#but a bunch of stuff in retrospect is just depressing

[andthatscanon]

dair parallels (133/?)

Gossip Girl 4x19 // Gossip Girl 5x16 // Gossip Girl 6x01 // Gossip Girl 6x02 // Gossip Girl 6x10

[floral-hex]

January 2024: well, I can’t get my antidepressants anymore and this withdrawal makes me want to kill myself. From now on I’ll just raw dog these feelings so I never have to deal with these side effects again.

June 2024: I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die. I’m gonna die. The world is ending. We’re all walking through the end times and whether I die soon or the world collapses in on itself, I can feel the simultaneous emptiness and crushing weight of the end. There is nothing.

[chzdavmpr]

Delicious in Dungeon Reading Diary Vol 5

Spoilers below, obviously

Oh so we are getting right into Falin weirdness off rip.

I called it that this person was the mad mage.

Hmm. So they recognize Laios, but know it's from within a painting that they recognize him. I'm surprised but I think that actually fully explains how the painting work. I guess it's time for a big rant on my guess as to how living painting work. If you don't care skip this paragraph. Ok so the mad mage made the paintings to trap people and it seems like whenever someone enters them a scene starts playing like a tape, except that people trapped inside can interact with things. These recordings are of things that actually happened, and the people within them act roughly how they actually did. However the mad mage is the exception to this. It seems that they can either perceive through the scenes of their painting counterpart or just know everything that happens in the painting. It also seems that they can choose to override their painting counterpart's recorded actions and take control of them, allowing them to know that laios was in all the paintings. This I'm a bit iffy on because if I recall they seem to think Laios is some kind of kingdom infiltrator in the painting which wouldn't quite line up but it's the best I got. Additionally you can draw/paint extra stuff onto the painting and it will be sentient but won't be in the painting proper, just kinda in a plane on top of the painting, or maybe that's just because Laios drew bad. Either way that is a lot, but hopefully this is the last time I should spend way too long talking about living paintings.

Very funny how the label follows them. I also love Senshi's face of "what the hell man those are my hams"

Oh so since Falin was made with the dragon's flesh and blood she is the dragon. Wait does this mean Falin is dead forever? I sure hope not.

I'm skipping over most of the next 3 chapters, I'll get to them in my final thoughts.

Wow this samurai guy is having just an awful time.

So senshi probably got the cheese from the orcs. But I should mention I've also been watching the anime with some friends as it comes out. And one of them has a huge pet peeve about every time they have oil in the dish, since he says they should've run out forever ago. I'm not bothered by it at all, and find it very funny how he reacts every time oil is on screen. The reason I bring this up now is if this cheese is seen more then just this once he is gonna blow his gourd and it will be very funny.

Senshi giving Chilchuck "the talk" is so funny that I literally got light head from laughing.

It's very cool that Laios is learning magic. I feel a lot of stories wouldn't do that just because he's "the fighter" and Marcille is "the wizard" and they would have to stay as those archetypes.

The art in this whole series is great. I love the way the cockatrice is drawn here.

It may have been fine if it didn't come right after another whole chapter where Chilchuck recaps the story so far like there's been a hiatus and they wanna make sure you remember everything.

Man this chapter is on a roll with these A+ panels

I somehow only just now, while taking the above picture, that the chapter called cleaners has the characters dressed up as cleaners. That's cute and I may be a little stupid.

Ok so I was gonna say this this guy may be Delgal hiding, since we saw that the mad mage is looking for him.

But then I remembered; isn't the whole backstory for the golden city that it's king told of the mad mage and then died? Cause that would make it kinda hard to find him.

But then now when I'm composing this I'm remembering that the dungeon doesn't allow people to die, so either he died right outside or that story was wrong. Hmmm.

Seriously every panel with Shuro has him look like the worlds most depressed man.

He's practically sinking into the earth.

You know in retrospect, if the Dungeon Gormet Guide was a bunch of lies and guesses it's awfully lucky that it's happened to be right about what is and is not poisonous. (Or which tentacles' swelling can be reduced with vinegar)

To conclude my thoughts on this volume, that first chapter is great. I was a little worried about what the next plot hook would be but it delivered. They just show straight up that the elf is the lord of the dungeon. And they introduce the mystery of "what is going on with falin." But then it spends 2 whole chapters just telling us stuff we already know. Like it was kinda cool seeing the B Team piece together who A Team is with limited knowledge, but other then the stuff about Shuro there wasn't much new or interesting.

And then the party is just trapped on the 5th floor the entire volume, I imagine because next volume their plans will change and they won't want to go back to the surface and the author wanted to avoid too much backtracking. Which I get, but it ends up feeling like a bunch of these chapters are just kinda killing time until the B team shows up.

That being said, still a great volume of manga. Probably the weakest so far, but only because it's a like a 4.5 instead of a 4.75 or 5.

[tuttocenere]

Thoughts on Mefistofele recordings? You've convinced me (you and Samuel Ramey) so I'm gonna take the plunge. 😈

Hi! Thank you for asking! I think recordings of this opera are always missing something, because it's meant to overwhelm the audience with sights and sounds. But there are some good ones.

This is also for @skeleton-richard who also asked for recs.

The famous one: SFO 1989

This one has Samuel Ramey in it and it's legendary for a reason. I personally am not a huge fan of the maximalist production style and found it a bit hard to follow. But it's definitely a great performance. Probably the most fun of all of these.

The video quality, video framing and sound quality are not ideal, because it's old. There's a 2013 HD recording of the same production with Abdrazakov and Vargas. Still good, just has no Samuel Ramey in it. Pictures from the 2013 version because they're easier to find.

Also the devil is shirtless in most scenes, whether that's a plus or a minus lies in the eye of the beholder.

The one I personally saw live: BSO 2015

This one blew my little mind back in the day and I'm still not really over it. Especially the tenor Calleja has a fantastic voice for Faust. The stage is really beautiful and there's a whole lot of actual fire. Great busy dramatic crowd scenes.

In retrospect, I don't really agree with some of the production choices, especially the very cynical interpretation of the ending. But the recording has the best audio out of all of these. Perfect sound.

This production has a bunch of gross stuff in it - blood, gore, nudity, dirt, misery, and so on. The director opined that you can't put heaven on a stage so we're just dealing with various degrees of hell here.

The one I like most: Baden-Baden 2016

I've been posting a lot about this one and I'll probably post some more because this suits my taste perfectly. The costumes! The skull! The choreographies! The sound!

Prologue is a bit weird but it always is. After that, this production captures really well how it feels to be a over-educated depressive german academic who wants to be taken on an adventure by a glittering devil beneath a giant skull (and then hates it).

Not recommended to the photosensitive because there's a lot of sparkling and flickering everywhere throughout.

Some others I watched partially / long ago:

Palermo 2008 - didn't like this one overall, but Ferrucio Furlanetto makes a great Mephisto. There is a desperate "devil x person going to heaven" kiss that was blatantly ripped off in a recent TV show.

Staatsoper Stuttgart 2019 - very stereotypical Regietheater that still can't bring itself to let Faust go to heaven. Their Mephisto is very charming. Still wouldn't recommend this one.

Verdict

I recommend SFO 1989, unless you hate old videos in which case SFO 2013 is probably best. They're all on VK. At least the SFO and BSO ones are also available on DVD.

SFO 1989 is also on YouTube with English subs.

[deathxproof-archive]

💖 — what was one of the greatest/happiest moments you’ve had in the rpc?

🖤 — what was one of the worst/most depressing moments you’ve had in the rpc?

💖 I cannot recall many specific ‘moments’ in either direction, however, in college I was dating a person on campus who I talked about rp with since we were talking fanfiction. A few days later I get a text from my now-ex that was just “are you arkytiorforeman and does this url sound familiar to you?” And I was like UH— yeah? yeah? where’d you pull that out from, friend? huh? how do you know that? how do you know who -I- am? Turns out one of their friends from home was a mutual (2014 Merlin RPer who’s url evades me) who I wrote with a fair amount and shipped with !! Which was just very sweet to find out !!! (Same ex also drew me Rory!Master fanart, which was ultimately incredibly sweet, and it might still be rifled in with a bunch of papers from that year.) On that note I’m also gonna be gay and say some of the happiest momence were meeting some of my good friends that I either still talk to (or only recently met) !!! or just remember having good friendships and rps and ships with <333

🖤 And I! Genuinely! Don’t! Know! I would say that more of that comes from like… Making friends and both of you goin through life stuff on other sides of screens and stuff but that is absolutely not related. And also suddenly getting an unexplainable and unsourced anxiety being in the rpc for a while before I came back. HOWEVER. This is more amusing than anything now. When I was small. No older than 17. I did not understand how notifications worked, sometimes. Did not realize that I was reblogging a couple of memes from a RPer who was much older than me multiple times, and not the SOURCE. (Donna RPer, does not matter, do not remember them, however. Adds flavor.) Woke up to them BLOWING UP in my inbox and essentially telling me to learn how to use the website and something along the lines of ‘if nobody’s sending you anything maybe that fucking says something’. Even at the time I thought it was… Pretty funny, honestly? I can’t remember if I apologized, tbh, but I think I did, and one of us blocked the other. The Drama Of It All. najsndkajnsdkjas it was silly. In retrospect now as a 25 year old I can’t imagine blowing up at a 16-17ish year old over my notifications, but tumblr’s notification system was SIGNIFICANTLY more broken back then. So.

[fictionfixations]

TW: some dark themes i want to write nagito komaeda (pls im not trying to be cringy cause oOOH anTAgoNiST, i wen tthrough that with kokichi already)

but i have zero idea what about

ive never done free time events besides in dr3 (cause thats the one dr game i own) because i think u do them all in the dating minigame??? i say that cause i did do like one and so the love meter bar was up +1 and stuff

but i watched a vid which is a retrospective over dr2

and how he views life as 'the more bad there is, the greater his luck gets'

ex: kidnapped in middle school, but the place said kidnapper puts him at has a winning lottery ticket of like 500 mil

ive been reading a bunch of stuff where [character fully believes theyre in the right] when they arent, but genuinely dont know whats wrong with it

i mean considering his parents died at a young age (which was the 'good' part of his luck...) id imagine hes a little desensitized to that

just tf do i write about

ive written dr3. kokichi in particular, being angsty stuff that was just me venting

i treated it a little lightly though. like 'oh, all my friends kinda want to kermit sewer slide and have bad home situations and vent and hurt and so on' its not that bad

add on the fact that theres 'trends' about depressed ppl in a fandom most of them including me are in, not to mention some bashing on said ppl that just gives the msg 'oh. youre just faking it. youre an attention seeker. stop it.'

which in fear of being lashed out at, you say nothing (also the stereotypical s/h of cutting on the wrist?? dude i felt like such a faker when i couldnt bring myself to do such a thing)

but that shouldnt mean my experiences are invalidated? certainly didnt stop me from actually trying to commit

basically.. i think maybe i can.. vent in a sense. having the reality break by other ppl who misunderstand you

in this confusion you 'mask' yourself, unsure of how to act besides the suffocating guilt

the thing is though is that i dont usually return to fandoms ive written before cause that means i usually abandon it for something else

i mean ive tried writing undertale stuff again but i didnt get that far cause motivation

aggh..

i feel like a lot of the fandom has misunderstood nagito in a way.

goddammit who else have i misunderstood bc i skipped free time ev

also no one told me nagito has dementia whatthefuck--

[curhartwrites]

Hollis, a short story by Linden Curhart

[This is a piece of original Queer erotic fiction, intended for adult readers only. No major trigger warnings apply. Casual death mention. A trans man who can see ghosts has a one night stand with one in a quiet cabin during a snowstorm.]

Having the ability to see ghosts was not exactly something Jesse had asked for. He wasn’t born with the “gift” like most people; instead, he just woke up one day to a world that was much noisier than the day before. At twenty six, he had just begun to feel like he might be getting his life together. He had a house with a few roommates who were sort of okay, and a job he didn’t hate. He was a year past his top surgery, and was starting to feel more confident about his body and his appearance. He felt stronger. The pieces of his life were starting to fall into place one by one, but all of it was shattered by the sudden appearance of a bunch of dead people he didn’t know. 

They were everywhere. It was astounding just how many of his friends and neighbors didn’t know that they were being followed around by their dead relatives. The older buildings in his neighborhood were densely populated with the echoes of human beings who had died decades or sometimes even centuries ago. Their voices were everywhere, and their presence in a room sent chills through his body. It was inescapable.

In retrospect, that first year was the hardest. He moved into a smaller apartment where he could stay on his own, away from the ghosts who followed his unwitting roommates around every day, desperately trying to attract their attention. It was in that apartment, which was the size of a walk-in closet and painted a horribly depressing “landlord white,” that he tried to come to grips with the fact that he was never going to feel alone ever again. This was actually happening to him. It was real. He spoke to friends, a woman with purple hair who worked in a crystal shop, a priest, and his mom. No one had any advice for him regarding how he might be able to get rid of his new second sight - at least, not anything that worked. When the people around him started to look at him with pity and suggest that maybe his issue was more psychological than spiritual, the sting of not being believed was more painful than the burden of his new sight. He decided that the best thing to do was go away for a while. 

Late in the evening, he picked up his key and a bundle of firewood from a shack at the edge of the camp property, and then drove down a winding dirt path through fir trees that were already leaning and shuddering in the wind. He eventually found the dimly lit path up to cabin number seven. The one room cabin sat underneath the spread of a large oak, whose leafless winter branches resembled black, long-fingered hands scratching at the flat grey sky. Jesse parked close to the cabin and carried his necessary belongings inside: a sleeping bag and rolled up blanket, a few camping essentials in a backpack, and a cardboard box of non-perishable food stuffs. Standing on the narrow front porch and looking out through the gathering blue dark, he could smell the sharpness of coming snow in the air. Out beyond the evening silhouettes of the trees, the half frozen lake gleamed.

