#fans of a strange and funny band when something strange and funny happens in one of their fan groups: :0

[sustiawan-author]

You guys put me up to this (lol). Here are some of my thoughts on how I think The X-Files could've been improved? At least show-wise. Reddit was being unnecessarily cynical about this so let's just take these here.

Plot patterns. It gets repetitive my love like </3 I'm sure you've all seen the memes, but every episode goes through the exact same order: something strange happens, Scully hands the file to Mulder or the other way around, Mulder puts up a strong but absurd theory about what could've been a cause for such absurdity, Scully denies it with "scientific" cynicism, and the end of the episode concludes Mulder being right. It's almost always this way. And the lack of variety in plot structure, not to mention for how long the show went on, made it feel... old? Like for once I want Scully to be right about her gut, or maybe let's see them both be wrong, or let's explore many other structurally varied points to vamp it up a bit.

This, in turn, kind of pissed me off? Cause in the beginning, I loved Scully to bits. She was cynically funny, snarky, logical, and says what's true in-your-face. But when the pattern of Mulder being right about his preconceived theories gets used repeatedly, and we still see her emit the same snarky stubbornness and supposed "scientific" cynicysm even when put forth with the fact that what Mulder says has a 98% chance of being true, it just makes her seem like a bitter and, in turn, illogical character.

We need more POC </3 I know it was the 90s, but if a kids' show like Barney & Friends can even do it, I don't see the excuse lol.

I mostly see such potential for Scully's character. She could've been a strong woman in an otherwise male-dominated environment, who's both empathetic, emotionally intelligent & emotionally available, gentle, and kind, but also does not take any disrespect — but instead we get a cardboard-stale robot. I know she's smart, but along the way she became so in ally with the system that I feel like Mulder was working through these otherwise unconventional cases all by himself. I'm not saying she should jump up and cheer him on like an overeager college girl but it would've been somewhat a nice change to see genuine self awareness coming from her.

I know they tried to depict Fox as dysfunctional when Dana's not around, but to be real, I think these characters were created purposely as polarized extremes of two archetypes. They need to be more humanized in a way that makes... a bit more sense sociologically!

I really wish their banter was just pure banter and not bordering on insults or physical attacks on eo and then slapping a rubber duck-patterned band-aid over it and call it Quality TV Romance. Lolz.

Mulder and Scully being so good together onscreen is mainly and mostly courtesy of Gillian Anderson & David Duchovny's chemistry </3

I wish they could've stayed good friends and kin instead of lovers. I really wished that by the first few episodes of the series. If they wanted to make the insults and physical humor between the two work, it would've been more heartwarming to see them get together in a way a found family would be protective of one another — even through the various chastising lol.

That's it for now 💀 I love this show to bits, but as an author, there are times where we need to do a bit of a surgery-review to certain fictional works and observe them not just through a lens of unbridled admiration and love, but also a constructively critical approach especially through the basis of being a fan of the series/movie/book. Let me know what you think though! ♡

@california-112

I've got some HOT NEWS unpopular opinions for you guys about The X-Files that would probably put me in an actual FBI watchlist but if I get enough notes on this post I might as well just put myself up for it.

[carcarrot]

ive never heard of the wombles until now but i think the sensation theyre causing on sparks facebook is hilarious

[badnewswhatsleft]

2023 september - rock sound #300 (fall out boy cover) scans

transcript below cut!

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE

With the triumphant ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ capturing a whole new generation of fans, Fall Out Boy are riding high, celebrating their past while looking towards a bright future. Pete Wentz and Patrick Stump reflect on recent successes and the lessons learned from two decades of writing and performing together.

WORDS: James Wilson-Taylor PHOTOS: Elliot Ingham

You have just completed a US summer tour that included stadium shows and some of your most ambitious production to date. What were your aims going into this particular show?

PETE: Playing stadiums is a funny thing. I pushed pretty hard to do a couple this time because I think that the record Patrick came up with musically lends itself to that feeling of being part of something larger than yourself. When we were designing the cover to the album, it was meant to be all tangible, which was a reaction to tokens and skins that you can buy and avatars. The title is made out of clay, and the painting is an actual painting. We wanted to approach the show in that way as well. We’ve been playing in front of a gigantic video wall for the past eight years. Now, we wanted a stage show where you could actually walk inside it.

Did adding the new songs from ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ into the setlist change the way you felt about them?

PATRICK: One of the things that was interesting about the record was that we took a lot of time figuring out what it was going to be, what it was going to sound like. We experimented with so many different things. I was instantly really proud. I felt really good about this record but it wasn’t until we got on stage and you’re playing the songs in between our catalogue that I really felt that. It was really noticeable from the first day on this tour - we felt like a different band. There’s a new energy to it. There was something that I could hear live that I couldn’t hear before.

You also revisited a lot of older tracks and b-sides on this tour, including many from the ‘Folie à Deux’-era. What prompted those choices?

PETE: There were some lean years where there weren’t a lot of rock bands being played on pop radio or playing award shows so we tried to play the biggest songs, the biggest versions of them. We tried to make our thing really airtight, bulletproof so that when we played next to whoever the top artist was, people were like, ‘oh yeah, they should be here.’ The culture shift in the world is so interesting because now, maybe rather than going wider, it makes more sense to go deeper with people. We thought about that in the way that we listen to music and the way we watch films. Playing a song that is a b-side or barely made a record but is someone’s favourite song makes a lot of sense in this era. PATRICK: I think there also was a period there where, to Pete’s point, it was a weird time to be a rock band. We had this very strange thing that happened to us, and not a lot of our friends for some reason, where we had a bunch of hits, right? And it didn’t make any sense to me. It still doesn’t make sense to me. But there was a kind of novelty, where we could play a whole set of songs that a lot of people know. It was fun and rewarding for us to do that. But then you run the risk of playing the same set forever. I want to love the songs that we play. I want to care about it and put passion into what we do. And there’s no sustainable way to just do the same thing every night and not get jaded. We weren’t getting there but I really wanted to make sure that we don’t ever get there. PETE: In the origin of Fall Out Boy, what happened at our concerts was we knew how to play five songs really fast and jumped off walls and the fire marshal would shut it down. It was what made the show memorable, but we wanted to be able to last and so we tried to perfect our show and the songs and the stage show and make it flawless. Then you don’t really know how much spontaneity you want to include, because something could go wrong. When we started this tour, and we did a couple of spontaneous things, it opened us up to more. Because things did go wrong and that’s what made the show special. We’re doing what is the most punk rock version of what we could be doing right now.

You seem generally a lot more comfortable celebrating your past success at this point in your career.

PETE: I think it’s actually not a change from our past. I love those records, but I never want to treat them in a cynical way. I never want there to be a wink and a smile where we’re just doing this because it’s the anniversary. This was us celebrating these random songs and we hope people celebrate them with us. There was a purity to it that felt in line with how we’ve always felt about it. I love ‘Folie à Deux’ - out of any Fall Out Boy record that’s probably the one I would listen to. But I just never want it to be done in a cynical way, where we feel like we have to. But celebrating it in a way where there’s the purity of how we felt when we wrote the song originally, I think that’s fucking awesome. PATRICK: Music is a weird art form. Because when you’re an actor and you play a character, that is a specific thing. James Bond always wears a suit and has a gun and is a secret agent. If you change one thing, that’s fine, but you can’t really change all of it. But bands are just people. You are yourself. People get attached to it like it’s a story but it’s not. That was always something that I found difficult. For the story, it’s always good to say, ‘it’s the 20th anniversary, let’s go do the 20th anniversary tour’, that’s a good story thing. But it’s not always honest. We never stopped playing a lot of the songs from ‘Take This To Your Grave’, right? So why would I need to do a 20-year anniversary and perform all the songs back to back? The only reason would be because it would probably sell a lot of tickets and I don’t really ever want to be motivated by that, frankly. One of the things that’s been amazing is that now as the band has been around for a while, we have different layers of audience. I love ‘Folie à Deux’, I do. I love that record. But I had a really personally negative experience of touring on it. So that’s what I think of when I think of that record initially. It had to be brought back to me for me to appreciate it, for me to go, ‘oh, this record is really great. I should be happy with this. I should want to play this.’ So that’s why we got into a lot of the b-sides because we realised that our perspectives on a lot of these songs were based in our feelings and experiences from when we were making them. But you can find new experiences if you play those songs. You can make new memories with them.

You alluded there to the 20th anniversary of ‘Take This To Your Grave’. Obviously you have changed and developed as a band hugely since then. But is there anything you can point to about making that debut record that has remained a part of your process since then?

PETE: We have a language, the band, and it’s definitely a language of cinema and film. That’s maintained through time. We had very disparate music tastes and influences but I think film was a place we really aligned. You could have a deep discussion because none of us were filmmakers. You could say which part was good and which part sucked and not hurt anybody’s feelings, because you weren’t going out to make a film the next day. Whereas with music, I think if we’d only had that to talk about, we would have turned out a different band. PATRICK: ‘Take This To Your Grave’, even though it’s absolutely our first record, there’s an element of it that’s still a work in progress. It is still a band figuring itself out. Andy wasn’t even officially in the band for half of the recording, right? I wasn’t even officially the guitar player for half of the recording. We were still bumbling through it. There was something that popped up a couple times throughout that record where you got these little inklings of who the band really was. We really explored that on ‘From Under The Cork Tree’. So when we talk about what has remained the same… I didn’t want to be a singer, I didn’t know anything about singing, I wasn’t planning on that. I didn’t even plan to really be in this band for that long because Pete had a real band that really toured so I thought this was gonna be a side project. So there’s always been this element within the band where I don’t put too many expectations on things and then Pete has this really big ambition, creatively. There’s this great interplay between the two of us where I’m kind of oblivious, and I don’t know when I’m putting out a big idea and Pete has this amazing vision to find what goes where. There’s something really magical about that because I never could have done a band like this without it. We needed everybody, we needed all four of us. And I think that’s the thing that hasn’t changed - the four of us just being ourselves and trying to figure things out. Listening back to ‘Folie’ or ‘Infinity On High’ or ‘American Beauty’, I’m always amazed at how much better they are than I remember. I listened to ‘MANIA’ the other day, and I have a lot of misgivings about that record, a lot of things I’m frustrated about. But then I’m listening to it and I’m like ‘this is pretty good.’ There’s a lot of good things in there. I don’t know why, it’s kind of like you can’t see those things. It’s kind of amazing to have Pete be able to see those things. And likewise, sometimes Pete has no idea when he writes something brilliant, as a lyricist, and I have to go, ‘No, I’m gonna keep that one, I’m gonna use that.’

On ‘So Much (For) Stardust’, you teamed up with producer Neal Avron again for the first time since 2008. Given how much time has passed, did it take a minute to reestablish that connection or did you pick up where you left off?

PATRICK: It really didn’t feel like any time had passed between us and Neal. It was pretty seamless in terms of working with him. But then there was also the weird aspect where the last time we worked with him was kind of contentious. Interpersonally, the four of us were kind of fighting with each other… as much as we do anyway. We say that and then that myth gets built bigger than it was. We were always pretty cool with each other. It’s just that the least cool was making ‘Folie’. So then getting into it again for this record, it was like no time has passed as people but the four of us got on better so we had more to bring to Neal. PETE: It’s a little bit like when you return to your parents’ house for a holiday break when you’re in college. It’s the same house but now I can drink with my parents. We’d grown up and the first times we worked with Neal, he had to do so much more boy scout leadership, ‘you guys are all gonna be okay, we’re gonna do this activity to earn this badge so you guys don’t fucking murder each other.’ This time, we probably got a different version of Neal that was even more creative, because he had to do less psychotherapy. He went deep too. Sometimes when you’re in a session with somebody, and they’re like, ‘what are we singing about?’, I’ll just be like, ‘stuff’. He was not cool with ‘stuff’. I would get up and go into the bathroom outside the studio and look in the mirror, and think ‘what is it about? How deep are we gonna go?’ That’s a little but scarier to ask yourself. If last time Neal was like a boy scout leader, this time, it was more like a Sherpa. He was helping us get to the summit.

The title track of the album also finds you in a very reflective mood, even bringing back lyrics from ‘Love From The Other Side’. How would you describe the meaning behind that title and the song itself?

