#even the bit about getting the balance between kindness and cleverness. and power and politeness. really resonates because i don't think

[influencermagazineuk]

Nikki Glaser, the comedian who hosted the 82nd Golden Globe Awards, delivered a memorable opening monologue filled with witty jabs and playful humor. As the host, Glaser had the tough task of keeping the audience engaged while balancing the art of comedy with respect for the guests in the room. Although her jokes were sharp, they never crossed the line into being overly harsh. Here’s a breakdown of some of the best and funniest moments from her 10-minute monologue. Glaser kicked off the show with a funny remark about the event’s atmosphere. She opened by saying, "Welcome to the Golden Globes, Ozempic’s biggest night!" The mention of Ozempic, a medication that’s recently gained attention for weight loss, instantly grabbed the audience’s attention. Glaser joked that she had finally "made it" by being at the Beverly Hilton, but humorously noted that this time she was fully dressed. It was a perfect start to her night of jokes, blending self-deprecation with the kind of humor that made her such a popular choice for hosting. Credits: Instagram One of the most memorable parts of Glaser’s opening remarks was when she poked fun at the political influence of celebrities. She said, "I’m not here to roast you. And how could I? You’re all so famous, so talented, so powerful. I mean, you could really do anything — except tell the country who to vote for. But it’s okay. You’ll get them next time!" The playful jab at Hollywood’s political involvement was met with laughter, as Glaser captured the complex relationship between fame and activism in a lighthearted way. Later, she made a cheeky joke about Ben Affleck and the movies nominated that evening. "Wicked, Queer, Nightbitch — these are not just words Ben Affleck yells after he orgasms. These are some of the incredible movies nominated tonight." The comment, although a bit edgy, was clearly meant to be playful, and it got a great reaction from the crowd. Glaser had a unique way of balancing sharp humor with genuine respect for the movies being recognized that night. Zendaya, another favorite at the awards, was also the target of a few jokes. Glaser praised her performance in Dune, saying, “I woke up for all of your scenes.” She also teased Zendaya’s other movie, Challengers, calling it more sexually charged than Diddy’s credit card. It was a humorous way to compliment Zendaya while making light of the buzz surrounding her roles. Glaser’s comment about the after-party, humorously mentioning how it wouldn’t be as good this year, added to the playful tone of the monologue. At one point, Glaser addressed the television networks where the show was airing. She said, “If you’re watching on CBS, hello. If you’re watching this on Paramount+ you have six days left to cancel your free trial.” It was a clever, timely jab at the ever-growing streaming wars, with Glaser’s delivery making it feel less like an advertisement and more like a well-timed joke. Another funny moment came when Glaser pointed out the hard-working actors in the room—by which she meant the servers. The line was a funny contrast, as she acknowledged the unseen work that goes on behind the scenes during such a glamorous event. It was a clever way to include everyone in the room, even those not on the stage. Glaser also couldn’t resist making a joke about Timothée Chalamet, who was nominated that evening. “Tilda Swinton is, of course, nominated this year for her role as Timothée Chalamet,” Glaser joked. The audience was in stitches as she continued, commenting on Chalamet’s iconic look, specifically his "gorgeous eyelashes" and his portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown. She cheekily noted that even Bob Dylan himself had admitted that Chalamet’s singing voice was "absolutely horrible." As the monologue continued, Glaser shifted gears and shared a funny story about her own high school experience with Wicked, the popular musical. She shared how much she loved the show, just like her friends, her boyfriend, and even her boyfriend’s boyfriend. This quirky and funny personal touch made the audience feel like they were getting to know Glaser a little better while still keeping things lighthearted. In a playful dig at two of the night’s most anticipated films, Wicked and Joker 2, Glaser made a funny comparison. She joked that in Wicked, some people complained the movie was ruined by people singing, while in Joker 2, people complained that the movie was ruined by "the images on the screen and the sounds that accompanied them." It was a humorous take on how both movies received mixed reviews, but it was all in good fun. When it came to Harrison Ford, Glaser didn’t hold back either. She shared an amusing exchange where she asked the legendary actor if he would rather work with Zendaya or Ariana Grande. Ford’s response? “Indica.” The audience burst into laughter at Glaser’s perfect delivery and the unexpected punchline. Credits: Instagram As the night went on, Glaser continued her witty commentary, including a playful reference to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the various television shows nominated that evening. Her comment about The Bear, The Penguin, and Baby Reindeer being “not just things found in R.F.K.’s freezer” was a sharp, yet playful jab, which once again balanced her comedy with respect for the event’s tone. Nicole Kidman also got her share of attention, with Glaser acknowledging her impressive 20 Golden Globe nominations. Glaser jokingly thanked Keith Urban for playing guitar around the house so much that it led Kidman to "make 18 movies a year." It was a funny and light-hearted way to pay tribute to Kidman’s dedication to her craft. Finally, Glaser ended her monologue with a joke about the unpredictability of the night. She joked that years from now, people would watch clips from this very event on YouTube and spot someone in the crowd who would later become infamous. The punchline was a clever nod to the fact that anything can happen, even at an event as glamorous as the Golden Globes. Read the full article

[parsley-the-crow]

The power to destroy a city. You mean nuclear power? Oh, I would have a field day explaining that to him. The weapons we have that just one of, one button you could press, would take an instant to reduce a city to rubble. Killing everyone in miles, scorching all the surrounding land in a way that will make it toxic to even approach for hundreds of years, possibly thousands, causing anything that steps foot there in that time to get sick and wither or mutate, every generation born there devolving genetically a little bit more. Just one button. It sounds like the power of a biblical curse put in human hands. It's wrong.

But isn't that kind of why the brain part of the Pretty surgery exists? Human civilization destroyed itself once with those things. That's because we're too clever, and too destructive. So we inevitably figure out how to do things like that, and then we can't help eventually using it. So those trapper predator instincts needed to be dulled. This is their idea of a more perfect human. One that looks perfectly, heart-meltingly charming, and is incapable of taking any risks and hurting themselves or saying anything that might not be socially acceptable. This was the reason I did really take to the Uglies books. It drew a direct line between self destruction and vitality. It claimed that one does not increase or decrease without dragging the other along with it and asked “How much danger is your zest for life worth? I didn’t really care about the criticism of beauty standards, but I love a good story that puts the question of “what is the optimal balance of chaos and order” to the reader personally. Jekyll’s answer was clearly “I more need more risk than the life I’ve been saddled with allows for, let me do something about- WAIT NO NOT THAT MUCH MORE-”

Which reminds me, when Tally was starting to find ways to break through the Pretty brained fog, do you remember that? Other Pretties could tell something was different about her. They couldn't tell what it was, but they could feel something inside her that they didn't have. So like. Imagine if it's Hyde who realizes there's something wrong with how Pretties think because of that instinct but in reverse? Maybe Jekyll thinks they act a lot like polite society does back home and everything that feels strange about them is just cultural drift, but then Hyde - who is more instinctive - tries talking to one of them and realizes what's going on. This is not a social face they're putting on like people would back home. There's nothing behind those big charming eyes of theirs. It's not a facade for them because this is all they are. There's something wrong with them. It's like trying to talk to a decoration. He finds it deeply unsettling for some reason. He liked the idea of the way the New Pretties lived, what with unlimited alcohol and sex and partying and thrills if you want them (I'm personally of the mind that Jekyll would be sent to live in Middle Pretty Town where they are decently far into adulthood and have jobs, but Hyde could pass as an older New Pretty and would try to sneak off to New Pretty Town). But as attractive as the people there are, they make him weirdly anxious. He keeps telling Jekyll, "They're mindless. They're all just copying each other." And that's how they find out about Pretty brainedness. Since they know about the whole surgery, they assume it comes from that.

So yeah, I do think Hyde would come out a few times. And he if he gets caught (which, let's be real, he probably will) they'll know about the transformation. Luka, they aren't going to give him the surgery, not at first. They're going to vivisect him. Both of them. Do you remember that Pre-Rusty tribe Tally found? That was in a huge enclosure? The Pretty scientists study human aggression for the purposes of controlling it, and they don't care about being ethical with their experiments at all. They're going to pick him apart. The technology is going to fuck Jekyll up and then the Pretty scientists are going to fuck Hyde up. They don't even know if the surgery would work on him, with what the transformation does. (What it will do is bind Edward up in that void where you can't feel time passing and affect Henry the same way it does a normal human.)

He’ll probably figure out how to rewire his brain like Tally and Zane did and get his emotional range and wits back and then get back home eventually (because I like hurt/comfort.) But I don’t think he’ll be able to bask in the feeling of not being watched for a long, long while. He’ll have lived under unending surveillance for months, at least. He’ll keep subconsciously feeling the need to act for a camera, censor himself for a recording device by default, even when he’s alone, until he can unlearn that impulse.

Another J&H crossover idea I had: Have you ever read the Uglies series?

Imagine Jekyll (could be the original book, could be TGS) ending up in Uglies because of plot contrived time travel stuff. Imagine the people there end up figuring out what happened to him (maybe the guy from the museum of Rusty technology knows something that could've done done this) but they assume he's from another city at first because it turns out that he's what they call a "natural Pretty." Inspired by TGS and how, not only is everyone he meets positively taken by his big amber eyes and his brilliant smile, there are so many stories of people getting the physical copy of the comic and all their friends flocking to comment on how handsome Jekyll is, kinda getting into the story themselves out of attraction to the guy. His sirenish charm even works in real life. Reminded me of the Pretties from Uglies.

But you know what about them reminds me of him even more than that? The lesion thing. That brain surgery. The one that inhibits your ability to feel your emotions very strongly or to be very alert or clearheaded. The one that increases your susceptibility to social influence and makes your senses dull. Puts you in a daze where time feels like a syrup and you feel pleasant always, but never pleasure. Where you're never fully there. For the purposes of suppressing their ability to get into destructive conflicts. To keep them away from "ugly" thoughts and feelings. Wouldn't do to have a group of people that picturesque spoiled by a capacity for behavior that doesn't match. The surgery that does the exact opposite of what the potion does. This is what it really looks like when you extract all there is in you that is unsocial or extreme. Imagine Jekyll finding out what happens to Pretties' brains and making the connection. Imagine him realizing this could just have easily been what happened to him and being horrified.

I think it would be fun.

@jekyllhyde-ballad, @m0ntylee, @lukas-broken-bow, @marisol-000, @beacedocrime,

@shyshyaaaaa

[opalsiren]

whatever you do don't listen to marjorie by taylor swift and imagine charlotte thinking about her grandma gracie

[tlbodine]

The Horror Genius of Five Nights At Freddy’s

I’ve been playing FNAF: Help Wanted VR on my Oculus Quest lately (a birthday present to myself -- I know I’m late to that party!) and it’s reignited in me my old love of this series. I know Scott Cawthon’s politics aren’t great, but I don’t think there’s any malice in his heart beyond usual Christian conservative nonsense -- and I think he stepped down as graciously and magnanimously as possible when confronted about it. Time will judge Scott Cawthon’s politics, and that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I want to talk about what makes these games so damn special, from a horror, design, and marketing perspective. I think there’s really SO MUCH to be learned from studying these games and the wider influence they’ve had as intellectual property. 

What Is FNAF? 

In case you’ve somehow been living under a rock for the last seven years, Five Nights At Freddy’s (hereafter, FNAF) is a horror franchise spanning 17 games (10 main games + some spinoffs and troll games, we’ll get to that), 27 books, a movie deal, and a couple live-action attractions. 

But before it exploded into that kind of tremendous IP, it started out as a single indie pont-and-click game created entirely by one dude, Scott Cawthon. Cawthon had developed other games in the past without much fame or success, including some Christian children’s entertainment. He was working as a cashier at Dollar General and making games in his spare time -- and most of those games got panned. 

So he tried making something different. 

After being criticized that the characters in one of his children’s games looked like soulless, creepy animatronics, Cawthon had his lightbulb moment and created a horror game centered on....creepy animatronics! 

The rest, as they say, is history. 

The Genius of FNAF’s Horror Elements

In the first FNAF game, you play as a night security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a sort of ersatz Chuck-E-Cheese establishment. The animatronics are on free-roaming mode at night, but you don’t want to let them find you in your security room so you have to watch them move through the building on security camera monitors. If they get too close, you can slam your security room doors closed. But be careful, because this restaurant operates on a shoestring budget, and the power will go off if you keep the doors closed too long or flicker the lights too often. And once the lights go out, you’re helpless against the animatronics in the dark. 

Guiding you through your gameplay is a fellow employee, Phone Guy, who calls you each night with some helpful advice. Phone Guy is voiced by Cawthon himself, and listening to his tapes gives you some hints of the game’s underlying story as well as telling you how to play. A few newspaper clippings and other bits of scrap material help to fill in more details of the story. 

Over the next set of games, the story would be further developed, with each new game introducing new mechanics and variations on the theme -- in one, you don a mask to slip past the notice of animatronics; in another, you have to play sound cues to lure an animatronic away from you. By the fourth game, the setup was changed completely, now featuring a child with a flashlight hiding from the monsters outside his door -- nightmarish versions of the beloved child-friendly mascots. The mechanics change just enough between variations to keep things fresh while maintaining a consistent brand. 

There are so many things these games do well from a storytelling and horror perspective: 

Jump Scares: It’s easy to shrug these games off for relying heavily on jump scares, and they absolutely do have a lot of them. But they’re used strategically. In most games, the jump scares are a punishment (a controlled shock, if you will) -- if you play the game perfectly, you’ll never be jump-scared. This is an important design choice that a lot of other horror games don’t follow. 

Atmospheric Dread: These games absolutely deliver horror and tension through every element of design -- some more than others, admittedly. But a combination of sound cues, the overall texture and aesthetic of the world, the “things move when you’re not looking at them” mechanic, all of it works together to create a feeling of unease and paranoia. 

Paranoia: As in most survival horror games, you’re at a disadvantage. You can’t move or defend yourself, really -- all you can do is watch. And so watch you do. Except it’s a false sense of security, because flicking lights and checking cameras uses up precious resources, putting you at greater risk. So you have to balance your compulsive need to check, double-check, and make sure...with methodical resource conservation. The best way to survive these games is to remain calm and focused. It’s a brilliant design choice. 

Visceral Horror: The monster design of the animatronics is absolutely delightful, and there’s a whole range of them to choose from. The sheer size and weight of the creatures, the way they move and position themselves, their grunginess, the deadness of their eyes, the quantity and prominence of their teeth. They are simultaneously adorable and horrifying. 

Implicit Horror: One of the greatest strengths to FNAF as a franchise is that it never wears its story on its sleeve. Instead of outright telling you what’s going on, the story is delivered in bits and pieces that you have to put together yourself -- creating a puzzle for an engaged player to think about and theorize over and consider long after the game is done. But more than that, the nature of the horror itself is such that it becomes increasingly upsetting the more you think on it. The implications of what’s going on in the game world -- that there are decaying bodies tucked away inside mascots that continue to perform for children, that a man dressed in a costume is luring kids away into a private room to kill them, and so forth -- are the epitome of fridge horror. 

The FNAF lore does admittedly start to become fairly ridiculous and convoluted as the franchise wears on. But even ret-conned material manages to be pretty interesting in its own right (and there is nothing in the world keeping you from playing the first four games, or even the first six, and pretending none of the rest exist). 

Another thing I really appreciate about the FNAF franchise is that it’s quite funny, in a way that complements and underscores the horror rather than detracting from it. It’s something a lot of other properties utterly fail to do. 

The Genius of Scott Cawthon’s Marketing 

OK, so FNAF utilizes a multi-prong attack for creating horror and implements it well -- big deal. Why did it explode into a massive IP sensation when other indie horror games that are just as well-made barely made a blip on the radar? 

Well! That’s where the real genius comes in. This game was built and marketed in a way to maximize its franchisability. 

First, the story utilizes instantly identifiable, simple but effective character designs, and then generates more and more instantly identifiable unique characters with each iteration. Having a wealth of characters and clever, unique designs basically paves the way for merchandise and fan-works. (That they’re anthropomorphic animal designs also probably helped -- because that taps into the furry fandom as well without completely alienating non-furries). 

Speaking of fan-work, Scott Cawthon has always been very supportive of fandom, only taking action when people would try to profit off knock-off games and that sort of thing -- basically bad-faith copies. But as far as I know he’s always been super chill with fan-created content, even going so far as to engage directly with the fandom. Which brings me to....

These games were practically designed for streaming, and he took care to deliver them into the hands of influential streamers. Because the games are heavy on jump-scares and scale in difficulty (even including extra-challenging modes after the core game is beaten) they are extremely fun to watch people play. They’re short enough to be easily finished over the duration of a long stream, and they’re episodic -- lending themselves perfectly to a YouTube Lets Play format. One Night = One Video, and now the streamer has weeks of content from your game (but viewers can jump in at any time without really missing much). 

The games are kid-friendly but also genuinely frightening. Because the most disturbing parts of the game’s lore are hinted at rather than made explicit, younger players can easily engage with the game on a more basic surface level, and others can go as deep into the lore as they feel comfortable. There is no blood and gore and violence or even any explicitly stated death in the main game; all of the murder and death is portrayed obliquely by way of 8-bit mini games and tangential references. Making this game terrifying but accessible to youngsters, and then marketing it directly to younger viewers through popular streamers (and later, merchandising deals) is genius -- because it creates a very broad potential audience, and kids tend to spend 100% of their money (birthdays, allowances, etc.) and are most likely to tell their friends about this super scary game, etc. etc.

By creating a puzzle box of lore, and then interacting directly with the fandom -- dropping hints, trolling, essentially creating an ARG of his own lore through his website, in-game easter eggs, and tie-in materials -- Cawthon created a mystery for fandom to solve. And fans LOVE endlessly speculating over convoluted theories. 

Cawthon released these games FAST. He dropped FNAF 2 within months of the first game’s release, and kept up a pace of 1-2 games a year ever since. This steady output ensured the games never dropped out of public consciousness -- and introducing new puzzle pieces for the lore-hungry fans to pore over helped keep the discussion going. 

I think MatPat and The Game Theorists owe a tremendous amount of their own huge success to this game. I think Markiplier does, too, and other big streamers and YouTubers. It’s been fascinating watching the symbiotic relationship between these games and the people who make content about these games. Obviously that’s true for a lot of fandom -- but FNAF feels so special because it really did start so small. It’s a true rags-to-riches sleeper hit and luck absolutely played a role in its growth, but skill is a big part too. 

Take-Aways For Creatives 

I want to be very clear here: I do not think that every piece of media needs to be “IP,” franchisable, an extended universe, or a multimedia sensation. I think there is plenty to be said for creating art of all types, and sometimes that means a standalone story with a small audience. 

But if you do want a chance at real break-out, run-away success and forging a media empire of your own, I think there are some take-aways to be learned from the success of FNAF: 

Persistence. Scott Cawthon studied animation and game-design in the 1990s and released his first game in 2002. He released a bunch of stuff afterward. None of it stuck. It took 12 years to hit on the winning formula, and then another several years of incredibly hard work to push out more titles and stoke the fires before it really became a sensation. Wherever you’re at on your creative journey, don’t give up. You never know when your next thing will be The Thing that breaks you out. 

If you want to sell a lot of something, you have to make it widely appealing to a bunch of people. This means keeping your concept simple to understand (”security guard wards off creepy killer animatronics at a pizza parlor”) and appealing to as wide a segment of the market as you can (ie, a horror story that appeals to both kids and adults). The more hyper-specific your audience, the harder it’s gonna be to find them and the fewer copies of your thing you’ll be selling. 

Know your shit and put your best work out there. I think there’s an impulse to feel like “well, nobody reads this anyway, so why does it matter if it’s no good” (I certainly have fallen into that on multiple occasions) but that’s the wrong way to think about it. You never know when and where your break will come. Put your best work out there and keep on polishing your craft with better and better stuff because eventually one of those things you chuck out there is going to be The Thing. 

Figure out where your target audience hangs out, and who influences them, and then get your thing in the hands of those influencers. Streaming and YouTube were the secret to FNAF’s success. Maybe yours will be BookTube, or Instagram, or a secret cabal of free librarians. I don’t know. But you should try your best to figure out who would like the thing that you’re making, and then figure out how to reach those people, and put all of your energy into that instead of shotgun-blasting your marketing all willy nilly. 

You don’t have to put the whole story on the page. Audiences love puzzles. Fans love mysteries. You can actually leave a lot more unanswered than you think. There’s some value in keeping secrets and leaving things for others to fill in. Remember -- your art is only partly yours. The sandbox belongs to others to play in, too, and you have to let them do that. 

