#and its only now occurring to me that people probably think Sam

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive

LOUISE RAW speaks to Long Covid sufferer Sam Williams and others who feel let down by a state that ignores their debilitating illness

ON NOVEMBER 29 this year, a groundbreaking study by German research centre Helmholtz Munich and Munchen University was published.

It seems to confirm beyond doubt that the condition we call Long Covid (LC) is “real” — physiological, as opposed to psychological.

The long-lasting brain effects many sufferers have reported may finally be explained by its findings — that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein remains in the brain’s protective layers and the bone marrow of the skull, for up to four years after infection.

This, researcher say, may trigger chronic inflammation, and an increased risk of neurodegenerative disease.

You could almost hear the Long Covid community’s weary, collective “We told you so!”

It’s been a long and draining few years for them, as sufferer and activist Sam Williams told me recently when I spoke to him about the hand-grenade LC had lobbed into his and his family’s lives.

Sam says he feels as if he’s in mourning for the life he had before — and, in 2019, it was a good one.

Sam was a fit and healthy husband and father, probably fitter than most men in their forties, with a very active lifestyle, including running marathons.

Now, he describes himself as “completely broken.”

Sam has lost not just the everyday things — the ability to work and to drive — but much of the fun of life, too. Family bike rides, camping trips and long walks with the dogs are now a thing of the past.

Sam can’t relax with a drink, because alcohol makes his symptoms worse; and, he says, has rarely been able to be sexually intimate with his wife since becoming ill, which has naturally affected their relationship.

Sam’s wife has had to take on a higher-paid job to cover bills, and to take over far more household chores. “It’s like a whole new relationship,” Sam says. He feels guilty about this, and although he knows, logically, it’s not his fault, that doesn’t stop the self-blame. At times, he tells me he’s felt hopeless, and even suicidal.

It’s incredible how we ignore the growing group of people enduring similar experiences. It is also partly because we ignore it that the LC community continues to grow. Fresh infections occur as people eschew masks and other simple mitigations; so new cases of Long Covid develop, and older ones are worsened by repeat infections.

Currently more than two million people in the UK say they’re suffering the effects of Long Covid, and the vast majority — 1.5 million — find their everyday lives impacted.

An astonishing one third of all health care workers have Long Covid symptoms, and 1 per cent of all our children.

More than half of those reporting Long Covid symptoms say they’ve been suffering for two years or more.

As there’s still no diagnostic test, we can only say people report themselves as LC sufferers.

Accordingly, people can’t seem to resist “helpful” advice: Think positive! Just get on with it! Have you tried this essential oil?

No chronic illness sufferer has, as far as I know, ever recovered due to being told it might be in their head; it’s an attitude that has made Sam himself sicker, as he’s tried to “push through” his symptoms — which only increased them.

While we don’t know yet how the Munich study will be received, change seems likely to be slower than sufferers would like, and than we all need.

The current situation leaves people who are already exhausted and overwhelmed by illness facing further battles: with ignorance, with self-blame, and with the system, as they struggle for a diagnosis.

Sam is not alone in saying he feels abandoned by a society in “deep denial” about his condition. This sense of isolation is all the greater for being one of very few Long Covid activists of colour; he also suspects this makes it even harder for him to get his voice heard.

The media seems generally uninterested; this should be a national story, but appears to be regarded as yesterday’s news. LC is just not, it seems, in any sense “sexy.”

Two of the UK’s best-known writers share Sam’s struggle.

It’s well-known that Michael Rosen became seriously ill with Covid after contracting it in March 2020.

The bestselling author, poet and presenter was in a coma for 40 days, in intensive care for 48, and in hospital for a total of three months.

Rosen still has blurred vision he suffers in his left eye, and hearing loss in his left ear, which unbalances him.

“I’ve also got numb toes. It’s as if you have these strange cushions underneath your feet,” Rosen said in a recent interview.

“It’s possible that these creaks and pains which I call ‘pinball pains’ around my body have increased a lot since Covid. But if I do a lot of stretching, that does help.”

Rosen had also some counselling to talk through the hallucinations and delirium he experienced in hospital, although he says his dreams were “more hippy-like than nightmarish” — he can recall bizarre visions of, inexplicably, German Christmas parties. His sleep remains disturbed:

“There are some nasty moments when I wake up in the night. I call it ‘Lonely Corridor Syndrome’. As I’m lying there, I’m instantly back in the hospital lying there. It’s a very mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“There’s not much you can do about it immediately. I have to go into various forms of mental and physical tricks to play on myself to put it away again. It’s a sense of loneliness.”

Rosen described his ordeal and recovery in Many Different Kinds Of Love, combining prose and verse with enduring tribute to the NHS. It’s a good sign that his latest book is called Getting Better; but it’s still an ongoing process, and Rosen acknowledges the importance of family support, not available to all: “I dread to think what it would have been like if I’d just come home to an empty house.”

Another acclaimed author and LC sufferer is AL Kennedy.

I spoke to Kennedy about how she feels now, as she recovers from another Covid bout. A very fit woman with a punishing schedule, Kennedy has found her literary skills affected as well as her body: “With the LC my heart beat is still 10/15 bpm faster when I’m just generally unfit — much faster than my fit rate.

“I can work, but I’m slower.”

I can’t see a drop in quality in new work she’s kindly sent me compared to her old: but Kennedy of course knows her style better than anyone, and she can. It’s frustrating: “[My work] still needs more rewrites than it did. I need a lot more rest. The thyroid rumbles along in the background. If I lecture, I have to set out notes for safety and follow them.”

She was used to being able to speak spontaneously and just follow the track her mind took.

“I’m way better than I was,” Kennedy reflects: “In 2021 I would be knocked out for weeks at a time. Semi-permanent migraine, couldn’t finish sentences, couldn’t remember tasks to complete them, probably not a safe driver...”

Life is still not the same: “A lot has improved, but I live in fear of re-infection; and group work is hard to run in a mask. When I’m working at a uni, or travelling, I am basically in a mask for seven or eight hours straight... I compromise on stage without a mask and then signing [books] with one... It’s miserable,” she concludes.

The future is unpredictable, both in how Britain will react to the news out of Munich and how the condition will develop: researchers have found evidence of the protein spike four years after infection not because it goes away after that, but because four years is all the distance we currently have from those first infections.

As Sam says, “Many people recover. Many people get worse. A few weeks ago, I met Alan, who got Long Covid in March 2020. This March he had a mini-stroke, and lost the sight in one eye overnight.”

Sam tends to operate on pure adrenalin, which is unsustainable long-term, and means his Long Covid activism takes a toll on him: as much as he wants to raise awareness, and as vital as that is, every article he writes, every radio appearance, drains his limited resources of energy. A Catch-22 situation.

Sam is not impressed by the new government’s response so far.

Although figures reveal LC leading to higher healthcare demands and costs, meaning it is both an economic and ethical imperative to tackle it, the Department for Health and Social Care seems coy about its plans.

Parliamentary Under-Secretary Andrew Gwynne admitted, in response to a parliamentary question form the Greens, that he chaired a “roundtable” of researchers and “people with lived experience” in October this year.

The LC community has been unenthusiastic about what it calls this “secret meeting” to which they say they were not invited: and they want concrete information about Gwynne’s next steps.

Sam considers himself to have disabilities as a result of LC, as many do; he is also extremely concerned by the late November passing of the Assisted Dying Bill.

“I am absolutely horrified by it,” he tells me.

“In Canada, they started off with assisted dying only applying to the terminally ill.

“Then they expanded to include chronically ill and disabled people.

“I, and many other disabled people, are terrified it will happen here in the same way. And there’s no coincidence that the Assisted Dying Bill comes at the same time as the white paper on Getting Britain Working.”

The government must act fast to take on board the Munich findings, and involve activists like Sam and the wider the LC community in an open and transparent process for future funding, support, treatment and mitigation.

This is a frightening and unpredictable condition which could affect any one of us at any time: and an increased cohort of people with disabilities at a time when our National Health Service has been pushed to its knees is alarming.

Labour must act fast, must involve activists like Sam Williams, and must make Long Covid a priority, if we’re not going to deepen what is already a crisis.

[theboombutton]

Bad Fictional Data vs Fictional Bad Data

WARNING: This post will include discussion of a name that might be Alice Dyer's deadname. I won't be calling Alice by this name or using it in the context of that name being a pointer to Alice, but I will be using the name, uncensored, when talking about where and why the name appeared in chdb.xls .

----

You may know that as part of the ARG, the sleuths on Statement Remains uncovered a document called chdb.xls, allegedly a list that has something to do with The Magnus Institute. There's a list of names, ID numbers, first and last names, dates of birth, and information apparently related to each person's "score" in an assortment of psychological/personality tests. Three of the names in particular have stood out in a lot of analyses: Samama Khalid, Gerard Kaey [sic], and Connor Dyer.

You likely don't know that the commonly linked version of the spreadsheet, ported to Google Docs and linked in the TMAGP ARG Masterdoc, is presented out of order. (I'm guessing they didn't lock down editing until it was already all out of order from various people messing with it - totally understandable, this is not a callout post, thank you for making this easily accessible to people.)

But let me tell you about something I discovered by looking at the spreadsheet in its original order, and the almost certainly incorrect rabbit hole of theorizing it has sent me down.

Bad Fictional Data

Until episode 2 I had the same thought about the Dyer listed in the spreadsheet that I think most people did: that it was Alice's deadname, and that she had therefore been one of the Institute's young subjects. But after Alice had absolutely no reaction when Sam mentioned the Magnus Institute to her in episode 2, I now think this is significantly less likely.

Don't get me wrong: it's still reasonable to think that the Dyer listed in chdb.xls is Alice. Maybe she had some kind of supernatural experience that wiped her memory. (It probably wasn't that Alice was too young to remember, as the Dyer on the spreadsheet is listed as being at Piaget Stage 3, which occurs from 7-11 years old; but it's always possible that the Magnus Institute was using the names of legitimate psychological tests to hide their tracks when recording more esoteric data.) The point is, this isn't hard evidence that Alice has no connection to the Magnus Institute; it just made me go looking for more evidence.

I went back to the spreadsheet to look for more clues about whether or not this was Alice's deadname. What I found instead was some extremely sloppy fake data at the bottom of the spreadsheet.

For context, here are first ten names in the spreadsheet:

Note how each ID begins with the name's first and last initial.

Now check out the last ten names:

Not only do these IDs no longer always match their subjects' names, they occur in order: CD, EF, GH, IJ, KL, MN, OP, QR, ST, UV. The first names of each pair match the first letter of each ID, but many, though not all, of the surnames don't match the second letter.

My first thought was that whoever Rusty Quill had contracted to generate these names had gotten sloppy at the end of the list, created the IDs all at once using this alphabetical pattern, and picked names to fill in that roughly matched the IDs. But hey, we could use this to our advantage! Any name that was filled in as part of a series of IDs with an alphabetical pattern like this could be removed from consideration for red string analysis - we'd know they were meaningless fakes added by a lazy contractor, and not clues or characters that might show up again later.