PETE: The record title has a couple of different meanings, I guess. The biggest one to me is that we basically all are former stars. That’s what we’re made of, those pieces of carbon. It still feels like the world’s gonna blow and it’s all moving too fast and the wrong things are moving too slow. That track in particular looks back at where you sometimes wish things had gone differently. But this is more from the perspective of when you’re watching a space movie, and they’re too far away and they can’t quite make it back. It doesn’t matter what they do and at some point, the astronaut accepts that. But they’re close enough that you can see the look on their face. I feel like there’s moments like that in the title track. I wish some things were different. But, as an adult going through this, you are too far away from the tether, and you’re just floating into space. It is sad and lonely but in some ways, it’s kind of freeing, because there’s other aspects of our world and my life that I love and that I want to keep shaping and changing. PATRICK: I’ll open up Pete’s lyrics and I just start hearing things. It almost feels effortless in a lot of ways. I just read his lyrics and something starts happening in my head. The first line, ‘I’m in a winter mood, dreaming of spring now’, instantly the piano started to form to me. That was a song that I came close to not sending to the band. When I make demos, I’ll usually wait until I have five or six to send to everybody. I didn’t know if anyone was gonna like this. It’s too moody or it’s not very us. But it was pretty unanimous. Everyone liked that one. I knew this had to end the record. It took on a different life in the context of the whole album. Then on the bridge section, I knew it was going to be the lyrics from ‘Love From The Other Side’. It’s got to come back here. It’s the bookends, but I also love lyrically what it does, you know, ‘in another life, you were my babe’, going back to that kind of regret, which feels different in ‘Love From The Other Side’ than it does here. When the whole song came together, it was the statement of the record.

Aside from the album, you have released a few more recent tracks that have opened you up to a whole new audience, most notably the collaboration with Taylor Swift on ‘Electric Touch’.

PETE: Taylor is the only artist that I’ve met or interacted with in recent times who creates exactly the art of who she is, but does it on such a mass level. So that’s breathtaking to watch from the sidelines. The way fans traded friendship bracelets, I don’t know what the beginning of it was, but you felt that everywhere. We felt that, I saw that in the crowd on our tour. I don’t know Taylor well, but I think she’s doing exactly what she wants and creating exactly the art that she wants to create. And doing that, on such a level, is really awe-inspiring to watch. It makes you want to make the biggest, weirdest version of our thing and put that out there.

Then there was the cover of Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, which has had some big chart success for you. That must have taken you slightly by surprise.

PATRICK: It’s pretty unexpected. Pete and I were going back and forth about songs we should cover and that was an idea that I had. This is so silly but there was a song a bunch of years ago I had written called ‘Dark Horse’ and then there was a Katy Perry song called ‘Dark Horse’ and I was like, ‘damn it’, you know, I missed the boat on that one. So I thought if we don’t do this cover, somebody else is gonna do it. Let’s just get in the studio and just do it. We spent way more time on those lyrics than you would think because we really wanted to get a specific feel. It was really fun and kind of loose, we just came together in Neal’s house and recorded it in a day. PETE: There’s irreverence to it. I thought the coolest thing was when Billy Joel got asked about it, and he was like, ‘I’m not updating it, that’s fine, go for it.’ I hope if somebody ever chose to update one of ours, we’d be like that. Let them do their thing, they’ll have that version. I thought that was so fucking cool.

It’s also no secret that the sound you became most known for in the mid-2000s is having something of a commercial revival right now. But what is interesting is seeing how bands are building on that sound and changing it.

PATRICK: I love when anybody does anything that feels honest to them. Touring with Bring Me The Horizon, it was really cool seeing what’s natural to them. It makes sense. We changed our sound over time but we were always going to do that. It wasn’t a premeditated thing but for the four of us, it would have been impossible to maintain making the same kind of music forever. Whereas you’ll play with some other bands and they live that one sound. You meet up with them for dinner or something and they’re wearing the shirt of the band that sounds just like their band. You go to their house and they’re playing other bands that sound like them because they live in that thing. Whereas with the four of us and bands like Bring Me The Horizon, we change our sounds over time. And there’s nothing wrong with either. The only thing that’s wrong is if it’s unnatural to you. If you’re AC/DC and all of a sudden power ballads are in and you’re like, ‘Okay, we’ve got to do a power ballad’, that’s when it sucks. But if you’re a thrash metal guy who likes Celine Dion then yeah, do a power ballad. Emo as a word doesn’t mean anything anymore. But if people want to call it that, if the emo thing is back or having another life again, if that’s what’s natural to an artist, I think the world needs more earnest art. If that’s who you are, then do it. PETE: It would be super egotistical to think that the wave that started with us and My Chemical Romance and Panic! At The Disco has just been circling and cycling back. I  remember seeing Nikki Sixx at the airport and he was like, ‘Oh, you’re doing a flaming bass? Mine came from a backpack.’ It keeps coming back but it looks different. Talking to Lil Uzi Vert and Juice WRLD when he was around, it’s so interesting, because it’s so much bigger than just emo or whatever. It’s this whole big pop music thing that’s spinning and churning, and then it moves on, and then it comes back with different aspects and some of the other stuff combined. When you’re a fan of music and art and film, you take different stuff, you add different ingredients, because that’s your taste. Seeing the bands that are up and coming to me, it’s so exciting, because the rules are just different, right? It’s really cool to see artists that lean into the weirdness and lean into a left turn when everyone’s telling you to make a right. That’s so refreshing. PATRICK: It’s really important as an artist gets older to not put too much stock in your own influence. The moment right now that we’re in is bigger than emo and bigger than whatever was happening in 2005. There’s a great line in ‘Downton Abbey’ where someone was asking the Lord about owning this manor and he’s like, ‘well, you don’t really own it, there have been hundreds of owners and you are the custodian of it for a brief time.’ That’s what pop music is like. You just have the ball for a minute and you’re gonna pass it on to somebody else.

We will soon see you in the UK for your arena tour. How do you reflect on your relationship with the fans over here?

PETE: I remember the first time we went to the UK, I wasn’t prepared for how culturally different it was. When we played Reading & Leeds and the summer festivals, it was so different, and so much deeper within the culture. It was a little bit of a shock. The first couple of times we played, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, are we gonna die?’ because the crowd was so crazy, and there was bottles. Then when we came back, we thought maybe this is a beast to be tamed. Finally, you realise it’s a trading of energy. That made the last couple of festivals we played so fucking awesome. When you really realise that the fans over there are real fans of music. It’s really awesome and pretty beautiful. PATRICK: We’ve played the UK now more than a lot of regions of the states. Pretty early on, I just clicked with it. There were differences, cultural things and things that you didn’t expect. But it never felt that different or foreign to me, just a different flavour… PETE: This is why me and Patrick work so well together (laughs).  PATRICK: Well, listen; I’m a rainy weather guy. There is just things that I get there. I don’t really drink anymore all that much. But I totally will have a beer in the UK, there’s something different about every aspect of it, about the ordering of it, about the flavour of it, everything, it’s like a different vibe. The UK audience seemed to click with us too. There have been plenty of times where we felt almost more like a UK band than an American one. There have been years where you go there and almost get a more familial reaction than you would at home. Rock Sound has always been a part of that for us. It was one of the first magazines to care about us and the first magazine to do real interviews. That’s the thing, you would do all these interviews and a lot of them would be like ‘so where did the band’s name come from?’ But Rock Sound took us seriously as artists, maybe before some of us did. That actually made us think about who we are and that was a really cool experience. I think in a lot of ways, we wouldn’t be the band we are without the UK, because I think it taught us a lot about what it is to be yourself.

Fall Out Boy’s ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ is out now via Fueled By Ramen.

[black-arcana]

Watch: EVANESCENCE's AMY LEE Joins HALESTORM For 'Break In' Performance At Canadian Tour Kick-Off

EVANESCENCE singer Amy Lee joined HALESTORM on stage last night (Tuesday, October 15) at the Vancouver stop of the two bands' joint Canadian tour to perform the HALESTORM song "Break In". Fan-filmed video of the performance can be seen below.

In August 2020, HALESTORM released the official music video for a reimagined version of "Break In", featuring a guest appearance by Lee. The new version of the track, which originally appeared on HALESTORM's second album, 2012's "The Strange Case Of..." , was recorded in October 2019 at a Nashville studio with producer Nick Raskulinecz, who had previously worked with both bands. The clip captured Hale and Lee delivering an impassioned studio performance of the track.

The updated "Break In" appeared on "Halestorm Reimagined", a collection of reworked HALESTORM original songs as well as a cover of "I Will Always Love You", the love ballad made famous by Whitney Houston and Dolly Parton.

Lzzy and Amy performed a quarantine rendition of "Break In" in May 2020 on Hale's Internet show "Raise Your Horns With Lzzy Hale".

Speaking about the collaboration, Lzzy told Amy: "What I love about dueting on that song with you is that it started out as as love song that I wrote for my significant other" — referring to HALESTORM guitarist Joe Hottinger — "but when we sing it together, it's this act of unity, especially with the two of us being women and being women musicians. It's like we have each other's backs. And the lyrics mean something completely different when I sing it [with you]."

Regarding the way the new version of "Break In" was recorded, Lzzy said: "We did it performance-style, literally next to each other in the same room — from beginning of song to end of song, singing with each other.

"I've never done anything like that, but especially with a female singer of your prowess."

Amy added: "Nick always gets the challenge and gets the most out of me… So he made us stand there in the room and sing it live together a bunch of times. What that really means is that editing, you couldn't use when you did something cool but I messed up; it would have to be that we both nailed it for it to make the cut. So to do it in that way was really challenging and it was really cool and it fits the song so well.

"I remember you saying, and we both were saying, when we were listening back, it's really weird, at times — I know my part, but you can't pick out whose voice that is in that one particular moment, 'cause we started matching each other, 'cause it was on the spot. It's really cool how that happens.

"It feels like a match. It doesn't feel like any one person is pulling the other person along a little bit or leading the train. It really felt like an evenly matched dance."

Lzzy and Amy originally performed "Break In" together in 2012 during the "Carnival Of Madness" tour, which was headlined by EVANESCENCE and featured HALESTORM in the support slot. At the time, Hale told Zoiks! Online about how the live collaboration came about: "It's funny. We had talked in the beginning of the tour, 'Oh, we should do something.' What would we do? Do we do a cover? Do I come out during her set? She came up to me, I think it was two weeks in and said, 'I'm obsessed with your song 'Break In' right now.' I was like, 'Thank you so much.' Then she said, 'I know all of your parts, all the backing parts and everything.' I was like, 'Sweet, that's awesome.' Then she said, 'This is going to sound really weird and please feel free to say no, but do you think I could come up during that song and sing it with you?' I'm, like, 'Of course. This is awesome.' We didn't have a whole lot of time to rehearse. We literally ran through it once before our show in El Paso, right before the doors opened. It was perfect. I told her, queue insane crowd noise. She was like, 'Oh, I don't know.' 'No, seriously — they're going to freak when you walk out on stage.' ... [And] they did. We couldn't hear each other for the first four lines."

Back in 2021, EVANESCENCE and HALESTORM joined forces for a massive North American tour that ended up being a rousing success.

[hopeswriting]

Top KHR fanfics

hi nonny, thank you for the ask!

okay so i obviously haven't read all the khr fics out there, so this will be by no means an exhaustive list. but from the ones i've read? *crack knuckles* let's go through my bookmarks in no particular order!

also adding this after i finished answering the ask, but this just ended up being a list of arco fics and/or tsuna fics (+ the 10th gen and/or reborn). but like. are we surprised zfsdfdsf.

on ao3:

flip a coin [head for villain, tail for hero] by petroltogo

Superhero/Supervillain AU: All Sawada Tsunayoshi wants to do is help people. Considering his occupation as a Vongola Inc. superhero, you'd think that wouldn't be much of a problem. You'd be wrong. [Of course 'people' isn't supposed to include wanted supervillains. But it's hardly Tsuna's fault that the training manual doesn't specify that, is it.] Along the way, he learns to help himself.

this series is just so, so good! all the works in it are simply *chef's kiss*. the worldbuilding is amazing, the characters so in character and complex and with so many layers and depth to them. also it's obviously planned down to the last detail, so it's incredibly fun to follow along and try to piece the puzzle along with the various characters' pov.

The Boy in the Ice by eloquentelegance

A mysterious pillar of ice drops out of the sky and fuses with the grounds of Yuuei. It's not the strangest thing to happen, especially for this school. But the boy, frozen within, is strange - yes, very strange indeed.

haven't read chapter 2 yet, but i have no doubt it won't disappoint whenever i'll be able to get to it. as for chapter 1? a fucking masterpiece. it's a khr x bnha crossover, and i don't usually read crossover, but boy, am i glad this is one of the few i gave a chance to haha.

