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abigailnussbaum · 4 years ago

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Infinity Train, S1-3

Infinity Train is a Cartoon Network animated series (now transferred to HBO Max) that premiered last year. Three seasons, each made up of ten 10-minute episodes, have aired, so you can watch the whole thing in an afternoon. The premise is quite familiar - the titular train picks up passengers (mostly, though not always, children) who are at some kind of crossroads in their lives. As they traverse cars filled with challenges, puzzles, dangers, and sometimes just nifty environments to explore, the passengers work through whatever issue brought them on to the train. Their progress towards wellness is reflected in a number that appears on their hand, and when the number drops to zero a vortex appears and returns them to their home. The train also contains native inhabitants, usually referred to as “denizens”, who sometimes help the passengers, sometimes hinder them, and are often just going about their own lives.

Like I said, the sort of premise familiar from many children’s stories, in which a character who is struggling with some important challenge or milestone is whisked off to a fantasy setting that just happens to have been tailored to help them work through their problems. The execution is pretty fantastic, with both the writing and animation striking a compelling mixture of humor and emotional depth. The train itself is a wonderful creation, vast and often surreal or even phantasmagorical, and the denizens are quirky and winning in their own right, not just as reflections of the passengers’ needs. The show also features an absolutely stacked voice cast, with guest appearances from Kate Mulgrew, Bradley Whitford, Ernie Hudson, Lena Headey, and many others.

But what I find fascinating about Infinity Train is how, almost from the first episode, it sets to work examining the core assumptions of its story template, chiefly the idea that the train is helping people, and that its kind of help is effective and positive. As someone who grew up on stories like Infinity Train and didn’t question their premise until I got older, it’s fun to watch a show that leans right into those inherent problems.

The first season of Infinity Train tells its story pretty straight. Our protagonist is Tulip, a tween who is struggling with her parents’ recent divorce. When a scheduling snafu between them leaves Tulip unable to get to a youth coding camp she’d been dreaming of, she impulsively runs away from home, and ends up being picked up by the train. There, she’s quickly joined by a royal corgi called Atticus, and a scatterbrained robot called One-One, who try to help her in her journey towards the train’s engine. Along the way, the trio are menaced by a sinister, semi-robotic figure who is destroying the environments in the train’s cars, and who seems to be fixated on One-One.

Even in this fairly basic spin on the story, a few reservations crop up: first, Tulip doesn’t actually have a real problem. Yes, her parents’ divorce has put a strain on her, but she still seems fairly well-adjusted - she has friends and interests and, apart from the ill-advised decision to run away, doesn’t seem to be acting out in dangerous ways. The things she learns over the course of her journey through the train - to face up to the hurt that her family’s breakdown has caused her, to admit that her parents’ marriage wasn’t perfect, to realize that their divorce wasn’t her fault, to ask for help when she needs it - are probably things she would have figured out as she gained some distance from the trauma of the divorce (or, for that matter, that any halfway-decent child psychologist would have helped her realize). It’s hard to justify a cosmic interference in her life, much less one that puts her in mortal danger, as the journey up the Infinity Train often does

And sure, this is a children’s adventure story, so it’s far more compelling to watch the child protagonist struggle with real danger (that is always avoided at the last possible minute) than attend a therapy session. Even if, as adult viewers, we might see the whole thing as unjustifiably risky. But the thing is, Tulip herself very quickly expresses resentment towards the train. When she realizes that the number on her hand drops when she does something healthy and good, Tulip’s reaction is anger, and for a while she refuses to cooperate with the system, covering her hand and refusing to consider how her actions are affecting her number. Even within the children’s adventure template, the child protagonist says what most of us would feel in her situation - that being kidnapped and made to jump through hoops for the sake of some seemingly arbitrary, numerical value of “wellness” is high-handed and manipulative, and encourages hostility and suspicion, rather than participation in the train’s system.

Ultimately, Tulip goes back to playing along with the train’s scheme and benefits from it. She gets her number down to zero fairly quickly, and gets to go back home. But along the way she also solves the mystery of the train’s mysterious villain, who turns out to be another passenger, Amelia, who was picked up by the train after the death of her husband. Instead of letting the train walk her through her grief and learn to accept it, Amelia tried to take over the train and use its reality-bending capabilities to recreate her lost husband. Along the way she’s committed so many acts of abuse and mayhem that her number has extended all the way to her neck. So even once Tulip talks her down and convinces her to stop hurting people, they both acknowledge that she’s never going to get off the train (oh, and by the way, the journey on the train happens in real time, so Amelia is now an old woman).

Now, it should be obvious that Amelia’s problem was significantly more complex and fraught than Tulip’s, and rather than helping her, the train gave her a venue to indulge her grief to anti-social, even psychotic extremes. So at the end of the first season, we’ve encountered two passengers. One who benefitted from the train’s system (after some initial hostility) but who also probably didn’t need its help that badly. And one who did need serious help, but instead got an opportuntity to screw her life up even more than it already was, and probably irrevocably. Not a great track record, in other words.

The second season mixes things up a bit by making its protagonist a train denizen, and giving us a behind the scenes look at the train’s community when the passengers aren’t there. MT (or: Mirror Tulip) is a character first encountered in the first season, whom Tulip helped to escape from the mirror world. She’s being pursued by mirror cops who want to destroy her, and in the process of evading them, she comes across a passenger, Jesse, and decides to help him get his number down so that she can piggyback on his exit and evade her pursuers. Jesse initially seems like he doesn’t belong on the train - he’s almost preternaturally friendly and happy-go-lucky. But it’s eventually revealed that his willingness to go along and get along is fairly indiscriminate, and leaves him prey to stronger personalities, as when he tolerates and even enables the violent bullying of his younger brother.

It’s a thornier problem than Tulip’s, not least for making it harder to sympathize with Jesse. But it’s also one that exposes the train system’s flaws, as Jesse is so passive that he doesn’t even try to move through cars and get his number down until MT lights a fire under him. And that, in turn, triggers MT’s own identity crisis, as she begins to wonder whether she has a right to exist as her own person, or whether her entire purpose is to reflect Tulip or help passengers.

That tension comes to a head when Jesse and MT encounter the Apex, a group of child passengers, led by teenagers Grace and Simon. The Apex have come up with a theory of the train’s nature that runs completely counter to its actual purpose - they believe the train is their reward, and that the system trying to bring their number down and send them back is cheating them. They strive to get their number as high as possible by committing acts of violence against the train’s denizens, whom they dub “nulls” - not real people, incapable of feeling pain.

Because S2 has been told from MT’s perspective, we know that the Apex are wrong about her and the other denizens (and in general, it’s not a good sign when someone says “this being, which exhibits all the signs of personhood and feeling, is actually not real, and is only shamming a form of suffering while feeling nothing”). But at the same time, it has to be acknowledged that this is an entirely plausible conclusion to draw from the evidence at hand. The train exists for the passeners. It has created environments and beings whose sole purpose is to interact with and affect the passengers. Why should those beings be real? Which is yet another failure point of the train’s system, because as both Tulip and Jesse’s stories show, developing connections with denizens is what spurs passengers to travel up the train and get better. The Apex have therefore interpreted the train’s system in a way that can only accomplish the exact opposite of what it was designed to do.

The show returns to Grace and Simon in its third season, in which we learn more about their history and their understanding of the train. We learn, for example, that Simon’s hostility towards denizens was sparked when the one who befriended him (The Cat, a character who appears in each of the show’s seasons) left him when they found themselves in a dangerous situation. And we learn that the Apex worship Amelia (whom they view as the train’s true conductor) and believe that the current system is a corruption of the one she intended, in which the passengers get to enjoy the train for as long as they like. In yet another demonstration of how open the train’s system is to misinterpretation, the Apex warn their new members that if they let their number get down to zero, they will “disappear”. Which is the same reaction Tulip had when she first witnessed another passenger departing, and, again, a thoroughly logical conclusion to reach given the evidence.

The season’s story involves Grace and Simon being separated from the rest of the Apex, and, in their attempts to get back to them, picking up a young passenger, Hazel, whom they try to initiate into their understanding of the train. The two teens’ interactions with Hazel shed light on the crucial difference between them. While Grace genuinely cares about the kids she’s gathered and sees herself as their protector, Simon only teaches Hazel about the train because he wants converts to his worldview, and validation for his anger at the Cat and other denizens. Once separated from the Apex and their regular schedule of destruction, Grace’s care for Hazel causes her number to go down, all the more so when she discovers that Hazel is really a denizen, and lies to Simon about it to protect her. Simon, meanwhile, only sinks further into his anger and resentment, and when he discovers Grace’s lie he sees it as a betrayal of everything they stand for. The conflict between them ultimately leads to a confrontation in which Simon is killed, while Grace reveals to the Apex that their conclusions about the train and its denizens were wrong, and that they need to come up with a new system.

So, to sum up, the Infinity Train:

Kidnaps people whom it perceives as being in need of help and holds them, sometimes for years or decades, until they achieve a predetermined threshold of wellness.

Advances this goal through a system of rewards and punishments that is so transparently manipulative, it alienates basically everyone who engages with it except the guy whose problem was being pathologically passive.

Relies for the success of this system on a community of denizens who haven’t signed on to it and who are often unsuited to the task of shepherding others towards growth.

Is so open to misinterpretation that a large chunk of the train’s passengers take the exact opposite message from it that they were meant to, which leads them to behavior that could put them permanently beyond being able to leave the train.

Sometimes kills people.

I’m pretty sure most of this is stuff I’m meant to be taking away from the show, but I also wonder how far Infinity Train is willing, or able, to take this idea. The open ending of S3, in which Grace, though headed in the right direction number-wise, is still nowhere near being able to leave the train, and also more focused on remaking the Apex into something more constructive, suggests that future seasons will get further into the question of whether the train can be reformed or made more productive. Or, conversely, the show could abandon its original premise and just become a story about the train, and the community of passengers and denizens that develops on it. I wonder, though, how much you can push against the inherent limitations of this premise - when you’ve got a story where getting better and more well-adjusted causes you to be forcibly ejected from the story, where does that leave you as far as plot progression and character development are concerned? There’s an inherent conflict to a world that is designed for a specific character (or group of characters). Infinity Train is fascinating for how it leans into that conflict, and I’m very curious to see how it handles its core contradiction going forward.

