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limetimo · 3 years ago

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RAB fics I read This Week (21-27 where did March go??? i feel attacked)

Rewriting Destiny by mayawrites95 (mayarox95) After Voldy's defeated everything goes to hell in a hellbasket when Lucius Malfoy becomes the Minister of Magic. Knowing they're fucked beyond saving, Draco and Hermione do a ritual that yeets them to 1972 as Hermione Potter, younger sister to James, and Draco Black, youngest brother to the Black sisters. Together they work on mending relationships and battling prejudice. It's pretty good

movement by oceanicfeelings Jegulus used to be a thing, Regulus ficks off to the cave, in 1982 James finds him and saves him and Lily is dead and Voldemort isn't dead enough. Super beautifully written ok

rewrite my heart (let the future in) by secretpersona WOOOOOOOOOO! Pandora and Regulus! Strangers to Besties to Lovers! And so much more! ♥♥♥♥♥

Best Friend's Brother by zeppazariel huhuehehehe, in Remus and James' defence, they didn't know their best friends had brothers when they started dating their dark and handsome men.

melodrama by moonymoment I. Okay I love this, Regulus bribes Mrs. Noriss with Catnip so that he can read in the library after curfew, and that's only the first of absolutely beautiful things about this fic. Jegulus.

Best birthday present ever by anauro get your tissues ready, you're going to melt! Married Jegulus

it feels so good when i suffer (its so insane the things we do) by hidingskeletons Sirius @ James: Hey, everybody likes you. Make my brother like you so that he doesn't become a Death Eater! James: ok *proceeds to fall in love with Regulus* I mean that bit didn't happen yet as we're only 2 chapters in but I can see it coming already and it's going to be glorious xD

Thin White Lies by wotcherremus Wrong number Identity Porn Texting Fic with estabilished Jegulus (they're idiots and i love them your honour) and developing wolfstar :D

The Marauders and the Philosopher's Stone by SilverShadow1 Marauders read HP books BUT THERE'S A TWIST as it's an AU and Jegulus are dating :D Lily is so ready to murder Dumbledore and Vernon ♥

The Blood In Your Mouth by moonysmirrorball Story of toxic love, JAmes and Lily are detective, Remus is their scientist, Sirius MArlene and Mary are M16 and Regulus is the serial killer they're trying to catch. #GiveRegulusAKnife2k22

Ready or Knot by La_Matrona first POV Hermione, she goes home with an older man on a vacation at Spain aaand it turns out the guy is her bast friend's godfather's younger brother and wants to marry her now haha talk about awkward. Very horny

From Eden by INFPwriter Anne (Harry's little sister) is sent back to the 70s to change the course of time and save the wizarding Britain from Voldy. They make up a very patchy story about her being James' American cousin, and also she and Regulus are sooo not dating, no sire :D

a shrike (to your sharp and glorious thorn) by nyxveuss Regulus got yeeted to fifth year, discontinued and being rewritten but def give it a read!

lycoris radiata by nyxveuss the re-write of aforementioned, some things are similar some things are different but it's amazeballs all the same!

t’s always summer under the sea by nyxveuss :((( Regulus is straight up not having a good time after Sirius runs away from home.

victory does not make us conquerors by nyxveuss Harry dies at the Forbidden Forset and chooses to go back in time to save REgulus and end the war sooner. Whoopsie, they get captured by the Death Eaters. No bond forged is like a bond forged by sharing a prison cell and being tortured for info. They gets saved tho!

Madness by any other name by AtomicMint Regulus is accidentally gaining a following of Hufflepuffs.

The Pure Blood Prince by pjxckson Regulus in the cave was frozen in time, Harry pulls him out and Regulus gets the chance to redeem himself and kick Voldy's butt for real! Ft. Charlie Weasley!

As The World Caves In by reylo_is_canon Hermione and Theo travel to 70s and get Regulus and Snape to help them defeat Voldemort

Did You Miss Me? by Fantismal, Krethes Jily and Wolfstar and Longbottoms and Floradora in a modern college texting fic with Regulus as mostly plot device and background character

A Star Goes Out by tuxedoallie So! Good! and different. James and Regulus are dating, bring Lily in their relationship, Barty is clinically a psychopath BUT HE'S TRYING OKAY it's not his fault Regulus can't communicate to save his life

For Shits and Giggles by silverfield Regulus' bowels can't kill him if he goes out with a bang first, right? Everyone else around him disagrees. I love protective Barty ♥

Quite Like Us by Anonymous wrong number texting au Jegulus, v sweet!

BLAME by YouBlitheringIdiot FUCK DUMBLEDORE ALL MY HOMIES HATE DUMBLEDORE THIS WAS A PSA THANK YOU aka JAmes took the blame for the Prank and became Dumbledore's spy among Death Eaters

Finders Keepers by jeggie_toast AAAAAAAAAAAAAA THIS WAS SO GOOD slowburn Jegulus, with sad and happy ending, you can pick :D

Tides by jimmyjanejams PIRATE ROYALTY AU I REPEAT WOLFSTAR JEGULILY PIRATE ROYALTY AU

#regulus black #fic rec

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equallyloyalandlethal · 4 years ago

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Thiam Drabble #6

What’s Enough?

The air around Theo thickened as he stepped back from the hospital bed, hands curling into white-knuckled fists at his side. He hated being here. Everything was clinically sterile, but the sharp smell and fear that couldn’t be washed out or masked just due to the sheer volume saturating every inch of the building.

“I’m—I’m sorry. I'm not who you need,” he said, shaking his head again.

This whole situation was his fault. He knew it, and so did everyone else. Everyone except Liam. Stupid, infuriating, forgiving Liam who rivaled Scott’s tendency for seeing the better side of people. This should have finally woken Liam up enough for the wolf to tell him to fuck off and put the kibosh on whatever this thing was between them. Unfortunately, he overestimated the level of rationality he was capable of. That and and Liam’s engrained stubbornness far exceeded what Theo could talk around with the state his animals were in.

The coyote was still screaming for blood, itching to track down the idiot who landed the blows and rend him limb from limb, while his wolf wanted nothing more than to plant himself next to Liam and not move again. They were ripping him in two in a way he hadn’t felt for a long time. Merging their desires wasn’t hard, most of the time. Survival was the coyote’s main instinct, which was easy enough to twist around when he needed to. The wolf was harder. Those instincts screamed about pack and connection louder than anything else. Before he was thrown in Hell he could manipulate it well enough. But since then…

He huffed, dreaded the moment both of them got on the same page, what with his self-control reserves at an all time low.

"But you're who I want. Isn't that enough?” Liam’s question was so quiet, he wouldn’t have thought he had said it at all if he wasn’t in the room.

He shrank back a step, turning his head away as his eyes started to prickle. Where was the chimera that murdered his friends without a care, who schemed his way into a pack by breaking up a lifelong friendship? Hot tears gathered at the corner of his eyes, damn near burning his skin the longer he let them sit there. Wiping them away would mean acknowledging them, which he was not about to do. He had a reputation to maintain.

“Theo scrunched his face, hating the sharp sourness leeching into Liam’s scent, his chest clenched, like a vise-grip was tightening around, knowing he caused the hurt. “Besides, it’s not like I ever really belonged here anyway.”

“Wait.” Liam sat up so abruptly Theo cringed internally at the thought of how the stitches had to have pulled. “You’re leaving?”

The way his voice nearly broke, straining to get the words out before the pain and fear overtook the ability, made Theo flinch. This was supposed to keep Liam from being hurt, not make it worse. It’s all I’m good at, he grumped to himself, teeth grinding. It didn’t matter how much he changed in Hell, he would never be good or even good enough. Failure was the name of his game, and there was no changing it.

“Yes,” he said as he forced his head to turn and lifted his eyes.

Regret zinged through him as Liam met his gaze. Instead of the rough, volatile anger he was ready to battle against, he found soft brows and pained, glassy eyes. He took a breath to steady himself, only to be gut-punched by the sharp tang of Liam’s pain.

Tears rolled down both their cheeks.

“Theo, please—”

“You almost died because I’m a freak of nature, because I couldn’t step up, because I—” He grimaced as words caught in his throat, hating how it let him think about the words that nearly flew out of him.

Silence stretched between them, grating at his nerves more than the tears he couldn’t stop. His wolf and coyote were howling in unison, damn near screaming their want for the human version of sunshine laying in the hospital bed. He couldn’t listen to them, not this time, not after the woods.

“The best thing I can do is leave,” he said, turning to the door.

“That’s absolute bullshit,” Liam snapped, the growl in his words making Theo stop and look back at him. “You’re afraid and you’re running the other direction, just like with the Ghost Riders.”

He bit at the inside of his lips, trying to stop himself from back sliding the small distance he had managed to put between them. The hurt puppy-dog eyes Liam was giving him were decidedly not helping his resolve in the slightest.

“You put on a brave face, convincing everyone you’re happy on your own, but the truth is you’re terrified of any emotional connection.” Liam paused as he swung his legs over the side of the bed, wincing and letting out a near inaudible squeak.

“Get back in bed before Melissa tranqs you.” Theo meant to say it as a threat, but the awkward tightness in his throat made it sound more like he was pleading.

As usual, Liam threw caution to the wind, white-knuckling the bed as he stood, never dropping his eyes from Theo’s. “Do you even know what love feels like?”

He couldn’t stop the snarl that ripped from him as his eyes flashed gold. Of course he knew! That’s why this whole mess was killing him. If he didn’t, nothing would have changed. Everything he was now started with that stupid emotion.