Now, three years later, he was beginning to make peace with his gift a little at a time. He traveled from place to place doing odd jobs and repairs for people who wouldn’t remember his name when he was gone. The less they spoke to him, the better, as far as he was concerned. He never stayed in one place for very long, since doing so would invite too many questions about where he had come from and why he had left. On occasion, a particularly communicative spirit might ask him for help in passing on a message to someone who was still alive. He did his best, but never made any promises. Many factors made it difficult to live like this, but the one that he struggled with the most was the loneliness. Before gaining his ability to see ghosts, he had been a very social person. He had close friends and lovers, people he thought would stick by him no matter what. Now, he made few connections, and none that lasted very long.

Quietly, Christmas came and went. January arrived while he was on the road, between temporary waystations, and the new year passed without fanfare. He listened to the happy racket of other people cheering and spinning noise makers somewhere else, on the radio in his car. It was a few days later that he found himself looking for a place to stay to wait out an impending snowstorm. He was far from any kind of major city or town where he could get a hotel room, so he would have to consider other options. Asking around led him to a campsite that offered cabin rentals. It was inexpensive this time of year, and there would be almost no one else around. It wouldn’t exactly be the height of luxury, but Jesse reasoned that he might actually prefer it to staying at a roadside motel, since those places tended to be full of unhappy spirits. 

The inside of the cabin was dusty and cold. It was an old structure made of lumber and stone, with a low bed with a rubber camping mattress, a table and two chairs, and a small wood burning stove. A rectangular mirror with a plastic frame leaned against one wall, between a gingham curtained window and an ovular wood-burning of an eagle. The straw rug in front of the door read “Gone Fishing.” There was a water pump around back, with a red handle, but he reasoned that the pipes were probably already frozen. Jesse set down his belongings on top of the round wooden table. He looked around for a moment, then ran his hand over one of the wooden bedposts. Over who knew how many summers, people had carved names, initials, and inside jokes into the wood with pens and pocket knives. He could feel the indentations of those marks now, underneath his fingertips. Katie Loves Ash. Brendan was here. E&H. MG & DD forever. From ancient caves to rental cabins, it seemed that human beings shared a timeless need to leave some kind of evidence that they had existed in a certain place - a plea to be remembered. Jesse resisted the urge to pull his multi-tool from his pocket.

It was too early to sleep, but without electric lights, it quickly became dark inside his quiet shelter. The low orange light from the fire threw black shapes on the walls that danced and swayed, their forms indistinguishable except for the occasional stark claw of a tree branch. Outside, the firs and cedars made a low groaning sound as they bent under the force of a frigid wind. Lying with the sleeping bag pulled all the way up to his nose, Jesse wondered if it had started snowing yet. He reached one arm out from his cocoon of warmth and felt around inside his backpack for a flashlight and a book. Three pages into his paperback werewolf romance, he fell asleep. 

After lighting a fire in the stove and rolling up a towel underneath the door to trap some warmth inside the drafty cabin, Jesse had a dinner of peanut butter crackers, baby carrots, and blue gatorade before getting ready for bed. As cold as he was, his jeans and flannel both got tossed to the foot of the bed, and he climbed into his sleeping bag in just his boxers so he would warm up faster. 

Without much thought, Jesse knew that he was dreaming. He was still in bed, but instead of being bundled inside a winter-weight sleeping bag, he was lying underneath layers of soft blankets, and draped over his waist was the pleasant weight of someone else’s arm. He kept his eyes closed and ran his hand over that arm, feeling soft skin and a scatter of hair. A broad, strong chest pressed against his naked back, and in his ear was the rhythmic sound of someone else’s breathing. 

Underneath the cover of their shared blankets, the man curled up behind him slid his hand slowly up Jesse’s body to gently frame the front of his throat, and then back down again. Callused fingertips skated over the iridescent scar tissue that framed the shape of his chest. The slow drag of that hand over his soft stomach sent a shiver rippling up his spine and elicited a soft anticipatory gasp. He didn’t speak. He couldn’t find any information in his dreaming mind about who this man was, but he didn’t feel afraid. He knew that he was in the same cabin where he had fallen asleep. He stretched one leg back and slid his calf up between the legs of the stranger sharing his bed, encouraging closeness. It was a simple touch, a slide of warm skin, but its relaxed slowness held an unspoken invitation. Arousal pooled with a pleasant and unhurried tension between Jesse’s hips and at the base of his spine. 

The stranger’s hand slipped just underneath the elastic waistband of Jesse’s boxers to brush teasingly through coarse dark curls and then lower. His fingertips bypassed Jesse’s small, sensitive dick for now to instead tease at his wet hole. The sound he made as he opened his thighs was soft and needy. He could feel the pressing thickness of the stranger’s cock against the curve of his ass. He rolled his hips back. The man’s index finger slid inside him and he tipped his head back, lips opening around another gasp. The moment they were in felt fragile, as if loud sounds or coherent speech might break whatever spell they were under together. He knew somehow, with the instinctive wisdom that is sometimes made available in dreams, that if he opened his eyes and tried to look at the stranger, it would all come apart. He trailed his own hand down his body to toy with his dick as one finger inside him became two, and then three. Sweat dampened his forehead and the back of his neck. They were breathing together now. The languid tension in his body coiled tighter and became something more urgent. 

The stranger’s mouth brushed over the curve of his throat. He felt the rough drag of facial hair and the warmth of an exhale. The ember burning at the center of his body broke open and scattered into sparks that traveled all the way to the ends of his limbs and he came without breathing. 

His body hummed. The stranger withdrew his fingers and instead reached between the close press of their bodies to steady the base of his dick. Jesse arched his lower back into a curve. Around them, the edges of his dream wavered like a heat mirage. 

“Please.” The wind buffeted the cabin window with a rattling sound. The storm had not yet arrived, but it was well on its way. No wintering cardinals broke through the morning hush with their music. The woods held their breath, bracing for impact. Jesse woke up alone. 

He felt overheated inside the confines of his winter sleeping bag, and fevered with arousal. He stuck one arm out of his sleeping bag to get a little cool air moving on his skin. When he pressed his thighs together, he found that his boxers were wet. 

The fire had died overnight, so the cabin was cold again. It didn’t take long for that overheated feeling to wear off, and Jesse got dressed quickly in the dim, colorless morning light. A peek through the curtains revealed light windblown snowfall. It had only just started to stick to the ground, so he would still have a little time to prepare. 

As he dressed in warm layers and made his way back to the welcome shack at the edge of the property, he noticed that, unlike most dreams, this most recent one stuck with him even once he felt fully awake. It lingered in glimpses as he picked up some jugs of drinking water and extra firewood to bring back to the cabin. The memory of rough hands on his body occupied his thoughts as he made instant coffee over the cabin stove. The dream had felt too real, and he remembered it too vividly. Sitting in one of the chairs under the window with his chipped Snoopy coffee mug held between both hands, he shook his head as if to clear it of cobwebs. It was still just a dream. 

As the day passed in solitude, the wind picked up speed. The snow fell thicker through the dark trees, collecting in drifts, and the cabin door creaked in its frame. The storm covered over the flat, cold sky so that by nightfall, the woods had already been dark for several hours. Jesse pulled the light rubber mattress off of the wooden bed frame and laid it on the floor in front of the fire, then curled up inside his sleeping bag with his blanket folded underneath his head to pillow it. He would wait out the storm in his quiet nest of accumulated comforts, surrounded by the low voices of leaning trees.

Here in the winter gloom, Jesse felt his solitude more keenly. It was a hollow ache in his chest. Most of the time, the work involved in traveling from place to place distracted him from his own loneliness and from thoughts of home. But last night’s dream had brought his isolation to the forefront of his mind. When, he wondered, was the last time he had been touched by another person?

He was half conscious, drifting in the timeless space between wakefulness and sleep, when a figure appeared in the chair beside the fireplace. He materialized slowly, gossamer-thin and with edges poorly defined in the flickering red light. He was tall and broad shouldered, with a dark beard and deep brown eyes. He sat in the wooden chair without really touching it, as if he were sitting in another chair that had occupied the same place in another time. Jesse sat up slowly. 

“Who are you?” he asked, and the usual surprise followed. 

“You can see me?” The ghost’s voice was as deep and warm now as it had been in Jesse’s dream. It mimicked the sound of the windblown pines. 

“Yes. And I remember you,” Jesse confessed without blushing.  “You were in my dream last night.”

A slow grin softened the ghost’s careworn features. He had the ruddy face of a man who spent most of his time outdoors, and though it was difficult to see now in the firelight, Jesse had the impression that in life, his eyes had been blue.

“My name is Hollis.”

“I’m Jesse.”

Hollis stood, only to kneel on the floor beside Jesse’s bed. There was red clay streaked on the knees of his jeans. 

“Are you angry with me for showing up in your dream, Jesse?”

He considered the question for a moment. Again, it came back to him - the warm, secure feeling of Hollis’ broad chest against his back, the sweet ache of need that swept in a wave through his body. Thinking about it now made his heart pound. 

“No. I’m not angry.” Jesse reached out a hand toward Hollis’ face, but stopped just short of his jaw, knowing that if he reached out any further, he would find nothing but cold air. He dropped his hand to his lap. 

“Are you going to ask me how I died? Isn’t that how this is supposed to go?” Hollis asked him, and he smiled. 

“You can tell me if you want to. But you don’t owe me your story.”

“You don’t seem very scared.”

“I’m not. I just wish you could touch me.”

Hollis shifted closer. In the firelit warmth of the cabin, the diaphanous image of him emitted a tangible chill that sent a faint shiver through Jesse’s body. 

“So do I.” His dark eyes drifted over Jesse’s face, over his throat, and down the slope of his shoulders. “But you could touch yourself. Be my hands and let me guide you.”

Jesse did flush this time, but he didn’t look away or shy from the invitation to a novel form of intimacy. He shimmied up out of his sleeping bag. Like the previous night, he was stripped down to his boxers, baring a body that was lean from labor, but with a layer of softness over capable muscle. 

“I like that idea.”

His hands slid down his body, slow and teasing, to slip fingers underneath the elastic of his boxers and push them down, but Hollis’ voice stopped him in his tracks. 

“Not yet.” The words were stern, and Jesse froze instantly. “Leave those on. I want all of you, and I want to take my time.”

All at once, Jesse felt more exposed and vulnerable than he had before. Not knowing what to expect left him vibrating with anticipatory tension. 

“Touch your lips for me,” Hollis went on, “gently, with just your fingertips.”

He watched as Jesse trailed his fingers over the plush softness of his mouth. The unwavering intensity of Hollis’ gaze made him feel as if he were pinned in place, like a moth under glass. 

“Good. I wish I could kiss you, feel how soft you are.” Hollis’ voice pitched a little deeper, a little rougher. Jesse wondered what arousal felt like to him, without a body to experience it with. Maybe it was more like a memory. But it didn’t seem like the right time to ask. “I want you to trace your hands over your body,” Hollis instructed, “and go slow. Focus on the way your hands feel against your skin.”

As Jesse’s hands skimmed down his arms, along his sides, and over the soft give of his stomach, desire thrummed in his blood. This was not at all how he usually went about touching himself. It was usually a quick, goal oriented pursuit involving very little thought, and he didn’t treat himself to much foreplay. It was strange to treat his own body with such gentle, patient consideration now, to touch himself like a lover. His palms skated over the scatter of dark hair over the tops of his thighs, and then the softer skin on the inside, and he watched Hollis’ eyes follow the path of his hands. 

“Very good, Jesse,” Hollis said, dripping sweetness, and the praise made Jesse’s ears and throat feel hot. “Your legs look so strong.”

As if following the pull of the ghost’s thoughts, Jesse paused to knead at the firm muscle in his thighs, and then down his calves - muscle he had built through hard work. He was proud of this body, which he had made his own a little at a time with injections and surgery, with exercise, with the choices he made and the way that he carried himself, with patience and love. That pride suffused his touch now, and his arousal became colored by a kind of reverence for his own flesh and the ways it had changed with him. 

“You can take them off, now.”

Pulled up from his thoughts, Jesse nodded and slid his boxers down his legs and kicked them off of his ankle. He was struck with the sharply masculine scent of his own sex as he ran his hands over the insides of his thighs again. His need to be touched (for Hollis to touch him through the instrument of his own hands) was a hot pulse in his body. 

“Slowly,” Hollis reminded him in that firm, commanding tone which left no room for argument, “touch just your outer folds. I want you to tease yourself a little. Can you do that for me?”

“Yeah,” Jesse breathed, nodding, even though what he wanted to do was slide his fingers inside himself to satisfy that needy ache. The simple touch of his own light fingertips over the soft shape of his cunt raised his need to a fever pitch and he swallowed hard. The way that Hollis instructed him, taking time to truly feel everything, required him to be fully present with his own body - something he rarely did these days. He breathed deeply and noticed each sensation as it occurred - the warm flush in his skin, the low teasing pleasure, the heat from the fireplace and the strange contrast of coldness that radiated from Hollis’ form. 

“Please,” he breathed, and watched as the corner of Hollis’ mouth lifted into a smirk. “Hollis, please, you’re killing me here.”

The ghost’s laughter carried in it an echo of warmth from another life, something playful and easy. The gauzy edges of his image floated around Jesse like tendrils of cold smoke. He nodded.

“Okay, sweetheart.”

The unexpected endearment drew a pleased sigh from Jesse’s lips. His eyes were half lidded and hazy as he slid the soft pad of his index finger between his inner labia and over his hole to gather his own wetness, then back up to rub at his dick. It was bigger now than it had been before he started taking testosterone, but it was still small and sensitive in his fingers. As he slowly stroked himself, taking care not to overstimulate, a quiet moan left him. Here he found another novelty. When he masturbated alone, he was always silent except for the rapid rhythm of his breath. Now, even though it was still only his own hands on his body, he made sounds as if Hollis were really touching him. 

Slow strokes turned into a clumsier rubbing up and down over his dick, and he pulled at his lower lip with his teeth, but again Hollis’ voice held him in its sway. 

“Jesse. Slow down. You don’t need to rush to finish,” Hollis assured him. Jesse looked up to find his eyes. “Slow down, and keep your legs open nice and wide for me so I can see you.” 