#infinity train

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a-very-fond-farewell · 5 years ago

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The forbidden crack! Untamed prompts: 19/?

Wedding Planner AU [xicheng edition]: “Chickens on the Loose”

[let me have this]

Jiang Cheng doesn’t believe in love and that’s precisely the reason why he plans other people’s special day. The most extravagant, the boldest, the loudest, the better. Because if there’s something he got to accept over the years is that people aren’t willing to pay for something realistic, but for something unattainable instead. Over-compensating bland, ordinary reality with fantasy and dreams is his job and he’s well aware that no one can compete with his genius. Not with his father owning a catering and food chain company. Not with his mother being the most sought out wedding gown fashion designer on the market. They taught him everything there is to know on how to make other people’s dream come true before the inevitable envelope of a dainty, innocuous divorce application can make its way in a once happy household. Better make the satisfaction last, because Jiang Cheng will only accept advanced payments in cash, no monthly installments allowed.

His sister YanLi may have married honoring tradition over useless exaggeration, but what did her love bring aside from suffering and neglect? Marrying into the richest family in the country to the heir of a textile empire has given her nothing but sorrow and a husband too proud and distant to even visit her regularly. Jin Ling growing up without a father, spoiled rotten by the wrong side of the family who lured him into their shining world of nothingness day after day. At least Jiang Cheng’s family did rise from nothing and learned to trick the rich into relying on useless services soon enough. But Jin ZiXuan and his family had never worked once in their life and didn’t know how to take care of their loved ones. Not that Jiang Cheng’s parents could do any better, their marriage a wasteland where no love could grow, but at least they were honest about it. Better enjoy a dream while it lasts.

That is why if even Wei Ying’s marriage were to turn out to utter shit like YanLi’s, at least it will not be Jiang Cheng’s fault. Everything needs to be perfect, from the vows to the tea ceremony, from the food to the color scheme, from the seat arrangements to the music. Hell, some of his stepbrother’s requests may be too much to handle for most, but not for Jiang Cheng and if Wei Ying wants a parade and a whole week worth of celebrations, Wei Ying will have exactly that.

Hence he will not, under any circumstance, allow anyone snooping around as he plans the wedding of the century. No, not even the fiancée’s overprotective older brother asking people for blackmailing material on Wei Ying behind Jiang Cheng’s back. Not even if he pays him in nature, no ma’am.

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

Lan Huan is the best divorce attorney in town precisely because he believes in unconditional love. That’s why he doesn’t see the point of two people (or three people, on one memorable case in Europe) spending the rest of their life together if change is inevitable and something to be expected. He would much prefer to get the best deal out of it for his clients and prevent children to suffer from it in the process.

Judges fear him and his diplomatic smile that can never hide his tunnel vision drive for victory. His trusty private investigator Nie HuaiSang is equally terrified by his assets, but still feeds him with the juiciest details whenever Lan Huan asks for favors, discreetly requesting the younger man to do background checks on this or that subject. Settlements may be nice, but not if the (soon to be ex) husband or wife in question can be easily found guilty of adultery, gaslighting, or even violence. Not on Lan Huan’s watch.

That’s why his world gets completely turned over the moment his younger brother Lan Zhan announces his intention to marry a man he hasn’t known for a full three months yet. Truth to be told, Lan Huan had never seen him this happy: glowing with something akin to adoration, affection dripping from every pore, love spilling all over just by mentioning one name, Wei Ying. In case this rascal happens to crush his precious baby brother’s heart, Lan Huan needs to find dirt on this man and squeeze everything he has out of his dead cold hands the second his brother files a request for a divorce.

But for some reason Nie HuaiSang cannot seem to be found for the job this time around. Not unlike most of his other contacts and informants, who have seemingly disappeared at the mention of his brother’s fiancee’s name. If this Wei Ying is such a big fish in the sea to make even Lan Huan’s most loyal colleagues dissolve into thin air, then he must find the answers by himself.

And if it means to bomb the wedding preparations to get shit done, oh he will. He’s not above flirting to get what he wants, but if this Wei Ying turns out to be a good person in the end... well. Lan Huan prays things won’t get too messy to proceed with the celebrations in the end. Hopefully, that is.

[fun stuff under the cut.]

NHS went to uni with Wei Ying and he knows LXC won’t find anything on him bc WWX himself is a blackmail master and will 100% diss you in front of your children calling you out on your deepest secrets so no. NHS will not mess with that and he urges to do as much to all LXC’s informants and sources.

JC looks scary but his staff loves how dedicated he is and they make bets on when he’s going to lose it and sleep with someone out of frustration. although they think he gets more turned on by going over every point in his check-lists at times...

LXC’s colleague always ask him if he’s dating anyone, clearly to set him up with someone (who will not be of LXC’s liking, he’s sure). to which he answers by smiling and lying saying he has a terrible personality. since nobody believes him, he asked his friend Meng Yao to make a scene at the firm once: (all too pleased to mess with his bestie’s reputation) Meng Yao murder-walked into the office and demanded to meet LXC, only to cry in front of everyone and smack him across the face for cheating on him. THEN his sister A-Su made her sudden appearance and smacked LXC’s other cheek lamenting the same, ridiculous thing. the two siblings gaped in fake horror at each other before spitting on LXC and storming off of the building.

NMJ laughed his ass off for weeks after the sharade. he started dating A-Su not long after (with both JGY and LXC’s blessings) bc he was mildly impressed by her willingness to jump on the opportunity to make a fool of both LXC and her brother at once. LXC thinks they are a good match, but he worries A-Su might be too tiny and full of undiluted mischief for NMJ to be able to handle her antics.

NMJ used to date LXC, but they were too driven and competitive to let their relationship get in the way and in the end they stopped seeing each other. they still care deeply for one another, but they love their jobs at the firm too much and making things messy at the office wasn’t worth it. A-Su knows about it and doesn’t feel left out because of it, glad that they settled into their respective lives while still being loyal friends to each other.

JGY tries to set LXC up with a new woman every week, saying he would benefit from having a cute wife taking care of him. but LXC doesn’t know what business JGY has to talk about women that way when Meng Yao’s been a raging homosexual since the first time he has landed his eyes on another boy in kindergarten. too many crushes on boys to even be aware of how many hearts he has broken in his life. all those pretty girls falling for his looks, poor kids. only JGY’s younger brother Mo XuanYu could rival his victim count, but barely so.

ZiXuan is secretly keeping an eye on his half-brothers and half-sister while he works as a representative for his family company and this is mainly the reason why he has distanced himself from YanLi and Jin Ling in these past few years. he would like to approach his three half-siblings and maybe have a chance to rekindle lost relationships, but by stressing over it he is losing sight of the found family he actually has. YanLi wants him to come around, eventually, but she knows how lonely ZiXuan has been with no siblings and how secretly jealous he is of the bond that she has with her family. so she won’t pressure her husband, but she feels lonely nonetheless.

the two wangxian lovebirds are too happy to notice the mess LXC is making and they don’t even realize he’s there until like, three days before the actual wedding.

LXC may be a shark but he’s not subtle. JC doesn’t know what he does for a living but he assumes he has too much time on his hands, hence not someone worthy of his time. but LXC always causes troubles on the venue or messes up with the flower arrangements or prods for information to the wrong people and JC is over it.

“if you don’t have anything better to do help me find the sommelier so I can ask him what’s wrong with him and if he studied anything at all” or “if you have so much time to waste be useful and learn how to make flower crowns for the children to play with” or “if you can sit on your ass all day at least look over my nephew while I go look for someone to emotionally bully to let off some steam.”

Jin Ling is five and even more bossy than his uncle and orders LXC around to be his pony when JC should babysit him at work. LXC discovers the boy is JGY and A-Su and Mo XuanYu’s nephew and that JC doesn’t what any of them to interact with Jin Ling. but LXC secretly lets them hang out with the boy when JC is too busy to notice.

JC and LXC get closer the more the latter understands that there’s not much dirt on Wei Ying (aside from some questionable pictures taken during a university party back in the days, but that’s beside the point). LXC appreciates how crafty and ingenious JC is, always helping others around instead of just shouting orders...even if his temper is atrocious at times.

JC forces LXC to take dance lessons with the lot of the main family members and LXC meets JC’s mother for the first time. she is competitive about her dancing skills and Wei Ying tries to win her over by asking her to show everybody how it’s done by leading her ex-husband in a tango. after publicly humiliating her ex-husband (and making him fall in love with her once more), she insists on practicing a waltz with LXC and basically threatens him to cut off his balls if he dares to lead JC on with his charms.

LXC realizes he’s been playing and flirting too much with the man for him not to notice, but JC seems oblivious. no. he’s completely oblivious and kind and beautiful as he dances with Jin Ling and twirls him around in delight. LXC played too hard and now he’s in too deep.

the only source of drama in this would be JC finding out LXC let Jin Ling hang out with his other uncles and aunt despite the warnings. JC was starting to trust the man... and LXC stabbed him in the back. he would have much preferred not to discover it from his nephew (who let it slip that LXC “told him not to speak of his uncles and aunt to Jiujiu”), because he would have given LXC a chance to explain himself otherwise. but no. JC cannot have good things apparently and now he’s heartbroken without even knowing why.

without the lucky charm that is JC (holed up in his flat eating junk food to forget the pain of being an afterthought in other people’s lives), everything goes to shit three days before the wedding: the chef quits, the tea set for the ceremony breaks, one of the maids has accidentally torn apart one set of wedding robes and so on.

the venue gets flooded with live chickens when a truck transporting them breaks down in front of the building and the chicken escape. Jin Ling is loving every second of it, but everything gets destroyed in the ruckus and JC’s hard work is ruined.

Wei Ying is heartbroken and Lan Zhan silently accuses LXC of being the cause of this and urges him to fix the mess unless he wants to receive the cold shoulder for the rest of his days. but LXC is a cowards and spends his time actually fixing the broken things or replacing them or finding seamstresses to help with the garments and so on himself. anything but facing JC and be rejected.

ZiXuan comes to his senses and blurts out that “he really just wanted to have a loving family” the moment JGY, A-Su and Mo XuanYu come check on LXC. they hug and cry and laugh and YanLi gently reminds them that this is not about them right now and that they should help with the preparations if they have so much time on their hands. her mother is very proud of her and nods appreciatively at ZiXuan’s shocked and weirdly intrigued expression after being humiliated so boldly in front of everyone. the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree indeed.

the day before the wedding Wei Ying threatens to call the wedding off if JC doesn’t show up for his big day: not because he’s the planner, but because Wei Ying wants him close on his happiest day and he will not have it any other way.

