#her bob was so iconic it's become canon

[blorger]

So, I'm going through all of Pansy's appearances in the books in order to produce yet another verbose character masterlist and I was surprised to find no mentions of Pansy's infamous bob... like, the books never even talk about her hair color, why are we as a fandom so uniformly convinced that she has dark hair and a Edna Mode haircut?

Because I'm me and I can leave no stone unturned, I went looking for movie Pansy to see if that's what has beguiled the fandom so and, like, the answer is yes but in a complicated way:

Pansy Parkinson is played by four different actresses in the movies, we have:

Katherine Nicholson in Chamber of Secrets

Genevieve Gaunt in Prisoner of Azkaban

Lauren Shotton in Order of the Phoenix

and finally Scarlett Hefner (nee Bryne, she is married to Hugh Hefner's son, just a fun fact for you) in Half Blood Prince and the Deathly Hallows movies

And while the bob propaganda clearly began in CoS that movie's Pansy is practically non-existent so it's clearly Genevieve Gaunt's portrayal of Pansy that crystallised bob-having Pansy in our collective unconscious.

I find it interesting that the only Pansy with a speaking role (and also our longest lasting Pansy) - Pansy n4- made such a little dent in the fandom's communal view of Pansy but, like, I'm guilty as well, I'm also a bob Pansy hardliner... are you?

[brilliantfantasticgeronimo]

the star beast reactions:

the end of time part 2: “the story never ends” switches to “ the story hasnt ended yet” this show is driving me to cookoo land

taxi logo! Very 2005.

“That says grand mistress!” “oh, catch up” [….sentient physic paper headcanon? Maybe everything the doctor carries is secretly sentient sdlkfj rip all those sonics that fell in battle]

NERYS HAD AN ACCIDENT. KARMIC JUSTICE.

"me putting up with that" ksksksks "what do I care? I’ve got the true greatest girls in the world" just u wait for what’s coming shaun. Hope u always secretly wanted an autistic queerplatonic husband.

"and I shoukd know, I invented them!" bully!donna headcanon comfirmed (?) to go with already-canon teenage!wreck donna.

"oh, yes definetly" sylvia "queer-coded mom "mother of a queer " subtext finally becomes text as "grandmother of a queer"!!!!

"you had a bit of a breakdown… and then you got better" sksksks every “the doctor is a hallucination” dark!fic ever/ alternatively: amy coded

"I should be really happy"'... but sometimes I lie in bed thiking, what have I lost?" THIRTEEN CODED THIRTEEN CODED OH GOD THE REGRETS OVER DROPPING THE FOBWATCH….

“Fuge” is iconic

THE MUSIC IS DOING A THING!!!

14 is definetly someone who lived 11/12/13's lives lol my girl is so tired

"I’ve read the files" when UNIT personel says this the translation is: I’ve watched all of three’s era.

"I dont know who I am anymore" understatement of the billenia!!!!!!!!!!!!!! "she's happy! Is she?” I mean tbf, is anyone ever? in this economy? Lol

"I don’t believe in destiny but-" (yeah you do?)

"You know my rules, no secrets in this house" I wonder if Donna didn’t get at least a little bit mad after this that everyone lied to her for 15 years dlskjf

NERYS. VIPER IN THE NEST

the bit with wilf’s accomodation was a good subtle commentary about accesibility again…

ok…. But the definite article bit was excellent??? sdlkfj i swear fandom is so recalcitrant sometimes

"two hearts! so do I!" [rtd: in case u didn’t notice, this is what we call A Foil]

"that’s not concrete ', it’s mortar" "thank you, bob the builder"

the doc in the wig…………………… valeyard coded

There will be no violence... UNTIL he deems it fit and proper! and that’s GROWTH(tm)

solar psychodelia my beloved eu band

"it just felt like the sort of thing he woukd do" t.t

"who cares about me?" "i do" T.T!!!!!

(sdklfj tho ngl it feels like it escaletes to this emotional level wayyyy too quickly)

clifftops.... grief... fingerprint… THE SMELL OF DUST AFTER RAIN……..

I mean he did very much kill donna (again?) ddklSjs THIS IS A VERY SIGNIFICANT THING THAT JUST HAPPENED???

“She chose her own name…” trans doctor fodder?

"male and femape and neither and more" tbh this works rlly well on the metaphysical level I was talking about (note to self: elaborate on that in another post), do have to agree it sounds a bit iffy on the gender politics front...

"cryptic, I hate that" liar, you’re all about that

tbh "shame you are not a woman anymore" feels riiiiiight in line with "you two are just time lords, you dumbos!" sdkfj donna has to be a lil’ bioessentialist about meta cris-es every time doesn’t she.

"and we choose to let it go" / [the one adventure I could never have] / [terf island will eventually let go of transphobia] / [“how to let go of depression”: the scifi/adventure series]

"why does it have to be one last trip?" good question!!! yaz would like to know as well!!!

CONCLUSIONS!

Fun as hell! But i did feel a tinge disappointed that rose and the nobles aren’t that developed (and Shirley as well).

I think The Point and The Message is a bit clumsily delivered, but overall the writers’ hearts are in the right place and it does work philosophically for where (I think?) the series is going next. As a ~Trial Of A TimeLord Enjoyer~ the bit where 14 puts on a wig made me go feral.

The meep is well realized but tbh I don’t think the OG story is that strong? And I think my Hot Take is….. I think that a straight-forward story wasn’t super compatible with all the mechanics and logistics and exposition that this “fix fic-ing the doctordonna” story necessitates. So the whole thing feels kinda bogged down by having to be a recap.

Finally… I think the resolution feels a bit too... mechanical? because Rose is not developed / put as the POV at the start, it’s not enough of an emotional thrill to see her saving the day (other than like, idk, if I interpret Rose Noble triumphing being a metaphor for Donna’s life being complete when she has her own life but also the doctor back again (?)).

[strangertheories]

💙

I'm going to rank my favourite characters, ships and seasons of Stranger Things for you (:

Characters:

Robin Buckley - she's a disaster lesbian and I relate to her so much

Will Byers - very close second. The character helped me through a lot a few years ago, but he's fallen just behind Robin after S4

Max Mayfield - she's funny, cool but I care about her a lot and cried so much in Dear Billy

Steve Harrington - what is there to say about Steve that hasn't already been said

Lucas Sinclair - criminally underrated, super funny, protective, great boyfriend, great character

Shout out to Nancy and Hopper as well, didn't make it into the top five somehow which shows how great the characters are but I really love them (I love them all obviously, but these are my faves)

Ships:

Ronance - this is pretty much tied with second. Their dynamic is iconic, they'd be such a great duo and I love sapphic ships. I really hope they become canon (not sure) because they're so cute together and bisexual Nancy is a must.

Byler - again, pretty much tied. I love Will so much and I want him to be happy with Mike. They'd be great for each other. Duffers, please make them canon.

Lumax - I said before S4 that I preferred Elmax to Lumax, but after seeing it, I've changed my mind. They're so cute together. Their relationship is a lot more mature than others on the show. They're not constantly making out or gushing about each other; you can just tell that they deeply love and care about the other person. Lucas is the best boyfriend and he's the support that Max needs.

Jopper - solid ship, really sweet, great parenting duo

Seasons:

Season 1 - a perfect season of television in my opinion. Brilliantly crafted (especially with a lower budget), great pacing, great plot, great characters, a tear-jerking finale, what's not to love? There's a reason the show was so successful and I think that can all be seen in S1

Season 4 - I love how they went back to more mystery and horror content. I cried so many times watching it and it's such a fun and exciting season of television. Well worth the wait. My only complaint is that the California plot line was a lot less interesting than the other ones, but it was still a good, natural continuation of the series.

Season 2 - another great season of Stranger Things. It was a little slow at the start of the season, but the mystery was great and well written. The Lost Sister episode wasn't bad, but it completely killed a lot of the pace that the season had been working up. The season started Dustin and Steve's bromance too. (also, rip Bob)

Season 3 - you know a show has to be epic for this to be the bottom ranked season. It was funny, entertaining and engaging. However, I felt like the plot felt like less of a logical continuation than the other seasons did. As well as that, I like the mystery of the show and season 3 didn't really surprise me ever. They showed us everything that was going on (Billy being flayed, Russians building gate) and didn't let the audience put together the clues like in previous seasons. I also didn't just find it that scary. The last episode was one of the best of the show though, I still sob every time I watch it.

Hopefully this answer was alright! Thanks for the ask, anon (:

[phantaloon-books]

Things about Tower of Nero that I want to highlight to remember them forever:

Lu being an absolute badass woman, I just love her too much

Piper McClean being canon wlw, she was actually kissing another girl, we really fell in love in october

Chaos being canonically female (just chaos being mentioned as a deity rather than what's below tartarus)

nobody DIED, like no one on the good side at least?? yes plenty of beings have died throughout TOA, but nobody died in TON?? so many died in TLO and BOO, I expected to mourn someone and I didn't have too??! it made me so happy

solangelo. that's it. solangelo makes me happy.

will being incredibly supportive of nico, and instead of stopping him, going with him on dangerous adventures because he doesn't want to leave him alone. also them treating Nico's PTSD for what it is

WILL SOLACE CANONICALLY GLOWS IN THE DARK. HE'S A GLOWSTICK BABY.

also will just appearing at the gates of the throne room, glowing in rage because someone touched his boyfriend (and tried to kill his dad), and him just marching through everyone (everyone else letting him), just to pick up his hurt precious boyfriend and take care of him.

meg McCaffrey got her happy ending. she's baby, she deserves her family and her happy ending. also Lu being the mother and the 12 children being siblings?? that's one hell of a way to tell nero to fuck off and right his mistakes. we love meg.

dionysus being the best olympian after apollo. the duo content we needed, and now will never get

nico mentioning bob and how he wants to go look for him, because he can still be in tartarus

rachel still being a Total badass and hitting people in the eye with her blue hairbrush thus being iconic

meg acting as lester's anchor and only reason why he didn't let go of the ledge, not falling into chaos, is top tier 'reasons why I cried reading', because if you think about it, Meg is the first ever friend apollo ever had, and them being best friends is everything to me

also apollo choosing to go looking as lester rather than apollo because lester feels like home is on top tier 'reasons why I cried reading' too

again, the only thing apollo did in the end (once he was god again) that could be described as 'godly' was be in several places at once, fly his chariot, and get meg her unicorn

but apollo shooting fucking fire out of his hands is crazy asf, it was so cool. he really got amazing godly powers this book.

rick being bold enough to showcase abusive parenting knowing that a huge porcentage of his readers are minors, helping many realize that they could be in abusive households, and giving them a tool to reach out for help

apollo defeating nero was so satisfactory, because you realize in the end, that nero wasn't really a monster, he was monstrous, but still very much human (if only with some godly power), and pretty useless once he couldn't hide behind props and weapons, his being wasn't powerful, he was just under layers of protection

the jackson/blofis scene was so warm and loving, they really are willing to put their family in danger, baby estelle in danger, to help 'percy's friends' even tho she knew percy didn't like apollo, but she still takes in everyone who needs help, and paul being a loving and accepting husband

sally working on her SECOND novel, she really is having her best life

none of the big heroes from other series having protagonism, besides nico and will, instead giving the other kids from camp halfblood their chance to show they're just as worthy as the "heroes of olympus"

(still I would have loved to see a scene with everyone else, like the heroes of olympus guys, fighting together one last time, just for nostalgia's sake - I legit hoped to see percy and annabeth arriving with chiron in triumvirate tower, but yeah)

the arrow of dodona may have been a dumb, cringey, and slightly ridiculous thing at first, and I personally rolled my eyes everytime it said anything, but it knew what would happen from the start, and without its sacrifice, apollo would have achieved nothing. we stan one arrow

nico wearing a white cowboy hat. idky but it makes my heart swell with joy. he a gay cowboy

y'all know I love Apollo's arch, and I just gotta point this out. his trials, his time as lester, started with him falling to earth, and ended with him getting up after purposely throwing himself off the earth, towards tartarus, almost falling to chaos. that's really clever writing.

the olympians watching over him, and some actually being concerned for him rather than his progress.

poseidon not really giving a fuck about the world or council meetings anymore because percy's not there anymore

athena being the only one apart from artemis who trusted apollo could do it makes me warm fsr

lester deciding that the best way to retell his adventures is by singing is hilarious to me, he really thinks it'll solve everything

Grover not telling percy and annabeth jason died seems so funny to me, he really said "nah it doesn't matter much, field trip, yes"

"hey man" my heart broke in twenty million pieces. like I don't know where I expected to see jason. but that wasn't it. and it hurt me as much as it hurt apollo man.

