#anyway there were so many components to this dream that even if I had written it down right after I woke up-

[amandabe11man]

had the most insane dream about how Saw XI would go and it was so spectacularly bad that it reminded me of reading SNK's last chapter 😭 there was one cool part, but it was made pointless a couple minutes later

[rachelamberprice]

i’m an amberprice before all, but chloe is one of my favorite characters of all time and i think the way they wrote the pricefield break up (and really the fact it exists at all, narratively) is ooc. chloe’s arc in lis1 shows she becomes very attached and fiercely loyal to her loved ones. to a degree most people just wouldn’t go. it would take military grade equipment to remove her from william, rachel, max and even joyce. the reason why she even offers to sacrifice herself also hinges upon that loyalty, hence how she brings up not wanting her mom to die. but she also knows the trauma max has gone through (that’s like life ruining trauma) to try and save her and she loves her for that in ways you couldn’t put into words

i agree with michel on this one

but even he conceded that it shouldn’t have happened, narratively

but anyway, to tack onto this, something about deck nine that really frustrates me is the way they sort of break life is strange down into these marketable “components”. you can see this both in the ads for the game and the game’s writing itself. they’re like “look, it’s a small town and a murder mystery! that’s what you want, right? look, some independent music! that’s the same thing, right?” and even their love interests feel phoned in/shallow that way. life is strange 1 (and even before the storm, which is theirs) didn’t have these marketable love interests that were commodified more or less. they just had organic characters that were organic to the story — max, chloe, rachel. none of them were there to be love interests specifically. they were there to tell the story that the creators had a lot of artistic passion/inspiration to tell. the indie music wasn’t chosen just to be novel and hipster, it was carefully chosen to tell the player even more things about the scene or its characters. “To All Of You” was commentary on how poorly female characters are written in american media and how they aren’t allowed their own complex emotions and portrayals because they’re dainty archetypes usually. the entire game flies in the face of that issue by showing us a cast of women who are more than just their traumas and the abuse they suffer to the men in the game. they’re allowed to be imperfect, angry, multi-faceted

then you have “Santa Monica Dream” which set the tone for what chloe had lost in her relationship with rachel. i mean, there’s so many examples

there was sooo much passion that went into crafting that game and none of it was like “oh, we’re checking boxes to please the publisher and market the game”. to be fair, the game was made first and then shopped to publishers. but even with LiS2, it had the same love and genuine care instead of just… marketable pieces forced in

and i don’t fault the devs for being forced to do some of this under square’s thumb and complying to do everything they can to keep the IP because they want to have jobs. how can i fault people just trying to feed their family and live? and even when corporate/capitalist shit has been ruining the lives of devs in the industry forever now, they’ve always asked us to keep buying and supporting games anyway because they don’t want to lose their livelihoods. they would suffer, not the higher ups at square. but the issue is complex. because at some point the product isn’t being made with a desire to make art anymore, and it’s also not being made with over 60% of the audience in mind… and a lot of us are poor or struggling too and don’t have the money to waste. so then we don’t support the game, fine. but it’s like… no one is winning here? the devs aren’t winning because they’re closer to losing the IP because fans are let down (and arguably kind of lied to in marketing), square is making less money as pre orders are canceled, fans are just getting these games without love/passion that are made under extreme stress because the workers are in awful conditions. no one is winning here. something has to give and if that means it’s voting with our wallets then…? i guess that’s what it comes to, right?

the game industry is less about art now and more about appeasing these rich people that are making demands and that sucks for everyone involved. it’s predatory on the devs and the fans. and this is without talking about the nazi the studio had employed. not even sure if he’s been let go yet. not that that’s the fault of the other people who are having to suffer working alongside him (and HR is usually corrupt in games anyway) but it’s still something to really consider when supporting a studio?

but anyway, my main point with this post was just to analyze the way deck nine’s LiS games have now turned into this “hit the check boxes, give them the murder mystery, manufactured love interest, music, etc” and to me that’s making the games worse than anything else. even the pricefield debacle aside

because at least before the storm felt like a story being told to tell the story and not like a “hey here’s a murder mystery with love interest 1 and 2”, which started happening with true colors

maybe this is like a melodramatic take though, idk. i mean, i love before the storm so it’s clear to me there’s people in D9 (or there were) that do care about the original story/world of LiS1 and want to make art. even if there are also some losers in the mix (the nazi… 😭) maybe there are some really redeemable things in double exposure that make it worth playing and also just worth more than the sum of its bad marketing and flaws. i didn’t like true colors much because it felt hollow a lot of the time (and rushed?) but yeah

[lurkinglurkerwholurks]

Catch Me

First posted: August 28, 2019

Focuses on: Dick Grayson and Clark Kent

Favorite bookmark: “Really refreshing in the unexpected stylistic choices the writer made in each sentence. Really held your attention with figurative language. Also, lots of nightmares and cuddles, so... :)"

Tier: Middle-ish

This is my “behind the scenes” series where I indulge myself horribly by annotating my fics. Link to the fic itself above. Thoughts below the cut.

The title from this one comes from "Tightrope" from The Greatest Showman. Fun fact, before I was friends with @audreycritter, she did a fundraiser for a friend that included a fic component. I donated so I got to pick the prompt, and it was also this song, because it gives me BIGGGGG Dick & Bruce emotions, and that prompt became The Hand In My Hand.

Go listen to that song and think of these two. It's amazing.

Anyways. This fic was written for @husborth as a late birthday gift, if I remember correctly. I sussed out preferred characters and took it from there. Sickfics are always fun, but this ended up being a horrible prophecy of a fic, because I wrote it and then BOTH of us got sick, separately, in separate states. But did EITHER of us have a Bruce to lovingly tend to us? No.

This had happened before. He knew what was coming. He couldn’t stop it.

Poor Dick. I am very mean to him in this fic. (Not meaner than the original writers who made him watch his parents plummet to their deaths, but.) Thankfully I am not prone to nightmares, but I do get rerun dreams, and I am usually just as annoyed about it as you might suppose.

Dick’s ears filled with the roar of the crowd, the tumult pressing down on him like corpses, pinning him in place. 

"How many ways can I describe things in terms of death and dying before anyone actually dies?"

They were cheering, not screaming, urging the spangled bodies high above to climb higher, to step out onto the narrow platforms, to jump.

"How. Many. Ways."

He could feel the air, oppressively full and stifling, wrap over him like a soaked towel. He couldn’t move.

Can I just say. Getting trapped in blankets with a fever? Like physically getting an arm or leg wrapped in a twisted sheet or something? The worst. Just cut it off, I don't need it.

Dick collapsed forward, weeping and wheezing in equal measure. Strong arms caught him, lifting him back onto the bed before he could hit the floor.

Having Bruce catch him was so important, given the song. Also, it's just lovely to read, imo.

He didn’t want to dream again, didn’t want to get caught in that sickening loop that had played over and over and over, spurred on by the heat tearing through his head and prickling down his spine.

Poor Dick. When I have fever dreams, they're usually less of a dream and more having every moment of thought invaded by a line from a song. One time it was the theme song to Calamity Jane and it was the actual worst.

The arms moved, muscles hardening to shift Dick so his burning face rested against cool, soft fabric. A fridge-chilled washcloth wiped the tears from his cheek and the sweat from his brow. 

I used so many adjectives in this fic. It feels excessive. Me @ me were they on sale??? put some back!

“I want my mom.” Dick hiccuped and curled his limbs in tight, fists pressed to the bridge of his nose. He trembled in every muscle, in every tendon, in every centimeter of his marrow. He ached with fever and exhaustion and grief. He wanted his dad to cradle him like a baby. He wanted his mom to sing him to sleep. He wanted to remember what their faces looked like. “I want my mom.”

That was the line I was writing for, right there. Dick wishing his mom were alive to take care of him again. (It is usually what I whine when truly ill, even as a very grown adult.)

A throat ground down to gravel by years of wear hummed a lullaby, soft baritone to the tenor of his tears. . . .

“Bruce. Bruce.” “I’m still here, chum.”

Bruce 👏 is 👏 his 👏 children's 👏 bedrock 👏

“Father?” called someone quietly, voice high and young. “Will Richard be alright?”

I remain SO incredibly pleased with the reception to this line right here. When I started writing, I couldn't decide if I wanted to write about baby Dick or grown Dick... so I cheated. My highest hopes were just that readers wouldn't be too confused but instead the comments were shock and delight over what seemed to be taken as a mega-twist. I didn't expect that level of surprise, but I'm happy about it!

Bruce hummed an old tune, something low and swayed that made his chest rumble beneath Dick’s cheek like a monstrous cat’s purr.

And here I cram in two things that are important to me—Bruce singing to his kids and anyone fortunate enough to rest against him comparing him to a massive predator that is also remarkably comfy and soft.

And that was enough.

I could swear I've ended at least one other fic like this. Maybe more than one. Endings are hard.

[writing-in-a-chipotle]

Unbearably Mortal (Part 1)

(Alcina Dimitrescu x gender neutral reader)

Summary: In which you arrive in Romania, and are not exactly given a warm welcome.

Words: ~1.5 K

A/N: Hi, y’all! This will be a multi-part series following you, the reader, through your weird and possibly scary trip to Romania. There will be plenty of fluff, a dash of angst, and some lovely miscommunication. Oh, and lots of blood. And murder. But you were already expecting that, weren’t you? :P

Cold.

Everything was cold.

This was not what you had expected when you’d gone to visit your late grandmother’s home.

None of your family members knew her really, not like she had very many to begin with anyway. And sure, she was your mother’s mother, but when your mom was eighteen, she took almost every cent she had and bought a one-way plane ticket out of her little Romanian hometown.

She hadn’t spoken to her mother since, just sending the occasional letter every few months. And while her mother responded with letters of her own, they eventually stopped coming. Your mother was busy with her life with her new family and job, so she didn’t have time to worry about exactly why she wasn’t being written back.

When you were 23, you received a phone call from your mom, telling you that your grandmother had passed suddenly in the night. You drove two hours to your parents’ house to find your mom’s face streaked with tears. In her hand was her mother’s — your grandmother’s — crumpled will.

Your grandmother had left almost everything in her possession to your mom. She had never known you or your father, and probably didn’t even know you two existed. You and your father were fine, but your mom was devastated, decades of guilt from abandoning her mother finally bubbling to the surface.

Your mom was incredibly distraught with herself. Seeing her drown in her emotions, you offered to go there to scope out the area. You were in college of course, but summer vacation was just around the corner. When the semester ended, you could travel to Romania for a few weeks, see what the house had to offer, and return home with a truckload of pictures. What your mom decided to do with the house would be completely up to her after that.

Your parents agreed, however reluctantly. They were worried about you traveling alone in such a rural area. You waved them off, telling them that your phone was connected to satellite, so no matter where you were on earth, you would be able to call for help.

You had not predicted a blizzard would freeze the components. And now you’re lost. Oh, and gravely underprepared as well.

Time stood at a standstill. The frozen landscape seemed infinite, stretching on untouched no matter which way you turned. It was almost impossible to see through the sleet and snow. Looking down, you couldn’t even see your own footprints in the snow. You shivered, pulling your threadbare jacket closer.

How long have you been outside?

You didn’t know anymore. Every step ached, every breath hurt. You glanced down at your fingers and swallowed dryly. They were blue.

You wouldn’t survive out here for much longer.

You blinked away the snowflakes that were rapidly collecting on your eyelashes. You needed shelter, and fast.

In the distance, a piercing creak of metal caught your attention. It sounded close.

You didn’t bother to think. Stumbling and slipping through the ice and snow, you made your way towards the sound. You kept going until you practically walked into something.

It was a large gate.

A large open gate.

You stumbled through, trudging up to a set of tall wooden doors.

“H-help…” you rasped, grasping the iron knocker. You winced at the metal’s unbearable temperature. It was frozen at its hinges. Weakly, you banged on the doors with your fists. “Please…” You leaned against it, sliding to the ground. Your eyes were so heavy…

The door opened and you fell backwards through the entrance. There were two young women… maids? You couldn’t tell. Your vision was too blurry to see who exactly had come to your rescue. They grabbed your arms and pulled them around their necks, carrying you further into the hallway.

“This is bad,” one whispered, “oh, this is very, very bad…”

“What do we do??” The other one hissed.

“The doors…” the first woman dropped your arm as if she’d been burned and raced to the open door, shutting it as quickly as she could. You groaned.

“Be quiet, you!” The second one snapped fearfully.

The first maid rushed back to you and pulled your lax arm over her shoulder again. “Servant’s quarters. Now.”

They carried — well, more like dragged you through the winding hallways, stopping only once to catch their breath. It was hard for you to pay attention. Your head lolled back and forth with the jostling from the maids’ rushed steps.

Everything was cold… everything hurt…

The maids placed you down on a bed and hurriedly built a fire. The warmth cut through the blistering cold, sending a chill up your spine. Your eyes fluttered closed.

And you were sent tumbling into a dream.

———————-

Visions passed your subconscious mind in a swirling blur. Snowdrifts, claws, a woman in white…

You didn’t understand the images.

Gloves hands came into view. They bent and flexed, flitting across your face like smoke. A gentle finger traced your jawline and you leaned into the touch. You looked up, trying to catch a glimpse of the person caressing you face.

You saw nothing but inky darkness.

Just as suddenly as they had appeared, the loving hands vanished.

And in its place, a grinning maw materialized, blood dripping from razor sharp canines.

You couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t do anything.

And then you were falling.

Falling….

Falling…..

————————

You awoke with a strangled gasp. You were lying on a cot in a strange and small room. Blankets covered you from head to toe, and you melted in the heat.

“Hey, you’re awake.” You turned, startled at the voice. It was a maid, clad in an outdated black and white uniform. Her auburn hair was braided neatly into a bun, with only a single wispy lock escaping, hanging by her ear. She frowned, leaning closer. “Woah, I’m here to help you. No need to panic.” She pressed the back of her hand to your forehead and sighed with relief. “Your fever finally broke, thank the Goddess.”

Goddess?

“I… thank you,” you said, your mind swirling, “but, uh, where am I? And who are you?”

“Oh! Where are my manners…” the maid shook her head. “I am Mary, one of the maids here at Castle Dimitrescu. Another maid — her name is Sarah, mind you — helped me put you here. You’re in my bed, in the servant’s quarters.”

“Oh, sorry,” you mumbled guiltily, suddenly very aware of where you were. “I didn’t realize...” You pulled back the blankets to get up, but sank back down into the material as you processed her words. “Wait… Castle??”

Mary’s eyes widened in fear. “Sh!!! Keep your voice down!” The maid’s demeanor changed on a dime as she smacked a hand over your mouth, muffling any sound you might make. Shocked and confused, you tried to mumble out your questions, but the icy glare Mary gave you quickly shut you up. Your heart raced.

What was going on??

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

The sound of heavy footfalls from the floor above echoed around the room. Your heart beat wildly in your chest.

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

Was it getting closer? You couldn’t tell. You looked at Mary for any hope of comfort and your heart fell. She looked just as scared, if not even more so than you felt.

THUMP… THUMP...

The sound of footsteps suddenly stopped. You could hear your heartbeat in your ears, it was beating so loudly. You tried not to breathe too hard, for fear that whatever was up there might hear you.

A pained scream echoed through the castle, ricocheting off the stone walls. You flinched at the sound. It sounded so agonizing… so... human.

Mary didn’t move. Her eyes were fixed on the wall behind you, seemingly trying to bore holes into the stone.

Finally, after what seemed like hours, the footsteps started again, traveling deeper into the castle. Mary didn’t remove her hand until the sound of the footfalls were long gone.

“W-What… what was that?” You whispered to her.

“I believe that was the Lady of the house.” Mary said blankly, still keeping her eyes locked on the wall.

“And… the screaming? Mary, what’s going on here?” You didn’t want to know. You didn’t want to hear what horrible things happened here. Was this an elaborate prank? A horror house??

She shook her head fearfully “I… I don’t think that’s a good idea-“

“Please, Mary,” you pleaded, “I need to know what this is. I have to.”

Mary looked at you for a moment, then took a shuddering breath. “This… is Castle Dimitrescu. The Lady, along with her three daughters, drink the blood of whomever they choose and make wine from the excess.”

Your stomach churned. That couldn’t be right… vampires didn’t exist. “Wha-“

“And,” Mary turned to look at you, locking you into her haunting gaze, “if they catch you,” she leaned closer as if to whisper a secret.

“You’re going to wish you died at the door.”

[druidx]

SPC Challenge Four

Universe: Astyria's Star (Original) CW: Politics Words: 930 Context: This was written in 2010 for the Protagonize Summer Prose Challenge - a challenge designed to lead you through some world-building exercises. I do not recall what the prompt for Challenge Four was.

“Settle please, Councillors. Settle please,” the Chancellor called out. “I know this isn’t anywhere near as pleasant as Gont Point, but we must make do in the present circumstances.”

Astyria glanced around the more modern building - shining glass, varnished wood and precious steel - that had been commandeered for the council’s emergency use. It seemed to have been some kind of theatre, given the tiered seating and the dais on which the Chancellor was sat. Slowly around her, the noise subsided, as the council took its seats and stopped its chattering.

“I now call this session to order,” the chancellor began. Astyria leaned over to the woman sitting next to her. “Councillor Breaken,” she whispered, “I really don’t see why I am here.” “Please, call me Saris,” the councillor whispered back. “And you are here because the council has requested an update from all the contractors working on a solution to our current problem. Since you are in my constituency, you get to come along with me.” “Even the backup plan?” The councillor looked at Astyria. She was a strong looking woman, Astyria thought. Heavily tanned, with high cheekbones, her intricately carved Mother-of-Perl collar helped show off the status she held. “Especially the backup plan,” Saris whispered. Astyria gave a small sigh as Breaken returned her attention to the session, and began to look over the assembled councillors.

Many of them she had never seen before, but there were a few she recognised from the news - those with Coalescences of over twenty islands. However, given the importance of this meeting, not only were all the councillors and guests like herself present, but also the heads of each island. The room was packed with an array of hues of skin and cloth, and some thoughtful administrator had arranged the seats geographically. Far to her left sat the ones who lived closest to Arctus: their skins white turning to olive. Most of their clothing was in bright, primary colours, because (Astyria had once been told) many of the plants they used would only grow in the colder climates of the north. As her eyes followed the curve of the seating, she saw how the majority of the central seats were taken up by those like herself - light to medium tanned. Astyria smiled, recalling the night she’d helped Joishi with his homework, explaining that their planet had an axis tilt of 35º which meant the best places to live were on the numerous islands a few hundred miles from the equator.

There were a few colonised islands closer to the equator, their representatives sitting not much further to her right. They didn’t tend to wear much of anything if they could help it, and what they did wear was usually white or the sandy colour of unbleached fabrics, standing out in stark contrast to their ebony skin.

Astyria turned her attention back to the session. “And so,” a man on the dais was saying, “with expected resources evaluated to be very low by the time the generation ships are made, we have attempted to make each one a self-contained ecosphere so that the little we will have to take with us is not wasted.” One of the other councillors stood up, an older man from the Northern end of the room. “Of course,” he said. “We would hope this would be the case anyway. Do you see many synthesised products in this room, sir? Even with some of our newer technologies making resources more readily available for exploitation, oil and metals are still precious gifts, not to be used frivolously.” There was a murmur of assent from the room.

“Obviously, councillor, we would not dream of wasting these assets. The majority of the materials used will be things we can harvest directly from the seas or beaches. After all one of the major components of the nano-factories used to build the elevator and the ships is silicon, a direct derivative of sand. Everything we plan on using, right down to the power generation, will be - for what it’s worth now - sustainable, or used with as little wastage as possible.” “So, if we do in fact have to leave, we will be leaving the planet mostly intact?” “Yes, councillor. Though it would be more beneficial if we were able, once the entire population was aboard a generation ship, to be able to nanofactor the planet and take with us more materials.”

A darker tanned woman stood up. “And what if parts of the population want to stay - do you propose nanofactoring them as well?” she asked. “Well, no...” The engineer looked at the Chancellor for help. “That, I think, is a debate for another time. Thank you, Tolen,” said the Chancellor. The man nodded and moved back to his seat. “I believe we have thoroughly established that the planet may well be unsalvageable. The issue now becomes: do we continue our efforts to evade the latest acid age, or do we move to commence building the elevator, and the generation ships, at once and proceed directly with transporting the world’s populous to Astyria’s Star?” A thrill ran through Astyria at hearing her name mentioned, but the Chancellor was continuing, “We will now take a short break. Please discuss what you have heard, then we will vote on the matter when we reconvene.”

“You see my dear?” Saris said to Astyria as the council began to rise and shuffle out to the refreshment area. “That is why you are here.”

[meta-squash]

I did a long thread on twitter analyzing/interpreting You’re My Waterloo for the fun of it, but it was mostly for the amusement/interest of myself and like one other friend on there that likes The Libertines. So I figured I’d transcribe it over here where people might get more out of it? Since it was a twitter thread, the sentences might be a bit weird and stilted, by the way. So:

I'm glad they waited to record Waterloo until 2015. I feel like any other time would have been wrong. I know Peter was playing the slow version back in at least 2007 but I think it would have been sad in a different way if they had recorded it before 2015. Like, in 2015 it's just a straight up love song that's slightly sad because, well, it's Peter. If they had recorded it before I feel like it'd have been a love song with resentment wound through it.  There's just a lot of emotion in that song and if there's one thing Peter is really really good at doing, it's Emoting Intensely. But it's not just Peter, the piano is so beautiful and the strings are beautiful and Carl's guitar solo is Intense. It's all A Lot. Like, of all the songs that Peter has written about Carl, about their relationship and career and experiences together, THIS is the one where you can feel most strongly the near-obsessive type adoration. So I’m glad they waited to record it properly when they were friends again (also I’m mildly surprised that it was Carl’s suggestion to rerecord it). Anyway.