“When would I have had the chance to learn about it, huh? Between them shoving needles in my arms and opening my chest over and over and over again? When they praised my initiative for tearing out a failing chimera’s throat for the first time with no prompting? After I lied to yet another kid they conned into their clutches and told them it’d all be okay, despite the stench of death leaking out along with their black blood?”

His heart tightened at the memory of the sweet little girl, too young and innocent for such a wretched end. It was the only time his sister’s heart roared to life in all his years with the Doctors. She was so gentle. Too much so.

A roaring snarl ripped out of Theo as he shoved away her last moments, ignoring how his scar burned where her tiny fingers had grazed the skin. “I think I’m in love with you, but I’m not good enough. I never will be,” he said, turning away again. “And that sc—” He stumbled over the word, grinding his teeth, fighting against finishing the sentence. “It terrifies me, okay? It makes me shit bricks every time you go near a fight and paralyzes me when I think about losing you because I don’t want to go back to classic Theo but I don’t know how else I’d survive without you.”

For a moment he stood there, frozen. Those words had barely been given shape as thoughts. They weren’t supposed to leap out so readily! He shrank back, arms cinched across his chest like he could hold himself together through sheer force of will as he fought against his shoulders rolling forward.

He jerked back, claws and fangs dropping in a blink, as something touched his cheek. Luckily his head caught up in time to not rip through the already injured Liam standing right in front of him. Right in front, less than an arm’s length between them, with a soft smile he only ever saw once directed at someone that was definitely not him.

“Li—”

“No talking. Just listen, okay?” Liam moved his thumb to sit on Theo’s lips, effectively silencing the chimera. “I don’t care what you think of yourself, you’re the most amazing person I’ve ever met. You came back from so much trauma, shit that most people won’t even experience a sliver of in their whole lives, and you’ve been trying to do better every single day since I brought you back. There’s not a person alive, or dead, that I could ever feel safer with or more in love with than you, Theo.”

One second stretched into two, silent except for their erratic heartbeats. For once, his head was as quiet as the room, no instincts screaming at him to act differently. Instead, his inner wolf was damn near purring, overjoyed at the warm hand on his cheek, and the coyote was begrudgingly admitting that it agreed with this turn of events. Of all the times for you two to agree, he huffed, slowly closing his eyes and leaning into Liam’s touch.

Even he couldn’t argue how right it felt, but that didn’t mean his stomach knotted itself any less or the tremors in his hand subsided in the least. Letting positivity in had yet to end well for him or anyone else involved, and Liam was a positive in his life. The most positive thing, actually. The man was sunshine incarnate, just like that stupid princess movie he made them watch the other day. If whoever she was could help a shifty, no-good thief redeem themselves, maybe he could trust his sunshine to do the same.

Ao3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28894329

#thiam #angst #theo raeken liam dunbar #Theo raeken needs a hug #Why do my teen wolf things end up with someone in the hospital?#Liam DunbarXTheo Raeken #Theo needs some self-esteem #Liam is sunshine #God i love these idiots #posted on AO3 #teen wolf #liam dunbar

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historytaker · 4 years ago

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Fly Away Vincent

Sometimes art tells us something the artist is unsure they mean to say. But that had always been one of the tragedies of Vincent Van Gogh’s dramas. His paintings were earthy, mucky blends: sermons and pleas to find something. Yet, it was precisely at the penultimate moment in Vincent Van Gogh’s career did he finally give us a farewell that probably was not supposed to be a farewell. For it would be the Spring of 1890 that Vincent Van Gogh would produce Wheatfield With Crows, and shortly after kill himself. Ever the composer and the symphony, Van Gogh mashed opposites in his paintings in greedy jabs of oil, demanding us to take it in and meanwhile being the servant to his impulses that played out in the work. He struck the balance in Wheatfield with Crows. But in that balance he put a punctuation on his mastery, his gifts, his sermon. Could Heaven and Earth meet? Maybe. Wheatfield with Crows say exactly that.

Vincent Van Gogh was not well. He suffered bouts of manic activity often followed by deep spells of self-loathing and loneliness. He was also epileptic. He had a cunning self awareness though that often meant that his suffering was the expiation or price to be paid for being one of God’s children. Never far away from his religious zeal, burned a patriotic self-indulgence of love for the common man and the earthy struggle. Smothered in much of his works are these influences; his mental health, searching for God, and political thought.

Van Gogh thought it only right and proper to take his sermon to the people who deserved God the most, and equally needed God the most. The tramp, the whore, the beggar, the drunkard, the miscreant all God’s people… they just did not know it yet. Often this meant a life of even more privation than the would-be parishioners of the Church of Saint Vincent. He cobbled together a pittance in trading drawings for crumbs. His real lifeline was his beloved brother Theo, however.

In fact, it would be this relationship with his brother that would ultimately sustain Van Gogh’s life. Theo, always the true believer, would attempt to sell or promote the works Van Gogh produced. Sometimes, indeed, most times, the work was not appreciated. In his early years, Van Gogh was enraptured by the aplomb but simple landscapes and toiling work of the indescribable laborer, the everyman. Where Van Gogh’s contemporaries patronized the subject as rustic, Van Gogh blended his subjects mercilessly with the mud. They were the mud. No better picture did this radiate more totally than with Potato Eaters. The brown grey effluviates all over the canvas. The people surrounding the table, gaunt, strung-out, wide eyed, are communing over ashen potatoes and earthily mud brown coffee. They have the emaciated look of the overworked, underfed, neglected. But pulling in the room, keeping everything together, granting all of these diners the chance to partake in their concord is the singular illumination of a flame hung sturdily overhead by lamp.

In a rare moment for early Van Gogh, he knows he created something worth feeling accomplished by. How incredibly sad it must have been, when Theo maintained that the picture did none of the things the sort of people who bought art wanted it to do. It was ghastly after all. No matter.

Van Gogh kept at it and would build on this work. And like lightening, we begin to see sunburst almost literally in his landscapes. The thing about Van Gogh was, he became a deeply ardent lover of Japanese landscape art; Where if people are involved at all in the scenes, they exist in the most miniscule of parts. Tiny homes, tiny boats. Infinitesimally minute, casually present human touches in the landscape hammered home the humbling truth that we are not separate from nature, but nature. In that, Van Gogh attempted to bring down Heaven into Earth. “Don’t you see,” we can hear him say, “God is here.”

That was the hope anyhow. Van Gogh was notoriously nomadic. The lightening rod of Christ was somehow present and elusive for the artist. He was always searching for this emotionally true feeling. In moments he bathed in it, and in others he was absolutely bereft of the spiritual elixir. So it was that when he painted, he searched. Along the way, the full gamut of the human experience, he tells to us in his work. Everything, we learn quickly, Van Gogh experiences is intense. We all know the type. He was noted for shaking peoples hands heartily. He verbally reprimanded himself for aging himself 10 years early because of the intensity of his smiles and frowns. His face wore the marks of raw emotions. He had deltas in his face for tears, mountains of peaked flesh across gaunt cheeks when he donned a smile. Buried beneath was a brilliant sun burnt red beard.

It would be no surprise to our sensibilities then, that when Van Gogh took off and painted, and really got into it, the experience was flooded with emotions and personal euphoria. Perhaps no painting wraps more completely the need Van Gogh had for pairing opposites, companionship, God on earth…a taradise if you will, and somehow innocently enough, sexual explosion all at once than Sower At Sunset. The hallmark of Van Gogh that the background is the picture more than the subject is takes place. The Sun, the singular entity wholly prominent shoots strings of brilliant light at us. Gobs of purple, golden browns, stream everywhere. Our farmer vanishes in the fully loaded paint thrust Vincent elects to give. We are positively covered in the essence of the seeds being planted. Don’t take my words for it, Van Gogh refers to his paintings as a sort-of orgasm, jouissance. His ecstasy is permeating in the picture.

By this point, Van Gogh was finding himself. He was no aesthete, but he was finding his expression. And for all the tears, bouts of madness, brilliance, personal victories he is remembered for two things even the most minimal observer can tell you, Starry Night and he cut off his ear.

Starry Night is the return of the darker blues. While he was ward of the hospital he stayed at, he paints Starry Night. Giving us the timeless scene. It is perhaps the most prolific of his works and deserves all the credit it receives. We are moved as it moves. We feel the solitude and purity of the moment the painting gives. But for my money Starry Night does none of the things Van Gogh needed for himself quite like Wheatfield with Crows Does.

For in Wheatfield with Crows, we have climax. Vincent had always been nomadic, looking for a path that had a clear direction, he gives us a path but stopped trying to say where it went and from where it came. There is no redeeming work to be done by a casual artisan working the field. Those nightscape blues tell us a storm is coming or just went. Our crows are minimal strokes – afterthoughts—flying away or landing. Those brilliant bursts of yellow weren’t sources of vitality emanating from a giving Sun, but there is life in there yet. Grassy paths yawn with earthy mud. He is at peace. It is a troubled mind realizing itself. “The zenith of the Sun is in you,” we get the feeling he is saying, “no need for looking for it in the painting, get the picture?”

Not long after this is done, Van Gogh shoots himself. He was finally being seen by his contemporaries as the visionary. His sermons were reaching eyes and not ears, finally. What the parishioners of Saint Vincent needed, Van Gogh at last found for himself. And then, when for a change, he was ready to be the lifeline of the family’s needs, he withdrew himself from the picture. And for my sensibilities, I would say it was the greatest of all his works. It mirrors the best that Turner made us do with his watercolors; he gives us the final stroke of the brush and tells us to decide what we are seeing. What do we need from this? Is it salvation? Is it acceptance? Is the point of life the living of it, or does the path actually go somewhere? Its existential without meaning to be. It’s a gospel without fantastical happenings. It is our comings and our goings. It is everything and it is nothing. Heaven meets earth, finally.