If in doubt, appealing to furries never hurts. 

Do I take all of this advice myself? Not by a long shot. But it’s definitely a lot to think about. 

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go beat The Curse of Dreadbear. 

[ga-yuu]

~Kurama~Main Story Chapter 5~Part 2

Part 1

*

*

*

------Part 4-----

Shigehira: "Yoshino-san!"

Pulling up the fabric of the tent, Shigehira-kun jumped inside with great energy.

Yoshino: "Shigehira-kun! ....Are you injured?"

Shigehira: "No."

The sight of the blood-stained figure was a bit of a shock, but it turned out to be someone else's blood.

Shigehira: "I'm here to inform you. Listen. A party of the enemy has set its course here. Take the wounded and move with the others."

(The enemy!?)

Yoshino: "Oh, okay, I'll get ready."

Shigehira: "I'll help you. I've already given instructions to my men."

I quickly put together my tools and left the tent with Shigehira-kun.

.............

Those who are lightly wounded are mounted, while those who cannot ride on their own are assisted by other soldiers.

They are placed in the middle of the squadron to avoid delays.

Yoshino: "Will you and your men join us? And what about Morinaga-san...."

Shigehira: "Morinaga-san cannot leave the front yet. For now, the Shogunate has the upper hand... I'll return to my post after I've escorted you."

Yoshino: "...Oh, okay. Take care of yourself."

(I'm worried, but I'll pray for your safety...)

Shigehira: "Same to you."

Shigehira-kun muttered seriously as he rode alongside me, his horse flying.

Shigehira: "Neither I nor Morinaga-san thought the war would get this bad. This battle is...."

..................

Kagetoki: "This war is clearly an aberration."

Yoritomo: ".................."

At the same time, in Kamakura, Yoritomo, who had received a report on the battle from Kagetoki, moved his eyebrows slightly.

Yoritomo: “You said that the information about the Shogunate and the rebels was leaked and mixed up at the same time.

Kagetoki: “Yes. It’s becoming a war of attrition, with both sides making a series of surprise attacks. Although the Shogunate had the advantage in numbers...We don’t like the fact that the damage has exceeded what we had envisaged as an outpost.”

Yoritomo: “Has there been an investigation into who is pulling the strings?”

Kagetoki: “I’ve got some nasty information about it.”

A glance alone signals ‘Go on’, and Kagetoki reels.

Kagetoki: “Private armies, secretly recruited by some noble families, are infiltrating the battlefield.”

Yoritomo: “Nobles?”

Kagetoki: “Yes. At least ostensibly, the families have no connection. It took a long time to get caught up in the network because they were hired separately in small numbers.”

Yoritomo looked over the report quickly, and his gaze sharpened.

Yoritomo: “I see. Even though it’s just a bunch of mooks, there’s still a good number of all together.”

Kagetoki: “It doesn’t look like an opponent who can use sophisticated tactics to manipulate the information of two armies to reduce each other’s strength... When you've assembled on a battlefield, you can’t be irrelevant.”

Yoritomo: “There is something fundamentally puzzling about the complicity of the nobles.”

Kagetoki: “Yes. The noble families mentioned in the report were probably just a bunch of birds clinging to a vanishing power. All I can see is that they are suddenly united. It feels contrived.”

Yoritomo: “If the rebels are on the back foot, there’s no way they’re working with the nobility.”

After a brief pause for thought, Yoritomo locked eyes with Kagetoki.

Yoritomo: “Find out if anyone high up in the court is involved. I will send word to Morinaga and Shigehira on the battlefield as soon as possible.”

Kagetoki: “Yes.”

................

(I’ve managed to resume treatment, but I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable with the idea of another surprise attack here.)

And yet, as I dealt with one wounded man after another, time goes by in a blink of an eye.

Injured soldier: “Did you get the latest news, Yoshino-san? It seems that the war will end soon.”

Yoshino: “Is that true!?”

A wounded soldier who was lying on the floor spoke happily and his voice became more lively.

Injured soldier: “The guy who just brought in the wounded said that the rebels are going to withdraw at last.”

(Thank god.....!)

Yoshino: “I hope as many soldiers as possible are safe....”

Injured soldier: “There are a number of soldiers who have been saved thanks to you, Yoshino-san. Like me.”

Yoshino: “Hehe, I’m honored.”

The faces of the other soldiers in the tent were brighter because they had seen a glimmer of hope.

When I sighed relief-----

???: “Excuse me.”

Yoshino: “.....? Yes.”

I heard someone calling from outside my tent and I went to look out, only to be greeted by----

Boy: “Hello, Yoshino.”

--------Part 5------

Boy: “Hello, Yoshino.”

Yoshino: “A kid?”

He greeted me in a rather mature voice and bowed gracefully.

(Why is a KID in such a place?)

(Maybe from the nearby town? But....)

But his high-quality clothes and beautiful face tell me a different story.

Yoshino: “Where are you from? and also how do you know my name?”

Boy: “I came from there.”

With a strangely calm smile, the boy points to the west.

Boy: “A very beautiful man told me your name too.”

I was a bit suspicious by his somewhat impersonal, age-inappropriate manner.

(But I can’t leave him alone like this.)

Yoshino: “Okay, this is a dangerous place, so stay close to my side. I’ll take you home later.”

(I have to tell everyone about this. I wonder where the guards have gone...)

Boy: “That’s very kind of you. I’ll be happy to stay with you. But sorry,....you’re coming with me.”

Yoshino: “Eh?”

----At that moment, I noticed a bracelet falling off from the little boy’s wrists.

And the next moment----

Man: “My name is Ibuki. Nice to meet you again, fox princess.”

(This person...)

His wavy golden hair and blue eyes showed that he was the same person as the child from earlier.

But more than that, I gasped at the two horns on his head.

Yoshino: “Oni....?”

Ibuki: “Correct.”

(Demon! What’s more, from what you just said you’re an enemy, aren’t you?)

As I stepped back, my thoughts wander.

(I can’t call for help from inside the tent. It would involve everyone.)

Yoshino: “What did you do to the guards?’

Ibuki: “It would be negligent of the watchman to let him fall after a little play.”

(I don’t know...how strong this demon, this Ibuki is.)

(Also he addressed me as fox princess, so he does know about my powers.)

Ibuki: “Now now, don’t think too much.”

(Ah)

He easily closes the distance between us by pulling me by the wrists.

Ibuki lightly supports my body, when I was about to fall out of balance.

Yoshino: “Let go! What’s your intention?”

Ibuki: “It’s a common story in folklore that a demon kidnaps a princess. I’d take you if I could, but I’m not really into that. So here’s the deal, if you resist, I will kill you and everyone else inside the tent.”

(........)

Ibuki: “What do you want? Decide for yourself.”

(You!)

Yoshino: “What’s your purpose....?”

Ibuki: “You’ll know it on the way. Now come. If someone gets suspicious that you’re not coming back and leaves the tent, then you’re out of options.”

(.....Looks like I’ve no other choice.)

Yoshino: “Fine. I’ll come with you.”

I killed my trembling voice as much as I could and stared at Ibuki.

Ibuki: “I like clever women. How about we flirt for a while...? But first, let’s get out of this bloody place.”

...........

Riding the horse that was tied to me, Ibuki carried me in front of him through the mountains of the battlefield.

Ibuki: “The Shogunate must be in full retreat by now, as the rebel army retreats. Are feeling lonely, fox princess, now that you’re left behind?”

Yoshino: “Nn....I’ll never tell you. Will you tell me where are we going?”

Ibuki: “You’ll know soon----Oh, look there he is.”

(Eh?)

Ibuki dismounted me and pointed to the full moon in the night sky.

No way----the next moment, something dark covers the moon.

(That’s!)

When I realized what was that dark thing was, I saw huge jet-black wings covering my vision.

Then something came down at a tremendous speed.