Fuck the first verse of this song is a lot. This whole song is a lot. I mean it starts off with such a sad sentiment, it's almost a warning? "You'll never fumigate the demons / No matter how much you smoke." You can't smoke away sadness no matter how much you want to. Bitterly ironic, considering the sorts of things Peter ended up smoking etc to chase away demons, the types of extremes they both went to above and beyond just trying to fumigate. But anyway. "Just say you love me for three good reasons / And I'll throw you the rope." It's just so fucking codependent. So intensely obsessive and codependent. There was a quote, I think maybe from Roger Sargent?, about Peter crying outside a venue in like 2002 because even then he was scared about losing his friendship with Carl to the Something Bigger of fame. This feels like a desperate bid to hang on to that love. But also like Peter is so intense. Every video of interviews where he's sitting next to Carl or gigs when they're friends or reunions or whatever, he just wants to be in Carl's space and have Carl's gaze and his attention and stuff. Like a cat that sits on your work.

Again, a digression. Oops. I said I was in a mood. It's so interesting that while it's definitely a love song To Carl, the only direct mention of Love is asking for love From Carl. It's like he's working on the assumption that his feelings are obvious (they are) and desperately wants reassurance or reciprocation.

"You don't need it / Because you are the survivor / Of more than one life" We know the origin of this is apparently Carl's dead twin brother. But also the offering of a rope only to reassure that no, you don't need it is just so...I don't know...sweet? Especially because while "throw you the rope" is obviously a symbol of rescue it could just as easily be a noose. Except that it's neither. Because he doesn't need it. Because he can survive fucking anything, because they love each other--he hopes. It’s like, if you love me as much as I love you, I’ll try to help you, even though I know you don’t need me because you just need to realize you can do it on your own. "And you're the only lover I had / Who ever slept with a knife" The interview where they talk about this line is so funny. "No it's not about us. But Carl did sleep with a knife and the line about being a survivor is about Carl having a dead twin and Peter saying he was the twin reincarnated. But it’s totally not about us." Anyway. Ugh just so much of this song seems to be about Peter being Super Obvious and open about his love for Carl and Carl being more closed off. Carl being the only lover who slept with a knife; he'll accept the love but he's wary of it and wary giving it.

(By the way by love I don't necessarily mean Romantic or Sexual love. They clearly adore each other one way or another, that's obvious enough. But Best Friendship love is 100% a thing.) (However, the Judy Garland line is so funny to me because "Friend of Dorothy" was a secret code for gay men for a while. And considering the amount of queer literature etc Peter references in everything, there's no way he didn't know this.)

I can't really go in depth into the Tony Hancock line since I really don't know much about Hancock and I know that it was a real touchstone for Peter and Carl. But it plus the Judy Garland line feels like a "neither of us have ever really had a home, but we found one in each other" thing. Which is. A lot. Especially with the "until the dawn" bit, because a main component of so many stories about them from other people is the two of them staying up for days together writing and adventuring and just doing stuff and no one else being able to get in their little bubble.

I love the "ahh" after "Stone the crows" and the way the music starts to swell. It's obvious that the next verse is the Important One. And it is. There's the story about Peter crashing an event at the Old Vic while Carl was ushering to tell him they should be writing together and everyone who's there are dicks. But it's also like...so many layers of what is success and what is appreciation and how do you express love. I assume the flowers are not from his show, that he's collected them from the stage after someone else's show. But it's reusing tokens of mostly empty/superficial/performative appreciation--the tradition of tossing flowers on the stage--as a token of genuine love. Sitting through an entire performance, watching someone else's success and dreaming of being there and then using the token of appreciation for that person to instead give it to the person you yourself appreciate and love and want to succeed with. It's like a promise, a "we'll get there." But also another act of desperation because he's been sitting there for hours. Carl wasn't there to receive the gift and wasn't there to write with him. But he's been chasing words around on the page--the love-words to this song or the words to another one?--and he needs Carl there to really complete it, needs Carl there to hear it. It's very much in line with Peter yelling that they should be writing. This intense "Please be with me please accept the way I express myself please complete my incomplete bits please like me as much as I like you" etc.

And then the chorus which is so interesting. I desperately wish I understood the Gypsy Lane and Stanley Park references. I think Stanley Park is a footie reference but I’m not sure? I'm trying to do all of the interpretation off my own brain and not use the notes on the Genius website or anywhere else but I wanted to see if those two references here had been crowdsourced. Apparently both Gypsy Lane and Stanley Park are places he spent time in his childhood (and I called it on the football reference, yes!). Which is. Wow. Okay. And then there's Waterloo which is a whole thing in itself. It's Waterloo as Waterloo but also Waterloo Station. So Carl is able to be Peter's Ultimate Defeat, the thing that has the ability to ruin him. But also Waterloo Station is near the Old Vic where Carl worked & would go to theatre bars, so it's also a place of familiarity. Since I don't know anything else about the Gypsy Lane reference, I can only assume it's also a place of comfort and familiarity. So Peter's admitting to Carl's power over him, ability to hurt him, but offering to comfort him in return. (Important for later.)

"I'm so glad we know just what to do / And exactly who's to blame" I love this line because it knows it's wrong. Especially in 2015 but maybe even in the early days. They bounced blame back and forth between them for YEARS. Not to mention all the outside bullshit. And obviously they didn't know what to do. The Waterloo/Stanley Park is another reference to a familiar place and a power to hurt/offer to comfort moment. I wish I knew if there was some sort of proper football reference here (aka a QPR reference since that's Peter's team) but I know absolutely nothing about sport so idk.

"Well I'm so glad we know just what to do / And no one's left / Stumbling around / Tumbling around / Fumbling around / In the dark" The way Peter sings this sounds so hopeful and sad at the same time. It's interesting to know this line was written way, way back. Like, this song was apparently one of the first ever songs they demoed. The demo is a lot more frantic and less romantic but jesus christ. The way Peter sings it now it's like he knows that was just an unconscious self-fulfilling prophecy. Like, no, they absolutely were left in the dark, hurting each other over and over and not being able/willing to place blame or to communicate. Except now, in 2015, they're not anymore. (and especially not now in 2021). But it's also another desire for comfort. Like, Peter's offering the comfort here. But he's also just confessed the power to hurt that Carl has. So this is also a "are you going to offer me comfort the way I've offered it to you?" sort of question. 

And then there's the solo which. Woof. It feels like a response to Peter's words. Like reaching out with sound. Like a shoulder-squeeze or a hug in response, something nonverbal that’s really trying to catch up and match up to the intense emotions in the words. The music crescendos and the solo is literally waves of notes that roll up and down and up and then it crashes down but lands so softly at the feet of the chorus.

And then we have equal footing, sort of (and Carl as Jesus again). Carl is still Peter's Waterloo, his ultimate defeat (or his place of comfort). But now Peter is Carl's Calvary. Which is the place where Jesus was crucified. Peter’s been offering comfort to Carl, but suddenly Peter has power over Carl. It's like...veneration and threat at once. Carl's Jesus, the savior, but also if he doesn't love Peter, Peter has the power to crucify him (or at least threatens to have that power). Or it's another portent: Carl could be Peter's savior, except that everything falls apart and Carl ends up hurt instead. They both end up hurt instead. So then they're on equal footing.

Which brings them to the "Well I'm so glad we know just what to do," which feels a little sadder but also a little more confident than the other two. The answer is in the "Everyone's gonna be happy / But of course." They need to work to figure out how to make each other happy, how to be comfort rather than hurt. It's not that simple. It never is. The "But of course" is a sarcy acknowledgement of how difficult that actually is. But it's also that sort of quiet hopefulness that yeah, maybe soon we'll figure it out and everyone will be happy and will get to say "of course I'm happy" about it.

[twisted-fun-funny-stories]

Oneshot: Cinderella (Part I)

One day, Crowley stated that he had some matter he needed to speak with you after your classes. As you ran to his office, you saw Kalim heading towards you. Kalim, not being aware of his surroundings, almost bumped into you until you saw a familiar hand grabbed Kalim by the collar. As you stopped yourself and took a closer look at who could’ve prevented this collision, you saw Jamil scolding Kalim as usual.

Jamil: *sigh* “Just when I take my eyes off of you for one second, be more careful Kalim! You could’ve bumped into someone!”

Kalim: “Hehe, sorry Jamil…I wasn’t really paying attention!”

You call out to the both of them:

A: “Kalim-senpai! Jamil-senpai! Are you alright?”

B: “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to bump into you guys!”

Kalim laughed it off, going up to you to give you a pat on your shoulder. “(y/n)-chan! I’m fine, don’t worry about me! It’s thanks to Jamil that we didn’t get hurt. Anyways, I haven’t seen you in a while! How’ve you been?” You give him a small smile, “I’ve been fine, I guess I was too busy with the exams that I didn’t get to talk to you and the others that much.” You heard Jamil give a small cough as he eyed at Kalim, Kalim seemed to be clueless and look over to him.

Kalim: “Jamil, are you alright there? Don’t tell me you caught a cold?!”

Jamil: *sighs in an annoyed tone* “I am fine. Ahhh! Kalim, us second-years are also done with our exams right? We do seem to have a lot of free time on our hands, which is nice, right Kalim?”

Kalim: “OOOH THAT’S RIGHT! (y/n), I’m planning to have a banquet tonight to celebrate with all the students, now that exams are over! You should come too! I’ll make sure to bring extra magic carpets and camels just for you!”

You giggled, remembering that the last time he stated that he’ll bring you a thousand camels to you if that would get you to come to his first banquet, which resulted in getting scolded by Jamil for bringing such an outrageous number of camels.

You respond:

A: “Sure! I would love to!”

B: “I don’t mind, just don’t stress Jamil-senpai too much.”

You look at the clock on the wall, realizing that you should be meeting with Crowley by now. “Ah! I have to go! I have to talk to the Headmaster! I’ll see you two later!!” As you ran to Crowley’s office, Kalim turns to Jamil.

Kalim: “I just realized that I should’ve only invited her tonight…” *sighs* “I wasted an opportunity to confess my feelings for her!”

Jamil: “I was trying to help you out earlier but it seem like you didn’t catch my signal again. You’ll have another chance someday. Now, let’s set this party that you suggested last minute.”

You arrived in Crowley’s office, you can see his slightly angry demeanor as he tapped his foot on the ground with his arms crossed. He got up from his seat and approached to you. “My my! To think that you would be late!”

You bowed, quickly apologizing him for making him wait for you. Crowley just sighs and gestures for you to come to his desk.

As you got yourself together, you saw Crowley reaching for something in his drawers. He places a piece of paper on top of the desk.

Crowley: “Well, because I am so nice after all, I shall let this little incident go. Oh, I also see that the trio isn’t with you. How rare.”

You forgot that you left Grim with Ace and Deuce at the courtyard without telling them anything. You can remember the faint screams from them asking where you were going as you ran off.

Crowley: *small cough* “Anyways, going back to the topic at hand! (y/n), I need you to help set up a play.” You raise your eyebrow in confusion. “A play? What is the meaning of this, Headmaster?”

You picked up the paper to see a picture of a glass slipper with the words Cinderella. You remember back in your old world where you watched the movie Cinderella on your TV as your younger self once dreamed of becoming a princess like her.

Crowley: “You will be participating in the play, the classic Cinderella! As you can see, we do not have that many female students or to be more exact you are the only female student. And I thought that being an all-boys school wouldn’t last us long. So! I am declaring that Raven Night College will be accepting female students! And to introduce this, I was planning on announcing it after the play! The play is to show off our very successful female student at Night Raven College! How does that sound? Ah, I am such a genius!”

There was so much for you to take in that all you could do is blink in response. As you look back to the paper, you can the list of roles, ranging from the prince to the evil stepmother and stepsisters. As you took a closer look at the list, you see next to “Cinderella” was your name.

“Headmaster, so you are saying that I have to set up the play and play the main role of CINDERELLA?!” Headmaster laughed with such glee, as he got on top of his desk in a dramatic motion, raising this arm high in the sky with his other arm on his chest. “Why yes (y/n)! You shall be the main star, as that you are the only female, it is a given that you will have to play as Cinderella!”

You let out a heavy sigh, not only will other students seeing this, but you have to figure out who is going to play these roles?! That sounds like a lot of work. Crowley senses your tension and comes to give you a pat on your shoulder.

Crowley: “Now, I am sure that you are excited but also stressed that you are suddenly given this task. But no worries! I have already written the script and getting the costumes ready! All you need to do is to find who is willing to be part of the play. Because I am so nice!”

At least Crowley has laid out the foundation, but to find people for these roles, will you even find people willing to? But before you can think, Crowley pushes you out of his office and as he was closing the door, he states, “I’m looking forward to what you have to offer, (y/n).”

You hesitantly walk forward as you thought about how you were going to handle this. Should I put up flyers? No, too many people might apply or no one would notice them. Maybe I can ask the upperclassmen to help spread the word? Or should I-

“(y/n)!”

You look up to see Ace, Deuce, and Grim running towards you.

Ace: “Jeez! If you were going to the Headmaster’s office, you should’ve said something!”

Grim: “We were looking for you everywhere!”

You apologized profusely, feeling bad that you left them behind. You promised them that you would treat them to something at the Mostro Lounge if that would make up for abandoning them earlier. Deuce spots the piece of paper in your hands and asks what you were holding. You sighed as you state that it would be a long story and started to head your way to the Mostro Lounge as you explained the situation.

~Some Time Later You Arrive at Mostro Lounge~

Deuce: “Huh, I see. So, the Headmaster is forcing you to pick the cast and you have to play Cinderella. That sounds rough.”

Grim: “Cinderella? What’s that?”

Ace: “As usual, Grim doesn’t know these types of stories. Cinderella is a story of a princess that goes to a ball and gets married to a prince. Right?”

You shook your head:

A: “Ace, that’s too little. It doesn’t even sound like Cinderella anymore.”

B: “You’re missing a very key component Ace…”

You decided to take the lead and began to summarize the story of Cinderella. After you were done, you were asking for everyone’s input on the plan to get the play ready. As you guys were throwing suggestions, Jade happened to be near your table and overhears this. He takes a glance at the piece of paper that was sitting on top of the table and lets out a small inaudible chuckle before walking away. He then quickly heads for the VIP Room and calls to Azul. “Azul, (y/n) and the others seem to be struggling with something.” Azul, who was looking at his papers, look at Jade with a slight gleam of interest in his eyes.

Azul: “Oh, my poor (y/n) is struggling with something? I must help her! What seems to be the problem?”

Jade: “It seems like they are setting up a play and they don’t know how to start one.”

Floyd, who was standing by Azul’s side like a bodyguard, giggles.

Floyd: “A play? Is shrimp-chan going to be in that play?~ What type of play is it?~”

Jade gives a small grin as he answers, “It is Cinderella. And it seems that (y/n) is chosen to play Cinderella in this play.”

Azul gives a small chuckle, this is his chance, he can help out (y/n) and then find a way to get his spot as the prince. He shall take this opportunity to steal (y/n)’s heart. “Jade, have them meet me in the VIP Room. I shall aid them in their predicament…” Jade nodded and gets Floyd to come with him as they make their way to your table.

“Excuse (y/n), but I can’t help but to overhear that you seem to be struggling with something.” sound familiar?

You look up to see Jade and Floyd with smiles on their faces. You smile back in response. “Hello Jade and Floyd-senpai, well we are having a bit of trouble...” Ace gives a long sigh, “We are trying to set up this Cinderella play but we don’t know where to start and how we are going to handle this…” Floyd takes your arm and has you stand up. He gives you a wide grin as he responds. “Azul is free right now, you guys wanna go see him?” You nodded and you guys make your way to the VIP Room. As Jade open the door, you were greeted with Azul at his desk with a smile on his face.

He gets up from his seat and walks up to you, kissing your hand as a greeting. “My dear (y/n), I can see that you are struggling with something, is there something you would like to tell me?” as he guides you to a seat next to him while holding your hand, the others follow suit and sat in across from you two.

You turn to face Azul:

(y/n): “Azul, I need you help with setting up a play.”

Azul, grinning to himself, knowing full well what you were struggling with, but he acted as if he didn’t know firsthand. He rubs his thumb on the back of your hand gently as he ponders on your question.

Azul: “A play you say? I’m afraid that it might be hard to accomplish with just the two of us. I do not have much experience in that field…”

Ace: *whispers to Deuce* “Wait, did Azul just say just the two of them? Did he forget we’re here?”

Deuce: *whispers back* “I heard it too. So it wasn’t just my imagination…”

Azul: “What play is it, (y/n)?”

You hesitate to respond, but Grim beats you to the punch as he climbs on top of your shoulder, causing you to let go of Azul’s hand in shock.

Grim: “It’s this story about a girl named Cindela?”

Azul: *sighs* Why would you butt in our conversation like this? “I believe you mean Cinderella. And? Have you decided the roles yet?”

You shook your head. “No, but the Headmaster says that I have to play the role of Cinderella so I am stuck with that role. He also said that he will take care of the script and costumes so all we have to worry about is who is playing what role…” Azul nodded as he took a bit of time to process the situation.

Azul: “Hm…so you are saying you need people that are willing to participate in this play? I can also send out Jade and Floyd to recruit other members. But if you do not mind, I can participate in that play as well.”

You dropped your jaw, right away Azul is willing to help you out by not only helping you recruit members but also to participate in it as well. “Really Azul?! You don’t mind at all?!” He shook his head in response. “Of course I don’t mind helping you out. Plus, if anything, since you are playing the main role, I’m sure you will gain a lot of attention. But I do have a request…”

Holy frick! So since the way I want to lay this out will be too much to put into one post, I will be splitting it into two parts. Sorry to leave you at a cliff-hanger! But no worries, I will finish this request and the other requests ASAP! But I do have exams to worry about (sucks to be a college student...), so I hope you guys can give me a little more time to write out these requests! 

[fimflamfilosophy]

Characters: Tearing Each Other Together

After the world-sweeping success of my previous article (forty notes on Tumblr, wow!) and being driven out of my house due to mold for the second time in two months, I think the time is right to add another essay to the subject of character design and writing. But what’s left to say after having definitely solved the entire process of character writing the last time?

Well, suppose you can figure out the emotional state of one person. That’s well and good, and oddly harder for people than you might imagine. And I think the reason it’s so hard is because in virtually any show you’re not going to be given a character in a vacuum to learn that process from. They have some story, something they’re trying to overcome, and other characters they’re bouncing off of, and the actual process of conflict is more complicated than knowing who your characters are.

Hate, Love, or Indifference, It’s All A Struggle

So what’s the essence of a story? There’s some motive that’s trying to be achieved. A conflict. And I can’t stress this enough. Conflict. Because it’s one thing if you say your main character is a kid who wants to be the best Poke’mon trainer and completely another to have that be a concrete objective with a satisfying story and conclusion. Wanting to be the “best” isn’t actually conflict. It’s a dream. Being forced to travel the known world to acquire eight gaudy pins that probably cost twenty-five cents each to manufacture? That’s conflict.

And not only do you have to travel the world, you do so with a shrill red-head who explicitly hates you because you trashed her bike, and a sex-starved pervert whose life dream is to make Poke’mon mate with each other for a living. And that’s important. Without Misty and Brock, Ash’s journey is a lot less interesting for a lot of reasons. Misty calls Ash out every time he messes up, and aside from being on a watch list, Brock is a helpful older character who tells Ash, and therefore the audience, what’s what.

But let’s back up, because people understand the benefit of Brock and Misty at a basic level, but when you’re starting off, how do you know who those people should be? Well, every show, from sitcom, to comedy to drama, does its best to balance personalities against each other so there’s always some sort of conflict possible between them.

Now, “conflict” doesn’t mean they’re trying to kill each other. It could mean they’re falling in love with each other. Maybe it means they don’t have much in common but have to work together over long hours in isolation. The idea is simply that there’s something to overcome between these people. Misty thinks Ash is stupid - that’s a conflict which is often leveraged to push Ash forward. Brock, however, has a reactive role in the show, only functioning in conflict when a womanizer who grovels at the feet of ladies Ash is already helping anyway.

It’s odd because if Misty were older she would be set up very well as kind of an “opposites” romantic torture device with Brock. They’re even depicted as professional equals, which would have made their levels of expertise and experience more balanced. Had they been closer in apparent age, a “will they won’t they” romance would have fit adequately, with Brock’s constant hitting on other women serving as a major, hopeless, long-lasting roadblock to a serious relationship between them; it would work especially well because Misty is established to have an inferiority complex to her prettier sisters. It also might help explain why Brock hung around so long. But as it was, Brock’s main contribution to the inner dynamic was to act as a mediator, caretaker, and mentor.

But circling back to Brock’s dream of Poke’mon husbandry. Well, on the meta level that’s why he doesn’t leave. Because it’s not a motive, he’s not taking steps towards it, and it’s not going to happen, it’s just a dream. Until it does happen, anyway, and then they wrote him out of the show - but we’ll dig more into this later.

Balancing Imbalance

The best place to look to see good conflict set ups between characters are popular sitcoms. Consider the show “Frasier”: it ran for eleven seasons and revolved mainly around the personal spats of Frasier, his brother Niles, their dad, and the dad’s caretaker, Daphne. Frasier was arrogant, Niles was insecure, Dad was an earnest roughneck, and Daphne was well-meaning. Frasier and Niles were also elitist pricks at times so they couldn’t even always agree where to eat together, much less with their father who was happier having a burger with ketchup.

