#haven’t figured out the logistics of this properly yet but like. might write more one day who knows

[sugarsnappeases]

microfic - lesbian tedromeda!! | 2k words | kiki’s delivery service au

this one’s for my angel @stillagoodwitch and also (mainly) for cat (want u to read it aloud to her please, do u think she ships tedromeda??)

Andromeda thought she was doing well, all things considered.

She’d made it to the ocean, flown through the night to a seaside city with no other witches where she could settle down and start her new life, and no lightning bolts had come down from the sky to smite her, no demons had come from the manor to try and drag her back.

She was free and she was doing well.

She had Cat, her cat, all her savings and, of course, her broom and she thought she was making a good first impression on the townspeople, smiling politely and floating overhead in the early morning sun as she looked for somewhere to land.

It was a busy city, busier than anywhere she had ever been - people bustling across the pavements, cars rushing through the streets - but she thought that was probably a good thing, the change, the freedom, the anonymity of crowds.

She moved out into the road a little to fly under a bridge and - swerved as quickly as she could to the left to avoid being run over by a truck that was coming through the other way. Her broom lurched off sideways, her elbow scraping against the wall of the bridge as she flew away from it - directly into the path of another car.

It was louder now, cacophonous even, cars screeching to stops and beeping their horns at her as she tried desperately to get her broom back under control, swinging this way and that and nearly hitting another three cars before the broom sped off down the pavement, Andromeda still clinging on, pedestrians jumping out of her way.

She managed to stop, hovering in the air just around the corner from all the chaos she had caused, and lowered herself, and Cat, who had also been hanging on for dear life, and her savings and her broom, down onto the pavement with a sigh of relief.

Andromeda took a deep breath before looking up at the people who had stopped to stare at her, trying to smile her friendliest smile, which was rather unpractised, trying to look like she knew what she was doing and like she belonged there and like she wasn’t a complete disaster.

She wasn’t entirely sure how well she was succeeding but she smoothed down her hair and after a few moments everyone started to move about their days again.

Turning to Cat, who was perched on her shoulder now, she said “Well, I think-“

“What do you think you’re doing flying around like that?!” Shouted someone who had marched up behind her. Andromeda turned to see what looked like a policeman, still yelling at her, “You could’ve caused a crash! In fact, you’re lucky you didn’t!”

“Sorry, sir,” Andromeda stepped back against the wall behind her, trying to think what she was supposed to do in this kind of situation, it wasn’t really something she had ever been taught to deal with and for all that she was doing well, for all the she was freer and happier, she was started to feel a little overwhelmed, “I’m still getting used to how busy the city is, I just got here today, you see”

The policeman looked unimpressed, “That’s no excuse, you should still know better than to fly around causing a ruckus like that, someone could’ve got seriously hurt!”

Andromeda frowned a little, because surely it hadn’t been that dangerous, she knew she was a good flyer and it wasn’t like it was her fault that the truck had suddenly appeared like that, but she thought it unwise to say, so she let the man continue his tirade.

“Now,” he said finally, pulling out a notebook and flipping it open, “What’s your name and address?”

Andromeda opened her mouth, racking her brains to think of a suitable answer because she wasn’t sure if her name was really hers anymore, she thought her parents would probably have burnt her off the family tree by now, once they had woken up and discovered that she was gone, and she certainly wasn’t going to give out her old address but she didn’t yet have a new one to use instead. She was alone, and she didn’t have a home anymore and she desperately didn’t want this policeman to get in contact with her parents so all that she could come up with to say in the end was, “Um…”

“Don’t even think about lying to me, girl,” the policeman frowned at her, tapping his pen against the top of his notebook, “And hurry it up, I haven’t-“

Just then, he was interrupted by a shout of “Stop! Thief! Somebody stop him! Thief!” and he hurried off around the corner towards the noise, telling Andromeda to wait where she was and not move a muscle.

Andromeda stood there for a second or two, then relaxed her shoulders, turning towards Cat again, “That was lucky”

Cat nodded sagely, agreeing with her, and they wandered away in the other direction, slipping in between the other pedestrians and taking the next turning they came across.

She was taking it as a good sign, a symbol that maybe some god was smiling upon her running away - she knew she had done the right thing, knew she couldn’t have stayed there for a single day longer, she wasn’t sure what she would’ve done if she’d had to come up with a name and address for the policeman.

Running away had been like shedding her name, her last name at least, like an old coat, like a skin that didn’t quite fit right over her bones. The further she had flown from that manor, the more at peace she had felt, something settling in her.

So maybe the two of them, Andy and Cat, weren’t off to the best start but they had still been fairly lucky; at least they hadn’t been hit by any of those cars, at least they didn’t have to give up their old address and at least they weren’t currently being dragged back across the country to Black manor and the parents who Andromeda wasn’t sure would even let her in anymore, to the sisters, who she had been trying quite desperately not to think about, who she wasn’t sure would even want to speak to her anymore.

She had Cat, and her savings, and her broom, and she was going to make a new life for herself. She was free, and she wasn’t going back, and things were going to work out. Andromeda was repeating that like a mantra as she and Cat walked down a side street, trying to decide where to go from there.