Kurama: “Why are you here? ---Shuten Doji, Ibuki.”

~~~~~~’I won’t call your name’ (Normal Story)~~~~~

Ibuki: “You’ll know soo----Oh, look there he is.”

(Eh?)

Ibuki dismounted me and pointed to the full moon in the night sky.

No way----the next moment, something dark covers the moon.

(That’s!)

When I realized what was that darkness, I saw huge jet-black wings covering my vision.

Then something came down at a tremendous speed.

Kurama: “Why are you here? ---Shuten Doji, Ibuki.”

(Kurama!?)

Ibuki: “What a coincidence, huh? Kurama.”

Kurama: “You’re the one who deliberately came close to me, releasing your spell so that I’d notice you.”

(They both know each other?....But...)

Ibuki: “Don’t be so angry. I’ve gone out my way to bring you a gift to mark our reunion.”

Kurama: “Gift?”

Ibuki holds me by the shoulders as if to show me. Then Kurama’s eyes turned to look at me.

Kurama: “For what reason do you have that little puss?”

Ibuki: “I seduced her politely and snatched her.”

(Even if he says this, Ibuki must have a reason to kidnap me.)

Kurama: “I have heard rumors that you have been in hiding for a long time....Why have you come to me now?”

Ibuki: “Because I want to play with you like I used to, of course. Have you forgotten how well I looked after you?”

Kurama: “.....I forgot.”

Kurama replies with a pause and clicks his tongue.

Ibuki: “Why are you so cold to me, Kurama? You were so much cuter when you were a kid. Do you remember that one time, when you lost to me in a match, I had you call me ‘Ibuki oni-sama’ all day?”

Kurama(menacing glare): “Die.”

Ibuki: “Whoa, rebellious, I see. It makes me smile and cry to see you pouting and clamoring.”

(Who the hell is Ibuki to treat that Kurama like a kid?)

Kurama: “I’m beginning to remember. It’s no use talking to you.”

(......!)

At the same time as Kurama’s voice crawls across the ground, a cloud of dust is instantly raised from the ground.

Ibuki: “Hahaha...”

(Ah)

There was an amused chuckle, and then a thump on my back.

Kurama: “..........!”

As I slumped to my knees on the ground, Kurama’s eye met mine.

Ibuki waved his hand to take advantage of this.

From somewhere a dense fog rolled in, obscuring his appearance.

Ibuki: “See you again, Kurama.”

Kurama: “Wait.”

(Nn....)

I can feel the sound of the tornado as it snatched me right in the face. My hair is curling up and I can’t keep my eyes open very well.

Kurama: “.........”

The noise and the wind stopped and I opened my eyes to find that the fog had lifted without a trace.

(Ibuki...disappeared.)

Yoshino: “......Kurama.”

Kurama, who stood silently in front of me, looked at me. 

The stinging air was the same as before, and my instincts told me that the slightest movement would kill me.

Kurama: “Where did you meet Ibuki?”

Yoshino: “....just a while ago. And he kidnapped without any reason. But who is he? And how is he related to you...?”

Kurama: “Our relation, huh?”

(Ah.)

In an instant, the hilt of the sword touched my shoulder, and I was pushed backward.

When I looked up stunned, I saw an unusual rage simmering in the depths of his cold eyes.

Kurama: “Don’t ask me whatever you want.”

Yoshino: “Don’t treat me like that.”

I endured my fear and returned the words.

Kurama: “You let that guy kidnap you easily and now you got thrown away like a bone to a dog......How do you call that? In fact, Ibuki had been  talking nonsense about you being a gift.”

(That’s...)

Kurama: “Well, since you failed to knock it back, I suppose it makes sense to break it.  The ‘gifts’ he always gives me make me sick.”

Yoshino: “What are you going to do....?”

Kurama: “I couldn’t do it last time. Now that you’re on the battlefield, you should be ready to die. Or else----”

There was a gurgling sound and an unnatural gust of wind emerged.

Kurama: “Will you try taking me down? Little puss.”

(.....! He’s coming after me!)

Kurama raises one hand, unconcerned about his black hair being disturbed by the wind.

A number of transparent whirlpools were created and poured down from above the head.

Yoshino: “Ngh.”

(----I can fight! Lend me the power of the nine-tail fox!)

I opened my eyes and raised the palm of one hand boldly.

At the same time, with my other hand, I grabbed the hilt of the sword that was on my shoulder and jumped up while bouncing off.

Kurama(surprised): “......”

(.....I’m strong now. I can cancel his mystical powers.)

The wind is losing its momentum around the outstretched palm.

Feeling this, I carefully distance myself from Kurama.

Kurama: “Ohh. Did you manage to use your powers from that distance without shying away?”

Yoshino:” I did say I’ll get stronger, didn’t I?”

The memory of the last time we parted lights up in my heat like a beacon.

------FLASHBACK-----

Yoshino: "No, I mean.....the next time I meet Kurama on the battlefield, I will be stronger than I am now."

Kurama: "What?"

Yoshino: "I felt bad about what Kurama said about me. But I also thought he was right. Thank you for making me aware that I am weak."

Kurama(surprised): "...................."

------FLASHBACK ENDS------

Kurama: “Do you think we’re in the same league after you ran around Kamakura killing the petty little demons?”

Yoshino: “At least, I made an effort.” (This is the reason! This is why I love her. Even if it's not that great, she at least proved herself that she’s not entirely useless, unlike some other MCs who want the male leads to save them. I’m proud of you, Yoshino.)

(.....It was never the end of the crisis.)

Kurama could easily take my life without using his other powers.

(But still, as long as I have a life, I’ll continue to resist until the end!)

Kurama: “Don’t be so tough, your legs are shaking.”

Yoshino: “....Really? Might be from excitement.”

Kurama: “......Heh.”

(Eh?)

A faint laugh, leaks from his thin lips.

The heavy tension in the air suddenly relaxed.

Yoshino: “Kurama....?”

Kurama: “So the chicken has finally come out of its egg. Very well. I’ll see you as a living thing. Breathe freely in my presence, speak the same language, and I’ll also allow you to move as long as you live.”

(That’s.....)

Yoshino: “You won’t kill me anymore...?”

Kurama: “Not for now. Rejoice, Yoshino. You’ve made my day.”

(Ah....my name.)

I was struck by surprise before relief when he declared that he would not kill me immediately.

Kurama: “Hey, why are you not answering?”

Kurama, who has carelessly closed the distance between us, lightly touches my cheek.

Yoshino: “I was just surprised. That was the first time, you called me by my name.”

(Also I’ve never seen him laugh so softly like that.)

Kurama: “A name is just a symbol. Whatever you call it, it means nothing.”

Yoshino: “.....You’re right.”

(That’s how Kurama thinks.)

Kurama: “But I don’t call the names of things that don’t deserve to live.”

(.....!)

Yoshino: “Does that mean...you acknowledge me now?”

Kurama(glares cutely): “Don’t get too carried away.”

Yoshino: “Sorry.”

I reflexively shrug my shoulders when I’m told off....

Kurama: “....What are you smirking about?”

Yoshino: “Eh?”

(Oh no, maybe my cheeks were unconsciously loose.)

(But why?)

I was surprisingly happy to be recognized by the enemy Kurama.

Kurama: “You don’t seem to be taking me seriously, despite me telling you not to get carried away.”

Yoshino: “No, it’s nothing like that.”

Kurama: “So, what are you going to do now?”

His red ferocious eyes approached me but I unintentionally looked away.

But then he holds my cheeks and forced me to look at him, leaving me no chance to escape.

Kurama: “You’re not quite what I expected. Tell me what you want. Maybe you’ll miraculously succeed in filling my boredom again.”

(I don’t have the confidence to respond to such an unreasonable request!)

When I was wondering what to ask, I sighed a little.

Yoshino: “....I was happy when you called me by my name.”

Kurama: “...........Is that what you want?”

Yoshino: “Mm.”

Kurama: “......I don’t why you liked it, but let’s try.”

(What..?)

His neat face approached...and his lips were brought near my ears.

Kurama: “Yoshino.”

My cheeks get hotter as I listen to his honey-like voice slowly pouring into my ears.

Kurama: “Answer me. Why do you like to be called by your name?”

Yoshino(blushing): “I don’t know...

Kurama: “Are you kidding me?”

Yoshino(blushing): “Ah.”

I let out a small moan, as he kissed my ear. The impact led to heat spreading all over my body.

Yoshino(blushing): “No....wait....Mm...”

In a hurry, I pushed Kurama’s chest back.

Yoshino(blushing): “I don’t think that’s the right thing to do!”

Kurama: “Why?”

Yoshino(blushing): “What do you mean ‘why’? You should be doing these sort of things only with the person you love.”

Kurama: “Unfortunately, I have no connection with the vulgar feelings of love and affection.”

Yoshino(blushing): “But I do.”

Kurama: “I don’t know about you, but know one thing.”

He forcibly draws my waist and my heart races as it sensed a bad premonition.

Kurama: “Yoshino, from this day on, you are my prisoner. So what’s wrong in treating you however I like?”

(I should be annoyed at his arrogant attitude.)

But looking at the happy Kurama like this, for some reason I can’t fight back.

Chapter 6

[thefoulbeast]

A little bit good deal of character analysis in regards to Saburota Todou in the Kyoto arc. This is for my own benefit bc I’m writing smth involving him...

Skipping over the 1st appearance in ch16 because it didn’t really have what I was looking for. Instead I’m skipping straight over to ch25 where Tatsuma shows up and they fight.

This got. Very Long And Very Rambly. So uh, yeah.

tw for canon typical violence and gore

So - Todou already has considerable enhanced physical abilities and regeneration before Karura. Granted, not as strong, but still there. 

(man i wish i could do backflips like that when im 56 lmao)

He’s been planning this whole fiasco for over 10 years now (Myou Dha joined the order 10 years ago, and that’s when he first started on manipulating Mamushi)... I wonder how long he’s been eating demons and stuff? How did that even start? How many has he gone through over time? Things to ponder...

Anyways, my biggest question here is... what the fuck is up with his pain tolerance?

He’s straight up getting barbecued and all he has to say is, “I can’t heal fast enough!“ He doesn’t even look a little distraught. Just mildly inconvenienced by the whole thing. (Also - what kind of knife is that? The shape & handle is really funky :O)

I think he was originally intending to like. Eat Karura as soon as it showed up but he had Impure King as a last resort in case he couldn’t overpower Tatsuma (as was the case). The guy really did all his research and had a lot of back ups planned huh.

...I also want to know just how he managed to find out all the stuff regarding the Impure King. How exactly did he know that it hadn’t been destroyed completely? How did he know about Kurikara being empty? And the deal between Karura and the Head Priests?

Sir please cite your sources I’m so curious...

Back on track though! Stuff happens, Tatsuma gets it in the neck with the weird knife, Todou’s all healed up from those nasty burns again and it’s all dandy.

And then we get straight up fire eating.

Again... that should hurt, no? That’s mouth, throat, oesophagus and probably tracheal burns. And Todou just... doesn’t care. He’s still as calm and collected as before, no indication of discomfort. Personally? I’m unnerved by this lol.

The closest we get to discomfort is this when he groans a lil bit after he’s done eating but I think that’s more the stomach upset. From this point on I guess we assume he doesn’t feel pain from fire... but I’m still squinting at everything before this...

Adding this purely because I love these panels. This guy is so messed up. So very very messed up lol.

[Skip forward everything Im not interested in right now]

Someone is having a bit of a bellyache. This is why we don’t eat things while they’re still alive, sir!

But upset stomach or not, he’s still??

“Yeah it’s fine - hello yukio how have you been? - yes, I’m ready to throw hands with you; pain who?“

also... he may be a Huge bastard but I absolutely love how!! Polite he is!!

“Thanks for cooperating ^w^“ <- Todou after cutting off Yukio’s escape route with a wall of flame. lol. However he got evasive when Yukio asked: “What the hell are you?“

He seems to happily give out tidbits of non-vital information, but he obviously knows when to keep his mouth shut (10+ years spying on True cross and no one knew? This guy is very clever! Very tricky! Many secrets!)

I’m sorry this whole thing is so funny... Small, polite talk during fighting is exactly the kind of unhinged I expected from him and he did not disappoint in the slightest. Bless. (I mean he does admit that he’s only doing it to rile Yukio up a few pages later... but still... This man knows just how to get under people’s skin and is so very good at it...)

Also I love how this fight reveals so much about his character so subtly?? I honestly just rec ch28 for p much most anyone would need to get a feel of him as a character.

He’s got this new body and these new powers and the first thing he does is fight a teenager for shits and giggles. Except both the teenager and the younger body keep reminding him of his own youth.

Lower right panel... his face says they’re not happy memories. (In my very biased opinion I would call that expression a mix of “oh whoopsie” and “these memories literally make me want to die”) (And oh Boy does it go well with ch106 pages 23-26 where we actually see how the Todou brothers interacted with each other and that is So Much To Unpack i dont even know where to start lol)

And then right after remarking that family is a sore spot for Yukio, he immediately goes “lmao me too I get it“ ( it’s actually ”Heh heh heh! I feel such a connection between us! Asleep or awake, you’re always hung up on your family! I understand. I used to be the same way.“)

And then finally I reach the part that originally made me want to re-read his scenes in the Kyoto arc...

Todou literally getting his brains blown out with water type bullets 😍😍😍 This is literally the only instance of him admitting that something hurt that I could find so far! What the hell! But that’s not all!

Even then he’s still smiling! He’s still playing around! He got shot through the head, said “oh ouchie“ and immediately shook it off and kept trying rile Yukio up like nothing had happened. Pretty fucked up in my humble opinion, not gonna lie.

“Ah yes I’ve sustained a horrific facial wound let me just dab at it with a handkerchief for a bit that’ll do it.“

He does underestimate Yukio though, becaue he doesn’t see the naiads coming at all. But even with the whole water prison, it bothers him for a few seconds and he’s back on track. He’s very... I’m not sure if tenacious is the right word, but perhaps diligent? Goal oriented?

Very hard to knock off balance, that’s for sure! And even if you manage to catch him by surprise, he seems to adapt very quickly. He’s just genuinely fighting Yukio to have a good time and doesn’t see him as a serious opponent.

But the chilling bit is that he was going to kill Yukio, just like that. He got a feel for his new abilities, had some fun at the expense of Yukio’s emotional state, reminisced on his past for a bit... and that would have been it, if not for the Satan-eyes.

Anyways this got so much longer than I wanted it to lol and I managed to fry my brain so I’ll leave off here. Maybe I’ll do smth aditional later maybe I wont. But just know that I am screaming about this unhinged bastard like 24/7 ❤

Idk if anyone even got to the end of this but I wanted to put my thoughts down somewhere I could find them later lol. Thanks xoxo

[squidbatts]

i’m gonna run this nothing town

“That’s how I know I'm making the right choice. Cal, will you be my aide-de-camp?” A smile spreads across Calroy's face, sharp like the water-steel dagger he keeps tucked in his boot. “Amethar,” He says, voice sweet as the sugar beneath their feet, “It would be my honor.”

or: four snapshots of calroy and amethar, after the war

((this requires some explanation. this exists in an au where calroy and amethar (eventually) get married, calroy hates amethar but is also in love with him (and doesn’t know he’s in love with him), and calroy is still actively working against the rocks. it’s.... involved. inspired entirely by the enablers in the d20 server of color and @kindlespark‘s wonderful calroy art. please enjoy!))

{ao3}

1.

When the War is over, when all the dust has settled, Calroy still stands.

He stands beside Amethar, the new King of Candia and the Sugarlands; Amethar, the War buddy that considered Calroy his closest friend; Amethar, the arrogant, spoiled, ungrateful boy that cared more about playing soldier than his place in the Kingdom; His Majesty King Amethar of House Rocks, the Unfallen.

He stands there, and Amethar, in mourning clothes even at his own coronation, clears his throat.

“Cal,” Amethar starts, voice a whisper and brows furrowed, “You know I- I can't do this. I was never supposed to be the one to do this, I don't know anything about politics and I didn't pay attention in my etiquette classes and I never remember any of those fancy titles. I don't even know how to read, you know that.”

Calroy, who once had to trade hard labor and quick favors for his lessons, makes himself nod understandingly. “So you've told me, Your Majesty.”

“Oh, come on, don't call me that,” Amethar says quickly, waving a hand like his title is an annoying bug that he can shoo away. Calroy feels so sick with envy and anger that he worries for a moment that he'll pass out. “I'm not just outlining my flaws for my own health, alright, I wanted to ask you… I mean, you're the best guy I know, and I trust you to watch my back, and you're great at talking us out of scrapes, and my advisors told me that I should choose someone, and-”

“Keep talking like that and I'll die of boredom before you can ask me anything,” Calroy interrupts, tone balanced on the line between joking and rude. 

Amethar smiles, a clever little thing that looks much more at home on his face than his earlier wide-eyed nervousness, and his shoulders relax from where they'd begun to climb towards his ears.

“That’s how I know I'm making the right choice. Cal, will you be my aide-de-camp?”

A smile spreads across Calroy's face, sharp like the water-steel dagger he keeps tucked in his boot. “Amethar,” He says, voice sweet as the sugar beneath their feet, “It would be my honor.”

--

2.

Her name is Caramelinda Merengue and she hates Amethar. She doesn't say as much, because she's whip-smart and understands that would be an insult that even Amethar couldn't miss, but Calroy can tell. He reads it in the line of her brow and the tilt of her lips, in the way her hands tighten on her dress under the table and the way her cheek dimples when she bites it to keep herself from speaking.

Calroy rather likes her.

Her father is in talks with Amethar about marriage and Amethar is deeply miserable about it, as he makes clear to Calroy each evening when they drink together. Caramelinda is miserable about it too, though she's more graceful about it and never even brings up the fact that her set engagement to the late Archmage Lazuli of House Rocks had been one of love and not simple allyship; no, Calroy had to use his spies to find out that one because Caramelinda was too loyal to her duty and her father to complain where she could be heard. This is, technically, exactly the type of thing Amethar brought him in for, even ignoring that he has his own reasons for not wanting Caramelinda and Amethar to get married; marriage means heirs and Calroy doesn't need any Rocks brats running around and complicating his plans.

He approaches the Duke of Meringue with a soft smile and an open ear. He asks leading questions about the Duke's land, his crops, his wife. Caramelinda is his only child, the last of his line, and even despite subtracting the land and livestock included in her dowry, the bride price Lazuli had promised is… exorbitant. More than enough for the Duke to live comfortably for the rest of his days and more than the daughter of a fairly minor noble merited, in Calroy’s opinion.

Love, He scoffs mentally, can make fools out of even the brightest of mages.

“You know, he doesn’t actually want you to marry his daughter,” Calroy confides to Amethar that evening.

“It seems like he wants me to marry her,” Amethar responds petulantly. The syrupy scent of his cologne fills Calroy’s nose as Amethar leans closer to fill his goblet with butterscotch schnapps and Calroy has to resist the urge to either sneeze or take a deep breath in. “My advisors want me to marry her too. They said keeping Lazuli’s promise will show that we still respect our allegiances in Candia.”

A part of Calroy is almost impressed that Amethar remembered all that well enough to be able to parrot it to Calroy; the rest of him is too busy being annoyed at Amethar’s advisors to care. Amethar’s advisors are a bunch of rich elders who have been pressuring the Kings of Candia for the past fifty years and who have no problem publicly calling Calroy an upstart.

Calroy does not like Amethar’s advisors.

“Don’t you trust me?” Calroy asks, making a show out of pouting. Amethar’s eyes flicker down, just for a second, before he settles that earnest gaze back on Calroy’s eyes. There was a time, during the War, when Calroy had gotten tired of Amethar trying to be subtle about checking out his ass and staring at his mouth, when Amethar had let Calroy push him against a tree just outside of camp, when Calroy had bit Amethar’s lip hard enough to make him bleed and then blamed it on inexperience, when Amethar had cupped a hand over Calroy’s cheek and-

Well.

Calroy mentally shakes himself. None of that matters right now. The War was the War, but this is now.

“‘Course I do, more than anyone in the world,” Amethar answers, soft and genuine enough to make Calroy’s skin crawl.

“Then trust me on this. He wants land and gold, and his quickest route to those things right now is making you keep up Lazuli’s part of the bargain. If we can offer him an easier way to get what he wants-”

“Then I don’t have to marry Caramelinda!”

Calroy makes a noise like a champion’s bell and clinks his cup against Amethar’s. “Then you don’t have to marry Caramelinda.”

Amethar is smiling so widely that he spills more than he swallows when he tries to knock his drink back. “You’re the best, Cal, really.”

Calroy grins back, but when he says “And don’t you forget it,” his voice comes out a touch too demanding.

Whatever.

It’s not like Amethar will notice anyway.

-- 

3.

Amethar is looking for something. Calroy doesn't know what it is, which is weird enough on its own and would normally make him dismiss the idea, but Amethar's been spending too much time personally visiting the Dairy Islands for someone without a vested interest in what he could find there.

While Calroy appreciates the space he’s been given to pull at the strings that move Candia, the absence of the King has had the side-effort of making the other nobles bolder with their power grabs, more openly distasteful about Calroy's power. If Calroy has to hear another minor baron say Amethar's reliance on Calroy is unbecoming or gossip about how Calroy is a leeching social climber, he's going to do something he regrets, like run them through with his saber.

None of these people know that it's Calroy that keeps their precious liquor and food flowing, that he writes the trade proposals and organizes the council meetings. None of these people have ever had damp soil from a newly weeded field caked so deep under their fingernails that it takes fives washes for the water to run clear, they've never had so much blood dried into the creases of their hands that their palms were dyed red. Everything Calroy has, everything he is, has been fought for, and he refuses to let some snobby nobles or a flighty King ruin this for him.

He starts with increasing the number of meetings Amethar has to attend. As the Royal Aide-De-Camp, Calroy has almost complete control of Amethar’s schedule and, while it’s typically more advantageous for Calroy to go to these meetings alone and gently shift the popular opinion, Amethar’s stubborn blunt force works just as well when aimed right.

For a while, that is.

He can tell when Amethar starts to get jittery as he has less and less opportunity to sneak himself off to another country; the man all but whines about having to actually do his blood-granted duty, and Calroy makes himself grit his teeth in an approximation of a smile and then lets himself grip just a bit too tightly onto Amethar’s arm as he leads him to his next appointment.

He likes to think that he responds with more restraint than Amethar deserves.

It’s not until Amethar actually skips a meeting, like he’s a child sneaking out of his lessons, and doesn’t come back to the Castle for three days that Calroy decides this has to come to a stop. He stands outside Amethar’s rooms and puts all his energy into channeling the visage of a kind and concerned best friend. He takes a deep breath to center himself, puts a hand on the doorknob, and enters without announcing himself.

“Hey, you can’t- Oh, it’s just you,” Amethar says from where he’s making a pathetic attempt to cover the blown-up map of the Dairy Islands, brush still dripping with ink from where he’s been apparently marking the map. He relaxes when he sees Cal, even as Cal tenses.

This doesn’t look like a silly flight of fancy for Calroy to prod Amethar out of pursuing, it doesn’t look like the thrill-seeking work of a boy who misses the adventure of War. This looks calculated, particular. This, Calroy thinks, looks like a nightmare.

“What’s all this, then?” Calroy asks, gesturing.

Amethar runs a hand over his locs and laughs nervously. “It’s nothing. Just a little project of mine.”

Calroy wants to sigh, to yell, to demand that Amethar explain, but he knows that Amethar moves easiest when he thinks he's not being made to do so. He allows himself to furrow his eyebrows a bit more, hunch his posture a bit; make himself look confused and small like something hurt and sad, like someone who needs Amethar’s protection. It takes only twenty seconds under Calroy’s pitiful stare before Amethar folds.

“Okay, fine, but you have to promise to not get mad.”

“When have I ever been mad at you?” Calroy asks, question rhetorical not because he’s never been angry at Amethar but because Amethar would’ve never realized he had been. “I’m just worried. All this galavanting around, avoiding your duties, it’s not like you.”

It is like him, Calroy and Amethar both know it, and Amethar slumps at the lie. Calroy can almost see the cracks appear in his defenses. “Alright. You can’t tell anyone, but I… I have a wife.”

“You have a what.” Calroy says. It’s not a question but it should be because surely Calroy’s misheard. Surely Amethar Rocks is not telling Calroy that he has some secret little milkmaid in the Islands.

