#basically I really need to write a bunch of posts comparing my two bands

[sunkissedliterarylightofchrist]

Favorite line from each track on Now, Not Yet?

YAY! Now, Not Yet, my beloved. And even better, an ~analysis~ question. You know me well. Fair warning though, while there are some great one liners in these songs, I think that they are far better if you consider the entire lyric. So that's what I did. 😅

ok ok?

I think 'The animal of destiny' reflects how God pushes us into hard situations and times of life because they're what shape us. While the 'highs' of life are awesome and we all love them, the 'lows' are what really define us. What we do in them. Who we turn to for help and comfort in them. How we change through them. And tough periods we both see from afar, affecting other people, as well as up close and personal, in the midst of our own lives.

And that line, 'Far too great a toll it's played on me' I see with two meanings. First, that in dark and hard moments of life, that they are too much for us alone and we need help. We need Christ to come into our mess; whether its our own personal sin or us being affected by someone else's; and help us to grow through it and change through it and to lean on Him more because of it. And second, that 'the animal of destiny' is God Himself. Tearing us open and ripping us apart, but not to hurt us, but to help us and save us, both from ourselves and the outward hurt of the world. Because then he heals all the brokenness in us with His goodness.

RUNAWAY

Yeah I'm sorry I cannot possibly pick a single favorite line from this song it deserves an entire post of a line-by-line breakdown. But since I'm nice and I love talking about half•alive, here is one of the lines I love.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present, the human condition. But more specifically, what it looks like when you accept Christ and chose to submit to Him and His will for your life.

First, we've got him being faced with his own sin, having it reflected back at him. Exposed. He can't hide or run away from it any more. And his heart is naturally inclined to go try and run anyway. To choose the easy life. To escape the scrutiny that he's fallen under. But then he stops himself. He asks himself, Who do I really want to be? And he sees that by himself, he wants to be a selfish, wicked, sinful, despicable person. And that that life is empty. And messy.

Then he reaches the conclusion that all Christians face- that we need to give it up to God. Everything that you are is everything you shouldn't be. So he decides not to run away, but stay right where he is and give up his plans and dreams in exchange for what God has planned for him. We don't need to run away.

Man this song is incredible.

Maybe

Yeah this guy also deserves an entire post I'm not even sorry its too good. But here's a great verse from it.

I did not even know it was possible to so perfectly describe the concept of original sin in a single lyric but these guys did it. And they continued to do it in the rest of the song, but I'll focus for right now.

Romans 6:23 - "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 3:23 - "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." 1 John 1:8 - "If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us." Romans 3:12 - "None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”

We are dead in our sin. Enslaved to it. We are caught in our trespasses. Children of the Devil, apart from Christ. Read the entire book of Romans for this. And all alone, the story is over! There is no meaning to life! No matter what we do by ourselves, we are stuck in our sin and just truding to death with no purpose or meaning.

BUT GOD (best phrase in the Bible) rescued us from all of that. Which the rest of the song delves into.

1 John 2:1 - "My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One."

This song makes me feel things and I will write a whole post on it just you wait.

the notion

I like the little interlude here. It's narrated by a British model, Liz Ord, who sent the voice note to the band after they toured in Europe, and she says how surprised she was that so many people there were Christian with so many people in Europe (and all around the West honestly) becoming more and more anti-religion. I think it's pretty hopeful honestly.

still feel.

Also cannot confine this song to a single lyric, it deserves an entire post. But I'll try.

As Christians, we are no longer slaves to sin and death and darkness. We are Children of God. Even when it feels like we are too entrenched in sin to escape, we still feel alive in Christ, and Jesus will pull us from the grave again and again and again. That's His promise to us.

TrusT

Being a Christian isn't easy. We feel everything wrong with the world just as much, nay, even more than the world does. Because we can see exactly how much evil is in it. But we also see the hope too- Christ. The book of Ecclesiastes goes into depth on this. Also this post.

Also its a great prelude to creature. For reasons I will get to.

arrow

I honestly don't even need to break this down, the rest of the song does that. But basically, the human heart is never satisfied with where we are at any one time. Even if we are on the top of the world, there is always something more we desire. Partially because of sin. But really more so for the human longing of our hearts for Eden. (Go listen to Blue Flower by The Gray Havens. Also I think I've written a bunch of posts on this idea specifically.) And that can be really hard, if the desire is pointed towards a bad thing, sin. But if we allow God to direct the arrow in our hearts towards Him, it can be good.

But actually more so we should seek to be satisfied with where we are in life and with what God's given us. Now that is Really Hard, but it's what we're called to do, so even if my flesh doesn't want to, I will be obedient and ask God to teach this to me.

Pure Gold

I like how this song is talking about how when you view everything through a Christian worldview, you can see so much beauty, and recognize how God is the purest gold of it all.

ice cold. (ft Kimbra)

I wrote a post about my favorite lyric once.

Rest (with Samm Henshaw)

Psalm 46:10 - 'Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!'

I tend to wildly swing between two extremes- either being stupidly lazy or overworking so hard that its really damaging. I have different ways to wrestle with each one, and I'm constantly working on steadying myself out, but anytime I start to get into an overworking high-achiever mindset, I use this song as a way to help remind myself to rest in God's presence, as well as physically rest my body and mind. We as humans are created to work, but we are also created to rest. Rest is where we find wisdom and often hear God's voice the most clearly.

BREAKFAST

Once again, deserves an entire post. But here's the best part.

Vunerability is just... really hard. Especially for me. It takes a lot for me to tell anyone anything. And even after I spill my guts about something I often instantly regret it, even if I knew it was the right thing to tell them. Everything just seems easier if I keep it to myself. Which is like... not true. I know that in my head. But not my heart yet. I'm working on it.

Vunerability with people is one thing, but with God its a whole other. Because, you can choose what people do and don't see about you. But God knows everything. He knows me better than I know me. He created me. Knows every bit of my heart. Which is scary. Every terrible thing I've ever done that no one knows about, He does. Even bad things I don't know about myself, He knows. And He is utterly aware of my heart posture at all times. If I'm ever holding something back from Him- He knows it. Which is why if we as Christians ever chose to live in intentional sin, it feels so icky. We've drunk from the Living Well, and ran right back to the poisonous slimepit because it's familiar to us and tastes better to our flesh, but eats at our souls.

But after the scary bit, God knowing us is the most comforting thing in the world. Really. Because He saw all the broken and evil and terrible things about us- and still chose to die the death that we deserved to die for us anyway. I can't think of a greater gift. One I don't deserve, truly. He's been there for me when no one else has. And He's sent people to me to help me learn to be vulnerable with them as well. And when you open yourself up to Him, and surrender everything, and chose over and over again to repent of your sin and to be with Him and to lay on the floor sobbing about your pain, begging Him to help you with what you're going through- He will be there. Vunerability with God, while scary at first, is one of the most beautiful things in the entire world.

Anyway, to bring it back to the song, we can't flee to the mountains and hide ourselves from God, or other people who want to help us. Even if it feels better temporarily. When you feel so utterly broken and exposed, well, its actually when you are the strongest. Which it won't feel like, but it is. You decided to open yourself up to be comforted and having the Spirit poured into you, and the brokeness will be filled in because you chose to be vulnerable and humble. God sees that, and He will give you rest and His love.

creature

Its my favorite song of all time I have elaborated very heavily on this. Best line is 'I am creation both haunted and holy'. Which is also my bio. Because it perfectly describes the Christian life.

Yay, made it through! I love this album so so so much. I think it's the best allegorical album of all time. Just listening to it at a surface level, it has very spiritual themes and mentions God a few times, but the more you sit and think about it, the more apparent it becomes just how much they are pointing to Jesus through it all and pleading others to find Him through the music. I think this lyric in TrusT sums this album up perfectly. I know I already picked a lyric from that song already but shhhhhh

From a storytelling perspective, it's an incredible journey.

Life Hurts -> We See Our Condition -> We Want to Run From It -> We Can't Improve Alone -> Seeing Sin -> Explaining Sin -> Even in Sin, I Feel Alive, But Not Because of Me, Because of Something(One) Who Saved Me -> [Big Shift in the story right here] Maybe I Don't Have to be Stuck in this Sin -> There is Certainity in the Goodness of This Thing(Person) -> This Good Thing(Person) Has Saved Me -> Oh Wait but I Still Feel All That Pain -> I've Been Saved from my Sin but it's Still There -> I Long for Pure Goodness -> I Find it in this Thing(Person) -> I Need to Rest In It -> True Goodness is Revealed to Me -> I Can Surrender Myself to It -> Jesus is the Answer

Point-blank period, no grey area. Up until creature, you could intrepret different songs in different ways, but at that point when they pull off the curtain and show God at the center of it all, everything else suddenly clicks into place and becomes so much richer and better. It starts off pretty ambiguous, but with each song the final point becomes clearer and clearer.

This album is called Now, Not Yet because that's the theme. We are Creation, both Haunted and Holy. And we feel the tug of the world between our flesh and our souls. We've been saved already, its guaranteed. But until that day, we've got to continue to fight. And for His Glory, pointing it back to Him in all that we do.

[theghostpinesmusic]

So, like my post about 12/29's "Oblivion," I'm going to start this write-up with a small gripe, which is that this take on "Life Saving Gun" is great, but is maybe the...fifth (?) most compelling improvisatory moment of this show for me. My favorite is probably the massive "Fuego" -> "Train Song" combo from earlier in the first set, but also the entire second set after a straightforward take on "The Well" is amazing: "Tweezer" -> "Twist" > "Piper" -> "Golden Age" -> "2001" > "Sigma Oasis" > "David Bowie."

I came into this show expecting it to be a letdown compared to the previous two nights based on online reviews but that, as usual, turned out to be a mistake. At this point, it's basically de rigeur for any Phish show without at least one 20+ minute jam in the second set to get voted down by "fans," but the fact is there are a lot of ways to improvise, and often length matters less than how you use it. For my money, this second set never lets up, is consistently creative and imaginative, and, among other things, has the most interesting "Bowie" since the early 2000s (though that's sort of damning with faint praise).

But none of that matters because Phish uploaded video for "Life Saving Gun," SO WE'RE TALKING ABOUT "LIFE SAVING GUN" NOW.

This song comes originally from Page and Trey's probably-underappreciated-by-me-thus-far 2023 album "January," and thus, like "Oblivion," it's a "new" Phish song. The version on the album is a weird, synth-heavy experiment, and I dig it, but this more Phish-y arrangement is a great addition to the band's repertoire and engages in a trope the band has indulged their entire careers: writing new Beatles songs the Beatles never got around to writing themselves.

I don't mean that in a derogatory way by any means: the Beatles are great, and they have obviously been a huge influence on all the members of Phish (to the point of their famously covering The White Album in its entirety in 1994). I just hear that influence really strongly on this song, and feel compelled to mention it because it's fun. Your mileage may vary.

I'm partial to the song in part, too, I think, because it...actually sort of rocks? Like, inasmuch as a bunch of sixty-year-olds can rock compared to Trey ripping through a "Chalkdust" solo thirty years ago at least. It heartens me that not only are these guys still producing tons of new material, but also putting out songs like this and "I Never Needed You Like This Before" that are legitimately great rock songs.

This particular great rock song is pretty short, but ends with a rare moment of Fishman going apeshit on the drums at 2:35, which leads right into the jam proper kicking off at 2:48. The band rides the groove of the song for a bit at first, with Trey taking a solo (and reprising the song's vocal melody a few times in a neat way). Page's super chorus-y organ chords deserve a mention here, too, as they add a 70s-type vibe to the proceedings in a cool way.

At 4:08 everyone in the band does that thing they do where they read each other's minds (?) and collectively turn on a dime, this time into a funkier space. I appreciate how the feel of the jam changes here without losing any of its momentum. Page's synth contributions here are just wonderful. For the next few minutes, these guys are just all doing the things they do really well and while it's not something as weird or as unique as, say, parts of 12/29's "Oblivion" jam, there's something equally satisfying about them just ripping through this groove. The lights are great here, too.

Starting at 6:07, Trey holds/loops a note(ish) for about thirty seconds. It used to kind of bother me when he would do this (he does it fairly frequently) because it felt like he was "dropping out" or "being lazy," but lately it's occurred to me (maybe as I've gotten better at guitar myself) that he's doing it to drop back into the mix and add texture so others can step up, and I feel like that's what happens here. By the time he comes back in, Page is leading the way on the clavinet and Mike's gotten his drill out (yes, he's playing his bass with a drill here).

The band returns to the groove after this brief break, but Trey starts to take a more authoritative approach to soloing, and Fishman starts accentuating his playing with cymbal crashes at 7:35 or so.

I'll be honest here: as much as I love this groove they've locked onto, by now it's been about four straight minutes of it and I'm more than good, and maybe getting a little bored. But then Trey, as if reading my mind, plays this wild ascending scale starting at 8:15 that, in peaking, seems to teleport him back to the 90s briefly and he commences to freak out. I love that you can hear the crowd roar on the video right here. I've never seen a show at MSG, but I've got to imagine a sold-out crowd losing it at a jam peak is probably a pretty great experience to be a part of.

Fortunately, we aren't even close to done with the fireworks yet.

The intensity keeps building over the next minute, with Fishman and the lights both peaking around 9:30. I should say that I haven't experienced their newest light rig in person yet, but it's wild enough seeing things like whatever's going on at 9:50 over the internet. God help everyone in that building who was tripping balls when this happened.

Right around here is where Trey starts building a bunch of guitar loops on top of each other (and there's a crowd shot with a guy wearing a Book It! shirt!) and we enter the stage of the jam where Phish Fries Our Adrenal Glands.

The solo Trey starts playing at 10:18 could have come straight from a CD-R of some 90s-era show that I wore out playing in my car while driving around the Appalachians in 2002. Needless to say, I'm a fan.

Things start to really take off at 11:15, and the lights...well, presumably if were at the show in person and on drugs, you are now dead. Rest in peace.

Trey starts adding loops on top of loops at 12:00 as if things aren't already intense enough, and at 12:40 we finally reach the top of the mountain. From there, it's a short wind-down to the end of the jam and the tune. Whew!

I've got one more post to make from this run, but it's going to be an unfocused rave about how good the 12/31 show was rather than a detailed breakdown of a particular jam.

After that...I haven't actually watched anything else lately (been writing a bunch for work), so I'm not sure? Orebolo is livestreaming next weekend, but they don't really lend themselves to long-form jam posts. In all likelihood, next I'll either be diving into a) old Goose shows that I attended in person and want to revisit, or b) another Phish run from this past year, possibly the spring tour.

Either way, I'll be back sooner rather than later! Thanks for reading!

[love-takes-work]

Steven Universe: End of an Era: Outline & Review

I wrote this review in October but never got around to posting it here

Steven Universe: End of an Era is far more than an art book–it’s also a collection of behind-the-scenes material, stories about the experience of working on the show, planning documents and associated background info, and both older versions of developed concepts AND concepts that never made it into the show. It's a huge fusion of all those elements, and it's definitely an experience!

Some low-quality images are included with my review just to give you an idea of what’s there--it’s not a good substitute for getting your own copy, but here’s a tour!

Like the previous concept art book, Art and Origins, I'll be giving you a description of the structure and overview, while also collecting notable information for fans. Obviously just about everything is "notable" once again, but I'll aim for unique insight or perspective on the main source material, keeping the screaming about everything new to a minimum so you can also enjoy something for yourself if you pick it up. My low-quality photos should prevent people from feeling like I'm reproducing the book in any capacity. Please grab one while you can and have your own experience!

[SU Book and Comic Reviews]

OVERVIEW

The book is titled "End of an Era" for a couple reasons--obviously because it is released after the show has wrapped, but also because Gem history recently ended its "Era 2" and began Era 3--an age of prosperity and peace. The author--the person in charge of adapting all of this information into this slick, readable package--is Chris McDonnell, whose work was previously applied on the Art and Origins book.

The foreword is by N.K. Jemisin, a well-known science fiction author who's a huge fan of the show (and wrote a really excellent series that also has a weird geological connection, by the way).

And the cover, like its predecessor, is shiny and decorated with a beach scene featuring minimalistic characters--this time it's the Gems at night in front of the Temple, and on the back cover is a big pink leg ship in a cross-legged pose.

The interior covers are decorated with tons of amazing sketches of Steven and Connie on the front, and a bunch of Gem sketches on the back. Every interior page that most would leave blank is highlighted with some kind of sketch art or character exercise--it's so much to look at, so much to absorb.

The book is dedicated "For Eddie."

Its organization is different from the previous book in that it shares applicable work in chunks associated with groups of episodes rather than pertaining to different aspects of building the show.

FOREWORD

N.K. Jemisin gives us such a great introduction to the book--apparently understanding very well that the audience of this book is full of animation enthusiasts and adult fans more than it is full of kids, and explaining that bewildering journey some adults had from blowing this show off as a silly kid thing to falling in love with it hard and fast.

The important thing, Jemisin says, is being able to trust a storyteller with your heart. And it was clear to her that Rebecca Sugar knew what she was talking about and was saying important things about identity and the radical power that comes with accepting it and demanding respect.

Important also is how we handle heroes and who gets to be one in fantasy. That's part of the reason Steven Universe speaks to so many--because we see ourselves here, and know stories can be about us. Acknowledging the power we all have to MAKE THINGS BETTER with what we fight for is so important--especially if we're going to speaking to the next generation about it.

Highlighting Rose Quartz as a "born leader" who failed and Steven as a relatable scamp who did what she couldn't, Jemisin asserts that we can save the world.

1. END OF AN ERA

We start with an appeal to the audience to think about identity and the formative parts of our childhood--and how different it is if who you are and who you become is restricted, mocked, erased, or Not Allowed. Most people, if not ALL people, can relate to this, but for those of us with a special relationship with Steven Universe because of queer identity, this hits hard.

But it doesn't have to be anything grand to be something we respect--this show's authenticity comes largely from how personal everything is, drawn from real-life experiences and incidental truths from each artist's perspective, leaning hard on childhood and formative experiences.

Rebecca Sugar offers some interview bits to discuss writing philosophy and why "writing female characters" was difficult for a nonbinary person who'd been socialized as a girl and a woman. Rebecca has spoken before about how frustrating it is that marketing for cartoons was SO gendered when she was growing up (and to some extent still is).

The Gems in the story are all "she/her," but on their planet they're defined by their work, not by emotion or relationships (unlike women in our society), so having them be socialized opposite to how she was and be able to claim those emotions through choice and NOT as just an expectation "as women" was revolutionary. Rebecca wants her show to tell all marginalized people that they don't deserve to be in the margins.

Weighing in on other aspects of the show were Ian Jones-Quartey, Joe Johnston, and Miki Brewster. Ian describes feeling like at first doing SU was a thrill ride that meant they'd finally get to do all the cool stuff, but it quickly became a responsibility that he took very seriously--the need to tell a good story now that he'd been given a megaphone.

Promotional art, planning documents, character sketches, and concept art from the lighthearted to the stone serious is included, along with some very cool (sort of famous) timeline charts that track major characters' developments. It's emphasized by Rebecca that the developmental materials ARE NOT CANON (and especially are not MORE canon) compared the final show.

There are concept sketches alongside final art for Aquamarine and Topaz in "Wanted" (with Topaz labeled "Imperial Topaz"), the Zircons in "The Trial," Blue and Yellow Diamond, and the Off Colors (including Pink Lars).

And there's also a spread of "the two sides of Steven's life: Gem Magic and Rock N Roll" featuring Sadie Killer and the Suspects (referred to as "Buck's band")--as well as a cool "Crew Cameos" key and some concepts for short-haired Connie.

And then there's some more "finished" art with stills alongside concepts, including some background art, revision, and really cool "fairytale" art from some of the shadowplay storytelling bits. We get "Lars of the Stars," "Jungle Moon," and "Can't Go Back."

2. THE BEGINNING OF THE END: A SINGLE PALE ROSE

In discussing the huge reveals and Gem mysteries in the show, the pacing is examined, and emphasis is put on the intended "slow burn." One of the most difficult things in the show was to strategize so that every piece that was needed to support another piece in the future was placed properly to seed what it was supposed to.

Some of the ideas they developed were more of a group effort and were fit together collaboratively (like Amethyst's being younger than the other Gems and Jasper being from Earth), while others were intended from the beginning based on Rebecca's vision (the fundamental idea of Pink Diamond's true identity, for instance, as well as Obsidian's design and sword and our Pearl not being Pink's first).

The writing process gets a great deep dive here, including fun tidbits like how the orb in the moon base was inserted by Joe Johnston and they literally had no idea what it was for when they wrote the episode. They repurposed it when they figured out what they needed.

Rebecca credits her detailed timelines for helping keep the order straight, and discusses how other artists are sometimes flabbergasted that a storyboard-driven show can have this much detail and continuity and yet not get wrecked by the free non-scripted boarding process. But Rebecca and the Crew valued that approach and loved the way fresh eyes would handle an idea, making it come back alive, entertaining, vivid.

Several Crew members weigh in on the writing process. Lauren Hecht refers to making lots of incorrect guesses despite being on the inside. Joe Johnston recalled getting briefed on his first day and getting so excited to start working on this massive project.

Miki Brewster remembered being told Rose Quartz is Pink Diamond and being shocked--and also confused about why Ruby and Sapphire would need to be married if they're already basically married. Drew Green talks about being brought in late and getting to watch unaired episodes and a rough of the movie while eating cereal.

Ian Jones-Quartey complains about Pink Diamond's real jester-like form being leaked to the internet through a Hot Topic shirt. Rebecca piggybacks on that and says it was upsetting that the wedding was leaked because of toy fair keychains featuring Ruby and Sapphire in wedding attire. They'd always be worried about leaks, and sometimes Rebecca struggled not to talk about the reality of Pink Diamond before the reveal because she knew it would make so much more sense once the truth was out. And everything associated with Rose makes more sense once you know she's Pink--especially what happened with Bismuth, considering what we know about how Pink Diamond has a habit of treating anyone who no longer serves her interests.

When it comes to visual cues, Rebecca also talks about intentional designs to create a feeling of unity between concepts, like the flower shapes on Pink Diamond's palanquin lining up with the poofs of Steven's hair and the star imagery of the series. Steven Sugar and Mary Nash discuss how the Human Zoo incorporated this imagery, trying to look like Homeworld with a Pink Diamond touch.