Despite the strong urge to just hurry up and make himself cum after so much teasing, Jesse obeyed. Just like in his dream, he had the sense that what they were sharing now was fragile and precarious, like rushing things might shatter the moment. He spread his thighs wider. 

“Good boy.”

The praise elicited another moan, louder this time. The muscles along the insides of his thighs and in his lower abdomen trembled. He leaned back on one hand, stretching his body long, and tipped his head back as he teased his dick with slow, gentle strokes. He closed his eyes, eyebrows knitting closer together in focus and frustration. He would never be able to cum like this. 

“There you go, sweetheart.” Suddenly Hollis’ voice was right next to his ear, and the ghost’s closeness made him shudder with sudden biting cold. “That’s perfect. I knew you could be patient. You look so beautiful like this.”

Jesse was truly surprised to feel the tight coil of pleasure which signaled impending climax gathering again at the base of his spine. That familiar singing tension sped his breath and his pulse. It came at him, not all at once, but in a slow wave that seemed to build and build forever, towering over him, until it finally crested and dragged him under, helplessly gasping. 

In the wake of his unraveling, Jesse lay naked in front of the fire, feeling sated and boneless. Hollis came to lie beside him, his floating figure not quite touching the mattress on the floor. The silence they shared was weightless and companionable. Eventually, Hollis spoke. 

“Thank you,” he said, “for helping me feel alive for a little while.”

Jesse regarded him for a moment, studying the complex feelings which surfaced in his rich brown eyes. 

“I’m only staying here until the storm dies down, and then I have to keep moving. Will you be okay?”

Hollis smiled at him again. “Don’t worry about me. When I died here, nobody knew where I was, and nobody really cared. I left this world without a single soul to remember me when I was gone. But you… you’ll remember me now.”

Jesse traced his fingers through the air around the shape of Hollis’ face again, as if he could offer him physical comfort, as if he could lend him some of his warmth. 

That afternoon, once the road out of the campground had been cleared, he packed up to leave again. He hauled the mattress up onto the bed frame where it belonged, swept the floor, and stacked his unused firewood next to the stove. His last act inside the enclosed warmth of the cabin, where the remnant of sex hung faintly in the air, was an act of remembrance. He pulled his camping knife from the pocket of his jeans, and into the much-loved wood of the bed frame, he carved in neat square letters the name “Hollis.”

“How could I forget?”

The following day, sunlight broke through the treetops in thin pillars and gleamed like white gold on the undisturbed snow. Jesse stepped out onto the cabin’s narrow front porch with his cup of coffee and watched a flock of starlings wing across the bright sky. Their small black bodies moved in perfect synchrony. The worst was over. 

Once the car was packed, he stood in the open doorway and looked in on the sun-dappled interior. “Rest easy,” he said aloud into the midday silence, before shutting the door. 

[aroaceconfessions]

im feeling kinda bad rn, so imma just, vent in here a bit

so, last winter vacations i discovered i was aroace, and it has been one of the coolest things that has happened to me, because everything made so much sense, and i felt so, so happy to know that my experiences were not weird or unique to me, and now that i knew, i could change my life for the better.

I was so excited to share this with my friends, and to be able to explain on detail why this made me so happy, and how did i experienced life.

then i got scared, cuz some of my friends have done stuff that, in retrospective, was aphobic, and it hurt me then, but now knowing all this new stuff about myself, hurted more

so, i decided i was coming out just to a few, and i had it all planed

the first girl to who my came out wasn't as intended, but it was okay. She is my best friend, and during vacations she gets depressed, and that day she was feeling awful, she felt like she was going to suffer from the loneliness she felt on that moment all her life, because she has never had a good and genuine romantic relationship.

so i was talking to her, and trying to make her feel lovable, i said all the things i found cool about her, and how she was such and important person for me, and that i loved her a lot.

then she said something like "yea, but it's not romantic love :/" and, i wanted to make her feel like other kinds of love are important, and that romance isn't everything in life, that she could be happy even if she didn't have a romantic partner.

(all of this without making her feelings less, i also told her that she is a big deal, and that anybody would be lucky to date her, and that someone eventually was going to)

so i came out to her, in a "there's a lot of people that are full without romantic and sexual love, so you can be full too, and then when you get a romantic partner, you will be happy and with a plus, like putting glitter on a cool drawing!"

it went well, and im happy i came out to her

but the other times were not so great.

the other times i wanted it to be about how i felt, i wanted it to be kind of special to me (ofc not saying that i was disapointed that the first time wasnt about me, i just wanted at least one of the rest to be how i wanted it to be)

so i decided trying different stuff each time. like coming out with a joke, an sticker, i was going to fucking paint an As card of the asexual colors, i was going to wear a black and a white ring, i was going to do a lot of cool stuff

but i wanted to test the waters with another friend, to see if some of them even knew ace existed

and, uh, i picked her because she was openly pan, and she felt safe, and wow, she is the one that says the most accidental aphoboc stuff out of all my friends

but i'll get to that

first, i had a bunch lf conversations of me trying to get her to understand what i was saying, and i was so fucking obvious but she just, didn't get it??

I- okay, once we were talking (with the first person i came out to btw) about their past crushes and such, and she asked for mine, and i said "oh, i havent have one, i dont really get those feelings"

and it became a very awkard me-trying-to-explain-that-im-aroace and-she-didnt-understanding-me conversstion, and my other friend jus sat there watching (that last thing was okay tho, she was still kind of down)

so i let it be, and tried to come out to another friend

this one was with a joke, and it was both great and awful

It was something like

*she making a pan joke about how she plays for the other side*

*me making a joke about how i dont have a side*

she: *inmediate understanding that im ace*

And we didnt talk about it, of how i was aro as well, because another friend arrived and aaaaaaaaa

im so mad about it lol

The next one was a f u c k i n g a c c i d e n t

A friend i was so not coming out to made a comment about a classmate being ace, and i said, damn same OUT LOUD, WHEN I THOUGHT I DID THAT ON MY FUCKING MIND

only she and the first friend i came out to where there, but it was a "oh shit" moment, i fucked up so badly

she saw my oh sit face, and said that it was okay, that she was demiace

and then there's the weird stuff

i told ALL my friends how cool it was that on a bday party with middleschool friends, they all acted so normal about me nlt having crushes, like "ah yea, we know u havent ever had one :)", cuz it felt so nice

and i thought it was not going to click to them that i was aroace just because of that one random story i told them because

a) they were d e n s e, like the second girl i tried to come out to, i had already been making subtle jokes about my aroaceness, and NO ONE UNDERSTOOD, and i counted with that everytime i did a joke. i did them carefully, not wanting to out myself, but enjoying my recently discovered identity

b) i phrased it so carefully and casual, and we changed the topic so quick, and no one asked me anything or gave any sign of have just witnessed someone coming out to them

but like, a week later, they all knew?????

and they didnt said anything to me

they just

knew

and somethimes they'll just trow a joke about my aroaceness and i'll be like ???????

for example, there was this time they were talking about crushes and one of them said something like "jaja [my name] is inmune"

and ??????

hello????

how do u know that????

I'm 80% sure the friend i came out on accident outed me to all my friends

and that they talked about me behind me, asking the questions i had the right to answer, but instead they'll just, speculate or something

and it sucks, mostly because i didnt got to explain my boundaries, and they are so fucking open about it

at this rate, im surprised the entire school doesnt know!

and a bunch of sruff that msde me uncomfortable (aka: how i didnt get to talk to them about how much they hurted me when they pressured me to date this guy, how they'll bring their partners to hang outs even if the partner wasn't invited, how the ones with a partner would kiss infront of me, how i felt i was less important that the partners even if we had been friends for way longer than the time they knew the partner, stuff like that)

just, hasn't changed, because i never got to talk about it

and now i wish i just came out to the first friend, and i wish i could made them forget

specially since if i got a partner now (a qpp is what i want, but i would be okay dating an allo, just, i'd have to explain to them all the stuff i didn't get to explain to my friends) they'll fucking invalidate me, i can feel them judging me and thinking to themselves "oh, she was not for real, she has a relationship woth someone!"

aáaaaaaa it suckssss

i cant even say someone is pretty, cuz i have to watch my steps and avoid anything that might make them think im not aroace enough

im not even sure they understand how split attraction works, im so done

if u read all that, advice is appreciated :)

[chireikiden]

Almost a year ago, when Gensokyo of Humans ended, I talked about doing a little retrospective post on it. Never did, but Ashiyama’s new manga finally reminded me of it. So here you go: a bunch of emotional, kinda stream-of-consciousness rambling, mostly about the emotional things I like and not the practical critiques I also have. Memory being what it is, the former have far overshadowed the latter, anyway.

HEAVY SPOILERS FOR GENSOKYO OF HUMANS. GO READ IT, YOU. Also CW for neurological disease, and the depression and suicidal thoughts of fictional characters.

----------------

I’ve said it a couple times, and it sounds a bit corny, but it’s the way it feels to me: translating especially emotional content feels like you have to almost physically take in the emotion of reading it, and try to pass it into the translation as undiminished as possible. Reasonable enough so far. And of course, this means that you have to take it in as honestly as possible, dwell on it through the whole process of actually translating it without letting it shrink from the first reaction you as a reader had, and kinda push it to its strongest at the moment you’re writing the line, as the weird translation equivalent of method acting or something. Then potentially keep revisiting it as you proofread, typeset and all that. For this reason, translating emotional stuff (that I’m invested in, anyway) is a way more intense experience to me - in a good way - and leaves a stronger mark than simply reading it. I can’t say I do much original creative writing, but I bet there’s some similarities.

Anyway. Plenty of doujins have done this, but out of SCoOW so far, mainly just Azuma Aya’s Shinigami and Gensokyo of Humans - the latter far more so, and at length. And it follows that though I also liked the art, the writing (though it had its oddities), the Gensokyo lore and whatnot, when prodded about GoH, my first impulse is to start rambling about the emotion. Which is what I’ve done in this post, for like an hour or two.

----------------

Akyuu’s problems – both the new crisis in Gensokyo of Humans and her situation in general - are caused by the supernatural, but still extremely human, in a way that is evocative both on a general level and for all too many people’s personal experiences. I have lost a close relative to Alzheimer’s (which other people have also brought up in relation to GoH), though never went through it myself of course, and certain parallels are obvious: dementia and memory loss are brought up from the start, but the absolute worst of Akyuu’s despair coincides with when she stops recognizing the faces of the people closest to her. It’s subtle enough that you could even miss it on a quick read, but the page in chapter 13 when we see (and Akyuu sees) that this even includes Kosuzu begins the emotional climax, and is one of the most loaded in the series. It’s a weird subject, because we see it from the person’s own perspective, but for reasons of selection bias, most readers with experience have only seen it from the outside; but it still stings.

However, from Akyuu’s perspective, the mental deterioration itself is not what causes her the most struggle: it’s the feeling that her only value as a person, and the only value people see in her, is what she produces and the status that she brings to whoever can claim possession of her. When she can no longer write, they immediately move on to thinking about the practicalities of her death. Something something capitalist experience, but anyhow: “I’m not afraid of death. I was afraid of ending up like this. Of realizing none of it matters.” On a factual level, she’s known her fate since she was young, but the bad thing wasn’t living that way: it was having to feel like not only had she lived that way all along, now she had nothing left to do but to die worthless. She’s also spent most of the story wanting nothing more than to see her friends, but now when she finally does, what she sees when she looks at Kosuzu is only the final proof that all hope is truly lost.

I’m very consciously not using words like “realize” above: Akyuu can’t “realize” she has no worth, because obviously, she does. I’m 100% one of those people who couldn’t care less about “power of love” stories as a kid, but as an adult, is absolutely moved to tears by them. And I think it’s 100% clear in GoH that this would’ve been resolved far more like a regular incident if Akyuu'd had Kosuzu (and Reimu and Marisa) by her side from the start. Much of the first half is about both parties just trying to meet, hoping or knowing that this would solve everything, but of course one of the biggest plunges in Akyuu’s morale comes around the halfway point when Kosuzu does reach her, only to be physically torn away. Eventually her isolation starts becoming self-imposed. And it’s not merely about solving “the problem”, anyway, because the actual problem in the story is ultimately way, way secondary to the emotional snowballing it causes in Akyuu. The content of Akyuu’s life is in the people she cares about and who care about her, not just her work, and being deprived of them is what really brings her to the edge.

The emotional core of GoH is, in the end, about being plunged into the depths of despair, your biggest regret that you couldn’t have died sooner, and being pulled up by those who love you - very literally, yeah, in a maybe-cliche-but-I-literally-don’t-care underwater scene. And it’s the power of love not in the form of some magic beam, but literally caring about Akyuu more than she, at that darkest point in her life, cares about herself. For that reason, even though you could take the vast majority of GoH and say it’s a “dark, depressing story”, and I don’t blame anyone who’s been put off by that and decided not to read it, read as a whole, it completely turns around into an uplifting one. And here it’s definitely true that the light wouldn’t be near as bright if it weren’t for all the darkness before it. At the time it came out, I was more invested in seeing GoH have a happy ending than in any other Touhou story.

----------------

Yeah, I’m still going. And this post is still only about Akyuu’s side of the story, not, say, Tea Store Girl who has her own problems to deal with, and who also ties into other stuff about Akyuu I won’t have space for here.

The last three chapters are narratively in a difficult spot, coming after the emotional climax of the story and basically being an extended bit of cleanup for the practical side - and I’m not gonna claim the execution is flawless. The whole twin-memory thing is hazy enough, both in-universe and to the reader at this point, that the way it “will be resolved this way, probably” also ends up feeling kinda half-hearted. And at the time of reading, I was emotionally disappointed with Tea Store Girl's final handling in general. But more on that later, if I end up rambling about her too.

But besides indulging the whole lore and literature aspect that Ashiyama loves so much - a slight case of split attention on the doujin’s part, someone might say, but at least I like that stuff too - and being a fun little story in its own right, the three chapters of what you’d usually consider epilogue or falling action serve a vital purpose related to the emotional aspect above: obviously there’s still the baggage of the rest of the story to deal with, and the overall somber tone is still there, but we are shown that the instant Akyuu, Kosuzu, Reimu, Marisa and Tea Store Girl are together, they have the answer to the incident, and the focus shifts to them working together on a kind of zany scheme. All those horrible things from just a chapter ago seem like a distant memory that could almost have been a different manga, and I’m going to claim that means it’s working.