Yugen by Little_Miss_Bunny

In one world, Tsuna sacrificed his life to save the Arcobaleno. As soon as he drew his last breath, he opened his eyes again to see beaten students cowering in front of him and a bloody hammer in his hand.

it's been a while since i've reread this one, but i still have the reaction of "oh, this one was so, so good!!" whenever i come across it lol, so yeah. what i do remember is i absolutely love the depiction of hibari in this one as well as his dynamic with tsuna. also little miss bunny is one of my favorite khr writers, they're so good at crafting the different aus they come up with and making them feel real while still keeping the characters in character, i love it.

Target Acquired: Wicked Jester by poorasdirt

Colonnello has always been a military man. He understood what led to him being cursed. He understood why the others had been cursed. Or, well, why most of the others had been cursed. Skull's motivations had always been a mystery to him. Now that the curse had been lifted, Colonnello could finally sit back and try to puzzle it out. If only it were that easy. Or Colonnello's instincts were telling him something wasn't right and curiosity only kills cats.

i know for a fact i've already recc this one before, and i'm doing it again because it's just that good. <3 it's another one heavy on worldbuilding, which is funny because usually worldbuilding isn't exactly my thing, but how can i say no to them when they're all so well written like this. anyway it's a skull-centric fic through nello's pov, so of course i was all for it zfsegfdsds.

Starstruck by Little_Miss_Bunny

All Tsuna wanted was his siblings to be happy. So, he didn't see a problem attending a fan signing for one of the hottest bands to date, even if he had no clue who they were. He did start seeing a problem when more idols started appearing in his life. It got even worse when they just wouldn't leave him alone.

i love this one so, soo much! this is my favorite work of theirs. it's currently at 153k words tho, so not too sure how to summarize it lol, but just trust me on this one! it's more on the lighthearted one compared to their other works, tho still touch on serious stuff and do it well, but i'd still consider it a comfort (and funny) fic.

Scorching Ember by Little_Miss_Bunny

When the revered Sky Priestess suddenly passes away, everyone mourns. However, the world is soon engulfed by darkness, giving rise to creatures that seemed to only exist in folktales. With the gods mysteriously absent, there is no one to keep everything from descending into ruins—until a hunter finds a curious object in a barren creek.

another one from little miss bunny that i love so much!! maybe or maybe not because nello is the first arco to appear, so there's certainly no shortage of nello & tsuna interactions. more seriously tho zrfsdfds, this is another one where the worldbuilding has obviously been given a lot of care, and the characters are written so well, tsuna first of all, and it's just super fun to read.

Forever Family, Forever Vongola by AnimationNut

They're a group of insane, energetic, destructive and hyper people. But they also love each other, whether some are willing to admit it or not. Family sticks together, through thick, thin, and crazy.

the ultimate platonic/familial khr fic! with how many chapters it already has (57 for 195k words), you're bound to find more than one you'll love. some are connected, most are not. some are lighthearted fluff, some more on the heavy, serious side of things. but all chapters are written so well, and at their cores it's all about how much these guys love each other.

The Hottest of Flames can Melt the Strongest of Chains by Luki (KelpieCodyne)

I'm not a liar, but I close my eyes a lot by Seito

another incredible series that is just so, soo good! it's about tsuna not wanting to become vongola decimo and doing what he can so it won't happen. no happy endings yet, but the series isn't marked complete yet either, so we'll see.

It started with bang. A bullet casing falling to the ground; the clatter echoing off the walls. It started with Tsuna putting a bullet through the head of his enemy, unflinchingly. Blood spattered, flying, rolling down Tsuna's cheek. Brown eyes burn with orange fire, yet so, so, so cold. In another world, Reborn would have smiled. In this world, Reborn flinched.

i haven't reread this one in a long while, so i honestly... don't quite remember how it goes zqdsfds, but i still remember it was an amazing read all the same!! i mean, the summary alone is so good? also this writer is one of the best in the fandom imo, so yeah.

ozymandias was a punkass bitch (but he had the right idea) by Seito

“You want Vongola? You can have it,” Tsuna says serenely.

loved this one too! badass tsuna is always a treat, and i always love to see it.

last to fade by Trilies

Mammon's last breath is of rain and gunpowder. Before they make their choice, they consider lives lost and the options they have. There's not a lot. Set during the Millefiore timeline.

a look at what mammon's last moment could have been like. super well-written.

Striking Once by istilllikekhr

A peek into the universe where Nana Sawada was given the Lightning Mare Ring.

this one has an unsual pairing (byakuran & nana), but you'll be missing out if you don't give it a chance because of it. i also didn't have a clue what to expect when i first clicked on it, but when i tell you it did not disappoint. and the ending? oughhh. please give this a chance!

Sunny Skies Ahead by Ourliazo

Reborn is not yet the world's greatest hitman, not quite a proper Sky, and definitely doesn't want these ridiculous Guardians that he keeps running into.

sky arco reborn who does not want to be the sky arco? it's just as chaotic and funny as you might think zqefdddsf. the interactions in this are absolute gold, and it's just such a fun ride to see all the bonding happen despite reborn's best efforts lmao. also ourliazo is another one of my favorite khr writers. the way they write the arco and tsuna (and every other khr characters tbh)? absolute peak. and then you add their humor, and i will simply never be tired of their writing.

Sincerely, Scattered Shards by You_Light_The_Sky

Tsuna’s the foolish type to give a bit of his heart to anyone he meets. No one ever wanted his ugly heart shards until he met his Guardians. No one ever treasured his heart shards until them either. Hints of All27 and R27.

heartbreaking and heartwarming all at once. i actually had forgotten i had this one in my bookmarks, as well as the fic as a whole tbh 😅, but it all instantly came back to me like a punch in the gut. there's so much love in this one guys. the kind that hurts and the kind that heals and the kind that makes it all worth it in the end.

Forgotten Memories of a Broken Soldier by Maintenant

The Arcobaleno arrive at their collective house after their yearly meeting turned mission. Skull had been left there to cook them a warm meal for their return, seeing as he is useless in a mission, but it is not Skull they find when they return. Rather, it is, but it is not. For this Skull has cold eyes and harsher threats, and he doesn't know the rest of the Arcobaleno. Perhaps more importantly, the Arcobaleno find, is that they don't know Skull.

i love this one for the ending and the build up to it. it's a wip, but the first chapter can be read as a one shot (imo) so it works well. it's a skull is harry potter fic, and like i already said i don't usually read crossover fics, but this is another one i'm glad i gave a chance to.

Never Will Forget by Squoxie

Tell the ones, the ones I loved I never will forget

a song fic about skull surviving the rest of the arco. the summary alone always pulls at my heartstrings whenever i read it.

Beginnings And Middles But No Ends In Sight by Ourliazo

A compilation of the various chaotic missions that the Arcobaleno take on pre-curse - as well as the many dumb things they throw themselves into even without being paid for it. [Fon tries to trap a cockroach with a tissue, but it runs up his sleeve. Reborn watches as Fon flips his shit, rips off his sleeve, and punches the cockroach to death. Reborn is still laughing by the time Fon comes back from disposing of the corpse and washing his hands. "Thank you," Fon says pointedly, rather upset by the entire experience. Reborn is crying.]

this is the daily life arc - arco version fic as i like to call it. an absolute fucking ride as you can imagine. love it to fucking bits.

don't look at the child underneath the floorboards by Kosaji

Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. - The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Ursula K. Le Guin In which truths are realized and a choice is made.

the one where tsuna is freed from vongola thanks to his guardians. love it a lot.

Those Last Few Memories by Ourliazo

In one future, the Arcobaleno band together and try to fight off the Anti Tri-ni-set radiation.

the way my heart squeezes whenever i think of this fic. so heartbreaking and so well written. and the ending? oughhh. you just have to read this one!

on ff.net:

Rage Vs Hope By: ariathal2410

The order was to kill anything that moved, the city was too far gone to hope for survivors. But if there was one thing Colonnello didn't sign up for, it was killing kids. (28 Weeks Later AU, eventually merges into a semi-au) eventual all27?

zombies au that is both nello and tsuna centric! alternate between both their povs too. there's other canonical characters as well as ocs, but they're written well and enjoyable to read about too.

How to Survive the Fae By: MikeLamp

As the trees around them collapse, Tsuna's eyes don't stray from the human trembling before him, "So tell me," he hisses, eyes glowing, "where is your King now?" She whimpers instead of answering. In a world where the fae haunt the overgrown forests and angels control the cities with an iron fist, Tsuna doesn't want to just survive anymore.

another fantasy au that still manages to keep the characters true to themselves and is super well written. it's arco27 (seems to be anyway), with skull and who is likely fon in the last chapter being the only arco who appeared so far. and the skull & tsuna interactions in this? *chef's kiss* i love them.

Just Another Tuesday By: ariathal2410

Tsuna doesn't know why all this supernatural shit started happening in his life, but he'd really like it to stop now please. Mild Arco27

this is one of my favorite khr comfort fics. funny and fluffy with just the right amount of protectiveness and possessiveness from the arco (as well as flirtiness tbh lol).

come get me By: MakeItVoid

Reborn waits a little impatiently for someone to come get him. He doesn't know what to do now. The fire is creeping closer. (Reborn doesn't want to die like this.)

this is imo one of the best written reborn i've ever read about. maybe even the best one? either way i just love so, so much the way he's written in this fic, i couldn't not have added it to this list.

Gokudera Hayato By: rynoa29

It hurts more than you think it would, but your face can't help but to beam with pride.

a look at gokudera and his dynamic with the key people around him throughout his life. a lovely and well written exploration of his character.

and that was the last fic of the list! by which i mean there's actually more haha, but these are the cream of the crop among my favorite khr fics.

[vampylily]

Transcription of Fall Out Boy's interview with Rock Sound

Since I was going to read the article anyways, I thought I'd transcribe in case it'll be more accessible to read for others. The interview with Pete and Patrick goes in depth on the topics of tourdust, evolving as a band, So Much (For) Stardust, working with Neal Avron, and more.

Thank you to @nomaptomyowntreasure who kindly shared the photos of the article! Their post is linked here.

PDF link here. (more readable format & font size)

article in text below (and warning for long post.)

Rock Sound Issue #300

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE

WITH THE TRIUMPHANT ‘SO MUCH (FOR) STARDUST’ CAPTURING A WHOLE NEW GENERATION OF FANS, FALL OUT BOY ARE RIDING HIGH, CELEBRATING THEIR PAST WHILE LOOKING TOWARDS A BRIGHT FUTURE. PETE WENTZ AND PATRICK STUMP REFLECT ON RECENT SUCCESSES AND THE LESSONS LEARNED FROM TWO DECADES OF WRITING AND PERFORMING TOGETHER. 

WORDS: James Wilson-Taylor

PHOTOS: Elliott Ingham

You have just completed a US summer tour that included stadium shows and some of your most ambitious production to date. What were your aims going into this particular show? 

PETE: Playing stadiums is a funny thing. I pushed pretty hard to do a couple this time because I think that the record Patrick came up with musically lends itself to that feeling of being part of something larger than yourself. When we were designing the cover to the album, it was meant to be all tangible, which was a reaction to tokens and skins that  you can buy and avatars. The title is made out of clay, and the painting is an actual painting. We wanted to approach the show in that way as well. We've been playing in front of a gigantic video wall for the past eight years. Now, we wanted a stage show where you could actually walk inside it. 

Did adding the new songs from ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ into the setlist change the way you felt about them?

PATRICK: One of the things that was interesting about the record was that we took a lot of time figuring out what it was going to be, what it was going to sound like. We experimented with so many different things. I was instantly really proud. I felt really good about this record but it wasn’t until we got on stage and you’re playing the songs in between our catalogue that I really felt that. It was really noticeable from the first day on this tour - we felt like a different band. There's a new energy to it. There was something that I could hear live that I couldn't hear before. 

You also revisited a lot of older tracks and b-sides on this tour, including many from the ‘Folie à Deux’-era. What prompted those choices? 