#@history

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mrplantman · 7 years ago

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“if I smile with my teeth, i think I’d believe me/oh please don't ask me how I've been/don't make me play pretend” - f a k e h a p p y (paramore)

01 / BASICS

Full Name: Arlo Jean Booth

Nicknames: Arlie/Lo

Birthday: September 17th

Gender: Cisgender Male

Sexual Orientation: Bisexual

Romantic Orientation: Biromantic

Astrological Sign: Virgo

Spoken Languages: English

Birthplace: Bridgeport, Connecticut

Relationship Status: Dating @striker-brayden

02 / PHYSICAL TRAITS

Hair Color/Style: Deep brown; usually cropped short on sides, longer on top; currently it’s grown out to about shoulder length & he wears it in small buns/low ponytails

Eye Color: Hazel

Face Claim: Samuel Larsen

Height: 6′0″

Tattoos: The phrase “i want to believe” + a scene of a UFO on the inside of his right forearm, a black and white pin up girl displaying his star sign/constellation, Virgo, on the inside of his right bicep, designed by his boyfriend Brayden, a bright cactus with flowers on the back of his left calf, a human and a skeleton hand performing a handshake on his left pec + the words “death is certain, life is not,” a small and simple crown on the inside of his left knee with the name “Max” directly below it, the quote “beautiful, little fool” from The Great Gatsby on the back of his upper thigh, following the curve of his right ass cheek, a black and white lunar moth + geometric design + flowers in between his shoulder blades that he plans to expand into an upper back piece (with more flowers and foliage) at a later date. Those are all for now.

Piercings: Several on both ears; both ears gauged to a small degree; left eyebrow pierced; nose pierced

Unique Attributes: Cute smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose

03 / PERSONALITY TRAITS/TYPES

Positive Traits: Calm, Capable, Levelheaded, Reliable, Goodnatured, Personable

Negative Traits: Stubborn, Sensitive, Insecure, Moody

Hobbies/Interests: Art & tattooing; film; music (especially vinyl); photography; playing guitar

Major/Minor: He is pursuing a major in Botany/Plant Science with a minor in Agriscience

Insecurities: His past as the son of a convict/foster child; being left behind; the fact that, outside of the Foxes, he doesn’t have a home or any kind of family

Quirks/Eccentricities: Has a very intense, slightly odd obsession with Bruce Springsteen; superstitious; meditates regularly; hates holidays like Black Friday that support aggressive consumerism; always wants to adopt weird, implausible pets (and normal ones!)

MBTI Type: INFP-A

Enneagram Type: The Helper

Moral Alignment: Neutral Good

Temperament: Phlegmatic

04 / FAMILY & HOME

Immediate Family: Father, recently deceased; Mother - whereabouts unknown

Other Family: Foster family -> The Masseys (most importantly = Theo, foster brother who he shares a strained, destructive relationship with)

How do they feel about their family?: Arlo loved his dad, despite the mistakes he made; the only Massey family member he cares for at all is Theo’s mother, Charla, whom he feels sympathy for

How does their family feel about them?: Arlo’s father loved and cared for him and hoped for a chance at redeeming himself as a father and caregiver, but ultimately never got one; Theo and his family rarely speak about Arlo since he moved out, but when they do, it’s always with polite indifference

Pets: None yet (due to living situation), but he does want one (or two, or ten, preferably weird ones)

Where do they live?: Stays in the dorms @ Fox Tower during the semester and with Abby on breaks/holidays

05 / THIS OR THAT

Introvert or extrovert? Introvert

Optimist or pessimist? Optimistic Realist

Leader or Follower? Follower (Mostly)

Confident or Self-Concious? Outwardly Varies, Inwardly Self-Concious

Cautious or Careless? Cautious

Passionate or Apathetic? Passionate

Book Smarts or Street Smarts? Street Smarts

Compliments or Insults? Compliments

06 / FAVORITES

Favorite Color: Green

Favorite Clothing Style/Outfit: Casual meets grunge; lots of ripped jeans, hoodies, leather jackets, band tees, and combat boots/Converse/Vans

Favorite Bands/Songs/Type of Music: Too many too count; as mentioned, he loves Springsteen as well as most other classic rock/punk, but he also enjoys rap, hiphop, and singer/songwriter stuff and even loves Top 40 pop music unironically

Favorite Movies: Hot Fuzz, any kind of spaghetti Western, Star Trek, Star Wars, E.T., any 80′s sci-fi

Favorite TV Shows: anything on HGTV, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones,weird TV documentaries, Ancient Aliens, pretty much any reality TV

Favorite Books: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Lord of the Rings series by JRR Tolkien, Saga by Brian K. Vaughn, anything by Edgar Allen Poe

Favorite Foods/Drinks: Pizza, Cereal, Toast, Doritos, Flavored water and teas

Favorite Sports/Sports Teams: Exy (duh), The Foxes (duh); also enjoys hockey and basketball, and loves watching the Olympics (swimming, diving, and ice skating)

Favorite Time of Day: Early Evening

Favorite Weather/Season: Cloudy, overcast, rainy; Autumn

Favorite Animal: Literally all of them (but his most favorite are ducks)

#extra #about #BE PROUD OF HIS TATTOOS YALL IT TOOK ME A LIFETIME OK

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liliaeth · 7 years ago

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I’ve got to admit it, I’m not entirely anti-thiam.

I don’t think they could get together right away, because of the huge amount of issues between them. For one thing, Liam has no way of knowing that anything Theo does, isn’t yet another attempt to manipulate him, and the rest of the pack.

And that’s Theo’s own fault. He’s unlikely to ever be pack, because of the way he abused the pack’s trust when it was given to him.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t get there. I love redemption stories. And just like Derek redeemed himself from the way he treated Scott in s1-2, Theo has been putting the first steps into redeeming himself, and trying to become a better person. Partly for Scott, and partly because underneath it all, he doesn’t want to be alone anymore. And he’s hooked unto Scott and Liam as ways to prove himself.

And I for one do hope that Theo will eventually get there, that eventually he can regain people’s trust, that Liam can forgive him. Because the two do have chemistry.

What I don’t like on the other hand, is that several thiam fics I saw, tried to vilify Scott, or had Liam pick Theo over Scott.

When the reality is, that Scott matters to Theo, just like you can’t just deny the bond between Scott and Liam.

And the chances are incredibly high, that Scott will forgive Theo long before Liam does. Hell, he probably already has. Scott doesn’t tend to hold grudges against people, for what they do against him. Even to someone like Theo who literally murdered him.

But since Scott doesn’t hold grudges, those who love and care for him, tend to hold them for him. And that’s what Theo will have to get past. Not Scott’s issues, Scott already sees Theo as on the road to redemption. He might not trust Theo yet, not entirely, but he’s probably already forgiven him for what Theo did to him.

What Theo has to get past is Liam’s anger over Theo manipulating him against Scott. Liam’s distrust that Theo will be trying to manipulate him again. Liam’s issues with Theo. Not Scott’s, Liam’s.

I just wish that more thiam fics realized that if you want to get Theo and Liam together, Scott is probably Theo’s greatest ally in getting Liam over his issues, rather than someone who’d get in the way of the pairing.

#Scott McCall #theo raeken #liam dunbar #thiam #teen wolf

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a-lil-bi-furious · 4 years ago

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This reply is a bit of a branch off from this post, because in your discussion of fandom’s romanticization of betas violently overthrowing alphas, you talked about something I think is really big. You and the person who sent the original message brought up Liam’s attempted murder of Scott and the way it was dismissed. I want to talk more about that. And I want to talk more about Scott in the fallout. Forgive me if this post doesn’t flow quite right or if it’s too off topic. I’m not quite used to engaging in discourse, but I have thoughts.

I think about the Season 5A finale all the time. I think about how Scott was abandoned by his friends, torn to shreds by Liam--his beta,which we know carries a child-parent bond, and murdered in cold blood by Theo, and then nothing came of it. We saw the violence, and then we saw Melissa bring him back to life in a miracle resurrection, and then we saw Scott’s best friend assault him directly after. We saw an almost apology from Liam to Scott, in which Liam insists a spoken apology isn’t enough, and Scott points out “You haven’t even done that yet.” And even after that, he doesn’t (at least not on screen). And we’re expected to believe that everything is somehow okay. Because of who Scott is as a person--always putting others before himself--I suspect he buries any kind of resentment and hurt caused by these events, because he doesn’t feel he’s allowed to have space for himself. He feels he has to worry about the others first. Always. And that’s a hefty burden to carry, especially considering just how much trauma this kid has experienced over the years. Eventually, all of that is going to bubble up to the surface. And this pattern of internalizing trauma with a general lack of care for himself or asking for help would ultimately be catastrophic. Scott is one of the most loving characters I’ve ever seen, and I have no doubt of his capacity for forgiveness, especially for Liam and the rest of his friends. But it’s ludicrous to me to expect that of him. You’re absolutely right. A victim decides whether or not they forgive their victimizer(s). It seems likely Scott would, given his history on the show. But I’m also convinced Scott has never been taught that he doesn’t have to forgive someone who’s hurt him even if he believes everyone deserves a chance to redeem themselves.