Scrolling back up the spreadsheet, we can see the person generating the data having more care the earlier we go. We find the beginning of the AA/BC/DE/FG/HI pattern at line 136, but at first, the names mostly conform to the initials they've been given. JK09874 "Josie Jordan" at line 154 is the first break from the "first two letters of the ID are their initials" pattern; and breaks occur more often the further you go down the sheet.

Scrolling up to before line 136 (AA09911 - Aaron Atkinson), while the pattern isn't yet at AB/CD/EF/GH levels of obviousness, the first initials are still in alphabetical order. Zoe Hart follows Yara Logan follows Xavier Freeman follows Wyatt Edwards. The data creator skips a few letters - for example Niamh Fenton is followed by Phoebe Emmett, and S and T are together in the same line in Skye Travers.

We can follow this less-obvious version of the alphabetical pattern up to an abrupt break right at line 118, above which the IDs don't follow an alphabetical pattern at all. (They might follow a different pattern, but it's not one that I've found yet.) So that means we can discount all the names in line 118 and below as purely fake, generated lazily by a contractor, and not worthy of our attention for the purposes of red-stringing. Right?

What the fuck?!

(highlight is my own, it is not present in the original document)

My first thought was that the sloppy data generator had done the funniest thing imaginable, sending everyone on a wild goose chase about Alice's deadname just by having the name "Dyer" on the brain while looking for a surname that started with D. This would be Very Funny. No plot relevance, no implications, just the brain fart that launched a thousand theories.

My second thought was that maybe Connor Dyer was the last legit name on the list, and whoever started filling the rest of the sheet in with alphabetical junk data was inspired by the "CD" initials in the first place - whoever it was went on from there.

These are both valid thoughts! But I prefer my third thought:

What if it's on purpose?

Fictional Bad Data

There is a very obvious break between the set of data that doesn't look obviously* fake, and the set of data that is immediately identifiable as such. If we assume that this was intentional - and I want to reiterate that it all being unintentional is still a very real possibility here - why would someone at Rusty Quill want the data to be structured like this?

If the sharp dividing line between reasonable-seeming data and obviously fake data is intentional on RQ's part, it would suggest that we should take the data above row 118 as in-universe real data, and the data below row 118 as in-universe falsified data. It suggests that someone, either at the Institute or after its demise, was adding nonexistent children to the roster of The Magnus Institute. Why would someone want to do that?

There are all kinds of possible reasons, but here are a few off the top of my and my theorizing buddies' heads:

Financial fraud (institutional edition). If the Magnus Institute received funding on a per-child basis, they'd have an incentive to inflate their numbers.

Financial fraud (researcher edition). One or more people on staff were blowing off their child-analysis sessions and recording fake numbers for fake children. This would be ballsy as hell if they could be fired for it, but it was the Magnus Institute, so there's decent odds they couldn't be.

Scientific fraud (faking conclusions edition). The Magnus Institute in the Protocolverse claimed to be doing research on giftedness in children, which is the kind of thing that you'd normally publish in a scientific journal. It's not unheard-of for dickhead academics to falsify data to generate statistically significant results, since statistically insignificant results aren't going to get you published.

Scientific fraud (obscuring paranormal bullshit edition). If the Magnus Institute was using legitimate psychological test names to record Fear-related test results, it's possible their results showed different patterns from what you would expect from the real tests. They could have added the fake children to balance out the dataset as a whole.

Pseudonyms. The children are all real, the Institute just started using fake names for them for privacy purposes. They couldn't go back and change the names they'd already written properly for some reason. Probably something paranormal.

Those are all pretty interesting possibilities, and if we could narrow them down, it might tell us something about what things were like at the Magnus Institute before it burned down!

And the other big question is: why did RQ make the dividing line between the two sections, the first likely-fake entry, Connor Dyer?

One straightforward reason could be as a troll, a red herring to watch fans get in a lather over. And once the community inevitably noticed all the obviously falsified entries, RQ could eat popcorn and watch us lose our minds over whether or not that's even a real entry! (That sounds really fun, I would absolutely do that.)

But let's dig a little deeper, and look at what Connor Dyer being on the border between the real and fake entries would mean in-universe. Because of its position as the border between real and fake, it would be very easy for that entry to be accidentally included in the wrong group - a real research subject discarded as fake, or perhaps more interestingly, a fake research subject accidentally reclassified as real.

Remember, if a name is fake in the context of the Magnus Institute's research, that doesn't mean that the name itself is made up. If I was trying to think of a name that fit the initials CD, and those were the initials of my next door neighbor's kid, I might just write their name in as a lark. Especially if it was my first time trying to get away with falsifying information: this is a kid that verifiably exists and lives in the area.

My theory, supported primarily by my love for The Implications instead of actual evidence

Twenty years on, after all institutional memory of the fraud was long gone, trans icon Alice Dyer applies to work for the OIAR - an institution that (according to this theory) has an unofficial preference for hiring former Magnus Institute kids.

They are very confused when Alice proceeds to act nothing like a former Magnus Institute kid. It doesn't occur to anyone that her entry might have been falsified. What reason would anyone have to do that?

----

* Of course people with a background in data analysis or statistics will see immediately that even above line 118 this is a wild-ass dataset that would raise red flags for falsification, but at least it's not "the alphabet over and over" levels of obvious.

[goshen-applecrumbledore]

20 fanfic author questions

tagged by @runawaydr3amerao3 to do this, excited as always to talk about myself, let's gooooooo

1. How many works on AO3?

52 and I can only ballpark how many have been orphaned. probably about 12.

2. Total AO3 word count?

953,146. Jesus christ

3. Top 5 fics by kudos?

all of these are old as hell which is why they're top. they are not all good.

transposition ciphers (9,010) fma, roy/ed

the hang of being alive again (3,600) the raven cycle, adam/ronan

not funny (3,573) check please (eugh), holster/ransom

awful wonderful (3,564) naruto, kakagai

hard reset (3,162) fma, roy/ed

4. What fandoms do you write for?

Currently, technically, just spn, the bear, true detective and house md. but fma is never far from my mind. my otp no matter how much time passes...

5. Do you respond to comments?

Up until very recently I never did because it never occurred to me. I wasn't trying to be a dick, I just didn't know I was supposed to. then I went through a period during spn after learning that where I felt bad and replied to everything. Now I reply to comments that ask me a question or are thought-provoking. I want to answer and to applaud. people leave comments that are more beautiful than the actual fic, you people are very smart and insightful.

6. Angstiest ending?

I'm not good at writing sad endings!! I believe in love! but, for this audience, worthless cartography. sam and dean hook up for the first time right before ahbl pt 2 and then sam dies, so dean thinks it's his fault in a divine retribution kind of way, so when sam is alive again, dean rebuffs him. I always meant to write a second part, but without it, it's pretty sad.

7. Fic with the happiest ending?

I was going to say pine sweat but I remembered it takes place in S5 so sam is dead within a fortnight lmao. it's definitely hard reset, an fma roy/ed fic. it's 15 years post-canon and after a lot of yearning and trying to make it work, they make it work. very blue skies everybody wins.

8. Do you get hate?

Not much these days, but I used to. mostly for writing roy/ed, with a big age/power gap, and for my novel with the same. for writing hockey rpf ships people didn't like, someone threatened to call my office and tell my bosses I was a pedophile. also when I was 13 I wrote a very OOC house/wilson fic and someone said it sucked and I got so mad I started writing original works out of spite (because nobody could tell me they were ooc)

9. Do you write smut?

Very much so, as a treat/reward/resolution to a story, much like sex is irl, lol. I rarely write smut on its own (blood sacrifice sex magic type of thing would be the closest, or middle name) not because I have anything against it but because in my own work I wanna feel very much like it's THE characters, whoever they are, and plot is the easiest way to do that. if I wanna just crank my hog I can do that on my own time.

10. Do you write crossovers?

Nosiree, I'm boring. no crossovers or AUs. barry tells me I will want to write an spn/x files crossover though, and because he's the one that got me into spn I've learned not to tell him he's wrong.

11. Ever had a fic stolen?

Yes actually, someone put huge swaths of one of my yakuza fics into a majima/reader fic. I opened a ticket with AO3 but they said it wasn't clear cut enough. I didn't pursue because I don't care.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yes, this is my favourite thing!!! such a compliment and a beautiful reminder, in english speaking internet and under the shadow of the US, that there are other folks online. several of my spn fics have been translated into mandarin and 2 of my expanse fics have been translated into russian.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic?

Once, in hockey fandom, with someone I didn't like very much. she wasn't a good writer and it was a disaster. I don't remember what happened to it. I wouldn't do it again lol.

14. All time favourite ship?

If I'm honest it's gotta be roy/ed from fma. what if this very annoying kid sauntered into your life but then he grows up and he's brilliant and noble and beautiful and haunted and also the specialist boy in the world, but you're a decorated military official in a corrupt dictatorship and the kid hates your guts and you will never be able to forgive yourself for your past war crimes so why should this beautiful genius like you anyway?? anyway. im over that now

15. WIPs you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

A wincest john finds out kind of full-house-of-wincest type situation. somebody with a fundraiser fic should email me and tell me to swap their fic to that one. who said that

16. Writing strengths?

Dialogue and canon-complianticity

17. Writing weaknesses?

Nobody tells me what I suck at so I don't FULLY know, but. Speed. Grammar. Flexibility. everything I write sounds like everything else I write and I reuse the same words and idioms, like same song syndrome but for writing. a greatest hits album.

18. Thoughts on mixed language dialogue?

Only thing I've done in my fics is kind of a crossed-out written words in an epistolary fic. I've maybe had a few french lines in a fic but I don't think so because it was referencing subtitles. haven't read much either, so, no opinions. but I will say it's shit to do a weird patois in your English language dialogue

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Naruto baybeeeee. when I was 11 my sister found my scanned fan art of naruto and sasuke kissing on deviantart. I didn't even think she was on deviantart. 

20. Favourite fic you've ever written?

Hangdog, easily, but I think that's only because true detective s1 is remarkably rich and good so I'm really just drafting off marty and rust's coattails. but also probably Matryoshka dolls for spn, because it feels very well considered and tied together and intentional and satisfying, to me. but it deserves merit because as any spn fan knows, you gotta have a rich inner universe in order to truly play in their space. cw gets no credit.

EDIT: or, actually, my venture bros fic, lol. there was something very lovely about writing fic for a show that in no way makes me horny. Just a show I love very much.

No tags because I don't know anyone anymore but tag me if you do it because of me and I'll read it!

[thefreshprinceofjunes]

soriku endgame: an imagining

OKAY WELL HERE IT IS

TEN WHOLE PAGES OF HOW SORIKU ENDGAME MIGHT ACTUALLY PLAY OUT

i was rewatching vin play RE2 and fsr this invaded my thoughts and wouldnt leave

this is barely proofread and i reused a lot of the same words/phrases BUT its just meant to be an outline/abridged version so keep that in mind

(if i got any lore wrong tho pls let me know)

btw if you dont want to read this on tumblr for whatever reason, heres a link to the google doc

note: this is going off the assumption MoM saw everything (or at least everything soriku) through the gazing eye

scene is quadratum probably. master of masters (or whoever the bad guy in kh4 is) has sora and riku caught in a bad situation (for temporary visuals im picturing something similar to the dark guardian restraining aqua and ven in kh3)

sora and riku are struggling to break free, while the MoM just laughs. some kh dramatic banter occurs, before MoM changes the subject and starts monologuing (with sora and riku probably interjecting here and there)

MoM: [to sora] you still havent figured it out yet, have you?