(also I kinda hoped we would see nico summon his spirit or smth, but I'm actually happy nico realized that jason went by his own choice, and he was in peace, so he decided not to summon him, because it was alright. that hurt too)

kinda love how lester passes out after literally every battle. it reminds you that even tho he's apollo, his body isn't. I'm sure we all would pass out too if we did a quarter of what lester did in the span of 4 days. his body isn't made to endure that, it doesn't even have a halfblood endurance, it's a weak mortal body

the trogs were fucking hilarious. their screeches and grrs, idk there's something ridiculous and so childish about them, it's so fun

really happy that apollo never had a /real/ love interest (reyna doesn't count), cause that wasn't what his story was about. instead he got to make so many friends, and have quality time with them and his children, it's amazing

apollo being thankful people were telling him he'd grown, and was more human, because he realized that was the best thing he could have learned from his time as a mortal

also him saying fuck you man to zeus and his speech, like "no asshole dad, I did learn, I'm not going to see this as punishment, it was a great time in which bad things happened but I enjoyed it." yes, we love apollo not letting zeus win

getting to see what everyone will do now. nico and will figuring out rachel's prophecy, probs saving bob. rachel living her best life away from her parents. leo doing what leo does, always helping those who have no one else. the hunters' open storyline about this fox, possibly hinting at content? piper settling down in a quiet life is what she deserves tbh, she's earned quiet life with a cute gf, wish her the best. Frank and hazel being the best praetors, and I bet they will continue to be so. And annabeth and percy, who chose their happiness over all, at last

kinda wish we got to see someone still really miss jason after apollo becomes god again tho lmao like apollo missed jason more than the others, nico and piper being the exception. I mean, leo is fine and dandy, hazel and frank are okay, percy and annabeth are done mourning... I just we got to see any of them really mourning, rather than reading they mourned. it would have made it feel more emotional

the last conversation and the last words in general. "the sun always comes back" and "we're friends now. call on me. I'll be there for you" that shit got me sobbing my heart out. rick really managed to do right by the books and end it like he should have, unlike BOO. he took what made TLO good and used a similar formula. it's very different from "and for once I didn't look back", but it still fills you with warmth and the feeling that even though it's over, it's okay.

I'm just really emotional, this is all I can think about, but you bet I'm gonna add more when I remember

[ct-multifandom]

More s4 predictions? More s4 predictions.

Luka closure, duh. He will start moving on from his breakup and start existing outside the scope of Marinette’s love life

I really hope we see Adrien hanging out with him to parallel Mari hanging with Kagami but I’m afraid the parallel might just be Mari hanging with Luka as friends

Marinette will try to give Adrien a miraculous again. Near the end of the season, she’ll realize that there are only a couple if not one miraculous left without a holder, and she’ll get overtaken by the desire to work Adrien into her team. If I had to guess which one, I’d say the dog because it juxtaposes the cat and I think Sabrina, as an outsider to the group and former mean girl lackey, might be the last to go.

We’ll meet someone’s mom for the first time and she’ll get akumatized along with a mode of transportation. Maybe a motorcycle or airplane this time? Edit: I guess Gina/Befana was motorcycle mom already so we’re just missing airplane mom

Alec Cataldi will be Psychomedian. Since they rewrote Gagotor for this I’m guessing the new character was probably replaced with one we know, and Alec is a recurring, humorous TV personality who hasn’t been akumatized yet. I came across his English VA’s insta by chance on explore and he made a post about recording more Alec lines after Optigami’s release

Rocketear will be/have to do with Max who misses his mom after she leaves for a space mission. It’d be nice to see the continuation of this subplot, which was shown for a moment in Miracle Queen after Startrain. Plus, Ladybug needs to give Max a charm sooner rather than later and Gamer, a very specific akuma, already had a 2.0. Edit: I’m Stan and I was wrong.

When Megaleech was first announced I thought it might be Bob Roth(’s sentimonster?) based solely off the name, but assuming that’s the thing in the Polymouse episode, it’s hard to tell. It’s so non-human. I wasn’t expecting Mylene to get her miraculous here based off the name either. My new theory, which I’m admittedly not super confident in, is that Megaleech is the fusion of the entire Kitty Section who got screwed over by Bob and/or XY again. That would explain the French pun and also Mylene’s personal connection to the case at hand. It might also explain why this group of heroes was hanging out outside of school. I wonder how Ladybug’s new charm animation would work with more than one charm at a time. Would they skip it altogether and just show her passing them out? Would they all match with Megaleech’s colors or would they be different for the individuals?

Edit: I am editing this post because I just saw a theory that the villain of this episode will be Andre Bourgeois again. Megaleech’s color scheme and medallions match Malediktator perfectly, and the tiny thing Chat kicks in the trailer looks like a shrunken version of him if you look closely. This is a lot more believable, but it makes me wonder what leads to Mylene being the hero of the day.

I hope Polymouse doesn’t get overshadowed by the large team, but I also hope she doesn’t get overshadowed by Multimouse. Unfortunately, there are a lot of immature kids who hate Mylene for no reason, so I hope Polymouse will be the one to come up with the winning plan, use her powers cleverly, and be heroic in general so that she can prove how well the mouse fits her instead of unknowingly competing with Marinette.

Teenage Alix will make her entrance as Bunnix when her dad gets akumatized. Both Timebreaker and The Pharaoh had time-y powers, and Alim is a historian, so if he were to get akumatized, he’d probably turn into a villain who controls time as well, leaving his daughter as the only one who can take him.

Sandboy 2.0 will happen as everyone predicted based on the voice director’s story post with Sandboy’s VA. Ladybug will probably see Chat Blanc in place of zombie Adrien, raising a lot of questions and tension. Maybe Chat will see Ladybug abandon him, or something else related to solitude rather than being trapped? We will also finally find out who the akumatized kid is.

Speaking of, I think Sandboy 2.0 might be Caprikid’s entry episode. (What?) Let me explain. I think the Sandboy kid and Marc look pretty similar, and correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure they’re the only male characters with defined eyelashes in the whole show. Both of them also have celestial thematics which would fit with Marc’s last name, Anciel (en ciel, in the sky). Sandboy looks like the night sky while Marc has a rainbow theme. It’s possible that they’re related, so Ladybug will enlist Marc to help defeat Sandboy. Here are pictures:

I’ve also seen other people theorize that Caprikid’s power is related to dreams, I guess because of something like “counting sheep”. This isn’t my theory for his powers, but I see where it’s coming from. His kwami has the most interesting name. While most of the kwamis are related directly to their animal, Ziggy, the goat kwami, is named after David Bowie’s stage persona, Ziggy Stardust, who is an alien from space. David Bowie had other famous personas like the astronaut, Major Tom, and Aladdin Sane who had the iconic lightning bolt, all themes associated with the sky. I wouldn’t be surprised if these themes show up in Caprikid’s design, like if he has face paint instead of a mask or a similar hairstyle to Bowie.

We can already kind of tell that Caprikid and Coq Courage are matching just like their civilian selves do from their opening silhouettes with the chest fur and feathers. I predict it goes further than that with daytime/nighttime thematics. Roosters are associated with the sun, and my theory for Orikko’s power is illumination. Evillustrator’s biggest weakness, which ended up defeating him, was darkness, and I read a post today that pointed out that he can draw without even looking at his tablet so it’s more likely that he’s just scared of the dark. If he has day themes I think Caprikid will compliment that with night sky themes based on the stuff above.

I expect Evillustrator will have a 2.0 episode or any sort of comeback at some point. He’s probably one of the most iconic akumas, yet he’s only been truly akumatized once, at least on-screen. Plus, ladybug needs to get protective charms to all her hero pals asap.

We will probably meet the family of a couple more major characters who don’t have canon family members yet.

I hope we see more more-than-one-person and/or fusion akumas among the major cast. The protective charms are helpful but it sucks that they limit our possibilities for this type of stuff.

Sabrina will leave Chloe once and for all, which will trigger a big change in both of their characters. Sabrina will become more independent and leader-like, but Chloe will hit her lowest point. If not for... a certain person’s writing... I’d say this will be the true catalyst for her development as she faces cold hard reality for the first time... but I’m not so sure. Maybe she’ll just mellow down and become less bad and less relevant. Maybe she’ll snap and join evil Lila. Only time can tell.

I want to see my boy King Monkey again this season before the big finale, which will probably have everyone, and I’m pretty sure I will. I feel like they’ll all show up before that. I want him to move across the city by swinging across stuff like a monkey on vines.

We will finally see Ryuko’s full transformation and lightning dragon. I saw that the Roblox server thing featured the (oversimplified and blocky) coreo for her full transformation before the actual show did? A bit embarrassing.

I want to predict something for my boy Ivan, but he gets so little screen time that I just can’t think of anything :( I’m very excited for Minotaurox, though, and it’s possible that he’ll be involved with his family rather than Mylene or his friends.

The whole gang takes down Shadowmoth. Booyah, 17 teenage furries, bet he didn’t see that coming. And everyone has a big “pointing and laughing” moment until the obligatory Adrien angst commences

[variousqueerthings]

Tom Hardy Movies rated least to most queer

I made a list of some Tom Hardy movies and I rated them based on my own, non-specific criteria about what makes a movie queer. Results below the cut.

(Some films not included, because I haven’t watched them yet, because Mr Hardy’s only in them for a few minutes, because the subject matter doesn’t lend itself to this list, or because I just don’t want’em here. TV series also not included. The list is organised into both groups and ratings, because I’m doing The Most.)

Movies are divided into four groups and rated from 0 – 10 on the Queer-Scale, scroll down to the bottom if you want the ratings without the commentary.

Disclaimer: This list is subjective. Don’t come at me because I didn’t rate Inception higher, Nolan himself is as queer as cargo shorts. 

1. This movie would make more sense if it were queer

If this movie were queer it… might not become a perfect film all of a sudden, but it’d make a hell of a lot more sense than what’s actually going on. With an occasional dose of “are the cis-straights okay?”

This Means War (2012): So Chris Pine and Tom Hardy are ostensibly both in love with Reese Witherspoon, but say “I love you” to each other pretty much constantly throughout the movie and their friendship is often presented as a domestic partnership. Cool, cool, cooool.

Queer Rating: 2 out of 10. This movie hate-crimed me by having Tom Hardy literally spell out his relationship with Chris Pine, only for the script to then have him say… “can you imagine all that… but with a woman…” Later on the movie explicitly denies polyamory is possible. Fuck this film.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012): Batman movies should always be queer. Mr. Hardy’s the only one who acceptably camps it up, despite Nolan’s best attempts to make him “acceptably gruff.” No matter what you do, Bane is a massive daddy in a mask and thanks to Mr Hardy’s honestly iconic fucking speech pattern in this film, it goes from pretty atrociously straight to just queer enough to imagine a future where Robert Pattinson plays batman and maybe adopts a bunch of kids.

(the only truly decent mask in this franchise tbh)

Queer Rating: 3 out of 10. Mr Hardy’s back is the one that’s actually broken carrying any semblance of fun in this overly long movie all on his own.

Lawless (2012): Wow, this really was the year of the not-queer-enough, wasn’t it? Look, it’s “based on a real story,” but it’s also a movie and movies don’t need to stick to the truth, and this one certainly doesn’t. Was the guy queer in real life? I don’t know. But that doesn’t matter, what matters is that it’s just kind of an eh movie and maybe being queer would add something to it. One of those “but why make someone queer? because it’s always more interesting to do so,” movies.

Queer Rating: 3 out of 10. It’s just not queer. But Tom Hardy wears cardigans and described his character as a “mother figure,” which adds an interesting dynamic to him.

2. Actually Queer but in a homophobic way

Tom Hardy plays a canonically queer character, yaaay. The whole movie contains a strange sense of the director being too not-queer to actually engage with that and everything around him is almost aggressively straight, noooo.

RocknRolla (2008): Honestly this movie has the funniest coming out scene ever + that familiar undertone of “all these manly men secretly want to fuck each other” is only heightened by one of them actually being gay and in love with his best friend. It’s such a fucking… it’s such a movie. Personally I find Mark Strong, Idris Elba, Thandie Newton, and, of course, Tom Hardy to be really hot in it, so that’s a plus. There’s a scene in which Strong’s character teaches another gangster how to do a proper backhand. It’s really gay of him. Also slow-dancing at a gay club. Butler’s character needs to get himself together, you really don’t think 2008 Tom Hardy is hot? Mate.

(left to right: functional queer, disaster queer, distinguished queer)

Queer Rating: 6 out of 10, for having an actual gay character who is played by Tom Hardy doing a sexy phonecall voice to another guy, but then there’s that feeling you can’t shake that the whole movie is vaguely uncomfortable about it, like a family member awkwardly patting you on the shoulder after they found out you were queer second-hand, but they’ve still got 50 years of bias to unlearn. Also Thandie Newton is killed, fuck that noise. 

Legend (2015): If I had a nickle for the amount of times Tom Hardy’s played a gay gangster, I’d have two nickles. Which isn’t a lot, but weird that it happened twice (looks at Peaky Blinders and thinks it ought to be three times). I’ve watched Legend three times and every time it just… loses me. And because this is a biased list, I’ll only specifically mention that it fails to make Ron’s queerness anything but a way for him to shock others. Gangsters could be gay? Gasp! On the upside Tom Hardy has so much sexual tension with everyone in this movie, including himself (why would you do that? Asks Ron, bemused. Because I can’t kill you, no matter how much I fucking want to, hisses a blood-soaked Reggie right into his ear. It’s hot).

Queer rating: 5 out of 10 because the film is just not very queer for a movie with several queer men in it.

3. Straight as a forced family dinner

It’s straight.

Locke (2013): He’s a married man who had an affair and trying to deal with the fallout of it. This isn’t a spoiler for most of the movie, it’s a pretty neat movie where we look at Tom Hardy having a bit of a mental breakdown and taking lots of phonecalls (my personal hell). Is it queer? Not in the slightest.