Furthermore, though the actual scheme is about practical clean-up - fixing the memory problem, convincing people that Akyuu is fine now - the chapters’ greater purpose is to solve the true problem mentioned: Akyuu’s feelings. While being around her friends has immediately made her feel better, the deeper, honestly rather “rational” cause behind her worries hasn’t really been fixed. But the few chapters of extra time give her, and the reader, time to absorb both the fact that people do care about her, and that as Akyuu herself points out, she’s been really blind to her relationship with her “servants”. The Humans of “Gensokyo of Humans” aren’t really any of our main characters, but the many unnamed ones around them, and while it would be silly to blame Akyuu too much for feeling offended when people seem a little too mercenary about her death, these are people who have not only taken care of her for her entire life, but whose own lives are very much tied to hers, and who have no choice but to feel concern about the practicalities of Akyuu’s death while also grieving it. It’s maybe a little glossed over, could’ve been shown better, and emotionally I can’t really blame people who felt disappointed that the servants didn’t get some kind of narrative “comeuppance” in the end, but I do think they’re missing the point. Akyuu’s earlier perspective of the cruel, self-serving servants isn’t meant to be any more objective than her view of her own worthlessness.

The bigger problem behind Akyuu’s feelings, her being the Child of Miare with a limited lifespan, isn’t anything the characters can fix, and that might end up making the whole story feel like a bit of a delaying the inevitable, Pyrrhic victory kind of thing. Other than ZUN making a kind of half-meta joke in Who’s Who that Akyuu might end up living way longer due to medical advances, which the end of GoH also jokingly alludes to, this is true. However, besides some platitudes about how that is true for all of us yadda yadda, I think it’s incredibly important that Kosuzu has managed to convince Akyuu that even if every life, or book, will inevitably end... it’s still worth it to the last.

...And immediately after Kosuzu says that she’ll be reading this book to the end, after everything Akyuu has thought and felt during the story, she goes out to give this speech no one can convince me wasn’t improvised. And it’s maybe slightly corny. But at this point, it's earned.

I have thoughts about Gensokyo of Humans.

[dendrite-blues]

Given the events of today, this seems an appropriate time to tell an embarrassing story about myself.

Me, 2 me:

It’s about Loki, and 2012 fandom, and growing older. In retrospect, I suppose it’s not actually that funny, but the irony is pretty strong.

The first MCU movie I saw was Avengers 1. I had never read a comic book or seen a super hero movie. I just happened to be in the common room of my dorm when a bunch of nerd bros were going to see it, and a good friend insisted that I had to see it.

I was ENTHRALLED the entire time. Start to finish. Every joke, every fight seen, all the characters being introduced and meeting each other. The hot ass villain that stone cold just WHACKED a guy with his cane and drilled some motherfucker’s eye out. Like WTF?!

My mind was blown. I opened AO3 on my phone in the car ride back, I couldn’t even wait to get home. Mind you, AO3 had only been started like... a year before that. It was baby. I got it so I could comment on some BNF’s Sherlock fics in 2010, but stopped using it until 2012 because there weren’t any fics on there. For real! there were like, maybe 100 fics on there when I joined. I remember telling my wife it was a cool idea, but it’d never work. No way would they get the whole fandom to leave FFN. LOL!!

But there were stories already popping up on premiere night. There were stories from visionaries who’d written shit before the movie even came out. Bless them, they made my entire week!

I thought Tony Stark was fucking incredible, so I looked up his ships. Fell into Science Boyfriends. Didn’t so much like Stony. Fell even harder for team fic and found family stuff.

I remember when Howard Stark’s A+ Parenting was first used. I vividly remember Tony Stark Has a Heart being coined and abruptly being tagged on EVERY SINGLE FIC for a week. Fun times.

Anyway, time passes. I moved into an apartment with 2 roommates and my (now) wife. We were all fujoshi, and conversation in our house would have be completely indiscernible to someone who didn’t know the fandom lingo.

We all go to see Age of Ultron together. It was a great time, but as a Tony/Bruce shipper I was understandably distressed by the sudden yeeting of Bruce from planet Earth and essentially removing my OTP from the entire 2nd Phase of the MCU.

“What the hell am I supposed to read now?” I wondered. 

I still don’t feel any flutters for Steve, Tony doesn’t know Bucky exists yet, and I’m still living with some intense internalized misogyny that prevents me liking any straight ships.

So my roommate, quite reasonably, mentions Frostiron.

And this is where the story gets embarrassing, because I immediately wrinkled my nose in confusion and went on a five minute, idiotic rant about what a dumb, weird-ass crack ship that was. Tony and Loki? Excuse you? What, is that some kind of “ship the two hot fandom heart throbs even though they have nothing in common” ship? He threw Tony out a window FFS? He’s a VILLAIN.

Queue the laugh track.

And my roommate, bless her, she was a total champion and a good friend and she just completely let me get away with it.

She shrugged and said, “Welp, sorry I mentioned it.” and life went on.

FLASH FORWARD SEVEN YEARS AND TWO EXISTENTIAL CRISES LATER

I’m now a 27 year old Hollywood washout whose lost my career, my apartment, and all of my friends in a matter of months. I’m back home in the Bible Belt with my homophobic parents and experiencing the most intense depression, self hatred, and gender dysphoria of my life.

I’ve been so busy working to keep my head above water as a film worker that I haven’t seen a movie I didn’t help make for six years. I have no fandoms, I don’t even know what’s popular anymore. I go looking for anything familiar, anything that can reconnect me to a time in my life when everything didn’t royally suck.

I go to the MCU.

Now, it’s important to note that when I was into MCU before I did not know I was on the trans spectrum, or the autism spectrum, or the asexual spectrum. I thought I was just another slash loving lesbian that really, really liked to cosplay men, and maybe felt a bit sad that I couldn’t be like that all the time, and also kind of wished I could be masculine without going through scary, expensive surgeries, and OH MY GOD I’M NOT CIS OH MY GOD.

Ahem. So. I was processing that at the same time as my life was utterly imploding.

And I found intersex Loki. I can’t overstate how important to my recovery Loki fic was at that time. They felt my struggles, they felt my confusion, they embodied gender in a way I could only dream of, physically changing genitals and all, AT WILL! Whenever they wanted! It was a powerful fantasy, and an escape from the reality of being gender non-conforming in a conservative state.

But I’m sure the irony has already occured to you at this point, you see my dillema. 

Because the options for intersex Loki shipping are, by and large, Frostiron and Thorki. 

Now I had always been intensely squicked by Thorki. My family follows a similar dynamic to the Allfamily, with me being the golden child and my sister being the scapegoat. So I was (and admittedly still am) incapable of reading that ship without thinking about my actual sister, and that’s not sexy.

Which left Frostiron.

[pause for reader to laugh at my shame]

I naturally fell into a deep obsession with the ship, reading the top 80 pages of fic in less than two months. I started writing my own when I ran out of the kind of Loki I craved. I projected so much of my pain and frustration and feelings of isolation onto them, and I even got support and appreciation from the fandom community! It was amazing, and not at all something I expected.

...but in my heart I always knew the truth.

I had dismissed the ship outright years earlier. I thought I knew better. I looked down on the shippers as Tumblr hoes that would ship anybody hot regardless of character. I thought that just because characters didn’t get along in canon that there was no reason to ship them. I thought that you couldn’t possibly write a good story based on one scene. I didn’t bother looking deeper into the characters to see their similarities.

So basically, I’m a giant hypocrite!

If there’s a moral to the story, I guess it’s to be suspicious of your biases and that you can always change your mind. Years have passed but I still look back on that conversation and cringe. 

The one mercy is that I didn’t do it on the internet, so there wasn’t a record. I was allowed to leave that childish arrogance in the past, known only to me and my faithful friend who has been kind enough not to mention it.

But in my true heart... in the back of my mind... I know the truth.

I was an anti of the ship I’ve now written 500k about. And now you all know too.

Thanks to anyone who read to the end! I hope it was at least a little entertaining. Let this be a warning to the youngins. Careful the things you say, you never know what the future holds. Don’t be a clown like me!

[al-the-remix]

A Loving Retrospective of Self

Rules: It’s time to love yourselves! Choose your 5 (or so) favourite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought to the world in 2021. Tag as many creators as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!

Tagged by @justtoarguewithyou

This year I wrote 267, 942 words, passing my personal goal of 200k for 2021, which I’m very pleased with! I don’t think I’ll be putting out nearly that many words this year in fanfiction so I’m happy that I was able to achieve it.

These are my favourite children out off all the ones I kicked out of my basement this year:

White Fences  27k Sid/Geno -- this one is probably my favourite of right now purely for the fact that it's the most recent longer fic I've written, lol. but also because it scratched that it I have for writing the weird. I've been wanting an opportunity to write a teeth/oral fixation kink fic that (in my estimate) wasn't depressing for a long time, so I was ecstatic to finally get it. Also, I always love it when something I think might just be TOO ODD does is well received :')

Tampa  32k Sid/Steve -- this one might be my actual favourite from this year. the cherry on top of my tin-hatty sidsteve universe. It's basically just 32k of indulgence and I don't regret a word of it.

If We Were Made of Water  28k Sid/Geno -- this one gets a place on the list purely because I finally FINISHED IT after MORE THAN A YEAR, rip. but also I just really enjoyed writing it despite the large breaking the middle. It's filled with all the juicy established relationship, emotional intimacy feels I love so much.

Twin Compasses 105k Sid/Steve -- big, big boy. most of my pride from this one comes from just finishing the thing, tbh. It was also just an excuse to write a bunch of my favourite tropes--but I did learn a lot from writing a fic of this length. lessons I'll use of long works I write in the future and when I go back in and fix all the stuff I'm not satisfied with in this one...

The Long Way Down 12k FlintWood -- love these boys, love the abo feels, and wish I had written more than just one fic about them this year.

Tagging: @waddlingpenguin, @plethoriall, @getoffmyhead, @idontlikeem

[realegypciansilk]

so i just saw inside by bo burnham and here's what i think about certain scenes and songs.

First of all, i have never written stuff like this, so i apologise if it’s gramaticlly incorrect, (eng. It’s not my 1st language).

The first time i watched it, it made me feel kinda confused, somehow felt empty and i really didnt feel a connection with it. Now i know it was due to my perspective. I watched this at 3am because i was bored, i’ve read some things about it on articles and news, nothing really special, the first impression of it, (i think for most of us too) were: oh, so like, inside, a pandemic stand up?, this made me spect some silly sketches and maybe 1 or 2 “serious” retrospective of the world, humanity, how to help, motivational speeches etc.

I rewatched it again today, clearing my mind and deleting the thought of being something related to the pandemic, because it is not. That changed everyhing. It is not about being inside your house while a deadly virus threatens the humanity, it’s about being inside you, who are you?, your thoughts, dealing with yourself. may appear redundant, about being inside you. I love how it adresses things like “the seek of attention”that everyone has, how we are, so complex that everytime we will have more to say about ourselves justifying and explaining our actions to others. This made me think about myself (obviously). ¿I’’m always justifying, even in this post trying to be redempted for not speaking english so well, why?. Our perception of ourselves, we always bring us down with thoughts, making us smaller and reducing us and apologysing for doing that with a bunch of strangers.

the second time i Heard “goodbye”, felt so personal and close, the way he sangs reminds me when i try to come out from my shyness, anxiety, suicide thoughts, all my bad stuff and say, hey, you know what? I wolud like to be different today, just 1 day. Change me. Do something for me. It´s an ingenous feeling, with a short duration. when you know that, in reality, it wont happen. “well, well, look who’s inside again……” feels like a “told you, now come back again”, a part of you knows that you’ll never be able to achieve something, but you ignore this, that quickly feel of hope makes you think things will be different and you’ll take the weel of your life. Trying to leave behind a part of you that, whathever you do, you cant get rid of it, and you find yourself returning to those habits, actions and thoughts that feels, good. Like a hug.

When he talks about suicide, it was just genious, he saying that, “he dont like it when close people did it” presents that, even while having “empathy” to other people, we´re still being selfish, always puting our needs, feelings and thoughts above them. (not only in this part, also in “how the world works”). While ignoring his own advice. and it made me tear up seeing the screen with suicidal prevention contact.

I love that in “welcome to the internet” he dont blame someone or something in particular, (these type of songs always or, the majority of times fingerpoint to something). It doesnt feel like an acusation, blame, i didnt feel shame. He just presents the things for what they are.

When he kicked the camera and the equipment made me think of; We can be fine for a moment and then snapped, then wonder what happened?,everything was going fine, and you just dont understand why you cant do something to change what it’s making you not being able to do nothing. It’s a cycle. Then, a fear comes, what if, im never going out to be able to past this?, will the rest of my life will be like this?, if it’s, i will start to consider. When im alone im a complete different person, probably the cheeriest person in the room if you’d like to say. I laugh, almost at everything and if it’s not there’s always a smile. All of it turns 180 when im alone, just with myself. Im a person who, no matter the situation (for good or bad), will always had humor. it feels so personal that, as bad as the situation is, i'll try to make you laugh. Using comedy as a resource to heal it's obvious, yet amazing.

The ending it’s just The inevitable reality of, someday having to come out . being exposed so raw, it is necessary. (in a metaphorical sense & literally the action of leaving your house). You will have no where else to take refuge. The shot of being naked and pointed with a refflector, it’s just, assuming what one way or another it had to happen; and just be like “well, there’s nothing that it can be done”and accept it. Even if you’re not ready. No one is ready.

If I wake up in a house that's full of smoke I'll panic, so call me up and tell me a joke When I'm fully irrelevant and totally broken Dammit, call me up and tell me a joke Oh shit, you're really joking at a time like this?