“Hey! Hey, wait!” Came a voice from behind them, it wasn’t the policeman, it was a much younger voice, so Andromeda didn’t immediately break into a run, but it put her a little on edge nevertheless. She wasn’t sure what this person wanted so she didn’t turn to face them, continuing to walk onwards,

“Hey, that was pretty good, right?” the person was beside her now, Andromeda peered at them out of the corner of her eye, a person around her age on a bicycle, pedalling along in time with her steps, “I was the one who called thief, it was a distraction, I helped you get away, right?”

Andromeda turned her head slightly to look at them but didn’t reply, still walking along, struggling to suppress the instinctive sneer at the person’s unkempt hair and untidy clothing. She wasn’t her father, she wasn’t a Black, not anymore, but as much as she had shed that skin and felt better for it, there were things that had been drilled into her since birth that would take more than one night on a broomstick and a fifty odd miles to remove.

“Oi Teddy!” someone else called out from a group of teenagers gathered outside a shop, speaking to the person on the bike, who Andy now assumed was named Teddy, “Isn’t it a bit early to be on the prowl?”

Andromeda frowned, wondering whether she should be offended and feeling slightly out of her depth, more than she already had been. Teddy’s only response was a middle finger - frightfully vulgar, said her mother's voice in her head - and Andromeda worried this would lead to some act of violence or something, but the other teenagers barely batted an eye, just laughing in response.

“Shut up,” laughed Teddy back, and then proceeded to nearly crash into a lamppost because they hadn’t been concentrating on the road in front of them. Andromeda lips twitched, wanting to smile in spite of herself, as she continued to walk on, watching all of this out of the corner of her eye and studiously pretending that she wasn’t.

Teddy cycled a little quicker to catch up with her again, “Hey, can I have a look at your broom? It’s so cool that you can fly like that”

Andromeda kept walking, acting like she hadn’t even heard. She wasn’t used to speaking with people her age, or with anyone who wasn’t her family really, and she didn’t know how she was supposed to behave. There was a part of her that found this all quite endearing, but it was being drowned out by panic and frustration and an insistent need to be alone.

“Please could I just have a quick look?” Teddy continued, undeterred by her lack of response, “I love flying, I just wanna see what your broom is like - It could be payment for how I helped you out with the policeman”

At that, Andromeda stopped, turning sharply to look at the person still cycling beside her.

“I didn’t ask for your help!” she said, a little angry now, probably a little irrationally, she had never been good at controlling her temper, she was a Black after all, or she used to be, “I didn’t want your help. I suppose I have to thank you for it now but it was rude of you to not even introduce yourself”

Andromeda started walking again, frustrated at herself for snapping like that but also frustrated when out of the corner of her eye she saw Teddy recover from their moment of shock and grin, wide and bright, pedalling to get beside her again.

“I’m Ted,” they said, still smiling, and Andromeda didn’t know why that made her feel all warm inside, like that smile could solve all her problems, could calm the stormy seas that were constantly waging war on her, trying to pull her under. Then Ted, not Teddy, which must be a nickname, spoke again, “Now I’ve introduced myself, can I please have a look at your broom? Pretty please?”

Andromeda huffed, a bit discomfited by how friendly they were despite her rudeness, a bit annoyed by their persistence, entirely out her depth and clinging on to her pride and her anger like they were life jackets, a last bastion of familiarity in this new life where everything was new.

“No,” she snapped, harsh and definitive, “Leave me alone.”

She felt a bit pathetic as she stomped away, unsure why she had gotten so worked up like that, her anger gone almost as soon as it had arrived, disappointed in herself and the way she had behaved, worried that she was still too much like her family, like she would never be able to escape them even as she left them behind.

Andromeda didn’t know how she was meant to interact with this person, or any person really, she was beginning to worry that she didn’t know anything at all, overwhelmed by the newness of the city, the crowds and the buildings and the sense that she was on the outside, looking in on something that she might never be able to be a part of, uncomfortable with how Ted was trying to invite her in.

She turned a corner and got on her broom, flying away quickly and aimlessly, confused and maybe a little upset but mostly at herself. Andromeda, with Cat sat on the handle of the broom now, wondered whether this new life might be just a tad more difficult than she had first anticipated.

[brassandblue]

Munday meme: what are some storylines or AUs you'd love to write (for any of your muses) that you haven't gotten to do yet?

Ooh ooh I’m excited about answering this one in particular:

FOR ARTHUR:

- I honestly want more Terror-adjacent stuff with him. Pun intended, but I want to dive deep!

- Really want to stretch my legs with his Turnverse human!AU. I want to see if it’s possible to sway him to the Patriots’ side, and I’d like to see him deal with the fallout regardless of his decision.

- I NEED more practice with him during the late 1800s. I’d like the chance to learn to write and refine a character who has fooled himself into abandoning his principles for money, wealth, influence, and I’d like to write him suffering the consequences of that. It might be the case that I need to write a fic though because I’d feel bad inflicting that mess on anyone, esp while I’m in ‘trying shit out’ mode and stretching myself as a writer.

- I want to write him being properly angry and letting his temper flare out of control and things come to blows.

- I’d like to write someone (rightfully) holding him responsible for something he’s done that hurt them personally.

- I really want someone to lovingly call him out on his bullshit. What I mean is, please push back at him but in his defense. Be kind to him. Love him and love him fiercely because he will resist (at first). Acknowledge his flaws and many misdeeds, but love him anyway. I want to write something where someone is like “no shut up Arthur, you stupid asshole, you were monstrous but you aren’t resigned to that”.

- There are AUs that are more fandom related like, I haven’t written him against a Doctor in literal years and I have a mighty need.