Queer Rating: 2 out of 10 for Hardy’s face being in almost every shot.

The Revenant (2015): Yeah, yeah, DeCaprio’s and Hardy’s characters are obsessed with each other, yeah it’s a man’s world where the only women are dead wife, kidnapped sexually assaulted native princess, or background whore, yeah, they fight each other and there’s a ton of grunting, but also… I just fucking don’t like this movie. The thin line where a storyline like this one becomes queer might be crossed for others, but not for me. Fuck these guys and their stupid  bear fights.

Queer rating: 3 out of 10 for it being about dirty men in the middle of nowhere (but you could just watch Brokeback Mountain or The Lighthouse or God’s Own Country or any Mad Max, or, or, or…)

4. Queer? Queer. Queer? … Queer…

The plots, aesthetics and/or characters played by Tom Hardy lend themselves to a queer reading, even if there is no overt intention towards queerness. Often this is because of a deliberate lack of heterosexual and/or cisgender writing, which in this day and age is still pretty uncommon not to include within a plot.

Inception (2010): Okay, I don’t even need to write about the added “darling,” or the “go to sleep Mr Eames.” I don’t need to go on about the absolutely bonkers amount of fanfiction written for Eames and Arthur, based on a few minutes of film and a boatload of chemistry. It’s queer.

Queer Rating: 7 out of 10, because the actual plot of the film isn’t very queer, but between the Arthur/Eames dynamic and Elliot Page, Nolan was really given a gift he didn’t deserve.

Warrior (2011): Okay, so first off, this might be my favourite Tom Hardy film, at least some part of my brain is fixated on it at almost all times and I’m considering watching it for the third time in two weeks. I don’t only consider it queer based on Mr. Hardy’s character, although he has no romantic or sexual interest and could be read as aroace, but because of the themes, especially those surrounding said character, who is coded as a caregiver to women and through close emotional connections to men. It’s got possibly unintentional deconstructions of masculinity and two men (brothers) who need to forgive each other and can only do so through the catharsis of violence. It speaks to me as a transmasc with several cis brothers, struggling with my own masculinity. It’s not at all written for me, but I find myself all over it. I could talk about this movie forever.

Queer Rating: 8 out of 10. I’m not allowed to say any more or I’ll never stop writing about it. I love you Tommy…

The Drop (2014): Bob’s lack of sexual and/or romantic interest in Naomi is so strange to her that she doesn’t know what he would want from her otherwise. Bob really just wants to raise a dog with her (and also forgiveness for past sins). Bob is such a rare ace and possibly aro coded character, it really throws me every time I watch this film how obvious it is. Bonus points for also being autistic-coded and not in the stereotypical ways.

(Tom Hardy’s most challenging role: pretending he doesn’t know dogs)

Queer Rating: 9 out of 10 because it’s so fucking rare to see ace and aro coded characters that aren’t, you know…. serial killers. Also Tom Hardy adopts a puppy and has a very cute, kinda lispy voice. How often does Tom Hardy play softer men like this?

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015): Very deliberately no sexual or romantic writing included in Max’s and Furiosa’s relationship. Sure, there’s not a lot of time for that in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, but it was also done with a purpose! “It was always going to be two warriors on par, starting off with very little respect for each other and ending up with a massive respect for each other.” - Charlize Theron. “So of course they meet, of course there’s a relationship, an unspoken understanding. A recognition.” - Tom Hardy.

Queer Rating: 9 out of 10. It’s not just the characters, but the world and it’s apocalyptic BDSM leather scene, the questions it asks about sustainability and about people as tools, and the found family. It’s about overcoming violence through multiple kinds of love. And it’s about watching a guy playing flame-thrower guitar. What could be queerer?

Venom (2018): Talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show stopping, spectacular, never the same… No, but Eddie is queer. The only question is whether the sequel will acknowledge that aspect or not, but even if not. Even if it manages to straightly bypass the reality of a symbiotic relationship with a genderless? genderfluid? being from another world that is linked to you down to your very cells and understands you more intimately than any other person possibly could… even if all that: Eddie is queer. Venom and Eddie are in a relationship. Any relationship Eddie ever enters into will automatically become a thrupple. He makes out with Venom in the movie! Eddie is queer.

(aw yeah that tongue is going down his throat)

Queer Rating: 9.5 out of 10, because it’s still coded by the creators in the language of bromance (hey, bro, is it gay if we’re physically and emotionally closer than any other people on earth?), but the movie is so, so camp and Mr Hardy’s acting choices are beautiful – the screaming? The lispy soft voice and lack of taking up space? The lobster tank? The only people who don’t know how queer this is are the people making it apparently. Fingers crossed for that sequel!

Hon. mentions:

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002): Star Trek – even at it’s worst (especially at its worst?) – is camp af + Hardy is a straight-up baby in this film.

Bronson (2008): It’s about a real person who’s still alive, so I won’t comment on the actual man. However the film seems to code the character Bronson along an ace line and also has genderqueering Vaudeville. Someone let Tom Hardy do more of whatever was going on in those stage-bits.

(this right here: this the good shit)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011): Another ensemble piece not massively about Hardy’s character, but it’s a movie that centers around queerness in a strange, depressing way. Tom Hardy’s character isn’t queer. Colin Firth and Mark Strong are though. The book makes me cry.

Peaky Blinders (2013-): Because it’s a TV series I left it out. There’s a lot of straight nonsense going on there, but Alfie Solomens is gay. There’s nothing in the series that disputes that and plenty that lends itself to the reading.

Dunkirk (2017): Tom Hardy plays an RAF pilot in a deep emotional connection with the other main RAF pilot. That’s immediately gay. However he’s not in the movie much because of the way it’s constructed, so I left it off.

Queer Ratings (least to most)

No queer to be found here traveller:

This Means War: 2 out of 10 - illegal movie, Tom Hardy swore he wouldn’t do another rom-com after

Locke: 2 out of 10 - straight Welshman and his straight problems. He pretty though

Lawless: 3 out of 10 - cardigan-Hardy being a mother-hen, but very straight for all that

The Dark Knight Rises: 3 out of 10 - a superhero movie that doesn’t deserve Mr Hardy’s camp talents (unlike Venom)

The Revenant: 3 out of 10 - doesn’t give me what I want out of a movie full of dirty, bearded men

Queer but we deserve more:

Legend: 5 out of 10 - timid homosexuality, considering the source material. 

RocknRolla: 6 out of 10 - hey bro, is it gay if we kill the only female lead in our massive ensemble cast

The queerest of Hardy’s:

Inception: 7 out of 10 - Elliot Page and JGL kissing was an all-around terrible choice that made no sense, we know the truth, Nolan

Warrior: 8 out of 10 - I’m still crying, Edgerton’s crying, Hardy’s crying, we’re all crying, and I think that’s really emotionally healthy and queer of us

Mad Max: Fury Road: 9 out of 10 - non-romantic love in the time of BDSM post-apocalyptic wastelands is something that can actually be so personal

The Drop: 9 out of 10 - “Fucking punk. Go out to dinner dressed like you're still in you living room! You wear those big hippity-hoppity clown shoes! You speak to women terribly! You treat them despicably! You hurt harmless dogs that can't defend themselves! I'm tired of you man. I'm tired of you. You embarrass me!”

Venom: 9.5 out of 10 - Sometimes a relationship is an anxious reporter, the sentient goo inhabiting his body, his kinda-ex-girlfriend and her new doctor boyfriend, and I think that’s beautiful

[bosmermage]

The second part of my progression of Zelda fashion series this time with the Downfall Girls, design descriptions under the cut. 

Part 1: here 

First off yes I know FS and FSA are design swapped from what they are in canon. No I’m not changing it because a) I like the progression from MC better this way and b) that’s how I draw FS+ Zelda and I’m attached to it now, sorry. And yes this is a modified timeline, here the downfall timeline splits from the game over in Minish cap instead of from Ocarina of Time with FSA being a direct FS sequel.  

Four Swords - happens in this progression a single generation after MC. FS and FSA Zeldas are part of the same dynasty as MC. After MC more fanciful dresses come into fashion, modelling the First Interim Period. Now the aprons are belted on with a matching fabric to the trim  as the metal girdles from before have fallen out of fashion. Cloaks that are long are back in, and to increase the practicality they are fastened at the shoulder of the dominant arm to keep the dominant arm free. I made her purple because I think she deserves to wear the prettiest colour. 

Four Swords Adventures  - is a direct sequel to four swords, although I did steal the original Four Swords Zelda design to base this dress on - again because this is how I draw FS+ (the manga) Zelda, and now I’m attached. I like this progression because it takes us from the simple, plain dresses of MC to a slightly more exaggerated version of that type of dress in FS pulling on the fashion of the interim period: and then by FSA a couple generations later we can see how that style is being rejected by the current generation. The overgown takes its neckline inspiration from the dress of Zelda I, the waistline moves up and the skirts become much fuller and less A-line than before, while the length drops past the floor. Cartridge pleating at the waist is common as we see the overgown begin to pack in as much fabric as humanly possible. Up until and even after Vaati attacks this is period of never before seen prosperity.  The Sealing War - The time of the Fallen Hero, and my first set of fleshed out ocs. I’ll explain the fashion first so you can skip the ocs if you want. Here, you can see with the tiara, is the 3rd Dynasty shift. Fashion is primarily inspired by military dress, and it became fashionable to wear a white linen smock as an top layer instead of just the under layer, with a pair of trousers tucked into your boots beneath. A gambeson, though much thinner than our real world counterparts thanks to protective enchantments, became common outerwear for nobility, with unpadded and unenchanted vests being common for the lower class. The crest our noble lady is wearing is based off the Red Shield from ALTTP since these two ladies are part of the same dynasty.  As for my ocs, my Link was betrayed by the dynasty this lady belongs to and killed so that he couldn’t aid the previous dynasty in battle. Of course, Link only seems to reincarnate when the great evil does so this was, ultimately short sighted of them. But, they did find the reincarnation of Zelda, who had reincarnated as a weaver’s daughter, as well as the master sword, and she is the Zelda pictured above. She was given the master sword and tasked to work with the maidens to seal Ganon away after he had broken free from the seal the four sword had on him. This worked yes but the dynastic struggle had evolved into a civil war and then Ganon had struck while the iron was hot, so while Zelda was able to seal him quickly, Hyrule was left in ruins. 

A Link to The Past - ages have past but the military elements are still seen in the dress of the royals. Instead of full armor though, this Zelda is only wearing ceremonial pauldrons and would wear a overly fancy rapier for formal occasions. Her dress is full at the sleeves and hem, but it’s still short enough to show her boots so as to remain a little practical (although the bodice style limits how useful the dress would be in a fight..)  A Link Between Worlds Zelda isn’t here because I literally have no notes, her design fits this progression perfectly and I didn’t want to crowd the already wide document with a pretty much unchanged design.  Legend of Zelda - Marks the final dynasty shift in the timeline. This would be the dress I think she would wear in the time after the game, between this game and Adventure of Link. I really liked the 80′s style dress the original Zelda had in the concept art, I decided to revamp it though by mixing it with a more 1820s flair. I kept the short bob hair of the concept art and the very simple necklace-tiara because they’re both very iconic to the character but also because I think they fit the image of a princess of a country recovering from the apocalypse much better than something more fancy. 

[madlori]

A quick primer on Schitt’s Creek

So apparently going by the comments on some of my fics I’ve done the thing where some of you who have been reading my fanfic a lot over the years want to read my newest stories without ever having seen the canon source material! You are all valid and I support you. 

So I thought it might be nice to write a bit of a primer on the show so you at least know what these people look like and who they are.

First of all I recommend just...uh, watching the show! It really is fantastic, and not just because of the amazing queer normalization. It’s funny and surprising and strange and heartwarming.

Caveat. A lot of people struggle with the first season. It is true that some viewers find it a rough start. The Roses all have significant character arcs and to do that you have to start from somewhere, let’s say. Also the tone of the show and its pace changed markedly between seasons two and three, which is when Dan Levy took over as head writer and they got a bunch of new writers. But even if you’re not quite feeling it from the first episode (I did not have this problem but some people do) I promise, you will be rewarded. And it’s fast, the episodes are only 20 minutes, so.

So! WTF even is this show. 

The Premise: The wealthy Rose family lose all their money when their finance guy absconds with it having never paid taxes. They’re left with nothing but the clothes (and wigs) on their backs and the ownership of a small town called Schitt’s Creek that father Johnny once bought for his teenage son as a joke. They relocate there and move into a dilapidated motel, thanks to the good graces of the town’s rednecky mayor, Roland Schitt (Chris Elliott). There they occupy two adjoining rooms, the parents in one and siblings in the other.

The Roses

Johnny (Eugene Levy) - Patriarch Johnny Rose made his money with a chain of video stores. Johnny is the straight man of the family, finding himself constantly shepherding his dramatic spouse and offpsring. 

Moira (Catherine O’Hara) - a former soap opera star, Moira is a creature not of this reality, it sometimes seems. She is an eccentrically outlandish persona who cares deeply for her family but is often befuddled as to how to handle those emotions or express them. 

David (Dan Levy) - firstborn son David is probably the character most viewers connect with first and more strongly, for a variety of reasons. His personal arc(s) are really the show’s emotional backbone. A former gallerist and pansexual aesthete, David is constantly frustrated by the Incorrectness of everything happening to the family.

