean of nonsense he had poured on himself.

All of this while pretending that he really was doing just fine.

Stupid Cataclysm, he muttered under his breath as he flopped on the bench at last, his forehead hitting the desk immediately afterwards. Stupid Hawk Moth and his power-stealing villains, stupid me for not dodging them in time, stupid magic spells that never work when you really need them to. And stupid, stupid -

He stopped when he felt a gentle pressure against his shoulder, and straightened up instantly, suddenly alert. He was relieved to realise that what he had imagined to be the weight of his classmate’s hand was in fact the full weight of his kwami who, in all honesty, wasn’t doing much better than he was; the very fact that Plagg had not yet cheeked him for his unexpected movement spoke volumes, successfully adding to his already overgrown sense of guilt.

After all, it was all his fault to begin with.

“Come on, you really shouldn’t be showing yourself like this,” he urged in a tired whisper, rubbing his hand against his eyes. “We’ve got enough to worry about as it is, without someone seeing you float around. Really Plagg, you can’t -”

Right on cue the door creaked, announcing the arrival of his fellow students, who now entered the room with fervour typical for their age, leaving him next to no time to grab the half-conscious kwami in his hands and thrust him hurriedly inside his bag.

Stupid black cat’s luck.

Frantically hoping that no one had spotted the creature after all, Adrien felt rather than saw Nino take his place by his side. He still refused to look him in the eye for fear of giving away more than he was allowed to - more than he thought he could reveal. He heard his companion clear his throat meaningfully, but again, he chose to disregard it, focusing on readying himself for class instead.

After all, all he needed now was to survive it.

Just one more lesson and it’s over for good, he reasoned with a newfound determination as he pulled out his notes and prepared his tablet hastily. One lesson and I can go home. Just a little effort and then it’s all about hot showers and bed and rest.

"So, are you gonna tell me what's wrong with you today, or should I just stand back and let Alya deal with you?" Nino interrupted his musings, giving him a worried glance that did not match his teasing tone. "Seriously, dude, you're acting really weird today. Are you coming down with something?"

"I'm fine," Adrien answered impatiently. For the first time in his life he wished he did not share a desk with anyone. "Really, it's nothing."

As if to contradict his words, a wave of nausea came over him, however, he paid it no mind, convincing himself that the best way to go through this nightmare was to think of it as little as humanly possible.

If only Nino could take the hint and shut his mouth as well.

"Yeah, well, I don't really think you look fine," his impossible friend insisted. "Alya sure doesn’t either, or Marinette for that matter. Why can't you just admit that you're sick, man? It's no crime to be, you know."

"Look, we've just had a week full of tests, and a huge akuma attack kept half of Paris awake on the night right before one of them. Why can't you accept that I'm simply tired after going through all this?"

Nino shook his head almost piteously. "I've taken the same tests as you, my man, and I was no more asleep than you were when that akuma showed up; but you don’t see me grimacing at everything and everyone around me while I barely hold my balance."

"Well, unlike you, I actually did study for those tests."

He wasn't surprised when he heard Nino snicker at his comment, even though he wished his friend had not done it as loudly as he did, startling Miss Mendeleyev and consequently driving her attention right to the pair of them. Truly, they were lucky to receive nothing but a scolding glare from her.

The rest of the lesson went smoothly, and soon Adrien found himself packing, leaving the classroom in the midst of the crowd of his friends. His head was beginning to pound, what with him staying in the very centre of the noisy group of teens, all of them eager to leave the building without any unnecessary delay, and yet he didn't try to escape, hoping it would counter the allegations of him acting any different from what was considered the norm. He didn't exactly want to lie to the trio that clearly felt concerned for him; however, being an object of their pity was no more appealing to him, especially since he knew they really couldn’t help.

If Ladybug's magic hadn't been enough to heal him, what on earth was?

He was suddenly brought to attention by a conspiratorial whisper next to his ear, this time coming from none other than Alya."You can act all you wish, Agreste, but you won't fool me."

He winced, surprised, and chanced a glance at her; and then he had to use all of his strength to not roll his eyes at the determined expression she was wearing, obviously intent on making him spill the beans and admit to her what he had refused to own up to her boyfriend before hand.

So he really wasn't joking about letting her out at me.

