#days after i've actually written this review

[theflyingfeeling]

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[thankskenpenders]

The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings review

The day has finally come. Many, understandably, thought we'd never get here. Maybe we shouldn't have gotten here. We've been through so much. Lawsuits, reboots, redesigns, unreleased NFTs, empty legal threats over the fact that movie Knuckles has a dad, an attempt to license out Scourge the Hedgehog to fans that immediately got canceled (in both meanings of the term), and many, MANY idiotic Twitter controversies. But now, here we are.

Thirteen years after first announcing it in the middle of his legal battles with Archie and Sega that changed the American Sonic comics forever, former writer Ken Penders has released the first part of his new series: The Lara-Su Chronicles.

Yes. I had to buy the book. I had to take one for the team. Look at the fucking URL of this blog, a blog I've been using to talk about the American Sonic comics for nearly a decade while the specter of this book loomed in the distance. The one time I've actually been paid to write an article about anything in any professional capacity, it was an article about the Penders lawsuits. I'm cited on his Wikipedia page. There was no way I was going to skip reviewing this, and there was no guarantee that scans would ever turn up online given the incredibly small audience for this trash. (Only 166 people preordered this, and even that number feels way higher than it should be.) No, I had to preorder it to ensure I could get a copy and cover it for the blog... even if that meant my name would be forever immortalized in the list of "supporters" in the back of the book. These are the sacrifices I must make as a woman who stumbled ass backwards into being an amateur Archie Sonic historian.

So, what exactly is in this book? How much of it is new? How bad is it? How did we even get here in the first place? How can this exist without Sega pursuing legal action? What happens next? And, most importantly... why are there multiple depictions of an Archie Sonic character breastfeeding in this book?

I'm here to answer those questions as best I can, and in agonizing detail.

First, for those just tuning in to this decades-long saga or those who maybe don't know the full story, here's a refresher on the background info.

"What the hell is this?"

The Lara-Su Chronicles is Ken Penders' long-dreaded long-awaited continuation of his 1994-2006 run on Archie Sonic, ignoring everything written after he left by other writers like Ian Flynn. In particular, it picks up from the cliffhanger ending of the 2003-2004 arc "Mobius: 25 Years Later," which was set in what Ken considers the definitive canonical future of the series. It stars Knuckles' daughter from that future era, Lara-Su, among other new and returning characters. The project was first announced near the start of Ken's legal battle with Archie in 2011, and he's been posting WIP previews online for about a decade. Now, after all this time, a Lara-Su Chronicles book finally exists.

We'll get to the actual contents of that book in a bit.

"He can do that without getting in trouble with Sega?"

Believe it or not, yes, he can.

Thanks to the outcome of Archie Comics' woefully mismanaged lawsuits against Ken (yes, they sued him after he started filing for copyrights, not the other way around), he now has full legal ownership of every story he wrote for Archie Sonic and every character he created for the series. This was explicitly granted to him in the terms of the settlement between him and Archie (acting on behalf of Sega). He can even reprint his old Sonic material as-is to his heart's content. The main catch is just that he can't write new stories featuring Sega characters or trademarks, and his new stories also have to be distinct from Sonic at a glance to avoid confusing readers. As such, reprints can't use Sonic iconography on the cover, a few Sega characters (mainly Knuckles) have been renamed and slightly redesigned in the new stories, and the art style has been changed to less closely resemble Sonic. But otherwise, he can do whatever he wants with his own characters.

All of this is because Archie lost the original copy of Ken's work-for-hire contract that signed over the rights to his work. Without that (or any alternative that was considered permissible in court), his comics and characters are the property of their creator by default. Yes, those old comics are full of Sega stuff, but Sega doesn't automatically own the copyright for every drawing of Sonic in existence. And Sega put their stamp of approval all over those comics and let them get sold at retail for decades, even though (in the eyes of the court) there was no legal paperwork granting them ownership of any of it. It's almost like they were unwittingly distributing a fan comic for years and declaring it a fair use of their property, and now there's no takesies backsies. It's a strange and unique copyright situation. Again, they worked all this out in the settlement. And, yes, fans have long speculated that Ken stole and destroyed his own contract to regain the rights to his work, but frankly Archie was so incompetent throughout the lawsuit (it went so bad that they had to fire and replace their lawyers midway through) that I completely buy the idea of them just losing important legal documents.

Also, in case it needs to be spelled out: while Ken's a weirdo, it's ultimately a good thing for creatives everywhere that Archie lost their lawsuit against Ken. We do not want to live in a world where corporations can claim ownership of peoples' work without the contracts to back it up. That would be an incredibly dangerous legal precedent to set. And more comic creators, and artists in general, should own their own work! Corporations are not your friend! They'll delete your work for a tax write-off in a heartbeat! It's just bewildering that this guy, of all people, was the creator who ended up successfully getting his shit back, and that this is what he's doing with it.

"What about his old collaborators? Are they involved? Is he paying them?"

Ken is mostly doing The Lara-Su Chronicles solo, though he has, in fact, talked about compensating the artists involved in any material he's reprinting. The ones who give enough of a shit to get paid for a small scale reprint of something they did 20 years ago, anyway.

On the subject of his collaborators, it's also worth pointing out that Ken's wasn't the only contract that was lost. Most of the early Archie Sonic writers from before Ian Flynn's time seem to be in the same boat as Ken, with the ownership of their stories and characters defaulting back to them. Again, Archie fucked up big time. But like I said, most of them don't really seem to give a shit. For most of them, Sonic was just a random temporary gig they took to pay the bills while Marvel was busy going bankrupt in the '90s, not the thing that defined their entire careers.

The only other Archie Sonic contributor who's tried to do anything on the level of what Ken is doing was writer and editor Scott Fulop. In 2016 he attempted to sue Archie for the unauthorized use of what are now retroactively considered his copyrighted characters and stories, and he even announced a standalone comic about his most famous Sonic character, the recurring villain Mammoth Mogul (sort of a pastiche of DC's Vandal Savage and Marvel's Kingpin, with wizard powers added for spice). However, Fulop lost his lawsuit because he didn't put together a particularly compelling case. Since then he seems to have wiped all traces of his ill-advised Mammoth Mogul comic and his company, Narrative Ark Entertainment, from the internet. For now, this leaves The Lara-Su Chronicles the only project of its kind.

"What about those other Archie Sonic reprints he just announced?"

At the time of writing, Ken is once again claiming that he's trying to get the band back together to reprint all of Archie Sonic, now under the bad new banner "Floating Island Productions: MOBIAN LINE" that I can't imagine he consulted literally anyone else on.

So, like, look. As we've established, Ken can reprint his own stories. And if he can work something out with the other contributors whose contracts were lost, he can print their work, too. But there is no fucking way he's getting his hands on Ian Flynn's run, which Sega undoubtedly holds the copyright for. Even if they don't, Ian needs to maintain a good working relationship with both Sega and IDW if he's to keep his job, so he'd never go for this. Not to mention that Ian and Ken just... don't get along! Ken's whole plan here seems to be predicated on IDW going out of business (a thing he REALLY wants to happen) and freeing up the Sonic comic license, after which he knocks on Sega's door and goes "hey I've still got dirt on you guys," blackmailing them into giving him the Sonic license back so that he can reprint the later comics. Every step of this plan is ludicrous. It's never gonna happen.

He's been saying he wants to reprint the whole series for a few years now, though. This isn't really anything new. And despite his lofty plans that set Sonic Twitter ablaze, he quickly backpedaled. The only specific things in the works right now are a "two-volume omnibus" of all of his Knuckles stories and a collection of artist Scott Shaw's work on the very early Archie Sonic issues, since they're on good terms with each other. I have no idea how Ken plans on packaging these when he can't put any Sega characters or the Freedom Fighters on the covers, but these projects are small enough in scale that there's a decent chance they'll see the light of day. Scott Shaw only did like five issues. But anything beyond that? I'll believe it when I see it.

Or, y'know, this could've all just been a publicity stunt for his new book. I wouldn't put it past him. Let's just focus on the book that actually exists.

"So he finally did it? He made a whole Lara-Su book? It's out? He finished it??"

Yes and no.

The book that's out now is The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings, a prologue for the series of seven graphic novels Ken somehow plans on making, even though it's taken him 13 years to put out literally anything new. I don't know whether or not this counts as book one of seven, because it only features 30 pages of new comics. 30.5 if I'm being generous.

Most of the book is actually just a reprint of his infamous Archie Sonic storyline "Mobius: 25 Years Later", which ran from issue #131 to #144 in 2003-2004. (Again, yes, he can reprint this, he just can't put Sonic on the cover.) Why's it infamous? Well, Ken had been building anticipation for this future era of the series for basically his entire run. We kept seeing King Sonic and Queen Sally from the future. Knuckles' entire backstory hinges on his dad having a vision of this future. Several years before Silver the Hedgehog was created, it was Lara-Su who was Sonic's equivalent to Future Trunks, the cool-looking child of one of the main characters who traveled back in time to try and prevent a dark future. Believe it or not, yes, there was hype for Lara-Su. And then we finally got M25YL, and none of that cool stuff happened. Instead it really ended up being about how unbearably boring the middle aged Sonic, Knuckles, Sally, and co. are in this peaceful future where Robotnik is dead and they're all married with kids, forced into traditional nuclear family gender roles. Lara-Su is present, but she mostly just does generic teen girl stuff and complains about how Knuckles won't let her do anything even though she REALLY wants to be the new Guardian of Angel Island, like, super bad! Come on, dad!!!

In its original printing, this meandering arc ended on an abrupt time travel cliffhanger that Ken was never able to follow up on before he left Archie in 2006. This new printing slightly changes that ending, using the unresolved timey-wimey shenanigans as a convenient excuse to alter the entire timeline. This creates the slightly different world of The Lara-Su Chronicles, where the few relevant Sega-owned characters have been replaced and everyone is ten times uglier.

After this, we finally get two short new stories picking up where M25YL left off: "The Storm," starring Acorn Kingdom super-spy and known creep Geoffrey St. John, and an early release of the first chapter of The Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows, the first full TLSC graphic novel.

And now that we're all on the same page about what we're looking at, let's actually talk about the book!

The cover

Let's start by beating a dead horse. The cover art: it's still bad! But why is it bad?

The cover is, of course, based on Patrick Spaziante's cover from Archie Sonic #131, the start of the "Mobius: 25 Years Later" arc. (Ken did the layout for that cover, though, so in the eyes of the law he's the original creator who owns that cover.) That cover was, itself, a tribute to the iconic cover of Giant-Size X-Men #1 by Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum, the issue that introduced the version of the team with Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, etc.

Ken seems to have forgotten that the point of both these covers was to hype up the arrival of a new cast of characters. The new guys are supposed to make a dramatic entrance front and center. That's the focal point. Meanwhile, the cover for Beginnings has the old timeline versions of the cast from Archie Sonic dramatically bursting out of a shattered crystal ball, while their new counterparts look on in mild bemusement - if they're even bothering to look at all, since most of the characters here are just copied and pasted from their profile pages. That's just not how you do this particular homage! The point is supposed to be "out with the old, in with the new." And why are they using a crystal ball to view the past? Hell, why are they even using a crystal ball at all? The original arc was presented as a magical vision of the future courtesy of Tails' uncle Merlin (don't ask), but the new story leans all the way into being futuristic sci-fi.

Of course, there is no real artistic intent at play here. The old versions of the characters are placed front and center in the crystal ball simply because Ken traced over Spaziante's original art of Lara-Su and Julie-Su (the only two characters on the Sonic cover he owns) and threw out the rest, ruining the composition in the process. Look at the awkward empty space where Sonic, Sally, and Rotor once were, and the new drawing of The Character Formerly Known As Knuckles who's no longer properly centered between his wife and daughter. Even if Ken can claim ownership of the cover because he did the original layout, this all just feels scummy and lame.

And, yeah, if it needs to be said, the new characters and Ken's new rendering style look like absolute fucking dogshit. Putting new Lara-Su directly next to old Lara-Su does her no favors. The shattered glass effect looks absolutely atrocious. I could go on, but we'll have plenty of time to talk about the art style when we see how bad the stories inside look.

Changes to "Mobius: 25 Years Later"

Overall, 99% of M25YL is presented identically to its original printing. Sonic, Sally, Knuckles, et al. are still present with no changes to their names and no tweaks to the art. Even the original cover for issue #131 is included only a few pages into this book with its Archie, Sonic, and Sega logos still intact and everything. Again, because of the weird copyright situation described above, these preexisting comics can be released without any changes.

There is exactly one bizarre change to the art, though, where a hand drawn shot of Angel Island is replaced with an unfitting photo background and the ugly Floating Island photobash that Ken has been using as his personal logo for decades. I think he only did this as part of a test for his motion comic app that nobody asked for. I don't know why this had to make it into the print version. It's like the book is firing a warning shot for what's to come if you keep reading.

The new content begins on the final page of M25YL. In the original wet fart of a cliffhanger ending, Sonic and co. accidentally alter the timeline with an old time machine of Robotnik's and Lara-Su begins to fade away. Then, after everything goes white, we just cut to the present day heroes going "gee, you ever think about the future?" In this new printing, that last bit has been cut, and the rest of the page has been awkwardly shrunk down so that Ken can fit in a new panel. We now see the hands of an off-screen villain, seemingly named "Override," proclaiming that "the Praetorian" (Knuckles) has messed up the timeline again and that they'll finally get their revenge.

Who is this Override? I have no fucking clue. The new stories in this book make no mention of them. You have to buy the next book to find out.

My confusion over the identity of this villain overlaps with another big problem: name changes. So many names and nouns have been arbitrarily changed in The Lara-Su Chronicles, even ones Ken didn't have to change for copyright reasons, and I only know what half of them are replacing because Ken's been tweeting about this shit for years.

The echidnas are now a totally original alien race called "the Echyd'nya." Even in flashbacks to events from M25YL attempting to mimic the old art style, if it's on a new comic page, they're gonna call themselves "Echyd'nya." Evil echidna faction the Dark Legion is now the "Cyberdark Dominion," hailing from the "Cyberdark Colony." The Brotherhood of Guardians is still the Brotherhood of Guardians, but now the main guardian is called "The Praetorian." Angel Island is still called "The Floating Island," like it was in the older Archie comics, but it's ALSO sometimes called "Avion"? When I read this I wasn't sure if he had randomly renamed Albion, the other echidna city from the Archie comics. But no. Now we have an Albion AND an Avion. Sally is mentioned simply as "Princess Acorn," while Sonic is referenced once as an unnamed "blue-spined Erinaceinae," using the scientific name for hedgehog to make it sound more sci-fi. In an incredibly ballsy move, Ken even mentions Robotnik as "the Insurrectionist Kintobor," retaining his original surname from the Archie comics that's just "Robotnik" backwards. Guess Sega never trademarked that one.

Aside from every name change being a downgrade, this leads to confusion when you're not sure if something is supposed to be new, or if it's just an Archie thing you're supposed to recognize despite having a new name and design. Is "Override" someone I'm supposed to know already? Am I just supposed to have read a fucking tweet from Ken where he said he changed the name of some existing villain to "Override"? The answer is no, but I had to term search his Twitter just to verify this.

Moving on!

New story #1: "The Storm"

If you've been following the WIPs, this is that story about Geoffrey St. John that Ken's been posting previews of for almost a decade. The title page copyright dates it to 2015, and that absurdly long gestation is probably why the art is so inconsistent here. Even the style of speech bubbles and the font change between pages two and three.

This is a problem when there's supposed to be a deliberate and noticeable change in art style here signaling the moment where the time travel stuff alters the timeline, replacing the Archie Sonic world with the Lara-Su Chronicles world. If you don't already know that's what's going on, the idea isn't conveyed clearly at all. It just goes from one hideous art style to a slightly different one with no explanation.

The main problem here is that Ken has hitched his wagon to a franchise about anthropomorphic animals when he can't draw furries to save his life. (Though a bit later in the book we'll also begin to wonder if he can even still draw humans.) He's shifted away from the cartooniness of the original designs and given them more human proportions and facial features, but this just ends up making them look incredibly uncanny and lumpy and gross. With some designs he's trying to lean into more of a Star Trek alien vibe, but then he still insists upon retaining the giant Sonic eyes on most characters even though he has no idea how to make them emote.

The rendering of these godawful designs doesn't do them any favors, either. Ken's going for more of a painterly look now, but it almost seems as though he's shading everything with Photoshop's burn and dodge tools that are designed to darken and lighten select areas of a photo. The result is a muddy, smudgy look that makes it feel like the color layer has been smeared in vaseline. And it only looks worse after coming off of 14 chapters of M25YL that have way more palatable art.

The backgrounds, too, are a complete mess, a jumble of low res jpeg photo elements (sometimes with extremely noticeable pixelation), stock textures, and smooth digital gradients. There's no real sense of place here, and it gives everything a surreal, dreamlike quality when you can't really tell where anything is supposed to take place. This first story is seemingly set in a high-tech stronghold below Castle Acorn called "the Bunker," but it could just as easily be confused for the bridge of a spaceship. This whole story features characters speaking to each other over floating video displays and hologram projectors from three different locations, but without a hologram effect and without a clear sense of where the characters are it often feels like they're just in the same room as each other. Characters will be in one location on one photo background, and then the camera angle changes and they're in a completely different place, because Ken just uses mismatched photos off of the internet. It's been like 25 years since he first tried using photo backgrounds in the Archie comics and he hasn't gotten any better at it.

When I had my boyfriend read the book to see if it made literally any sense to him (it didn't), Anthony said this: "This is the kind of shit I'd see linked on a Second Life world that hasn't been touched since 2004." I think he really hit the nail on the head. Now, there's actually a contrarian part of me that thinks that might theoretically almost be kind of cool, in sort of a messy counterculture way. I love weird indie shit. I was a Homestuck reader! But this isn't a scrappy mixed media zine, or experimental outsider art from someone just messing around with Photoshop, or a loving throwback to weird old internet art, or even something intentionally bizarre and offputting like Xavier: Renegade Angel or a PilotRedSun video or whatever where the fact that it's weird and ugly is part of the humor. This is supposed to be a sincere sci-fi epic drawing on Star Trek and Jack Kirby comics, made by a guy who's been drawing comics professionally since the '80s. This is supposed to look good. This is supposed to compete with mainstream comics that are on sale right now. He thinks any day now IDW's gonna go out of business and Sega will come crawling back to him so that he can stamp the Sonic logo on shit like this. It just doesn't work.