Alexis (Annie Murphy) - younger sister and socialite, kind of a Coachella girl, who has spent most of her life globetrotting and getting herself mixed up in outlandish scenarios (it’s a running joke on the show for her to drop in “That one time when I was...” stories as offhand remarks). David is very protective of her even though they fight constantly, and often bailed her out of her Situations when their parents were too caught up in their own stuff.

The Honorary Roses

While the central “character” of the show is the Rose family, in my opinion there are six core characters, which includes these two.

Stevie Budd (Emily Hampshire) - Employee of (and later owner of) the motel where the Roses fetch up. She is David’s best friend and the first person in town he connects with. She is snarky and deadpan and sarcastic. She and David have a short-lived romantic/sexual relationship which ends amicably in season two, but their close friendship remains an important part of the show (yet another thing SC does that’s quietly revolutionary - feature exes who decided to be just friends and then actually do that). She later develops a strong surrogate-father relationship with Johnny as he becomes the co-owner of the motel.

Patrick Brewer (Noah Reid) - David’s business partner, and by the end of the show, husband. Although the show has a great deal to offer apart from this, a lot of people watch mostly for the David & Patrick relationship (which is fine, it’s a big part of the show). Note: if you are watching for this, Patrick does not appear in the show until the mid-third season. At first Patrick seems like an oasis of down-to-earth normalcy amidst all these larger-than-life personalities but it doesn’t take long to realize he’s actually an enormous troll who expresses his love for David by gently roasting him constantly.

And the Others - The show is an ensemble, and apart from these six folks, includes a lot of great secondary characters. Veternarian Ted Mullens (Alexis’s on/off boyfriend), Mayor Roland Schitt and his wife Jocelyn (who is one of my favorite characters), town council curmudgeons Ronnie and Bob, cafe waitress Twyla (played by Dan Levy’s sister Sarah), the local all-gender Casanova woodworker Jake, and the Schitts’ adult son Mutt, Alexis’s first hookup in town.

The Arc: This show is about how the Rose family - who have historically been distant and disconnected - had to lose all their money to find themselves as a family, and later, for each of them to find new fulfillment for themselves. They start out chafing and struggling to get out of this new reality, trying to find a way to sell the town, get “back to normal,” but gradually, they fit themselves into the community. Their family reconnection is pretty strong by the end of S2 (the final scene of that season was my first teary moment) and starting in S3, each of them finds a way to rediscover themselves. Johnny invests in the motel and in Stevie. Moira joins the town council and the local women’s a cappella singing group. Alexis goes back to school and starts pursuing a career in public relations. David takes over a vacant general store and turns it into the Rose Apothecary (which you have probably seen on merch everywhere), a venue for local artisans to sell what they make. It is through this venture that he meets Patrick, who first consults and then decides to invest and become David’s partner in the store.

The show is at the same time outlandish, hilarious, touching, abrasive and over the top. The Roses are over-the-top characters - especially Moira, who speaks in an unidentifiable accent and uses words that may or may not exist - and the story seems to exist in a kind of alternate reality (it’s a fandom joke that the timeline of the show makes no sense - it doesn’t - and it is always summer in SC except for one time when it was Christmas). There is also, by design, no homophobia in Schitt’s Creek. The various iterations of queer characters and relationships aren’t just represented, they’re normalized in a way that I didn’t know I was missing until I saw it.

Plus, it’s fun. Like many of Eugene Levy’s previous works (although the show is really Dan’s creation), the show makes use of musical set pieces. Probably the most famous is the iconic mid-season 4 episode “Open Mic” in which Patrick and David host an open mic night at the store and Patrick serenades David with an acoustic cover of Tina Turner’s “The Best” (arranged by actor Noah Reid, who is IRL a talented singer-songwriter, check out his albums, they’re great). It’s one of the most romantic things I’ve ever seen, made more poignant by the really remarkable face journey David goes through as he listens.

Well, have a look.

Another big moment was season 5′s production of “Cabaret,” directed by Moira and Jocelyn and starring Patrick as the Emcee and Stevie as Sally Bowles. The rehearsals and performance were mined for a lot of great moments.

Anyway, that’s the gist. Probably more than you wanted or needed.

[doomonfilm]

Ranking : David Lynch (1946-present)

Film is definitely an art, and yet, it seems to be distinct from other forms of visual art such as painting or sculpture.  Perhaps that is what makes David Lynch such a fascinating director, as he has the ability to tap into the surreal stimulus often found in the most famous paintings and transform it into brain-bending moments on film.  Whether it his fear-fueled fascination with fatherhood present in his debut film Eraserhead, his ruminations on Hollywood society present in Inland Empire, or any of the stopping points in-between, it’s safe to say that David Lynch sits in the rarified air of directors like Ingmar Bergman, Alejandro Jodorowsky and the other few who can turn film into something deeper, more visceral and more meaningful.

With one of the most unique collections of films credited to his name, including a couple of curveballs in the early portion of his career, ranking the films of David Lynch is as perplexing as it is entertaining... so, without further ado, we attempt to climb that hill.  I’m not even going to pretend that I can break down all of the symbolism and meanings of these films, but I can give my honest opinion about them.

10. Dune (1984) For a film that is supposed to be such a science-fiction gem, it’s a bit funny that nobody can seem to make a coherent, entertaining version of Dune.  After nearly 15 years in pre-production hell (and three iconic names attached to versions of the production), the film landed in the laps of Dino De Laurentiis and Ridley Scott, but after another extended period delaying production, Scott bowed out, leaving the door open for David Lynch to step in.  For what it’s worth, he did bring a huge list of names to the project, but the fact that the directing credit for Dune belongs to the throwaway pseudonym Alan Smithee should clue in any perceptive viewer that the project may not be one that Lynch cares to stand behind.

9. Inland Empire (2006) David Lynch isn’t the type of director that revisit ground he’s already covered, which is what makes Inland Empire (the seemingly final film from Lynch) such a confusing choice.  Had this film not been released after a five year gap between it and the stellar Mullholland Drive, another film that focuses on the dark underbelly of Hollywood, fame and the tolls of the acting craft, perhaps it would hit a little different to me.  That’s not to say that the film isn’t good, as it is definitely a slight adjustment from the style that Lynch basically trademarked, but when a director like Lynch experiments on what feels like general principle, it makes experiments that feel like a step backward lose impact.

8. Lost Highway (1997) Technically, you could count all of the Lynch “mystery” films as noir in some capacity, but Lost Highway feels like a direct skewing of what we know as the traditional noir structure.  At its core, the film is a simple murder mystery, but it doesn’t take long for the Lynch signatures to begin appearing in every form from a mysterious, unnamed character to our protagonist literally changing into another person with no base explanation provided.  Perhaps the latter choice was a look into split personalities and the disassociated nature that can come with brutal crimes... as I said before, I’m not here to try and decode the David Lynch mystery.  While Lost Highway serves as a good entry point into the David Lynch catalog, it sits on the back half of the rankings due to no fault of its own... it’s more of a situation where the other mysteries are so stellar, that even the strange seems simplistic by comparison.

7. The Straight Story (1999) If you played a game of “one of these things is not like the other” with the films of David Lynch, it would not be difficult to make a winning choice, as The Straight Story is clearly the most accessible and standard of all the Lynch fare.  What the film lacks in oddness and style, however, is more than made up for in terms of heart and performance.  The use of a lawnmower as the main source of travel allows for some beautiful landscape cinematography, and the sheer force of will exhibited by Richard Farnsworth pays off in spades when he is reunited with Harry Dean Stanton.  If you’re looking for something creepy, eclectic and mind-warping from Lynch, there are plenty of other films to choose from, but if you are looking for an excuse to shed a tear or two, this is the film for you.

6. The Elephant Man (1980) It’s funny to think that if not for The Straight Story, the Joseph Merrick biopic The Elephant Man would serve as the most normal film of the Lynch canon.  This sophomore film dialed back on the abstractions present in Eraserhead, but it brought some extraordinary makeup and costuming to the table, not to mention it gifted viewers with a powerfully moving performance from John Hurt.  Though memorable in its own right, the film really made its mark by tying Raging Bull at the 53rd Academy Awards, garnering eight nominations (and sadly losing in all categories, going home empty-handed).  The backlash for the Academy’s lack of giving The Elephant Man special praise for its makeup effects also led to the creation of a Best Makeup award for the Oscars.  It is quite possible that the combination of shock from Eraserhead in tandem with the skill and prowess shown in The Elephant Man opened all of the creative control doors for David Lynch, as not even Dune could derail his career and artistic oddness. 

5. Blue Velvet (1986) While Twin Peaks is where I first heard the name David Lynch, it was Blue Velvet where I first got a taste of why Lynch was held in such high regard.  The suburban paradise presented in the opening credits is immediately shattered by the discovery of a random ear, and the weirdness rabbit-hole gets deeper and deeper from that point on.  The classic look of the film stands in powerfully beautiful contrast to the extreme darkness of the narrative, and Dennis Hopper turned it all the way up to 11 for his performance in the film.  If Lost Highway serves as the best introductory film for those curious about Lynch, then Blue Velvet serves as a good midpoint to determine how much weirdness, abrasiveness and shock you can handle in a Lynch film.

4. Mulholland Drive (2001) I really and truly do not know where to begin with this insane rollercoaster ride of a film.  The first time I watched this film, I thought I had everything figured out, every mystery solved and every bait and switch identified, but upon repeat viewings of Mullholland Drive, I’ve determined that I either had a brief moment of harmonic brilliance or I was fooling myself.  The film makes sense at its root, if really and truly dissected, but when taken at face value and in real time, it’s almost impossible not to get completely lost in the sheer immersive nature of everything thrown at you.  Naomi Watts is brilliant as the viewer guide through the film, and it’s good that she is so powerful in her lead role and guiding task, because Mullholland Drive is not afraid to get downright bonkers on more than one occasion.  While films about the trappings of Hollywood and stardom are nothing new, I’m hard pressed to think of another film that approaches these in a manner even remotely close to that of Mullholland Drive. 

3. Wild at Heart (1990) Quite possibly the most enjoyable of all the David Lynch films, despite some downright brutal moments of celebratory violence sprinkled throughout.  The combination of Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern is nothing short of electric, and the presence of Willem Dafoe as antagonist is the perfect spark to ignite an already volatile mixture of leads.  The energy level of this film starts on ten and only continues to rise as the film progresses.  If/when I ever get the chance to program theater showings, I am putting this film on a double bill with Natural Born Killers immediately.  While I can’t say that Wild at Heart is my favorite David Lynch film, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that it’s my favorite Lynch film to gush about with other fans.

2. Eraserhead (1977) More often than not, directors the caliber of David Lynch have stunning debut films to their name, and Lynch certainly exploded onto the scene with a gamebreaker in the form of Eraserhead.  Upon first viewing, there is enough “WTF?!” going on to confuse most people, but for those brave enough to watch the film more than once, it becomes painfully obvious that all of the madness and shocking imagery on display is a clear metaphor for Lynch’s fear of fatherhood.  The simple act of taking a fear that resonates with most humans and turning it into the equivalent of a black and white bad drug trip works perfectly, and Jack Nance’s iconic look and performance are almost recognizable enough to know without knowledge of the film.  Eraserhead is one of those films that leaves you different than you were prior to watching it.

1. Twin Peaks : Fire Walk with Me (1992) In all honesty, was there every any doubt that Twin Peaks : Fire Walk with Me wouldn’t be in the top spot?  Of all the properties that the David Lynch name is connected to, none of them have even come remotely close to touching the sheer size of the lore and fandom that has emerged from this modern day masterpiece.  The story of the high school princess with deep, dark secrets to hide is not new territory, but the way that Lynch handles it all with Twin Peaks takes the familiar to all new realms of weirdness, including the creation of iconic places and characters like the Black Lodge, the Log Lady, the production mistake that created the infamous Bob, and the eternally iconic Laura Palmer, and oh yeah, the film’s not half bad either.  I doubt that David Lynch ever had any intention of reaching the heights of fame that Twin Peaks : Fire Walk with Me afforded him, but it would be dumb to think that he isn’t impressed with the magnitude of the world he created based on that single idea for a film.