I’m sure this is a controversial statement, but many of the important people in Scott’s life should have at very least acknowledged that they hurt him. I mean Derek, Stiles, and Liam. I mean Chris. I mean Theo, who owes Scott a lot more than acknowledgement, but hadn’t even mustered that. I mean Deucalion. I mean Peter, though Peter would never. I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting. But I can’t really think of an instance where someone hurt Scott and actually acknowledged that they did and apologized. We almost got there with Liam, we almost did. And I know that apologies and forgiveness are not all verbal. But it does feel different when someone explicitly acknowledges your pain, and explicitly expresses a desire to make amends, rather than it just...happening. Scott deserves that kind of explicit validation, just like everyone else.

On the Liam of it all: I love Liam. I do. But very little riles me up faster than expressing love or compassion toward a character, while completely dismissing their wrongdoings. Not everyone does this, but some people do. And I don’t think it’s always intentional; I think in many ways, the way society and mass media are structured conditions us to excuse behavior, rather than explore the complexities of relationships, harm, and healing. People love redemption, but don’t seem to love the nitty-gritty of the actual process. So, most of the time, redemption goes like this: Person does bad thing. Show (or other media) decides they like person. Said media states person is redeemed. Person is considered good now. We rarely see any of the process in between. We focus on the wrong pieces, and I think that’s incredibly harmful. It encourages dismissal and tends, I think, to remove attention from those a “redeemed” character hurt.

It’s egregious that there’s so little exploration of the effects of Liam nearly killing Scott. Theo manipulated Liam left and right and certainly fed into whatever Liam was feeling. But manipulation aside, IED aside, Hayden’s condition aside, super moon aside, at the end of the day no matter how you spin it it was Liam who attacked Scott. To some degree he wanted to; everything else amplified it. And that is a really big issue, for both Scott and Liam. I want an in depth exploration of Scott trying to work through what Liam’s attack means and how he feels about Liam after that betrayal. I want an in-depth exploration of Liam’s guilt over attacking Scott, and having no idea what to do about hurting him. Because, really, there’s nothing to do about it. I want Liam trying to work out why he wanted to attack Scott in the first place and struggling to figure out how much blame he’s going to assign himself. I want Scott doing what Scott does, and trying to help Liam work through the whole thing, only to realize it’s absolutely something he can’t help with, because he hasn’t worked through it himself, and he isn’t sure he’s forgiven Liam. He thinks he has, but love and forgiveness don’t always exist together, and that’s okay. I want Scott to know that’s okay. I want Mason struggling with what he saw Liam, his best friend, do to Scott. I want an explanation of how seeing Theo kill Scott cemented that distrust and fear he mentions in season 6, but seeing Liam tearing into Scott had no effect at all. I want an exploration of their friendship, and Mason working through the love he has for the Liam he grew up with and the fear he has of the Liam who nearly killed Scott, and the fact that they’re both Liam. Even knowing the effects of the moon/the shift and how it amplifies Liam’s anger, I sincerely doubt witnessing something like that would have no effect on Mason. I just feel there’s a lot to discuss here, and not just the show but a lot of fan content glossed right over it. I want a detailed exploration of this whole event and how everyone’s feeling about it, and I want that with Scott’s experience of this trauma and the healing after being the central piece.

Hope that all made sense. And please, if I’m forgetting something or remembered something incorrectly, let me know.

1/2 Something that stood out to me from your last post was the whole idea that a beta can try to overthrow an alpha if they feel the alpha is no longer worthy, and how that is such a popular fanfic trope for some incomprehensible reason. This despite the fact that the only times we've seen it in canon it was unequivocally a Bad Thing. Marco attacking Deucalion after Gerard's ambush led to Deucalion going insane, Derek killing Peter turned him into the careless, power-obsessed alpha of S2,

2/2 and then Liam attacking Scott was his worst moment on the show. I just don't understand why fans are so keen to glorify it. Oh wait, they're using it against Scott. Now it all makes sense. (Sorry for the long ask, I had to vent.)

Venting is fine! Considering the show’s been over for three years, most of my posts are about venting my frustration about things that probably mean very little to anyone but me. Yet, we’re part of a community and that requires communication. There is no need to apologize.

Your observations are very valid. Our fandom is remarkably comfortable with the idea of murdering those who don’t believe as they do, even though that is a belief directly opposed by the themes of the show. I once saw a post saying “we like our werewolves to be bloodthirsty beasts, not poodles who won’t kill.” I refrained from responding -- “then perhaps you’re watching the wrong show.” But, unsurprisingly, they do tend to focus this belief on a particular set of characters.

The show made a clear statement that executions and murder do not comprise the path to victory. Derek’s murder of Peter in Code Breaker (1x12) was the first time the production pointed out “Here is the villain for next season!” Now, of course, detractors would scream that Scott also wanted to kill Peter, yet I don’t consider him evil. Scott wasn’t trying to punish Peter or usurp him; he was trying to reclaim his life, even though I truly believe that the cure was a lie that Derek used to get Scott to help him track down the alpha, just like how he hid the fact that he wasn’t the person who bit Scott to get Scott to help him track down Peter. No matter how this is seen, it doesn’t change the fact that all of the trouble in Season 2 came from revenge killing, whether it was Peter killing Kate or Derek killing Peter.

And then there was Marco’s assault, which was shown as vile treachery and a bad enough action to push Deucalion into pursuing a blood-soaked vision of the perfect pack. (It’s really intriguing that the same fans who are willing to give Peter’s butchery a complete pass because he burned with his family will scream about Scott and Derek not executing the Demon Wolf who was ambushed, his pack murdered along with him, and then betrayed. Could it be because Deucalion wasn’t the least bit interested in their self-insert? I think so.)

And then, of course, there’s Liam. In this, the fandom and the show unite as one in their sheer embrace of violence as an expression of disapproval. How many Thiam stories do more than skim past the idea that Liam and Theo worked together to murder Scott? Theo certainly didn’t do it by himself. Yet then they turn around and act as if it’s something that Scott, when he sees Liam and Theo canoodling, just has to get over. After all, if Scott were a better alpha, Liam wouldn’t have had to beat him to death. (And yes, that’s not a grammatical error. Liam bears just as much responsibility for that as Theo does.)

Now, of course, my detractors are going to come back with the fact that I write Sceo works, and my defense is that, unlike the freaking show, I prioritize Scott’s feelings in this scenario as the victim. Victims get to say if they forgive their victimizers or not. The show neglected this by having Liam focus his non-apology entirely on making himself feel better. (Jeff Davis missed one of the key parts about apologies -- they’re about the person hurt, not the person doing the hurting). You know why I can say this? Because while Liam was beating his breast over “I feel like I have to do more than just apologize,” he never once bothered to ask if Scott was, like, feeling okay or not. He was so fixated on crafting an apology in order to be able to live with himself, he forgot that there was another person involved.

But most of the fandom doesn’t act as if Liam has anything for which he has to apologize. No matter how obvious the show made it that Liam was being nudged to kill Scott by Theo, the fact that Liam felt Scott was incompetent was enough. There’s no fan fiction about consequences for Liam’s mistake, no endless supply of opinions about what Liam deserved for believing Theo over Scott. Compare that with the consequences envisioned for Scott’s mistake in believing that his paranoid, violent, best friend was lying to him right after he caught him in another lie.

Are you surprised? You shouldn’t be. The fandom has long directed violence towards Scott without remorse. Derek is given a pass for his assault on Scott in Co-Captain (1x10), in Ice-Pick (2x03), and in Venomous (2x05), because Scott ‘deserved’ it, but Scott is condemned to figurative Judecca, the circle of hell for those who betrayed their benefactors, for grabbing him by the neck and forcing him to Bite Gerard -- an act which saved Derek’s life -- and was forced at kanima point.

So why not double down in fandom content? If an alpha -- even an eighteen-year-old alpha who was dragged into being both a werewolf and an alpha -- is incompetent, whack him! (No one argues that Scott should have butchered Derek for his flops, and so many argue that Peter should be an alpha again, even after he repeatedly got his ass kicked by a bunch of teenagers. Liam is going to be a great alpha, especially after he broke Kira’s sword in order to get Theo to tell him that ... hey, Nazis are bad.) In this fandom, justified violent overthrow is reserved solely for the Latino protagonist/hero. Derek, Peter, Liam, Stiles can hurt Scott as much as they want, because you know, he deserves it.

But it’s not racism.

#Teen Wolf #Scott McCall #Liam Dunbar #Fandom Problems #I have a lot of feelings and don't always know how to properly express them

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junker-town · 5 years ago

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Kobe Bryant’s 32 most iconic basketball moments, ranked

There were so many memorable NBA moments in Kobe Bryant’s career.

Counting down the most memorable moments of Kobe Bryant’s NBA career

Kobe Bryant’s life was cut short at the age of 41 on Sunday, along with the lives of 13-year-old daughter Gianna Bryant, six other passengers, and a pilot flying to the Mamba Academy on Kobe’s Sikorsky S-76B helicopter. This is a tragedy on multiple levels that goes far deeper than the loss of a famous basketball player.

For basketball fans, Bryant was a player that seared many of the sport’s most iconic moments in recent history. It’s impossible to remember them all, but in honor of his two jersey numbers (24 + 8), here are 32 that I’ll never forget.

32. The air-ball fest that started it all

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It’s only fitting that we begin with his lowest on-court moment, which also happened to be his first significant one as a pro. Bryant averaged only 15.5 minutes per game as a rookie on the that 1996-97 Lakers team, but in that moment, they needed him out of necessity. Veteran shooting guard Byron Scott sat with a wrist injury, small forward Robert Horry was ejected in the third quarter for shoving Jeff Hornacek, and Shaquille O’Neal fouled out with 1:46 to play in regulation after foolishly biting on a Karl Malone pump fake. That left a teenage Bryant as their best hope to extend their season.