But, okay. It's ugly. We knew it would be ugly. But that ugliness would be much easier to accept if it was in service of an otherwise genuinely good story. So what about the writing? After all this time, how does Ken choose to kick off this new saga? Well, credit where credit's due. "The Storm" feels like a proper continuation of Ken's writing style from M25YL.

Because it's eleven pages of characters standing around and talking while nothing fucking happens.

Here's the synopsis: A dog woman named Brownie, an ensign in the Royal Secret Service fresh out of training and the only character who's almost cute, walks up to Geoffrey to deliver a report. He's immediately suspicious of her, asking who let her in and if she's a spy for Elias (Sally's brother, if you're new here) or Alicia (Sally's mom). The art style suddenly shifts when the timeline is altered, but the scene continues uninterrupted. Geoffrey points a gun at Brownie when she won't say whose spy she is. Geoffrey is distracted by a call and proceeds to have a conversation via a mix of holograms and video screens with Remington (head of Echidnaopolis security), Spectre (Knuckles' great great great great great grandpa, the one with the helmet who always looks evil), and a new scientist character named Dr. Zephyr/Zephur. (The spelling of this character's name changes multiple times throughout the 11-page story, because I guess nine years wasn't enough time to spellcheck this shit.) They say a bunch of made up technobabble nonsense about how it looks like the timeline was just altered and Knuckles and co. seem to be involved. It's complete drivel that I'm not even going to try to make sense of. Everyone decides to investigate further, and the conversation ends. Brownie tells Geoffrey she's his spy, then walks out and implies she's actually Alicia's spy in her inner monologue.

To be continued!!!

Yes, that's it. It's really just a bunch of technobabble where some characters talk about how it seems like the timeline has been fucked with. That's it. The whole time Geoffrey doesn't even get up out of his damn chair, which he's of course sitting in backwards to show how cool he is. It's just 11 pages of Geoffrey sitting in a chair and talking to people and looking uglier than he's ever looked. Nothing happens. Nine years for this.

I'm also struck by how meaningless all of this is to anyone who hasn't read Archie Sonic. The added context from M25YL may help a little, but "The Storm" focuses on characters who weren't in that arc, and the story does very little to introduce who any of them are. Brownie could've been super useful as an inexperienced point of view character who's only meeting the others for the first time here, but instead she's really just a passive observer who's here as part of some kind of 4D chess game between Geoffrey and Alicia, an off-screen character whose motivations in this era of the story are completely unknown to even returning readers. Who are the good guys and bad guys here? What are the conflicts and the stakes of the story moving forward? What do these characters want? Basic questions like this aren't really answered. I can't imagine a new reader being able to make heads or tails of this. Hell, I can't really imagine a returning reader who hasn't been following the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets about this story making heads or tails of it, either.

...Maybe more will happen in the next story?

New story #2: Shattered Tomorrows preview chapter

After another message from Ken, the story of The Lara-Su Chronicles proper begins with the redesigned Lara-Su walking along a jpeg photograph beach at sunset and crying while thinking about how Knuckles - sorry, his name is K'Nox now - is dead.

Yep! Straight into the dad stuff!

Look, I'm the last person to complain about writers getting super personal and drawing from their own baggage in their writing, but Ken's just no fucking good at it. There's no nuance, nothing interesting to say. He just keeps writing mediocre-to-horrible dads whose misdeeds are always justified by their "good intentions," and then sometimes they die and their kids are like "we may have fought but actually you were the bestest dad ever and I'll miss you forever, I'll never be able to fill your shoes!"

This is the only part of the new material here that feels like it has any heart behind it, because I know how much his complex relationship with his late deadbeat father means to Ken (there's an author's note in this outright saying as much). But the guy died 42 years ago, and it doesn't feel like Ken has had any new thoughts about this part of his life in those four decades. He's just not an introspective or self-aware enough artist to actually mine his personal baggage for anything beyond "father knows best."

Anyway, so then it jumps forward in time(?) and now we're following this human guy who looks like this.

Previously, Ken got a lot of shit for literally just using the likeness of Anthony Mackie for this guy, based on his IMDB profile photo. Ken has thus redesigned the character... and by that I mean I think he looks more like Ernie Hudson now? Ken's clearly just working off of photo references (if not straight up tracing), given his face is the most detailed and realistic-looking thing on any page where he's present.

But you may be wondering: who is this, and why is he here? Well, for one, he's here to run around in front of some low res space photos while making trite references to things like Planet of the Apes and Star Trek. Haha, he makes a joke about red shirts! Original!! But beyond that, Commander Mykhal Taelor (yes, that's really how he chose to spell it) is a human... from Earth! Archie Sonic readers are probably confused, because in those comics Mobius is Earth in the distant post-apocalyptic future. Well, despite being a Planet of the Apes fan, Ken always hated that particular worldbuilding decision from Karl Bollers, always preferring to think of Mobius as a separate alien planet. And now he gets to make that canon in his own stories and throw out Karl's ideas. So Mobius is basically just, like, a Star Trek planet now, with its own alien creatures that sometimes just so happen to look like anthropomorphic Earth animals.

Also, at one point Taelor wonders if the inhabitants of the dead Mobius might have been human, and the alien ally he's talking to over the radio says it's unlikely. "I don't understand why your kind has a problem understanding you're a minority within a minority." Perhaps poor wording for a line said to the only Black character in the story.

Anyway, Commander Taelor here seems to have discovered the uninhabited husk of Mobius after the vague time-space cataclysm everyone was worried about in M25YL has come to pass, and he finds an audio log from Lara-Su that I presume will explain what happened. I guess those are the titular Lara-Su Chronicles. In theory this flash forward establishes some sense of pressing danger, but when the threat to the planet is so unclear and technobabble-y it just kind of lands with a thud.

It doesn't take long before we get back to Lara-Su being sad about her dad. A good little chunk of the chapter is spent with this new timeline's Lara-Su recalling moments in her life, including echoes of the original Lara-Su's memories from M25YL, which feels redundant coming hot off the heels of a straight reprint of that entire arc. And boy, for anyone who read the later Archie Sonic comics, the protagonist having vague memories of the old version of the series from before a lawsuit-related timeline reboot sure does sound familiar, huh?

The art inconsistency somehow becomes even worse in this story, with Ken flip-flopping on whether or not he wants to use outlines, with the no-outline art managing to look even worse by relying entirely on Ken's awful rendering. By this point in the book, readers are also likely to start noticing how often Ken reuses art from previous panels. This is a shortcut that tons of comic artists use, of course. Invincible famously did a joke about this. It's often understandable. But, again... it sure does stand out in a book that took 13 years to make with only 30 pages of new art. Amusingly, Ken even manages to combine his inconsistency and recycling problems by reusing the same art with and without outlines. And, of course, any time Ken tries to draw the Archie era designs it's just... the worst.

And, yes, it's in this dreamlike montage sequence of Lara-Su's life that we get...

The uncomfortable family nudity scene, followed by the dual timeline Julie-Su breastfeeding scene.

Yeah, you might have heard about this one already. If this incredibly eerie presentation of Lara-Su's hazy memories of the two different timelines make it hard to tell what's going on, don't worry. There's another, clearer version later in the book as part of Julie-Su's character profile, because I guess Ken was just so proud of it.

(I censored these myself because I'm not playing Russian roulette with Tumblr's inconsistent nudity rules and risking getting banned lmao)

Like, okay. Is a mother breastfeeding her child really that shocking of a thing to see in a story? No, not at all. But, like... when it's two characters who you previously created for an officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comic for 7-year-olds... and some of those officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comics for 7-year-olds are reprinted in the same book... and when it's drawn like this... yeah, it's kind of a shocker.

It just looks so unnatural. Julie-Su is posed very deliberately so that you'll see both of her breasts, and in the new timeline version she's barely even holding Lara-Su so you can really get a good look at her supermodel body, showing zero physical signs that she just gave birth. Most people will immediately jump to this being Ken putting his fetishes in his work (a type of criticism that I'm incredibly tired of - it's 2024, all the cool artists are blatantly putting their fetishes in their work now). And my immediate response is that, no, this is probably just Ken trying to come off as really mature on a surface level, a thing he's been obsessed with since the Archie days. Free from the shackles of writing a licensed children's comic, of course he's going to jump immediately into depicting some nonsexual, artistic nudity to try and prove he's A Real Mature Artist For Grown-Ups who just thinks the human body is beautiful and breastfeeding shouldn't be a taboo etc. etc.

But then, like. You look at some of the other character designs. Like Espio's daughter Salma, who's now this horrifying alien lizard person who's always nude, and her scale pattern puts scales exactly where her nipples should be. Or you look at his comments about the Echyd'nya age of consent. Or you look at how he keeps drawing Lara-Su in this. Like, does the shuttle really need this, like... reverse chaise lounge thing in the cockpit? So that we can keep getting these shots of the 16-year-old Lara-Su lying on her stomach and posing with one of her legs kicked up, her naked ass in plain view?

The vibe isn't great, is what I'm saying!

I'm not going to try to ascribe authorial intent here. I don't know. I'm not a psychic. Given his very blatant reliance on photo references elsewhere in the book, it's entirely possible he just referenced some figure drawing photos that were maybe just a little too sexy. And also, he's an American comic book artist, and a boomer one at that. Those guys tend to draw women a certain way, even when it's not supposed to be sexual. I don't fucking know. It just sucks. I'm not gonna make some hyperbolic statement about how this makes him a literal pedophile who should be in jail, but it is deeply offputting and objectifying.

But if you already knew about the nursing scenes and were hoping there was some other really shocking stuff in there for me to talk about in this review, sorry to disappoint, but nope. That's the only shockingly weird new thing in here. Once again, not a lot happens in this story, and what does happen is pretty boring.

Once we get past the recap stuff and the human guy, the plot developments boil down to this: The timeline was altered at the end of M25YL... but not as much as you might think. In the new timeline, Knuckles ("K'Nox"), Cobar (now looking significantly younger), and Rotor (now a rhino just called "The Emissary") still traveled via shuttle to go find a time machine in the Badlands and fix the time-space continuum, like in the climax of the original arc. This time, though, Sonic wasn't there, and Lara-Su came along without having to stow away. Lara-Su watches the ship while the grown ups go deal with the time machine, and then after a couple panels Not Rotor comes back with Cobar and is like "Hey, Cobar got hurt, we gotta leave. Dunno what happened to your dad." And then they just, like. Presume that Knuckles must have died. Even though we have no idea what happened to him. And then they just fly away. And then Lara-Su is sad that her dad died.

And that's pretty much it!

This is supposed to be a really emotional sequence - it's literally the scene where Lara-Su learns that Knuckles is dead - but instead it comes off as unintentionally funny because of how poorly it's portrayed. Not showing Knuckles' actual disappearance is a huge misstep, for one, making his uncertain fate more confusing and anticlimactic than dramatic. But also, Ken keeps just using the same two drawings of Rotor for two pages, so he doesn't really seem to be emoting at all, and he's in this spacey hazmat suit that honestly just makes him look like fucking Moltar from Space Ghost. So the whole time I'm just reading his dialogue in Moltar's deadpan voice as he's like "I dunno. We did what we could. Anyway, let's leave."

After this, we get a two-page spread previewing the rest of the story from Shattered Tomorrows. It's basically like a trailer in comic form. It has one of the most mystifying layouts I've ever seen in a comic book. I have no idea what order I'm supposed to read this in.

Yeah, I kinda have a feeling this is the full extent of what Ken has drawn for the rest of that book. I'd love to be wrong, but I fear that I'm right.

Bonus material: Data files

These are mostly very dull, recapping a lot of events shared between Ken's Archie run and the new Lara-Su Chronicles timeline. It seems like almost his entire run is still considered canon to the backstory of the new timeline, just with some names changed, and things only really diverge at the climax of M25YL. But I'll share the interesting stuff here.

Lara-Su

The main thing you'll notice in Lara-Su's profile is the massive, unreadable wall of text where Ken felt the need to list the entire Knuckles family tree, split across both pages.

This is literally so long that Lara-Su's personal history has to awkwardly cut off mid-sentence and be continued on the final page of the book, after the rest of the data files.

Also, please note that this list gives Julie-Su's mom's full name as Mari-Su of the House of Atrades. Incredible on all levels.

There's also a reference to the dark timeline Lara-Su was originally supposed to come from. You know, the one where Julie-Su is the leader of a rebel movement fighting against a Knuckles who had gone mad with power? The timeline that would have been way more interesting than the one in M25YL? Here it seems to have been written off as the result of another "timeline disruption." Lara-Su allegedly has vague memories of this timeline, in the same way that she has vague memories of the M25YL timeline.

Geoffrey

Geoffrey's bio mostly recaps events from the Archie comics, which means the Sonic/Sally/Geoffrey love triangle has to be alluded to. His rivalry with Sonic is described like this:

"He would later resurface when Kintobor was transporting his latest hi-tech weapon, the Dynamac-3000. It was during that mission he discovered a rival for the Princess' affections. Whereas the Princess would be one of a line of conquests where St. John was concerned, the blue-spined Erinaceinae who protested doth a bit too much regarding his affections for the Princess for St. John's taste would prove to be a source of great sport and amusement."

Yes. It's gross. Saying that Geoffrey saw Sally as "one of a line of conquests" is gross. Ken writing this and then still treating Geoffrey as the coolest badass ever is gross. The "Princess Acorn" is also first on the list of Geoffrey's "female relationships" elsewhere in his bio, though I suppose how much of a "relationship" they had is left vague. Honestly, at this point the fact that Ken didn't explicitly confirm that Geoffrey took the underage Sally's virginity in the book comes off as a display of restraint. The bar couldn't be any lower, I know.

Remington

His bio is, frankly, shockingly long for such a minor character, though I guess he does get a large portion of the word salad dialogue in "The Storm." There's a lot of stuff here about how the identities of his biological parents are shrouded in mystery, a plot point that fans have long speculated Ken just straight up forgot about in his time at Archie. (Ian confirmed that Kragok from the Dark Legion was Remington's dad, though, so this isn't really much of a mystery.)

Lien-Da

She gets a bio even though she's not present in the two new stories, just so we get to look at her awful new design and compare it to how Steven Butler drew her earlier in the book:

Commander Taelor

We get to see two drawings of him with the same exact Ernie Hudson face side by side! That's fun.

Julie-Su

She gets a list of "known friends," but the only character listed is Knuckles' mom. Poor Julie-Su.

Also, Ken feels the need to reiterate that Knuckles and Julie-Su are still distant cousins. He made a whole new timeline where he can change whatever details he wants, but THAT had to remain canon. Thanks, Ken.

And then after the data files we get the special thanks page, listing everyone who preordered the book and/or bought TLSC merch from Ken.

With my name on the list. Because I had to buy a copy to cover it for the blog.

My name is on the very next page right after the breastfeeding panel in Julie-Su's data file.

Yep. He got me.

Is it at least a well put together book? Like, in terms of manufacturing quality?

Its physical quality is... fine. It's a nice, sturdy hardcover. The print quality seems fine, though mine does have a bit of smudging from some sort of printing error on one page. The pages don't seem like they'll fall out on me. The image quality is crisp. The colors are vibrant. This is a low bar, but this is one of the few places where I'm able to give this book anything resembling praise.

The formatting and graphic design work, on the other hand...

(I didn't crumple those page corners, it came like that.)

For one, the placement and sizes of the M25YL pages is inconsistent, largely due to the fact that the book doesn't actually match the proportions of a comic. A lot of pages aren't properly centered vertically. Some pages go all the way up to the top edge of the paper, while others leave a visible gap of about half a centimeter. Every page has a 1cm gap to its left and right, which is sometimes filled in with a solid color or gradient that doesn't quite match the page it's surrounding. I have to assume Ken didn't have any sort of source files or original artwork to work off of, as those ideally would've had more generous bleed to account for slight shifts in printing. It kind of seems like he just got the highest resolution versions he could find of the digital releases online and printed those. The colors are a dead ringer for the digital versions, which have always looked slightly more saturated and pastel than they did in print.

I can't say this bodes well for his further plans for Archie Sonic reprints - sorry, Mobian Line reprints. If they ever come out, please, for the love of god, do not buy those. I don't care how much you love Archie Sonic, they aren't going to be good reprints. For comparison, IDW's similarly priced hardcover Sonic collections have none of these formatting problems, because they're made by people who know what they're doing with access to the actual source files.

The book also has its fair share of text-focused pages, split between the data files and messages directly from Ken about the history of his career and this project, and these are formatted in the most amateurish way possible. Just massive walls of Arial text over either plain white backgrounds, simple gradients, or faded photos. I've seen school yearbooks with better graphic design. Even ignoring my subjective feelings about the art and stories within, this book does not feel like it's worth $36 USD.

It's frankly shocking how shabby he let this thing look considering it's supposed to be his baby. And doesn't that really sum it all up?

Closing thoughts

Obviously, I did not expect this to be any good. But I'm still left kind of dumbfounded by it.

I think what really strikes me about it is that Ken had a blank check to do whatever he wanted here. He got an opportunity many writers would kill for when he gained complete ownership of his most famous work. He's free from the limitations of a monthly licensed comic book for children, free to make whatever creative decisions he wants without editors or other writers or Sega to worry about, free to completely reinvent the series to his heart's content and finally tell the story of his dreams. And with that opportunity and 13 years of his time, he made... this. A direct continuation of "Mobius: 25 Years Later" that barely changes anything about the characters or world beyond their awful new designs, even though much of the word count is spent rambling about how the timeline has changed. A story that makes zero concessions for new readers, or even returning readers who don't already have the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets explaining his creative decisions burned into their memory. 30 pages where nothing really happens and the story barely moves forward an inch despite the decades-long wait - but maybe something will happen if you buy the next book!

Who is this for? Maybe this really is a project for no one but Ken. Maybe he just really, really wants to finish the story he started, a story that's personal to him due to the family history it evokes, and the number of people who enjoy it or buy it beyond that is irrelevant. I think that many of the best artists are incredibly self-indulgent ones working with that exact mindset, artists whose enthusiasm for their own work jumps off the page or screen. So, if that's the case, then why the fuck isn't he telling the damn story? What's stopping him? Why is he still spinning his wheels? Where is that passion for his own work? Because it sure as hell isn't there on the page. There's a huge part of me that really wishes I could say "Man, what a weirdo, but you do you, Ken. You tell your weird little story." But there's barely any story here. It's like he loves styling himself as a storyteller, but he's terrified of finally having to actually tell a story after all this time. He's still stuck in the exact same mode of writing he was in almost 30 years ago when he was doing 6-page backup stories about Knuckles, just killing time and stringing readers along until he's eventually able to truly realize his vision. If not now, then when, Ken?

