#but I also feel MUCH about how those scenes which built up to Louis taking Lestat back played out | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale · 3 years

Text

I’m sorry, but can I just go on a little rant about the Louis, clouis, and the Clem comic...?

I didn’t really talk about Louis in my overall review of the comic because I wanted that to be more contained to the content shown on the pages, Clementine’s relationship with AJ, and her as a character.... but the more I think about these comics and Louis, the more frustrated I become thinking about what Clementine abandoning everyone would do to him.

[... okay it’s not little anymore since I guess I can never just do anything simple when it comes to Louis, sorry my bad]

So, no surprise, we all know the comic’s bullshit by now. Clementine leaving everything and everyone behind because she’s not happy is dumb, AJ just letting her go is dumb, and Clem going to the mountains on crutches and a peg leg to find this so-called happiness is dumb.

Now that we’ve established it’s dumb, I wanna talk about Louis because I got a lot of built up feelings about how bullshit this storyline is with how Clementine would not only abandon AJ, but also abandon Louis.

Because let me tell you..... his heart would be broken beyond repair and I need to talk about why.

Sigh.... so.... muh boy.

Before he met Clementine, Louis was this laidback, irresponsible, but caring and musical person who kept his head down to avoid conflict and never looked at the future. He was the kind of person who took things one day at a time, saw survival as a day-to-day task, and said that the future doesn’t exist, there’s only today. You get the point, he was never too concerned with things because they always seemed to work out, and if they didn’t, then that sucks and that’s why we should appreciate every day while we have it.

Louis is shown to be charismatic and friendly, he spends his free time playing piano and card games, but no one really takes him seriously. Not even Marlon, his best friend for 8+ years. While he doesn’t seem to be on bad terms with anyone [including Aasim, they just act like people who disagree with the other’s point of view and have had the same argument many times, but that doesn’t mean they hate each other, y’know?] he also doesn’t appear super close with anyone outside of Marlon and possibly Violet, but even then.

Marlon’s shown to have little faith in him with the way he talks about if Louis will even show up to hunt. He has a controlling grip on Louis that’s prominent during the confrontation scene when he uses intimidation to try to convince Louis to not interfere. Oh, and there’s the fact that Marlon’s been lying to Louis for the past year about the twins and then continued to lie to his face about what really happened to Brody... which isn’t great when you consider how Louis was the only one who had blind faith in him as a leader and, according to Marlon, was the only one who couldn’t see how pathetic he always was.

Violet, while having a few more nicer moments with him than Marlon, still invalidates him and his feelings several times throughout the first half of the game which makes me wonder how close they ever were, or at least if Violet ever considered him a close friend to begin with. And no, a small monologue in the dorms doesn’t make everything better or confirm they were brotp the whole time... especially when once they’re on the boat, Louis might as well not exist because Violet can’t be bothered to acknowledge what happened to him or inquire about how he’s doing. I guess she just didn’t have time react while standing in her cell for several unbothered minutes-- no wait, it’s she already reacted off screen. Right. Good writing is good.

What I’m getting at here is that even though Louis is surrounded by people who he genuinely cares about, there is an argument to be made that he’s a lonely person. Hell, he’s aware of his loneliness when he says that no one hears past his music and jokes. I mean, how many nights do you think he spent by himself playing the piano because no one wanted to hear it? Are they like Violet and crack jokes about how he doesn’t have actual talent? Probably, given that someone literally carved “you suck at playing” onto the side of the damn piano.

Oh, and let’s touch on that backstory of his. Louis grew up wealthy with two parents who loved him and each other, and they gave him anything he wanted except singing lessons. Louis says he wanted to be a real musician. But I guess his father didn’t like that idea and told him no, with the [as Louis puts it] dumb dad lesson of, “You get to be happy, or you get to be rich, can’t be both.” ...which is interesting given that Louis and his family were stupid rich but also.... were they not happy? well, that doesn’t make sense because little Louis knew that if he broke up their marriage, they would be hurt.

So yeah, Louis was so upset that his father continually refused to let him take singing lessons that he broke into the man’s credit cards and faked an affair, which led to his parents divorcing... and then he spit his father’s words back in his face.

Then they dumped him at Ericson. And the walkers came.

There’s so much to unpack from the story he tells that it could be it’s own analysis, but basically.... Louis is aware of why what he did was fucked up, and he carries it with him every day.

He regrets what he did, chews himself out for being such a “vindictive fuckhead” [and the amount of force used in that line tells you a lot, like how it’s not the first time he’s chastised himself like this] and he admits that he doesn’t even know the person he’s talking about. Yet, he still sees himself as bad, saying that they [I assume the staff] told him and the other kids they’re bad people. I don’t doubt that Louis internalized that which played a huge role in the confidence and self-esteem issues he has during tfs.

Anyway, I’ll come back to this later, but when you take that amount of guilt and regret, and mix it with the fact that they dropped him off at this school that was supposed to make him better.... then the walkers came and those teachers, staff, and headmaster? Gone. Left a bunch of kids to fend for themselves, with the exception of Ms. Martin [but given how she looks when we find her I doubt she lasted that long] and I cannot imagine how horrifying that was for all of them. The dead are up eating people, and if you die you become one of them... and the people you thought you could rely on just fucking left you to die at this school.

Every kid in that school has trauma and abandonment issues from before and after the world went to shit, every last one, and Louis isn’t the exception here. Over the years, a lot of kids died and they’ve all seen horrible shit. They all knew they were never going to see their families again, and as far as we know, no one came to get their kids at the beginning. They had to find ways of coping while trying to survive, and all they had left was each other.

Louis copes with music and games and jokes. He’s built up this persona where it seems like he’s unaffected by the comments the others make, that the death and suffering he’s gone through is in the past, that he is confident and open to those around him.

But then Clementine and AJ show up, and Louis grows close with both of them. They had immediate chemistry upon first meeting, he was the one who looked after AJ since it seems like everyone else saw him as a little terror, and he went out of his way to be kind and make them comfortable.

When they go hunting with him, Louis and Clementine have a moment after taking care of the walker where they lower their guards a bit-- Louis gives her more in-depth reasons for his views of survival, and going off her expression, it gets to her and makes her think.... but they’ve know each other a day and he’s not quick to infodump his life story or let her in, so he cuts the conversation short.

Then we have the Marlon confrontation scene that I have gone over so many times in the past. I won’t dillydally with it too long but..... Clementine appeals to Louis, who curls in on himself because of the control Marlon has on him. He wants to help, and hell, he knows this is wrong but he’s so used to not getting involved that he gets defensive.... plus, he’s known Clementine for two days, and he’s known Marlon for 8+ years.... he wants to believe Marlon but you can tell he doesn’t want this, either. It takes Clementine talking to him to give him courage to stand between her and Marlon’s gun and it’s a lot.

AJ shoots Marlon and everything goes to shit, and Louis is a goddamn mess. His best friend was murderer right in front of him, so add that to the trauma list, and he’s overwhelmed with all these feelings that again.... they keep getting invalidated by Violet because “Marlon was a liar and murderer, therefore you shouldn’t feel bad about his death. Get over yourself, Louis, you can be such a shithead sometimes.”

Oh yeah Vi, I guess he should care more about two people he’s known for a total of two days rather than for the safety of the people [including you] he’s grown up with and cared about for 8+ years.... makes sense.

So yeah, little to no support during this time. Alone again.

And just because I have to make this clear so no one gets a hair up their ass-- both Louis and Violet are wrong here. Kicking them out isn’t the solution, but neither is acting like AJ was right to commit murder just because it was Marlon.

But plots gotta plot, so they get voted out and you can see that Louis is conflicted about the whole thing. He wants them gone, but at the same time, he knows what kicking them out means. You can see it on his face that he’s not okay with kicking them out. He’s hurting when he’s there in the dorms telling them how the vote went... he literally doesn’t know what else to do. He just knows that everything hurts, Clem and AJ caused it, and he wants the pain to stop. He even tries to justify it to himself by figuring that they’ve done this before so they’ll be fine. Not a great thing to say, Lou.

Anyway, we know the story, Clem and AJ come back and Louis once again sees the consequences of acting out of pain.... AJ is shot because Louis was hurt and he made a bad decision that he’s gotta live with.... something that he’s done before, and this affirms to him that he’s bad. He wishes he could take it back, and goes as far as to admit that to Clementine during the archery scene.

By the way, credit to him for his apology to her. It’s rare in these games that Clem gets a genuine apology from someone who hurt her and doesn’t turn around to repeat the hurtful behavior, y’know? Plus, I can think of plenty of characters who owed Clem an apology in the past or if they did apologize, it was half-assed.

You can feel how conflicted he is with this whole thing-- learning who Marlon really was and what he did, feeling something for Clementine before everything went down and not knowing how to handle those feelings afterward, caring about AJ and understanding why he thought shooting was the best choice but still hurting that his friend is dead....

And the thing is.... Louis forgives her for so much, as she does him, and through all of that bullshit, they manage to develop that strong connection that turns romantic. Louis lets himself be fully vulnerable with her and is honest about his feelings, how she listened when no one else did and seeing him for more than just the persona he put on.

This works on Clementine’s side, too. Clementine has been through her own fair share of bullshit-- trauma, abandonment, loss, injury, you name it. She’s made mistakes, done terrible things, and has been in enough groups to know that romance usually ends in heartbreak.... and yet, she’s willing to open herself up to Louis and admit she feels a lot for him.

Is it a little rushed? Yep. Could it have been handled better? Of course, most things this season could’ve, but what we got was pretty good.

So Clementine and Louis are romantically involved now, the raiders attack, and she saves him... and boy does Louis feel guilty about that one, too. He feels bad enough that he questions why she would pick him because he can’t fathom his life being worth saving over another’s. He doesn’t see himself as useful, and even though Clementine is literally his girlfriend at this point, his self-esteem is so all over the place that he can’t understand why she would have him at her side.

And when Clementine tells him that he’s too important to her, he’s too baffled to even give a response. He looks at her in disbelief like he wasn’t expecting her to say that. But this shows that at the beginning of their relationship, he still doubts himself, and through her working with him, he begins to build up that strength in himself.

He becomes brave enough to share what got him sent to the school with her, and he plays Don’t Be Afraid for everyone at the party and like.... for once, everyone is listening to him. Really listening to him. They’re not talking shit about his musical skills, they’re not ignoring him or the feelings he’s putting into the song, they’re sitting there with him and I just..... if you watch him, you can see that his eyes get pretty glossy throughout the song. The moment meant something to everyone.

There’s also the fact that Clementine asked him to come with her and AJ onto the boat, and to be the one in charge of the bomb... that’s a huge responsibly and he feels the pressure of that. He starts to panic a bit about if he can do it, because what if he fucks up? What if he gets them caught and makes everything worse? What if something happens to Clementine and he can’t do anything about it?

She’s there to reassure him that she believes in him, and that he can do this. They’re going to get everyone back, and he needs to focus... then he asks her to slap him which why would you? that’s dumb, so Clementine smooches him instead and like.... he physically relaxes into her because he’s comfortable and trusts her in this situation.

Also, he loves her and cares about this mission enough to cover himself and his fancy jacket in walker guts.... sure, he complains while doing so but how else is he gonna cope with rubbing rotten guts on himself to blend in with a herd of walkers?

Skipping ahead so that we’re not here all day, I wanna talk about the walk back to the school because it’s one of the most important clouis moments in the game and a huge reason that solidifies why the comic is bullshit.

Louis went off on his own to go out and find them. He didn’t know where they would be, he just knew that he had to go out and find them after making sure everyone was okay back at the school because he couldn’t bare the thought that he had lost them. And the way the AJ gets so excited to see him? and the group hug??

At this point, Louis has grown so much as a character. With Clementine by his side to support him, he’s grown stronger and more reliable. Remember how he never thought about the future? Well, now he is because his relationship with Clementine has given him a reason to long for a future. He talks about building this imaginary house with her, one he knows they can’t physically build... but it’s his way of saying we can build a home together, that he wants a future with her and AJ and everyone else. It’s such a personal conversation that flows so easy between them. Louis is more comfortable talking to her about things from his past, which is something he didn’t want to do back in ep1.

He confides in her how he’s feeling after he shot and killed Dorian, he tells her that having a home means protecting it and I just.... it’s so good, okay? And from Clementine’s side, you can feel how at ease she is with him, too. Just the way she smiles at him as they’re walking? like he’s the cutest thing and she’s so happy to have him with her?

But then we gotta deal with Minerva’s crazy ass on the bridge and well, AJ shoots Tenn and Louis is having flashbacks to Marlon and it’s not great. That’s a whole thing, and he ends up separated from them while escaping.

We don’t get to see Louis’ reaction to Clementine getting bit and losing her leg since I guess that puts a damper on the overly happy ending. But, going off of what we know about him and what I’ve explained [which isn’t even all of it, this isn’t a full Louis character analysis. if it was, it would be much longer and in multiple parts... believe it or not, I’m trying to not make this too long and only sorta failing...] we can get an idea of how he would react.

Um, to say he was upset is an understatement.

Because remember, he had no time to think and climbed over the fence, thinking he could get them to climb over and they could get away, but it didn’t work. He ended up leaving them in order to save himself since walkers were closing in on him.

But you know that he’d blame himself for the bite. A lot of, “if I had just stayed” and “I should’ve climbed back over, I should’ve stayed with you.” I’m sure there were points where it looked like Clem wouldn’t make it and I can’t imagine how much hurt he went through watching her suffer and heal from losing a leg like that.

Not only that, but knowing that AJ was the one to do it? And him thinking about what Clem’s death would do to AJ after all this? There isn’t a doubt in my mind that Louis would take care of AJ if she died. He cares about AJ, and he loves Clementine, so he be there for both of them, even if he’s still hurting from Tenn’s death.

However, Clementine didn’t die. She survived the bite and amputation, and when we flashforward, she and Louis are still happily together. Louis is right there next to her at dinner, and he’s the one to help her with her crutches. He’s there to go over future plans to meet the traveling caravan, and Clementine wants him to be the one to go.

Oh, and Louis once again forgives AJ for shooting Tenn, claiming that he understands that AJ saw something that he couldn’t. Like with Marlon, he’s not happy Tenn’s dead but he can see why AJ did it to save his life.

I just..... happy ending. Clementine and Louis are together and she’s truly happy to have found a home for her and AJ with him at Ericson.

....But then the comic thought it would be fun to say “nah.”

The comic isn’t canon, I’m still insulted that it would ever consider itself as such, but even so I can’t help but feel so frustrated about how this would destroy Louis.

He finally found someone he would consider his best friend, not just his girlfriend. She saw past that funny man persona and he trusted her enough to let her past this wall he built around himself. He let himself become vulnerable around her, he named his song after her. Their initials are carved into his piano with a heart surrounding them. He loved her.

Clementine left him feeling loved, something he probably hasn’t truly felt since he was a little boy with his parents before their divorce. She loved him even after hearing his past because she knew that wasn’t him anymore, and she helped him build the confidence he needed to step up. Because of Clementine, Louis wants to enjoy every day while also looking at the future. He isn’t lonely anymore, he has her and AJ. He’s truly happy.

So to tell me that Louis would wake up one morning only to have AJ tell him that Clementine’s gone, she’ been planning an escape without telling anyone because she wasn’t happy...? I’m sorry, but if you think that wouldn’t leave Louis absolutely devastated, then you know nothing about him as a character.

This idea is just.... look, Louis is perceptive. That’s a big part of his character, he’s perceptive of those around him. If Clementine was showing signs of being unhappy or depression, he would see it. He would notice a change. He would be able to tell if something was off, and he would ask her about it. Louis is the type of person to ask you what you need. What can he do to help? What do you need to feel better? And if you don’t know, it’s okay, he’ll help you figure it out in any way possible.

Plus, the comic suggests that there are times where she went off on her own but came back [probably doing her escape prep ugh] and you expect me to believe that Louis wouldn’t notice that or wonder what she’s doing? Wouldn’t sense that something’s going on?

After she’s gone, he’s going to blame himself for not being enough. He couldn’t make her happy and he was a fool to think he ever could. AJ lost the only family he’s known since he was born because Louis couldn’t help her, couldn’t do anything to stop her from leaving.

And for him to realize that she didn’t love him? Clementine, the girl he thought the world of because of how strong and confident and in-charge she was, because she saw him for who he was..... she left him, abandoned him... and she couldn’t even be bothered with a goodbye.... that says that she didn’t care all that much about him in the end.

You KNOW that he would think he had this coming, too. How could the universe allow him to fall in love and be happy with someone who loved him back after what he did to his parents? He would feel so heartbroken that he would see this as some sort of karma for breaking up his parents happy marriage as a kid years before he ever met Clementine and before the apocalypse.

I fucking can’t.... I don’t have the words to fully explain how much I hate this. Louis wouldn’t be okay afterward, and I doubt he’d ever fully recover. I wasn’t joking when I mentioned before that Louis would stop playing piano. How could he sit there and play when I he can see is their initials and remember the night she confessed to him? When he named his song after her? Clementine left and took the music with her because Louis wouldn’t have it in him... something that he used to cope would be ruined and that’s just.... it’s fucking awful.

Not only that, but now he has AJ who I assume is hurting just as much [though the comics inaccurately assume he would just let Clem go sooo... yeah] and he would be the only one Louis would really talk to about it, but then again.... what if AJ doesn’t wanna talk about it? What if AJ starts to act out and things just become terrible and Louis is just too overwhelmed?

I just.... UGH. That’s how I feel. UGH.

Clementine from the comic? Not her. She would never fucking do this to Louis, AJ, or anyone else at Ericson, and you would know that if you played the tfs.

Sigh.... sorry, I just needed to get this all out. I haven’t seen anyone talk about how Clem leaving would affect Louis and I’ve gotten some asks/come across some posts about Louis that have left me incredibly annoyed.... well, I was annoyed before because of the comics, so my annoyances with those things were only heightened. So yeah... I wanted to talk about Louis’ character in hopes of explaining why he would be so hurt if this comic was canon.

Which it’s not. So it’s fine.

How are we all feelin’ at this point, by the way? I know I’m not the only one still annoyed with the comic, so I hope y’all are doin’ okay. Hope you’re stayin’ chill and thinking about your faves to help cope with this mess hahaha

#twdg louis #twdg clementine #twdg clouis #twdg aj #twdg marlon #twdg violet #clouis #twdg #sometimes i just need to talk about louis okay #one day i'll do a full character analysis that goes over everything #but today isn't that day #long post

158 notes · View notes

doomarchives · 4 years

Text

David Annandale’s The Harrowing Of Doom: An In-Depth Review

So, I was kindly offered an advance reviewer’s copy of The Harrowing of Doom by David Annandale for the Marvel Untold series, a new prose line revolving around Marvel’s villains. Although I’m not personally familiar, the author’s prior written work and academic scholarship indicated a strong background in fantasy, science fiction, as well as horror film and literature - all essential elements of Doom himself honestly, whether in his character, design, or formative influences. A promising start from the outset!

To no one’s surprise, I was especially excited for this one. Doctor Doom is both my favorite Marvel character and area of nerdy comics expertise, and Annandale sounded like the perfect candidate to tackle him.

The Harrowing of Doom centers around a conflict familiar to those who know the character. Taking place fifteen years after his ascension to the throne, Victor von Doom is still hellbent on rescuing the soul of his mother, Cynthia, trapped in hell by the demon Mephisto. His yearly attempts to save her have been fruitless thus far, but he believes he can really do it this time, enlisting the help of a new character, Maria von Helm, and some of his lesser known subjects (also new characters) to accomplish the task, by building a machine called The Harrower. The noble scheme is further complicated by the reappearance of Prince Rudolfo Fortunov, son of the monarch deposed and murdered by Doom years prior, who is equally determined to take back what he believes is his birthright by any means necessary. The novel is a relatively dense and detailed one, and as a true blue Doom enthusiast, I have a dense and detailed review to match.