[solarcitymelodies]

Wowza sorry y'all about the random massive Rockafire spam, I'm pretty sure ??most?? People on here? know me for just Knight Rider because that's the only thing I've ever REALLY posted about--

but I Do Not Care it's RAE hours right now so uhhh here's some headcannons that probably aren't Canon compliant very much because I just got into RAE like last week

So like. I feel like Mitzi is a Good Amount younger than the rest of the band like she was in highschool when she joined, the rest of em were all Adults™ and she was a little bit nervous about it because...... ADULTS™

She was just lookin for a place to get her singing voice out there, because ya girl REALLY wanted to perform, and showbiz happened to have a slot open, but she did not expect all of the members to be older than her (although looking back, she realized she probably should have expected that)

It was intimidating at first but Billy Bob and Fatz were just the absolute sweetest and they introduced her properly to the rest of the band because she was like "oh I barely talk to them because I get nervous :(" and the resident dads p much said "aight we can do all the talking for you then, how about that?" And badabing badaboom she's now attached to these two and like honestly who isn't or maybe that's just me but ANYWAYS I feel like the band would become a second home/safe space for her

Yeah fr some reason I have BIG long headcannon for her joining the band but the rest of them? Nobody knows how they got there for all I know they just Showed Up One Day

Also I came across this

https://youtu.be/UU7BeUWQBDI

Which got me thinkin about what my headcannons were as far as sexuality/gender stuff

And I find the concept of Billy Bob being Very Much Straight And Ignorant but trying his hardest to be a good ally SO funny like if someone came out to him he'd probably be like "oh!! I don't understand why you would choose that lifestyle but I respect you!!" not realizing how incredibly stupid he sounds sjkrjh like I don't think he can very easily wrap his head around how people are just. not cishet. so he's like "OH then it must be a choice, right? like you can choose to be gay but you're born straight. Right?" and everyone just shakes their heads in the background but he does earnestly try his best and my man would rather DIE than disrespect someone's pronouns I know this for sure

Fatz is pretty similar, straight ally and a lil confused but he's got the spirit, you know? He still least knows being gay (as well as,,, m o s t sexualities that aren't straight, although some he doesn't get/know about at all) isn't a choice but he hasn't quite grasped that being trans is also not a choice. He will respect your pronouns to hell and back but by god he doesn't get it,,, he's trying though and he feels very accomplished in himself that he's starting to get the hang of using they/them even though he slips up a lot

The rest of the band encourages the HELL out of these two because they're. Trying their best and making an honest effort which is more than a pretty good chunk of people would give

Rolfe, Earl, and Dook are the reasons Billy Bob and Fatz are trying so hard to understand it lmao

Rolfe took it upon himself to hang up a MASSIVE gay pride flag backstage, being the flaming homosexual that he is, and the rest of the squad quickly realized "oh he's GAY gay he wasn't kidding" because at first they literally thought he was joking as he was actually just being openly and obnoxiously a raging mlm (and like I mean no shade to him this isn't me tryna to make fun of it because my dumb sapphic ass almost crashed my car once because I saw a pretty girl walk down the street. And by "once" I mean. Yesterday.) Anyways yeah that's when the rest of em Realized and were like "OH" but after the massive pride flag was hung up that prompted Dook to come out and they were all like "???? YOU TOO????"

Dook is a non-binary ICON he's a demiboy and goes by both he/him and they/them and probably would have a bunch of pride pins I think,,, I'm not really sure of his sexuality though!! honestly he kinda gives me bisexual vibes but Who Knows . Not me. He has a HELL of a time trying to explain his gender to the rest of the band (except for Rolfe because like. He's a part of the community so he knows) and basically he was met with "so you're just a dude but ✨spicy✨?" and it was like, "no, but I have no idea how to explain it in a way that will make sense to you, so. yes?" And that explanation seemed to suffice for most of them

Mitzi went in knowing NOTHING about what being non-binary was so she asked a l o t of questions about it, which Dook just kinda dealt with answering (he's heard most of it before, and it gets tiring after a while. if you're nb or trans or honestly any part of LGBTQ+ you know what I mean) but he thought it was really sweet of her to be so determined to learn about it and eventually she did get a grasp on it ish, so she was able to understand why it wasn't just ✨spicy male✨ (the conversation pretty much went "well if i was just male, don't you think I would label myself that way instead?" "....oH TRUE!!!") and she ended up a VERY passionate ally, and she'll ask occasionally about how to be better at it, bein a queen as she is 👉👉 also definitely started questioning her sexuality after a while and just went with "maybe bicurious" and Rolfe, Dook, and Earl were all like "ONE OF US, ONE OF US"

Earl has never once spoken about his sexuality in his life, because 1. He's very aware that's an awkward conversation to have with a puppet, and 2. He's aroace anyways, which is basically what people assume even if they don't realize it just for their own peace of mind, because seriously, puppets and any identity that ISN'T aroace creates a really uncomfortable mental image for... Most people, pretty much. So it's not like he ever needed to say anything about it, which is convenient for him because he wouldn't want to say anything either way. not worth the risk of embarrassing himself and making everyone feel awkward

(side note ish though Rolfe 100% came out to Earl first and was met with "I already knew that but okay." Rolfe was mildly offended)

And spEAKING OF EARL he's VERY much sentient but he can't say he's particularly enthusiastic about it because Rolfe has to carry him around everywhere

He can move on his own but it's limited and generally annoying to maneuver around with his tiny body so he just says screw it half the time and stays on Rolfe's arm or hitch a ride on Random Object, but like... Yeah, the majority of the time Rolfe just has to deal with only having one arm available and a puppet directly next to him making fun of him at every possible chance

They high-key have chaotic and unorganized college roommate vibes (like they're actually roommates because... Where tf is Earl supposed to go?? So Rolfe took him in) and idk if this is really like a part of my headcannons or if I just think it's funny so I keep entertaining the idea of it but I think it would be Fantastic if Rolfe had no idea how to cook but Earl somehow did so this idiot is trying to take instructions from a puppet, who can't physically show him what to do, and it's like Hell's Kitchen live featuring a furry and a sentient stuffed animal

Aaaaamd going off of my Rolfe and Earl headcannons still Rolfe for SURE has some sort of executive dysfunction issue. ADD or ADHD I'm not sure (probably ADHD) but he definitely has it also this totally isn't just me projecting how dare you accuse me of that

And!!! More about Dook!!!! I don't know how or why I thought up of this but I cannot possibly imagine him any other way now-- he's autistic and space is his Big Huge special interest, and if you ever ask him about it you have to be prepared to get infodumped or possibly even shown a PowerPoint presentation, because GOD he loves space!!! He wants everyone to know all about it!! He knows not everyone thinks it's as cool as he does so he tries to keep his mouth shut but when someone asks about it he can't help himself and will infodump a LOT, also haha drumming stims go brrrr, playing the drums isn't really a stim but he likes to just take his drumsticks and whack em around in the air and get that good ol Wavy Arm Action (wavy arms is best stim change my mind you can't it's GOOD)

Also i bbbbelieve earlier I reposted somethin about someone else headcannoning that he has echolalia, which I don't really know enough about to say anything on it?? But even if he doesn't have echolalia he'd probably repeat phrases over and over until he gets tired of them (which is,,, something I do lmao, it's either memes I get stuck in my head or things I've heard from various medias I like the inflections in (like one tiktokker I saw was talking about their tourettes and their vocal tics and one of them was "uh oh! How unfortunate!" and now I CAN'T STOP SAYING IT)) but like uhhh yeah :))) repeating phrases that get stuck in your head for various reasons for the win

This is already really long so I'm just gonna vibe out thanks for coming to my Ted talk feel free to ask questions I probably won't be able to answer a lot of em though because my headcannons are a Mess hehe >:)

[new-sandrafilter]

True Romance: Saoirse Ronan and Timothée Chalamet on reuniting for Little Women

They may be posing in an airy lower Manhattan studio, but Timothée Chalamet and Saoirse Ronan have a way of making you feel right at home. “I made a little playlist this morning,” Chalamet announces to the room. He syncs up his cell phone to the sound system, his boyish grin widening as Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” starts blaring. He returns to the camera, which snaps him and Ronan at a furious pace.

It’s their first joint cover shoot. He’s wearing a shimmery striped shirt with high-waist trousers; she’s rocking a shirtdress, fishnet stockings, and clear stilettos. He keeps cracking her up; she musses his hair with doting affection. During a break that follows, he wanders, gripping a paper bag stuffed with assorted bagels — from Tompkins Square Bagels, which Chalamet, a lifelong New Yorker, insists are the best in the city — and offering one to anyone in his path. He sings and dances — very Elio-in-the-town-square-like — to Bob Dylan’s “Tombstone Blues.” He creeps behind a distracted Ronan before spooking her with a yelp. “I didn’t even know you were there!” she exclaims, reddening from the fright but with a smile so lovingly at ease, you sense she’s used to the prank.

They’ve known each other, after all, for some time. About three years ago, Ronan, now 25, and Chalamet, 23, met filming Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut, in which Ronan’s irrepressible heroine (briefly) romances Chalamet’s douchey amateur musician. They reunited with Gerwig last year, on the heels of Lady Bird’s Oscar-nominated success, for a bigger undertaking: a remake of the oft-remade Little Women (Dec. 25). Ronan and Chalamet slipped into the roles of tomboyish Jo March and buoyant Theodore “Laurie” Laurence, best friends who ultimately break each other’s hearts. Their courtship ranks among American culture’s oldest tales of unrequited love — made indelible by Katharine Hepburn and Douglass Montgomery, Winona Ryder and Christian Bale, and so many others — yet finds, in the hands of two of the most compelling actors of their generation, galvanizing new life.

That goes, in fact, for the whole of Gerwig’s Little Women. Her version certainly contains the snow-globe coziness of treasured adaptations past, but also carries a fizzy emotional authenticity and attention to detail. The film is remarkably lived-in, too: This take on Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel, which follows Jo and her three sisters pre– and post–American Civil War, feels plucked straight from the text in the best way, with siblings fighting like siblings, love and loss and hope and pain vividly experienced on screen.

Ronan and Chalamet’s charming big sister–little brother dynamic is not unlike the one that Jo and Laurie share in Little Women. Watch the actors play off one another, and the film’s tender realism clarifies itself: Their on-camera intimacy is just as palpable behind the scenes. Indeed, after shooting Lady Bird for a few weeks, the pair hung out regularly over the next year, making the awards-circuit rounds and scoring lead-acting Oscar nominations — Ronan for Lady Bird, Chalamet for Call Me by Your Name — before swiftly signing on to Little Women. In advance of filming in Concord, Mass. (the actual setting of the book), Gerwig and producer Amy Pascal gathered the large production’s cast and crew for rehearsals at a house just outside the town. For Ronan and Chalamet, the contrast between this and their early Lady Bird days was immense. “I felt very prideful… about how big it had gotten, how many people were there,” Chalamet recounts. “On Lady Bird it was, like, 25 people hanging out in a house!”

They fell back into each other’s rhythms instantly. “He keeps me on my toes — I’m never quite sure what he’s going to do next,” Ronan says. “That only progressed more and grew more. It helped that we do have a very natural rapport with each other…. These two characters physically need to be very comfortable with one another. They’re literally intertwined for half the film.” Chalamet adds: “In the least clichéd way possible, it really doesn’t feel like [I’m] acting sometimes [with her].”

Chalamet credits Gerwig, too, for establishing a playful, comfortable atmosphere. He thinks back to his first day of rehearsal: He reunited with Ronan. He introduced himself to Emma Watson (who plays the eldest March sister, Meg). He was guided into a third-floor conference room of a “random building” where, “all of a sudden, there was a full dance class going on.” He recalls fondly: “Everyone breaks down and becomes a little kid. This job is so trippy in that regard — you want to be serious, you want to be professional, and then it’s almost best when you’re able to be 12 years old. When it’s someone you’re actually friends with, it makes it easier.”

Ronan smirks, gearing up for a jab: “We’re not friends!” Delighted, Chalamet keeps the bit going. “We’re not friends,” he says, solemnly. For once, they’re not very convincing.

Greta Gerwig doesn’t remember a time before she knew Jo March. “[Little Women] was very much part of who I always was,” the writer-director, 36, says. “It was something my mother read to me when I was growing up. It’s been with me for a very long time.”

She joined Sony Pictures’ new Little Women adaptation when she was hired to write the script in 2016. Once Lady Bird bowed the next year, she emerged as a candidate to direct the film. “Greta had a very specific, energized, kind of punk-rock, Shakespearean take on this story,” Pascal says. “She came in and had a meeting with all of us and said, ‘I know this has been done before, but nobody can do it but me.’” She got the gig.

In her approach, Gerwig drew on her lifelong relationship with Little Women; beyond childhood, she discovered new, complex layers to the novel, and in turn to Alcott’s legacy. “As a girl, my heroine was Jo March, and as a grown lady, my heroine is Louisa May Alcott,” she says. It’s perhaps why Gerwig’s Little Women feels like the most adult — and modern — version of the story that’s reached the screen to date. The movie begins with the March sisters in adulthood — typically where the narrative’s second half begins — and unfolds like a memory play, shifting back and forth between that present-day frame and extended flashbacks to the childhood scenes etched in the American literary canon.

In that, Gerwig finds fascinating, fresh areas of exploration regarding women’s lives: the choices society forces them to make, the beauty and struggles of artistic pursuit, the consequences of rebellion. Jo’s journey as a writer anchors Gerwig’s direction; tempestuous Amy (Florence Pugh) gets more of a spotlight as she matures as a painter (and Laurie’s eventual wife); and Meg is realized with newfound nuance: “We felt it was important to show Meg juggling all her roles — a mother, a wife, a sister — whilst also celebrating her dreams, despite them being different to those of her sisters,” says Watson. But Gerwig doesn’t see herself as reinventing the wheel. “A lot of the lines in the film are taken right from the book,” she explains. “When Amy says, ‘I want to be great or nothing’ — she says that in the book! I don’t think we remember that, but she does say it.” Gerwig also loves one line spoken by the sisters’ mother, Marmee (Laura Dern), also revived in this version: “I’m angry almost every single day.”