Steven Sugar, as a game nerd, liked to throw in video game references from old and modern stuff to feel like he's inserting what he's enjoying and who he is from moment to moment, while Mary Nash, who related to Sadie as a basement-dwelling young person with cult interests, liked to include stuff from MST3K and cult movies. Pearl's hand gestures get a spotlight too--her reflex to cover her mouth when Pink Diamond was being discussed was analyzed here.

A "Top Secret Visual Timeline" from 2016 is included which tells us some Diamond history. It has an earlier version of Pink Pearl's fate and does not include Spinel since the movie hadn't been greenlit. The timeline includes the birth of the Diamonds, the emergence and major story beats for each major character, and some philosophy of the driving force behind each.

We're told that Pink Diamond straightened up, behavior-wise, after she lost her first Pearl, and that Yellow and Blue wanted to give her a planet but White only agreed to it to prove she would fail at managing a colony. Pearl, meanwhile, is so confused to have a Diamond who keeps asking her what she thinks when she doesn't believe she should have opinions.

And when Pink moonlighted as Rose to start conflict, she found herself leading an army to fight Pink's troops--then Yellow's, and eventually Blue's too. Lapis is said to be waiting for the conflict to end on Earth so she can terraform, but she gets trapped instead.

Pearl's love story with Rose is described as "an endless honeymoon" where she's free to love her, while Rose's is more like "I'm now the head of the family and I'm going to give everyone what they never had, so everyone is super special!"

Jasper is described as "adopted" into Yellow's army as the only successful Beta Quartz. And White Diamond knew that Pink Diamond was not dead--she thought she was just running away from home like a brat and would eventually be back.

3. THE HEART OF THE CRYSTAL GEMS

Now we discuss Rose Quartz--the original Pink Diamond. How she was selfish and selfless, never enough and always too much, and how Greg was her first partner who "challenged her" to be an equal. Rebecca describes Rose as being delighted by the idea that both she and Greg reinvented themselves, but when that leads her to want to share her past, Greg isn't interested--he only wants to know who she is now, and doesn't consider the old her to be her.

Rebecca likes Carl Jung's concept of "enantiodromia," which is the idea that extremes lead to their extreme opposite. This is demonstrated in all of the Diamonds. This narrative is interspersed with drawings of Greg and Rose being cute.

But another "heart" of the Crystal Gems is its relationships--particularly, Garnet, the fairy tale romance embodied. More psychological theories are discussed with regard to differentiation in a relationship making the relationship stronger, and how they made sure that happened for Garnet during the appropriate arc. Rebecca has struggled with the idea that she, like Ruby, went straight from a "family" group to a living-with-others situation and never lived by herself. But she also learned that you can in fact develop as a person in the context of a relationship--you don't have to be alone to do it. Ruby learned that too, and chose on her own terms to be with Sapphire.

The wedding made so much sense to Rebecca and the crew that they couldn't imagine a wholesome couple like Ruby and Sapphire not having a wedding episode. They wanted it for years: The wedding concepts always included the tuxedo for Sapphire and the wedding dress for Ruby.

But pushback (often blamed on the conservative standards of the international market) led to negotiations trying to keep Ruby and Sapphire's relationship from being explicit. Rebecca and the Crew were very tired of this double standard, and they were especially irritated by attempts to claim a wedding wouldn't be well received by a core demographic or wouldn't make sense for Steven's character. But other shows had done weddings and Steven had been established to love weddings already.

Rebecca kept adding more elements to the wedding episode to answer all the concerns, but she didn't want to back down from explicit marriage between these characters. They deserved it. And the audience deserved to see this as wholesome, like any other cartoon wedding. Eventually they got their way and were allowed to have the wedding. But the ordered episodes were also coming to a close without promise of more, so Rebecca had to request more episodes to be able to wrap up the storyline!

And of course, there is Steven, the true heart of the team. A very interesting aside discusses Garnet's leadership and how the network pushed the Crewniverse to acknowledge Steven as the leader. This was successfully resisted throughout as well--because Garnet is the leader (unless she's incapacitated, of course). It's fantastic that this concept was preserved because too often a young male chosen one is elevated above people with more experience and knowledge because of that chosen one tradition, so it's really nice to have a show acknowledge that team leadership is more appropriate for an adult.

4. ERA 3

Beginning with a discussion of the Diamonds, this chapter deconstructs the dysfunctional "family" of the Diamonds (who are said to be based on tropes about evil stepmothers and stepsisters), with the thread of dysfunction originating with White Diamond.

Yellow is physical, Blue is emotional, White is judgmental, and Pink is impulsive. Some philosophy on why Pink is naturally manipulative and why she clashes so much with White is offered.

White believes her identity is to be imposed on all because she is the pinnacle of what should be--and therefore, she has the right to make decisions and statements about and on behalf of everyone. But her secret is that she can't do what the others do--act or feel or want. In trying to be everyone, she is no one.

And this becomes very important when she confronts Steven about his identity and turns out to be wrong. The triumph of Steven being totally, fully himself is a beautiful, simple revelation that's described as far more satisfying than the theories about Pink living inside him or Rose returning from his Gem.

Also discussed is Gem architecture. A lot went into this idea, and Steven Sugar weighs in to say he had to think of what it would mean for a world to have buildings but serve no human needs. That's why it's mostly focused on transport and storage. Even the broken planet is meant to indicate a place stripped for its resources, and everything serves a function that is meant to avoid looking like the human equivalents.

And there's another layer, too: a difference between Era 1 and Era 2. Era 2 became more functional to hide Era 1's broken bits, and older Homeworld buildings still have some "ornate and ancient" feel to them. And the fact that props, tools, and even walls and doors could be living was taken from a concept Rebecca thought was horrible from old Busby Berkeley movies, where people were inanimate objects and it was portrayed as lovely. Tom Herpich helped conceptualize these living objects.

Steven dealing with "princess tropes" is discussed here too. The Pebbles (worked on with Pendleton Ward) were sort of his Cinderella's mice, and all the locked-in-a-tower, having supportive tiny friends help you, getting princess clothes made, attending a ball, having to mind your manners stuff was intentionally related to fairy tales.

The point of doing that (besides fun) was to easily invoke the feeling that Steven was being made to be someone he's not, and that he was being treated like THIS is who he really is when it isn't. White Diamond as the "evil stepmother" is discussed with regard to her detailed features and massive scale. They generally didn't put fingernails and eyelashes on characters (especially not to indicate that they were women or girls!), but they decided White would get all of these feminine markers for tradition's sake.

Rebecca also invokes several other references that were included and describes the princess tropes as "chipping away at his integrity" setting him up for the final challenge with White.

There is again tons of concept art: Homeworld architecture, Pebbles, Diamond diagrams, background Jades and Lemon Jade Fusion, Comby, Diamond extraction chambers, and White Diamond.

5. CHANGE YOUR MIND

Now we finally begin to discuss Steven's identity. The "Perfect Steven," discussed in several interviews before this book's release, was an idea back in 2013; the "ultimate Steven," beefed up and shonen-looking, was far from perfect because OUR Steven is perfect, while this alpha hero Steven idea (used in Steven Universe Future) didn't belong being idolized in such a show.

They thought about having Steven fall apart into organic half and Gem half early in the show (during "Giant Woman" after a successful fusion and unfusion, even!), but they didn't try the concept until the last episode. They didn't want the "Pink" Steven to be portrayed as "better" even though he would be more powerful, so they decided he isn't whole without his organic self and he's just as much of a shell as the organic half. They absolutely did not want any ending that required Rose to be inside him or waiting to come back. But the debates were fierce--what DOES it mean to have Rose's Gem?

Ian Jones-Quartey brings in an anecdote about his own family to emphasize some of the immigrant themes that inspired aspects of the show. He had a brother who reinvented himself elsewhere away from family without resolving issues, and all the ramifications of that were explored in the show through Rose Quartz. (He is careful to say he doesn't think his immigrant experience is like being from another planet!) But he did say you can hurt your old family even if they were toxic or didn't know the real you, and you can hurt your new family by hiding your past. The Pizza family of course was also a more direct reference to Ian's Ghanaian family.

In talking about the new Fusions from this episode, Sunstone is largely described by Miki, who also got to board the Sunstone section. Sunstone was described as a cool 1990s character and the evolution just continued into making them a fourth-wall-breaking PSA dispenser. Obsidian is also discussed, with their sword being an early concept. Steven Sugar said they totally knew it would be forged in action. Obsidian being similar to the Temple design is of course another very early detail.

The story of how James Baxter got involved with one of the final scenes (Organic Steven and Pink Steven fusing in front of White Diamond) was shared. His family was fans of the show and Rebecca Sugar took the time to drive to a birthday party for his daughter and give her a drawing. He then owed her a favor, and this was it.

Concept art is again included, this time with sample boards, promo images, a Diamond fight concept, costume design changes for the Gems, new Fusions, the so-called "Mega Diamond" ship conglomerate, some scenes from the White Diamond confrontation, Pink Steven, multiple pages of James Baxter animation, corrupted Gems and their healed selves, and photos from the "Change Your Mind" premiere and some awards. The show has won one design-related Emmy, a Peabody Award, and a GLAAD award.

6. STEVEN UNIVERSE FUTURE

The book doesn't cover the movie because it got its own book, but dives right into Future. Ian Jones-Quartey emphasizes that the movie and Future are separate and different from the original show, which ENDED. After all, after that, Steven has a neck!

Some new names are invoked now: new writers Kate Tsang, Jack Pendarvis, and Taneka Stotts. They were excited to have Steven make HIS OWN mistakes instead of trying to clean up someone else's! Now, instead of doing the usual shonen anime thing and having the final battle be a big physical rumble, Steven has to make peace with himself and take an active role in coping with what all the fighting has done to him and what effect it's had on who he is (and who he wants to be). There is no sudden "I love myself!" answer, either. It's always a process.

Drew Green and Maya Petersen, who came on board as storyboarders officially in Future, also weighed in on writing for a "mature" show, how to deal with Steven being a "moral compass" while being sort of unreliable, and what they learned as Crew that they didn't know as fans. Drew didn't know Garnet never asks questions. Jack didn't realize the show never deviated from Steven's point of view. Taneka was nervous but excited to collaborate. Kate was worried about how established the show was and what to do as a new writer to contribute appropriately.

Maya was on the old Crew but not as a storyboarder, so felt like some of the "old" ideas ended up not being appropriate for the "new" Future in an embarrassing way--and dreaded the idea of dealing with Steven's emotional problems when they were similar to stuff she'd been through. She also was personally behind the idea of Steven wanting to dump his problems by becoming Stevonnie, and got to work with Etienne Guignard on inventing the Pearl creation backstory with Volleyball.

There's some discussion of "depression hobbies," stress, and the show's pacing. And they say Etienne was entertaining at pitches. There's even some discussion of how Greg is taken off a bit of a pedestal because his terrible restrictive life in the suburbs sounded wholesome to Steven and Greg presented it negatively.

And then there is some information about how the Crew felt behind the scenes due to fan reactions and negative press. Ian discusses feeling offended when the Black characters are described as bad examples, as if their cartoonized but realistic-in-context features are automatically caricatures.

Rebecca Sugar felt beaten down by some of these narratives and began to access mental health services, inspiring some of the content of "Mindful Education." A long reflection from Rebecca discusses people's infighting about her show and what she had a responsibility to show or not show in the story. She learned a lot about bullying from Cartoon Network's anti-bullying program and learned that bullies thrive on whatever attention you give them--unless it is made clear to them by a peer group that no one is impressed by their cruel actions. Also, not all negative feedback is bullying. Constructive criticism is different. Self-awareness can help you avoid internalizing what bullies might do or say to you.

Segueing from the discussion of how people are affected by and connect with the show, we then discuss how they chose as a team what should be covered as the show came to a close. They didn't have time to do quite a few stories they wanted time for, like a Rhodonite story, a Lars side story, and Diamond "prehistory" and religion; all of it was put aside for the main arc with Steven.

They thought people would find those stories about Homeworld and Off Color history very interesting, but so much of the show had been about Steven's Gem adventures, so keeping him mostly on Earth seemed appropriate. The acknowledgment of his battle damage, of his trauma, was necessary and real, and helpful in an important way to the core audience.

Oh, and there was some stuff about a cheeseburger tree. Don't ask.

In discussing the "reverse escapism" of the original show (Gem aliens are intrigued by everyday human culture, and realism is necessary), Rebecca says her views have changed on escapism and gets why some people want a soothing feel-better show. She acknowledged also that her own escapist dreams-come-true fulfilled in the show didn't feel like escapism because they were givens to the majority of mainstream culture, but were never guaranteed to marginalized people.

Rebecca ties in her several-times-told story about "Love Like You" and how the middle bit was when she didn't feel she was worth looking up to, and the realizations she had to tie the beginning to the end. Feeling like someone will like you less if they know you more is terrible. So sometimes a show like this can be helpful in telling people that they belong when their fantasies are things like "I want to be loved" and "I want to know I exist."

In Future, Steven has to connect to who he is and love that person--and understand that person enough to finally feel that even if he's not fixing their problems or saving their world right this second, Steven deserves his family's love and support, and they WANT to give it to him.

There's a huge amount of supplemental material in this section so there's no way I could name it all. The charts for Future's timeline are pretty straightforward, though a few episodes like "A Very Special Episode," "Why So Blue," "In Dreams," and "Bismuth Casual" aren't specifically represented and a couple are in a different order ("Prickly Pair" was conceived as happening after "Fragments" and "Homeworld Bound").

Steven feeling like a monster, having intrusive thoughts, having not forgiven the Diamonds, and getting help/moving on--it's all there.

We have keys, color scripts, and boards for the new opening and some various backgrounds and storyboard art from episodes. Model sheets for Shep, Nice Lapis and Mean Lapis, Jasper, Steven Tag Gems, Pink Steven Powers, Monster Steven. New house concepts, Era 3 Homeworld concept art for the Diamond environments, and background art for the Reef.

New Connie and Greg designs. Concepts for Mega Pearl, the Rose Quartzes, Bluebird, and Morganite (who didn't get used). And there are some photos from recording and the conference room. There are even some extras from "Crossover Nexus," the crossover with OK K.O.!--including an unused cut scene that included Ruby and Sapphire fighting. The rest of the book is a bunch of adorable Crewniverse art--extras, blog drawings, promos, and gifts to each other.

NOTABLE

1.

The first timeline chart in the book features a cool sketch of the original Off Colors, which at the time this planning document was drafted included unused Off Colors Flint and Chert.

We knew of their existence already because of an episode of the podcast, but these two unexpectedly appeared as incidental characters in the Steven Universe Future episode "Homeworld Bound," identified only in the credits. Sad to think that instead of banding with the Off Colors, these two were probably shattered for their crime (being Quartzes who don't want to fight) and that's why we see them being repaired in this episode. Later, there's some brainstorming for types of Off Colors and "a Ruby that wants to wear limb enhancers" is mentioned as well.

2. 

It looks like there was also originally more juice to the story of tracking down the events of the war culminating in Pink Diamond's assassination.

One of the timelines talks about Steven thinking it makes sense that Pearl can't talk about her involvement because she might have been a double agent, explaining why Rose Quartz always knew what Pink Diamond was doing. It seems like that bit was supposed to be included in Garnet's version of the story she believed in "Your Mother and Mine." Seems like they originally conceived Garnet's story to inspire the Off Colors to become pirates and freedom fighters, though in the show's canon this storytelling happened after Lars had already reinvented himself the way he did.

Sadie was also supposed to be sending letters to Lars via Steven, which is funny since the "Letters to Lars" episode is just a montage Steven letter. And of course it's specified that Steven was supposed to get Pink Diamond flashbacks by going to the Palace on Homeworld.

3. 

The second chart in the book makes references to Sadie's reinvention of herself as a parallel to Lars, Greg, and Pink Diamond all doing the same thing, and how positive it is to embrace such a thing--a version of yourself that YOU create.

I love that Yellow Diamond's arm ship arm-wrestling the Cluster was always part of the plan.

There's some more explicit direction to have Connie help Steven understand the Diamonds as "strict parents," and a lot more emphasis on everyone realizing Rose had been inspired by THEM rather than them all following her.

White Diamond is presented here as if she thinks of Pink Diamond as a "daughter" (whom she now understands she has "lost"). There are notes on how the Diamonds have a responsibility to their children and should attend to it before just continuing to make more.

4.

One of the concept art images for the Off Colors features Rhodonite crouching by Padparadscha saying "Don't worry, I won't let them hurt you." It's very interesting because she DOES seem to protect Padparadscha in the show, but doesn't seem confident about it in her final version, even though it does seem like she'd be "programmed" to guard aristocratic Gems because of her Ruby and Pearl makeup. Cool.

5.

A "Crew Cameos" spread was included, which is of great interest to some of us who loved seeing the Crew insert themselves into the show. Not every SU Crew person who's been represented in a crowd was there, but this crowd included Amish Kumar, Kat Morris, Amanda Winterstein, Angie Wang, Lamar Abrams, Emily Walus, Mary Nash, Joe Johnston, Christy Cohen, Danny Cragg, Hilary Florido, Danny Hynes, Matt Burnett, Ben Levin, Elle Michalka.

6.

The official national flower of South Korea, Hibiscus syriacus, is the name of Pink Diamond's flower.

7.

One of Steven Sugar's comments about the silhouette difference between humans and Gems points out that humans have ears. This seems to be pretty good confirmation that they are not supposed to have ears, despite that sometimes we'll see ears drawn on them in some frames.

8.

Rose Quartz/Pink Diamond is characterized in this book as "self-hating" in a really interesting way, saying that because she believed she was not capable of compassion, she practically worshiped those who demonstrated that ability and thought they were so much better than her--which is described as "intoxicating" and resulted in others being drawn to her. How interesting is that!

9.

Timelines reveal that early plans for Pink Diamond's first Pearl originally had her getting destroyed by Pink during  a game, and then her destruction was rewritten as a punishment from the Diamonds after Pink Pearl defended Pink Diamond to the other Diamonds. They went back to the idea of her getting hurt by Pink for the final version, though the cracked face and control by White Diamond was not on the agenda until they started writing "Change Your Mind."

10.

The approximate ages of the major characters, based on emergence, are revealed on these timelines. It begins with a cracked-planet-looking graphic depicting four tiny Diamonds emerging at 20,000 years ago. Some suspicious "blacked out" redacting surrounds a long timeline tail that goes back before that, which may mean there are secrets they still don't want to reveal. But the dates go like this:

20,000 years ago: The Diamonds emerge.

11,000 years ago: Pearl is custom-made for Pink Diamond.

8,000 years ago: Sapphire emerges (on Homeworld).

6,000 years ago: Ruby emerges (on a colony).

5,750 years ago: Garnet is formed.

5,600 years ago: Lapis is poofed and put in the mirror.

5,200 years ago: Jasper emerges (on Earth).

5,050 years ago: The Cluster is planted.

5,000 years ago: Amethyst emerges (on Earth).

4,500 years ago: The Crystal Gems found Amethyst.

3,000 years ago: Peridot emerges (on Homeworld).

40 years ago: Pearl found Lapis's mirror at the Galaxy Warp.

And of course we know 14 years ago Steven is born!

11.

Originally the Diamonds were based on a quartet of themes: Love, Fear, Pride, and Sorrow. It got too complicated to keep and it was abandoned, with Pink's identification of "love" being described as "particularly outdated."

12.

Notes on a sketch say that Pearl was inspired to become bold and unashamed because Pink's questions drove her to have opinions, and it's said that Rose "fell in love" with her boldness.

13.

Rebecca tells the story of driving off a ridge and getting stuck in the desert, comparing this to Ruby's tumble during her Wild West adventure and using it as inspiration. She's told this story before but here it is in print. She also included the story about using the flowers from a friend's wedding to put in Ruby's hair.

14.

Rebecca describes having to "fight" notes she was given when it had to do with Ruby and Sapphire's relationship. One she describes as NOT fighting was for a signing card depicting Ruby and Sapphire dancing. It was called "too romantic" and she decided not to worry about it since it wasn't the actual show content.

She was also scolded over her book The Answer because the powers that be expected her to downplay that relationship. She always argued that queer youth deserved these things.

15.

Tom Herpich describes being inspired to name Blue Diamond's comb "Comby" because he was watching the news about Comey getting fired from the FBI. It's also a mineral-related term and I always assumed that reference was intentional, but maybe it's not and this is the only intended significance to Comby's name?

16.

Rainbow Quartz 2.0's design is not discussed, though the other two new Fusions from "Change Your Mind" (Sunstone and Obsidian) were. RQ2 has some sketches included, but no accompanying narrative in the text.

17.

A sheet of corrupted Gems and their healed selves is offered, though it doesn't appear to be final. The obelisk in "Serious Steven" is labeled Albite. The unnamed Worm Monster, Desert Glass, and Watermelon Tourmaline are included. An unnamed birdlike Gem represents the Big Bird monster from "Giant Woman." The crab monster from "Arcade Mania" is labeled Blue Chalcedony. The Tongue Monster is drawn uncorrupted but not named. The Flower Monster from "Back to the Kindergarten" is labeled Grossular Diopside or Titanite. The invisible monster from "Island Adventure" is labeled Moonstone. The Lighthouse Gem is labeled White Topaz. A form for Larimar that was used in "Change Your Mind" but changed in Future is there. The Slinker is listed as Chrysocolla. And the Crab Monster is listed as Aventurine.

On the next page, this is changed to Bixbite (as it was in Steven Universe Future), and we then also have Lace Amethyst, Blue Lace Agate, Crazy Lace Agate (Fusion), Ocean Jasper, the Mother Centipeetle Nephrite (Facet 413 Cabochon 12) and three other Nephrites, Angel Aura Quartz, a hooded Jasper, Zebra Jasper, Biggs Jasper, Watermelon Tourmaline (labeled as Fusion of Gem * Onion--huh?), Snowflake Obsidian, "Little" Larimar, and Orange Spodumene (who was the Worm).

18.

The Rhodonite side story would have been about the love story of a Ruby and a Pearl working for Morganite. Images of Morganite and her servants, unfused, are in the book. We do not get this additional information, but Rebecca said in a panel shortly before the book's release that Rhodonite's story would have been about finding out that she had been Rejuvenated 17 times because her components kept falling in love and needing to be reset.

19.