- I’m obviously open to crossovers, plus he’s tailor made for supernatural AUs. I’ll throw Arthur into just about anything and any setting tbh!

FOR BEN:

- That AU where Ben ends up being a Redcoat, but I can’t figure the logistics of that happening just yet. 👀

- MODERN SPY AU!!

- Reincarnation AU!

(I’m in dire need of a rewatch tbh.)

FOR GOODSIR:

- Vampire AU. Please please please please.

- Night in the Museum AU. It’s the most wholesome and adorable thing in the world ok!!

- MODERN AU!! And Reincarnation AU tbh.

- I’d actually like to ship more with him and I’d be interested to explore more of how he might navigate being with a lady and also how he might handle discovering he has feelings for another man.

[infinitestarsintheskye]

A03 Stats

I was tagged by @kaytikazoo. Thanks lovely! 

I joined October of 2013, and have posted 32 works in 10 different fandoms.

What are your five most popular works of all time? (starting with the most kudos)

1. When I Kissed The Teacher with 180 kudos (Captain America/Agent Carter - Steggy Single Parent/Teacher AU) 

2. The Lady and the Chauffeur with 124 kudos (Agents of Shield - FitzSimmons Downton Abbey AU) 

3. Four with 94 kudos (Agents of Shield - FitzSimmons, pre-canon speculation) 

4. I’ll Always Be With You with 93 kudos, (Captain America/Avengers/Agent Carter - Steggy Endgame Canon Divergence)

5. 2015 NMTD Secret Santa with 83 kudos, (Nothing Much to Do/Lizzie Bennet Diaries - Beadick, Pedrazar, Donalduke, Dizzie, Various drabbles) 

What are your five least popular works? (starting with the least kudos)

1. Lydia’s Spiral with 8 kudos (Lizzie Bennet Diaries - Lizzie Bennet & Lydia Bennet, post canon speculation fic) 

2. Winter Flurry with 12 kudos (Agents of Shield - FitzSimmons, FZZT poem)

3. Wednesday, Tuesday, Thursday with 21 kudos (Agents of Shield - FitzSimmons, Academy Era, How they met fic) 

4. First to Last with 22 kudos (Captain America/Agent Carter - Steggy, Future Fic) 

5. October 29th with 24 kudos (Lizzie Bennet Diaries - Dizzie, Future post canon fic) 

Are you surprised about any of these lists? 

Nah. All of the bottom five I wrote during the fairly early stages of the AoS fandom, when I was about 15/16 years old anyway and not that good a writer, or were written for fairly small, fairly niche fandoms, like NMTD and LBD. The top ones, not really either. When I Kissed the Teacher was written DIRECTLY post Endgame when the Steggy fandom was on literal fire, and was a multichapter fic so got lots of exposure during that time. The 2015 NMTD one is a bit of a headscratcher. Maybe bc I included LBD in there, for legitimately about a paragraph. Who knows, I cannot account for its popularity AT ALL. 

Optional, if you want to calculate it (remember that ao3 will count all the words in a multichap towards the year it is completed, regardless of how much was actually posted that year): How many words did you publish in 2020?

I wrote 157,931 words this year, which is about 100,000 more than I have ever written any other year. I think I doubled my overall wordcount this past year ALONE, and I only started writing fully and properly in about May. 

What’s a favorite fic you published this year?

Oh Other People easily. 

How do you feel like you’ve improved as a writer this year?

Well, I feel a lot more confident in myself and my abilities. I wrote my first ever long form fic, and I pushed myself and wrote things I never thought I ever could or would. I feel like I’m beginning to acknowledge that I can actually write and that I’m not actually that bad at it.

What is something new you did writing-wise in the past year? (new fandom, pairing, setting, genre, collab, etc)

I wrote my first smut! (See Other People) I never in a billion trillion years thought I would write smut, and yet here we are. I surprised myself, by kind of enjoying it too. 

What is something writing-related you would like to try in the future? (check back at the end of the year and see if you did it!)

FitzSimmons Pride and Prejudice AU. I want to do it so badly, I will do it I promise, it’s coming at SOME POINT I just need to figure out the logistics of it, will honestly I think will take longer than writing the damn thing. 

Today’s date, so you can see how your results might change if you do this again in a year

02/01/2021

I think just about every writer I know of has been tagged in this now, so if you are a writer, haven’t done this yet please consider yourself tagged! 

[zosonils]

@pan-crow​ oooooh hoo HOO i’m boutta go apeshit

basically the au is based on the statue that serves as an occasional plot point in lost future, about the author and the sick kid

because this shit hits goddamn HARD every single time i play the game and even though the actual story behind it is like five dialogue boxes long i think it’s an au just begging to happen and i’m surprised that nobody seems to have done anything with it [although if anybody has done something with it? :eyes emoji but fast: lemme see that shit]

like i said before the actual ingame context for the statue doesn’t give a lot to go on and i literally managed to sum up every major plot point it gives us in four bullet points that are barely a sentence long each, but the absolute basics of the au are as follows: hershel is an author of complicated nonfiction books, luke is sick as shit all the time, and hershel goes ‘actually fuck it what could go wrong’ and writes an adventure novel to try and cure luke’s existential depression. he ends up writing more of them because they’re successful and probably fun as shit to write, and he and luke continue to bond over this until eventually luke Fucking Dies because this au is sad as shit, actually. something something power of friendship everlasting bond sentimental epilogue

obviously there are a LOT of blanks to fill in here, and i’m still working on filling those in and the more i try to do that the more i realise that i don’t know what i’m fucking doing because the last time i wrote anything with more than one chapter was a shitty [if admittedly ambitious] edgy bad future sonic fic when i was like 12 years old, but i’ve got a couple additional plot points figured out:

-hershel and luke’s first meeting is a little similar to last spectre in that hershel gets a vague letter from clark inviting him to misthallery, except this time it’s handwritten so it’s real. clark really just needs some support from a friend after finding out that his son is dying and conveniently sets things in place for luke and hershel to enter The Bro Zone. eventually luke’s family moves back to london because keeping a big ass house in shape is borderline impossible with all the medical bills and whatever

-hershel is still a professor of archaeology and writes long ass books about long-dead civilisations and what have you

-luke fantasises about going on adventures with hershel, exploring ruins and doing puzzles and solving ancient mysteries. if he goes flinging himself into some dusty temple he will probably catch pneumonia and die but he initially remains stubbornly optimistic, although said optimism starts rapidly decaying as he gets worse

-i absolutely despise ‘soap opera disease’ so i figured out what exactly is diagnosing luke with dead. it’s idiopathic aplasic aneima, which tldr means that your body starts making real shitty no-good dumb bitch blood with idiot failure cells that doesn’t do its fucking job properly and results in chronic fatigue, dizziness, and a garbage immune system that usually makes you die of the common cold or some shit after about 5 years. this was chosen exclusively based on how goddamn concerningly often luke mentions that he’s dizzy over various games, especially lost future

-i haven’t worked out the logistics of how just yet but emmy and flora are legally required to be there

-this is the header i have for the links to wikipedia pages

-hershel’s adventure novels are essentially compilations of all the exciting mysteries that luke’s invented with him, and are definitely based on the actual canon games [or at least the original trilogy]

-i’m abso-fucking-lutely gonna work in my headcanon/theory/analysis/whatever on how luke is like the son that hershel and claire never had, and i’m abso-fucking-lutely gonna use that to make it even fucking sadder when hershel loses him

-it was good fun while it lasted, but hershel stops writing fiction after luke dies

anyway that’s about as much as i have to infodump about, but i realised as i was writing this that i haven’t actually drawn anything for it yet, so here’s a quick luke who’s understandably less than thrilled about having three years to live

sorry to Go The Fuck Off i just really like making painfully bittersweet aus, if you wanna know anything more about this clusterfuck of a feelings zone feel free to ask! i’m hoping to eventually figure it out enough to start writing a big old fic for it but as previously mentioned my writing skills are a lil rusty [i also haven’t written any layton stuff yet, although i have an infuriatingly huge collection of half-ideas], so it might be a while before i get around to it

[lauraxxtennant]

don juan in soho

Review & lots of spoilers below

Ok. So, you guys know by now that I was, let’s say, cautious about several aspects of this play prior to seeing it.

I was completely turned around on one of those things, though, and this was the inclusion of music/dance numbers and an actual. Duet. Between dt and adrian. This duet was the highlight of my night. I know!!! That’s bonkers!!! I thought I was going to find this the most embarrassing moment of my life, and yet!!!!!

Let me be clear, I love musicals. I love plays. I don’t usually find it beneficial to the material when a play tries to shoehorn in a musical number. I usually think it’s best for straight plays to leave the musicals down the road to their singing and dancing, and just act the damn thing. Added to this, the fact that david tennant is clearly desperate to be in a musical lmao made me think, ‘oh god, this is gonna be a disaster, he can’t sing, it’s gonna be embarrassing.’ HOWEVER. I fully admit that he sounded good tonight. Really really good. DJ & Stan basically get stoned and sing a (brief, TOO BRIEF) semi-romantic duet under the stars at the end of act one. It’s the best point in the play, and no one is more surprised by this than me.

There’s another brief musical number in the play by the cast (not including dt) where you see a couple of real life, floppy-haired teenage dt photos projected in the background (none that we haven’t seen before.) I also really liked the tiny snippets of music from the opera Don Giovanni, which gave me the shivers. I feel like this could’ve been used to greater effect actually; if the ~moment of revelation~ and the ending of the play were stronger, bringing in those strains of Mozart could’ve had a greater impact, really set a nice tone of doom about the place. But perhaps there were practical limitations on how much they could use of that music anyway; this play is, after all, not the opera Don Giovanni.

Before seeing the show, I was also dubious about what I’d heard re: the staging. It’s quite a sparse set, which I think is fine actually, and there’s an absolutely ridiculous moment where david tennant flies into the air on a rickshaw (yes, really) which clearly made him very happy so i can take that all in good fun lol. Therefore, the only gripe I have about the staging has to do with the whole statue-coming-alive thing (yeah...really.) More on that later, though.

The third thing I didn’t think I was gonna like but did, was the hospital scene. DJ receives a blowjob from Lottie (played by Dominique Moore, who is very funny in the scene preceding this where she actually gets to speak) whilst chatting up the bride (or, ‘the fox’ as DJ charmingly calls her...) whose wedding reception he has just ruined in his pursuit of her. The logistics of it are frankly ridiculous - nobody could get away with that in a hospital waiting room lmao, blanket covering the action or not. There’s a large bag sitting on the seat between him and the bride, hiding Lottie’s ministrations from her, but the rest of the people in the room can see what’s going on. So it’s bonkers. But it’s also hilarious. I’m incredibly impressed that david tennant managed to offer up such a variety of expressions over the course of several minutes, whilst also having a conversation with the bride. Several times you think, ok, he must be nearly done, this is the orgasm face...but nope, he keeps right on going, and he doesn’t even blush. Stellar receiving-blowjob acting right there. This is the funniest part of the play, imo.