Gerwig compiled a “bible” filled with cultural references: to Whistler tableaux of family life, to David Bowie–Jean Seberg hairdos that inspire the look of Jo’s mid-film cut, to Alcott family letters. “I wanted it to be footnote-able,” Gerwig says. “I wanted to point to it and say, ‘This is where this is from.’” She considers Alcott’s text sacred: “I wanted to treat the text as something that could be made fresh by great acting.”

Beyond those charged but less quoted Little Women lines are its famous ones — throw-pillow staples like Jo’s “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” that no adaptation is complete without. The actors rehearsed these “almost like a song,” pushing to move through them with a rapid musicality. “We [read] the book out loud,” says Dern. Gerwig expected the script’s words to be memorized precisely. “I knew I wanted them to get this cadence that felt sparkly and slightly irreverent,” she says. “I wanted to make them move at the speed of light.”

She poured the same love into iconic scenes, like Jo and Laurie’s ebullient dance that follows their first meeting. Here it goes on longer — and more vibrantly — than in any previous iteration. (Ronan says they filmed it at 3 a.m., to boot, adding, “We must have done it, like, 30 times.”) Then there’s the devastating moment when Laurie asks Jo to marry him and she rejects his proposal. Gerwig tasked the two actors to unleash here. “Emotions just bubble over,” Ronan says. “[Greta] just let us go with it, wherever it went, from take to take. What I loved about that scene is that every take would be different emotionally. It didn’t have the same trajectory.

“The two of us, it’s a relationship I have with no other director,” Ronan continues. “She makes me feel like I can try anything.”

As Ronan and Chalamet emerge from their photo-studio dressing area in impossibly chic new ensembles — she donning a form-fitting knit sweater, he a silky, ruffled top — their creative energy fills the space. They try out different poses, debating concepts and ideas with each other on the fly; at one point he wraps his arms around her waist, and she quips to no one in particular, “We’re expecting our first.” Camera snap.

They’re modeling a new brand of movie stardom — pursuing projects with a point of view, adamantly being themselves in the public eye, subverting gender norms. Their androgynous fashion performance here reflects their wardrobe shake-ups in Little Women: Gerwig and Oscar-winning costumer Jacqueline Durran (Anna Karenina) had the two actors swapping clothes throughout filming, to reinforce the masculine-feminine fluidity between Jo and Laurie. “They are two halves,” as Pascal puts it. “These are really bold characters that are really different than you’ve seen them before.”

And just as Gerwig expressed a need to direct Little Women, Ronan knew in her bones she needed to play Jo. She’d first encountered the story via the 1994 film when she was 11, and later read the book, feeling an immediate kinship with the young woman she’d come to portray. “When Louisa describes Jo, it felt like someone describing me physically: sort of gangly and stubborn and very straightforward, and went for what she wanted.” At an event for Lady Bird, she — in a very Jo kind of way — just “went at it” by approaching Gerwig. “I said, ‘So I want to be in Little Women, but only if I’m playing Jo.’” (Chalamet, for his part, was asked by Gerwig, “Hey, want to do another movie?” He responded: “Yes. Yes, please.”)

Over months of living in Concord with her castmates, Ronan discovered new depths within herself: “Jo’s ethos is ‘Everything everyone else is doing, I’m going to do the opposite.’ [I had] to try things that I’d never tried before. Be a bit messier with a performance.” Gerwig set up etiquette lessons for the cast; whatever the instructor said (“Don’t shake hands! Don’t gesticulate with your arms!”), Ronan made sure to ignore it. She speaks now of this as freeing, even transformative. “I felt like I had tapped into something I’d never gotten the opportunity to tap into before, or I just didn’t have the guts to tap into myself,” she says. “Finding that was just amazing.”

Shortly after wrapping Little Women, she filmed Wes Anderson’s next film, The French Dispatch — marking her third time costarring with Chalamet, who plays a central role. As for now? Ronan is taking a little break. “I’ll wait for the right thing to come along,” she says. “It’s lovely to be in a position at this moment where I can wait for the absolute right thing.” Same goes for Chalamet — he shot Netflix’s The King (out Oct. 11) right before Little Women and just completed production on Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation. “It’s the first time in almost two years I’ve gotten a breath, so I’m savoring it.”

It’s been a long day. They’re back in comfy clothes; Ronan is taking a late lunch. It feels like both actors — as another whirlwind of acclaim and press and romance-shipping awaits — are at a kind of peace, exhausted but satisfyingly so. Little Women is the biggest movie either has done to date; more attention, as they inhabit such revered characters, is sure to follow. “I just haven’t thought about it that way,” Ronan admits. “Maybe because it’s just Greta — even though it’s on a much bigger scale, she wanted it to feel like Lady Bird.”

Ronan understands the timeless power of Little Women, of course: “It’s as important to tell Little Women right now as it would be at any point in our lifetime.” She points to this pop culture climate of “celebrating female friendships and sisterhood,” and continues, “It’s a story that’s full of love. That will always be relevant.”

She turns toward Chalamet, and you realize the love they brought to Alcott’s classic is what first blossomed between them on Lady Bird. “I love that in Lady Bird, you broke my heart,” she says to him softly. “In Little Women, I got to break your heart.” (Chalamet, ever the goofball, finds an obvious opening: “Yes, that’s true. Then I married your sister. Ha, ha, ha!”)

If this all sounds a little idyllic, well, neither actor — nor Gerwig, nor Pascal, nor the rest of the cast — can do much to convince you otherwise. Shifting back to Little Women’s timelessness, and reflecting on Ronan’s comments about it, Chalamet says, “I don’t know how to add to that.” Instead he turns back to his costar, his expression suddenly sincere, filled with gratitude. “But if I can add one little dose of information,” he says with a nervous laugh. “And not just because she’s sitting next to me.” He credits Ronan with bringing that “timeless energy.” He says “thank God” they were able to make the movie. “It’s so rare with Saoirse — I’m so f—ing grateful to get to work with her,” he says. “Whatever book I write for myself when I’m older, to look back on —” He stops himself. “Well, this is a bigger conversation.”

But Ronan, chuckling, doesn’t let him off the hook. “Will I have, like, a chapter?” And Chalamet laughs — another opening, another chance to act with his greatest scene partner, to see what journey of creation and discovery they’ll go on next. “A chapter of Saoirse,” he says.

At this rate, one chapter won’t suffice.

[radioromantic-moved]

i lied i’ve got thoughts again. these are always long but this one’s Long long since i infodumped for a couple of paragraphs in the middle because i deal with emotions through lengthy rants.

-LOVED fern creature. easily one of my favorite parts of the ep. i especially love that we launched into that right off the bat with no preamble.

-hartro’s good with disguises huh? good with costumes? good with...acting?

-s3 ending leaked. the main cast forms their own traveling theater production. i am speaking that into reality the way i did with enola’s return and hartro’s redemption. merediths if you can give me one thing let it be this

-i badly want to make a joke about helen’s “it’s very tasteful. there’s ferns.”

-me when someone asks me if stellar firma season 3 is any good. is that anything

-something something trexel spiral avatar something something they like ferns

-HARTRO’S RED LINE CONSPIRACY BOARD...you iconic little fucking gayperson i adore you. mwah. 

-okay i am thinking so much about trexel’s protagonist complex both on a meta level and a canon level. i mean on the canon level it’s just kinda sad the way most trexel stuff is. feels very emblematic of how he genuinely really needs people to pay attention to him whether it’s good or bad and it’s just now sinking in that part of that might be because of the parental neglect shit shit shit

-but on a meta level it’s even better. i was actually thinking about this in regards to tma the other day when i was reading the summary of it on the rq website. and so as not to spoil anything it obv just talks about jon trying to get the archives in order and having paranormal experiences, which is so much funnier in context when you know that. from the standpoint we’re at now it feels like that was an entirely different show. which is where we’re going with sf too i think, but the craziest part of that is that going in most people (me included) didn’t even expect david to be the main character. in the summary you’ve got “trexel geistman and his assistant.” if you count the teaser as canon content, he’s technically the first character we hear speak. not even touching on the aerith and bob situation (sidenote he’s definitely trans because only trexel would name himself trexel). then there’s the plot itself, which david and hartro lampshade point blank, and even call it “the plot.” this started as goofy planet-designing adventures and now it’s a socialist clone uprising, with briefs and submissions as the comic relief. and trexel’s not good at consultancy, and i’m pretty sure he knows that at some level, but he knows where he stands with it, and as long as he keeps doing what he’s doing at least he’s not gonna be the one getting hurt. but he’s terrible with change, and would rather stick where he is even if it’s worse for him (david’s place...f). he doesn’t have ideas for this, people keep leaving him out, and he’s becoming -gasp- a deuteragonist. maybe it’s giving him too much credit to say he knows that something big’s going on and he’s not at the center of it, but i just know that learning to be sidelined (or even, wonder of wonders, finding a way to Help?) could be good for him if he wasn’t such a FUCKING ASSHOLE.

-honestly though i really love the trope of “person who’s tried their entire life to be special is wholly unremarkable” paired with “chosen one who would do anything to not be the chosen one.” wait a second that’s oren and dario in scream all night huh.

-TIME IS A FLAT CIRCLE.

-they/he david rights!!! but also :( because david is having to put himself down again. fuck you trexel!! be nicer to your only friend!!

-imogen snark is music to my ears. i love her i love her i love her

-wait we get a SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION for SWOLE CLONES??? THAT’S what we’re choosing to delve into? this sounds like i’m criticizing it which i’m not, i actually think that’s hilarious and i LOVE ridiculous scientific explanations of things so actually this might be my favorite part of the episode.

-no this episode’s genuinely given me a lot to think about but i think i’m gonna relisten to it in a little while when my emotions aren’t all fucked up. everyone is such DORKS and i love them (i love david and hartro and imogen. trexel’s on thin ice. i still haven’t forgiven him for threatening to leak everyone’s secrets because of his existential crisis.)

[aion-rsa]

Why the Studio Kept Santa Claus Being in Miracle on 34th Street a Secret

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If you ever sit down to watch 20th Century Fox’s original trailer for Miracle on 34th Street, a few things might appear strange. Right off the bat it’s unique—unprecedented even—to market a new release without any real footage from the film. Other than a few seconds of the movie’s opening titles and an actual shot from the picture’s final seconds, audiences were told nothing about Miracle on 34th Street other than it was “hilarious!” “exciting!” and, dare they say it, “groovy!”

There was of course a reason for this: 20th Century Fox, and more specifically studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, had absolutely no faith in the feel-good holiday movie and didn’t even want the audience to know it was a holiday movie. Zanuck’s insistence that the film open in New York City on June 4 probably added to their skittishness toward the subject matter.

An all-time Christmas movie classic today, Miracle on 34th Street pivots on the marvelous idea that Macy’s shopping mall Santa Claus (Edmund Gwenn) believes he genuinely is Santa—even going by the name Kris Kringle on his identification. And to prove this, he’ll even take the matter to court with the help of a couple of doubting Thomases like his boss, career woman Doris Walker (Maureen O’Hara), and her precocious daughter Susan (Natalie Wood).

An ingenious concept by Valentine Davies, who’d go on to write a book out of his high-concept, and penned for the screen by the film’s director George Seaton, the story enchanted everyone who came across it. Except Zanuck. He didn’t like the concept on the page and was reluctant to greenlight it; and then he liked it even less when he saw Seaton’s cut of the movie.

“[Darryl] Zanuck wasn’t sure it would be a success, so he had it released in June when movie attendance is highest, rather than wait for Christmas,” O’Hara wrote in her memoir ‘Tis Herself. “In fact, the publicity campaign barely talked about Christmas at all.”

Director Seaton’s original pitch was for the film to open in New York City on Thanksgiving, likely in no small part because the movie itself opens during the then quite regionally specific Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. However, Zanuck balked at the idea, believing the film would vanish from theaters quickly.

Some accounts suggest the studio head was knowingly gaming the tiered rollout of theatrical releases in the 1940s—wide releases would not become common until the 1970s—and that Zanuck foresaw the advantage of Miracle on 34th Street playing in major cities during the summer and then trickling down to the smaller and rural parts of the country in the fall. Yet given that Zanuck was reportedly astonished his Christmas movie was doing big business all the way through Christmas, it’s likely he didn’t believe the actual hype his studio plastered in the marketing for the film.

Which brings us back to that trailer. How do you market a Christmas movie where the main character believes he’s Santa without, you know, mentioning Christmas or Santa? The answer was to market a five-minute sketch in which a parody of a studio executive (who seems both as oblivious and ultimately wiser than Zanuck) wanders around the Fox lot hearing studio stars not in Miracle on 34th Street gush about how wonderful it is.

In the trailer, which you can view below, a nondescript boss named Bob rejects Fox’s marketing department for claiming a movie can be both exciting and tender (he insists he doesn’t need to watch it to sell it). However, as he prowls his own studio, he runs into Rex Harrison, the future Professor Higgins himself trying to cut an unconvincing figure as a man’s man. Harrison proclaims, “I never heard laughs like that in the theater before. Don’t miss it… I don’t know if the women will like it, but it’s a great man’s picture!”

Elsewhere, poor Bob bumps into Anne Baxter, who he helpfully reminds audiences just won an Oscar for The Razor’s Edge. After the congratulation though, he’s flummoxed to learn Anne also adored 34th Street but “I don’t know how the men are going to like it [because] it’s a great woman’s picture.”