I interpret this part like waiting, waiting for a reciprocity, at the beggining of the special, bo told us he will be there for us when our house burst in smoke, and he will tell us a joke on different situations, but, at the end of the day, who will be there for bo?. The sensation of giving the best of you to other people, but never see that reflected. And when people makes you regret for joking about certain topics, like depression.

We have a lot of social criticism content now days; a lot that it is almost imposible to navigate youtube and not stumble into a video like, “we need to talk about….”, “adressing ……”.this is diferent, he’s not criticising society and their actions it's not the main focus, he puts you in a pov where you’re just and overwhelming person, so many things to worry about, from the world to yourself and not being capable of doing anything.

So yeah,

this is a masterpiece, I admire him, he’s so brave and it makes me happy he did all of this.

[crystalelemental]

Alright, Chapter 4 and endgame stuff.

OPHELIA Her sister is going along with this Savior guy who is clearly working evil miracles from the dark god.  But little did you know the Savior guy was Mattias!  Did...did you forget?  He was the merchant at the start of her story, he showed up in part 3 to re-introduce himself in case you forgot so this reveal would be important.  Anyway, he made a cult, and tries to kill a bunch of these villagers and have Lianna awaken the dark flame so he can siphon out more power, without waking the dark god up.  So hey, points for not being completely stupid, but still a bad call.  So we killed him.  Eat shit.  We then reunite with Lianna, and have to take her up to that hill from the start to snap her out of her depression, just like she did for Ophelia when they were kids.  It’s very cute.

I will say that, with a lot of these final chapters, the stories that focused on mystery will be...fairly obvious like this.  Like with Simeon.  Because any fair mystery had to have established the players early on.  And each route...only has so many characters to work with.  So either they’re like the only other relevant face in that route, or they’re the person who showed up before the big reveal.  Speaking of which.

CYRUS LUCIA WAS EVIL?!  WHAAAAAAAA?!  That’s so surprising, that the person who led us into the trap and then vanished might have been suspicious.  Anyway, she also hulks out, and honestly her fight was the scariest of all of them, because no weakness to magic and goddamn 30 shields.  I have to admit, I didn’t even try.  I just let Ophelia brute force her through the defenses.

Cyrus’ story then goes on to involve him looking through these lost tomes, and deciphering a mural that’s pretty clearly some eldritch shit, and having all the text translate to death and doom.  So yeah, something about don’t fuck with this thing, which Lucia was at least partially fucking with.  Good work, everyone.

TRESSA Tressa gets to Grandport, set to win the Merchant’s Fair, and runs into a young woman named Noa.  Who it turns out, is the daughter of Mr. Moneybags who runs this whole show.  He puts on this fair to get gifts for his daughter, who is, at least in my reading, disabled and not always able to walk.  He gets her extravagant gifts to help her experience the world like she always wanted, and we’re here with this super rare jewel as the prize.

But oh no!  Some lady steals her notebook, and it’s up to us to go kill her and take it back!  I don’t think we actually kill the lady, but we do take it back.  The big mystery they set up is that we don’t even know who the hell wrote it, what do we care?  And Tressa realizes that it’s packed with all her journey’s exploits and that it’s important to her.  So when we get it back, Tressa has an epiphany.  On the stage, she goes up to present her treasure...and shows off the notebook, as something heartfelt that chronicles the world through the eyes of two adventurers.  And while all the merchants laugh at her useless junk...Noa wants it, so Tressa wins.  Mr. Richman tells the crowd that this selection was easy, because it’s literally the only time Noa’s ever asked him for something.  And the whole thematic purpose is that Tressa, as a merchant, is always trying to get the customer what they want.  And in this case, the rarest jewel on the planet wasn’t going to make Noa happy.  But giving her something that helped her feel like she was on that adventure, just like Tressa did when she first obtained it, is exactly what she wanted.  I love it.  They’re so cute.

The story ends with some guy telling you he made the notebook, and that the original author’s name was Graham Crossford.  In retrospect, I was probably supposed to recognize that last name, but I didn’t so...

PRIMROSE God, for a revenge tale, there’s an awful lot of talking and too little stabbing.  Primrose, sweetie, I know you’re having a crisis, but “Faith is your shield” means stab that motherfucker instead of listening to him talk.  I am kinda glad they let him talk though, because now instead of being Generic McBadman, he can be Kotomine Kirei!  Yeah, it turns out Simeon’s just a wee bit unhinged, in the way where he has a flair for drama, and loves watching the tragedy of someone’s life falling apart.  Which is at least something.  But Primrose does eventually get to the stabbing part, and that’s good, but it’s placed beside this play he wrote about her life, that’s supposed to end with her admitting she loved him?  Anyway, everyone in her story is a weird sex criminal and I’m glad we stabbed him.  Mission accomplished, girl.

THERION In the other “short but effective corner,” we have Therion, who is apparently listed as wanted by Darius, so everyone’s out for his blood.  Heathcote is here to help, and you sneak in and kill Darius.  The big focus is on trust and bonds, and that Darius doesn’t have any.  He hates that Therion does.  And his ultimate end isn’t by Therion’s hand.  He runs off and tries to gather his gold and make his escape, but his underlings never cared about him at all and just kill him, stealing his stuff for themselves.  Which is fitting.

The really good part?  Cordelia offers to unbind the bangle now, and Heathcote’s like “Oh, I did that ages ago.”  And Therion’s like “Well I’ll be damned,” but Cordelia notes that hey, Therion, you absolutely would’ve noticed that shit coming loose.  Did you actually do all of this out of the goodness of your heart?  And he’s like who knows, Highlander.  Who knows.  So then they go to see him off, and he tries to be a tough man about wanting to leave all cool, but does cave and thank her for believing in him, and honestly I’m in.  There’s the emotional hit that was always going to be there but I needed to see before I could appreciate him.  I like this one.

ALFYN While I have on multiple occasions felt like Alfyn’s story is mostly about people making dumb decisions instead of easily preventing a bad outcome, I’d be lying if I said the concepts didn’t make me really emotional.  We meet other apothecary, whose name I literally cannot remember, and learn that he has contracted the plague as well.  In fact, it’s the same one Alfyn had as a kid, so now Alfyn must finally rise to the level of the man he always wanted to be like.  And he does, but that’s not what’s cool.

Cool point #1 is that, in keeping with the themes of a healer, this other apothecary (Ogen, I had to look it up), wants to die.  Apparently, after the murder of his wife, he found the guy who did it with his own family, and broke, then decided to kill him like he killed his wife.  And for the record?  Correct move.  I’m sorry, but fuck you, I hate this trope of like “Oh this dude who murdered someone for basically nothing actually had their own family, and will you be as bad as them?”  Yes, because I’m doing the world a favor, and there’s no way a guy who murders for funsies isn’t also a terrible partner and parent, so I’m doing his family a favor as well.  I will sleep so goddamn soundly tonight.  But Ogen’s grappling with it and his own code that you shouldn’t heal bad people, and Alfyn’s stance of always trying to believe in the good of people sees it through.

Cool point #2 is that, Ogen knows the guy who healed Alfyn.  A dude named Graham Crossford.  And see, this time I recognized that name.  They pass it off as just a thing, but I imagine the intent is either the name is incidental here or in Tressa’s route, and then you see it again and go oh shit, stuff’s connected?  Oh man.  Oh man, is it ever.  But more on that when we get to endgame.

OLBERIC Olberic’s hunting down the leader of that band Erhardt was from, and we get to the town to find out it’s a shithole.  Blatant corruption from the guards, public executions via burning at the stake once a month, most criminals up there are now just general dissenters, etc.  Fortunately there’s an armed resistance so we get in their good graces and lead a charge and fight and kill him.  Erhardt shows up to save us at one point.  There’s not a ton interesting going on, but Olberic does ask why Werner here wanted to destroy Hornburg.  Apparently it was the Gate of Finis.  Which...I can’t remember if they name dropped this in Cyrus’ route or Ophelia’s.  But someone definitely referenced this before, so this is another of those incidental moments.  The purpose of the gate is that it connects to the dark god, it’s where it was banished, so like...big deal.  Olberic gets mad it was all for a gate, but buddy you gotta understand, it’s like...a really good gate.

Anyway, then he goes back to the town and it’s all very cute.  Nothing much.

H’AANIT H’aanit goes to hunt down Redeye, and honestly it’s sorta like Olberic’s where it’s not too interesting, just setting up that more people are lost to its petrification and we gotta stop it.  I’m gonna skip being half-assed about the story this time, and focus on a detail I thought was super weird at the time but is...very interesting to me now.

When they talked about Redeye petrifying, I was like oh, it’s gonna be like a basilisk or something.  You know, one of those mystical creatures that has that ability.  And then we get...that thing.  This weird fucked up humanoid creature on all fours with its mouth like cracked open and some glowing red stuff in its guy and billowing shadows coming from it.  And it’s like damn.  That is...not at all what I expected this thing to be.  So like, props for setting up some understanding of petrification lore and completely subverting it with whatever the fuck that was.

Her ending is finding Z’aanta, now freed from petrification, and returning to the village.  And with that, everything is done.

ENDGAME Except there were no end credits and that’s a weird way to leave off, so I looked up all the sidequests to complete and turns out there’s still a lot to do.  I started knocking them out, but I had finished a pretty heavy amount.  If it involved needing an item, information, or a challenge to solve, I had it done just fine.  But I suck at figuring out the Guide quests.  I think I solved maybe two of them correctly by accident.  So we get those done, and eventually the only one left is some conclusion for Impressario, that has like five different required conditions, including completing all character stories and a few sidequest events, and then finding him on an early game trail that no one in their right goddamn mind would ever go back to.  Seriously, I’m confident that I would’ve searched for days without a guide.  You save them from some random beast, not a huge deal, but you have two people present.  Impressario is some traveling performer guy, who took on Kit from a questline you pick up.  Kit traveled a while with them, looking for word of his father, and allegedly found a lead with some woman claiming to know him, and left.  The other I can’t remember his name, but he’s from the Daughter of the Dark God questline, which...man, how did I not pick up on that one?  I mean, I recognized it for what it was, but went “Oh she must be a part of the faith or something.”  But they told me outright and I just didn’t realize it.  Anyway, they talk about their respective NPCs having both left...to the Ruins of Hornburg.  And briefly wonder hey.  Are they...going to the same place?  Weird.

You can now go to the Ruins of Hornburg.  If you can fucking find it.  It’s a tiny little dot in the southeast corner, it took me forever, I was looking for like a town icon.

Anyway, you get there, and there’s nothing.  Like, notably not even monsters and shit.  Just...nothing.  Which is neat.  Anyway, it’s here you meet Lyblac and Kit...in front of the Gate of Finis.  Kit is persuaded to go in to see his father, and just...goes.  Lyblac notices you, and kinda just gives a general bit of info about finding her perfect man and coming after them if you wish, so you can head on it if you want.  Good luck with that.

If you choose to go in, you are faced with a ten-phase boss gauntlet that ends in the most frustrating shit I’ve ever seen.  So that’s great.  But it’s the prelude to the final phase that I love.

You have eight altars with some unholy flame upon them.  Checking the flames will cause you to engage in a boss fight, against a figure from each character’s route: Mattias from Ophelia’s, Yvon from Cyrus’, Venomtooth Tiger from Tressa’s, Werner from Olberic’s, Simeon from Primrose’, Miguel from Alfyn’s, Darius from Therion’s, and the Dragon from H’aanit’s.  It’s a fun little revisit of the bosses, and by this point I could destroy them easily with Ophelia and Tressa.  We have perfect setup too, it’s incredibly consistent and devastating.  Shame the final boss is such an asshole and I’d have to start all over if it beats me like it always does.  Ugh.

But what’s cool is that each defeated boss leaves behind a notebook, outlining information about the boss, or about stuff that happened prior to your adventures.  Some of it is self-contained.  But they all connect to Lyblac, who it sounds like is effectively immortal, and has been pulling shit for years.  She convinced Yvon to murder the former headmaster and take his position.  She gave Mattias the power of the Dark God, that allowed him to just outlive the church members that excommunicated him and show back up later with new faces who don’t remember him and just do it again.  She’s behind Simeon’s shit, and Darius’ shit, and even Werner’s shit.  By the way, shoutouts to Werner’s diary, for having a section specifically devoted to “Yeah she’s hot as hell, but I’m not gettin in there, that shit’s cursed.”  Honestly had me dying.

But the real juice is in the three-part diaries of Graham Crossford, traveling apothecary and author of Tressa’s notebook.  It turns out, he was on his trip to gather medicine for his wife, who had the same affliction as Alfyn did as a child.  When he finally had what he needed, he made his way back, offering his journal as payment to Leon for passage, so that’s how the notebook got there.  However, when he arrives, he finds his wife had already passed.  The elixir is used on Alfyn instead, and he takes to wandering, until he encounters Lyblac.  She tells him of a way to see his wife again, and draws him to the Gate.  Graham notes that yes, he had an idea of what this place was and what she was up to, but was willing to do anything to see his wife again.  Unfortunately, it is, of course, a lie, and her magic begins to twist him into a vessel for the dark god.  She mentions just before the final battle, and I think it’s hinted elsewhere, that the Crossford line is associated with the mage that helped bind the dark god here, so only one of their bloodline can release it as well.  Graham describes that his body is contorted beyond recognition, but the thought that his child will be next in Lyblac’s ambitions causes him to momentarily snap to his senses, and attempt to kill her.  It doesn’t work, but in his pursuit it notes that he is attacked by others, and his final words are a desperate plea that he’s not a monster, he’s a man.  The script is notably doing that alternating capital and lower case letter thing to indicate Gettin Fucked Up.