LXC goes to fetch JC in his apartment himself the night before the wedding and they yell and they make peace and then they make love and then they woke up late the next day and they have to rush to the venue.

Wei Ying is livid until JC appears and then they celebrate the wedding of the century. A week of celebrations later Lan Zhan deadpans that they actually got married already like, one month in after meeting each other, but Wei Ying wanted a big wedding and he didn’t want to deny his husband a single thing.

JC tries to strangle his brother as the last family picture is being taken.

give me an award already.

#mdzs #cql #the untamed #the forbidden crack! untamed prompts #xicheng #wangxian #mdzs/au: modern #mdzs/au: wedding planner #mo dao zu shi

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threelivesthreeworlds · 4 years ago

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@mcheang said : First off, I wouldn’t say Jiheng was abandoned by the demon clan so much as she abandoned them when she left them to pick up the pieces of the botched wedding. She knew she would be exiled and chose to run away anyway. Second, it was never really stated that Dong Hua would stop visiting her after he was married. He would still have to check on the poisoned daughter of his trusted general and make sure she survived.

The admins always think of a few quotes to go in each essay as textual evidence, and admittedly with these next few quotes the previous essay would’ve likely been more complete - we just don’t want to overload our audience with paragraphs and paragraphs of text. So, let’s consider this the Ji Heng Essay, Pt. 2, feat. some Interesting Narrative Foils / Parallels, because I think we don’t actively recognize how similar Ji Heng can be to our leads, and I think sometimes we have to directly look at that and to look within ourselves to figure out why we let our favorite characters off, but we go hard on Ji Heng forever. You’ll have to bear with me - this carries a lot of extra analysis of the text per point addressed, but I believe a somewhat more thorough exploration is required.

TW SUICIDE MENTION, TW DUB CON MENTION, TW GASLIGHTING, for mention of certain canon events, proceed with caution

TO THE FIRST POINT, we have to address, in further detail, what happened after Ji Heng ran away from the wedding. When Xiao Yan tells Feng Jiu about the story Ji Heng told him of what’s happened since they went their separate ways, he does say that she stayed away from the demon clan of her own accord:

Feng Jiu massaged her shoulder, and looked a touch confused: "What does that have to do with Princess JI Heng?"

Xiao Yan was even more confused. "Did I never tell you, that when Ji Heng ran away with that little guard Minsu, they eloped to Fanyin Valley?" He scratched his scalp, the face as beautiful as autumn flowers under the moon touched with a tint of red: "Actually, I only found out half a year ago. All this time, Ji Heng's true love Minsu was a girl who was dressed as a man, and she liked her brother. After she figured that out, Ji Heng couldn't deal with the shock and fought with Minsu, and they separated, but she felt that she was too embarrassed to return to the demon clan, and so she stayed in Fanyin Valley to be the court musician."

However - later, at the end of the book when Chonglin goes to ask the Red Demon Clan about Ji Heng and where she is, he gets this answer:

When Chonglin went to meet with the Red Demon Clan, Lord Xuyang said that after the incident three hundred years ago when his sister ran away with Minsu, the Red Demon Clan had already banished her, and Ji Heng had no contact with the Red Demon Clan since then. Their clan could not tell where she was now.

If anything, then, I think it would be considered a mutual abandonment. For, drastically different reasons, I might add. Ji Heng’s reasons for staying away from home appear to be pride - that she ran away with someone who ended up not being in love with her, who ended up to be lying to her this whole time. That she’s become “pitiful,” because she didn’t follow through on the marriage her brother arranged for her even if she didn’t want it, and now she’s unhappy. Put yourself in her shoes for a minute - and because Admin Ro is both Asian the queen of analogies, imagine that you’ve decided against everyone’s wishes in your family that you were going to be an actor. They all told you you’re going to starve, and, what do you know, they were right. You are in fact out of work and poor. Would you go home, to a chorus of I-told-you-so? To a chorus of people more pleased that they’re right about you than they are willing to support your dream and what you want to do with your life?

Along that vein, her brother’s motivations for banishing her are likely more political. He arranged Ji Heng’s marriage to Donghua because he wanted the political ties to Heavenly Realm. And, in the aftermath of the elopement, in all likelihood he’s trying to disown Ji Heng as fast as possible to avoid it being a reflection on him / his clan, so they don’t get into trouble with either Donghua Dijun (who, by all means should’ve been humiliated by this turn of events) or Jiu Chong Heaven. He does not support his sister’s decision, and in fact, does not want to even be seen supporting his sister’s decision.

Now, food for thought, okay - take a moment and compare that to Feng Jiu, who’s had a very similar narrative. When Feng Jiu goes after someone she loves, going so far as to become a maid, pretend to be a fox, and, basically lose all face for Qingqiu, and he turns out not to have loved her and he turns out to hurt her, what happens? She goes home, to friends and family that do love her. That do support her and have shown support for her, all this time. She has a family who’s waiting for her to go home, who’ll be shields for her, as Zhe Yan says, who she trusts because they’ve always been there for her, over political obligation sometimes. The Bai Family “help their family, not the one that’s in the right.” And let’s take a look at what happens when Feng Jiu runs away from a wedding okay - she blows Cang Yi’s whole palace apart, and yes, she gets punished for this but it’s no more drastic than, likely, being locked in the cave or being spanked. Her family doesn’t disown her because she lost face or because she made a political blunder.

The fact that fandom in general holds these two women to very different standards in this very similar event despite them both being just women who’re trying to run away from a political marriage they don’t want - is concerning. But that fact notwithstanding - from just these two different environments, it’s not hard to see why, in the face of certain decisions, Ji Heng and Feng Jiu make different choices. Now, as a person, I firmly believe no matter what your situation is you make your own choices. So, it’s still on them, as to what choices they make when faced with yet again, a similar situation: not being loved by the person they love. But, with any amount of compassion, you can see, very clearly, why it’s more likely and easier for Ji Heng to make the bad choice. She hasn’t had a particularly large amount of strong relationships in her past, familial or otherwise, that shows her what a good, healthy, strong relationship is like. There is no reference point.

One might argue that Donghua’s just the same, since he has had no real parents and he isn’t close to his foster family. Well, that’s just it - out of this void, where his close relationships are supposed to be, Donghua doesn’t do any better either. In fact, he screws up just as much. Now, I can’t weigh “threatening to kill yourself unless your crush divorces his wife” and “lying to your crush and changing their memories so that they forget everything bad you’ve ever done and sleeping with her using a whole different identity” against each other on a scale of, which is worse. Because they’re both bad, and it’s both toxic in a relationship - but, it seems as though the fandom in general judges them differently as well.

With Donghua, we seem to be more capable of admitting that the things he does are mistakes. We seem to be more capable of saying “it’s because he doesn’t know what he’s doing, it’s because he hasn’t had any experience, it’s because of xyz.” We seem to be capable of understanding that his flaws are flaws, but that Donghua is not a fundamentally evil character and these flaws don’t fundamentally define who he is. We seem to be capable of liking him and forgiving him for his flaws overall. Whereas, with Ji Heng, the general trend I and Admin Lins have seen is to dislike her, even though these two characters screw up the same amount, and, I mean, for similar reasons and to a similar scale.

And while I’m not saying people can’t dislike the characters they dislike - I think we have to to evaluate ourselves and ask ourselves the question - why is it that we are capable of forgiving Donghua for what he does, but we aren’t capable of forgiving Ji Heng? Why is it that we would rather assume that Donghua is a good person and that he isn’t making these decisions because he is bad, but we aren’t capable of the same assumptions for Ji Heng?

One of Donghua’s major flaws is carelessness - and that lead us TO THE SECOND POINT. When Donghua leaves the valley with Feng Jiu, Ji Heng catches up and asks to be taken with them. His response implies that Ji Heng’s condition was not really a concern to him at that moment:

A flash of surprise entered Ji Heng's eyes, but her gaze was full of hope as it directed toward Dijun. Donghua said coolly: "Living in Fanyin Valley will control the Quishui poison. If you live here for three thousand years, the poison will fade away by itself."

And also gives a response that leaves even Feng Jiu saying he’s cold:

Donghua suddenly said: "Your father asked me to take care of you before he feathered...but, I have never liked to care for someone who has designs on me."

Ji Heng's face was suddenly pale, and after a long while, she said sadly: "Yes, I understand."

At the edge of the lake, Feng Jiu stared at the surface of it. Dijun wet a handkerchief and gave it to her. Feng Jiu took it and pressed it to her face for a while, and waited for the cold to sink into her skin, and finally woke up entirely to say: "Thank goodness when I was maid at your palace, you didn't have the chance to know me. If you met me then, you would've said to me what you said to Ji Heng today, right?" And said, tentatively, "You were a little cold, when you said that."

Now, I can’t tell you for sure whether or not Donghua meant exactly to make good on it - but the implications are all there. Telling her the poison is no longer a concern and she should just stay in the Valley while he presumably leaves, and when he talks about her father, doesn’t that sound like a threat? It certainly probably would have, to Ji Heng: “I know you like me, now stop, or I’ll never come back.” That’s what that sounds like. Now, both admins on this blog have anxiety, and, if you look at Ji Heng and how she was literally ready to kill herself at the end of the book, it’s not hard to conjecture that she probably has some mental illness. Piecing that together with what we previously discussed, it’s not hard to infer that she likely has some anxiety surrounding abandonment.

In her mind, that might very well translate to a straightforward, he’s leaving and never coming back. One might say “why doesn’t she just stop liking him then” but that’s an unreasonable thing to expect...honestly, no one can just turn their emotions off like that, we know this, right? We can’t expect that of a person, so we can’t expect that of a character or that character would no longer be authentically human. Furthermore, if you look at the actions Donghua took in the Valley before he and Feng Jiu ever got together, I think you can see where Ji Heng’s mind might take that even more drastically. The second Feng Jiu showed up in the Valley and this coincided with Donghua’s visit, what does Donghua do? He makes her cook for him, he goes to live with her, he straight up puts up a ward to block them both from the rest of the world. He basically declares to the whole world that, “the only thing I care about here is Feng Jiu.”