As always, dt’s comic timing is great. But I think he mines more laughs through his delivery and physical comedy than the writing actually offers him. He deserves much better material. This play is a comedy but I get the impression it thinks it’s funnier than it is, or at least it thinks it’s more quick-witted and worldly than it is. Admittedly this comes down to personal taste as much as anything.  I did laugh aloud in places, but there were several times I heard someone a few rows back really, properly laughing at something I considered pretty tepid on the humour front tbh.

As I mentioned in my summary earlier, the staggering amount of alliteration in this play nearly made me lose my mind. Once you notice something like that - something repetitious in someone’s writing - it is so hard to tune it out. I know this sounds like a very nit-picky, minor thing, but it was honestly so irritating!! The line that’s been thrown about a lot in the promo stuff/reviews, ‘Satan in a suit from Savile Row,’ is truly just the start; that line is said by Stan, but DJ gets most of the excruciating stuff, including a dozen or so lines informing us that DJ cannot possibly be racist because he’d do it with, among other alliterative ladies, ‘a babe in a Burka.’

Talking of racism. There’s a terrible line about how DJ wants to fly to Alaska to have sex with a ‘furry little eskimo,’ which I didn’t find particularly pleasant or funny. 

The supporting cast is very non-white for a West End show, so kudos to the casting director for that, but it is unfortunate that DJ’s brother-in-law, who I have seen described in a review as a ‘black thug’ (!!!) is the maker of DJ’s demise.

There’s also a really tasteless scene where DJ is interacting with a homeless Muslim man. This is the scene I was referring to when I said something turned my stomach. He dangles his £6k watch in front of his face and tells him he can have it if he blasphemes Allah. I’m aware this is a direct parallel to a scene in Moliere’s Don Juan (wherein he offers a coin to a beggar on the proviso the beggar concedes to blaspheme; interestingly this scene was removed from performances at the time.) But the execution of this scene is just so tasteless and unpleasant. Oh, and also dt imitates the Muslim man’s accent at one point. Grim. 

Though DJ, in his monologue near the end of the play, riles against hypocrisy, he is so self-righteous in this scene that it’s almost unbearable; he goes on and on about how Allah hasn’t done anything for this homeless man, so why can’t he insult him (at first he wants him to call Allah a cunt, then he de-escalates to ‘twerp,’ neither of which the man does. Thankfully DJ throws him the watch anyway, ‘because of his integrity.’ But that this rich, vile, atheist man could shout in this other guy’s face about his religion...it’s horrible. Stan agrees, so at least our ~moral compass within the play (dubious) is on the audience’s side. But still, it’s very uncomfortable to watch. 

For me, this was the only shocking moment in the play. Though this play is billed as being filthy and shocking, there is nothing inherently shocking or controversial about a fictional portrayal of a womanising, amoral, cynical, privileged white male with an excessive sexual appetite, penchant for prostitutes, and evidently an addiction to drugs and/or drink. Those characters are, let’s face it, ten a penny in literature, on stage, and on screen. DJ’s liberal use of the word ‘cunt’ might shock some in the audience, granted, but I think this play thinks it’s more shocking that it is. The language in the play is clearly something dt relishes getting to perform, and I am not offended by swearing at all, and honestly quite like hearing him going for it (apart from that one time he calls a prostitute ‘fuckface,’ not that she seems to mind.) But it’s sort of a bit laughable, that lines like ‘I’m just a cunt with an eye for one,’ are trying so hard to provoke laughter and/or shock, when...it’s just not even that great a line? A lot of the ‘funny’ lines are phrased pretty awkwardly tbh.

Other absurd moments:

DJ declaring himself a radical feminist. (this is funny because aside from Marber’s use of that word in this one instance, the rest of the play seems to take place in a contemporary world where feminism never happened.)

The statue coming alive. I hated this lmao. I mean. It’s all hallucinatory/figurative I guess (i hope??) because it’s his own voice bellowing from the statue that DJ hears, foretelling his impending doom and indicating how much he despises/fears himself, but the surrealness of the statue moving about and pedalling him into the air on a rickshaw, it’s just...it’s embarrassing

‘I’m not a rapist, I don’t grab pussy!’ getting a huge laugh. a) the bar is truly low when you have to say at least the dude is not a rapist, b) i hate donald trump as much as anyone but this is one of those poorly-phrased lines i mentioned that aren’t actually very funny. It felt a bit shoehorned in tbh.

Elvira, DJ’s wife, is an oddly-conceived character. I understand that reflecting the convent-girl origins of this character in the modern day was gonna be tricky, but the modern-day equivalent Marber comes up with is not particularly believable. Rather than a nun he’s lured away from the convent to marry/take the virginity of, as in Moliere’s play, in this play Elvira is a charity worker who, after a two-year pursuit, DJ has finally persuaded to marry him. The reasons he wanted to marry her are the same as in the original: she’s a virgin, and won’t sleep with him before marriage. Once they’ve had their honeymoon, he’s off to bed Croatian supermodels, done with her now that he’s finally had sex with her. 