Every episode had some central motivator; an ice fishing trip, a joint investment, an awards ceremony - but these things were just catalysts to the main conflict, which was almost always something between characters. We’d seen it time and again, that Frasier and his Dad would come to blows over differences in taste. Niles would try to court Daphne while torn by his commitment to his failing marriage, over and over. But the pithy banter and the way they resolved it would always be new, so people watched this show, episode after episode, for over a decade.

And the simple beauty of it all was that each of the characters had something to do with each other. Whether it be filial obligation, lust, sibling rivalry, friction between introversion and extroversion, or taste in food, they always had some source of conflict to make a show out of. Niles and Frasier were both psychiatrists, but from different schools of thought and different working environments, so they even had chances to butt heads academically and professionally. It was rich with writing opportunities and it’s not any wonder it lasted so long.

Another sitcom, “New Girl”, which was about a group of roommates, had a good dynamic set-up between two characters, Schmidt and Nick. Nick is a messy slob and Schmidt’s a type A neat freak, creating a really obvious source of conflict to work with. But then they had a third character, Winston, who they lampshade as the token black guy. 

Now, the joke that Winston is the “black friend” has pretty much no legs, so in the early seasons you see him acting as kind of a third party mediator, or maybe a wild card, and it winds up being funnier when Winston is unhelpful. So as the seasons went on, Winston gradually lost his damn mind. He becomes a cop and meets a woman so that he’d have some character growth and dynamic, but also develops into a man who would burn a building down as a prank. The writers had no idea what they were doing with him and he gradually flew further and further off the handle.

Don’t get me wrong, I really liked Winston as a character. Aside from being funny in the show, watching the writers gradually unglue him from sanity was its own meta comedy above that. I knew they were doing it on accident, but having such a good time with it that it was just going to keep getting worse. In fact a major component of the finale for the whole show is an insane thing Winston does. They wrap the show on the note, “Winston is crazy”. And it all happened because they didn’t figure out what Winston’s conflict was at the start. He didn’t have a source of conflict with anyone, so the man became a living breathing embodiment of conflict in general.

Your Story Ends With the Conflict

Now, the catch is, in any type of fiction, whether a video game, a roleplaying session, or a sitcom, the story ends when the conflict does, because if the conflict is over there’s nothing more to tell! It used to frustrate me to no end back when “My Little Pony” was popular and the other nerds on the internet used to ask, “How many times must Fluttershy learn not to be shy, or that being shy is okay? When will she overcome all that she is and eliminate the core element that creates conflict for her?”

The answer should always be that the character will learn their damn lesson when the show ends or when they’re written off it. If you are sick of seeing a character and don’t want to see them any more, the best thing to do is close out their issues, because once they have no conflicts, they have no story, and there’s no point in doing a show about them. Asking Fluttershy to stop being shy is asking to say goodbye to her, because she's a cartoon and her job is to entertain kids by being neurotic and yellow.

People think they’re so smart when they say they’d solve all a character’s problems if it were them. In the finale to the first season of Poke’mon, for example, Ash decides to gamble his whole championship run on Charizard, who’s a self-absorbed bitch of a creature that ultimately throws the match and leaves it an open question whether Ash might have won if he’d left the team primadonna sitting on the bench.

Some viewers see that and complain it’s the dumbest possible thing Ash could have done, but it’s probably one of the single most brilliant things the Poke’mon writers did in the grand scheme, because think about where it left us. Ash didn’t achieve his goal of proving he’s “the best”, but it feels like a fluke and if he got another shot, he might make it all the way. This gave the show a gateway to more episodes with Ash still having something to prove and a dumb mistake indicating he still had a lot to learn. Because he didn’t win, his story hadn’t ended.

In some cases shows can end characters just by addressing some dream goal they’ve been expressing since the first season. In the case of Brock, they intentionally removed him from the show by introducing him to some girl who was willing to work with Brock in the animal husbandry business. He’d been traveling all this time, his dream opportunity fell into his lap, and he was gone. What reason would he have to refuse, and why would anyone stop him? And of course, Brock’s dream job was incompatible with the central plot elements of the rest of the show, so that was it!

The Format Informs the Conflict

If you want to write something but you aren’t sure when it’s going to end, you need a concrete, long-term conflict that’s not just going to go away. For example, in “Scooby Doo and the Thirteen Ghosts”, there were thirteen ghosts. By design, that show should have ended after Scooby Doo found all thirteen ghosts. It actually ended earlier than that because it was cancelled, but you get the idea. When you have a finite goal, your run time is going to be finite as well.

At least in theory. In “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” they establish at the beginning of one season that everyone’s magic powers were based on the Tarot. Now, I don’t know the Tarot off hand, but as the show went on I knew that sooner or later they’d run out of Tarot cards, and in my mind I assumed the season would be over when the Tarot ended. But then I got a good chuckle when a guy showed up and his powers were based on a totally different theme, because I knew the writer had realized he’d stumbled into something good and wasn’t ready to end it. He invented a cheap excuse to keep going! And I think if “Scooby Doo and the Thirteen Ghosts” had been successful they’d have managed to unleash a whole lot more than thirteen ghosts because Hannah Barbera was not exactly a studio with a lot of shame.

Character conflicts like those in sitcoms are a great way to have conflict perpetually, because people don’t really change that much and there’s no reason why most of the fundamental friction shouldn’t be there indefinitely. But of course, character-driven conflict is going to be secondary in an event-driven show. “Jojo” actually does have a lot of character conflict, but the plot is primarily about the battles and the journey - if all the fighting ended Jojo’s characters probably couldn’t carry a sitcom, at least not without some serious hard work, a little genius, and a touch of elbow grease.

For event-driven conflict, you’ll want to establish a target - a moving target if you don't know when the story ends, and that can be pretty difficult. Old action shows and comics used to do it by having a rotating cast of villains, so that after one was defeated another would show up tomorrow, and it was assumed these guys regularly broke out of prison, or they escaped in rocket pods, or whatever, and they’d be back later with a new goofy scheme. In these cases you tend to find reactive heroes; they patrol the streets until a lunatic in tights and a garden-themed hat shows up and transforms everyone into people-shaped topiaries somehow.

For active heroes, you need to establish something that requires a lot of structure, like Ash’s journey to win the Poke’mon League. In every country he visits, they all have this asinine rule that you have to go to eight unique locations and kick the ass of someone who disadvantages themselves with an easily-countered mono team that all have the same exact weakness. You can’t be accepted into the League if you haven’t proven you own a water Poke’mon to utterly flatten the fire gym! Let’s be real, this nonsense is probably designed intentionally as a money gate - most people run out of cash before they qualify. Either way, it ends when Ash wins the league, and he lost the league so the show could keep going.

For roleplaying games, the same rules apply. With your players, you’re either going to establish a reactive goal - an adventuring guild hires a bunch of colorful salarymen with silly accents to go to a dungeon as part of their nine to five job - or you need players to set an active goal for themselves and keep the realization of that goal beyond their reach until you’re ready to end the game.

The Active Hero Acts

In my younger years, I learned to roleplay in almost exclusively player-driven games where we were expected to come up with our own goals and pursue them ourselves, but I’ve discovered that is stunningly rare in most roleplaying circles. Your typical D&D player likes to play the salaryman with a funny accent who doesn’t have to worry about the venturous part of adventure. His boss told him to go to the Cave of Everlasting Wonders and Torturous Screams, recover the Sword of Bad Portent, and then hand it over to the department of magic items where they’ll file the paperwork to get it delivered to the patron that wanted the sword for some reason. No need to have your own motives.

But what if you want to play a crime fighter who actually, you know, busts up all the crime? Clearly you can’t just wait for crime to happen passively - you’ve got to go after people. Act instead of being reactive. Purse snatchers are small time and in a more grounded setting the guys you’ll catch by being passive are just grunts being hired out by someone - usually kids in a lot of cases. You have to seek out the bosses.

Making an active character to fit into any setting can be challenging, and I’ve seen quite a few pitfalls. I think one of the funniest motives is always “the guy who wants to go home” due to its obvious failure condition. A lot of stories are about everymen who just want to get out of trouble, but those stories end when they get out of trouble! In many books, movies, shows, or roleplaying games, you’re almost always going to find opportunities to send that guy home, and you’ll have to either conveniently ignore it, switch motives and decide not to go home, or end the whole story with going home. These characters only work where the story is happening to them and it's all out of their control.

I’ve also seen my share of the “quirky genius inventor/scientist”. When someone designs a character mistaking a dream for a motive. They dream of building a better mouse trap, you see. That’s their inner conflict. And while this is a real world conflict, it’s difficult to make it a good story because actual science and invention involves a lengthy quantity of controlled experiments. You breed hundreds of fruit flies, expose them to nicotine, and try to isolate the gene that causes nicotine resistance. It can be fascinating work at its level but sometimes the most exciting part of your day is when you give yourself a steam burn cooking the fly food. The “quirky scientist” in fiction is usually more of a mentor, and if he insists on staying in his lab doing his work then he’s not even a main character - he’s a guy who explains fruit flies to the audience and then is never heard from again. Other times he’s the asshole who invented the story’s whole problem.

I once played in a game with “the quirky scientist who wants to go home”, and man was that a frustrating ride. The game itself was about occult magic and demons, and for most of the game the scientist was experimenting with teleportation magic to go home and was focused on that above the goal of finding and eradicating demons (the game’s premise). And when he finally met a boss demon that could teleport him home to his lab, he went! We wound up retiring a character who, to be honest, was barely even interested in the main subject of the story. Had he been in a film or a show, they’d have cut the character after the first draft because he served no purpose and wasted screen time.

So how do you make sure your character has a working, proactive goal, in a nutshell? Establish a goal that can be achieved by the character within the framework of your story through action by leaving his house (or after burning his house down so he can’t go home), and then make sure the goal is big enough that it will take many broad steps to get there - those steps need to be concrete and visible, not things that would happen off-screen. Most importantly, tie that goal into the main premise of the story, so that reaching the end of the story generally may achieve what the character wants.

If You Aren’t Trying, It’s Not A Trial

Okay, I understand that last bit probably requires more unpacking. But think of it this way. There’s a writing structure referred to as the “Hero’s Journey”. Basically it goes like this: the hero is forced into adventure, he meets friends and goes through trials, he hits his lowest point, he is reborn into a better man, he ends the conflict, story over.

What I’m talking about specifically right now are the trials. The “wacky inventor” is usually presumed to do all his research off screen because most media likes to focus on the results of the invention and the conflict. But if you were to focus on the trials of a scientist, it’d actually be about procuring research grants and potentially materials. You wouldn’t watch a show about a man who checks gene A-235 for nicotine resistance in flies, then goes on to A-236, then A-237.

If I were to write a story about a researcher, here’s one thing I might do: the researcher fails to find what he’s looking for in gene A-235, and when he goes to seek a grant to look at A-236, he finds one of his colleagues has convinced the university that the protagonist’s research is a dead end. Hearing this, the researcher realizes he’s about to lose his lab, so he writes a bit of a lie into his report on A-235. He says it may prevent cancer.

Now, the protagonist is, deep down, a good man. He thinks this will generate some buzz at the university and get him more funding, but he’ll do a follow-up and show the data doesn’t hold up. After that he’ll ask for money for A-236 and everything goes back to normal. But disaster strikes. His article, which was only supposed to show up in an obscure research journal, gets picked up by a major news network and winds up being spread all over. Suddenly he’s “the man who cured cancer”.

And as he’s trying to figure out how to navigate the issue, another researcher comes out and says that under peer review, he was able to replicate the results. He too shows that A-235 cures cancer! Now the hero isn’t sure. He becomes a celebrity and simply lies about his research because he has no real data, but try desperately as he might, in private he just can’t get the results the peer review insisted were there.

He struggles and struggles, coming to blows with his colleague who’s scrutinizing his research notes. Throw in a love interest who’s impressed with what this guy did, and actually I think I’ve just described the plot of some movie I saw a long time ago about faking cold fusion. I think Albert Einstein was a supporting character in it. In my version the twist would be the peer reviewer was also trying to get a grant by lying. Point is, the central conflict of the film certainly isn’t the scientific process, it’s all the crazy crap that happened on the way from point A to point B.

The story is in the trials. If nothing changes, if the character doesn’t have to change their way of life or go through anything special, it’s either not a story or it’s not your typical story. There are plenty of experimental films or well-regarded books that can make a certain banality become interesting. Stories that explain the simple struggles of day to day living for people on hard times. But the trials, the palpable challenges, that’s really the meat of it all. When you think of what your character should be doing throughout the story, he should be going through these efforts, these steps, these trials, all in the name of whatever his broader goal is.

Where You Start Affects Where You End

It also matters quite a lot when and where characters are introduced. A lot of tales follow some basic notes, and one of the more common elements is “crossing the threshold”, which prevents your characters from going back to their life before the adventure. It’s used because it compels the characters forward, as they have no other direction they can go. It can be anything: the character’s home town is destroyed, the character commits a crime, he accepts a contract, his mother dies - so long as it prevents him from going back. It’s especially useful in roleplaying games where you really need everyone to be driving forward.

In one such roleplaying game, I got in a spat with the guy who wanted to run the game because I was trying to make a leader character, but the game master wanted to base his game around a movie he’d seen with a single main character. He’d elected another player to be that main character, and explained to me he’d be starting the game after that character had already crossed the threshold and had begun his journey. This meant that everyone else were supporting cast and could go back to their normal lives at any time, because they were coming willingly from where they were and not really facing any drastic changes to their personal status quo.

I eventually resolved not to play in that game at all, because none of the character dynamics I wanted were going to work. It was supposed to be a “wannabe” superhero game, with the premise that everyone wanted to be heroes, except one player had already started the journey and it turned out another had already reached the end of that arc and was going to play a character that had been a hero going on years before the story began. There was no plan to really reconcile the narrative clashes.

If that game were to work as it was, without me being present, then the person playing the pre-established hero would have needed to take the mentor role. The other players besides the main character would have needed to be comfortable in auxiliary roles, and the group would have to play as though they were part-way into the story. Still learning to be a team but well past the initial stages of a plot, and they’d all need to think up reasons to be in this group individually on their own, because the threshold had already been crossed and they didn’t cross it together.

The friend running the game was actually dismissive of my advice here, arguing that I was overcomplicating everything with a meta analysis of narrative and structure when all we need is a basic drive to play, and I don’t think he realized he’d set himself up with a much more complicated game and less cohesive premise by going about things as he had.

The already established hero couldn’t be the mentor because a mentor character had already been created as an NPC. The auxiliary players weren’t really informed at the outset they’d be auxiliaries - especially not me who’d wanted to play the team leader. The player who’d been designated as the central protagonist didn’t want to lead or be the central protagonist. It could have worked, but it would have taken a lot more planning and many more concessions than a typical game.

In a more recent game, I’ve got another bit of an issue with the start misleading the general goals of the players. It’s a sci-fi game, and first, one player is doing “the quirky inventor scientist”; his current stated dream is vaguely to create transhumanist technology. He also wants to play the leader, so he established himself as the most important man nobody has ever heard of. He has spies in every major institution in the known galaxy and is a genius beyond comparison. He’s currently based in a rusting pirate ship in the middle of the space boonies doing nothing with his life save being the most important man.

Meanwhile, I set up a disgraced military officer with a revenge quest against his own nation. But the pirate crew my character joined turned out to not believe in structure nor leadership and they killed their last commander to have a system of “democracy”. My structure-minded character has tried to take the lead and drive us forward, but he runs into general deconstructive resistance and the “quirky scientist” wants to be the leader, but hasn’t yet expressed self-motivated goals.

It’s not exactly my most harmonious game and there’s quite a lot going wrong here, but here’s how it could have worked: first, establishing that the crew of the pirates respects no leadership places the entire crew in the precarious position of being “chickenshit” at the outset. That kind of incohesiveness is why a band of rogues gets easily defeated; it’s not the behavior of scrappy men of action, but hopeless men of inaction. A corrupted “democracy” collectivises failure while awarding success to whoever actually has the most power in the group structure - it protects the weak leaders from responsibility and disincentivizes good work by allowing those same men to reap rewards while offloading the burdens to those lower on the ladder. In essence, “If things are screwed up, blame the democracy. If things are good, I did it.”

What should have happened was the “quirky scientist” should have been in charge to start with, because otherwise he has no reason to be on board the ship. He’s the most powerful man in the galaxy, after all. If it were because he was financing the pirates to go on raiding and salvage missions relevant to his research, then it would make sense. He’d have a purpose and a position of leadership just as the player wanted. It would also establish the pirates have some command structure and a level of respect for it that allows them to function.

And the power struggle between the disgraced officer and the scientist? Perfectly reasonable character conflict that would drive actual, meaningful roleplaying and story. The scientist may bankroll the operation but the officer is the tactical talent and the two pull in opposite directions, as power-hungry men often do.

However, the opportunity to start with a sensible and meaningful social dynamic has passed, and on top of that the “quirky scientist” keeps his galaxy-wide power a secret, so it’s all kind of messy and “badly written” in the sense that most audiences would be generally rooting for the crew to fail, and they’d find the grand reveal of the scientist’s galactic power to be frustrating and unrewarding because it’s more of a plot hole than anything. So close on so many counts and yet so very far, and the opportunity to pull it together eventually is present but a more challenging and uphill battle than getting it right at the outset.

In The End, Did We Even Learn Anything?

Creating a character is easy, in my opinion. Creating a working story with a group of self-driven characters can be a lot harder. This is especially true of roleplaying games or of cooperation with multiple writers, where you need to be on the same general page with a committee. It can help a lot to establish the exact conflicts at the beginning, but as can be seen with Winston from “New Girl” or the later seasons of “My Little Pony”, what you have can morph beyond your control as things go on.

Sometimes you never had control in the first place. Sometimes you lose control because you conclude the original conflict of your story and struggle to find a new one - the brand is too successful to let go. Maybe an executive comes in and injects an idea that throws the entire balance of everything totally out of whack and now nothing works. Sometimes your friend thinks story structure is overrated. It’s a difficult juggling act.

So at the end of this essay did we even learn anything? It depends a lot on what you’re trying to do and what you wanted to learn. If you’re the more typical Dungeons and Dragons group, you don’t need to think much about this. Just make your characters and passively react to activities handed out by Dungeons, Dungeons & Co - your conflict is event-driven. Are you writing a sitcom? Well, balance a tangled web of conflicting character habits and write the ensuing disaster. Want to make a complex film about a group of highly motivated, proactive people with sophisticated individual goals that ultimately converge while still respecting their rich, conflicting, inner politics, and do all that writing as part of a team? Well, good goddamn luck, but with the right start and enough care you can make it happen.

[elamikaaa]

Plot Twist

Now, I haven’t had any professional vocal lessons at all for the eighteen years I have lived, but since I started singing at the tender age of four, I think it’s safe to say that I’m somewhat a singer. I lack a lot in technique, sure, but I think I sound somewhat decent, at least. 

 As a singer, it is best that you really pour out the emotions that the song is trying to convey. It is as if you are the messenger trying to communicate an intricately crafted message to whoever is listening to you. Every word in every verse, hook, chorus or bridge, every single chord progression, every single note, pause, the speeding up and the slowing pace of the beat, the transpositions... every single component of a song was carefully put in there to construct an overall message that you as a singer have to relay. So, it is very important that you really mean what you sing for you to do so. Knowing whatever the song is trying to express alone simply is not enough for a singer to capture the essence of a song. The moment you are unable to feel, the more you’ll deviate from whatever the song is trying to convey. This, in my honest opinion, is what makes someone fail as a singer, or as an artist in general. After all, all modes of art are forms of expression. 

 One of my favourite artists, NIKI, released her first album, Moonchild, 3 days ago. Me being the fan that I am, I checked it out on SoundCloud as soon as I could. I listened for every single track in order (except for the songs that she already released prior, such as Switchblade, Selene and Lose). I have not finished listening to the whole album yet — I haven’t listened to Drive On — because there’s this one song in the album that really caught my attention: Plot Twist. 

 Plot Twist really encapsulates the unexpected blossoming of a newfound love. The moment I hit play on SoundCloud, my eardrums were smacked lovingly with what sounded like utopia in its melodic form. Maybe it is because of my current predicament, but this song, from the lyrics to the dreamy instrumentals, perfectly epitomised how someone can either enter as, or develop into, a pleasant surprise in another’s life. Honestly, this song really hit home. As soon as I listened to it, I thought of one person and I can think of only them whenever this song comes to mind. 

 I could go on a whole analysis and a breakdown of key parts of the song but honestly, the lyrics are self-explanatory. There is really nothing for me to elaborate on. All I really can say is that it is the first verse that makes me think of him the most. when I was really contemplating ‘closing the book’, there he was, ‘in every nook’, making me want to continue reading to see if the ending will be different this time around. I had just gone through the biggest heartbreak I had experienced with my best-friend who I had a crush on for two years, and he was among the many who supported me through it all. Little did I know that he’d be my next heartbreak... oh well.  