Bear in mind, he visits Ji Heng every ten years and is the only thing close to a friend she has in the Valley before Xiao Yan shows up. Ji Heng has been cooking for and living with Donghua every ten year interval he has shown up. To be suddenly and quite completely shut out and removed by this person she thought was her friend, that she had feelings for, even if they were only on her part as far as she knew, is hurtful. It’s like Donghua is saying “I like Feng Jiu, and so I don’t care about you or what you do anymore.”

Now, that’s not Feng Jiu’s fault, and it’s not Donghua’s fault. He’s free to do that, of course, and people change and they outgrow each other and they leave. But - to a person who’s been left by a lot of people, doesn’t it make sense for Ji Heng to react drastically? Doesn’t it make sense for her to see that Donghua is getting married to Feng Jiu and further extrapolate from his previous actions that he’s unlikely to visit again? Think of it if it happened to you - if your best / only friend, one that you care about a lot and are extremely invested in, left you because they found a new friend, can you truly say that you wouldn’t harbor a single bitter thought for that new friend? Can you say in those circumstances, every time, you would make the right choice?

IN CONCLUSION, all this, and the previous essay, is not to say that what Ji Heng does throughout the narrative isn’t bad. It is bad, and it is messy, and it does hurt people. These are explanations and not excuses for her behavior. I and Admin Lins will both agree that of the two of us, I am definitely the harder one on Ji Heng. I get my little bursts of rage when I get to certain areas in the novel that, yes, I can’t soothe over even knowing everything that I know. However, I do think - that a part of evaluating reads and the flaws of each character is trying to understand them. I think I have enough faith in Tang Qi that I believe she wouldn’t put a flat antagonist character in a novel to be “evil” for evil’s sake - and therefore, when I go through my read and I see the hints of dimension, I can say, I see it and it’s there.

In the end, sure, it’s about what everyone wants to believe. You can see that evidence and interpret it however you want. That’s how art and subjectivity and reads work - no one read is completely right. No one read is completely objective. If someone looked at all of this and thought “nah, bull, Ji Heng did all of it because she’s just an awful person,” I guess there’s nothing to stop them. But in literature, where every character is a reflection of a living, breathing, relatable person, the admins on this blog are more inclined toward a middle read. That not everyone is completely good and that not everyone is completely bad. That people make bad decisions because of their pasts, because of their circumstances, because of their mental illnesses, but that it does not make them, over all, a bad person forever.

I think if I can extend my compassion to Donghua and Feng Jiu, who have screwed up all over the place throughout this novel, and say, “I understand why you did this, you’re stupid, but I love you anyway” then I can extend that very same compassion to Ji Heng. And I think, if I can say “It’s ok, give them time, they can do better” about the main characters, then Ji Heng also deserves that very same hope. People are flawed. People make mistakes. People can regret it and get better.

#mcheang #eternal love of dream #three lives three worlds the pillow book #ji heng #admin ro posts #((sorry if you were hoping to get admin lins))#((but it's easier for me since I can just translate the text citations directly))#((the admins usually are of the same opinion with slight variations so i hope I did the topic justice))#((haha this got very long))

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frazzledsoul · 4 years ago

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Thanks for tagging me @dollsome-does-tumblr even though I haven't written fic in a gazillion years.

Rules: List the first lines of your last 20 stories (if you have less than 20, just list them all!). See if there are any patterns. Choose your favourite opening line. Then tag 10 authors!

The first thing that hit Rory Gilmore when she woke up was an overwhelming sense of vertigo.

The migraine was encroaching on the borders of her skull soon followed.

Where was she?

(The Morning After, Gilmore Girls, post series, Rory/Jess, or what happens when two not-quite-stepcousins hook up and everyone in Stars Hollow debates whether they should be encouraging this or not)

The first time they tried a real relationship again, it was a disaster.

He hadn't seen or talked to her for five years. Part of him regretted that a little, but she did say no, and he knew he had to start fresh if he was going to make any sort of clean break from the family legacy that had claimed him long before he was born.

(The Dynastic Plan, Gilmore Girls, AYITL era, Rory/Logan, or Logan explains to us why he could not get his shit together with Rory during AYITL)

Luke first noticed that something was amiss when he picked April up from the airport.

It was the middle of spring and she was wearing a turtleneck, a baseball cap, and sunglasses. When he asked her about it, she shrugged and claimed she thought that Connecticut was having a late winter spell, which didn’t sound right to him at all.

(The Cactus Incident, Gilmore Girls, post-series, in which Luke learns about the avian misadventures of one of his offspring)

“This has gotten completely out of control.”

Lorelai glanced up at her husband from where she was sequestered at her usual table by the window, surrounded by her laptop, piles of eclipse glasses in various colors, assorted boxes and tubes sprinkled in glitter and confetti, and a pile of streamers that had half fallen to the floor.

“This is a major celestial event, Luke”, Lorelai insisted. “A once in a lifetime opportunity to escape the daily drudgery of life to celebrate standing in the middle of the street for two hours and looking at the sky while we are treated to the spectacle of the universe pretending to usher in the doomsday a way too significant portion of the population are eagerly anticipating at any given moment –“

Luke put up his hand. “I get it.”

(A Convergence of Fancies, Gilmore Girls, Rory/Jess overtones I guess, post-AYITL, or Stars Hollow celebrates the 2017 solar eclipse, Rory is a sleep deprived new mom, and Lorelai is concerned because her family is watching too much Game of Thrones, aka the most chaotic thing I have ever written and I'm sorry)

Richard Lucas Gilmore’s second Independence Day celebration was turning out to be a lot better than his first.

For one thing, he was actually awake for it.

Rory’s pregnancy had stretched a week and a half past its original due date, leading to the delivery of her squalling bundle of joy on a humid June morning after fifteen hours of labor.

(Independence, Gilmore Girls, post-AYITL, in which Luke and Lorelai celebrate Independence Day with their combined offspring and toddler grandson and Lorelai confronts her impending empty nest syndrome)

Lorelai had thought that sending Rory off into the adult world would make her feel like her heart was being ripped out of her chest.

She had been dreading it for days, weeks, maybe even years. Despite what everyone had told her when she was a newly knocked-up teenager, she still felt that those first eighteen years raising Rory as she grew up herself had been the easy part.

(Full Circle, Gilmore Girls, post-series, in which Lorelai and Rory go through the same major milestones at the same time)

The fall of 2017 was turning out to be quite a revelation for Lorelai Gilmore-Danes.

She had never loved fall quite as much as she loved winter. Sure, there was the crispness wrought by the change of seasons and the concurrent excuse to shop for brightly colored sweaters and boots.

(The Grandparents, Gilmore Girls, Luke/Lorelai, post-AYITL, or Rory's love triangle and parenting woes as seen through Luke and Lorelai's eyes)

Few enterprises seemed to be designed with a specific target in mind quite as much as Facebook was for Lorelai Gilmore.

It caught her a little by surprise. Sure, she knew the basics of using a computer to run her business and control her finances. She could be disciplined and organized when she absolutely needed to be, and there was little use in clinging to outdated technology.

(Boundaries, Gilmore Girls, Luke/Lorelai, post-AYITL, or Luke and Lorelai try to rebuild their relationship and are very angsty about it)

Luke and Lorelai's third Valentines Day as a married couple started in the usual way.

It was usually their tradition to spend the holiday at home, but this year they had departed for Luke's cabin on the lake to spend a few days by themselves before the rest of the family joined them on Sunday. It was a beloved, time-honored tradition between the two of them to devote this day to each other to celebrate with their own brand of fanfare. Their adult children knew to stay very far away from them during this time.

(A Season of Peace, Luke/Lorelai and Rory/Logan, post-AYITL, in which Luke and Lorelai spend a weekend in the snow with their brood and we get an update on the younger generations's relationship statuses)

"Mom?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm pregnant."

She turned to face me. Gap-mouthed. Shocked. Disappointed. Humiliated.

This was not how I planned to share this news.

(A Simple Twist of Fate, Gilmore Girls, AU but fairly canon adjacent, in which Jess is Rory's baby daddy and Rory discovers that he has not exactly been solely pining for her in the years they were apart)

Jess didn't exactly intend to introduce his daughter to professional sports in this manner.

For the most part, he and Rory weren't quite the stereotypical thirtysomething hipster couple that they sometimes appeared to be. Sure, Rory was still occasionally breast-feeding after seven and a half months, and you could find quinoa and kimchi in their fridge stocked next to the baby food and hoagies.

(Home, post-AYITL, Rory/Jess, a "fast forward" of ASTOF in which Rory and Jess raise their daughter in Philadelphia and try to avoid admitting that they are no longer hip)

Lorelai Gilmore's journey to becoming an active participant in Stars Hollow town life was a bumpy one.

She stepped off of the bus in Stars Hollow a few months after her eighteenth birthday, freshly divorced and clutching her almost two-year-old daughter by the hand, determined to talk herself into whatever opportunity presented itself to her. She wasn't able to work on her charms on Taylor Doose at the grocery store, or Fran Weston at the bakery, but William Danes at the hardware store gave her directions to the inn at the outskirts of town and an offer to work the counter at his store if things didn't work out.

(Beginnings, Gilmore Girls, pre-series/AU, Luke/Lorelai, in which Lorelai and Luke's parenting situations are reversed: she and Christopher are divorced and he is involved in Rory's life but Luke is raising April by himself after Anna flaked out, and they start to bond)

Lorelai Gilmore Danes didn't expect to have empty nest syndrome hit her quite like this.

She'd spent much of her adult life – even long before she was technically an adult – tethered to Rory's side and not regretting a second of it. Then Rory was grown up and off exploring the world, and she was settled down with Luke in their unconventional but happily domestic manner.

(Glimpses Through the Looking Glass, Gilmore Girls, drabble series that goes all over the place based on #NationalFillInTheBlankDay)

Ted and Robin's seemingly long-awaited reconciliation lasted just short of six months.

Five months, three weeks, and two days, to be exact. Not that anyone was counting, least of all Robin.

(Making It Easy, How I Met Your Mother, Barney/Robin, post-series, in which Robin figures out that dating a widowed Ted is actually a very bad idea)

In the end, it was decided that the best way to resolve the battle for the Iron Throne was to dissolve it completely.