Referring to the Diamonds on one of the charts, Steven's perspective is "I can't believe I helped these" and then there's a censor bar. Welp.

20.

Some included art by Hilary Florido features Kevin with a souped-up Koala Princess car and another where Kevin is staring at himself in the mirror in front of an altar to himself.

21.

Rebecca's sweater collection is included in the Crew art.

[SU Book and Comic Reviews]

[thatringboy]

Can we have more twst headcanons on the students graduating? Maybe all of them? (Not the dorm leaders because you already did them)

FUCK YEAH LET’S GO!

These may be shorter than what y’all are used to because I’ve got 15+ students to do 

They’re under the cut because of how many they are and I don’t wanna take yo too much space lmao

Trey

My mans didn’t do much for graduation 

He said is goodbyes to his friends and left quickly

The first year after graduation he went to school to become a dentist

He managed to graduate quickly and moved in with Cater for a bit

Trey saved up some money to buy a building with an apartment in it and moved in there full time to set up his bakery 

He returned to NRC to pick up Riddle and he wasn’t expecting the “SEE YA FUCKERS” part

As I said in the last hc post, Trey and Riddle started a bakery together

It’s called “Clover’s Cakes”

Cater 

The first year after graduation he became a Magicam influencer

He vlogged about fashion, sports, living with Trey and other dangerous and thrilling things 

Cater won’t admit it but he hates living with Trey

Cater and Lilia got their band up and going and once they rescued Kalim from his wedding, Cater sold his house and went on the road full time

He may or may not be a stoner now

Deuce

After Trey graduated, Deuce became vice dorm head

His last two years at NRC were for the most part uneventful 

Graduation was very emotional for everyone involved

His mom picked him up from graduation and Deuce started to do odd jobs

He saved up enough money to rent out an auto shop and opened shop

He always made time to meet up with his old friends and classmates

Ruggie

He got some scrutiny from his dorm residents because he wasn’t “big enough” to run Savannaclaw 

Luckily he had Jack’s loyalty and beefiness

He was one of the last to leave his graduation because he and Leona had to haul a bunch of food

While Leona manned the physical side of their construction company/charity, Ruggie ran financials and public relations 

They often invite Cater and Kalim to preform for the people in the slums

And the band does it for free

Jack

Some rude students celebrated Jack becoming dorm head because “Ruggie wasn’t man enough to do the job”

Jack had put a no violence policy in place, but let’s say that being dorm head meant that he went around it sometimes 

He changed the dorm’s image to be a respectable and honorable dorm

After graduation he moved back home and became a pro snowboarder

He can be seen in a bunch of Cater’s vlogs when the band visits Pyroxene

He gives snowboarding lessons to little kids once a week

Jack still has his cacti

Jade

Jade followed Azul after graduation 

He managed almost all of the underwater restaurants while Azul managed the above ground ones

Jade took some time off and took a course in psychology 

He didn’t really need it seeing that his time working in Octavinelle made him a master at monitoring body language

Jade returned to work and is now known to identify different situations by just surveying a room

Floyd

Yeah he didn’t like working after NRC

He loved graduation because of Riddle’s grand exit

But working in a restaurant didn’t give him the same thrill as squeezing scared high schoolers 

Floyd quit working and moved above water to become a dancer

His career took a bit to get off the ground

He ended up signing on with the band to work with them

Jamil

It’s the same as Kalim’s story

But with a lot more annoyance 

He knew the wedding rescue was gonna happen but he didn’t know that he was gonna get swept up in it

Jamil took it in stride and is now the manager of the band

He was the choreographer for a bit too until Floyd joined

Purple Haired Scarabia NPC

My mans

He became a politician after running Scarabia

He is the face of equality and freedom for all

We stan a king 👑 

Rook

Oh boy

He went on to purchase land and start a game reserve

He invites the guys out there a lot

Vil couldn’t be bothered to go but Epel loves it 

Rook doesn’t believe in other haircuts dear god help him 

Epel

Dorm head for two years in a row? Heck yeah 

He focuses a lot on fitness and playing Magift 

After graduation he joins a pro Magift team and is now a sports icon

Epel likes to rub it in Vil’s face a lot

Ortho

He also enjoys running Ignihyde 

After graduation he joined Idia in his “mission” to invent better technology that helps improve magic

Ortho also notices Idia’s obsession hobby about magic mirrors but doesn’t comment on it much

He basically is just Idia’s assistant

Lilia 

He returns with Malleus to the Valley of Thorns and helps him transition into becoming king 

His time at NRC was extremely short compared to his 500+ years of age, but he enjoyed every moment

He kept in contact with Sebek and mentored him until the band rescued Kalim

After that Lilia goes back and fourth between collaborating with the band and serving Malleus

He’s a proud dad of his two boys

Silver

Unlike Ruggie, Silver didn’t receive scrutiny for not being the ideal dorm head 

He supposed that being close to Malleus had something to do with it 

After Riddle ran out of graduation, Silver was crowned Prince of the Valley of Thorns in front of the student body

Silver returned to the Valley of Thorns and lived there as a guard

He doesn’t expect to ever become king because of Malleus’ long life span

But the look on Sebek’s face when Silver was appointed a royal status will be one to cherish forever

Sebek

Oh poor boy

Silver becoming prince, Lilia running off to join a band and Malleus just not needing guards hit him all at once

But Sebek bounced back

He took his time as dorm leader to do some soul searching 

Sebek still became a guard for Malleus

And he ended up writing a book about his adventures at NRC

The book became so popular that he often got his old friends together and they helped him write more books

Malleus appointed Sebek “Keeper of the Fairy King’s Library”

Grim 

My guy is famous for a lot of things

Being the first monster student at NRC, being the first monster to join a Magift team, starting his own dorm etc

He missed Yuu Prefect deeply but never really opened up about it 

After playing Magift professionally for a few years, Grim returned to NRC and ended up teaching his own course named “Magical Studies 101″

The class is mostly for first years who don’t know their Unique Magic and other students who want to study pure magic and its origins 

Despite Grim’s attitude while attending NRC, he was named Teacher Of the Year twice in a row

I didn’t leave Ace’s after-graduation life out on accident. I don’t have any hcs for what he does after he graduates because I don’t hc Ace graduating. I’m working on a short story about what that means and it should be out later this week or early next week. 

I really hope you all enjoyed this list!

[mocarena]

post of Chu2 rambles and predictions

i realized i actually needed to make this now that S3 is knocking me down with anticipation

blabla this thread is long as heck and incomprehensible so aha good luck if youre actually trying to read thru it. i just wanted a place to write my predictions down to see how right or how utterly wrong i am! whole thing’s under a read more cuz its a lot

spoilers for S2, the RAiSe! manga, and small spoiler for Film Live

Exhibit: Songs

I’m starting off with talking RAS’ songs because they give me a good basis to talk on several things regarding the band & Chu2.

There might be mentions of other songs, but I will focus on 2 in particular.

Takin’ My Heart

Imo, the most important piece in regards to Chu2 and her character.

That is due to Radio Riot #7 having revealed that the song is literally about Chu2’s beliefs/feelings.

It is also written by her in the Bandori canon (as all RAS songs are since she is the producer, but we know for sure with the Radio confirmation & also how the song came out past Season 2 that this is a song written with Chu2’s perspective in mind).

Raychell even said that she once cried singing the song during her own practice time.

Information source: Iviachupichu on Twitter, a faithful translator who often talks about the contents of Radio Riot episodes. Link https://twitter.com/iviachupichu/status/1106469855757164544!

TL of the song taken from http://www.rizuchan.com/bang-dream-cardfight-vanguard-takin-my-heart/ !!

Long falling down again I’m immature, building up lies and distancing myself from others I feel all torn up; I hold my heart Try to fake a smile… hey, my cheeks hurt

Cry… I hide my rusted eyes Cry… I want you to notice Oh, Come here, Please…

Takin’ my heart Does my voice Takin’ my heart Reach you now…? Takin’ my heart I don’t want to vanish pathetically Takin’ my heart Into a sea of loneliness I’ll just keep crying out to you Today, tomorrow, and for a long time after (Without giving up) I hope my feelings reach you…!

^ not the full TL, just a taste of the beginning

Clearly I don’t have to point out how heartfelt that song is, the lyrics speak for themself and aren’t very subtle (which is very much the point since she’s asking for her feelings to be reached after all).

I’m stupidly annoying when it comes to talking about Takin’ My Heart, I absolutely need to emphasize on the fact that these lyrics are Chu2’s honest feelings.

Expect parts of this song to be brought up throughout this a whole lot.

2. UNSTOPPABLE

Now this song has no confirmation on being composed with Chu2 in mind, considering it’s a very early RAS song and has been sung before we even got the reveal of the RAS characters.

However, I believe it DOES hold significance:

-I have no doubts that the introduction of RAS characters together with the band were in mind early on already, due to how early Bushiroad plans things months in advance.

-RIOT, the first RAS original, has very clear tones of it having been written by Chu2 in Bandori canon (a very arrogant sounding song, sure of its music and it almost seems like it’s directed at Yukina). Thus I wouldn’t put it past the production team having formed Chu2’s character around RIOT and UNSTOPPABLE, or they already had her type of character in mind when first composing these songs.

-It’s not far-fetched to say this song might have some ties to Chu2’s feelings since we’ve got the even more blatant song Takin’ My Heart.

I won’t copy paste all of the lyric translations, it’s simply too long, but here are several parts that stick out to me:

———————

The emptiness springs forth like I'm helplessly thirsty

My back droops... I put too much hope in each day

(Hurry up)

「Don't let me down」, I'm always told

(Hurry up)

Cornered, mouth covered, difficulty breathing

I'm caught in a trap

Please indulge in my annoying ramblings

I just won't stop seeking approval every day

Me, I'm my own accomplice,

with a fake me, dance! Dance! (Lullaby)

Doubt and worry stick their tongues out,

pointing at and ridiculing me

Are you enjoying? Are you excited?

Yes? Do you really get it?

Then that's fine

———————

Please ignore my annoying ramblings

I'll just abandon seeking approval every day

———————

My belief of UNSTOPPABLE still having an intended Chu2 connection also lies within the lyrics:

“Please indulge in my annoying ramblings, I just won't stop seeking approval every day”

From what we’ve seen in the anime, Chu2 definitely seems very attention and approval-seeking, specifically when it comes to Yukina.

I will talk about more specific parts of these songs (+ other one-liners from RAS lyrics) within the rest of this big time ramble.

————————————————

Exhibit: Chu2’s Past….?

A big emphasis on the question mark at the end, as we barely know anything about her past. One thing we know is that due to her excellent grades, she is in her first year of high school despite being only 14 & she studies/studied(?) in an international school, explaining her use of English.

However, based on RAS songs + some bits of the anime I can try to theorize on her past. It might be completely wrong, or I might just get it right, who knows, this is just for fun & speculation.

Family Situation

The anime made a point of how luxurious of a building the studio Chu2 works and has band rehearsals in, there’s even a ~50 seconds scene of Tae just staring at the building and the insides of it in awe.

Now whether or not that building entirely belongs to Chu2’s family, or only the studio, or it’s only being rented out, it still is clearly very expensive either way. The studio is often being used after all, too.

What that very glaringly hints at is that Chu2 is wealthy. Well, not Chu2, but moreso her family, who we know virtually nothing of.

Now that could mean that her family situation isn’t of significance at all like how it is with a lot of characters in Bandori. But that could also not be the case, considering that Bushiroad does dip into family stuff with a few characters (Saaya, Ran and Yukina come to mind).

Chu2 is 14 years old, so having her lyrics be based off of feelings regards her family/overall social situation isn’t that far fetched.

I’ll go ahead and say that personally I theorize that this might fall into the tropey category of “Kid of rich parents gets practically anything but barely gets attention from their parents”.

I can easily believe that Bushiroad would want to take a route different from this, but there’s a lot of freedom for theorization and I think going with the common route is a pretty safe bet for a theory.

Unlike Betadori they don’t dip into territory that is too angsty, it seems, but it’s not like they’d need to be blatant about something like that either.

「Don't let me down」, I'm always told

———

Please indulge in my annoying ramblings

I just won't stop seeking approval every day

———

Please ignore my annoying ramblings

I'll just abandon seeking approval every day

^UNSTOPPABLE lyrics

I think it’s important to point out the difference between the last two bits. The lyrics first start out as a plead for listening to her and approving of her achievings, later in the song that part changes to ‘just ignore me please’.

Those lyrics also explain Chu2’s personality pretty well, in my opinion.

Even after being rejected by Yukina she kept trying to get her to watch her band, basically asking for approval from someone whose talent she looks up to.

I also believe that Chu2 might be an unhealthy perfectionist, which seems like a thing that might rise the tension within the band, but more to that later.

————————————————

Exhibit: Chu2 in the Present

The childish child who won’t let herself be a child

Now if that ain’t a mouthful of a title, but hopefully I can explain my thoughts well enough so it’s somewhat understandable.

Chu2 clearly has a bratty personality and throws tantrums when she doesn’t get what she wants, but to me it doesn’t seem as shallow as that.

The official website describes her as a professional who is arrogant at times, but not rude.

Need I remind you that this girl’s just 14?

Here’s what I think:

Chu2 is a child at heart. But she doesn’t want to let that part of hers show too much due to how she wants to be treated: like a professional.

But she’s clearly an excitable child, as it was shown with how excited she got over the studio when she came to talk to Popipa in Arisa’s basement. For that moment she lost herself and probably could’ve gone on for a while Maya-style if Pareo hadn’t reminded her of her “official greeting”.

What I think is that Chu2, due to wanting to be treated with high respect   as a producer, doesn’t want to appear childish, so she holds herself back unless the heat of the moment gets her or she feels like she can express her excitement without it damaging her ‘professional’ manners. Like when she got pumped after a RAS live, for example.

A quote that could be overlooked but might actually have a little bit of relevance if the words were carefully chosen was the following:

“She thinks playing “band” like a bunch of kids is better than being in my group?!”

Tbh this literal child using the phrase ‘like a bunch of kids’ for something like…well, a band of friends being a band, just makes her seem like she wants to take herself incredibly seriously compared to other bands. To show that they’re not “kids” like the others.

In addition to that, she skipped a grade. In an international school. She seems to be really set on providing the best grades and world-changing music to appear worthy without letting herself indulge all that much in living a childhood. I could totally be exaggerating things, but I think it’s not too far-fetched of a thought.

Tantrums

Not a subject I’ll talk long about, but I think there’s things worth pointing out.

She’ll wait until whoever she’s angry at is out of her sight.

With Yukina she started yelling once Roselia was completely gone.

With Otae it’s a bit of a different case. This time she verbally even told her to get out of her sight before letting off steam, though Popipa weren’t completely out of hearing reach either.

2. She looks genuinely distressed.

The purpose of pointing out #2 is that she seems to have deeper reasonings as to why exactly she’s this desperate to have the perfect band/band members. Especially paired with the line of “I finally found what I’ve been looking for…”, she clearly isn’t doing this stuff just for fun and has got some sort of inner turmoil dealing with the fact that things aren’t going her way to which she responds, well, like that.

She’s not entitled to any bands or like anyone else obviously, and she needs to deal with that fact more maturely in the future.

But still, something HAS to be the root of exactly why she feels like this, to finally have found something.

It’s of importance to her, but why…?

I’d throw out the theory of seeking for approval again. She wants the perfect band that could make impact on the world. Maybe she wants the approval of someone (not Yukina, as she’s been searching for a while and clearly already felt this way before even seeing Roselia), probably someone older and personal to her. So I’d bet it on parents again, it IS the easiest answer after all, but who knows. There just seems to be someone (or more) she wants to impress.

Probably related to her bc it seems personal, if not maybe someone else she looks up to.

---------

Exhibit: I wrote all the above way before I’m writing this part

I genuinely haven’t revised the above at this point of time, the 7th of January. So some stuff might be outdated, but I kinda wanna leave it like that, to see what past me has come up with. I vaguely know and have skimmed, but I wanna write more beyond this point now without knowing the details.

Aka I might repeat a lot of things here now!

CHU2 is actually very much in tune with people’s feelings & desires...when they express them through music.

Now I’m pretty sure this is something I haven’t talked about (or at least not much). Chu2 doesn’t strike one as a very empathetic character, as one has seen with how she was still willing to get Otae back into her band, despite Popipa’s deep bond.

But hear me out. This girl actually can understand other’s feelings well, under specific circumstances. And the RAS manga “RAiSe!” proved that.

With each RAS member, it seems like she just knew their desires upon hearing them play. It’s not yet confirmed with Pareo due to Pareo’s 2nd chapter not having been published yet at this point of time, but chapter 1 already leads up to what I think is Chu2 confronting Pareo (online invitation first), and understanding that Pareo holds her true self back.

With Layer she knew she was unhappy- she knew she didn’t want to keep playing support. She knew she didn’t look very happy, especially for someone who played at Budokan. And through that knowledge she was able to persuade her to listen to her music and to imagine what it’d be like in a band together with other members who’d give it their all.

Very much the same with Masking. Masking’s drumming is intense, and she feels like she cannot express herself well outside of drumming. Her desire was to have fun in a band with others on her level, where every member gave it their all on their instruments. Once again, Chu2 was able to convince her to join her band, she let her listen to her track, and Masking did improv drumming on it, in turn also impressing the producer.

Pareo’s desire is to be accepted for who she is. Since she was small she hid her true self that loves cute things, and kept her distance from classmates, pretending to be the perfect student in the eyes of them, her teachers, her parents...and when she first saw Pasupare on TV, she cried due to seeing how much support they got, something she didn’t feel like she received. She found joy in uploading videos of her doing keyboard pasupare covers online without showing her face. The simple prediction here is that Chu2 finds her covers, meets with Pareo in one way or another, and is able to tell that she hides her true self. Somehow she convinces her to change that and embrace her true self, and that she’ll be supported by the band.

RAS songs often are about going against the norm- RIOT for example symbolizes a rebellion. Masking heard the demo song Chu2 gave her, and got the impression that it made one feel like you want to declare war against the world. That it seemed like “that girl” was trying to raise hell itself with her intense music. Even short bits like in DRIVE US CRAZY, one lyric line goes “Never Say Never Crazy”. RAS is a band about expressing your true self. And Chu2 very much could be putting those kinda desires and feelings into these songs.

A little thought here about Chu2 watching Popipa performances on two occasions with very different reactions. When Popipa played a supporting band at Roselia’s self-sponsored live, Chu2 was shown to be very disinterested in them. Whilst Popipa was great, Chu2 might’ve felt the anxiety that Popipa had in them at that point of time and thus had that disinterest. At the Popipa self-sponsored live at the end of S2 however she showed a completely different reaction, dancing happily along to Dreamers Go! and being embarrassed upon Pareo noticing. Maybe at this point she truly felt Popipa’s real confidence, and the bond that they share.

Not to mention she admitted to having felt moved by Popipa later on.

Chu2′s got something big coming. Hopefully in S3. Maybe later on. (Cough RAS in game COUGH)

There’s just a whole lot of signs pointing to that. Especially since Lock, the future RAS guitarist, really is an opposite to Chu2′s own ideals. All Lock wants to do is have fun in a band with anyone at any level of playing instruments, as long as she feels the dokidokis. Chu2 is very profession-oriented. It also has a great potential to be a little bit of a Roselia parallel, since that was the band Chu2 originally wanted to be the producer of. And Roselia had their struggles with the just-pro approach, learning that forming strong friendships within the band very much are beneficial.

A little step towards that I feel is already hinted with the Film Live, in which she appeared backstage with the rest of RAS, bringing flowers together with Pareo.

Even if she is huffy about it and it’s hard to admit for her that she does want to be nice and that she had been in the wrong regards past issues, it’s a step in the right direction.

Chu2 will have great development, and a lot of depth behind her character will be revealed.

[theexistentiallyqueer]

I would like to hear what you have to say about p5r

Oof so like–bearing in mind that I can’t understand Japanese, did not watch most of the livestream, and very much believe we all need to calm our takes down until the English release comes out so we have a better understanding of what is actually happening yadda yadda yadda–

I’m excited. I’m very excited. It looks really really good. They really dug into the meat of Goro’s character and served us a supreme fucking feast in that respect, and I’m very glad for that. His confidant is amazing, from what we can get from reading @lokiarsene‘s translations. His very central role in third trimester arc is excellent. The way Kasumire and Takuto are integrated into the stories of the existing cast rather than dominating them, a la Marie from P4G (also bearing in mind I haven’t played P4G but that’s the general impression I’ve gotten of the game), is also excellent. Additions should comment on what is already there.

I’m disappointed Atlus seems to be going for a Big Tease about whether Goro survives in the end. I know exactly why they’re doing it–so they can string us along and hype up Scramble–but I hate that they’re doing it. I get that they claim Scramble is a direct sequel but like….is it? Is it really? My money is on Goro and Sumire being DLC characters for that game.

When I say “shuake canon now,” I’m saying it with the exact same degree of belief as when I say that I personally am a Hugo award winner because I have fanfiction posted on AO3. Shuake is unfortunately not canon, because Atlus are a bunch of cowards. I haven’t played Catherine so I can’t speak to how well they handle Vincent’s relationship with Rin in that game, but the fact that they let players date Rin, a crossdresser, in Catherine, but don’t let you date any of the guys in Royal is….not a good look for Atlus. We’ve been very clearly and very successfully queerbaited, and I can both acknowledge that and make fun of Atlus for accidentally coding Akira’s relationship with Goro as so heavily romantic that you really can compare it to Shinji and Kaworu or Utena and Anthy or Madoka and Homura, but at the end of the day if Atlus were allies (and they’re not), they’d have cut those gross predatory gay men who hit on Akira and Ryuji on not just one but TWO occasions.

I will not give Atlus credit that Atlus categorically does not deserve.

I’m seeing a lot of valid criticism of the game as well. The addition of cognitive Shiho in a bunny costume to Kamoshida’s boss fight is fucking disgusting and I want to personally destroy the career of whatever jackass came up with that idea and also whatever other jackass approved it. Ryuji still gets beat up by the girls after Shido’s palace collapses, because haha, female on male violence is harmless and funny. You can still be an absolute dick to Mishima. 