 Not every single part of the song is representative of what once was between us, if I can even call it that, anyway. It was not 'always gonna be [him] and I’, nor did I really think that something was ever really going to come into fruition. He felt like a ‘brand new arc’ but not exactly one that I ‘never knew’ the outcome of. He was definitely different, but in a way, he’s similar because he, like the others, was also a very good friend who never got to fully reciprocate my feelings (I know, looks like I have a preference for best-friends, huh). To add onto that, he ended up moving on very quickly with someone else after many months of us developing a relationship together — not necessarily a romantic one, but just a strong bond. It is okay that he did not reciprocate. That is not what I have an issue with. It is how he moved on to her straight away, but I will not go into detail about that here. That has been the topic of every single other piece I have ever written, so I think I have harped about that enough.

Anyway, it was very painful, and although I am grateful for the lessons my experience with him has taught and revisited, I am not exactly thankful for ‘plot twists’ like him. Despite the euphoria he made me feel, which the song captured, I feel more regret about him than anything, really. 

 I love singing NIKI’s songs; more specifically, her more melancholic songs: Lose, Around, and my all-time favourite, La La Lost You. I feel more of a connection to these songs because, well, they are all about heartbreak. One perk of being extremely sensitive is that I can sing these sad love songs just fine simply because I can really feel it all. I can feel the resignation in the ending of Lose when she sings, “I don’t need a reason to keep on dreaming, that I can win this stupid thing called love.” In Around, when she sings, “I miss you though you’re cold,” I immediately think of the day he ignored my messages and started talking to me in an uncharacteristically stern manner. Though I was anxious, I still missed him very much and wanted to talk to him even if every single inch of my body screamed at me that he did not want me around anymore. La La Lost You, from how I am perceiving it, shows a person’s divergence from someone they loved dearly. “Hope New York holds you, hope it holds you like I do” in the second verse of the chorus is the line that made me cry the hardest when I first listened to it, because it very much resembled how much I love him and how much I’ll always love him despite how terrible our ending was. Even after everything, even if it were justified for me to be petty and upset, I could not; I can only wish the best for him. I really meant it when I concluded my final texts to him at the time with, ‘Hope you’re doing well’ and ‘Wish you all the best’, or something along the lines of those — I don’t have the best memory so I can’t give an exact recall, but you get the gist. In saying this, I hope whoever is reading this knows the distinction between having love for someone and being in love with someone. I am not in love with him anymore, just to clarify. However, he still does have a spot in my heart, and I will forever wish him all the best. I will be here for him, should he need me and if I am able to be there for him. He called me a couple of months ago and talked so we are in better terms now. Not as close as we once were (I think that is the best measure to take, to be honest), but better terms, nonetheless. I must admit, there are some things I still want to ask and get clarity for, but I do not think I’ll get the chance anytime soon, so I’ll leave it be. 

Point is, only NIKI’s melancholic melodies have hit me to the point where I can execute their messages adequately enough when I sing. To add to that, I just love singing her songs in general anyways, they are quite close to my vocal range. 

 Listening to Plot Twist, however, struck a different chord in me. As much as I love the song, and as much as I relate to many parts of it, I do not think I can ever sing this song. In the grand scheme of things, that is okay. There are many more tunes of solemnity that I can sing instead. But Plot Twist was very bittersweet. Probably the most bittersweet song I have ever listened to. I know it is only bittersweet because of what I associate the song with, but still… damn. NIKI really got me good with this one. 

 Sometimes I cannot help but wonder if I would be able to really relate to this song in another life. Not in the bittersweet way that I do right now, but in a way that I am only reminded of a serendipitous encounter. Should I love again in this life (I know I sound naïve but really, please get love away from me thank you) then this song is for them since now, I really am ‘closing the book’. But should anyone draw my attention enough to make me ‘stay and wait’ and give me the happy ending I have never had, then I can finally say that I can feel this song in its entirety. Only then can I sing this song and narrate its beautiful story. 

  In this life, however, I will just have to stick to humming along to the lyrics on SoundCloud behind closed doors. 

[wetalkinboutbooks]

Kingdom of Souls by Rena Barron

Summary: Magic has a price—if you’re willing to pay.

Born into a family of powerful witchdoctors, Arrah yearns for magic of her own. But each year she fails to call forth her ancestral powers, while her ambitious mother watches with growing disapproval.

There’s only one thing Arrah hasn’t tried, a deadly last resort: trading years of her own life for scraps of magic. Until the Kingdom’s children begin to disappear, and Arrah is desperate to find the culprit.

She uncovers something worse. The long-imprisoned Demon King is stirring. And if he rises, his hunger for souls will bring the world to its knees… unless Arrah pays the price for the magic to stop him. (Taken from Goodreads)

Our Ratings:  

 → Geena:  ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

 → Kae: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐⭐️

Overall: Kingdom of Souls is full of worldbuilding and characters that draw you in, thought sometimes their actions want to make you rip you hair out. BUT! We really loved this book and are excited to see where this trilogy takes us! Oh also, we should mention there are a few trigger warnings that Rena Barron has listed on the goodreads. 

Spoiler-full review below!

The Good:

→ The Worldbuilding

Geena: So, one of the best things about reading this book was the amazing worldbuilding, which she based off of West African mythology. The kingdoms are complex, and the separation of the different people and their faiths was super easy to follow too. I’ve read so many books where they have some wildass worldbuilding that leaves you scratching your head but this author did a good job at making it easy to understand. Also, Rena Barron did such a good job at describing the magic system? When she introduced the witch doctors in the first few chapters I could just visualize how they were and it was like watching a movie in my head. Like I’m still thinking about that one witchdoctor and her tribe that came down on clouds….. Poetic cinema… 

Kae: OK, so! I really enjoyed reading the differences between the tribes and how they are distinguished from each other. Some people had their bodies covered in tattoos others were known for their tall and lean figure, light eyes, etc. it was very wonderfully written and I always knew who Rena was talking about when she was mentioning the characters or introducing new ones.  Sometimes others don’t do a very good job of separating characters by looks and they expect the reader to remember everything based off of personality, which is quite annoying. Rena did a wonderful job of giving all of the characters their own individuality so we wouldn’t have to struggle and figure out who was who even if they weren’t mentioned by name. The way she wrote the big city (which I cannot remember the name), was very well done and you could easily see the differences between the city and the tribal lands.  I also love the way she incorporated the religious ties to magic in this world and the origin story of how they got their magic. There was a war between the gods, and the God of gods gifted humans with his magic. There are even mentions of fallen angels technically. It was just really interesting altogether. 

Geena: Yesss, the origin story was also one of the coolest components of the book. Also, Rena Barron does this cool thing of interspersing chapters throughout the book that are from the perspectives of different gods and their opinions on whatever is going on in the book. I really enjoyed that even though the first time I read it I was lowkey confused.

→ Arrah

Kae: Arrah!! My sweet summer, very cursed child. Arrah is the daughter of two of the most powerful witch doctors in this world. Her mother, Arti,  comes from a tribe where she was known for being the next in line to be the chief and a high witch doctor. Her father, Oshhe; who is the son of the high priestess/witch doctor and his tribe, making him one of the highest as well. This lineage from which Arrah comes from, left many to have very high expectations for her and her magical abilities. Unfortunately for Arrah, no matter  how many magical rituals she went through, was not blessed with magic. She often beats herself up about it because she feels she has let her family down, and truthfully the only person she let down was her mother. Her mother is The high priestess, and I mean THE HIGH PRIESTESS The entire kingdom. So she often waves her daughter off and is not home most of the time anyway because she is fulfilling her duties at the temple. So our main character is very close with her father who is honestly everyone’s dream dad.  oshhe is the epitome of a perfect father. 

Geena: Reading about her relationship with her dad, I was like “it’s just not realistic.”

Kae: LMAO BUT HONESTLY THO!! So when the children start to go missing in the city people begin to worry. Arrah’s Self-proclaimed a little brother ends up going missing as well. This leads her to sell small pieces of her life in order to use magic for a short period of time and figure out who is stealing the children.

Geena: LMAO Kae’s “sweet summer, cursed child” is so accurate. All she wants to do is become a powerful witchdoctor so her mom will love her :(  Despite everyone around her saying that her magic (or lack of) doesn’t define her, Arrah lives in a constant state of anxiety where magic is on her mind. She isn’t the most perfect protagonist and I liked that about her, she made dumb decisions and recognized they were stupid… but did them anyways 💀 A big fucken mood… But then again a lot of what she does throughout the book is driven by her need to help others, like finding her self-proclaimed younger brother or selling more of her lifespan to find a way to free her father from her mother’s spell. Her personal relationships are a wreck too like this girl had a crush on Rudjek, the future royal vizier, it was very much a two way crush but the whole time Arrah was like “Idk does he :////” like u absolute dumbo… EVERY SIGN POINTED TO “YES”  AND SHE WAS STILL LIKE “I’m imagining things.”

→ Arrah’s Squad

Geena: Barron also wrote Arrah an amazing group of friends. Primarily, Sukar and Essnai, both her friends from the city who would travel to the tribal lands to visit their own tribes for the yearly magic ritual. Sukar was very much a himbo (like almost every guy in this book lmao) and Essnai was a wlw QUEEN who was the oNLY ONE WITH A STEADY RELATIONSHIP THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK. Barron really said lesbian rights by giving Essnai the most wholesome relationship. Sukar and Essnai didn't turn their backs on Arrah even after her family was banished from the kingdom for crimes that Arrah had nothing to do with, and even accompanied her when it was revealed that Arrah would have to die to set the world to its original state. Also…. Omg when Sukar, Essnai, and Rudjek found out that she gave some of her lifespan for magic they were literally that meme:

Arrah: So I did a thing

Them: What?

Arrah: Sold my life for 3 hours of magic

Them: 

Kae: LMAOOOOOOO BINCH 

Geena: I JUST LOVED HOW THEY WERE LIKE “U DUMB BITHC!!!!! I GUESS NOW WE ALL GOTTA HELP U DEAL WITH THIS” I loved their friendship so much :’) 

Kae: IT WAS REALISTIC AF. I’d also like to mention how everyone and her friend group was basically like “Did you and Rudjek finally kiss yet? No? Typical.” And they would tease Arrah and Rudjek CONSTANTLY. Arrah’s friends had her back through literally everything and were ready to die by her and Rudjek’s side. They were some real ride or die friends when it came down to it. THEY WERE WITH THE SHITS. 

Arrah and Rudjek: *standing near each other* 

The homies:

→ Arrah’s Dad

Kae: OK so we have Arrah’s father, Oshhe, who is honestly the kindest man that I have ever encountered. He is such a wonderful father to Arrah and does everything in his power to let her know that she is loved and that she does not need to possess magic in order to be loved. He is constantly showering her with the reassurance that she needs to have two accept who she is. Arrah is in love with the stories he tells her. He also allows her to hang out with Rudjek when they both know that Arti, Arrah’s mother, would forbid it. (Rudjeks father did some foul shit to Arti when they were young and she isn’t over it… which is understandable, considering he had her tortured.) sadly, Arti curses oshhe and he is under her spell. He tried to fight it, but his magic just isn’t as strong as hers. He is complicit in whatever Arti says while he is under her curse, but he is often sweating or staring off into the distance, because he is still trying to break free. He’s basically under my control, knows he’s under my control, but is stuck behind magical, mental bars watching everything go down well he can do nothing to stop it. It’s really fucked up.

Geena: Kae summed up Oshhe really well. We learn about how he met and married someone as unloving as Arti and it’s so sad. He’d always been in love with Arti from their time at the tribes, and he still loved her when she came to the kingdom and fell in love with the King. And he was the one there after Arti was freed from her torture, even though he knew that Arti would never love him back and that she wasn’t the same woman he’d fallen for. Also, when he tells Arrah something along the lines of that when she was born he knew she’d be the love of his life bc he loved his daughter so much it’s unREAL. He went to a dangerous forest and killed a mystical animal for her. And he would have killed the gods themselves if it had come to that. And like Kae mentioned he was under Arti’s mind control but was aware of the torture she was putting Arrah through, and when he finally gains back control at the VERY END… AND DIES RIGHT AFTER?????? BRO????? I WAS LIKE THE FUCK!!! HE DID NOT DESERVE THIS!!!!!

Kae: I WAS SILENTLY SCREAMING AT MY DESK 

Geena: GIRL RIGHT… IDK BUT HER DAD JUST WARMED MY HEART. HE DIDN’T DESERVE HIS DEATH… 

Kae: THAT SHIT HURTED. 

The Bad:

→ Arrah NOT CATCHING A BREAK  

Kae: So, I’m going to backtrack just a little bit. But when Arrah sells some of her so for magic, she does like this magic phantom walk and finds out that her mother is the child snatcher. Her mother discovers that Arrah knows this and curses her so she can never speak with ill intent against her mother. So whenever Arrah tries to get help or tell someone what’s going on she literally cannot talk. It’s pure agony for her. So her mother curses Oshhe, gets pregnant by a demon via possession of him, and is exiled from the country. So they take a boat and travel to this small town that is known for its unresting spirit activity. Time also doesn’t exist in this town so it’s very hard for her to keep track of minutes, days, months, etc. they get to like this hidden Temple where Arti gives birth to Efiya, the demon baby. Efiya grows rapidly. She is born, then she’s like 5 the next day, then she’s 10. Then she’s Arrah’s age, 16. Efiya is a SUPER powerful girl who has the power of actual Gods, and she is completely unstoppable. Arrah escapes, returns home to her friends, and they’re on a mission to try to stop Efiya. Rudjek dies, comes back, she and he ditch the homies because they don’t want the homies to get hurt. WELL!!!!!!!!!!!! Gotdamn EFIYA shape shifts to look like her sister, waits until Arrah leaves for a moment to collect herself after it gets a little HOT with Rudjek, and goes to take some herbs. OUR GIRL SAID I'M NOT GETTING PREGNANT. comes back and boom. She sees him having sex with her sister. She’s shooketh. And PISSED. And hurt. Then the homies find them, blah blah blah. And long story short, they find the temple of the Gods, she fights and Efiya and they  basically kill each other. BUT Arrah comes back and learns her and Rudjek can’t be together. BUT THEY KISS ANYWAY. THEY WERE LIKE FUCK IT. I'M HERE FOR A GOOD TIME NOT A LONG TIME. Oh, yeah… and Efiya killed her parents. That happened. And her grandmother. And all the elder witch doctors because she wanted to steal  their magic. 

Geena: Poor girl was just knocked around like a ping-pong ball. One tragedy to another 🤕 First, she can’t do magic for SHIT and her mom doesn’t love her because of that. Second, the guy she likes is her mom’s nemesis’ son. Third, every single person she cares about is taken from her one way or the other, from her adoptive lil bro to her dad. Like I thought the book couldn’t get any worse when she saw her dad be possessed, but then Rudjek dies? And when he comes back to life he ends up sleeping with her evil sister thinking it was Arrah. Right, we gotta mention… in an attempt to free the demon king Arrah’s mom has a half-demon half-god baby, aka Arrah’s sister 

Kae: SHE FUCKS A DEMON!!!!!

Geena: A DEMON IN HER HUSBAND’S BODY TOO… AND ARRAH WATCHES THIS HAPPEN IM SCREAM .. AT LEAST I THINK SHE DOES BC I HAD TO RE-READ THAT CHAPTER LIKE 2 TIMES

Kae: GIRL THAT SHIT WAS SO WILD WHAT THE  F U C K 

Geena: AND YEA…. TO TOP IT ALL OFF TURNS OUT ARRAH IS  THE REINCARNATION OF THE DEMON KING’S SOULMATE…. SO THERE’S THAT, NOT TO MENTION SHE AND RUDJEK ARE ILL-FATED BC TOUCHING EACH OTHER SAPS ARRAH’S MAGIC (which she acquires permanently after some wild rituals her grandma does before dying at Efiya’s hands). THE LIST OF EVERYTHING THAT GOES WRONG WITH ARRAH’S LIFE IS SO FUCKING LONG OH MY GOD I FORGOT HOW SHIT SHE HAD IT

The Ugly:  

→ Arti and Efiya

Geena:  The ugliest villains can be found in this book. We have Rudjek’s dad that had Arti tortured, which broke her mind and twisted her into an unloving and terrible person. Hearing Arti’s story pulled at your heartstrings, but did it justify her killing 12 underprivileged children to resurrect a demon with whom she’d have a baby with JUST so she could resurrect the demon king. In my opinion… no. Not even just that, but treating your own child like shit and basically ignoring she exists until the very end of the book where suddenly she feels regret for neglecting Arrah for 16 years. Overall, on a scale of 0-10 Arti is a -5 when it comes to the mom scale.  Also, Arti is a powerful witchdoctor, and she cant feign ignorance because I’m pretty sure she would’ve seen the future at one point and seen everything that goes down. The only good thing she did do was kill the man that tortured her and countless other women. I feel like I’m too harsh on her given what she’s gone through, but she essentially puts Arrah through the wringer by cursing her and forcing her to watch her dad lose his own body. I’M LIKE I DONT WANT PPL TO BE LIKE ‘UR JUS BEIN A BITCH, ARTI SUFFERED TOO’ LIKE yes she did suffer, but rather than taking action against those that put her through hell she chose to ruin the lives of innocents ju kno. 

Kae: YES!! Arti was on some bullshit and I get she got fucked up and the love of her life was against her. But like… don’t take that out on your daughter because you can’t use her to get back at your enemies. I think that’s exactly why she treated Arrah the way she did. Arti married Oshhe for his power in hopes to have a powerful child. When that didn’t happen, she was pissed and started planning for that damn demon baby. Her actions are all based on revenge and power and in the end, they kill everyone. Including Arrah, though she doesn’t stay dead for long. She literally is like “Nah, I got shit to do.” And the gods are like “Mmm ... we can’t let our sister be reincarnated into you again… soooo, no?” And Arrah is like “Too bad bitches!” And zooms back into her own body. 

And then there’s Efiya. Efiya is described as beautiful and looks much like their mother. She starts off as a sweet little girl who just likes being around her big sister. But once she learns human things, like playing and being a child, she gets interested in that, and begins to abuse her powers. 

Geena: I was kinda disappointed on how the Efiya storyline went because like Kae mentioned, she had started off as a sweet girl who loved Arrah. And I had thought Arrah would run away with Efiya and train her against Arti but bOY WAS I WRONG. Efiya is powerful and she knows it, she kills countless gods and absorbs their power, and when she kills Arrah’s grandma she tries to take her power too but for some reason it doesn’t take. Instead, Arrah ends up taking her grandma’s magic (along with every other powerful witch doctor). This annoyed the fuck out of Efiya, bc she’s supposed to more powerful than Arrah, prettier than Arrah, and just generally better at everything. So, Efiya is like ‘I can’t take your powers or see your future so I’ll fuck your man instead” …… very much 0-100. Near the end of the novel I still couldn’t tell, did Efiya really love Arti and Arrah? Because on the one hand it seemed like she hated the prospect of killing them, but on the other hand Efiya didn’t care about skewering Arti. She was a complex villain for sure, kinda in the same way Arti was. 

Kae:  OH. AND THE DEMON KING GAVE ARRAH SOME OF HER PAST LIFE MEMORIES BACK. So like, now a piece of Arrah feels torn because she loves everyone in her current life. But she was married to the Demon King in a past life and he is determined to have her love him again. And I feel like a very small piece of Arrah does. The Demon King wants her back so they can resurrect demons, kill the remaining Gods, and take over the world like they originally planned. SO. THERE’S  THAT. A big whammy for ya there. But yeah. Shits crazy. 

Geena:  KJDNFDS RIGHT THE WHOLE ‘MARRIED TO THE DEMON KING IN A PAST LIFE’ SCHTICK…. THE POTENTIAL FOR ANGST???? GOD I CAN’T WAIT. This is a love triangle I CAN get behind because it’s gonna be MESSY 

Kae: He also mentioned possibly trying to kill Rudjek. 

Geena: Oh yea oh man.... Wait... there is a meme for this 

Arrah seeing the Demon King and Rudjek throwing hands:

Conclusion

Kae: SO! In conclusion, we loved this book. The story was WILD from  Start to finish. Rena is such an amazing storyteller and her descriptions that were vivid without being overdone. You know how some others like to go on for 10 pages about the smell of the wind and the bark of a tree. But Ren does it right! My favourite part of the book has to be Arrah and Rudjek . being so awkward around each other and dodging the fact that they’re both in love with each other. It was really cute because neither of them wanted to ruin their friendship and I think that was very realistic. The friendships are also beautifully written as well. And the way Rena differentiates the cultures of the tribes from one another is amazing and I felt like I was there. 

Geena:  I agree to everything Kae said above, Barron does an amazing job in (like what we mentioned before) worldbuilding shit. AND YEA my favourite part was like when Sukar purposely hangs around Arrah to make Rudjek jealous JUST BECAUSE IT WAS SO FUNNY TO ME. But honest to god I’m so excited to see how it’ll go from here because it’s supposed to be a trilogy right, so there is SO MUCH that can happen and there are SO MANY paths this can take. 

[jq37]

[obligatory recap ask]

**spoilers for subway skirmish and borough of dreams**

@kickmuncher3 and @galfast: ty for your asks, I’ll use them for the next two recaps. this is probably the least efficient way for me to handle this but I want to keep all of these visually consistent dammit. 

One of the funniest things about this season of D20 is most if not all of the cast has lived in NYC which manifests as very specific references and in character complaints that you just know come from a place of truth and experience. Which is to say we got a lot of that in these episodes.  

Also, this has nothing to do with anything but living in NY update: On Sunday, I saw a man hanging upside-down from a tree--by his feet--and playing the flute. And barely anyone registered it at all. So I really cannot stress enough how much New York is Like That.

Pete opening the fight by blasting a fireball and then telepathically calling out Kingston is--como se dice--a Power Move.