It took all of that to give him a formative professional experience that would drive the rest of his career.

31. A dozen threes in a game?

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Fun fact: Kobe was shooting 28 percent from three-point range through the first 34 games of the 2002-03 season. My favorite part, via the Seattle Post-Intelligencer game story:

In fact, before the game, Los Angeles Times’ columnist T.J. Simers informed Bryant that his daughter — a state champion shooter — could beat Bryant in a three-point shooting contest. He asked Bryant to bet money on the contest, the proceeds going to charity.

30. The passes to himself off the backboard

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Kobe wasn’t the first to pull off this move — that’d be Tracy McGrady, who did it in the 2002 NBA All-Star Game. But it’s befitting of Kobe’s audacity that he did it in a playoff game in 2008 against the Jazz, then even more spectacularly in a postseason game against Houston the very next season.

29. Behind the back on the Nuggets

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The current Lakers have a a set play where LeBron James launches a full-court pass to a posting-up Anthony Davis off an opponents’ free throw. Here’s how I described it a month and a half ago:

In those situations, the Lakers like to take Davis off the rebounding line and put him on the opposite block for early post-ups the other way. (They borrowed this tactic from Alvin Gentry, who used it during the Pelicans’ brief Davis-DeMarcus Cousins twin towers era). LA inbounds to LeBron, and he rushes the ball up to feed Davis as quickly as possible, giving him space to go one-on-one before help arrives.

As the year has progressed, LeBron has become more audacious with his post entry passes. He’ll sometimes eschew dribbling up the court and instead toss 60-foot bombs on a rope to Davis’ waiting arms.

I’d like to think Kobe’s 2003 dunk inspired them.

28. Sharing 2009 All-Star MVP honors with his nemesis

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Kobe’s ongoing feud with Shaq was so multi-layered that it has its own seven-part Wikipedia page. It’s hard to know when it really started and when it really tapered down, because both men weren’t exactly the most reliable narrators. (Remember when Shaq told Stephen A. Smith that “it was all marketing?” Nice try, big fella). But their 2009 All-Star experience is considered a key de-escalator in the overall cannon. As Shaq told USA Today’s Sam Amick in 2016:

“Everything became cool (with Bryant) my last All-Star Game in Phoenix,” said O’Neal. “Me and him got the co-MVP (at All-Stars). It was a great time, (and) my son Shareef, who was like nine (years old) at the time (was there).

“I was just going to give the trophy to Kobe, and Kobe looks at my little man and says, ‘Here you go, Shareef.’ ... I was kind of surprised that he remembered his name. He was like, ‘Here you go, Shareef. Here’s the trophy.’ Then I knew everything that happened (during the Lakers days) was silly.”

27. Welcome to the NBA, Dwight Howard

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This was the first time Kobe tormented Dwight. It wouldn’t be the last.

26. Welcome to the NBA, Yao Ming

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This game took place late in Yao’s 2002-03 rookie season, and Yao actually held his own with 24 points and 14 rebounds before fouling out. But the Lakers still got the last laugh, winning without Shaq in double overtime thanks to Kobe’s 52 points. “I feel like I want to get to bed quickly,” Yao said through an interpreter, via the New York Times. “Once I am asleep, everything is in the past.”

Fun fact: the voice you hear on TNT’s color commentary is none other than Jeff Van Gundy. Four months later, the Rockets hired him to be their head coach.

25. Welcome to the NBA, Ben Wallace

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Your eyes don’t deceive you: that is indeed UNLV’s Thomas and Mack Center, future home of the indie-turned-mainstream NBA Summer League. At the time, it was the host of an otherwise forgettable 1997-98 preseason game between the Washington Wizards and the Los Angeles Lakers.

I’ll let Marcus Vanderberg of the now-defunct Ball Don’t Lie blog (miss u) take it from here:

With time winding down at the end of the first quarter, Bryant crossed over journeyman guard Jimmy Oliver and set his sights on the basket. Ben Wallace — either not knowing any better or proving that he didn’t give a damn even back in 1997 — stepped up in the paint and became the first person to find himself on a Kobe poster. Bryant took off from inside the free-throw line and demolished Wallace with a ferocious dunk that got Hall of Fame broadcaster Chick Hearn just a wee bit excited:

“Slaaaaaam dunk! Wooooo!”

24. Welcome to the NBA (Finals), Todd MacCulloch

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Calling the 2002 NBA Finals anticlimactic is like saying snow is inconvenient for drivers. But in case there was any remaining suspense, this Kobe slam in the third quarter of Game 1 vanquished it. Eleven years later, ABC commemorated this dunk with one of the coolest Finals promos in recent memory.

23. Not yet, Kevin Durant

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I’m a sucker for young buck vs. old head duels. This one wasn’t the most artful contest, nor was it the one that ended a playoff series. Kobe and KD both dropped more than 30 points, but they weren’t guarding each other. Both made big shot after big shot, but neither made a field goal in the final two minutes. It was ultimately Jeff Green’s missed three that ended things. Still, this game foreshadowed a passing of the torch and was a sign that the Thunder were going to be a damn problem for years to come. As Kobe told Durant and Russell Westbrook after Game 6, “Glad we’re done with you guys.”

22. Quiet, Denver fans

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This was another epic Bryant performance against a younger peer (Carmelo Anthony) that has been lost to history. The scissor-kick three Kobe hit over J.R. Smith to give the Lakers a one-point lead with just over a minute left is still seared in my mind. So is that scowl, a Kobe specialty that peaked in that moment.

21. Speaking of sucking the energy out of the building

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With 16 words, TNT’s Kevin Harlan simultaneously captured a single moment in Kobe’s career and the enduring quality that made him such a basketball villain to so many non-Lakers fans.

20. The buzzer beater on Dwyane Wade

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Kobe had many regular-season buzzer beaters, but this one stands out because he redeemed himself for missing a game-winning attempt a few seconds prior.

19. Scoring 61 at Madison Square Garden

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The Madison Square Garden mystique was cool, but I’ll most remember the spin move and jumper Kobe made on Wilson Chandler to cap the night off. Technical brilliance mixed with ingenious creativity.

18. Kobe Bryant 62, Dallas Mavericks 61

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During the third quarter, Lakers TV analyst Stu Lantz delivered a prophetic line. “The only guy that can stop No. 8 tonight,” Lantz proclaimed, “is Phil Jackson.” It turns out Kobe was the one who declined Jackson’s invitation to re-enter the game in the fourth quarter, but the point still stands.

17. The infamous non-flinch

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Like many Kobe moments, this one ended up being too good to be true. Still, I had to include it.

16. Vanquishing the “Kobe Stopper”

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Ruben Patterson was once an end-of-the-bench Laker who, according to legend, nicknamed himself the “Kobe Stopper” for the way he defended Bryant in practice. (As with other Kobe stories, this one is more myth than reality). Patterson eventually left the team and established himself as a key defensive player for Seattle and then Portland.

That brings us to the 2003-04 season finale. The Blazers had just been eliminated from the playoffs for the first time in 22 years, while the Lakers needed a win to clinch the Pacific Division. Still, Portland played hard, and would’ve stolen a victory had Bryant not hit two impossible long threes to end regulation and overtime. The first was with Patterson in his jersey, while the second was a moonball that fell into the hoop as Patterson and Theo Ratliff rushed to close out.

With the win, the Lakers rose to the No. 2 seed and dropped the Kings to No. 4. That made a big difference in their eventual NBA Finals run.

15. The Magic never had a chance

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Another brilliant Kobe playoff performance that has been lost to time. It wasn’t his most prolific or most important, but it set the tone for a series that was only going to go one way. I most enjoyed Kobe performances that showcased his all-around game, and this one was a textbook example. Here’s an old Silver Screen and Roll breakdown that’s well worth your time.

14. The 50-point streak

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The league’s current pace-and-space trajectory may render this streak less impressive with time, but it was absurd in the moment. Here’s a summary.

13. Take that, Alvin Gentry

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It’s easy to forget how close the Lakers came to losing the 2010 Western Conference Finals. They dominated the first two games, only to be flummoxed by a daring Suns tactic to use a 2-3 zone to limit LA’s inside dominance. LA never really solved the Suns’ wrinkle, but maintained a 3-2 series advantage after Metta World Peace’s serendipitous buzzer-beating putback in Game 5.

That set the stage for Kobe to brutally shut the door in Game 6. After mostly deferring in the first half, he staved off a furious Suns comeback with a series of impossible shots. His second-to-last bucket was a spinning fadeaway 21-footer over Grant Hill and Channing Frye to push the Lakers’ lead back to five. His final hoop: a pump-fake, rise-up jumper over Hill from nearly the same spot as the shot clock expired. As it dropped through the net, Kobe gave Suns coach Alvin Gentry a gentle butt tap, as if to say, Nice try.

“There’s an intense game going on and you almost have to laugh at what he does,” was Gentry’s interpretation. “I mean, I thought we played great defense on him. He just made tough shot after tough shot.”

And Kobe’s?

“It looked like a much tougher shot than it was.”

12. See ya, Sacramento

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My favorite Kobe playoff performance once you separate out the stakes. It had everything we’ve come to know about Kobe.

He flew back to Los Angeles during the one-day break after Game 3 because Vanessa was in the hospital. Once he felt confident she was OK, he returned to Sacramento late on the night before an afternoon Game 4.

He embarrassed nemesis Vlade Divac with a thunderous poster dunk early in the game.