The suspension of disbelief comes in twofold: firstly, we have to accept that Stan and Elvira’s brother throwing around the words ‘she was an innocent’ and ‘she was pure’ (and the implication that she has now been corrupted) are likely phrases to be said these days. I mean, come off it. Secondly, Elvira’s speech - about DJ being terrible but at least he opened her up to physical pleasure! At least he showed her how magnificent all these filthy fantasies she didn’t know she had could be! She won’t be with him now she knows what he’s really like but she still loves him and always will! - all of that nonsense, it just didn’t ring true. Especially as we come into their relationship just as they are back from their honeymoon and he’s sleeping with someone else, so we don’t even get to see evidence of how he charmed her in the first place (she references that he was sweet and kind and acted so in love, but we never see these traits in DJ at all.) The actress playing Elvira, Danielle Vitalis, didn’t give a particularly strong performance imo, but I honestly don’t know how much of that was really her fault, given the ridiculous lines she had to say.

The final thing that rubbed me up the wrong way was the monologue near the end. The disdain for millennials from middle-aged male writers made a jump from online articles to stage with this one, or, if not targetted at that generation specifically this time, then at least at this digital day and age we currently live in. It elicited rapturous applause from the audience, and yeah, the ‘welcome to my vlog; today i bought a plum’ line was amusingly delivered, but I have no time for a character who is morally bankrupt claiming the moral high ground simply because he finds selfie/social media culture undignified and lacking in class. I might agree with him on his comments on the value of privacy, but this dude is shamelessly shagging his way through Soho (christ, I’ve caught Marber’s alliteration bug) and so I think his sermon on hypocrisy is a little tone deaf.

Are we expected to equate the unapologetic, relentless pursuit of ‘skirt, or occasionally, trouser’ with a life lived to the full, a life celebrating ‘free will and answering to nobody?’ It’d be one thing if DJ genuinely loved women, as in loved in the way dt’s Casanova loved women; a seducer and a bit of a cad, sure, but one who at least respected and admired rather than objectified women. But DJ generally seems to have contempt for them bubbling under the surface, and in any case, the only reason he is able to pursue this kind of life - one sexual dalliance to the next, a snort of cocaine here, a cigarette and a scotch there - is because his father is rich and can fund such an elite lifestyle. There’s also your typical middle-aged male writer cynicism about love dressed up as a philosophical, salient point about the unnaturalness of monogamy as opposed to the natural state of man being to ‘hunt his prey.’ Marber, mate - you ain’t saying anything new, here. Writers just like you wheel out this faux-philosophy about the human condition more times than I can count, and all it ever really tells me is that you wish you had the guilt-free option to have an affair yourself.

I say all this because it’s quite hard for me to decipher what Marber really wants us to take from this play. DJ is warned of his reckoning, promptly feigns contrition to ensure his father doesn’t cut him off, but feels no actual guilt or compulsion to change his ways. He then eventually gets his comeuppance, and Stan regularly tells us how despicable he is, but I still get the impression that, in spite of Stan’s warning, ‘please don’t be charmed, he’s not a loveable rogue,’ that’s exactly what’s expected of us. Indeed, Stan says at one point ‘just as we were starting to warm up to him!’ (I think after the homeless man scene.) But I…..was never charmed. Not even for a second. I don’t think anyone could be? Honestly? Because he clearly is despicable, he has no compassion, is selfish to the extreme, has received all the luxury and privilege being the heir to an earldom affords him, with none of the responsibility, has never worked a day in his life, and has only limited affection for even the one person closest to him (Stan, an employee he never pays and treats abominably.) As dt has postulated in interviews, DJ is a sociopath. And yet we are subjected to a lecture from him on the indignity of a world of selfies and vlogs and hypocrisy, as though those things, vainglorious though they can sometimes be, are more sinister and morally corrupt than his objectification and dismissal of every woman he comes across. It’s a bit hard to swallow, frankly.

DJ has great hair, tailored suits, tiny red pants, and the innumerable benefits afforded to him by virtue of being played by david tennant. But he’s never particularly charming. We never see anything of the kindness and gentleness that so charmed Elvira into marrying him. We never really see him seduce anyone, aside from Lottie (this seduction is essentially him groping her boobs in the guise of being a ‘specialist doctor,’ complimenting her assets and telling her she shouldn’t change herself in any way [she’d mentioned she wanted a boob job]) and the only other time we see him in a sexual situation is with four prostitutes, and he has evidently paid for their company. But we hear he has had sex with three different women a day for the last 25 years, and that he is ‘extremely fuckable.’ I mean, yes, to look at him, clearly sexy af. Yet I feel there was a twinkle in the eye missing for anyone to actually be compelled to go for it with him; for comparison, rather than returning to dt’s Casanova again, I’m now thinking about Tom Ellis in Lucifer, who does play a loveable rogue, and the contrast is pretty clear.

And I bring this up because I’m left here thinking: if there’s nothing really interesting about DJ, if he really is just one-dimensional, and selfish, a destructive man with delusions of self-importance, who’d ‘fuck a hole in the ozone layer’ if he could, then....why? Why are we interested in this man? Would we sit there and watch two hours of a female character doing the same thing? Would anyone even bother writing that, let alone consider producing it? I don’t think they would.