Brennan *immediately* channels the opposite of whatever energy Emily's on and goes right for Ricky's dog to the horror of everyone at the table and his absolute delight. Like, it's a spectral dog but still. Bro. Dog. 

Kingston taking the heat metal damage to get Epona to drop him is so raw. But then, for the rest of the fight, he doesn't say a single thing except for his Command spells which is a very different kind of raw. 

Question: Is Riz's mom the only good cop that exists in D20?

I know this was an RP ep and I know they knew it was gonna be an RP ep but I wonder what would have happened if they had pretended to cooperate with Epona to get more info. Probably just an extended RP ep that would have segued into this same fight eventually. But I'm curious about what information they let get eaten by a swarm of rats.

Misty's Irresistible Dance spell is very clutch. 

The gators from the last fight are back in the form of Kug's summons and one of them still has a grudge against Misty. Misty is all, "send me your resume!" because she appreciates the spunk. I was starting a sentence about what the hell play this sentient gator is going to be in but as soon as I hypothetically asked it my brain was like, "Peter Pan. Next question."

Y'all, this really was Kug's fight. Between calling the roaches, crocs, and gators, channeling Moonshine to call lightning, and killing Epona within 40 mins of the ep, he truly was on fire. Good for him. He also turns into a bear but specifically a bear that would have escaped from the zoo. It's the little details that make this show great. 

Brennan putting his foot down on tying rats together not being acrobatics is the eternal DM mood. 

Back to Epona for a second, do we think she was working for Robert directly? Someone connected to him? Something else? When her shadow split after Ricky's attack was that meaningful or just flavor? Where did that badge come from? Has it always existed? What does destroying it mean? It didn't seem to help. The bad cop ghosts were still around, just no one could control them at that point. If they had yoinked that badge, could they have had a summoning item that hey could use? Or is it bad karma to use something like that? Is it still bad if you're forcing the bad cops to do good stuff? Did Brennan anticipate this or is the Coach Daybreak 2: Electric Boogaloo? Lots of questions.

Misty's cutting words to the cop (saving Ricky) making the Law and Order "DUN DUN" noise is great. 

Emily ends up not needing to roll to make rat nunchucks because her health goes low enough that her magic ring activates but I feel like she low key wanted rat nunchucks. 

Wild that Kingston went down for just long enough for it to be cinematic before being revived by Misty ("Get up, old man,")

Also wild that this whole fight only took about 45 seconds of in game time. It makes sense if you think about it the way you would a movie and that's how most D&D fights are but that's so much play time for so little game time and it hit me this ep because I was actually keeping track of rounds. 

Anyway, I have not mentioned up until this point that the whole crux of this fight is to last long enough for Alejandro to roll high enough to summon the train to Nod but, long story short, Pizza Rat shows up to save the day. Does that make more sense in context? Marginally. 

I like that the train to Nod shows up on the wrong side of the tracks. Like I said, man. Details. 

Oh and to my above point about the cast making comments about NY as people who have lived in NY, I loved Brennan looking directly at the camera when he was going off on people who just stand at the door like idiots while you're trying to get in and then Siobhan pokes like half her head into frame so she can also stare directly into the camera. Mood.

When Ally said Pete shoots Kingston I half believed it for a good couple of seconds. I was right there with Lou. 

OK, so I don't know how many of you have watched Sharkboy and Lavagirl (and, if you haven't feel free to skip this bullet) but no movie has brought me more enjoyment overall than SB&LG. Not because it's good because it's not. But it's so insane that it's amazing. It's right in the sweet spot. I always say, if it was any better, it would be Spy Kids 3 and, therefore, unwatchable (SK 1 + 2 are dope as hell though, for the record). I bring it up because the way Brennan describes Nod reminds me a lot of Drool in SB&LG. Like, the rollercoaster subway car def could be in the same universe as the Train of Thought. This is all to say that I think Brennan could have written a version of SB&LG that was better without being worse. Idk if that comes across as complimentary, but it is, and to both parties actually. 

From the way Nod (the kid) is being framed (in this ep and the next) I know we're not supposed to mistrust him but, put in that situation, there is no way I would trust the gray faced, black eyed, creepily gliding dream child. 

Post fight, Kingston wants to offer an apology for what he said about Pete and Nod wants to apologize for putting Pete in his current situation. Also, the group decides to be more open in general. Kug, as most of us guessed, got beauty and the beasted for white collar crime by his business partner (Gabby) who is Esther's mom and a witch (also, Ricky thinks his crush on Esther is a secret which is just adorable and completely incorrect).  

Brennan cuts sharing time off because this is the combat episode dammit! Save it for next session. But, because I'm behind, next session is now! Let's get into The Borough of Dreams.

Misty, as a faerie, is instinctively mistrustful of vising other magical worlds and eating the food or taking things at face value. I love that she's playing a character where she can ask these questions and not be meta-gaming because I had some of the same concerns. 

Wildly, WALLY walks out of the train as he just happened to be on it (as conductor) at the time. Kug bursts out with the fact that he's his dad and Wally takes this to mean that Rat Jesus is his bio dad but, even after being left alone for so many years, he claims Bruce as his real dad. He's wrong but he's sweet. 

"I thought you were mad at me." Brennan, you didn't have to do that.

Murph clearly trying to not accidentally call Wally a piece of shit because that's his go to Kug way to describe things is so funny.

"We could turn me into a rat." WALLY

Kingston and Misty looking at each other like, "These absolute children," while Pete and Soph are making Brittney Spears references. 

So we find out what all of the magic stuff they picked up does. Misty's mirror can see invisibility. Pete's grill helps with persuasion. The thousand hour energy makes you immune to sleep for 42 days(!) The bagel can be used for divination or to essentially kill a person but spread their essence throughout the universe  (which low key sounds like a sacrifice someone might make to help cancel the spread of say an undead presence or a money virus). 

I want Ricky and Wally to be friends forever. 

Kingston's lack of connection to the dream world is so sad. Like, he's no nonsense but he's like NO NONSENSE. Like no nonsense possible. So he's just walking around like Eddie Valiant in Toontown. 

And, at the same time, the rest of the party is doing the MOST nonsense. Mary Poppins-ing into the sky. Misty is making out with the moon. Wild. 

SOBER SALAD

Ally drops the ketamine on the tomatoes line and Brennan fully breaks

Very sweet for Pete to bring Kingston a salad, even though that's such a random food to just have in your pocket(???). Why does salad keep coming up on this show? One more time and it's officially a motif.

So the dream world basically works on Sharkboy and Lavagirl/Xanth/Phantom Tollbooth/Wonderland/Toontown logic. If you've seen/read any of those, you basically have it down. 

"Only people with Sprint have service."/"Oh, amazing!" Brennan threw that softball out for anyone who wanted it and Emily, as usual, hit it out of the park.

Brennan very clearly knows his NY history. The mob boss (lucky Luciano, no not that one) that he mentioned during the sleeping with the fishes bit is a real dude and basically the dude who brought organized crime to the US (in the form we know it now). 

Ricky and the mints. Lord.

Anyway, the one item I didn't mention earlier is the holy grail detergent which can literally clean souls. Which sounds mighty interesting considering some of the other stuff that's come up this campaign. 

(Also, I wonder if you could use the bagel as spell components since it contains everything in the universe in microcosm).

I can't believe Pete was the one saying, "At least eat before you shotgun that 1000 hour energy." By the by, the 42 hour span of the energy drink makes me suspicious. Is that just for humor (and accurate math) or it this a Chekov's Gun kind of an item indicating some kind of time jump at some point? Ricky drinks it later in this ep so, if there's a clock attached to that, it's ticking. I'm prob reading into this but I assume if you're still reading these, this is what you're here for. 

Ally making sawing motions before being told an egg creme has nothing to do with eggs and is in fact a drink.

Pete! OK, so Pete has made some good steps in this ep, starting with promising to start reining in the drug usage. Later he works on his magic and also gets over Priya. This is the most endeared I've been to him all season. Especially his, "I try to do a good job," line. I felt that. 

"It's still open to you." Aw.

Brennan clearly saw the chance for a lore drop this ep and boy did it drop. Let's run through the highlights.

Nod dumped all this on Pete the way they did because it's super super hard to contact a Vox Phantasmus beforehand due the the natural, waking world inclination to brush off dreams. You have to have the job before you can talk to the boss. Cruddy system but that's how it goes. 

When Sophie said the thing about Robert Moses creating spaces that can't be accessed she meant by magic but it's an interesting way to phrase it because the irl Robert Moses is known for (allegedly, but like, it tracks) trying to keep black people out of certain spaces. 

Robert Moses sold his soul to Hell and Faerie which is why he's still alive it seems. No one wants to collect on his soul and anger the other party.

Whoever predicted that the golden door for Emma Laz's poem was the rectangle from episode one, collect your prize because it's confirmed in this ep. 

We learn about the ephemeral axiom which basically says, a dream can be all things but once it manifests, it's a single thing. (you might even say, "it is what it is".)

So another big thing we learn is that if a dream gets so big that manifesting them in the real world would break the game, it's called a Paragon. There are four total: Heaven, Hell, Faerie, and The American Dream. (Wild that The American Dream is the only country specific one that exists. Like, I rep my home team of course but the U.S. is a pretty latecomer to the country party. You'd think someone else might have gotten Paragon status at some point.)

"Was one of them the Grand Canyon?"

Anyway, dragging the American Dream into the waking world would fix the American Dream to mean one thing--I assume making tons of money if Robert Moses has his way. I'll admit, I was a  little fuzzy on the mechanics of this on my first watch-through because pulling the American Dream into the real world sounds like it should be a good thing. But I think, at the most basic level, it's a matter of you shouldn't put magic that shouldn't be in a box in a box. I'm still wondering about the exact implications for the waking world if he succeeds though. Like, how would that manifest? Would everyone suddenly become money hungry (lol, how would you tell)? Would people still want what they want but the American Dream would just be understood to mean making stacks and none of the good Superman-y stuff?

"It's not Protestant work ethic is it?"

Robert Moses is undead and can't get into Nod, so those are good things to note. 

I was so ready for Wally is get dispelled and for him to be a figment of Kug’s imagination or a dream or something. I braced myself so much. I was ready to set up a firing squad for Brennan for doing that to Kug.  

Who tipped the bugsters off to where Pete was gonna be? As far as I can tell, the only people that knew were the gang plus Alejandro and Esther. Maybe someone was scrying on them and that’s what the roll Zac failed during the wedding ep was. 

As soon as Brennan mentions locking the door, Ally immediately makes the connection and goes, "Key to the city." Nod "locks" the American Dream and gets rid of the lock which seems to mean the American Dream is temporarily unavailable. Which seems not good and like it's gonna have collateral damage for sure but I guess you bad is a matter of degrees and Robert getting in would be worse. But still, imagine your immigration papers get declined because some random kid decided to close down the American Dream for a couple of days. 

So, we get some backstory of Misty. She apparently just was straight up not having a good time in Faerie so she stole Titania's shoes (allowing her to be in iron-filled NYC without triggering her fairy vulnerability) and peaced out. 

"She's gonna kill you."/"Only if she can get here and I have her Goddamn shoes." (**A million airhorns in the distance**)

I love that Emily is still on the souls thing. Emily doesn't believe in Occam's Razor. In fact, I'd like to propose a corollary called the Axford Axiom: The coolest path between two points probably isn't the correct one, but it should be! I want her to run a campaign so bad so I can see her be in a game where her crazy endgame is what's going on because she's the one who wrote it. 

Misty: Let's go to hell!

So much like a videogame, the map has opened up and we have three places to check out. The former locations in the dream world of Faerie (Carnagie Hall), Heaven (JFK airport), and Hell (where do you think? Hell's Kitchen). The gang splits up to look for clues (and drinks, in Misty's case). Actually, make that four places: Pete goes to the Met Museum of Memories to basically Avatar mind meld with the other Voxes and get a handle on his magic to a degree (thank God--Nod?). We'll take these in order of appearance, which means we're off to Hell with Kug and Ricky (plus Ox and Wally).

(Focus on the Pizza, baby!)

At first I wanted Ricky, the good boy, to go to Heaven, but the idea of a firefighter in Hell also has appeal. 

Re The rat holding his guts: Gross. 

Ricky holding his axe like a cell phone.

So we and Kug learn that the rat-spell that was cast on him wasn't actually a rat-spell. It was a spell that would make his outsides reflect his insides and his insides happened to suck. I'm wondering if that means that it's a static spell that reflects his outsides at the time it was cast and it would need to be recast to reflect any moral progress made or if it will just revert him once he's made enough progress. 

I'm also wondering (partially bc one of my players asked to do this last session) can a Druid wildshape into a person? I feel like no, but like, did any of you ever read Animorphs? You know how in book 1 Tobias gets stuck as a red-tailed-hawk but then later her gets his morphing ability back and then he can turn back into his human form for 2 hours at a time? What if Kug just started doing that? Just being a rat who is sometimes a dude. 

They also go to the statue of liberty (which has a French accent, natch) who shows them that there's, like, a money/greed virus infecting the Dreaming and the American Dream. Ricky smells undeath again. They think vampires. That's plausible but I'm not sure. 

OK, Heaven. 

WHOOOO, strap in y'all

(Sidenote: I wonder what would have happened if Soph hadn't chose to go to heaven. I feel like she could have easily run into you know who in hell had she chose to go there, but I'm getting ahead of myself).

Brennan actually tries to lead Emily into the thinking about Dale mindset but Emily, having reached a note of closure in Soph's character arc, pushes back on that.

honeyougotastormcoming.gif

Brennan,about to wreck her entire life: Cool.

I and the cast keep saying heaven a lot but it's like an all roads lead to Rome situation. It's heaven, Valhalla, Elysium, nirvana. Like, whatever Good Place you believe in. It's the Good Place. 

Sophie, upon being told that if she jumps into the fight at the Pearly Gates she knows nothing about, she might literally die: And what about it?

Emily's face when Brennan says, "And you see Dale," is so much. You can see the entire range of human emotion in her eyes in that moment.

Sidenote: I wonder how much of her backstory Emily planned and how much Brennan dropped on her. Like, she knew Isabella was part of her backstory obv. Did Brennan come up with all of this whole-cloth or did she say she wanted there to be something supernatural and and let him fill in the details. Very curious about the collaborative process.  

 When Dale's character art comes up, it says "Sophie's Angel" for Dale's descriptor so where I thought we were going was that Dale was Sophie's Guardian Angel who wasn't supposed to be romantically involved with her and the reason he was gone is that he was forcibly brought back to heaven. But that may be because I recently watched this.

Dale, is upsettingly sweet with Sophie, calls her "sweetie" the entire time they're together, fights a ton of angels to get to her, and says he got her text message. Emily is about to cry. *I'm* about to cry. I'm sure the only reason Brennan isn't fistpumping is because he needs to stay in character. 

Dale gives this cryptic piece of advice before he is dragged off by angel guards: When you get to the top, I know what it'll seem like, but there is someone there.

Emily, of course: I fight the angels.

The angels, hilariously, don't take it personally that she's fighting them--and very well, but not well enough to beat a nat 20. Sometimes the dice are spooky in tune with the story.

"He's got a job to do here. Who's gonna watch the deer?"

Dale also tells Soph to tell Jackson he said hi which is interesting to say the least. 

Emily gets two very dope lines in a row:

"Let me hold your hand through this Alejandro."

"I'm gonna kill her. And I don't think she's going to the great big airport in Brooklyn."

That's it for her for now, but let's put a pin in that for now and come back to it after we check in with the others. 

Siobhan and Kingston are at the former spot of Faerie, the Glamour Bar.

Zac jokingly (I think) guessing Dr. Doolittle as the thing Siobhan can't remember when she says Eliza Doolittle is so funny. 

Also, her terrible cockney British accent on top of her actual British accent is great.

I love that the two actual Real Adults are the ones who go and get wasted mid-mission. 

Brennan introduces "Bobby Goodfellow" and it takes Siobhan exactly four seconds after Brennan finishes the word "Goodfellow" to be like, "It's Puck." She knew and she knew her character would know it and she hardcore pounced.  

I meant to mention this before but it's super funny that Kingston has been around the magical block but there's still so much he doesn't know. He was surprised by a bunch of stuff in this ep that I'd think he would know about (like the Midsummer's faeries being real) but nah. He's like, "This is my specific brand of magic nonsense. That's what I know about. I don't mess around with any of *that* stuff. I stay in my lane. I stay in my city."

Ty Brennan for teaching me how to pronounce sláinte. This is the first time I'm hearing it out loud. 

I love his Puck voice. Like, the little British street urchin voice.  

No big surprise, Puck sent the mirror on the order of Oberon and Titania (who are not back together but are knocking boots according to him). 

Puck warns Misty, "The world of mortals is not long for this world," and follows it up with a seemingly sincere, "Come home. We miss you," which is an interesting thing to say after announcing that Titania is gunning for her. Who is this we, Puck? Your boss wants to bodyslam her!

Also, what do the faeries know that they're not saying? All of them in the bar seemed to know something was off but none of them said anything and Puck didn't elaborate. 

I've always liked the trope of the person from the otherworldly, magical or super advanced being like, "Idk what you're talking about. Humans are great!" because it's the opposite of the snooty elf/vulcan/whatever trope that I really can't stand. Misty showed shades of that in this conversation but I feel like there's still so much that we're missing in her backstory and I wanna know what it is.  

(Also, this is prob just me being a little pepe silvia but I would be very unsurprised if Misty got an opportunity to betray the party at some point. Don't @ me. It's just something I could see myself offering to a player for the drama of it all). 

Anyway, Kingston is extremely uncomfortable in the bar and makes a hasty exit so let's go to the museum with Pete and Nod.

Ally jumps onto the, "Suggested donations are for suckers" train w/ Siobhan. 

Turns out, Pete f'd up Robert up so much that he has kind of a brain link with him. I wonder how long that's gonna last. 

Pete gets proficiency in arcana and a choice between lesseing wild magic surges or gaining some control over them (2 wild magic rolls on a fail and ally gets to choose which effect takes place). Obv the second one is more fun rp-wise so that's what Ally picks.

It's a memory museum so OF COURSE he gets a chance to look at the memories of the rest of the party. But it's getting late so he only has a chance to check on one person's memories. He, naturally, picks Kingston. Makes perfect sense from an RP perspective but out of character I feel like Misty is the most closed book of the party. 

Pete sees Kingston's life from his childhood to the present (Brennan puts Lou on the spot to do some improv...I mean beyond the improv they're already doing) and it's about what you would expect based on what we know about Kingston but it's very beautifully described (sidenote: did any of y'all ever watch the life and times of juniper lee? where she can't leave the city bc she's like the buffy of that world? I really felt shades of that, except more self imposed).

During that montage, a character is like, "You could make hundreds of millions of dollars--I mean, I'm exaggerating," (s/t like that) and I'm not gonna go back and check but I feel like Brennan (or maybe Lou) made almost exactly the same comment in the first ep of this season in a very similar context.

Oh, also, Kingston gets dubbed Vox Populi by a dragon on Bleecker Street in case you were wondering about logistics. 

Again, Nod says that inviting Liz into his life was basically dooming Liz to be stuck dealing with the Unsleeping City but I feel like unless you have a Vox position or something similar you should be able to, like, opt out. So what you need to ignore some weird stuff day to day? May I direct you to my earlier anecdote about the flute dude in the tree. New Yorkers are good at that. And if she moved away, would it even be an issue?

Actually, that raises another question. Is NY the only place where magic is happening? It can't be because Santa is doing his thing at the North Pole. And NY has the Umbral Arcana which shields magic from muggles. Does that mean that elsewhere, magic just isn't hidden? I'm guessing that works because the bulk of magical happenings are happening in NY. Which, again, if so, couldn't Liz just move if she really wanted to? Or is she actually being *kept* there? 

Ahhhhh, that argument scene with Kingston and Liz. Ow. 

Robert's subconscious is heckling Kingston's memories the entire time. 

The party gets back together, Pete immediately lets Kingston know he was memory spying on him and hugs him (while Misty is drunk a singing over him). Their rift literally caused a kind of rift in NYC which is now healed (which causes Sophie to see the Unsleeping City/Dreaming Yin-Yang sign over their heads).

 Ricky drinks the 1000 hr energy so start the clock I guess. 

Misty, upon hearing that Dale is dead basically does that John Mulaney bit: Hey, do you want me to kill that guy for you? Because it sounds like [s]he sucks and I will totally kill that guy for you. 

It's the day of Priya's art show which I totally forgot was happening. Before that, Sophie finally goes to see her brother and we can return back to that pin I mentioned earlier.

(Also, it’s the 20th which means we’re getting really close to Christmas)

He says that their family got mixed up with the Confettis and they've been helping to launder magical items that Confetti is paying some rep from Hell (an associate of Robert's).

And by, "Some rep from hell," I mean Isabella Infierno specifically.

Emily, hilariously riffs for a while about how small it was of her to call Isabella a succubus even though she clearly knows at this point that Isabella is some kind of demon. I mean...Infierno. Come on. 

Sidenote: Which demon actually trying to be subtle would pick the last name Infierno? You wanna blow your cover for the aesthetic that bad?

Emily goes, "Oh my (beat) Nod," which I think is the exact way she dropped the first, "Oh Melora," in one of the first eps of Naddpod. 

Anyway, it turns out that Soph's family knew that Isabella was gunning for Dale (he was getting close to realizing something shady was going on) and, while they didn't call the shot, they let it happen.