The first thing that I personally take note of in any material involving Doom is the author’s perspective on the truth of Latveria’s “benevolent dictatorship.” It immediately speaks volumes about a writer’s perception of Doom’s accountability and sense of morality; it kind of ends up coloring his entire characterization. That being said, I was really pleased by the evenhandedness with which Annandale treats Doom’s Latveria and his influence upon his subjects. It slots in neatly with some of the greats, Lee & Kirby, Jonathan Hickman, Roger Stern, etc with the acknowledgement that Doom is indeed a despot with an iron fist and a will absolute, but one who cares for the wellbeing of his country. Through dialogue from his subjects like the skittish Father Grigori Zargo and diehard loyal Captain Kariana Verlak, the reader gets the sense that Doom’s rule may be the best leadership Latveria has ever known. (A brief aside: another great strength of The Harrowing of Doom that has to be mentioned is the fleshing out of these different original characters. Maria von Helm was a particularly welcome addition, as a close friend of Doom’s mother and a far more empathetic magic user compared to him.)

Verlak is openly married to Dr. Elsa Orloff, a trans woman and neurosurgeon of international renown. Both of them had experienced the Fortunov rule that predated Doom’s, with Orloff even having fled Fortunov’s Latveria when she first come out as transgender, in fear of his tyrannical rule and the dangerously transphobic legislature he enforced called “The Laws of the Person.” It is apparent that Doom exists in obvious juxtaposition to the prior ruler’s bigotry. Beyond the total erasure of all previous discrimination and state-enforced bigotry, he has Verlak appointed in a role of great prominence, gave Orloff the tools she needed to succeed in her field, and even shares an exchange with her where he remarks that he knows her from her publications in the Lancet Neurology and that he appreciates them for their “speculative” approach. In an excellent exchange between Father Zargo and the rebel Prince Fortunov, the priest, who is by far Doom’s number one fan, explains Doom’s mesmerizing hold on the populace and the benefits they reap from his rule, despite it being a despotic one:

“I’ll be explicit, all the same,” said Zargo. “Doom is a sun king, even more fully than Louis XIV ever was. Latveria is a world power. How? Because of Doom and only because of Doom. Latveria’s strength and its wealth come from his inventions. And the beams of his sun touch every citizen. Universal basic income, free healthcare, free schooling, free universities, free training to the highest level of your calling - all of these things flow from Doom.”

“Free?” Fortunov snarled.

“The price is obedience, yes,” said Zargo, “And yes, Doom is feared.” Zargo stopped himself from saying Vladimir was feared and hated. [...] “Even though Doom is feared, he also is Latveria in every sense that matters.”

What I really appreciated was the author’s ability to walk the tightrope of acknowledging how beneficial Doom is for the country and his protectiveness over his domain, whilst also acknowledging Doom’s intense paternalism that ultimately favors his own goals. Doom, as well-read comic fans would know, is heralded as one of Marvel’s master manipulators. It’s a great strength of this novel to see him exerting his willpower and the strength of his personality to manipulate and sometimes, fully overpower that of his subjects. Father Zargo is definitely the most profound victim of this, a man with ties to both the church and the occult. Through the novel, Doom insistently pushes him towards the latter, his priorities made clear in one sentence: “The work was what mattered. Zargo’s soul was not Doom’s concern.” An especially interesting scene occurs later in the novel. Without too much elaboration, Doom performs an experiment where he uses the old Latverian nobility as guinea pigs. This was something I immensely liked, corroborating one of my own personal perceptions of Doom. It’s always made sense to me that Doom would continue to hold a certain amount of disdain for Latverian high society, even after he went from low class Romani boy to monarch himself.

(“The Fantastic Origin of Doctor Doom,” Fantastic Four Annual #2.)

Afterwards his partner, Maria von Helm, muses aloud that she always wondered why Doom let vestiges of the old regime remain, to which Doom responds: “Now you know. The aristocracy has its uses, and the advantages of being disposable.” It’s maybe my favorite example in the book of the exceptions to Doom’s purported benevolence. He does want the country to flourish and for his subjects to prosper, but this intent can be superseded by his innately ambitious nature and his own personal biases. It’s clear at several points in the book that Annandale is obviously well-read on Doom himself, but it was especially in the capturing of this nuance that it really stuck out to me in a big way. (As well as the fun reference to Doom’s brief jaunt in the French Riviera in Supervillain Team-Up!)

Outside of this core aspect of his characterization, I really enjoyed how the novel not only built up Doom’s cult of personality, but emphasized the sheer magnetism of Doom himself, in person. Constantly, characters find themselves buffeted by strength of his will, craving his approval or cowering and scrambling to avoid his displeasure. It’s a great true-to-character depiction of interactions between Doom and Latverian citizens, dynamics that were only touched upon briefly in the periphery of most comics involving Doom. I think, ironically, this is also perhaps the source of one of the novel’s few weaknesses. By keeping the book very Latveria-focused, Annandale does an excellent job of adding world-building on every level, from expounding on Latverian national holidays to the layouts of Doomstadt to the country’s storied history with witches predating Doom and his mother. But the fact that Doom mostly interacts with those beneath him or those who work for him gives the reader a bit of a myopic, overtly flattering perspective of him as almost too certain, too powerful, too unfeeling. I suppose it serves the scope of the novel for Doom to be more an obelisk of a man than fully well-rounded, but I contest that one of the best things about his character is that his indomitable exterior hides a deep well of pain and uncertainty.

(“In The Clutches of Doctor Doom,” Fantastic Four #17.)

(“Oath of Fealty,” Doctor Doom #7.)

The novel obviously perceives Doom as Byronic, there’s even excerpts from Manfred interspersed between chapters that I greatly enjoyed, but I did find the heart of the Byronic character a little lacking here. Where Manfred bares his soul alone in monologue or to others, Doom, for the most part, does not. There are definitely brief allusions to the trials he’s faced, but he seems rarely prone to doubt or vulnerability until the very end. (For example, the central task is the attempt to rescue Cynthia von Doom’s soul, but little time is spent dwelling on this very human connection between mother and son.) Or even self-admitted imperfection! Interestingly, I only ever caught one mention of his scars in the entire novel.

The Harrowing of Doom seems to prescribe to the line of thought that the mask is the only true face of Doom’s that matters, but I think with that philosophy, it stays firmly within the character’s own comfort zone. And his psyche never feels truly challenged, because there’s no worthy challenger. Doom knows without a doubt that he is Fortunov’s superior, so there’s no real interpersonal friction there. It left me keenly interested in seeing how the author would write Doom in the presence of someone like Reed Richards, an opponent who has historically brought out Doom’s baser instincts and invoked his self-doubt, drawing out his flaws and humanity in the process. Hopefully Marvel approves a sequel!

Doubtlessly, it’s still a strong entry into Marvel’s Doom canon and an excellent read for anyone who enjoys the character and is familiar with his history. The novel gives a sprawling, detailed look at Latveria and fleshes out both country and countrymen with aplomb. I took real delight at the indirect peeks at Doom’s personality through other characters’s observations or simple exposition. Some notable examples include Doom’s occult librarian wondering if he had been appointed out of spite of his witch-hunter ancestry, Zargo noting the west wing of Werner Academy was dedicated to clinical research in a nod to Werner von Doom’s work as a healer, and my favorite: the paintings within Castle Doom being impressionistic depictions of Doom’s ancestors, “people long buried, long forgotten, and in their lifetimes ignored or worse.”

The conflict also moves at an engaging, brisk pace and smartly takes advantage of the widely known fact that Doom is preoccupied every Midsummer Night and turns that into an opening to be exploited by Fortunov, who also is well characterized throughout the novel and even experiences his own personal growth.

(“Though Some Call It Magic!”, Astonishing Tales #8)

Essentially, the product is a great novel about Doctor Doom influenced by strong comic lore knowledge, Gothic and Romance literature, horror cinema (According to the author, Doom’s lab is modeled after the lab from The Bride of Frankenstein!), and fantasy. If that sounds like something up your alley, definitely check it out. It gets a wholehearted recommendation from me.

About Marvel Entertainment

Marvel Entertainment, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is one of the world’s most prominent character-based entertainment companies, built on a proven library of more than 8,000 characters featured in a variety of media for over eighty years. Marvel utilizes its character franchises in entertainment, licensing, publishing, games, and digital media.

#victor von doom #doctor doom #media type: book #Marvel #MarvelEnt #aconyte books #review

33 notes · View notes

gaylorlyrics · 4 years

Text

the last great american dynasty

Rebekah rode up on the afternoon train, it was sunny

Her saltbox house on the coast took her mind off St. Louis

Rebekah is Rebekah “Betty” Semple West Pierce a sculptor, and philanthropist born on April 17, 1915 in St. Louis. She also composed music, one of many similarities between her and Taylor.

Bill was the heir to the Standard Oil name, and money

Bill refers to William Hale "Bill" Harkness, the grandson of David Harkness who invested with John Rockefeller in Standard Oil. When David died he left what would today be over a billion dollars to Bill’s father, who was also named William Harkness. Eventually Bill inherited what would today be approximately $185M dollars from his father (approx 70% of this wealth was from Standard Oil shares).

And the town said "How did a middle class divorcée do it?"

In 1939 Rebekah married Dickson Pierce, descendent of President Franklin Pierce. However they divorced in 1946, and then in 1947 she married Bill. Her father was a stockbroker, and her grandfather started a trust company - so she wasn’t exactly middle class, but her wealth was significantly less than the wealth of the Harkness family.

The wedding was charming, if a little gauche There's only so far new money goes They picked out a home and called it "Holiday House"

Holiday House was built on Watch Hill in Rhode Island by Mrs. George Grant Snowden who, contrary to the song, named it Holiday House. Seems like this house has been having raucous 4th of July parties for a long time - at least according to this NYTimes article from July 6, 1941:

Their parties were tasteful, if a little loud

The language here mirrors that of the first verse - “the wedding was charming, if a little gauche”.

The doctor had told him to settle down

Bill died in August (interesting!!!!) 1954 of a heart attack - he had also had a heart attack the year prior, but that one was obviously not fatal. He and Rebekah had one child together named Edith who eventually committed suicide at the age of 34.

It must have been her fault his heart gave out

This line calls attention to how women are frequently blamed for, well, everything. Something that is explored more in mad woman.

And they said "There goes the last great American dynasty" Who knows, if she never showed up what could've been There goes the maddest woman this town has ever seen She had a marvelous time ruining everything

The chorus and the title of this song seems to come from the title of a book about Rebekah called “Blue Blood: How Rebekah Harkness, One of the Richest Women in the World, Destroyed a Great American Family” written by Craig Unger. The from cover of the book reads “The story of Rebekah Harkness and how one of the richest families in the world descended into drugs, madness, suicide, and violence”. [Also, interesting that the background of the cover I found looks a lot like the blue/pink in the Lover cover!]

The chorus also references “mad woman”, another track on folklore. This song subverts the idea of a mad woman. The title and subtitle of Blue Blood use Rebekah as a scapegoat for everything that went wrong, blaming her solely for violence, drugs, mental illness, and loss. It uses several classic, sexist tropes of a gold-digger, a “crazy” woman, and the whore. However, in this song Rebekah is not taking the blame or feeling guilt about what is happening - she is having a marvelous time.

Another interesting thing is changing “great American family” - family is defined as “a group consisting of parents and children living together in a household” - to the word “great American dynasty” - dynasty is defined as “a line of hereditary rulers of a country.” I find this specifically interesting because dynasty, unlike family, acknowledges a long lineage of people and decisions that lead to this outcome, as opposed to placing all the responsibility and blame on Rebekah, who only entered the picture at the tail end of this story. The title of Blue Blood has no accountability for the people who were involved with the dynasty before - framing it as if David Harkness didn’t choose to leave his wealth to his lineage, as if Bill Harkness did not choose to marry Rebekah, and as if the wealth Bill inherited wasn’t already diminished by 81.5% from what the family’s original wealth was (as passed down from David Harkness to Bill’s father).

However, Taylor is changing the narrative here to give Rebekah a more joyful way to be remembered.

Rebekah gave up on the Rhode Island set forever Flew in all the Bitch Pack friends from the city

Rebekah and her fellow debutantes formed a group called the Bitch Pack and were known for causing a scene at parties, doing strip teases on the tables or putting mineral oil in the punch, which acts as a laxative.

Taylor is drawing a parallel here to her famous squad days, when her and her group of girl friends were constantly under fire from the internet/press.

Filled the pool with champagne and swam with the big names

Rumor has it that Rebekah cleaned her pool with Dom Perignon. Being a socialite and one of the richest women in America, she frequently kept high profile/famous/successful company - hence the “big names”. Stories of her involve J.D. Salinger, Alvin Ailey, and Andy Warhol, to name a few. However, swimming in champaign is also a metaphor or the carefree life of the rich and famous - something that she used in This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, from Reputation, where Taylor describes a similar scene:

It was so nice throwing big parties

Jumping to the pool from the balcony

Everyone swimming in a champagne sea

And there are no rules when you show up here

Bass beat rattling the chandelier

Feeling so Gatsby for that whole year

Another interesting tidbit is that the house where The Great Gatsby (1974) was filmed is the Rosecliff Mansion in Rhode Island, about 1 hour away from Holiday House.

And blew through the money on the boys and the ballet

Rebekah married twice more after Bill’s death, once in 1961 and once in 1974. As a life long dancer, she spent the majority of her time and energy founding (in 1964) and developing The Harkness Ballet Foundation, which still exists today as The Harkness Foundation for Dance. As part of this endeavor she also established a ballet training school and the Harkness Theater. She paid for everything for the company, from teachers to housing to plastic surgery. The company went on tour and performed at the White House, although it had a generally negative critical reception. At the peak of the company’s success Rebekah abandoned the project and started a different company

And losing on card game bets with Dalí

Although I couldn’t find anything specifically referencing a card game, Rebekah was good friends with Salvadore Dali. Here they are pictured holding a press conference together.

A portion of Rebekah’s ashes are in a $250,000 urn created by Dali called “The Chalice of Life”. The urn was designed to spin, so that Rebekah could always be dancing.

And they said "There goes the last great American dynasty" Who knows, if she never showed up, what could've been There goes the most shameless woman this town has ever seen She had a marvelous time ruining everything They say she was seen on occasion Pacing the rocks staring out at the midnight sea And in a feud with her neighbor She stole his dog and dyed it key lime green

According to the NYTimes, Rebekah dyed her neighbors cat green

Fifty years is a long time Holiday House sat quietly on that beach Free of women with madness Their men and bad habits, and then it was bought by me

Weeee the classic Taylor Swift storytelling twist! This is a great flex by Taylor to just casually drop in a reminder that she is a rich woman who has made her own money and can buy whatever she wants. The phrasing of this also let’s us know that the house is no longer free of women (plural, more than one woman) with madness (we’ll hear more about being a mad woman later in the album), their (possessive, something owned or bought) men, and their bad habits (bearding?). Taylor is admitting to having all of these things. Who knows, if I never showed up what could've been There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen I had a marvelous time ruining everything I had a marvelous time Ruining everything A marvelous time Ruining everything A marvelous time I had a marvelous time

This makes me think of the line at the end of Miss Americana - “Sorry I was loud in my house. That I bought. With the songs that I wrote about my life.”

Taylor, like Rebekah, is used to being blamed for everything and causing a scene. Even her purchase of Holiday House caused considerable backlash and commotion - with the governor creating a tax in 2015 (two years after Taylor purchased the house) called the “Taylor Swift tax” on homes worth over $1M dollars - something that affected many people in Rhode Island, especially those with large houses and vacation homes. All Taylor did was buy a house to live in (with her money, that she got from writing songs about her life), and she was immediately brought under fire.

However, like she did with Rebekah’s story, Taylor is flipping that narrative and focusing on how much fun she is having instead.

#last great american dynasty #the last great american dynasty #folklore #taylor swift #rebekah harkness

128 notes · View notes

patriotsnet · 4 years

Text

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-republicans-riot-after-obama-was-elected/

Did Republicans Riot After Obama Was Elected

Undocumented Kids Are Saved By Obamas Executive Order Daca Which Would Put A Halt To Deportation For Those Whod Entered The Country Before Age 16 And Yet In A Bid To Get The Gop To Come Over To His Side On Immigration Reform The President Has Also Deported A Record 15 Million People In His First Term

A Family Caught in Immigration Limbo

When Belsy Garcia saw her mother’s number appear on her iPhone on the afternoon of June 15, she felt what she calls the “uncomfortable fluttering” sensation in her chest. She knew that daytime calls signaled an emergency. The worst one had come the previous year, when her sister told her ICE agents had placed their father in federal custody.

Garcia was attending Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, when her father was marched out of her childhood home. As an undocumented immigrant — like both of her parents, who are from Guatemala — she couldn’t qualify for loans. She financed her education through scholarships and a stipend she earned as a residential assistant. Now she wondered if her mother was calling to say her father had been deported, which might force her to leave school to become the family’s breadwinner.

But this call was different. “Go turn on the television,” Garcia’s mother said. “You’re going to be able to work, get a driver’s license.”

Onscreen, President Obama was announcing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the United States as children could apply for Social Security numbers and work permits. Garcia qualified: Her parents had brought her to this country when she was 7 years old. DACA transformed her into a premed student who could actually become a doctor. “It was like this weight was lifted,” she says. “All of that hard work was going to pay off.”

In The Next Hundred Days Our Bipartisan Outreach Will Be So Successful That Even John Boehner Will Consider Becoming A Democrat After All We Have A Lot In Common He Is A Person Of Color Although Not A Color That Appears In The Natural World Whats Up John Barack Obama White House Correspondents Dinner

And Then There Were Three

The first woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court did so in 1880. It would take another 101 years for a woman to sit on that bench rather than stand before it. Even then, progress was fitful. Over the 12 years that Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg served together, their identities evidently merged; lawyers regularly addressed Ginsburg as “Justice O’Connor.” When O’Connor retired in 2006, she left the faux Justice O’Connor feeling lonely. Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned of something far more alarming: What the public saw on entering the court were “eight men of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side.” They might well represent the most eminent legal minds in America. But there was something antiquated, practically mutton-choppy, about that portrait.

How many female justices would be sufficient? Nine, says Justice Ginsburg, noting that no one ever raised an eyebrow at the idea of nine men.

Seal Team Six Kills Osama Bin Ladenraiding His Secret Compound In Abbottabad Pakistan While Obama And His Top Advisers Watch A Live Feed Of The Mission From The White House Situation Room The Picture Of The Assembled Becomes The Last Supper Of The Obama Era

Poop Feminism

For me, it’s one moment. All the bridesmaids have come to the fancy bridal shop to see Maya Rudolph try on wedding dresses. This should be a familiar scene: The bride emerges from the changing room and … This is the dress! The friends clap. The mother cries. Everyone is a princess. Go ahead and twirl!

But when the bride emerges in Bridesmaids, almost all of her friends have started to feel sick. Sweat coats their skin. Red splotches creep over their faces. They try to “ooh” and “aah,” but it’s already too late. It starts with a gag from Melissa McCarthy, followed by another gag. Then a gag that comes simultaneously with a tiny wet fart. It’s the smallness of the fart that’s important here. It’s the kind of fart that slips out — a fart that could be excused away, a brief, incongruous accident. Women don’t fart in wedding movies, and women certainly don’t fart at the exact moment that the bride comes out in her dress. This can’t be happening. Melissa McCarthy blames the fart on the tightness of her dress. We breathe a sigh of relief.

Then sweet Ellie Kemper gags, and the sound effect is surprisingly nasty. Ellie’s face is gray. Melissa’s face is red. They look bad. They are embarrassed. How far is this going to go?

The camera cuts. We are above now. We look down from a safe perch as the release we have been anticipating and dreading begins. It is horribly, earth-shatteringly gross. A woman has just pooped in a sink. The revolution has begun.