Even the back cover blurb is mostly just a dry recap of the history of this thing. It was a Sonic comic, the original arc was published in these issues, it went unfinished, Ken left Archie, the lawsuits happened, now he's continuing the story. There's nothing about why anyone should give a shit about this as its own story, even though Ken has spent years trying in vain to convince people TLSC is its own beast that shouldn't be judged as a Sonic story. I think deep down he knows that there's no pitch for this beyond the novelty of it originating from Sonic. And that's why, despite declaring that he'd leave the site, he's still on Twitter riling up Sonic fans. It's the only attention he gets at this point.

Maybe this is too harsh when those 30 pages of new comics are just intended as a preview for the "real" book. But the elephant in the room is that we have no idea if that "real" book will ever actually come out, let alone the entire series of seven graphic novels that will supposedly complete this saga.

Ken is undeniably a complete jackass and all around unpleasant, vindictive person who's rightly become an industry pariah. He's a self-proclaimed paragon of progressive values who'll send Comicsgaters after his successors for the crime of not worshiping the ground he walks on, and then turn around and announce he's going to reprint their work without even consulting them. He's a sore winner who already won his copyright battle on a level most comic writers would never dare to dream of, and yet still won't truly be satisfied until he sees an entire major comic publisher go out of business, putting god knows how many people out of work, because he thinks this would get him back the license to a video game franchise he doesn't even like.

But I still have to pity him.

As an artist, the trajectory of his life is my nightmare. I think all of us fear dying before we can tell all the stories we want to tell. There's simply never enough time to do everything. And here's Ken in his 60s, talking about how he's still planning on making his magnum opus all by himself out of stubbornness and pride, despite demonstrably proving he can't handle the workload, and also talking about how if he dies before the project can be finished he'll have to pass the torch on to his kids and get them to finish it for him. It's so grim. Even just typing that sends a shiver down my spine. It took nine years of his limited time on Earth to finish and release an 11-page comic about Geoffrey St. John sitting backwards in a chair.

This is a purgatory of his own creation. And yet... I'm not sure he's ever been prouder. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I guess if I want people to take anything away from this review, it's this:

Lesson one: If you're an artist or writer of some kind, or an aspiring creator, don't wait around. No one else is going to tell your story for you. Start writing that novel. Start drawing that webcomic. Start making that game. If Penders can put out this damn book that no one asked for after 13 years of work, then proudly proclaim that he's still going to make six or seven more books and also reprint hundreds of comics he doesn't have all of the rights to, then show up to cons with that foul Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows banner and sit in front of it beaming with pride, fully aware of his critics but saying "fuck 'em, I know I'm hot shit," then you can do fucking anything. Tell the weird, sincere, cringe story of your dreams. If Ken Penders doesn't have imposter syndrome, then nobody should.

And lesson two: Don't buy Ken's books.

[inkskinned]

okay yes it's often bad and hard and sometimes i am so anxious my whole body feels like it's vibrating but also at the same time the gps took me a different way on my drive and i got to see more of the river than i usually do and yesterday the sun was still above the horizon after 7pm and that was amazing and the whole sky turned an orange-gold like how they try to make ice cream taste; you know, one of those evenings that just tears you open no matter how jaded you get. it's warm for the first time here and people had lined up against the water just to stand outside and watch the sunset

and yeah it's tax season no i haven't done mine yet but when i mentioned it offhand in a single side-comment three days later my friend sent me a list of helpful tips and followed up to see if i'd need help on them

there's this parking lot for a walking trail near where i live and one of the two google reviews is my actual favorite: love it here. there were so many beautiful parking spots but sadly we could only take one. and no this person isn't going to go viral and probably the only people navigating to this spot are extremely local - but there's something so precious to me about someone taking the time to write something that will make strangers in their community laugh, even though there's no way for me to tell them good one! directly

yes i am not doing well sometimes i'm doing even very-badly but recently i have been given enough breathing room to say okay, this situation is bad, but then it will be over, and you will be moving onto the next thing and it's true that i need to get groceries and pay rent and argue with my health insurance but it is also true that in the absolute stress and anarchy of my life today someone recognized my dog before they recognized me and was so excited because "they tell everyone about the greyhound in the area and didn't get a picture before so can they take a picture now please"

in class we all stand in a circle and are all grown adults and for a moment while the teacher is figuring something out, we all hold hands, just to be silly and connected. for no reason at all at 8pm on a thursday my friends and i start breaking out the dance moves to high school musical. my coworker gchats me during a meeting about the book he recommended to me and i'm enjoying reading

i help a high school set up for a star-themed dance and while putting up streamers i find graffiti that says if you're reading this, i love you, and we're both going to get out of here right next to fuck everyone, live out of spite, don't let the fuckers make you die. on the bridge where i walk my dog someone has written i love you and on the sidewalk in chalk someone has written i love you and on the side of the water tower someone has written i love you

at the bottom of a text post an internet poet says - i love you, i love you, i love you. i've never met you, i love you because you exist and we exist together. and isnt that enough for now. just for this moment, i mean. like, if you just close your eyes and breathe - somewhere, across this world, i love you, because you're here with me.

[genericpuff]

The Elephant in the Room - Queer Erasure and Westernization in Lore Olympus (and all its horrid stepchildren)

This is one people have been asking me for a while now, and I've been waiting for the right inspiration to hit, as is required for my ADHD hyperfixation-fueled rants. After recently watching a video that did an objective review of Cait Corrain's Crown of Starlight, I felt now was the time, because Crown of Starlight effectively proves exactly what Lore Olympus - and other Greek myth interpretations like it - has issues with.

And I want to preface this post with one question - why do we keep getting these Greek myth adaptations written by queer women that still wind up perpetuating toxic heteronormative culture?

Buckle up, because this one's HEFTY.

In that aforementioned review of A Crown of Starlight, there were a lot of points that came up about how Cait wrote the female protagonist - Ariadne, wife of Dionysus - where I immediately stopped and went, "Wait, this sounds awfully familiar."

It should be mentioned briefly for anyone who's unaware - Cait Corrain is an author who was recently (and still) under fire for using sock puppet accounts on GoodReads to intentionally sabotage the ratings of other debut authors, many of whom were her own peers or from the same publishing imprint as her (Del Rey), and most of whom were POC. I mentioned in that previous essay that I just linked that Cait Corrain is a fan of Lore Olympus and decided to give it 5 star ratings from these alt accounts, not just de-legitimizing the reputation of the books she bombed, but also the ones that she praised (including her own book, because of course she had to leave an obvious calling card LMAO). I felt it necessary to tie Cait into my discussion of white feminism in LO and its fanbase because people like Cait are exactly who we're talking about when we dissect the intent and consequences of LO's writing - much of its brand of "feminism" seems to only be catered to a specific kind of woman (i.e. white women who fetishize queer people/relationships) and seem to encourage/embrace violence towards women if those women aren't "behaving correctly" or just aren't fortunate enough to be white and rich - and so Cait choosing to give Lore Olympus 5 stars in her hate-raiding and even have it visibly in the background of her headshot photos was... not exactly disproving my argument that these are the types of people LO caters to and encourages, to say the least.

But then I watched Read with Rachel's "Did It Deserve 1 Star" review of Crown of Starlight and it cemented my assumptions and concerns regarding Cait's intentions and influences even more.

As a brief tangent, I've read A Touch of Darkness by Scarlett St. Claire. It very obviously is using Lore Olympus as its blueprints, but it's not super obvious that if you didn't read Lore Olympus or weren't aware of it, you probably wouldn't notice. It's still not a great book on its own, it's riddled with writing problems, but at least it can call itself its own thing to some degree.

Crown of Starlight is just blatant Lore Olympus fanfiction pretending to be original, even down to its marketing (which I'll get to shortly) but swapping out Hades and Persephone with Dionysus and Ariadne, and setting the entire story in space. Why is it in space? There doesn't seem to be any actual necessary reason for this, it just is, go with it. I'd be willing to accept this because changing up the setting of pre-existing stories can be fun (god knows I loved the premise enough of Lore Olympus being a modern day Greek myth retelling that I had to go and make my own version of it that's still in that modern setting) but as RWR says in her review:

"... we're told that it's the 'island' of Crete, but then we talk about commbands, airlocks, [holo-shields] and it wasn't really written in a way that I felt meshed 'Greek retelling' and 'sci-fi' in a cohesive way."

Needless to say, Crown of Starlight unsurprisingly suffers from the same problems Lore Olympus does, where it will try to "subvert" the original myths by changing their setting and characters and then doing absolutely nothing interesting with them to justify those changes.

To really drive my point home that Crown of Starlight is undoubtedly Lore Olympus fanfiction, Lore Olympus was literally used as a comparison point in Crown of Starlight's marketing which is a fair tactic to use to advertise to a specific niche or demographic, and while some have argued that Cait isn't technically the one to come up with that marketing jargon, it's made much more clear that she used that comparison herself when writing and pitching the book because it is quite literally just Lore Olympus with a different couple in space, right down to the main female protagonist being part of a purity cult. And of course it wouldn't be a bad Wattpad romance if it didn't have our main female protagonist Ariadne talking about how inconvenient her MASSIVE BREASTS are and of COURSE Ariadne is a poor innocent uwu babygirl who needs a man to come in and rescue her from the evil purity cult and of COURSE it hints at them eventually having raunchy sex just for it to wind up being milquetoast bondage and of COURSE it all just winds up taking traditionally queer characters and stories and turning them into this sanitized Disney-esque plotline where the boy and girl were always meant to be together and nothing else matters except their love-

And that, at its core, really just screams "this is bad LO fanfiction". From the stylization of the book's writing which never outgrew its "adorkable fanfiction writing" phase-

"Realizing that I'm being gaslit by my entire world doesn't make it easier to deal with, but hey, at least I still have some part of my soul!" - an excerpt from Crown of Starlight quoted from RWR's review timestamp 13:03

-to the "creative" choices made to turn Ariadne into a chastity cult girl whose resolution is obviously going to be to have what's implied to be dirty raunchy sex just for it to be like... the most tame level one bondage stuff;

-to the classic "she breasted boobily down the stairs" focus on Ariadne's body and breasts and sex appeal that's being kept in check by that pesky purity club.

And that's really disappointing because I had seen people say, "Yeah, Cait did an awful thing and deserves to be removed from her publishing schedule, but it's a shame that that book was written by Cait because it's actually a really good book!" because now it's just making me even more sus of people's Greek myth adaption recommendations (I'm still mad at BookTok for convincing me that A Touch of Darkness was worth reading). All I could think while listening to some of the excerpts quoted by RWR was that if I didn't know about Cait Corrain and read Crown of Starlight blind, I'd undoubtedly assume it was being written by a heterocis guy... but it's in fact being written by a queer woman.

And this is where I segue into talking about the root of this problem, where the calls are really coming from - Lore Olympus and its erasure of queer identities and relationships, despite also being written by a queer woman who should know better.

I could think of no better character to help carry this essay than Eros.

Unlike many of the characters in LO that Rachel has managed to straightwash by changing their motives entirely or straight up changing their identity from the source material (ex. Zeus, Apollo, Crocus who was turned into a flower nymph, Dionysus and Achilles because they're both literally babies, the list goes on), Eros has largely remained the same on paper who had zero reason to not be queer within the story.

Eros is still the god of love in this, he's still a guy and presumed to be an adult, but we NEVER see or explore him having relationships with anyone other than Psyche, aside from a brief mention of organizing orgies in the beginning that's used as a quick joke and then promptly never mentioned again.

Just like with Crown of Starlight and A Touch of Darkness and all these other "dark romance" stories, it's that brand of "pretends to be sexually liberating but isn't actually" writing, where they'll briefly mention orgies or sex-related things and then beat around the bush or avoid involving them entirely like a kid at Sunday school who doesn't want to say the word "penis".

(fr out of all the corny and awful slang for genitals I've seen used in stories like this, "a certain part of my anatomy" is definitely one of the most boring and stupid, like for god's sakes Hades you're both adults and at the beginning of this comic you thought she wanted to bang in the kitchen, why are you suddenly talking like a 7 year old boy LOL)

All that aside, while Eros might still be hinted at being queer and sex-positive, it's only as vaguely as possible so that the story can quickly move on to focus on him and Psyche or, better yet, Hades and Persephone. When Eros isn't deadset on finding Psyche, he's being the gay best friend for Persephone, who he has NO right having a friendship with when he introduced himself by intentionally getting her as drunk as possible with the intent of dumping her in Hades' car as per his mom's command. It's brushed off later as "well Aphrodite maaade him do it, for Psycheee!" but Eros still agreed to potentially put Persephone in danger over a relationship that had NOTHING to do with her and was also mostly his fault in its fallout (which Artemis calls him out for, but of course, like all the other times characters have called out the actual issues in the story they're inhabiting, they get brushed aside so that Persephone can talk about Hades):

Now, the Eros and Psyche plotline is one I've talked about before here and not the focus of this essay so I'll keep this tangent brief, but it's absolutely wild to me that Rachel took a story about a woman going to the ends of the earth to prove her love for someone whose trust she broke (a common theme in a lot of Greek myth stories, such as the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice) and turned it into... woman of color gets turned into a nymph slave for Aphrodite to 'test' Eros, a test that isn't clear at all in what it's trying to achieve, and wait hold up, didn't Eros actually fail that test by kissing Ampelus while completely unaware that it was Psyche-

This is just that episode of Family Guy where Peter justifies emotionally cheating and eventually physically cheating on Lois because "well you were the phone sex lady the whole time so no harm done!", isn't it? (×﹏×)

Anyways. It's all very convenient that the comic will hint at queer rep just to either have it be a constant question of whether or not they're actually queer (ex. Morpheus) OR to have it be promptly swept under the rug to make way for other characters/plot points. It's like when mongie tried to be "inclusive" by writing a stereotypical vaguely Asian character with no specific ethnicity just to get angry at her fanbase for calling her out on this that you can't just call a vaguely Asian character "representation" of anything (because Asia is MASSIVE and covers so many different ethnicities and languages and cultures).

Eros is only as gay as he needs to be to fill the role of "gay best friend" for Persephone.

Krokos is no longer a male lover of Hermes but a flower nymph created by Persephone because... apparently we can't dare imply that Hermes would be into anyone besides his unrequited childhood love, Persephone.

Achilles is introduced as a baby even though it makes no sense in the comic's own timeline where Odysseus is presumably already a well-known hero in Olympus, so much so that he was invited to the Panathenea.

Apollo is turned into a flat-out rapist who's only concerned with getting Persephone at all costs and when that doesn't work, he tries to get ANOTHER flower nymph (Daphne) who's actually genuinely interested in him (contrary to the original myth, there's that "swap it subversion" Rachel is known for) to cut her hair so she'll resemble Persephone more because we can't have a single plot point not resolve around Persephone.

Despite there being loads of genderbent characters already, Morpheus is supposedly the only one we're supposed to assume is specifically trans and not just a gender-flipped version of a Greek myth character. Why? Not because Rachel stated so explicitly, not because the comic has actually explored her identity as a trans woman, but because the readers just assumed it in good faith and Rachel was clearly fine with taking credit for trans representation that's only there via assumption (and only confirmed via her mods in Discord, which is... not how you establish canon information in your comic, Rachel.)

Hestia and Athena are part of a chastity club, until uh oh how convenient that they're secretly in a relationship with each other even though it further vilifies them and their morals, particularly Hestia who was promptly called out for being a hypocrite for taking Persephone's coat gifted to her from Hades while secretly being in a relationship the whole time. Not only does the Hestia and Athena relationship manage to commit queer erasure - of two gods who are considered icons in the aroace communities - but it also makes the only two lesbians in the story come across as assholes AND ON TOP OF THAT ALSO manages to somehow invalidate queer sex and relationships as being legitimate due to the even deeper implication that breaking their chastity vows "doesn't count" because it's not a male x female relationship. It's the 'ole poophole loophole all over again.

And then there's Artemis, who has MORE REASON THAN EVER TO BE IN THE PLOT but keeps being conveniently ignored. Her finding out about Hestia and Athena doesn't get any more screentime than her going "oh you're in a relationship, okay" , we never see her question the true intentions of TGOEM or what it means to her, we never see her have any opportunity to carve out her identity beyond just being Apollo's twin sister (it tries to at times, but then immediately goes nowhere with it, amounting to just poetic word salad), and she really just comes across as what a lot of people assume aroace people to be - alone and standoffish, because obviously someone who's nice and a good person would be in a relationship, there has to be a reason they don't want to have sex or fall in love, and that reason obviously has to be that they just hate everyone and want to be alone forever (￢_￢;) Then again, like many of the queer characters in LO, I don't know if I can definitively call her aroace because it's kept as vague as possible, and - going by Rachel's answers to these questions way back in her Tumblr era - apparently people can't be gay and ace at the same time-

There are undoubtedly loads more examples that I could cover here but that goes for practically any essay I write about LO - the more you peel it apart, the more you start unearthing some really questionable and frankly mean-spirited stuff. Queer people feel largely ignored in LO, alongside many of its derivative offspring such as A Touch of Darkness and Crown of Starlight, and it really speaks to how so many people - queer women, no less - have somehow managed to bastardize and sanitize what were traditionally very queer stories with queer characters. It's like these people think "olden times" and can only get as far as "women were slaves and men were rich assholes". Like, yeah, okay, that was the case for many cultures, but not all of them, and for some of them it wasn't as clear cut as that, many had misogynist power struggles in them while also still celebrating women and queer people in their own way. Greek myth is full of stories of women being forced into marriage or being made the victims of assault, but many of them are supportive of women and their struggles, unlike works like LO that somehow manage to be less feminist and sympathetic to women and queer people than these works from thousands of years ago.

This is another topic that's surely meant for another post, but it really speaks not only to the straightwashing and whitewashing of Greek myth, but also the Westernizing of it. That's not to say Rachel Smythe and Cait Corrain and Scarlett St. Claire are intentionally trying to whitewash another culture's works here, but if you're raised predominantly on Western media, you're undoubtedly going to absentmindedly adopt ideas about society that are primarily molded around Western beliefs .