Oh! He also says Dale was a chosen one from "some monastery" which, of course, fits in with Dale's comment about saying hi to Jackson. Now I'm wondering if his other comment--about there seeming like there's nothing at the top--is about whatever chosen one test he had to take to get the position to begin with. And maybe he was giving a clue to Sophie so that when she takes it, she'll for sure pass and get whatever dope powers or weapons or privileges come with the position. 

"The only reason I'm not going to go after you right now is because I'm not organized enough to give you the fucking revenge you deserve." Soph is cold as ice after hearing about what her family did. 

"Maybe you should have said that to Isabella before she went after me." Another mic drop line from Emily. This really was her episode. You can really see Emily channeling hr genuine emotional reactions into her character.  

La Gran Gata shows up to let Soph know she has her back to hunt down Isabella. The only other warlocks really seen played are Fjord on CritRole and Leiland on Bloodkeep so it's wild to see a character with such a chill relationship with their patron.

So, Priya's art show. They show up (to a distressingly unsafe building from Ricky's perspective) and it turns out, not only is it performance art (the worst kind) Pete *is* the art.

"I present to all of you: cruelty, a exploration of a relationship. Peter, take my hand."

major barf.

Pete goes OFF

Kingston: Picasso is art, this is bullshit!

Siobhan: Her last name is Danger? I hate this bitch.

Pete gets over Priya instantly which totally tracks because, like I said, barf. 

Sophie stealing Ricky's thing and rooftop jumping. Zac narrows his eyes when she says that.

I love Isabella's title card. It says, "Literal Succubus". It reminds me of the funniest scene in Bedazzled when the Devil (Liz Hurley) gives Brendan Frasier her business card and it just says, "The Devil".

But she's here and she's here to fight! I'm so excited for this one y'all! Unsafe building. Lots of civilians. Sophie (and Emily) going totally feral. I haven’t looked forward to a fight this much since Adaine went for Aelwen. Let's gooooo!

[nataandreev]

Fragments from “Sister Outsider” Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde

“Sister Outsider” was probably one of the most soul-fucking-searching book I ever read in my life. It made me question what I stand for so many times, that it made me sick to my stomach. I realized that I am not that good at this self-reflective-shit.

That my efforts of doing better are not anywhere close to where they should be. Audre Lorde taught me through her works that I got a lot of work to do. Like a lot. Her truth cuts deep. She has no mercy and her opinions are raw. They are hard to swallow. There were moments when I had to pause, because I wasn’t fully understanding it and weird enought I finished to read it today, February 18, 2020, on her birthday. Audre would’ve turn today 86 yo. Here are just a few fragments from the book, but, please, if you can read the whole thing. 

Biography:

Audre Lorde is an American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist. As a poet, she is best known for technical mastery and emotional expression, as well as her poems that express anger and outrage at civil and social injustices she observed throughout her life. Her poems and prose largely deal with issues related to civil rights, feminism, lesbianism, illness and disability, and the exploration of black female identity via Wikipedia.

⁃ Poetry Is Not a Luxury

We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not. The white fathers told us: I think therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. ⁃ The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expect to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength. “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will punch you in the mouth from the inside.” Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid. ⁃ Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving The above forms of human blindness (racism, sexism, heterosexism and homophobia) stem from the same root - an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to define self, when there are shared goals. This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressed peoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only a limited and particular amount of freedom that must be divided up between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty going as spoils to the victor or the strongest. So instead of joining together to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for a larger slice of the one pie. ⁃ Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power* In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of oppressed that can provide energy for change. The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we experienced it, we know we can aspire. The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need - the principal horror of such a s system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, it’s erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel. That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage , nor god , nor an afterlife. ⁃ Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface Black feminism is not white feminism in blackface. Black women have particular and legitimate issues which affect our lives as Black women, and addressing those issues does not make us any less Black. Now I am sure there are still some Black men who marry white women because they feel a white woman can better fit the model of “femininity” set forth in this country. As Black women and men, we cannot hope to begin dialogue by denying the oppressive nature of male privilege. And if Black makes choose to assume that privilege for whatever reason- raping,brutalizing, and killing Black women- then ignoring these acts of Black male oppression within our communities can only serve our destroyers. One oppression does not justify another. As people, we most certainly must work together. It would be shortsighted to believe that Black men alone are to blame for the above situations in a society dominated by white male privilege. But the Black male consciousness must be raised to the realization that sexism and woman-hating are critically dysfunctional to his liberation as Black man because they arise out of the same constellation that engenders racism and homophobia. ⁃ Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist’s Response Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly “inferior “ capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in dependency and fear. “The next time you come in here crying ...,” and I suddenly caught myself in horror. This is the way we allow the destruction of our sons to begin in the name of protection and to ease our own pain. My son get beaten up? I was about to demand that he buy that first lesson in the corruption of power, that might makes right I could hear my cell beginning to perpetuate the age old distortions about what strength and ready bravery really are. It is hard for our children to believe that we are not only potent as it is for us to know it, as parents. But that knowledge is necessary as the first step in the reassessment of power as something other than might, age, privilege, or the lack of fear. It is important to step for a boy, whose societal destruction begins when he’s forced to believe that he can only be strong if he doesn’t feel, or if he wins. ⁃ An interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich They were very streetwise, but they had done very little work with themselves as Black women. They had done it only in relation to, against, whitey. The enemy was always outside. I did that course in the same way I did all the others, which was learning as I went along, asking the hard questions, not knowing what was coming next. The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot. And then, just possibly, hopefully, it goes home, or on. I knew, as I had always known, that the only way you can head people off from using who you are against you is to be honest and open first, to talk about yourself before they talk about you. It wasn’t even courage. Speaking up was a protective mechanism for myself. The Black mother who is the poet exists in everyone of us. Now when males or patriarchal thinkers (whether male or a female) reject a combination, then we are truncated. Rationality is not necessary. It serves the chaos of knowledge. It serves feeling. It servers to get from this place to that place. But if you don’t honor those places, then the road is meaningless. Because we cannot fight old power in old power terms only. The only way we can do it is by creating another whole structure that touches every aspect of our existence, at the same time as we are resisting. There are different choices facing Black and white women in life, certain specifically different pitfalls surrounding us because of our experiences, our color. Not only are some of the problems that face us dissimilate, but some of the entrapments in the weapons used to neutralizers are not the same. I wish we could explore this more , about you and me, but also in general. I think it needs to be talked about, written about it: the differences in alternatives or choices we are offered as black and white women. There is a danger of seeing it in an all or nothing way. I think it’s very complex thing done what women are constantly offer choices or the appearance of choices but also real choices that are undeniable. We don’t always perceive the difference between the two. But documentation does not help one perceive. At best it only analyzes the perception that at worst, it provides a screen by which to avoid concentrating on the court revelation, following it down to how it feels. Again, knowledge and understanding. They can function in concert, but they don’t replace each other. But I am not rejecting your need for documentation. I can document the road to Abomey for you, and true, you might not get there without that information. I can respect what you are saying. But once you get there, only you know why, what you came for, as you search for it and perhaps find it. So at certain stages that request documentation as a blinder, a questioning of my perceptions. Someone once said to me that I hadn’t documented the goddess in Africa, the woman bond that moves throughout The Black Unicorn. I had to laugh. I am a poet, not a historian. I’ve shared my knowledge, I hope. Now you go documented it, if you, if you wish. I was holding back because I had not asked myself the question: “Why is women loving women so frightening to black men unless they want to assume the white male position?” It was a question of how much I could bear, and of not realizing I could bear more than I thought I could at the time. It was also a question of how could I use that perception other than just in rage or destruction. What understanding begins to do is to make knowledge available for use, and that’s the urgency, that’s the push , that’s the drive. That you had to understand what you knew and also make it available to others. ⁃ Master’s Tools For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women. Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is the difference between the passive be and the active being. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support. If white American feminist theory need not deal with the difference in oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of color? What is the theory behind racist feminism. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower. In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, “We did not know who to ask.” But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Black women’s art out of women’s exhibitions, Black women’s work out of most feminist publications except for the occasional “Special Third World Women’s Issue,” and Black women’s texts off your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, white feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven’t also educated yourselves about Black women and the difference between us-white and Black-when it is key to our survival as a movement? Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women-in the face of tremendous resistance-as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragical repetition of racist patriarchal thought. Simone de Beauvoir once said: “It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting.” Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices. ⁃ Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future. Too often , we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insourmountable barriers, or that they do you not exist at all. The results in a voluntary isolation or false and treacherous connections. Either way, we did not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for a creative change within our lives. We speak not of human difference but if human deviance. By and large within the women’s movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the world sisterhood that does not in fact exist. Unacknowledged class differences rob women of each other’s energy and creative insight. By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The “generation gap” is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community nor ask the all important question, “Why?” This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread. Ignoring the differences of race between women and the implications of those differences presents the most serious threat to the mobilization of women’s joint power. As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define and woman in terms of their own experience alone then women of color become “other,” the outsider whose experience and tradition is too “alien” to comprehend. Refusing to recognize differences makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial “otherness” is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchical power and its tools. Today, with the defeat of ERA, the tightening economy, and increased conservatism It is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough pretty enough sweet enough quite enough teach the children to behave hate the right people and married the right man then you will be allowed to coexist with patriarchy in relative peace at least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along and true unless one lives in loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is senseless. Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shut down in the street and you turn your backs up on the reasons why they’re dying. Within black communities where racism is a living reality, differences among us often seem dangerous and suspect. The need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity, and a black feminist vision mistaken for betrayal of our common interests as people. Because of the continuous battle against a racial erasure the black women and black men share, some black women still refused to recognize that we are also opressed as women and that sexual hostility against black women as practiced not only by the white racist society but implemented within our black communities as well. It is a disease striking the heart of black nation of hood and silence will not make it disappear. Exacerbated by racism and the pressures of powerlessness, violence against black women and children often becomes a standard within our communities, one by which manliness can be measured. But this woman-hating acts are rarely discussed as crimes against black women. “As long as male domination exists, rape will exist. Only women revolting and men made conscience of their responsibility to fight sexism can collectively stop rape.” - Kalamu ya Salaam, a black male writer Black women who once insisted that lesbianism was a white woman’s problem now insist that black lesbians are a threat to black nationhood, are consorting with the enemy, are basically on un-black. These accusations, coming from the very women to whom we look for deep and real understanding, have served to keep many black lesbians in hiding, caught between the racism of white women and the homophobia of their sisters. What are the particular details within each of our lives that can be scrutinized and altered to help bring about change? How do we redefine difference for all women? It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortion which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences. All of us have had to learn to live or work Or coexist with men from our fathers on. We have recognized and negotiated this differences, even when this recognition only continued the old dominant/subordinate mode of human relationship, where the oppressed must recognize the masters’ difference in order to survive. But our future survival predicated upon our ability to relate within equality. As women we must root our internalize patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to each to others’ difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles. ⁃ The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures. ⁃ Learning from the 60s When we disagreed with one another about the solution to a particular problem, we were often far more vicious to each other than to the originators of our common problem. We forget that the necessary ingredients needed to make the past work for the future is our energy in the present, metabolizing one into the other. Continuity does not happen automatically, nor is it a passive process. That is how I learned that if I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. My poetry, my life, my work, my energies for struggle were not acceptable unless I pretended to match somebody’s else’s norm. I learned that not only couldn’t I succeed at that game, but the energy needed for that masquerade would be lost to my work. We are functioning under government ready to repeat in El Salvador and Nicaragua the tragedy of Vietnam, a government which stands on the wrong side of every single battle for liberation taking place upon this globe. Decisions to cut aid for the terminally eel, for the elderly, for dependent children, for food stamps, even school lunches, are being made by men with full stomachs who live in comfortable houses with two cars and umpteen tax shelters. None of them go hungry to bed at night. Recently, it was suggested that senior citizens be hired to work in atomic plants because they’re close to the end of their lives anyway. Revolution is not a one time event. It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses; for instants, it is learning to address each other’s difference with respect. You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other.I do not have to be you to recognize that they were Warriors are the same.what we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future it with the particular strength of our individual identities dot and the other in an order to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness. ⁃ Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger It is easier to deal with the external manifestations of racism and sexism then it is to deal with the results of those distortions internalized within our consciousness of ourselves and one another. Anger - a passion of displeasure that may be excessive or misplaced but not necessarily harmful. Hatred - and emotional habit or attitude of mine in which aversion is coupled with ill will. Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does. Growing up, metabolizing hatred like a daily bread. Because I’m black, because I’m a woman, because I’m not black enough, because I am not some particular fantasy of a woman, because I AM. On such a consistent diet one can eventually come to value the hatred of one’s enemies more than one values the love of friends, for that hatred becomes the source of anger, and anger as a powerful fuel. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone as a blind fours which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but up on what lies behind, upon what created it - hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not to a lifewish for anything else. For example: At this point in time, were racism to be totally eradicated from those middle range relationships between black women and white women, those relationships might become deeper, but they would still never satisfy our particular black woman’s need for one another, given our shared knowledge and traditions and history. There are two very different struggles involved here. One is the war against racism in white people, and the other is the need for black women to confront and wade through the racist constructs underlying our deprivation of each other. and this battles are not at all the same. Most of the black women I know think I cry too much, or that I am to public about it. I’ve been told that crying makes me seem soft and therefore of little consequence. As if our softness has to be the price we pay out for power, rather than simply the one that’s paid most easily and most often. “Don’t trust white people because they mean us no good and don’t trust anyone darker than you because they are hearts are as black as their faces.” (And where did that leave me, the darkest one?) it is painful even now to write it down. How many messages like that come down to all of us, and in how many different voices, how many different ways? And how can we expunge these messages from our consciousness without first recognizing what it was they were saying, and how destructive they were? When there is no connection at all between people, then anger is a way of bringing them closer together, of making contact. but when there is a great deal of connectedness that is problematic or threatening or acknowledged, then anger is a way of keeping people separate and putting distance between us. That’s because we sometimes rise to each other‘s defense against outsiders, we do not need to look at devaluation and dismissal among ourselves. Support against outsider is very different from cherishing each other. We refused to give up the artificial distances between us, or to examine all real differences for creative exchange. I am too different for us to communicate. Meaning, I must establish myself as not you. And the road to anger is paid with our unexpressed fear of each other’s judgment. ⁃ Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report This short, undeclared, and cynical weren’t against Granada is not a new direction for American foreign policy. It is merely a blatant example of 160 year old course of action called the Monroe doctrine. In its name America has invaded small Caribbean and Central American countries over and over again since 1823, cloaking this invasion is under a variety of names. 38 such invasion secured prior to 1917 before the Soviet Union even existed. I am only a relative. I must listen long and hard and ponder the implications of what I have heard, or be guilty of the same quick arrogance of the US government in believing their external solutions to Granados future.

[marshmallowgoop]

Why is Kill la Kill considered a magical girl anime? Just because of the transformations?

Short answer: It’s Complicated.

Long answer: It’s complicated. Incrediblyso. The magical girl genre—and shoujo mangaand anime in general—is… pretty neglected when it comes to serious analysis. AsDeborah M. Shamoom writes in the book PassionateFriendship: The Aesthetics of Girl’s Culture in Japan, “… writing on shōjo manga even in Japan has lagged behindacademic study of manga for boys. Although Yonezawa Yoshihiro published ahistory of postwar shōjo manga in 1980, for over a decade it was the onlybook-length study of the genre. In the late 1990s, women who had grown upreading these texts, such as Fujimoto Yukari and Yokomori Rika, began writingabout shōjo manga from a feministperspective” (5-6). And, when you consider that Sally the Witch and SecretAkko-chan, the first (arguably) magical girl anime series ever produced,were put to TV screens in the mid-to-late 1960s,it’s easy to see that there’s kinda a dearth of study here (Saito 147).

While there is a lot moreresearch devoted to shoujo today, inregards to Western, English-language discussions on something like the magicalgirl genre, it’s super important to note that—in my experience, anyway—therejust ain’t a lot of access to this work in English. Additionally, what is available in English is often writtenfrom a foreigner’s perspective. Even while working at a university and havingaccess to loads and loads of material, I struggle to find much of anything on shoujo written by someone who actuallygrew up and spent most of their life in Japan.

So, maybe it’s no surprisethat—for lack of a better term—Westerners get their panties all in a twistabout what’s actually magical girland what’s not. It’s just hard to get anything concrete on the matter. I mean,it’s hard to get much of anything onthe matter.

I also acknowledge that I am inno way an authority here. I’ve only dipped my toes into serious shoujo analysis, and I am not Japanese,nor have I ever even set foot on Japan. But I can provide a little bit ofreasoning for why Kill la Kill mightmaybe be magical girl. Hopefully.

First things first: what is a magical girl show, anyway? In thearticle “Magic, Shōjo, andMetamorphosis: Magical Girl Anime and the Challenges of Changing GenderIdentities in Japanese Society,” author Kumiko Saito offers a basic idea:

In public discourse, the general definition of the magicalgirl anime tends to solely focus on the content. Largely influenced by TōeiStudio productions in the 1960s and 1970s,mahō shōjo as a genre signifies (usuallyserial television) anime programs in which a nine- to fourteen-year-old ordinarygirl accidentally acquires supernatural power; majokko suggests the alternative setting that the female protagonist’ssuperhuman power derives from her pedigree as a princess of a magical kingdomor a similar scenario. In either pattern, the plot often revolves around theway she wields her power to save people from a threat while maintaining hersecret identity. She frequently uses magical empowerment gadgets, such as wandsand accessories (to be sold as toys), often accompanied by little animal pets(to be sold as toys). (145)

So, let’s consider Kill la Kill. Ryuko is older thanfourteen, but you might argue that sheaccidentally acquires supernatural power in the form of Senketsu as in mahou shoujo series... well, at first, anyway. When it turnsout that Ryuko was designed from birth tohave superpowers, maybe there’s something to be said about how Kill la Kill actually fits more into themajokko category rather than the mahou shoujo one, but at the same time,it’s not that Ryuko’s exactly a princess,nor do her superpowers really have much to do with her lineage; her dadjust used her as a literal science project. Right off the bat here, it’s lookin’like two nopes already for the Kill-la-Kill-is-a-magical-girl-show thing.

Still, moving on to the nextpieces of Saito’s definition, Ryuko doesn’t have a secret identity, and thoughshe does wield her power to savepeople from a threat, she’s also super motivated by her own self-interests fora good chunk of the plot, so I’ll be conservative here and say that Ryukodoesn’t fit either of these classic components. For the last two bits, Ryuko’s“empowerment gadget” could easily be argued to be Senketsu, and Senketsu couldalso be argued to be her “little animal pet,” especially when he won thirdplace for “Best Mascot” in the Newtype AnimeAwards 2014. Kill la Kill characterdesigner Sushio even drew Junketsu getting kinda jelly about it.

Satsuki: Seems like Senketsu won an award…

Junketsu: !!

Translation from @sushiobunny here

But let me stay conservativehere. Let’s say Ryuko’s “empowerment gadget” doesn’t count because Senketsu’s neithera magic wand nor a compact mirror, and let’s say that Senketsu ain’t a “littleanimal pet,” either (and I mean, he really, really, really ain’t, thanks). Out of the six common elements of magicalgirl anime that Saito presents—young girl, accidental acquisition ofsuperpowers, saving people with superpowers, secret identity, “magicalempowerment gadget,” and “little animal pet”—Kill la Kill arguably fits noneof these. Even being as generous with this as possible, Kill la Kill would still only score a 3/6at the most.

Do people who call Kill la Kill a magical girl series haveno idea what they’re talking about? Well, again, it’s Complicated. Saito’s definitionis super-duper extremely general. That’s why you got words like “often” and “frequently”stuffed in there. Even pretty unquestionably magical girl series like Princess Tutu aren’t fitting inperfectly. The magical girl genre encompasses a lot more than any simple plot outlinecould ever convey.

So, maybe the question of Kill la Kill’s magical girliness isbetter answered by examining more specific tropes commonly utilized in thegenre. In the article “Shoujo Versus Seinen? Address and Reception in Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011),” authorCatherine Butler provides a table that, though self-described as being “far from… an exhaustive list of mahou shoujo tropes,” includes some establishedfeatures of magical girl anime and notes whether or not they appear in Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura, LyricalGirl Nanoha, and Puella Magi MadokaMagica, which are all series that, unlike Kill la Kill, are widely accepted as magical girl shows (5):

Following Butler’s table, Kill la Kill scores much higher on the “magicalgirl” scale than it does following Saito’s general synopsis. Ryuko doesn’t havea “‘dream’ that is more than a dream” (unless you count her Senketsu death dream),and maybe clothing isn’t quite the same as jewelry, but Senketsu is officially considereda “cute mascot character,” Ryuko does sortof rescue him from eternal sleep, and he also turns out to be an alien. On topof that, Kill la Kill hastransformation sequences and named attacks. The increased specificity of thetable has Kill la Kill coming in anywherefrom a 4/7 to a 6/7—and a 6/7 is higher than even Cardcaptor Sakura, a show that I don’t think anyone would deny as a magical girl anime.