The Government Acquires A 61 Percent Stake In Gm And Loans The Company $50 Billion The Auto Bailout Will Eventually Be Heralded As A Great Success Adding More Than 250000 Manufacturing Jobs To The Economy

The Auto Industry Gets Rerouted

“The president was very clear with us that he only wanted to do stuff that would fundamentally change the way they did business. And that’s what we did. There were enormous changes. For example, General Motors had something like 300 different job classifications that the union had. If you were assigned to put the windshield wipers on, you couldn’t put tires on. And we wiped all that stuff out. We basically gave back management the freedom to manage, to hire, to fire. People stopped getting paid even when they were on layoff. We reduced the number of car plants so that there wasn’t so much overcapacity. So now, when you have 16 million cars sold , they’re making a fortune.”

Black Lives Matter Activists Are Arrested In Baton Rouge Louisianaprotesting The Murder Of Alton Sterling; More Than 100 People Are Detained In St Paul Minnesota Protesting The Murder Of Philando Castile

What Is the Point of a Quantified Self?

Melissa Dahl: The Fitbit was introduced at a tech conference eight years ago. It’s kind of incredible to realize that, before then, this idea of the “quantified self” didn’t really exist in the mainstream.

Jesse Singal: I feel like it’s the intersection of all these different trends: Everyone plays video games these days. You got smartphones everywhere. And people are realizing that solutions to the big problems that lead to sleeplessness and anxiety and bad eating — unemployment and income inequality and yada yada yada — aren’t gonna get solved anytime soon.

MD: That’s interesting, because all of this self-tracking is also, according to some physicians, giving people more anxiety! A Fitbit-induced stress vortex.

Cari Romm: It feels like productive stress, though. I’m talking as a recovered Fitbit obsessive, but it does make you look at Fitbit-less people like, “You mean you don’t care how many steps you took today?”

MD: Oh, God. I don’t care. Should I care? Sleep is the one thing I obsessed over for a while. Which does not really help one get to sleep.

JS: Do you think an actually good and not obsession-inducing sleep app could help, though?

MD: There’s some aspect to the tracking idea that really does work. I mean, it’s just a higher-tech version of a food journal or sleep journal, right? Ben Franklin 300 years ago was tracking his 13 “personal virtues” in his diary.

JS: Would Ben Franklin have been an insufferable tech-bro?

Officer Darren Wilson Fatally Shoots Michael Brownin The St Louis Suburb Of Ferguson Sparking A National Protest Movement And Setting Off Unrest That Will Remain Unresolved Two Years Later

On the Triumph of Black Culture in the Age of Police Shootings

In the two years since Mike Brown was fatally shot by the police in Ferguson, and the video footage of his dead body in the street went viral, we have seen the emergence of a perverse dichotomy on our screens and in our public discourse: irrefutable evidence of grotesquely persistent racism, and irrefutable evidence of increasing black cultural and political power. This paradox is not entirely new, of course — America was built on a narrative of white supremacy, and black Americans have simultaneously continued to make vast and essential contributions to the country’s prominence—but it has become especially pronounced. And it’s not just because of the internet and social media, or the leftward shift of the culture, or black America’s being sick and tired of being sick and tired. In fact, it is all of these things, not least two terms with a black president. In the same way that black skin signals danger to the police , his black skin, to black people, signaled black cultural preservation. African-Americans didn’t see a black man as the most powerful leader in the free world; we saw the most powerful leader in the free world as black. This is what comedian Larry Wilmore was expressing at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner when he said, “Yo, Barry, you did it, my nigga.” It was a moment of unadulterated black pride.

Militants Attack American Compounds In Benghazi Libya Killing Us Ambassador Chris Stevens And Three Other Americans There Will Eventually Be Eight Congressional Probes Into The Incident

“I Know I Let Everybody Down”

“Before the debate, David Plouffe and I went in to talk to him and give him a pep talk and he said, ‘Let’s just get this over with and get out of here,’ which is not what you want to hear from your candidate right before the debate. We knew within ten minutes that it was going to be a debacle. We had armed him with a joke — it was his 20th anniversary, and he addressed Michelle — and it turns out Romney was expecting just such a line and had a really great comeback. And Romney was excellent — just free and easy and clearly well prepared and showed personality that people hadn’t seen before. Obama looked like he was at a press conference.

We had a meeting at the White House and he said, ‘I know I let everybody down and that’s on me, and I’m not going to let that happen again,’ and that was his attitude. We always had debate camps before, where we’d re-create in hotel ballrooms what the set would look like, and all of the conditions of the real debate. When we went down to Williamsburg, Virginia, for the next debate camp, he seemed really eager to engage in the prep. We had a decent first night. That was on Saturday. On Sunday night, Kerry, playing Romney, got a little more aggressive and Obama a little less so; it looked very much like what we had seen in Denver. It was like he’d taken a step back.

Scott Brown Is Elected Massachusetts Senatorturning Ted Kennedys Seat Republican For The First Time Since 1952 And Suddenly Throwing The Prospect Of Passing Obamacare Into Jeopardy

Plan B

“I’m talking to Rahm and Jim Messina and saying, ‘Okay, explain to me how this happened.’ It was at that point that I learned that our candidate, Martha Coakley, had asked rhetorically, ‘What should I do, stand in front of Fenway and shake hands with voters?’ And we figured that wasn’t a good bellwether of how things might go.

This might have been a day or two before the election, but the point is: There is no doubt that we did not stay on top of that the way we needed to. This underscored a failing in my first year, which was the sort of perverse faith in good policy leading to good politics. I’ll cut myself some slack — we had a lot to do, and every day we were thinking, Are the banks going to collapse? Is the auto industry going to collapse? Will layoffs accelerate? We just didn’t pay a lot of attention to politics that first year, and the loss in Massachusetts reminded me of what any good president or elected official needs to understand: You’ve got to pay attention to public opinion, and you have to be able to communicate your ideas. But it happened, and the question then was, ‘What’s next?’

Sheryl Sandbergs Lean In Hits Bookstores Making The Feminist Case That Women Should Be More Aggressive And Ambitious In Their Careers And Making Feminists Themselves Very Angry

The “Mommy Wars” Finally Flame Out

After decades of chilly backlash, we find ourselves, these past eight years, in an age of feminist resurgence, with feminist websites and publications and filmmakers and T-shirts and pop singers and male celebrities and best-selling authors and women’s soccer teams. Of course, as in every feminist golden age, there has also been dissent: furious clashes over the direction and quality of the discourse, especially as the movement has become increasingly trendy, shiny, and celebrity-backed.

Perhaps the most public feminist conflagration of the Obama years came at the nexus of policy and celebrity, of politics and pop power. It was the furor over Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who gave a viral 2010 TED Talk about women in the workplace who “leave before they leave” — who alter their professional strategy to accommodate a future they assume will be compromised by parenthood — which led to the publication of her 2013 feminist business manifesto, Lean In.

It’s a lesson of the Obama era: One approach to redressing inequality does not have to blot out the others. Sometimes, attacking from all angles is the most effective strategy.

Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Laces Up Her Pink Running Shoes And Spends Ten Long Hours Attempting To Filibuster A Billthat Wouldve Imposed Statewide Abortion Restrictions

“The Concept of Dignity Really Matters”

“I was given an enormous degree of latitude. I did communicate with the White House counsel on occasion about high-profile cases, but it was much more in the nature of just giving them a heads-up, to calm any nervous feelings they might have. There’s only one exception to that, and it was on marriage equality, in the Hollingsworth v. Perry case in 2013. We were contemplating coming in and arguing that it was unconstitutional for California to refuse to recognize the legal validity of same-sex marriages. But we didn’t have to do it . And because it was a discretionary judgment, and it was such a consequential step, that was the one matter where I really sought out the president’s personal guidance. I wanted to make sure the president had a chance to thoroughly consider what we should do before we did it. It was really one of the high points of my tenure. It was a wide-ranging conversation about doctrinal analysis, about where society was now, about social change and whether it should go through the courts or through the majoritarian process, about the pace of social change, about the significance of the right at stake. He was incredibly impressive.

A Golf Summit Between John Boehner And Barack Obama Stirs Hopethat Perhaps The Two Parties Will Come To A Budget Agreement And Forestall A True Crisis Secret And Semi

A Grand Bargain That Wasn’t, Remembered Three Ways

“The president of the United States and the Speaker of the House, the two most powerful elected officials in Washington, decided in a conversation that they both had to try to make something happen. Maybe it would be the way it worked in a West Wing episode in a world that doesn’t work like a West Wing episode. That’s how it started — two individuals saying we’re going to try. I think they both shared a belief in the art of the possible, and they both did not think compromise was a dirty word.

When our cover was blown — a Wall Street Journal editorial came out saying that Boehner and Obama were working on this and attacking the whole premise — that was devastating. It resulted in Cantor being a part of the talks. Cantor and Boehner came in, and I think it was a weekend private session with the president in the Oval Office, and they were talking about the numbers. At one point Cantor said, ‘Listen, it’s not just the numbers. There’s concern that this will help you politically. Paul Ryan said if we do this deal, it will guarantee your reelection. If we agree with Barack Obama on spending and taxes, that takes away one of our big weapons.’ There were so many obstacles, some of them substantive — how much revenue, and what about the entitlements? — but there was also this overlay of ‘This is going to help Obama.’

Illustrations by Lauren Tamaki

The Obama Administration Unveils Its Plan For Regulating Wall Streetwhich Is Then Introduced In Congress By Senator Chris Dodd And Representative Barney Frank

MJ=JC?

Lane Brown: Michael Jackson’s death was a big deal for lots of obvious reasons, including the surprising way it happened and the fact that he was arguably the most famous person on the planet.

Nate Jones: He was an A-lister with an indisputable body of work; he was 50 years old, his hits were the right age — old enough that every generation knew them, but not too old that they weren’t relevant anymore.

LB: But it was also the first huge celebrity death to happen in the age of social media, or at least the age of Twitter.

NJ: MJ’s death came alongside the protests in Iran, which was when Twitter went mainstream.

LB: It also meant that so much of the instant reaction was to make it all about us.

Frank Guan: In a lot of ways, the culture prefers the death of artists to their continuing to live. Once an artist gets launched into the stratosphere, there’s no way to come down, and that permanence becomes monotonous. They run out of timely or groundbreaking material and the audience starts tuning out. At some point, their fame eclipses their art, and then the only way to get the general audience to appreciate them anew is for them to die.

LB: People seem to like the grieving process so much that even lesser celebrities get the same treatment.

Congresswoman Gabby Giffords Returns To The House Floor For The First Time Since Being Shot In A Massacre In January Casting A Vote In Favor Of The Debt

A Rare Moment of Unity

“I was doing intensive rehabilitation in Houston at the time but was following the debate closely, and I was pretty disappointed at what was happening in Washington. I’d seen the debate grow so bitter and divisive and so full of partisan rancor. And I was worried our country was hurtling toward a disastrous, self-inflicted economic crisis. That morning, when it became clear the vote was going to be close, my husband, Mark, and I knew we needed to get to Washington quickly. I went straight from my rehabilitation appointment to the airport, and Mark was at our house in Houston packing our bags so he could meet us at the plane.

That night, I remember seeing the Capitol for the first time since I was injured and feeling so grateful to be at work. I will never forget the reception I received on the floor of the House from my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats. And then, like I had so many times before, I voted.

I worked so hard to get my speech back, and honestly, talking to people who share my determination helped me find my words again. I’ve been to Alaska, Maine, and everywhere in between. Best of all, I got back on my bike. Riding my bike once seemed like such a huge challenge. It seemed impossible.”

Miley Cyrus Twerks At The Mtv Vmassetting Off A Controversy About Cultural Appropriation That Soon Ensnares Seemingly Every White Pop Star On The Planet

• Karlie Kloss wears a Native American headdress and fringed bra at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.

• Justin Timberlake is accused of appropriating black music when he tells a black critic “We are the same” after praising Jesse Williams’s BET Humanitarian Award speech about race and police brutality.

• DJ Khaled gets lost on Jet Ski, snaps the whole time.

• Two UW-Madison students snap their meet-cute as the entire student body cheers them on.

• Playboy Playmate Dani Mathers films and mocks an anonymous woman in the gym shower.

• A Massachusetts teen records the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl. The video is later seen by a friend of the victim.

Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months

What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.

They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. What’s more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.

The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.

In 2012 Republicans Predicted That Failure To Approve The Keystone Pipeline Would Send The Price Of Gasoline Sky High And Kill Large Numbers Of Jobs

Despite the fact that the Keystone Pipeline was not approved, the price of gasoline continued to drop below $1.80 per gallon, millions of new jobs were created and unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9% by early 2016. The most optimistic predictions say that the Keystone Pipeline would only create a few dozen long-term jobs and would do nothing to lower the price of gasoline.

Eric Cantors Stunning Primary Loss Suggests No Politician Is Safe From The Rage Of The Tea Party Not Even The Tea Partys Canniest Political Leader

From Party’s Future to Also-Ran in a Single Day

On the day his political career died, Eric Cantor was busy tending to what he still believed was its bright future. While his GOP-primary opponent, David Brat, visited polling places in and around Richmond, Virginia, Cantor spent his morning 90 miles away at a Capitol Hill Starbucks. He was there to host a fund-raiser for three of his congressional colleagues — something he did every month, just another part of the long game he was playing, which, he believed, would eventually culminate in his becoming Speaker of the House.

The preceding five years had brought Cantor tantalizingly closer to that goal. In the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election, he’d rallied waffling House Republicans to stand in lockstep opposition to the new president’s agenda. In 2010, he’d helped elect 87 new Republican members, giving the GOP a House majority and making Cantor the House majority leader. He became the champion of these freshmen members, stoking their radicalism during the debt-ceiling fight and working to undermine Obama and John Boehner’s attempt to strike a “grand bargain.” His alliance with the ascendant tea party was strategic — it gave him leverage not only over Obama but over other Republicans who might also have had aspirations of becoming Speaker. It never occurred to him that the wave he was trying to ride might crash on him instead.

In 1993 When Bill Clinton Raised Taxes On The Wealthiest 15% Republicans Predicted A Recession Increased Unemployment And A Growing Budget Deficit

They weren’t just wrong: The exact opposite of everything they predicted happened. The country experienced the seven best years of economic growth in history.

Twenty-two million new jobs were added.

Unemployment dropped below 4%.

The poverty rate dropped for seven straight years.

The budget deficit was eliminated.

There was a growing budget surplus that economists projected could pay off our national debt in 20 years.

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Republicans Predicted That President Obamas Tax Increase For The Top 1% In 2013 Would Kill Jobs Increase The Deficit And Cause Another Recession

You guessed it; just the opposite happened. In the four years following January 1, 2013, when that tax increase went into effect, through January 2017, unemployment dropped from 7.9% to 4.8%, an average of more than 200,000 new jobs were created per month, Wall Street set new record highs, and the budget deficit was cut in half.

Over 5.7 million new jobs were created in the first two years after that tax increase. That’s more jobs created in two years than were created during the combined 12 years of both Bush presidencies.

In 2001 When George W Bush Cut Taxes For The Wealthy Republicans Predicted Record Job Growth Increased Budget Surplus And Nationwide Prosperity

Once again, the exact opposite occurred. After the Bush tax cuts were enacted:

The budget surplus immediately disappeared.

The budget deficit eventually grew to $1.4 trillion by the time Bush left office.

Less than 3 million net jobs were added during Bush’s eight years.

The poverty rate began climbing again.

We experienced two recessions along with the greatest collapse of our financial system since the Great Depression.

In 1993, President Clinton signed the Brady Law mandating nationwide background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Apple Announces That It Has Sold 100 Million Iphoneswithin A Few Months It Will Overtake Exxonmobil As The Most Valuable Company In The World

Earthlings Gain a New Appendage

What if we had the singularity and nobody noticed? In 2007, Barack Obama had been on the trail for weeks, using a BlackBerry like all the cool campaigners, when the new thing went on sale and throngs lined up for it. The new thing had a silly name: iPhone. The iPhone was a phone the way the Trojan horse was a horse.

Now it’s the gizmo without which a person feels incomplete. It’s a light in the darkness, a camera, geolocator, hidden mic, complete Shakespeare, stopwatch, sleep aid, heart monitor, podcaster, aircraft spotter, traffic tracker, all-around reality augmenter, and increasingly a pal. At the Rio Olympics you could see people, having flown thousands of miles to be in the arena with the athletes, watching the action through their smartphones. As though they needed the mediating lens to make it real.

This device, this gadget — a billion have been made and we scarcely know what to call it. For his 2010 novel of the near future, , Gary Shteyngart made up a word, “äppärät.” “My äppärät buzzing with contacts, data, pictures, projections, maps, incomes, sound, fury.” Future then, present now. His äppäräti were worn around the neck on pendants. Ours are in our pockets when they aren’t in our hands, but they also sprout earbuds, morph into wristwatches and eyeglasses. Contact lenses have been rumored; implants are only a matter of time.

Let’s face it, we’ve grown a new organ.

Republicans Said Waterboarding And Other Forms Of Enhanced Interrogation Are Not Torture And Are Necessary In Fighting Islamic Extremism

In reality, waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation that inflict pain, suffering, or fear of death are outlawed by US law, the US Constitution, and international treaties. Japanese soldiers after World War II were prosecuted by the United States for war crimes because of their use of waterboarding on American POWs.

Professional interrogators have known for decades that torture is the most ineffective and unreliable method of getting accurate information. People being tortured say anything to get the torture to end but will not likely tell the truth.

An FBI interrogator named Ali Soufan was able to get al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah to reveal crucial information without the use of torture. When CIA interrogators started using waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation methods, Zubaydah stopped cooperating and gave his interrogators false information.

Far from being necessary in the fight against terrorism, torture is completely unreliable and counter-productive in obtaining useful information.

In 2008 Republicans Said That If We Elect A Democratic President We Would Be Hit By Al Qaeda Again Perhaps Worse Than The Attack On 9/11

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney stated that electing a Democrat as president would all but guarantee that there would be another major attack on America by Al Qaeda. Cheney and other Republicans were, thankfully, completely wrong. During Obama’s presidency, we had zero deaths on U.S. soil from Al Qaeda attacks and we succeeded in killing Bin Laden along with dozens of other high ranking Al Qaeda leaders.

Game Of Thrones Arrives On Televisionwith An Assemblage Of Dragons Torture Nudity Incest And Despair A Show The Whole Family Can Enjoy

Explaining Kale

ADAM PLATT: Many things in Foodlandia, these days, have a political element to them, and if you want to emblazon a flag to be carried into battle, you could do worse than a bristly, semi-digestible bunch of locally grown kale.

ALAN SYTSMA: To eat kale is to announce you’re a person who cares about the matters of the day.

AP: The idea of kale is much more powerful than kale itself. In short order it went from being discovered, to appreciated, to being something that was parodied. Frankly, I’m all for the parody.

AS: The same thing happened to pork. Remember bacon peanut brittle? Bacon-fat cocktails? There’s bacon dental floss.

AP: Ahhh, bacon versus kale. The two great, competing forces of our time.

AS: Do you think one gave way to the other?

AP: What we’re really talking about is artisanal bacon, and the more sophisticated-sounding pork belly, made from pigs that were lovingly reared at upstate farms and fed diets of pristine little acorns. Bacon is the great symbol in the comfort-food, farm-fresh-dining movement, a kind of merry, unbridled pulchritude. Kale is the righteous yin to pork’s fatty, non-vegan yang.

AS: But pork has an advantage: People like the way it tastes.

AP: That’s a huge advantage, one that will hopefully see it through to victory.

2 notes · View notes

sunbellylou · 4 years

Text

ask for writers !!

thank you @tomlinvelvetfics for tagging me! and thank you @soldouthaz for making this tag!