And this is apparent in LO, while Rachel is from New Zealand, you can tell she grew up on a lot of Western media and its influences are sorely showing through LO's worldbuilding, character designs, and narrative choices. That "modern setting" that I mentioned before is much less Greek and a lot more adjacent to The Kardashians which lends to the theories that most of the media that Rachel consumes is American. Rather than actually going to the effort of doing her research on Greek culture, she seems to just prefer defaulting to the easiest assumption of how modern society is across the board - a generic Los Angeles clone with big glass skyscrapers and pavement walkways. She rarely ever draws food or clothing from those time periods; despite this story being about gods she's spent so little time on the people who passed on the stories about those gods, the mortals, and the gods themselves rarely feel like gods, rather just like Hollywood celebrities covered in body paint. The clothing feels very generic and uninspired with often very little Greek influence, even though Greek clothing is designed around Mediterranean living which you could do a lot with, to such an egregiously Western degree that Hades and Persephone's wedding was Christian-coded. The food... well, there ISN'T any because as we've seen, like the stereotypical American child, Persephone apparently only wants chicken nuggies and Skittles for dinner, so we never see her eat; and not only do we not see Persephone eat, but Rachel weirdly tries to use Persephone's vegetarianism as some kind of anti-capitalist characterization when much of the Greek diet is predominantly vegetarian. It's NOT HARD or uncommon to be a vegetarian in Greece!

(it looks like they're literally all eating the same thing so IDK what Hera is referring to here, it looks like they're all eating toast and lettuce LMAO)

All that's to say, much of LO - and the books like it that I've gone over here - are written with this idea that every culture - including the one that it's trying to adapt - was subject to the same ideas that Western culture lives by in the modern day - that being a vegetarian is "counterculture" in every culture, that the notion of sexual purity is enforced in the same way it's enforced in the Western education system (cough Christianity cough), that queer or otherwise "unconventional" relationships should stay inside the bedroom and not be seen. As much as Rachel claims she wants to "fight the patriarchy" and "deconstruct purity culture", all she winds up doing is reinforcing it through a Westernized lens, which is, as I've talked about before, very indicative of right-leaning white feminism and what it embraces and promotes - being a "good woman" who follows the rules and willingly becomes part of the system that's oppressing them because that's what "good women" do. Women who are confidant in their sexuality are evil and should be shunned for being "sluts". Women who are in relationships with other women "don't count" as real relationships the same way heteronormative relationships do, and cannot be trusted because they're likely trying to spread an agenda that's designed to brainwash heterocis women. Women should only aim to achieve marriage and their entire personality has to be built around their true love. Women are allowed to be kinky, but only as kinky as roleplaying the exact same gender structures that puts the man in a position to dominate a woman, and it should always and only ever be with her first love who she marries immediately, no one else.

This is exactly what the critics are getting at when they hold LO - and its creator - accountable for the messages it's been sending for five years to its audience of middle aged women and young girls. Having a demographic is fine, if this were just a comic for girls it would be fine, but it becomes a lot more problematic when that demographic is being fed toxic power fantasy stories based on a culture that's being gentrified and sanitized of all its original messaging and characterization right before our eyes. It feels blatantly misinformed from the very beginning in its intention to be a "feminist retelling" of Greek myth, because somehow Lore Olympus manages to be less feminist than these stories drafted and written by men from 2000+ years ago.

I opened this essay with a question: why do we keep getting these Greek myth adaptations written by queer women that still wind up perpetuating toxic heteronormative culture?

I think cases like these really highlight how deep the heteronormative brainwashing from childhood onward goes. That, despite these writers being queer or women, still manage to reinforce the same ideas and tropes and harmful predisposed notions that were designed to be used explicitly against queer people and women. These are things that we can't ever stop challenging, and asking, and truly deconstructing, because it runs deep in many of us who grew up on popular media even as innocent as Disney. Learning about more complex social concepts like sexism and misogyny and queerphobia doesn't automatically absolve us of those very same biases that have been both blatantly and subtly ingrained into us since childhood. All that said, Rachel being bisexual does not mean she's not capable of straightwashing; Cait Corrain being a queer debut author with a POC main character didn't stop them from targeting other POC debut authors at their own imprint; being part of any minority group or identifier does not automatically protect you from perpetuating the cycle that you, too, likely had enforced upon you at some point or another in your life. The fact that these creators and writers are still perpetuating that cycle to begin with is indicative of why it's a cycle at all - it takes work to break on a subconscious level because those cycles are specifically designed to target and hijack the subconscious.

At its worst, do you really think Lore Olympus can claim to be a feminist retelling that's "deconstructing purity culture" when the creator herself admittedly never fully identified or understood sexism until her mid-30's and has the audacity to say her audience is "harsh" on the female characters that she constantly vilifies through her own narrative?

"I feel like female characters in general, people will be a little harsher on them and sometimes way harsher on them, and I used to be like.. before I started writing the story and like making a story I was like yeah, sexism is not that bad, and [now] I was like oh it's bad. It's quite bad [laughs], so like, I don't know, I feel like the female characters in the story don't get so much of a pass. But this isn't consistent across the board, it's not all the time" - Rachel Smythe, in an interview with Girl Wonder Webtoon Podcast

If Lore Olympus truly was just a series meant to be for fun "no thoughts head empty" drama and spice, that would be fine. I've said it time and time before on this blog and I'll say it again: I wouldn't have an issue if Rachel was just writing a story exclusively revolving around heterocis men and women. I'm just frustrated and tired and annoyed that she keeps lying about it, and doubly so that this comic and its creator who claim to be "feminist" have inspired other people in the same headspace to continue to perpetuate that cycle through works that are clearly inspired by LO and never challenged the things LO promoted - violence towards "unconventional" women, violence towards POC, and erasure of queer people. And worst of all, for writers like Cait Corrain, it's more than just writing a really bad book with really bad messaging, it's going so far as intentionally targeting those same groups of people that are regularly vilified in works like LO - people who are just existing, who don't pose a threat to anyone, but had the misfortune of becoming the target of a white woman's insecurity.

I don't know what the answer to this problem is. I don't know what form the solution will come in, if any, to address the ongoing issues with Greek myth adaptions that are being sorely written through an "America as the default" point of view and praised for "rewriting the script of Greek mythology", quite literally cultural appropriation happening live right before our eyes all for the sake of cheap entertainment. Maybe it'll take the failings of works like Crown of Starlight to really get people talking about it. But so long as the roots of these works - such as Lore Olympus - are still being protected and marketed en masse by the same kinds of people who don't see the issue in Americanizing other cultures and their stories, then Lore Olympus and Crown of Starlight will not be the last ones to cause harm to the source material - and the cultures that source material is born from and a part of - they're taking from.

I opened this post with a question, and I'm going to close it with another to really leave it as food for thought. That question comes from another video that I'll link here for you to watch at your convenience that spends even more time diving into and discussing the nature of works like this that have seemingly attempted to "deconstruct" the very dogmas that they still wind up reinforcing all the same.

Does the romance genre have a white supremacy problem?

(yes. yes, it does.)

[vivwritesfics]

DOG SITTER FIC! DOG SITTER FIC! DOG SITTER FIC! (You already know who lmao)

Lewis has a new dog sitter while he's away filming. She just so happens to be cute af

everybody say thank you to Tiff for being the reason Beth and i were talking about this -- but also if i've got his dog's name and stuff wrong i might cry lmao

Part Two

(moodboard by @nurse-sainz)

It was a little terrifying, having a stranger stay in your house to look after your dog. But his friends swore that she was the real deal. A qualification in animal care and enough good reviews on her business social media.

But she was still a stranger in his house, looking after Bodie while he was away filming. He'd met her the day before, showed her around his house and gave her the few instructions she'd need to look after Bodie.

But Bodie was instantly taken with her. Tail wagging so hard he was almost falling over as she said hello.

Lewis couldn't stop himself from watching her. Sitting on the floor, Bodie climbing into her lap to sniff and lick at her face. "Yes, yes," she said through a laugh as she scratched behind his ears. "It's lovely to meet you, too."

Her laugh was melodic. She gently pushed him off, stood up and wiped at her trousers. "He's lovely," she said, still grinning. "I'd be more than happy to look after him." She grabbed her bag from the banister post and pulled out a few sheets of paper, stapled together. It was all very professional, he noticed. "Just shoot me a text once you've read through and signed it and I'll be there when you need me."

Lewis flicked through it quickly and looked at her. "Can you start tomorrow?"

Now there was a stranger in his house, looking after his dog while he was on the other side of the country. While he wasn't filming, he couldn't stop himself from wondering what she and Bodie were doing in that moment.

On his second day away from home, Lewis got his first picture from her.

Bodie on her lap, staring down at the camera. The corner of her face, half of her smile, was just visible. Miss you, dad! - Bodie she'd written just beneath.

Missing you too, Bodes! He replied.

The next picture came the next day. Bodie sat by her feet on their morning walk. He was stood to attention, waiting for her to throw a stick or something, Lewis assumed. He's been so good, she'd texted him.

I'm glad, he replied. How have you been? It was simply being polite, wasn't it? Simply, he was asking how she was finding his house, how she was finding taking care of Bodie.

He didn't mean for it to spark into an entire conversation. But she replied to him and then he replied to her and then she replied to him and then he replied to her.

It never turned unprofessional. No, just a dog sitter talking to her employer. She sent more pictures of Bodie, including a video where he fetched a stick. When she disappeared (to walk Bodie home), Lewis couldn't stop himself from feeling disappointed. But she returned quickly and the conversation resumed.

The next week continued on in this manner. Texts, pictures and such. Lewis began looking forward to pictures and messages from her, even when she pretended to be Bodie messaging him. The better pictures had been saved to his phone.

Bodie at the beach, Bodie having a nap, Bodie on the spare bed with her.

There was maybe a week left of filming when Lewis got a phone call from her. She hadn't called him before, always opting to text instead. For some reason, it filled him with an insane amount of anxiety.

He swiped his thumb across his phone screen. Immediately, Bodie's face filled his screen. "Hey Buddy," he said and Bodie let out something of a snort.

But she was nowhere to be seen. "Is everything okay?" Lewis asked as he tried to catch a glimpse of her.

And then her face came into his view. He didn't mean for his breath to catch in his throat when he saw her, cowboy hat on is head. The cowboy hat that was normally hanging from his wall.

"Thought Bodie wanted to actually speak to his dad," she said, eyes shutting and voice coming out muffled as Bodie climbed up her to lick her face. "I love you too, Bode, but your daddy is callin'."

Lewis let out a whistle. As soon as he did, Bodie turned towards him and let out a little yap. "Yeah, boy," she said and scratched behind his ear. "That's your daddy."

"Nice hat," Lewis said, unable to hide his grin.

She pulled it down slightly, playing the part of the flirty cowboy. "Ma'am," she said, deepening her voice and putting on a country accent.

Lewis put the phone down, propped up on a counter top, and stepped back, revealing his outfit. "Holy shit!" She laughed as she looked at him, at the leather chaps and plaid shirt he was wearing. "You're a fucking cowboy!"

"I'm a fuckin' cowboy," he answered, grabbed his brown hat and put it on his head.

She was smiling so damn wide.

And that was when Lewis realised he had a crush. He had a goddamn crush on his dog sitter.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Homebrew Mechanic: Meaningful Research

Being careful about when you deliver information to your party is one of the most difficult challenges a dungeonmaster may face, a balancing act that we constantly have to tweak as it affects the pacing of our campaigns.

That said, unlike a novel or movie or videogame where the writers can carefully mete out exposition at just the right time, we dungeonmasters have to deal with the fact that at any time (though usually not without prompting) our players are going to want answers about what's ACTUALLY going on, and they're going to take steps to find out.

To that end I'm going to offer up a few solutions to a problem I've seen pop up time and time again, where the heroes have gone to all the trouble to get themselves into a great repository of knowledge and end up rolling what seems like endless knowledge checks to find out what they probably already know. This has been largely inspired by my own experience but may have been influenced by watching what felt like several episodes worth of the critical role gang hitting the books and getting nothing in return.

I've got a whole write up on loredumps, and the best way to dripfeed information to the party, but this post is specifically for the point where a party has gained access to a supposed repository of lore and are then left twiddling their thumbs while the dm decides how much of the metaplot they're going to parcel out.

When the party gets to the library you need to ask yourself: Is the information there to be found?

No, I don't want them to know yet: Welcome them into the library and then save everyone some time by saying that after a few days of searching it’s become obvious the answers they seek aren’t here. Most vitally, you then either need to give them a new lead on where the information might be found, or present the development of another plot thread (new or old) so they can jump on something else without losing momentum.

No, I want them to have to work for it:  your players have suddenly given you a free “insert plothook here” opportunity. Send them in whichever direction you like, so long as they have to overcome great challenge to get there. This is technically just kicking the can down the road, but you can use that time to have important plot/character beats happen.

Yes, but I don’t want to give away the whole picture just yet:  The great thing about libraries is that they’re full of books, which are written by people,  who are famously bad at keeping their facts straight. Today we live in a world of objective or at least peer reviewed information but the facts in any texts your party are going to stumble across are going to be distorted by bias. This gives you the chance to give them the awnsers they want mixed in with a bunch of red herrings and misdirections. ( See the section below for ideas)

Yes, they just need to dig for it:  This is the option to pick if you're willing to give your party information upfront while at the same time making it SEEM like they're overcoming the odds . Consider having an encounter, or using my minigame system to represent their efforts at looking for needles in the lithographic haystack. Failure at this system results in one of the previous two options ( mixed information, or the need to go elsewhere), where as success gets them the info dump they so clearly crave.

The Art of obscuring knowledge AKA Plato’s allegory of the cave, but in reverse

One of the handiest tools in learning to deliver the right information at the right time is a sort of “slow release exposition” where you wrap a fragment lore the party vitally needs to know in a coating of irrelevant information,  which forces them to conjecture on possibilities and draw their own conclusions.  Once they have two or more pieces on the same subject they can begin to compare and contrast, forming an understanding that is merely the shadow of the truth but strong enough to operate off of. 

As someone who majored in history let me share some of my favourite ways I’ve had to dig for information, in the hopes that you’ll be able to use it to function your players.

A highly personal record in the relevant information is interpreted through a personal lens to the point where they can only see the information in question 

Important information cameos in the background of an unrelated historical account

The information can only be inferred from dry as hell accounts or census information. Cross reference with accounts of major historical events to get a better picture, but everything we need to know has been flattened into datapoints useful to the bureaucracy and needs to be re-extrapolated.

The original work was lost, and we only have this work alluding to it. Bonus points if the existent work is notably parodying the original, or is an attempt to discredit it.

Part of a larger chain of correspondence, referring to something the writers both experienced first hand and so had no reason to describe in detail. 

The storage medium (scroll, tablet, arcane data crystal) is damaged in some way, leading to only bits of information being known. 

Original witnesses Didn’t have the words to describe the thing or events in question and so used references from their own environment and culture. Alternatively, they had specific words but those have been bastardized by rough translations. 

Tremendously based towards a historical figure/ideology/religion to the point that all facts in the piece are questionable.  Bonus points if its part of a treatise on an observably untrue fact IE the flatness of earth

[witchygirlgray333]

Journal prompts / ideas

Poems (either ones you've written or just ones you enjoy or connect with)

Book review

Film review

Write about your day

Collage

Vision board

Habit tracker

Calendar page

Notes from something you're learning

Quotes you like

Draw some outfits you like

Search up creative writing prompts and do those

Meditate and write down your thoughts before / during / after (I don't do this everytime or sometimes I'll only write afterwards but when I write before, during and after it's always really interesting to read back on and see how much has changed)

Stickerbomb page

Films to watch

Books to read

Wishlist

Bucket list

Highlight of the day (I like to have a page in my journal where I write a short sentence of my favourite thing that happened that day, it's nice to look back on and it's nice especially for days when I'm not feeling well enough to do a longer entry)

Gratitude list

Random thoughts

Drawings and sketches (I'm not even good at drawing but I love drawing or sketching in my journals and just expressing myself)

This one is more for chronically ill people but making notes for doctor / hospital appointments which helps so much! I have severe memory loss so a lot of the time I'll turn up to an appointment and have totally forgotten about anything I'd hoped to say so this has been a total lifesaver

Along with what I said in my last point about living with severe memory loss my whole journal works towards helping me deal with living with the memory loss. I'll probably do another post soon about more in depth ideas for journaling to help life with memory loss but I write down SO MUCH. I've got to do lists, a calendar page, my night routine (I'll also have my morning routine written down once I've actually worked one out!), things I need to do everyday (such as brushing my teeth, washing my face etc), contact info for people I'm close to, labelled photos of my loved ones (it can be really scary when I don't recognise people so having these pages really help), a list of things I can do throughout the day (I'm on bedrest but having a list of things that I enjoy doing written down is a nice reminder, some of the things on the list at the moment are make tiktok videos, do makeup, watch a movie or tv show, journal, scrapbook etc)

[obsessedobsesser]

It's been a while since I put together Part 1 of my GO fanfic recs. Having read a ton more since then, I figured it was time for another list.

In no particular order:

1. 'On Espionage and Prophecy (or How to Accidentally, but Wholly, Fall in Love With a Soho Bookseller)' by RockSaltAndRoll (Explicit)

This fic takes place in 1941 with MI5Agent!Crowley and bookseller!Aziraphale. Aziraphale is first recruited by, who he thinks, is an MI5 but turns out not to be. Crowley, an actual MI5 Agent then recruits him to "double cross the double-crosser". Lots of pining and badassery (from both sides) ensue in this one!

2. 'Ricochet' by NaroMoreau (Explicit)

I'm a sucker for anything written by Naro but 'Ricochet' has become one of my favourite fics of theirs. Crowley is missing his angel after S2 and ends up summoning another version of Aziraphale. So, we get 1 Crowley, 2 Aziraphale's. The best mix. The writing in this is *chef kiss*. How Naro writes Crowley's pain and the characterizations of the 2 separate Aziraphale's -- just gorgeous.

3. ‘Terminus’ by BraveLight (Teen & Up Audiences)

I had no idea how much I needed an Astronaut!Aziraphale and MissionController!Crowley AU in my life until I read this fic. They have to team up to get Aziraphale home, but there’s way more to the mission than meets the eye. The twists and turns had me clicking 'next chapter' instantly. And the way Crowley and Aziraphale's relationship is written is so gentle and romantic—it’s perfect.

4. "Villainous" by IneffablePenguin (Explicit)

This is THE fairy tale AU you need to read! Crowley (Crow) is a sorcerer, and Aziraphale (Azra) is a prince—this fic honestly feels like it belongs on a best-seller list. IneffablePenguin has a real gift for painting vivid scenes that are so easy to picture. And those final chapters? They totally got me. I couldn't put this fic down.