"Alya, you know I'd never in my life question your astounding journalistic skills, but you really are following a wrong lead here," he answered eventually with what he hoped was a friendly, if not teasing smile. "I've already said that to Nino and I can tell you the same thing as well: I'm as well as I could be. I'm tired, true; short of proper sleep, and that's true as well. But even though I appreciate the sentiment, I really don't want you to worry when you have no reason to. So even if I look a little unwell today -"

"You look like Cat Noir after he got cataclysmed in the ribs last Friday," he was once again interrupted by Nino, who seemed to have magically appeared next to them as soon as they’d reached the top of the staircase. Again, Adrien needed to make the best of his acting skills to stop himself from snorting at the comparison. "He was almost as clumsy as you are today, only unlike you, he has Ladybug to heal him after a fight each time. Or were you hoping she'd come to help you if you were doing badly enough?"

"And how would you know about Cat Noir's battle wounds?" Adrien shot back, deliberately ignoring the mention of his lady coming to save him, as well as the stinging realisation that she was no more able to help than anyone else.

Nino gave him a strange look but merely shrugged in response.

"Well, I am dating the best informed Ladybug fan in Paris, so I'd say my sources are rather obvious, aren't they?"

Adrien decided not to grace him with an answer this time.

"Anyway, where's Marinette?" Nino picked up after a moment and turned towards his girlfriend again. "I saw you two leaving together, so where the heck did she disappear?"

It was Alya's turn to roll her eyes. "You know Marinette, she's always forgetting something. A pen, a sketchbook, a phone... I think the only thing I haven't seen her lose yet are her earrings, but then again, you don't really need to remember to bring those along."

"So that's where she is now? Back in the classroom, looking for her drawing set?" Nino asked.

"I think it was a drawing itself this time," Alya responded cheerfully, with a sly look that, however, was totally lost on Adrien. "A very good one, by the way, she really is improving when it comes to seizing the resemblance of her... model references. Still, she should be back soon and then we can head straight to the cinema as planned. I mean, if Adrien is feeling so well, we don’t have to worry about cancelling it, do we?"

Now that was something to catch Adrien's attention at last. He turned towards his companions wide-eyed and stammered, "The cinema?"

The couple in front of him shared a glance, a barely noticeable shadow of shock appearing on both of their faces. Immediately, Adrien felt like he deserved to be kicked in the face for his forgetfulness; he restricted himself to a slap against his forehead instead.

"Gosh, it's today, isn't it?"

"Dude, you're serious?" Nino's expression was that of true astonishment now as he looked into his flabbergasted friend's eyes. "We've been planning it for a week - the movie and a picnic afterwards. We've talked about it so much, and we even had Ivan and Mylene come to confirm some details today - not to mention that we've chosen the date specifically because of your dad’s absence. How do you even forget something like that?"

"Adrien, you're really starting to worry me now," Alya cut in, her voice suddenly ringing with genuine concern. "You never forget your arrangements. Maybe you really shouldn't push yourself and just rest for a bit. It's okay not to be okay, you know? People will understand."

"Yeah, even if that means Marinette sulking for the entire afternoon again," Nino supplied readily while jamming his fists into his pockets.

That had earned him a prod in the side from his girlfriend, however, it was only another detail that remained utterly irrelevant in Adrien Agreste's eyes. He frowned, and for once, the grimace had nothing to do with his own health.

"Why would she do that?" he asked, confused.

Nino opened his mouth to answer, but again, Alya's reflex proved to be quicker. She pressed her hand against his mouth as if she'd known exactly what he was about to say (Then again, she probably did, Adrien thought) and believed it her duty to stop him from saying it in time. Her eyes met Adrien's and much to his surprise, she sighed wearily.

"Marinette will be fine," she said. "She will miss you because, darn it Adrien, even if she still stutters when talking to you at times, you've really become one of her best friends, you know. But I'm sure she wouldn't like you to push yourself just to please her, and if you come and look unwell, you'll only make her worry more. She will be fine; we all will be. You should make sure you are as well."