A similar look at Kill la Kill and particular magical girltropes can be found in the article “SentientSailor Uniforms are Serious Business: Trope-Twisting in Kill la Kill,” where author R looks to the TV Tropessite and examines what (presumably largely) Westerners have to say regardingthe magical girl genre:

Notably, consider what [TV Tropes] credits to have been pioneered by Majokko Meg-chan, a magical girl series from 1974that allegedly “codified many of the tropes that would later become staples ofthe magical girl genre”:

Another important early Magical Girl showwas Majokko Meg-chan in 1974. This was the firstshow to be marketed to boys as well as girls, and featured a number ofdevelopments—it was the first Magical Girl show to…

have a Tomboyish heroine—all magical girls prior to this had been sweet feminine girls;

feature a rival to the main character (Non, Meg’s rival and the local Dark Magical Girl);

include a really evil character. Prior to this, there was a perception that young girls couldn’t handle such things;

feature Fanservice (in the form of Panty Shots, slight nudity, and Megu being a borderline Fille Fatale), as well as Lovable Sex Maniac characters (Megu’s stepbrother Rabi and Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain Chou);

touch on more serious social issues, like Domestic Abuse, extramarital relationships, and drug abuse; and

have the heroine not only lose fights, but having to face serious consequences (deaths, injuries, humiliations, etc.).

Kill la Kill has all of this. Ryuko Matoi is certainly portrayed astomboyish, Satsuki is her rival, Ragyo is a really evil character,the fanservice is notorious and we have the Mankanshoku boys and dog as(supposedly)-lovable perverts, sexual abuse is present with Satsuki’snarrative, and Ryuko loses and faces humiliation, severe injuries, and shock.Combine all this with the magical transformation sequences that this genre isfamous for, and Kill la Kill absolutely feels pretty magicalgirl.

Hey, maybe anyone who considersKill la Kill a magical girl anime might have some idea of what they’retalking about?

But then again, isn’t a genremore than some tropes mashed together? After all, many series simply featuringa female protagonist could probably fit into several magical girl tropes just ‘cause they’vegot a female protagonist, but I wouldn’t call something like Birdy the Mighty: Decode a magical girlshow, even if it does have a transforming heroine and a robot alien mascot buddy.

The question of whether or not something is a real “magical girl anime” also has a tendency to turn into even more questions about intended audience. Can amagical girl show be made primarily for boys? What about for adults rather thanyoung children? When Kill la Kill seemspretty clearly aimed at the seinen (oldermale) demographic, it’s easily dismissed as a magical girl series simply forthat aspect alone. Something designed for adult men just can’t ever be considered“magical girl.”

But—and I bet you can alreadyguess where I’m gonna go here—it’s Complicated. The 1973-1974 anime Cutey Honey is widely understood as theanime that began many of the commonmagical girl tropes of today; in fact, authors Brian Camp and Julie Davis describeCutey Honey as “the classic seriesthat served as a prototype for anime’s magical-girl genre” in the book Anime Classics Zettai!: 100 Must-See Japanese Animation Masterpieces, and they furthernote that the famous magical girl transformation sequences that make mostpeople think Sailor Moon were actuallystarted by none other than Honey herself (86-87).

But… the original Cutey Honey anime was initially intendedfor boys. Though the story got adapted into a very “classic” magical girl series with CuteyHoney Flash in the late 90s, which “add[ed] more romance and expand[ed] therange of Honey’s fashions,” as well as marketed itself primarily to young girlswith merchandise that consisted of “fashion dolls in the style of the popular JapaneseJenny and Licca doll series” (Camp and Davis 88), the pieces of the magical girl genre werealready right there in the original. In fact, Camp and Davis argue that “Honeyneeded only a slight cosmetic makeover and bust reduction to qualify for the[magical girl] genre” (87)! If so much of magical girl is built off of Cutey Honey,can’t even the original Cutey Honey beconsidered a magical girl series itself?

Cutey Honey isalso extremely relevant when it comes to Killla Kill because Kill la Kill drawsa ton of influence from old anime—especially the works of Go Nagai, of which CuteyHoney is (another example is Devilman,and it was allegedly even confirmed that the coloring of Ryuko/Senketsu’sberserk form was modeled on Devilman himself in Trigger’s Christmas commentary for Kill la Kill’s 12th episode). Many, many others have written on the comparisons between Kill la Kill andCutey Honey before me—actually, Iwent to a Cutey Honey panel a fewyears back, and the panelist actually noted that talking about Honey’s influence on Kill la Kill would be “cheating” becauseKill la Kill is so clearly and heavilyplaying homage to the show—but here’s just one visual example:

On top of all this, the2004 OVA Re: Cutie Honey was even writtenby Kill la Kill’s scriptwriter KazukiNakashima, and the first episode shares Hiroyuki Imaishi as director! Magicalgirl stories are nothing new for these two—I mean, if you count Re: Cutie Honey as a magical girl story,anyway.

In the end, I can’t say I really got any dog in this Kill la Kill magicalgirl fight personally, though I do scratch my head a bit at the inclusion ofPanty and Stocking as magical girls but not Ryuko and Satsuki. What interestsme more than how anyone categorizes the show is how the show utilizes its “magical girl” tropes andwhat it’s trying to do and say with its utilization of these tropes.

But that’s just me! However yousee it, I do hope that this provides some reasoning for why Kill la Kill could, perhaps, be categorizedas a magical girl anime.

Sources

Butler, Catherine. “Shoujo Versus Seinen? Address and Reception in Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011).” Children’s Literature in Education, Springer Netherlands, 2018, pp. 1-17.

Camp, Brian, and Julie Davis. Anime Classics Zettai!: 100 Must-See Japanese Animation Masterpieces. Stone Bridge Press, 2011.

Saito, Kumiko. “Magic, Shōjo, and Metamorphosis: Magical Girl Anime and the Challenges of Changing Gender Identities in Japanese Society.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 73, no. 1, 2014, pp. 143–164.

Shamoon, Deborah M.. Passionate Friendship : The Aesthetics of Girl’s Culture in Japan. University of Hawaii Press, 2012.

[rebelwheels-blog]

Little Sparrow Freed From Its Cage

September 24, 2018

Per aspera ad astra - Through adversity to the stars

Hello there everyone! I have quite a bit of news to share with all of you lovely readers, as it has been quite a while since my last update. Hopefully my writing habits will be a bit more consistent now, due to the main reason I am writing this update. So grab a cup of tea, or coffee for you Americans, and be prepared for a lengthy blog entry.

Commencement to Independence

For the longest time, it was my belief that graduation was just another event where I would only witness others experience the joy of being released from the dictatorship of homework and the school setting.

Much of my student experience has been infringed upon due to various circumstances; whether illness was to blame, being placed in classes my superiors wrongly believed I belonged, or unwillingly leaving the only place I called home, as well as exiting the lives of many I held and hold close in my heart.

Not everyone experienced the same scenario as I did, which is wonderful. Even so, for much of my life there was a common denominator.

Adversity.

Due to my disability, my experiences and memories of the school setting are extremely unconventional.

Which leads to the less self-pitying part of my screed. If it weren’t for all those obstacles, and more, throughout my existence as a student, graduation would not grant me the same satisfaction and pride as it does now to declare to you all that I am no longer a high school student. September 21, 2018 was the day I was set free.

Although there are plenty of memories I have to look back on that made my school days less dreary, so I shall not admit that every second of my years at school were terrible, as I had the good fortune of making a few friends along the way as well as learning some lessons that allowed me to grow as a person.

So I thank all of you who have stuck with me through the good times and the not so good times, because I couldn’t have made it here without you.

I’d especially like to thank my first teacher who set me on the right path to homeschooling. You know who you are, with your huge green duffel bag full of wonderful toys each day as we sat in the garden room. Thank you for always being there for me academically and as a friend. You mean the universe to me.

Every experience and every person that one encounters affects the future, individually and worldly, good or bad, long or short. Because, who knows? Maybe one day someone who experienced something they perceived as awful will change the life of another so someone else will never experience what was already lived through by another.

Celebration?

To celebrate this momentous occasion, my grandmother and I designed what would normally have been the top of my cap to go along with my gown.

Then we made a message in a bottle, with the message being the poem The Road Not Taken as it is our favorite poem.

But the most important component to all of this is the timing of everything that has unfolded over the past few weeks.

Enjoy the first ever gif I have ever created, of course it’s to do with Stephen

I managed to finish the last of my exams the day directly before my grandmother’s birthday, which was coincidentally purposefully happened to be on my cousin’s birthday. Then, on Friday, I was officially set free from my classes on the birthday of my great grandfather. Everything took place over the course of three days, and three birthdays of three people that mean the world to me.

Funnily enough, exactly one week to the day, another event unfolded spontaneously. I was granted the most amazing graduation gift. A friend, a very old friend, of tremendous significance and value to me. We had not seen each other in almost nine years, but we always kept in touch. Last Wednesday, we broke our hiatus and had lunch together with our grandparents. I felt like I was in a dream. I couldn’t believe we were even in the same room. He has seen my old self, my pathetic self, and my happy self, and he never left. He’s one of a kind and I don’t know what I would do without him. Making him laugh after taking a nervous drink of water while we were at lunch and burping due to my liquid consumption was one of the highlights of our visit together. Hopefully we won’t have such a lengthy hiatus between seeing each other again, which neither of us believe will happen. I already can’t wait to see him again.

Then on the Saturday following that Wednesday, I swam with my other best friend who happened to come home from college that weekend. I honestly don’t remember the last time we just chilled out in the pool, or anywhere, and hung out like two normal teenage girls. Granted I did complain quite a bit about school work after we got out and had lunch, but that wasn’t the entire visit. It felt so normal to just hang out with my best friend, and I can’t thank you enough (you know who you are if you’re reading this). I couldn’t have asked for a better way to finish my classes.

But graduation is supposed to be a big deal, right? A huge celebration is supposed to take place, right? Well, I honestly have no idea how else to celebrate my accomplishment. I would love to have a party and do something the way everyone else does, but many of my friends and family live far, far away. So out goes that idea... Nevertheless, if no other celebration takes place, I am forever grateful for being able to visit with my friend from New Jersey thanks to his and my grandparents.

Moving Forward

Now that I have soooo much time on my hands, I don’t know what to do with it! Well, I do, but it’s only been almost a week since I finished my classes and it’s still rather odd. I spent the weekend creating and improving a sort of sketch that puts together my Halloween costume. Yes, I’ll be 19 by then and many will say I’m too old to do Halloween, but you know what? Adults are allowed to dress up and have fun too. Halloween is not just about the candy, well not to me anyway. To me, it’s about letting yourself be free to be whatever you want to be for one day of the year. As it seems that it is only socially acceptable to dress up when one is an adult around Halloween, if one were to dress up any other day of the year you end up being labeled as a psychopath.

Okay, maybe not a psychopath, but anyone dressed up as a character or dramatic makeup is worn outside a concert, theatre club, comic convention, or Halloween, etc., side glances and glares will be made.

I decided that I will be dressing up as my own version of Sherlock, as long coats are as much of a pain to get on as a dress. I have a few components of my costume together, but I still need the hat, scarf, and maybe shoes? I may just go with a pair of short boots that I have as finding shoes in my size is an entirely different story.

I wasn’t sure if the coat I had would look Sherlockian enough, so I decided that I would put together a sketch of my outfit to see how it would look. So I put this together.

Originally, as you can see, there was no face. But I worked on it and worked on it over the past few days and this the outcome. In the beginning I did trace the undershirt, but that’s it. I figured out the rest. I’m very proud of it, as it is the first drawing I’ve done in quite a while that I haven’t gotten angry with.

Having this freedom has made me realize that after a few days of numbly looking at social media, I am suddenly craving to learn new information and I miss my math and science classes. I think that within the next week I will unconsciously start to read books again just from the slight need I’ve had to expand my knowledge again. Maybe I’ll even start writing stories again due to new knowledge, as I have written down a few ideas for short stories the past few days. In the words of a good friend, the possibilities are endless.

Spinraza News

Luckily I have school finished to get through my next injection. I was reminded that I have to go through re-approval from the insurance, making my injection date is a week later than I wanted. This week I have to get blood drawn again as well as other tests.

Speaking of tests, I had to do a strength test last week, my first one after having Spinraza. My results have to either stay the same or improve in order for the insurance company to say I can keep having Spinraza. Needless to say, I was terrified that I wasn’t going to improve due to their standards. I’ve noticed more strength in my legs than my arms, granted my right arm is noticeably stronger, but I did not anticipate the evidence the strength test would grant me.

The first test was to tear a sheet of paper. No big deal, right? Wrong. I had to try to tear a piece of paper that was folded four times. I tried and it didn’t happen. So my physical therapist unfolded it so it was in half. I believed that I was trying to tear it wrong as I was using my nail to start the tear. But I was wrong. That’s how you physically tear a sheet of paper when you pinch it. So when it cooperated and I split the paper down the middle, I was like “okay, I could totally do that before Spinraza.” Again, I was wrong. When I did the baseline test, I was able to rip the paper but only if:

it was started for me

it was a single sheet unfolded

it only ripped sideways not straight down

My physical therapist kept my old paper and showed it to me to prove that I had improved. After I saw the paper, I felt like Captain America

Go ahead, enjoy that gif because Tumblr doesn’t allow more than 10 images so that’s the last one guys

Once I completed that question of the test, the test was gravy. I was actually able to do other things as well such as:

lifting a weight I couldn’t before

completing a short maze test without stopping my pen

pressing a stupid light button and making it stay on

opening a container that was entirely too difficult when I tried six months ago

I gained 5 points in the scoring system, from 11 to 16 points. I still can’t get over it. So much has been going on the past... Well, year, honestly. Between myself and my family members, it’s been nonstop.

Well, I think I’ve written enough for this update, probably too much... But whatever, if you guys enjoy these updates you don’t mind. If you don’t enjoy them... Well... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[elanorjane]

A Little Flip (Love on Ice series)

Summary: Gold attempts to transfer Belle’s feelings for him to Gaston. Let’s all take a guess how that’s gonna go! Part of the Love on Ice series wherein disgraced ex-pairs figure skater Gold is hired to coach ice princess Belle and her partner Gaston to the Olympics. If Gold and Belle don’t kill each other first.  

AO3

Her blade cut across the ice. If she so much as shifted her weight the wrong way, causing any snow, he was prepared to berate her. But she didn’t wobble an inch. She was just as poised and technically precise as always. Ah, to be twenty-one again and drink all night and still be up bright and early doing Salchows the next morning.  

He, on the other hand, averted his eyes because the spins were making him dizzy. Last night, Belle made her ridiculous announcement about being in love with him. Afterward, he hid from her the rest of the night like a pubescent at his first party. He’d found the booze reserves in the kitchen and helped himself. After making sure Moe saw him hobnobbing, he swung back by the kitchen. Snagging a bottle for the road, he staggered back to his rented house and drank some more.  

He’d tried to sober up, but the weak rinse this country called tea didn’t make a dent in his hangover. They were already on the ice running through the free skate when he’d stumbled in. They completed a twist and he almost retched. 

He felt like hell. He couldn't focus. The lights reflecting off the ice sent sharp stabs to his brain. The screeching of violins emanated from the loudspeakers. If he had to listen to this bastardized version of The Police one more time, he was going to murder someone.

Her words to him echoed through his alcohol soaked brain. You’re the most annoying person I know but I think I’m in love with you anyway. Think, was the key word there. She thought she was in love with him.   

That’s what this was about, he realized. He knew how lonely yet incestuous the skating community was.  They barely got to meet anyone else besides other professional athletes. Skaters slept together, dated, and married. But a lot of these relationships were mistakes. His marriage imploding was evidence of that. That’s what this was. A young, lonely, impressionable girl who, at twenty-one, had certain...urges. She was looking for a safe place to expel them.   Fine. If she wanted someone to fall in love with, she had a perfect candidate right in front of her...her partner.

She’d fought him to play the part of a courtesan in their Moulin Rouge free skate program. But on the ice she was hardly even a flirt. She was a pristine skater, but she wasn’t a performer. This shortcoming was successfully masked up to this point by serious, formal routines. If they were going to succeed at the senior level and win over the judges, the free skate relied heavily of her playing a character. At this point, no amount of red lipstick was going to turn her into a convincing prostitute.

Ironically, he knew she was capable based on her conduct last night. The way she'd prowled down the hallway towards him, pinning him against the wall. She was magnificent. Confident and seductive and kissable. A far cry from the ice queen he got once she put her skates on. He'd observed her for months. Gold knew Belle was a person who couldn’t hide her true feelings, misguided or not. If it took real feelings to make her emote on the ice, that could be arranged.

In theory, transferring her feelings from him to Gaston shouldn’t be too difficult. Her partner was dumb as a brick, but Gaston was every woman Belle’s age’s dream. He was tall, dark, and handsome and able to lift her up with one hand. On the ice, Gaston’s size and power could sometimes overwhelm her petite frame. But it made for truly terrific, explosive throws. Despite being well matched, they had zero chemistry.       

The music, along with the jumping and spinning, blessedly came to a stop. Technically, the performance was proficient. But the program component was barely off the ground. She’d choreographed the majority of the program herself. Yet Belle didn’t skate like she was committed. Unbalanced as it may be, skating focused on the female’s performance. By remaining upright, Gaston fulfilled his role as the handsome hero. In contrast, Belle’s performance needed depth and nuance. Right now she wasn’t playing the femme fatale, she was just "the girl". They each had to play their parts all the while looking like they were skating as one person.

Belle and Gaston broke apart from their final hold. Unsurprisingly, Belle scooped her water bottle off the sideboards and skated towards him. This would be the first time they spoke since last night. He had no interest in embarrassing her, if she remembered what she’d said to him at all. He’d made his own share of mistakes while drunk, and he decided to do her a favor and not hold it against her. He’d chide her as usual for her uninspired skating. Allowing her to fall back into her role as indignant pupil, all would be as it was.  

She glided off the ice next to him. He surveyed her with practiced indifference, “Miss French, if you want-”    

“You know what I want,” she asserted, looking him in the eye.

He blinked. So she hadn’t forgotten, or regretted, her words to him last night. A flare of panic rose in his chest. They could not go down this path together.  

“An Olympic medal,” he filled in. “Because that’s what I’m here for. That’s the only thing I’m here for.”

The indignation that overcame her face. She looked passionate and at turns angry. She was still breathing heavily from the routine. It was perfect. Where was that fire out on the ice?

He peered across the ice at Gaston. He was scrolling through his phone. Completely disinterest in what his partner was doing. Gold sighed. You’d think spending sixteen hours a day skating together would be enough to bond a couple.   He glowered at the little girl in front of him. Her bouncy ponytail and her arms cross, she starred up at him nonplussed. As if she wasn’t taking him seriously.  Unsolicited, the image of him taking that defiant chin between his thumb and index finger, tilting her head up, and kissing her overcame him.

He was going to shake this ridiculous notion out of her little head once and for all.

He raised his voice. “Both of you are off the ice for the rest of the day. Get changed. You’re going to therapy.”

***

Belle knew seeing a sports therapist was common for skating partners at this level. But she’d gotten this far on her skills alone. She couldn’t help but think Gold was sending them here out of spite.

If it was possible, he was even harder and less approachable after the party. She knew she had affected him. When she’d taken that last gulp of champagne and descended the stairs she saw the look on his face. It was like in the movies. Their eyes had locked and his mouth had opened just a little. But today he seemed to think she was a little girl who didn’t know her own mind.

“He should be the one going to therapy,” she grumbled as they approached the door. Yes, she’d been tipsy that night, but not enough to not know what she was doing. More like brave enough to go after what she wanted.

Gaston looked down at her, “What?”

She shook her head, as she knocked and entered. “Nothing.”

Dr. Archibald Hopper, sports therapist, had an office full of paintings and books, leather and dark woods. She and Gaston took opposite sides of the couch while Dr. Hopper (“Call me Archie.”) perched diagonal from them. Belle glanced at the chasm of space between her and Gaston. Was it bad they’d automatically sat as far away from each other as possible? Did it mean something? Would this be part of Dr. Hopper’s assessment of them? She scooted a little closer, pretending she was adjusting her skirt.  

Archie cleared his throat. “Belle, Gaston, I hope you understand coming here doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. Think of it as a check-up for your relationship.”

Relationship? Belle had never thought of her and Gaston’s skating partnership that way. Maybe when she was sixteen and he’d kissed her a few times. Before he’d realized that the older females skaters were more willing to give him what he wanted faster and without emotional attachment. Five years later, she didn’t bear him any ill will. But they weren’t friends. More like work colleges.

“As you know, at this level you can’t just show up, skate, and go your separate ways. There must be constant communication. Do you think you are capable of that?” Archie looked between them.

Gaston shrugged, “Sure.”

Belle hesitated. How could he be so confident? Constant communication, with Gaston? They didn’t have anything in common. He thought it was weird how many books she read. She thought his zombie laden video games and horror movies were dull.    

“Pairs skaters spend more time together than most married couples,” Archie continued.  

Belle winced at the comparison. She imagined what her days spent as Gaston’s wife would be like. Watching him play video games and complimenting his manliness came to mind.  She grimaced at the memory of her sixteen year old self’s diary with ‘Belle LeGume’ written in flowery cursive. That poor, clueless girl.

That wasn’t the type of marriage she wanted, if she thought about it at all. She pictured travel that didn’t consist entirely of ice rinks and gyms. Sharing books and ideas. Evenings spent inside and glasses of wine consumed slowly in front of a fireplace. It didn’t take much to picture herself doing those things with Gold. One glass of wine would turn into two. Which would lead to making out in front of the hearth. Him stripping off her clothes and making love to her by firelight.   

Belle,” Archie’s voice brought her back to earth. “How do you know Gaston isn’t going to drop you?”

“History,” she answered, her cheeks coloring from the daydream. “He’s rarely dropped me.”    

“I can tell by her body language if she’s going to fall,” Gaston broke in. “So I adjust my grip to catch her.”

Belle’s eyebrows shot up. She didn’t know he paid that much attention. Belle assumed he only used brute strength. She didn’t think Gaston took skating as seriously as she did. The fact that he put any thought into it whatsoever was a revelation.