1. describe how you first started writing and when you first posted: i’ve been writing for years now, i started with het (ew!) 1d fics in portuguese back in 2011, it was actually those little imagines we used to write, don’t know if anyone remembers hehe. i posted them on a facebook page i was part of and i remember the first thingy i wrote was something with niall, but i really don’t remember any details (but was probably bad as heck since i was 11).

my first larry fic i probably wrote around 2012 when i found out the gay fanfics world haha, i don’t remember what it was or anything tbh, in my head i always wrote and posted gay fanfic.

my first fanfic in english was a little one shot (like 400 words honestly), it was a translation of a previous work i wrote portuguese. i posted it a year and a half ago and it’s called playground love (please don’t look).

2. which of your characters do you typically resonate most closely with? do you base any characters off of yourself?: i usually write from harry’s pov because i love love l o v e describing louis and how angelic he is, so usually i tend to see louis as this ethereal ish character, cause it’s usually about harry falling in love with him. so whether i like it or no, i tend to be closer to harry’s characters in my fics, i always like to put a bit of myself on him and make the character real, you know?

3. where do you often find inspiration?: honestly? anything! i’ve written fics inspired by tumblr posts, tweets, pictures, songs, movies, things that happened in my real life, books. i literally wrote a pwp because i couldn’t stop thinking about leather pants (go read my robin hood au).

4. has quarantine helped or hindered your writing process?: in the beginning it was really helping me, i’d stay up till 4am everyday just writing like crazy, but then i got into the worst writer’s block and didn’t write shit for months. (and of course right when i started getting new ideas, i started working so i have no free time).

5. do you listen to music/noise while you write or do you prefer silence? always listen to music, all the time. i can’t do anything without music. mostly because my brain is a mess and music helps me concentrate. i usually go for some chill songs, some indie pop and stuff.

6. what is your biggest writing pet peeve in your writing or in general?: oh my god, when i’m writing and two or more paragraphs start with the same word, one after the other. it drives me crazy!!!! and sometimes i spend hours looking for ways to word differently the sentences, just so i don’t have two paragraphs starting with “the”.

also when my paragraphs are two (or one) lines long, i can’t! it has to have three or more lines.

7. describe your ideal writing setup: at the dining table, in the middle of the night, with some soft music playing in the background and some popcorn with me!

8. favorite time of day to write?: well, just said it hehe i like writing at night.

9. favorite genre to write + one you’d like to try writing in the future?: woah, that’s tough because i literally write any genres! i really love writing fantasy and horror stuff, but i feel like it’s not really well accepted in the fandom? (spec horror). and when people like it, they only read from bigger authors so i usually keep myself from writing those. aaand tbh i probably already wrote most of fic genres out there, so there isn’t much left to try.

10. do you struggle with writer’s block? how do you typically overcome it? i’m writer’s block bitch and i do not know how to overcome her

11. what is the easiest part of your writing process and the most difficult? outlining tbh, i usually don’t (and it comes back to kick me in the ass). i always have too many ideas at the same time and can’t stick to one, so outlining and finding the right plot is really hard.

12. how do you come up with original characters? (if applicable): lately i haven’t really had the chance to come up with ocs, but when i wrote original books (not fanfics and stuff), i usually started with the gender and one outstanding personality trait and went from there.

13. what is your favorite and least favorite word? i love the words ethereal and breeze, omg you’ll find them A LOT on my fics. and my least favorite word is growl.

14. what is one thing about your writing that you’re really proud of and one thing you hope to continue working at?: i think i describe the vibez in the scene really well, it’s my favorite thing to do. and i need to work more on building my sentences, because theyre always supermessy.

15. what work of yours has your favorite ‘verse/world building? how did you come up with it?: definitely the fic i’m working on right now! i’m putting so much work on the world building since it’s a fantasy fic, so i’m planning every little detail about it. i hope other people like it too when they read it !!

16. what font and size do you write in? single spaced or double?: comic sans, 12pt, single spaced. don’t come at me.

17. what is a typo(s) you find yourself making consistently?: because english isn’t my first language, i always change like ‘th’ for ‘d’ (because it has a similar sound in portuguese), so catch me typing ‘de’ instead of ‘the’ or ‘dey’ instead of ‘they’.

18. (if applicable) do you separate fic writing from fandom?: i didn’t understand the question so i’m pretending i never read it hehe

19. what emotion is your favorite to write? which is the most difficult?: my favorite to write is probably,,, love/adoration, like harry looking at louis like he’s the whole world and thinking about how amazing he is? i love it.

and the most difficult is probably anger, i find it really hard to write like fights and stuff like that because usually i make the characters sound more sad than angry.

20. what is one thing you hope readers always take away from your works?: i never thought about that but,,, i hope they start finding joy in small things that happen in their day. that’s something i use a lot in my fics and i think it’s very important to bring it to real life. like enjoy that late night tea, showering in the morning, spending a summer day in the house, cleaning, etc.

21. what is the best and worst writing advice you’ve ever received?: i think the best advice is one i got from someone i no longer talk to, they told me this when i first started writing in english and it is to stop trying to write fancy or like native english speakers, because it’s much better to write simple sentences that i’m confident about than write sentences with words i barely know how to use.

and the worst advice is TO OUTLINE! i know i should maybe i dont know but leave me alone, i hate outlining bye

22. which one of your works would you most want to see turned into a film/television show?: ok so,,, it’s a book i wrote like three years ago with original characters. it’s called great evil and i wrote it in portuguese. it’s full of violence and acid humor, about a very evil and sarcastic demon and an angry hunter. (one day i’ll translate that book and turn it into a larry fic)

23. do you write scenes chronologically or out of order?: chronologically. always

24. how do you handle criticism?: really bad. please be careful with what words you use. i’m already really hard on myself when it comes to my writing, so sometimes someone says something and (it might be dramatic but) i feel my world crumbling and i want to stop writing right away.

25. what is the advice you would give to someone who is looking to start writing?: just,,, do it. there’s no right or wrong way to do it. there’s no such thing as too much or too little, bad or good plots. every idea is a good idea. write it for yourself, write something you like. go ahead and just do it. there’s always someone out there who will enjoy your work, no matter what.

26. what kind of feedback on your work always makes your day?: any comments make my day tbh, if you comment on my fic i’ll be forever grateful and will be smiling like a fool the whole day. honestly, even a “omg i loved it” comment can make my day.

27. which fic ‘verse of your own would you most like to exist in? which fic’s characters would you most like to befriend?: the one i’m writing 100%, please i want to live in a fantasy world. i wanna live in the water kingdom and have faerie louis as my king please.

and i’d like to befriend louis from my fic kiss me in your chevrolet, he’s a sweetheart and i must protecc.

28. what do you always enjoy getting asks about/wish people would ask about more?: anything! i rarely get asks so anything is good hehe

29. what has writing added to your life? how has it changed you?: it’s such a big part of my life, i spent all my teenage years writing and it really is what built my personality. it helped me being more creative with all aspects of my life and take life lightly, enjoy little things and moments.

30. why do you write?: i just love having ideas and putting out there, playing with words and finding new ways to describe daily things.

boost yourself + tags!

1a. share the last sentence you wrote:

The path through the dense forest, covered in slippery rocks and burning trees is already difficult enough, but it becomes ten times worse when you’re being pestered by small, demonic creatures.

2a. describe the wip you’re most excited about:

i’m honestly only working on one fic right now and i’m super duper excited about it

3a. share the piece of dialogue from one of your works you’re most proud of:

"I mean, I still don't plan on watching Star Wars, so…"

The boy groans playfully, throwing his head back and Louis' eyes are suddenly really interested in the column of the guy's throat.

"Americans really have no culture." He shoulders Louis slightly, warmth spreading through Louis' dainty shoulder and making him trip to the side lightly. With a faux outraged scoff, Louis waves a dismissing hand.

“What do British people know about culture? All you do is drink tea and talk about the weather all day,” Louis teases with a mischievous gleam in his eyes. “Also, Star Wars is American, just so you know.” He rolled his eyes playfully, feeling surprisingly comfortable in his presence.

Skater Boy sighs comically, shaking his head, his wavy locks falling gracefully on the sides of his face and Louis can’t stop thinking about how soft his hair must be.

“You got me there.”

not posted but i kinda like it (i’m not really good with dialogues, so it was really hard to find one lmao)

4a. share the best first and last lines from your work(s): I will do only those that are already published:

best first lines are from a halloween fic i never finished:

Louis’ blue eyes snap open. His heart pounds fast inside his rib cage, making something as easy as breathing almost impossible. Sweat drenches his body and he feels like drowning. He feels too awake and wary as his breathing calms down, as well as his grips on the sheets under him loosen.

best last lines are from my 2019 BLFF there’s more than one place to call home:

Their life was utter chaos, and they were definitely complete opposites, and sometimes Harry wished Louis would just shut the hell up, but at the same time, Harry wouldn’t change a single thing about his life, because he had Louis, and that was all that mattered to him.

5a. link the last fic you read: it was the devil's in the details by @raspberryoatss

6a. link the last work you published: you could take a lick (but it’s too cold to bite me)

7a. link to your ao3 (if applicable): cinnamons

8a. someone that inspires you: louis hehe

9a. a comfort fic/work that you’ve been grateful for this year: tbh i don’t read a lot of fics, but there’s this work a friend of mine wrote. it was in portuguese and she ended up deleting it but it’s amazing.

10a. other writers that you’d like to tag! @bottomlwt @raspberryoatss

8 notes · View notes

letterboxd · 4 years

Photo

Ghosted Films: A Director’s Nightmare.

To mark a conversation with Peter Medak about his new documentary The Ghost of Peter Sellers, which details a particularly tumultuous early 1970s film shoot, Dominic Corry looks at how the inherently nightmarish pursuit that is filmmaking has informed other movies.

“Every frame you set up references yourself and your entire life, so bits and pieces indirectly of your life go into every movie.” —Peter Medak

On a certain level, filmmaking is an essentially traumatic experience. The extreme number of moving parts, umpteen tiers of variables—both creative and practical—and the cacophony of egos involved all amount to what in the best-case scenario could generously be considered organized chaos.

And for the most part, it all falls on the director’s shoulders. Although the long-prevailing auteur theory is regularly and healthily challenged these days, our default perception tends to be that whatever happens, good or bad, it’s the director’s fault. Some directors process their filmmaking nightmares by writing a review of the film on Letterboxd. But in the case of journeyman filmmaker Peter Medak (The Changeling, The Krays, Romeo Is Bleeding), he chose to process his filmmaking trauma by… making a film about it.

The Ghost of Peter Sellers revisits the making of the 1974 Peter Sellers-starring pirate comedy Ghost in the Noonday Sun, an infamous folly of a film that has long haunted Medak. It’s also one of those rare films on Letterboxd: at the time of writing it has just two reviews, and only 26 members in a community of two million have noted seeing it. Giving it one and a half stars, EWMasters writes: “Pretty awful. I mean talk about throwing it on the stoop and seeing if the cat’ll lick it up. There is one very good sequence where the crew goes to town on this big plate of fish and vegetables that’s really well done—but otherwise, this is really only worth the time of a Sellers completist”. (Perhaps the main character’s name—Dick Scratcher—should have sounded alarm bells.)

Medak is not the first filmmaker to spin non-fictional gold out of a director’s nightmare (in this case, his own). His movie follows in the footsteps of legendary documentaries such as Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s 1991 film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which revealed the full extent of the already infamous insanity that comprised the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 classic Apocalypse Now, and used extensive footage shot at the time by Coppola’s filmmaker wife Eleanor (filmmaker spouses are handy to have along for the ride, as Nicolas Winding Refn also knows). And there’s Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s 2002 work Lost in La Mancha, which detailed Terry Gilliam’s (ironically?) Sisyphean efforts to film an adaptation of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

In both instances, the films in question were (eventually) made—and released to some acclaim (one considerably more than the other)—but as The Ghost of Peter Sellers shows, the shooting of Ghost in the Noonday Sun was such an epic boondoggle that the unfinished film sat unreleased for years and was much later released to no acclaim whatsoever.

The uphill battle to make his never-released horror movie Northwestern made indie filmmaker Mark Borshadt an unlikely filmmaking hero thanks to the breakout success of Chris Smith’s 1999 documentary American Movie. Like with Ghost in the Noonday Sun, the efforts to make a film proved more interesting than the film being made.

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kevin Bacon in ‘The Big Picture’ (1989).

There are several narrative films of note that have successfully captured the specific pandemonium of filmmaking. Richard Rush’s 1980 cult classic The Stunt Man follows a fugitive who stumbles his way into the titular job on a big chaotic Hollywood production (Peter O’Toole plays the Machiavellian director), while Christopher Guest’s under-appreciated 1989 comedy The Big Picture stars Kevin Bacon as a hot young director who is roughed up by the Hollywood machine. It’s a notable and often overlooked antecedent to The Player, and like the Robert Altman classic, is more about ‘the business’ overall than the specifics of filmmaking, although in both cases Hollywood proves itself analogically appropriate.

Playwright, writer and director David Mamet’s own filmmaking experiences obviously inform his 2000 comedy State and Main, in which a Hollywood production takes over and smothers a small town with its singular thinking. It’s not hard to imagine Mamet processing his own filmmaking trauma in State and Main, just as the Coen brothers famously did in Barton Fink, their ode to writer’s block supposedly inspired by the difficulty they had penning the screenplay for Miller’s Crossing.

Charlie Kaufman channeled his own creative struggles into the screenplay for the 2002 masterpiece Adaptation, then built on those themes with his wildly ambitious 2008 directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, whose more maddening aspects arguably capture the irrational nightmare that is filmmaking better than any film directly ‘about’ filmmaking.

With her 2018 documentary Shirkers, writer Sandi Tan gained some measure of closure regarding an indie film she had starred in and written in her home country of Singapore, in 1992. The documentary (which shares its name with the original movie) has her revisiting the footage from the never-released film, which was stolen (!) 25 years previously by its director—and Tan’s filmmaking mentor—George Cardona.

Back to Peter Medak. In The Ghost of Peter Sellers, which premiered at Telluride Film Festival in 2018 and has just had its virtual screening release, we learn that Hungarian-born Medak was a rising directing star in the early 1970s in London, hot off the Oscar-nominated Peter O’Toole film The Ruling Class. Unable to resist an offer to work with Peter Sellers, then comedy’s reigning superstar—mostly thanks to Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther films—Medak set about shooting a treasure-hunting pirate film on the island nation of Cyprus in the Mediterranean.

In addition to the usual production problems associated with shooting on boats, Medak had to contend with the titanically and infamously fickle Sellers, who quickly turned on him and attempted to get him fired. Sellers also antagonized the other actors, then, after failing to get the production shut down, brought in his friend and longtime creative collaborator Spike Milligan to try and salvage the film, but things kept going wrong, leaving Ghost in the Noonday Sun unfinished and Medak with the blame for the production’s troubles.

Director Peter Medak with Peter Sellers (as Dick Scratcher) and Spike Milligan (as Bill Bombay) on the set of ‘Ghost in the Noonday Sun’, finally released in 1984.

Although Medak’s career recovered, he has clearly been carrying around a lot of hurt associated with the experience, and it’s remarkable watching him work through that on screen by revisiting Cyprus, telling the story of the shoot, and talking to some of the people involved. Sellers (who died in 1980) looms large over the film, but it also has interesting content surrounding the great Spike Milligan, who died in 2002.

Why did you decide to revisit this experience with a documentary? Peter Medak: Because it’s been haunting me for all these years. Because it should’ve been a really very successful film and I was blamed for everything going wrong, when in fact it had nothing to do with me. It was due to Peter’s changing mind and state of mind, and all kinds of things had physically gone wrong on the film. It was always easiest to blame the director for everything and my career at the time was very high up after [The] Ruling Class and this should’ve been the icing on the cake and it wasn’t.

It really bothered me for many years afterwards, even though I went on working. I was asked to do it by the producer of the documentary and I originally said “It’s the last thing I want to do”, because it would mean I would have to go back to Cyprus where I shot the original movie and go on the water, and I never want anything to do with water anymore because a lot of the disasters on the film, production-wise, were all connected with shooting at sea, which is totally impossible to do. Then I thought: well, you know, I should just do it and try to explain what happened on the film. And because some of the explanations were funnier scenes than the original film. So that’s why I did it.

Peter Medak fishing for answers in ‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’.

In the documentary, you talk about needing to free yourself from the experience by making this film. Do you feel like you achieved that? Well, I think I did because I had a wonderful time doing it. A very sad time at the same time because when you go back to places where you shot 45 years before, it creates a very strange kind of illusion inside your mind, your heart and everything of the time. And having been there then and then being there again, it’s a very strange kind of a supernatural feeling in a way. It felt like you have died and your ghost is actually revisiting all these things you know. I called it The Ghost of Peter Sellers because it sounds good and also because the original film was called Ghost in the Noonday Sun, and this ghostly feeling of mine of revisiting that island after all these years, it’s a very, very strange feeling and somehow the film captures that emotionally.

Do you feel like the large distance from the shoot was necessary to be able to revisit it? It’s not that I thought about it every day of my life, but I talked about it to all the people who I worked with in my following career. When I was doing Romeo Is Bleeding with Gary Oldman, my darling Gary said to me one day, “You know, we are crazy, what we should do is make a movie about your movie, but I don’t want to play Peter Sellers, I want to play you, with your Hungarian, broken-English accent.” We had a script written but we never did it. That was a good 25 years ago.

Peter Medak in front of a promotional poster for ‘Zorro, The Gay Blade’, his 1981 film starring George Hamilton and Lauren Hutton.

So you had considered doing a scripted version of it? Yeah, but I don’t know quite what we would’ve done. I said to Gary at the time: “I never want to go on a boat again”, and so I thought in my mind that the scenes would start each day [with] the characters getting off the pirate ship and they come ashore—that’s where the scenes would begin. I’m sure we would’ve done something quite wonderful, and it would’ve maybe explained the things the [documentary is] trying to explain because I guess that’s what has unconsciously driven me. Because [for the documentary], we didn’t write one word of it, I just completely did it out of instinct. Where I want to shoot, what I want to shoot, and how we should go from here to there. I loved it, so going back on to it was quite easy. It did show me actually what a wonderful medium it is, documentary, because you can do anything with it. It’s a much freer form than scripted movies. Which is rigid. And this is liquid.

Did you have any other documentaries about filmmaking in mind when you went into this? Not really. I knew Terry Gilliam’s Lost in La Mancha, because I love Terry and I love his films and we know each other and knew each other. Terry was very fortunate, because he had so much trouble before on Baron Munchausen, that he decided to have a documentary film crew filming the whole process, so he had the material available, which allowed him to make his film. I said to him after [a screening], “You were lucky because you didn’t make the movie. I had to suffer through 90-something days of shooting with Peter [Sellers].” But of course since then, Terry made the film, and he made something slightly different than what he was originally gonna do.

Peter Medak retraces his steps in ‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’.

Did any of your subsequent films feel nearly as difficult? Most movies are very difficult to make, and always when you anticipate problems, they never seem to happen. When I did The Changeling, everybody said “George C. Scott is very, very difficult to work with” and he was an absolute angel with me and [it was] the easiest thing to do. It was a wonderful ghost story. I’m very proud of that film. It will live forever. All movies are like your kids, your own children, because you put so much emotion, so much of your soul. That’s what I’m saying to [Ghost in the Noonday Sun executive producer] John Heyman [in The Ghost of Peter Sellers]: the director’s viewpoint is completely different from the producer’s because every frame you set up references yourself and your entire life, so bits and pieces indirectly of your life go into every movie. Because of that it becomes an incredibly personal journey when you put your absolute soul on the line. When it gets criticized or not accepted or whatever, one takes it very personally because the whole thing came from a very personal experience, even though the subject may be nothing to do with you.

Peter Sellers on the set of ‘Ghost in the Noonday Sun’.