"I will be there," came Adrien's unexpected yet resolute answer, his whole posture suddenly straightening up again. "I told you I was okay, and I'm not going to pass up the chance of meeting with you guys just because I'm slightly more tired than usual. Not after we've put so much effort into arranging this - not to mention, the next time my father will be absent long enough for us to try anything of the sort again will probably be around my 20th birthday, if at all. The worst that may happen is that I'll fall asleep during the screening, but hey, it's not like you need my attention at that time, right?"

Alya's look was sceptical. "Yeah, as long as you're asleep and not unconscious."

Adrien mustered a little smile and waved his hand at her.

"I don't faint, if that's what you mean," he said, amused. "I haven't so far and I have no intention of changing that - so as I said, there's no reason why I shouldn't come. In fact, you two should go ahead and make sure we all have good seats. I can wait for Marinette here and then we'll join you at the cinema in no time. How about that?"

"Yeah, well, I think -" Alya began.

"I think it's a great plan, dude," Nino agreed zealously, grabbing his girlfriend's wrist and starting to drag her down the staircase. "I'm sure Marinette will be here soon - if not, then you can always go to the classroom and see what's taking her so long yourself. Good luck, dude!"

And with that they were gone, leaving him with a rush Adrien couldn’t understand if he had tried to. Feeling like he no longer needed to keep up appearances, he leaned against the bannister, deflated and prayed inwardly that Alya's half-playful prediction about him passing out would not come true after all.

Tumbling down the stairs certainly wouldn’t make him feel better.

"Why in magic's name would you agree to go anywhere in this state?" he heard a hoarse voice whisper right into his ear. He realised with dismay that Plagg had left his hideout once more, and that this time the kwami was perfectly ready to speak his mind on the matter at hand.

Adrien's head turned towards him as he shot him an impatient glare.

"You should not be out in the open like that," he repeated his statement from nearly an hour ago, although this time his tone carried much more irritation with it. "I told you we can't afford someone discovering you, especially when I'm too exhausted to think of any reasonable excuses for you."

"Oh, so I’m supposed to stay put when you go on endangering both our healths because you feel like watching a movie with your friends?" Plagg responded without missing a beat, his own voice heavy with derisiveness. "Now I may not be the most responsible of kwamis, but I won't sit still when you're behaving like an utterly reckless fool. Did you forget that I'm bound to you? Or that you were actually Cat Noir when that super-villain hit you, meaning that even if I wasn't, it still would have affected me as well? Do you have any idea what a sick kwami is like?"

"Will it make you more or less touchy than you usually are?" Adrien retorted on his part. "Oh, wait, I don't think it can get any worse, so I suppose we're good in that regard. Now, you really should hide yourself again, before Marinette actually leaves that classroom -"

"Are you really not getting it? You're putting both of us at risk just because you want to party with your friends!"

"I can't have them know something really is wrong!" Adrien shot back in an angry whisper, his grip on the bannister tightening involuntarily. "We both know it's more than a cold I am - we are - dealing with now, and that no amount of rest or hot water or camembert will cure it, so we can't just pretend it's a cold I'm fighting off. How am I supposed to explain anything to them if that excuse won't work? 'Hey, guys, that Cat Noir that got hit with cataclysm last week? That was me. Yeah, no, I'm okay, don't worry about it.'"

"Sarcasm doesn't suit you, kid."

"Well, I think I've been around you long enough to pick up some of your awful habits. And… I just really don't see a way for us to act other than to play along as if nothing was wrong in the first place. We can't cure it. The best we can do is to get used to the thought, and start practising our new everything-is-fine act, because heck, we're gonna need it. I'd say it's better to begin while I'm still in a relatively good form."

Plagg wasn't given a chance to answer him this time, as they both heard the noise of the classroom door opening, revealing a strangely put off Marinette, who was now leaving the room with her head bent low. Luckily for them, she was too determined to stare at the ground under her feet to take notice of the strange conversation she would have undoubtedly seen otherwise; and yet as grateful as Adrien was for the extra moments they thus gained, he was not at all happy to see her in such a state.

He inhaled deeply, instantly deciding to put away his personal worries and focus on the girl who was unconsciously approaching him. She was looking rather gloomy, indeed, but it didn't seem like it was anything a friendly talk and an evening with her friends couldn't fix - and he surely was up to fulfilling the first requirement before the second could happen. With a smile warmer than any of those he had summoned so far this day, he opened his mouth to greet her.