MoM: dont you ever wonder why rikus heart holds as vast of a darkness as it does?

MoM: its not because of jealousy, or ansem, or even his desire for strength since you were children.

MoM: no, its much simpler than that.

MoM: remember that dream you had, sora? before the islands were destroyed?

MoM: there was a voice speaking to you, from deep within your heart:

MoM: 'the closer you get to the light, the greater your shadow becomes.'

MoM: well, the road goes both ways, kid. the deepest of darknesses can only come from the brightest of lights.

sora: wh-what are you saying?

MoM: its been in front of all along, but you were too blind to see it.

cut to voiceless flashbacks of all the times sora encountered the brightest light: when receiving the keyblade, when almost pulled out of sleep by the memory of aqua on DI, during the dive to heart at the beginning of kh3 (assuming it really happened and wasnt just for gameplay purposes), and after using the power of waking at the KBG (the tunnel scene)

sora looks at riku, then back at MoM. riku is grimacing.

sora: that… that was… that was rikus light?

MoM: bingo!

MoM: but theres even more to it than that.

MoM: theres another force of power in this universe that keeps light and dark in harmony

sora: another…?

MoM: you feel an unfathomable depth of it in your heart for, well, pretty much everyone youve ever met.

MoM: what lies in rikus heart, however, comes from the same place, but is also very, very different. its something you claim to not understand, even though youve encountered it many times during your adventures.

rikus eyes widen and he tries to interject, but the MoM physically stops him; sora calls out for him

MoM: its more than just friendship. its hearts that are really, truly connected between two people.

MoM: think about it. think about all the times when everything seemed hopeless, but something, something, kept the bad guys from winning. it wasnt light.

cut to voiceless flashbacks between many of the disney couples sora has met: the beast arriving at hollow bastion out of sheer force of will in his search for belle, flynn sacrificing himself for rapunzel and her tears bringing him back to life (some shit with will/elizabeth and sam/quorra too maybe idk), and finally, herc gaining his strength back as he rescues megara from styx, followed by herc saying, 'people always do crazy things when theyre in love.'

sora stares ahead at nothing in particular, before wincing in pain; suddenly, a forgotten memory surfaces in his mind (if the convo with NS confirms he hasnt completely forgotten, then its the key details that have been missing):

rikus sacrifice in the KBG

riku calls out for him and struggles, but MoM just laughs some more.

MoM: there, now its coming back to you. and that wasnt the only time riku sacrificed everything for you, yknow, although it was probably the most heroic instance. remember him taking on ansems form to beat roxas? and his dive into your heart to wake you from slumber, despite the tremendous danger? you only met her briefly, but one of the princesses of heart experienced something very similar.

MoM: aurora. maleficent placed a curse on her when she was a baby, causing the princess and the rest of the kingdom to fall into a deep sleep on her 16th birthday. but the heir to a nearby kingdom, prince phillip, valiantly fought his way to the castle, and woke up the sleeping beauty– through a kiss. a kiss, of true… 

MoM trails off and looks at riku, then back at sora, expectantly. riku is still struggling to free himself before the truth is revealed, but its no use.

sora stares off again, before looking MoM in the eyes.

sora: … love…?

MoM does jazz hands and poses.

MoM: ding ding ding ding! we have a winner! it only took you, what, 12, 13 years to figure it out? honestly, i just couldnt stand watching it go on for any longer.

MoM: but, hey, i still have my honor. if im wrong, im more than happy to apologize.

MoM turns to riku then.

MoM: well? am i wrong, riku?

riku doesnt respond, and MoM sighs dramatically.

MoM: still no answer? okay, guess well have to do this the hard way.

MoM starts hurting sora, causing him to cry out in pain while riku watches helplessly 

MoM: come on, riku! do it! use your true strength! unleash the power hidden within your heart!

sora gasps and winces, barely getting out rikus name 

suddenly, theres a bright flash of pink energy (maybe rikus eyes also turn dream eater pink too?)

(if the power of love is too cheesy even for kh, then maybe its a black and white darkness/light combo attack)

riku breaks free of whatever MoM did to him, and then channels the energy through his arm, blasting it through soras restraints.

unfortunately, sora was being held in the air, and starts to fall– but in the blink of eye, riku is there to catch him in his arms.

MoM laughs in triumph and draws back slightly.

MoM: there we go!

MoM then shrugs.

MoM: well, this was fun, but ive got places to be. and im sure you two have a lot to talk about. toodles!

MoM disappears, leaving sora and riku in stunned silence.

after a moment, riku sets sora down and turns away from him, avoiding soras gaze.

sora meanwhile takes a second to catch his breath, before staring at riku with wide eyes.

sora: r… riku… is… is that...? is that really… how you feel?

riku clenches his fists at his sides and stays turned away. after a pause, he responds.

riku: … even if it is, it doesnt matter.

sora: what do you mean?

riku: i know… im not the one for you.

riku takes a deep breath.

riku: … when you were put to sleep for a year to fix your memories, some of them found their way into xion. they happened to be your most important memories– the ones you couldnt wake up without.

riku: those… were your memories of kairi. and xion took on her appearance because of them.

sora is stunned, only having been vaguely made aware of what happened in that year.

sora: k… kairi?

riku nods solemnly.

riku: yeah. and the only reason your memories got messed with in the first place is because the organization forced namine to make herself the person most important to you, instead of kairi.

sora pauses.

sora: you mean… castle oblivion.

riku nods again.

sora watches, before feeling a pain in his heart and grabbing at his chest instinctively.

underneath his hand, he can feel the cold metal of his crown necklace.

and thats when it finally clicks.

everything blurs, and theres a sudden rush of memories.

(maybe a memory sequence that you actually play through?)

sora, holding kairis wayfinder in castle oblivion. suddenly, the memory gets static-y, like during soras memory restoration.

cut to namine confessing to sora shes not the girl he cares about– but every time the word is feminine, its distorted by video static. (this is how we fix the aitsu thing)

"no. the g̸͓̦͙̫̮̦̠͗͐͗̊͑̕͝i̷͖̝̝̱̐ͅͅŗ̸̄̆̓̆̊̄̿l̶̮͉̦͓͔̹̀̂͗͝ͅ you care about...the one who was always with you... its not me. its ḧ̴̳͔̻̾̇e̵͚͂̀r̸̺̣̠̓̂̀̚."

cut to namine speaking to sora before he goes to sleep.

“but theres another promise you made—a promise to someone you could never replace. s̵̹̀͗͜h̷͇͇͌̆̐e̷̡̛̱'̷̦̆s̵̫͖̦̄̈̄ your light. the light within the darkness. if you can remember h̷̼̼̜͚͒e̸̢̡̤̹̬͖͐̒͒̾r̸͓̣̜̼̜̠͚͂̋̃...all the memories lost in the shadows of your heart will come into the light."

cut to a flashback of repliku talking about their shared promise. again, the feminine words are indecipherable.

"there was a meteor shower one night when s̶̳̄͑̆̅̆͗h̴͍̞͖͙͑̔̋̈́̎̈̾ę̷̧̰̰̖̝͆̆̕̚ and i were little... n̸̨̙̼͑̽ả̴̗͕̮́͊͝m̴̻̳͚̒i̸̳̟͑n̶̡̥̋̑̌é̸͍̦͑͐͋́ got scared and said, what if a shooting star hits the islands? so i told ḧ̷̡̬̽̅͆̊ė̸̙̩̠̥̿̃̚͠r̶̛̥̻̖̉̾̽͝, if a shooting star comes this way, ill protect you! and then—"

cut back to the memory pod.

"look at the g̴̬͛̄̚͘ŏ̴̞̙̰̍͂̀ö̴̘̥̗̱̐͋͆ͅď̷̨͙̙̩̓́͝ ̸̢̋̈́̂̚ļ̷̯̥̲̪̐̋͌̾̚ṵ̵̼̥̥͖̎c̸̱̟̹̚ķ̸̭̱̖̓̇ͅ ̷͇̳̃̑́͑͐͜ͅc̸̢̤̈̈́̊̚̕h̵̙̗̓͊̾ͅą̷̣̮̞̾̈́r̶̜̜͓̥̀́͋͝m̸̺̖͈̖͓̊̀̕. i changed its shape when i changed your memory. but when you thought of ẖ̴͚̙̆ȅ̴̡̛̞̲̥̼̋͐r̸̹̱̐, it went back to the way it was."

finally, a few more lines from namine.

"remembering one thing leads to remembering another, and then another... your memories are connected, like links in a chain. those same chains are what anchor us all together. i dont destroy memories. i just take apart the links and rearrange them. you still have all your memories."

cut back to sora in the real world. everything is still blurry, but now rikus voice can be heard in the background calling for him, distorted.

and then, a flash of light.

nighttime. its still. everything is quiet and peaceful.

young sora and riku are walking back from the beach.

suddenly, theres a bright streak across the sky. 

sora and riku both gasp.

then, another. and another. and another.

the night of the meteor shower.

riku watches the sky in amazement– until he feels a tug on his arm.

he glances at his side and sees sora, utterly terrified and clinging on to him for dear life.

sora: wahhhh!! r-r-riku, the sky is falling!!

riku laughs.

riku: no, those are shooting stars. theyre way up high in the sky.

sora however is not convinced, and keeps shaking as tears start to well up in his eyes.

sora: b-but…! theres so many of them. and theyre so fast!! what if a shooting star hits the islands?!

the reality of soras mood finally sets in, and riku is left staring as he tries to think of what to do.

hanging from his pocket is his wooden sword.

the words of the man with the real sword echo in his mind:

“no more borders around, or below, or above, so long as you champion the ones you love."

riku grabs his sword then and holds it up to the sky as he looks at sora, courage glinting in his eyes.

riku: if a shooting star comes this way, ill protect you! ill hit it right back into outer space!

sora sniffles as he watches riku swing the sword around.

sora: r-really?

riku nods his head confidently.

riku: i will. i promise!

after a moment of thought, riku reaches into his pocket and pulls out a silver chain with a crown dangling from the end.

riku: here. take this. i found it the other day.

with the magic of cutscene, riku somehow turns the chain into a necklace, and then reaches over to hang it around soras neck.

riku: whenever you get scared, all you have to do is look at this, and remember that ill always be there to protect you. no matter what.

tears run down soras face as he looks at the necklace.

the voice of the strange girl theyd met before rings through his mind:

"so then if something happens, and riku is about to get lost—or say, he starts wandering down a dark path alone—you make sure to stay with him and keep him safe. thats your job, sora, and im counting on you to do it, okay?"

sora gulps and then reaches out to grab rikus free hand in both of his own. riku is surprised by this.

sora: ill… ill protect you too! i-i know im not as strong as you, but ill… ill try! i promise!

riku is taken aback for a moment, before he smiles gently at sora.

riku: … thanks, sora.

afterward, a multitude of quick flashbacks to all the times sora and riku protected each other, culminating in seeing the KBG sacrifice one more time.

fade to back.

in a hotel room (or smth similar), sora suddenly sits up straight in a bed, heart beating rapidly.

sora: riku!