“Gaston,” Archie asked, “what’s your ultimate goal?”

Gaston sat forward, his hands on his knees. “To win,” he barked, making Belle jump.  

Archie pivoted, “Belle?”

“Um,” she looked from Gaston to Archie and back. “To win an Olympic gold medal,” she recited automatically. She’d been saying the words since she was five. But for some reason this time they didn’t trip off her tongue as readily. She remembered Gold’s words at practice. That’s the only thing I’m here for. Did he really only think of her as a job he had to do?

Archie seemed pleased with her answer. “You both share a goal. In your instance, a mistake isn’t one of you forgetting to take out the trash, like most couples. It’s the difference between winning and losing. But if Gaston drops you or one of you falls, it’s not the end of the world. If I can give you one piece of advice,” he looked at both of them. “Never leave the ice mad.”

Ha! Belle laughed to herself. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d left the ice fuming at Gold. She had skate guards strewn about in every bag and corner of the rink. Because she never knew which direction she’d storm off the ice next.

“Think about the people you love,” Archie mused. “You can hate someone one moment, but you still love them the next.”

That was true, she thought. All the times Gold was rude and she was pissed off, she still came back, didn’t she? Not because she had to or because she took masochistic pleasure in fighting with him. But because he fascinated her. He brought out parts of herself she didn’t know she had, like assertiveness. It made her wonder what else he could bring out in her and what parts she could possibly bring out in him.

Archie scribbled in his notebook. “Another thing we’ll work on in these sessions is trust. If you don’t have the ability to trust yourself, you can’t trust anyone else.”

Belle trusted herself. She believed that, unlike the curly cues of a sixteen-year-old girl, her feelings for Gold were real and worth pursuing. But would he ever be willing to make that leap with her?

“Belle? Belle.” Archie’s voice came louder than before.

“Hmm?” She immediately realized they’d continued talking after she’d retreated into her own thoughts.

Archie looked at her concernedly. “Gaston had been sharing his feelings with you, but I get the sense you’re somewhere else.”

She looked helplessly between Gaston and Archie. Oh god, she’d failed therapy.

“You can’t hold back from one another,” he told her. “In many ways, this will be the most intimate relationship of your entire life.”

Belle frowned, sinking further into the couch. Intimacy, marriage, trust, communication. Did she really want those words to describe her relationship with Gaston? Did Gaston have to be the deepest relationship she’d ever have?

“What’s holding you back, Belle?” Archie persisted.

She felt the weight of their stares, their expectations of her. Along with the sting of Gold’s words earlier that day. The weeks of quietly struggling with her feelings and confiding in no one.

“I’m in love with somebody else!” she blurted.

Gaston gawked at her in astonishment. “Who?”

Belle fought the urge to hide her face in her hands. She wasn’t even telling her female friends about her infatuation. It felt strange to tell Gaston, her first and only kiss.

“Gold,” she admitted finally, her voice wavering.

He didn’t look horrified, like she expected, just dumbfounded. “Our coach?”

Belle searched for something to say. But her one syllable utterance hung heavy in the air between all of them.

Archie gaped at her. He opened his mouth. Then snapped it shut. He fiddled with his glasses. “I, uh, think that’s enough for today.”

***

“Belle?” Gaston peered down at her hesitantly as they left Archie’s office. He jerked his thumb at the door. “I know he said a lot of stuff in there. Things that we’re supposed to do. But...do you want to go to a movie?” The surprise must have shown on her face. “Doesn’t have to be a horror movie,” he added hastily. “Your choice. It’s just that we’ve never, ah, done anything, you know, as friends.”

She stood in the hallway and considered her partner. She’d shared with him her greatest secret and he hadn’t judged her. He didn’t point out the age difference between her and Gold. Or how it would make practices awkward. He’d just accepted it and moved on. Belle sensed that mabe she could confide in Gaston now in a way that she couldn’t with her other friends.

“Gaston,” she smiled up at him. “I’d love that.”

[ayearofpike]

Master of Murder

Pocket Books, 1992 198 pages, 14 chapters + epilogue ISBN 0-671-69059-0 LOC: CPB Box no. 1081 vol. 14 OCLC: 26075926 Released July 28, 1992 (per B&N)

Everybody’s reading the thrilling Silver Lake series by Mack Slate. With the last book due out in a few months, fans are excited to finally find out who killed Ann McGaffer. Only problem is, Slate — that is to say, twelfth-grade nobody Marvin Summer, hiding behind a pen name  — has no idea himself, and hasn’t even started writing the book. It’s only as he works to close the distance between himself and his crush, Shelly Quade, that the grand finale starts to make itself clear to him, in ways that unexpectedly and gruesomely parallel his own life.

This might not be my favorite Pike book, but it has certainly had the most influence on me. I’ve always called myself a writer, since a fifth-grade teacher recognized my ability to craft a narrative and pointed out that somebody had to make books and I should think about it. In high school, it was my defining trait, and it wasn’t until I’d almost graduated from college that I realized it didn’t make me special. Everybody has a story, as Marvin finds out, and some of them are even better at telling it in an engaging way. It’s sad, in a way, that I identified with this book so much (like, I literally carried it in my backpack for my entire senior year) and it still took me so long to get that theme.

What I did get was an intense sense of connection with Marvin. Shy loner? Check. Separated parents who didn’t get along? Check. Younger sibling who wanted to be like me? Check. An English teacher hung up on prescriptive strictures of language who quietly cared about her students, and a language teacher who was more interested in building a classroom community than sticking to a scheduled curriculum? Check and double-check. Writing ability revered by peers? Check, even if my work rarely made it past my immediate circle of friends. Subconscious inclusion of issues I was going through in my work, to the point where it got me in trouble with the girl I liked? Well, not directly observable, but I mean, it’s hard to not come off creepy if you’re writing a love story to a girl instead of, like, actually TALKING to her.

I also really enjoyed the way Pike works with language in this book, and honestly, I still do. Modern YA gets a lot more respect, and deservingly so, but a lot of it is written in a direct, almost sparse way. It makes sense, considering how many contemporary authors write in the first person, and most people don’t actually think in metaphors and syllogisms and even (to some degree) descriptive adjectives. Master of Murder kind of goes hog-wild on this, kind of a leap from representational art to impressionist art. And I buy it. As Marvin is our POV character, it makes sense that as a writer he’d put some more florid prose into his observations and understandings of the world. Plus, this style kind of helps to establish him as an unreliable narrator, as we slowly learn how much he actually doesn’t know and, in fact, how much maybe he’s repressed.

That said, this story does have some holes. Let’s jump into the summary and I’ll get there.

We start out with Marvin in his English class, watching Shelly read his most recent book and thinking about their relationship. They’d gone out a handful of times a year before, but it stopped after the death of Harry Paster, another flame of Shelly’s who’d jumped off a cliff into the nearby lake. Marvin figures enough time has passed that he can ask her out again, but first he has to read the short story he’s dashed off for their creative writing assignment. Man, remember when creative writing was an actual COMPONENT of high school English class? And the only reason I got to do it was that I took a creative-writing-focused senior English course. I mean, I get it — public school English is about preparing you to pass the SAT or ACT, not teaching you how to reach and grab an audience. They save that for us, in post-secondary ed, by which time the interest in writing has already been drilled out of kids by making them do repetitive five-paragraph essays. Most of my students still don’t want to write, but I at least try to give them some room in the assignment structure to flex their creative muscles.

But anyway, “The Becoming of Seymour the Frog” is a legitimately good short-short story. It gives us a sense of Marvin’s author voice straight away, which is of course the same as the narrative, and it legitimizes how much Pike uses what modern writers would call excessive description. The teacher grades it right away (what? I give everything two reads, and this teacher is just going to LISTEN one time?) and tells Marvin he might be a writer someday if he learns to control himself. We both (the reader and Marvin, that is) know he’s already there, and Marvin completely discredits this advice. He writes best by giving up control and going into a state of flow, one where he can’t stop writing but also doesn’t necessarily feel that what’s going onto the page is coming from inside his own head. This is important later.

After class, he catches up to Shelly, but their talking is interrupted by the arrival of her current squeeze, Triad Tyler. Triad is a big dumb football jock who wants to buy Marvin’s motorcycle, which Marvin would never dream of selling. Before he can get around to asking her out, she ducks into the bathroom, and Triad complains that it seems like she’s always trying to escape. This is probably important later too. So already in the first 15 pages, Pike has nicely set up the major characters and their interplay with each other.

We jump to speech class, and I call BS. Like, we learn later that Marvin only has four classes as a senior. Why is one of them speech? My high school only required a half-day of seniors, sure, but our classes were English, math, world history, and economics. It turns out this class would be better called “communication skills,” which was required in ninth grade, but I’d still buy that more than speech. The teacher basically has them engage in conversational debate, and this day the topic they choose is Mack Slate’s Silver Lake series. It’s a good framework for sharing Marvin’s story, and showing the corner he’s painted himself into: Ann McGaffer’s body was found naked and tied up with barbed wire floating in Silver Lake, and five books on we’re no closer to figuring out who did it or why. The description grosses me out a iittle bit, but on the heels of the last two super-tropey thrillers, I’m going to choose to believe that Pike is poking fun at the intentional shock attempts of the genre.

After class, Marvin finally successfully asks Shelly out for that night, then goes to his PO box to pick up his fan mail. His little sister is already there, and once again we’re subjected to the jaw-droppingly beautiful small child. It was gross when it was fifteen-year-old Jennifer Wagner, but Ann Summer is ELEVEN and Marvin’s SISTER. Pike, isn’t it possible to describe a female one cares about without making it all about her looks? He does it with Marvin’s mom in a few pages too, when they get home. We get it — girls we care about are hot. Only problem is Marvin’s mom is an alcoholic who almost never leaves the house except to buy more booze. Dad is an alcoholic, too, but he’s not at home and his child support payments are erratic. Good thing there’s a best-selling author living in the house! But Ann’s the only one who knows, and it kills her to not be able to sing her brother’s praises and brag about how great he is.

They go upstairs to Marvin’s room to read his mail, and one of the last letters makes him pause. It has a local postmark, and the letter inside simply says “I KNOW WHO YOU ARE.” It starts to pull the book into more general thriller territory, but before we can think too much about it, the phone rings and it’s Marvin’s editor, asking about Silver Lake Book Six, which is four months overdue. I have some serious questions about the timeline of this series, but we’ll get there in a little bit. Marvin soothes her concerns, then goes to take a walk around the lake, trying to figure out where to start his book but not actually ready to start it before he picks up Shelly.

The date is successful, by most measures. They have dinner, go to a movie, and then stop on a bridge crossing a raging river because Shelly wants to look at the water. They sit down on the edge, Marvin landing on an old and weathered piece of rope, and watch the waters pound away down to their final destination — the lake. Then Shelly invites Marvin back to her house to sit in the hot tub, where they get naked and make out, but she suddenly gets sad and pulls away. I give Marvin props for being respectful and apologetic here rather than trying to force her to continue. Woke in 1992! But as he’s getting ready to leave, he learns the reason she’s sad: Shelly is thinking about Harry, which he expected, but he didn’t expect to learn that she thinks he was murdered. And she wants Marvin’s help to figure it out and clear Harry’s name.

There’s no basis for this belief, but Marvin figures he might as well listen and do some research, seeing as he can’t figure out his own murder mystery. He checks his PO box first, and finds another ominous letter that’s been mailed there directly rather than to his publishing house, so maybe somebody really does know him. He calls his agent (whose name is one letter away from a real literary rep, maybe even Pike’s) to ask about it. This insert, plus the editor whose name was close to the woman in charge of YA at Simon and Schuster at the time, made so many of us so sure that this was as close to autobiographical as Pike had ever gotten. I seriously chased leads from this book to try to figure out more about him, back before he started answering questions on Facebook and there was so much less mystery about it.

So then Marvin goes back over to Shelly’s house to talk about Harry. She has the police report and autopsy report, and Marvin looks them over, along with articles about Harry’s death from newspapers at the time. What it boils down to is Friday night a year before, a night when Marvin had taken Shelly out for her birthday, Harry and Triad were drinking beer together. Triad said that he dropped Harry off at home, and that was the last time anybody saw him until a fisherman found his body in the lake on Monday morning. Marvin starts to question the narrative that Harry jumped, because there are several physical symptoms that indicate maybe he was held captive. He talks to the fisherman and to Harry’s mom, and takes a look at the jacket Harry was wearing, and makes note of definite rope burn marks around the back and under the armpits. So Harry was tied up somewhere for a long time  — but where? And how?

Marvin goes home to rest and digest this info, and has a dream about his book series that shows Ann McGaffer hanging from a bridge by a rope around her waist. He’s startled awake by Ann, who says that their dad is breaking things downstairs. Marvin gets down there just in time to watch his dad shove a lamp into the TV, and the resultant cuts to Ann and his mom from the exploding picture tube send Marvin into a fit of rage. He starts to beat the shit out of his own father, and only stops when Ann tells him to, even though the dude is unconscious. Like, holy shit, buried violent tendencies that will make you like your father? So Marvin gets the hell out of the house to give himself some space.

He ends up back at his PO box, even though he knows there couldn’t have been another delivery, but there sure is a letter in it. He follows this back to Shelly’s house, where he finds her making out in the hot tub with Triad. Marvin overhears her say that she was using him to get him to do something, and Triad tells her not to go out with Marvin anymore, to which she readily agrees. So now Marvin is scared, he is heartbroken, and he has unlocked some deep-seated rage that will allow him to strike back. He ends up on the bridge, where he starts to figure out what must have happened a year ago. There’s a rope, there’s a giant oil stain on the bridge right behind it, and there’s a dead boy with rope burns on his jacket who was maybe hanging from it rather than being tied up. Marvin figures that Harry was jealous of his relationship with Shelly and decided to stage a little motorcycle accident, but accidentally slipped off the bridge and ended up hanging himself, slowly suffocating to death until the rope broke and he washed down to the lake.

And it occurs to Marvin that this would be a perfect way to get back at Triad.

After a misadventure with two girls in a bookstore who accuse him of trying to pick them up by pretending to be Mack Slate, Marvin buys a new car and a bunch of motorcycle-dropping gear at Sears, then takes the bike to Triad’s house to sell it to him. Marvin says that he left the helmet in a motel in the town across the river, and that the manager said he was going to throw it out if Triad didn’t pick it up tonight. Then he hikes to the car, which he’s had delivered around the block, and goes to stake out the bridge. While he’s waiting, he starts to think about the parallels between his own series and how Harry died. And we learn that the first Silver Lake book only came out after Harry’s death — in fact, that Marvin didn’t start writing it until then.

So this is my timing issue. Master of Murder does have some gaping inconsistencies, I’m not gonna lie. There’s the variable height of the bridge over the river: it’s 150 feet when Marvin and Shelly stop on their date, and maybe 60 when they have the final showdown two nights later. Also, later apparently Shelly knows details of a book that Marvin hasn’t even written yet? But this, in my mind, is the biggest problem. We’re supposed to believe that in a year, five books have come out about Ann McGaffer and her loves and hates. We’re also supposed to believe that he’s four months late with book six, and that it takes at least three months for the publisher to turn a story around and get it into bookstores. We also have the information that the fastest Marvin’s ever written a novel is eighteen days. So by that logic, there’s no way he could have finished and submitted Silver Lake Book One before mid-December. So five books have somehow appeared between probably March and let’s say November (they say the fifth one just came out) — five books in seven months — but they’re going to wait another three months to release the sixth? Also, how does an author, even an experienced and acclaimed one, sell a six-book series to his publisher without knowing the beats and especially the ending? There are too many inconsistencies and timeline impossibilities for me to buy it. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Pike was a new author writing publication fanfiction.

But anyway, Triad races across to the other town. Marvin is too far away to see him, but he recognizes the sound of his motorcycle. He grabs his rope, his knife, his can of oil, and his binoculars, and hustles the probably mile to the bridge to set up his death trap. But as the motorcycle is coming back, he gets his first good look — and sees Shelly on the back. So he drops the rope, but Triad is already braking, stops short of it, and shoves Marvin off the bridge.

So now it’s Marvin hanging from his armpits by a rope under the bridge above a raging river that leads to the lake in his town, and did I mention he’s wearing Harry’s jacket? Shelly’s more annoyed than angry — it turns out she’s expected this from Marvin the whole time. In fact, she DOES know who Mack Slate is, and she’s already read about this scheme in the Silver Lake books. But Marvin doesn’t even remember writing it. She wants to turn Marvin in to the police. But Triad wants to untie the rope and drop him into the river.

And suddenly Marvin knows what actually happened. Harry wasn’t alone on the bridge a year ago. Triad was with him, and shoved Harry just as he shoved Marvin. Shelly doesn’t believe it until Triad knocks her out for trying to stop him killing Marvin too. Marvin manages to get hold of the underside of the bridge just as Triad unties the rope, then he kicks Triad in the face when he leans over to look and see whether Marvin has actually fallen. The semi-conscious wedged body of the football jock gives Marvin a ladder to climb back up onto the bridge, and he stomps out Triad’s bad knee when the dude wakes up and threatens to go after him again. Only the knife falls out of his pocket as he does so, and Shelly picks that moment to come to, and it’s a simple matter for Triad to grab both her and the knife and threaten her death if Marvin doesn’t help him get away.

What’s in it for Marvin, though? The guy who tried to kill him is holding the girl who tried to frame him for a death the guy is responsible for. He gets on his bike, where Triad has courteously left the keys in the ignition, and drives away. I don’t like that he’s left a vulnerable girl at the almost-complete mercy (he can’t stand up) of a confirmed killer. What I like least is that he doesn’t even call the police. But then again, he’s abandoned his new car in the woods near the scene and surely doesn’t want to be implicated if somebody dies. So Marvin drives to a seaside town, rents a house and a computer, and writes an entire book in five days, only stopping to eat and sleep. Of course, within a few pages of the end he has to stop, because he doesn’t actually know how Ann’s best friend, left in the clutches of the boyfriend’s jealous best friend, is going to escape, or whether in fact she does.

Marvin calls his editor and tells her the story is done and he’ll express-overnight it to her. He also asks her to set up a reading from it at his high school that afternoon. More BS? Like, how are they going to allow an author to read from a book that the editor hasn’t even SEEN, let alone put through proofs and galleys? Marvin has to physically print and ship the manuscript — remember, this is 1992 and most people don’t have email yet (and when it would become widespread in a few years, it still had a hyphen). But she does it, and Marvin goes home first to find out that Dad’s in jail and Mom hasn’t touched a drop since. More good news! He takes Ann with him to school, where the entire student body is in stunned disbelief about the identity of Mack Slate, and finally gets some personal acknowledgement from his peers and teachers.

But Shelly doesn’t show up. Neither does Triad. The kids he does ask say neither has been in school all week. Marvin can’t dwell on this, because he has a major book series to finish, but it’s precisely this reason that he hasn’t made it all the way to the end yet. He knows that he needs someone else’s story to finish his own. So he goes back to the lake, and makes his way to the top of the cliff that everyone thought Harry jumped from. As he’s thinking, Shelly shows up with his knife. She tells Marvin that she suspected him of being Mack Slate back when they were dating, and he would tell her stories that had the same voice as Slate’s published work. So she sneaked into Marvin’s room one day and snooped in his computer for proof.

When the Silver Lake books started coming out, she saw the parallels immediately, and figured the only way Marvin could have known so much about how Harry died is if he had killed him. She got Triad, Harry’s best friend, to help her set up a situation where Marvin would implicate himself, not realizing that Triad had always wanted Shelly and been jealous of both of the other guys and didn’t care who hurt if it meant nobody else could have Shelly. That includes Shelly herself: if Triad couldn’t be with her, nobody else would. He didn’t tell Harry that Marvin and Shelly were out together that night, and when Harry realized Shelly was on the back of the motorcycle he did like Marvin and dropped the rope. So Triad pushed him.

Triad obviously has told Shelly all of this, and Marvin figures the only way he would have is if Shelly somehow overpowered him. It’s an interesting twist that she told Triad about using Marvin to get him to figure out Harry’s death and Triad never realized she might use him for the same purpose. (I feel like Shelly has more strength than even the story gives her credit for, seeing as Pike describes all her agency as coming at the hands of her feminine wiles.) Marvin suspects that here, the spot where it all began, is the spot where it has all ended as well, and that the soft soil where he’s sitting is Triad’s final resting place. Shelly doesn’t say as much, but elicits Marvin’s silence before throwing the knife into the lake. But of course Marvin still has a book to finish, and Shelly’s OK with that as she’s apparently the only one who’s figured out the parallels anyway. The book closes with them in Marvin’s car, Shelly driving to Portland so they can get the manuscript on a flight to New York while Marvin writes the last few pages longhand.

I have to admit it: I still really like Master of Murder. Obviously I’m not in high school anymore, so I don’t relate to Marvin the way I used to, but I do connect to his being trapped in his own story and having to listen for others. The book has a lot of holes and inconsistencies in general that either I didn’t notice when I was a teenager or I glossed over in the excitement of having a character I could relate to so well. In particular, the YA publishing description is not without issues, and the ways the industry has changed after the Internet and Columbine and social networks and Trayvon Martin and #MeToo don’t jibe with the already-shoddy impression of how it works that Pike puts on display. The story is consigned to be a relic of its time. But for those of us who were there, who were trying to make our stories heard the way Marvin wanted to, it carries some warm nostalgia. Maybe I only like it so much now because I liked it then, but I’m OK with that.