PETE: There were some lean years where there weren't a lot of rock bands being played on pop radio or playing award shows so we tried to play the biggest songs, the biggest versions of them. We tried to make our thing really airtight, bulletproof so that when we played next to whoever the top artist was, people were like, ‘oh yeah, they should be here.’ The culture shift in the world is so interesting because now, maybe rather than going wider, it makes more sense to go deeper with people. We thought about that in the way that we listen to music and the way we watch films. Playing a song that is a b-side or barely made a record but is someone’s favourite song makes a lot of sense in this era.

PATRICK: I think there also was a period there where, to Pete’s point, it was a weird time to be a rock band. We had this very strange thing that happened to us, and not a lot of our friends for some reason, where we had a bunch of hits, right? And it didn’t make any sense to me. It still doesn’t make sense to me. But there was a kind of novelty, where we could play a whole set of songs that a lot of people know. It was fun and rewarding for us to do that. But then you run the risk of playing the same set forever. I want to love the songs that we play. I want to care about it and put passion into what we do. And there’s no sustainable way to just do the same thing every night and not get jaded. We weren’t getting there but I really wanted to make sure that we don’t ever get there. 

PETE: In the origin of Fall Out Boy, what happened at our concerts was we knew how to play five songs really fast and jumped off walls and the fire marshal would shut it down. It was what made the show memorable, but we wanted to be able to last and so we tried to perfect our show and the songs and the stage show and make it flawless. Then you don’t really know how much spontaneity you want to include, because something could go wrong. When we started this tour, and we did a couple of spontaneous things, it opened us up to more. Because things did go wrong and that’s what made the show special. We’re doing what is the most punk rock version of what we could be doing right now. 

You seem generally a lot more comfortable celebrating your past success at this point in your career. 

PETE: I think it’s actually not a change from our past. I love those records, but I never want to treat them in a cynical way. I never want there to be a wink and a smile where we’re just doing this because it’s the anniversary. This was us celebrating these random songs and we hope people celebrate them with us. There was a purity to it that felt in line with how we’ve always felt about it. I love ‘Folie à Deux’ - out of any Fall Out Boy record that's probably the one I would listen to. But I just never wanted it to be done in a cynical way, where we feel like we have to. But celebrating it in a way where there’s the purity of how we felt when we wrote the song originally. I think that’s fucking awesome. 

PATRICK: Music is a weird art form. Because when you’re an actor and you play a character, that is a specific thing. James Bond always wears a suit and has a gun and is a secret agent. If you change one thing, that’s fine, but you can’t really change all of it. But bands are just people. You are yourself. People get attached to it like it’s a story but it’s not. That was always something I found difficult. For the story, it’s always good to say, ‘it’s the 20th anniversary, let’s go do the 20th anniversary tour’, that’s a good story thing. But it’s not always honest. We never stopped playing a lot of the songs from ‘Take This To Your Grave’, right? So why would I need to do a 20-year anniversary and perform all the songs back to back? The only reason would be because it would probably sell a lot of tickets and I don’t really ever want to be motivated by that, frankly. 

One of the things that’s been amazing is that now as the band has been around for a while, we have different layers of audience. I love ‘Folie à Deux’, I do, I love that record. But I had a really personally negative experience of touring on it. So that’s what I think of when I think of that record initially. It had to be brought back to me for me to appreciate it, for me to go, ‘oh, this record is really great. I should be happy with this. I should want to play this,’ So that’s why we got into a lot of the b-sides because we realised that our perspectives on a lot of these songs were based in our feelings and experiences from when we were making them. But you can find new experiences if you play those songs. You can make new memories with them. 

You alluded there to the 20th anniversary of ‘Take This To Your Grave’. Obviously you have changed and developed as a band hugely since then. But is there anything you can point to about making that debut record that has remained a part of your process since then? 

PETE: We have a language, the band, and it’s definitely a language of cinema and film. That’s maintained through time. We had very disparate music tastes and influences but I think film was a place we really aligned. You could have a deep discussion, because none of us were filmmakers. You could say which part was good and which part sucked and not hurt anybody’s feelings, because you weren’t going out to make a film the next day. Whereas with music, I think if we’d only had that to talk about, we would have turned out a different band.  

PATRICK: ‘Take This To Your Grave’, even though it’s absolutely our first record, there’s an element of it that’s still a work in progress. It is still a band figuring itself out. Andy wasn’t even officially in the band for half of the recording, right? I wasn’t even officially the guitar player for half of the recording. We were still bumbling through it. There was something that popped up a couple times throughout the record where you got these little inklings of who the band really was. We really explored that on ‘From Under the Cork Tree’’. So when we talk about what has remained the same… I didn’t want to be a singer, I didn’t know anything about singing, I wasn’t playing on that. I didn’t even plan to really be in this band for that long because Pete had a real band that really toured so I thought this was gonna be a side project. So there’s always been this element within the band where I don’t put too many expectations on things and then Pete has this really big ambition, creatively. There’s this great interplay between the tour of us where I’m kind of oblivious, and I don’t know when I’m putting out a big idea and Pete has this amazing vision to find what goes where. There’s something really magical about that because I never could have done a band like this without it. We needed everybody, we needed all four of us. And I think that’s the thing that hasn’t changed - the four of us just being ourselves and trying to figure things out. Listening back to ‘Folie’ or ‘Infinity On High’ or ‘American Beauty’. I’m always amazed at how much better they are than I remember. I listened to ‘MANIA’ the other day. I have a lot of misgivings about that record, a lot of things I’m frustrated about. But then I’m listening to it and I’m like, ‘this is pretty good.’ There’s a lot of good things in there. I don’t know why, it’s kind of like you can’t see those things. It’s kind of amazing to have Pete be able to see those things. And likewise, sometimes Pete has no idea when he writes something brilliant, as a lyricist, and I have to go, ‘No, I’m gonna keep that one, I’m gonna use that.’ 

On ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ you teamed up with producer Neal Avron again for the first time since 2008. Given how much time has passed, did it take a minute to reestablish that connection or did you pick up where you left off? 

PATRICK: It really didn’t feel like any time had passed between us and Neal. It was pretty seamless in terms of working with him. But then there was also the weird aspect where the last time we worked with him was kind of contentious. Interpersonally, the four of us were kind of fighting with each other…as much as we do anyway. We say that and then that myth gets built bigger than it was. We were always pretty cool with each other. It’s just that the least cool was making ‘Folie’. So then getting into it again for this record, it was like no time had passed as people but the four of us got on better so we had more to bring to Neal. 

PETE: It’s a little bit like when you return to your parents’ house for the holiday break when you’re in college. It’s the same house but now I can drink with my parents. We’d grown up and the first times we worked with Neal, he had to do so much more boy scout leadership, ‘you guys are all gonna be okay, we’re gonna do this activity to earn this badge so you guys don’t fucking murder each other.’ This time, we probably got a different version of Neal that was even more creative, because he had to do less psychotherapy. 

He went deep too. Sometimes when you’re in a session with somebody, and they’re like, ‘what are we singing about?’, I’ll just be like, ‘stuff’. He was not cool with ‘stuff’. I would get up and go into the bathroom outside the studio and look in the mirror, and think ‘what is it about? How deep are we gonna go?’ That’s a little bit scarier to ask yourself. If last time Neal was like a boy scout leader, this time, it was more like a Sherpa. He was helping us get to the summit. 

The title track of the album also finds you in a very reflective mood, even bringing back lyrics from ‘Love From the Other Side’. How would you describe the meaning behind that title and the song itself?

PETE: The record title has a couple of different meanings, I guess. The biggest one to me is that we basically all are former stars. That’s what we’re made of, those pieces of carbon. It still feels like the world’s gonna blow and it’s all moving too fast and the wrong things are moving too slow. That track in particular looks back at where you sometimes wish things had gone differently. But this is more from the perspective of when you’re watching a space movie, and they’re too far away and they can’t quite make it back. It doesn’t matter what they do and at some point, the astronaut accepts that. But they’re close enough that you can see the look on their face. I feel like there’s moments like that in the title track. I wish some things were different. But, as an adult going through this, you are too far away from the tether, and you’re just floating into space. It is sad and lonely but in some ways, it’s kind of freeing, because there’s other aspects of our world and my life that I love and I want to keep shaping and changing. 

Patrick: I’ll open up Pete’s lyrics and I just start hearing things. It almost feels effortless in a lot of ways. I just read his lyrics and something starts happening in my head. The first line, ‘I’m in a winter mood, dreaming of spring now’, instantly the piano started to form to me. That was a song that I came close to not sending the band. When I make demos, I’ll usually wait until I have five or six to send to everybody. I didn’t know if anyone was gonna like this. It’s too moody or it’s not very us. But it was pretty unanimous. Everybody liked that one. I knew this had to end the record. It took on a different life in the context of the whole album. Then on the bridge section, I knew it was going to be the lyrics from “Love From The Other Side’. It’s got to come back here. It’s the bookends, but I also love lyrically what it does, you know, ‘in another life, you were my babe’, going back to that kind of regret, which feels different in  ‘Love From The Other Side’ than it does here. When the whole song came together, it was the statement of the record. 

Aside from the album, you have released a few more recent tracks that have opened you up to a whole new audience, most notably the collaboration with Taylor Swift on ‘Electric Touch’. 

PETE: Taylor is the only artist that I’ve met or interacted with in recent times who creates exactly the art of who she is, but does it one such a mass level. So that’s breathtaking to watch from the sidelines. The way fans traded friendship bracelets, I don’t know what the beginning of it was, but you felt that everywhere. We felt that, I saw that in the crowd on our tour. I don’t know Taylor well, but I think she’s doing exactly what she wants and creating exactly the art that she wants to create. And going that, on such a level, is really awe-inspiring to watch. It makes you want to make the biggest, weirdest version of our thing and put that out there. 

Then there was the cover of Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, which has had some big chart success for you. That must have taken you slightly by surprise. 

PATRICK: It’s pretty unexpected. Pete and I were going back and forth about songs we should cover and that was an idea that I had. This is so silly but there was a song a bunch of years ago I had kind of written called ‘Dark Horse’ and then there was a Katy Perry song called ‘Dark Horse’ and I was like, ‘damn it’, you know, I missed the boat on that one. So I thought if we don’t do this cover, somebody else is gonna do it. Let’s just get in the studio and just do it. We spent way more time on those lyrics than you would think because we really wanted to get a specific feel. It was really fun and kind of loose, we just came together in Neal’s house and recorded it in a day. 

PETE: There's irreverence to it. I thought the coolest thing was when Billy Joel got asked about it, and he was like, ‘I’m not updating it, that’s fine, go for it.’  I hope if somebody ever chose to update one of ours, we’d be like that. Let them do their thing, they’ll have that version. I thought that was so fucking cool. 

It’s almost no secret that the sound you became most known for in the md-2000s is having something of a commercial revival right now But what is interesting is seeing how bands are building on that sound and changing it. 

PATRICK: I love when anybody does anything that feels honest to them. Touring with Bring Me The Horizon, it was really cool seeing what’s natural to them. It makes sense. We changed our sound over time but we were always going to do that. It wasn’t a premeditated thing but for the four of us, it would have been impossible to maintain making the same kind of music forever. Whereas you’ll play with some other bands and they live that one sound. You meet up with them for dinner or something and they’re wearing the shirt of the band that sounds just like their band. You go to their house and they’re playing other bands that sound like them because they live in that thing. Whereas with the four of us and bands like Bring Me The Horizon, we change our sounds over time.  And there’s nothing wrong with either. The only thing that’s wrong is if it’s unnatural to you. If you’re AC/DC and all of a sudden power ballads are in and you’re like, ‘Okay, we’ve got to do a power ballad’, that’s when it sucks. But if you’re a thrash metal guy who also likes Celine Dion then yeah, do a power ballad. Emo as a word doesn’t mean anything anymore. But if people want to call it that, if the emo thing is back or having another life again, if that’s what’s natural to an artist, I think the world needs more earnest art. If that’s who you are, then do it. 

PETE: It would be super egotistical to think that the wave that started with us and My Chemical Romance and Panic! At The Disco has just been circling and cycling back. I remember seeing Nikki Sixx at the airport and he was like, ‘Oh you’re doing a flaming bass? Mine came from a backpack.’ It keeps coming back but it looks different. Talking to Lil Uzi Vert and Juice WRLD when he was around, it’s so interesting, because it’s so much bigger than just emo or whatever. It’s this whole big pop music thing that’s spinning and churning, and then it moves on, and then it comes back with different aspects and some of the other stuff combined. When you’re a fan of music and art and film, you take different stuff, you add different ingredients, because that’s your taste. Seeing the bands that are up and coming to me, it’s so exciting, because the rules are just different, right? It’s really cool to see artists that lean into the weirdness and lean into a left turn when everyone’s telling you to make a right. That’s so refreshing. 