Even within the canon of famously difficult performers, Peter Sellers is notorious. How would you describe him to a modern audience? Well he was a genius, there’s no question about it. But he was a manic-depressive person. And it’s a generalization, but most of the great comics are manic-depressive. And he changes his mind all the time. One minute, he loves you, next minute, he hates you. One minute he loves the subject, next minute he doesn’t wanna do it, he wants to get out and all that. So it is very up and down. When you’re running film with a crew of 150 people, and boats on the sea, and weather’s changing and everything, you can’t have that, because you fall behind the schedule and things go wrong.

At one point very early on, all he wanted to do was get off the movie. And then he did everything he [could] to sabotage the film so the film would close down and he wouldn’t have to finish it. But it didn’t just happen on my film, it happened with all his biggest successes, including the Pink Panther movies. Because if you look into Blake Edwards, each one was an absolute nightmare for the director and for the film company, United Artists. And I was gonna include that in the documentary but it had nothing to do with the Ghost in the Noonday Sun so I didn’t. I actually shot some scenes with one of the executives from United Artists at that time who had to deal with the insanity of Peter and also Blake Edwards. I say ‘insanity’; I didn’t want to say it too much in the documentary because I love Peter, even today. And it’s wrong for me to accuse him of those things because it sounds like I’m excusing myself. Peter was crazy. There’s no other way one can describe it. Touched by God. And so was Spike Milligan. But Spike had the love of goodness. Peter had kind of a nasty streak on him when he turned on people.

There’s a moment in the documentary where you suggest that Spike Milligan is more influential than he gets credit for. Do you think he’s under-appreciated? Totally. Totally. Totally. Because his talent was absolutely, monumentally genius. I always say this, but Spike basically created Peter Sellers through [legendary BBC radio programme] The Goon Show. And he also gave him all those various characters and developed those voices for him. It’s all in The Goon Show. The Monty Pythons, they were inspired by The Goon Show and they made it into television. Not story wise, but style wise. That kind of zany, insane humor. Spike was a total genius. Not that Peter wasn’t, but they stood together, completely overwhelmingly wonderfully insane. But Spike was quite something. He was incredibly human, he was incredibly gentle. And incredibly kind. Peter was incredibly combative. And he had that most incredible ego.

But all our lives come from our backgrounds and what our past was and where we come from, and Peter had a very sad upbringing and a very sad life and he was tremendously influenced by his mother. When his mother passed away, he kept on talking to her for ten years. When he came to Cyprus to make the movie, he arrived with big blow-up [photos] of Liza Minnelli—who he’d just broken up with a week before—and his mum. And it sounds terrible when one says it, but psychologically, some of the answers are there. But at the same time, both Peter and Spike, I can’t tell you what a gift it was… I mean the reason I did the film is: who could give up the chance of actually working with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan? It doesn’t matter what the fucking script is, you know? It was a wonderful thing and I would do it all over again tomorrow.

Related content

Our Showdown on films within films

‘The Ghost of Peter Sellers’ is screening in virtual theaters now. It will be available via video on demand services from June 23. A list of all the films mentioned in this article can be found here. Comments have been edited for clarity and length.

#peter medak #peter sellers #ghost in the noonday sun #the ghost of peter sellers #filmmaking fails #directing #documentary #filmmaking process #filmmaking #spike milligan #the goon show #monty python #the specific pandemonium of filmmaking #epic boondoggle #letterboxd

7 notes · View notes

homenum-revelio-hq · 4 years

Photo

Welcome (back) to the Order of the Phoenix, Gabe!

You have been accepted for the role of REMUS LUPIN! We loved your thoughts on the darker, more difficult layers of Remus’s friendships and fears and we were fascinated by your ideas about lycanthropy’s effects on his gender transition! We’re so happy you’ve come back to Homenum Revelio, and excited to see you on our dash again!

Please take a look at the new member checklist and send in your account within 24 hours! Thank you for joining the fight against Voldemort!

OUT OF CHARACTER:

NAME: Gabe

AGE: 22

TIMEZONE: GMT-3

ACTIVITY LEVEL: Honestly pretty active, I’m still quarantined and will stay that way for a good while, probably. Remus is just one of those characters that comes easy to me, so good chances that I’ll be around a lot, hah. I’m most active on the weekdays! Weekends my sister usually tricks me into watching a billion movies or a new show, so I end up being less present.

ANYTHING ELSE: Nope!

CHARACTER DETAILS:

NAME: Remus John Lupin

AGE: 21

GENDER, PRONOUNS, and SEXUALITY: trans male, he/him/his, he’d rather not classify his sexuality as anything other than not-straight.

Remus didn’t start taking the wonderful Attisgalli Corrective Draughts until he joined Hogwarts officially, as his parents wanted to wait for that before they started him on the gender reassignment potions. That’s not to say they didn’t support their son’s identity, which he’d been frankly very vocal about since he could talk, they just wanted to be sure that he would be safe. He already had a lot on his plate. Being a werewolf, they needed to make sure the potions could even be safely used with someone like him, so they waited to talk to Dumbledore and his trusty team of potion-makers about it. Remus was on corrective draughts for all of his puberty and he’s currently on the heavier dose that only needs updating every few years. He has a few annoying side-effects after taking the wrong dosage too early. He doesn’t suppose many people know about this, and he doesn’t particularly care to tell anyone, apart from the people who already know.

As far as his sexuality goes, I don’t think he likes any of the labels he’s stumbled upon, I don’t think he openly – or even privately – calls himself anything when it comes to sexuality. He just doesn’t give it much thought. He likes whoever he likes, and if you were to say “oh, so you’re pansexual, then”, he might simply offer you a tired grunt and an unhappy twist of his face. He doesn’t feel comfortable in any boxes. “Queer” as an umbrella term would be the closest he’d get to labeling himself. All that being said, as the writer, I’d personally put him as a 4 on the kinsey scale, but that’s between you and me.

BLOOD STATUS: Half-blood/Half-breed

HOUSE ALUMNI: Gryffindor

ANY CHANGES: Don’t think so! I’m keeping the fc of Charlie Rowe after surfing through many others because I think he does Upset & Angry right. That’s really important for a Remus, he’s working through a lot right now. I also really considered to go for Paul Mescal from the new show “Normal People” because I think he has a great normal face and (from what I can tell, maybe) some pretty scars on his chin and he has some great scenes BUT he currently has no resources. Also considered Louis Hofmann, from netflix’s Dark, but decided he looked too young, even though he’s in his twenties, too. Anyway, just wanted to briefly take you with me on that faceclaim journey, the conclusion is that I love Charlie Rowe and I didn’t know him before so I thank you guys for suggesting him!

CHARACTER BACKGROUND:

PERSONALITY:

Remus today is very different from who he was in Hogwarts. That’s no surprise, of course – who doesn’t grow out of their weird teenage years? But it feels different with him, and that’s because at seventeen, Remus already had enough baggage to count for an adult. So where does that leave you, at twenty-one?

He is a lot of things. He is tired, he is angry, he is devastated, he is young. If before he was only a boy, crushed under the weight of all the things that happened to him, now he is a man, standing tall but hardened by life’s constant beating. He hasn’t so much overcome his issues as he has simply grown friendly with his demons. His edges have turned sharper, his hands have grown colder, he’s losing contact with his faith.

That’s not to say his core has changed. Remus is kind, before anything else. He hasn’t lost the warmth his mother taught him, because that kind of empathy is not something one easily shrugs off. Even the war couldn’t take this from him. It wears him down these days, being selfless, having a caring vein and needing to look after others. He’s already lost so much, and he doesn’t see this changing anytime soon, as they continue to lose battle after battle, but this is still who he is. He wants a better world, he wants the good side to win.

Remus is also very secretive. He can come across as cold or distant to people he doesn’t know, because he had a lifetime of keeping himself concealed. It’s his defense mechanism and it’s how he’s kept himself alive after all these years.

In fact, he’s not even fully sure how his few friends managed to slip under that armour so easily. Sure, his armour wasn’t so well-built when he was a child, but it was still some work. He was once simply a scared eleven-year-old, eager to learn and be a good student, and suddenly he ended up in a lifelong bond with three other idiots. In a lot of ways, he owes so much of his personality to the Marauders. He bloomed in Hogwarts, he had a safe and healthy environment with people he loved, he could finally grow into a normal boy; he cracked jokes and he made fun of himself and he learned not to take things so seriously. He was not just a werewolf, not just a monster. He’s a great friend, he’s funny on his good days, he’s sarcastic and kind and protective of his friends. He owes this to them.

Remus is a trans man who started taking corrective draughts as soon as he entered Hogwarts. Dumbledore was the one who encouraged his parents to allow this, promising he’d keep an eye out and take care of Remus. There wasn’t exactly any research done on whether or not the potions would affect a werewolf’s body differently, so they’d have to be cautious, but several potion makers insisted nothing should go wrong.

They were right, technically. The potions didn’t react any kind of way with his blood, they did their work normally. It also perhaps helped that most of the side-effects were all things that Remus had been dealing with his whole life, due to the curse: muscle and joint aches, mood swings, headaches. The only catch was that every time he turned, every full moon, when he came back into his human form, the draught had completely worn off.

This made things a little more complicated. It didn’t mean anything to his health, thankfully, all he had to do was take another dose of the potion in the morning and he’d be back on track. It was something about his metabolism overworking, the fact that his body healed itself after each moon. They could never quite fix that little quirk – every morning after the full moon, he’d wake up in a body that didn’t belong to him.

This was when he was on a small dosage of the draught, of course, still going through puberty and taking the so-called “Children’s Corrective Doses” that had to be ingested every week.

Despite the general crippling discomfort of briefly being in the wrong body once a month, it was fine when he was making the turns by himself at first. Then the Marauders joined, and that was weird; it took him a while to agree to their presence and it wasn’t only because they could be in danger. He was scared of being that vulnerable, too.

Because of this monthly hiccup on the process, potioneers instructed that he should be on this smaller dose for as long as possible before he transitioned safely into the “Permanent Corrective Dose”. Five years at least, seven if he could, before he switched to the potion that he’d only have to take every two years or more. This shouldn’t be a problem, he thought innocently, hearing this at age eleven.

By sixteen, the temptation of the Permanent Dose was too grand. It stopped being bearable after a while, the whole “waking up in the wrong body once a month” experience. And the temptation was there because the potioneers said that an adult dosage would likely fix that monthly issue. All he wanted was to stop worrying about this thing – wasn’t the fact that he turned into a murderous beast more than enough? Besides, he was turning seventeen soon, he was most likely done with puberty, he had done the smaller doses for six years already.

So the Marauders made a grand plan. And out of all the illegal, morally questionable things Remus has done, he probably holds this one as the best. They managed to buy him a vial of a Permanent Corrective Dose, and he drank it without thinking twice.

This didn’t come without consequences. Dumbledore was mad. His parents were mad. Every potioneer he knew was pretty annoyed. He frankly couldn’t give a damn, he was overjoyed – it had worked. The moon came, and for the first time when he came back to his senses, he was in the right body, his body. He didn’t care if anyone was pissed at him.

He still doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about the debilitating migraines he still gets as a side-effect. He doesn’t care that his muscles will sometimes cramp, or that his skin sometimes feels raw. He can handle all of that – quite frankly, he’s happy to deal with all of that, if it means keeping his body through the transformations.

It’s important to take from this that Remus Lupin doesn’t shy away from many things. He likes to deal with things head-on, he is a Gryffindor, after all. Once Dumbledore sent him to live with the werewolves shortly after graduating, he made sure to take another permanent dose, a heavier one, to last him however long he stayed out. This time the draught was acquired legally, since he was already of age, but the higher dose in this short amount of time wasn’t exactly what the mediwix ordered. This ended up aggravating his side-effects.

Still – and perhaps that is a testament to his stubbornness –, he’ll tell you this was all worth it.

BRIEF OVERVIEW OF FAMILY:

Remus grew up in a happy home. Well, as happy as a family could be, while plagued by the curse of lycanthropy. So maybe not so happy at all.

He doesn’t remember much of his early childhood, if you ask him. He remembers the looming sense of despair, he remembers seeing his parents cry through cracks of barely open doors, he remembers quiet dinners and he remembers feeling awful. He can’t remember not being a werewolf, but he thinks they were the happiest before that.

They were okay after it, eventually, too. They all had to learn to navigate it, and once he grew a little older, things were easier, as easy as they would get. He remembers that time a little better – the times just before he went to Hogwarts and his time at the castle, too.

Overall, Remus grew up with a good family, he’d tell you. They didn’t have many distant relatives, so it was always just the three of them, and his parents were supportive – mostly. Hope was the warmth of the house, and if anything, she only grew closer to Remus after he was bitten. She was overprotective, and stern, and she had trouble handling when things didn’t go exactly her way, but those are hardly things kids notice about their parents when they’re still kids. He could tell you this today, but his memories of her are still all sugar-coated, tinted pink, gentle.

She didn’t understand his gender identity at first, his father once told him. Hope still had too many roots in the muggle world, it took her some time to wrap her head around all of these ideas. Lyall was the one who had to sit her down and explain to her about the corrective draught, and how common it actually was, how safe. She was the one who wanted to wait for a talk with the Headmaster before she let him take the potions.

Luckily for Remus, he was so young by the time she was having those first doubts and issues with his identity, he doesn’t have any bad memories of that. To him, she never mistreated him, and he never felt anything but accepted. She protected him with all of her heart, and that included all of him, her son, and a werewolf.

In fact, one of his fondest memories of her is getting a haircut, before his very first day in Hogwarts. He usually wore his hair somewhere a little above shoulder-length, a little choppy; he just liked how it swung when he ran, to be honest, and how it splattered water everywhere if he spun his head really fast in the shower. But he was terrified of having magic classes for the first time, he was scared of being thrown into a castle full of people he didn’t know, far away from his parents, the only safe haven he knew. She was the one who suggested a haircut first. They sat and flipped through silly muggle magazines until he found a cut he liked on some cologne ad, and she did it herself. Looks somewhat similar to what he still has as a haircut, if only with more bowlcut-esque qualities back then.

Lyall was more distant, growing up. Hope had little trouble getting over her bias of gender to accept his identity, but his father couldn’t do the same for his curse. If you asked Remus, he never really accepted his child being a werewolf, he was ashamed of his condition.

If you asked Lyall, the story’s a bit different. He was distant, but only because he couldn’t deal with all of the turmoil within himself. He couldn’t look at his child without thinking that he was the one responsible for Fenrir’s attack. He was responsible for his son being a werewolf, cursed forever – how could he look at Remus and see past that? Of course he was distant. Of course he dedicated his time trying to find a cure. As the turns hurt Remus, they hurt his father just as much. Every moon, he suffered with him.

It was hard for him, looking past that, but not because he was in any way ashamed of the condition. He felt sorry, and he didn’t know where to put all the guilt. He didn’t want to spend all of his time pitying his child, but he did. And it was easier to be distant when he felt undeserving of his son’s love in the first place; there would never be anything he could do to make up for this.

In conclusion, they were good parents, but it would also be unfair to completely ignore that Remus has such an issue with being a werewolf, as an adult, and – given that he was closeted about that his whole life –, this must’ve come from his parents. Their efforts to protect and hide Remus’ lycanthropy have not done him any good on the long run, they have not quite focused on the “but also, love yourself” part of their speech. Not to fully blame them or anything, of course there isn’t a “how to raise a werewolf” manual out there, and they had to deal with so much since he was just a little boy, they did what they had to do to keep their child safe. Remus truly believes they did the very best they could, and that they were perfect parents, given the circumstances.

I don’t think it registers to him that they may be the very root of the crippling self-deprecation he feels, and frankly, I don’t think it ever will register. This is not the kind of thing you unravel within yourself without some serious help.

Nowadays, since Hope’s passing, the two Lupin men have managed to grow closer. The hurt is still there, Remus still thinks his father is too cold and ashamed of him, and Lyall thinks he’s guilty and that Remus must hate him. They’re not big on talking about feelings, but they’re warmer with each other now than they ever were. That’s not saying much, it’s barely anything more than the occasional back pat and smile, but Remus likes to think Hope would be happy.

OCCUPATION:

He currently still works with the Dissendum Task Force, as he feels truly at home taking care of that part of things. He wants a job, he always wanted to be able to take care of himself, of course, I imagine he put up a fight when it came to depending solely on James’ money. He always intended to pay it back, to eventually find something for himself. He grew comfortable, the slightest bit, with James’ money, knowing he had that safety net while he figured things out, and while they all had bigger things to worry about. Now he has lost his friend, and he needs to find something, anything, to keep himself afloat, and all of this on top of the grieving, it might just make him reach a breaking point.

ROLE WITHIN THE ORDER/THOUGHTS ABOUT THE ORDER:

Remus feels like a paradox within the order. He feels both at the very center of it, as well as standing on the outside, looking in. He believes in them wholeheartedly, even if he’s not so sure he stumbled upon all of this belief himself, or if it’s been drilled into him by one very dedicated James Potter. And now that James is gone – how should he know how to feel?

More and more, he feels like he’s simply floating around in this war, a walking mystery, neither here nor there. He does as he’s told, he helps whoever he can help, and he won’t say a peep but he is starting to question his own faith, at this point. It’s difficult not to. He had a problem going with the werewolves, of course, and that time was generally awful, but he owed Dumbledore too much to say no. How much of what he does really is his choice, or someone else’s? He’s starting to grow tired of it.

He loves his friends more than anything, therefor he loves the Order, but he’s afraid of how long this might last.

SURVIVAL:

Remus is always on the move, but that’s nothing new to him. He’s been on the move since he was a kid, occasionally dragged off from one side of Europe to another, their family led by his father’s blind ambition towards finding a cure. He never felt like he could truly stop, and he grew up to embrace a sense of restlessness. The first place he truly understood the meaning of “home” was the castle, and even then, he knew his time there would have an end. In a way, this has helped him survive. He stays alert, he stays on the move. He’s always ready to pack up and disappear, as long as he knows he has the right people on his side.

His current living situation is, I imagine, complicated at best. He wouldn’t want to get a place on money that’s not his own, and he’s never been able to make his own money, at least not substantially. First, he was out with the other werewolves, he followed them anywhere and slept wherever he could when he needed to.

Then, he stayed at the McKinnon estate, and even though he knows he can stay there, he’s still often looking over his shoulder, waiting for the day they’ll kick him out. It still doesn’t feel right. It never does. He hasn’t felt at home since Hogwarts – or, perhaps, the odd times in between when he couch surfed wherever Sirius, James, or Peter were staying.

Now, he’s with his father momentarily, hiding. He hasn’t told Lyall anything that happened, he just packed up and showed up at his father’s doorstep. The contact isn’t ideal, but Remus needed the full recharge, even if just for a day or two. Lyall welcomed him with a brow heavy with concern, but he put the kettle on for some tea anyway, and he didn’t ask questions he didn’t want the answers to. Remus deemed that good enough.

RELATIONSHIPS:

Oh, boy. Things are a mess. This is the emo part of the app.

I must start this section talking about how much friends mean to Remus. They mean everything. Everything he heard since he was five-years-old was how much he needed to hide himself, how badly he needed to keep this secret, or everything would end terribly. He was a monster. He was capable of horrible, despicable things, and no one could accept him. By eleven, he’d come to term with this. By eleven, he barely even believed he’d get the chance to study. This is the weight this little kid had to carry around.

And then – enter the Marauders, the best, most miraculous thing to happen to him. A boy with a curse, suddenly welcomed into the coolest group of kids he’d ever met. He honestly felt like it was some kind of lie, or an elaborate prank. Those very first months after they met, he’d wait until the others all fell asleep and he’d write letters to his mom, telling her all about them. He’d write fast and he’d write over several sheets of parchment, talking about all the wonderful, terrible things that boys their age did. He was happy.