5. "Cilice It To Say" by izzyspussy (Explicit)

Ho boy. This will be a fic I'll think about often. It's up there with the one I mention next. It's not as explicit as some of the other I've read but jesus christ. As it says on the tin: Crowley has a kink - The kink is Aziraphale. This is big on divinity kink, if that's not your jam, you may not like this one.

6. "Tether" by Ginger_Cat (Explicit)

It's coming up on a year of reading this fic and I think about Chapter 6 constantly. I don't want to spoil it but let me tell you, it's worth it. Aziraphale, now Supreme Archangel, keeps getting summoned back to Earth by Crowley but they don't know why.

7. "Intermezzo" by FeralTuxedo (Explicit)

Aziraphale is a music critic who, back in the day, tanked Crowley’s classical music career with a harsh review of his debut opera. If my fic recs haven’t given it away yet, I’m all about that bickerflirting, and this fic provides. It's also by FeralTuxedo. Anything written by them is 10/10.

WIP'S

8. “Reclaimed” by gallifreyshawkeye (Mature):

Are you in the mood for some Crowley Whump? If so, this fic DELIVERS. Gallifreyshawkeye knows how to paint a very vivid image of injury, so do mind the tags. This takes place 4 years after S2 and Crowley gets dragged down to hell by Satan in front of Aziraphale. It's honestly one of my favourite WIP's at the moment. I am on the edge of my seat whenever a new chapter comes out.

9. "Wavelengths & Frequencies" by imposterssyndrome, shades_of_eccles_cakes (Explicit)

Who doesn't love an enemies to friends to lovers story? While this fic only has 3 chapters so far, I am hooked. But hey, you give me a fic with Crowley and Aziraphale as radio hosts, I am there! I'm so excited to see how this develops and to see more of our 2 idiots going at each other.

10. "Stroke Play" by moonyinpisces (Explicit)

Moony knows how to write pining and I am here for it. In this AU, Crowley competes in beach volleyball, while Aziraphale takes on the golf course at the 2024 Olympics. They're both so down bad for each other but no one communicates. I love it!

Got any good fic recs? Send them my way :) Sharing is caring.

[ninja-muse]

The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door by H.G. Parry is like coming home after a long day and having someone to share a comforting, knowing sigh with. It's hot tea on a blustery weekend, a beam of light splitting rain clouds, and an acknowledgement that the world has always been complicated and imperfect and worth fighting for. It is, in other words, another pretty much perfect novel from Parry and as written for me as I thought it would be.

I don't know where to begin, really. My instinct right now is to wave my hands dramatically and say: this! this! so good! everything! just! aaah! Which is, I realize, not all that helpful. So let's start with the fact that this is a memoir. Clover, the narrator, has lived the story already and is telling us what happened, with compassion for her younger self, and criticism, and regrets, and a commitment to the truth. It feels very much like other books I've read looking back at the time between the wars, that mix of nostalgia for youth and excitement and novelty, and awareness that it can't last, that it was spurred on by a world that had fractured, that there was darkness at the edges of everything. (This has to be intentional; the book begins in 1920.)

This is also a magic school novel. It's a story of a girl fighting her way into a magical university, determined to find a way to break the faerie curse on her veteran brother. It's about finding a friend group and falling into research and learning about a hidden world. It's about the joy, and the pain, of striking out on your own as an adult. And it's about what happens when all of your hopes and dreams go awry, as well as the dangers of messing with the fae. It's not quite dark academia, but it's certainly on that continuum.

Where Parry really excels though, here and always, is her characters. Clover feels real. Her friends and family feel real. They're people shaped by their circumstances, full of complexity and contradictions, not beings whipped up by an author or puppets on a stage to further an end. They do things and make mistakes that take the story in unexpected directions and, generally, lend the book a richness that a lot of novels lack. That's one of the reasons I'm calling this a memoir. It felt like I was reading something that actually happened, told by someone who experienced history.

So: we've got the 1920s, a magical school, faerie lore. That could easily lead to something trite and repetitive, but Parry lends it all so much nuance, so much shading, that even when it felt familiar, it also felt fresh. (For instance, a lot of the faerie stuff reminds me of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but tackled from a different angle.) I loved the way the themes and narrative wove together, the way Parry believably builds up the historical world, the way she has of foreshadowing and then surprising the reader anyway. The way she merged the tropes and "genres" together felt seamless and, dare I say, magical.

You might notice that I haven't really said much about what the book's about or what happens in it. I don't think I can, without ruining the experience. I can't very well say this goes in unexpected directions if I also tell you what to expect, after all, and a lot of what Parry is actually talking about will be more powerful if you have to put the pieces together in time with the characters. I went in blind, knowing only what was in the reasonably unhelpful blurb, and my experience was all the better for it.

In short, this was a wonderful read and one that pulled me in and kept me close. If you're a fan of anything I've mentioned in this review—Oxford novels, magic schools, dark faeries, character-driven stories, the 1920s, etc—I highly recommend checking this out, especially if you've been on the fence about it. Take this review as a sign.

[aalinaaaaaa]

2024 In a Gift Box

Hey, everyone, greetings after another year that has flown by all too quickly! Featuring new friends, a few awards and 400% more holidays (rip my wallet lol), this has been a wild year for me. And that's only half of it.

For some strange reason, my desire to write increases with the hecticness of my life. Much of Obsidian Sapphires' revival/troubleshooting phase occured during the latter part of the year, from October onwards (though I had been tinkering with its plot for some time now). All because I woke up one morning with the solution to a plot hole appearing in my head.

Anyway, preambles aside, here's a few major highlights from my year (in writing terms):

First up, thanks to @druidx for the Year in Review Tag! The premise of the tag is to post one's favourite five or so pieces that they've written throughout the year.

To be truthful, some of Obsidian Sapphires' scenes would make this list only the respective chapters for them aren't completed yet 😅

A Pawn for a Greater Cause — I had a ball writing the starting dialogue, and the prompt gave me a few revelations regarding Petrius' character.

Regrets — This made me cry at 1am, the catharsis was unreal.

To Perpetuate Life — Amazing how almost falling asleep gives me ideas. This piece helped me answer a few questions about Orlaith's backstory, and also gave me extra questions surrounding the lore.

Blue Moon — This feels like a nice deviation from my usual style, it's more dreamy and whimsical. Also, this reminds me to go and work on its second part, lol (because the scope was too big for one piece)

That angsty pining scene — This is not posted as one scene, but rather in splinters because parts of it are dripping in spoilers for Obsidian Sapphires. However, I enjoyed writing this scene too much not to post some snippets.

WIP Roundup

First things first, an ode to the WIPs that I've put on ice to focus on Obsidian Sapphires.

The Lady's Lament, a brief idea born out of a plot bunny inspired by a plot on Wattpad. The idea sprouted in April 2023, but it lives on in the form of worldbuilding ideas for South Arobyre.

And then also, Flamebearer, one of my oldest wips but also arguably my most complex one. It's a story of grief, religious dilemmas and romantic/familial drama, all under the backdrop of sociopolitical turmoil. It's going to take a lot of research and planning, that much I know. Hence why I want it to be as perfect as I can make it, when I have the knowledge and writing practice to do it justice.

In April this year, one of my Flash Friday pieces (Duel to the Debt) sowed the seeds for another piece (An Endless Round) in May, and later on Soulswapped derived from it. I intended it to be a short enough story, a novella of sorts that would be woven into a larger compilation, but it's become its own thing. Already, I think it may get a sequel. But I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

Obsidian Sapphires

So its progress this year has been skewed. Like, 'a lot of its progress spawned in October or thereafter' sort of skewed. I woke up one morning and the cogs for the rigmarole surrounding what is currently Chapter 2 all clicked, to the point I yanked out my laptop and starting writing notes until I had to run for class.

Since then, I've had a bunch of ideas, but currently I'm deliberating on the story I wish to tell. It seems more cohesive and easier to plan for when I cut Eshani's perspective out, but at the same time, cutting her perspective would cut or at least hide much of her character development. That and I love her to bits, and she may/may not be a readers' favourite also.

In terms of actual tangible content, bits of the angsty pining scene got posted, as did sections of the first and second chapters. It even came with a few memes, lolololol. (And there's more memes sitting in my gallery/Scrivener notes, this story's quite memeable honestly).

The antagonists got their time of day, however brief so far. And not just the lead meshai, but also the septet of folks angry at the meshai and his fellows.

And this gets onto something that has existed as tags and headings and brief little mentions. A collection of pieces, leading up to answers surrounding some major events in the history of the country Obsidian Sapphires is set in.

That would be This Blood-Stained Charcuterie. It is going to be the anthology of short stories and one-off pieces surrounding Morilast's High Councillors (and indeed, the Court's other denizens and its namesake himself!). A lot of juicy details surrounding certain characters' backstories are going to feature here, I can't wait to get into it. (It's also my excuse to figure out all the bits of lore and convoluted ancestries [who murdered who], lol).

When I finish with Obsidian Sapphires, that is about when I'll start releasing this one. The title could change upon me getting to the end, but we'll see.

Flash Fiction Friday

I started doing these pieces in late 2023, so it's been about a year since my first one (Contemplations). In all, I've completed a total of 28 pieces so far :D

The masterlist came about in early January, because I was inspired by other people who had masterlists for their pieces. It's very satisfying to see it develop from a few pieces to what it is today, a decent few pieces.

Whatsmore, it reflects the trends in my writing, such as the wips that the prompts inspired me for, and what periods I was consistently doing it week-by-week and when the major gaps were.

For whatever reason, I have a tendency of getting inspiration for these at about midnight or so. Even if I get a handful of basic notes written down, it may not still be until late in the night that I can get a piece together, lol.

To commemorate the end of the year, I've started a series known as Flash Friday Flashbacks to celebrate what I've made and show off behind-the-scenes when it comes to notes, context, deleted scenes, etc.

There are a few pieces left in this year's version, which will be reblogged close to the end of the month (to celebrate the New Year).

Next year's edition is going to feature the December 2024 pieces in addition to all the 2025 stuff (which hopefully is a lot). There will also be a 2025-specific masterlist too.

Writeblr Community Events

What is writeblr without its community? It's beyond a pleasure to be part of a group so lovely and talented, everyone has something amazing going for them.

As part of this, there are some people here who create events, discords and/or other initiatives that bring people together. Shoutout to everyone who has done/is doing something along these lines ❤️

Special mentions in my case go to:

@flashfictionfridayofficial for taking the prompt submissions, making the posts, and reblogging everyone's stories (with fantastic comments) every week

@writeblrsummerfest for making a lovely event spanning the entirety of August, encompassed by a well-organised theme and all

@bardic-tales for establishing the @creators-club and doing all the various types of ask/tag games to foster interaction and support

@agirlandherquill for her first ever Writemas! These prompts are impeccable and it was really fun looking forward to the next day's prompts! I wish I could've participated more, but alas, that's how the cookie crumbles. (Also, high five, we're in the same timezone, woo!)

Plans for 2025

Continue with Obsidian Sapphires — I'd love to get the draft finished

Doing as many of the Flash Friday prompts as well

Reblogging people's posts more and hopefully improving at reaching out to people

Learning to draw is something that I've always wanted to do, but I want to get focused with it this year. It would be cool to put my characters in visual form

Getting a handle on the lore and background information needed to compile This Blood-Stained Charcuterie

The Tags

That brings this post to its natural course, the end. Merry Christmas everyone ❤️🎄

Giving a Year in Review Tag to everyone who is on at least one of my taglists (ask, comment, etc to be added/subtracted): @mr-orion @the-ellia-west @guessillcallitart @thereadingfoz @glassstardust22124 @original-writing @honeybewrites @ashirisu @drowsy-quill @oliolioxenfreewrites @theglitchywriterboi @seastarblue @gioiaalbanoart @rae-butter @corinneglass @midnight-and-his-melodiverse @outpost51 @mundanemoongirl @scarletteflamerald @ceph-the-ghost-writer @flock-from-the-void @mattresses-and-macaroni @limitlesswritingvoid

...As well as all these people I'm tagging here: @winterandwords @finickyfelix @wintherlywords @anyablackwood @cherrybombfangirlwrites @kaylinalexanderbooks @angelfevr @thatndginger @thepeculiarbird @ominous-feychild @oh-no-another-idea @space-writes @veneritia @the-golden-comet @jev-urisk @cljordan-imperium @an-indecisive-nerd @mauannacreates @laureleavess @theeccentricraven @paintedbutton (@/bardic-tales, @/agirlandherquill, both of you are tagged for this too)

...And most importantly, here's a tag for everyone in the audience!

Here's to a hopeful 2025! 🎉

[strawberrylegend]

What do you think about naming the tag and your villains AU as reverse linked or reverse hero or something similar like that(?)

I only suggest that, you can consider them or not, it's up to you because that idea was in my head lately when I first saw your meme about ravio and legend.

You maybe don't know but dang, HE.IS.SO.HOT!

Like, he is so beautiful, so cool and so so handsome 😍🤤💗💗. The mark, the trace, the vibe, the way he acts and dressed. All of them, I have to clear all the space in my heart just to make room for him.

Then I immediately check your blog. Hylia, they are so BEAUTIFUL!😔💗💖

How can you create such gorgeous and wonderful design and idea. I'm really in love with them at the first sight 😍 (I want to lick the screen so much because they're too good😔)

After all, sorry for the ramble but I just want to tell you my thoughts and love with your AU. Have a nice day

OMG! This is the first time I've ever received such a long long review .....! Gosh I've been confessed! Thank you so much for liking the idea of my evil abortion au!🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰

I've actually written a lengthy fic for this and have updated it to 11 chapters at home, which I intend to post on the ao3 site in the near future, as well as preparing designs for each Link for this, though I'm still working on them for this; as well as creating some of the related artwork, which I can now disclose to this self-titled tag: Reverse Villains Linked! As for their settings, I think I need to spend some time converting the Chinese into a language you can understand.😋😋

The drawings I've posted were created during the June-September period, so the style of drawing has changed a lot, and I can see that I've made a lot of progress!🌹🌹🌹

[boneskullravenriver]

The free write travelers are ridiculously expensive with added bells and whistles I don't need. Plus it looks freaking gigantic for no reason.

The reviews of that and the other one were... Meh.

This is why I feel like old tech kinda wins out in some respects.

Look at this chonk late 2000s beauty. I may not have used this in school (we were using actual desktop computers to learn how to type) but it gives me such a feeling of nostalgia because so many devices in the late 2000s and early 2010s had this sort of look. And the screen as well.

"I may not be pretty, but I get the job done 👍"

I got it in the mail yesterday after months of debating on whether or not to get it.

It's completely offline. I don't need some stupid cloud service bullshit or extra app or wifi. It runs on batteries and all I need is a cable that plugs into the device at the top, then the other end on the computer to transfer text. That's it. It's great.

Only thing I dislike is that there's no way to use italics or bold but I use asterisks to indicate when a word should be like that so after I transfer to my computer, I can fix everything up because this is more of a "on the go get everything down" sort of device as if you were writing in a notebook, I'll say. It's messy. The computer is for formatting and fixing lol.

Also, each file can hold 10k words. It's an old device, so the storage isn't as extensive as modern things but we'll see. I assume that once you hit 10k on one file it doesn't let you write anymore on that file. There's 8 files that you can switch to via the buttons on top.

I've been using it all day yesterday to type up chapters I'd written by hand and so far so good

[yuurei20]

I've noticed Epel keeps adding 'kana' to the end of his sentences. What does it mean?

Hello hello! Thank you so, so much for this question, I have always wanted to mention this.

“Kana” can be a multitude of things in English, such as “probably,” “I guess,” “I think,” “I wonder,” etc. A basic explanation would be, “a word used to express uncertainty,” but like most things when it comes to language, that is not the only thing it does.

A quick review of Epel: from his first day at NRC he has been under order from Vil to “speak more politely,” as he tends to use informal speech with his senpai.

As you point out, Epel often adds “kana” to what he is saying, and that is because one of the things that it can do is ‘soften’ something that you’re saying in order to make it sound less direct, and thus more polite.

Examples: Epel telling Kalim that his assumption is wrong, telling Vil that he disagrees with him, saying that his Phantom Bride look is weird, etc., these are all sentences that he is awkwardly gentling via “kana,” often after several ellipses or a comma, as though it is not a part of his normal speech pattern.

This gets into cultural differences: When Ace assumes that Epel is dedicated to a certain brand of apple juice, for example, an English-speaking Epel could probably respond, “That’s not actually the case!,” without sounding rude. But that could be interpreted as a little brusque in Japanese.

In order to soften the expression Epel adds “kana” at the end, which sounds more like, “That might not be the case,” “I’m not sure that is exactly what is going on,” etc., in English.

Even though he knows for 100% certainty that he is not actually dedicated to a certain brand of juice, he is still using “kana” in order to not sound too straightforward.

(screenshot from maggiesensei.com)

(This can and does cause issues when moving in between languages: a Japanese learner who only knows that “kana” means “I think” might not add it onto sentences where they are certain about something, and thus risk annoying their Japanese-speaking colleagues, for example. In contrast, an English learner may say “I think” too often, leading their English-speaking colleagues to wonder why they don’t seem to actually know anything. It’s all part of the joy of language and culture!)

While there are several words in Japanese that can be used to soften your phrasing, Epel seems to have latched onto “kana” in particular, possibly because it is an easy word to add on to the last part of what might otherwise be a rude sentence in an attempt to avoid a reprimand from Vil. 

Other times Epel will belatedly add “desu” onto his sentences, also in a bid to sound more polite than he is used to speaking. 

If you are a language learner I would not recommend using Epel as an example of when to use “kana,” as he will sometimes shoehorn it into places in an unnatural way (as a part of his character).

EN is doing its best to recreate Epel’s “kana” by including things like “kind of,” “not sure” and “maybe” in his dialogue, but as sounding uncertain doesn’t necessarily mean you sound polite in English, this may not be having the same effect. And I have no idea how they would go about recreating this habit of Epel’s in a way that can properly portray what is happening in English—it might just be one of those things that gets lost in translation :<

Bonus: The Japanese language has four different alphabets (kanji, katakana, hiragana, romaji), and katakana is the alphabet used for foreign loanwords. 

Whereas other characters who use honorifics have “-kun” and “-san” written in hiragana in their dialogue, Epel’s dialogue uses katakana. This is possibly meant to symbolize how using honorifics in these situations is foreign to him, and he is not used to it.