Most frustrating for me is that Haru remains criminally underdeveloped and it looks like hers and Futaba’s feelings about Goro aren’t really explored with remotely any degree of what I would personally consider nuance (and believe me, as someone whose father was murdered, I have a very low bar where that’s concerned because nuance on that subject is not a thing most media is capable of). There also doesn’t seem to be much direct acknowledgement from Goro (going off of what @lokiarsene has already translated and posted and also told me while she’s working on future translations) of the very personal hell he put Futaba and Haru through, which I would again stress–I have a low bar where that’s concerned.

What I’m most interested in is how the third trimester arc is focused on mental health, specifically mental health care, a thing for which Japan is famously garbage at managing. Given that the Persona franchise is one of the few examples of overt Japanese counter-culture we get access to in the West (in that the games are openly critical of some pretty major aspects of Japanese society), I’m curious to see the extent to which Maruki’s arc critiques the Japanese mental health system. Is it just going to be about shitty malpractice? Is it going to comment on how mental illness and neurodivergency are just covered up and shut away? Is it going to talk about how when people do go to doctors, they usually just get prescribed medication as a band-aid but therapy is basically nonexistent in any meaningful widespread form?

Given the Persona series’s track record, Royal seems to be pretty par for the course: a flawed mixed bag with some really solid writing and some really glaring blind spots, if not abject failures. From what I’ve seen of Royal, I think the solid bits weigh out the not so solid bits, at least for me personally. I look forward to engaging with the finished product in a language I can understand and then picking it all to pieces with everyone else on here, come March.

[makeste]

I was glad to see you enjoyed my Top 10 ask. You did mention you had a ranking for the arcs - would you do a ranking for them? Like, worst to best? (My guess (of the arcs you've finished): Internship arc, Hero Killer Arc, License Exam, USJ, Intro Arc, Culture Fest, Battle Trial, Pro-Hero arc, Final Exams, Sports Fest, Camino Ward, DvKp2; since you haven't liveblogged Joint Training Arc yet, no clue.) Just curious.

good morning evening everyone, and welcome to another Wednesday episode of “makeste tries to answer asks from two months ago while on the bus.” this one is a bit of an interesting challenge since it involves ranking and that always takes me a long time, but as you said, I did have an ongoing ranking of the arcs in my head, so we’ll see. at the very least the ones at the beginning and end shouldn’t be too hard, and you can probably guess them already. (in fact, you actually did.)

(ETA: yeah this took me two sittings to do, so I ended up posting it on the ride home lol. I just like BnHA you guys. almost as much as I like talking about how much I like it!)

okay so here goes.

14. Basement arc - yeah so let’s just go ahead and get this over with. this is the one and only BnHA arc that I actually dislike. fortunately it’s an outlier and suffered from a bunch of one-time issues, most of which stem from the fact that Horikoshi was apparently trying to write a longer and darker arc than usual. well he succeeded! and thankfully learned his lesson. and at least this arc gave us Eri and Mirio and some good Kirishima flashbacks and Chekov’s Quirk-Be-Gone bullets and the Highway to Hell. hopefully the anime can improve on the rest.

13. Provisional License arc - okay, so it might surprise a few people that this arc is all the way down here. let me explain. this is a perfectly fine arc, and I like it well enough, but it’s a bit longer than it needs to be, and not that much happens in it aside from our introduction to best boy Yoarashi Inasa, and the Great Toga Conspiracy (which is admittedly excellent). there are some great moments (Aoyama doing his best impression of “THE BEACONS ARE LIT” from RotK comes to mind), but overall it’s fairly forgettable, and it suffers from being placed directly in between my two absolute favorite arcs, which means I have a tendency to overlook it, which isn’t really the arc’s fault.

12. Hero Killer arc - this one is interesting because I really lost patience with it during my first read-through, but strangely enough when I watched it in the anime I actually really enjoyed it. it was also much shorter than I remembered. I’ve belatedly realized that reading it while doing commentary really slowed me down, because for the parts that I wasn’t feeling, doing the commentary took a long time and also left me dwelling on a lot of the things I didn’t like. but in actuality, Stain’s Annoying Rants aside, this is a pretty enjoyable arc full of Big Hero 6 flashbacks, hot revenge-driven Iida, Gran Torino’s introduction, Deku learning full cowl, Bakugou’s Best Jeanist internship, and Todoroki saving Deku and Iida’s lives by being glued to his phone when he really should have been paying attention to his own internship. get off that social media already Shouto.

11. USJ arc - this is a great arc, but it just feels small compared to everything that happens afterward. but it’s fun to look back on because there are lots of little hints for future developments to come. the traitor theory, for instance. and this is also our introduction to the League and to Tomura and the Noumu. and that final fight between All Might and the Noumu is still one of my favorite scenes in the whole series, especially in the anime. it’s so fucking good you guys. shit.

10. Intro arc - just FYI, I lump everything from the first chapter up until USJ into one arc since it’s easier. anyways, so this is roughly on the same level as USJ, but gets a slight edge because there are some iconic moments here. namely, the first chapter (which is still one of the best shounen intro chapters I’ve ever read, if not the best); Kacchan VS Deku 1; the entrance exam; and our introduction to the rest of class 1-A, particularly Ochako and Iida. oh, and Aizawa! gotta love how he starts out all ready to expel some bitches only to wind up falling in love with the whole class. fatherhood agrees with him.

9. Band AU arc - I actually love this arc. I just love all of the ones above it on the list a bit more, and I can’t really justify it being any higher than this. but it has The Band and the Babysitting Squad and Mirio being the best big brother in the world and Eri being just ridiculously, astonishingly cute. Gentle and La Brava are also great villains, if not quite my favorites. there are a few questionable plot holes in the arc, and it lacks any sort of big impact on the rest of the series, but it’s basically a canon filler arc and it’s so much fun and I can’t wait to see it animated.

8. Fanfic Lodge arc - you guys this arc started out so fucking cute and ended up so fucking tense. and this was our intro to the League of Villains proper, including Spinner, Twice, Tuxedo Mask, the prodigal Todoroki son, and my best girl Toga. Deku VS Muscular is still hard for me to read (his liiiiiiiimbs) but it’s one of Deku’s best moments regardless. and the angst at the end of the arc is almost unparalleled. god I love it.

7. Final Exam arc - a.k.a. the one where all the kids team up with each other to shoot their teachers in the fucking face. this arc has it all: Momo character development, Bakugou character development, TodoMomo, BakuDeku, and Aizawa being a total badass. (and All Might too, but he’s kind of overkill tbh. which is its own kind of awesome though.) there’s so much good stuff in this arc that this description is a bit vague because if I got any more specific we’d be here all day. it’s just a lot of good stuff that I like.

6. Joint Training arc - dudes I love this arc so much. class B and their array of ridiculously awesome quirks! class A and their impeccable teamwork! Bakugou joining the OFA Scooby Squad and showing off his new WIN AND RESCUE COMBO! Monoma! Shinsou!! SIXQUIRKS!!! god there’s so much great content.

5. Endeavorhawks arc - this arc would be even higher except that it’s a bit short (though it’s perfectly paced, so that might actually be a plus) and it doesn’t feature as many of my faves. but Hawks’s intro + our intro to The Great Noumu Conspiracy + Todoroki Family Drama + some of the best character development I’ve seen in a shounen manga (god I still can’t get over what a ballsy move it is to try and redeem Endeavor) = solid gold. and it’s so well done. and caps off with one of the best plot twists in the series to date, which sets up what promises to be one hell of an interesting arc later down the line. just. it’s so good. possibly the best-written arc to date, even if it doesn’t quite top my list.

4. My Villain Academia arc - and this isn’t even done yet!! and it’s still already this high!! Tomura flashbacks! Toga flashbacks! TOUYA FLASHBACKS???! (we’ll see??) creepy cults! my new favorite character One-Handed Giran, the biggest badass in the whole fucking series! worldbuilding for days! Dr. Robotnik! more Noumu shit! etc. etc. this arc has been non-stop goodness and I almost feel spoiled at this point.

3. Sports Festival arc - the most fun of all the arcs. I have rewatched the cavalry battle in the anime like a bazillion times. there used to be this show on Nickelodeon called Wild & Crazy Kids where kids teamed up for all these zany competitions (water balloons were usually involved), and I fucking loved that show, and parts of this arc kinda have that same kind of spirit. it’s just fun. and then to top it all off we have our Shouto character development, as well as Bakugou’s little character arc that he also has which is excellent. not to mention what is probably Ochako’s most badass moment to date. love it.

2. Kamino arc - guyyyys where do I even start? this arc is perfection. good VS evil. All Might taking a stand even when he’s got nothing left in the tank, because the world needs him and he won’t let them down. the sheer visceral terror of AFO’s introduction. my favorite character getting fucking kidnapped and being brave AF and his friends rallying to save him yesssss. and the reveal of All Might’s secret, which is arguably the most powerful scene in the series. I get chills every time. “my heart is still the heart of the symbol of peace.” if All Might had announced at that moment that he was starting a new religion I would have been like “yeah okay.” I would follow him to the ends of the earth. how can one man be that selfless and brave. anyways this arc is absolutely incredible and objectively one of the best in all of shounen.

1. Deku VS Kacchan Part 2 - nothing to see here, just two boys who’ve known each other since they were in diapers, who’ve done everything together and have always been together but have never actually understood each other until now. just the two of them finally opening up to each other, because the one who always tried to act so tough actually isn’t that tough, in truth, and in spite of everything, he trusts the other enough to let his guard down around him this one time. just two rivals, sorting out their shit and figuring out what it all really means. and their dad, helping to facilitate the whole thing because he knows that one day, somewhere down the road, this bond between them will mean absolutely everything. is this really even an arc?? it’s only like six chapters, and only one event actually takes place. but do I care?? yeah, no. Deku and Kacchan’s relationship is the series to me, so yeah. to me it counts as an arc. and not just any arc, but the best arc.

so there you have it! I hope I haven’t accidentally left something out lol. but this should hopefully be a pretty definitive list, at least for now. looking back at all of this really makes it sink in just how good of a story this is, though. damn.

[moonlightreal]

Winx Club season 8/1

In which the Winx are back and younger than ever.

Welcome to season 8!  I love this show, I love everything about it... including the parts I don't like, because I can snark at them.  So warning: there will be some snark when I see something dumb.

About the new art style:

Why I don't like it:  The girls have gotten a little more samey-samey with the loss of their individually shaped features, and Tecna's eyes shifted from turquoise to blue.  I know that's a tiny thing, a slight eye color change but it's one more step towards them all looking the same.  It feels like by the time we get to season 20 they'll be six identical fairies!  Also the girls now look twelve.  There’s been no mention so far of them de-aging so it's just the art style change, but... ok most of y'all wouldn't care but I'm writing a fanfic that parallels the show and now I have to decide whether to de-age my characters or what!

Why I like it: They're sooooo cute! They look like Moondreamers or Lady Lovelylocks or some 80s dolls!  I love it!

I have a theory about why the style change.  This is only a guess since I don't know animation, but is it possible they're using a program with sort of mannequins, and they're now using the same bodies for both Regal Academy and Winx?  To save money maybe, since now the animators will only need to learn one style?  Is that even the way computer animation programs work? Animators, help me out here!

And yes, Musa and Flora are now basically Caucasian looking.  This is not cool.  I have acknowledged it and written to Rainbow about it but since there’s nothing else I can do I’m going to enjoy my show in spite of it.  That’s my response to the color change; your response is something you’ll have to decide for yourself.

1 Night of Shooting Stars

We open at Alfea where some minor fairies are watching shooting stars.  Familiar minor fairies!  It's not just the Winx who have a new look; the whole class has been ported over.  I'm really happy about this!  I was sure they'd just do a whole new background cast and we'd lose more continuity, but here are Evie and Lori, those two dark skinned and indigo haired girls, and other familiar faces.

The Winx are up on a sort of bridge over the courtyard-- Alfea has had slight upgrades for the new season and it looks great.  And so do the girls!  They're so detailed, the layered outfits and all their accessories are so fun.  Their necklaces sway when they move, even, props to the animators.

Bloom is delighted by the shooting stars but Musa’s not feellin’ it, she was hoping for musical inspiration but it isn’t coming.  Flora, Tec and Aisha join them and it turns out Musa wants to write the new song for the concert tomorrow!  Tecna conjures her “astroscope” so they can watch the stars, and starts to explain something but Aisha shuts her down. Kiko pops up on the other end of the astroscope and scares Musa when she looks through.  

Out comes Stella, for a selfie!

In the Italian, Stella says “Selfie time!” in English.  Heh.

But Musas’s glum face spoils the selfie.  Stella says there should be no problem since, “You have ME to inspire you!”

Kind of not a great intro for the girls, but now we leave them and cut to Twinkle being chased by star-eaters.  Which are cool, as villain minions go.  They look like dark purple puffs or blobs, I’m getting a very Original My Little Pony vibe from them.  A whole swarm of them are chasing tiny Twinkle through the rings surrounding planet Magix.  They merge into a giant blob that roars as Twinkle flees towards the planet below.

Musa’s spidey sense tingles!

The star-eaters display their power of splitting into tadpoles and joining together again.

The Winx are concerned: this star is coming down awfully close!  Twinkle zooms above their heads and crashes in the woods.

The girls arrive in the scene we saw in the trailer and are immediately charmed by the sleeping Twinkle. Stella identifies her as a Lumen, “a creature of pure light that lives inside stars.”  They take their find back to Alfea to take care of her.

But evil is watching them!  Or at least a turban-wearing lackey of evil with a bunch of star-eaters around him is.  Obscura says, “Oh no!  That Lumen managed to reach the Winx!” so he knows who the Winx are.

In the Winx common room Twinkle is still asleep and the girls and Faragonda admire her cuteness.  I think she’s got some kind of charm ability!    Stella gives us some more information, “She’s from Lumenia, the star that lights Solaria.”  and Faragonda says Lumens never leave their stars except for serious reasons.

The next morning—daylight shots of Alfea, great cg—Twinkle wakes up, gets scared of Kiko, there’s some chaos and room destruction, Twinkle flies around screaming until she bangs into Stella.  Stella introduces the Winx, “We’re fairies and this is our school.” and asks why Twinkle came.  But Twinkle can’t remember.

Tecna scans Twinkle and detects “a memory lapse.”  The Winx offer to help her remember but Aisha thinks scaring her is the way to go!  So they try to scare Twinkle, who just laughs.  Short slapstick scene.

Then Bloom gets a text: the boys are coming!  Their ship lands in the courtyard to a rockin’ beat.  The girls stand with little hearts around them, Stella twirling her hair.

The boys look so weird in this art style.  I will try and probably fail at not mentioning this every time they appear.

And oh heavens, Brandon still has a deep post-puberty voice in his 12-year-old body.  I think this may be the same voice actor from last season.  Voice weirdness aside, he brought Stella a big pile of presents.  These two are the best couple.

Helia is showing Flora a picture he did of “a rose from the planet Iris, but its beauty is nothing compared to yours.”  Wasn’t Iris where Diaspro’s from?  Flora blushes and it’s cute.

Sky and Bloom kind of twirl each other around and laugh, which is sweet.

Timmy and Tecna are already up in the dorm working on a Lumen amnesia curing device, which explodes. Twinkle bounces and chirps, “Again!  Again again!”  Ok she is a little bit adorable.

They get the memory viewer going and its screen shows Twinkle’s memories of being chased.  She freaks out and flies into the air glowing brightly.  Then the memory viewer overloads.

Cut to the courtyard, the girls ponder what they saw while Twinkle looks glum.  Kiko tries to cheer her up. Stella says that Lumens are peaceful creatures with no enemies, so the girls don’t know what was chasing her.  Poor Twinkle is very down, and Stella prescribes music to cheer her up.

Over at Red Fountain we’re in either the ship or a locker room.  The boys are tired out, they’ve been on a mission to the Omega dimension before the Winx called!  Points to the writers for remembering the names of places!  Also points for how the boys are powering-down their suits, it’s a neat little detail that they do this.

The boys talk about how they wish they could’ve helped the Lumen, then do some reminiscing!  They had a mission on the planet Hypsos where they beat a horde of space mutants and destroyed an opal dragon??  And apparently neither of these was as scary as the landing!  Timmy, who was the pilot, droops.  Then he blames Helia for not being able to read a star chart.  It looks like they’re about to fight when…

A Mysterious Figure arrives!  Wearing a kind of ship-captainish coat and purple neck scarf.  Codatorta said he could come back.  The boys are pleased, more pleased than most of the fandom is!

The mysterious figure is not Venomiya, so there should be no sabotage at the Winx Band concert we go to next.  More great cg Alfea.  Is there an official map anywhere, of what rooms are what?  There are some weird outbuildings and stuff. I’m not even sure if the bridge is new or if it’s just that the girls didn’t hang out there in previous seasons.  And did the wings attach differently before?  I can’t tell if the school has changed shape or not!  I think it has...

And there’s a blast from the past, it’s Knut the ogre, Alfea’s handyman!  He’s back after many seasons, helping set up the lights for the concert with Kiko’s help.

And here’s Grizelda, and the new art style has not been kind to her!  She looks younger and has a more WoW art style look, and I don’t like it!  And whaaaaaat happened to her voice?  She does the ‘I’m watching you’ thing at Knut.  she’s not very nice.  I mean, she’s not supposed to be nice, she’s supposed to be a scary lady so that’s good.

The concert is being held at the top of the steps in front of the main door to the school.  All the minor fairies hang out on the steps or in the courtyard to watch.  It is so nice to see the same minor fairies as before.  They’re super excited to see the Winx in their—freaking adorable—concert outfits.  The girls are all in brightly colored fake fur and music note themes, with streaks in their hair.  Bloom dedicates their first song to ‘Our new friend from far away.’  and Twinkle giggles with delight.

And then… concert transformation! The girls’ PURSES do magical girl henshin routines and transform, Bloom’s into a microphone, Stella and Flora get guitars, Musa has a keytar and Tec gets a three-piece piano while Aisha’s got drums. Ok, I love this.  I know, it’s gotta be a gimic to sell toys, but sparkly henshin instruments, it’s wonderful!

The song’s all right, it’s Winx pop just like every song in Winx and I don’t think the voice actresses are in any way professional singers, but it’s fun.  Miss F, Grizelda and Palladium are in the audience.  Twinkle loves the music. Knut seems to be trying to pick up on the minor fairies, but Grizelda shuts him down.

Then the concert is rudely interrupted by a portal opening and delivering a bunch of star-eaters!  Twinkle sees them and remembers what happened to her and flies for help!

Stella observes the sun-eaters don’t look too scary, but then they all pile together into one big one.  Oh no!  The minor fairies, unable to fight since the artists haven’t designed transformations for them, back away in fear.

Faragonda and the teachers—Wizgiz appears too—direct the minor fairies to take cover inside.  The Winx transform.  Butterflix time!

Twinkle is impressed.

The girls fight but the giant eater can portal in and out and break apart whenever it wants.  Only Stella’s sun power seems to have any effect!  Then they get an idea: Twinkle lit up with the memory viewer, maybe she can help here!  Stella gives her some power and little Twinkle is just so happy!  She lights up like a sun and the big eater breaks apart into little eaters that all look despondent and flee back through their portal.

Since Twinkle has remembered everything, now she can tell her story!  The girls and Grizelda for some reason meet with the headmistress in her office.

Twinkle is the messenger of Lumenia, on a mission from Queen Doranna(?) to the “most powerful fairies in the magic dimension.”  The stars are in danger!  The eaters are eating their light!  I do like that there’s a reason the Winx are going to be called to save the world again, that Doranna specifically requested them.  

Then there’s… Faragonda tells them this is a delicate mission and to be cautious.  Stella breaks in with, “caution is our middle name!  well, more of a nickname.” Heh.

Then Bloom has an anime moment, she goes to the window and puts her hand up to her reflection, with a serious expression.  Not the kind of moment we usually get in Winx, and I really like it.  “Tomorrow we leave for Lumenia, Queen Doranna can help us understand what’s going on.  This is a mission for the Winx!”

[grimelords]

I realised I finished writing up my January playlist and then forgot to post it, so I’m doing it here and now at the tail end of February. It’s 3 hours of good music, complete from A$AP Ferg to ZZ Top. Please enjoy.

​Dream House - Deafheaven: I started the year off with extreme mental anguish at the realisation that Sunbather is five years old this year and that I am thusly one million years old and have wasted my youth. That aside, Dream House is still an incredible song. It does what the best songs do and speaks directly to the teenaged part of your brain that thinks nobody will ever understand you like this song does right now. It is an overwhelming experience, the whole album is, and very good for having an embarrassing amount of emotions while you're driving alone and it's very loud.

Hold My Liquor - Kanye West: When this song came out I remember someone said the best musical moment of 2013 was when you couldn't tell the difference between Chief Keef and Justin Vernon on this song and I'm inclined to agree.

Melody 4 - Tera Melos: I've talked about this album at length in these playlists and probably featured almost every song at this point but I'll just say, what I like so much about this song is how it moves so effortlessly between a very melodic almost pop-punk type chorus before disintegrating into stop start mathematics and back again before you even notice.

B Boy (feat Big Sean & A$AP Ferg) - Meek Mill: I don't know how the fuck he did it, but somehow Meek Mill got a bunch of rappers who are normally nothing amazing (Meek included) to operate at the absolute top of their game for whole verse each. Highlights especially are 'I got commas on commas on commas, and I ain't talkin about a run on sentence!' 'put my P up on her head like that bitch is reppin Philly, and I wheelie in the pussy like my n**** meek milly' and the immediate about turn of A$Ap Ferg saying 'You thinkin' Khloe don't know me, I'm in the car dashin' haters/I'm in the Kardashian, get it? I'm lyin', can't I pretend?/They say fake it 'til you make it, well let the fakin' begin!'

Shabba REMIX - A$AP Ferg, Shabba Ranks, Busta Rhymes, Migos: This song's a good example of how many different flows you can get to work over one beat, and how much it improves the song. Ferg is so fast and so varied, then Migos even it out with straight triplets for most of their verse before Busta kills it by just doing absolutely everything. Great job everyone.

Attak (feat. Danny Brown) - Rustie: I normally can't stand Danny Brown but he kills this song. I still have a lot of feelings about Rustie, who showed so much promise for being the weirdo that dance music needed before presumably watching HudMo make a million producing for Kanye and friends and deciding to remove every interesting element from his music to make it palatable for rappers. That is, at least, my theory. This song is great, but every other song on this album is an example of this approach not working and instead producing boring, half assed songs where nobody's at their full potential.