Eventually, he stopped waiting for the other shoe to drop. They grew close, the others found out his secret, they never once turned away from him. They helped him. They loved each other, the lot of them. And it was so, so much more than a monster could hope for – still, to this day, he’s not sure how they do it, how they can love him. He owes them so much, but it’s not even about that, it’s not about owing. If he did, he’d owe them his entire soul. There’s not enough space in his body, in his heart, for how much he owes them.

They were, and they continue to be, everything.

And then the war happened. They parted ways, and by the time Remus came back, things had shifted. Things felt off. He was certain the love was still there – it has to be, it has to –, but it felt like it was stained, tainted by something else, something ugly. Suddenly, he’s not sure he can trust them anymore, but he doesn’t know if that’s his gut speaking, or if it’s paranoia.

That’s the duality of man, and the duality of monster, he supposes. Everything trails between gut feeling and paranoia. He’s scared of being doubted, so he’ll turn a pointing finger right back. If they think he can be a mole, then they can be a mole.

He’s terrified of losing them. More than anything, Remus really is terrified of losing his loved ones. He knows he can survive it; he’s lost his mum, he now lost James, you would think he’s hardened enough by now to be able to take it, but he’s not. In his eyes, they are his humanity. What is he, if he doesn’t have his friends? What’s a monster if he isn’t loved?

They all knew going into this that it wouldn’t be easy, sure, but sometimes Remus feels a little alone in how much he feels. It seems like the world keeps turning, the war doesn’t stop for grief. And it feels like everyone else picks themselves up and moves right along with it, but he can’t. Every death weighs on him, every loss has just been piling and piling up onto his shoulders and he doesn’t know how much else he can take. He feels like everyone else is so much better equipped for this. They all mourn, sure, but… do they? They can’t be feeling this like he does, because if they were, they’d be feeling this crippling dread. They’d be feeling how hard it is to move, how shaky his hands feel all the time, how his heart seems to be broken into a million pieces and all of his insides have rottened.

He resents that. He wants to be able to grieve openly without feeling like he’s slowing anyone down. He wants to be able to feel things, and give them time, before they’re running into the next death trap that could easily take another one of his loved ones. He really needs the time to stop and feel this, because it’s crushing him, and he doesn’t feel like any of his friends understand how bad it is – which in itself is the most crushing part of it. When did they all become these sort of robots programmed for war? And why didn’t he get that memo?

James Potter – Don’t get me started on the duality of being so hurt by the fact that your best friend outed your biggest, most damning secret to everyone, and then died. I mean. What the fuck, James. In all seriousness, this is a lot to handle, which is why he deserves to be mentioned in this section even if this doesn’t exactly make for new plots. Remus doesn’t know how to feel; normally he’d be upset at that betrayal, accidental or not, but he didn’t even have the time to process that, before grief steamrolled into everything. He wants to be angry. He wants the right to be mad, to maybe yell at James, to hear his apologies and immediately forgive him, because of course he’s not really angry, he’s just scared. And instead, he gets silence.

Sirius Black – Sirius always has a way of filling up every room he walks into. Remus always thought he’d be better off if he was a little more like Sirius, and maybe that’s why they work – how opposing their energies are. Remus is always trying to make himself smaller. In a way, this is also why they don’t work, on the times they don’t. Sirius was probably the person he trusted the most, even if they didn’t always see eye to eye. It hurts him a lot to think that maybe this trust is broken now; that maybe after all of this, they’ll end up too cold and distant to have the friendship they used to have. He hopes, blindly, that’s not the case.

Peter Pettigrew – He feels protective towards Peter. Maybe that stems from their years in the castle, how Peter was seen as the little kid who trailed behind them and not one of the Marauders himself. Remus never liked hearing that. And Peter is different than the others to him, he always seemed a bit smaller, a bit more innocent; Sirius and James have no trouble taking care of themselves, that’s not even a question. Peter, on the other hand. Remus feels like he needs to help him any way he can.

Lily Evans – He loves Lily like a sister. She reminds him of his mother, sometimes, with her warmth and her determination. She’s the strongest person he knows, and he think he’d probably trust her and follow her blindly anywhere – or, at least, he felt like that when they were all in school. He still wishes they were closer nowadays, he wishes they spoke more.

Marlene McKinnon – She’s too cool for him, honestly. Plain and simple, somewhere in the core of his being, he’s still just a really lame teenager who thinks she might be too cool to hang out with him. He’s grateful that he gets to crash at the estate, but he’s also well-aware of her family’s view of the half-breeds. He can’t quite relax while he’s there, he keeps expecting to be discovered and kicked out any passing second. Now that his secret is out, he fears she’ll turn on him.

OOC EXPLORATION:

SHIPS/ANTI-SHIPS:

I ship Remus/chemistry first, always, of course! I always find that you have to throw characters together in action before you start planning anything, you never know where the chemistry will be. I’ve taken part in many a ships in my time, Sirius/Remus probably being the main one, but in this context, everything’s a little trickier! It’s a very unstable, difficult time, and this is a very sad and angry Remus. He wants something, he wants to have someone, I just don’t think he even knows how, or where to begin with. I think he pushes the idea of romance so far back in his brain, thinking he can never have it, that it’s almost an impossibility in itself because of it. I think he’ll have a very difficult time believing anyone wants him like that, even if it does happen. I really look forward to possibly exploring any ships if chemistry happens! And I don’t think I have any anti-ships, currently. All is fair in the rp land.

WHAT PRIVILEGES AND BIASES DOES YOUR CHARACTER HAVE?

It is safe to say Remus has a bias against werewolves, in the saddest, most twisted way possible. Yes, he is one, and he doesn’t deny that to himself, but there’s a reason why he’s so careful to hide it from everyone else, why he was so reluctant in letting even his closest friends help him out – he agrees with all the stories and tales. He doesn’t feel proud to have this curse, he wouldn’t defend it if someone were to attack it.

They are monsters, once a month, under the moon. It doesn’t matter if his friends for years tried to convince him he’s a good person, he won’t believe it until he lets go of these horrible ideas he has of the curse itself. Even after meeting so many others like him. He may think hating it – hating himself – makes him better, a higher moral ground on the scale, as opposed to the werewolves who flaunt it. He may think some of them, like Fenrir, are worse than him for this, but it doesn’t make things that much better for how he views them.

As far as privileges go, Remus recognizes he has it pretty easy as far as his family life goes. He had loving parents – as far as he can tell –, he had a normal home life; he’s a half-blood, which meant he usually flew under the radar, considering how other wix seemed to view muggleborns, in contrast.

But as far as privileges he doesn’t recognize, I’d say that’s probably more interesting. Remus thinks of himself as a monster. A werewolf, bitten while he was still so young. His bite scar sits on his shoulder, now grown and shifted but the pale scar tissue never gone, an ugly mark. He doesn’t think himself particularly handsome, he doesn’t see many talents that stand out. He thinks he’s pretty much at the very bottom of the food chain.

Which is all kind of untrue, he’s blinded by his self-deprecation. Everyone has privileges, he is no different. He’s a werewolf, and that’s terrible, but other than that he’s not exactly doing too bad. He was always a good student, he liked studying, good grades came easy. His looks had never proven to be a problem, even if he believes it is. He had a good home, dedicated parents, he never ran out of money for books and robes and chocolate bars growing up. If you strip Remus of his lycanthropy – and lord knows he’s dreamed of that –, the truth is, he doesn’t have anything else to feel sorry about. And he’s so stuck feeling sorry for himself all the time, that he has a hard time recognizing his privileges and biases.

To him, he’s a monster, but to anyone else who doesn’t know of his condition, he’s really just another regular guy fighting the war. Of course, now, with everyone’s discovery – things will change.

WHAT ARE YOU MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO?

Well, I’m not new to this scene, hi, hello! So I already know everyone here is an amazing writer, and I adore you admins (I promise I’m not just sucking up for the sake of the app, it’s true). I love Remus, it’s been a few years since I last played him but he’s the muse that’s always alive in my head – this is the fastest and longest bio I ever wrote, to prove my point, aha. I especially love this Remus, the mid-war, post-Hogwarts, “can’t get a job”, “questioning the loyalty of the people I love the most” Remus. He’s feeling a lot. He’s tired, he’s angry, he’s grown sharp edges from the soft boy he once was. There’s so much to explore, and while it’s definitely a little scary to fill in someone else’s shoes, I’m really looking forward to writing with everyone and exploring all the many plots and relationships possible!

PLOT DROP IDEAS (OPTIONAL):

I’m terrible at these, I’ll admit, but I am open to everything you may want to throw my way! I also think I’ll need to take a second to acclimate into any of Remus’ pre-existing plots before throwing around any specifics of my own.

That being said, though, something that I’m excited to explore is his current unemployment. I want him to search for some kind of proper job to try to pay things for himself. I think he’s too proud to ask anyone else for help at this point, and he might have several emotional breakdowns on this process, but he’s gonna do his best. Also anything to do with his current (quite terrible) side-effects from Attisgalli Corrective Draughts, or exploring his gender identity in general, I’d love that!

ANYTHING ELSE? I was gonna do a pinterest board but I’ll spare you guys the trouble for now, this is already 11 pages long. Oops! Thank you for reading!!

#marauders era rpg #hp rpg #marauders rpg #harry potter roleplay #hp roleplay #homenumaccepted

5 notes · View notes

ficclique · 5 years

Photo

Fic Clique hosts choices for our top fics of the decade - as featured in our Minisode from Jan 3rd.

Brenna’s choices:

Honorable Mentions:

Worldwide Lonesome by loindexter (BTS)

2018, 39k, Yoongi/Jin

The biggest gut-punch I’ve ever felt from a character confession. The Jin of this fic has stuck with me every day since reading it. This fic examines sexuality in a way that made me feel seen & I love that.

Timeshare by Astolat (HP)

2016, 14k, Draco/Harry

This is sort of a stand-in for all of astolat’s drarry fic, which as a bundle are one of my top fics for the decade. They are fics that feel like instant-classics and the variety of characterizations, stories and tropes helped establish astolat as perhaps my all time favorite fic author. Timeshare won out above the others because it’s one of the fics that helped us decide to do this podcast! Thank you Timeshare!

Top 5 picks:

The Student Prince, by Fayjay (Merlin)

2010, 145k, Merlin/Arthur

A fic that has defined fanfiction for me. Perhaps the fic that first convinced me to love fanfiction. Something I keep coming back to and have reread numerous times. Funny, heartfelt, just different enough from the canon versions of characters. Perhaps the only University AU I will ever fully love.

The Love Song of the North American Douchebag, by Gyzym (Star Trek RPF)

2013, 25k, Chris/Zach

If you want to hear me (and my lovely co-hosts) discuss this fic in depth, then I recommend listening to Episode 6! However, one of our listeners also submitted this as a top fic of the decade, so I’m going to add what the lovely Scout said:

“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, I HOPE I CAN SWEAR. I'm not even in this fandom. The world building is just THAT good. It's one of my highlights *because* of its power to draw me in as a standalone. So much fucking talent in the transformative work community. The banter, characterization, sardonic-ness of this – international impact baby!”

Not Easily Conquered (series), by dropdeaddream & whatarefears (MCU)

2015, 117k, Steve/Bucky

An incredibly, precise, gut-wrenching trilogy. Each part is astounding both together and apart. A devastating exploration of love and dedication. One of those fics that created a Fandom Moment. I sobbed through the entirety of part 2 when I first read it. Womb to tomb, sweetheart.

Azoth by zeitgeistic (HP)

2013, 88k, Draco/Harry

A stunning exploration of magic beyond JKR’s universe. A timeless coming together of two characters. A frankly genius use of a plot device (and something as simple as a school project) to foster an incredibly touching and meaningful relationship, one in which they are not able to find what they need to complete their task until they find what they need in each other. ALCHEMY BABY!

Honeysuckle Arch by junkshopdisco (1d)

2015, 46k, Niall/Harry

Perhaps the most I’ve ever related to a character in fic. The Niall of this fic lives in my heart, and I feel like reading him helps me understand myself, and everytime I come back to it I understand him better too. It’s a touching portrayal of a character coming to terms with their sexuality in a way that feels completely grounded and who is surrounded by characters who love them, even if they don’t always know how to show it.

Nicole’s choices:

Honorable Mentions:

Protostellar by ninamondays

bts, 64k, pub 2019, Namjoon/Jungkook & Taehyung/Jimin

Space, cryogenics, fate, reincarnation, class struggles, revolution, climate change, character death. Having hope is punk rock. Processing grief is a slow and ugly process. [deep breath] Have I ever felt so profoundly touched by a fic while I was reading it?

the other thing by cornfields

hockey rpf, 16k, pub 2015, Jamie/Tyler

An absolutely unflinching look at personal accountability and internalized homophobia. What happens when your self-hatred has collateral damage? It’s about healing but it’ll fucking hurt first. Bleached out vibes. Makes texas feel very big, and the world feel very, very small. A story I’d only trust a fic author to tell.

Top 5 picks:

Murmuration by fringecity (indiachick)

bts, 167k, pub 2018, Yoongi/Jimin/Taehyung

Film noir/murder mystery meets gritty sci fi and superpowers. Everyone is morally gray. You Will sob about Kim Taehyung. A masterclass in plot. Felt like a trilogy all wrapped tightly into one fic. A kaleidoscope. An unfurling. This fic mesmerizes.

The River and the Deep Green Bend by liquidmeasure

1d, 70k, pub 2016, Harry/Niall

Dark tower au, but only technically. Makes me want to believe in the multiverse. An arid western, a sideways coming of age story, an elegy. The first time I’ve ever cried because an ending was perfect.

the undiscovered country by indigostohelit

hamlet, 56k, pub 2014, Hamlet/Horatio

What else can I say about this fic. What else can I Fucking say.

(note: we discuss this fic at length during episode 5)

All Things Shining by Askance and standbyme

spn, 142k, pub 2013, Dean/Castiel & Sam/ofc

A story about miracles. Literary as hell, with long luxuriant scenes that never drag. Masterful characterization. The thing I wanted from spn fic—connection, plot, and a fic that not only can handle the lore of the show, but is willing to expand upon it.

Who Painted the Moon Black by throughthedark

1d, 95k, pub 2013, Louis/Harry

Hunger games crossover. Doesn’t just use the other fandom for setting, but entirely inhabits it. I had to stop partway through my reread because I knew I’d have nightmares, but this fic never stops hoping. Trauma is not an ending. This fic is certain of that the whole way through.

Reid’s Choices:

Honorable Mentions:

songs from the ash, by explosivesky, 2017

Critical Role, Percy/Vex, Keyleth/Vax, 54k, WIP (sort of)

rockstar/movie star AU

A fantastic example of how fic can just standalone as really good original fiction. A lovingly rendered, devastating and beautifully crafted portrait of four broken people doing their best to navigate through their lives and around one another.

delta, by sharpa, 2019

BTS, rapline ot3, 60k

What happens when you’re a public figure who gets unwillingly outed, and two people you used to love reach out to offer you sanctuary? You make Reid cry, that’s what.

Top 5 picks:

Salt on the Western Wind by Saras_Girl, 2013

Harry Potter, drarry, 60k

Immediately post war, bond

It represents a lot of what I was looking for when I started really getting into Drarry fic, which was an exploration of what canon wouldn’t give me. My favorite Drarry fics have always been the ones that let them dig into their shared trauma, and while this fic isn’t the heaviest one I’ve read, I think the fact that it’s set literally hours after the Battle of Hogwarts ends lends itself well to that concept. I couldn’t have a list of the decade without a Drarry fic, tbh.

The Great Sealand Takeover, by whalehuntingboyfriends, 2015

Roosterteeth/Achievement Hunter RPF, ot6 (gavin, michael, ray, geoff, ryan, jack), 365k

FAHC

When I think about fics that set the standard for a fandom, this is one of the first ones that comes to mind. This fic means a lot to me because it was my introduction to RPF, and in addition to its intricate plot and fandom-constructed lore, also was a take on poly relationships and found families in a way I had never experienced before, with themes of belonging and a love that transcends typical convention.

The Twice-Told Tale by arysteia, 2012

Marvel, steve/tony, 15k

This fic hits a sweet spot for me where it does have some of that 2012 tower-fic nostalgia, but I also think it holds up well in terms of what I (and fandom) find so fascinating about Tony, which is all this grief and trauma that he struggles so hard to process, and the way puts himself at the center of attention to obfuscate the fact that he keeps everyone at a long arm’s length.

There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, by Shoshanah-ben-hohim, 2015

Hockey, Sid/Geno, Canon Divergent, 77k

& the whole series, including There is a Field, I’ll Meet You There, Alex Galchenyuk/Olli Maata, 131k

When I think about this fic I want to scream from every rooftop I’ve ever been on “please read this fic”. The way it weaves together details to provide a level of grounding and realism in what sounds like the most absurd concept for a fic just floors me. The empathy and compassion and fear in this fic just gets at the most tender parts of my heart, and the fact that it’s ostensibly a ship fic, and yet Sid and Geno spend nearly the entire fic with no communication, but instead are just holding on to the innate truth that they know about one another to get them through this crazy endeavour they’re on elevates the entire fic for me.

what comes after, by poppyseedheart, 2018

Roosterteeth/Achievement Hunter RPF, mavinseg (gavin, meg, michael, lindsay), 36k

Dystopia/Spy AU

When I first read this fic, I finished it and I put it down and then I spent a few days feeling like I was just sort of wandering around in a haze because every single thought was consumed by this fic. In addition to its impeccable worldbuilding and the tone work that it does with its setting, I don’t know that I had ever resonated so deeply with fic characters before. Reading this felt like someone had pried my ribcage open one by one and revealed the softest, most tender parts of me and then went “I’m going to write something that targets this.” This fic is an ode to loss and love, to mourning something that you once had and then hesitantly and clumsily opening yourself up to building something new, and recognizing that, impossibly, that new thing you built can somehow be better than what you had before.

And I felt all of these things, I felt like my world had just been shattered by this new author I discovered… and then, somehow, I became her friend. Then through Nic I met Brenna, and now when I think about this fic I not only love it for being a work of art, but also for being representative of the thing that brought me to two of the most important people in my life, and that to me will always make it my favorite fic I’ve ever read.

#fic clique #fic recs #multifandom #minisode #fics of the decade

29 notes · View notes

claritalunaluna76 · 5 years

Photo

MBW’s World’s Greatest Managers series profiles the best artist managers in the global business. This time, we speak to Mark Gillespie, founder of Three Six Zero and manager to huge artists like Calvin Harris. The World’s Greatest Managers is supported by Centtrip Music, a specialist in intelligent treasury, payments and foreign exchange – created with the music industry and its needs in mind.

Mark Gillespie grew up in Redditch, just south of Birmingham, England – where, as a teenager in the mid-’90s, he developed his passion for electronic music as a record collector and amateur DJ.

From there, he met local promoter Eddie Boulton, who gave him a job handing out flyers for Birmingham’s soon-to-launch legendary superclub Godskitchen.

Within a couple of years, Gillespie – deemed something of an internet-age whizkid within Godskitchen – was becoming an increasingly influential figure within the club, helping pick out emerging DJ talent, while also building websites, launching digital marketing campaigns and acting as a talent liaison.

This was a heady lifestyle for an 18-year-old dance music fanatic, which, by Gillespie’s own admission, invited “all kinds of crazy shit” into his life. Including the fact that local gangs – particularly the notoriously violent Birmingham Zulus – liked to frequent the club.

“For quite a while, I wore a bulletproof vest to work,” says Gillespie, matter-of-factly. “That was just being sensible; there’d always be standoffs between various gangs over who was and wasn’t allowed in the club. And then one night, this guy pulled a gun out and waved it right in my face.”

Funny thing is, Gillespie (pictured) doesn’t actually count this incident as his worst ever day at work. That came a couple of years before, when he considered turning his back on the music game for a ‘proper job’, by starting an engineering apprenticeship (similar to an internship) at UK car maker Rover.