Only it wasn't the words that came out.

It was a cough.

#mlb #miraculous ladybug #ladynoir #marichat #adrienette #marinette dupain cheng #adrien agreste #miraculous ladybug: tales of ladybug and chat noir #chat noir #master fu #tikki #plagg

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mizutina · 4 years ago

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As someone who has been collecting manga since their early teens, many discussions never really reached my ears until I joined the community itself in the last few years. By many years, I mean late 2003/early 2004, I may have had a few times where I've stopped due to severe depressive episodes and financial strife due to being a young teen with no funds. So I know what it is like to long for manga but not being able to afford it brand new and having to stoop to scans and secondhands or borrowing off friends who can afford just a bit more.

Through the years, I accepted what the companies gave but after a while, you know what you want from what you buy, so I stopped being silent. What came from it, was something one could align with the sense of regret. A few years back I've even stopped reading scans unless it's to see if it's a series I really want and read no further than 3 chapters to decide. Any that I do want either goes on a list or enter the cart until payday. Sometimes, some even get bought in a heartbeat but again, it took me years to get to this stage where I can do that, have space for my series and even gain the confidence to share what I love but even then, some people don't like that and that's fine, it's their choice.

Don't get me wrong, a side doesn't regret making the amazing friends I now have but it regrets being so involved to the extent that I am classed as a villainess for asking for prints, since it's considered cancelling a company saying that I would rather have a printed copy over bits of data, especially for the insane prices they ask for and the lack of reassurance that it is as eternally as my copies seem to be, since if they take the digital away if the server or company goes bust.

I am the bad one for being apart of a chat group with people who love the things I do and have the hide to comment about things that make us unhappy, especially about companies and their lack of variety, especially for shojo. We also don't favour digital, which is our choice since it's our money we are spending. It is why I now keep comments sweet and simple when "nagging" for titles I'd love to see in print and not shit all over series even if it is pandering to lolicon fans, which is a sin to point out in the animanga community cause "it's a cartoon, it won't hurt anyone" or "age is just a number", which is a very telling sign about what kinds of people they are.

But that's a community, not everyone will get along nor share opinions that is on par to your own. Unless you have this obscene view of yourself being some sort of manga master which allows you to shit on others, insult them and basically shoving their opinion as facts, this is where the first two parts of my title comes in, the final part being the first thing I've talked about heh. Then again, these same people believe they are some sort of knowledge head or insider into these companies when, at best, they are hardcore fans that believe anything someone actually in the company says, even if the figures are cherry picked to all hell. I mean, come on guys, just cause you are given free copies doesn't make you any more special. You just supporting the company a bit less in order to promote in hopes that enough people buy to cover the fact the company sent out possibly 20 copies to other people like you and chip in for you getting one free instead of doing the right thing by BUYING THEIR OWN COPY TO SUPPORT THE INDUSTRY THEY ARE SO IN LOVE WITH, but oh well, they are above that apparently, they can do and say as they wish.

Like one says, do as I say not as I do.

So a few weeks ago, some dumbarses believe that secondhand buying and selling of a legally bought product is piracy. Anyone with half a brain and a search engine can prove otherwise. The other reason they claim is that it doesn't give back to the creators and company. Yes, that is correct but not everyone can buy new, not everyone has access to new series or even stores that stock series. Also, some companies have deemed some series either out of print (OOP) or the company is now defunct.

In that case, secondhand is the only option. Unlike some people, I'll admit to buying secondhand, my reasoning's are simple. I can't get some series due to OOP, cheaper as a bundle and, most importantly to me anyway, I rather they sell it to me than throw it away, it's better for the environment that way.

Sure, who knows what they will do with my cash but that's not my problem. I bought a manga from them that they legally bought. Just like when someone borrows from the library, they bought it and lend it to people, in some cases, depends on how many people borrow it, they give funds towards procuring more manga, which means the industry is still supported.

When some people start buying mangas, they usually start secondhand, find the series for them and then usually buy new ones, so in the end, they end up becoming a new consumer for the industry. For example, when I sell some mangas, I end up buying new ones cause I like to keep up with my pre-orders, I like being up to date and I love buying new series that fascinate me, I no longer buy for the sake of buying.