It’s an entertaining play because dt and adrian breathe humour into a script that is, occasionally, lifeless. They can’t save every line, but their chemistry is great and their relish for these parts is evident. The play isn’t as shocking or as funny or even as filthy as you’d expect, and I don’t think it taps into the moral quagmire it thinks it does; honestly, it’s pretty standard stuff. I still don’t know quite what Marber’s going for. Of course, there doesn’t necessarily need to be a ‘message’ or a twist or a social commentary to be figured out within a production. But I think if you’re adapting something that plays with the idea of a libertine repenting through fear of death/hell, and if you feel that won’t resonate in a contemporary setting, then the stakes ought to be raised in another way. The spectre of impending doom looming over him is pretty lacklustre, and, given that DJ would rather die as he lived than profess a simple apology to save himself, the ending isn’t very evocative at all - it’s actually a bit dull.

Best bits:

DJ & Stan’s duet

dt’s hair

stan’s endless exasperation at DJ’s antics

the hospital scene

the tight blue suit

dt looking so happy flying overhead in a rickshaw (despite the ridiculous statue driving it)

stan’s last few lines

i cannot stress this enough: dt looked super hot

Worst bits:

the homeless man scene

the patronising tirade against this vain new world

the elvira plot

the statue coming alive and foretelling his doom a la marley’s ghost in a christmas carol

the lacklustre ending

3/5 stars, could’ve been a lot better. with a different writer. and plot. 😂

[bthenoise]

Play Ball: Riley Breckenridge Talks MLB Opening Day Plus 15 Years of Thrice’s ‘Vheissu’

Photo by Julius Aguilar

As you are probably well aware, most musicians have passions outside of music. Some like to draw. Some like to skate. Others, like Thrice’s Riley Breckenridge, enjoy America’s national pastime -- baseball. 

Growing up watching the game at an early age and later playing it in high school and college, the Thrice drummer has always been drawn to the bright lights of the big league.    

“My earliest memories are watching baseball games with my dad,” recalls Breckenridge. “He had it on at the house all the time. I'd go play in the yard as a little kid and as soon as there was an opportunity to play organized ball I played.” 

Now, with Thrice currently out on the road celebrating 15 years of their beloved  LP Vheissu and MLB’s Opening Day right around the corner, we figured what better time than now to catch up with the soft-spoken Puig Destroyer member and talk all things baseball.   

To check out our Q&A with Breckenridge discussing World Series predictions, the Houston Astros cheating scandal and how well his Los Angeles Angels are going to do this year (plus a little insight into the Vheissu tour), be sure to see below. Afterward, make sure to grab tickets to see Thrice out on tour here.

MLB’s Opening Day is almost here. Any thoughts? 

Riley Breckenridge: I'm excited. The Angels made a great addition in Anthony Rendon. I wish they would have got some more pitching but they haven’t done that yet. So I'm cautiously optimistic about the Angels’ chances. As far as the game as a whole, I think it's gonna be a weird season with all the Astros drama. I don't think that's going away anytime soon. I don't think Major League Baseball handled it properly. Because of that, I feel like players feel like they're gonna have to kind of fend for themselves and punish them in their own way. I don't know if that's gonna come in the form of beanballs or dirty slides or protests or anything like that, but it should be interesting to see how it all plays out.

How do you think it should all go down in your opinion? Like if you were pitching, what would you do?

I don't know. I'm not a big fan of the beanball war. Even though they're entertaining, I don't think I would enter into that if I were a pitcher. The risk of hurting somebody and then shortening a career is just too frightening to me.  

What were your thoughts when you initially found out about the Astros sign-stealing?

Super disappointed. I mean, I genuinely liked the Astros. I have a friend who works in the front office there. So even though I'm an Angels fan and they’re a rival, I really liked watching that team. I mean Altuve, Bregman, Correa, George Springer... they got a lot of really cool, good young talent and it was awesome to see them be so successful so quickly. So to find out that it came by some shady practices is super disappointing.

Aside from stealing signs from second base, do you think other teams are cheating similar to how the Astros did?

Well if you listen to Major League Baseball, they would say outside of the Red Sox, no, the other teams are not. But I have to think that with the tools baseball gave teams to do the instant replay stuff, challenging calls and stuff, they gave them the tools to do this cheating and they didn't police it well enough. So I would be surprised if other teams weren't doing it because it would almost be foolish in a way even though it's unethical. But I think there's a lot of stuff that goes on in baseball that we don't really know about and we aren't privy to. There's a lot of insider secrets.

Do you think sign-stealing is worse than steroids?

That's a tough question.

Some players say if you know what pitch is coming, that's a lot easier than just being a super muscular dude.

Yeah, that's definitely true. I mean, if you're taking steroids, sure you're going to be stronger and you're going to recover from injury quicker and there'll be less wear and tear on you during a long season, but you still have to hit the ball or throw the ball. So yeah, knowing what's coming eliminates a huge challenge.

Okay, so we're gonna get some predictions from you now. Who’s your pick for the World Series this season? And if you say the Angels, we don't blame you whatsoever.

No, I'm gonna go Yankees and Dodgers. Barring any catastrophic injuries, they clearly seem like they're a level above everybody. I think the Astros are gonna have a tough season just because of all the drama. There's gonna be a tremendous amount of scrutiny and it's hard to play through that. Even if you're immune to that kind of stuff, it's still difficult. But yeah, Yankees and Dodgers. They're both stacked. The Dodgers look like an all-star team.