It had been a savage war, far more savage than any of its players had fought up to this point. Euron and Cersei were dead.

(The Calm, Game of Thrones, post-series but written halfway through season 8 so it doesn't include any of the stuff that people hate, in which I come up with a solution to the Jonerys dilemma that no one liked but it was still better than canon)

Summer finally bloomed beyond the wall five years after Jon Snow had crossed it for the last time.

Sometimes it seemed to him that everything before those five years was nothing more than a half-remembered dream. He had braced for his departure for the wall half-hopeful: at least this grand march towards kingship, the burden of unwanted responsibilities, the dread in his chest as he wondered if he would survive to the end of the latest war was over.

(After, Game of Thrones, post-series, Jon/Tormund, or in which Jon Snow is living happily ever after beyond the wall with his ginger, his dog, and a family of his own because I am in charge and I say so)

“You’re still shit at that, you know,” Tormund whispered in Jon’s ear.

Magritte snickered from the other corner of the main room of their cabin where she was roughhousing with Ghost. Alsi sighed beside her, picking up her bow from where it was lying beside her and inspecting it for flaws.

(The Line, Game of Thrones, post-series, Jon/Tormund, in which Jon is still living happily ever after but takes his family to visit Queen Sansa)

The images solidified in Jaime’s mind as he made his way through the streets.

Charred skeletons. Screaming children. Rampaging soldiers. Blood. Smoke. Mangled limbs. Chaos. He couldn’t keep any of it straight.

(The Lion and the Snow - Snapshots, Game of Thrones, AU, Jaime/Brienne, in which Jon is King, Jaime is the Hand Without A Hand, Brienne is the Lady Commander of the Kingsguard, they are all disasters, and I am not telling this story in order)

Tormund didn’t intend to get seriously involved with anyone when he moved to King’s Landing.

It had been a rough couple of years. Hell, the entire last decade had been its own special blend of unexpected pleasure and slow, turgid, relentless episodes of confusion and pain. That was adulthood, he supposed. Always one damn thing after another.

(The Dragon Heist, Game of Thrones, modern AU, in which single dad Tormund - Brienne is his baby mama - falls in love with art student Jon Snow and there are lots of coparenting shenanigans)

Patterns: Gee, I like to start these stories off with long, complicated explanations of everyone's relationship status.

Favorites: I guess that would be starting off The Morning After with Rory half-horrified at what she has gotten into. I also like dropping right in on Jonmund domesticity in The Line.

Tagging: @fineosaur, @seethemflying, @aliveanddrunkonsunlight, @janiedean, @angel-deux-writes, @littlerockerao3, @istaricelebelasse, @tormundjonthings, @sdwolfpup, and anyone else who feels like it (apologies if y'all have already been tagged)

#mine #fanfiction #thinking about writing again for the first time in ages

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kimmyiewrites · 5 years ago

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Dreams Coming True

Fandom: The Last Five Years, Newsies Ship: Jamie Wellerstein x Katherine Pulitzer AN: This idea came from my music going from the Newsies cast album to The Last Five Years soundtrack. I love the chemistry that Kara and Jeremy have and well this one shot was born. I hope you enjoy it and I'd love to know what you think!

As soon as the divorce was final, it was like the appeal he had to women vanished. The thing he had going with Elise didn’t work out. It had truly just been a fling, unlike what he had thought before going to Ohio one last time. He threw himself into writing his next book then. He wasn’t going to just be someone who wrote one good book and then never be heard from again.

The parties started up again when it was time to release the latest book. Random House had really out done themselves this time. He knew more people this go around. Mingled with those he hadn’t seen in some time and spoke with the ones that had become his friends while answering questions from the press.

“Pen and paper, huh? Isn’t that a little old school?” Jamie asked as he approached the bar. He had been watching her for most of the evening. The lanyard around her neck informed him that she was with the press but those he had spoken to had a tape recorder or just their phones. Not to mention, she was gorgeous. She had a polite smile that just teased at the real thing. He was sure it could light up just about anything if it was unleashed.

“Maybe but it gets the job done and I don’t have to worry about batteries dying or trying to make out what the person said through the background chatter.” She shrugged, looking towards him, that polite smile making its appearance as she held out her hand. “Katherine Pulitzer, The New York Times.”

He took her hand, giving it a shake before letting go. “Jamie Wellerstein, author.” He smirked a bit before ordering another drink. “Any relation to the designer?” There were times Cathy would always come back. He remembered his ex-wife always complaining about it.

Katherine looked at the author with wide eyes. No one ever linked her to her cousin first. It was always her father since she too was a journalist. “Actually, yes. She’s my cousin.” She smiled fondly, smoothing out any wrinkles in her dress, which happened to be the original dress in the design that was named after her. “I’m surprised you didn’t ask about my father first.”

Jamie’s eyebrows furrowed. He really only knew about her cousin because of Cathy. Should he know who her father is? “I’m sorry but maybe I could get a refresher?”

She then laughed and he smiled, knowing that he had been right. Her entire face lit up. “Oh my god, you don’t know. I think you might just be my new favorite person.” She said in between her laughter. “Joseph Pulitzer, owned The World before selling it and going into semi-retirement to terrorize the grad students at Columbia University?”

He shook his head, still not knowing who this man was, which seemed to be just fine by Katherine. “That’s it. You are my new favorite person. Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

He smiled, motioning to her lanyard. “By all means. That’s what you’re here for after all.”

She finished off her drink and picked up her pen. “So how -”

“You’re not going to ask about my ex-wife, are you?” He interrupted her. Too many others had asked that tonight, starting off the same exact way and he just couldn’t any more.

She looked to him, brows furrowed. “No. Have people actually asked you that?”

He nodded his head, waiting for her to finish her original question.

“While I’m glad people have thought of men to ask that question to, it’s still just as tasteless if you had been a woman. I’m sorry my colleagues don’t have any class. I was going to ask how you found your inspiration for this book? It’s much different from your first, yet it still has the same heart that draws your reader in.” She looked to him expectantly.

He smiled fondly, explaining how he wanted a different kind of coming of age story. One where the main character stayed true to themselves and still completed their goals without changing their appearance or who they were. He called it a finding of purpose story.

Katherine smiled and it wasn’t the polite one he had been seeing her show everyone else once she got what she needed. “Great quote, thanks. Enjoy the rest of the evening.” She pushed away from the bar closing her notepad.

“You’re not staying around for the rest of it?” He asked, not wanting her to go just yet.

She shook her head. “No, I’ve got a deadline I need to make. It was great meeting you, Jamie.” She started making her way towards the door before turning back around to face him. “Off the record, I hope you find your own brigade.”

Jamie stared after her. How did this woman know? There was no way she could somehow guess that this story had spurred from all of his frustrations from these past few years.

~~~

It had been months since they had last seen each other. He had printed out her review, a mix of wit, honest opinion, and persuasion to go get his book. It may not have had to do anything with the spike in book sales but he was definitely giving her that grateful credit. There was also the twitter conversations. It remained strictly about books but they had begun an exchange of recommendations for each other. Books turned into movies which turned into what to binge watch on Netflix.

Of course the others in their world began to gossip and Katherine had nipped it before it could grow into a large enough rumor for TMZ to cover. “If you do not wind up befriending the creators you write about, you’re doing your job wrong or are in the wrong business.” She had started a whole other controversy with that tweet that their small conversations went right back under the radar.

Random House had orchestrated another party. A different book launch for a different author and because he too was under the publishing house, he had been invited. He briefly wondered if she would be here. He hadn’t really noticed her before the first time they had met. Then again, he had been caught up in Cathy in the beginning.

At this point these parties had become a bit of a routine. Mingle here, grab a drink there, graze whatever food was laid out and then back to mingling. “Did you finish season one yet?” Her voice cut through the background noise as he was waiting for his drink.

“I’ve got like two more episodes. I still can’t believe how good it actually is.” He turned to face her, signaling for the bartender to come back over.

Katherine placed her order and smiled up at him. He shouldn’t feel special that he got a genuine smile from her but it sure did make his heart flutter. “I told you, you would.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He waved her off with a laugh. “What’d ya think about this one?” He motioned to the party to signal he meant the book they were supposed to be celebrating tonight.

She shook her head. “Not his best work but not his worse either. He hit the sophomore slump bad so anything is better than his second book.”

He choked on his drink, not quite expecting that reply. “Yeah, this one was a little dry.”

“Can I quote you on that?”

“Keep me anonymous. We’re under the same publishing house after all. Don’t want to stir anything up.” He nodded.

“Thanks.” She scribbled down the quote and finished her drink. “Guess I’ll see you around then. Tell me what you think once you finish season one.”

“Wait, you’re leaving already?”

She gave him this look that said you should know by now. “I’m Cinderella at these things, remember. Midnight and I turn into a write up for not making deadline.”

“At least give me your number. It’ll make things so much easier.”

“Twitter’s not that hard to navigate. I should be at the top of your dms anyway. I’ve stayed too late already. I gotta go.” She waved and hurried off.

He let out a sigh as he watched her maneuver through the crowd. He brought his glass up to finish off his drink when he realized what she had said. ‘I’ve stayed too late already.’ Had she been waiting for him?

~~~

The next party, she slipped a piece of paper into his pocket. He didn’t even realize it until he got home. He unfolded the torn piece of notebook paper and gasped. Pulling out his phone, he immediately tested the number.

If this is really Katherine. Tell me something that only she would say.

The fact that you don’t believe that I would give you my number is a little disheartening, Jamie.

The Writer: You did just slip it into my pocket without me realizing it.

The Critic: I was trying to keep Twittergate from happening again.

The Writer: The fact that you want to keep this friendship a secret is a little disheartening, Kath.

The Critic: Oh you’re hilarious. Ha. Ha.

The Writer: Did you make your deadline?

The Critic: I did. Thank you. Good night, Jamie.

The Writer: You don’t want to watch Casablanca with me?

The Critic: Can I get raincheck on that?

The Writer: How about tomorrow?