Which starts to tie stuff together.  That’s how Tressa’s notebook got where it was.  That’s why he was wandering the land.  That’s why all these events feel so connected, through this background NPC you probably didn’t take any notice of.  But you’ll notice, the only one that doesn’t seem to line up is H’aanit.  Why is she drawn in?  And if I’m getting the right thing out of this...dude, is Graham fucking Redeye?  Is that why Redeye is this fucked up humanoid monster?  Because holy shit that’s awesome.  I think that’s what I’m supposed to get from it, because I think the third part of his diary that talks about this transformation and being labelled a beast was after beating Dragon.  So like...damn.  Damn that’s good.  I love how they tied all of this together at the last minute.  I love how it fits together sensibly, and how they actually managed to craft this big mystery that wasn’t even recognizable as a mystery until you think about it.  Why did Darius know about the stones?  Why did Werner know about the gate?  How did Mattias find out about this power?  And it’s all Leblac, a character that was fairly set up in the overall mystery, and even literally called her questline “Daughter of the Dark God,” and still caught me off guard.  This one’s well played.  I love that.  And I feel like there must have been small hints leading up to it.  Like, did Kit ever mention his last name?  Was I supposed to be able to put that one together?  I think Darius mentions a woman wanting Therion dead; is that Lyblac just setting up Darius for her purposes?  There are so many little things I kinda want to go back and see if I notice now that I have the full picture, and that’s so much fun, I love it.

Unfortunately, the final boss sucks.  I hate this fight and I hate that it takes like two fucking hours to get to the final phase only to lose.  I really don’t know if I’ll actually play to the finish on this one.  I just don’t know if I have it in me.  But I guess we’ll see.  Not like I have much else going on today, might level a bit and take one more shot.

[chibivesicle]

Hi, I just read about postponing your meta-writing activities. I hope you've recovered from your covid-infection, and that work has been less stressful to you. I wish you the best and I'm looking forward to read your thoughts on GK again some day :)

Hello,

Thanks for the kind message! I finally finished reading the manga (I ended up letting a bunch of the chapters pile up so I could just read them all). I'm looking to post a reaction to the end of the manga, sometime this month between all the regular life things.

After starting to search for a new job in 2019 (god that hurts my brain to type it out), I finally found a new job and got an awesome offer and all that stuff. But now, it means packing up my home and cat and moving ~1,000 miles in a north and east direction in about a month or so.

The pandemic pretty much killed the job market in 2020 and I had to continue with my current job, which was very stressful from spring 2020-spring 2021. And then fall 2021 reaallllyyyy damn well destroyed me for a whole host of reasons - I had to put in for promotion for my job that I technically didn't want to be promoted for - everyone was excited to be in person for about a week and then collapsed - I got freakkin' strep and it sucked horribly - I got to spend American Thanksgiving recovering from strep on crazy antibiotics which made traveling lovely (I'm still bummed out I didn't have to poop in DFW airport b/c Texas). I had a brief and lovely visit at Christmas to see friends I hadn't seen in years - but then got Covid on the way back and that sucked so bad. The last time I'd been that sick was in fall 2010. Which was likely H1N1 in retrospect.

I swear, I can write a guide about how to look for a new job remotely and the soul sucking levels of shit you have to wade through. Wow, I sound so lovely, but it is true - I worked my full time job and remotely networked in two different locations and applied to jobs. It was - a lot. Writing my GK meta had been a way to deal with my frustration around my current role and at first helped with my eventual decision to leave my current position. The longer the search went on, in the pandemic (which is still totally a pandemic) the less I could motivate myself to write the meta. Like many people, in mid-2021 I looked for a therapist, got wait listed and finally found someone, who has been great. This should be no shock to my readers as I wrote a very personal meta a long time ago with my relationship with my own mental health and what I know is a life long struggle with depression. One of the suggestions of this excellent therapist was to cut back on the busy work that was overtaxing my burnt out brain with my day job. This included:

1.) pausing my watching of the drama Nirvana in Fire, because that is a great drama for detail nerds like myself. You have no idea how much I loved trying to predict things with limited information and I was doing a damn good job of it. I haven't forgotten you NiF, I'll watch you when I'm in my new location.

2.) forcing myself to write GK meta when it was a slog. Now, that I've finished the manga, I will continue to note that the overall, depth and quality dropped after the Karafuto arc. Does this make me think the entire manga was terrible? No, it is still a very very solid manga and I still love certain aspects of it. But it did not deliver a satisfying ending for me. However, other than being the same age as the GK readers in Japan, I do not have anything else in common with them.

3.) encouraging me to do other sorts of activities that were more relaxing or to watch/read things that were still good but not going to turn my brain into full on 'must examine every little detail mode' which is actually bloody hell for me to not just do automatically.

I am so thankful that I was lucky enough to find a professional at the time I needed it. Yet at the same time, I'm really disappointed at how mental health care is soooo hard to get for many people. We are going to be unpacking the layers of collective PTSD we all have from the impact of the pandemic - for years - maybe even the rest of our lives.

An unusual result of the manga and reading about Ogata did result in me adopting my cat when I did. I can thank Noda for that idea, I love my cat and he was adopted long before the pandemic lock downs, but it was nice to have him around. Unlike most cats, he loved lock down and got to see me all day every day. He was more upset I returned to work in the summer of 2020 than one would have expected but all in all he's a lovely cat.

Anyhoo, I'll likely write out a few metas here and there before putting a bow on it and calling it good. The manga may have ended on a let down, but I found a great community in the fandom and can't thank Noda enough for that. United by a love and interest in Ogata.

[nagisasstunningpersonality]

TINSITOGS, a retrospective (happy birthday)

(yes I’m like two days too late I know I’m sorry) 

Why hello followers and ass class fandom, nice to see you there. I’m sure MOST people know about this, but in case you don’t, hi. On AO3 I’m better known as livixbobbiex, writer of maybe one of the most infamous Assassination Classroom fics. 

Which I mean like, if you haven’t read it yet you totally should it’s fanlore at this point I promise- 

Shameless plug that I don’t need aside, I felt that, on its first birthday since actual completion, I just wanted to share some things about it. Some tit bits about writing it, fun facts, maybe even some author advice TM. I appreciate that it’ll be super annoying if I do that in the tags, though, so that’ll all be under the cut. If you don’t want to read the whole post, then no matter what, thanks for the support in general! 

I also want to take the opportunity to announce that I’ve reopened my discord, so if you want to talk about my fics with me (and others), you’re more than welcome to join! (the link is here) 

The origin story 

I’ve stated this many times, I think, but TINSITOGS was never supposed to be a serious story. Taking you back, quite a long time, it actually started in a facebook DM with a friend. We used to come up with “head canons” with each other, which were basically just very condensed fanfiction plots over a multitude of text messages. I believe I was trying to cheer her up, and I tried to come up with some kind of plot line. 

At the time, I was fairly fresh to the Ass Class fandom, and I was joking about how there were no teen pregnancy melodrama fanfictions. It wasn’t that I wanted one, I just thought it was strange for a school centric anime with a bunch of ships to NOT have one. And, back then, I only really cared about karmagisa. So I just decided ‘right it’s happening’. The reason I decided to make it ABO was due to ‘it making sense’. Fun fact: it was almost written as AFAB trans Nagisa, but I decided against it as I didn’t rate my ability to handle it well back then. Looking back on it, I’m glad I made that decision. 

Over around two months, writing out the plot of this story took over my life a little bit. I had no idea where I was going with it, but I was having so much fun with the drama that I decided that Karma and Nagisa shouldn’t get together soon at all, and I had a lot of fun teasing my friend with the ‘will they won’t they’. It was only when I got bored that I invented this intense drama plotline to finish it all off. 

That period of time was a lot of fun. And whilst that friendship didn’t end well, I still have a lot to thank her for. She chose Daichi’s name because I had no idea, and she wanted to annoy me because I didn’t like Haikyuu. When I couldn’t decide on his hair colour, the purple was her suggestion because ‘why logic?’ Daichi speaking Korean was because of how much she liked Kpop. She even helped me choose the title of the actual fic, so there’s a lot you can thank her for, honestly. 

After I finished that story, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Whenever I daydreamed, I used to think about that damn Daichi Akabane, and how much I wanted to tell his story. I’d even come up with extra stuff to fill in a lot of the gaps, and developed his character in my mind. I decided that I was really desperate to write it down. Usually that worked when I had an idea I wanted to work through. 

I wrote the first chapter in late 2017, and then the next two as well. I just, kept going, and realised that I could go further still. TINSITOGS was never something that was supposed to be shared, but I decided I may as well. After all, that fated ‘teen pregnancy drama’ fic still didn’t exist, and I thought it would be funny to make it happen. 

Yes, as I’ve stated publicly a few times, TINSITOGS was a crack fic. If I wanted attention from it, it was infamy. We even joked about me cursing the fandom if it ever became the most popular fic (whoops?). What I wasn’t expecting was a bunch of people, in a fandom where at the time there were NO ongoing karmagisa fics and it was pretty dead, to really seem to enjoy it. It was enough to have me keep writing it, at least. I still don’t know at what point I actually started taking it seriously, but somehow I did, and the rest is history? 

The reception 

In my wildest dreams, I never thought that I would be the author of one of the most popular fics in the fandom. To this day, the amount of views TINSITOGS has is insanity to me. For the record, across all platforms it’s on today it has 238,000, which is literally a number I can’t even visualise anymore. Almost quarter of a MILLION. To this day on AO3, it’s the most viewed Ass Class fic that’s an ACTUAL ass class fic (the others are multi fandom compilations). So yeah, I achieved the original goal, I guess? 

Now you might be wondering, “omg the karmagisa fandom is fujoshi trash”. And, considering the origins, it is kind of funny. The thing is, though, TINSITOGS was written at incredibly good time. It was written when there were, essentially, very few long form Karma/Nagisa stories. If any other fics did get posted on occasion, they were usually just oneshots. I was also, at that point, writing very fast. A symptom of ADHD is becoming obsessively productive over certain things. Since I was able to get a 3k chapter out every few days/once a week, TINSITOGS was consistently bumped to the top of AO3′s default view. And some of those first few chapters were altered canon, and transcribing the canon dialogue didn’t take very long. The more views it got, the more people would read it out of sheer curiosity. 

I think it also helps that, at least after it started getting some positive feedback (which was honestly after the pre written chapters), I purposely tried to make it ‘not terrible’. I mean, I personally think the first chapter is pretty weak and if it wasn’t somewhat iconic to a lot of people I’d rewrite it. But in general, I purposely tried to make the world of ABO my own, to make it more accessible to those who don’t like that genre, and stay away from the inherently grosser stuff as much as possible. I genuinely do get comments about how I introduced people to the genre as a whole, still not sure if that’s a GOOD thing but hey, it happened. 

TINSITOGS turned into a lot more than just a joke. It turned into my favourite hobby. It turned into a research project (honestly, you would not believe the amount of mummy vlogs and legit scientific articles about child development I consumed). It turned into something that, at least I believe, was widely loved. 

Meaning 

I think it might be wrong to say that I don’t have AN idea of when I started to take the fic super seriously. For me, it was around the time someone commented something along the lines of saying my writing meant a lot to them, that they’d spent all night reading it and had been unable to put it down. 

Not to get too dark here, but I do have a past in writing a very long, somewhat popular fic (it’s still on my fanfic net profile if anyone’s interested, but I don’t recommend it). However, in the latter part of my teenage years, the depression struck. Writing was the love of my life, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it anymore. Maybe I’d be able to muster an idea or even a chapter at the best points of that, but I’d never completely finished any story. Starting to write again was a huge step in my recovery, and one of the reasons I convinced myself that life was worth it was being able to impact someone’s life somehow. Even to this day, I still remember the fics I read when I was, like, thirteen. How much I still remember them, and how much they meant to be at the time. I wanted to be that writer for someone else. To be honest, it was actually Yuri!!! On Ice that got me out of the super bad, but I still never wrote anything of real consequence. TINSITOGS was the first time in a long time I actually committed to something. 

And, to be completely honest, there were a lot of times I was tired of it, and wanted to just quit. But, the thing was, I felt like people depended on me in a way. I got so many comments that were just FILLED with support, telling me how much they looked forward to every update. It wasn’t just empty words, either, a lot of the times these comments would be super engaged with the actual writing. I can’t even describe just how much they meant to me, how much I would look forward to reading everyone’s opinions. And then discord happened, which was a lot of fun. 

TINSITOGS went a lot further than I ever thought it would. There were comments, discussions, fan art, fan FIC (which is honestly incredible to me). Someone even added it to TV Tropes, at one point. Not to mention the Cards Against Humanity deck and quiz It makes me so unbelievably happy that I could inspire that much creativity, but it’s a two way street. It was all of that which inspired me to write, too. 

Writing 

The only real goal I actually had was aiming for around 3000 words per chapter. I had a whole facebook log of plot points as planning, and I was mostly just trying to expand on them into prose. I honestly thought that, at its completion, the entire fic would be around 100k words, if that. Not, at one point, being literally the longest ass class fic on AO3. 

There are a lot of aspects that were directly adapted from the original messages, and I tried to stay faithful to it more so at first, even if I later removed some of the pure crack. But the style was also vaguely similar, with the story being told mostly from Nagisa’s perspective with swaps to Karma when it made sense. All the main plot beats, too, are pretty much identical. The plus to this was I was able to add a lot of really fun foreshadowing, and I feel like it’s a fun reread because of it. 

Honestly though, if there’s a demand to release those OG message logs, I will. Mostly because it’s kind of funny, and interesting to see. Isogai and Nagisa were engaged at one point, even. 

Obviously, it changed somewhat. 3000 was the minimum length, and the time to completion was whenever it felt right. One of my big concerns was about pacing, so it took a lot more fleshing out and maybe ‘filler’ content for some of the main arcs to work. 

There’s parts of TINSITOGS I don’t think aren’t written that well, and some that I’m still super proud of. I think you can definitely tell there’s a gradual shift in style, and I get a lot more comfortable with writing them as characters as it goes along. To be honest, my pride for the fic overall is what it represents. 

It is funny to think about the places it got written in, though. I started it when I worked at McDonalds with no life direction, then it went through my first year of university with me. It’s been written in at least four countries. Aeroplanes, night clubs, long haul buses, a train through the Japanese southern coastline. Even the start of covid. TINSITOGS managed to see a lot. I even turned a scene in (the boat scene during the India chapter with altered names) to my university as a legitimate assignment. 