Then we have the selling aspect, since buying is piracy, so would selling right? apparently if the dumbarses do it themselves, it's fine, you just happen to be the bad guy buying from them as they possibly spend the buyers money on new mangas while pointing fingers and blaming others for the "piracy" that they basically contributed in.

Fun fact: don't go spouting off about buying new manga and saying buying second-hand is piracy when you both buy and sell mangas secondhand, you look foolish and defeats the purpose of the whole argument. Also, buy manga secondhand if the creator did a crime is okay but when you ask how bad the crime must be in order for it to be allowed, reflect by being a douche, totally helps the argument by reminding people how incredibly stupid your opinion really is.

My opinion? if you don't like what the creator did and don't want to support them, buy secondhand or don't bother with the series. Maybe buy the series, who knows, it's up to you. I'd support purely on the fact that other people put in their time and hard work into it and they deserve to have that acknowledgment, the scummy person can go eat a cold one for all I care, I don't think others should suffer for one criminal. Also, if they did pay for the crime, then power to them, as long as they learned from it, that deserves some respect.

Moral of the story; Secondhand is a very grey area, many start there and you should be praising them for buying legal copies, it will help them feel accepted and eventually buy more from their local stores and online. Bullying them for buying secondhand only makes them leave and not support the industry. Also, just don't be a gate-keeping dick. Manga is meant to be fun, being in a community is meant to be fun. Be fun with new collectors, help raise them up.

Now, recently, I saw another dumbarse mention Manga Hoarding or Manga Collecting cause apparently making videos showing hauls may be toxic and a form of hoarding.

Fun fact: hoarding and collecting are the two sides of the same coin. It's all about perspective.

One could say my large collection is hoarding. I would say I'm a collector and I love showing, sharing my collection with people in hopes that they may one day buy the series that I mention and love them as much as I do.

Also, this is also a money issue for some people, having a lot means having a lot of money. 1. Who cares about that, it's not your money they are spending. It's theirs. 2. If we use my hauls as an example, mine are large due to two reasons: I pre-order new series and bundle buy older series secondhand at a bargain price. It's a way to both show interest to companies when pre-ordering and it helps someone get rid of something you want, also to explore things you probably wouldn't think of buying. 3. What's it to anyone when it comes to how much someone has? It's got nothing, unless they are putting their own cash into that person, otherwise sit down and shut the hell up.

IMO, manga hauls are as toxic as someone perceives it to be. Me, like many others, enjoy seeing what others have and makes you think about what they have that you may end up wanting. This is where you ask the person about the series and, tied with piracy topic, you may end up buying the series which helps support the industry. Also, some people collect vast amount of mangas cause they love it, it helps them and should not be shamed for what they love. If you shame others, then you're a dick.

Which, like I said earlier or if I didn't say it clearly, these dumbarses who believe they are elitist, wants people to support the industry that they love so much but sometimes refuse to do themselves. Like mate, you say one thing but shit on people doing their best to support the industry their own way. You can't have the cake and eat it too, stop doing shit like this, keep a solid opinion and don't do shit that points out what a giant hypocrite you are.

But why use logic, that be too hard, right? Well, to me, it seems like people want drama, a reason to ostracise people from their Utopian community. It's quite unfair on people, telling them how to be a collector when it just feels like foolish projections.

Sure, I'm projecting a bit here, feeling their opinions of stupid people when I feel like it's more about how foolish and childish it all seems, how it feels like they just don't think further than "people should be like me and if they ain't, they are the toxic part of the community" which is not a healthy view to have.

Wooow, indeed I have written quite a bit about these topics which are so dear to me, especially as someone who has been supporting silently for years until recently. All the topics I have spoken about is basically something that can't be seen as black or white like the elitist pushes so hard since it's all grey area and to do with perspective.

I shall give it a rest now and read some manga, since that's what someone with a healthy habit does when they are taking a break. Heh.