Ultra Thizz - Rustie: Compare it to this, the busiest song in the world. The way the melody of the bassline that sounds like it's about to swallow you whole contends with the synth melody AND the pitched up vocal melody for your attention, they all come it at once and trade barbs before being superseded by a fuzzy, inscrutable guitar solo which fades out and leaves us back at the start. What I love about this song is the absolute maximalism and hypercolour sounds, combined with the only simple melody being the big chord stabs that centre the piece combine into a total sensory experience. Not to mention the rhythms, where absolutely every part of it seems to be slightly stranger than you expect, constantly dropping one beat before or after you expect - your first clue is the snare build at the start suddenly splitting into triplets.

If I Were A Carpenter - Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash: My girlfriend showed me this song and it unlocked a third of the triangle in my brain where this song, Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell and The Engine Driver by The Decemberists make a sort of trinity of songs about having a job and thinking about Wife. They're all very very good too.

12 Bricks - OG Maco: Outside of the famous video, which is very good, this song is also incredible. Another in the pantheon of songs with extremely minimal instrumentation where the vocal performance is so good it doesn't need anything. The slight delay makes all the screaming and wooing toward the end just pile on top of each other in waves building the texture up until it finally levels out.

Requiem Para Um Amor - Toquinho: I really cannot get enough of the organ in this song. I don't think I've ever heard a classical guitar/electric organ duet before and now I'm hungry for more.

You Can Be A Robot, Too - Shintaro Sakamoto: This song appeared on my Discover Weekly playlist and I'm not really sure why but it's very good. I can't tell if it's actually a children's song or just playful like one but I appreciate it either way. When it started playing from the playlist the album cover was a cartoon of a kid surrounded by robots, but when I tried to add it to a playlist the art changed to a green picture of a skeleton playing a lap steel guitar with an explosion in the background, which felt very cursed to me.

Raver - Burial: This song has always stood out to me on Untrue because of how straightforward the beat is. Under anyone else's control this would be a normal song but instead it's this incredibly detailed, messy piece of work that feels like looking at a house song through a dirty window. I also have no proof at all to back this up but in my mind the xylophone line is sampled from Donkey Kong 64 or possibly Banjo Kazooie.

Cavalettas - The Mars Volta: I remember reading a bad review of this album when it came out that was mad because it pulled 'the most egregious studio trick in recent memory' by having the whole mix except for one guitar get sucked down into a wormhole multiple times, including the bass getting physically detuned until you can hear the strings slack before resuming as normal a second later. In my opinion it's incredibly funny and it sounds good so more bands should do it. Also the other day I saw the drummer Thomas Pridgen comment on Omar Rodriguez's instagram 'check ur dms bro'. Imagine being in a band with someone for a decade and not having their number, insane.

Flash Back - Rustie: Honestly I cannot get enough of this bassline. This song is another good example of what I was talking about with Rustie dumbing his melodies down after this album, the main line in this winds around and around itself in this loping confused rhythm and against the bass that's also syncopated it just ends up sounding like hypercolour, which is a feat for a song that's basically just those two melodies against each other for the bulk of it with some plastic choir stabs throughout.

Heaven - DJ Sammy: What an absolute perennial banger. Can you believe this AND Boys Of Summer were on the same album? Incredible stuff DJ Sammy. I've been meaning to make a playlist of all the 90s/2000s lame rave songs that are secretly very emotional and have definitely inspired absolute emotional turmoil in ravers the world over like this Better Off Alone and Heaven Is A Place On Earth, but for now just enjoy the Bryan Adams classic as reimagined by DJ Sammy.

Stalking To A Stranger (Planets Collide Remix) - The Avalanches: I owe this song a lot because it not only for me into Hunters And Collectors, who it turns out have far better and angrier songs than Holy Grail, but it also turned me onto Vertigo/Relight My Fire by Dan Hartman which is sampled at the start. When this song came out it was the first new Avalanches song in a decade or so and nobody knew what to make of it because suddenly Avalanches songs just have screaming men in them, which was very good.

Miracle - Kimbra: I think that very soon everyone is going to figure out that Kimbra has been the pop genius the world needs and she's been here all along.

Wayfaring Stranger (Burial Remix) - Jamie Woon: Jamie Woon got a raw deal in my opinion. He had a song remixed by Burial, and then Burial co-produced Night Air for him and he was the king of dark and mysterious British dubstep wave, but then James Blake and everyone else came along and sort of overshadowed him totally. Now that whole movement is sort of clouded because of how quickly 'dubstep' came to mean 'skrillex', and for some reason the only place this song is on Spotify is a compilation called The World's Heaviest Dubstep, Grime & Bass.

Chanbara - At The Drive-In: A lot of writing about At The Drive-In focuses on how they never really captured the ferocity of their live shows on record until Relationship Of Command but the absolutely big screams on this working against the salsa bongo rhythms is an amazing thing. I also kind of prefer the weedy half-clean guitar sounds on this and their first album especially to Relationship of Command's crunchier sound, it feels like it gives a lot more space to the weird noodling melodies that come and go.

All Medicated Geniuses - Pretty Girls Make Graves: The intro of this song absolutely blew my 15 year old math rock mind with how simply it transitions from the snare on the beat to the snare off the beat. It is endlessly fascinating to me because I am a dummy. Every part of this song is amazing to me, from the big swing band bassline behind the guitar that's sort of just screaming through the verses and absolutely on its own journey through the chorus to the drums for the reasons I already mentioned but also the way they keep everything straight and absolutely refuse to indulge the guitar's worst math impulses.

Dangerous - The xx: I really love the horns in this song, and the big air raid sirens toward the end. It is still shocking to me that The xx transitioning to making upbeat bangers worked out for them but I'm so glad that they did.

Running - Bully: I was listening to a podcast about water management policy and infrastructure called Water You Talking About because I am young and cool and for some reason they were using the chorus of this song where she goes 'I'LL ADMIT IT! I GET ANXIOUS TOO!' as their theme song in an episode which is I suppose appropriate but also really made me laugh.

Simultaneous Contrasts - Warehouse: The singer in this band has my new favourite voice, it's amazing. She sounds like she's eaten a belt sander or something. I love the way the guitar line follows her vocals up in the chorus and also just how extremely busy the whole band is around her. They remind me of some kind of alternate universe Life Without Buildings where she's pissed off instead of just beguiling.

Light Up The Night - The Protomen: There's no reason this band should be good. They wrote a rock opera based on the story of Megaman inspired by Queen and Bruce Springsteen and it actually turned out incredible somehow. Unfortunately since this album came out almost a decade ago all they've done is a couple of live albums and covers albums, so I may never get the resolution I crave on the story of Thomas Light and Joe and whoever.

Tonto - Battles: Here's what's so good about this song: it spends 2 and a half minutes winding up to a huge centrepiece that's over way too soon and then the next 4 minutes slowly slowly slowly winding down to absolute zero. It's like the opposite of how to write a good song but it's absolutely enthralling.

Wall Street - Battles: Around a minute into this, there's two snare hits where it sounds like it's part of a roll that got digitally muted that I am obsessed with. Every part of this song is incredible, but the drums throughout alternate between sounding like he's desperately trying to keep up and sounding like pure power and total command. I especially love the big brassy snare sound that comes up from underneath occasionally to pull the brakes. The performance of this song that Battles did for La Blogoteque is one of my favourite videos on youtube.

Every Single Line Means Something - Marnie Stern: For about a week this month I developed a quiet mania about John Stanier from Battles filling in on drums in the Late Night With Seth Myers Band (for some reason), and then I found out that Marnie Stern is apparently in that band as well and it really threw me for a loop. I don't really know why this was such an incredible thing or why I focused on it so much, maybe something I need to figure out, but it reminded me of this great song so that's a positive. This is some of my favourite work Zach Hill has ever done because he's being forced to play pretty much a normal backbeat for a lot of this song and it feels like he's been cursed by a witch. The amount of power he's putting out for such a straightforward idea is incredible. Of course because it's Zach Hill he's also doing the absolute most in every other part of the song. I haven't even mentioned how much I love Marnie on her own song! Anyway, listen to this whole album.

Hacker - Death Grips: I never got into the hype around Death Grips when they were the thing, and haven't really investigated their discography past this album, but this song is an absolute masterpiece and probably everything you ever need to know about them. Lyrically between this and 'I've Seen Footage' there's a pretty neat summation of their worldview, paranoid because your existence is inextricably linked to the internet and everything that entails, 'having conversations with your car alarm'. 'make your water break at the apple store,'

Pass The Word (Love's The Word) - The Mad Lads: I was looking up where the sample's from in Hilltop Hoods' Chase That Feeling and it turns out it's this song. Try to listen to this whole intro. He's trying to give a sermon but his dumbshit friends simply will not shut the fuck up for fully three whole minutes. Other than the intro the song is very, very good.

Monkey Time '69 - The Mad Lads: I also found this other song by the Mad Lads called 'Monkey Time '69', which to me is the definition of comedy.

She's Got Guns - The Go! Team: New Go Team album! Unfortunately nothing on it sort of lived up to the promise of the first two singles Mayday and Semicircle song, but this song is still a hit. The way this is mixed is so good, the brass behind the massive bass and spacious drums and the vocals sort of backgrounded within it all, very appealing.

Coast To Coast - Tune-Yards:It feels weird that a Tune-Yards song can be this smooth. A sort of apocalyptic, politics is ruined, new york is sinking, funky smooth jam.

Cattle And The Creeping Things - The Hold Steady: I've never listened to much of The Hold Steady outside of this album because I don't feel like I really need to, it's got everything I'd ever need. Sorry to always to talk about drums but the amount of reverb on them in this song makes them sound absolutely huge and I really love it, especially in the last verse they just become massive. Also I went through a long period of being obsessed with the lyrics of this song, it's a good distillation of this whole album's christian cult/drugs in middle america story and it is completely my shit.

Losing All Sense - Grizzly Bear: There's something about Painted Ruins that's impenetrable to me. I keep listening to it and only absorbing about one song at a time, totally loving that song and then ignoring the rest of the album. Now it's Losing All Sense.

Blue Cheese - Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile: This song is like Kurt Vile in his purest form, just sort of strumming and talking about whatever the fuck. The best part of this song is when they go 'woo hoo!!!' then he whistles a little bit and then says 'here come the lone ranger!' in an elvis voice and plays a solo that sounds like he's tuning his guitar. Also right at the end you can hear someone's phone message tone going off.

Catch Me If You Can Theme - John Williams: John Williams didn't have to go as hard as he did with the Catch Me If You Can theme. I have this in my head all the time. I love the rapid shifts in this recording, because I guess it's functioning as the overture so he's just cycling through every different variation he's got in his aresenal.

I've Seen Footage - Death Grips: It's good that Death Grips' most popular song is about how the internet melts your brain There's a good quote from Zach Hill about where the title came from: 'The line “I’ve Seen Footage” was from a conversation I had with this street-person dude in Sacramento named Snake Eyes. A friend of ours recorded him on the porch in a conversation– he didn’t know he was being recorded. He was all fucked up on drugs and shit, just rattling off all this crazy information. He was talking about structures on the moon. I mean, I talk about those things, too. So we were talking about moon structures, and Snake Eyes says, “I’ve seen footage! I’ve seen footage of it!” And I was like, “That’s good!”

The Bucket - Kings Of Leon:It seems impossible that Kings Of Leon were a really good band at one point but here's the proof.

Standing Next To Me - The Last Shadow Puppets: I'm a truther for Muse ripping off Knights Of Cydonia from The Age Of The Understatement by The Last Shadow Puppets but that's a post for another time. This is a perfect song in my opinion. The absolute pace of it, the minimal drums that are just sort of accenting the strumming, the huge sweeping strings elevating the whole thing, the fact that it's over in just over two minutes. Incredible.

Jesus Just Left Chicago (live) - ZZ Top: Nobody believes me when I tell them but ZZ Top are very good. I have a fantasy about this song that ZZ Top were ringleaders of a sort of revival blues cult and this song is gospel to them. Jesus did really leave Chicago and he's heading towards California and we will be here waiting for him. You may not see him, but he sees you and he loves you. This and the La Grange recording are absolutely furious for live recordings, I love how much crowd noise there is in it throughout, they are truly fucking loving it.

La Grange (live) - ZZ Top: Especially here, my god they love it. La Grange is a good song because it's just a good riff and one verse of nonsense lyrics that are just an excuse to go the fuck off for the remainder. The huge drum fill and the 'have mercy everybody!!' is massive, the solos are ferocious, and somehow this song that feels like it could jam out for 15 minutes is reined in and tightly structured and has somewhat abrupt end.

Barracuda - Heart: Hey remember Guitar Hero? Cause I had ptsd flashbacks when this song came on during I, Tonya.

Bloodmeat - Protest The Hero: I don't know how exactly Protest The Hero pivoted from a concept album about a goddess(?) being executed(?) and bringing about a new genderless utopian age(?) to their second album opening with this very bicep emoji classic metal song about the mongol hordes slaughtering all who oppose them, but good for them I suppose.

Born On A Day The Sun Didn't Rise - Black Moth Super Rainbow: The drums in this song have no place being that huge. Black Moth Super Rainbow are good and I can't believe I hadn't listened to them in years until I woke up with this song in my head one morning, like an omen.

Been Drinkin' Water Out Of A Hollow Log - Mississippi Fred McDowell: Literalyl every Mississippi Fred McDowell song sounds exactly the same which is good because if it works why change it. In my understanding this song seems to be about a man dying of hunger and thirst on purpose to meet god, which is very good to me.

Listen here.

[sinceileftyoublog]

Landlady Interview: Landlady’s Fourth, Best Album

Photo by Adam Schatz

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Adam Schatz loves music. It seems like a basic statement to make about a musician, especially one who has led his most successful band for 10 years and played on a wide variety of records for much longer. But on Landlady’s upcoming self-titled, self-released record, out next Friday, their fourth and first in four years, Schatz pays tribute to all the songs and albums and bands he’s loved over the years, in the car and on the radio, as a consumer and appreciator of art, even if they didn’t directly inspire his music. Better yet, he doesn’t directly refer to any titles specifically in his lyrics or instrumentation, save for an offhand mention of a beloved Beach Boys song. Instead, Landlady is a testament to being in a band, anchored by the skill of Schatz and the three other prolific players in the band, drummer Ian Chang (Son Lux), guitarist Will Graefe (Okkervil River), and bassist Ryan Dugre (Eleanor Friedberger). For four people who live their lives surrounded by other musicians, even in non-music contexts, the creativity clearly wears off.

The basis for Landlady was when the current incarnation of the band, the first time they were a four-piece, were touring in Europe in 2019, and Schatz found a period of five days where they could hammer out songs by day and, in the true spirit of Landlady, listen to records at night. Fast-forward to a week long recording session in upstate New York, and Schatz had what he needed to finish off the record, every decision made with the intent of capturing a live band. The harmony is remarkable; voice, piano, and guitar fill the contours of “The Meteor”. Schatz’s warbling singing emulates the nervous tremolo guitars of “Take The Hint”. The instrumental falls out in the perfect moment in the chorus of pop ditty “Rule of Thumb”. And vibraphone-laden closer “Bulldozer” eventually morphs into a time-signature-complex fast-paced boogie. If there was a lot of post-production on Landlady, you wouldn’t know it. It exudes the type of second-nature looseness you’d expect from a live recording session from a band that oozes musical knowledge, both theoretical and popular.

The COVID-19 pandemic and absence of touring has given Schatz to really reflect on what it means to be a professional musician, and in conjunction with the release of Landlady, he’s been writing various informative, humorous and creative pieces in a variety of publications about his interactions with the biz. For one, his monthly income right now is in the form of his Patreon, where for a couple bucks he’s offered deeper insight into Landlady songs, including those so far released on the upcoming record. He’s also published a satirical Talkhouse piece on how to write your own artist bio and wrote a piece about learning to play a complex Randy Newman song on piano over the course of lockdown. (Newman approved.) Most notably, in an essay associated with the album, Schatz non-linearly recalls almost his entire life as a music fan and touring musician, reflecting on life on the road and the deaths of two dear friends, The Teenage Prayers’ Terrence Adams and Jessi Zazu of Those Darlins. (At one point in the essay, Landlady, driving straight from Seattle to San Francisco in the rain, spun out on the road perfectly synced with the climax of Harvey Danger’s “Flagpole Sitta”; death almost became them.) And Schatz is also donating 5 dollars of every digital sale of Landlady to The Okra Project, an organization “that seeks to address the global crisis faced by Black Trans people.” In essence, Schatz treats his relationship with his fans, the music listening public, his band, and the world at large as a symbiotic one, thriving on a collaboration of not just financial morality but mutual empathy.

I spoke with Schatz over the phone from his new home in East Dover, Vermont last month about Landlady, the associated essay, playing on others’ records, and The Okra Project. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: What do you think is unique about this record as compared to anything else you’ve released in the past?

Adam Schatz: It’s hard to say. Each one feels better to me when we’re done with it. Each feels tighter than the last one. This one was a four-piece for the first time. We used to have two drummers, but one of them moved to the West Coast, and with the economy of touring, it was worth seeing how it felt [with four members when touring the last album]. It ended up being the version of the band that’s toured most consistently. So this is a document of a band getting to that place where we can read each other’s minds. A lot of the arrangements came together in the studio as opposed to in rehearsals beforehand. The older you get, the more you lose that luxury of everyone being around.

SILY: Was there anything new or specific that informed the lyric-writing process?

AS: You know...everything. Everything’s new. Everything’s specific. How’s that for a non-specific answer? [laughs]

I take pretty long breaks between doing this stuff. I’m sort of always recording little voice memos and nuggets of things that will eventually become songs. It always feels like a couple of years between concentrated songwriting sessions. On a personal level, it feels like, “Okay, you’ve got to get your shit together because you’re bringing this stuff to other people.” It’s funny, because I’m sort of gearing up for that again now. This took longer to come out than I wanted it to, and what else am I gonna do right now than get ready to make the next one if I can? There’s always a separate lyrical dump of a million thoughts and ideas I write down whenever I think of them, but 99% of those things never make them beyond that folder. It’s circumstance: what you think through, what you’re listening to at the time, what you allow yourself to be able to say, perspectives you feel comfortable portraying. It’s never conscious. All this stuff, I’m only able to think about when I go back and reexamine my work, which luckily isn’t a drag  for me. I like the things I make, so it’s fun. I don’t love the sound of my voice, and I think most people don’t, but it’s an interesting thing. For my Patreon, I’ve been doing an in-depth song breakdown every month, and I’ve been doing it for songs on this record. It’s been lined up with every single that’s come out. I’ll put out the single and then do a couple pages of writing. I’ll sort of just bop around between the circumstances of writing, recording, and producing the songs, and then I’ve started including little stems from the record sessions, like isolated tracks and things you don’t necessarily hear when it’s all piled on to each other.

SILY: There seem to be a lot of lyrics about fire and heat. Is that something you noticed or intended?

AS: No, I didn’t. There’s "The Meteor”’s lyrics, but that song is about a meteor--sort of--as far as I know. That’s all real. That thing’s burning up. It’s an element. I’m watching snow melt right now. I don’t have the answer you’re looking for. I wish I did--that would have been great.

SILY: Why did you choose to release “Supernova” as the first single? And can you tell me about the video?

AS: I’m pretty bad at knowing which songs to put out. If more than one person tells me one is a good idea, I usually just go with it. It was also definitely the first song we got together for the record. It’s the oldest one on the album and has been kicking around for a while. It feels the most anchored where we’d even played it live. Most of this record, we haven’t yet. All other albums, we road-tested the material before tracking it. Probably a few people on my side of things suggested it would be a good one to put out there first. Usually, when I think about what to release as a single, I think about what’s gonna be good in the streaming world and all that crap. I sort of always have to check myself and see which songs have choruses, because it’s usually half or less than half depending on how well-behaved I am. I try to make a point to have everything I write be hooky in one way or another. It’s what I drift towards, so I’m never worried about that. But a chorus is a time-tested way to get someone to recognize a song. “Supernova” checked all those boxes: not too fast, not too slow, showcases the production range on the record. It felt like the best candidate.

SILY: On “Supernova”, you sing, “Why did my friend have to die?” Are you talking about either of the friends you write about in the essay?

AS: I am talking about either of the friends on the essay.

SILY: Did the thought process for releasing “Supernova” also apply to singling out “The Meteor”, “AM Radio”, and “Sunshine”?

AS: You’re trying to get people excited about what’s coming next. On the record, there are some songs that are quiet, some that are short, which I loved putting in there as connective tissue as things that work on their own but don’t make sense as singles, and others are a little long for being singles. It also changes every time we put out a record, what’s customary. Around the time of our first record, it was only 1 or 2 songs and then drop the record. People now put out, like, 5. It doesn’t matter. I try to not lament too hard about the state of things, because you can only help what you can help, and whatever’s happening with streaming, those are facts, and I can say what’s right or wrong about it, and I will, but I’m going to try to build a microeconomy of people who are going to give a shit about the record and buy it and remember that we’re human beings and this is a human exchange. At this point, for this record, it’s like, “Let’s put out a bunch of things,” and it’s nice to have a new song out for Bandcamp Fridays.

SILY: "Sunshine” is a slow-burning change of pace.

AS: It’s sort of the opposite [of the others]. That one, we’ve played live a bunch and I’ve been doing in my solo shows a lot. A lot of Landlady songs don’t feel right doing solo because the band arrangement is too important or they’re not conducive to what I love about playing solo, which is being able to improvise and change things pretty dramatically. “Sunshine” is such a good one for both. It’s the same chords over and over and over again. It’s either one verse or four verses, depending on what you call it, and they happen twice. It’s open-ended. We drew a contour of what we wanted to do in the studio. When we perform that song, the choices people make are different. It feels like a step in a new direction to us and for me as a songwriter. It’s near and dear to me and felt like a good one to put out there.

SILY: Is there an overall mood you’d describe the record as having?

AS: Is there one that you would?

SILY: Uneasy.

AS: Sure. That’s okay, I guess.

SILY: It’s definitely a good thing. Like on “Take The Hint”, any time there’s a tremolo guitar effect, and the relationship between the music, lyrics, and arrangement in general.