(When he does shift into using honorifics in hiragana, it is only when he is talking to people from his own village: people he is used to!)

[seaofreverie]

They Might Be Giants at the Roundhouse, London, 17th November 2024

Happy 35th to Flood, hooray!!!! So here's this thing that I've put together just in time for this occasion, my written record... I mean, my very lengthy and detailed review of the first and so far only TMBG show I’ve attended, on November 17th 2024 in London, so, the last show of the so-called “30th anniversary” Flood tour.

And yeah, I mean it that this thing is lengthy and mostly my personal insights on stuff but still, I wanted to share it since this was an event that I’d been anticipating for many many months, and I tried my best here to capture all the feelings this day brough and the whole magic and all the amazement surrounding it.

I’m also going to put here all of the 7 videos I took during the show, ranging in length from 7 seconds to 7 minutes. And they were taken from the front row, so the view is pretty great and something worth sharing I think!

So yep. Hope you enjoy!!

Every once in a while a day comes along in your life that feels like it’s been taken straight out of a movie. It’s hard to tell how often that happens, but probably not too often, since I can’t remember the last time it did before this. And what I mean here is that the day of my first TMBG show was pretty much nothing but moments that somehow felt just RIGHT, like everything was coming together just PERFECTLY, so that I could have the best possible experience and the best imaginable time!! Starting with my biggest wishes and hopes, down to all the extra details that I didn’t even think about previously. But anyway…

Before the show…

You’d think that I would start officially #freakingout about one of my biggest dreams in life coming true (seeing my favourite band, who are also one of my biggest special interests, in REAL LIFE, and enjoying one of their amazing live shows IN PERSON) earlier than this, but that only actually started on the evening of the day before the show. And because of that the entire next morning and afternoon felt really weird and tense in a way that I can’t really describe. But I hope you get what I mean. It’s like wow, it’s finally happening, but noooo wait hold on, I’m not ready yet…

And so my travel companions and I spent most of the day walking around Camden Town where the show was taking place, but for me that whole time was this really weird mix of feeling like I’m walking on clouds and like I’m just entirely somewhere else and also awaiting the scariest most important exam of my whole life.

We arrived by the venue sometime around 1 PM and when I saw the poster plastered on the wall that listed “An Evening With They Might Be Giants” among other acts, that was the moment when it maybe finally hit me that THIS THING WAS REAL. And maybe this is a good time to mention that the only thing left on the long list of all the things that could possibly still go wrong at this point, was managing to get a spot as close to the stage as possible, so, in the first row. And there were already two people just standing there by the venue when we got there and I actually couldn’t tell if they were already queuing up because, well, it was still so early. But I’m about 100% sure now that, in fact, they were.

Another important thing to note is that I was hoping to meet my friend at the show, who also attended the previous night’s show in Bristol, and me impatiently awaiting any sort of updates on how all of that went definitely added to all the nervousness I was feeling that whole day. And also, when I decide on something, well, I’m stubborn as hell so it HAS to go the way I planned it or I will be pretty much devastated.

But it was still super early and we had to get dinner and all that stuff so we left for now. And after some time I eventually got a message from my friend saying that NO, 5:30 will be too late for the first row, probably, and I was uhhhh, very on edge at this point. But ok. Better wait too long in the queue than regret not getting there earlier forever.

It was probably a pretty unusual sight to my brother (who I dragged along with me to the show) when I practically RAN to the venue when we were close to arriving there sometime past 4 PM. I swear I remember imagining that I’m already seeing a huge queue of people in front of me somewhere in the distance until I get closer and am relieved that no, no such thing happening, thank god. I mean, well yes, I was REALLY not even remotely chill about this whole thing guys. And yeah, it’s important to mention that I did travel over 1500 kilometers or so just for this show and nothing else. The whole trip and all the sightseeing I did in London in the days leading up to this day and afterwards was just an added bonus.

But alright, we got there. And what we were met with instead were maybe 15 or so people who were mostly scattered in small groups around the entrance. And a guy playing an accordion. Just in case I needed that extra confirmation that, yes, the gig I’m going to will be HERE and not in some other place. Yet I still had this worry as I started talking to one group of fans that waitttt, maybe they’re actually talking about some other band and I’m making a fool of myself…

But well yeah anyway, we were there, it was time to just wait for the big event now, time to be brave and use this opportunity to chat with other fans even a bit… And so I did, and despite not really having any opportunities to actually TALK in English to other people most of the time, I think I did pretty well. One thing that stuck with me the most for some reason was how these two guys were talking about how one of them doesn’t like BOOK and how that’s scandalous according to the other guy pretty much, and the other guy's statement on Synopsis For Latecomers was that whatever your opinion might be on the song, it’s still definitely a THEY song (I love that and I think about that all the time now, like man, it really is just They in a nutshell in a way).

And then my friend and their bestie arrived!! Just after we (all the people who were waiting already) decided to form some sort of actual queue. We found ourselves at the end of it, at least for now… And the remaining 2 hours of waiting for the doors to open were before us. It dragged on a bit of course but not TOO terribly, since I could catch up on all sorts of stuff with my friend, because we haven’t actually seen each other in oh, well over a year!

We talked about the Bristol show too among many other things, and I learned some important things, such as how Lie Still, Little Bottle got played already the day before, soooo… probably not much of a chance of it returning this evening (this might be like the only real thing I wish was different about this day because, AAAAHHH, THE STIIIIIIIIICK!!!!!! how I’d have loved to see that… But never say never, maybe it just wasn’t meant to be just YET!). And also how today the queue was luckily much smaller so, no being stuck in the third row this time!

Also, it started raining eventually, as it does in the UK, right, (it actually wasn’t rainy at all for most of the week I stayed there, just that day pretty much… another one of very few somewhat unfortunate things about this day) and it rained for probably close to an hour, and by god, did it get freaking FREEZING very fast. I inevitably had a huge cold for several days afterwards because of this, but well, what even is this sort of sacrifice, when in exchange you get the best possible concert experience. Because yeah, it definitely paid off to get there early, the queue never got SUPER long but still, wouldn’t have ended up where we did if it weren’t for that long wait.

And maybe now I should say some more general things about the wait, which is that this whole time, when I wasn’t feeling impatient, I was really just, truly soaking it all in (and not just the rain, lol). And a crucial part of that whole wait was that the accordion guy was still playing his songs, many songs of TMBG and at least a couple of John Linnell’s State Songs. I realize now that I should have written them down right after the show, because now all I remember him playing are Erase, South Carolina and West Virginia.

One funny thing that happened was when some guy walked by our (by then) pretty long queue and seemed surprised that there were so many people waiting for something. So my friend told him that we were waiting for a show and that it was a They Might Be Giants show, but what did he actually hear??

The guy: …Michael Jackson? But he’s dead!

So I guess that English speakers will also get the band's name terribly wrong sometimes, not just every vinyl vendor I’ve ever talked to back at home, lol. But yeah, he eventually got the name right but still, it’s really funny to think about… There May Be Giants, Michael Jackson… it’s all the same thing.

But alright, the last few minutes were drawing near… And then, at long last, we were in! And I guess I was so caught up in the moment (and also the fact that the security guy had a bit of an issue with my metal pins that I put on my jacket without really thinking about this possibly being a problem, oops) that I almost screwed up big time in a way because hey, we’re in, you’re free to go now, get your spot by the stage as fast as possible!! And so I got myself together, followed the example of my friend, and did that.

And ok, all in all, this was absolutely surreal to me. Only the very first of the many biggest this CANNOT be real moments of the night. Realizing that wow, we’re actually here… Nothing went terribly wrong in the end, we travelled all this way just to get here and here we are. And we’re in the first row!! OH MY GOD!! The folks who were ahead of us in the queue lined up by the left side and the middle of the stage, so we ended up to the right of Linnell’s keyboard and right in front of Marty’s drumkit. So we still had a very good viewing point if you ask me!

And I could NOT believe how close we were, the stage and all the instruments were SO CLOSE!!! This was actually my first time being in the pit at a concert, I’ve only ever known the balcony view… Meanwhile here they were, the legendary Main Squeeze in the REAL WORLD, the jackalope thingy on the drum kit that says They Might Be Giants… The pre-show music was blaring, everyone else was getting excited and I was suddenly HIT by all of it and how unbelievable and amazing and perfect it was and I was so so close to just crying right there because of it all…

But well, I collected myself and faced the fact that there was still at least an hour of waiting ahead of us (turned out to be an hour and a half, because the doors opened earlier than originally scheduled, but the show didn’t start until the original 8 PM anyway). But at least we were inside now, so no more freezing! And we could actually even sit down for a while finally (not that anyone besides me or my two friends did that from what I could tell, for once I managed to not care about how I appear to others and do what’s considered “normal” and it’s so great and important and such a big part of why this was such a wonderful evening in the end).

I also need to say that wow, Flansburgh’s intermission playlist really is so good. Not gonna lie that I was really excited for this part of the show as well, and I even had some very satisfying moments of recognizing a song or two and telling my friends about it (Funkadelic’s Can You Get To That will have a very special association for me now because that’s what was playing when we first got there). Some other memorable moments include when crew members were milling around the stage, and I’m pretty sure that none other than Stan Harrison walked in for a moment too?? Because those moments also served as constant reminders that THE GUYS will be here too, so soon…

Show time!!!

Set 1

Alright, time for what we all actually came here for. Time for the show. The lights went down for a moment, there were moderate amounts of screaming that made me feel like I’m back on a school trip visiting a theatre with other kids, who start screaming the moment it gets dark right before the play starts. But this time I was (even if just mentally) screaming along.

The recording of the song They Might Be Giants started playing, we watched a short animation on that huge screen at the back of the stage, and then, the scariest and most unexpected thing happened. The whole band walked in and after a couple seconds launched right into Synopsis For Latecomers. And I’m saying this kind of as a joke but actually though, can we agree that the emotion that comes with the first time you see *your band* in the real world is just something else completely and kind of impossible to describe. Because in a way it’s also just so funny: you arrived here specifically with the intention of seeing these guys and then, when that actually happens, it feels like the most shocking event of your entire life. A little MIND ERROR moment, wait hold up kind of moment, or even… a Brain Problem Situation, if you will.

But ok, I also need to admit that it didn’t help when I got distracted over the fact that less than half a minute into the song, someone from the crew walked onto the stage to fix something about Danny’s guitar. And with all that stuff put together I was only half aware of what was even happening and being played most of the time, and like a second passed before we got to the horns part of the song, and the horns entered the stage (accompanied by cheering from everyone). And it was all just. Happening. Right in front of me. Like it’s nothing and no big deal at all.

But anyway. While I’m still on the topic of this song I need to say that out of all songs played this one still stuck with me probably the most in a sense. Because days after the show I could still hear it still playing in my mind aaaaaaaall. the. damn. time. So all in all, this was definitely a total BLAST of a first impression. This is an amazing live song, and a 10/10 show opener, which I think is also fully supported by my reaction to it, as documented here. And the horns!!! The horns, ladies and gentlemen!!!

After the first song we got greetings and an introduction from Flansburgh, who said that this was the last show of the run of Flood shows… and that they had to figure out a way to include all songs from Flood in the show. So what got played next was the obligatory Particle Man, something that I found myself being all sort of like “alright, of course…” about at first... I mean… it is funny and don’t get me wrong, this song is great live, and I loved the whole “Triangle Man, take off for the planet, for the planet VENUS!” bit of course (oh it was really really great and GRAND and loud), but I guess this also shows how very quickly I got into this whole spirit of a regular TMBG show goer of sorts, who already sort of resents one of the most played songs… even before actually hearing it.

Next up was Meet James Ensor and here’s another really funny thing: how surprisingly hard it can be to identify the song that’s being played during a show. You know them all and know all the lyrics, and yet you aren’t aware of what you’re actually singing??? *HOW* does that work!! Because the whole time I thought it was actually James K. Polk, later I couldn’t remember which of the two it was actually… And I only realized which song this actually was on the next day, when a random bit of conversation reminded me that yes, those were the lyrics of Ensor that I was singing yesterday.

However, you must forgive me for these follies, because it’s hard to think clearly when you have to catch up with the fact that without pause, the next thing played is The Famous Polka. It’s like oh my god it’s actually THE Famous Polka. The infamous Famous Polka stage collapse incident (so, the first thing that comes to mind concerning this song, to me) aside, another notable thing about this song is that it’s SUCH a blast of energy live. I want to say that around this point of the show I started really getting into it and singing along and stuff (well, not singing yet on THIS song) and I’ll add some more general thoughts of this nature at the end of the post but by god, is the pure energy and excitement of a TMBG show impossible to convey in any recording. I think you just really have to be there to really understand what it’s all about. And a song like this one might be one of the finest examples of that.

And now, for something completely different… Moonbeam Rays! Lovely song that mostly helped me get into the mood of how beautiful this whole moment was, you know… I might be wrong about when exactly that was, but I got seriously close to crying once more during the show, and it’d be probably a fair guess to say that it was sometime during this song. And afterwards, we got some more insights from Flansburgh.

JF: This is the last show of the Flood show thing. (audience makes a sad “oooooh” sound) Yeah, it’s a little bit sad… it’s a little bit *excellent!* (audience laughs)

And then the Johns started talking about how they “started doing this pre-pandemic…” And it delighted me SO MUCH that they pointed this out because I could never get over how the Flood anniversary tour started when the album turned 30, and at the time of the last show of the tour it was two months away from turning 35!!

JF: It’s taken more years to celebrate the anniversary of Flood than it took to *make* Flood.

But as Flansburgh said, it was time to move on to some other, less popular things… And also he shared with us that he walked through a beautiful part of London today, wondering how it would feel to have enough money to “belong there”. Linnell said that he was resting up for the big flight, and that he was actually resting up for it RIGHT NOW.

JF: There’s nothing John Linnell likes more than a *paid rehearsal*.

JL: It’s a sweet ride… When you get to be *this* age…

JF: Nothing matters at all.

JL: Every day above ground is beautiful.

If you ask me, that last sentence deserves to be immortalized as one of the most iconic stage banter moments, and in a way it already has, because it inspired this wonderful piece of art, and who knows what else.

The following songs were Letterbox (and a short break from singing from me, because that song is already impossible to follow with, and then you add all the excitement of the moment and it’s impossible impossible) and Twisting!!! This started a long series of songs where the moment it starts I get super excited because I KNOW this song is a huge deal and a favourite but it takes me at least a couple of seconds to get to WHY this is a huge moment… through remembering and recognizing the song. And AAHHHH this song was so amazing, the bridgeeee, and then also the extra outro with the guitar solo and all, the energy!!! God, it truly is incomparable. And I totally didn’t expect that outro so that made it all an even better time.

And so we were well into the Flood songs segment, because next up was another of my top favourites from the album, Someone Keeps Moving My Chair! And another wonderful sing-along moment, but honestly, which of all these songs was not… (other than Letterbox, but that was just because of my lack of practice with that one). Chanting the title of this song, especially that one penultimate, elongated CHAAAAAAIIIIIIIR, kind of healed something in me I think.

After that was done, the Johns gave us some more insights into the performer’s life and all the things that they’ll never get used to, such as crowds that continue beyond your line of sight.

JF: …So you sort of think like: “I gotta get these people going, I gotta rock these people…” And then it’s like: (said in a silly, high-pitched voice) “But there’s no end!...”

Flansburgh remarked on the special challenge that they had come across this time, which was that we were all in a circular room, which is exciting, but means that people continue past where the stage is…

JF: I hope you guys got your tickets on Stubhub or something. I mean, can you even see us? I can barely see *you*. In a hockey match this would be unacceptable.

Another thing that Linnell would never get used to was when there’s a huge crowd of people, all of them happy and singing along, but then there’s one guy “who’s got this sort of Charles Manson expression”. This one really made ALL the people laugh. The Charles Manson guy included I hope.

JL: Never got used to that! For some reason.

JF: Tomorrow: Get. Linnell.

(JL pretends to be writing something down)

JL (addressing the audience): Not to put any ideas in your mind…

But moving on, as I said it was more Flood time indeed, with Whistling In The Dark. Me calling each single song amazing and a blast and so much fun is probably already getting a bit repetitive by now, so one special point of interest with this one and its live version is when near the end we get this little vocals only moment and then the horns come in again, then joined by everything else with such fanfare… simply triumphant.

Also, maybe this is a good moment to say that man, on one hand thinking about this show and how I’m going to hear THE ACCORDION was always a huge deal, but even then, I wasn’t prepared for how cool the accordion really is in person. It sounds kind of different from what I’m used to from recordings, and definitely makes a heck of a great impression all in all. One could wonder why it’s not more popular in rock music, because really, just how amazing is it?? And it can create all sorts of moods.. which is something I’m just about to get into properly too. Also, speaking of horns, Flansburgh gave a special shout out to the horns at this point, and began to introduce the next song.

JF: This next song is called The D-... uh, I forgot what it’s called, but… (JL laughs)

Even if it weren’t for this slip-up with the name, I already could tell from how Flansburgh went back to talk about how this was a song put together by Stan Harrison and introduced all the guys individually… That *IT* was in fact happening, one of my biggest hopes when it comes to songs I wanted to hear in person the most. The Darlings Of Lumberland - THE horns song to beat them all. And at this point I had to get my camera ready and start recording because well, this would definitely be one of the most preservation-worthy and outstanding moments of the show.

I was not mistaken of course, the way all the instruments complement each other here, most importantly the horns and the accordion, is something beautiful. This is one of the best examples of how the studio version just sounds so WEIRD to me now, even though it’s been my big favorite for a long time in that form as well. All in all a hypnotising moment, and coming back to my earlier question, maybe THIS was the only other song that you don’t really sing along to, because you have to just. Take it all in. Soooo much going on. And yes, no less important, THE CHOREOGRAPHY - *EVERYONE* did the hand thing!!! So you know, another good reason to have this one specifically caught on film.

Anyway, I was going to put my phone down for the time being but THEN... could it be, another of my top wished-for songs?? Cause yeah, without a pause we got the one and only screaming introduction to Let Me Tell You About My Operation from Flansburgh and oh boy, is this yet another song I could talk for many minutes about. First of all, I had very very high hopes for one of, what I think is often referred to as, Flansburgh showman moments. So, songs such as this one, Lie Still, Little Bottle, She’s Actual Size, and a couple others.