(paralleling when riku called out for him after waking up from the dive into his heart in ddd)

riku has been seated at the edge of the bed, waiting and worrying. when he realizes soras awake, he scoots down the bed towards him.

riku: sora! youre okay!

after catching his breath, sora looks around the room, confused.

sora: … what… happened?

riku: you passed out, so i brought you here. how are you feeling?

sora puts a hand to his head, grimacing slightly at his pulsing headache. but that doesnt matter right now.

sora: im… im fine. listen, riku… i saw… i saw some of the things that happened at CO.

rikus eyes widen.

riku: you did?

sora: yeah. i saw you… well, a version of you. and namine. namine…

sora looks into rikus eyes.

sora: she… she was wrong. or… maybe i was wrong, and she just played along for my sake…

riku: huh? what are you talking about?

sora swallows as his voice starts shaking, just a little.

sora: kairi… kairi wasnt the one most special to me. you were. i remember… i remember the night of the meteor shower.

sora clutches at the crown necklace.

sora: all this time, id thought id remembered everything important… but i forgot about it. [sighs] im sorry, riku

riku stays quiet for a moment, before putting on a forced smile.

riku: its fine, sora. we were little kids.

sora frowns.

sora: but… you never forgot, did you?

riku shrugs, and theres a moment of silence between them, before riku speaks again.

riku: maybe i was the one most important to you back then, but its not the same now. thats alright. im just happy to be your friend. i know how you feel about kai-

sora suddenly moves forward, closer to riku, now yelling as he cuts him off.

sora: i get to decide how i feel, riku! its my heart!

riku is taken aback at the shouting, and stares in shock. sora realizes hes gotten loud, and takes a moment to calm down.

dearly beloved starts to play in the bg

sora: i… i know now. maybe it took me a long time, but… i figured it out. the person most important to me… all along, its been you.

riku freezes up in pure shock. he cant believe what hes hearing. hed talked himself out of hoping for this day long ago.

sora finally smiles again.

sora: youre the one i love.

(paralleling prince eric with ariel)

BOOM FIREWORKS MAGIC SORIKU ENDGAME

riku is absolutely speechless, staring at sora with his mouth agape.

sora gives riku a sheepish grin, now growing nervous at the lack of a response.

sora: and… im the one you love… right?

after a second, riku returns soras smile– and, for the very first time in the series, starts crying.

he nods, shakily.

riku: … yeah. yeah, i do. i always have.

riku wipes at his eyes to stop crying, but its futile. the tears flow even harder.

sora feels himself start crying, too, but hes laughing at the same time.

he pulls riku into a hug, grabbing his upper back tightly.

without any hesitation whatsover, riku returns the embrace, holding onto sora in the same way.

(like so [sora in orange, riku in teal])

fade to black.

then they kill the MoM, get married, and live happily ever after. the end. :)

love balancing light and dark is largely taken from these tags by @osrinlore on this video of mine btw:

[writing-of-an-angel]

“Y/N, can I talk to you for a second?”

You looked at the youngest Winchester who was walking into the kitchen with a book in hand.

“Sure Sam, what’s up?”

He pushed his hair out of his eyes as he turned around and walked to the library motioning for you to come with.

He pushed his hair out of his face three or four times during the short walk through the bunker as if he couldn’t figure out what to do with his hands.

“Is everything okay Sam? What did you want to talk about?”

Sam didn’t answer your question but he opened the book he’d been holding and put it on the library table in front of you.

“This book was discovered by the Men of Letters sometime back in the 40’s”

He stopped there and motioned for you to look in the book.

“I don’t get it, why are you showing me a page in a book with the names John and Mary?”

He pushed his hair out of his face again and moved in next to you to take a closer look at the leather-bound book.

“Look at the last names in small print beneath them. John Winchester and Mary Campbell.”

You had met the Winchesters a few years ago and connected romantically with Dean pretty fast, so he’d told you stories about his parents.

Mary came from a family of hunters whereas John grew up with a mechanic for a dad and only picked up hunting after Mary was killed.

“Wait, those are your parent’s names. Why are they written in this book from 80 years ago?”

Sam flipped past a couple of other pages that looked similar with pairs of names on them as well.

“The Men of Letters labeled this as a Book of Soulmates. Its supposed to list every single couple that’s supposed to end up together”

Sam continued to move past pages of people that you hadn’t heard of, but you assumed ended up together

“Why are you showing me this Sam?”

His hazel eyes darted across the pages as they swept past under his fingers until he finally stopped on one of them.

He couldn’t meet your eyes so you let yours drift to the page he was on instead.

Y/N Y/L/N and Sam Winchester

“Y/N, there’s a page with our names on it”

You let your finger drag between the two names on the aging yellow paper

“Yes I can see that, but I don’t understand. I’m in love with Dean,” you struggled to find the words to express how you were feeling

“This book is just wrong Sam”

You backed away from the book trying to figure out why your name would be next to Sam’s and not his brothers.

“Y/N, I checked all of the pages before ours and each of the couples have ended up together over the years”

Sam closed the book and tried to take a step toward you before realizing he should probably give you some space to breathe.

“I can’t do this right now Sam, I’m sorry”

You tried to walk out of the room, but before you could Sam had grabbed your arm and was turning you back towards him

“Y/N, the front page of this book says these pairings have been foretold since the beginning of time”

You were face to face with him now and he hadn’t let go of your arm.

“The book also says that the angels of heaven are responsible for making these matches happen if they don’t occur naturally”

You tried to look anywhere else besides his eyes, but it was no use. His nose was inches from yours and you could feel the warmth of his breath as he was breathing heavy trying to think about what to do or say.

“Sam, I love your brother. Dean and I have been -“

He cut you off before you could continue

“Dean’s name is not the one on that page Y/N and if we don’t make that page the truth, the angels could intervene themselves. Is that what you want?”

The last thing you wanted was winged dirtbags trying to hurt Dean

“No, but I.. I don’t know what to do Sam”

He finally let go of your arm as you both took a deep breath and walked back over to the book that was taking up most of the small wooden table

“I don’t know either, but we’re going to figure this out.”

[senzasord]

Okay I've slept on it and I have THOUGHTS and THEORIES

Okay, but listen. We already had the link to the original series throughout season one with Magic, Beth, and Janis. But the fact that they created such a strong link in the finale with the handlink, and confirming the events of Mirror Image is setting up to intertwine things a lot more.

I saw someone theorise that the reason the swap code didn't work was because it pulled Sam home rather than Ben, which on a watsonian level is a really good theory and I would be thrilled if that were the case because there would be so much to explore with ALL the leapers. But considering the behind the scenes hesitation from Scott Bakula, I have a different theory.

The problem with Sam's original code was that it had a failsafe built in - Sam only swapped places with the leapee, not created a quantum superimposition. This meant that he kept a tether to the present, but there were no jumps home in between leaps - every time he leaped the new leapee replaced the old leapee, instead of him swapping back with them. At the end of Mirror Image though, through whatever forces were at play (God, or time, or whatever, as Sam and Al would say), the failsafe is removed, but Sam no longer needs it because he has control over his own leaps and doesn't need a leapee to swap with anymore.

Stay with me.

The problem with Ben's code is that there is no failsafe like this to begin with, they're just trusting the code to slingshot him back home rather than creating a tether to the present. And I can see the benefits of Ben and Ian's change - you no longer have a leapee that you have to keep safe, the leaper has the benefit of accessing the muscle memory of the host etc. I wonder even if their starting point was the state of things after Mirror Image rather than Sam's original code, just so they could figure out what the hell happened.

So, original Quantum Leap couldn't bring Sam home because even though there was a failsafe, the accelerator kept skipping over a return trip to move Sam onto the next leap. And new Quantum Leap couldn't bring Ben home because he had no tether to the present. But Hannah's code solves both these problems! It forces a switch home, rather than letting the accelerator push the leaper onto the next leap, and its premise relies on having someone to swap with - a tether.

It solves both Sam's and Ben's problems - but Sam's and Ben's problems are not occurring together. Sam had no driving code, and Ben had no tether - but each had one. I think the reason why Hannah's swap code didn't work and instead flung Addison towards Ben was because the current version of the program still doesn't have the concept of a tether built into it. There was still no one Ben could actually 'swap' with. So rather than pulling Ben home, it just pulled Addison towards Ben - like towards like (something something quantum entanglement something something - I actually do think that was a cute engagement speech, and people just don't like it because they don't like the romance plot).

As I've been writing this, another theory did occur to me, which would honestly probably be simpler to write, and therefore more likely - which is the swap code DID work. On Addison. So now Addison is leaping like Sam was, with a leapee in her body (they'd have to build a new waiting room lol), and Ben is still stranded.

Or maybe no one swapped, and it was God, or Time, or whatever.

Oh boy.

[hellosupernatural]

Season 1, Episode 12, "Faith"

dean is dying (for the first time), the episode

its kind of cool having a cold open right at the end of a rescue mission because thats probably what it looks like from the perspective of the rescuee, suddenly these people just burst in and save you, all heroic and macho

i wonder if the episode's events ever get mentioned again in the show, or if it impacts sam and dean, cause i really dont remember this being a thing aha, although i do remember the monster, i just dont remember dean dying being the reason they happened upon this episode's baddie

its interesting how easily dean accepts his impending death, maybe because he's relieved that neither his brother nor father are dead or dying. thats probably the ideal end for him, one in which he lived his life serving his family, and spent none of it grieving them. but also i can imagine thats sad to him, he would want to be alive to protect them

its so interesting that sam goes to the miracle worker, something that would be a quack job to normal people, but a viable option to sam because he knows the supernatural exists

OMG DARLA FROM BUFFY, i wonder if i recognized her when i first watched the show

dean is reluctant to be healed by the healer. this is really sensible characterization for him that fits in with what i remember of his character in the future. reluctant to accept help, in part because he feels undeserving of such goodness because he himself hasn't done enough good or has done too much bad

omg dean is 27? thats basically my age now...

i know im so biased because i adore benz' performance in buffy and angel, but i just feel like her performance as leyla is so vibrant, she really commands attention

i almost forgot, i started making these episode reactions because i was so in love with julie benz' performance in this episode i wanted to do reviews so i could keep track of guest performances that i felt were genuinely good, and not just good for an SPN filler

its really interesting how sam breaks the news to dean about roy trading life for life thinking he's healing the dying. he talks to dean as if he's apologizing to dean rather than upset at the loss of innocent lives. i wouldnt be surprised if, while unhappy about the death of an innocent man in place of dean, he's mostly ok with the outcome so long as dean is still alive

which kind of reminds me of dean's blase attitude in the beginning of the episode, while unhappy about sam's distress, hes mostly ok as long as he knows sam and dad are alive and healthy

i love every time kripke gets to overlay music on a scene, he's great at picking songs

also, introduction of a reaper! so exciting!