“A wife. Her name is Catherine, Catherine Ghee, and I was going to marry her the right way after the War and bring her in as my queen, but then I got moved from the Islands and she stopped answering my letters, and then my sisters-” Amethar cuts himself off, clearing his throat thickly. “Anyway, I forgot about it in the shuffle of everything else. And then there was the whole Caramelinda thing, you know.”

“I know,” Calroy confirms. Bribing enough the duke to make him rescind his acceptance of Lazuli’s -- Amethar’s -- marriage proposal had been his job, after all.

“Yeah! It reminded me. And I thought I’d go find her, it’s the right thing to do and I mean, I think I really loved her, Cal. I think she might’ve been it for me.”

Calroy’s jaw works hard enough that he feels the joint pop. Calroy closes his eyes in the face of Amethar’s enthusiasm, just to give himself a second to process. This would’ve been useful to know when you were almost married off to someone else, Calroy thinks but doesn’t say. What do you mean you got married and then just forgot about her? What part of that screams ‘she’s the love of my life’ to you? Calroy thinks but doesn’t ask.

“So, have you had any luck?” Calroy asks when he trusts himself to speak without screaming. Amethar’s face drops immediately.

“No. I found her parents back in her village but they say they haven’t seen her in almost a year, so I’ve just been traveling around. I hope- well. You know what I hope.”

Calroy hums. He does.

Many, many Dairy Islanders were lost in the War, a larger percentage than any other country. It’s very possible that Amethar’s Catherine Ghee is dead by now. Still, if she’s not…

“You should’ve asked me for help in the first place,” Calroy chides, playfully hitting Amethar’s chest. He lets his hand linger, feeling Amethar’s warmth and the strong pulse of his heartbeat through his doublet. “You have people to do things like this. I mean, really Amethar, I completely understand you and usually I’d be all for this -- hell, I’d join you! -- but when you’re gone so often, it worries the Kingdom.”

“It does?”

Calroy hums mournfully, tucking his hands behind his back and turning away from Amethar to study the map. “The War is over and the Concord is formed, but things are still getting back to normal. If your citizens notice their King, the venerated Amethar the Unfallen, leaving them so regularly, what will they think?”

Calroy doesn’t have to look at how Amethar’s face spasms at the title, but he watches out of the corner of his eye anyway. He knows the flinch intimately, has watched it and caused it enough that it’s burned into his memory; the way it starts with Amethar’s eyes slipping shut, how his jawline shakes, how he twitches as though he’s been slapped. Sometimes, Calroy wishes he could chant it just to see the reaction over and over again. Amethar the Unfallen, Amethar the Last of House Rocks, Amethar the Unprepared.

“The people will really get upset?” Amethar asks. His voice sounds smaller, less sure. Calroy makes sure his smile is more concern than smug delight before he turns around.

“It’s very possible,” Calroy answers, “But there’s no need to worry about it. Now that I know what’s going on, I can get the people whose job this should be on it. We’ll find your girl, Amethar.”

Amethar brightens, falling into step with Calroy and allowing himself to be guided from his rooms. “What would I do without you, Cal?”

Calroy is already mentally scripting how he'll tell Amethar that I've gotten some news back from the Islands and, well... your wife… they just couldn’t find anything. I'm so sorry, Amethar, I know the War has taken so much from us all, but no news is good news, right? regardless of what his search-and-destroy party finds. He bumps his shoulder against Amethar's, supportive and affectionate. “Let's hope you never have to find out.”

--

4.

It has been… a very long night.

It began with a furious letter from the Duke of Meringue, accusing Amethar of defiling and kidnapping his daughter, of breaking his word, of trying to undermine him. Calroy, who reads all of Amethar’s mail, throws the letter into the fire before taking the Amethar his daily stack of relevant but not too important mail. The day only turns to chaos as the evening falls, when an unannounced carriage pulls up to the gates, holding none other than the Lady Caramelinda Merengue. Before anyone can react, Caramelinda shoves a letter at Amethar’s chest, furious and red-eyed from crying.

“I’m pregnant,” She said, with a voice that carried across the courtyards of Castle Candy like a song even as she bowed low and proper, “It is your sister’s. I have come to ask to be quartered by House Rocks, on behalf of my unborn child, your kin.”

Amethar embraced the women, gleefully accepting her words without a lick of proof, while the entirety of the assembled court gossiped and Calroy picked up the letter. It was from Lazuli, of course, and it explained what had happened in the most confusing and circuitous way possible, of course. all will make sense in time, Lazuli said, trust your feelings, Lazuli said, all is as i foresaw, probably, and if it is not then it is close enough that it does not matter, Lazuli said. It all seemed to fit perfectly, arriving just in time, and Calroy could barely stop his fist from tightening and crushing the letter. After all, if he remembered Lazuli, there was probably a letter in lemon ink waiting just for him on the back, just like there had been on so many of the missives she sent to Amethar and Rococoa on the front lines.

Calroy, now, sitting on a part of the Castle wall far from the celebration for Amethar’s new sister-in-law and incoming nibling, lets his eyes slide closed for a moment. If there's one Rocks sister he hated, it was Lazuli, who used her powers of divination for busybodying and mocking instead of something as simple as saving her own life. There's nothing Calroy hates more than a waste of potential.

Speaking of which, I should probably check this. He holds the letter carefully over his lamp, watching as the heat darkens the lemon ink until he can clearly read Lazuli’s final secret message.

congratulations. or maybe not congratulations, if it didn’t happen in this time, The letter reads, you might never get this letter, or you might get it too late, or it might not matter to you, or you might get it and assume it means something else. it is of no concern to me. congratulations, if they apply.

Calroy presses a hand to his temple, frustrated. This, right here, is why he liked Lazuli the least. He's meditating on that when he hears the footsteps and jolts, his hand is almost around his secret dagger before he recognizes the gait, the sound of the slight drag of expensive shoes and the sure thud of his steps. Calroy forces himself to relax as Amethar swings himself onto the wall beside Calroy, close enough that he can feel the other's warmth.

“What a day. Just like Laz to drop something like that in a letter,” He starts without prompting, “When I was a kid and snuck out, she was almost always waiting right outside the gate for me like she’d used her divination just to scare me shitless. She loved that kind of stuff. Guess she wanted one last gotcha, huh?”

Amethar swings his legs restlessly as he gazes out over his Kingdom, lost expression making him look more like the youth of his story than the Ruler of the Sugarlands. Calroy reaches over and pats Amethar’s knee. “It’s not your fault.”

He says it both because Amethar wants to hear it and because it’s true; with all the forces invested in the downfall of the less impressionable Rocks siblings, it would’ve been impossible for Amethar to stop it.

Amethar’s eyes clear as he nods, and then he reaches down and takes Calroy’s hand in his own. “You always know exactly what to say.”

“You make it easy,” Calroy says, half a joke. Amethar snorts, and then he pulls their joined hands up and presses a candyfloss-soft kiss to Calroy’s knuckles

It happens so quickly that Calroy can’t anticipate it or stay his reactions; the shock that he feels, the flush rising to his cheeks and the speeding of his heart, is all 100% real. Amethar looks up at Calroy through his lashes and smiles at whatever expression he finds, slow and small. When he lowers his lips back down to Calroy’s hand, this time a proper kiss right at the curve of his wrist, Calroy is more ready.

He goes for flattered but nervous, allowing some of his real tension to make a laugh come out jerky and unsure. He widens his eyes and looks away even as he continues to let Amethar hold his hand. “Your Majesty-”

“Please,” Amethar murmurs, and when Calroy turns his head he’s looking back at Calroy with warm, expectant eyes, “Not from you, Cal. Never from you.”

“Amethar,” Calroy concedes, and is rewarded with a brilliant grin, “I don’t- I didn’t think-”

“I didn’t think of it either,” Amethar says, picking up Calroy’s purposefully fumbled sentence with perfect timing. “But it just makes sense. We’ve been through so much together and I wouldn’t be able to run anything around here without you; you’re my partner in all but ceremony at this point anyway. And Laz’s letter said to trust my heart.”

“And your heart says-”

“Yes. Yes, this is what my heart wants, Cal. What about you? Will you give me, give this, a chance?”

Calroy gives himself exactly two seconds. Any longer and Amethar will get anxious, any shorter and Calroy will seem desperate. In those two seconds, Calroy starts to reorganize his gameplan for the next five years and makes a mental note to write a letter to Ceresia to personally inform them of this development. He takes a deep breath in, lets it out, and smiles like the crescent moon above them.

“I'm so lucky,” Calroy says, entangling their fingers, “To have had a man like you beside me all this time. I would be luckier to keep him at my side.”

“Not as lucky as I’ll be,” Amethar says, looking like he’s barely holding himself back from doing something decidedly improper. He settles for pressing another kiss to Calroy’s hand and Calroy, sitting atop the parapet of a castle that will be his much sooner than planned, looks out to the sparkling stars. Not as lucky as you indeed, he thinks, but still, when he squeezes Amethar’s hand, their hearts beat as one.

[paradife-loft]

Tagged by @leatherbookmark​ like a week ago, look I’m trying, thank you! :D

Top 3 Ships: The Untamed-edition bc I am currently 1 thought / head empty full of dimples, and it’s been about eighty billion years since I last interacted with other media in a remotely ship-centric way.

Lan Xichen/Jin Guangyao -- Free space??? free space in the middle of the bingo card anyone? But really, where do I even begin here. The contrast between violence and ruthlessness, degradation, being trapped, being every bad thing you could possibly be capable of; and on the other hand, the one person who has never thought poorly of you, who is kind and good and gracious and smart and powerful and of the most lofty status - and who loves you unreservedly, as his equal. Finding someone astoundingly clever and capable and charming where you’d barely expected it, who makes you smile and laugh and has seen you at your most vulnerable and still deeply cares for you, the whole person with weaknesses and well-disguised rough edges, not just the sect leader and superlative title. Generic social ritual metamorphosed into a dialogue of mutual affection! The interposition of politics and status and calculated language with blistering UST!!! And of course - the final scene. One last test, of a despised, shattered man, scared that the one person he esteemed above every other has finally turned on him too - who is answered, no, despite it all I still love you - and so makes his last act in life to save that person, yet again. God. Kill me ;A;

Wei Wuxian/Lan Wangji -- Like, really, why would we be here otherwise? But. Most particularly with these two, I am all about the “showing in myriad tiny (and less tiny) ways over the course of months/years that you, damaged and sad and always trying to hide it, are going to be loved and cared for with the utmost devotion because your utter lack of belief in your self-worth and deservingness of love is wrong” dynamic. Look. I am what I am. (Other Top Faves: WWX gradually becoming oh so loving and fond toward all the Peak LWJ Traits that he scoffed at and made fun of as a dumbass teenager. The way they learn to accommodate and adjust for each other’s preferred interaction styles. The scorching flirting and teasing. The fact that these are, ultimately, adults who put in work and effort to become who they are to each other, and the comforting wonderful ease of their interactions toward the end of the show didn’t ~just happen~ and isn’t immune to future road bumps and potholes, but they both care enough to work it out.)

Wei Wuxian?Wen Ning -- The ? is my new explicit “fuck the sexualromantic/platonic binary, it’s MY single-plank bridge and I WILL be a nuisance to your tagging system” ship-dynamic-indicating symbol. Because yeah -- I am, like, Very Happy with this ship regardless of whether they’re ever fucking or not in a given iteration of the fic/headcanon possibilities multiverse (although, uhhh, I am Biased toward a certain amount of erotic longing for a couple of Peak Weird Gremlin reasons). ANYWAY. It’s about the “doing whatever you can to save someone, even if it transforms them in ways that are kind of horrifying and that eventually you regret and hate yourself for actually; but meanwhile they do not hold anything against you for it whatsoever (and you feel even more guilty because of it)!” crunchiness! It’s about the “you were the first person outside my immediate family to make a point of dramatically respecting and caring about me and I will now have HEART EYES FOREVER” dynamic (which is apparently a recurring theme for me lmao). The fact that Wen Ning consistently goes out of his way to help Wei Wuxian even without/before being asked, because this is perhaps one of the only relationships he’s had where he gets the opportunity to be the one doing things for someone else instead of just being the object who’s taken care of - almost like a way of asserting his personhood, by setting them/himself into the social roles of reciprocal favors and patronage, that I don’t think he otherwise has access to. God, they are just. So Good.

(And, ofc, postscript for Important Personal Context bc being perceived is a terrifying minefield: in my own interpretation and story-making universe, all of these relationships are aro-inflected rather than romantic. All of them. Because in the drama at least, everything is delightfully unnamed via modern relationship terms and stands on the basis of the portrayed interaction alone, and that’s honestly a fair good bit of why I like those portrayals so much. I’m aro, I like to identify with media, and I do what I want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Last Song: “Mother” by IDLES

Last Movie: lol, a good question. I really really don’t watch that many movies. possibly Parasite? was it that long ago? *stares off into the distance*

...oh lmao what am I even talking about, it was Fatal Journey! I clearly am defining “movie” differently in my internal categorisation system than objective reality does. thanks a lot, brain.

Currently Reading: ......way too much fanfiction and not much else. as I believe I mentioned at one point to someone recently, actually acquiring the books I’d been intending to read at the beginning of this year would involve far too much interaction with the real world and general passage of time for my current delicately-balanced emotional fragility to handle. I’m... not really happy about this state of affairs :<

Food I’m Craving: my ability to crave food to return from the war, tbh :/

(aaaand obligatory disclaimer of “I’m bad at tags but pls steal and fill out if you want to! aha :’D)

[goblin-alchemist]

Do you have any tips for getting a hang of characterizations? You always do so amazingly, especially with Gabriel!

Thank you!

I have talked about this with a few friends prior, so I'll see if I can put it into words again.  This might be redundant to those who remember discussing this with me before, but here we go.  I'll focus upon Gabriel since he seems to be the trickiest for people to write.  I'll also reference some of my stories to give examples.

Gabriel's primary motivation, in my mind, is Emilie.  I default everything back to Emilie.  If Gabriel gets absorbed in something and forgets his grief/goals, etc, I have him suddenly think “Man, if Emilie were here we would be able to watch Adrien experience these milestones together” or “I wish I could hold Emilie's hand like Adrien is doing with Marinette”.  And then he gets sad again.  It's an instant grounding focus for him, and thus leads to renewed determination.  “I am doing this because the ends justify the means.  I just want Emilie back.”  I kind of play with the sunk-cost fallacy with Gabriel, too.  At this point, he's put in so much to being Hawkmoth that he can't back out now.  (Until I slam something in his face that gets him to stop abruptly, like him discovering the heroes' identities).

So that's his primary motivation.  But now to address a lot of the rest of his personality.

The fandom likes to emphasize that Adrien is the face of the company and he has to put on a mask, and only when he's Chat Noir does that mask slip and he's allowed to be his “true self”.  I feel Gabriel is also in the same boat.  He's the head of his company.  He's expected to maintain certain social graces just like his son (if not more so).  He's quiet and reserved and polite, but he's not very forthcoming because of fears of industrial sabotage, or revealing a weakness to competitors that can be used against him, or getting taken advantage of (all of which as an adult, he should have experienced at one point in his life).  His stoic poker face was developed as a result of his life experiences.

However, we're shown he's not really reserved and in control.  Just like Chat Noir, we have canon evidence that Gabriel is as ham-fisted, emotional, and pun-filled as Chat Noir.  We see it in every single Hawkmoth monologue, in every time Hawkmoth transforms and gets giddy with excitement that he might win, and with every anger-fueled declaration of vengeance.  (The argument of 'are those Gabriel's legit emotions or does the butterfly miraculous emphasize those emotions from his victims?' is a nice angle to play with in fiction as well).

But as Gabriel, he's not excessively impulsive (Miraculous-stealing opportunities aside).  He lets people speak their case before forming judgment (more on this in a moment), but once the judgment is formed, it's hard to get him to change his mind.  He's stubborn.

So if I'm writing the story or scene from a third-person-perspective, like Marinette, I can't delve into his thoughts on paper.  I have to show the audience what he's thinking through other cues.  Since he's a man of little words, I'll have him silently scan a room before speaking.  He allows people to speak and give them the opportunity to screw up in his presence before he says a word as to his opinion.  Once that opinion is formed, however, good luck getting him to change his mind.  I have to show this using his glowers, frowns, squared shoulders, and clenched hands.

If something pops up that's great dramatic irony (when he was secretly overjoyed that Marinette designed a Hawkmoth-themed dress, for example), I'll show it as flashes of amusement in his eyes, twitching of lips, the relaxing of his posture, and the crinkling of his eyes.  The key here is to show subtle ways of expressing emotions without outright stating that's what's happening, because Gabriel schools himself and his emotions in front of others.

But when I write directly from his POV, that's where the fun begins.  There, I can describe his internal monologue, which is inspired by his actions as Hawkmoth.  I can have Gabriel sit silent, glowering at anyone who approaches while he observes and dryly comments on everything around him.  He won't say his sarcastic thoughts aloud, but he'll be thinking them, and here's my opportunity to channel the exasperation.  Somethings things will just slip out because honestly, is everyone around him an idiot?!  He'll recover and glower away any funny looks aimed at him, because his intimidation is as much a weapon as his silence is.

Frustrated exasperation is what I usually write Gabriel as a lot of times.  As Hawkmoth, he releases that frustration.  As Gabriel, it has to be kept bottled up inside and it only comes out in internal sarcastic remarks.

If I feel Gabriel strays too much into the OOC/cracky territory (which happens a lot in my stories, I admit) when I channel a bit too much Hawkmoth through his civilian form, I stick Nathalie in there as his straight man. She displays even less emotion than Gabriel and ends up being a really nice balance when I go a bit overboard on Gabriel's emotional outbursts.  A few pointed phrases or deadpan replies that juuuuuust touch upon inappropriate for an assistant to talk to her powerful boss, but she helps ground Gabriel into more of his realistic canon personality instead of complete OOC crack.

He's a man of few words as Gabriel, and he's used to being in a position of power, surrounded by yes-men (Nathalie and the Gorilla).  He isn't used to having anyone challenge him.  So, he doesn't need to explain his reasons to people.  When Marinette was rambling on about why he of all people was bidding on her dress design, he halted her mid-ramble and merely said “I like it.”  The end.  He keeps his cards close to his chest, and the only time I've actually seen him let down his guard is oddly, to Nooroo.  I'm certain this is just a narrative device for us, the viewer, but the fact is Gabriel is weirdly forthcoming to Nooroo and pretty much lays out his thoughts, plans, and analysis on the situation at hand.  I use that to my advantage in my stories when writing the Nooroo/Gabriel relationship, and how subconsciously, Gabriel might view Nooroo as a mentor (even if he disregards all of the advice Nooroo freely gives).

He's the head of his multi-million euro company.  He didn't get there by being lax and lazy.  He has super high standards, and isn't afraid to verbally rip apart his peers if it's warranted.  However, he's not entirely unfair, I don't think.  He allowed Marinette to defend her hat design in Mr. Pigeon before coming to a judgment on it.  He allowed Nino to propose his last-minute plan in Bubbler to throw Adrien a birthday party before he denied it (and then interrupted Nino and got angry with him only after the boy continued to push the point).  He allowed Marinette to explain how she stumbled across his Miraculous book before saying anything to her.

To me, the fact he actually went and met with these people in the first place shows a lot about his character.  He's willing to hear people out, but he makes fast judgments and doesn't budge from them. People have to get into his good graces right away or it's hard to change his mind later.  He has flashes of anger, but its not sustained, because he's already moving onto finding a solution to the problem (like in Volpina when he got that phone call about an issue with his designs).  Sometimes, I wonder how much of his anger and irritation is a result of his real thoughts and emotions, or just him seeing an opportunity to akumatize someone by riling them up further.

In this manner, he's calculating, very calculating, and if something reflects him in a poor light its probably for a reason (staging his 'temper tantrum' in Collector).  I ignore the canonical inconsistencies toward his waffling degrees of intelligence and treat Gabriel as very smart, but oblivious and arrogant.

I see him actually as very much like Marinette, only bitter and jaded.  She's clever and creative, and so is he.  The only difference between the two is that life has struck him down with angst.  He's lost his soulmate.  He's experienced the lows of being a starving artist.  He's encountered failure. Marinette has yet to go through any of that.

I could probably go on further and delve into different aspects of different scenarios (his wish, etc) but I think I've rambled on long enough and seems like I've jumped erratically between a bunch of different points  :)  Let me know if you have any additional questions and I hope this has helped at little at least.

[dent-de-leon]

Hey Leo! Sorry for the random questions but do you recommend The Dragon Prince? Is it about the dragons or are they like background lore or something? Thanks!

Short answer: hell yeah,, it’s so much fun!! Give it a try if you love fantasy adventure stuff. Long answer: 

DRAGONS ARE MY FAVORITE THING EVER SO I WILL TELL YOU THAT I ABSOLUTELY CAME CAUSE I HEARD “DRAGON” AND “PRINCE” AND “DRAGON PRINCE” AND THAT SEEMED TO SUIT MY VERY SPECIFIC INTERESTS,,, there’s a lot of lore and they seem to be more or less the ruling forces of Xadia, the land of magic and elves. But they’re definitely not just a backdrop piece, they’re major players! Sadly we don’t get to see as much dragon action in the first season, but the entire focus of the main trio is to protect a dragon that’s a royal heir, the eponymous “Dragon Prince.” 

And so,, bit of a spoiler, but you DO get to actually meet the Dragon Prince in the series,, they hatch right before season 2 and become one of the traveling companions of the main trio. They’re the cutest little baby dragon!! Again, I’m sorry for the spoiler, but if I say like…there’s a dragon companion Eventually and you know that episode 1 introduces a dragon egg, like…it’s kinda hard to talk about without giving away, and DP certainly didn’t shy away from advertising Baby Dragon in all the promo stuff for season 2 so I figure you’ll run into it anyway. And we see glimpses of other dragons as the episodes go by, and they all exude this sense of absolute awe and power. So if you came for the dragons,, there will!! Be!! Dragons!! 

But what else is at the forefront–even more so than the dragons? One of my other favorite things in all of fantasy ever. ELVES,, and lots of them!! All elves–and indeed, all the magical creatures native to Xadia–are born with an innate connection to something called an arcanum, which is a kind of really cool elemental magic!! The writers of Dragon Prince are some of the people that splintered off from the Avatar series after Last Airbender (so they were uninvolved with Korra, but part of the original series). And you can definitely see that in the influence of a lot of the lore and world building. 

Each race of elves having their own affinity for a particular arcanum is definitely going to be reminescent of the whole bender thing. These arcanum are also known as “Primal Sources,” because they’re kind of this mystical, primordial energy that controls the natural forces of the universe. So you have: 

Moon Arcanum (Moonshadow Elves: value loyalty and their oaths above all else, honorable, mystical, withdrawn, spiritual, duplicitous, illusionists, assassins, conditioned to never show fear)