There were also a few messages I wanted to achieve, once I realised I had the platform to put them across. One of them was, obviously, ‘use protection kids’. It was important to me that I didn’t glamorise it too much, and I think that came across. I also wanted to dispute some of the issues with ABO, and subvert the consent issues as much as I could. An arc I really ‘liked’ writing was how abuse doesn’t always look the same way, and that it can be a drawn out change in behaviour. How the most important part of ‘being a good parent’ isn’t perfection, but genuinely loving and doing the best you can for your kid. How love doesn’t solve everything, and effective communication can take a very long time to learn and build a functional relationship. I mean, there definitely was a lot I tried to put in, and you’re free to interpret it all how you want. But, I like to think some people learnt some of these things, at least. 

Daichi 

Honestly, Daichi developed almost of his own free will. I had a good idea of his appearance, and that he was smart. Writing him from birth until around nine years old (older if you read the sequel fic) pretty much allowed that fluidity. It was really fun to explore a nature vs nurture development, and let his own characteristics speak for themselves. 

He’ll always have a special place in my heart. 

This is the first image I ever made. When I was trying to figure out what Daichi looked like, I honestly just edited Karma’s hair (pretty well, actually? I’m impressed with my past skill). That’s where the ‘he looks just like Karma’ meme kind of came from. 

This was the first image I actually created of Daichi. I THINK it was on rinmaru games mega anime creator or something, but it’s literally not available on the internet anymore as far as I can tell, so I can’t double check. This was in the pre-piccrew days. His eyes are closed because they didn’t have the right tone of goldish/silver.  

His sister, Kaguya, didn’t even exist originally, even though I decided on that ending pretty early on. Actually, she was going to be called ‘Irina’ due to some hijinks. Initially, when Karma found out about Irina’s pregnancy, she was going to get super emotional and mad at him and basically force him to name his first born daughter after her. Karma agreed to shut her up, never intending to have another child, so when the surprise second child later came along they had to live with the pain. However, to be honest I just forgot to write in the actual scene that set it all up, and I decided against adding it anywhere else. The name Kaguya was a very last minute decision, and it was a chance for me to explore some ideas that didn’t fit with Daichi’s character. 

Interestingly too, Daichi and Nao were never intended to be a thing. I only decided that towards the VERY end. Even though the reason I named Nao that was because of a ship I had in a J Drama (Good Morning Call). It just kind of ended up happening because I won myself over with imagining the cute. 

The music 

I used to write with a lot of background music, though not all the time. Particularly towards the start, there was a lot that didn’t really make sense thematically, yet I would write to a lot. 

Here’s a link to the spotify playlist if you want it it’s basically all the ones I noted I’d listened to a lot. Not including the smut ones, though, I have a whole playlist for that. 

Some of the notable ones: 

Five String Serenade - the first scene I wrote of the entire fic, in Chapter 25 New Year Time where they fell asleep cuddling. 

Cosmic Love - when I wrote Nagisa’s love confession scene in hospital (I also wrote this pretty early on) 

Northern Downpour (though it was actually a cover by Emma Blackery) - The chapter after Daichi’s born (30) 

When The Party’s Over -  Confession Time Third Period, Chapter 69. I literally listened to this song on REPEAT when I planned and wrote the kind of ‘break up’ scene, and it’s one of the few parts that made me cry writing. 

Turning Page - I know I said no smut, but this song actually gave me the idea to have the “I love you” in chapter 108 be less on a whim and actually more built up. In the original plan, Karma really did just say it without thinking. I’m glad I changed that.  

Bury Me Low and Numb - pretty much all I listened to when writing the last few chapters, because Evil Nagisa core. So much so that Bury Me Low was in my top 2020 songs rewind. 

As for the title, there’s actually quite a funny story. I had no idea what to call the fic, and when that happens I usually just try and find some song lyrics. I really wanted to use something from ‘October’ by the Broken Bells. Not only because it’s my favourite song (has been for years), but thematically it really worked. The issue was, it worked as the WHOLE song, there were no individual lyrics that captured everything. And, if they did, they didn’t flow very well. And naming the fic ‘October’ would have been weird for a lot of reasons. There Is No Sweeter Innocence That Our Gentle Sin really was just plucked randomly, in a desperate search to find any snappy lyrics from any song that had some kind of meaning. After a bit of discussion, we settled that it kind of worked... if Daichi is innocent and they committed a sin or something. It also wasn’t the most obvious lyric from the song (Take Me To Church if anyone doesn’t know) so I just went with it. It works out, I think, because TINSITOGS turned out to be a pretty good acronym and pronounceable word in its own right. 

The merch  redbubble drama 

It’s a well known fact that I’m not very good at art. However, I decided to try pixel art because it seemed the easiest to not mess up. I made Karma and Nagisa, before deciding to also give Daichi a try. 

This, to this day, is the only good quality art of Daichi that I actually own. The only one I’m actually happy sharing and thinking it doesn’t look terrible. As much as I love people sending me fanart, it’s not ‘my property’, right. 

So, I was kind of joking about TINSITOGS having merchandise. At first I just made two funny quote things, and uploaded it to redbubble. I was never intending to actually make money from this, and I’d agreed to myself that if I did, I would just donate it to charity. I was joking with the quotes, but since I had this artwork I figured I may as well uploaded. Separately, there was also an image that had pixel Daichi next to pixel Nagisa and Karma (which I also created). 

Aside from showing up in a few people’s adverts across the internet, there was no real harm with this. In fact, I didn’t make money anyway. It was just... more the joke of it existing. I did, however, buy myself a Daichi phone case, which is one of my favourite possessions. 

The funny ‘drama’ comes in when they got taken down due to copywrite. Sure, the one with Nagisa and Karma, I understand. But the other three literally had no mention or anything to do with Assassination Classroom, aside from being from a fanfiction. So basically, someone who owns those rights claimed my OC as theirs. Which makes Daichi canon? Whatever the case, I found this hilarious don’t worry. 

How has TINSITOGS changed my life? 

This is quite a strange thing to think about. Because, in a lot of ways, it really hasn’t. As I’m sure a lot of people know, I don’t really consider myself to have any real ‘fame’, despite the impressive numbers. Whenever I tell people in my personal life, they seem to think I’m some sort of internet celebrity, but that’s never been the case for me. I mean, it’s hardly a cultural phenomenon. 

In a lot of ways, I’d much rather befriend someone than have them admire me. Possibly because being someone’s inspiration is kind of weird... I’m just an awkward duck who likes to write after all. I don’t mind it, though. I genuinely find it an honour, even if I don’t necessarily agree. I also want to take this time to say that if anyone ever wants to talk or message me, you’re more than free to do so. I’m usually super casual with people who do that, I promise. 

TINSITOGS was the first story I ever finished in the way I truly wanted to. Start to end, a full narrative. And it took a LOT. There were so many times I almost felt like quitting, or took super long breaks. For me, ADHD queen, actually finishing something was a huge deal. And I know I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t owe it to everyone who read it, and myself, to see it through. You know like, if I were to die tomorrow, at least I’ve left something behind. 

In a lot of ways, it’s changed me for the better. It’s helped me develop my writing styles, and way of thinking. It encouraged me to become more active in the fandom, and develop some important friendships. I always feel like my Tumblr and Fanfiction ‘known’ factor is separate. I think most of my Tumblr following is more to do with my theories/Japanese context research if anything, for example, but I know I wouldn’t be so interested in that if TINSITOGS hadn’t lead me to deeply examine character and really look into analysing source material for clues. I also think there’s just... a lot of myself in it. 

I was 17 years old, when I first came up with the idea. I finished the story when I was 20. Now, at the time of writing, I’m 21. That time has seen some pretty significant changes - just in general life facts and my own personal human development. For me at least, a lot of that was pretty turbulent, and TINSITOGS stands as a time capsule for that, in a way. 

I know I gained a lot of confidence, and it affirmed to me that writing is what I love. Telling stories and sharing them is what I love. 

Conclusion

Do I think TINSITOGS is an outstanding piece of writing, or the best fic ever? No. I really don’t. It’s strange to say because I definitely spent a lot of time on it, but it’s not like I put my full unbridled efforts into the story. I don’t fully plan, use a beta, or even read through on my own. And that’s okay - that’s not what I write fanfiction for. Fanfiction is my place to have fun with characters and stories I like, without the pressures of having to stand on my own complete originality. Yes, I’m fully confident that I can write at a “higher quality”, if I really wanted to. I’m also aware that some authors put their full effort into their fics, and that’s just as valid! 

It feels odd to say this about my own writing, but I honestly think there’s just something in this story. It might not be written in the best prose ever, and the premise might be kind of dumb for a lot of people. But, I think, there’s some part of this fic that managed to grab people. Somehow, at some point, many readers get captured into the emotions and so drawn in that ‘they just have to finish it now!’ Again, I’m not sure myself how I actually achieved that. Of course, that won’t apply to everyone, but I do feel there’s some truth in it. And it makes me happy, to have caused that. 

If TINSITOGS is your favourite fic, or if you genuinely think it’s the best story you’ve read, then thank you. I really appreciate your support, and I’m happy to have been a part of your life, I guess. I know how much fanfics can mean to a person, and that’s why I’m not going to take it down, or edit it at all. And it’s fine too, if you loved the fic for a while and moved on -i t happens. Whatever the case, I’m very honoured to have been able to occupy a moment of your life. Or if you find this fic in 10 years time, even, I still wholly appreciate you. 

This story was incredibly important to me, and thank you for reading if it was ever important to you too. 

You may ask, what now? Well, this is only intended to be a detailed look back for whoever’s interested, and it’s likely the only one I’ll actually do, a year after completion. Of course, if you ever want to ask me anything or just discuss the story, you’re honestly good to contact me in whatever way I have available. 

I’m still writing my ongoing stories, of course, despite taking a small break due to the university work load. I fully intend to complete the stories I’ve already started to tell, at least. After that... I’m not sure if I’ll still write fanfiction. Don’t panic, this isn’t a ‘I’m quitting writing’ thing. I may, however, have bled the Karmagisa genre a bit too dry at that point. Who knows? I am pretty interested in writing something original for once, so maybe that’ll work out. 

For now, at least, thank you to anyone who read this fic. To anyone who commented, liked, or interacted with me over it. To anyone who created or learnt from it. I’m really glad that I got to share this story with you all, and ultimately left some kind of mark, no matter how big or small. 

Happy birthday, TINSITOGS. I had a lot of fun writing you. 

[popculturebuffet]

Top 12 Three Caballeros Moments: Ride of the Three Caballeros Epilogue!

Salduos Amigos...and Adios, as this is the FINAL part of my 20 part look at those happy amigos, those snappy chappies in matching serapes, those birds of the feather, THE THREE CABALLEROS, THE RIDE OF THE THREE CABALLEROS! Yes after 19 other articles, all paid for by megafan and patron of the blog @weirdkev27​, it’s time to bid our boys a fond farewell.  And what a ride i’ts been... we’ve had trips to Bahia, animaton sequences requiring a LOT of 1940′s cocaine ,Jose reinacting the plot of “Come a LIttle Bit Closer” by jay and the americans but ironcially not in the Badman Jose roll,, a less happy reunion where Donald went full vanilla ice for a few moments, Panchito giving us his long and storied family history in song form, Donald needing a vacation after his girlfriend punched him in the face and instead getting eaten by a giant snake, FLAMENCO MASTER HORACE HORSECOLLAR, Soccer with super cars, and our heroes having a warm and fun reunion and having to admit their lives didn’t turn out so good while Dewey jacaksses around in the subplot.

 And all of this lead into their very own series where our heroes met a goddess and wayne knight all in the same day, defeated THE MIGHTY MINOTAUR, got into a giant robot fight on the fucking moon, meeting the roman gods who live on and tend to the norse world tree for some reason, preventing a stupidly started lava apocalypse, going to goblin jail via song, meeting some literal dead presidents, chasing a bear around a fancy rich people town, getting into the ch-ch-chalk zone, fighting a wrestling match against the respresntive of the god of death, dying and coming back to life as a result of said wrestling match, going to camelot to train with king arthrus’ self helf book, going to a yeti spa and finally returning for one last battle with an evil wizard, his pet monkeybatdonkeyrat, and wayne knight, and have to put up with Donald’s shrill abusive ex girlfriend through about half of it. All in all good stuff and i’ll always be greatful for kevn funding this and giving me the chance to both finally watch legend and in general cover these wonderful characters. While i’m sure Panchito and Jose wil lbe back for the big finale of Ducktales, I’m gonna miss these guys and hope they get another shot at the big time one day. 

But Kevin had a great idea, one I decided to do for free since this thing cost 100 dollars together as it was a movie, and 20 episodes of television, so it was a LOT to do.  Fun but a lot of work. A top 12 list of the best moments from across the works covered for this retrospective. From the movie to the series, these are the best of the best moments of the best boys around. So without further adeu join me under the cut as I throw one hell of an after party for one hell of a ride.

12. The Cold Blooded Penguin (The Three Caballeros (Movie) )

This one is low because it doesn’t exactly involve the boys at all as this was a short in their movie. But what can I say, I love penguins, especially Opus.

And the charming tale of a pengy named Pablo who has trouble with the cold and wants to head off for warmer climates just never ceases to entertain me. It’s adorable, pretty funny and just a nice little start to the film every time I watch it. Especially his friends with the sleepy, depressed eyebrows. Really relate to them, especially the tall one with a ponch, aka me as a penguin.  Not much else to say hence why it’s so low, but I really enjoyed this short and can’t help but put Pablo on the list.. and wish he’d gotten a nod in Legend, but then again given we weren’t given a second season they were probably just saving him. 

11. Charon’s Fabulous Cruise (Legend of the Three Caballeros) Another Cabs free entry but I Just love this concept: Charon, ferryman of the river sticks.. deciding since he’s not getting as many customers to turn it into a cruise ship complete with add. IT’s low both because it dosen’t involve the boys and it dosen’t take up much of it’s episode.. but damn if it ain’t funny. And Jim Cummings just brings his all to it.. granted HE always does, the man’s a legend for a reason, but dosne’t make his performance any less lovely. WIsh we got a second season just so we could see this guy again among other reasons. 