AS: It’s why we’re not on many playlists and played in many coffee shops. None of it’s really conscious other than me wanting to not be bored and make music I want to listen to and sound exciting. A byproduct of that is our records are active listening. When our fans find it and listen to it, it’s a great avenue for discovery. It’s not music to drink coffee to, though you can once you know the record. I was at a coffee shop one time with some friends and they were playing a Dirty Projectors record, and I was like, “This is the most distracting fucking thing.” That music is not built to be cruising above your head. It’s hit you in the face. 

I try to approach the production and arrangements with a bit more patience than we normally do, roping in our frenetic energy. I’m never worried about taming us. It’s never gonna go too far; if we try to be focused, solid, and patient whenever it feels right, it makes the crazier moments mean more, I think. A lot of really nice moments of that on the record.

SILY: This album’s very much inspired by all the formative music in your life you’ve listened to in cars, and on “Molly Pitcher”, you mention “God Only Knows” a couple times, which a lot of folks consider one of the greatest songs ever written. What’s your relationship to that song or Pet Sounds or The Beach Boys in general?

AS: Pretty late in life discovery of that stuff. Sort of a certain category of band where you hear one version of them, and the right person tells you, “No, they’re actually cool,” and you listen again and it reshapes everything you know. It happens with The Beach Boys. It happens with The Beatles for sure. It happens with The Kinks. I don’t think it happens with The Rolling Stones. I can appreciate them more and more also when I listen to them, but I’m never surprised by it. I always think it’s so weird they’re compared to The Beatles as a face-off situation. They’re such different beasts.

“God Only Knows”, I think in that song I picked because it was a good lyric for our song. [laughs] But the sentiment is nailed there. I want to paint this picture of us listening to a song loud in the car. That’s gonna do that, but it’s helpful from me from a wordplay perspective to pick a song with a title that could also mean something else.

I think “Molly Pitcher” had been written before we started doing this in the van to kill time but also find something pseudo engaging on social media without being totally soul sucking. Around 2017, we were doing these harmonies in the car, and one of the last ones at the end of the first tour we were pulling back into Brooklyn, under the BQE, which is always a really bad reentry when you live in New York. You’ve been on the road where things are hard but almost every other city is easier to reenter. You always hit traffic on the bridge, and you get off and there’s some horrible sound from a truck on the highway. It was dark at night, and we were singing that harmony, and it was a special moment. It makes the whole thing kind of double meta, where it’s a testament to my penchant for trying to hit on universal ideas in a way that doesn’t feel vague or general but, “This means something to me, I bet it means something to you too.” Then it can loop back around on my own life again and again. Driving in cars with friends growing up, and that’s still happening, and that’s kind of what the essay’s about, too.

SILY: There are some lines on “Nowhere to Hide” that make me think you’re talking about touring, where you sing about how your food’s gone bad and “give me a home here and there.” Were you feeling that: “Where do I live?”

AS: No, I forget. Some of that song’s about my grandfather who lived in Maine. Some of it’s about other stuff that I don’t know anymore. So, to that degree, sure, you could be right. That song isn’t really about tour. None of them are, really. “Molly Pitcher” is named after the Molly Pitcher Service Area in New Jersey, and “Bulldozer” sort of is about touring.

SILY: Do you think of some of the shorter instrumental tracks on here like “Western Divide” as interludes, or do they stand alone as full songs?

AS: I think they’re full songs that stand alone. That was sort of a fun challenge in putting them together. I knew I liked the idea of shorter songs living between longer songs, and in some ways, they function the way an interlude would function, but I wanted to have more meat on those bones. There were two more songs that up until pretty late in the process I was planning on finding a way to put in as that type of song. One of them we started playing live, and the loud band version is so good. But I was working too hard to make it fit where it wasn’t the best life it could live. It should just be on the next record as a better recorded version. The other one wasn’t feeling good enough on its own. It was feeling interludey. I had to tell myself, “You haven’t finished writing this song yet. There’s probably more coming after this ends. You’re psyched on the idea of doing cool, weird interludes, but it’s not good on its own.” So we cut it. “Western Divide” and “Take the Hint” are the ones that are really short. “Lights Out” is the in-between. It doesn’t really have traditional song form, but it’s longer. I love how that turns out, too. Short songs are something I tried on the first Landlady record, and it’s something I always loved about the Pixies, and the songs I had been writing since I was a kid were always too long.

SILY: How did you approach the order of the tracks in general on this album?

AS: I don’t know. The last two records we did with Hometapes, who are not a label anymore but dear friends, they sequenced. They put an order together, sent it to me, and I maybe had one question, but not much. It was cool to work with people whose input you might follow blindly. With this one, suddenly, it was me in charge of all of it, so I fooled around until I found an order that felt good. Some songs went where they had to go, like “The Meteor” had to go first. Ryan [Dugre], our bass player, even said that. Hearing our drum groove, it had to be the opener.

SILY: Was your decision to self-release this because Hometapes is no longer a label?

AS: By the time the last record came out, they knew it was gonna be the last record they put out, so we called it a co-release between Hometapes and Landladyland. This one we did a fair amount of trying to get someone else to want to put it out. When after a certain point it didn’t happen, I just wanted to put it out. I didn’t know the date until the election happened. After that, I was like, “I think I feel comfortable putting music out.”

SILY: Would have been a bleak alternative.

AS: It’s all bleak, but it’s a strange question. You ask yourself, “When’s a good time to put something out?” And your body’s telling you, “Never! It’s a good time to run a lumber mill and volunteer and learn things about yourself.” But building a microeconomy around what you’re doing and testing out the Bandcamp vinyl thing which was such a success but felt risky. You never know how many people actually care and how to make the thing work. I’m still very much in debt after this record, but we’ll see what happens!

SILY: Why did you decide to self-title this record?

AS: I didn’t have a better idea. I tried. Usually, I do it after a song name, and none of them felt right, and the ones that would have been right, I checked and they were other albums by other people with those titles. I thought “Tooth and Nail” would have been a good album title, but if there’s too many with the same name, it feels silly. For a while, I wanted to call it “Landlady’s Fourth Best Album.” I like it. It worked well for the album art. Everything fit the idea of what came after in a very spontaneous and accidental way. It was the benefit of deciding to do it myself last year and letting things take the time they took. I hired Case Jernigan to do the “Supernova” video last March or April, and he turned it in and we saw what it was and the band artwork at the end of it, which felt like a pretty ridiculous and compelling album cover. Also the band identity, making it clear this was a band record and performance. It was 6 days capturing this in the studio, and I spent many months toying with it on my own, but every choice I make is in service of communicating the energy of people in a room playing together.

SILY: So you don’t think this is your fourth best album? You actually think it’s your best?

AS: Yes, you misheard me. It’s “Landlady’s Fourth, comma, Best Album.”

SILY: In between this and your last Landlady record, you played on a lot of records, like Adia Victoria’s two records and last year’s This Is The Kit record. Did participating in those and others shape making this record?

AS: In the same way that everything shapes everything, where I’m a product of my experiences and am trying to always improve and get better and love working with people and producing. There are so many versions of that for me. It all ends up. I can’t point to any one thing and say, “This led to this.” I play on the Adia record, I’m up there for two hours, play a bunch of stuff, and it ends up on the record or it doesn’t. But there’s plenty of history with me and Adia who have played together and toured together and made music together. It’s funny, the documented recording is a small percentage a lot of the time of your relationship with someone and how everything connects. 

This Is The Kit had done a U.S. tour in 2018 and were in New York and needed a sax player for a show, so I got called because we had some mutual friends, and we hit it off right away. A year later, they were doing another U.S. tour, and I offered to open solo and play in the band. It’s not something I ask to do that often, because it’s an incredible hassle to play in someone else’s band. There are plenty of fun moments, but you’re on tour. But they’re really incredible people, and Kate [Stables] and I became really close really fast. So it felt great to work on the new stuff with them. The drag was that we were scheduled to do it all in person last April, but then I had to record by myself. They tracked the band and I laid down a bunch of ideas for every song. The producer, Josh Kaufman, I know really well, and I knew to play ideas I thought they would enjoy and to bring my energy into their universe, which is what I think about when someone brings me in or I bully my way into a project. I think I have something to offer, with the sounds I have access to and the perspective I bring to the music that’s my own. That’s a joy for me to put into other people’s world. Landlady is my world with my people, and we don’t have to tiptoe. It’s the ultimate freedom to go for whatever we want to go for, and we see what comes out.

SILY: Why are you donating money to The Okra Project for this record?

AS: We need to find a better way for this thing to make sense. This thing meaning being a person on earth and finding what other people have done wrong. I want it to be built into the economy of the project. The price is gonna go up. It’s 20 dollars for digital, which is traditionally high, but I’m gonna donate 5 of those dollars every time to The Okra Project, and that’s an ongoing thing. It’s an organization I believe in, working with trans people of color. It’s such a bare minimum, but if it’s something everybody can work into their work, it’s a better support network.

SILY: Are you doing any live streams or socially distant shows?

AS: No. It’s such a hassle to think about. The simplest answer is we can’t afford it. You think about anyone you’ve seen that looks good, and you’re basically making a live record that exists only once. The people who did that, and I did one with Sylvan Esso last year that was totally wonderful, and the fans got it, and they had the means to produce it, but I don’t have the means to produce it on my end. If I’m getting together with my band somehow, I’d rather just be eating snacks because it’s been so long. The idea that the next time we see each other we have to dive into production mode for something that’s not going to be as good. I’d rather ask people to have patience, and when they can see us live, they’ll see us live.

SILY: Are you working on anything else at the moment?

AS: I’m slowly kicking around new songs. I’ve been going slow on those but want to step back on that gas pedal to see what comes out. I’m working on my third sample pack for Splice of loops and sound design. The first one was loops and synthy stuff, the second, bass clarinet, this one, lap steel guitar. It’s been nice to have something to work on steadily. It’s good. It’s jobby. I’m working on a Landladyland podcast, and another comedy fictional podcast.

SILY: Anything notable you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately?

AS: Since moving, I haven’t had internet, so I haven’t been streaming at all. I’d been away from my record collection for the past year, so it’s been amazing to listen to my records again. That’s been the best. Yesterday, I was listening to this Keith Jarrett live record that blew my mind. I hadn’t heard it quite that way before. There’s also a radio station in Northampton that our radio picks up, and they have this show called Funky Fridays that has been consistently awesome. One night was all James Brown features. The other was all New Orleans, like deep Meters and Allen Toussaint, which forced me to grab all those records from my collection and listen to those. I’m trying to read The Brothers Karamazov and a Marx Brothers biography at the same time. We’ve been watching The Larry Sanders Show. I have them all on DVD. The finale’s tonight, I think. It’s gonna be very sad.

[1dreality]

It must have been well over a year ago now, when Liam Payne realised he had absolutely nothing interesting to say. The singer, known to most as ‘Liam from One Direction’ until the group’s indefinite hiatus in January 2016, had returned to the studio, settled into the idea of being a solo artist for the rest of his days, and promptly drawn a blank. He was, he says, just too darned happy to think of anything.

Everything in his life had fallen into place. He’d found love, moving in with Cheryl (formerly Cole), a fellow junior royal of the Top 40. Their first child, a son named Bear, was well on the way. He had signed a huge record deal with Capitol. He felt fitter and healthier than he had in years. And, yes, there’s no denying it: he was pretty pleased that he no longer had to be in the biggest boyband in the world.

‘I had a bit of a problem formulating what was going on in my brain into the music at first,’ he says, ‘because I was so content with everything in my personal life. It’s easy to spill your guts out on a ballad. But I was thinking, “Oh God, I’m really happy – what am I going to write about?!”’

More than 12 months on, the answer to that question still isn’t entirely clear. Payne’s debut album, as yet untitled, won’t be released until early 2018. There have been two singles, though, with a third, the unsubtly titled Bedroom Floor, arriving next month.

Of those we’ve heard, the first, Strip That Down, a R&B-inflected club hit released in May and co-written with Ed Sheeran, marked a departure from One Direction’s stadium pop-rock. It was also chock-full of hoary by-the-way-I’m-an-adult-now signposts: there are references to nightclubs, drinking rum and coke, driving Ferraris and having girls ‘grind’ on him. And mixed in with all that were lyrics that caused a minor stir among his acolytes: ‘You know I used to be in 1D, now I’m out, free / people want me for one thing, that’s not me’. Payne, it seems, is keen to reintroduce himself.

‘When I left the band, I felt a bit stranded,’ he says, when we meet in an enormous boardroom at his management’s offices. ‘It took time, but I know as an artist I am starting fresh now.’ He slaps the table with melodrama. ‘This is Moment One. It’s the start line.’

Liam Payne is 24 years old. He is athletically built, as anyone who has seen his shirtless Instagram posts will know, and kind of everyday handsome, in a Love Island, former-youth-footballer way. Both his arms and hands are almost entirely upholstered in tattoos, highlights of which include some thick black arrows on one forearm that look like road markings; the number ‘4’, in reference to One Direction’s 2014 album of the same name, on his ring finger; and, on his left arm, a scale depiction of Cheryl’s eye, that appears to follow you around the room as he gesticulates. ‘It’s so my missus can always keep an eye on me,’ he likes to say about that one.

He is impossibly nice. Before we meet, he plods through the office, saying hello to everybody in the building individually, and in most cases remembering something about them: that they beat him at Fifa last time he dropped by, so they must have a rematch before he leaves (‘I’ll whoop ya with West Brom!’), or they’ve surely had a haircut, haven’t they? (‘It looks really great anyway, man!’). It is the manner of somebody both impeccably raised and intensely keen for people to like him, and it appears genuine and successful.

To an extent, Payne says, the five members of One Direction – or four, after Zayn Malik left the band in 2015 – ended up playing characters over the six years they were together. Whereas the Beatles (arguably the only other group with a comparable scale and speed of world domination), grew increasingly cantankerous towards the end of the 1960s, One Direction stuck resolutely to the caricatures that fans and management assigned them right to the end.

Malik was brooding and mercurial, Harry Styles was a cool, flamboyant ladies’ man, Niall Horan was charming and laid-back, and Louis Tomlinson, who has since admitted to feeling a little redundant, was fun and energetic. And Payne? Well, Payne was The Responsible One.

‘I’ve always been a bit of an older soul,’ he says, mulling over his place. ‘It’s funny: there’s a thing on the net where the fans put what they think are our mental ages. All the boys were around their real ones, but then they put me at about 37.’

Payne admits to feeling a little daunted in 2010, when Simon Cowell thrust the band together on X Factor after they’d auditioned as solo artists. Keeping up with the other personalities in the gang was exhausting, so his coping mechanism was to attempt to rein them in as best he could, and work with management in doing so. Like the popular schoolboy teachers identify as mature enough to be a trusted emissary for his recalcitrant friends, Payne carved himself a valuable niche.

‘I was put with a group of rowdy teenagers, and when I was a teenager, I had mates, but I was always with my dad. I’d go out to the pub and chat with him. So when I was stuck with these boys I was thinking, “F— me, I don’t know how to do it.”

‘When something was going wrong, I’d get a phone call. If there was an apology needed, it was me. I was the spokesperson for the band, as it were, with the press and the label.’

Along with Tomlinson, Payne shares comfortably the most writing credits of the band on One Direction songs. Over their five albums, dozens of songwriting collaborators contributed to the group’s success, but it seems nobody worked harder than the two least-heralded members. Neither was the showiest or best singer; but they kept things ticking over.

One Direction’s hordes of fans around the world noticed the assumed roles, and nicknamed Payne ‘Daddy Directioner’. He lived up to it with them, too. In 2013, on tour in Australia, Payne tweeted a message to warn girls waiting outside the band’s hotel of snakes living in the surrounding fields. ‘It’s just not worth it someone’s gunna get hurt [sic],’ he pleaded.

Two years later, he gave an interview lamenting the fact he and the other boys were being sent sexually explicit pictures of themselves drawn by underage admirers. While the rest of the band seemed to find that funny, Payne called it ‘the sad and sorry side of what we’ve done.’ Yeah, all right, Dad.

Becoming a real-life father has at least given the nickname some purchase. Rumours swirled at the end of 2015 that he had started dating Cheryl – formerly Fernandez-Versini and Cole, née Tweedy – after her second marriage ended in divorce. By the next summer, she was pregnant with the second One Direction baby (Tomlinson, the eldest of the bunch, had one first).

The couple live in a mansion near Woking, Surrey, and aren’t married, but he considers them ‘basically at that stage’. Bear, with whom Payne is besotted, was born in March, and named for the growling noises he was making during his first sleeps. So far, no photographs have been released, but he instantly shows me one on his phone. And here, I can exclusively reveal that the heir Bear is – as you’d expect of a baby with that name, born of two professionally good-looking parents – very cute.

‘We’ve only shown him in glimpses,’ Payne says, explaining their decision to shield him. ‘We don’t want him to have the pressure that me and Cheryl have, as household names. We want him to enjoy himself first and then figure it out.’

Born and raised in Wolverhampton, Payne has an unexpectedly thick Midlands accent that gets thicker the longer he talks – which is a lot. His preferred conversational feature is the anecdote, resulting in a version of the phrase, ‘I remember, there was this one time…’ prefixing the majority of his utterances, which are in turn regularly punctuated with singular handclaps of self-incredulity. It can be mildly alarming, like interviewing a young, heavily-tattooed Ronnie Corbett, but I suppose it speaks to the amount of life experience he has already accrued.

Growing up, Payne’s father, Geoff, worked as a fitter, while his mother, Karen, was a nursery nurse. Money was tight and the house small, but he remembers it as a happy one.

‘My place was on the floor with the dog, there was no space on the sofa. It was great, though we didn’t have much. Dad was in debt, but they did the best they could. It makes you dream a bit, you know?’

As a child, he had two routes to possible stardom, both of which Geoff pushed hard for. One was singing, the other was long-distance running. For a time in his teens, Payne was one of the fastest 1500m runners in the country, getting up to train before school and seconds from qualifying for the London 2012 squad. It was before that, as a 14-year-old in 2008, that he first applied for X Factor.

Auditioning with Fly Me To The Moon, since it was one of the few songs he could manage while his voice was breaking, that year he got as far as the ‘judge’s houses’, before Simon Cowell told him to come back in two years and try again. He became a mini-celebrity back home in that between-period, and carried on performing around town. The adulation was short-lived, though.

Once, performing a Justin Timberlake cover at an under-18s gig in Oceana Wolverhampton, somebody lobbed a coin at his face and managed to draw blood. He laughs about it now. These days – admittedly a largely cashless society – it’s only bras and knickers they fling.

‘I had become less and less famous. One time, I was in McDonald’s with a girlfriend and someone shouted ‘X Factor reject!’ at me. The whole restaurant turned. It was like coming out of fame. So I knew what it was like at 15, and it helped me.’

Following Cowell’s advice, he returned to X Factor in 2010 and found himself shoved into One Direction with the four other boys, eventually finishing the competition in third place, but with easily the brightest future. Within weeks, he had moved out of his Wolverhampton bedroom and into a penthouse apartment in Canary Wharf.

And six years later, One Direction had sold more than 20 million records, become the first band in history to have their first four albums go to number one in the US, touring the world numerous times, and earned a preposterous amount of money in the process. Payne is now estimated to be worth £40 million. He hasn’t been back to Wolverhampton in a long time, but he paid off his father’s debts years ago, and bought his parents a new house in addition to funding the renovation of their family home. He refers to his time spent in One Direction as ‘like uni’.

When they were in the thick of things, all the boys used to obey Cowell’s omertà – relentless enthusiasm at all times, please – and never discussed any negative aspects of their experience. Now safely out the other side, Payne is frank on matters of burnout and claustrophobia.

‘Cabin fever. It sent me a bit AWOL at one point, if I’m honest. I can remember when there were 10,000 people outside our hotel. We couldn’t go anywhere. It was just gig to hotel, gig to hotel. And you couldn’t sleep, because they’d still be outside,’ he says, before telling several stories of how he and Tomlinson would sneak out of hotels just to feel freedom, only to find themselves bored once they got out.

‘People were speaking to me about mental health in music the other day, and that’s a big issue. Sometimes you just need some sun, or a walk.’

Every stop on tour became the same. Earlier this year, Payne was asked which was his favourite city of those he visited with One Direction. ‘One in Italy with a big white cathedral,’ he responded.(The band performed in Milan at least five times.)

‘One of the problems was that we never stopped to celebrate what we’d done. I remember us winning loads of American Music Awards and then having to get on a plane straight away. It got to the point where success was so fluid. I don’t even know what happened to our songs, we just sang them, then sang some more. It was like a proper, hard job. Non-stop. I can concentrate a lot more now.’

The paparazzi and fan attention sounds just as draining. It must feel weird having a Twitter following larger than the population of Australia, as he does, but especially odd to have fans so obsessed that they’ve set up multiple fake profiles pretending to be your mother, for some reason.

Moreover, footage of One Direction out and about makes A Hard Day’s Night look tame: thousands of screaming fans all over them, police escorts everywhere they went, an unending run of selfie requests... It came to a head in New York in 2012, when Payne was walking to a restaurant with his parents and a paparazzo accidentally pushed his mother over. He was incensed.

‘I was like, “Oh, f— this. F— this s—t.” There was a swarm of them and I just wanted a burger with my parents,’ he says, unsmiling for a moment. ‘I cried my eyes out. I thought, “I can’t do this”, and really hated my life.’

He soldiered on, but it wasn’t a healthy lifestyle; none of them seems to miss it now the ‘break’ is on.

‘It’s great that people can see what we’re really like away from each other,’ Payne says. ‘It got to a point in the band where we were just playing characters, and I was tired of my character. Apart from the daddy thing, I was really loud and bubbly. There were a lot of personalities in the band to keep up with, so I had to be all, ‘Ey!’, the rowdy lad, and I don’t have to now.’

There were times when the band would celebrate hard, and in that, Payne had catching up to do: as a child, he was diagnosed with a scarred kidney, meaning he didn’t taste alcohol until he was given the all-clear at 19. Tell a teenage millionaire they can now safely drink, and they’ll go for it. He admits ‘the floodgates opened’ that year.

‘I wasn’t happy. I went through a real drinking stage, and sometimes you take things too far. Everyone’s been that guy at the party where you’re the only one having fun, and there were points when that was me. I got to 13 stone, just eating crap. I got fat jibes, and it affects your head. I have nothing to hide about it…

‘As I say, it was like a musical university. We were pretty reckless, but I got it out of my system. I had my fun.’