Sun (Sunfire Elves: masters of the forge, unparalleled craftsmanship in their weapon and armor smithing, destructive, nurturing, charismatic, passionate, can invoke either a “rage” based state to rampage with increased strength and speed, or harness their “light” in order to heal) 

Sky (Skywing Elves: Keen minded, clever, value their freedom and autonomy above all else, gifted with flight)

Earth (Earthblood Elves: Patient, steadfast, stubborn, introspective, inquisitive, very in-tune with the balance of the natural world, value harmony and discovery) 

Ocean (don’t know what these elves are called still,, rip,,, but: Peaceful, empathetic, deeply connected to others, forge intimate bonds, adaptable, versatile)

Star (Startouch Elves: very rare, elusive, have a vast concept of time and space as seen through the lens of infinite cosmos, gifted in divination, posses ancient magic and potential secrets of the universe) 

The main conflict of the show is actually between the humans and the elves. They used to all live together, but then humans betrayed the others through the creation of dark magic, a sort of “cheat” since humans aren’t born naturally connected to any of the Primal Sources. Since they’re cut off from the arcanum, they saw their only viable means of practicing magic as sacrificing other magical beings to draw from their life force. This can be anything from crushing bugs to ritual use of phoenix feathers, and even killing dragons. So that’s how you get the alleged “sixth arcanum,” Dark Magic. And honestly, lots of Magical Creatures weren’t a Big Fan of that. Humans eventually went to war with the elves and dragons, and!! Yes!! They lost. And got driven out of Xadia. 

Dragon Prince takes place sometime later, and is essentially about heightening tensions between humans and elves, and likely, the very inevitable impending war. There are numerous human kingdoms, each with their own politics, as well as everything we’ve yet to discover about the interrelationships between differing arcanum elves. The series features two human princes trying to navigate their role in society and expectations for the future alongside the emerging threat of war and disconcerting realization that Xadia isn’t quite as sinister as they thought. There’s also their new friend Rayla, a Moonshadow Elf and trained assassin–who has decided to grudgingly open up her heart, and maybe give humanity a chance (I love her). You also have the obligatory Dark Magic sorcerer with his own agenda and secrets. Not to mention his jock son and dark magic daughter, who are honestly both so quirky, endearing, complex, and can just steal the show. 

I also have to mention General Amaya!! She’s the general of one of the human kingdom armies, and she’s also mute. All her soldiers communicate with her in sign language (and it’s actually correctly animated ASL!!). Everything about the way this character was brought to life was so amazing and, not knowing anything about her beforehand, I was so pleasantly surprised by her strength, charm, chivalry–she’s amazing. And it’s clear that considerable research and effort went into representation here. 

Other reasons to watch include one of my personal favorites,, Hot Elves,, you’ve got both Runaan and Aaravos here and they’re all I can focus on whenever they’re onscreen. They both own my heart and soul and they’re 100% perfect I’m very thankful I can always look forward to them,, 

Unfortunately, I can talk about how much I like Dragon Prince all I want, but I also have to definitely mention there’s a relationship between two queer characters in a flashback of season 2, and they’re both killed off soon after their introduction. That left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I’ve seen people “compare” it to Voltron, try to claim it did things “better,” but that’s honestly all ridiculous. Not to mention, VLD’s LGBT rep was always meant to be Shiro, and he was still around, whereas TDP introduced two minor LGBT characters and then proceeded to kill off their only LGBT characters an episode later. This isn’t me trying to complain or start a fight or anything, but it’s a matter that raises valid concerns and was understandably upsetting for people, so I feel like it’s fair to warn anyone going into it.

As a whole, I do love TDP though. Really, the fun here is in the characters and charm of the series. It’s also really not a show that takes itself too seriously, which is kinda nice. A lot of people have said it was too childish for them, which I can understand, but the whole thing feels very storybook and endearing to me. There’s also certainly layers of nuance there, with political games, duplicitous motivations, usurping kings, self-sacrifice, betrayal, the grieving process, how far you’d go for someone you love–I think there’s definitely some substance to it. I’d recommend that most people at least give it a chance to see if it’s their thing. And if you do, I hope you enjoy it 

[goliath-de-senfina-sango]

Local Teen fed up with Friends' Shit, Local Friends Having a Spat, Local Friends Fight a Ghost Instead of Each Other, Local Team of Youths Perform Exorcism

When Danny got to school, his friends were bickering, walking down the halls to their lockers stuck in a cyclical argument.   “This school needs change and I’m going to make sure it happens!”

“Nobody wants this but you and your vegans!”

“It’s healthier for you, better for wildlife and livestock and does less damage to the environment!”

“People literally need meat products in order to live, what about them?”

“There are supplements that can stand in for meat without slaughtering innocent animals that have no choice in whether they get murdered to feed us!”

“Just like you’re giving us no choice in our alternatives?”

Danny couldn’t stand it anymore and got between them both.   “Estrellas arriba, shut up! Go to class! No one wants to hear this screeching in the halls!”  Tucker and Sam both stared at him wide-eyed and red-faced but Danny was already pushing Tucker away since Sam was usually immovable.   “I can’t believe you guys.  You’re both so clever - how can someone so clever be so stupid?  How do you spend a week arguing over a temporary change that’ll never take hold?”  Sure, Danny’s angry ranting in Spanish may have been getting him stares but that’s what his hoodie was for and he was too annoyed to care.  Once they were in class, Danny went quiet and pulled out his sketch pad to lose himself in drawing whatever first came to mind. Hydra, the largest constellation in the sky, soon decorated the page until class actually started.

As the day progressed Danny shot out an argument on both sides and pulled his friends away from each other when they started yelling, determined not to deal with their bullshit more than needed.  By the end of the day he’d had to come up with several new star-based swears because regular cussing didn’t cut it anymore. “Gods, I can hardly get to lunch without a Denobola shouting contest! You two deal with this without me!”  Heading outside to eat his packed lunch in peace, Danny took solace in his last period being one without his friends. Who knew my least favorite class would be my only peaceful one?  Those two better be done with this soon.

A cow float, a stage, a ‘meat on a stick’ stand, kids in steak and hot dog costumes, a guy with a grill that couldn’t possibly be legal to just put on school property, and a sign that read “United we eat meat.”  These were the first things Danny saw when he got to school. Then he looked over at the other side of the schoolyard. A replica of the Mystery Machine, the biggest fake sunflower he’d ever seen in his life, and yet another stage were set up with people that Danny could only identify as hippies surrounding that stage with picket signs with “It’s easy being green,” and “Tofu for you” written on them.

“Literally, how?”  Danny groaned as his friends both approached him, looking furiously determined and holding megaphones.  He could feel the cold burn of his eyes flashing brilliant green once they were both in front of him. “Seriously, how did you even get this done!  I know there aren’t that many vegans here at the school who could’ve helped with this Sam, so how’d you get it done?”

Sam rolled her eyes at him, arms crossed.  “I paid some people to help us set up the stage on time, so what?”

“…How much money do your parents make that you ca-”

“So you’re a capitalist?”  Danny was not going to punch his friend for interrupting him, that’d be counter-productive right now.  Even if Tucker’s screeching in his ear nearly made that ear bleed. “You have the money and privilege to chose not to eat meat and you go and condemn the poor people who have to work their asses off to make ends meet and who literally need meat to live?”

“Enough!”  Danny put a hand over both of their mouths.  “Sam: you’re right, eating meat is bad for animals cause they die.  You’re also disregarding the struggles of the poor and forcing your choices on the rest of the school like your parents do to you and like they do to everyone else through money and political power.  And you.”  Danny whirled around and pointed his finger in Tucker’s face.  “This is going to ridiculous extremes. How did you even do this?  Don’t answer that, I don’t wanna know. This is only a week-long change, you know that.  Parents would’ve complained to the school about their kids being forced into someone else’s diets and the school would never do this again.  More importantly!”

Shiver, mist.  The sky darkened, the wind whipped up, and Danny swore he could hear cackling from everywhere.  He looked over at the truck that Tucker had brought in and grabbed his best friend’s shoulder. “I’m going to punch you later for bringing a stars damned meat truck when we’re fighting a ghost who’s obsessed with meat.”

“That was my b,” Tucker admitted meekly.  As the meat ripped out of the truck and flew through the air, Tucker and Sam slipped their wrist rays on and Danny ran to and slid under Tucker’s stage.  The sound of something huge hitting the ground shook it, and Danny reached inside of himself. That humming ball of cold and void and out of reach stars, he plunged into it, and light washed over his body.  The world changed, colors turning vivid and bright, strange colors he had no names for other than non-visible light raced into his eyes. The shadows were no longer black but silvery grey, the vast emptiness between molten starmetal and the blazing suns.  Sounds and smells and sensations hit him that were all too alien to process. He reeled, nearly dropping the form. But he had something to do, he had a job to do.

Danny phased into the ground and popped up in front of the meat monster.  It towered over him, so large Danny could barely see anything else. A check of his wrist showed that his ray was now pretty much melded into his hazmat.  “Weird, question later, ass kick now.” 

Tucker was shouting at the rest of the students, his wristray aimed at Agatha but attention on the crowd.  “MOVE, GET OUT OF HERE!” Sam grabbed onto Tucker to try and pull him out of the way of an oncoming meat fist but one of the vegans sprinting away knocked her into him and they both went flying onto the grass.  A snarl on his lips, Danny charged forward. He lashed out with his foot to the… head, he supposed, of the meat, and it staggered backward away from the student body. She swung at him with a hand that moved faster than he’d anticipated, and Danny went flying. The world faded into unreality and he passed through what he vaguely knew were trees and the ground before stopping and righting himself. He flew under the ground, legs merging into a tail - also to freak out over later - and he zoomed. He emerged right under her and missed his uppercut as she stumbled backward from the rays that Sam and Tucker fired.  Another fist grabbed him and Danny was slammed into the ground.

After a failed kick to the hand, Danny concentrated on his wrist ray and lined up the trigger that was sitting comfortably under his glove.  Pull and - Agatha screamed from within her monster host, and Danny flew free. His ray was clearly bigger than the others, but he also felt drained.  “Reserve for bigger fights.”

Danny weaved around her next few blows, kicking and punching the construct of processed meat backward away from the fleeing students and his friends.  Flying in circles to orbit the monster, Danny picked up speed and slammed his foot into the head of the meat pile and it toppled to the ground.

Danny took a moment to breathe, glad to find he could if he didn’t think too hard about it.  A fist came into view and Danny went soaring up and up and up. He saw a plane fast approaching and moved into that safe spot between the world and everything else.  He passed through the plane like it was a thin cloud of smoke before managing to stop. Then he dove, turning solid again when Agatha was in sight from within her meat construction.  “Not a lot of mass but anything with this kind of velocity should do the job.”

BOOM

In the center of the crater, at least as deep as Danny was tall and twice as wide, a splatter of green pulled itself back together into a black and white-suited Danny Phantom, blue skin bruised a sickly purple-black where his cheek had impacted the ground.  Picking himself up, the teen rolled his shoulder until it ached a bit less and saw Agatha there, staring at him. “Oh dearie, are you ok?”

“Surprisingly.”  Danny rolled his neck. When he focused in on Agatha - he really could just see everything couldn’t he? - her face was warped and stretched larger than the rest of her.

“Tough!  You being ok isn’t part of my balanced breakfast of death!”

Smaller chunks of meat came together into constructs about three-quarters of Danny’s size, five of them in total, and they grinned at him.  This was when Sam and Tucker caught up with everything, apparently. Danny spun, heel tearing through the creatures like a knife, and landed to see Agatha being pushed back by Sam and Tuck’s wrist rays.  “Fuck yeah!”

Danny’s celebration was cut short by his grasp on that deathly cold void slipping in the excitement, light washing over him with the warmth of being alive again.  “This is inconvenient.” The meat monsters grabbed onto Danny’s limbs, reminding him that they were mere extensions of Agatha’s will. “This is even less convenient, how about no?”

As Danny was dragged through the air, something smacked him in the face.  Catching it before it could fall out of reach, Danny felt a minor bloom of relief.  “The Thermos! Maybe I can get it to work!” Seeing his family below, Danny hoped to all the stars in the sky that he was just going for a ride.

The ride stopped.  Danny was dropped. A scream flew from his lungs, and Danny reached deeper, desperately grasping, to pull himself into the chill of the grave.  The abyss met his call at the same time that his family looked up at the blur fast approaching. “Thanks for the thermos!” He shouted as he dove into the ground.  Not waiting to see how that was handled he resurfaced to find Sam and Tucker bound in mounds of meat. “Work. Please work.” Danny aimed the thermos, poured his own cold  heat shadows into the thing, and hit the button.  A flash of blue light, a scream of defiance, and he capped the thermos. Gravity and heat washed over him again and Danny let out a sigh of relief, running over to pull Sam and Tucker out of the meat piles. “You guys ok?”

“I have meat and blood everywhere and I was nearly crushed to death.”  Sam shuddered, even as Danny phased everything off of her.  “I am the very definition of not ok.”

“My nightmares are scarred for life after that. That was freaky. What do we do with her?”  Tucker’s voice sounded more robotic than Danny liked, he’d have to do something to help him back to normal.

Before Danny could answer that he heard footsteps and turned the thermos invisible.  As he thought, his parents thundered toward him with the Ghost Finder in hand. “Just missed em, guys.”  Danny pointed behind him and was relieved when his mom and dad jogged off after a nonexistent ectosignature.  “Well, that was a shitty start to the day. We should go inside before someone makes something out of the crater here.”  Danny, Tucker, and Sam all headed off to the nearest entrance to the school, thoughts going south. “What if the security cameras caught all that?”

“Oh, no, that you don’t have to worry about,” Tucker said.  “I’m all over that in like, a couple of hours tops.”

“Good.”  Danny waited until they’d gotten to their lockers, and stuffed the thermos into his bag before punching Tucker in the arm.  “That is for bringing a stars damned meat truck when there was a food-obsessed ghost flying around!”

“Alright, yeah, that was stupid of me.”  Tucker nodded. “I shouldn’t have done that.  But uh, we all agreed not to do stuff that affects literally everyone without consulting each other?”  Tucker and Danny both looked to Sam, who glared at them heatlessly.

The goth sighed and leaned heavily on Danny.  “Alright, fine, ask people what they want first.  Lesson learned. Can we talk about what we’re gonna do with Agatha though?”

“Well, I don’t think she’s a mindless monster or anything,” Danny started slowly as they walked toward their homeroom.   “I think we can reason with her. Show her that change can be a good thing when it’s done right.”

“Alright, we can do that once we’re sure she’s not gonna try and kill us though, right?  Tucker tried to go for a neutral, slightly teasing tone but Danny could hear - could feel a shakiness to him.  “We are meat if you didn’t notice Danny, and I don’t know if her control over food extends to a cannibal’s diet.  I don’t wanna find out.”

“I’m horrified and grossed out,” Sam groaned.  “I’m all for not getting cannibalized. That’s the wrong kind of macabre for me.”

Danny shook his head, made some crack about how bad either of them might taste, and promised to let Agatha cool down before releasing her.  “Now, Sam, about how you’re using your money to muscle people around.” Danny groaned as loudly as he could and Tucker waved him off anyway.  “No no, she’s an activist and all that shit, she knows how capitalism effects the working class and the attitude that people can just get by without animal products..”  Danny pushed both of hs friends forward while this conversation happened. It was going to be a long day.

That cooldown time happened to be the amount of time it took for the veggie week thing to run its course and be done with.  The school was cleaned, though all the vegan students who’d showed up for the rally were questioned about any kind of explosives they may have tried to sabotage the meat truck with and the news settled in on a gas line story.  Saturday arrived, and the trio all met up in the park. Away from all the dog walkers, readers and normal people having fun outside, Danny Tucker and Sam stood in a small clearing of trees, a few chipmunks shifting around above their heads and in the bushes.

“Tuck, you got the reports?”

“Roger.  Sam, got your wrist ray ready?”

“Of course.  Danny, remind me to tell your parents they’re awesome for making most of their stuff solar powered.”

“They hadn’t figured out how to tap the afterlife for energy yet, it’s the most efficient thing we got.”  Danny shrugged. He pulled out the thermos, which hummed beneath his fingers with the contained energy of Agatha inside.  Sam and Tucker couldn't feel it, so he chalked that up to another ghost thing. “Alright, Agatha, if you’re ready to talk to us, I’m gonna let you out now.”  The thermos offered no response. Danny opened it anyway.

The bark on the trees darkened, the leaves turning grey and the branches and bushes rustling as birds and squirrels left in a hurry.  The air turned colder and sharper, and the sunlight dimmed as green spilled out of the thermos and stained the air. Agatha took shape quickly, though her glow was dimmer than it had been before.  Her eyes raked across all three of them and narrowed. “Well, children? You kept rambling on and on about talking whenever I tried to get out. What’s so important that you didn’t put me back in the Ethereal Plane?”

Tucking the name of the other side in the back of his mind, Danny offered his best-placating smile.  It disarmed most teachers back when he wasn’t having as many problems, he was hoping it’d work here too.  “Agatha, hi. I’m Danny, this is Tucker and Sam. I feel like we got off on the worst foot before, what with you trying to kill us and all.”  Tucker elbowed him in the ribs and Danny shoved him back. The buzzing in the air grew louder, his skin tingled, and some small part of his brain kept screaming to shoot, to run, to do anything that could get this thing that did not belong away from him.  “So, I understand why you were angry.”

“You, Sam, changed the menu to just one food group!”  Agatha’s voice was rising to those terrible echoes in the mind, and the tiny voice got louder.  Still it was ignored.

“I understand now that it was probably a bad idea.  No one’s been going to the line in the cafeteria all week except fellow vegans,” Sam grumbled.  “Still though, some change needed to happen. The cafeteria wasn’t giving us any healthy foods!” Sam was a good actress when it came to her voice. She sounded unafraid, ready to argue for hours.  Danny could feel something off though.

“And healthy diets aren’t exactly easy to come by if you don’t put a lot of effort into it nowadays.”  Tucker held out a sheaf of papers. “This, Miss Reece, is a report on the various health crises around the country because of the food they’re feeding us.”  The papers were taken and Tucker let out as subtle a breath as possible. “I don’t agree with changing the menu to just one food group, no one in their right mind would.  But I think we should still change things up. Is there any way you can help us do that?”

There was a long beat of quiet, where all that Danny could hear was the sizzle of patties on a grill, the crunch of lettuce being pulled apart, the chopping of a knife on a cutting board the came with Agatha’s presence.  It was in the background of everything unless he focused. It was still there though, and it was so distracting with everything else happening. Agatha read, frown deepening as she did before she handed the reports on obesity and diabetes increasing in children of their ages and lower back to Tucker.  “Alright,” she started, then stopped. A superfluous breath. She looked to Danny. “Well, I suppose that I was a tad extreme about everything. How about this?” She held out her hand, and above her glove, the green light that seemed to shine in all directions from her coalesced into the form of a burger.   “I’m not sure they’ll accept me in the school kitchens again but I’m certainly able to make a meal for everyone.”

“That’s amazing!”  Tucker crowed. “I’ve already sent a few texts and set up some online polls to find out what most people actually want out of their lunch, maybe you can help us with finding ingredients around Amity?  Do you have a food sense?”

“Even if they don’t let you into the school’s kitchen you could still probably find a soup kitchen that’d definitely let you in,” Sam offered.  “If you can create food from basically nothing, then I see no reason for them to turn you away.”

“Plus, since ectoplasm draws energy from heat and electricity, you can probably just relax in the sun and be able to pull out a full course meal.”  Danny took in his friends’ curious looks and scratched the back of his neck. “My parents are the world’s best ghost scientists. I just asked them.”

“I’ll certainly look into that soup kitchen idea dearies,” Agatha said with a bright smile on her face.  “For now though, I should be getting back to the Astral Plane. Sunlight is a nice substitute but after all that fighting I need a quick break.”

“I can get you back there without my parents noticing,” Danny offered.

“I only need to be invisible for that, dear,”  Agatha assured them and faded out of sight. The chill and fading of the clearing dissipated, and Tucker and Sam relaxed visibly.

“Well,” Danny said as he pulled his notebook out of his bag.  “That’s one ghost down.” He hoped it wouldn’t be too many till he convinced his parents.

Ao3

[philosapphos]

a fleeting memoir.

I don’t know how to write a great book. All I know how to do is feel. 

At my university, his eyes narrow as he skims through my writing. “You should cut down on the adjectives. And be more precise.” During the semester, I learn how to write quietly, obediently holding my hands between the walls of the keyboard. The writing was programmatic: a steady string of code to create tight, virus-free argumentation. I feel like I was choking during my lectures and would run afterward toward the campus gardens, gasping for air. 

It’s always raining in the classics. Whether it’s the European drizzle of existentialist contemplation and ennui, the dreary Scandinavian sleet, or just the histrionic downpour of a popular romance, something about water falling from the sky touches the soul. I moved from California to England a few years ago. Upon meeting me, everyone would always joke about the weather. Even at its most aggravating, there’s still something slightly mad and magical about getting wet from the rain: from the child’s ecstasy to splashing in puddles to the bursts of unexpected showers. Film is awash with portraits of a dark-haired woman, her face and arms lifted, her eyes closed, rain streaming down her hands and cheeks: a worship of the skies and sea, bathed in baptismal rivers, rising toward truth like an ancient Niniane. 

So let’s imagine it’s raining in this story: the tale of a brunette woman in her early twenties, sliding out of her damp coat as she settles into a library desk. The world outside is darkly wet but she is wrapped around the warm glow of a favorite book, smiling softly as she turns each page. 

As she moves through time, she loses herself for a bit, as young minds tend to do; drifting away into a third-person binocular gaze of her own life. One day, as though reminded of a long-lost childhood friend, she glanced into the mirror and feels a dull ache of recognition.  

Through a series of unfortunate events, she had become an academic. (She smirks to herself as she writes that.) Clever enough to critique the system, with a delicate list of degrees lifting her above the rest of society. The academy was a castle (a fortress), and she strolled its hallways, draped in elegance. The world lay like a lavish fur at her feet: it wasn’t until years later that she noticed the delicate golden chains wrapped around her wrists.  

People will think that this is an intellectual book because its text winks at readers with graduate degrees and aspirations of Platonic cerebrality. Unfortunately, the protagonist is an ordinary human: a body of neurochemical imbalances and menstruation and psychologically complex sexual urges. I am writing a story about a woman. 