During the second quarter, he told an enraged Chris Webber not to chuck the ball away after an offensive foul because he wanted to beat the Kings at full strength. NBC’s Jim Gray said this was “a real good show of sportsmanship.” That’s one way to put it.

When interviewed at halftime, Kobe told Gray he was happy the Lakers were losing because they needed a challenge.

Kobe bullied his way for 19 free throws and 16 rebounds.

His final bucket involved him splitting an attempted double-team for a layup to put the Lakers up four.

He told reporters that he viewed the game as “a life-or-death situation,” even though the Lakers already had a 3-0 series lead and had won their previous 14 games. (Not to mention Vanessa’s real-life health scare).

11. See ya, San Antonio

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All of the above, distilled into one play.

10. The unofficial passing of the torch

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We all figured this would be Michael Jordan’s last game against Kobe Bryant. The stars were aligned for something special. It still exceeded expectations.

It looked to be MJ’s night early on. He nailed his first four jumpers, then picked off a lazy Shaquille O’Neal pass and took it to the house. But then Kobe started shooting and scoring, and shooting and scoring, and shooting and scoring, and shooting and scoring. Twenty-five points in five minutes. Forty-two at halftime. Fifty-five in the end, mirroring the double nickel Jordan dropped against the Knicks in 1995.

“It came to a point where there was that curiosity factor: was he going to hit 80? I’m sure it went through his head,” said Phil Jackson, foreshadowing the future.

(There’s a story going around that Kobe wanted to get payback on Jordan for dissing him after an early-season Wizards win, but the timeline doesn’t quite add up).

9. That 6-24 game

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Let’s keep it 100 for a second: Kobe was awful in Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals and was ultimately saved by Pau Gasol and Metta World Peace. But the Lakers’ ultimate triumph was also a fitting tribute to Kobe’s determination in the face of failure.

8. The alley-oop to complete the Portland comeback

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History remembers this play as a symbol of the Kobe-Shaq relationship before it got messy. The reality is more complex, yet also makes the moment even richer. From Roland Lazenby’s 2016 book Showboat: The Life of Kobe Bryant:

Witnesses could hardly believe what they were seeing — a bonding moment between the center and the guard — but the victory was proof. It was as if Bryant had refused to get discouraged, and that paid off by season’s end. ‘I think they came to respect each other,’ [longtime Phil Jackson assistant coach Tex] Winter said, although the coaches could never be sure what the players were merely doing as a public gesture and what they truly felt. Scoop Jackson, for example, saw O’Neal running around at game’s end, looking to celebrate with anyone but his foil.

Asked about O’Neal, Bryant shrugged. ‘We just do it our separate ways,’ he said. ‘That’s all we did all season long. It just depended on what we needed in certain situations. So even though we go our separate ways, it all linked up in the end.’

In 2009, blogger Jason Kottke noticed something funny on the unedited version of the clip, which has sadly been removed from YouTube: (That last part is a stretch, alas).

O’Neal throws it down and the camera follows him as he heads down the court yelling in celebration, totally blowing right past Kobe, who has his hand out to high-five Shaq. Kobe half-heartedly grabs at O’Neal’s forearm as he passes; Shaq doesn’t even notice. [...] The unedited clip of the play1 shows an awkward ending to this awkward moment. After celebrating with the Lakers bench, Shaq looks for Kobe and the two finally acknowledge the play together. But it’s a brief moment; they slap hands and go their separate ways, foreshadowing Shaq’s departure four years later.

Knowing this only deepens my appreciation of the moment. The beauty of basketball is that two people without much real-life chemistry can become simpatico in an instant when they step between the lines.

7. Saving the Redeem Team

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Kobe’s most notable impact on Team USA was intangible. He was the last star to commit to playing in the 2008 Olympics, and his commitment signaled the importance of reclaiming basketball supremacy to a younger crew of stars that included the future Banana Boat crew. His leadership and work ethic rubbed off on those players, elevating them to levels they may not have reached otherwise.

But I’ll remember the way Kobe pushed them over the finish line in the fourth quarter of the gold medal game when Spain’s zone confused everyone else. Whenever Spain got close, Kobe had the answer. They couldn’t stop him.

Months later, he hung his gold medal in Pau Gasol’s locker during Lakers training camp in an attempt to motivate him. Ruthless, uncomfortably cruel, and ultimately successful: straight out of the Kobe playbook.

6. “Bryant, for the win. Baaaaaaang”

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This was when Kobe’s individual supremacy peaked. A few reasons why:

It came at the end of Kobe’s best individual season, when he averaged 35 points a game in leading a decrepit Lakers roster to 45 wins and a postseason berth. Imagine Russell Westbrook’s MVP season, but even more individually overwhelming. That was Kobe’s 2005-06.

The Suns actually wanted to play the Lakers in the first round. According to Jack McCallum’s book :07 Seconds or Less: My Season on the Bench with the Runnin’ and Gunnin’ Phoenix Suns, the Suns believed they could easily exploit the Lakers’ transition defense and bait Kobe into selfish play. They even rested key players for a late-season ABC contest to help facilitate the matchup.

The final 12.6 seconds of regulation were wild. With the Suns up five, the much-maligned Smush Parker, who was 1-14 from downtown in the series to date, hit a standstill three to cut the lead to two. Steve Nash, of all people, turned it over on the ensuing inbound, and Kobe sidestepped around Raja Bell and hit the game-tying floater over Boris Diaw’s outstretched arms. Absurd shot. (D’Antoni then drew up a beautiful out of bounds lob play for James Jones that failed because the officials ignored Luke Walton’s blatant hold.)

The Suns still led by one in the closing seconds of overtime when Nash bizarrely dribbled to the sideline. He attempted to pivot away from Walton and Lamar Odom and signaled for a timeout. But instead of calling a foul or honoring Nash’s request, the officials called a jump ball, even though a still photo later revealed Walton’s foot was out of bounds as he tied Nash up. Walton tipped it to Kobe and you know the rest.

At the time, it felt like the Suns were cursed and Kobe was destined to find a way to win no matter the circumstances. Which, of course, made Phoenix’s rally from a 3-1 deficit to win the series even more improbable.

5. The free throws after tearing his Achilles

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Longtime Lakers trainer Gary Viti once said that this was Kobe’s “gutsiest moment.” I don’t think Viti was referring to Kobe’s physical pain — a fully ruptured Achilles actually hurts less in the moment than many other serious injuries. Instead, I think he was noting Kobe’s strength to fight through his mental anguish at the thought of his body finally breaking down after years of feeling indestructible.

Watching Kobe’s postgame interview only drives home that point. He looks like a man finally coming to terms with his own athletic mortality.

4. A legend is born

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Most remember Kobe’s first championship run for the Game 7 comeback against the Blazers, but the six-game NBA Finals series win over the Pacers was no walk in the park. Kobe badly injured his ankle in a Game 2 victory when Indiana’s Jalen Rose slid under him on a mid-range jumper. (Years later, Rose admitted he did it on purpose). Kobe missed Game 3, an easy Indiana victory, and was a doubt for Game 4. He refused to shoot layups during pregame warmups, telling NBC’s Ahmad Rashad that he was “saving it for the game.” The game went to overtime, and with 2:29 left, Shaquille O’Neal fouled out jumping for a rebound with Rik Smits.

Remember: the Lakers hadn’t won a title yet and were up against a vastly more experienced team on the road. Lose this game, and the series would be tied 2-2 with Indiana hosting Game 5. The MVP was on the bench, and his co-star was operating at less than full capacity. The series swung in the balance.

Kobe’s response:

A vicious crossover and pull-up jumper on Reggie Miller on the next play.

A rise-up shot from nearly the same spot over a flummoxed Mark Jackson.

A crucial block from behind on an Austin Croshere layup that would have cut the lead back to one.

A reverse tip-in after the Pacers successfully denied him the ball with 5.9 seconds left to shove the advantage back to three.

This was when his clutch legend was born.

3. A curtain call for the ages

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A cartoonish mockery of the game of basketball for three quarters that turned into something magical by the end. That it upstaged the Warriors breaking the goddamn single-season wins record made it even more memorable.

What a perfect way for Kobe to go out.

2. 81

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Kobe’s basketball reputation is built on the premise that he plays his best when the moment is biggest. It’s ironic, then, that his best individual performance came in one of the most anonymous settings of his career.

The game took place on Jan. 22, 2006, a Sunday that was cleared for the NFL’s two conference championship games. Regular Lakers announcer Joel Meyers was calling the NFC title game, leaving backup Bill MacDonald to fill in. Jack Nicholson didn’t show up. Several other regular celebrities begged off the game.

Early on, there was little indication that Kobe was about to have one of those nights. The Raptors came out in a 2-3 zone that cut off the rest of Kobe’s teammates. They took a double-digit lead and swelled it to 18 to start the third quarter. Kobe had 26 first-half points: noteworthy, but hardly unusual.

In fact, it was part of the plan. As Toronto point guard Jose Calderon told ESPN:

People always ask me, “How is it possible to let one guy score 81 points?” Because we were winning almost the whole game. He can keep scoring as long as we’re up. Yeah, he’s killing us, but the rest of the team is doing nothing, and we’re winning. We didn’t think he would keep scoring like he was.

Once Kobe started heating up the third quarter, Raptors players pleaded for a change in strategy. Instead, coach Sam Mitchell stayed the course. “It was the most frustrating thing,” guard Mike James told ESPN. “Maybe that should have been one of those times where we were rebellious and went against Coach’s will.”