The Critic: Tomorrow works.

~~~

They started out with weekly movie nights, switching off who chose the movie each week. Those movie nights then turned into sleep overs and those sleep overs turned into spending the weekend together. There were comments, glances, and touches that suggested she wanted more but he never pushed his luck. If someone like Katherine wanted to be in his life then he was going to do his very best to keep her around. The last time he rushed into something it didn’t end well.

She was so full of life and ambition. She wasn’t where she wanted to be but she had dreams of getting there. She worked so hard to be the best that she could be and he finally realized why people wanted to know her opinion. People listened, made decisions off of what she wrote and she wanted to use that influence somewhere other than the entertainment section. She could do it too, he knew she could. He just was nervous that all of this was going to wind up like the last time and he wasn’t sure if he could survive another five years of that misery.

He had decided to surprise her. He finished the meeting early and it was movie night. He knocked on her door before letting himself in. After a night where she lost complete track of time, she told him where she kept a spare key. Despite the tv set up for the movie she planned to watch tonight, Katherine was nowhere to be found.

Then he heard the crash and the shout.

Jamie walked down the hall to her in home office, knocking on the doorframe. “Is there a reason it looks like a storm blew through here?” Writing utensils were scattered along the floor. Notebooks and books mixed with them. Pages ripped to shreds and Katherine standing in the middle of the chaos.

“I tried to pitch another story again. Guess who was told to stick to reading books?” Frustration laced her voice as she stood in the midst of the mess she created. Her hands were on her hips as she was trying to catch her breath.

He didn’t even get a chance to respond before she launched into her rant. “I was because that’s all I am to them. Their favored book critic. No one cares that I’ve been at this since I finished my education, hell, even before that. No one cares that my stories are given to other writers who couldn’t get the people to care even if there were tear stains on the printed version. No one cares that the glass ceiling is actually just different floors to a fucking high rise building. No one cares that each time I rear back to punch my way through they tie my arm back to make sure I don’t.”

“Maybe -” She cut him off again.

“Don’t. I don’t need any advice. I’ve been fighting this bullshit for too long and I’ve tried everything. I even wrote my own fucking story and they rewrote everything and published it under someone else’s byline.”

“Then what do you want from me, Cathy?” He shouted, not being able to take this anymore. It was too similar, being cut off when all he was trying to do was help. He hadn’t even truly registered the words Katherine had said. They weren’t filled with pity, they were filled with anger and determination.

She pointed to the front door. Her poster had gone rigid from hearing the name of his ex-wife. She knew enough from the stories reported on the two and connected some dots from what little Jamie had told her. There was a new kind of anger behind her eyes. “For you to go.”

“What?” Things finally began to dawn on him. Oh, he truly messed up.

“Go and don’t you ever call me Cathy again. I am not her. This is just one more set back, one more rope for me to cut through. They’ll eventually run out and you’ll see my byline on the front page. I know you had an important meeting today and if you being here earlier than what we had decided on indicates anything, then I can’t be happier for you because you deserve everything you ever dreamed of. I just will not stand to be compared to your ex-wife when I have even the most minor of setbacks because I come out of it fighting even harder. So right now, you need to leave.”

Jamie looked at her in shock before he gathered himself and did as she asked. He had a lot of rethinking to do. Sure both women had ambition but unlike Cathy, Katherine knew her worth and she was going to prove it to everyone. Katherine wasn’t about to let anyone stand in her way.

~~~

The Idiot: I’m sorry for calling you Cathy. You are a million miles away from her. I just wanted to say that and that whatever you do, you’ll always have me in your corner.

Katherine looked over at her phone, spoon sticking out of her mouth as the planned movie of the evening played. She read it over and sighed. His text was not helping her with her guilt for feeling like she overreacted. She was throwing a temper tantrum even if she thought she rightfully deserved it. It also reminded her that she lied a bit when she had told him, she had tried everything.

There was one solution she hadn’t tried yet. This one scared her to no end because it meant that she could potentially lose her job. Then again. She jumped up from the couch and hurried back into her office. She wasn’t going to get anywhere she wanted if she wasn’t willing to take some risks.

She set up a youtube channel, a blog, and changed her bio on twitter and instagram. Not just the book girl.

Her first blog and video went into detail about what she was doing, what she would be covering, and hoped that people would follow her. She drafted everything up, linked all of her profiles together, and then stared at her computer screen. This was it. Now or never. She was making a change for her future. She took a deep breath and hit publish. She tweeted a link to her blog post. She posted the thumbnail on her instagram with linking her new blog in her bio. She even went to her stories and linked it there with the swipe up option.

The One: Check out the link I just posted on twitter.

Katherine stared at her phone as she waited. The five minutes that passed felt like life times but when her phone dinged with his response, she felt like she could cry.

The Idiot: I’m so proud of you.

~~~

People ate Katherine’s blog up. They loved it. She updated every Tuesday and Thursday with doing various small videos on instagram and twitter about certain stories. Companies began to ask to be sponsors and the day she had been waiting for finally came. The New York Times let her go. She was upset of course but as Jamie had reminded her, it allowed her to spend more time doing something she wanted to do. Luckily the sponsor money helped and she was able to tap into her trust fund if she needed.

Jamie had gotten a movie deal for his latest book. A party had been organized by not just Random House but by the production company as well. With Katherine no longer a part of the media list, he had to figure out how to ask her to join him. She had easily become his favorite part about these things.

“Hey Katherine?” Jamie looked up from his dessert.

“Hmm?” She hummed around her latest bite of pie.

“Would you want to be my plus one to this event tonight? And then well for every event after that?” His voice grew quieter and more rushed at his second question.

“Are you asking me on a proper date?” She leaned a little forward, eyebrow raised.

“If I am?”

“Then I’d say yes.” She whispered, smiling at him before leaning back and taking another bite of her dessert.

He grinned, going to take another bite of his as well when a question came to mind. “Wait, what do you mean by proper?”

“I haven’t been seeing anyone since our movie weekends started, have you?”

“No.” He shook his head. If he was honest ever since he met her, he had stopped looking at other women.

“Then this will be our first proper outing as a couple then, wouldn’t it?” She quirked her eyebrow up once again.

“So you’re saying you want to be my girlfriend?” He really couldn’t believe it. Then again she had always been the one to set the pace in their relationship.

“Yes.” She smiled and he was reminded of how he wondered what a genuine smile from her would look like. He was reminded that he now got them all the time.

“Then I guess we’re officially dating.” He matched her grin with one of his own. He didn’t think he’d been this happy in a long time.

“Picking me up at seven, then?” She asked, after finishing off her dessert.

“I’ll be there.” He promised.

~~~

They still kept movie nights but the sleep overs definitely strayed away from sleeping in different areas and moved towards sleeping together. The night he found out that her father was Jewish but the only thing she practiced was Hannukah due to her Episcopalian mother was a night they missed the movie completely. They appeared at every outing together. She stayed by his side and never hid by the bar, steaming with jealousy. Despite working her ass off to make her blog the most successful it could be, she stayed on top of every party that he had to attend. She knew the book, researched the author, and wound up mingling like the best of them. Everytime he would compliment her, she would just brush it off and credit her mother for her behavior.

She had moved to covering the news during the week. On the weekends however, she would give a review of the newest book, tv show, theatre production, or movie she had seen that week. With the first one she did, she stated how it was important to remain in touch with her roots while bringing the hard hitting stuff throughout the week.

A few months into their new relationship, Katherine ran through the halls of Jamie’s apartment building. She knocked on his door, more like banged, until he opened it. His eyes were frantic until he realized the crazed person on the other side of the door was Katherine.

She squealed when he opened the door, raising her arms in the air in a victory celebration while bouncing on the balls of her feet. “I’m gonna be on the Today Show!”

“Oh my god!” He wrapped her in his embrace before picking her up and twirling her around a bit. “Congratulations! I knew you could do it.” He set her back down and ushered her inside. “Tell me everything.”

She launched into how she was getting a segment right before Kathy Lee and Hoda did theirs. It was going to be called Watch What Happens with Katherine Pulitzer. It would cover all the news stories she thought people needed to keep an eye on. She would then end it with a review of some sort or even an interview. They were going to allow her to keep the blog and actually encouraged her to keep it running. The only thing they were going to change was her youtube channel, making it more on brand and instead of uploading her own home made videos, they would upload video clips from her segments.

Jamie just grinned as he listened to Katherine tell him everything. She couldn’t even sit still, she was so excited. Once she was done, he pulled her in for a long, deep kiss. “I’m so proud of you.” He whispered after they separated.