PATRICK: It’s really important as an artist gets older to not put too much stock in your own influence. The moment right now that we’re in is bigger than emo and bigger than whatever was happening in 2005. There’s a great line in ‘Downton Abbey’ where someone was asking the Lord about owning this manor and he’s like ‘well, you don’t really own it, there have been hundreds of owners and you are the custodian of it for a brief time.’ That’s what pop music is like. You just have the ball for a minute and you’re gonna pass it on to somebody else. 

We will soon see you in the UK for your arena tour. How do you reflect on your relationship with the fans over here? 

PETE: I remember the first time we went to the UK, I wasn’t prepared for how culturally different it was. When we played Reading & Leeds and the summer festivals, it was so different, and so much deeper within the culture. It was a little bit of a shock. The first couple of times we played, I was like, ‘Oh, my God, are we gonna die?’ because the crowd was so crazy, and there was bottles. Then when we came back, we thought maybe this is a beast to be tamed. Finally, you realise it’s a trading of energy. That made the last couple of festivals we played so fucking awesome. When you realise that the fans over there are real fans of music It’s really awesome and pretty beautiful. 

PATRICK: We’ve played the UK now more than a lot of regions of the states. Pretty early on, I just clicked with it. There were differences, cultural things and things that you didn’t expect. But it never felt that different or foreign to me, just a different flavour…

PETE: This is why me and Patrick work so well together (laughs). 

PATRICK: Well, listen; I’m a rainy weather guy. There is just things that I get there. I don’t really drink anymore all that much. But I totally will have a beer in the UL, there’s something different about every aspect of it, about the ordering of it, about the flavour of it, everything, it’s like a different vibe. The UK audience seemed to click with us too. There have been plenty of times where we felt almost like a UK band than an American one. There have been years where you go there and almost get a more familial reaction than you would at home. 

Rock Sound has always been a part of that for us. It was one of the first magazines to care about us and the first magazine to do real interviews. That’s the thing, you would do all these interviews and a lot of them would be like ‘so where did the band’s name come from?’ But Rock Sound took us seriously as artists, maybe before some of us did. That actually made us think about who we are and that was a really cool experience. I think in a lot of ways, we wouldn’t be the band we are without the UK, because I think it taught us a lot about what it is to be yourself. 

Fall Out Boy’s ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ is out now via Fueled By Ramen

[slavghoul]

Interview from Classic Rock Magazine #309

What stands out in your memories of 2022?

TF: Going back to touring was a fantastic feeling! In the beginning it felt almost unreal; still with a bit of restriction, which was kind of unintuitive, but the last tour we did, in August/September, was as good as normal. We released the record when we said we would, we managed to back it up with seventy shows. We cancelled one show in total. That's a good result.

Impera has dark, historically rooted themes, but it's also music that makes the listener feel so many things - joy, aggression, excitement, sorrow... After such a turbulent couple of years there's something cathartic about that.

I am very happy about how the record came out, and that it seems to be well-received among our fans. That's a tremendous feeling. I feel like I managed to do a lot of things I set out to do. We're gonna continue next year, we still have a lot of things to do. But right now we're just recharging a little.

Kaisarion has been a hit live. For a song about the brutal murder of a female Roman philosopher, it really gets the party going.

Yeah, I'm still surprised that with a song that does what it does - and was so well received and opened up the shows - there's never been talk about turning it into a single. Which I don't understand. But at the end of the day it's a label decision, and people around that decide which ones will, quote-unquote, 'work best'. And I've realised that I'm not really capable of choosing. I remember Mary On A Cross was a B-side.

It's weird how that happens with some songs.

Yeah, I must say I feel very optimistic with regards to how that song is taking a life on its own. Even though it was technically a B-side on a fun additional thing [2019's Seven Inches Of Satanic Panic] - it was not our main single from a new album we have always played it ever since it came out, on every show. Maybe a few exceptions, but I've always pushed that song as something that I felt very good about.

On that subject, you're viral on TikTok now. What is it about that platform that appeals?

I hardly knew what it was until two months ago! I have two almost fourteen-year-old kids, so of course I'd heard the phenomenon mentioned. It's an insanely big thing among kids and teenagers. What happens is they create these short snippets, funny, sad or emotional clips, to which they often tag some sort of music or sound. And if you are a creator of sound or music, you might be tagged on to a clip that might go 'viral'. That way you hit a lot more people that you might never entertain, you know, aiming your guns at. So it's a bit of a crap-shoot as well. We are not a big mainstream act, so obviously there's going to be a mixed bag of reactions. Because people in general are kind of strange to a lot of these aesthetics of rock, and especially the darker aspects of it.

It has brought the band more attention.

But if all that attention is a good or a bad thing, we do not know yet. There have been people who might have come on to the track, and as soon as they see what the band is about - or what they perceive the band to be about - there's backlash, because it's like: "Oh my, God fearing hater!" "I don't like it!" "This is communist bullshit!" So there are two sides of the coin. But it's a great bonus if we can get new people, especially kids, into liking rock music or other things, or if it makes them feel in any way better-informed, if you will.

Do you think TikTok will be a bigger deal for musicians in the future?

I don't know. I think when you're a musician, and you're making records, you need to have a certain strategic mind. But your job at the end of the day is making records and playing live. That is the heart of the matter. If you sit around waiting for a viral thing to happen, you can wait a long fucking time.

Back in May, the identities of the Nameless Ghouls were confirmed on social media. How do you feel about them not being strictly nameless any more?

Well, they haven't really been for quite some time. So for me it was not an overnight sensation. As long as it doesn't in any way interfere with what we are doing, there's no desire that I have for people not to feel proud or happy about what they're doing.

You've lamented not being able to play more guitar. If you could be the guitarist for a day in any band, which would it be?

Good question. There's several bands. I would have loved to be what Mick Taylor was in 1969, coming into the Rolling Stones at their best era - but I would have stayed around! That would have been a great experience. Very fun music to play. Definitely within the limits of what I can play really well. I spent a lot of time as a kid learning how to play guitar. Otherwise I would love to play in the Red Hot Chilli Peppers; I love what John Frusciante does. Def Leppard might be a good fit too. Joe Elliott spoke very highly of Impera when it came out. That would have also been really cool. Also a fantastic band. In an alternative reality, in an alternative life, I would have wanted to do a lot of other things. But I did hear that [Joe said those things], and it was very heartwarming, of course. A very big honour.

[softnsquishable]

Thanks to this lovely post, I have been able to transcribe the entirety of the new Rock Sound magazine interview with Pete and Patrick. Find the entire transcript below the cut!

WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE

WITH THE TRIUMPHANT ‘SO MUCH (FOR) STARDUST’ CAPTURING A WHOLE NEW GENERATION OF FANS, FALL OUT BOY ARE RIDING HIGH. CELEBRATING THEIR PAST WHILE LOOKING TOWARDS A BRIGHT FUTURE. PETE WENTZ AND PATRICK STUMP REFLECT ON RECENT SUCCESSES AND THE LESSONS LEARNED FROM TWO DECADES OF WRITING AND PERFORMING TOGETHER. 

You have just completed a US summer tour that included stadium shows and some of your most ambitious production to date. What were your aims going into this particular show?

Pete: Playing stadiums is a funny thing. I pushed pretty hard to do a couple this time because I think that the record Patrick came up with musically lends itself to that feeling of being part of something larger than yourself. When we were designing the cover to the album, it was meant to be all tangible, which was a reaction to tokens and skins that you can buy and avatars. The title is made out of clay, and the painting is an actual painting. We wanted to approach the show in that way as well. We’ve been playing in front of a gigantic video wall for the past eight years. Now, we wanted a stage show where you could actually walk inside it.

Did adding the new songs from ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ into the setlist change the way you felt about them?

Patrick: One of the things that was interesting about the record was that we took a lot of time figuring out what it was going to be, what it was going to sound like. We experimented with so many different things. I was instantly really proud. I felt really good about this record but it wasn’t until we got on stage and you’re playing the songs in between our catalogue that I really felt that.It was really noticeable from the first day on this tour - we felt like a different band. There’s a new energy to it. There was something that I could hear live that I couldn’t hear before.

You also revisited a lot of older tracks and b-sides on this tour, including many from the ‘Folie à Deux’-era. What prompted those choices?

Pete: There were some lean years where there weren’t a lot of rock bands being played on pop radio or playing award shows so we tried to play the biggest songs, the biggest versions of them. We tried to make our thing really airtight, bulletproof so that when we played next to whoever the top artist was, people were like, ‘oh yeah, they should be here.’ The culture shift in the world is so interesting because now, maybe rather than going wider, it makes more sense to go deeper with people. We thought about that in the way that we listen to music and the way we watch films. Playing a song that is a b-side or barely made a record but is someone's favorite song makes a lot of sense in this era.

Patrick: I think there also was a period there where, to Pete’s point, it was a weird time to be a rock band. We had this very strange thing that happened to us, and not a lot of our friends for some reason, where we had a bunch of hits, right? And it didn’t make any sense to me. It still doesn’t make sense to me. But there was a kind of novelty, where we could play a whole set of songs that a lot of people know. It was fun and rewarding for us to do that. But then you run the risk of playing the same set forever. I want to love the songs that we play. I want to care about it and put passion into what we do.  And there’s no sustainable way to just do the same thing every night and not get jaded. We weren’t getting there but I really wanted to make sure that we don’t ever get there.

Pete: In the origin of Fall Out Boy, what happened at our concerts was we knew how to play five songs really fast and jumped off walls and the fire marshal would shut it down. It was what made the show memorable, but we wanted to be able to last and so we tried to perfect our show and the songs and the stage show and make it flawless. Then you don’t really know how much spontaneity you want to include, because something could go wrong. When we started this tour, and we did a couple of spontaneous things, it opened us up to more. Because things did go wrong and that’s what made the show special. We’re doing what is the most punk rock version of what we could be doing right now. 

You seem generally a lot more comfortable celebrating your past success at this point in your career.

Pete: I think it’s actually not a change from our past. I love those records, but I never want to treat them in a cynical way. I never want there to be a wink and a smile where we’re just doing this because it’s the anniversary. Thai was us celebrating these random songs and we hope people celebrate them with us. There was a purity to it that felt in line with how we always felt about it. I love ‘Folie à Deux’ - out of any Fall Out Boy record that’s probably the one I would listen to. But I just never want it to be done in a cynical way, where we feel like we have to. But celebrating it in a way where there’s the purity of how we felt when we wrote the song originally, I think that’s fucking awesome.

Patrick: Music is a weird art form. Because when you’re an actor and you play a character, that is a specific thing. James Bond always wears a suit and has a gun and is a secret agent. If you change one thing, that’s fine, but you can’t really change all of it. But bands are just people. You are yourself. People get attached to it like it’s a story but it’s not. That was always something that I found difficult. For the story, it’s always good to say, ‘it’s the 20th anniversary, let’s go do the 20th anniversary tour,’ that’s a good story thing. But it’s not always honest. We never stopped playing a lot of the songs from ‘Take This To Your Grave’, right? So why would I need to do a 20-year anniversary and perform all the songs back to back? The only reason would be because it would probably sell a lot of tickets and I don’t really ever want to be motivated by that, frankly. 

One of the things that’s been amazing is that now as the band has been around for a while, we have different layers of audience. I love ‘Folie à Deux’, I do, I love that record. But I had a really personally negative experience of touring on it. So that’s what I think of when I think of that record initially. It had to be brought back to me for me to appreciate it, for me to go, ‘oh, this record is really great. I should be happy with this. I should want to play this.’ So that’s why we got into a lot of the b-sides because we realized that our perspectives on a lot of these songs were based in our feelings and experiences from when we were making them. But you can find new experiences if you play those songs. You can make new memories with them. 

You alluded there to the 20th anniversary of ‘Take This To Your Grave’. Obviously you have changed and developed as a band hugely since then. But is there anything you can point to about making that debut record that has remained as a part of your process since then?

Pete: We have a language, the band, and it’s definitely a language of cinema and film. That’s maintained through time. We have very disparate musical tastes and influences but I think film was a place we really aligned. You could have a deep discussion, because none of us were filmmakers. You could say which part was good and which part sucked and not hurt anybody’s feelings, because you weren’t going out to make a film the next day. Whereas with music, I think if we’d only had that to talk about, we would have turned out a different band. 