i cant get over how good dean and leyla's chemistry is, it also helps that the two visually look good together, it's a shame this is their only episode together

what a crappy situation, dean feeling like he didnt deserve to live, and feeling like shit that he doesnt want another innocent life to go so he has to prevent leyla from getting healed even though she deserves life

i cant believe dean didnt just snatch the necklace from the reverend's wife

i also wish that dean could just explain whats happening to leyla, but i guess the darkness of the information, knowing that she believed in a god that would support roy's healing, knowing that she just supported a creative string of murders, would probably be even more distressing then just dying

interesting lingering glance when sam is like "you cant just play god." i think that dean wishes he were dying instead of leyla

this is a very good dean episode, i think because its an episode that hits to the core of dean's values/bottom line, which lays an interesting boundary for how viewers should understand him. clarity is so important for any works and its effectiveness, so i think thats what i enjoy about this episode

aww, roy started asking for sue ann. i wonder if he feels the rush of the supernatural when the exchange of life occurs. i also wonder if he sense sue ann was dying

lol, reverend's wife dies and they just drive off real speedily, and the cops dont immediately suspect him

i love dean's carefully blank expression when leyla tells him that the healing didnt work

"it must hurt to believe in something so much only to have it disappoint you like that." ok dean, could be about leyla and roy's healing...OR YOU AND YOUR DAD, DEAN

"if youre gonna have faith, you cant just have it when the miracles happen, you have to have it when they dont." ok leyla...i guess that can also apply to dean and his dad

leyla touches dean's head similar to how the reverend touches the heads of the ailing

"im not much of the praying type, but, im gonna pray for you." ugh, thats such a good line, actually makes me tear up. i find it very relatable. i work in a music ministry, but im not christian, but i still join in some of the prayers because, although i dont believe in god, i believe in many of the sentiments of some of the chants and recitations. if you have the fortune of being with a good group of people, i believe in the importance of sharing those sentiments because, in this case, the good will and well-being of others is more important than the why-of-it, whether through faith to god or otherwise. i think its very significant for dean to want to pray for leyla, not because he believes in god and his ability to help her, but because he himself holds her in his thoughts, and because she believes that the shared good will of people will help heal the people.

anyways, fantastic episode, really up my alley, super tight performances, thematic structure, and character writing. 9/10

OMG wait john winchester not coming to save dean is so funny, god he's the fucking worst. 9.5/10 lol

wait a second, netflix release of supernatural dont have permissions to use the original tracks for the earliest season(s) so the reaper intro didnt use oyster. i pity kripke for such a massacre of his vision. 9.6/10 lol

[your-divine-ribs]

I’m With the Band Part 25

Words: 2.3k

I’m With the Band Masterlist Main Masterlist

Before I've stepped too far away a thought occurs to me and I quickly dart back into my room, smiling to myself at Van's fleeting look off dismay which evaporates as soon I emerge with my phone in hand, urging him to lead the way.

He does, back to the master bedroom where I steal a glance at his bed as I cross the threshold, memories sparking in me of what I was doing there with him just last night. My cheeks immediately tinge pink as I recall how easily he'd coaxed a climax from me, and the fact that just a few hours later I'd led Sam back to my room for more of the same. It certainly wasn't the first time that I'd seduced two guys in the same evening and usually I'd be glowing with a smug kind of satisfaction, but Sam's hurt and angry face keeps appearing in my mind, an unwelcome reminder of how every action causes a reaction... and not always in a good way.

I excuse myself under the pretence of using the bathroom and perch on the side of the tub, opening up my phone, my heart sinking when I see a ridiculous number of missed calls and texts on the screen. A quick scroll through shows none from Portia since her texts from earlier last night but plenty from my other so-called 'friends' and assorted hangers-on who I'm sure are only too eager to ingratiate themselves to me now they think I'm probably part of Sam's inner circle.

I ignore them, scrolling down the list and bringing up Portia's contact, placing the call and anxiously listening to it ring and ring, the answerphone eventually picking up. I try again and again, even persisting when it's quite obvious that Portia is either asleep or still partying or blatantly ignoring me, only giving up when I hear a gentle rap on the door and Van's tentative voice asking if I'm okay.

"Yeah, I'll just be a sec!" I call out, before I'm dropping my voice down low as Portia's answerphone picks up yet again, hissing my words out in hushed, clipped tones.

"Portia! What the fuck d'ya think you're playing at? I've got the whole bloody world trying to get hold of me and Sam Fender hates my guts! Take those photos down... please! And call me when you get this."

I flick my phone on to silent just as I see my friend Dominic's cocky grinning face pop up on the screen as he tries to connect to me through FaceTime. It's the first time he's tried to call me since I've been away. In fact it's the first time any of the others have. Well fuck him and the rest of the London gang!

I swallow down the bitter feeling that's clawing its way up my throat, pushing back through into the room and flopping down on to Van's bed face first with a deep groan. A moment later I feel the bed dip down under his weight as he climbs on, then I feel a large warm hand on my back, soothing touches moving down across my shoulder blades.

"C'mon Bella, it ain't that bad... you'll see. It'll all blow over soon enough. Things like this always do. They'll be gossiping about somebody else in a few days."

Jeez, I wish I had Van's optimism. He's always been like this, not dwelling on the bad stuff, trying to cheer people up when they're down. Even though he used to tease me relentlessly during my childhood summers he also made it his mission to try and make me laugh, cracking a daft joke or pulling a ridiculous face or tickling me until I begged for mercy. He usually succeeded as well, much as I tried to hide it and act aloof. Maybe I just need to switch off for a while and indulge in a bit of his laidback goofiness.

I turn my face to the side, peering up at him. "Did you really do it?"

"Huh?"

I let the smile surface, hoisting myself up and reaching for a huge over-sized pillow, fluffing it up before placing it against the headboard and leaning back against it. "Did you really leak your own nudes? Think you're making up tall tales again!"

I watch the grin spreading slow on his lips as he repeats my actions, coming to a rest next to me on the bed, legs outstretched, slotted tightly into my side.

"Why d'ya ask? Wanna see 'em?"

I narrow my eyes playfully at him. "No! Of course not. I have standards. Anyway, I think you're talking crap."

He chuckles lowly, his eyes glowing with mischief. "Definitely not crap," he says. "Y'can ask Larry if ya like. Sent 'em to NME didn't I?"

Now I'm really confused. "Why the hell would you do that you weirdo?"

"They gave the band a shit review," he grins, mightily pleased with his antics. "So I posted 'em a pic of me completely starkers and said 'review this!'"

I'm stunned for a moment, the laugh bubbling up inside me but held hostage whilst I try to work out whether Van's winding me up or not. He certainly looks serious enough, and it's the kind of outrageous thing he'd do with his exhibitionist tendencies.

"Well?" I enquire.

"Well... what?"

"Well did they... review it?"

"Nah," he shrugs. "Thought they might print it or something but I didn't hear from 'em after that."

I let the laugh burst free then, letting my bare leg nudge Van's as I tilt my head towards him. "I'm not surprised! The person viewing a photo of your pasty white naked ass probably dropped dead of fright with a heart attack!"

"Cheeky fucker!" He fires back, darting a hand out to grab one of mine, entwining his fingers tightly through mine. "You know you'd better watch yourself or yer gonna get into trouble!"

He shifts into a kneeling position, catching my other hand and trapping it too, pushing it back against the headboard.

"Oh yeah, whatcha gonna do about it?" I tease, flexing my wrists but finding that I can't move them at all. The bastard's got me trapped. He looms over me, sly smile spreading.

"Well... I reckon I could do whatever I wanted right now, and there's not a lot you could do about it..."

Fuck... my pulse starts to race.

"I'm stronger than I look!" I warn him. "In fact if I wanted to I could get up right now and kick your boney ass!"

Van chuckles, leaning even closer, our faces now only inches apart. "I'd like to see you try! I'd say you were pretty much helpless right now."

He's peering down on me with an intensity that's making my heart hammer in my chest. My eyes dart down to his lips just in time to see his tongue dart out to swipe over his plump lower lip, moistening it. One of his knees slides between my thighs, parting them. I let him, trying to concentrate on my breathing so Van can't hear the way it's catching in my throat.

"I'm just biding my time, lulling you into a false sense of security," I smirk up at him. "Any minute now I'm gonna spring into action and you're gonna realise you picked on the wrong girl this time!"

The air between us both is thick with tension as he hovers there, his hair hanging down around us both, his necklace dangling in the space between us. I watch him carefully, see his smile fade, his gaze flicking between mine and my lips. I swallow hard, waiting... then his face suddenly creases into a frown as he pushes himself up and away, releasing me.

"Maybe I did... maybe I did pick the wrong girl."

What?

"What's that supposed to mean?" I quickly scrabble up to pull myself into a sitting position, my heart sinking as the atmosphere switches from heady and playful to serious and taut within a split second.

"Nothing," Van mutters and I watch as he gets to his feet and crosses over to the far side of the room, stooping to pick up the acoustic guitar that's propped up there.

"Van..." I begin but he doesn't let me finish, turning to face me and cutting me off, his next words shocking me.

"Fender... you must really like him, huh? With how upset you've been about all of this..."

I open my mouth to reply but I falter. I knew Van was jealous of Sam, that much was obvious right from the start, but I'd thought it was just some ridiculous laddish oneupmanship on Van's part, his arrogant streak shining through as he competed to see who would be the first to bed me. Now I'm wondering if there's more to it, that maybe there was some truth in Larry's earlier revelation. It throws me, and I'm still floundering when I mumble out a reply.

"I... errr... I guess... I mean, I don't know really," I finally admit. "I hardly even know the guy. He seems nice enough, but I only met him tonight..."

Van doesn't say anything, just huffs quietly under his breath and for some reason this unexpectedly cuts me deep. I suddenly feel uncharacteristically guilty for my fickle actions, feeling the need to explain myself.

"It was just the whole party atmosphere, I was drunk, we were having such a laugh... it just... kinda happened..."

"You don't have to explain yourself to me," he says stonily. "It's a free country."

"I know... I know... I was just..." I trail off, unsure what to say next. Van breaks eye contact, sighing loudly, glancing at the clock on the bedside cabinet.

"Aren't you tired anyway? It's not even 6am yet. You should try and get some more sleep."

"But I can't sleep, that's the whole point of me coming back to your room... remember?"

He just looks back at me for a moment and I feel uncomfortable under his scrutinising stare. I'm expecting him to come out with something profound the way he's looking at me but then the moment seems to pass. He looks down quickly, pulling his shoulders into a small shrug. "Well, you should try anyway. Tour starts up in a few days. You won't get a lot then. Sure there'll be plenty to keep you occupied."

There's no mistaking the inference in his words and it stings unexpectedly. I ignore it, plastering on a forced smile, trying to resist the sudden urge I have to push myself up off the bed and go to him, wrapping my arms around him and burying my face into his neck. "That's just what Bondy said... about not getting much sleep."

"Yeah, well he's right... anyway I'm... errr... just going out for a smoke."

I consider calling him back but I don't. I just watch him go as he turns, still grasping his guitar with one hand as he pulls open the sliding door with the other, stepping out on to the small self-contained balcony. A strange, sad kind of melancholy settles itself over me and it's unsettling. I sigh to myself, reaching down to pull the bedsheets up as I sink myself down into Van's bed. Maybe he's right. Maybe I should just try and get some more sleep. I'm drunk and I'm tired, my poor frazzled brain now so overwrought and confused that it's actually trying to convince me that I have feelings developing for Van!