Rilke writes about solitude: about the world created within the self, the infinite loneliness and the sweet-sounding lamentations of its suffering. “There I shall live all winter and rejoice in the great quiet.” Like most people living in the recurring buzz of a city, she was lonely. She often found her peace within the walls of her apartment: a silent altar to herself, as if she were living wrapped up in the pages of her diary. She hung her friends’ art up on the walls, framed photographs of her family, and filled her bed with soft, silky fabrics. She would light incense and candles, and fill the air with soft beats of music: purifying the space, making this ground holy. 

She was a graduate student, which meant everybody outside of academia thought she was brilliant and everyone inside of academia thought she was rather interesting and worthwhile. She grew up spoonfed the myth of the metals, told the tales again and again of her own precocious cleverness, of her mystical intelligence. She read far above her grade level and overextended her vocabulary. When she was young, she called herself a bookworm, and when she was older, she called herself a sapiosexual. At twelve years old, she dressed up as Athena and silently worshipped the goddess of wisdom (—she would ignore the war and weaving part). 

She was also enraptured by Boudicca. She grew up on McCaughrean’s Brittania and D'Aulaires' Book Of Greek Myths. She was fascinated by the portrait of powerful women, radiant in their own strength. She loved mermaids, selkies, sirens: those dark and dangerous women of the seas. Boudicca rode in the streets of her city, naked except for her long hair, which wrapped itself around her body: history painted an eroticized form of the woman, straddling a horse, pale skin and trembling lips; tresses enticingly, teasingly feigning at modesty. Boudicca’s performance to make some statement, some protest against patriarchy or injustice, but it was clear to her, even as a girl, that this story was not a political one. The sculpture of Justice may be a blinded woman in robes, but there is nothing more appalling than a hysterical female voice screeching for equality. 

I don’t remember when I first discovered feminism: I only remember hating women as a child. I found a notebook once, filled with a child’s scrawl, where I exclaimed that I was so glad to be clever—not silly and pretty like most girls. As I grew into adolescence, I occasionally cast longing glances at the other girls: with their golden curls and million-dollar smiles, exquisite little dolls of coiffed femininity and rich daddies. I went to a whiskey bar recently that embodied a kind of polished masculinity: mustached waiters in tweed vests over cuffed white shirts and sculpted forearms, busts of hunted deer and other achievements of man, wooden bookshelves filled with elegantly muted book collections. It was another kind of holy place: where one kneels before the marble mantelpiece in obeisance to the power-hungry colonizer. 

My sexuality began to emerge in the office of a professor: his mahogany desk looming around me, legs spread nonchalantly in an easy authority. My heartbeat quickened, knees crossed primly in a skirt, as I blushed and asked questions about the course. Lower your voyeuristic eyes: these encounters never went beyond a comment or an accidental touch. My years as an undergraduate were spent daydreaming over my notes, talking about the world over coffee, and thinking about sex in the library. I liked that momentary hesitation of surprise as I casually mentioned something sexual from my studies: a metaphysical puzzle about pornography, the liberatory rise of polyamory to dethrone an antiquity of monogamy, the darkly wrung layers of power within sadomasochism. Perhaps it was there that I found feminism: from a language of embodying oppression flowered forth the idea that surrender could be empowering. The thought was a pearly light: the gift of femininity, of submission and release—and the deep, silent power within. 

I found my sexual power like the rest of my generation: by exerting a measure of control over the other. It was a prize to hold enticingly before them; deliciously unattainable. To have something that someone else wants: that is the only measure of worth in a capitalist landscape. The mouth of the cave was enticing: that insidious allure of Pandora’s box. Suddenly, it was no longer enough to be intelligent: one must be desirable as well. Like a trophy held above the heads of others: they needed to see the prize and want it for it to be special. She saw herself as a tightrope dancer: balancing the power of the mind with the desires of the flesh. It was an elaborate performance, a practiced soliloquy for a darkened theatre: one hopes dearly for an audience.  

I spent a year as a professor. I recall a single frozen scene: it is raining outside of the coffee shop and I am listening to achingly melancholy French music (Les mémoires blessées, Crier tout bas). I prepared my mind and body for each lecture as though I were entering a gladiatorial ring: I neatly typed and stapled my handouts, and slid into a modest knee-length dress that subtly held close to my waist and dipped along my collarbones. My clothes felt like a costume for a 1960s-style secretary or stewardess: cleanly washed with a mildly sweet perfume, hair twisted into a tidy chignon, legs folded at a desk with my books stacked in alphabetical order. I answered emails in a timely manner, graded with a kind but firm hand, and smiled with the vacantly polite gaze of customer service. I checked my evaluations diligently and tried to be likable and friendly, welcoming my students into the warm hearth of philosophy and letting them wander through my home. They would step in for a moment, tracing their fingers along the spines of the books, glancing over at me as if I were an aspect of the furniture as much as the shelves. I felt like a salesman, smiling indulgently and explaining to the unimpressed consumer why they should consider getting into academia. I model prettily, showing them the life that they could have: the picture of success in this tier of society. I still see other professors twisting into this routine: the assumed air of authority, the dignified crown of the philosopher-king. Like prophets of an ancient religion, they share their advice with all and teach the one true path toward enlightenment: the rigor and the rituals of knowledge. Like any good advertisement, they draw others in with a manufactured sense of humanity: the self-deprecating humor, the melodramatic tearing of cloth and hair at self-imposed deadlines, the pale, bony thinness of perfectionism, wasting away before an audience of other performers. 

In academia, we hide our faces under a paper-mache mask of stiffly inked degree papers and watery excuses of endless busyness. A Kafkaesque artist of twisted, exhibitionistic self-torment, a Pharisee loudly lamenting a self-inflicted agony: the scholar fights to surpass another in self-flagellation, a mortification of the unbearably corporal flesh. “Only pain is intellectual.” We tout depression as an honorable badge of intellectual superiority—the masses are dead-eyed and drunk on a cocktail of prescription drugs and pre-packaged ideology. But those gifted, cerebral children can see through the painted backdrop and television lights: they witness reality as it is.

At its best, intellectualism is unhappy—at its worst, it is cruel. The 17th-century dramatist Jean Francine wrote that life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. Some scholars do care, and care deeply: for them, a pedagogical journey is like excavating a lost city, brushing dirt away from crumbling walls, filled with warnings written in an ancient, dying tongue. Unearthing the skeletons of a forgotten history, a memory that humanity longs to forget. 

“It would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state... In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.” (A. Schopenhauer, Lehre vom Leiden der Welt)

With the inevitable tumble into nihilism and absurdity, the rarity of the compassionate philosopher sinks deeply into the quicksands of despair. But what of the hermit, the ascetic, who casts aside the ropes of human connection? From the side of the hilltop, he looks down upon the ravaged city and laughs; like a dying man in a desert, watching his horse die before the mirage of a lush oasis. Perhaps I felt this way when I was younger: laughing at my freedom before the pilloried women, imprisoned in the bodysuits of gender. Perhaps I saw myself as androgynous: a sexless fae child with inexplicable knowledge of wordly things and a playful schadenfreude. 

As a child, I saw the pillars of women and their wisdom as arching tombstones in the chilling mist of my future, the inevitable decline into the pains of labor, that aching creation of an object to be snatched away from my grasp: the anonymity of motherhood. I longed to be a maker of worlds: to hold my hands in the raging welding fire and twist metal into mechanism. When asked why I chose to study philosophy over literature and history, I tell people that I never wanted to be relegated to Whitehead’s ‘series of footnotes’ on a great thinker. The idea of dedicating my life, fawning at the frozen feet of bygone wisdom, entangling myself in the discourse of another and attempting to organize their thoughts, struck me as debasing. 

I imagine these scholars as custodians, moving slowly along the great halls of the history of the mind: dusting off the tired exhibits, examining a relic of ancient wisdom, and guiding others to a particularly showy gallery of pop intellectualism. I longed to be one of the innovative elite: developing my own ideas and launching them out into the world like sleek silver rockets. 

Still, unbidden thoughts lift to a rising echo, like bloated corpses floating to the surface of a lake:

i. This too shall pass.

ii. The truth will always emerge. 

iii. Failure in life is inevitable. 

Why have we created lives that lack a solidity of meaning? The Aristotelian virtue of striving has been perverted into a constant desire for something out of reach. We exist in the hellish stance of Tantalus: the king of Sipylus who consumed his young in an unquenching burn for power. He was condemned to the agony of desire: emaciated, shaking fingers brushing against the soft, bruised flesh of a fruit he would never taste. I never understood why the Garden of Eden was a utopian paradise—Eve and Pandora have been damned by the priests of time for embodying that trait that is valorized in men: curiosity. The great men—the scientists, the philosophers, and the poets—have loudly proclaimed the glory of the inquisitive gaze, of those first pioneers who pressed into the darkness of the great unknown. Yet it is a sin for woman: feminine curiosity is prying, gossiping, the idle chatter of busybodies. The curious woman is one who should have known better, who ought to have kept her mouth shut: her questions are barren and vain. The moral of these ancient stories is simple: obey the commands of men and remain shrouded in ignorance. When offered knowledge or understanding, the good woman will look away and choose the path of purity. (“The innocent eye is blind, as the virgin mind is empty.”) 

I recently bought my mother a print transcribed with the cheerfully defiant line, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” The sentiment is true, in the bland, platitudinal way of many inspirational quotes, but what is the fate of the women that do make history? Too often, their mangled corpses are left hanging on the city walls: a grim reminder to all of the merciless suppression of insurgent forces. 

Curious women are not considered clever: they are considered dangerous. Eve damned humanity to physical pain and scarcity; Pandora released a whirlwind of sickness and death; even Joan of Arc was burned with so many others at the stake. The women who refused to be ‘well-behaved’ are condemned to inhabit our nightmares as graffitied caricatures of the Furies: shrieking women wreaking havoc and suffering across the orderly landscape of civilization. 

Again and again, we watch these women bowing their heads to accept their punishment: Boudicca, Artemisia, and Cleopatra each died by their own hand. Western history relishes the tragic figure of Lucretia: a woman who was raped before committing suicide to preserve the honor of her father. Marble sculpture immortalizes the brutal rapes of Prosperina, of Europa, and the Sabine women. Even the Old Testament tells the story of a Levite throwing his concubine to a mob maddened with bloodlust in an effort to protect himself. She is brutally raped and murdered and, like Lucretia, she is marked as culpable for her rape: the Levite later dismembers her corpse by slicing her body into twelve pieces.

If only I had known before that the trinkets of intelligence and sexuality are finery on men, yet mark women out as scapegoats. A woman told me yesterday of a line that resonated deeply with her: “Give no-one cause to fear you.” To me, it sounded like a warning. Intelligent women are intimidating—I am told this time and time again. Men are afraid of women who out-earn them, both in pay and degrees. They are terrified of being laughed at by women—and this fear quickly boils into a destructive rage. The woman who smiles at the wrong time is beaten, raped, and murdered; the confident, curious woman is seen to invite her own destruction. 

Academia is like wandering into a gilded museum and gagging upon the stark realization that the naked bodies of your mother and sister are hanging from the walls. Silently slipping into the room, you can feel the hands of men reaching for you next. 

The kindest death that I face is to be ignored and silenced. My words have already been torn away from me or kicked into the shadows, and I have already been punished for my ideas. Men only respect other men. The esteemed title of ‘philosopher’ is unattainable unless I contort myself into masculinity. Either I must destroy the woman or they will do so. 

Catherine Malabou writes on the contradiction of a ‘woman philosopher’: “Philosophy is woman’s tomb. It grants her no place, no space whatsoever, and gives her nothing to conquer... The possibility of philosophy is thus largely premised on the impossibility of woman.”

Female philosophers are exiled to the land of poetry, where their writing is derided further. I like to say that my favorite philosophers are Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath: a comment that raises the eyebrows of male academics. These writers are mostly known for their highly publicized breakdowns and suicides: while madness is romanticized in male artists, it is scorned in women. 

The two cruellest labels against women are hysteria and gossip. The powerful wisdom of the emotions, the deep interpersonal insight of psychology have become degraded feminine ways of thinking. The kingdom of the heart, the knowledge of the self and of others, is ravaged by the pillaging armies of the mind. The ideal individual becomes a solitary agent, swathed in a protective layer of rights: he relies on nobody and protects only himself. A father is permitted to walk away at any time, while a mother never gives enough for her children. The nuanced intricacy of the web of care and dependency is wiped away in the blank face of laws and duties: men see themselves as tabula rasa, pretending to be immune to the deep memory of the womb from which they emerged. Plato wrote that the traumatic event of being born caused men to lose touch of their innate knowledge, while Socrates called himself a ‘midwife’—both espousing an ideology that men must be pulled away from the treacherous touch of woman in order to flourish into excellence. It is a mantra repeated again and again within the Western tradition: the mother is the passive soil of the earth, little more than a breathing incubator, while the father actively sows his seed and causes new life to spring forth. 

The medieval philosopher Boethius is known for proposing a theory of time, stretched out across eternity, where God stands as Being in a place apart from spatiotemporality, gazing down upon existence. He writes often of a single woman: Lady Philosophy. Even within the Romantic languages, where declension casts a shadow of gender across the syntax, the word ‘philosophy’ is feminine. So too can we return to Iustitia, the female figure of justice. In the masculine world of law and philosophy, why are the disciplines imagined as encapsulated by the female body? And why is this female body possessed only by the men who study her? 

The male gaze is not merely a visual technique of producing images of women that cater to an audience of heterosexual men. In feminist theory, the ‘male gaze’ is often imagined to be a lavascious position: the businessman watching the stripper sliding around the pole, the voyeuristic neighbor peeking through a young girl’s window as she dresses, the horny teenager scrolling through a disjointed compliation of fragmented genitalia and artificial moaning. 

But the ‘male gaze’ is the dominating gaze: there is power in the ways that we see. It is written as far back as the Genesis Rabbah: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. To see is to rule over all, and the cruelest power is forcing another’s eyes open to gaze upon the unspeakable. MacKinnon writes that women live in sexual objectification the way fish live in water: not only does it surround us constantly, but it constitutes the only environment we have ever known. We see ourselves and other women through the blurred filter of this hierarchy—gender is not a dichotomy of body parts but rather a manufactured reality: nothing remains untouched by it. When men see philosophy and law as woman, they see themselves as her conqueror: explorers stepping foot on yielding, fertile ground, eager to ravage her body in imposing their structures of violence and cruelty. Within the institution of sovereign state, her life is nasty, brutish, and short. 

Do you remember the woman from the beginning of this story? Night has fallen and the library has grown cold around her. The austere portraits of men clad in greatness loom over her, reminding her that she will never join their ranks. The female body of classical art is nude, her limbs arranged invitingly. She smiles softly and asks no questions: she allows the viewer to take what he likes from her with a self-effacing brush of coy reserve. The woman has spent many hours studying the art of the Greco-Roman world, and she has never recognized herself in any of the half-lidded eyes of these soft, eroticized women. 

She once stood at a museum in front of a sculpture of Venus. The marble woman was crouching to the ground, as if kneeling before her viewer. Her arm curls across her upper body, obscuring the breast from direct view—her thighs are pressed together, and her hair falls in elegant waves across her face. Art historians have called her posture ‘playfully erotic’: a titillating peek-a-boo of sexuality behind a veil of feigned modesty. 

She imagined the marble woman standing up: pushing back her shoulders and jutting her chin upwards. She imagined looking at the marble woman directly in the eye. The sculpture is naked, but she is unashamed of her nakedness: like the endless depictions of the Athenian youth, her body is seen as a perfection of nature—strong and elegant architecture to house a dignified mind. 

This standing sculpture does not resemble the warrior women of the Amazon: fierce mythical women who sliced off their breasts in order to kill more effectively, rejecting their femininity to transform into virago. Our culture fantasizes about the Amazonian woman as female Ares: Diana, ferocious princess of the Amazons, is often depicted in armor and headgear. Even Athena is rarely depicted without her helmet and spear. 

But standing before us is not a warrior: she is simply a woman, and her body is simply a body. We can trace the muscles along her thighs, the soft rise and fall of her belly, the bones along her neck and shoulders. Her expression is unreadable: she gazes back to meet your eye, watching your movements. Standing before her, you seem to forget which one of you is the art and which is the audience. Perhaps you hold your breath, wondering if she will reach out to touch you. 

But the woman simply turns and walks away from you. Her marble feet make no sound as they climb down the pedestal and across the hallway. She was not created for you to look at her: she was created to exist, to experience the world through herself. 

One day, I find myself resting in a secret garden: there are stone walls surrounding me and in this hidden place, I have discovered the meaning of life. A grey cat is sleeping next to me and blue butterflies swim through the air, but there is no-one else here. I breathe deeply and on the exhale, my knowledge of time disappears: I float within the essence of reality and it is beautiful in its vast eternity. Like gazing upon the sea or the sky, I look at the world that I have created. With a smile that nobody will see, I press my lips against the small cat beside me and stand to leave. I retrace my steps by memory: across the hot desert sands and snowy mountaintops and finally to a familiar dirt path. I walk until I arrive at my childhood home. Tears spill over as I hold my mother, my sister: even my dog is there, her tail wagging in recognition. In Ithaca, I have found everything I was searching for. The rest of the marble melts away, and my story is just beginning.

[boglog]

HoC Onion !

[TW mention of sexual abuse/violence]

I’m foregoing the pros/cons format here but generally-speaking my negative points are still gathered at the top w the highlights near the end.

Obviously, between letting a sex offender have a platform in mass media and potholes, I’d choose the latter. My below crits absolutely are not a demand for Spacey to be brought back and he can die in a fire for all i care. I just wish his character’s absence was not the nº1 reason for this season not making any sense

as far as i can gather, this season’s primary arc is as much about Frank’s death (in lieu of Doug’s) as it is Claire’s emotional and political divorce from Frank while she undergoes your traditional postbreakup analysis of who she was pre Frank and post Frank and were Frank actually there this idea might have legs

...but instead we have Doug ://

the level of intensity that the plot demands cannot be carried by forcing Doug into being a deeper character than he was intended, all the way until the end, he truly just reads as either a pitiful sadist or a henchman. It’s disharmonious and dangerously close to bad. 

Frances Underwood makes more sense if Frank dies in episode 8!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! She’s literally going to be his reincarnation!!!!!!!

literally...who cares if Doug gets stabbed by Frank’s letter opener? whomst?

Doug can’t be Frank’s proxy, but sans a certain pedoph*le, the plot will just have to suffer. 

Other side effects of Doug’s undeserved promotion include but are not limited to: 

forcing Doug to share the role of antagonist with the Shepards, yet another New Villain © that feels totally unnecessary and confusing (the Conways at least got two seasons)

Frank’s diary feels forced and out of character for someone decidedly so unsentimental  

How does Claire have a bun in the oven when she clearly didnt sleep with Frank for all of season 5 and locked herself in her room while he was being assassinated? How is a Dramatic paternity test not going to be insisted upon in the show’s universe?

fixation on Frank’s will as a McGuffin is really... I don't know boring considering no one cares for the guy? What property of his does claire stand to lose? I’m sure the rich people fandom can speculate but i honestly needed this manifested in the show via some examples instead of the grand abstraction that is The Will bc losing Frank’s assets would set Claire back but it would not directly threaten her presidency. Not to mention that i’m not entirely sure Frank’d have Doug of all people as his sole heir if it didn't serve as revenge against Claire, which just lowers Doug’s importantance even more

Frank never cared for Doug, a largely unlikeable character, which we already knew from the beginning, so Doug’s entire arc is pathetic at best as well as his tangential inclusion in the Cliare v Frank arc

My major problems with Doug’s character began as early as season 4. 

Did not understand why they didn't actually have Doug switch sides by joining the Dunbar campaign in earnest in season 4. Like... it’s such an obvious opportunity to Thicken The Plot © that it’s reached this gif levels of dropping the ball:

P much everything about Doug’s character since then is just so.... lacking, while for the last few seasons they give him depth when he magically has empathy for one (1) woman before she dies (possibly as a direct result of his actions). This entire plot about him evaluating why he was so loyal to Frank could've been unpacked whilst he avoids Dunbar finding out about the murders he did commit. I’d rather him having agency than be a flat, troubled underling.

Aright I'm going to stop complaining about Doug. In season 3 and 4, his insecurity over being replaced and his sacrifices for Frank (and subsequent guilt) came close to giving us a real Moment with him as we delve more into how colourless his life outside of work really is. But beyond that, when his character started getting repetitive, there’s very little to compensate for his alternating acts of extreme narcissism/violence versus his childish confusion / self pity when he doesn’t get what he wants.

Anyways I'm basically at a point where I’d be okay if Frank’s long-lost cousin replaced Doug replacing Frank 

I’m appreciating the writers’ distinct refrain from plot formats and that the seasons progressively move towards the Underwoods but what if just for circularity and added balance we return to having a full-on reporter B plot in s6? More emphasis on Janine and Tom’s sleuthing, culminating in Tom’s assassination and Janine publishing the tell-all expose against Frank---including a reference to Zoe---that becomes the magnum opus of her career (and Claire using that against Frank). I just think the season needed more balance that Doug, the Shepards and Tom were not offering 

The Shepards and Tom, meanwhile, are decidedly banal. First of all, I had a hard time even telling Bill and Tom apart esp given that they were introduced one after the other. All white guys are the same.

Bill just kind of sits around until he has a platform to reference his favourite action movies doesn't he?

Moreover what does Tom do!? he doesn't want power, he doesnt seem to want anything. He’s just kind of there?