“They were good people, but I hated it,” he says. “One day, I just stood up and walked out; I realized I had to make my music stuff work, otherwise I’d be at Rover for the rest of my days.”

Getting a gun thrust in his mush for Gillespie was, relatively speaking, still living the dream.

By 2003, Gillespie had progressed to booking the DJ’s at Godskitchen and its related festivals, as well as processing payments for talent and managing project budgets.

If anyone ever tells you that learning on the job is somehow bested by an academic education, let’s just run through the skills that Gillespie acquired within a few years of joining a nightclub as the flyer kid, aged 16: promotion, artist liaison, accounting, digital marketing, coding, talent booking, self-preservation – not to mention one of the best contacts books in the world of electronic music.

The next step was inevitable, wasn’t it? Godskitchen began releasing compilation albums through Sony Music, giving Gillespie a taste of how the wider record business worked.

Inspired by the likes of UK indie labels Defected, FFRR, and Toolroom, he hatched a plan to launch his own part-time record company – while still working at Godskitchen – and began scanning MySpace “for hours and hours most days, just trying to find new music played by interesting people”.

Eventually, Gillespie landed on the MySpace page of Scottish producer/DJ, Calvin Harris, and hotfooted it up to Glasgow to meet him. Leaving the city deeply impressed, Gillespie made a life-changing decision. “I pivoted,” he says. “I decided I didn’t want to be Calvin’s label – I wanted to be his manager.”

This was the beginning of what would become globe-straddling artist management powerhouse, Three Six Zero. Via his role at Godskitchen, Gillespie had become friendly with influential UK DJ and broadcaster Pete Tong and, in mid-2006, Gillespie passed Tong a CD with a bunch of Harris’s music on it. Tong played his track, The Girls, on his Friday night show on BBC Radio 1, and Gillespie’s cell phone began lighting up.

“I made the decision, right then, to quit my job and become a manager full time,” says Gillespie. “Calvin said to me, ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Looking back now, leaving [Godskitchen] probably was a real leap of faith, but it didn’t feel like it at that moment.”

Before we come on to the status of Three Six Zero in 2019, it’s worth reiterating the enormity of Calvin Harris’s worldwide success. He has sold 12 million records globally to date, including 44 million singles, and has had 14 UK No.1s. He has also amassed over 16 billion audio and video streams.

Originally signed by Mike Pickering at Columbia in the UK, Harris is one of Sony’s bestselling, and perennially prioritized, global artists. He’s worked with everyone from Rihanna to Dua Lipa, Florence + The Machine, Sam Smith, Khalid, Pharrell Williams, Ariana Grande and Migos.

In tandem with Harris’s rise, Gillespie, alongside his former business partner Dean Wilson, has built Three Six Zero into a truly blockbuster player in the global music industry. Based in Los Angeles, TSZ has one of the strongest rosters in dance music globally – with Harris, Tiësto and Disciples on its books, amongst others. It also reps leading lights in other genres like Louis Tomlinson, Kacy Hill and Grammy Award-winning producer Noah Goldstein.

Gillespie has an excellent story about his first foray into the United States with Three Six Zero: A major record label was interested in hiring the British exec to run a dance music-focused subsidiary. He took the meetings, and the paid flights to New York, gladly – but while in town, he was also meeting with Roc Nation’s Jay Brown, with whom Gillespie and Three Six Zero ended up going into business with for almost a decade.

Today, after a transformational year, Three Six Zero is fully independent, and fully-owned by Gillespie. TSZ recently launched a new office in London, headed up by long-term friend of the company, Phil Sales.

Gillespie, a major movie buff, has also quietly made a name for Three Six Zero in the film world, managing the likes of feature-maker Brady Corbet, Shameik Moore – the lead actor in Academy Award-winning animated movie, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse – and bestselling author/ scriptwriter Bret Easton Ellis.

Three Six Zero’s ambitions in Hollywood moved up a couple of leagues earlier this year, when Music Business Worldwide broke the news that the firm had acquired Westbrook Entertainment. That firm’s on-screen talent – including Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith, Jaden Smith, Willow Smith, Kenna and Crespo – are all now integrated into the TSZ family.

What’s more, Three Six Zero launched its own first feature film – the acclaimed Vox Lux, starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law – at the end of last year. The soundtrack to the movie was released on Three Six Zero’s in-house record label, headed up by Pete Tong, which Gillespie runs as a JV with Sony Music Entertainment.

MBW recently sat down with Gillespie over dinner in Los Angeles to map out Three Six Zero’s history, and to learn what the British entrepreneur has up his sleeve for the future…

YOU’RE NOW FLYING SOLO AS THE HEAD OF AN INDEPENDENT THREE SIX ZERO – HAVING ALWAYS HAD BUSINESS PARTNERS SINCE YOU LAUNCHED THE COMPANY IN 2007. WHAT’S THAT LIKE?

The idea of running this company solo used to terrify me. But now it’s different: I like the autonomy, and I like that you can craft decisions that are entirely yours.

There isn’t any interruption in what you’re doing. In some ways, it’s more difficult, but in other ways it’s more enjoyable.

WHAT ARE THE BEST THINGS ABOUT THE MUSIC BUSINESS IN THE US?

I love the professionalism; people really take pride in what they do and that resonates with me. The level of execution that you see in the US business is very impressive – some of the festivals and the live touring setups in particular. You regularly come across people that are prepared to push the envelope [in order] to be able to ensure that really great and interesting things happen.

The potential scale in America is fascinating – the business here really thinks about things on a global basis. I’m really proud of the fact that we’ve managed to handle our business over here, and I’m really grateful that we’ve been enabled to do that.

We all know that some people [from international territories] come to the US with an attitude that they’re going to tell people what to do – to me, that suggests those people believe it’s somehow easy to conduct business over here, and it’s really not.

The flow of business and the way that things are done is totally different to the UK but I love it, and I’m hugely passionate about it.

CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE TRANSITION FROM CALVIN HARRIS THE FRONTMAN TO CALVIN HARRIS THE SUPERSTAR DJ? SOME PEOPLE IN THE STATES MIGHT NOT KNOW THAT HE STARTED OUT AS A SINGER, VERY MUCH IN FRONT OF THE DECKS – BEFORE EMBRACING HIS KINGMAKING ROLE AS THE ARCHITECT BEHIND THE SCENES….

It’s one of the smartest decisions that he made in his career – and it was all him. He used the live touring circuit in the early stages of his career to help establish his business and hone his identity.

At that moment in time [indie/dance crossover acts with ‘frontmen’] was what was happening in the UK, but he saw what was coming and very intelligently saw that the world was turning in a slightly different direction. He also happened to write some of the greatest records ever released at the right time. That always helps.

HOW GOOD IS CALVIN?

His successes broadly speak for themselves. I may seem biased but I think he’s the best writer/producer of his generation.

I love him as an artist and a person. He’s ridiculously hard working, always has been, and he’s a huge a supporter of mine. His drive has definitely helped pushed me along over the years.

OTHER THAN JAY BROWN AND ROC NATION, WHO ELSE HAS BEEN MENTOR FIGURES IN THE US FOR YOU?

Rob Stringer. He’s really perceptive, and gave me some of the soundest advice in the early stages of my career. He’s also helped guide me, on more than one occasion, through what can sometimes be quite a complicated and political business.

Then there’s Michael Rapino – one of the smartest guys in the industry. He has a very direct, knowledge-based approach, which I respect him for. [That approach] is why, above anything else, I think he’s so tremendously successful.

On the subject of mentors, no-one comes close to my mum. She was an entrepreneur and raised three kids on her own. We didn’t have a lot, but she managed to get us into a place where we all had enough.

Redditch is a very ‘normal’ place; part of it’s really nice, part of it’s shitty, and the town center is ‘burger, fries and two black eyes’. It’s not South Central, but it’s not Kensington either. She’s been an incredibly good example to me that if you work really hard, you can achieve important things.

WHY HAVE YOU GOT SUCH A HUNGER TO MAKE MOTION PICTURES OR AUDIO/VISUAL CONTENT?

Partly because I think that the world that we live in now requires the ability to work across multiple disciplines. And partly because I love film, and always have.

Film, TV, short-form digital content, music and socials all used to be very separate, different disciplines. But over the past few years, with the massive growth in streaming, they’ve all moved closer together – and I think they’ll continue to move closer together.

A lot of people ask me whether I’m moving more towards film [at the expense of music] and I’m not. I work pretty much every moment that my eyes are open, and the film thing began as a hobby. I decided to do a few things that made us a bit more of a [Hollywood] entity, and which showed that we have reasonably good taste.

We’ve had a few successes now, and I think that all of the practical lessons that we learn from the [film] business will be hugely beneficial to the music side of our business. But, by no means, am I getting out of the music business. If anything, I’m more focused on music than I ever have been for my entire career; I think this is the most exciting time that the music business has ever seen.

WHY?

There are fewer barriers. There is opportunity for all different types of music to be able to break through.

Also, streaming is working, so there’s the revenue there, if distributed correctly, for the industry to develop and build big artists.

Interesting things are happening in the music business on a daily basis. Since the start of my career, I’ve been hugely into technology, and hugely into music, and I feel like at this moment in time, I get to do a bit of both every single day.

WHY DID YOU START A LABEL WITH SONY?

Three Six Zero has always run labels since the beginning of our business. [The company previously released albums from the likes of The Prodigy in the US via a JV deal with Warner Music Group and label-managed Mau5trap, Rising and Fly Eye Records.]

Running a label helps define your level of taste as a company. It also means you can have different levels of involvement in the careers of talent. The most enjoyable part of that is the ability to work with other managers, actually.

As for why Sony, part of it is because [via Calvin] I’ve spent eleven years getting to know everyone in that system; if I need to ask a question of somebody in Mexico, I know who to pick the phone up to. I know all the label heads in all the major markets, and there’s some really great people there.

Sony’s a really good company at the moment with a great perspective.

YOU’VE HAD SOME BIG CHARACTERS AS CLIENTS DOWN THE YEARS, INCLUDING TRAVIS SCOTT, MORRISSEY AND FRANK OCEAN. ONE OF THE MOST NOTORIOUS MOMENTS INVOLVED FRANK AND THE RELEASE OF BLONDE, WHERE HE COMPLETED HIS ALBUM DEAL WITH UNIVERSAL WITH A VIDEO-LP, ENDLESS, THEN INDEPENDENTLY RELEASED WHAT APPEARED TO BE HIS ‘REAL’ ALBUM WITHIN DAYS. HOW DID THAT SITUATION COME ABOUT?

Frank is a private guy, and that’s part of what makes him so great. So if that story is ever to be told, he should be the one telling it.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS GOING TO BE THE NEXT MAJOR TECHNOLOGICAL SEA CHANGE IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY?

The business needs to find a new format, in order to protect itself.

The biggest threat to the music business right now is decentralized networks. Thanks to Daniel [Ek] and Spotify, a new economy has been created in the business from streaming, but decentralization is a potential threat to that. Decentralization [i.e. blockchain technology] is something that was super buzzy for a year or two, and has gone away a bit, but I think it will swing back around at great pace in the next five years, and could be potentially devastating for the entire entertainment content business.

What happens after streaming is something that we need to focus on. The good news is that there are people within the major record companies and major publishers that are a hell of a lot more technologically savvy than they were when Napster hit.

One other thing is that I think other streaming platforms, from outside music, will want to get into music. That’s going to make things interesting but it’s potentially a threat as well – making sure that music is valued at the correct amount when that happens.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR THREE SIX ZERO?

We’re in a place where we can largely do what we want, which is interesting. Over the last eighteen months, I’ve spent a lot of time reconnecting with my British roots, and I’ve come to the conclusion that, if everything came to an end tomorrow, I’d like to be seen as the guy who took some good British stuff to America and made it successful.

I hope for us to do more of that, which means spending a bit more time back in London, re-establishing the business there. I love seeing some of the new, young managers from the UK having a go at moving out [to L.A] and getting stuck in.

And obviously I’m really excited to see what we can achieve with Will [Smith], Miguel [Melendez] and the Westbrook guys. I’ve known them for seven or eight years, we all share a similar philosophy, and they’re very smart and innovative people. There is a real opportunity to work with them to grow our intellectual property [portfolio] while expanding our entertainment management business.

WHAT’S HAPPENING WITH THREE SIX ZERO UK? LAST WE HEARD IT WAS BEING CLOSED BUT NOW IT’S BACK.

It would be impossible for us to be champions of British talent and not have an office in London. Phil [Sales] is our head in London; we’re partners in the UK business and we’re building it around him.

He’s very direct, he’s honest, he truly loves music, and he’s incredibly passionate about what he does. I’m seeing lots of great things happening in the UK, musically.

The British business seemed to get very locked off [outside the US] for about a year and a half, but that seems to be changing now.

WHAT SIZE DO YOU WANT THREE SIX ZERO TO BECOME AS AN INDEPENDENT COMPANY?

I’m definitely not looking for mass scale – I’m not trying to be the biggest anything ever again. That’s one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my career so far; being the biggest is not necessarily being the best.

Continually re-assessing what success means to you – especially after you have prolonged success – is the most difficult bit of running a business, but it’s essential.

A specialist in intelligent treasury, payments and foreign exchange, Centtrip Music works with over 450 global artists helping them and their crew maximise their income and reduce touring costs with its award-winning multi-currency card and live foreign exchange rates. Centtrip Music also offers record labels, promoters, collection societies and publishers a more cost-effective way to send payments across the globe.

Music Business Worldwide - July 10, 2019

#“sony’s a really good company at the moment with a great perspective.”#rob stringer is one of his mentors #mark gillespie #three six zero #louis management #music business worldwide #music industry #for context #for the record

88 notes · View notes

nerds4life · 5 years

Text

2 winners and 3 losers from One Direction’s solo albums

The boys have all gone in different … directions … since their indefinite hiatus in 2016. Some are better than others.

By Alexa Lee (Jan 31, 2020, 9:00am EST)

A decade — yes, a decade — ago, a teenage boy band by the name of One Direction was formed. After auditioning as individual singers on the British musical competition The X Factor, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik were thrown together into a group by TV personality Simon Cowell in 2010. And thus, One Direction was born.

While the group only placed third on The X Factor, their time on the reality show was just the beginning of their global takeover. Over a span of five years, the group released five albums, did four world tours, broke numerous Billboard 100 music records (including ones previously only held by the Beatles), recorded a documentary, and even released a perfume.

At the same time, the five members also became the basis of adolescent crushes and fervor for many years to come. Thanks to their individual quirks and calculated branding ploys, each boy quickly became an archetype for a different high school crush: Niall was the adorable friend, Harry the artistic boy next door. Zayn was quietly mysterious, while Liam was extroverted and jockish. And Louis? Hmm, well — Louis was also there.

For those five years, the One Direction boys seemed like they were untouchable. That is, until Zayn left the group in 2015 to embark on a solo career, and, a year later, the remaining band members announced an “indefinite hiatus.”

Four years after One Direction announced its hiatus, each of the One Direction-ers have begun their own solo careers. It’s the first time any of them have recorded without each other, and the first time they’ve performed solo in front of an audience since being on The X Factor as teens. Their solo albums, good or bad, reveal how each individual wants to reintroduce themselves to the public, and how they’re attempting the complicated leap from adolescent pop star to independent adult artist.

Now that Louis Tomlinson has dropped his first solo album, every former One Direction member has released at least one solo project. (Harry and Zayn have each released two.) And there are some very clear winners and losers among them. Here’s how they stack up against each other and what each one tells us about who these boys are now that they’ve spent some time apart.

Winner: Fine Line by Harry Styles

Watching Harry emerge triumphantly, hair and culottes billowing, with the title of Most Popular and Critically Acclaimed Ex-One Direction Member is not unlike watching a long-awaited prophecy finally fall into place. Ever since One Direction first stepped into the international limelight, interviews and press circuits saw that Harry was different from his fellow bandmates. He was offbeat but cool, disheveled but sexy.

And in 2017, when he released his debut album named — what else? — Harry Styles, Harry established himself as worthy of all the hype from his years in the band. A brooding rock record filled with anecdotes about all the sex he has and heartbreak he’s felt, Harry Styles reintroduced Harry to the world as an indie songwriter, David Bowie fanboy, and charismatic lover. And with his next, more experimental 2019 album, Harry takes all these elements of his identity a step further, securing his spot in the popular music landscape as a modern rock star.

Harry released Fine Line at the end of last year, interrupting winter’s dreariness with bright, dancey songs about all-consuming yearning. The lyrics of “Adore You” and “Watermelon Sugar” conjure images of summer fruits and summer loves, and both songs set the perfect soundtrack for encountering a crush at a party, or at least fending off seasonal depression. And on “Cherry,” his transportive and melancholy ode to an ex, listeners get a glimpse at genuine heartache from Harry. Despite having built a career out of belting love songs, Harry has never before sounded this vulnerable in his music before. “Cherry” shines a light on the vulnerabilities of a seemingly invulnerable star and brings a touching depth to Harry’s music that was previously absent. Fine Line is the most adventurous and enjoyable of the One Direction members’ solo efforts, and it’s sure to convert even the most crotchety boy band skeptics into believers.

Winner: Flicker by Niall Horan

As a member of One Direction, Niall was beloved — but not for being the band’s breakout star or its scene-stealing performer or even its biggest personality. Niall’s greatest charm, and the primary allure of his 2017 album Flicker, is instead seeming like an ordinary, likable guy. The human embodiment of a chill night in, Niall projects affable, regular-guy energy, but in a more palatable way than, say, Ed Sheeran. He’s a man who, after being part of the most popular boy band this side of the millennia, can still convincingly seem like he’s bemused by his fame and wealth. Niall likes Nando’s, and he likes to golf on the weekends. It’s easy to imagine him as one of those people with the uncanny ability to put horses at ease simply by murmuring the dulcet opening bars of his hit single “This Town” and running his guitar-worn hands over their hides.

Niall brings this same aura of safety and coziness to Flicker, where he strums his acoustic guitar and sings earnestly about the mundane highs and lows of falling in love. His songs are emotionally and musically safe — the most upbeat tracks, “On the Loose” and “Slow Hands,” still retain a mellow, unhurried cadence, and sad songs like “Paper Houses” veer away from raw grief or anguish, opting instead for lyrics that just barely skim the surface of sorrow.

Is it always good when an artist’s best quality is being inoffensive and never taking risks? No, but perhaps in the swirling political and social chaos of 2020, it’s what we need. Niall is a calming lighthouse in the stormy sea of life, and we would be fools to let him out of our sight.

Loser: Icarus Falls by Zayn Malik

Writer Allison P. Davis once described Zayn as someone who “sings about sex like it’s this thing he just heard about on a Jodeci song.” It’s this image of Zayn that echoes in my mind whenever I think about his couple’s photoshoot with model Gigi Hadid, or the boyish pirate-themed pub in his backyard, or his many, many selfies featuring a tortured grimace and 5 o’clock shadow. Despite his reputation for being the quiet, mysterious band member, in his post-One Direction career, Zayn has revealed both his passion for sensual R&B, as well as a powerful lack of convincing sexual energy.

Davis’s one-sentence character study is also a devastatingly apt summary of Zayn’s second album, which came out in 2018. At nearly an hour and a half, Icarus Falls is a boring, corny exploration of what happens when a too-handsome man ensconces himself in cologne and longing. Chock full of weak lyrics (e.g. “That’s how I feel the soul inside her body”) and dull, forgettable beats, the album has neither the playfulness nor sufficient melancholy to breathe life into Zayn’s sensual aspirations, and the end result is unrewarding.