Feelings! For Van! Absolutely fucking ridiculous!

No... it's just been a crazy evening and I need to rest and besides, I'm pretty sure I'll have even more crap to deal with when the rest of the world finally awakens and catches up.

I stare up at the ceiling for a bit, ears pricking as I hear the faint twang of a familiar melody that I can't place drifting through the balcony door. It feels strange lying here in Van's bed whilst he's out there, and I wonder what he's thinking about.

Maybe I did pick the wrong girl...

My insides twist as I try to fight the hurt those few simple words incur in me. Van's right. I am wrong… wrong for him, wrong for Sam, wrong for any guy stupid enough to let their guard down around me. I'm so caught up in having a good time I don't stop to consider consequences, and boy have I got consequences to deal with after tonight.

I screw my eyes shut tight, rolling over on to my side and pressing my face into the pillow, hating this new-found critical introspection that's so unfamiliar to me. It's so alien that I don't know quite what to do with it, so I treat it like I usually do with any other problem that I encounter along the way. I shut it down, boxing it up, pushing it away, drowning it out as I try to bring other thoughts into my head. Thoughts of the upcoming tour, flirting with the boys, meeting new and exciting people, just letting loose and doing what I do best... having fun...being a good-time girl... no worries... no guilt... and definitely no regrets...

And if I break a few hearts along the way then I must be doing something right, hey? That's what Portia would say...

I'm resolute as I sink down even further into the soft, sumptuous pillow, finally feeling a little of the night's tension starting to dissipate. Much as I realise I'd been trying to fight it, I am tired, and not just tired. Exhausted. Sleep wafts enticingly behind the comforting blackness behind my eyelids and soon I can feel myself start to drift, lulled by the enchanting melody I can just make out from the open doorway.

I'm not even sure if I'm dreaming when I hear Van's voice start to softly sing, faraway and dreamlike in its quality.

Arabella's got a seventies head

But she's a modern lover

It's an exploration, she's made of outer space

And her lips are like the galaxy's edge

And her kiss the colour of a constellation falling into place...

[seanwinchester]

sorry this is a weird ask so you dont have to answer if its annoying but is your username pronounced sean as in portmanteau of sam and dean like a ship name or sean like shawn the name? bc i have been thinking shawnwinchester and it JUST occured to me that its probably the other thing and im so sos orry

hi anon I'm actually so glad you ask!! cause I don't think anybody has in the history of this blog

it is indeed a mix of sam and dean and NOT the name sean, though I didn't really mean it as a ship name at the time, but only as a way to write "sam and dean" but shorter. I pronounce it "seen" and not "shawn". which I also liked originally cause it reminded me of "sin", and well, if you know my blog you know what it's about. the possible confusion with the name sean only came to me later cause sean just. isn't a name in my country. so it didn't cross my mind. by that time though I already liked the url and people knew me by that so I said 'fuck it'

it just NOW occurred to me that I could have gone for seaMwinchester instead, which would have been genius actually (WAIT-)

[jackienautism]

going 2 be real for a sec

i usually keep this stuff to myself since its super personal and i probably will just sound like a crazy person bu t i really just want to get something down and post it and MAYBE get some sort of like ? validation. that im not the only one who feels this way or does this LOL

so just. long story short. does anyone get like physically ill over seeing someone else like . engaging and doing "more" with a special interest slash interest youre really really into? like. just like 10 or os minutes ago somethting happened and i started lowkey shaking and shit (but maybe its just bc its real hot where i am rn but idk) and felt sick to my stomach all bc someone was engaging "more" with something i rly rly like and i just uuuuugh

ive had this feeling ever since i got into until dawn and the quarry lol...... this feeling has been occurring a lot less frequently than during like last year. which like. speaking of. when the quarry first came out the feeling came and WEEEENT....... ALLL THE TIME. like i wasnt even into the game that much yet but seeing other ppl engaging w/ and making content for it...... made me feel suuuper ill. or maybe was it when i first started getting into it? yeah i think it was when i first started hyperfixating. but anyway LOL IT WAS A TERRIBLE FEELING. AND IT HAPPENED SO OFTEN TOO

luckily its gotten a lot better in terms of the quarry. especiailly after joining tumblr and all. but until dawn? naaah its still very much there lol. as i said earlier, it doesnt happen as much as it used to (in regards to UD) but. it stilll happens. as i just fucking found out. ive settled down quite a bit now but good god

until dawn is such a dead fandom but theres just some things that when i see it it still makes me go wiiiild (negative). i dont know why. it makes feel so sick. and i dont hold it against anyone of course, it just affects me interacting w/ slash following people LOL! and it mainly has to do w/ sam and emily LMAO especiallly sam as ive come to find out.... i think its becasue ive projected sooo much of myself onto her that im like super protective and shit. like... shes not your fictional public character shes MINE. and thats not your public piece of media. its MINE. you know?

and its liike. i KNOW that there are ppl who are more into UD and have been into it longer than i have. i know that. and htat doesnt always affect me. but tthen therr are just osme other times where it seriously DOES and its just.... man. i wish i werent like this LMAO

i think thats like the. basis of it. im just. man. and its such a hard thing to shake off ): i know im just gonna have to "get over it" and "learn to live w/ it" but man!!!!!!

idk man. just seeing others "understanding" a character "more" than i do and seeing others do suuuuper in depth character analyses just..... ESP if its characters i rly relate to and basically projected every part of ,my being onto........ it makes me ill!!!!!! like genuinely!!!!!!!!!

and its like weird bc like. i was SUPER into mean girls the musical back in 2019 / 2020 and so forth. but i dont ever remember getting THIS BAD over others being "more" into it than i was. and this isnt just straight up jealousy. i know how that feels and its DEFINITELY not that. i truly dont know what makes until dawn / the quarry so different. maybe becasue this was the first time ive engaged more with the fandom? especially on tumblr? i dont know man. i dont kn ow

hopefully this makes sense. im just tired

[heavenlymorals]

Oh, I love this analysis. I love your add ins, they give a lot of insight. I've played this game for years now and the constant disregard of the setting that the story takes place in always kinda irks me because Arthur Morgan isn't meant to be a modern protagonist. He isn't meant to have the same values that we do today in the 21st century and it's quite obvious that Dan and Sam Houser, as well as Rupert Humphries, wrote him to be like that but they did it in such a way that it isn't blaring in your face, but there are reminders.

You mentioning the way he treats POC is very interesting because if anything, it shows how sexist Arthur could actively be or at the very least, how he thinks on the inside. What do I mean by this? Very simple:

Arthur valuing the societal standard of gender roles, or, in harsher terms, being sexist is an active part of his belief system. How do we know this? His antagonizations. Arthur's antagonize lines are just as canon as his greet lines and more times than once, he can say something awfully sexist to women ("You belong in the kitchen!" "Go cook someone some supper!" "Women shouldn't be doing this!").

However, when you antagonize people of color, Arthur just insults them as people rather than their skin color or race.

This shows a stark difference in that when it comes to POC, he is just super ignorant of their plights (which id argue is super realistic to the time period he lives in) but not racist, while with women, he IS sexist.

Another historical game is Mafia 2 and the main character, Vito Scalleta, is an Italian man who fought in WW2 and the game takes place during the 40s and 50s, a very racist and sexist period in American history, and when Vito antagonizes someone, he is both sexist AND racist, unlike Arthur who is only sexist.

I know I'm breaking so many fangirl hearts right now but I'm tired of the blatant character assassination that occurs because people adore the character. I love Arthur too but to disregard the time period the game takes place in and to disregard the period-typical attitudes of the time is to do a disservice to probably the greatest western ever written because it destroys its nuance.

(warning: there is sexism and sexist ideas in this analysis because I refuse to sugarcoat the time period that RDR2 takes place in. Arthur is a product of his time and though it isn't shoved in your face, it's still there. Understanding the gender dynamics of this time period makes the characters much more understandable, nuanced, likeable, and better, if I'm being frank.)

I don't ship Sadie and Arthur, at all, it makes no sense to me besides two people liking the characters and thus putting them together. I like them as friends but that's about it.

And let's be so real for a second- even if they do get together for whatever reason, they absolutely wouldn't be compatible as partners because its been shown time and time again that Arthur believes in gender roles and gets visibly annoyed or angry when a woman takes up a man's role when a man is there or when a woman does something he thinks is unladylike in their line of work (just listen to his antagonization of Abigail (for her past as a prostitute, usually), Sadie, Karen, prostitutes, and female performers, all women who take on unconventional roles in their life(also pay attention to certain mission dialogues, and cutscene body language)).

Sadie proves herself as capable, and Arthur works with her, but he makes quips about her behavior or subtly judges her or makes fun of her("Oh, I'm sorry princess. Was there an insufficient feather in your pillow?" "You got a pair of pants and all of a sudden you think you're Landon Ricketts?" "You want to ruuuunnnn with the men?" "Few more like her and there wouldn't be much of a world left." "That ain't what you mean- I can still fight!" Or him being visibly annoyed when she doesn't take his hand to enter the boat and other similar things like that)

Arthur believes that a man should be the one doing the work that revolves around such physical exertion and if he isn't the one doing those things for a woman, he feels as if he is failing in his role as a protector and provider, which then provokes annoyance or in some cases, even anger. Sadie doesn't care about this obviously, and Jake Adler didn't either, hence why they worked so well together as a couple.

Not Arthur though. To put it quite simply, he prefers and is compatible with women who believe in the same gender roles as he does (Mary Gillis, Abigail Roberts, etc.).

This doesn't mean he dislikes Sadie, because it's quite obvious that he is fond of her, but given the intimacy of a relationship, Sadie would get fed up with him trying to be the ONLY provider and protector, and him getting fed up with her by encroaching on what he sees as his duties and responsibilities. He works with her in the way that he does because he has to and he respects that.

Some people may disagree with me on this analysis and that's fine, but to me, it feels like the most realistic outcome if they did become romantic partners. Another reason why I say this is because my mother comes from a culture that still operates a lot like 1899 America and I've seen this dynamic between men and women so many times that it's ridiculous- men who will accept working with a woman in more traditionally masculine roles and prefer partners who are more traditionally feminine.