Patrick: ‘Take This To Your Grave’, even though it’s absolutely our first record, there’s an element of it that’s still a work in progress. It is still a band figuring itself out. Andy wasn’t even officially in the band for half of the recording, right? I wasn’t even officially the guitar player for half of the recording. We were still bumbling through it. There was something that popped up a couple times throughout that record where you got these little inklings of who the band really was. We really explored that on ‘From Under The Cork Tree’. 

So when we talk about what has remained the same…I didn’t want to be a singer, I didn’t know anything about singing. I wasn’t planning on that. I didn’t even plan to really be in this band for that long because Pete had a real band that really toured so I thought this was gonna be a side project. So there’s always been this element within the band where I don’t put too many expectations on things and then Pete has this really big ambition, creatively. There’s this great interplay between the two of us where I’m kind of oblivious, and I don’t know when I’m putting out a big idea and Pete has this amazing vision to find what goes where. There’s something really magical about that because I never could have done a band like this without it. We needed everybody, we needed all four of us. And I think that’s the thing that hasn’t changed. - the four of us just being ourselves and trying to figure things out. Listening back to ‘Folie’ or ‘Infinity On High’ or ‘American Beauty’, I’m always amazed at how much better they are then I remember. I listened to ‘MANIA’ the other day. I have a lot of misgivings about that record, a lot of things that I’m frustrated about. But then I’m listening to it and I’m like, ‘this is pretty good.’ There’s a lot of good things in there. I don’t know why, it’s kind of like you can’t see those things. It’s kind of amazing to have Pete be able to see those things. And likewise, sometimes Pete has no idea when he writes something brilliant, as a lyricist, and I have to go, ‘No, I’m gonna keep that one, I’m gonna use that.’ 

On ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ you teamed up with producer Neal Avron again for the first time since 2008. Given how much time has passed, did it take a minute to reestablish that connection or did you pick up where you left off?

Patrick: It really didn’t feel like any time had passed between us and Neal. It was pretty seamless in terms of working with him. But then there was also that weird aspect where the last time we had worked with him was kind of contentious. Interpersonally, the four of us were kind of fighting with each other…as much as we do anyway. We say that and the myth gets built bigger than it was. We were always pretty cool with each other. It’s just that the least cool was making ‘Folie’. So then getting into it again for this record, it was like no time had passed as people but the four of us got on better so we had more to bring to Neal.

Pete: It’s a little bit like when you return to your parents’ house for a holiday break when you’re in college. It’s the same house but now I can drink with my parents. We’d grown up and the first times we worked with Neal, he had to do so much more boy scout leadership, ‘you guys are all gonna be okay, we’re gonna do this activity to earn this badge so you guys don’t fucking murder each other.’ This time, we probably got a different version of Neal that was even more creative, because he had to do less psychotherapy. 

He went deep too. Sometimes when you’re in a session with somebody, and they’re like, ‘what are we singing about?’, I’ll just be like, ‘stuff’. He was not cool with ‘stuff’. I would get up and go into the bathroom outside the studio and look in the mirror, and think ‘what is it about? How deep are we gonna go?’ That’s a little bit scarier to ask yourself. If last time Neal was like a boy scout leader, this time, it was more like a Sherpa. He was helping us get to the summit. 

The title track of the album also finds you in a very reflective mood, even bringing back lyrics from ‘Love From The Other Side’. How would you describe the meaning behind that title and the song itself?

Pete: The record title has a couple of different meanings, I guess. The biggest one to me is that we basically all are former stars. That’s what we’re made of, those pieces of carbon. It still feels like the world’s gonna blow and it’s all moving too fast and the wrong things are moving too slow. That track in particular looks back at where you sometimes wish things had gone differently. But this is more from the perspective of when you’re watching a space movie, and they’re too far away and they can’t quite make it back. It doesn’t matter what they do and at some point, the astronaut accepts that. But they’re close enough that you can see the look on their face. I feel like there’s moments like that in the title track. I wish some things were different. But, as an adult going through this, you are too far away from the tether, and you’re just floating into space. It is sad and lonely but in some ways, it’s kind of freeing, because there’s other aspects of our world and my life that I love and that I want to keep shaping and changing.

Patrick: I’ll open up Pete’s lyrics and I just start hearing things. It almost feels effortless in a lot of ways. I just read his lyrics and something starts happening in my head. The first line, ‘I’m in a winter mood, dreaming of spring now’, instantly the piano started to form to me. That was a song that I came close to not sending to the band. When I make demos, I’ll usually wait until I have five or six to send to everybody. I didn’t know if anyone was gonna like this. It’s too moody or it’s not very us. But it was pretty unanimous. Everybody liked that one. I knew this had to end the record. It took on a different life in the context of the whole album. Then on the bridge section, I knew it was going to be the lyrics from ‘Love For The Other Side’. It’s got to come back here. It’s the bookends, but I also love lyrically what it does, you know, ‘in another life, you were my babe’, going back to that kind of regret, which feels different in ‘Love For The Other Side’ than it does here. When the whole song came together, it was the statement of the record. 

Aside from the album, you have released a few more recent tracks that have opened you up to a whole new audience, most notably the collaboration with Taylor Swift on ‘Electric Touch’. 

Pete: Taylor is the only artist that I’ve met or interacted with in recent times who creates exactly the art of who she is, but does it on such a mass level. So that’s breathtaking to watch from the sidelines. The way fans traded friendship bracelets, I don’t know what the beginning of it was, but you felt that everywhere. We felt that, I saw that in the crowd on our tour. I don’t know Taylor well, but I think she’s doing exactly what she wants and creating exactly the art she wants to create. And doing that, on such a level, is really awe-inspiring to watch. It makes you want to make the biggest, weirdest version of our thing and put that out there. 

Then there was the cover of Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, which has had some big chart success for you. That must have taken you slightly by surprise.

Patrick: It’s pretty unexpected. Pete and I were going back and forth about songs we should cover and that was an idea that I had. This is so silly but there was a song a bunch of years ago I had kind of written called ‘Dark Horse' and then there was a Katy Perry song called ‘Dark Horse’ and I was like, ‘damn it’, you know, I missed the boat on that one. So I thought if we don’t do this cover, somebody else is gonna do it. Let’s just get in the studio and just do it. We spent way more time on those lyrics than you would think because we really wanted to get a specific feel. It was really fun and kind of loose, we just came together in Neal’s house and recorded it in a day.

Pete: There’s irreverence to it. I thought the coolest thing was when Billy Joel got asked about it, and he was like, ‘I’m not updating it, that’s fine, go for it.’ I hope if somebody ever chooses to update one of ours, we’d be like that. Let them do their thing, they'll have that version. I thought that was so fucking cool. 

It’s also no secret that the sound you became most known for in the mid-2000s is having something of a commercial revival right now. But what is interesting is seeing how bands are building on that sound and changing it. 

Patrick: I love when anybody does anything that feels honest to them. Touring with Bring Me The Horizon, it was really cool seeing what’s natural to them. It makes sense. We changed our sound over time but we were always going to do that. It wasn’t a premeditated thing but for the four of us, it would have been impossible to maintain making the same kind of music forever. Whereas you’ll play with some other hands and they live that one sound. You meet up with them for dinner or something and they’re wearing the shirt of the band that sounds just like their band. You go to their house and they’re playing other bands that sound like them because they live in that thing. Whereas with the four of us and bands like Bring Me The Horizon, we change our sounds over time. And there’s nothing wrong with that either. The only thing that’s wrong is if it’s unnatural to you. If you’re AC/DC and all of a sudden power ballads are in and you’re like, ‘Okay, we’ve got to do a power ballad’, that’s when it sucks. But if you’re a thrash metal guy who also likes Celine Dion then yeah, do a power ballad. Emo as a word doesn’t mean anything anymore. But if people want to call it that, if the emo thing is back or having another life again, if that’s what’s natural to an artist, I think the world needs more earnest art. If that’s who you are, then do it.

Pete: It would be super egotistical to think that the wave started with us and My Chemical Romance and Panic! At The Disco has just been circling and cycling back. I remember seeing Nikki Sixx at the airport and he was like, ‘Oh, you’re doing a flaming bass? Mine came from a backpack.’ It keeps coming back but it looks different. Talking to Lil Uzi Vert and Juice WRLD when he was around, it’s so interesting, because it’s so much bigger than just emo or whatever. It’s this whole big pop music thing that’s spinning and churning, and then it moves on., and then it comes back with different aspects and some of the other stuff combined. When you’re a fan of music and art and film, you take different stuff, you add different ingredients, because that’s your taste. Seeing the bands that are up and coming to me, it’s so exciting, because the rules are just different, right? It’s really cool to see artists that lean into the weirdness and lean into a left turn when everyone’s telling you to make a right. That’s so refreshing. 

Patrick: It’s really important as an artist gets older to not put too much stock in your own influence. The moment right now that we’re in is bigger than emo and bigger than whatever was happening in 2005. There’s a great line in ‘Downton Abbey’ where someone was asking the Lord about owning this manor and he’s like, ‘well, you don’t really own it, there have been hundreds of owners and you are the custodian of it for a brief time.’ That’s what pop music is like. You just have the ball for a minute and you’re gonna pass it on to somebody else.

We will soon see you in the UK for your arena tour. How do you reflect on your relationship with the fans over here?

Pete: I remember the first time we went to the UK, I wasn’t prepared for how culturally different it was. When we played Reading & Leeds and the summer festivals, it was so different, and so much deeper within the culture. It was a little bit of a shock. The first couple of times we played, I was like, ‘Oh my God, are we gonna die?” because the crowd was so crazy, and there was bottles. Then when we came back, we thought maybe this is a beast to be tamed. Finally, you realize it’s a trading of energy. That made the last couple of festivals we played so fucking awesome. When you really realize that the fans over there are real fans of music. It’s really awesome and pretty beautiful. 

Patrick: We’ve played the UK now more than a lot of regions of the states. Pretty early on, I just clicked with it. There were differences, cultural things and things that you didn’t expect. But it never felt that different or foreign to me, just a different flavor…

Pete: This is why me and Patrick work so well together (laughs).

Patrick: Well, listen; I’m a rainy weather guy. There is just things that I get there. I don’t really drink anymore all that much. But I totally will have a beer in the UK, there’s something different about every aspect of it, about the ordering of it, about the flavor of it, everything, it’s like a different vibe. The UK Audience seemed to click with us too. There have been plenty of times where we felt almost more like a UK band than an American one. There have been years where you go there and almost get a more familial reaction than you would at home. 

Rock Sound has always been a part of that for us. It was one of the first magazines to care about us and the first magazine to do real interviews. That’s the thing, you would do all these interviews and a lot of them would be like ‘so where did the band’s name come from?” But Rock Sound took us seriously as artists, maybe before some of us did. That actually made us think about who we are and that was a really cool experience. I think in a lot of ways, we wouldn’t be the band we are without the UK, because I think it taught us a lot about what it is to be yourself.

Fall Out Boy’s ‘So Much (For) Stardust’ is out now via Fueled By Ramen. 

[seekforwarmth]

hiii im the anon who want smau recs SJDJWJS they're just so fun to read and i can't find any 4 some reason 😭

hi anon! i’m going to list them in two categories: completed and ongoing, in no specific order. pls read the warnings when you click on each au. let me know if you want me to create a monthly rec list as i do with ao3 fics.

COMPLETED

໑ is ur mother worried? by @outropeace Where Louis' boyfriend wants to have a threesome for his birthday and he has set his eyes on the captain of the football team Harry Styles. Only issue? He is also the president of Louis' fraternity and knows he doesn't stand a chance against him.

໑ cowboy harry (a/b/o) by louis28angels Harry is an old farmer who doesn't do much except taking care of his animals and vegetables. Louis is the sweetest country girl that sells seeds and fertilizers to him. Things go a little deeper than that.

໑ big lip by louis28angels Pleasing releases its new lip balm and Lewith (Louis) is the model scheduled for the campaign. What happens when the worldwide singer and owner Harry Styles finds out the new model is just the most beautiful person he's ever seen in his life?

໑ pen pals by loulaylor Where Louis' uni started a system where you're assigned a pen pal in the beginning of the year, you only find out their identity at the end of the semester. Harry and Louis have never liked each other. they don't know they're each other's pen pals.