The Dodgers getting Mookie Betts from the Red Sox is just insane.

Insanity, yeah.

So what do you think will win between the two of them?

I would say the Dodgers but the Dodgers seem to be cursed. They make it pretty deep into the postseason every year and they just can't finish.

Clayton Kershaw can't seem to get it figured out.

Well now with the cheating stuff, how much of his postseason struggles can you chalk up to the other team knowing what's coming?

Wow, that's very true. Okay, how about MVP and Cy Young predictions?

AL MVP, I'm gonna go with [Mike] Trout again. He's just absurdly good at baseball. Unless he gets hurt, there's no reason to think he's not going to be even better this year than he was last year.

Especially with Anthony Rendon batting before or after him.

A better, healthy Shohei Ohtani too will be helpful. AL Cy Young, I would probably say Garret Cole. A full season with the Yankees is gonna be nuts.

We assume you're pretty bummed he didn't go to the Angels.

Very bummed, yeah. I mean if they needed one thing this offseason, it was like a front end starter and he's legit the best pitcher in the game and he was available. The Angels definitely had the money to throw at him but they just couldn't do it.

NL MVP and Cy Young: I think maybe [Cody] Bellenger again or [Christian] Yelich and Cy Young, even though he's on a terrible team, it would be a repeat again but Jacob deGrom. He's just too good. I feel awful for him that he's on a terrible team.

Some people think the Mets might turn it around this season.

That would be nice if they weren't the Mets. Like, I feel like they just have a thing where even if they're supposed to be good, they can't be good. That's kind of like the Angels too. I mean, every year I'm like, “I think they'll be decent this year.” And then they're like 81 and 81 every season.

So before we jump into your current tour with Thrice, how did you get into baseball as a kid? Did you play Little League?

My earliest memories are watching baseball games with my dad. He had it on at the house all the time. I'd go play in the yard as a little kid and as soon as there was an opportunity to play organized ball I played. Then I played through high school and through my first three years of college but quit to do the band thing. Then -- I stopped doing this a few years ago -- but I played in an adult men's league with a bunch of dudes that played in college and some guys that were in the minors for a little bit. So it was super competitive and it scratched that itch even though I'm way too old to do that [laughs].

Did your brother and bandmate Ed ever have a passion for baseball? 

He played. He played until like sixth grade. He had one season where he got hit a bunch and he was kind of getting into skateboarding at the same time. So he was like, “I'd rather injure myself on a skateboard than get injured by somebody throwing a ball.”

So just talking a little bit about these shows. You guys are celebrating 15 years of Vheissu. What has the tour been like so far?

It's been awesome. It's been really cool revisiting this record. It's a record that we're super proud of. And you know, 15 years after putting it out I still enjoy playing every song in the setlist. I can't say the same for other records. Like, we play some old songs and I'm like, “Ehhh I wish we would have done this different or that different or I'm not a huge fan of this chorus or something.” So it's been cool to play those songs. The crowds have been awesome. Our touring family is awesome. The bands that we're out here with are great. Holy Fawn is incredible. Drug Church, I loved before this tour started but getting to see them live every night is... they're so fun, and they're so good and they're so tight. Patrick, their singer, is such a good frontman. And then, the mewithoutyou guys we've known for 12 or 15 years and they're an incredible band. I'm bummed that they're putting an end to it but I'm stoked we get to do this with them one last time before they go away.

When you guys were rehearsing these songs again, were there any that were really challenging to learn again?

A lot of them actually. I mean, there were two. There's one album track and one b-side that we'd never played before. And then I think there were only like four songs from Vheissu that are in regular rotation in our sets. So a lot of it was like, “Oh man, we haven't played this in like 12 years or 15 years even.” Like, we played it on the first Vheissu tour and then we just put it to bed. So it's cool. It's challenging too because there's a lot of stuff going on. So there's like samples and guys are playing keys too. So we had to figure out the logistics of it all and track down some old samples. So it was challenging but it's been awesome.

Looking forward to the future of Thrice, what excites you most about the band?

Seeing where our brains go for this next record. It's always an exciting and scary time because I feel like we always have an idea of what we want to do and then people start sharing ideas and we get a little bit clearer idea of where the record is going to end up. And then by the time we're done writing and recording everything, it ends up being something completely different -- in a good way, though. So I'm excited to see where we end up with this one.

Do you think playing some of these more experimental songs every night might influence the future record in a way?  

I think so. I think it's been a cool exercise to go back to a record that was so important to us as far as branching out and trying different stuff. It's inspiring to get familiar with that stuff again and that way of thinking and then head into a brand new creative process. It's like, it's a better headspace than just kind of rolling from the last record to whatever comes next.

Since you guys have come back from your hiatus, you’ve been pedal to the metal releasing new music and touring nonstop. Is that how you guys want to keep going?

Yeah I mean, I think after this tour is over we're going to go away for a little bit. We're not really busy for the rest of the year. I mean, we have deadlines that we're trying to hit and stuff but it's a little more relaxed then maybe the last record cycle where we finished touring, we started writing immediately [and] we were like under the gun finishing songs at the very last minute so we could get into the studio and record. This time around, I think we're going to take our time a little bit more and enjoy being home for a little bit.

A break is very well deserved.

The only bad thing about not working and being at home is that when you're not working, you're not making money [laughs]. And stuff still costs money when you're at home. So we can't afford to go away for too long but we're gonna go take our time and hopefully come out with something good.