Katherine grinned before pulling him down to her for another series of kisses. Needless to say, Jamie was late for his morning meeting that day.

~~~

Katherine’s segment was going well. The rankings were beyond what NBC had predicted. The movie based off of Jamie’s second book was dubbed most anticipated and he was already working on a third book. Life was finally going the way that each of them had dreamed about. They had their dream careers. They had their dream relationship. They even had their dream living arrangement after they moved in together after the first year of them getting together. Jamie didn’t feel like things were moving too fast and Katherine finally felt seen and heard. Most importantly they had each other and the support from the other was something they never thought possible. All of their dreams really did finally come true.

#the last five years fic #newsies fic #crossover fic #jamie wellerstein imagine #jamie wellerstein fic #jamie wellerstein #katherine pulitzter imagine #katherine pulitzer fic #katherine pulitzer #jeremy jordan #kara lindsay #jamie x katherine #one shot #dreams coming true #kim writes things

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atruththatyoudeny · 6 years ago

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Monthy Reads | APRIL 2019

Happy 28th! Wow, April has been fantastic! Thank you so much to all the amazing authors and artists for sharing their work. @onedirectionbigbang started posting so make sure to head on over to their blog and check out all the fics and art!

Counterbalance || YesIsAWorld || enemies to lovers - motorcycle racing - ballet - implied/referenced homophobia - 44k Harry Styles loves two things: teaching ballet and racing motorcycles. Those two worlds collide when his greatest rival on the track, Louis “Tommo” Tomlinson brings his tiny siblings to Harry’s class.

Face Your Fears || SadaVeniren || a/b/o - mpreg - kid fic - implied/dubious consent - famous/ not famous - miscommunication - slow burn - angst - 92k Harry is a single father, pretending to be a beta after his alpha mated him and left him. He’s getting by just fine raising the twins when Louis walks into his bakery. Too bad him and Louis will never be a thing.

Latching Onto You || reminiscingintherain || famous/ not famous - 34k The one where Louis wants to book Harry Styles to perform at his best friends' wedding.

That's What I'm Here For || taggiecb || boss/employee relationship - age difference - farms - fluff - angst - friends to lovers - grief/mourning - depression - 46k Louis Tomlinson is a dairy farmer on a tiny farm in eastern Canada. His wife of nearly thirty years has left him and his children are all grown up and out of the house. Louis needs help running his business but has no idea where to even start looking. Luckily for him his children know just the man for the job.

(Something's Been) Hiding In My Heart || lululawrence || Sweet Home Alabama AU - exes to lovers - emotional hurt/comfort - mentions of miscarriage - implied mpreg - angst - 25k A Sweet Home Alabama AU where Louis comes home to finally get his divorce from Harry finalized so he can move on with his life. Alderford holds its own set of challenges when he returns, but by facing his past maybe he can find the healing he so desperately needs.

An Unbalanced Force || FullOnLarrie || divorce - miscommunication - 110k Harry has the rest of his life planned. Marriage. Career. Kids. Happily ever after. But sometimes plans don’t work out. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Fondre ton absence || scrunchyharry || amnesia - World War I - historical - 41k Harry had never really given much thought to the future. He preferred to let life steer him forward and to follow in the footsteps of Louis, his best friend from as far as his memory went, his lover, his everything. Louis knew better than he did what was good for him. It changed drastically when Louis was ripped away from him, drafted and sent to the front to fight in a war that Harry had always been sure would never reach him. Too young and too sickly to follow, Harry was left on his own for the first time in his life. When he thought things could not possibly get worse, Louis went missing at the Somme and was declared dead. While everyone buried and mourned him, Harry never moved on. If Louis were dead, he was sure that he would know it. Their lives were too entwined, he would know if half of his heart had died. Determined to find Louis, Harry did everything he could in his quest to be reunited with him, except prepare for the state Louis might be in. He did not prepare for the harsh truth he would have to face: was love possible without memories?

The Post-War BP || jaerie || a/b/o - mildly dubious consent - dystopia - post-war - mpreg - 17k The eight year war has left the country's birthrate severely stunted with a lack of virile alphas left to bring it back up. To ensure the survival of the country, the government opens The Breeding Program where young omegas can apply to carry an alpha's child in exchange for benefits. Louis' family is struggling and the BP is one of the only ways to secure a roof over their heads. Harry was drafted at the age of eighteen and spent six years of his life defending a country he doesn't recognize when he returns home. The government made the bed but it's Harry that has to lie in it.

Graphic design is my passion || FullOnLarrie || college/university - mutual masturbation - 6k Graphic design student Louis Tomlinson has exams to study for and final art projects to complete, if it would stop raining long enough for him to walk across campus. Luckily Harry Styles has an umbrella, and he’s perfectly willing to share. Louis doesn’t plan to get his heart broken and he doesn’t plan to make almost a hundred silicone dildos. One of these things definitely happens.

Fiction Romance || rougeandtonic || collge/university - blind date - misunderstandings - 17k Harry has a type. He likes older, sophisticated, mature men. Well-educated men. Men with life experience and passion for arts and social causes. Men who are established in their careers, who've sorted their lives out. Niall knows this. And so Harry can't understand why he's sat here opposite Louis Tomlinson. A punk Louis/uni Harry blind date AU.

Flawless || Throwthemflowers || strangers to lovers - injuries - angst - hurt/comfort - 25k After a debilitating surgery, former concert pianist Harry Styles isn't able to come to terms with his new reality. Sundered from his high standards of performance, Harry can't seem to feel anything anymore, except perhaps interest in his favorite coffee shop's barista, a man who seems wholly unsuited for the job and whose blue eyes hold in them the same pain that Harry struggles with every day. When fate renders them more than mere acquaintances, Harry is forced to deal with the insecurities of his condition and his stubborn pride. Louis wants to love him, but Harry can't accept that, because he can't accept himself. And besides, he's never loved. He doesn't know how. He just wants to be able to play his piano like before, because it was safe, because at its keys he could control the roiling of his heart and funnel it into music. With love, things are much too risky. Why would he ever take such a chance?

Snow Big Deal || FullOnLarrie || smut - 8k Louis is a professional snowboarder set to appear in ESPN The Body Issue and Harry is an assistant photographer working for the magazine. They have more in common than they think.

The Way Her Body Moves || dimpled_halo || Girl Direction - friends to lovers - 2k “Need help?” Harry jumps, her eyes widening as she drops the manual. She puts her hand to her chest, breathing deep. Her eyes meet Louis', her gorgeous co-worker who’s stationed in the office right next to hers. Harry has the biggest crush on her. She and Louis started working at the company the same day, right after New Year’s, and it’s been torture being around such a pretty person. Harry has caught herself multiple times staring at her, the way she talks with those soft glossy lips of hers, and her eyes. God, those dreamy blue eyes are embedded in Harry’s brain. She dreams about those damn eyes every night, she swears. Louis clears her throat, shaking Harry out of her thoughts. As much as she’s tried to get this chair together on her own, she needs the help. Harry was barely able to lift the backside of the chair by herself.

O! Yes! || homosociallyyours || a/b/o - omega/omega - sex toy store - 2k Louis is a somewhat sexually awkward omega into other omegas. When an omega-centric sex shop opens near his favorite coffee shop, he definitely doesn't plan to check it out. One friendly ambush later, he's standing inside and talking with a too pretty omega about things that definitely make him blush. He's not the only one blushing, though. Harry, the cute and enthusiastic toy store employee is too.

Small Voice In The Choir || Star55 || Girl Direction - homophobic language - 8k Louis is just a little lesbian who wants to audition for the school choir. She doesn't expect to gain a new friend from it.

All we can do is keep breathing || thealmightyavocado || Greys Anatomy inspired - medical AU - slow burn - angst - character death - grief/mourning - emotional hurt/comfort - 310k A fated story of two broken and battered boys who barely survived the unimaginable and how the love of one little brave girl defies all the odds and somehow puts them back together.

Drifting || noellehenry || enemies to lovers - implied/referenced homophobia - misunderstandings - 18k Canal Boat AU Harry becomes the owner of a shabby narrowboat, quite unexpectedly. He decides to keep it and make his longtime dream come true; he’ll start his own business, afloat. He embarks on a new adventure in a small village along the Grand Union Canal with his boat ‘Gay Tunes’ where his neighbours are the musician on the 'Black Velvet’, a fitness centre owner on the 'Slow’ and an extremely annoying bookshop owner on the 'Floating Pages’; seriously, what is Louis Tomlinson’s problem?!

Pillow Talk || FallingLikeThis || sexuality crisis - mutual pining - fake/pretend relationship - 26k When Harry starts having confusing feelings for a male classmate, his sister's best friend, Louis, helps him figure himself out. Cue lots of kissing, sex, and falling in love.

Naked Attraction || reader_chic_2 || Naked Attraction AU - meet-cute - famous/ not famous - 12k Naked Attraction: a gameshow where the contestant views 6 naked possible partners and narrows them down based off of pure attraction. Harry was not a fan of the shallow gameshow, so he decided to mix it up a little. Louis Tomlinson was the only gay and unfortunate staff member chosen to step in for one of the six possible partners when someone dropped out. He hated working there, and he definitely didn't want to agree, but it was too good of an offer to be turned down. Nothing would come out of it, surely, and they even agreed to keep his identity a secret. That all changed when famous singer Harry Styles walked out. Louis had no idea who he was, and Harry liked that about him.

Everywhere And Nowhere || 2tiedships2 || a/b/o - strangers to lovers - secret admirer - 16k Niall took a seat and said, "Apparently Louis' downstairs neighbor is a fan of giving Louis creepy gifts. Maybe I should go introduce myself and tell him that Louis actually prefers food." "What has he given you?" Liam asked. Louis shrugged as it were no big deal. "There was a rabbit's foot keychain on the door a little after he left from introducing himself and there was a small teddy bear sitting by my door tonight. Obviously I can't prove it's from him, but they seem to have his scent. I could be wrong though." "Wow," Liam said, looking deep in thought. "That's old school." "What's old school?" Niall asked. "Giving creepy gifts?" "I've never known an alpha to do it, to be honest, but he's courting you." Louis couldn't contain his look of disbelief directed at Liam. "He's courting me. Like some sort of romantic shit they'd do in the 1800s or something?"

Play It Back and Press Rewind || crimsontheory || childhood sweethearts - angst - mentions of death - 22k Harry and Louis were high school sweethearts until Louis broke it off when he moved away for uni. Ten years later they both return to their small hometown for a funeral.

Love Will Tear Us Apart || lovelarry10 || childhood friends - punks - friends with benefits - alcohol abuse/ alcoholism - drug addiction - drug abuse - recovery - angst - major character injury - 103k A story of two halves. Louis and Harry had it all - a career, friendship, and some of the best sex either of them had ever had. But Harry ruins it all with one life-changing mistake ... and Louis is left to pay the price.

Take Me Down Slow (Don't Let Me Go) || jacaranda_bloom || a/b/o - friends to lovers - omega/omega - 26k The one where Louis wants to find the right kind of partner to love, Niall hates snowboarding, Liam wants to settle down, Harry is really good with his hands, and mother nature could be the thing that changes everything.