10. You Don’t Get a Vacation You Take it (Legend of the Three Caballeros)  Wayne Knight as Sheldgoose.. was easily one of the best parts of Legend of the Three Caballeros. While the show itself was fairly high quality it’s other main villain Feldrake eventually fell into just calling Sheldgoose a moron and hitting him as his only character. IN contrast while at first apperance Sheldgoose was just a rich asshole with hair that looks like a bad toupe but apparently is his actual hair and what he choose to go with and a hell of a moustache.. and while that’s all true, he’s also cunning and manipultive, often making Feldrake’s plans work simply by using clever manipulations. He’s funny, enaging and the sadest part of no second season is not getting more of this guy. Hopefully he’ll show up in another.. even the comics using him without Wayne Knight’s Dulect Tones would be nice. He’s a good villian and would fit just as well in the classic comics being either a snooty nuisance to donald in some way, or being a rival fro scrooge, also being rich but his family having earned it by stealing from others.  But for now what we got ain’t bad and hte best example of just what sheldgoose is capable of is also his first bit of contirbuting more than as a set of hands for feldrake, phrasing. His vilian song. Yes Wayne Knight FINALLY gets a villian song. Your very welcome. 

The song is just fun, a Luau type song with a sinster undercurrent and wayne knight just having a hell of a time, alternating between speaking and singing> It’s low on this list because i’ts an OKAY song, i’ve seen better villian songs, I just really liked this one, and because it dosen’t exactly involved the boys, but I still hold to my convictions in putting this one on here.

9. Panchito Romero Miguel Junipero Francisco Quintero González (House of Mouse) Only House of Mouse entry, and suprisingly it’s not Donald squeaking “And i’m donald duck!” , which has been burned into my brain for a few decades. No it’s the groups OTHER song in there second apperance on the show Not So Goofy, sung by the incomprable Rob Pauslen. While I sitll think he was easily the worst Jose of the bunch, and that the roll never should’ve been given to a white man to begin with, credit where it’s do: he wasn’t a have bad panchito. He only voiced everyone’s faviorite rooster, suck it Foghorn Leghorn, once, for a song, likely to capatalize on the fact Paulsen was famed for Yakko’s World and other songs where he sang a lot at once, but boy did he make a meal of it. Observe.

The song is lightly hampered by the fact it also uses his version of Jose which is probably the worst work i’ve heard from Rob. And given it’s the only roll i’ve heard of his that wasn’t very good and he’s still VERY CLEARLY trying his best, that says a lot to the guy’s quality. And im not saying all this to avoid backlash, I stand by what I say and how I say it.. i’m saying it because I truly love and respect the guy this just was not his best work. This song however is Rob on full blast, using his ablitlity to talk fast no matter the voice to give us one heck of a lively performance and name for Panchito, one that was reused for Ride of the Three Cabs though sadly minus the song, as I would’ve LOVED to hear Jamie Camill belt this one out. But the lively animation and liveleir performance earn this one a spot.

8. Baia, Donald (The Three Caballeros) For this one i’m squishing three different but related parts of the movie together: The “Have you been to Baia, Donald” song, the train trip there and the awesome musical number at the end. But all three flow together as one great sequence with the frist two serviing as a fun prelude for a fun sequence as Donald and Jose try to woo a lady named Yaya, played by Aurora Miranda, and get into a big and fun dance number that for the time is AMAZINGLY blended with the live action work. The song is an utter ear worm, the seqeunce is fun and it lacks some of the creepiness Donald’s later session of flirting had and the colors are vibrant as hell. Wonderful, beautiful stuff. It’s really hard to talk about as not a lot happens in it other than a fun bit of song and dance.. but sometimes tha’ts just waht you need: a bunch of actors, two of which were animated, moving and groving to a heckuva beat. 

7. I Love You Guys (Legend of the Three Caballeros)  This was just a very sweet moment but one I treasure. The Cabs beat a giant horrifying rage beast.. by genuinely apoologizing to donald, telling him they love him then having a group hug. After a full episode before this of them just kinda ignoring what he cared about, Xandra and the boys genuine apologies and Donald genuinely telling them “I love you guys” and realizing for the first time in his life he’s genuinely loved and appricated. It just feels so fucking nice. Shame they didn’t you know.. end the Daisy plot with him realizing he dind’t need or or that he wasn’t angsiting over a selfish goldigger in the first place but hey, you take what you can get sometimes and the getting is good here. 

6. The Cabs Song .. in Comic Form! (The Three Caballeros Ride Again!) 

Another fairly quick one to talk about but one’s that damn impressive. The Three Cabs ride again is a wonderful story that reunites our birds of a feather for an adventure in mexico.. and one of it’s two best moments, the other one way further up from Don Rosa’s classic, seriously check it out it’s good, is when the boys, to distract their enemy for the story, play their classic song.  Musical numbers.. are hard to pull off in comics. As Linkara, comic critic and one of my inspirations check him out on youtube he’s really fantastic, has mentioned quite a bit not having the sound to go with it is an uphill battle. But i’m not as against this as he is.. as long as you can convey the ENERGY of said song and perofrmance in the page. As long as you got that, you can pull it off and boy oh boy oh boy did Rosa ever. While it’s only about a page and a half long it’s just a fun, wonderful litlte sequence, from the crowd that has no reaction til lthe end when our big bad clubs them with the guitar, to our heroes swipining tablecoths to seve as serape to Donald falling outside, it’s one of the highlights of an alreayd impressive story. 

5. Jam Session (Ducktales, The Town Where Everyone Was Nice!) 

Only one Ducktales moment but it’s a keeper to be sure and now I HAVE seen Legend... I can say as I did there Jamie Camil REALLY shoudlv’e been kept as Panchito but “The Town Where Everyone Was Nice”.. really was still ag reat version of the characters and still kept them true. It wasn’t AS good as the Legend versions.. but honestly that’s fine. Not every version HAS to be good as the others and they were still wella cted, wonderfully animated and the story was great. And the moment that shows it off best is the boys quite moment after lunch, where they remincse, have fun, think about old times.. then hear a radio and slowly but surely have a fun dance number together, playing like old times. It’s this moment that makes me REALLY question why people hated this so much, as this one tiny moment captures the cabs chemistry and comrander in just two short minutes, Donald getting angry, Jose defusing int with a dance then him joining in, the three just jamming iwth whatever’s on hand and jose magically playing the fluit with his umbrella. I’ts all just so charming I love it. The end version of the three cabs IS really awesome, it just didn’t make the cut. Still liked it though.. but this.. this is better. Sometimes less is more you know?

4. The Three Cablleros Song (The Three Caballeros (Movie) ) Look you knew this was coming, I knew this was coming, we all knew this was coming. But the song is no less awesome, with fluid animation, wonderful vocals and lyrics, and an unberably catchy tune. It’s iconic to the characters, having popped up in four different renditions during this retrsopective, all of them pretty damn good, but no one tops the original.  Even the two more dated bits, some latin baby and Panchito having a gun solo, somehow don’t hamper what’s otherwise an iconic moment. It’s fun, it’s fancy free, and it establishes the boys dynamic perfectly, one that as we’ve seen would last a few lifetimes and probably will last forever. 

3. We Say So! (The Three Caballeros Ride Again) While Ride again is a VERY good story, it’s best moment is ironiclaly it’s end despite leaving you wanting more and more. After a fun adventure and a laugh over it being for nothing really, our friends return to Jose’s job at a night club, which his manager, who understandably has issues with Jose choosing wooing ladies over actually doing his job sometimes, only gives him back because it’s a big night but needs a big act. The first touching moment here is the fact the boys pitch in without being asked because hteir friend needs them. But the real moment is what happens after: The Triplets return from the hotel, still bemoaning as they did ealrier in the story that Donald has no friends and assume when they see him on stage and see him crash off it that he incited a riot.. only for his friends to assure him he’s a very fine fellow and they say so.. and in an instnat the boys realize donald DOES have friends.. and the best friends a duck can ask for. And after a lifetime of being spat on and barely winning.. Donald gets an unquestioned victory, stnading proudly with his friends for a packed house who still want more while his nephews look on proudly. I say so.. and what I say is that this moment is one of Rosa’s finest and one of the most touching thigns the man’s ever written. 

2. This is Just Where I Came In (The Legend of the Three Caballeros) The Legend of the Three Cabs was excellent and it ended on one hell of a high. After a heck of a fight via callbacks that barely didnt’ make the list, our heroes rush in to stop Feldrake. their sorcerer nemisis,  from reviving.. only for it to be too late. He’s back in full and soon warps reality around him leaving the boys hometown of the New Quackmore insitute as a series of rubble, buildings and people clinging desperatly to both floating in a hell of a starry backdrop, the only chance to stop this from happenign to the world resting in our heroes. And it’s so we catch up with where the seires began: our three heros decked out in truly awesome armor, though why Panchtio’s is roman I have no idea, fighting a giant and mosnterious felldrake and while his deisgn in that form is eh, his threat is palpable and the fight is goregous and pitch perfect.. and only gets better when we catch up, as Xandra swoops in to save htem from the cliffhanger the series started with. It only isn’t up top because of tow reasons; I like the first moment better.. and the boys do fall in a magic pool of amulet juice and emerge with powers due to a character we just meet when they do so. It’s a bit of a cop out.. but even with it being a cop out and a dues ex machina of the HIGHEST order.. it dosen’t stop it form being awesome when our heroes emerge merged with thier amulets energies, in their signutre colors and whoop felldrakes ass with a revivied Xandra’s help and then nearly reseal feldrake before his being resealed, but in Sheldgoose, resotres everything and our heroes get a WELL earned bout of praise from the town and a fancy mansion and in donald’s case a new job. A specatuclar, tense and gorgeous finale to a wonderful series. 

1. Ride Em, Vaquero! (The Magificent 7 (Minus 4) Caballeros)  Look I know it sounds like a bit of a downgrade to go from a battle for the fate of the world to our heroes fighting a spoiled prince and a giant anaconda just to make it out alive.. but frankly this battle is more tense, has all boys showing off even better, and has a climax so awesome even saving the unvierse with suddenly gained magic powers can’t top it.  For the setting our heroes end up trapped in a lost city with the bad guy of the comic, Don Rosa’s second to last and his second of only two cabs stories, prepared to get away. But then Donald snaps, spurred on bya ll the shit he had to put up with back home,and TACKLES the fucking guy in his boat getting into one hell of a scrap. And if that wasn’t enough, what brings this to true glory is a giant Anaconda who shoed up earlier, popping up.. leading to Donald fighting our big bad.. WHILE BEING TANGLED UP IN A FUCKING PYTHON. 

What truly clinches this as the best of the best for me though is Jose and Panchito’s actions, with Jose fighting the guy off off donlad, and actually having his umbrella WORK this time, and while the bad guy gets the raft from our heroes.. he falls off a cliff. So how do our heroes escape.. simple .. PANCHITO LASSOS THE FLEEING SNAKE AND THEY RIDE IT OUT AS SEEN ABOVE THROUGH A POND FULL OF DANGEROUS CREATURES WHO ALL STARE IN AWE AT THE SIGHT OR FLEE.  You.. you just can’t top that. The awesomness, the teamwork, the sheer balls on panchito..i t’s all just so beauitful and sums up what the boys are about: Deft teamwork, camradire.. and doing utterly insane shit as only best friends can. 

So with that.. this ride has come to an end. As I said before and will say again, it’s been fun, easily the biggest project i’ve done so far, and easily one of my faviorites. I love these guys and geninely hope we see them again real soon. So before I go, i’d like to say some thank yous. I”d like to thank ALL of the talented people involved in the making of the original film, as there are way too many to mention as it was a package movie but without you lovely and mostly deceased people we’d never have these wonderful guys. I’d like to thank Don Rosa for bringing the boys back and better than ever and beautifully so AND returning to them again. I’d like to thank Henry Gilroy and Phil Walsh, who wrote the first and second house of mouse cabs episodes for bringing the boys back to the screen, as well as series creators Robert Gainway and Tony Craig and the MASSIVE pile of storyboarders for both episode.  I’d like to thank the people behind mickey and the roadster racers, while your episodes were not very good I am glad the boys got more screentime, i’d like thank Frank Angrones and Matt Youngberg for their wonderful versions of the boys and total respect to their legacy, and i’d REALLY like to thank Matt Danner for giving us a wonderful series and finally giving the boys a starring roll again. 

I’d also like to thank the MANY voice actors who voiced these wonderful characters, your beautiful all of you. To Donald’s voice actors for this retrospective i’d like to thank Clarence Nash, you absolute legend may you rest in peace, Tony Anselmo, may you keep on living please god we’ve lost a lot of good people lately don’t be one of them, and even Daniel Ross, who might not be the best Donald but he’s one of only five and you can’t take that way from him. 

For Jose i’d like to thank Jose Olivara, without you I don’t think we would’ve even gotten to the Cablleros as a group, Rob Paulsen, you tried your best and your still a winner in my heart, Eric Bauza, you genuinely were the best, and Bernardo Del Paula, who gave Bauza a run for his money and I hope returns in the role in the future. 

And finally for Panchito we have Joaquin Grey, again wouldn’t of had the rest without you man nice job, Carlos Alarzqaui, did the job and did it well, Rob Paulsen, gave us one hell of a song, Jamie Camill, the best around no one’s ever going to keep him down, Arturo Del Purto who while I prefer jamie.. still was excellent and I wouldn’t be mad if he returned again. 

And last but not least I’d like to sincerly thank @weirdkev27​. These reviews have GENUINELY helped me finacially since i’ts hard for me to find a job since I cannot drive and have a disablity, and thanks to htem i’ve been able to live comfortably and thanks to you in general i’ve been able to do what I love and get paid for it. You got me to do this wonderful restrospective, have been a genine support to the blog and a treasure to work with. Thanks man, your the best.  So with that, it’s time to ride off into the sunset. If the cabs get another apperance outside of ducktales, I will pick this up again... and wether it’s in a year or ten you bet your bottom peso they’ll be back. Who says so? I says so.