This song is a whole new story live, alright. Again, you have to be there to really get what it’s all about I think. JF’s energy is very infectious and awesome here to put it just mildly, and the horns add a whole lot, the whole song is just one big moment of old-timey big band-style musical bliss. And then there is also time to shine for all the other guys in the band, with awesome solos from Dan and Marty (ok, it appears that there was no special Danny time though?? Sad), AND the horns on the horns. Also Linnell doing this sort of thing on the keyboard where he plays all the notes quickly, sort of sliding down or up all the keys… Ok, I looked it up, I think that’s called glissando? So yeah, that also stuck in my head especially, because it was so fun. One of the top 5 moments of the show, without a doubt.

And now, alright, When Will You Die? is not a song that ever struck me as much of a favourite, besides being a very outstandingly hilarious and real song when it comes to lyrics of course, but I can’t lie and say that I wasn’t very happy to hear this one too. Singing these lyrics in a room full of hundreds of people who did the same was an incredibly grand moment, ok.

And then… then we were met with the haunting sounds of the intro of Road Movie To Berlin. A song that’s still, even after dozens of relistens, a whole experience each time I hear it when listening to Flood, and, as you might expect, it’s even more of an experience live. And I’m of course mostly talking about this whole sort of breakdown section near the end, but just the whole entire thing really hits anyway.

So when it started I definitely had a little moment of “oh shit, here we go, THE moment is here…”. Something akin to this happened over and over during the whole show obviously, but still, I feel like it was especially big here. Another thing is how later my friend laughed that they once again felt like they were the only person singing the secret third verse. Well, at least one more person did (me). Anyway, all in all it was just, magical, truly.

So, uh. Now, enjoy some top-notch banter that followed.

JL: So, uh, what’s going on here.

JF: We’re in London, John.

JL: We’re in London, we’re doing songs from Flood.

JF: We’re in yet another circular building.

JL: Right.

(a moment of silence)

JF: We’re doing songs from Flood. This is one of them.

(some people in the audience make clearly audible “wooo” noises)

JL: We get to woo.

(people laugh and woo even louder)

JL: There’s this thing in Britain where people get creative with the interactive thing. And it’s kind of good and it’s kind of, like… it worries us. The drunken part of it. It’s a problem.

(someone in the audience laughs in a very pronounced drunken manner)

Ok, Women And Men, that was the next song. Not much to say about this one to be honest, or like, anything at all really. And then more Flood, in the form of Your Racist Friend, which totally rocked, and we, I mean WE specifically, had the pleasure of standing where we could enjoy how Jordan Katz played his trumpet solo right in front of us. Honestly, this was kind of the only major downside of standing where we stood, that the horns were kind of hidden from our view for the most part… So this was a GRAND moment.

I have found that no matter how many times I watch recordings of it, the way Stellub gets introduced at these shows is always extremely funny to me, so here’s, like, almost all of how that went this time.

JF: Folks, we’ve got a very special treat for you right now. When we first embarked on doing these Flood shows, we thought: what can we do to make the show a little more challenging, a little more of… an endurance test. So we thought, we’ll take the time out to learn a song *sonically in reverse*...

(a long pause prompting audience laughter)

JF: …present it to the crowd… who might not enjoy that. (audience laughs) But then, we’re going to record it, on our very special fancy video recording machine, and we’re going to reverse the tape, and present it to you at the top of the second set, which will be… *pure entertainment*.

(audience laughs and woos. claps, also)

JF: …so think of the next two and a half minutes as a *musical investment in your future* (audience, well, laughs). If you brought friends here, we understand; they might be looking at you, going: “WHY?” (audience laughs some more) “Why this, why now? Life is complicated enough, why do bands *insist* on performing songs in reverse?”. But I can assure you, it’s a huge payoff. Especially if the machine works.

At this point I should give a shoutout to my uninitiated brother, who is not a fan of TMBG and whom I sort of dragged along with me here, although well, he did agree to this whole thing (besides the standing in the rain for two hours. He says that’s the part that he didn’t need to experience but well, what could *I* possibly do about that). Because he told me later that yes, the song in reverse thing was pretty cool. Well, I guess I could say as much anyway from how he definitely seemed very amused by Flansburgh’s introduction. But he also told me that if they didn’t say anything about this song being played in reverse, he wouldn’t even be able to tell, because it didn’t sound all that different from all the other songs. So I guess that answers my question of how newcomers may perceive TMBG’s lyrics, in a way. At least in the live show environment. It must be a lot to take in at once.

But anyway, the Johns joked about this whole thing some more (and how the screen was unusually huge for them and had this whole sort of 70s delay effect) and Linnell informed us that he would kick one of his shoes off at the end of the song and that we would also see THAT backwards.

JL: It’s just gonna be CRAZY! It’s gonna look… can’t even describe it.

JF (in silly gruff voice): Tonight! On video tape!

So, Sapphire Bullets Of Pure Love. You know, it’s just yet another of those things where I’ve been awaiting THIS MOMENT, IN REAL LIFE for so long. Very fun and at this point I sometimes even feel like I might be more familiar with the reversed sound of this song than the original… Like, it comes to mind more often. “stiiiiillub rah-fahs”, “stosh-nog, stosh-lut-sip” and similar phrases followed me around for days after the show. And I love how expressive the Johns are during this song, it’s just this whole theatricality of it that makes it very funny and awesome.

My favourite moment was when, in spirit of, well, all of this being performed in reverse, Marty also did the counting down to the start of the song with his drumsticks, but at the end. I read later that Linnell also used to sometimes instruct the audience to applaud before they start playing the song and damn, I wish he still did that because that's just hilarious.

And could this really be… the last song of the first set already - Brontosaurus. One thing about this song is that I used to not care about it much, until I saw a recording of their first live performance of it all the way back sometime around the end of 2022 / beginning of 2023, when I just about cried from the wonder of it all. This song is just a whole new thing live, in huge part thanks to the horns of course. Cathartic maybe is the right word for it. One of those songs that I could be pretty much 100% sure I would hear on this day but even despite that, when it actually came to it… Very very beautiful moment. Maybe this is when I almost cried again actually? Well, there were many contenders.

Set 2

So as you just read here, there was an abundance of stuff in the first set already that had me all like “this is the BEST!!!”, yet… We had this little moment of doubt with my friend, because: a) they were hoping to still hear at least a couple of songs that they didn’t already hear the previous night, b) I, having “analyzed” the setlists from this leg of the tour so far, in order to assess how likely I’d be to hear some of my favs, and if there’s any logic to how they change from night to night, decided that there’s two main setlist that the band alternates between. But based on the first half of the show so far it seemed to me like this was going to be a very similar set of songs to last night’s, and out of those two variants, the one I was hoping for less than the other… It was mostly them playing Darlings today once again that made me think this.

And all in all in my head it was like, well, I’ll probably get either the show with Darlings & Lie Still, Little Bottle (+the STICK!!!) OR the show with lots of miscellaneous songs that were very high on my wishlist. So, in either case I’d be happy, but maybe a bit more happy if we got the second option here…

Anyway. What I’m saying is that, keeping all of the above in mind, and how my expectations for the second set were shaped by that… I really can’t overstate how much of an UNREAL NO WAY YOU GOTTA BE JOKING THIS IS NOT ACTUALLY HAPPENING RIGHT??? time it turned out to be.

So let’s get right into why. And boy, there’s a lot. In a way this is when this show REALLY started for me, not that what was earlier wasn’t incredibly fun and amazing already but. This was just a whole different league. It’s like, I could say that earlier I felt at moments like I’m sometimes transported into some alternate dimension, and from here on it was all just, being transported into that joyous alternate dimension for the whole duration of the show. The TMBG dimension. I’ll get back to this, but being here was really just something like, a different type of existence, so different from the often bleak daily life that I’ve been way too familiar with until then.

One thing that sort of added once again to this whole “it’s all perfectly falling into place” feeling, even before the show started up again, was how I tried to pay attention to the intermission music again, and remembered from my days of watching many live show recordings in late 2022 how someone pointed out that when this one specific song plays, you can tell that the show will start in just a moment. And yeah, they were right. Girl Don’t Come started playing so I knew…

And so the second set started with the reversed recording of the Stellub performance of course (how many times have they performed it by that point? Over a hundred? But yeah, it was scarily accurate, as always), and the alternate version of Hearing Aid with this whole little animation thing, which was also a lot of fun to watch actually.

And so the band was back for the second round… with Memo To Human Resources! So I’d known for a while that this song has been a pretty oft played one recently, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any recordings of it live? And to be honest my memory of this song is really blurry, so it’s still kind of an enigmatic moment to me now, all in all I’m sure though that it must have hit the same way Moonbeam Rays or Brontosaurus did, and that might explain this whole effect it presumably had on me, heh.

And now, ok. Man, It’s So Loud In Here will never ever feel the same way to me again. Because actually nothing could have prepared me for how amazing it was live. And I didn’t even particularly anticipate this one, but when we got to it… I knew already that it was going to be a blast.

I remember thinking that this is one of those moments that you simply can’t capture in any way, you’re just fully here in the moment and you live it there and remember it forever. I was also thinking about the meaning of the song, about this classic TMBG fashion of singing this song in this huge room full of people, a song about how it’s so loud in here. And I was wondering if that’d be another of those little confusing moments for people unfamiliar with TMBG because yes, I suppose it’s pretty silly… On top of being an incredible and actually moving experience. I’m shedding a tear just thinking about it all now.

So now, more Flood time! Minimum Wage, a song that, per Linnell’s words, they’ve been playing “for 40 years”...

JL: …And we just got to the point where we all end at exactly the same time. We had so much integrity for so long… And now we’re just sleek… robots up here.

JF: Yeah, that AI showbusiness stuff. Nobody likes it - you gotta do it, you know. It’s the way people DO IT!

JL: I’ve got six fingers…. (JL demonstrates how he has six fingers, apparently)

JF: Yeah, yeah… (with emphasis) *AI*.

(long pause prompting audience laughter)

JF: It makes its own punchline!

But um, what was next on the agenda (John)? More songs from the Flood album, oh yes! Let’s give the people some more of what they want!

JL: That feisty… that album by that bunch of maverick… young… rulebreakin’... (pause) But those days are gone.

JF: Well, the one thing that remains is the barricade putting eight feet between us and the front row. That’s the important thing. The distance.

JL: And you know, it’s not for *our* protection, it’s for *yours*.

Alright, so here’s another song. Here’s another song from Flood. And that song is We Want A Rock. What I remember the most about this one is, once again, the beauty of being able to sing these “ridiculous lyrics” when everyone else is doing the same thing, when we’re all singing about how everyone wants a rock to wind a string around and about how everyone wants prosthetic foreheads on their real heads but someone in this town is trying to burn the foreheads down. At some point I just couldn't help having a little laugh over the joy of it all. And also, *boom boom boom* “ooooOOOOOOH!!” *boom boom boom* “oooooOOOOOOH!!”

Then it was Marty time, starting with the drum intro and the BUZZER, for it’s time for Hot Cha! Which becomes even more of a blast with the HORNS of course, and at the very end, can you believe it, I forgot that they change the last line of the song to “please come home” live, so I was slightly taken aback by that. Yes, that’s important to mention here, somehow.

Flansburgh introduced the next song as a song from the Lincoln album and for some goddamned reason the only song I could think of at the moment that fit that criteria was Shoehorn With Teeth.

It was not Shoehorn With Teeth. It was the song that came back to live rotation earlier in 2024 during the spring US tour, but seemed to fall from it afterwards once again, which was a shame, because it’s like, probably my favourite TMBG song to be honest and its newest live rendition was absolutely breathtakingly amazing from what I’ve seen from recordings online. I’m not sure if I was aware by that point of how it miraculously returned as an encore at the show of the night before…

But still, this was like the biggest “this can’t be real actual and happening right now” moment of the night, and maybe. of my. entire life?? And it of course took me a couple of seconds to recognise the song STILL, besides the instant punch of that *feeling* that happened the second the song started. Yeah, Where Your Eyes Don’t Go, played live at my show just like I dreamed about, no big deal, everyday stuff, haha.

The song really IS freaking amazing live though. Where would we be without THE HORNS!!! And honestly I could say a bit more about this “fav song” situation, because not only is it of course among my most beloved ever songs at this moment and has been for over two years, I also remember distinctly that it was the FIRST TMBG song that I loved and couldn’t get enough of and replayed over and over, and it’s a big reason behind why I became a fan in the first place. So, the extra beauty of the significance of it all, it just blows my mind completely.

So, Lucky Ball And Chain was a short little break for collecting myself again, because obviously we were far from done with all the biggest wonders of the night still. And I’m not saying that the song wasn’t a good time, it of course was just like everything else here, so it’s safe to just assume that without me specifying each time. Lol.

But, as I said, the break was short. I would have put seeing Spy live somewhere at the top of my general life goals / bucket list thing, if I had one, that is. I had been very vocal about wanting to see THAT song in particular in discussions with my friend, so the excited glance we exchanged the moment this song started was absolutely priceless and a thing of pure wonder.

Anyway, we all know Spy. We all know that it’s one of the most often played live songs of theirs, and that the reason behind its live durability is the several minutes long improvised jam band section at the end. And I might be one of those maybe rare kinds of people who wouldn’t mind hearing it a hundred times more. It IS improvised after all, so… different each time, ha! It was also very vital to me that I get to take part in the audience participation segment of it… and this is also what was granted to me on this magical evening by whatever godlike forces exist above.

So yeah, this was yet another among the top 5 show moments of course… The biggest highlights here were when Linnell did this sort of old-timey speech (“THIS! Is the *sound* of the thirties. The sound of the SWING ERA!”) that’s probably a reference to something that I’m completely unfamiliar with so that only makes it funnier, and the whole audience conducting part from Flansburgh at the end, because man, he was having a total BLAST with this, it was such a joy to see. And we were all also having a great time, by doing our part and screaming as if we’re in hell. All I’m trying to say here is. I love hellish noise, I love cacophony. This is my perfect kind of show experience, I won’t be hearing any arguments about this.

Ok, so what was the next thing that the Johns prepared with the intent of dealing the biggest emotional damage imaginable to us? Well, remember how Last Wave had never been played live until earlier this year and then they never played it again. Guess what happened now. Well, that’s yet another of the huge and one of the earliest personal favourites of mine returning onto the setlist on the previous evening actually.

This song is. Augh. I just love how it has this sort of elegant, but emotional sound that kind of sets it apart. It’s a completely singular song to me in every sense and I always wondered why they never played it live, but now I’m just glad they finally started playing it. Gotta love yet another AMAZING trumpet solo from Jordan Katz and the Johns’ overdramatized delivery of the lyrics, it’s so much fun. And this song also provided us with some more epic Marty moments, especially the solo and the ending, both just like on the studio recording technically… So maybe that’s why they were so great to see recreated in real time too?

JF: I think we were all a little stunned by the majesty of the ending of that song.

Two days before the show I went to the Natural History Museum here in London, and that's actually very relevant here because when I saw the exhibit that was entitled “Mammals” in that museum, that was when the SONG Mammal started following me around in my mind, for like, most of the remaining time of that day. And I had the amazing realization that oh, it’s not impossible that I could hear this song this next Sunday, played live, so awesome!!

So yeah of course, they played Mammal next. And honestly I’m not even that attached to this song, I do still love it though and it’s one of those situations where I see myself become excited over songs that I feel like are big fan favourites and something that other people are probably very happy about hearing, heh. But maybe even more important yet is that this meant APOLLO 18 representation!! So special to me.

Now I’ll just say that it’s worth it avoiding spoilers sometimes. Like, show spoilers, because I guess I didn’t actually watch that much recent footage and so I had no idea about what other awesome fun stuff was just about to happen.

JF: Folks, folks… we’ve been informed by the people who work here that every single person in the audience tonight is carrying a silly little phone with them. And we'd like to take full advantage of that right now…

We were instructed by Flansburgh to get our phones and open our camera and set it to selfie mode! And then Turn Around, Turn Around, (there’s a thing there that can be found)…

JF: We can see you now and I can tell that nobody is doing what I’m talking about.

You know, so this is when you get to live that wonder of actually BEING THERE once more. And enjoy the way that specifically TMBG shows are, because I’ll be real, I can’t think of any other concert where I could see something like this happening.

JF: Everybody, spin around for just a little bit, get a selfie and we’re gonna photobomb your selfie.

JL: Which we tried to do last night and nobody was getting it!

JF (interrupting): That’s not true! On social media you’re gonna see some very good evidence that some people got together over the course of the twenty minutes we dedicated to this portion of the show.

So yeah, now I can even keep on living my life knowing that I technically have a photo with my favourite musicians in the world. Definitely not something I expected to gain after this day.

JF: We’re gonna take a lot of time doing this. This is possibly the least important thing we’ll be working on…

So that was awesome!!! BUT WAIT THERE WAS MORE!!!!!!

JF: Ok folks, this the second part of the test: see if you can find the flashlight portion of your phone - the more traditional rock portion.

That “more traditional rock portion” part must have been lost on me then, because this was still a singular moment to me (I haven’t been to many live shows before this anyway), and I could only really think of one other thing that this immediately reminded me of. I like yearning for all sorts of things, including those that are in the past now and that I never even could have had a real chance of participating in. Such as the Hollywood Bowl show in 2023, where TMBG opened for Sparks, and during the Sparks show and the song All That everyone in the audience took out their phones and there was this whole sea of lights, people swaying with their phone torches to that song. So, yes, I was NOT expecting either that I’d get to experience THIS as well. After all.

At first I wasn’t even aware that all the stage lights had been turned off for the next song, because with all those torches facing the stage it was so bright in here!! And the song that got this special treatment was Dead - very fitting I must say. The large procession waved their torches AND sang, and I can hear it on the recording of this song especially that the audience was really into the singing part. Loud and beautiful and touching to be there.

And then it was time to thank the band, since the end of the show was actually drawing closer and closer, as absurd as it may have seemed to think about… (not that there was really time to stop and think about that anyway). And I think the Johns did some sort of jab at Elektra Entertainment here, but I unfortunately couldn’t catch what they were saying, rip. Anyway, it must have been very funny I’m sure.

So what songs could possibly still be left and ahead of us now? Two more songs from Flood, here we go.

Why is the world in love again? Because it's time to be marching hand in hand and singing Theme From Flood! And once again being reminded of how WE'RE ALL HERE TOGETHER. All in all, the moment of this song, and it going right into Birdhouse In Your Soul, yes, that was just as ethereal and unreal as I imagined it would be. Even now, as I'm thinking back to it, I start to feel overwhelmed with the excitement, how I was just sort of going “YES YES YES!!!” in my head, after the “I'm your only friend” bit, when it gets kind of quiet for a second and it starts up again we're all jumping and cheering. I could only try to picture an approximation of this scene in my mind months earlier, so thinking about how this actually happened is still absolutely surreal to me. There's just nothing else like Birdhouse.