The hiatus seems to have come at just the right time. But before he could take a breath, Payne lurched on in life, becoming involved with Cheryl almost at once.

Nobody asks how they met; their introduction is on YouTube for all to see. Ten years his senior, she was an X Factor judge in 2008 when the 14-year-old Payne shuffled in, all mop-hair and waistcoat, to perform his Sinatra number. He winked at her, she called him ‘cute’, they bumped into one another over the years, ended up working on a remix of one of her songs in 2014, and the rest is recent pop history.

Not everybody was happy when the relationship was initially confirmed. That Cheryl was in a quasi-pastoral role when they met raised eyebrows in the usual eyebrow-raising camps, as did the couple’s decade-wide age gap. Liam doesn’t care. In fact, he can still barely get over the fact she’s his girlfriend.

‘It’s a ridiculous place to be in,’ he says. ‘She’s even more amazing than I thought. I was watching her do Fight For This Love [her debut solo single, from 2009] when I was a kid, and now we’re together with a kid. I feel like I’m X Factor’s biggest winner.’

It helps having Cheryl around to ask about business matters. Like Payne, she was scouted on a TV pop contest (2002’s Popstars: The Rivals), had massive success in a group (Girls Aloud), and then went solo with a more urban sound. She is also the unlikely possessor of the record for number-one singles by a British woman.

‘We think about the same things. She understands what my life is like. She knows what it’s like to sit on the Graham Norton couch [or] we can talk about her L’Oréal work. It’s not that we’re “a brand” as a family, but we can help each other.’

In Who We Are, one of One Direction’s seven books, published in 2014, Payne writes in his chapter that he’s ‘worried about the idea of failing outside of this band’ and declared he’d become a low-key songwriter, because ‘there would be less attention on my life’.

The opposite of that is what’s happening, I inform him.

‘Yeah, that was a point when I was scared of our success, and we didn’t want to take a step back from it,’ he says. ‘I just wanted to be a songwriter and not be famous, but happy. Then Simon and Cheryl told me this is where I am supposed to be, and I’d miss the stage. The pressure of what was coming next was scary, but they talked me down.’

The solo product he’s come up with is the sort of music he’d always wanted to make: radio-friendly R&B in the style of his heroes, Justin Timberlake, Usher and Pharrell Williams, and more informed by the rap music he listens to than the pop he’s famous for. Who knows if he can shake the ‘embarrassing dad’ brand to pull it off, but the signs point to success. Strip That Down has been streamed more than 300 million times on Spotify alone.

‘I wanted this to be for people my age. The themes are a bit older, but you have to grow up with your fans. I can’t make bubblegum pop any more,’ he says.

One Direction fans needn’t despair. They might have dispersed and almost all signed elsewhere, but Payne is excited about the idea of a comeback gig in years to come. As, I’m sure, are the band’s accountants.

But that won’t be for a little while, if Payne has it his way, because – as he keeps on telling me – he is just far too happy with his lot at the moment to take a step backwards. When it reaches our time to wrap up, he’s still at it.

‘I feel great about what’s going on in my life,’ he says, giving it one last handclap and springing to his feet. ‘I’m extremely lucky. I feel like I’m in a comatose dream. I’m like, “when did I last bump my head?” because I can’t believe this…’

Liam Payne’s next single, Bedroom Floor, is out on 20 October

[unleashthemidnight]

SPN goes NSP: Guess Who’s Back (Just In Time For The Christmas) pt 2

Christmas Calendar: Masterlist SPN goes NSP: GWB part 1, part 2, part 3 Chapter name: Dinosaur Laser Fight People: Reader (x Gabriel), Winchesters, Danny Sexbang Synopsis: You were doing preparations for the Christmas celebration with Sam and Dean in the bunker when the party invitation threw you in the loop. Will you learn something new? Word count: 1100+ Warnings: Crack, language, song lyrics usage, The Frying Pan™ Notes: This is second part of the GWB and also part of the Christmas Calendar. NSP is amazing band called NinjaSexParty, whose songs, covers and music videos I have used. Songs are listed at the end of the fic. I would like to thank @serendiptious-esparza for helping me do some references by answering my questions; thank you darling <3 Here we go again, hope you all enjoy! This is still the shit that no one asked for. Reblogs and comments are loved Do not repost

It had been years since you were in school. Your hunting days happened shortly after graduation so you basically had more typical childhood and teen years compared to Winchesters. Sometimes you wondered how life would have been if you hadn't choose the hunter life. Would it have been even possible to just not do it? Would you have managed to avoid it all? You would probably have job from your field and somesort of apartment somewhere, maybe a significant other to go on your days and roam different stores and cities with. Someone who would hold your hand and whose hugs would tell you that everything would be okay. Someone who you would kiss in the rain. The things that you had with Gabriel. It would have meant that you wouldn't have met him. It would have meant that you wouldn't have met the Winchesters. You wouldn't have met Castiel. Sure you wouldn't have got yourself hurt multiple times and suffered from the pain unimaginable to most people, but thinking about your loved ones and not meeting them, the thought of that... You didn't regret any of that.

The hunter life wasn't easy, it never is. As much as you had have horror and pain in your life that you couldn't talk about to the most of the population, you didn't want to change a thing. You loved your memories. They made you the person who you were today. And you loved your brothers. They might have not been your real brothers, but family didn’t end with blood. And there you were now, back at the school, waking up at the familiar school desk near the windows in the backrow. Whiteboard, maps on the wall, cheap shelf for the books about different things. The technology was advanced since you had been in school but this classroom still used ever so familiar older school technology, the ones you could always seen in tumblr posts. The teacher’s desk was a mess; unfinished papers, tests to have, pens everywhere else than in the holder. Under one tipped over paper pile you could see handle of the… frying pan? What the... Your eyes soon found Sam and Dean next to you at the same row. ”Where are we?” you asked. ”Uh, school?” Sam answered shrugging his shoulders. ”Oh, are we now.” Sam received annoyed blank stare and sigh from you as you channeled your inner assistant district attorney from Manhattan. ”I just really - Wh- Why I can't move?” The boys didn't know and couldn't move either. As you tried to free yourself from the invisible force, other people, students by the looks of them, started to come in and found their own desks. You quickly decided to see where everything would go while Sam was more interested in what he would learn. The teacher walked in. You, Dean and Sam looked at each other not sure of what you were actually seeing. ”Hello class. I'm sorry but your normal professor couldn't be here today. So I'm your substitude teacher, Danny Sexbang, and this ninja science lesson's gonna rock your world. Are you ready to learn?! Alright, don't care, let's hit it!” Danny welcomed everyone. The substitude teacher was the same man as the host in the garage party. This time he had proper clothes on, a suit that would actually fit for the teaching job. 10 points to Gryffindor, you mentally noted. Only two things had remained the same with your jumping in different places: Danny Sexbang and the frying pan. By the process of elimination you made determinations on who just might be behind of the party invitation and knew more than wanted to tell. It has to be the frying pan. Everytime you tried to ask about something about the party invitation or the world shifting from your “teacher”, most peculiar things happened that either stopped you from asking things or you couldn't understand the response so you basically gave up with that. Maybe when class would be over, you could actually move and ask questions from other people. You didn't pay any attention to the teaching, Dean slept and Sam was naturally making notes on the papers that he had borrowed from another student. Sam said that he might as well make use of the situation when you couldn't leave. Danny walked over to your desk. ”Am I in trouble Mr. Sexbang?” you looked at him while playing your innocent card that was very familiar from your actual school days. Maybe you should have become an actor. Maybe you would have ended up getting a role as Marla McGowan on Broadway or the role of the doctor in The Normal Heart. ”Uh-huh,” Danny's voice got your attention again, ”But as much as I like to gaze into your beautiful starry eyes, I need you to close them and travel back in time with me for the next history lesson,” Danny answered to your question and whispered to your ear, ”It's gonna blow your mind.” Something in that made you shiver but still trust him. You closed your eyes. ”It was very ordinary day, day like this one at Dinosaur High, when stegosaurus raised his hand and called for high-fives. Tyrannosaurus saw this and got pissed because his tiny wrists caused his high-five to miss and he was like ”Fuck this!” Oh yeah, oh Hells yeah, it was classic old school futuristic prehistoric throwdown known as Dinosaur Laser Fight! But it was quiet because in space there's no sound. Did I mention that this took place in space? It did. Also, there were robots and sharks. It was a goddamn, balls out Dinosaur Laser Fight in space, with sharks - -” ”Doctor Sexbang, did this really happen?” one of the other students asked interrupting the monologue. The question made you open your eyes. You really wanted to see Danny's reaction. ”Uh, yeah. It's fucking science. Just ask Albert Einstein, he invented space. So shut your face,” Danny answered hurt from the question that interrupted his historically accurate storytelling, and then continued, ”- - and then bunch of fuckin' aliens from Mars showed up all ripping solos on V-neck quitars. The dinos, the sharks and the robots saw that the aliens came in peace so THEY KILLED THEM WITH LASERS. HOLY SHIT, CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT!?” The yelling managed to wake Dean up. ”And then they had a giant laser party. A Dinosaur Laser Party. The end. The assigment is to write 10 page analysis of one of the aspect of the aftermath of this fight. Mostly about the party. Make sure to add pictures so I don't fall asleep while reading those.” ”What did I miss?” Dean asked still half-asleep from you two. ”Just a punch of non-sense really,” Sam sighed disappointed. ”Mister Winchester, are you saying that my teachings don't meet your standards? This might not be Stanford but it doesn't mean you could be disrespectful,” Danny spoke to Sam making all of you tense up. Seeing your faces made Danny chuckle. Oh, he would have fun with this if the circumstances were different. ”Well then, I take that you won't do that again. Class dismissed.” For the third time, the world shifted making the classroom and everyone around you to disappear.

Christmas Calendar tag: @sumara62, @authoressskr, @be-fantastic, @pizzamanteachings Gabe tag: @nobodys-baby-now, @dlb1999 Hit me with ask or message if you would like to join!

NinjaSexParty's songs used in this fic, not in order

Dinosaur Laser Fight x

The Decision x

Ninja Brian was so Ninja that you couldn't see him in the locker that was in the hallway. The place where you never went.

[flockofdoves]

was trying to think of a way to divide up ocs on toyhouse so i don’t get too embarrassed about them yesterday but then it turned into just trying to list like every character i’ve ever made the vast majority of them i’d never put on toyhouse lol. but this was fun for myself even though i definitely forgot chracters and even whole stories from when i was younger

kinda old (definitely need updating they’re from when i was 17/18 and haven’t done much in recent years but nonetheless are my most recent ocs and i would probably like to do something with them someday still):

all the alienated characters - raul and michael primarily, also side characters like their relatives (lennie, joaquin, marcell, maybe also shinsuke, natalia, nina, naomi, hana, leela, etc) and friends (still need to name them lol) etc

justicia (less set on doing her story any time soon compared to alienated, but still theres something to it i might want to work with someday)

pretty old (like i was 16-17)

gf debate characters (this is actually older than a lot of the ones i list as even older in this list but i kept working on them til i was like 17 so they hold up better even if i don’t want to finish making their story anymore) - isaac, micah (micah is literally kinda from when i was 12 lol but i brought her to like 3 different stories and she was a boy in the first one too so shes basically not that character anymore), and then side characters like mirabel (originated in same story at 12 as micah), ayçin, anna, micahs mom and her wife, micahs cousin (another one from that old story) etc

those ocs that literally none of them have names or barely personalities i only ever did character sketches and basic concepts but its like a ghost story thing i was gonna do - 12 y/o baby butch protag, the ghost girl, baby butch’s trans girl cousin, cousins trans guy friend

really old (characters from when i was like 14-15 that did not really develop much from there. most of these are characters i have had fun with and maybe drawn since but are goofy and don’t hold up in a lot of aspects and most of them i’ll probably never pick up for stories again)

football lesbians - monica, wanda, and rania

pigeon magical girls (technically maybe i actually finished a very abbreviated version of their origin story for a school art project when i was 15 lol but i planned to do more back then and now i dont want to) - zehra, ronni, the pigeon, probably not amy and zoë that was just a cameo for myself of ocs from when i was like 11 lol

naomi’s story (this one i might actually want to do something with someday, i wrote a short story about it plus a bit more, but i have to make some serious changes i don’t really think i thought of some of the implications of some stuff in it before) - just naomi and the ghost basically. not to be confused with naomi in alienated who is michael’s sister they are not at all the same person

assorted characters that never really had a story - mels and cvijeta, charlotte (thought about putting her in football lesbians. she does basketball but. jock wlw you know)

really really old (characters from late middle school, like 13-14)

uhhh that wizards story. it never had a name idk. i still kinda like them though tbh even if i’ll never do anything with them anymore - tess, ali, nataline, brandy, mo, remora, cnidarian

really really really old (characters from the middle of middle school, like 12-13. at this point my recollection of what came before what might be kinda off tho)

that fae folk in pennsylvania and ohio story - emilia, ilana, micah (first version! lol), mirabel, that boy that i just hate and don’t remember the name of and resent making a character that had a crush on micah, micahs cousin, darling/angel (a faerie that just went by terms of endearment as if they were names), uhhh the second group of characters in a different more rural town i tried to write that i dont remember the names of

haunted victorian house story - benji, aisha, elizabeth

updated onex arget (fantasy world i wrote about a lot when i was in elementary school) story - nai, rieae

idk this story never had a name and barely a plot beyond ivy and victor becoming friends and venting to each other - victor, ivy, miles, maitê

forks and spoons (story i improvised with my little cousin who was like 8 at the time lol) - florimundi(?), i’m forgetting literally all 3 of the other characters names lol (maybe reese and victor for two of them??? but maybe not bc those are also other very old characters that idk if i reused the names of)

theo and ted - theoni and theodore (aka theo and ted!), oh also that guy they meet who wears like. a trench coat iirc

super old (characters from the later half of the 6th grade and early 7th, like 12ish)

really dumb story about a closeted trans person with did getting transformation powers - i actually dont remember the main character and their main other alters names anymore, i remember the other character they had a crush on stephan though

all those characters in bands that i never actually could settle on a story for beyond a variety of interpersonal drama. very inspired by the webcomic jenny hanniver tbh - avery, mark, etti, adrian, xavier, pepper, uhhh theres literally So Many more of them and also so many i dont remember the names of anymore but just for some that come to mind. that periwinkle colored hair in a bowl cut character that always wore a beanie who was in avery’s band whos names on the tip of my tongue (maybe that was etti and the character i’m calling etti was called something else?? maybe victoria? maybe andy? maybe andy was an entirely different 3rd character?? idk. actually yeah i’m positive bowlcut character was etti rereading this), xaviers ex-boyfriend who was obsessed with homestuck (lmao), that guy with red hair i accidentally directly ripped off the design of some jenny hanniver character, that goth guy with braces and glasses (maybe he wasnt in this?), that screamo band with 2 lead singers, that guy with brown hair that said he was straight with an exception (msfdkjghhsfd god), that person with the emo haircut in flame colors, this literally is not even all the characters lol

extremely old (largely from 6th grade, like age 11ish. weird period of time where i suddenly wanted to write about romance but thought it had to be straight but then very quickly was like ‘wait actually nvm i have a laptop now and think i’m bicurious i’m only gonna write about gay people)

gsa story (this might have been the summer before 7th actually but it feels distinctly before the other stuff in the last category so idk maybe just my whole impression of when i made things for middle school is off) - emmy(?), allie(?), noah(???), some other kid, i think noah(?) or the other kid got reused to be the guy i regretted making a part of that faerie story who liked old micah lol, maybe more kids, their teacher

idk that kid with blue hair and black eyes with white irises and his sister

middle school lesbians - leah and cass

lesbian who works in food service and there were weird references to comic books but filtered through me referencing an obscure emo humor youtube channel that made jokes about comics i’d never read - amy, zoë, amy’s straight best friend i dont remember the name of??

tosca (this wasnt straight romance but it was like the last thing pre me always having lgbt main characters) - idk. there were two characters i drew like once. theres nothing to note about this except wanting to make it is what made me learn about webcomics

that story i posted the first chapter of on quibblo about a hippie girl (somehow in 2010?? dont ask me) and an emo boy liking each other before abandoning to never write about cishet romance again. didnt even get to the romance part lol - i forget her name. maybe it was april? maybe it was florimundi and i reused it later for another character, nix, reese (her goth lesbian best friend. thank god for reese)

first attempt at straight romance. also about like. idk. fantastical powers in clouds in providence rhode island - selia, shay, cassandra, selias other friend i forget the name of??

ancient (literally elementary school ocs. obviously theres a lot of grades covered here but its just my memory and ability to reference this is so loose idk if i could even try to accurately divide it further)

shadow magic - mezzaluna, her aunt tabby(?), alexa

a, j, & j (barely counts i didnt do anything with them. those are the only characters also)

arine (some of these characters might not be arine characters and just from other onex arget (fantasy world i wrote a bunch of stories in and made a shitty conlang for and stuff) stories but i just dont really remember) - lia, lias sister, dibujurm, that other fantastical creature who was friends with dibujurm i forget the name of that kinda looked like calcifer from howls moving castle but fuzzy not an actual fire (maybe isigo??), emiaelaesa, that obnoxious prince (i think the story was called arine bc that was his name?), the prince’s servant, there absolutely were more

the musical adventures of shiri and don - shiri, don, some evil villain and his henchmen

rosington (there were like no characters besides her. weird junie b jones rip off with nonsensical humor to everyone but me)

that tree prophecy story (maybe set in onex arget?) - nico, emi (?? maybe not her name), their uncle (i forget his name, maybe lester?), their uncles shipmates, that fortune teller

idk some kid that goes on a scavenger hunt to solve a mystery on vacation in like bermuda or something where he meets some quirky girl character who helps him. thats all

i had some characters that started out as me trying to draw characters from the book hoot by carl hiaasen but for some reason then turned into my own ocs and looked nothing like those characters were described and also basically had nothing to do with them in personality and action beyond name after a while. - beatrice and napoleon. this was in a phase where i got a ‘how to draw anime’ book and napoleon straight up looked like a yugioh character his hair was ridiculous

those fake siblings i made up and lied to a substitute teacher in kindergarten about me having 6 siblings because of for absolutely no reason even though i only have one sibling irl

imaginary friends i shared with my brother and then made stories about - theres so many of these, the most important though was chick-chick-chick. who was a very small chick who wore a top hat. and then he had a family(?) of infinitely smaller chicks (chick-chick-chick-chick, for example) the more “chicks” you added to the name

[syrren]

Dear Evan Hansen X Yuri on Ice AU (see my other musical AUs)

So this has been swirling around in my head for ages (inspired in part by one of @zephyrine-gale‘s posts), and I have too many HCs to list, but featuring:

Yuuri as Evan Hansen

Victor as Connor Murphy

Yurio as Zoe Murphy

Phichit as Jared Kleinman

Minako as Heidi Hansen

Yakov and Lilia as Larry and Cynthia Murphy

See under the cut for headcanons about this AU (warning for long post)

Minako (Heidi Hansen) is a ballet dancer, but that means she’s always on trips, rarely home, and doesn’t bring much money home. Tries her best, and introduces Yuuri to ballet and eventually skating to deal with his anxiety along with his letters.

Yuuri (Evan Hansen) has his canon-typical anxiety, and no friends aside from the “family friend”, Phichit Chulanont. Honestly he and canon-Evan are basically the same, except instead of a closet tree nerd, Yuuri is a closet ice skating nerd who is actually really good at skating...he’s just never been able to skate in front of other people without his anxiety getting in the way and completely screwing him up.

Minako is childhood friends with the owner of the local rink (Hiroko Katsuki),  so she gives Yuuri a set of keys to the rink and he goes at random hours of the morning/night when no one else is there so he can skate alone.

Skating usually clears his mind and helps him relax, but one day, he’s just skating and thinking and skating and thinking and skating and thinking and in the middle of a jump, he’s thinking and he thinks: “what if I just...didn’t land right, and never got up again, wouldn’t everyone be better off? would someone come to get me? To help me? What if I―”

So he falls “on accident” and lays there dazed from his concussion and in pain from his broken arm and fantasizes about someone coming to help him for hours and hours until Hiroko comes in to open the rink in the morning and freaks out because he’s still lying on the ice, cold and alone, because when you’re falling in a forest an ice rink and nobody’s around, do you ever even crash, or even make a sound?

And of course he writes letters to himself on the advice of his therapist (Celestino, probably?), and they still come into play, but first:

Victor (Connor Murphy)  used to be the perfect student™ that everyone knew but never really knew. He used to get perfect grades and won all the academic competitions and figure skating competitions, but he never saw any point in all of it. Despite everything, he was never very close with his parents or his peers, and felt stagnant in everything from his grades to his competitions to, eventually, his personal hobby, ice skating. 

So once high school hit and even ice skating lost its appeal, he started dropping off the map and doing drugs and skipping school so by the time he commits suicide no one really knows him anymore and like typical high schoolers, no one really cares either (until the Victor Project of course).

The day he first talks to Yuuri in the computer lab isn’t the first time he’s seen him, but lord knows if Victor is ever going to admit that he broke into the local ice skating rink one day last summer and saw the most marvelous skater already there, skating his heart out to heartbreaking music. (He was skating to Waving Through a Window, and that song+Yuuri’s skating just about kills Victor but tbh who wouldn’t it kill). 

Near the end of the routine, the skater is on his final jump when suddenly he falls apart mid-jump, his limbs coming apart and going limp like he’s just...given up. Victor watches in silent horror as he crashes into the side of the rink, arm and head-first, slides a few feet on the ice, and goes still.

 Victor wants to help, but he panics and doesn’t know what to do (you know since he’s there illegally in the first place and being super stalkerish besides) so he just stays awkwardly until he sees Yuuri open his eyes, then leaves figuring that Yuuri can probably call someone to come help him.

So when he sees Yuuri in the hallway that first day, he panics and lashes out because he’s afraid that Yuuri knows he was there and didn’t help and hates him. In the computer lab, later, he decides to approach Yuuri a little more calmly with a VERY SUBTLE “So...how’d you break your arm?” (Nice going Nikiforov, very smooth, very subtle) and offers to sign his cast. Nevermind the stinging guilt when Victor hears that no one ended up coming to help Yuuri, and isn’t that just the saddest fucking thing he’s ever heard. It all goes swimmingly until he reads Yuuri’s letter.