[legolas-is-a-himbo]

ok y'all i'm fully on my bullshit. so get ready for some silmarillion thoughts!!!

people (including myself, probably) have talked about this before, but i love how beren and lúthien is one part of a cycle. tolkien loves things that come in threes, and his Big Epic Romance TM is the integral part of a trilogy of sorts, but it's neither the beginning nor the end. which i think makes it even more beautiful and also has sooo many implications.

so first - obviously it's already been established that the parallels between beren and lúthien, fingon and maedhros, and frodo and sam, whether coincidental or not, are A Thing. but let's examine this even closer.

we have the baseline of (1) one half of a pair goes on a solo quest related to some kind of cursed object, (2) the second person in the pair follows after them, (3) person a gets into deadly trouble, (4) person b rescues and/or aids them in part or entirely by singing, (5) there is some kind of struggle and person a loses a hand/finger, (6) divine intervention in the form of manwë's eagles.

we know this. but it recently occurred to me that there is more - this is not only a pattern, but a cycle. in the first iteration, the issue revolves around the silmarils: maedhros ultimately wants to take the silmarils back from morgoth and return them to his family. he not only fails at this, but also ends up being tortured for decades and nearly dies. more is lost than is gained. in the second iteration, silmarils are again involved, but both the motives and outcome are different. beren seeks a silmaril, not for himself, but to give to thingol (yes, this whole situation is highly problematic, but his goals still are not Take This Cursed Object For Myself). he succeeds, albeit only briefly. however, for him and lúthien, more is gained than is lost - although for the rest of the world, more is lost than is gained. now, third iteration - years later. frodo seeks solely to destroy the ring, and while near the end he arguably in part does succumb to its pull, the story ends with the ring's destruction. the goal is accomplished, and for everybody, everywhere (well. except sauron and gollum lol), more is gained than is lost.

and yet another interesting thing - in all three situations, the "second" person has all of their motivations reached. fingon, lúthien, and sam all get exactly what they want: they each couldn't care less about the silmarils/ring, saving the world, etc., all they wanted was to help/rescue/be with the other person. there's another post out there about this specifically, so i'm not going to elaborate on it, but tolkien was really trying to tell us something about who gets what they want, and when, and how.

i no longer can fully believe that these three things are completely separate, and i think they are in many ways connected across time. obviously i don't know for sure, but i choose to believe that this was intentional - and after millennia, the cycle is finally completed.

also this is tumblr and it's pride month so yeah i'm going to use this to prove that everyone is gay

[krikeymate]

So I was doing some research for a potential fic I might write, and I found out that incoherent speech, rapid and frenzied speaking, and speech disorders can be symptoms of schizophrenia, which just made me think about your headcanon of Tara having weird speech patterns and habits.

Idk I just think it's an interesting angle the headcanon could take

We love co-morbid symptoms in this household.

This actually had me look at the now-defunct subcategories of schizophrenia, and it was quite interesting. Specifically the part of disorganized schizophrenia where it mentioned the flat effect: which means that they show little or no emotions in their facial expressions, voice tone, or mannerisms. And how it is more likely to occur during the early onset of the illness—between the ages of 15 and 25, and how well that matches with Sam. It is now considered of course to be a spectrum with a scale of functioning.

It's interesting to think that the early signs of schizophrenia emergence could be unrecognized due to its symptoms being already established as something else. I like to think that by the time we meet Tara, she's already pretty on hold with her dyslexia - she takes the time to think of her words before she speaks, she's had years to work on it, so it's rarely an obvious problem anymore. After Sam returns, there are some slip-ups when she gets excited because she's talking faster than she can think. By the time they move to New York, they notice she talks strangely sometimes - but she's always drunk at the time, and they just put it down to the drink.

Then it begins to happen sometimes even when she's not excited and not drunk, just in normal conversation. Similar words get mixed up, she can't think of the right word, she gets easily distracted and her train of thought skips elsewhere. Well, she's just a little absent-minded, right? She's got a lot going on. If she's a little paranoid sometimes... well it's only to be expected, given all they've been through. If Tara thinks she's being watched/followed, she probably is, their faces are all over the news after all. She mutters to herself sometimes, but that's not abnormal, and lots of people do that. And she's been a little depressed lately, and everything that comes with that, but she's working through her shit in therapy! That's gotta be exhausting. Sometimes Tara seems younger than she is, but it's always around Sam, and that makes sense for the two of them.

It's not like she's hallucinating! Right? Well if she is, she's keeping that to herself. She doesn't want to worry the others, they've got so much going on, and Tara's tired of being the one they all worry about. The focus should be on Sam, she's got the brunt of the negativity. If she sees Amber in reflections sometimes, if she hears Ethan's laugh as she tries to sleep, well she can deal with that. It'll just go away eventually, she's just stressed and therapy is bringing everything up again. It'll go away, she doesn't need to worry Sam.

[shining-magically]

so I’ve wondered this since the trailer came out years and years ago and Chloe defended the movie - was the red shoes teaser written by the same team that made the movie? were they forced to market it like that, was that based on an earlier draft, etc?? not sure if you know but you seem like the leading expert!

Sorry, this is gonna be an absolute novel because you know I’m an animation fan and the history and production of Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs is SO interesting and insane. Like, Tangled levels of insane. Thanks for calling me an expert, no one else was gonna do it so I just kind of took up the helm lol.

Here’s the low-down... The timeline of the movie’s production is an absolute mess and kind of an extremely wild ride. It was in production for ten years, went through a lot of different crew members, and went through at least two other major versions of the story before landing on the final version.

Since there’s not a ton of info on the movie’s production, a lot of this is pieced together from different interviews and context clues, and also a lot of what I’ve read and what I am quoting has been translated from Korean, sometimes pretty roughly. But yeah.

Here’s the story of why the Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs teasers and poster were so, so bad and fatshame-y and the actual movie was so, so good and body-positive. (With pictures and production artwork!)

(This is a beast of a post so I’m putting it under a cut.)

All right, so. After its conception originally as a short story by the South Korean studio Locus Creative in 2009-2010-ish, Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs was being worked on and was set to come out in Summer 2017, as evidenced by this poster at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, featuring a different logo and very different character designs for most of the dwarfs.

In early-mid 2016, the first teaser (in which we see Snow White undress and then two dwarfs recoil in horror at her fatness when she takes her magic shoes off) was released, after the film had kind of been slowly chugging along for 6 or so years. (I am having such trouble pinpointing when the second teaser was released (in which one of the dwarfs basically attacks Snow while she is sleeping to steal her shoes), but I believe it was around the same time.) The teasers didn’t get that much traction because this was a small film from a small indie studio in South Korea.

None of the final actors had been cast yet. At this point in the production, the story was different, one of the many versions that the movie went through. As in the final movie, the dwarfs were actually cursed knights/princes and Snow White switched back and forth between two body types due to her magic shoes, but in this version, the dwarfs needed to steal the shoes from her in order to break their curse (rather than needing “a kiss from the most beautiful woman in the world” like in the final movie).

The weird thing is, I believe they had JUST changed the movie’s story when the teaser came out. I’m almost positive it was released more as a proof of concept than as an actual trailer for the movie. They had just recently combined two separate characters (seen above), a typical pretty, skinny princess character (Snow White) and a cute chubby girl character (’Bonnie’), into one single character that switches back and forth between the two appearances when she wears the magic shoes (also they had just dropped literally half of the movie taking place in the real world, with a magic mirror portal, it was a whole thing). 

They didn’t have the details of this aspect of the new story hammered out yet, and the first pass at presenting Snow’s magically changing body type, was, yeah, not good and super offensive. This was a really inexperienced indie studio making their first film on a low budget, so even the animation and voice acting wasn’t great. I think they just wanted to get SOMETHING out there because it had been 6 years and they wanted to have something to show for it.

But here’s the thing. Despite how the teasers make it seem, this was always supposed to be a movie about body positivity, letting go of appearance-based prejudices, and loving yourself and others for who you are and for who they are, which we see in the final film.

I like to think of our film as a kindhearted one. Our intentions are nice.

- Director Sung-ho Hong

It’s important to keep in mind that this movie was made in South Korea by a 99% Korean crew, and, as I understand it anyway, in Korean culture, ‘fatshaming’ is not really a thing that is seen as overtly offensive. Also, children’s media there seems to have more adult things in it than in the US, which probably accounts for the more risque parts of the teasers. That said, I really believe that at this point in the timeline, the movie was on-track to be bad (or at least not very good) when it was released, and it would have ended up bad IF a few key players hadn’t signed on (which I’ll get to in a moment).

Interestingly, the movie’s producer, Sujin Hwang, said in a 2017 interview:

“[Both teasers] were solely produced to induce curiosity. They’re completely irrelevant to the actual story.”

- Producer Sujin Hwang

I think what she was trying to convey was that neither one is a scene in the actual movie, because while the teasers didn’t reflect the revamped story as it existed in summer 2017 (the time of the interview), they DID reflect the earlier version of the story where the dwarfs wanted her shoes, which is what the story was at the time they were made.

Now that we’re in post-teaser 2016, HERE’S where things start to turn around. After the teasers were released, my guy Disney veteran and native Korean Jin Kim joined the project. He and Red Shoes director Sung-ho Hong had been buddies for about eight years and Sung-ho had been trying to get Jin to come to Seoul and work with him at Locus for a long time, and he finally succeeded.

Jin and his twenty years of Disney experience as an animator and senior designer on films like Tangled, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, and Moana, had a HUGE HUGE HUGE influence on the movie. He redesigned almost all the characters, oversaw all the visual development from the moment he signed on, and heavily (HEAVILY) supervised the animation, literally going frame-by-frame through preliminary animations and drawing over them, teaching the inexperienced animators at Locus everything he knew. (Literally almost everyone except him either only had TV experience or had no professional experience because they just gotten out of school.)

From an outsider’s perspective, it really seems as though Jin joining the project (and his gargantuan effort) made the quality SKYROCKET. Not just in character design and animation, but also in things like effects animation, story, etc. After he joined, Locus really started pushing HARD to make a good, high-quality movie, and his influence and experience from being a prominent figure at Disney was absolutely key. The studio also began to really study Disney films and other well-made animated films from other studios to really try and pinpoint what the DNA of a good animated movie really is.

I don’t have any solid evidence, but I’m pretty sure that Tony Bancroft (an animator and the co-director of Mulan) then joined the project because he’s good friends with Jin Kim. He is only credited as the voice director (the movie was recorded in English and the characters were animated to the English dialogue), but I am SURE that he probably also had a pretty big influence on the movie, because like... How could he not? I really really think there was more to his role than his title would have you believe, even though there’s almost no info out there about it.

So now the movie goes through a gigantic metamorphosis. Character designs, visual development, and animation quality are all rapidly improving, the story is tightening, and the themes of the movie (which, again, were always the same and intended to be positive) are being presented in a more sincere way. The movie is becoming the sweet, self-love-encouraging and body-positive movie that was eventually released.

I’m putting a gif from the credits of the final movie here. As we move into 2017, when the giant eruption of backlash occurred, please keep in mind that the story was finalized at this point and that THIS was the movie people were so mad about:

Chloe Grace Moretz accepted the role of Snow White immediately after she read the script and she recorded her lines (I think) in early-ish 2017. Her co-star Sam Claflin also immediately accepted the role of the romantic interest, Merlin, after reading the script and recorded his lines in (I believe) July 2017.

In the summer of 2017, the story and script were more or less the same as in the final movie. Promotional images from that time show that most of dwarfs had been completely redesigned by this point and didn’t have their teaser designs anymore.

They also released a few screenshots that look exactly like the final film. The movie was advertised as coming out in ‘2018′ at this point. Here’s a promo image from 2017 that is MUCH more tactfully worded than the infamous Cannes poster:

So now we’re in summer 2017. The Cannes Film Festival. The movie’s script and story have been basically nailed down, animation is underway, and the Korean film company Finecut is beginning to market and sell the movie to worldwide audiences. They are planning on showing some footage to potential buyers at the festival, and they make a poster to advertise the film there.