The disappointment of Icarus Falls is worsened by the fact that Zayn’s debut album, Mind of Mine, was so much better. Mind of Mine’s intriguing blasé attitude was an exciting change of pace from Zayn’s demeanor in One Direction, when he was obligated to sing very un-blasé songs like “What Makes You Beautiful.” Although the 2016 record also frequently stumbled when it intended to seduce, it showed signs of artistic promise that make Icarus Falls seem like dull anticlimax, with a mere two exceptions. “Let Me” and “Entertainer” are soothing tracks in which Zayn vows to shower his lover in devotion and luxury items, and they’re the only songs that come close to the groovy fun of his last album. For listeners who are unable to let go of Zayn’s undeniable vocal chops and moody flair (me), these quality songs are exasperating reminders that Zayn is wasting his potential as well as everyone else’s time.

Loser: LP1 by Liam Payne

For many years, Liam seemed poised to stay in the “normal guy” lane with Niall, often playing the band’s cheerful jokester in music videos and interviews. Because of his jovial stage presence and photogenic, symmetrical face, many people — Liam included — thought he would follow the footsteps of another boy band pop mogul, Justin Timberlake. Recently, however, Liam’s public personality has begun to curdle slightly, in the form of controversial Instagram posts about his personal wealth, dating and impregnating the judge at his X Factor audition, and regrettable jewelry he calls the “Payne Chain.” Today, Liam seems less like a new Timberlake and more like a second-rate Bieber.

Liam’s debut album LP1, released in December 2019, follows a similarly cringy trajectory. Boosted by Chainsmoker-esque beats and sleazy lines about “[doing] your ass in the car,” Liam’s music is a bold statement separating himself from the sound of One Direction, but it’s not for the better. At one particularly low point, he leers at and fetishizes his partner’s bisexuality in the song “Both Ways.” But even on tracks without pointedly offensive lyrics, Liam’s bravado comes off as corny, and he fails to utilize his sonorous voice’s full strength. Each song on LP1 sounds like a mishmash assembly of smash hit ingredients, but the final product can’t quite stick the landing, and songs blur together in a haze of tropical synth and repetitive melody.

It’s not all bad, though. Tasteless songs aside, it’s hard not to listen to LP1 without admiring Liam’s unwavering audacity. Not everyone has the bulwark of confidence required to sing lyrics like, “I just wanna have fun and get rowdy / One Coke and Bacardi, sipping lightly,” or release a song called “Hips Don’t Lie” that’s neither a Shakira cover nor good. While this album is not the radio-ready bop collection that Liam was perhaps hoping it would be, LP1 is, above all else, unapologetic about what it is.

Loser: Walls by Louis Tomlinson

In a recent interview with the Guardian, Louis says, “[Niall’s] the most lovely guy in the world … Zayn has a fantastic voice … Harry comes across very cool. Liam’s all about getting the crowd going, doing a bit of dancing … And then there’s me.”

Louis’s self-deprecating remarks reflect the popular perception of him as the forgettable, “other” member of One Direction. Sadly, his same failure to assert himself as a unique public figure and musician is the downfall of his album Walls, which struggles to sound memorable despite being the solo album that most closely resembles One Direction’s former sound.

Louis is the last member of One Direction to release a solo album, largely because he put off recording music for an extended amount of time after the death of his mother and sister in 2016 and 2019, respectively. Given this context, it’s not surprising that Louis’s music is steeped in solemnity, whether he’s nostalgic for an old relationship on “Too Young,” or openly grieving the loss of his family on “Two of Us.”

Unfortunately, Walls feels like a confessional series of diary entries set to drums and tinny acoustic guitar, and while the frank intimacy is a refreshing contrast to, say, Liam, ultimately the album feels lackluster and sonically generic. Soft guitar and even softer vocals accompany lyrics about longing — for someone, a feeling, a moment in the past — making Walls feel like a pale imitation of One Direction’s booming rock-inspired pop rather than an entity of its own. In his first attempt to separate himself musically from the group, Louis once again blends into the background.

Not everyone is better off alone [insert pun about One Direction becoming Many Directions].

The transition from boy band member to adult man solo artist is not an easy one. The scramble to assert oneself as a legitimate, relevant musician can be full of pressure, and not everyone walks away with equal amounts of fame and success. In the case of One Direction, the majority of these underwhelming solo efforts suggest that, as much as the members have striven to express their individuality, their biggest legacy will probably be being part of a group. (Unless we’re talking about Harry Styles, that is.)

#mine #ot5 #ride or die together #and discuss #ot5 reunion

7 notes · View notes

taki118 · 5 years

Text

Fenabela the looked over ship (a DA2 meta)

~~slight TW: mentions of abuse~~

Fenabela is one of those things often pushed to the side in the Dragon Age fandom, I find. Despite being a cannon ship there aren’t many fics or art dedicated to the pair. This is especially noted when compared to Adoribull (and the fact that the personalities of Dorian and Bull parallel Fenris and Isabela)

Now part of this is of course taste, most people having dubbed Isabela their wife or Fenris their husband and disliking pairing them with anyone other than Hawke or shipping with other npcs. To each their own I realize not everyone can multiship.

However I have noted a few general misconceptions or certain readings that get passed around and a few critics on the narrative that really need to addressed.

And I will display and counter these things here so strap in. (Obligatory sex joke)

Before that I want to state it is not my intention to tell anyone what they can and can’t ship. However I have found a good deal of unwarranted hate towards this ship and wish to defend it and explain why one might ship it. I do greatly enjoy this pair but I will do my best to remain objective.

I don’t like the characters

Of course if you don’t like characters involved in a ship you won’t like it. But Fenris and Isabela are often misunderstood or misread so I’ll go over some things for each quickly.

Fenris

Generally speaking Fenris is the fan favorite of DA2 (and I think a surprise one to the BioWare crew as I’m fairly certain they thought Anders would be the most popular).

However if you aren’t a fan of the broody archetype you likely won’t like him at least for half the game, towards the end he grows to be more relaxed and open.

Another general issue with him is his hatred of mages and support of the Chantry. While his feelings are understandable it can get grating. But again this softens as the game goes on if you weren’t an ass to him by the end he is willing to put his own issues to the back to protect mages and even stating he respects Mage Hawke or Bethany indicating mages who prove themselves to be humble and strong willed are able to earn his trust.

Isabela

Now Isabela is, at least I’ve found to be, one of the more polarizing and misunderstood characters in Dragon Age, and as such I’ll do a more in-depth meta on her at a later date. But here are some common things noted in regards to this ship.

People often think Isabela is a selfish bitch who doesn’t care about anyone but herself. However this is only if you don’t learn about her. The best quote I can give is from Act 3 between her and Anders.

Anders: I always knew you had a heart of gold

Isabela: shush don’t tell anyone.

Isabela has lived a life where she was shown that no good deed goes unpunished and as such tries to hide this aspect of herself. You gotta remember the whole reason she did the Qunari job is because she couldn’t go through with bringing slaves to Tevinter and was forced to steal the tome as compensation.

It wasn’t built up/rushed

Now I can’t be certain on this as I obviously don’t work for BioWare but it should be noted that:

1- this was the first time BioWare had a Love Interest romance and likely wasn’t sure about how much they should do. The next one was Talibrations in Mass Effect 3 that had around the same level build up followed by Adoribull that was given more time to develop naturally.

2- It seems like they wanted to do more but with the notorious 2 year time crunch by EA couldn’t. You can see this in the purposely added dialogue for them in dlc

Of course I am only guessing here but given this it sort of makes sense why it is the way it is. they were likely trying to find a balance between believable and non intrusive that was later utilized better in DAI but you gotta start somewhere.

Fenris doesn’t like Isabela or her flirting

I just um ok this is just so wrong I’m sorry I’m trying to be objective and shit but like come on.

So I know the line most go to, to prove this it’s

Fenris: From what I gather, you like a lot of things.

Isabela: Nonsense. But when I see something I like, I go after it.

Fenris: I suggest keeping your distance.

BUT that’s only if Fenris is romancing Hawke if he isn’t the banter is instead

Fenris: From what I gather, you like a lot of things.

Isabela: Nonsense. But when I see something I like, I go after it.

Fenris: Do you intend to go after me, then?

Isabela: Will you take off all that spiky armor you're wearing?

Fenris: It's been known to happen.

That’s a big tone difference isn’t it. In the first version he pushes her away as he’s interested in Hawke currently but in the second he’s flirting right back.

While yes in Act 1 he’s unsure and unused to her flirting but by Act 2 he’s willingly playing along. I mean he wouldn’t offer to play “Guess the color of my underclothes” with her if he didn’t enjoy it. It’s a safe way for Fenris to explore his sexuality and the only reason he tells her to back off at that time is because he’s serious about pursuing Hawke.

And no matter what Fenris respects her if only for one thing

Fenris: So you freed a group of slaves?

Isabela: Would-be slaves. They weren't slaves yet.

Fenris: Still, you did the right thing. Many would turn a blind eye.

Isabela: Don't read too much into it, all right? It just seemed a good idea at the time.

Like fundamentally I don’t think Fenris can hate someone who freed slaves.

It’s toxic/just about sex

I feel like this is more a jab at Isabela but again it’s over simplifying her character. Because here’s the thing most people over look when saying this ship is toxic for Fenris cause he’s a sexual abuse survivor ISABELA IS ONE TOO.

Isabela doesn’t really talk of her past much but from the dialogue given in game and tie in material we do know that

- her husband Louis purchased her from her mother young in the 10-13 age range

- he likely intended to groom her to be his perfect bride what with the lessons, gifts and such

- he forced himself on her and when isabela rebelled against him it’s implied he either did or was going to allow his friends to do so as well. To again let me reiterate a girl young enough to be his daughter.

Regardless of what exactly happened this did effect Isabela just in a different way. Isabela took autonomy of her body back once he was dead. Look some survivors of traumatic experiences are terrified of ever encountering it again but others continuously face the action head on to refuse it power, both are valid ways to deal with it. One is just less noticeable/sympathetic.

This line of thinking also ignores that literally the first intimate thing Fenris does when he enters a relationship with Hawke is have sex. They don’t ease into it just bam sex, but I have yet to see a Fenhawke is toxic hot take. which I mean I could make easily. Don’t believe me?

In the act 2 romance scene Fenris is angry, raw and emotional and taking it out on Hawke verbally before psychically pushing Hawke against a wall. when Fenris realizes what he’s done and pulls back Hawke immediately kisses him and they have sex. I could say Hawke took advantage of Fenris in his emotional state for their own sexual gratification. I don’t actually believe that but I could claim it. if you’re thinking that’s insane, you are correct but that’s the point it is very easy to twist things to fit a narrative if you really want to.

Now you might be thinking “Well it’s different Isabela just wants to use Fenris for sex” and if you think sex is just sex with Isabela you haven’t been paying attention.

Again I’ll go more into this with my isabela meta but to her sex is safe, it can’t hurt her but people can so she keeps them at arms length. With sex she can get the pyshical closeness she craves while keeping her feelings locked away in one night stands/flings. So the fact that she WANTS to continue seeing Fenris almost immediately after their first tour below deck is telling. And the fact he wants to continue just as much shows the relationship is as much his choice as it is hers.

And speaking of sex...

the memory plot hole

The main confusion I see people have with this ship is the Fenris gets memories after sex bit. And I get why it’s kinda vague but let me assure you it’s not a plot hole.

When you romance Fenris in Act 2 he leaves after having sex with Hawke due to memories returning and being unable to handle them. The confusion I see is often “so what sex with Hawke was so good it gave Fenris memories but not Isabela?” Or “why is it only Hawke?” The answer, it’s just a matter of timing.

The scene in question with Hawke only takes place in Act 2 but Fenris and Isabela don’t hook up until Act 3 and those three years in between make all the difference.

Act 2 Fenris has been free from Danarious(I will not spell his name right sorry) for at least 6 years but he’s still controlled by the man. He’s pissed at the lack of leads and when he gets one demands you go after it immediately and will straight up leave the party if you take too long. The reason is twofold he wants revenge and he’s afraid.

Fenris has only just started to carve out a life for himself in Kirkwall but he’s terrified that whatever life he has there will be torn away by Darnarious. Cause it’s happened before. So when he engages with Hawke and he’s flooded with these mostly happy memories it’s too much. He can’t handle it, at that time.

In just three years Fenris becomes a much more open and relaxed person. by Act 3 he has weekly card nights with Varric and Donnic, willingly helps Aveline and is even more relaxed about mages. The idea that he once had a life and a family before Danarious and that he can have one now isn’t as daunting or impossible to him as it was in Act 2.

It’s not that he doesn’t get the memories when sleeping with Isabela it’s only that he’s now in a place where he can handle them. Had Hawke the option to tell Fenris to take things slow in Act 2 the pair likely would not have separated. However that’s not what happened Fenris thought that he could handle it but couldn’t as he was in Act 2.

Don’t believe well Fenris himself says so to Hawke in Act 3 when asked why he left.

Fenris: the pain, the memories it brought up... it was too much. I was coward. If I could go back I would stay.

I’m not surprised people either missed or didn’t pick on this bit it happens late in the game and it is entirely possible to miss this branch of dialogue but it’s there and confirms what I stated. It’s not a plot hole only a matter of timing. Hawke had bad timing Isabela didn’t.

By Act 3 he’s in a better place mentally and is able to feel okay with the memories, with intimacy and with the idea of having a life. Whether or not Fenris and Isabela are serious about the relationship is irrelevant (though I head cannon they tell themselves it’s just a fling only to still be together years later) it’s the fact that he feels he can engage in this fashion with someone that’s important.

It should have been Isabela x Merrill

Now I can’t argue with people’s taste that’s ridiculous and I can see the appeal they’re cute. However it’s not something they could simply put in the game like Fenabela.

Let me explain. The reason it works in DA2 is cause it’s a light, flirty and fun type relationship and even if you don’t ship it, the idea is easy to chew off. If you play through their romances the idea that the two characters with huge trusts issues hooking up for fun isn’t that hard to buy.

Merrill however would require more than a couple teasing lines of dialogue. The reason being her romance plot.

The first thing Merrill says after having sex with Hawke is “I love you” if you don’t think Isabela would freak out at that and jump on the first boat she could find I don’t know but I’d like to hear your reasoning.

It takes Isabela a long ass time to be ok with saying and being told that with Hawke. It’s a big part of her romance arc.

Sooooo if one were to play through both their romances then play a game where they got together off screen it would require more dialogue than what Fenabela got otherwise it’d be a far bigger plot hole issue as the pair do not move at the same emotional speed.

Like I can’t see Merrill being into having a casual fling even by Act 3 and I can’t see Isabela being ok with a serious relationship either without a good deal of added dialogue and scenes.

Now this one is the most subjective part of the meta, I’m well aware, but with how BioWare handles their side romances Isabela x Merrill just could not be folded into the narrative as easily as Fenabela and likely would have been too intrusive for those uninterested in side romances.

So we’ve covered the main misconceptions and complaints on the ship. now to get into why Fenabela does work, and why people like this ship.

Their romances parallel each other

Something I noticed about the Kirkwall crew (and I might make a meta on it damn I got so many things to write) is that they each parallel and reflect each other (which is one of the reasons I dislike the Sebastian addition cause he kinda screws it up)

Aveline and Varric:

- Both are non romanceable

- Need Hawkes help to sort out their personal lives

- Both thrive in the friendship Hawke gives them

Merrill and Anders:

- both thirsty AF for Hawke and immediately move in

- both have blinders on in regards to their goals and ideals, Merrill with the mirror and Anders with well you know

- this also causes problems for both in their relationships with Hawke

So then we have Fenris and Isabela

- both wear a mask of indifference in Act 1 that is peeled away by Hawke in Act 3

- both runaway/try to distance themselves from Hawke and their relationship in Act 2 only to renew it in Act 3

- and both NEED to feel they can trust Hawke in order to move forward

Now unlike Merrill and Anders who’s conflict with Hawke is mostly situational (ie were it not for the mirror and being in Kirkwall aka mage torture capital of the free marches, there would be no problem) Fenris and Isabela’s conflicts are purely emotional and an emotion they share

Leading us to

They are damaged in similar ways

The main conflicts in their romances is fear.

A fear of happiness and a fear of love.

They both think that if they were to get that which they desire most they’d lose it or it’d be used against them or most of all they aren’t deserving of it and will never receive it.

And this is entirely because of what happened to them in life prior to arriving in Kirkwall.

They lived lives where love and happiness were things that could be used against them. A weakness to exploit or a reward to be taken away. So it makes sense that for their romance arcs they have to have trust to believe this love and happiness with Hawke is worth the risk.

So it’s safe to say that we’re they not romanced by Hawke it’s only natural they’d be drawn to one another. We often look for similarities in our partners sometimes it’s in appearance, others it’s values but for them it’d be their shared pain and fear.

Hawke: you’re not afraid of being hurt you’re afraid of hurting someone else

Isabela: no I look it isn’t like that it’s just easier this way

Isabela: you were right. I wasn’t afraid of love I was afraid of being loved.

Fenris: I killed them all

Hawke: why would you do such a thing?

Fenris: I felt it inevitable. My master had returned and this...this fantasy life was over.

Fenris: I’m sorry. All I ever wanted was to be happy...just for a little while. Forgive me.

Its why they are implied to have a more casual relationship in Act 3 than they would with Hawke. Hawke doesn’t have the same issues with intimacy as they do thus would take longer. And there is an appeal to the idea of two people finding comfort and support in one another even if it’s only temporary.

Isabela = fog warriors

So this is something I literally just noticed as I was working on this meta but um the Fog Warriors who helped Fenris after he first was free of Danarious whom he speaks of fondly greatly resemble Isabela at least in the traits he describes that he seems to find the most appealing.

Fenris: I had grown fond of the rebels. They bowed to no master and fought for their freedom.

Fenris: I had only been with them a few months but in that time I had felt I truly lived. They were bold, strong, free with their affections. I was in awe of them.

Like let’s take what he says here out of context for a second.

He says he was in awe and felt truly alive with someone who was

- bold - strong - free with affection - rebellious

- defiant - strong sense of freedom

That kinda describes Isabelas base personality perfectly. I can’t state that this was intentional or even if Fenris was aware but it’s not a long shot to say that Fenris would be drawn and attracted to people like this for this reason.

Their banter is cute

I mean I know it’s subjective but they do have some great back and forth and if you enjoy flirty snarky people it opens up some great opportunities in fan fiction and such. Characters who play well off each other are always more desirable and they got a great wise guy/straight man thing going.

They spend more time than we know together

A thing that can be overlooked easily it that each act has about 3 years in between them making the total run in the game about 9 years. We know from banter that the various characters interact with each other regularly regardless of whether or not Hawke is there. (Something I wish they could do more if EA got their heads out of their asses and gave us re release!)

Anyway we know from these brief moments that

- Fenris lets isabela visit the mansion

- isabela helps him out from time to time

- she’s one of the few people who’s opinion on mages he considers

- they play cards and/or make bets with each other

- they interact enough that Varric takes notice in the MOA dlc

it’s again something that’s fun to play with in fiction.

To summarize

- it’s not toxic

- they like interacting with one another

- there is no plot hole

- it’s not just about sex

- they were the easiest to pair up on the side

- they parallel each other

- share similar fears and traumas

- their personalities are fun to play with for fans

Fenabela really does not deserve the hate or lack of care it gets from the fandom. It’s the story of two damaged people finding support in one another if only for a short time and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying that.

Again I’m not saying this ship is better than any other, I’m not trying to get you to jump ship all this meta is here for is to clear up some misconceptions and unwarranted hate, and bring some much needed spot light to this ship that is often overlooked.

Anyway I want to thank anyone who read through this whole thing for their time and if you’d like to discuss any points here with me please reblog with “makers breath” first and I’ll 100% be up for talking (if you didn’t bother to read and just want to rant at me I will ignore it) I plan on making more of these as well as finishing fics but this topic has weighed on me for some time.

#dragon age #da2 #fenris #da isabela #da fenris #fenabela #fenebela #fenris x isabela #meta #isabela #da #bioware

68 notes · View notes