໑ Rockstar Harry & Opener Louis by babygirloui Louis is the vocalist of a band that will be opening for Harry Styles' tour, the Rockstar everybody has a crush on but is known for not having many public friends. We he gets closer to a member of said band fans start thinking it could be something else.

໑ Model Louis & Hockey player Harry by babygirloui Harry's career as a hockey player is going better than ever but his private life is falling apart, now he has to deal with a divorce, think what is best for his son, handle the media following his every step and try not to fall for the cute face that he sees everywhere.

໑ i’m your biggest fan by bunnylouies Where pop star Harry and model Louis part ways after a nightly adventure, just for Harry’s manager to want Louis to star in his newest mv. They both find themselves lost in more than they bargained for.

໑ football player Harry/campus journalist Louis by bunnylouies The attention wasn’t new to him, but in this case Louis didn’t even know how to deal with it. Surely their college set up a nice idea but he was not meant to receive these gifts every single day. Or was he?

໑ sugar rim by @nouies Louis misses his flight home on Christmas Eve. He stumbles upon a bartender who will change his night—and possibly his life.

ONGOING

໑ enemies to lovers by louis28angels Where Harry is the captain of the school's team, and Louis is their main cheerleader. They hate each other, except Harry is completely crazy about Louis.

໑ sugar and spice and everything nice by loupunkprincess Louis is a content creator who posts about his life as a baker and a mother of a cute girl. Harry, a small artist, is their fan and enjoys baking along during their lives. fate works in funny ways.

໑ pleasing by loulaylor Divorced father and CEO of Pleasing, Harry Styles, meets his new digital marketer, Louis Tomlinson, who won't stop posting silly things on the Pleasing social media accounts. Louis is the one person not intimidated by Mr Styles. Cue instigator Louis and grumpy Harry.

໑ Holmes Chapel by loubrry Louis received a strange text from an unknown number and gets involved in a messed up situation about a girl's disappearance.

໑ Influencer Louis & Gamer Harry by babygirloui Harry is known for his attitude and his mean group of fans. When Louis' friend send him a clip of a gamer making fun of him, he decides to confront him without realizing the big online fight that could start. After being public enemies no one expected them to fall in love.

໑ Fake relationship by babygirloui When singer Harry Styles gets in trouble, his team decides that the best idea is to ask the one celebrity they have near for help. Louis didn’t know what he was getting into when he agreed to go on tour with his photographer boyfriend.

໑ baker Louis/lawyer Harry a/b/o by bunnylouies Louis is a sweet omega raising his 5 year old son by himself. Harry is a strict and professional alpha. What happens when their paths cross? Will they be able to learn from the other or will it only cause trouble?

໑ eat the rich! by BLOUBIRDSHONEY In which Harry Styles, a retired model turned CEO, finds himself too buried in his work to shop for himself. Cue in Louis Tomlinson, a personal shopper who scams his clients.

໑ FEASTING ON THE FLOWERS, CHOKING ON YOUR LOVE by tomlinloufae You would probably never expect someone like Louis in the club where the punk rock band Vicious plays as the main band of every Friday night. People that go there eat boys like Louis for breakfast but he's not scared of them or Harry, frontman of Vicious, who scares almost everyone. However, this might be the first time Harry is the one who feels scared and it's not because of none other but the sweet boy with flowers in his hair who is trying everything in his power to make him fall in love with him... ໑ farmer Harry/influencer Louis by adorelousi Farmer himbo Harry is in a parasocial relationship with influencer city it girl Louis. When their mutual friend Niall sets them up on a date that’s when Harry’s insecurities get in the way and ruins everything… or does it?

໑ wedding planner Louis by louigallery Louis is the best wedding cerimonialist in the upper-crust NY circles. One of his friends is getting married with a rich kid, just one more normal situation… Or not, when you found out the groom is the man who you had the best night of your life years ago.

໑ college au by sunny_llou Where Harry has problems with the library printer and a cute and nervy boy help him with the jammed paper. ໑ bad idea right? by jacksescapade After being offered a longer contract to work with Disney and move closer to home, Harry jumps at the chance. Except, unbeknownst to him, his infuriating colleague (and self-appointed arch nemesis) isn’t above flying halfway across the world to annoy him.

໑ Flowers, dates and cats by mybluebirdd1 Both Louis and Harry give online dating a last chance. They found the perfect guy. But what happens when they find out that they've been both talking to the same guy at the same time for months. But will this twist of fate make them fall in love.

໑ Ice cold by lrrysmau Harry is a hockey team Captain who made it his life goal to get them to the #1 place in the worldwide charts. Louis is an figure skater who loves what he does and naturally, hates hockey players.

໑ enemies to lovers twitter au by 369rry Harry is a big account on Twitter that gained popularity from his viral tweets about love and relationships. Louis only downloaded Twitter to be a troll. They start beefing but refuse to block each other. They don’t know that they go to the same university...

[zot3-flopped]

I know we’re all just working off vibes here, but my impression is that louis’ days as an act are numbered. First he cannot surely go on bankrolling that festival, the 60%-full tour, and he can’t sink his cash into another film - maybe with merch sales he breaks even or something like that but otherwise Wtf is he doing with his money.

Second, more people seem to be on the cusp of realising he’s unpleasant. I see them half-laughing at the cigs/booze/the BAD attitude, but they are not enjoying this or celebrating it, they are currently pretending it’s funny, that’s all. To be successful you need to provoke real enjoyment, it’s not enough to make your audience a little uncomfortable.

Third that audience is pretending Louis is respectful of pride flags, a creative guy, a comforting presence, and the lack of evidence is picking them off one by one. He’s losing losing losing all the time. Name one thing where he has genuinely shown success or publicly shown he creates, engenders mutual respect?

Fourthly this thing where he’s photographed having his clothes ripped off by young women is going to bite him on the ass. He’s only happy on tour if he drinks and gets handled by women, and any idiot knows that eventually that’s a shitty combination, something will happen that the old guard will explain away but the younger ones, who have different boundaries because they’re taught more about abusive males, they will not stick by him.

Like none of this seems strange to us, we know how obvious it is that he’s a talentless goblin of a man who sponged off the others throughout 1D - but little by little it’s all working to lose him his following and I can see a crisis point coming when he fucks over some young woman, runs out of money, says something foul that gets caught on camera, and never forget that all of 1D’s business is still secret - there’s no way he was a good guy in that band. More like a pain in the ass, Zayn and Harry realised it earlier and when Liam realises he can get attention by airing out some of the past, Louis is going to look worse. Anyway I am here for it, bring it on!

👏👏👏👏 Agree that he is sailing close to the wind, and the only reason there hasn't been an outcry about him encouraging his young fans to grope him is because the mainstream media stopped following his career after Walls.

Like you, I believe Louis did some terrible things in 1d that Harry and Zayn won't forgive him for, and that extended beyond 1d to his behaviour towards the BBC and music journalists. He's a pariah and the music press won't touch him.

Remember this from a 2015 Sun article by their then showbiz editor, who had met the boys many times?

A source at music giant Sony said: "Frankly, Louis is a little shit who’s managed to annoy a lot of people over the last couple of years."

Never a truer word spoken.

[ixiraider]

Turned a popular color/species combo into the most controversial pet and 100x happier for it.

My title is a joke lol, but whew! SleepingBeast got a MASSIVE overhaul and I’m so happy with her now!!

For those who may remember, she’s been through a LOT. I created her a few years ago (4 or 5 now?) because I saw that the title to a song from my favorite band was free and I figured it would be a cool name to have, but I had 0 direction for her. She was a fire Xweetok for years but I had no clue how to customize her. I also didn’t want to give her up though, especially because I’d only have wanted her to go to someone who loved the band/song haha. So she eventually became a lab rat and after a little while of nothing became a pastel Aisha.

Now, I know this is sacrilegious to some, but I’m not really an Aisha fan. But this was back when pastel was one of the most, if not THE most, expensive PB colors on the site, way before it was a weekly quest prize and the cost went down to something affordable (though to my knowledge still a pretty coveted/desirable color for its customization potential), so I decided to see if I could learn to like her. I don't want to word this as if I only cared about the zap because it was expensive or rare or something, it was more like, at the time, I never even thought I’d own a pastel pet unless I got a FFQ or something, so I didn’t want to just instantly keep zapping when I had been given an opportunity to experiment with customizing a pet I usually wouldn’t have even thought much about. Like, how sad would it be if I zapped her the next day and she became like a red Grarrl or something lol. Plus pastel Aishas are a really cute strange sickly green and orange color combo that I genuinely like. Reminded me a little of a gourd. So I bought Greg the Clompkin to match.

Anyway, to make a long story short despite my best efforts I never really grew attached to SleepingBeast in her Aisha form. I experimented with multiple customs, tried giving her a backstory, had her on my main account for awhile… nothing. I don’t really enjoy customizing Aishas and I could not for the life of me find a wig or hat or head item that fit the vibe I was going for and she just looked kind of unfinished/bald lol. But I knew that I couldn’t just give her up as I still really liked her name, AND at this point I was super attached to Greg the Clompkin, probably more so than SleepingBeast herself at that point haha.

THEN the new baby body paints dropped, and in my rush to get the pink one for my baby Chomby I also got a purple one from one of the multiple capsules I had to open (f gacha style p2w), and although at the time I had no immediate plan for it I knew I wanted to use it for someone. The purple is suuuuuper cute. I started experimenting with what it looked like on various different babies and when I saw that the baby Vanda with purple baby body paint retains its big orange eyes I fell in LOVE. And knew exactly what had to happen…

None of this is actually that interesting but, I guess it was just really funny to me, as I was morphing her I was just thinking about how contentious Vandas are to this day in comparison to beloved pets like Aishas. But that’s the fun of playing the game for yourself and not getting too caught up in external “values” of certain pets or colors ig. I love Vandagyres (she's my third!) and I ADORE her. Just look at how cute she is now 🥺🖤

[whiskeyswifty]

As someone who’s emo taste leaned more towards mcr than any other band, I need to know what she thinks of them so badly (also the photo of Jack with Gerard from last year haunts me because that’s literally one degree of separation!!)

it's so funny you say this cuz one of my good friends and i talk about this specific thing alllllll the time. she's a little younger than me, a late 90s baby, and i'm almost exactly Taylor's age. and through our own completely subjective field work we've found that there is a bit of an age cutoff when it comes to MCR fans among emo fans. but JUST MCR which is the strangest thing.

mainly, there is the entire phenomenon of emo as a genre breaking off off into several simultaneously evolving branches that all stem from early 90s/early 2000s emo which is like core, foundational emo. some of those branches are entirely unrecognizable from others, like if you compare Death Cab to MCR. while both are under the umbrella of emo, they share very minimal fanbase crossover which is what me and my friend found so fascinating. MCR is also at the verrrrry edge of emo, the furthest evolution of it and also the end of it. What my friend and I found is that older millennials writ large got into emo earlier, and followed the branch of california pop emo of like blink 182 -> jimmy eat world -> death cab -> dashboard -> yellowcard -> something corporate/jacks mannequin -> (earlyl) AAR -> fob -> paramore -> and that pipeline usually is where older millennials age out and head towards the more generic pop/punk by the end of the 2000s, with later AAR, the academy is, boys like girls, metro station, etc. (they then tended to get into indie sleaze and twee in the 2010s but that's different). but meanwhile, younger millennials that maybe started with fob/paramore tended to branch off from that onto their own pop/punk twig that for some reason included MCR where older millennials didn't. no idea why that happened, but MCR was it's own thing. it's not 100%, of course there are outliers and we literally only talked to our family and friends lol, but it almost always was the case that MCR fans were that younger millennial group and older millennials had little to no interest in it. fascinatingly strange. one of the other contributing reasons is perhaps that older millennials were beginning to age out of emo around the time of MCR's height, and younger millennials were the prime age. who knows! There is so much to talk about and since it is recent history we're only just starting to parse it and why two people who are self described millennial emo fans have ENTIRELY different perceptions of what emo is. there's actually a NEW BOOK that is the oral history of just that sub-period of mainstream, which every emo kid from the 2000s would looooooove i'm sure. it has an AMAZING fob title, called "Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo's Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008" and it's on my reading list. highly recommend cuz thats a real collected history of it and not my friend and i just asking a limited group of people random subjective questions about a very specific MCR divide among a specific age range of emo fans lololol.

all this to say, and in my extremely biased opinion, given that taylor has so far expressed she had a similar taste to other older millennials american girls like her at that time, myself included, i'm going to guess she was not an MCR fan at the time. she probably has minimal familiarity with them but little to no meaningful relationship to them or Gerard. she probably knows of them, knows some songs, sure, but was never a fan. that's just my GUESS based on me and my friend's very stupid anecdotal study we did for fun lol and my personal experience being someone in her age range with seemingly similar taste to hers in emo music growing up.