Unfortunately, it’s THIS POSTER:

Now here’s where there are some unknowns. By this point, the movie is basically in its final form, which is an adorable, body-positive story about loving people for who they are, loving yourself for who YOU are, and that provides commentary on society’s standards of beauty and how they affect how people are treated/viewed. So why this poster??? All I can really tell is that someone (I think Finecut) really, REALLY messed up and either horribly mistranslated the tagline, or didn’t do enough research to know that this kind of thing is REALLY NOT OKAY in western culture.

The above picture is shared and the internet backlash begins, fueled by tweets from prominent body-positivity activists like Tess Holliday. Even Chloe Grace Moretz speaks out against it, because she of all people KNOWS that that’s not what the movie is about. The internet then finds the old teasers from before the movie was revamped and it makes things worse. Producer Sujin Hwang profusely apologizes and says that that is NOT the message of the movie. Locus pulls the advertising campaign, and takes down the two old teasers.

“Our film, a family comedy, carries a message designed to challenge social prejudices related to standards of physical beauty in society by emphasizing the importance of inner beauty.”

- Producer Sujin Hwang

Voice director Tony Bancroft also tried to explain the situation:

“The truth is the film has a body-positive message as its core theme–it’s the opposite of what reports are saying. The problem is one poorly translated movie poster that has been taken dramatically out of context.” 

- Voice Director Tony Bancroft

And then... There was nothing for a while. The movie didn’t come out in 2018 and was delayed. From what I can tell, I DON’T believe this delay was related to the Cannes backlash. I think it was mostly due to Locus’s limited budget and resources, because as we know, animation is difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and easy to do badly but hard to do well. Also, probably with Jin Kim and Tony Bancroft’s influence, they REALLY wanted to make sure to do a good job with the animation because they now had a great story and they really wanted the movie to be a quality, worldwide hit that would kind of put South Korean feature animation on the map. Just take a look at how nice the final animation was:

The movie was released in South Korea on July 25th, 2019. Unfortunately, the damage was done in the English-speaking markets and it was not released to an English-speaking audience until June 22, 2020, when it was released digitally in the UK. At the time of this post, there is no set US release date, but the distribution rights were recently bought by Lionsgate and the MPAA gave the film an official PG rating.

So who’s to blame? There’s no good answer. You could blame Locus for making those old teasers. You could blame Finecut for the competely tonedeaf Cannes poster. You could even blame cancel culture for raging against the movie based on one poster and two old teaser trailers without researching what the movie was actually about.

All I know is, it’s a damn shame.

[irenedubrovna]

A post regarding Euphoria for the benefit of myself and basically no one else

So, it really bothers me when people say Euphoria is groundbreaking, progressive media. Here’s a dissection of why I don’t think it is, because this is what I feel like doing at work:

The character of Rue is objectively great. She by far receives the least overt sexualization, and is treated neutrally in terms of active sexuality. She’s treated like a normal teenage girl with mental issues and an addiction to drugs. She falls in love with a girl who she pines for and places on a pedestal. The reason I think she is written this way is because she is a Sam Levinson proxy. She written with gender ambiguity and with little regard to the experiences she’d go through as a black gay female, probably because Sam Levinson has no insight to that aspect of life. Her performance is heightened of course by Zendaya, who breathes unique life to the Sam Levinson’s artistic extension, and without her performance this show would not get even half the acclaim it gets. Attribute that to Zendaya of course, because the director has done little to deserve this acclaim.

The rest of the females, sans Lexi, are pornified to a disgusting extent, not only due to the fact that they are supposed to be underage, but also because their existence as people is treated as being absolutely secondary to their sexual appeal. They are foremost presented in terms of their relation to sex. Cassie, Maddy, Jules, and Kat cannot be removed from their sexuality without disrupting the plot or their journeys in relation to the plot. Why are the females so intrinsically linked to uber fetishized versions of female sexuality, or uber fetishized versions of blossoming female sexual identity?

Maddy is presented not only scantily clad 90 percent of the time, but also dressed in a precariously unattainable sexual fashion. At any given time she is styled to look straight out of, simultaneously, a high fashion editorial, and a “barely legal” porno. She is airheaded and profane, and promiscuous, her mannerisms dictated by the adult films she’s “studied” in order to project an image of perfect hyper sexual femininity. She’s complacent in becoming a prototypical housewife because it will earn her a comfortable place as a trophy wife. She has no aspirations beyond that. So, let’s unpack all of that. Maddy’s role in the show is mostly passive. The most active thing she does in the plot is revenge fuck a man in the pool of a party. Nearly everything else she does in the show that is plot relevant is of someone else’s volition. Even less of what she in the show is related to anything other than a man. She is abused and then pressured into framing another man for said abuse. She has no agency as a character. The only notable difference to this rule is when she takes drugs at a carnival, knocks a pot of chili over, and calls her ex’s mom a cunt. Removed from her active sexual life and carefully cultivated aesthetic, she’s a trite stereotype of an unambitious girlfriend who gets treated poorly. I see people call Maddy iconic, but if she wasn’t gorgeous and well dressed, I doubt anyone would even think twice about her, let alone create fancams and Instagram pages dedicated to her. She exists as a plot device, and as pretty set dressing to build up the shows aesthetic. Her emotions are not well explored, her motivations are sexist, and she is often there to be demeaned, objectified, or to say a bad word. The most damning part of her involvement in this show is her episode where it is stated that she, as a fourteen year old girl, lost her virginity to an adult man, and it is stated she was in control of the situation. This is a dangerous thing to say about a character, to any audience, but especially a young one. To imply that a precocious young girl was in control during her first sexual encounter with a much much older man implies things that frankly border on rape apologist ideology. This show states this unflinchingly and with no further elaboration. If there’s one thing that tells you that Euphoria is a bad show, let it be that. Also, if there’s one thing that tells you about Sam Levinson as a person, and the way he views girls and women, let it fucking be that.

Jules is a young trans girl. She also likes to have sex with men as a means to “conquer femininity”. Scratch that, she likes to have degrading sex with older men in order to “conquer femininity”. This mindset is shown to be toxic, of course, but I think the problem with this idea in general is that there’s no deeper exploration for what this mindset means. It implies that she believes women are the sum of their intrigue and degradations. This mindset I can only assume would be a cultivation of dysphoria and internalized misogyny, which this series is absolutely not prepared to address in a tactful manner. Jules is a teenager with mental illness, trauma, and is undergoing an identity crisis. There’s something powerful in her character, something worth saying, however we only get trimmings of those meaningful things, and are ultimately left with a hurtful depiction of a trans girl because all of her musings on womanhood and identity are incomplete, and they fail to reach beyond the surface of their thesis statement. She wears colorful clothing, is overtly feminine and artistic in her presentation. Everything about her screams insecurity over her own womanhood. That is the crux of her character. Now, I think we should ask ourselves, is trans person who is insecure about their identity peak representation? Is this what trans people deserve? Is it “groundbreaking “? If this show was run by someone else, I might be inclined to say that there’s nothing insidious about this, but this is the guy that made Assassination Nation, so I think we know what he thinks of young women, the way they should be portrayed (that is, for the capitulation of a man) and realize his inclusion of a trans woman in his cast is no more meaningful than the inclusion of any other woman. Women to him are made to be categorized and should, at the end of the day, be easily palatable for the capitulation of a man. The device of having Jules being interested in older men and rough sex for identity reasons is transparent. Trans women are exploited and objectified with a similar fervor to cis women, the caveat being that they are “a forbidden fruit” of sorts to straight men. Jules is sissified, her presentation fetishistic. Her role in the plot is more involved. Her relationship with Rue is sweet, though toxic on both sides. She is ultimately betrayed, blackmailed, and snowballs into something of a manic episode, all well portrayed by Hunter Schafer, but I don’t think her inclusion in the show absolves it of any of its many sins.

Let’s talk about Cassie. Cassie is the Eurocentric beauty standard exemplified. She is the blonde haired blue eyed girl next store, and her boobs are of course always on display. She is notably promiscuous, something I say right off the bat because that’s how she’s introduced, as a so called slut through the words of the devil (Nate Jacobs). She is a girl with daddy issues, which we are all familiar with at this point. Her sexual boundaries begin and end at the whim of her partner. The terms of her consent are much like the terms of consent of many young girls brainwashed by society and the rising tide of degradation porn: everything is alright as long as you provide them comfort and affirmation afterward. You can touch them roughly without asking, you can use them as a tool to affirm your masculinity. This is the way men prefer their women now: just broken enough to say yes to anything they want. It’s become a joke at this point. Men like girls with issues, but only the ones that will feed their own desires. Cassie Howard is meek. Her inclusion in the plot I suppose ties to themes of drug addiction and how it divides and destroys the people you love. It doesn’t show what it does to her beyond shaping her sexual encounters, which is no surprise. Overall I’d say Cassie is in this roster of females as the most traditional categorically, in relation to how men view women and further how they sexualize them. She has a relationship with someone who doesn’t really love her. That mostly what she does here. Gets used. Doesn’t drive the plot or conflict much. More pretty set dressing. More aesthetics. How this show consists of so many women but is driven so much by men is unsurprising, and, again, very enlightening in the grand scheme of things.

Lastly we touch on Kat. I’d like to begin with the fact that self actualization through sexual exploration, in a show run by a man, is just a cloak for a woman to gratify the audience with her sexuality. Regardless of whether or not she is plus sized, this is overt objectification. She is on this show to be sexy. Beyond that, the fact that a minor using sex work as a form of liberation is disgusting. Whether or not she is portrayed as “owning” her sexuality is negligible, and speaks to the same mindset discussed with Maddy. Minors cannot fucking consent to sex, sexual acts, or anything within the confines of such. It’s crazy that this occurs with two different characters in such a similar way. It has echoes of “Well, she looked older..” and “Well, she wanted it..” or “She’s advanced for her age”. Never, not once in the events of the series is there meaningful introspection on what doing this kind of thing does to a minor. Moreover, these acts are explicit, and made clearly for sexual gratification. None of these things are absolved by the fact that she’s plus sized. If anything, her body type is fetishized in this context. It’s also another case of a “good girl to bad girl” transformation, which are archaic and, of course, sexist. With the rise of adult websites targeting minors for explicit content, this is even more reprehensible. Once again, in terms of representation, is this really what speaks to you as progressive? Groundbreaking? A girl gains control of her own narrative by having sex with lots of men. She gains control by being sexy. She gains control by dehumanizing and objectifying herself. No she doesn’t. Media controlled by men will tell this story to you thousands of times, don’t listen because she’s bigger than a size four.

ALL OF THESE CHARACTERS ARE UNDERAGE. ALL OF THEM HAVE EXPLICIT SEX SCENES, EVEN THE SEXUAL ASSAULT IS MADE CINEMATICALLY PORNIFIED. THESE SHOTS ARE MADE TO BE OBJECTIVELY SEXY. THIS IS NOT A CASE OF SOMEONE CREATING SOMETHING FOR THE SAKE OF REALISM. IT IS ABOUT MAKING SCENES THAT SPEAK TO A MALE AUDIENCE. THAT CATER TO THE MALE GAZE. ARGUE WITH THE WALL.

I won’t go further into the plot, other characters, or the structure or the episodes for sake of brevity, but I felt compelled to air my thoughts on this to the void. I can only hope I was critical enough that Sam Levinson will one day see this and cry because another bad feminist thinks something that he made sucks