To this day, Mitchell defends his decision. As he told CBS Sports’ James Herbert in 2017:

It’s always funny to me ‘cause I look at the other side, if we win the game. Because it’s not like we got beat by 30. We were winning the game. My thought process during that was one, how can we slow him down?, and two, we can still win the game. As great a game as he was having, I thought we had just as good a chance to win the game. We were winning. So, you know, you’re trying to stop him because if you can stop him, it increases your chance to win. But also, you’re saying even if we don’t stop him, we can still win this game.

He gives himself too much credit, but he also has a point. Whatever the Raptors were doing was working for a large stretch of the game. Then, out of nowhere, Kobe caught fire and directed the sports world’s attention to a game they otherwise would have ignored.

And yet, as magical as this night was, it won’t stick with me as much as ...

1. Kobe and Gigi, geeking out

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... a father and a daughter — a teacher and a student, a mentor and mentee — gleefully sitting courtside while nerding out over a piece of basketball minutiae in a mundane regular-season game between two losing teams.

I’ve watched this sequence hundreds of times in the last 48 hours, and it still gets me. The world didn’t just lose a basketball star Sunday. It lost a past icon and a future legend. It lost a proud father and a happy daughter, sharing in a routine moment while doing what they both loved.

Rest in peace, Kobe and Gianna Bryant.

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arlobooth-blog · 8 years ago

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01 / BASICS

Full Name: Arlo Jean Booth

Nicknames: Arlie/Lo

Birthday: September 17th, 1994

Gender: Cisgender Male

Sexual Orientation: Bisexual

Romantic Orientation: Biromantic

Astrological Sign: Virgo

Spoken Languages: English

Birthplace: Bridgeport, Connecticut

Relationship Status: Single

02 / PHYSICAL TRAITS

Hair Color/Style: Deep brown; cropped short on sides, longer on top; occasionally allows his hair to grow out & will then wear it in small buns/low ponytails

Eye Color: Hazel

Face Claim: Samuel Larsen

Height: 6′0″

Tattoos: Many (TBD)

Piercings: Several on both ears; both ears gauged to a small degree

Unique Attributes: Cute smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose

03 / PERSONALITY TRAITS/TYPES

Positive Traits: Calm, Capable, Levelheaded, Mature, Reliable, Goodnatured

Negative Traits: Aloof, Stubborn, Sensitive, Insecure, Moody

Hobbies/Interests: Art & tattooing; film; music (especially vinyl); photography; playing guitar

Insecurities: His past as the son of a convict/foster child; being left behind; the fact that, outside of the Foxes, he doesn’t have a home or any kind of family

MBTI Type: INFP-A

Enneagram Type: The Helper

Moral Alignment: Neutral Good

Temperament: Phlegmatic

04 / FAMILY & HOME

Immediate Family: Father, recently deceased

Other Family: Foster family: The Masseys (most importantly = Theo, foster brother who he shares a strained, destructive relationship with)

How do they feel about their family?: Arlo loved his dad, despite the mistakes he made; the only Massey family member he cares for at all is Theo’s mother, Charla, whom he feels sympathy for

How does their family feel about them?: Arlo’s father loved and cared for him and hoped for a chance at redeeming himself as a father and caregiver, but ultimately never got the chance; Theo and his family rarely speak about Arlo since he moved out, but when they do, it’s always with polite indifference

Pets: None yet (due to living situation), but he does want one (or two, or ten, preferably weird ones)

Where do they live?: Stays in the dorms during the semester and with Abby on breaks/holidays

05 / THIS OR THAT

Introvert or extrovert? Introvert

Optimist or pessimist? Optimistic Realist

Leader or Follower? Follower

Confident or Self-Concious? Varies

Cautious or Careless? Cautious

Passionate or Apathetic? Passionate

Book Smarts or Street Smarts? Street Smarts

Compliments or Insults? Compliments

06 / FAVORITES

Favorite Color: Green

Favorite Clothing Style/Outfit: Casual meets grunge; lots of ripped jeans, hoodies, leather jackets, band tees, and combat boots/Converse/Vans

Favorite Bands/Songs/Type of Music: Too many too count; as mentioned, he loves Springsteen as well as most other classic rock/punk, but he also enjoys rap, hiphop, and singer/songwriter stuff

Favorite Movies: Hot Fuzz, any kind of spaghetti Western, Star Trek, Star Wars, E.T.

Favorite TV Shows: anything on HGTV, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, weird TV documentaries, Ancient Aliens

Favorite Books: Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, The Lord of the Rings series by JRR Tolkien, Saga by Brian K. Vaughn, anything by Edgar Allen Poe

Favorite Foods/Drinks: Pizza, Cereal, Toast, Doritos, Flavored water and teas

Favorite Sports/Sports Teams: Exy (duh), The Foxes (duh); also enjoys hockey and basketball, and loves watching the Olympics (swimming, diving, and ice skating)

Favorite Time of Day: Early Evening

Favorite Weather/Season: Cloudy, overcast, rainy; Autumn

Favorite Animal: literally all of them (but his most favorite is ducks)

#about #extra #FINALLY got around to finishing this #info

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fuzzypurplestuff · 8 years ago

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The architects of teen idoldom have always known that more than music, though perhaps less than good orthodontic work, the clothes make the boy. The shirt of a heartthrob needs to be soft and ever so slightly rumpled, offering visual evidence that if it were removed and tossed onto a floor (say, in a dressing room as its owner heads into a post-show shower), it could be grabbed and held like a treasured lovey blanket, emitting a scent just on the verge of sour, yet intoxicating: a blend of tree fort and licorice and ropy muscles, of girls' letters written in felt pen. The perfume of a young man's pleasure at merely being alive.

What made the boy was a polo shirt in the 1950s, a turtleneck in the 1960s, something polyester during the disco era. Gloria Stavers put Jim Morrison in her own fur jacket when she posed him for the cover of the magazine she edited, 16; the designer Bill Whitten put Michael Jackson in sequined jumpsuits that made him seem like light itself. As the teen male physical ideal was reshaped by gym rat practices and creatine, the fashions became simpler, to better show off honed physiques. By the mid-2000s the perfect teen idol outfit was more an ideal than a fashion statement: a white t-shirt, somehow never sullied — the ultimate sign of easeful male privilege. The one Harry Styles most frequently wore as the shaggy-haired main libidinal force in the boy band One Direction was a little loose but definitely clingy, sleeves rolled up so his fresh tattoos peeked through, possibly pulled out of a heap but somehow never wrinkled.

Styles has worn a variation of this shirt since trying out for the X Factor in 2010, when he covered it up with a scarf and a cardigan. (Maybe Simon Cowell, his mentor and white t-shirt devotee himself, convinced Styles of its magical powers.) His short-lived romance with the equally precocious and popwise Taylor Swift was defined by it when she immortalized the shirt in her song "Style". On his self-titled solo debut, out last week, he answers her with his own t-shirt-centric "Two Ghosts."

Styles also wore a t-shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone, for a feature that officially signaled his coming of age. That one, however, had an orange collar and was a little dingy, not shiningly bleached. It was an indie rock t-shirt, the kind Kurt Cobain wore when he was demolishing the value of manufactured teen pop back in the 1990s. It placed Styles in time, within the same lineage that the magazine featuring him had helped canonize: the illustrated history of rock.

In 1972, David Cassidy also grew up on the cover of Rolling Stone. The cherubic star of the rock and roll sitcom The Partridge Family was a huge star that year, riding a couple of Billboard Top 40 singles, selling out sports arenas, and fighting off groupies in the lobbies of the hotels that served as his home. At 22, he was ready to make a leap into something more meaningful — he wanted to act in movies and TV shows "with meaning," and in his off hours, he strummed his guitar and studied the music of Crosby, Stills and Nash. To signal this maturation, Cassidy gave a frank interview to journalist Robin Green, revealing his aspirations, his struggles with anxiety, and his mixed feelings about the rock world, which he felt excluded him because of his ardent young female fan base.

Cassidy spoke up for the girls who bought buttons and posters plastered with his face: "They're not that stupid. You can only hype them to a certain degree. There has to be something there.... They can't just manufacture someone and expect him to be big and successful." He talked about being raised in a Hollywood family, taking acid in the L.A. canyons as a teenager, then making his own way in New York, where he got serious about his craft. Green portrayed him as a loner who survived on canned peaches in his house in Encino, meeting groupies on the road who had sex with him but thought his Vegas-style act was uncool. Though his defense of his fans still resonates, his scorn for the industry that made them love him is palpable. Teen idoldom, in 1972, was a prison; rock and roll was on the other side of the wall.

Green's excellent probe into Cassidy's world is mostly forgotten today, but the photographs that accompanied the feature are immortal. To say what he did in their interviews and have his words taken seriously, Cassidy had to challenge his own image as a musical toy whose moving parts were pulled from a backlot costume rack. He did this in the most drastic and logical way. The portraits Annie Leibovitz shot show Cassidy recumbent, arms overstretched or grasping his own chest. He is nude. In one, bushy pubic hair skims the bottom of the frame. At first glance, with his long shag and lean torso, Cassidy could be Iggy Pop or Patti Smith. In the 1970s, getting naked was a common way to show one's daring — heavy metal bands did it on album covers, loving couples did it in the illustrations for sex manuals, streakers did it across athletic fields. But Cassidy's nudity accomplished something else: It pulled him out of the milieu that had defined him and made him seem innocent as a fawn, with his whole life ahead of him instead of stuck within a showbiz tradition that he had no interest in trying to redeem.