…

Damn it, I still have a bit more of the show to write about, it’s not the time for tears, brother.

I didn’t want the song to end and it almost seemed like the band didn’t either, because Linnell kept singing the “soul” at the end for several more seconds and also making it goofier still.

Encores time

End of show? No, two encores now. The encore waiting and clapping time until the band comes back on stage felt much much shorter than it always did when I watched recordings of shows. Shouldn't be surprising but everything here felt like it took 10% of the time it actually lasted.

So it was time for the most wondrous thing, a John and John only performance as a duo! This wasn't a total surprise to me, because I knew they switched up the way they play this particular song once again, on some nights at least, but I couldn't be sure that I'd be blessed enough to witness it myself too… And here it was, about to happen!!!

People were screaming Istanbul a lot. I could’ve been easily more annoyed by that, but you know what, I think this is necessary too. How could this be a REAL concert experience without a bunch of presumably drunk people shouting out the titles of songs and being annoying. Maybe if one of those people was standing close to us I'd be talking differently, but… It's part of the charm, sorry.

It was in fact Istanbul (Not Constantinople) time. I’ll be honest, if it weren’t for the duo format I would have not cared for this song any more than I did for Particle Man. But it turned out to be one of my favourite things on this show, yeah, this evening subverted so many expectations in every sense, alright.

You could argue about the significance of the duo format here because OMG, it’s just like in the old days!!!! The good old days or whatever. But no, it’s also just… I don’t know. Even to me, who obviously hasn’t known TMBG for that long, it was another of those kind of touching moments. And what made it all even better was when soon after this show, I happened to watch a video of a Flood show… from 1990. Like wow, this really is kind of just like the 1990 duo days. EXCEPT it’s much cooler now actually.

I didn’t record this song but definitely would have if our view for it was better. Well, thankfully someone else took care of that anyway. And I think that instead of me trying to describe it here, everyone should just do themselves a favour and watch it. I can't get over how beautifully unserious and funny this performance was, watching that must have been the most fun I've had in a looooong time. Again, top 5 moments of the night, maybe top 3 even.

Now, what were the funniest bits. “Peoplejustpeoplejustpeoplejust…” and the Get In The Car bit. And the “yeeeeeees”. And the “noooooo”. And the “istanbuuuuuuul…. ouuuuu…. oouuuuuu…”. You get it, right.

Can’t Keep Johnny Down was the second song of the encore and this performance is the only reason why this song suddenly became like, a literal favorite. The power of live shows! Now whenever I hear it I'm just like. OOOOOH Johnny. Save me Johnny, save me.

Linnell told us “thanks so much, you guys are great!” before they all left the stage :) And of course there was still one more song that I had to hear today. So after more clapping and cheering they were back on stage again.

JL: Yes! Thanks a million. No! Two million! (in a bit of a jokey voice) …I’ve never thanked that much before.

And you know what, I choose to believe that he meant it.

The last song of the night was Doctor Worm. I don’t know what else I can say about this song now, just that upon relistening to this whole show again I’m realizing that I could just. call this song kind of a perfect live song. Maybe I associate it with live shows more than anything else since it's not featured on any studio album and I've definitely heard it wayyyy more times in the form of live recordings than the studio version. And also maybe I lied that Synopsis haunted me the most after the show, Doctor Worm must have been even more insistent in that sense, and I had no issue with that honestly.

And so, with the last one “They call me Dooctooor WOOOOOORM!!” and a finishing BWAAAAA from the horns, the show was over.

After the show

Don’t worry, there’s much less to talk about now in terms of the after show stuff compared to before the show. Just this one important thing that, yet again, as if this wasn’t ENOUGH ALREADY…!!! We had to hang out by the stage for a bit longer still, because there’s a chance of ending up with a SETLIST. Or a drumstick. But I guess the setlist was more important.

And Marty walked over to us. And handed us the setlist. I mean, it was my friend who grabbed the setlist, but to me that was just like we all were chosen, it really didn't matter to me who actually had it. So it was a win! I really couldn’t ask for anything else by that point. I got it all.

Then we had to wait for a bit by the merch stand because lots of folks gathered there and thankfully, there was still lots of stuff to choose from! I would have loved to go a bit more crazy with this maybe, but since I still had to keep in mind having to travel back with all this stuff, flying, customs and all that… I settled for a tour shirt, because yeah, a shirt with the dates of the tour I ATTENDED printed on it? I needed that, that would do as the only physical souvenir even, no need for anything more (well, I actually did get a bit more, because the very next day I went by a random record store here in Camden Town in hopes of finding THE album somewhere in London still. and guess what I found….., but that’s a whole different story so let me just limit myself to only the day of the show in this post). The shirt is a total slay by the way, I love the burgundy color.

After we left the venue we still managed to bump into more folks going back from the concert. And like 3 different people in total who asked us about the setlist and where we arrived from, said that woooow, you deserve to have it then. Thank you people for also appreciating all the hard work that went into this.

My brother & I had a very short way back to our hotel now, so in the end it really felt like we just returned from a quick little fun event just down the street. Even though we travelled pretty far to get here, you know. So it didn't even feel like some huge endeavour or anything all that unusual, and I mean that in the best way possible.

So my day ended with my head full of thoughts and images and fragments of songs looped ad nauseam. And also with an aching back and no energy left in me to stand for even one more minute. The tiredness was very real but I must say that tired-happy might be one of the best emotions / states one could have to deal with. I hope I can do all of this again someday, because I’m actually so serious that I wouldn’t mind going to a TMBG show every other evening if I could. That’s the dream actually.

Miscellaneous T(houghts) time

Ok, I swear I’m almost done. Just a couple general / finishing observations about the show as a whole now.

● First of all, I want to come back for a bit to that TMBG dimension thing. Because this whole thing really was sort of like entering some sort of different mode of existing. The Johns are very funny guys and the whole band’s energy is extremely infectious, but I also think it’s a very special thing how their stage presence creates this whole atmosphere that’s just completely laid-back and fun in the purest form of fun. Even when there’s a big crowd and we’re in an “important” venue. Because you sort of really feel at home, like you’re exactly where you belong. And earlier I could imagine it being more like, oh the stakes are so high, because this is THE EVENT, finally. And in reality this was the most relaxed I’ve felt in a very long time. And I was almost painfully aware of how I was watching it all with sparkly eyes, hoping that it’s maybe not too obvious because waaaah, embarrassing, it’s not like I’m having the best time ever right now or anything, please.

● However, all of the above definitely had a lot to do with how the audience was at the show, and I was just really surprised by how very awesome the audience's energy was. Like I could imagine it being maybe less enthusiastic after all because uh well, maybe a lot of people actually could be here more for Flood and Birdhouse and all that rather than the actual band… Shouldn’t have underestimated this fanbase, because the audience was so responsive to everything and just made it feel even more like the explosion of joy it really was. And I really felt like I was with *my* people, and, especially when it’s a huge group like this.. that’s very rare and special to me.

● I’ve discovered that in TMBG dimension time isn’t real because I swear, when the first set was coming to a close, I felt like maybe only 20 minutes passed and we’ve only heard maybe 6 songs so far, instead of the actual. 17 songs. 17?? damn, that's a lot of songs. I actually haven’t counted them until now. And it was 33 songs in total, 36 if you add the intros and reversed Stellub, huh!

● You people weren’t lying about the Linnell stare. Actually, related to this, another worry I sort of had before this was that should I end up close to the stage, I might feel too awkward about being possibly perceived by the band in any way to truly enjoy myself. But that actually wasn’t the case at all, not counting like a couple of moments only where I’d make maybe-imaginary, maybe-real eye contact with someone from the band and have to look way fast because noooo, don’t perceive me actually, lol.

● And again, you people weren’t lying either that these guys have unbelievable amounts of energy that make you feel like an old man who can barely stand for a couple hours in comparison. This is coming from a 23-year-old, maybe not the most athletic person in the world, but still. Also, Marty really is the guy of all time, loved watching his antics. And one more special shoutout to the Tricerachops Horns, because yes, these songs I’ve loved for a while already CAN get even better and simply epic and beautiful.

All in all, best show ever! Honestly, I don’t know if any other show could possibly top this. I would be very happy to be proven wrong of course, especially if that were to happen because of another TMBG show. Thank you Johns and everyone else for this evening, it was a dream come true and I’ll never forget how out of this world and amazing it was!!

[thekatebridgerton]

Rewatching s3 I realized that I never actually gave my opinion on the full season to you guys.

Mostly because it was good, every single Penelope and Colin scene was well written, well paced and crafted to bring their relationship full circle. In fact if I could edit s3 into a movie I'd cut everything off and leave the 1 or 2 hours of accumlated screentime that Penelope and Colin had together. Nicola and Luke really brought their A game.

Lord Debling wasa solid character, I really liked him, at first I thought he was going to be like Theo and have no purpose other than make Colin jealous, but he stood his ground as a well developed character ( for the few episodes he was in), I'm sad that he seemingly disappeared after Penelope and Colin got together and I genuinely wish he'd have found a good bride who would write to him and take care of his estate in his absence.

Francesca's storyline with John was also very complimentary, I once said I wanted to see how Eloise related to Francesca who didn't mind being a debutante just like Daphne and I am glad they gave Francesca her own unique charm as well as her own brand of awkwardness, not as obsessed with being perfect as Daphne but also not as antagonizing as Eloise. John was just the right ammount of kind and special that you can see how much Francesca really loves him. ( I'm choosing to ignore what I know of the books and look at Francesca's meeting with Michaela as just another awkward moment Francesca suffers in front of an extrovert .. mostly because I think its weird that neither John or his staff told Michaela he was married and to a Bridgerton sparkler at that, the whole ' and you are' felt really out of place and made me scratch my head)

The featheringtons actually felt more organically integrated into the plotline because this season they are in the position of being the female lead relatives so their shenanigans actually feel more plot relevant. And add levity to what would otherwise be a very dramatic series of episodes

Now on to the things I made fun of: every scene Benedict had with Lady Tilly, is very skippable, and honestly not plot relevant, after 2 seasons of watching him hoe around, a third one is just overkill. Also lady Tilly catching feelings and Benedict activating ' I want my freedom' mode is so hilarious. Gosh I wish him a very sexually frustrated and abstinent season 4.

Eloise friendship with Cressida also felt like filler. I know I've been saying Eloise needs friends since forever but I meant Kate, or Edwina or Sophie. Cressida Cowper was..a choice. And one that ultimately added very little to Eloise character development. But hey at least Eloise tried to make friends this season, I call that a step in the right direction.

Overall it was a good season, I'm sorry if I complain a lot about the parts I didn't like, but for the most part, it was good watchable content with a few snags that can be ironed out in fanfiction. The dresses were amazing and I hope their wardrobe department gets a raise for the hard work they put in these 2 years of sewing and pattern making. Hopefully one day I'll get a documentary about the Bridgerton wardrobe department process of selecting fabrics and making dresses. It would be lovely to see.

So far that's been my very belated season 3 review. And that's the tea

[aquamarine-oceanfront]

Unofficial Bunny Maloney FAQ

Since Saberspark's reviewing the show today, I figured it would be in everyone's best interests to write this up now - people new to Bunny Maloney can get answers to several common questions in one go, while people already familiar with it can send this to others whenever necessary. (For what it's worth, I honestly think even the biggest fans of the series might learn something new here.) I know the show's creator posted a short FAQ of his own about a month ago, but I figured it was worth treading some of the same ground while going more in-depth.

Disclaimer: I'm trying my best to be as factual as possible here, but I cannot completely rule out the possibility that I am wrong or misleading about something here. Please let me know if something's amiss, or if you've seen other common questions that could be added! Similarly, for authenticity's sake, all quotes are presented exactly how they were originally written.

I've divided this post into short and long sections - they cover the same questions, but the latter is more in-depth and is replete with source links. If you're in a hurry, then here are the brief answers:

"Was Bunny Maloney really meant for children?" No, not originally. Original creator Nicolaï "Méko" Chauvet intended for the show to be aimed at teenagers first and foremost (with some appeal to younger children), but MoonScoop insisted it be targeted solely at kids. Director Stéphane Stoll fought to keep true to the original intent, hence why the final product still has a lot of adult content.

"Does Méko have any missing English episodes?" No. All he has are 8-10 episodes of (an early version of) the French dub that MoonScoop gave him back in the day.

"What species is Charlotte?" While many sources (including her English voice actor and two lines in the show itself) assume she's a cow, Méko actually intended for her to be a goat.

"Is Jean-François's English voice actor the same as the main character in Hatred?" I'm not so sure about that. Tom Clarke-Hill was definitely part of the English cast, but the credits don't specify which characters he voiced, and I haven't found anything that would definitively prove he voiced Jean-François. (For that matter, Hatred uses a pseudonym while crediting its player character's voice actor - it's commonly believed Clarke-Hill did it, but I haven't found any hard evidence otherwise.)

"Will there be a season 2?" There's no definitive plans just yet (and please don't bother Méko about it). Not much to add here - he's stated many a time that he'd love to revive Bunny Maloney, but there's nothing concrete at the time I'm writing this.

Below the jump are my full answers to the same questions:

(V1.1 [12/14/24]: Lightly edited to correct some errors I missed)

Was Bunny Maloney really meant for children?

This is surprisingly complicated to answer in full, even if the short answer seems simple enough.

While Méko first came up with Bunny Maloney (the character) in 1998, the history of the TV series specifically began with L'attaque du poulpe rouge géant ("Attack of the Giant Red Octopus" in English), a short Flash animation he directed in the early 2000s. As he wrote in an email to YouTuber Li Speaks earlier in 2024:

l'attaque du poulpe rouge geant, and it's total freedom of speech, references and mature content was aiming only 2 targets in my mind : Internet of course, free content, like my friends pushed me to do, and anime conventions, where it have a big succes because it was clearly dedicated to all we loved in japanese pop culture.

He did not originally intend for it to be a pilot, mind you. Méko only decided to try and rework the concept into a full TV series after the short won the "Netsurfers Award" at the 2003 Annecy Festival, producing a pitch bible for what was then called Pinpin le Lapin. In the aforementioned email exchange, he clearly states twice that he intended for the show to target a teenage audience. (He does say at one point that "we wanted to keep an interest for the big brothers and sisters and make them watching buny too, like the simpsons at the beginning." Tying into this, the cover of the pitch bible gives the intended audience as "8 year olds and over" - Méko later explained that "'over' was more important than '8'" here.)

However, these plans were repeatedly challenged as the series entered production. According to the tweet I just linked, the primary investor insisted that they exclusively target teenagers & adults, forcing the bible to be rewritten accordingly. MoonScoop, the primary production company, had the opposite problem - their management was equally insistent that the series target kids and kids alone, watering down Méko's original intent. (He claims in the same email exchange as before that the company was "a real army of 40 years old parisian mothers at that time." They were also the ones responsible for renaming the series Bunny Maloney - they reasoned that English-speaking audiences would find it funnier, ignoring Méko's warnings about potential confusion with the singer of the same name.)

However, director Stéphane Stoll spent a significant amount of time and effort sticking to the original target demographic (according to Méko's emails). His work certainly paid off, as evident by the amount of adult humor in the final product. MoonScoop, for the most part, seemed to continue treating Bunny Maloney as a children's program - their official site billed it as being for ages "6 and up," for instance. (The lone exception is an official PowerPoint presentation that gives the show's genre as "adult-escent’ comedy, action adventure!") The tension between the disparate target audiences actually impacted its premiere in France: originally scheduled to debut on Canal+ Family near the end of March 2009 (specifically as part of Cartoon+, a then-new series showing episodes of various contemporary cartoons), it was pulled at the last minute because the channel decided it was unsuitable for children. (It ultimately premiered on the network three months later, albeit in the early afternoon instead of its original evening timeslot.)

I haven't examined every single non-French channel that aired the show, but all the ones I'm aware of were definitely meant for kids. The two most familiar ones definitely were: Kabillion (in the US) is dedicated to children's cartoons, while Kix (in the UK) specifically targeted 7 to 12 year-old boys.

Does Méko have any missing English episodes?

He does not. All he has are a few early French episodes (between eight and ten) that MoonScoop gave him back when the series was in production.

What species is Charlotte?

She's a goat. I don't blame people for getting confused, since Bunny and Candy explicitly call her a cow in two separate episodes - even Phillipa Alexander, her English voice actor, once described her as such on her website. However, Meko originally designed her with a shorter tail than in the show as produced - closer to a goat than a cow. (His own artwork also refers to her as a goat quite frequently.) But don't take my word for it - take his:

HEY, YANKEES : CHARLOTTE IS A GOAT !

Is Jean-François's English voice actor the same as the main character in Hatred?

I can't give a definitive answer to this either way. In case you didn't already know: Hatred is a video game released in 2015 that attracted massive amounts of controversy because of its extraordinarily violent content. Its player character, officially named "the Antagonist" but popularly known as "Not Important," is voiced by someone credited as "Clint Westwood" - a pre-release interview with the developers confirms the actor used a fake name to stay anonymous. Many people believe his real identity is Tom Clarke-Hill, but to my knowledge he has never confirmed this (perhaps unsurprisingly) - it's just speculation rooted in comparisons to his other roles. (As an example, this Steam forum post notes that "the Antagonist" sounds similar to Clarke-Hill's performance as Karl Fairburne in the Sniper Elite series.)

As for Bunny Maloney: Tom Clarke-Hill was 100% part of the English voice cast, as you can see below.

However, there's no mention of which roles these six actors took on. While some of them have provided that information elsewhere (like their own websites or, in Matt Wilkinson's case, a demo reel), I haven't been able to find a credible source saying that Clarke-Hill voiced Jean-François. (If you find or already know one, please let me know!)

Also, there's another, possibly more important question to consider: since Jean-François's lines sound exactly the same in French, does he even have an English voice actor? I'm genuinely not sure - he is the only character who always uses the French pronunciation of his own name (while the others tend to say it more like "John-François"), but that's hardly definitive evidence.

Will there be a season 2?

I think Méko answered this succintly in his own FAQ:

For now, i would be more than happy to do season 2, it has been in my dreams for years and i will do everything in my power for that, but there isn't anything official yet. Please don't ask me "when" […] but be sure i will do an announce when the time has come!