Finally, the now totally befuddled exec runs into teen star Peggy Ann Garner—just adorably learning to drive—and singer-actor Dick Haymes. Now just what exactly the married with children 30-year-old Haymes is doing in a car with the studio’s teen sensation is never explained. But what is, is that Dick was kept “on the edge of his seat every second” of the film’s last 20 minutes, and that Peggy Ann thought the movie was “really groovy” too.

So Bob finally resigns himself to the fact he needs to watch this sucker, and after he does, he tells us it’s all of those things, and you’ll also love it! Just don’t ask what it’s about!

The secretive marketing campaign carried over to the film’s poster, which put hand drawn portraits of O’Hara and co-star John Payne across 50 percent of the one-sheet, as well as their names above the title. Gwenn’s Kris Kringle, however, is relegated to the background in a brown suit as he hugs young Wood like a dear old grandfather.

Nowhere in any of the marketing are the words “Christmas” or “Santa Claus” even teased. It’s a bizarre gambit for what was so clearly a holiday movie. And yet, it didn’t matter.

Read more

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When audiences and critics finally saw Miracle on 34th Street for themselves, they were as charmed then as we are more than 70 years later. Gwenn, who’d go on to win an Academy Award for playing Kris, much to Zanuck’s delight (the film also won a screenplay Oscar), instantly became iconic with the kind twinkle in his eye and entirely earnest depiction of a Santa Claus who walks among us. Genuinely, there may be little as endearingly cheerful as watching Gwenn’s St. Nick sing Christmas carols in Dutch with an orphaned immigrant.

Wood’s still convincingly natural performance as the skeptical child who’s made a true believer also made her the child actor of her age and launched her on to a movie star career..

Miracle on 34th Street remains one of the shinier highlights of the Christmas movie canon, and the rare example of a film changing the holiday season itself. Indeed, it was the movie’s actual footage of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, breathlessly filmed over a few hours during the real 1946 event, that turned the local tradition into a national celebration that would soon be televised from coast-to-coast in the next decade on a newfangled technology called television.

Not bad for a film the studio was afraid to show even one red cap or white whisker of in its ad campaign.

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[curious-minx]

A strong Bob’s Burgers flutters its wings of relevancy. The Simpsons get rid of the Simpsons.

“Your parents are what’s wrong with society” - Bob to Linda 

The best thing about the latest season of Bob’s Burgers is that it does not full on embrace the reality of the Pandemic, but finds way to tip around relevant issues. As a viewer my heart’s ache for Louise grows stronger while 2020 concerts being canceled. Gene’s holiday spent in writhing illness induced  agony isolation from his family is more than just an upset stomach. In this latest episode, “The Terminalator II: Terminals of Endearment,”a care-free frolic through an airport terminal becomes a lot more compelling as many of us viewers are wondering if we will ever darken an airport gate ever again.

What hits this weary viewer harder than sickly nostalgia for plastic airport food court offerings or impulse buy stores that look like drug fronts , but Bob’s disdain for seeing his elderly Floridian in-laws. The hackiest, most tired horse in the comedy stable becomes so much more with Quarantine brain.  The question this episode poses is,“Why bother traveling when you can have all the necessary family bonding at the airport?” The episode answers this question by gifting us Veep’s Timothy Simons’ audience surrogate TSA member. The Airport in general gets a pretty good wrap in the Bob’s Burgers verse. The employees working the airport are more or less helpful and patient with this meandering family’s hijinks, none of the sinister heartless bureaucracy seen in Babe Pig in The City. This is the detail that makes the slight nod and wink to Wings work as more than a wink or a nod. Having a fun TSA worker though instead of someone working at one of those airport stores that sell watches or an airport restauranteur would have been fun, but Jon Glaser and Timothy Simons are two thorny gentlemen born to play a genial front service and TSA agents. 

Seen above: Renee Taylor voicing Allen Gregory’s Principal 

Seeing our family over the holidays is often as thoughtless as checking a box, “I’m not a robot, I like to spend time with my family. I’m a good person.” Despite the fact that spending time with our families is often an exhaustive wringing out your brain of passive aggressive needling. For the Belcher’s the elderly are not founts of wisdom but are over grown toddlers too loud, leaky, creaky and confused to be much in the way of fun. They are not hate mongers like many of ours Nanas and Peepaws, Linda’s parents only serve as catalysts for casually paced shenanigans. Linda’s parents Al, voiced by series regular Sam Seder and the iconic Renee Taylor as Gloria are relegated to being flaky from eczema and too loud on the phone. One underlying thread present in this episode is that Linda has a lot in common with her parents making her the perfect Parental pawn. At one point in the episode Louise explicitly drives home how similar Linda and her mom’s voices are. For me this read as the show winking at John Roberts’ performance as Linda being largely indebted to an icon like Renee Taylor. Taylor once vivacious sex pot Eva Braun in the Producers more or less becomes overshadowed by her role as Sylvia Fine in the Nanny. Although I would be remiss to say that Renee Taylor is no stranger to the Fox Animation Domination family previously starring as the Principal in Allen Gregory. 

The episode inspired me to go back and revisit one of John Roberts Brooklyn Mom videos he was performing in the mid 00’s. His video “Mother’s Day” essential serves as a demo reel for Linda and in general a truly fine piece of online comedy video filmmaking. Roberts’ takes what could be a loud and brash stereotype and really takes his beats and delivers an authentic character that provides the foundation for Linda. The pacing and energy of this video is a stark contrast to the modern comedy front-facing camera comedy videos littering Twitter timelines and Tik Toks. The fact that John Roberts still approaches Linda as a sympathetic fully dimensional character which is not often the case in live-action sitcoms. 

The sideplot with Louise dragging her siblings on a campaign for decorative first flyer wings is a succinct and nice addition preventing the episode from being too claustrophobic. The image of an emergency bed bound Teddie as a result of a food allergy is one of those things visuals that once again that lands much differently with Quarantine brain. Regardless I am always grateful for whatever amount of Teddie the show is willing to provide us. 

Overall I give this episode four wings and a broken half wing out of five. A true season 11 highlight!

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The Simpsons The Road to Cincinnati is one of those rare episodes that gets rid of that pesky Simpsons problem by kicking them out of their show. Instead of the titular nuclear family we get an entire episode based around a Griffin and Stewie styled road trip romp with Principal Skinner and Super Intendant Chalmers. Excuse me, Superintendent Geribaldi Chalmers. A fact I am sure will definitely make official Simpsons Wiki canon and be something referenced in future episodes *eye roll emoji*. 

This episode has some weird pent up old man aggression. Seeing as this is an episode written by Princeton and Harvard grad Jeff Westbrook that is definitely to expected. Apparently the dude really thinks pretty low of cyclists. So much so that the episode comes to a screeching halt when Jeff Westbrook has to pat his own back from coming up with a Biker Bar turning out to be a Cyclist Bar. Also, don’t get Westbrook started on what he thinks about Improv Shakespeare! 

Removing the Simpsons from the Simpsons is an ignoble experiment. I can see the temptation and Chalmers and Skinner are a duo that yields some of the shows more iconic and meme-worthy moments. Plopping them down into an entire episode focusing on them doesn’t prove disastrous, instead it lives up to the late Simpsons business model of underwhelming the hell out of you. 

The episode suffers from a case of “and then…and then… and then” plot structuring. A criticism I have picked up from Chuck Palahniuk’s road trip masterpiece to top all road trips, Invisible Monsters. Things have taken a turn for the worse when I am writing one of these reviews and am searching for anything else to write about. Nothing in this episode is flat out bad and it’s an interesting failed experiment. A rotten piece of Steamed Ham served with a signature smugness typical of an algorithm researcher. :P

Skip. 

[harry-lloyd]

In many ways, the horrible wig was the best thing to happen to Harry Lloyd.

The shock of platinum blonde hair, slashed to a sensible bob at his shoulders like a high-fashion Legolas, was the coif that tied Lloyd’s indelible, insufferable Game of Thrones character together: Viserys Targaryen, the petulant narcissist whose play for the Iron Throne melts along with the rest of him under a pot of molten metal poured over his head, one of the show’s first and most iconic gruesome death scenes.

The splashy HBO production was the biggest job the young actor had ever landed, and as a character with an unmistakable, unforgettable look, to boot— the better to sear into TV fans’ consciousness.

Blessedly, that unmistakable, unforgettable look in no way actually resembled him, a then-27-year-old rising star with short, dark brown hair and alabaster complexion. He played one of the most memorable characters in recent TV history on possibly the last truly massive global TV phenomenon, yet, by the grace of a wig, he was still unrecognizable.

“I kind of loved that,” Lloyd tells The Daily Beast over Zoom from the loft study in his North London home. “And I kind of loved that he died. He had this lovely arc, and he still has his place in this enormous and infamous canon.”

Given how vivid that arc is in Thrones lore, it’s almost startling to remember that he was only on five episodes of the show.

“I had my go,” he says. “I got in early and I got out early. And he didn’t look like me, which, number one, is good because he is a little shit. And so I was happy to not have people throwing stuff at me in the streets. But number two, and I didn’t notice at the time, but it has since become the biggest show on TV. It doesn’t make me worry about being typecast so much.”

In the years since becoming a scalded puddle of boiling jewels and flesh, Lloyd has been able to shapeshift through an impressive résumé of prestige TV series and award-nominated films—Manhattan, Wolf Hall, Counterpart, Legion, The Theory of Everything—relieved of the kind of limitations actors who play little shits in garish white wigs on TV’s biggest show typically shoulder.

The occasion for our conversation is yet another transformation, as Bernard Marx in Brave New World, the splashy adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian sci-fi novel. The series is the marquee original offering for Wednesday’s launch of the new Peacock streaming service, casting Downton Abbey alum Jessica Brown Findlay and Han Solo himself, Alden Ehrenreich, alongside Lloyd in an updated take on the classic work.

Brave New World thwarts the idea of a restrictive, Orwellian dystopia with one in which society is instead forced into surrendering their inhibitions. “Welcome to New London,” a prologue explains. “We have three rules. No privacy. No family. No monogamy. Everyone is very happy.”

The new series boasts modernized flourishes when it comes to style—if there had been this much sex in Huxley’s book, we would have paid far more attention to it in high school—and sensibility; some of the problematically racist and misogynistic themes and plot points have been corrected.

Lloyd’s Bernard is an upper echelon member of society, called an Alpha-Plus, whose job is to maintain social order. Throughout the series, he experiences a crisis of conscience, an existential awakening at odds with the blissful stasis he’s meant to both control and enjoy.

If a narrow escape from typecasting and a career playing snooty, megalomaniacal manchildren has meant a diverse array of opportunity for Lloyd, then Brave New World marks more new territory: It’s his first outright leading role.

Lloyd had never read Huxley’s book before being cast, but was impressed by the ambition of the script, “almost like a mega tentpole movie in scale” but esoteric and satirical at the same time. “I was like, this has the whole package if they can shoot this, but I don’t think they can.”

It took one day on set for him to catch wise to the technical prowess at play. “I was like, wow, this really is a brave new world,” he says.

Don’t worry. He promptly scoffed at himself and rolled his eyes.

It is one of the best opening lines to a profile that I’ve read, from a 2011 feature on Lloyd that ran in Britain’s The Independent: “There was a time when Harry Lloyd worried that he was forever going to be typecast—as a woman.”

It was in reference to Lloyd’s days as a student at Eton College, where the young teen’s voice had not yet broken and he was cast as women in a slew of all-male Shakespeare productions.

Here we were prepping to engage with Lloyd about the perils of typecasting following his Thrones stint, ignorant of the fact that he had already confronted the issue decades earlier.

Lloyd laughs good-naturedly when the era of fake bras and bonnets is brought up.

“I hated it,” he says. Just when he had vowed never to agree to it again, in his last year at school he was asked to play Rosalind in As You Like It, by all counts a fantastic leading part. He nailed it, and earned raves. “At an all-boys boarding school, it took balls to put on tights, as it was.” A perfectly-earned smirk at his own joke follows.

The truth is that being typecast or pigeon-holed is a stressor that followed Lloyd, who grew up in London with parents who worked in the book industry. “Sometimes it’s just the face you have at a certain age…” he says.

His first major role came at age 15 in the BBC’s 1999 adaptation of David Copperfield, opposite Daniel Radcliffe. (Adding another fascinating layer to the trivia: Lloyd himself is the great-great-great grandson of Charles Dickens.) One of his first jobs after that was playing a bullying prefect in the series Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

“I guess that’s what I looked like, and I did that a couple of times,” he says. “Then I was like, I don’t really want to just be that guy. He’s a bit of a dick. And then I think next up I played the murderer in some procedural police thing, some young kid that’s gone sideways.”

Each time he felt a box starting to close its sides around him, he actively sought out something different. Having Great Expectations, in which he played Herbert Pocket, “the loveliest, most benign chap you’d ever meet,” air months after his Thrones debut was key. But he can’t refute that, with or without a platinum wig, there’s something about the way he looks that telegraphs a certain kind of sinister character.

“If I turn up in a murder thing, it’s often me who’s done it,” he says, grinning. “I don’t want to give anything away from the stuff I’ve been in. But I don’t know, there’s something about my face that is like, ‘He could do it.’”

After he had finished filming his part on Thrones and the series was about to come out, he was cast in the buzzy West End production of the Tony-winning play The Little Dog Laughed.