In 2017, Harry Styles is doing things differently. One Direction, the Cowell-constructed boy band that brought him superstardom, always salted its music with rock reference points, borrowing hooks and riffs from beloved bands like Big Star. Emerging as the band's front man, Styles led the charge in this reclamation of a history teen idols have always been denied. His Rolling Stone fashion spread takes the claim further. Shot by magazine founder and baby-boomer icon Jann Wenner's son Theo, Styles dresses in the finery of rock's legacies: not just that t-shirt borrowed from grunge, but a Carnaby Street style black suit designed by the late post-punk fashion maverick Alexander McQueen and a punkish ripped-jeans-and-bandana look that makes him look like a youthful Mick Jones of the Clash. He also appears in a high-necked lace top that places him within the queer continuum of current trendsetters like Perfume Genius.

As Cassidy did, Styles also stands up for his female fans. But he goes much farther than his more petulant forebear, who clearly felt exiled from rock by his teen associations. "Young girls like The Beatles," he told his interviewer, the filmmaker and journalist Cameron Crowe. "You gonna tell me they're not serious? How can you say young girls don't get it? They're our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going."

Crowe's lengthy feature on Styles is a key element in the rollout of the self-titled solo album that's getting him crowned the genre-saving king of popified rock. That's the circle of life in the land of teen idoldom, a space that's changed a lot since Cassidy's day. Rolling Stone has played a role in teen pop's slow legitimation. Myriad idols have sought the coveted cover spot as part of proving their bona fides. Michael Jackson, ever precocious, claimed it in 1971; the headline read, "Why Does This 11-year-old Stay Up Past His Bedtime?" George Michael, still trying to transcend Wham! In 1988, brooded gorgeously over line, "No More Kid Stuff." Christina Aguilera posed naked, but with a legitimizing guitar, in 2002 (women's nudity, unfortunately, often reads more like the sexist status quo on these covers than an act of self-determination.) And the list goes on: The Spice Girls, Usher, Warped Tour type bands like Panic! At the Disco, all lengthily considered not simply as commercial juggernauts but as artists within pop's changing cultural milieu.

Cassidy never had a chance in the 1970s. Rock was still the dominant force in American pop, and even as they packed sports arenas, its denizens prided themselves on not pandering to the corporate music industry. For all of the sartorial glam androgyny that Styles has now adopted, rock and roll in its classic phase was a masculine form that relegated women to support roles. Pop never stopped belonging to girls, but as rock stars became more self-consciously artistic, they (and their packagers in media and the industry) started to downplay the influence of teen culture. The Sgt. Pepper Beatles became the paradigm, the Hard Day's Night moptops forgotten. To prove he wasn't "brain dead," George Michael told his Rolling Stone interviewer Steve Pond, he actually grew stubble. It was a "simplistic, very obvious way" to prove he was no longer a kid, nor for the kids.

Harry Styles's rapid ascent to the status of widely accepted genuine musical contender — his crowning by eager reviewers as everything from the new Frank Sinatra to "a true rock star," reflecting almost universal positive reviews — is something new, though not revolutionary. It locates rock as a social and stylistic force within pop, not superior or opposed to it. Styles, born the year rock's last acknowledged savior Kurt Cobain killed himself, was raised to think of rock sounds and styles as ingredients enhancing pop's appeal instead of either purifying or banishing it; he grew up loving Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac, he tells interviewers, and sees no contradiction in that. Like Swift, whose polymath abilities he clearly envies, Styles has no problem projecting rock's unusual mix of earnestness and cool without surrendering his pop-bred affability and graciousness. And having grown up within a teen-culture system that brands its human agents as intelligent and self-aware, Styles doesn't have to reject what he built with his idol band and his teen fans. Instead, he can embrace it as something enduring — in fact, as the ground of rock history itself.

Teen spirit started rock and roll, after all, with high school-produced doo wop sweeping the nation even before Elvis came along. The Beatles themselves certainly knew what they were on about, wittily making art of the mania surrounding them.Dion DiMucci, whose fine lost transitional album Kickin' Child just received its first release this week, is just one of several 1960s teen idols who held onto pop's charms while exploring new musical approaches. Yet for all its power as a seedbed, teen pop remained an environment artists sought to grow beyond until the late 1990s, when the place most wanted to go — the rock counterculture — finally started sputtering out.

An important caveat: This was true predominantly for white artists. In R&B and, later, hip-hop, the dividing line between teen and adult music has never been as strong. Girl groups spoke of youthful dramas, but the institutions that produced them — the Brill Building and Motown chief among them — always aimed for several demographics at once. Michael Jackson struggled personally with his own maturity, yet when he died in 2009, his childhood hits with the Jackson 5 echoed from mourning fans' stereo systems alongside his epochal adult work on Thriller and Bad. And despite the personal problems that have made him seem at times like the most immature of pop's "bad boys," Justin Bieber, who was mentored by Usher — one of the most successful African-American teen pop stars of the past thirty years — has made a smooth musical transition into adult pop by consistently showing mastery as an R&B vocalist and songwriter. The more seamless relationship between youthful and "grown" music within African American music is one reason that the adventurous 2016 solo debut by former One Direction member Zayn Malik wasn't greeted with the rapturousness his ex-bandmate is enjoying. No one was surprised that a heartthrob like Zayn, who is half-Pakistani and has always been styled as the One Direction member with the closest affinity to hip-hop, could make cutting-edge R&B music.

In the rock-adjacent world, it was the Spice Girls — the 1990s version of One Direction, and in many ways a self-conscious Beatles tribute act, though the vocal quartet's many detractors would have never accepted that — that engaged with postmodern pastiche to cast teen music in a light that made it not an enemy of sophistication, but its conduit. Influenced by Asian pop at its most wackily self-reflexive and in tandem with Britpop bands like Oasis and Blur, the first bands to approach rock's archive the way hip-hop producer claimed the sounds they sampled, the once-derided Spice Girls now seem highly prescient. Styles's music doesn't sound anything like the Spice Girls, but his personal style recalls the group's theatrical parade through pop's sartorial heritage; in costume, he doesn't signal outrageousness the way rock stars like early Bowie or Mick Jagger did, but comfort with fashion's way of telling stories through artful accessories.

Musically, Harry Styles fits in with Britpop, rock's most pastiche-driven subgenre. Thought the album has earned endless comparisons to classic rockers like Rod Stewart and glam pioneers like Bowie, it doesn't sound anything like those artists' key albums, which were not produced digitally and ride on a live energy very different from this one's clean, subtle mix of elements. Songs like "Sign of the Times" much more closely mirror Britpop anthems like Blur's "Tender" or the Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" than anything Bowie released in his prime. And there's no bottom on this album, none of the whomping beat that lent glam its irresistible rudeness. Rolling Stone critic Rob Sheffield's invocation of soft rock is more apt, especially when it comes to ballads like "Meet Me in the Hallway"; he's following the path of Ed Sheeran on tracks like that one, updating the troubadour confessions of James Taylor with subtle hip-hop production elements.

When Styles does throw back to something resembling classic rock, as he does on the mid-album designated party cuts "Only Angel" and "Kiwi," he lands in the one spot where rock happily opened up to teenpop influences before Britpop: 1980s hair metal. Those two songs almost do have a bottom, and are aptly reminiscent of Def Leppard, the British band that, in partnership with the old school genre-busting producer Mutt Lange, made what Rolling Stone itself has called the greatest hair metal album of all time: 1987's Hysteria, a shockingly successful attempt to stuff Michael Jackson's ambition and versatility into a tight pair of Spandex pants. The only negative aspect of Styles's embrace of the fun and flash of Def Leppard is that along with their sound, he's grabbed a handful of their vintage sexist attitudes about women. Styles's growls about "dirty girls" who threaten him with unwanted pregnancies are one element of his colorful costuming he'd do best to leave behind.

Yet though they strut their way into rock's clichés, even those songs emanate a seamless approach to genre. This quashing of categories is not only the common moveof the Top 40 in the streaming era, but also the essence of teen pop, which, in its attempts to serve young listeners not yet locked into their own musical loyalties, has always been fluid, gravitating toward whatever sounds tickle the ear and excite the feet.

Though directed at an audience supposedly preoccupied with dividing into tribes, teen pop — like hip-hop, which has often merged with it, from Kriss Kross to Rae Sremmurd — is an open form, more engaged with whatever seems novel than with any particular lineage. Styles presents himself as a savant of such novelty. So did the best Britpop artists, whether they would ever admit their connections to teen pop or not: Damon Albarn continues this pursuit of inexhaustible eclecticism in Gorillaz today. Britpop's appropriation a hip-hop sensibility, in particular changed rock, and represents the mood that in 2017 propels hits by artists across categories, from bands like Young the Giant and OneRepublic to R&B remodelers like Bruno Mars to country mold-breakers like Keith Urban. It's no accident that Jeff Bhasker, the producer who bottled the magic that makes Harry Styles a universal crowd-pleaser, has worked with all of those artists.

This is why Harry Styles really might be rock's savior: He's not a rock artist. Instead, he's a pop polymath, like Adele, whose warm, emotionally resonant vocal tone he can nearly match; or like Rihanna, whose bulletproof nonchalance he emulates in his seamless encounters with the media. He's also an emblematic millennial, projecting entitlement but not grandiosity, simply claiming space wherever his laptop and hair products fit on the counter. Forming the persona that best suits his roving psyche, he's collecting himself in bits and pieces. "I always said, at the very beginning, all I wanted was to be the granddad with the best stories ... and the best shelf of artifacts and bits and trinkets," he told Crowe during his Rolling Stone victory lap. Bits and trinkets, electrified: That's the naked truth of rock and roll.

#article #lovely boy hs #harry styles #solo harry #harry styles the album

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