#ramble #opinion #manga #piracy #secondhand #manga community #rant #just saying it

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lia-nikiforov · 6 years ago

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Spring 2018 Anime Final Review

So, uh, this is six months late. I’ve had half of this post in my drafts forever. To make it short, as I’ve mentioned previously, mom lost her job, which has not only been a heavy hit to my sense of stability for the last six months, but also means my time to watch anime was seriously reduced and even now a slight change of plans fucks up my whole schedule and sets me back for a full week. Anyway, nobody cares about any of these shows anymore so let’s get straight to it? I’m gonna ommit the two-cours that continued into the Summer - hopefully I’ll be able to make that post soonish? idk. Worst to best, same as usual

The crappy gender politics pit of shame

Darling in the FRANXX: I think everyone has ripped this show to threads at this point and there isn’t much I could add to that. It is quite funny to me to see how many people flipped out when the show went completely bananas in its last few episodes. Feels a bit like KADO, I’ve been telling y’all this was a ton of empty crap since episode 2, it just took the writing to completely self-destruct for everyone else to notice. A part of me feels tempted to do a long post breaking down just how badly the show collapsed in its final shebang, specifically how every single twist and turn completely nulled any remote kind of message or central thesis the show may have had, but at the same time it doesn’t seem worth the time. In the end, I may have given What is Internal Consistency, The anime way too much credit. It’s not hateful antigay propaganda, it’s just dumb as shits, with a writer and creators who didn’t think for half a second of the implications of what they were doing, and who were so incompetent they couldn’t even conserve the minimal plot and character coherency within a single episode, let alone 24. In other words, Darling isn’t saying “gays shouldn’t exist” but “I have no idea of anything regarding gay people”. What makes it egregious is that the show spent so much time acting like it was “meaningful” and “important” and yet it ended saying absolutely fucking nothing. Except mayb “have babies”. Down to oblivion you go, along with the likes of KADO, to the void of shows that couldn’t even be offensively bad and no one will remember a year from now. Bonus garbage points for the half-assed “bury your gays”.

Nil of Libra Admirari or whatever this show was called: I’m not trying to diss on the show, I just genuinely never remember the title because I have the JP and EN all mixed up. Not that it matters much, as far as I could tell, the show could call Shalabalabatuna and it would have the same significance in regard to the content. But the title isn’t important. In fact, it may be a bit unfair to have this show in this section. For the most part, Main Girl is very self-determined and has an active role in the story.... but then the last two episodes heavily featured a lot of rape threats or rape themes and forced pregnancy (real and threat) and I don’t really understand why they’d go there all of a sudden. One of them was treated relatively well, even empowering the victim in the process, but when the ikemen bad guy was rambling endlessly about how he wanted to impregnate the protagonist it really turned me off :/ I’m also not a fan of “main boy was her secret fiancé all along”, but at least they also handled that somewhat decently. It’s a very disposable series, but since I watched all of Amnesia, I think I owe every otoge adaptation at least the smallest chance to clear that very low bar, and Libra of Nil does it, more competently than most other stuff in the same genre.

Hisone to Masotan: I really, really wanted to love this show. Even now, as I put it in the pit of shame category, I’m pained. There was a good show in this, and a lot of it made it to the screen: an adorable, charming little story about a woman finding her place in the world, making new friends, finding her calling and bonding with an adorable dragon. Unfortunately, it got buried down under this opressing, horrendous gender politics that tried to do something with bringing attention to sexism in the military only to cancel it out making the one dude that embodied that sexism getting rewarded with the affections of a girl he explicitly tried to crush. It also called back on the virgin or whore fallacy and even managed to shove in a “bury your gays” trope. Even though Hisone challenges the ritual bullshit, it’s too little, too late, and she does end up carrying it out anyway, so the defiance to the status quo is of little importance in terms of problematizing the ritual itself. Sorry BONES, it wasn’t meant to be this time.

The ni fu ni fa section

Ni fu ni fa is a Mexican colloquialism for “It was okay but it didn’t change my life.”

Binan Koukou Chikyuu Boueibu HAPPY KISS: This soft reboot of the franchise had some really great episodes and did an actually good job of developping its characters. For the most part, it achieved what its predecessor did in terms of satirical comedy and I enjoyed it quite a bit. However, what bunked it down so low in the list was the final episode. At some point, the writers forgot they were doing a parody and made the show somewhat self-serious, way closer in tone to the magical girl anime it was supposed to be making fun of, rather than the satire its predecessor was. Whereas S1 ended with the whole Magical boy stuff being revealed as a crappy space reality TV show, this one ended with a real cheesy conflict about happiness and family and blablabla. Which is not bad by itself if this were a Precure show, but that kind of self-serious plot development just didn’t work for this series. I still enjoyed it, and the fanservice episode is one of the best of the whole franchise, but I’m a bit sad the finale missed the mark so badly.