Unlike the Conways, the Shepards don’t have a clear goal and are not often in direct conflict with Claire the way Frank and Conway were. They want to control the presidency for money and Claire is always bouncing back from reliving her girlhood to political rivalry w Anette, yes, but what does that mean? What are the consequences? The logistics are so indirect and complicated, what precisely does Anette want? And why does anyone care? The Shepards are extremely boring.

Frank’s asides were purple and long af so I appreciate Claire’s succinct style not to mention her fantastic screen presence. I’m left to wonder, though, if maybe hers and every other aside in HoC is a little too on the nose. Like, they didn't hafta spell it out that the bird in the wall was a representation of Frank’s shadow trapping her, I think we got that 

The artistic intercuts to Claire’s troubled childhood wherein a group of bullies coerce her into stripping naked through the forest, while visually stunning and clever for its self-explanatory nature, feel really passive. They don't visually show us any reason for her not to resist, the bullies even let her keep her clothes after cutting them off her so we’re left to wonder why she does nothing....

Claire was raised to be ~proper~ so her resistance (likely) comes in the form of biting, passive-aggressive poise which is hard to get across in a silent montage but it just feels.. weird

Frances Underwood is going to have a very sad childhood

nearly all the Claire flashbacks are cinematic masterpieces and as much i think Claire’s backstory deserves more attention, i also appreciate the minimalism and the choice humanising moments of her adolescence 

listen I'm sure we all agree Robin Wright is peak acting but the actor for young Claire, who has the arguably harder task of copying Wright is fantastic 

Of all the characters who crop up every season seemingly out of nowhere only to disappear once more once when the plot the Underwoods are done with them, Jane is one of my favourites and possibly one of the greyest characters alive. Smart, mysterious, worldly, a bit of a hippie despite her job, severe despite her sense of humour. Really loves her extremely pedestrian surname. We stan.

Secondary characters rarely get anything close to a backstory on this show, esp ones that were introduced so late. Still, her motivations seem more complicated then others (i.e. betraying Cathy, one of two people she cares about) and I wonder if they deserve a bit more of an explanation. Especially seeing as she has a relationship with every major character.

If anyone deserves a spin-off it might be Jane and her name-dropping career/social life

Cathy faking her own death with a terrible french accent? On stan !!!

Seth teasing Doug even while he’s completely undervalued by everyone around him is a power move

Impressed that they managed three characters named Tom, their distinctly different appearances and the fact that they're almost never in the same POV shots works to separate them.

Claire using the word “female” even facetiously is cringe

Whenever they use the cinema room, the movie they watch is always symbolic. Before the 2017 election, Frank and Claire imitate the characters in Double Indemnity, and this season a pregnant claire watches Rosemary’s Baby. Clever.

i liked the whitehouse tour guide’s inclusion and the cameo from _____ though this season was especially white without their usual token secondary character

So overall i liked season 6 as an exploration of Claire’s character even while it did v little justice to most of the other characters and unfortunately spacey’s absence did affect the storyline

and finally: that cinnamontography !

Not that the series should be pushed past its prime, but wouldn’t it be interesting to see Claire as a mother?

[ubourgeois]

Top 30 Films of 2018

I’m actually getting one of these out at a fairly reasonable time! I’m a champion.

Compared to last year, I would say 2018 had fewer films that I really loved, that shook me and immediately registered as important - but also, more films that have grown on me over time, that were clever and inventive in ways that convince me to look past their shortcomings (or reevaluate if they are shortcomings at all). Plenty of odd, perhaps imperfect movies made it far up the list, and I think I ended up privileging that weird streak more than usual this year. But hopefully that makes for interesting reading here.

I found making this list that a couple of the big arthousey hits of the year (Eighth Grade, Burning, The Rider, and others) ended up slipping into the basement of the top 50. Keep an eye out for a rejoinder post following this in a couple days where I hash out my thoughts on those. For now, top 30 after the jump:

30. Unsane dir. Steven Soderbergh

Remember when Tangerine came out and everyone was like, “wow I can’t believe this was shot on an iPhone” and it was a whole thing? Well, I can believe that Unsane was shot on an iPhone, and that’s really for the better. Ever the innovator, Soderbergh follows Sean Baker’s lead by taking full advantage of the logistical advantages and distinctive appearances of iPhone-shot footage, putting together a film that uses its hardware not as a flashy obstacle to be overcome but as a driver of its look and feel, proving at least for now that mobile-shot films are viable (though we’ll see how his next one turns out). The film itself is good too - Claire Foy gives a wonderfully prickly performance, and the claustrophobic visuals make for a great psychological thriller.

29. Cold War dir. Paweł Pawlikowski

Expanding on the aesthetic territory he explored with Ida, Pawlikowski brings another black & white, Polish-language period piece about identities split between different (religious, political) worlds. Cold War is the more complicated and perhaps less focused film, but also the more alluring one, with a luscious love story, incredible music (Łojojoj...), and great, showy performances from Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot. In other words, it’s luxurious, romantic Euro-arthouse fare. Probably best watched with a full glass of wine in hand.

28. Ready Player One dir. Steven Spielberg

A film that many accused of “pandering” to audiences for its many blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nods to 80s nostalgia and gaming culture, Ready Player One was on the contrary seemingly uninterested in anything of the sort. It managed to accomplish something more meaningful by packing the film so dense with nerd-bait that it becomes just texture and noise - Tracer popping up in the background of random scenes ends up being less of Overwatch reference and more of a piece of plausible set dressing in a VR social media hub. This contributed to RPO being not only a technically impressive but a visually overwhelming effects film, packaged around a seemingly knowing 80s blockbuster pastiche (the story, the character types, even the music cues were too old-fashioned to be on purpose). A film both smarter and easier to like than the discourse around it suggested.

27. Widows dir. Steve McQueen

I do really wish that McQueen would go back to making demanding, brutal films like Hunger, but if he simply has to become a commercial filmmaker I guess I don’t mind this. Surely the ensemble film of the year, with the entire cast firing on all cylinders - Daniel Kaluuya as the sadistic enforcer/campaign manager in particular impresses, though naturally Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, and even Colin Farrell make for compelling characters in this twisty, nervy heist film. The action scenes are all impressively mounted (if a bit few and far between) and there are enough McQueen-esque florishes to keep things interesting in the interim (that long car scene!). Great moody popcorn stuff.

26. An Elephant Sitting Still dir. Hu Bo

Elephant has gotten a lot of press for two reasons: its nearly four-hour length and its director’s untimely death shortly after its completion. The length is important because it beats you into submission, forcing you to accept its rhythm and smothering you in tight focus on its main characters until you feel like it’s your own POV (I wasn’t really into it until, uh, the two hour mark, but then somehow I was hooked). Hu Bo’s death is important because knowing that, the sensation of being trapped, pressured, and disoriented by the Current State of China (ever the popular subject matter) feels all the more palpable and, maybe unfortunately, grants the film some extra layer of authority, or at least urgency. If I ever have the time or energy, I would love to revisit this film - I expect it will one day be seen as a landmark.

25. Make Me Up dir. Rachel Maclean

A bizarre little bit of sugary pop-feminist techno-dystopia, pulling off a sort of cinematic cousin to vaporwave by way of Eve Ensler. What unfolds is pretty insane, involving dance numbers, incomprehensible lectures on dodgy gender politics, and sets that look pulled out from a cheap children’s TV show. It’s definitely a marmite film - how well you connect with this will depend heavily on your tolerance for clearly-fake CG, well-trodden feminist talking points, and pastels - but for those with the appetite for this brand of political kitsch then this is just about the best version of itself imaginable. 

24. Liz and the Blue Bird dir. Naoko Yamada

Naoko Yamada out Naoko Yamada-s herself. A standalone spinoff of Hibike! Euphonium that focuses on members of the secondary cast, Liz makes good on the sensitive, subtly-executed love story that the show ultimately failed to produce (not quite Adolescence of Utena-tier course correction, but we’ll take it). This is a film propelled by the tiniest gestures - a hand tensing behind the back, a nervous flicker of the eye, a cheerful bounce in the step - in that way animation can provide that seems not incidental but hugely, blatantly filled with meaning. While A Silent Voice was a great breakthrough for Yamada as an “original” feature, it’s Liz that feels like the more mature film, and a promising indicator for what lies ahead.

23. Sew the Winter to My Skin dir. Jahmil X.T. Qubeka

Maybe the most surprising film of the year is this, an action-biopic about John Kepe, a South African Robin Hood figure, that almost entirely eschews spoken dialogue in favor of visual storytelling, physical acting, and clever audio design. But this is not some pretentious, austere arthouse film substituting gimmicks for actual character; Sew the Winter to My Skin is an engaging, fascinating, and unexpectedly accessible historical epic, prioritizing mythic bigness over simple recitation of fact. While it demands some patience at first (with no dialogue, it takes a bit for the film to properly introduce its cast), it quickly shows itself to be an inventive, exciting, and occasionally funny adventure that proves Qubeka as a truly exciting voice in South African cinema.

22. Mom and Dad dir. Brian Taylor

Forget Mandy, THIS is the crazy Nic Cage movie of the year. A slick, rapid-fire horror comedy that feels almost like a music video at points, Mom and Dad has what’s surely Cage’s best unhinged performance in years as well as a great, more restrained turn by Selma Blair. The violence is ludicrous, the premise is nutty, and the sense of humor is utterly sick - that the film manages to squeeze out a surprisingly coherent commentary on suburban family life on top of this is a minor miracle (a scene where Cage destroys a pool table proves strangely thoughtful). For all the broadly acclaimed “serious” horror films in recent years, like this year’s kind of boring Hereditary, groan-filled A Quiet Place, and mostly incoherent Suspiria, I more appreciate this breed of deranged, funny, and tightly focused effort. It doesn’t need to be that deep.

21. Good Manners dir. Marco Dutra, Juliana Rojas

I’m going to mark this write-up with a **spoiler warning**, as I think it’s basically impossible to talk about this film without giving the game away. Good Manners has one of the best genre switcheroos in recent years, starting off as a proper Brazilian class drama (think Kleber Mendonça Filho) with a lesbian twist before explosively transforming into a horror movie that reveals a hidden monster-coming-of-age story that’s nearly unrecognizable as the same film from an hour before. As delightful as this bit of narrative sleight of hand is, it can’t justify a good film alone, which is where the great lead performance by Isabél Zuaa and the mesermizing, inventive matte paintings of the São Paulo skyline come into play, making this fantastical, genre-bending film a true original of the year.

20. The Miseducation of Cameron Post dir. Desiree Akhavan

There’s a tendency in the queer teen film genre to sometimes drift towards miserablist portrayals of growing up; to emphasize the hardship, nonunderstanding, and isolation to the expense of other experiences. Cameron Post manages to avoid this path even as it explores the dreadful premise of life in a conversion camp by balancing the solidarity, humor, and defiant joy hidden along the edges of the camp experience with the cruel, dehumanizing nature of the place. The film works, then, not only as a statement against conversion therapy and the real harm it does to all participants, but also as a lively, triumphant teen movie that feels more powerful than the lazy, doom-and-gloom approach.

19. Minding the Gap dir. Bing Liu

Few films capture the particular small city Midwest atmosphere quite like this one, a very raw documentary that feels very much like the first feature it is - but in a good way. Cut together from years of Liu’s amateur footage as well as new material of its subjects (the director and two of his old friends), a documentary that at first seems to be about the local skateboarding culture stretches out to many other topics: domestic violence, race relations, middle-American economic anxiety. The film, perhaps because of its closeness to the director and his relative inexperience, manages to take on a quick-moving scattershot approach, weaving stream-of-consciousness from one topic to the next, while still giving each the time and weight it deserves. 

18. The Green Fog dir. Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, Guy Maddin

A hard film to sum up, though at its heart not a terribly complicated one. Ostensibly a very loose reconstruction of Vertigo using clips from other material shot in San Francisco, from The Conversation to San Andreas to Murder, She Wrote, this new, uh, thing from Maddin and the Johnsons is a short, sweet, and really quite funny collage less interested in slavishly reenacting its inspiration than making funny jokes with movie clips. Some highlights include Rock Hudson carefully watching an *NSYNC music video on a tiny screen, a long sequence admiring Chuck Norris’ face that doesn’t seem to match any particular part of Vertigo, and a number of scenes of dialogue with all the speech cut out, leaving only awkward pauses and mouth noises. It’s high art!

17. Sorry to Bother You dir. Boots Riley

Boots Riley’s transition from long-standing underrated rapper to breakout auteur has been wild to witness. Sorry to Bother You is certainly one of 2018′s most original and distinctive films (what other film is it like, exactly?), and any complaints about unsubtle politics or overpacked narrative can be easily counterbalanced with the film’s sheer verve and oddball energy. Like Widows, it’s another of the great ensemble pieces of the year - Lakeith Stanfield and Tess Thompson are great as usual, and of the supporting cast Armie Hammer emerges as the standout with an incredibly funny halfway-villainous turn, plus a great bit of voice casting with David Cross. Leading candidate for this year’s Film of the Moment.

16. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse dir. Robert Persichetti Jr., Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

The problem with comic book movies a lot of the time is that they’re somehow too embarrassed to own their source material. Into the Spider-Verse succeeds because it emphatically embraces its roots, not only visually (the cel shading, impact lines, and even text boxes that make up the film’s look) but also narratively, by adopting the multiverse concept in earnest and milking it for comedic and dramatic effect. It’s an incredibly innovative (not to mention gorgeous) animated film that not only raises the standard but expands the scope of superhero films, giving new hope to a genre that has been stuck spinning its wheels for years. Plus, it has probably the only post-credits scene actually worth the effort, which is a very special sort of victory.

15. Museo dir. Alonso Ruizpalacios

A playful, thoughtful heist film that gets the actual heist out of the way as soon as possible. Two suburban twenty-somethings pull off a daring robbery of Mayan artifacts from the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, then set off on an ill-fated roadtrip to fence the goods. There’s a certain magic to this film, in its approach that is at once totally reverent and mythologizing but also eager to take the piss out of everything (the recurring motif of Revueltas’ The Night of the Mayas suite does both), and in how it turns this story into something of a love letter to the history and geography of Mexico. Very mature, well-balanced filmmaking in Ruizpalacios’ second feature.

14. BlacKkKlansman dir. Spike Lee

The best Spike Lee joint in a long, long time. It taps into the freewheeling, confrontational energy of his best work, but almost as a career victory lap as he makes a game out of outfoxing Klan members. There’s plenty of humor and tension here, with a great, dry leading duo in John David Washington and Adam Driver, and a funny turn from Topher Grace (!) as David Duke. Even if it does play it a bit safe with an easy target and wraps up a bit too easily (a quick flash-forward to Charlottesville as a postscript notwithstanding), it should be fine, I think, for a film to indulge in the simple pleasure of overcoming obvious villains in a glorious fashion. For all the recent films that give nuanced and serious takes on racism in America, one ought to be about the joy of blowing up the KKK.

13. Mirai dir. Mamoru Hosoda

Since he’s started making original features, Hosoda has been taken with relatively high-concept storylines, from his “debut” The Girl Who Leapt Through Time to Wolf Children, but Mirai is certainly his most ambitious yet. Nearly every choice about the film is a bit weird: from the unusual, compact layout of Kun’s home to Kun’s very believable, nearly alienating (to an older audience) childish behavior to the simply bizarre logistics and metaphysics of Kun’s fantastic adventures. The time- and space-travel antics Kun and Mirai get up to never seem entirely literal or entirely imagined, somewhere between childish fable and psychological sci-fi, a mixture that culminates in a surprisingly existential climax for an unabashed children’s film. After the quite safe The Boy and the Beast, it’s exciting to see Hosoda branch out into such a complicated and strange project, certainly the most daring animated feature of the year.

12. Support the Girls dir. Andrew Bujalski

A bubbly, sensitive, and lightly anarchic workplace comedy in that most essential of American institutions: the Hooters-flavored sports bar off the highway. Bujalski continues to prove himself an observant and funny writer, putting together a fascinating ensemble of characters brought to life by a perfectly-cast ensemble (Regina Hall is flawless as advertised, and Haley Lu Richardson brings us one of the most adorable characters in cinema). I don’t think I’ve seen a more charming film about workers’ solidarity and the lively communities that find their niche in liminal spaces. 

11. First Reformed dir. Paul Schrader

Edgy priests are in a certain way low-hanging fruit; the tension is automatic, the contradiction inherently compelling. It’s a lazy symbol that can be milked for cheap profundity when employed, if you will, in bad faith. That’s why it’s so important that First Reformed, for all of its alcoholic, violent, libidinous angst packed into Ethan Hawke’s (masterfully interpreted) character, is also a great, genuine film about faith besides. It’s a Revelations film if I’ve ever seen one, about facing down the apocalypse with no way of understanding God’s plan, about living on the precipice of a collapse of belief, about accepting mystery. It’s the only film I saw this year that communicated actual dread, but even then still, somehow, bizarrely hopeful. 

10. Birds of Passage dir. Cristina Gallego, Ciro Guerra

Ciro Guerra (now with partner Cristina Gallego co-directing) follows up the excellent Embrace of the Serpent with another powerful portrait of an indigenous community that, under the pressure of colonial influence, gradually devours itself. In the new film, however, this takes the form of a traditional gangster film, from the humble beginnings and runaway success to the explosions of violence and crumbling of an empire. Birds of Passage shows the origins of the Colombian drug trade with the native Wayuu people (a counterpoint, Gallego explains, to the much-celebrated Pablo Escobar narrative), and in doing so still finds room to organically and respectfully depict the traditions of the Wayuu, as well as showcase their beautiful language, which makes up much of the film’s dialogue. Best film in the genre since at least Carlos. 

09. The Favourite dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

Though I really admire Dogtooth, I’ve found myself increasingly disappointed in Lanthimos’ output since that film. Alps was fine but clearly minor; The Lobster started strong but fizzled out; Killing of a Sacred Deer was ultimately too self-consciously bizarre. With The Favourite, we’re finally back in exciting, unsettlingly weird territory, Yorgos having found that his very mannered style of English dialogue works superbly in a costume drama context. He also gets great, uncharacteristically emotive performances (compared to, say, the last two Colin Farrell outings) out of his central trio of Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone, with especially great work coming from Stone, who I think has discovered that all of her best roles take full advantage of the fact that she looks like a cartoon character. It’s wonderfully perverse, incredibly funny stuff, with one of the great, inexplicable endings of the year - fair to call it a Buñuel revival.

08. Bisbee ‘17 dir. Robert Greene

A documentary that tackles a shocking forgotten chapter in American labor history - a group of strikers deported from their mining town and left for dead in the desert - as well as the potential of historical reenactment to act as communal therapy. Greene moves a bit sideways from his usual performance-centric subject matter to show a different kind of performance meant not to affect the audience but the performers themselves, breaking through decades of near-silence on Bisbee’s tumultuous small town history. It’s also a remarkably multi-faceted film; though it would certainly be easy to side fully with the strikers, Greene makes sure to document the perspectives of current Bisbee citizens who sympathize with or even celebrate the decision to deport, complicating the emotions and politics of the reenactment in genuinely interesting ways. A powerful, important documentary.

07. Asako I & II dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Unwieldy and annoying English title aside (especially considering all the possible translations of Netemo Sametemo), Asako seems on the surface like nothing more than a cheap TV romance. It hits many of the same beats and adopts much of the visual style associated with this vein of visual media, particularly in the music video-esque, almost-supernatural meet-cute that opens the film. But hidden beneath these affectations is a shockingly cold un-romance, a story with an inevitable bad end that you’re tricked into thinking might not come to pass. By employing so many stylistic and even verbal cliches, Hamaguchi reveals how these internalized these storytelling devices are, and how they not only can’t prepare us for the complications of actual relationships, but even shift our expectations away from reality. It’s an absolute gut-punch of a film, covered in a seductively sweet carapace. 

06. Sweet Country dir. Warwick Thornton

In a fairly large shift from his previous Samson and Delilah, Thornton has put together one of the best and most unusual Westerns in recent years. Featuring great, earthy performances from its nonprofessional cast (plus a bit of Sam Neill and Bryan Brown for good measure) and a weird, almost Malicky flash-forward structure, the film explores a not-widely-depicted history of exploitation of indigenous Australians. It’s a sad film, showing a fairly exciting lead-up to a somewhat deflating moment of unjust violence - but of course, many of the best Westerns aren’t about good triumphing, either. It’s the film on this list that most grew on me over the course of the year, having not impressed me at first but then blowing me away on a second viewing. 

05. Leave No Trace dir. Debra Granik

For all the buzz surrounding Winter’s Bone - a film that still holds up after so many years - it’s a bit surprising that it took Granik eight years to put out a follow-up, but I guess it’s worth the wait. Unlike Bone, Leave No Trace is a kind, gentle film, leaving behind the edgy Ozarkian drama of its predecessor for a similar but more forgiving setting of woodland communities in the Pacific Northwest. It initially seduces you with Ben Foster’s outdoorsy survivalist lifestyle, cut off by seemingly uncaring state officials, but gradually revealing, through the second thoughts of his daughter (Thomasin McKenzie, in a shall we say Lawrencian turn), the downsides and flawed motivations for their lifestyle choice. It’s a quiet and thoughtful film, melancholy and optimistic in equal measure. Makes one hope Granik can get another project off the ground sooner. 

04. Roma dir. Alfonso Cuarón

I mean, what else can we say about Roma? It’s about as good as claimed, beautifully shot, framed, written, acted, whatever. It’s at its best, sort of ironically, when Cuarón breaks up the quiet personal drama for some of his characteristic action-y set pieces (a Children of Men-esque protest sequence and the climax on the beach are particularly memorable), but he also shows his talent in handling relatively uneventful family scenes, using the layout of the house to facilitate some surprisingly interesting camera movements. I’m happy that Cuarón, who could easily transition into a more boring prestige Hollywood filmmaker if he so chose, is using his industry clout to pull together neat little films like this. 

03. The Old Man & the Gun dir. David Lowery

What a completely pleasant film. A film that walks a dangerous tightrope - one of nostalgia, roguish charm, and incessant aw-shucks optimism - that can easily fall into twee, navel-gazing hell, but that miraculously pulls it off, resulting in a genuinely spirit-lifting character study of an almost folkloric figure. Robert Redford’s good in this, but of course he is - that’s the whole point. Perhaps more appropriate to say that this film is good for Robert Redford, that it rises to the occasion of celebrating his career in full and pulls it off without appearing trite or disposable. As good a (reportedly) final outing as anyone could ask for.

02. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians dir. Radu Jude

A nearly three-hour, densely conversational, nakedly didactic examination of the historical effects and contemporary sources of fascism and ethnic nationalism that somehow flies right by. Radu Jude, a relative latecomer to Romanian cinema’s rise to international prominence, makes a strong argument for being his country’s best and most important filmmaker, taking on complicated, controversial, and infrequently discussed subject matter about Romania’s troubled past. If you can get past Barbarians’ sort of user-unfriendly exterior (Iona Iacob opens the film by introducing herself and explaining her character, which tells you the sort of thing you’re getting into), it should prove to be a remarkably stimulating and even fiendishly funny ride. 

01. Shoplifters dir. Hirokazu Koreeda

If you’ve spent the ten years since Still Walking wondering what exactly Koreeda is trying to do anymore, then this is your answer. He’s spent most of the last decade pumping out the same nonconventional family drama over and over again (everything from I Wish to After the Storm, at least) so he could hone his skills like a weapon and create the perfect, ultimate version. With a pitch-perfect cast (Koreeda regulars Lily Franky and Kirin Kiki are the standouts, but Sakura Ando, Mayu Matsuoka, and the two child actors more than hold their own), and probably the perfect expression of the chosen family, spots and all, that has consumed much of Koreeda’s career, Shoplifters is one of its director’s career-best films, showcasing all of his talent for depicting delicate, intimate moments and bringing smart, complex ideas to seemingly straightforward premises. The most exciting Palme d’Or winner in years and easily the best film of 2018.

[thespoonplayer]

(DJ) Spoon’s Review of 2018

This year I haven’t listened to much music at all, at least not in comparison to previous years and I certainly haven’t been to many gigs. I’m sure this won’t last but this year I’ve been busier at work so less likely to plug in, I’ve stuck to the radio in the car just to keep up with how messy Brexit really is (ooer a bit of politics) and my runs have been 100% fueled by podcasts so music has just taken a backseat. However, I couldn’t let the year go past without some kind of list...so here is a pot pourri of my favourite discoveries of 2018.

1. Podcasts

Seeing as these have been so important this year I’ll start here...and cheat slightly by bigging up some oldies, but good enough to bang on about again.

Old favourites : Running Commentary (Comedians Paul Tonkinson and Rob Deering take you on their runs and chat sometimes about running, but always about life, kids, comedy and anything that pops into their heads), Adam Buxton (always entertaining ramble chat from Dr Buckles whoever is on, I’ve learnt stuff and I’ve laughed a lot), My Dad Wrote a Porno (Sheer filth as ever but genuinely caused me to LOL during my runs, wondering if people can hear that I’m listening to chat about vaginal lids).

New entries : Off Menu (Ed Gamble and James Acaster opened their genie run fantasy restaurant a month ago and it has quickly become one of my favourite podcasts ever. Eclectic guests pick their fantasy 3 course meals, simple premise and it works. The Scroobius Pip episode was a perfect clash of two excellent pods), Blank (another late entry into 2018 from Jim Daly and Giles Paley-Phillips ostensibly about blank moments in life but just rammed with infotaining chat from ‘non standard’ guests including a jaw dropping episode with Michael Rosen and fun with Gary Lineker and Susie Dent), Poddin’ on the Ritz (sadly now finished with maybe its only series) this pod recorded backstage at Young Frankenstein by Hadley Fraser and the sublime Ross Noble made me laugh more than any other in 2018, it might be about musicals but their search for Kenneth Branagh’s snowglobes and Lesley Joseph adoration was a joy.

2. Board games

They say a family that plays together, stays together. Well we are together more than you can imagine. We’ve played over 220 games this year! Here are our favourite new games into our collection:

The game of the year is Azul, a seemingly simple tile grab and place game, building up a mosaic prettier than anyone else, is full of strategy and a little (but not too much) shafting of others. If you really want to shaft your fellow players though then pick up Unstable Unicorns, a card game where you aim to grow your stable of unicorns, whilst stopping others filling theirs. SO many different cards, tactics and ways to mess it up, you will swear at some point. Discovered in the excellent new board game cafe The Dice Box in Leamington, we bought Meeple Circus before we left, it’s that much fun. Rehearse and perform the best tiny wooden meeple circus performance, accompanied by a bespoke playlist. Stack the acrobats, balance the lions and raise the bar. Another board game cafe, Chance & Counters in Bristol introduced us to the frantic game of Klask, a cross between air hockey, pool and table football. Slide the magnets around to flick a ball into your opponents hole, avoid the magnetic biscuits and don’t KLASK! When is a game not a game? another game of the year has been played a lot in our house, and it’s The Mind. 100 cards numbered 1-100, no words between players and a tense task to lay cards in ascending order. Simple? yes? possible? nope! but it’s sure to cause fun and arguments. The final two of MY favourite sadly aren’t quite as loved by my family, but I’ll get them there. Sagrada is a similar game to Azul with you attempting to build a beautiful stained glass window with coloured dice. More variations and thinking needed than Azul which adds to the challenge. And finally and lovely chess like 2 player game which transports you to the sun dappled Greek island of Santorini. Take the powers of a god and build the traditional blue domed white houses of the island whilst trying to stop your opponent climbing onto a roof. A lot of ‘aha, you’ve stopped me’ moments.

3. TV

It’s been a long old year at work, and in the world of parenting so we’ve found ourselves flopped on the settee many evenings just soaking up great drama, comedy and chilling ;o)

We are very late to the party with Suits but that means we have 8 series to wade through! Really neat writing, bants and relationships between characters, a ‘don’t worry they will always win’ calmness about it and you get to see the Queen in her knickers...ish. Another Netflix treat this year was Magic for Humans with Justin Willman, a hugely likeable and funny magician pulling off tricks that constantly make me smirk with a huge dollop of WTF? amazing. A huge recommendation. A late entry to my TV highlights of 2018 is from the warped warped mind of Charlie Brooker...of course with Bandersnatch. An interactive choose your own adventure TV ‘event’ (I know) that had us hooked for the full 90 minutes (only if you want to see how much bloodshed you can invoke!). Completely on the other end of the spectrum was the sublime and minimalistic Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone Fishing. I don’t like fishing and why would I find two old mates just teasing each other for half an hour entertaining? No idea but it was beautiful. Like Radio 4, comforting and perfect. Then a few suspenseful dramas that got us on the edge of the settee, Killing Eve (quirky AF), Bodyguard (did they really kill Keely Hawes that early?) and Informer (bleak bleak bleak) and sweaty bullocks in ‘should be in the next section really’ Bird Box (made Informer seem like a giggle fest).

4. Films

Really haven’t been to the cinema much in the last 12 months and only once to see a ‘grown up’ film I think but kid’s films are SO good at the moment that’s ok. A few stand out films for me were:

Ralph Breaks the Internet, much better than the first one, lots of #lolz internet jokes and more than a little heart. Wrap me up in a duvet and give me a hot cocoa and Paddington 2 any day, tears at the end. A little more sighing but just as much emotion in Christopher Robin, not sure why Eeyore had an American accent but the characters were spot on and nicely faithful to the original concepts. The one time I did venture out for an adult (it’s a 12 so almost ;o) and saw Ready Player One I was delighted, yeah it might not be a) as good as or b) anything like the book but a visual treat and an enjoyable romp.

5. Books

I read A LOT, until my Kindle donks me on the head in bed anyway...literally a tiny selection of books that have kept me awake. 

The Secret Lives of Colour - Kassia St Clair. They say never judge a book by its cover. Well that didn’t work...I bought this purely because it is a beautiful package, the hardback a lot more pleasing imho. Simply 2 coloured pages about how each colour was discovered, invented and introduced throughout history. I never really gave it a thought that colours were...made. Weird and fascinating.

This Is Going to Hurt - Adam Kay. A hilarious ‘secret’ diary of a junior doctor that horrifies at the same time. I think we all knew it was a hard life but bloody hell, if you didn’t love the NHS before you will after this. A thoroughly enjoyable and insightful story of Adam’s journey through medicine. And that ending...wooof.

Moose Allain - I Wonder What I’m Thinking About. I love Moose, I love his colour-me-advent calendars, I love his tweet threads that show the best in Twitter, I love his cartoons and this book is all of those wrapped up in one. And a certain Mr Spoon is to thank for the publication, find me in the back of Unbound funders! An inspiring book for anyone who loves art, creativity and childish humour.

Factfulness : Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World - Hans Rosling. A brilliantly clever and educational book about why the world is NOT as shit as it might seem some times. It’s all backed up by real data and lovely lovely graphs!

Lee Child and Ian Rankin. A highlight of the year is the next Reacher and Rebus novels and these two didn’t disappoint. Rebus’ latest adventure Past Tense, is a self-contained story that could introduce anyone to the man machine that is Jack Reacher. Rebus however is back, retired but won’t lie down, in In A House of Lies, an old case comes back to haunt him and will this finally be his downfall? I doubt it!

6. Music

As mentioned, I haven’t ‘been into music’ as much in 2018 for various reasons but I’ve still enjoyed some great new discoveries:

Barns Courtney - The Attractions of Youth, discovered via the use of Glitter and Gold for the theme tune of Netflix’s Safe. An album of ‘cheesy, commercially viable blues and folk rock’ apparently. I just liked the visceral nature of some of the tracks and it always fired me up at work on slow days.

Isaac Gracie - Isaac Gracie, a rare listened to recommendation from my wife. Isaac is everything I claim to like, fragile thin sensitive boys with acoustic guitars....and I do very much with this. Painful screeched out tales of heartbreak. Sublime.

R.E.M. - Live at the BBC, 104 rare and live tracks from arguably one of the best bands ever. Some of the tracks I haven’t heard since my bootleg cassette buying days at Sheffield Uni, when the world was in black and white. Not all tracks are of the greatest audio quality but bliss for a fanboy like me.

Creep Show - Mr Dynamite, a spin off project for Mr John Grant and even from the eclectic crooner this is an odd one. Glitchy electronica with vocoders all over the place. Weird and very Marmite.

Public Service Broadcasting - Every Valley and everything else. The latest offering from the other PSB was a trip through the miner’s crisis and Thatcher years. Bleak? yup but fascinating snippets of well, public service broadcasting and guest stars including the obligatory Welsh rockers the Manics. This album is perfect by itself but it ‘forced’ me to go back and really discover all the PSB albums. The Live at Brixton release is a huge recommendation, I wish I was there.

Rex Orange County - Apricot Princess, maybe I just added this in to seem cool as Rex, aka Alexander O’Conner, was ‘one to watch in 2018′ from the BBC. A multi-instrumentalist that dabbles with hippity hop, R&B and piano pop. The first track alone contains about three musical styles if you wait. 

7. Food & Drink

I run, because I really like food. And thankfully I’ve run a lot in 2018 so I got to enjoy a lot.

I was introduced to the weird fermented tea monstrosity that is kombucha by my sister-in-law. Vinegar tasting drink that may or may not help your gut that grows in your living room. WTAF? However, health benefits aside the LA Brewery Strawberry and Black Pepper drink is something, alongside my pilgrimage to Leon, worth going to London for. I’ve heard it’s also for sale in Solihull but I don’t often travel that far beyond my class ;o) I’d say, try it...but I suspect 9/10 people with hate the flavour. 

I suspect 10/10 people that try the Aldi Black Forest Mince Pies would love them, but you won’t get a chance as I’ve bought them ALL. Aldi are a bugger for getting you hooked then never restocking. I only managed 10 boxes in 2018 and we’ve rationed well so have 12 left to get us through the bleak January weather. Cherries, Dark Chocolate, Chocolate pastry and a smidge of mincemeat. Perfect!

There are many ingredient delivery services available and I’ve only tried Gousto but I don’t know why you’d go anywhere else. 33 recipes tried and 32 of them I’d have again, with the one not so good one was still far better than anything I’d cook by myself. So easy, so tasty and if you want to try it I can give you a big discount that will help us buy another box, a tad expensive without a discount but worth a treat every so often.

Genuinely I traveled to London just to visit Max’s Sandwich Shop...kinda. It was certainly the deciding factor in a day out at the Summer Exhibition (see below). I downloaded the Kindle version of this book when it was promoted in an email, I bought some Scampi Fries and made a Fish Finger sandwich, I crumbled up some Ginger Nuts into a Mascarpone and Jam sandwich and I made a Fried Egg, Shoestring Fried and Gammon sandwich then I NEEDED to go and see how it’s really done. Amazing over the top sandwiches in a rough little hipster cafe in Stroud Green (no me neither and it’s a long walk from the tube!). So good I had to a) buy the hard copy of the book and b) carry half the sandwich home as even I couldn’t manage it all...not with deep fried macaroni balls filling me up ;o)

8. Places

A family that plays together, stays together as a great man once said. And we don’t just play inside, we love adventures so adventures we had.

I’d never been to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, as it’s in that there London which often seems hundreds of miles away...but I’m so glad that I visited this year. A trip with a good friend with neither of us knowing quite what to expect. We saw, and laughed, and marveled at, paintings, sculptures, videos, photos, models, and weirdness by Banksy next to Joe Lycett next to Grayson Perry next to Harry Hill, next to me mate Lorsen Camps from Coventry. The SA allows ANYONE to submit artwork for consideration and anyone can be accepted. I think this has to become a yearly visit, awesome.

My parents have been wanting to take our kids, and their big kid, to The Forbidden Corner in North Yorkshire for a few years now...and I’m so happy we finally got round to going. Started as a folly to entertain his children this huge labyrinthine site is crammed with strange sculptures, mazes, tricks and squirting fountains. Many hours were spent squeezing through holes, getting lost and getting wet. Beautifully eccentric.

A family holiday to Brittany meant we could visit the loopy city (it’s their phrase!) of Nantes and more importantly Les Machines d’Ile. Ostensibly the workshop of  a group of engineers and artists that make huge animatronic machines and animals...that you can ride on! Needs to be seen to be believed, the Elephant brings out the big kid in everyone...and we can’t wait to go back in a few years when they’ve built a huge forest over the river with ride on caterpillars and dragonfly. Incredible. The city itself is dotted with crazy art and interactive pieces encouraging play, I know a city closer to home that should be the UK Loopy City of Culture!

Luckily Tilly is a Harry Potter obsessive AND it was her birthday last year so it gave us the excuse we didn’t need to visit the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour. Wow, just wow. The incredible detail in everything made for the film, the engineering, the amount of artists involved and the presentation of the exhibition blew us away. I’ve enjoyed everything in this list but this maybe was the most magical in the best way.

Many many amazing experiences warrant a mention, but I just don’t have enough words, include Talking Birds - Walk with Me, Print Manufactory Darkroom Workshop, Ludic Rooms Random String Festival, Go Karting with Tilly, some dancing balloons in Broadgate, Godiva Festival with Tony Christie et al, Bristol Gromit trail, Disc Golfing with my girls, Edinburgh Fringe with Dick and Dom and with another wonderful dick from Coventry starring in Bon Jovi musical We’ve Got Each Other, Pandas! at Edinburgh Zoo, Matilda the Musical with Tilly at last, running the Coventry Mile with the girls’ school, Dippy the Dinosaur in Brum, Wicksteed Park (amazing family fun theme park like what they used to be), Cycling on Stratford Greenway in the sun, Autotesting at MotoFest, Bourton-on-the-Water (it’s just a shame 3 million other people know about this gorgeous village), Giant Pac Man in the city centre, Pork Pie making with a good friend, CET several times, Novelty Automation in London and being on The One Show, a couple of Hope & Social gigs and much much much more fun with my wonderful fam and friends. Roll on 2019!

[bonnissance]

hey so guess who has a lot of feelings about Hecate and cottages and also baking? this gal, that’s who!

part one of cottage feelings, Hecate Hardbroom (eventual hicsqueak + Hecate & Ada feelings) an amount of words, teen, CW: bit of regret/anxiety for past life choices, not being keen on sweet food/eating heaps, nothing major (despite the fact that it’s literally just Hecate’s internal thinking about literally everything bc my Hecate is healing!Hecate) 

~*~

Hecate has a cottage, a few hours flight from Cackle’s. Deep in the forest nearby a bubbling brook, a clear sky above a wilderness of gardens surrounding a home of oaken timbre and hardwood floors and a stonecast fireplace at the heart of it.

She doesn’t live there, not really, not with her heart and her mind at Cackle’s for so much of the year. But at the same time, she does: has a space all of her own where she can breathe and simply be, whenever she chooses.

She doesn’t visit on weekends, unless there’s some there she truly needs which simply cannot wait till the break between terms. Sometimes it's a spell book or a spare cauldron, or her second stash of anti-aching potions when her cycle is particularly fierce. Other times, it's just some peace and quiet which the ruckus of the castle cannot provide.

On those days, when things really become too much, she defers to Ada, who sends her to the respite of the cottage with barely a moment’s thought, only pausing to assure Hecate that she’ll keep an eye on her girls and there’s nothing to worry about until Hecate has her head together again.

She’s eternally grateful, for the way Ada seems not to need to poke and prod and pry. For the way she just understands whenever Hecate has something she can barely even communicate herself.

She doesn’t know what kind of a witch she would be if she hadn’t come to Cackle’s a decade and a half ago, and most days she doesn’t give it second thought. But on days like this, when she wrung out and tired and terrified, she can’t help wondering how her life would have turned out, if things had gone any other way.

Those thoughts never end well, full of more sorrow and anger and wretched worries that simply won’t leave her alone, and she knows this life is the best version of any she could have lived (except one, her traitorous mind always whispers, there could have been another. But whenever she entertains that thought, of what it might be like to rewrite three decades or more of her history, she always finds a way to ruin things anyway.)

This is simply how things are meant to be, she’s come to accept. And there are things she has now that she would never want to give up. 

Her cottage, buried deep in the wilderness, is one of them. She loves having a home away from home.

Granted, she’s never been good at sitting idle. And she refuses to finish a term with unmarked paperwork. So she never has anything to bring with her, when she returns home with the beginning of break to leave Ada to enjoy the the solitude of her castle. 

Once she’s spent the first night cleaning and fixing the interior of the house, so it’s back to being warm and bright and habitable again, and the next day working on the garden to get it back under control without quashing the wilderness that reins free when she’s not here to supervise and any other problems that might have developed in her absence, she does tend to get bored rather easily.

There’s always old spell books to revise, old texts to read over for new ideas to integrate into the coming curriculum. But she’s been over them so many times by now there’s never anything new, just things she hadn’t thought relevant before which the past term have made obvious might actually be a good idea. Her introductory texts get more and more use with each passing year, as the standards of the schools the girls attend before coming to Cackle’s fall lower and lower, and it’s up to her to fill in the gaps left over. 

Because it’s her responsibility to train the girls to become the best witches they can possibly be.

Sometimes she thinks it’s a thankless task, but she’s never once wanted to give it up; never once wondered what it would be like to do anything else with her life but this. She really does love teaching, moulding young minds into something better and stronger and brilliant. So they leave the care of Cackle’s Castel with everything they need to become the best witches of their age.

The only problem is the students; they don’t seem to want to learn.

Not all of them, mind—some meld themselves to her methods and grow to shine. Esmerelda Hallow amount to the brightest of her students, though now that fire has flickered out.

Some of them try their best, and learn well, but never truly take to witchcraft the way she wants them too. Maud Spellbody is something like that—smart, clever, and Hecate knows she tries hard; but there’s something missing, that last flicker of drive to become truly brilliant not because it’s expected, of from afraid of failure, but because it’s truly wanted.

Maud doesn’t have that yet, though Hecate wonders if she might come to grow it, if only she could stay away from Mildred Hubble.

Mildred Hubble, who is, without question, the most troublesome witch the corridors of Cackle’s has ever seen. But even she isn’t blind to the effort the girl puts in, even though she’s constantly failing or getting it not quite right. But there’s only so much she can do for the girl, when she doesn’t listen to Hecate.

But she doesn’t come to cottage to spend her time thinking about the school and it’s students. She comes here to get away from them.

So the spellbooks are quickly set aside, leaving Hecate with a immaculate house draped in reds and purples, wood varnish and velvet trim, jars scattered over top-high shelves and flowers drying for hooks hanging down from the ceiling and a forever crackling fire that never ever burns too warm and only ever goes out when Hecate returns home, with a tamed wilderness of a garden outside her kitchen window which gives her a wonderful view of the woodland just beyond, where more creatures to chase that even Morgana could hope to catch, and nothing else to occupy her time.

It’s why she bakes. 

She’s never been particularly fond of sweets. Never been fond of the way sugar rushing through her vines makes her feel flighty, twitchy, never quite settled. But she’s always loved the way a kitchen full of baked goods smells.

It reminds her of her mother, when she was small and could sit atop the countertop and watch her mother shuffle around the kitchen making magic they could eat—nothing at all like brewing a potion to cast a spell, but just the same. Exactly the same.

She’s always been gifted with brewing, balancing, blending components to make a greater whole with just a little of herself inside. It's why she excels at potions, why she's spent her life mastering the old ways: collecting and casting to conserve her energies, to balance the fundamental forces of nature against the power in her soul: a touch of this, a splash of that, a spark of her heart.

Baking is just the same.

(It’s called chemistry, she’s been told, in the non-witching world. Mildred mentioned it when she was flicking through a tome during detention one evening.

‘Mum says it’s just like cooking—mixing things to make a chemical reaction, except with food so you can eat it.’

Hecate was surprised the non-magical world was so sensible about the matter, with the way they degraded necessary tasks like cooking and cleaning. How they grouped types of kinds of skills and acted as if different meant lesser.)

But she still doesn’t really like eating sweets. Certainly not the quantities she bakes each day, in any case. But she knows Ada does, that her headmistress adores treating herself to sugary sweet foods throughout the day.

So she sends them over to Ada, alone in her castle; sends her something to brighten her day while she enjoys her huge stone castle, miles and miles away.

She knows Ada appreciates the gifts, just like she knows Ada enjoys sweets all the more when she can share them with others. So she invites Ada to visit, from time to time, to share the solitude of a different kind of peace and quiet. To give her something away from the castle, if only for an afternoon.

She always makes carrot cake when Ada comes to visit, so she can stomach eating a whole slice without making Ada seem rude for helping herself to a third when Hecate is still working on her first. She wants Ada to enjoy herself as much as she can, without remorse for Hecate’s own preferences.

She knows Pendall loves the chance to run through the woods with Morgana, and she takes that as further confirmation, that Ada isn’t just being polite, that she really does love Hecate’s company.

Besides, Ada shares her home with Hecate for nine months of the year, it’s only fitting that she should offer her house open to Ada, whenever she wants it, too.