If you’re familiar with the work, a satire about Hollywood illusion (and delusion) in which an acerbic, big-wig agent crisis manages her rising-star client’s pesky “recurring case of homosexuality,” you understand why it’s a fairly hilarious, if sobering, project to be involved in just as an actor’s own fame and industry profile is about to skyrocket.

“Because I was about to be on Game of Thrones, I thought, this is the time for me to get an American agent,” he recalls. “And so the American agents, when they were in London, would come and see me in this play, which basically looks at agenting and their ways with quite a big, angry magnifying glass. They would come backstage and say, ‘Look, I am not like that…’” He laughs. “It was always quite a funny way to start the proceedings.”

Having starred in episodes of Dr. Who and played Charles Xavier in Legion, not to mention his connection to Thrones, Lloyd has had his taste of the particular brand of rabid, Comic-Con fandom. Though he prefers to classify himself as “adjacent-adjacent” to that world.

While there are certainly those who will know right away that he was a Targaryen, what he gets more of is a “Wait, how do I know you?” awkward conversation. “Genuinely, people are like, ‘Hey, did I go to school with you?’ I’m at that level of renown. You can’t quite place why you might recognize me.”

Asked how life under the coronavirus shutdown has been, Lloyd is very British about the months spent with his wife and their almost-2-year-old. “We’ve done alright,” he says. “We learned how to finally kind of plan our fridge. And now we know how to do our shopping tactically. We cooked some good stuff.”

For fear of sounding “solipsistic,” to use a word employed often in Brave New World, he identifies the extended time home with typical feelings actors have throughout their career.

“You have accelerated times in your life when things happen like a dream,” he says. “Things are so fast and our whole world’s rebuilt entirely every time you get a job. And then is the come-down and the fallout.”

He remembers that feeling from when he was doing plays: the energy and pace of putting on the show, and then a few weeks after it ends there’s a massive crash.

“It feels a bit like you’re in lockdown. You stare around on a Tuesday afternoon. You don’t want to watch anything. You don’t know what to do or who to call, and you kind of lose your style. There’s been a bit of that.”

Just when things got to the point that he felt like he might lose his mind, he was contracted to record an audiobook. So for a couple of days a week, he would sit up in his “sweatbox made out of duvets” and read Great Expectations aloud for Penguin. “That saved me for sure.”

On the subject of works by his great-great-great grandfather, Lloyd used to be at a loss for what to do when people brought it up. Often they would say, “Congratulations!” on the relation, as if he had accomplished something himself by being born into Charles Dickens’ lineage. “But these days, I’ll take it, I’ve decided. ‘Yeah, thank you so much.’ It’s a nice thing to celebrate.”

The 150th anniversary of Dickens’ death was in June. There had been plans for a commemoration ceremony at Westminster Abbey that, because of the shutdown, became a Zoom event instead.

“I don’t know how many people’s deaths get a 150th anniversary,” he says. “The fact that I have any kind of personal connection with that is very much secondary. But something that I’m very proud of.”

At risk of belaboring the point, we ask if working on any of the Dickens adaptations he’s starred in on TV or recording this audiobook makes Lloyd feel any sort of profound or poignant connection to him.

He laughs. “I can’t point to a physical sensation like hairs in the back of my neck standing. ‘I feel him. It’s me and Chucky D in the room right now.’”

[nazariolahela]

Something Domestic: Chapter 1

A/N: Hey y'all! This is a new TRR AU I’ve been working on. This story is told in first-person narrative, from Riley’s (MC) POV. There will likely be smidges of canon in this, but not too much. Thanks for reading, and please leave feedback, and/or if you would like to be tagged.

Thanks to my guardian angel and internet best friend forever, @burnsoslow. I appreciate you, boo! 😘

Synopsis: When Riley Brooks takes a new job as a nanny for the affluent Rhys family in New York’s Upper East Side, she assumes she’s just going to care for the children of the couple who hired her. But instead of just school pick-ups and afternoon snacks, she also finds herself spending time with Liam, the handsome divorced dad. Can Riley control her feelings for Liam while still performing the job she was hired for?

All characters are the property of Pixelberry Studios. Thanks for allowing me to borrow them.

Chapter Summary: Riley meets her new employers.

The city zooms by as I stare out the tinted windows of the town car I’m riding in. I’m on my way to interview for the nanny position for one of the most upscale families in New York and my palms are damp. What if the kids don’t like me? What if I don’t like them? Or the parents for that matter. What if the father tries to seduce me? Will the mother have me fired because she thinks I’m sleeping with her husband? Thoughts invade my mind as I try to calm myself. I’ve never nannied for a family of this stature before and I don’t know much about them, other than who they are. Depending on how this job goes, it could make or break my career.

The car stops in front of a luxurious penthouse. I crane my neck to scale the height of the building. 60, maybe 70 floors. Who knows? The driver opens the door for me and I exit the vehicle, making my way to the entrance. I’m greeted by a well-dressed doorman.

“Good afternoon. Can I help you, miss?” he says, smiling.

“Riley Brooks. I’m here to see the Rhys family,” I reply, fumbling with the untucked hem of my blouse, quickly tucking it back in the waistband of my skirt. He nods and steps aside, holding the door open for me.

I walk through the magnificent entry vestibule and enter the double-height marble lobby. The view makes me stop in my tracks. This place is incredible. It rivals the lobby of a five-star hotel. A cream-colored banquette round settee sofa sits in the middle of the room, with two circular metal end tables on each side. A gold metal-framed coffee table with a clear beveled glass top sits next to two upholstered grain Italian leather high back chairs. Strewn across the surface are copies of Robb Report, The New Yorker, and DuPont Registry. A crystal chandelier hangs from the ceiling, illuminating the room in a warm glow.

A single receptionist desk presides on the left side of the room, where a short, middle-aged woman with chestnut brown hair sits, thumbing through the latest issue of Trend Magazine. When she notices me, her head shoots up and she tucks the magazine under a stack of papers.

“Welcome. What can I do for you today, miss…?” she pauses, studying my face. “Are you a resident here?”

“I’m not. I have an 11 a.m. meeting with the Rhys family for their nanny position. My name is Riley Brooks.”

She eyes me incredulously. “You seem a little young to be a nanny,” she huffs, then flips through an appointment book. “Ah yes, Miss Brooks. The Rhys are expecting you. Take the elevator up to the Penthouse level. Someone will be there to let you in.” She nods her head toward the elevator on the right side of the room and returns to her magazine.

I make my way through the lobby and step onto the elevator. I take a deep breath and press “PH,” my hands trembling slightly. The car jolts and begins its ascent to the top floor. I pull out my phone and shoot off a quick text to my best friend and roommate Hana, filling her in.

I smile, tucking the phone back into my purse as the elevator car arrives at the top. The door glides open and I step out into the foyer. As I walk through to the main part of the penthouse, I’m immediately blown away by how elegant this place is. The main floor is a massive open cellar with impressive double-height ceilings. The interior has a fresh and modern style, flooded with natural sunlight coming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows. A set of heels clicking on the marble tile breaks me from my trance and I turn to see a stunning woman with a shoulder-length blonde bob coming in my direction. She’s around my height with a slim build. Her black polka dot blazer and red pants hug the curves of her body. Her emerald green eyes are piercing as they look me up and down.

“Ah. You must be the new nanny. I’m Madeleine Karlington,” she says, extending her manicured hand. I take it in mine and give her a hearty shake. “Come. Everyone else is in the living room,” she says, pulling back her hand before turning and heading back in the direction she came. 

I follow behind her, taking in the penthouse. She leads me through the large eat-in kitchen with imported counters and top-of-the-line appliances, to the living room. A wood-burning fireplace adorns the only wall without windows. Three large floor-to-ceiling windows give me an unobstructed East, South, and West view showcasing the East River and every iconic landmark midtown building in the city. The sun casts a warm glow through the already bright room. There’s no way a family with children lives here. The room is all-white-everything. 

I turn away from the windows to my left and see a tall man with sandy blonde hair rise from the plush white sofa. Good lord, he’s an Adonis. He’s at least six foot four, his thick blond hair is parted slightly on the left side of his head, his high cheekbones shape his beautiful face. His sapphire blue eyes glitter, making any woman who looks into them weak in the knees. His soft pink lips frame his straight white teeth, making his smile to-die-for. He’s wearing a maroon sweater over a white dress shirt, and dark denim jeans. Through his sweater, I can make out the outlines of his muscles. He definitely works out. I’m pulled from my daydream to see a young boy and girl both with platinum locks staring me down from their hiding place behind their father’s legs.

Before anyone can speak, Madeleine introduces me to her family. “This is Riley. She’s here to interview for your new nanny. Please be respectful.” She motions me to the center of the room where the sofa and a matching loveseat and chair are sitting in a semicircle with a glass-top coffee table in the center. Liam and the children take a seat on the sofa. I sit down in the chair and smile at the kids. Madeleine sits down on the loveseat and turns to me.

“So, Riley. Tell us a little bit about yourself,” she says, leaning forward to retrieve a martini from the coffee table. She then sits back and takes a long pull from her glass.

I take a deep breath. “Well, I’m 25. I’m originally from Brooklyn, I have a BS in Early Childhood Education from NYU Steinhardt. I was going to become a teacher, but I took a job with the nanny agency to pay for school and ended up falling in love with it. I’ve been a nanny full-time for two years now, and I’m really looking forward to getting to know all of you,” I smile, turning towards the kids, who are curled up next to their father on the sofa. My eyes travel up to his face, and his blue eyes sparkle as he smiles at me.

“Riley, it’s so nice to meet you. I’m Liam, and this is Charlotte and Phillip. Charlotte is six, Phillip is four,” he says, wrapping an arm around each child, snuggling them close to his body.

As he speaks, I catch myself fantasizing about him. I imagine those blue eyes staring into mine as I rip off his sweater and run my hands down his broad chest. My pulse races as I think about kissing those lips. My eyes travel down the length of his torso to his hands as they rest on each child’s shoulder. His hands are just as perfect as the rest of him, long fingers ending in short, clean nails. I pause at how big they are. He’s a tall guy, so I’m not surprised by their size, but I’m shocked at just how big they are. My mind reverts to that old saying, “Big Hands, Big Feet…” and I feel a blush creep up my face. Stop it. He’s your potential boss.

Shaking the thoughts from my mind, I focus my attention on the kids. Charlotte, the six-year-old, has her mother’s stunning emerald green eyes and a head of platinum blonde hair pulled into two pigtail braids that rest on her shoulders. Her pudgy cheeks are tinted a rosy pink and her nose curves up at a slight point. She’s wearing a light green dress with a blue bow and white sandals. Judging by how her mom looks, she’s going to be a knockout when she grows up. Phillip, the four-year-old, has a mess of sandy blonde hair atop his head, and the same sapphire blues as his dad. His pert nose sits on his face, nostrils caked with a thin-layer of snot.

I straighten up and turn my attention back to Liam and then Madeleine. “So, tell me more about yourselves,” I say. Madeleine looks to me, then Liam, then back to me. “Well, I work in PR for Fydoria Communications and Liam is CEO of Cordonia Enterprises. We’ve lived in this penthouse for about seven years. Liam spends about 50/50 time between the office and here, so occasionally, you’ll see him around the house, but he’ll be working, so you’ll need to tend to the children full-time. I work from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., so I’m usually here around six to relieve you of your duties. We won’t require you to work on weekends unless something comes up where both of us are unavailable, and we’ll try to give you twelve hours notice.”

“Okay,” I reply. “Can you tell me about what my duties with the kids will be?”

Liam chimes in. “Charlotte is starting first grade at Stormholt Elementary in a few weeks, and Phillip stays home so you’ll be with him full-time while Charlotte’s in school. We’ll need you to drop her off at 8 a.m. and pick her up at 3:30 p.m., as well as help her with her homework and handle snacks,” he says.

I nod. “Do you have a vehicle I can use for pick-ups and drop-offs? I don’t drive.”

Madeleine answers, “We have a town car and a driver at your disposal. You can use them any time you have the children. The driver lives in an apartment here in the building and he’s on-call during work hours, so you can just call him and he’ll take you where you need to go.”

I listen intently, absorbing every bit of information about the job. Take the kids to school, pick them up, feed and tend to them until their parents get home. Seems easy enough. “Will I be required to cook or clean anything while I’m here?” I ask.

Liam chuckles and shakes his head. “No. We have a cleaning service that comes on Saturdays, and our personal chef Mira comes on Sundays. The only cooking and cleaning you’ll need to do is to prepare snacks for the kids and pick up any mess you or they make.” 

Charlotte starts tugging on his Liam’s shirt, “Daddy. I’m bored,” she whines, while Phillip rubs his eyes and stifles a yawn. He looks down at the children, then across to Madeleine, whose expression is unreadable. “The kids are getting fidgety which means it’s almost naptime. Do you have any questions for Riley?” he asks her.

She downs the rest of her martini and sets the glass on the table. “We’ve already done an extensive background check on her through the agency, so I know she’s not a criminal. I also have copies of her resume and college transcript, so I know her credentials are legitimate. If you don’t have any other questions, I think we’re finished here.”

Liam’s lips curl into a grin and he turns his attention to me, “I have just one more question. When can you start?”