Hinamatsuri: Hinamatsuri was very hit-or-miss for me. There were some truly brilliant episodes, a lot of funny vignettes and heart-warming stories, and then there was some stuff that made me uncomfortable -like every single Hitomi story- or felt unnecessary and dry. It also threw me off that the superpower dynamic completely disappeared in the second half of the show, especially in Anzu’s part of the story. It was okay but I feel like I needed something that felt like a closing, and choosing to end it with Mao who featured very minimally in the show overall didn’t cut it. It’s a fun show, I’d reccommend people check it out, but it felt a bit too disjointed for me

Persona 5: The Animation: This is a hard show to place because I love the looks of it and I think the concept is interesting and pretty cool, but there is something that’s keeping me from connecting emotionally to the story. The part where changing the villains’ heart makes them repent from their sins and become “good” feels very artificial and very tasteless when you’re dealing with rapists and abusers. I ended dropping it at episode 16, I just couldn’t find the motivation to catch up with the 6 episodes i’d fallen behind on because my schedule is a tragedy

Tokyo Ghoul: Re: I guess it’s fair to say I’ve kind of outgrown Tokyo Ghoul. There’s something messy and confusing about how this season panned out, and there comes a point in which misery porn just doesn’t cut it anymore. I still watch because Ishida has a way to make every single goddamn character extremely sympathetic, which makes for an emotionally engaging viewing even when you’re not sure of what the plot is supposed to be or who you should be rooting for. I tried picking up the new season that just started airing and immediately found I had no idea of what was going on, who was on who’s side and in general, who the fuck were 90% of the characters, so I dropped it.

Nanatsu no Taizai: Imashime no Fukkatsu: I’ve mentioned it before, this second season had the opposite problem than the first one: the pace was too slow. It took more than half of it to get to Escanor, and then the season ends at a kind of random spot. I really thought we’d get further along on the story, since Gowther’s backstory was hinted at in the openings, but no such thing happened. They did manage to give us a variety of cool moments and fights, and I love Ban so his scenes with Zhivago and Elaine made me quite happy, though I really wish the romance between Elizabeth and Meliodas wasn’t su dubious and cringy. In light of some revelations that take place further along the manga, going out of their way to emphasize that Meliodas was a sort of mentor figure for Elizabeth when she was a toddler seems unncessary and just very squeamish. I do hope we get a third season though, and an OVA of the Vampires of whatever side story would be great too.

Rokuhoudou Yotsuiro Biyori: I was pleasantly surprised by this show, and it’s closer to being one of my top of the season than it is to “meh”. It had some weaker, cheesier segments, but it also managed great whacky moments and a genuine soothing atmosphere. What surprised me most is that the vanilla looking cast of moderately handsome dudes managed to develop into interesting, funny individuals with a dynamic that made every episode enjoyable. A solid reccommendation for anyone wanting to see delicious looking food and moderately handsome dudes being ridiculous. Also, the cat episode is the best episode of anime ever produced.

The I’m probably the only person alive who enjoys these shows

Mahou Shoujo Ore: This is a difficult show to place because it wasn’t quite as great as I wanted it to be and its parodic nature took me by surprise, but somehow I was still seriously entertained more often than not. The twists in the final quarter and the absolutely bonkers finale was a total riot, but I definitely advise caution before going in, given that some of the jokes may seem insensitive or in poor taste in regards to gender presentation, sexuality and there are even some mild harrassment jokes that certainly made me roll my eyes.

Yowamushi Pedal: Glory Line: I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but I think through half of the show’s 25 episode run, I was convinced the title was actually Glory Road. It’s kind of anticlimactic that it’s called Glory Line if they don’t actually reach the final Goal btw. Anyway, I feel I say this a lot, but really, if you didn’t like the previous Yowapeda seasons, there’s nothing here for you, and if you did, you’re probably not gonna hop off this late in the game. This season does suffer from the same dragging than its predecessors, with the added issue of being quite pessimistic for no reason in about half the episodes, and a diminished presence for Onoda. I really wish they hadn’t dragged the Day 2 goal so long, I really hoped we’d see the end of the race, but no such luck I guess. Still love most of it and hope we get one more season or a movie to complete the story.