Because you see, Yuuri has been wanting to talk to Yurio, Victor’s little brother for a very long time. Yurio is famous for being in the jazz band a very skilled figure skater, and Yuuri admires that even though he’s never actually talked to him. He had been inspired to start skating by a certain local figure skater a long time ago, after all, and since he never learned the skater’s name, he just assumed that it was Yurio, the only real publicly prominent figure skater in the area (Hint hint, it wasn’t Yurio). 

Yuuri  doesn’t have a crush on Yurio, but he wants to be his friend, and writes about him (in place of Zoe) in his letter.

And this piece of “mockery” combined with panic about Yuuri knowing combined with hopelessness because “Oh, he likes Yurio, not me.” is the last thing to tip Victor over the edge, and he leaves, the letter still in his pocket to...well, you know, to do what canon-Connor does at this point. He comes back as our resident dead gay son tho its ok

Yurio (Zoe Murphy) is Victor’s little brother, the self-proclaimed better skater/son, and he’s always resented Victor for being seemingly perfect and then throwing it all away. Yakov and Lilia (Larry and Cynthia Murphy) had always compared him to Victor, and Yurio feels Victor’s influence looming over him even in death.

 When Victor had been perfect, everyone told Yurio that he needed to “be more like his older brother,” but when Victor started crashing and burning, Yurio suddenly needed to “be better than his older brother” and he’s just so sick of being defined by his older brother that Victor’s suicide makes him even more bitter, because now he will never be able to surpass him and shed the shadow he left over his life. (Insert Requiem here) or as i like to call it in this AU, the “Victor Nikiforov is Dead” song.

So, when Yuuri comes out proclaiming that he was Victor’s best friend, Yurio is very very skeptical. Until it turns out that he knows Victor used to skate and he starts talking about an unmistakably real time they went skating together and Yuuri broke his arm trying a difficult jump, but Victor came to help him up (For Forever).

 And when Yurio, who has never been very close with his brother, but has always secretly wanted to be, asks Yuuri about why Victor would have written about him in his suicide note, Yuuri word-vomits everything he’s ever admired about Yurio’s (and by proxy, Victor’s) skating. (If I Could Tell Him).

The two of them end up bonding (platonically) and go skating together a lot because I’m a sucker for happy friendship.

Whenever he gets bored, Yurio scribbles stars cats on the cuffs of his jeans

Yuuri bonds with Yakov over skating, because Yuuri has never had a mentor for his skating (Minako helps, but she’s a ballet dancer, she doesn’t really understand). Yakov teaches Yuuri how “To Break in Skates” with a pair of old skates that he bought for Victor after Victor started drifting away (he doesn’t know that Victor never stopped skating).

Phichit (Jared Kleinman) and Yuuri used to be super close as kids, but their friendship kinda fell apart when Phichit started getting more social and Yuuri’s anxiety got in the way of any and all attempts at joining him and his friends.

Phichit gets enlisted to help write the emails and channels every shipping bone in his body into writing the gayest emails in existence, full of bad puns and as much sexual tension as Yuuri will allow him to slip in.

Yuuri also gets very attached to Victor while he’s “researching” for his faked emails. He finds a bunch of old videos of Victor in local skating competitions before he dropped off the map and falls in love with his skating all over again, realizing that Victor is the skater that inspired him to start figure skating, which leads him to base a lot of their “friendship” around skating.

Alright this is becoming a small novel, so I’m going to cut it there, but I have a bunch of sketches that aren’t finished yet, so definitely expect more from me on this AU! 

Please PM me if you have any ideas for who should be Alana or if you just want to talk about DEH/YOI in general, I’d love to hear what you think!  

[brokebecauseconcerts-blog]

Father

John

Misty

Where oh where do I begin? I try not to pick favorites, in anything I do. I think picking favorites sets people up for failure. I figure there will be one day another candidate outshines the favorite, resulting in disappointment. But fuck it, Father John Misty is my favorite. And I trust it because there is virtually nothing he can do wrong that would take that title away- and he does a lot of textbook things “wrong”.

Josh Tillman stole my heart when I heard “I’m Writing a Novel” on WFUV Radio when I was in college (around 2012) Not knowing much about him personally, I started listening to “Fear Fun” and fell in love with his music. “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” and “Everyman Needs a Companion” landed every mixed CD (yep, still made CDS in 2012) and I decided to dig a little deeper and actually check the dude out. WOAH he’s hot! WAIT he was in Fleet Foxes? OMG he has the exact the type of humor that I adore, equal parts witty, snarky and dark. Fuck, he has a girlfriend. I’m absolutely done, they’re getting married. I can’t remember a time I fell so hard for an artist post-emo/punk/highschool days (Think Gerard Way and Travis Barker). 

However, I’m really fucking glad he was and is in such a beautiful relationship because thats how his sophomore album came to be. i wasn't sure If I’d ever love an album as much as “Fear Fun” but lo & behold: “I Love You, Honeybear” took & continues to take the damn cake. Has there ever been an album (albeit, Rumours) that has described love so honestly? It talks about the honeymoon phase in depth, the ga-ga feelings and pedestals that we put our partners on in the beginning. The way new love helps us start to feel creative again, or creative in a new, fresh way. And then after time, how love can start to get a little paranoid and jealous. It’s messy, it’s raw and it sort of made me hate his beloved Emma (who eats bread & butter like like a queen would have ostrich and cobra wine. Listen if you don't get the reference but also stop talking to me: https://open.spotify.com/track/2eg2gvPXuwZ9FyrPaLgrXi) Could you I-M-A-G-I-N-E having someone write you a love song such as that? Fun fact, I heard this song for the first time freshly after ending a 4 year relationship. Bad timing? Nah, it actually was so beautiful and uplifting that the song gave me hope and made me feel secure that I haven't found the right person yet and that I didn't just lose that person (burn). It gave me hope that I’d eventually meet someone that I could picture having a satanic christmas eve with or dance around to a mariachi band with. Spoiler Alert: FJM did help me find love. I will get to that at the end. Any who, this album ruled and continue to rules my world. The title track “I Love You, Honeybear” is about taking on the shitastic world we live in with someone you love. “Bored in the USA” is about the absurdities within our pop culture and the bullshit promise of the American Dream gone wrong. The album as a whole is romantic and existentialist and I am 100%AboutThat.com

And then we were gifted “Pure Comedy”. I write that with a sigh. Not because I am disappointed but because It’s heavy. It highlights our current political and social climate and it does so in a very dark, darker than usual way. When he realeased the video for title track, “Pure Comedy” a few short months after the election I wept at my desk. The song itself is so eerie and fantastical with the baritone sax wailing the fuck off as Donald Trump’s face slyly pops up. I Think FJM is making the point that everything happening right now is so fucking ugly and wrong that it’s absurdly funny. Not haha-funny, just...funny. As in “something smells funny”, as in our country. He attacks religion, pop-stars (gotcha, Taylor Swift), environmental issues, the delusional lifestyle of LA inhabitants, you name it. But, in true Josh Tillman fashion, and we know theres a big beating heart in there, he ends the album in a hopeful way with “In Twenty Years or So”. In the song, Tillman addresses the cosmic indifference of the universe and the existential fear that comes with it. In the first two verses he sets up the great comedy: That despite all our grand gesturing and philosophizing (with the character of Father John Misty as the embodiment of this behavior), we ultimately don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Then in the second verse he starts to assign a little more meaning to the chaos.

That in twenty years More or less This human experiment will reach its violent end But I look at you As our second drinks arrive The piano player's playing "This Must Be the Place" And it's a miracle to be alive

I *think* he’s saying, “Look, the world is fucked, we’re only getting worse, it’s too much to handle, but thank god I have you to navigate it with. And we have music, and it really all is amazing, isn't it”. I’m sorry it sounds like a basic Audrey Hepburn wannabe annotation of his beautifully written song, but It comforts me. It’s like a really elongated and philosophic way of saying “All you Need is Love”, but The Beatles beat him to it.

All in all, “Pure Comedy” takes us through a (trippy) walk of life thats starts out as that scene in Willy Wonka where they’re all taking a boat ride through the tunnel of hellish images, to a calm setting where all you want to do is hug the people you love and be left with the simple yet complex thought, “it’s all going to be okay”. Bravo FJM for creating such a mature and powerful album. I think melodically it is not for everyone, as it is much slower that what he’s done. But give it a good listen through and really listen to what he’s saying. If 2017 had to sound like anything (besides screams and tears) it would sound like “Pure Comedy”.

Kk thanks for reading.

OH WAIT, yeah I forgot this is a concert blog. Well! I saw him last night at the Kings Theatre in Flatbush, Brooklyn. A tremendously stunning place to see live music, in my opinion. He played most of “Pure Comedy” straight through, without any speeches or commentary. Nerd moment- I fuuucking love when artists do this with newly released albums. it shows they care about it, it shows they're not just trying to appease the crowd with favorites. It’s saying here is the art i just created and worked on for mad amount of time. Sit the fuck down and experience it. He did every song except the 13 minute “Leaving LA” (good call IMO) and the last two songs, yanno, the uplifiting ones. Then halfway through he broke out the oldies, a couple from “Fear Fun” and a bunch from “I Love You, Honeybear”. The whole theater was standing and dancing and watching HIM dance and holy shit I love when tall lanky men swivel their hips. Probably one of the best parts about seeing Father John Misty live is watching him break it down. He was even slow dancing with himself at one point during “Strange Encounter” and i was both turned on and hysterically laughing. One interesting point to make was that he was oddly quiet. He’s known for long on-stage rants, whether they're actually anger driven or just a comedy bit- they usually always show up on Pitchfork the next day. This was my third time seeing him and i’ve had the pleasure of hearing some of those rants and raves. This time he was quiet, appreciative and...mature? IDK I really liked it. I think it mimicked the seriousness of his newest album and demanded that you pay attention to the music and what it’s trying to say. I noticed a bunch of Brooklyn bros at the end of the show making comments like “he wasn't that funny!” “I thought he was going to talk more” and thats fine, but maybe consider why that is. After he came back on for his encore he played the last two songs on “Pure Comedy” and ended on a very special and postive note with a v sweet sun and moon setting in the background. Father John Misty is giving us hope.

Also I felt this deserved it’s own paragraph but his band absolutely blew me away. I would 100% go see them live without vocals. He had an entire orchestra + five piece band. Another additive to the experience compared to past Father John Misty concerts, as he’s always played with just a 5 piece band. It made the album come alive in the most spectacular way.

All in all, he is still my favorite. I hope to see much more from him in the future because I think he has a really really good thing going on on all levels. So back on the topic on Father John Misty and hoping to find love. JOSH, BABE. if you ever see this, I owe you some thanks. If it weren't for you and if it weren't for Tinder syncing my Facebook page likes, I never would have matched with my current partner whom we both share a massive and almost grotesque love for you & we wouldn't have anything to talk about on our first date, or a an album to makeout to for the first time. so really, thanks. At the risk of sounding like a cheese dick, It’s amazing to me that your song, the one that gave me hope and an idea of an ideal partner, led me to so much happiness. Awwwww.

Steam “Pure Comedy” & go through an existential crisis, today! https://open.spotify.com/album/3CoFoDt6zt5EKxmTpOX32b

[japanessie]

Hey! I found your blog recently and I also just started listening to MFS and I really like their music. I'm a bit lost as to where to start to learn more about them and their motivation/thoughts behind their music since it's been a couple years since they've debuted. What would you suggest?

Hello (^^)v Welcome to the fandom.

I’m guessing you probably discovered them through their more popular songs like ALONE, 不可逆リプレイス or the more recent ones like Missing You. Firstly, too many people get caught up in singer Hiro’s family relations and ignore the other members. So, I would highly encourage a new fan to NOT follow that crowd XD

There are basically 4 aspects to MFS that all fans need to know OR you won’t understand the band and what diehard fans talk about:

1. Band members & the personnel changes.2. Their musical roots especially the main songwriter Sho Tsuchiya + their twin band named fromus.3. Hiro’s lyrics in relations to his life story.4. The important people in their team especially their boss GEN, A&R exec KTR (Kentaro Suzuki) from Japan Music System (JMS) & circle of friends. Also, their earliest mentor K ( Kei Goto) the late singer of Pay Money To My Pain (PTP).

BAND MEMBERS

1. Sho Tsuchiya ~ leader, guitarist, main composer (currently only functions behind the scene & as a non-touring member)2. Nob @ Nobuaki Katou ~ bassist3. Teru @ Teruki Nishizawa ~ guitarist (many like to categorize him as rhythm guitarist when Sho was in but I personally disagree because he played both lead & rhythm guitars even from the 1st album)4. Kid'z ~ drummer (officially joined on 3 Mar 2016)5. Hiro @ Hiroki Moriuchi ~ vocalist, lyricist6. Masack @ Masaki Kojima ~ drummer (officially left on 3 Mar 2016)

Note: MFS current members “deactivated" from public social media in early 2016. So, don’t bother looking XD

PERSONNEL CHANGES

Sho’s hiatus:Sho remains as a member. He announced his hiatus in October 2015. I won’t call it “inactive" like some people do because he’s still composing with them and most recently served as the Sound Producer for ANTITHESE. He’s just not a touring member for now. He didn’t give specific reason other than family matter.

Drummer change:Masaki didn’t state why he left but it looked like he didn’t want to be tied down to only one genre of music. He was active playing outside MFS before his departure. So, he probably wanted that musical freedom even though he loves MFS. But his decision was enough to badly crush the two youngest members at the time, Hiro and Teruki, from what I observed. Those two younger men were still emotionally dealing with Sho’s hiatus at that moment.  Kid'z is their friend / labelmate who had always got along well with Teru & Hiro. He had worked together with Sho & Nob before too. Co-incidentally, his band officially split up in Nov 2015. So, he was the natural choice to replace Masaki. But Kid'z was drumming as a sessionist musician for singer ナノ(nano) at the time MFS took him. He stopped using his real name and took on a stage name Kid'z* after that. 

* I personally don’t use his real name in public anymore out of respect for his decision. Understandably, he was initially worried about MFS fans’ reaction. Also, it was and probably still is an awkward situation for him regarding his former bandmates when their band split up and he went to their biggest rival band just a few months later. So, I chose to respect his wish to start anew.

THEIR BEGINNING

On my blog so far, the interview that tells their formation year story the most is this one from GEKIROCK.

MFS GEKIROCK Interview March 2016 Translation

The band did describe how they got together in this video interview around minutes 01:42 to 02:58.

My Japanese listening ability is not up to that point yet though, sorry. Hiro explained how he and Sho met at a PTP concert. Couldn’t catch what Sho said about Hiro & Masaki with the music playing in the background :-/ Hiro also said he and Teru knew each other when they were high school students. Well, the GEKIROCK interview is a pretty good picture of their history.

FOR OLD PHOTOS of MFS, check out these places:

My First Story Unofficial fanpage on FBMy First Story Thailand fanpage on FBex-drummer Masaki Kojima’s Twitter @kojimasa 

THEIR TWIN BAND fromus

Ignore whatever musical comparison people made about them and OOR. The real band to compare MFS to is their real twin band fromus, a piano-rock unit. I made an entry about them here.

http://japanessie.tumblr.com/post/140215899677/meet-fromus-mfs-real-twin-band

I personally feel that musically, MFS first two albums are the direct guitar edition fromus. Just take MFS, change the singer & then the guitars to piano. You’ll get fromus.

OTHER MUSICAL INFLUENCES

They do have influences from old school hard rock & metal. Sho and Nob are already in their 30s. Both men said they started on guitar with British rock legend Deep Purple’s Smoke On The Water. Guitarist Teruki grew up with a heavy-metal-music-loving father and would often cite Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica as his early influences.

DISCOGRAPHY

If you want to see their musical & lyrical evolution, try to listen to their songs chronologically from the 1st album to the current work.

Albums & Singles

1. MY FIRST STORY ~ MV Second Limit & Take It Back2. THE STORY IS MY LIFE ~ MVs The Story Is My Life & The Reason3. 最終回STORY (Saishukai STORY)4. BONEDS (a joint 4-band project in which they contributed 2 songs)5. BLACK RAIL ~ MVs Black Rail & FAKE6. 不可逆リプレイス ( Fukagyaku Replace) ~ their breakthrough song IMO7. 虚言NEUROSE ~ MVs 虚言NEUROSE, Child Error & Someday (lyrics MV available on Livehouse iOS App & STORYTELLER website)8. ALONE ~ MVs ALONE & 失踪FLAME * 9. ANTITHESE ~ MVs The Puzzle (exclusive for STORYTELLER members only), Missing You (there’s another STORYTELLER-only version too) & Last Call

Update: 12 Jan 2017. Sorry I forgot the MVs from the ALONE single XD

They also have a special 2-track single dedicated to band leader Sho Tsuchiya, released to the public at the Budokan called:

We’re Just Waiting 4 You (available at MAGIC ROOM while stock lasts)

DVD Collection so far:

1. THE STORY IS MY LIFE Final at Shibuya Club Quattro (bundled with 最終回STORY) ~ the only official DVD released when Hiro still sported his natural black hair colour.2. The Ending of the Beginning at Ebisu Liquidroom.3. BONEDS Tour Movie (with AIR SWELL, BLUE ENCOUNT, SWANKY DANK).4. ITSUWARI NEUROSE Tour Final at Shinkiba Studio Coast.5. MFS at A.V.E.S.T. Vol.9 (released as a free bonus for ANTITHESE Pre-order)

TIDBITS Info (^_-)

Hiro called 虚言NEUROSE creation process as “creating a human-like superhero" & the sound as “listening to the radio in the city“. Does that make any sense to you? LOL. Read what he said in this interview:

Hiro’s Interview with Rockin’ On Japan magazine Jan 2015

HIRO’s LYRICS

Sho let Hiro be in charge of lyrics writing from the start (from an interview for Yamaha Music).

Hiro comes from a famous family thanks to his parents and his successful brother. As a result, he was heavily thrashed on the internet by people who disliked his “easy entry” into the music industry. Hiro used to be very active on Twitter but the criticism against him soon turned into cyber-bullying. I personally had seen the cruel things people wrote about him on Japanese 2ch forum.

I can only guess what happened that drove Hiro to leave social media. Other than abusive online comments, some people probably took advantage of his Twitter presence by sending inappropriate messages or even being intrusive about his brother Taka’s personal life. He tweeted an angry response about 2ch on 14 Feb 2013. Then he wrote on his blog on Ameblo (now deleted / deactivated(?)) that “people’s words can hurt". A few months later, he tweeted “I started blocking fucked up people" in English. Not long after, he tweeted his final tweet “Goodbye forever" and abandoned Twitter in Sept 2013.

He then channeled his anger through the song BLACK RAIL in 2014. He explained it in this interview.

Hiro MFS Rolling Stone Japan Aug 2014 Interview Translation

From then on, a lot of his lyrics reflected what he was going through while writing them.

It must be noted that the special project singles ALONE & 不可逆リプレイス (Fukagyaku Replace) were written for the themes of those projects. Hiro talked at length about ALONE around its release and there are a bunch of them that I posted on this blog.

For details on ALONE Project with HAL College, read these posts:

HAL Project Special Musician Interview with MFS Translation

MY FIRST STORY Flying Postman Interview Translation

Hiro’s ALONE Blog Translation

What is HAL Project & HAL College?

不可逆リプレイス / Fukagyaku Replace was made for the historical anime Nobunaga Concerto. Interesting to note that Hiro wrote the lyrics not from the main character Saburo’s point of view but the other guy Michi. The lines, “I don’t know why but you saved me ………… “ all the way to “I will follow you ….. keep you close to me,” were directly inspired by what Michi said to Saburo in the finale or Episode 10.

The lyrics of Someday are for the late K.Hiro said in Kaohsiung, Taiwan that “This is a very important song to me,“.

His blog entry translation on K’s death

ANTITHESE Lyrics & Hiro’s personal stories

The Puzzle & Tomorrowland are about his heartbreak over Masaki’s departure.Home is about his family who split up after his parents divorced.

IMPORTANT PEOPLE IN MFS TEAM1. GEN ~ boss, owner of INTACT Records, owner of Zephyren, organizer of AVEST Project, formerly of Subciety clothing brand.Twitter : @Zephyren_genInstagram : Zephyren Gen2. KTR (Kentaro Suzuki) ~ A&R + marketing exec of JMS, marketing exec of Deviluse clothing, regularly seen at MFS video shoots and concerts.Twitter : @kkktttrrr, Instagram: Kentaro Suzuki3. The late K @ Kei Goto ~ vocalist of Pay Money To My Pain (PTP), mentor in MFS early days.4. Nori (producer), Makiko (merchandising) but she’s better known now as the lady who covered Rassungorerai with Hiro XD

* Update (Jan 2018): I believe Makiko is not in the staff team anymore but she remains a close friend. Here is the YouTube link to the video of her and Hiro.5. Japan Music System (JMS) ~ the music distribution company specializing in indie music and the one that markets/promotes MFS musicYouTube Channel: JMSTVOnline shop for bands’ merchandise: MAGIC ROOM ONLINE STORE

5. Circle of friends among many:  Shirakawa-san (SAKAEYA clothing shop manager) ~ the members regularly visit his shop.Twitter: @sakaeyatenchonano, SWANKY DANK, AIR SWELL ~ artists they had musically collaborated with.

The funny interview with Hiro & KOJI about the Sink Like A Stone collaboration in which Hiro admitted the song’s high notes were difficult to sing is here.

STORYTELLER Fan Clubhttps://xxxstorytellerxxx.comAll MFS members let go of their individual public social media after the club was launched in 2016. If you’re interested to join, feel free to ask questions on how to do that.

In case you have an iOS mobile device ……..

JMS created a Japan-only iOS App called LIVEHOUSE where they feature videos from JMS artists. The videos vary from live performances, interviews, behind the scenes etc. However, if you create a different Apple ID specifically for Japan iTunes account, you can still download the App and watch those videos even if you don’t live in Japan.

*Update (12 Jan 2017): You will then get to watch videos like this one!

**Update (15 June 2017): JMS decided to stop the App by 31 May 2017.

Lastly yet very important, don’t believe any ridiculous claim about Hiro and his brother Taka hating each other because they don’t. You’ll find such comments at some point, I’m sure. These two brothers love and support each other away from the public eye and rightfully keep their family relationship private.

I hope that will give you a good start (^_-)