[overbearingstruggles]

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, everything they put on social media feels so soulless. No fan interaction except for song requests for setlists or asking people to buy tickets to shows. Like what were the last 3 reels on insta? I had to watch it a couple times because I could not decide if it was supposed to be funny or not or what it actually meant to say? I still haven’t decided, is it just a really bad tour promotion? They have become so bad at social media it’s unbelievable and I’m not sure what happened, are they just so out of touch with their fans? It’s so strange. Like selling this Calm Down version as for the fans? Show me one person who asked for that. Their whole brand has always been about them being in it together with the fans and just to have fun together and be there for each other but now it seems like there is a line between the fans and them mingling with the bigger name people. You are completely right about the DP era and I feel like their blessing in disguise has always been precisely that they were never too mainstream so they had to rely on the real interactions with fans, which are now crumbling with their eyes set on different goals. I remember listening to a podcast with Ashley Osborn where she talked about how when they were on tour (pre-pandemic), she usually posted all the content and made updates on stories throughout the day, went and talked to the people in line, took photos and did M&Gs and just talked about how important and just fun it was for fan interaction and also for her. In 2018 they even did the green room sessions thing which was awesome and did weekly recaps on yt. It felt so much more natural than the mindless (sometimes funny) tiktok videos they do now. Mostly I just cringe and then I’m sad because it doesn’t feel authentic. Somebody please just bring Ashley back! I’m sorry, I feel a little heated today..

Their social media presence crushes me!!! They had already been much more ahem presentable for years and imo were doing great showing personality and interaction but not being offensive (lol). Now it’s the blandest lack of personality. I get not wanting to dive into comments where people are calling you heinous names! I get not wanting to seem too engaging after you’ve been accused of taking advantage of that engagement! It’s a fucked up line to walk that everything they ever did and made their entire brand has now been decontextualized and demonized. But flipping a switch and hiding out isn’t going to help rebuild. For the love of god, do not make multiple videos of Rian leading conversation!! That is the last thing those of us that have really stuck by this band want. The concept of showing boys in a room interacting in uninteresting ways…. I know they’re scared but they also haven’t fucking pandered and idk who needs to hear this but a little pander to keep the rest of us engaged while you figure out the sanitized brand would be lovely. Green Room sessions are a perfect example of something fun and interesting. 👑Ashley!!! 🆘

[black-arcana]

Watch: EVANESCENCE Joined By HALESTORM's LZZY HALE For 'Bring Me To Life' Performance In Ontario

HALESTORM's Lzzy Hale joined EVANESCENCE on stage Tuesday night (October 29) at the London, Ontario stop of the two bands' joint Canadian tour to perform the EVANESCENCE smash hit "Bring Me To Life". Fan-filmed video of her appearance can be seen below.

At most of the shows on the Canadian tour, EVANESCENCE singer Amy Lee had been joining HALESTORM on stage to perform the HALESTORM song "Break In".

In August 2020, HALESTORM released the official music video for a reimagined version of "Break In", featuring a guest appearance by Lee. The new version of the track, which originally appeared on HALESTORM's second album, 2012's "The Strange Case Of..." , was recorded in October 2019 at a Nashville studio with producer Nick Raskulinecz, who had previously worked with both bands. The clip captured Hale and Lee delivering an impassioned studio performance of the track.

The updated "Break In" appeared on "Halestorm Reimagined", a collection of reworked HALESTORM original songs as well as a cover of "I Will Always Love You", the love ballad made famous by Whitney Houston and Dolly Parton.

Lzzy and Amy performed a quarantine rendition of "Break In" in May 2020 on Hale's Internet show "Raise Your Horns With Lzzy Hale".

Speaking about the collaboration, Lzzy told Amy: "What I love about dueting on that song with you is that it started out as as love song that I wrote for my significant other" — referring to HALESTORM guitarist Joe Hottinger — "but when we sing it together, it's this act of unity, especially with the two of us being women and being women musicians. It's like we have each other's backs. And the lyrics mean something completely different when I sing it [with you]."

Regarding the way the new version of "Break In" was recorded, Lzzy said: "We did it performance-style, literally next to each other in the same room — from beginning of song to end of song, singing with each other.

"I've never done anything like that, but especially with a female singer of your prowess."

Amy added: "Nick always gets the challenge and gets the most out of me… So he made us stand there in the room and sing it live together a bunch of times. What that really means is that editing, you couldn't use when you did something cool but I messed up; it would have to be that we both nailed it for it to make the cut. So to do it in that way was really challenging and it was really cool and it fits the song so well.

"I remember you saying, and we both were saying, when we were listening back, it's really weird, at times — I know my part, but you can't pick out whose voice that is in that one particular moment, 'cause we started matching each other, 'cause it was on the spot. It's really cool how that happens.

"It feels like a match. It doesn't feel like any one person is pulling the other person along a little bit or leading the train. It really felt like an evenly matched dance."

Lzzy and Amy originally performed "Break In" together in 2012 during the "Carnival Of Madness" tour, which was headlined by EVANESCENCE and featured HALESTORM in the support slot. At the time, Hale told Zoiks! Online about how the live collaboration came about: "It's funny. We had talked in the beginning of the tour, 'Oh, we should do something.' What would we do? Do we do a cover? Do I come out during her set? She came up to me, I think it was two weeks in and said, 'I'm obsessed with your song 'Break In' right now.' I was like, 'Thank you so much.' Then she said, 'I know all of your parts, all the backing parts and everything.' I was like, 'Sweet, that's awesome.' Then she said, 'This is going to sound really weird and please feel free to say no, but do you think I could come up during that song and sing it with you?' I'm, like, 'Of course. This is awesome.' We didn't have a whole lot of time to rehearse. We literally ran through it once before our show in El Paso, right before the doors opened. It was perfect. I told her, queue insane crowd noise. She was like, 'Oh, I don't know.' 'No, seriously — they're going to freak when you walk out on stage.' ... [And] they did. We couldn't hear each other for the first four lines."

Back in 2021, EVANESCENCE and HALESTORM joined forces for a massive North American tour that ended up being a rousing success.

[rubyvroom]

Let me tell you something. I feel it is important for your life education to know about Detachable Penis, if you do not already.

The first thing you need to understand about the 90′s is that this song played on the radio. Even out in Bumfuck Nowhere where I grew up. If you had an alternative or college station in range you would have heard it frequently. For a while in the 90s, an oddball spoken word stoner track by an avante-guard rock band with a poet frontman could get regular airplay just because it was funny and it made you sing “detachable penis” to yourself the entire rest of the day. 

I woke up this morning with a bad hangover and my penis was missing again. This happens all the time. It's detachable. This comes in handy a lot of the time. I can leave it home, when I think it's gonna get me in trouble, Or I can rent it out, when I don't need it. But now and then I go to a party, get drunk, and the next morning I can't for the life of me remember what I did with it.

Our hero spends the rest of the song looking for his missing penis while sounding only mildly put out about it, and the listener is inspired to think about the pros and cons of having a detachable penis. (Which leads inevitably to other thoughts, such as, of course, detachable titties. Someone make the sequel please.) These were highly unusual ponderings for a genre still very much concerned with hyper-masculinity and misogyny. Gender introspection in my radio hit? It’s more likely than you think! (Not much, but still.)

In the late 80s-early 90s, before Nirvana exploded and grunge became marketable, rock radio was flailing around for a direction. Hair bands were dying out and nothing was replacing them. In this window of time the College Radio format had its time to shine - a smorgasboard of bits and pieces of things that sound cool fished out of the Our Band Could Be Your Life mileau of independent label groups. Everyone figured one of these oddities would blow up into the Next Big Thing, and everyone wanted to find it first. So at this time you got some genuinely strange stuff into the mainstream, with pretty risky endeavors given major label record deals and even videos onto MTV.

King Missile, meanwhile, was on their Fifth album and Second lineup by the time this song hit the airwaves, and it both made and broke the band -- a wave of fans jumped aboard that wanted to hear Detachable Penis and absolutely nothing else. Things got weird for everyone and the lead singer ended up quitting music and going to law school for awhile for much of the rest of the decade, before showing up again with the Third, and then Fourth, incarnation of King Missile, no longer remotely interested in radio airplay, sales, or major labels. In that they have the same trajectory of a lot of bands of this time, like Butthole Surfers, that made one big hit on a major label that proved to be an aberration in a long career of weird music. In nearly all these cases the band itself quickly faded from memory, but the song lingers on, and if you play Detachable Penis for a Generation Xer of any stripe they will quickly perk up and start nodding their head.

Anyway here’s one more track from King Missile circa 1987, well before Detachable Penis - it has a much more haphazard backing track, and is a little less friendly to your ears, but is overall some good funny commie stick it to the man stuff. It’s called Take Stuff From Work.

[hospitalterrorizer]

diary400

10/26-27/24

saturday - sunday

listening to dir en grey... drawing daan, staying up too late.

feels right to listen to dir en grey because miro seems like a big fan, i quite like them too... maybe funny to be into visual kei, at least a bit (dir en grey are definitely liked by some people because they're seen as / talked about as the most artistically sound group), but i like some other bands too. but i'm listening to arche, which i've never heard, or i just finished it. i really like how kyo screams here, he's got a great scream.

i also listened to uroboros, extremely good record also.

trying to figure out how to draw daan's head is bothering me... i'm just doing the little figures underneath what will be the actual drawing, like, i do blue lines, then red lines, then black over top of that. still on some blue lines. i have a tinier daan half drawn in red, then i'm doing his head / face big, but that's proving difficult but i like it. i like drawing or figuring him out. it's just hard for me to draw men.

just made his eye a bit smaller, that helped a lot. looks a lot more like him. interesting how that works. that's something i like being able to mess with. it's such an odd thing how we see and read faces.

okay i messed a little more with it too. much closer and better i think. i have a new idea for the drawing too, so i put a little bit of that down... since i drew 2 little other armature thingies sorta, i'll put needles and stitches into the drawing surrounding him, to taunt him... and then idk. i want pocketcat somewhere in there.

here's a strange one, listening to dum spiro spero now:

the riffs are baffling. i quite like this.

i'll listen to the rest of this record tomorrow.

i slept in too much today, just a lot of... i dunno, exhaustion from all these people. and then, in the middle of today, i got a call from a friend telling me about how he got in an argument with my really close friend, and i'm on his side, the friend who called me, because the fight was just like, hey why don't you just tell me what's up and why are you a flake, and the other friend was like, why is it such a problem for you, blah blah blah, no one else cares, and the friend who called said that's bullshit because it bothers me how he's like that, my gf, and other people as well. which made my friend decide he needs to become a recluse i guess.

i don't know. frustrating and annoying. i'll see what happens over these next few days, i honestly expect him to realize he's being childish and that at this point, making friends who will tolerate his ways of being is now going to be impossible, like if he wants new friends? he needs to change. he should also be better to us in terms of like, realizing when he can make time, or just tell us he can't, instead of disappearing because of anxiety. i get it in part. but idk. i try to do better...maybe i suck too... idk.

either way. this is the current social situation i'm in. i wonder if anything at all will happen. the other friend messaged me today to talk about the hellp record a bit but i didn't respond. i really do not know what to say to him. or his gf, who also throws weird shit in my friend's face. like that my gf is more polite than he is in text??? i told my gf she did that and my gf is so weirded out by that.

speaking of weirded out, dum spiro spero is an insane record, this could be their peak for me... i don't know. i like how un-musical they're willing to get here. i wonder what they're up to now, i heard their 2022 record, i thought it was good but not so cohesive as from what they had going on during this little run here, from uroboros to arche.

i forgot how cool i think this band is... watching this live video now:

i love kyo's makeup here, so freakish for a song like this, it totally works for me, then all the aubrey beardsley art scrolling by, that's totally beautiful to me... i love the fake frames for it as it like... imovie transitions slowly from each thing to the next almost. that's such a genius thing to me idk. i love how they make the v-kei classic look thing here feel decrepit and odd.

okay, i have to sleep now, just been up listening to random songs now... stupid stupid stupid... my sleep is #jeopardized by my silliness...

so,

byebye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!