The favorites of the season

Golden Kamuy: In spite of its pacing issues, terrible animation and general clunkiness, I can’t help but love this show. When season 1 ended my feelings for it had mellowed quite a bit, but as soon as I picked up season 2 this Fall I just fell in love all over again. It’s fun, unique, over-the-top in some ways, incredibly grounded in others, and the dynamics between the characters are incredibly charming.

Hozuki no Reitetsu: It’s hard to talk about this one because it feels repetitive, given how tonally the show remains just the same across its three seasons. It could’ve very well been a one-season, 36 episode show, for how little it changes in spite of the time that transpired between the first season and the second. But in short, the comedy continues to be as spot on as always, the Zashikiwarashi twins are the best addition to the cast. It’s definitely a show I could watch endless episodes off, and the rare case of an episodic series with no overarching plot that I can enjoy wholeheartedly.

Card Captor Sakura: Clear Card arc: Over the course of the series, I’ve expressed a few concerns and misgivings about how the story of this 20th anniversary sequel was playing out. The final episode was particularly troublesome in that it left the story unfinished in spite of deviating from the manga. In spite of this, more than anything I’m very happy that this continuation still retains what made the original so special, that they captured the magic behind Sakura’s “everything will be alright” spell and gave us the chance to spend more time with these beloved characters and see their stories continue. The slow but sweet development of Sakura and Syaoran’s puppy love is a definite highlight. Needs more Touya/Yukito and Yue in general.

Piano no Mori: This show got heavily overlooked because it was kidnapped by Netflix (pls stop immediately), and then when it was finally unceremoniously dumped a month or two ago, it came under fire for the wonky CGI during the piano scenes -and it is indeed very wonky-. But beyond that, I found the story very engaging, especially because Kai is such a fascinating protagonist, his intense rivalry-friendship with Megane-kun (sorry, it’s been six months, i can’t remember names) is exactly the type I can’t help but root for. Kai’s participation in the final episode gave me goosebumps. I’m very happy we’re getting a continuation, can’t wait to see how the Chopin competition develops.

Wotaku ni Koi wa Muzukashii: Sweet, funny and absolutely delightful from start to finish, Wotakoi was easily one of the highlights of the season. Although there were some aspects about Cosplayer-senpai and Yuri Otaku-senpai’s (I’m really trying to remember the names, I’m sorry!! ;---;) that didn’t work for me -namely the izakaya segment- Narumi and Hirotaka more than made up for it with their clumsy yet adorable romance. I spent the entirety of the amusement park episode screeching. I really hope we get a continuation -and get a chance to see more of Hirotaka’s brother and his gamer friend too- and that in general we can get more anime about adult stories

Megalobox: Who would’ve thought that a show that wasn’t even in my radar before the season started would’ve end as one of my favorites, possibly of the year? Even as someone who’s only marginally acquainted with Ashita no Joe and has no interst in the sport of boxing, I was completely enthralled by the style and passion of this production. As I said a bit above, intense rivalries are very appealing to me, and the build up in the tension between Joe and Yuri was almost palpable, their mutual respect gave me chills. Definitely the surprise of the season, made even better by its optimistic happy ending to contrast with its predecessor’s tragedy. Megalobox is a unique anniversary project that is closer to an homage and it works perfectly. Definitely check it out.

That’s it for the Spring season! I hope i can do the summer season this weekend and maaaybe even my watchlist for the Fall season. Fingers crossed i won’t get swallowed up in other stuff :’D

#anime final impressions #spring anime #god i've forgotten 95% of my tags #darling in the franxx #megalobox #wotaku ni koi wa muzukashii #piano no mori #card captor sakura clear card arc #hozuki no reitetsu #golden kamuy #yowapeda #mahou shoujo ore #rokuhoudou yotsuiro biyori #nanatsu no taizai #persona 5 #tokyo ghoul: re #hinamatsuri #hisone to masotan #binan koukou chikyuu boueibu

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