Medicine || SophiaSoames || enemies to lovers - 23k I've had a few, got drunk on you and now I'm wasted. Louis Tomlinson doesn't do feelings. He doesn't do relationships. And when he has an itch to scratch there are always clubs and hook ups. Quick dirty encounters in dark places that feed the need that brews in the pit in his stomach. He works every hour of the day as the Front Office manager or the Clouds Westminster hotel in central London. He's a good boss, and he knows his shit. Then that asshat Styles swans in like he owns the bloody place and Louis's carefully managed world starts to fall apart. Harry Styles needs. He's impulsive and stupid and childish and probably the last person in the world who should be allowed to run the Food and Beverage department at the Clouds Westminster, however many brilliant ideas he has and seems to manage to miraculously pull off. He needs. And he needs Louis Tomlinson. It's a match made in hell. A recipe for disaster. There will be a bloodbath one day. They all know. Everyone knows.

Streetwise hercules || jacaranda_bloom || collge/university - fake/pretend relationship - 7k Uni AU, where Louis pretends to be Harry's boyfriend to scare away his one night stands.

#28th appreciation #1d fanworks appreciation day #fic rec #big bang 19 #my reads

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augustjcrdan · 5 years ago

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{ kj apa ♔ 24 ♔ he/him } well, well, well if it isn’t [august ‘aj’ jordan ] running around peach hollow. legend has it, they come from [olive avenue] and have lived here for [all their life]. if you’re wondering what they’ve been up to, i hear they’re an [NFL player] for a living. they have been known to be [naive] yet [CHARMING]. a word of advice to them, always look over your shoulder. you never know who is watching. { adri ♔ 26 ♔ est ♔ she/her }

basic information ↴

full name : August Michael Jordan nickname(s) : AJ preferred name(s) : AJ birth date : November 3rd age : Twenty Four zodiac : Scorpio gender : Male pronouns : He/Him romantic orientation : Straight sexual orientation : Heterosexual nationality : American ethnicity : Samoan, Scottish current location : Peach Hallow, Atlanta living conditions : Bought his own home recently in the same town he grew up in. Had it designed & built from scratch

background ↴

birth place : Atlanta, Georgia hometown : Peach Hollows, Georgia social class : Upper-Class education level : Went to college for 4 years before entering the NFL draft, but didn’t graduate. Was one semester short of getting his teaching degree parents: Divorced father : Mike (girlfriend Gwen) mother : Christina (married to Jake) sibling(s) : 6 biological, 4 step siblings previous relationships : Angel - high school sweetheart

occupation ↴

nfl tight end for the atlanta falcons. wears number 83 does endorsement deals helps promote giving back to the city helps out a lot with children events at hospitals has appeared on lot of social media campaigns, has his own workout plan to purchase

physical appearance ↴

face claim : KJ Apa eye color : Honey Comb hair color : Red with darker roots sometimes hair type/style : slicked back with some gel or just free flowing dominant hand : Right height : 6′1weight : 200lb build : super lean, abs for days tattoos : 8 but wants more piercings : both of his ears marks/scars : one in the middle of his eyebrows

BIOGRAPHY ↴

When August’s parents were in college, both out of state and newbies to Atlanta, they found themselves with an unplanned pregnancy and a decision to make.

Mike and Christina decided to keep their son when they were 20 and 21, raise him in an off campus apartment while they finished up their degrees and figure out things along side their friends and extended family.

They moved to Peach Hollow when Christina finished college. August has lived in quite a few places throughout the town as he grew up and loved it.

His dad, a Chicago native was a huge basketball fan. Being named Michael Jordan growing up, he thought he was the man and wanted more than anything for his kid to love basketball. When August came out with firey red hair, Mike thought that was the sign and called him basketball head for most of his life. But little did he know, AJ had a completely different plan.

His mom, a soccer player in college, was never going to push sports or anything onto her baby. Her parents were super hard on her and disappointed that she would never make the USA team after having a baby in college, so she wanted to raise August to pick whatever he wanted in his life to do.

Christina was more laid back in the parenting department and Mike was more demanding and short tempered. This caused for a lot of fights and a lot of blow outs that AJ witnessed at a young age. One of those fights resulted in his scar that he got in between his brows that he tells everyone was a slam dunk gone wrong.

Once Christina got the balls to leave Mike after a failed marriage, she found herself starting a lifestyle magazine in Atlanta along with a boutique. It wasn’t long after that she met her now husband, Jake, who already had a son and the two went on to have 2 more kids. Giving them the picture perfect, 4 kids, white picked fence life. Jake was in business and Christina’s life really took off.

Mike on the other hand wasn’t stable at all. He worked all different kinds of dead end jobs and bounced from one girl to the next, having 3 with 3 different women thinking that was his ticket to getting them to stay. The unstableness was uneasy for Christina to deal with having in August’s life and she had to often keep her son from seeing his dad for long stretches of time.

Mike was quick to turn to alcohol and get drunk to deal and cope with how he failed as a father in many ways. And there were many drunk phone calls made to their home, restraining orders, the whole nines. It wasn’t something he really told many people about.

Jake was a great step dad, and his brother was cool, but at the young age of 7 - August really wanted to play football and have an escape from his life. He wanted to play the game he loved to watch on tv. Whether it was the Falcons, Bears or the Eagles (Since his mom is originally from Pennsylvania) he was mesmerized by the plays, the positions and the entire game.

Once he played in his first game, AJ was in love. He was tall for his age so jumping others and ‘mossing’ other children, August fell in love with being a tight end. There was no other position that he loved more. He got to be physical, block, protect the qb but also score touchdowns and create them all at the same time.

His workouts and daily routines became intense. He was talented and wanted to ride out his dream, he promised his mom if she let him go through with this, he was going to give it is all and he always has.

Having abs at 14 was something that was nice to impress girls his age with, but never did he think that older women would be hitting on him? Sure, cheek pinches and all of that were nice but when his mom took too much interest in him, he really didn’t know what to do.

She was someone his family trusted, someone they used to help further AJ’s career in high school and beyond and behind everyones back, she was taking advantage of him and sleeping with him. Her name is Macy and she still haunts his thoughts today.

Throughout high school, she took photos when he was asleep, would use them against him for blackmail to get time with him. She caused him so much pain, anxiety and depression that he couldn’t tell anyone about. Regardless of knowing he could take her down, she had some mental hold over him and he hated it. Plus, most people don’t think guys/men can get abused/raped and when AJ tried to tell his dad once, he said an older woman is every high school kids dream. She’s not. It’s not. It’s a nightmare.

Once he was able to get away from Peach Hollow, he attended PSU for four years and flourished. He was able to shake away Macy and though he missed someone from his past, still loved the hell out of her and wanted to be with her, he has always told himself he was protecting and saving her from the wrath of Macy.

Atlanta wasn’t where he was expecting to get drafted. Not at all. He was actually hoping and praying it would be to any other city for another fresh new start, but they took him in the first round. As a TE, that was huge. He was their ‘hometown’ hero guy that earned the nickname red jordan or red around the league easily thanks to the hair.

Now that he’s been playing and signed a huge, multimillion dollar deal with the falcons, along with tons of endorsements, a new management and pr team, he decided to move back to Peach Hollow and build a home on the lot he always admired on his walks home from school. It was another dream he was able to make a reality. Along with taking care of his mom.

His dad is still a mess, he’s with a girlfriend now and they’re having another baby on top of the 6 combined they have together. He asks AJ for money constantly and it’s the hardest thing in the world to have to turn down supporting his father, but once you give someone an inch, they usually take a yard. That’s exactly how he would describe his alcoholic, still over the top, biological father.

random headcanons ↴

has two dogs; max & luna. had one growing up that was his best friend named scar. loves cars. has 5 favorite drink is whiskey straight or rum and coke. will do as many shots as you tell him to and is king of keg stands. will never shy away from jumping behind the bar. had to learn how to play the guitar in high school for an extra curricular class and still from time to time picks it up and jams out. he can’t really dance, so the guitar it is. if you put bacon on anything, he will eat it. hangs out with celebrities and acts like it’s no big deal. has issues knowing how to dress for events? he likes to keep it casual and relaxed like every day looks, so needs to hire someone to dress him. is obsessed with hats to hide his red hair. hates being asked if he was born in august. his mom picked the name out of a baby book, he wishes there was a cooler story behind it. his mom has been filmed on RHOA a few times and it gets to her head if you talk to her about it. so please don’t.

wanted connections ↴

best friends step brother possible sibling like cousins/grew up together childhood friends matched on a dating app sports world friends hookups/one night stands models/girls he’s taken out on dates college friends anything/everything. i like to build off our characters and what they want/need in their lives!

#tw: abuse #tw: alcohol #peaches:intro #intro

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bonniejstarks · 5 years ago

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Kinfolk’s Katie Searle Crafts a Beautifully Imperfect Life

Chantal Anderson

When Kinfolk magazine emerged in 2011, it quickly became a cultural touchstone for a distinct millennial aesthetic that combined rustic twee and Scandinavian minimalism. Like a cross between Martha Stewart Living and your coolest cousin’s Instagram feed, its pages evoked a world of wind-swept daydreams: Maine lighthouses perched above cranberry bogs. Camping recipes for Dutch-oven cornbread and spicy dandelion greens. Long-haired dads in denim jackets cutting down Christmas trees in snowy forests. Photogenic friends gathered in fields of clover.

The magazine inspired legions of devoted fans—despite its modest circulation of 85,000, its best-selling companion books sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and in a certain milieu the name “Kinfolk” was ubiquitous, as if it had distilled an essential vapor of youthful identity. Its devotees fanned copies of the handsome paper magazine on their reclaimed-wood tables and made pilgrimages to its Portland, Oregon, offices. But the magazine also inspired a backlash that ranged from legitimate critique (it featured few people of color) to self-satisfied snark, construing the publication as peddling the absurd fantasy of an impossibly perfect and privileged lifestyle.

A photo spread at the beginning of The Kinfolk Home, a companion book, shows Nathan Williams and Katie Searle, the beautiful twentysomething couple who founded the magazine along with friends Dan and Paige Bischoff, sitting in their Portland loft, on an elegant tweed couch in front of walls striped with sunlight—both of them fair and beautiful and stylish, dressed in minimalist dark clothes. It looks like a life built from sophistication and composure, as if one could summon domestic harmony with style itself, almost like casting a spell.

But as with most glimpses of paradise, this one already held in its frame the seeds of its own unraveling. After Nathan and Katie relocated the magazine from Portland to Copenhagen in 2015, they lost a baby—Katie delivered their son, Leo, stillborn at six months. Just a few months later, when Katie was pregnant with their second child, Nathan came out to Katie as gay, and they decided to end their marriage. At three months pregnant, Katie moved back to Oregon to be closer to her family, preparing to raise their daughter as a single mother.

Katie Searle and her daughter, Vi, photographed in Oregon last December.

Chantal Anderson

It might be easy to look at Kinfolk and simultaneously crave, distrust, and resent the perfect lives it seems to evoke. It’s the same envious resentment we bring to Facebook pages and Instagram feeds, the triple punch of projection, aspiration, and repulsion we often fling at lives that appear more ideal than our own. But in truth, its pages don’t testify to perfection so much as its impossibility: how every “ideal” life is actually a constructed fantasy cast across the troubled fissures of reality, in ways that are more vexed and contradictory than we imagined—and in this human trouble, also more full of grace.

On a crisp evening near the end of 2019, I meet Katie for dinner at Ned Ludd, a lamplit restaurant located just across the street from Kinfolk’s old offices, which are now occupied by “tech bros,” she tells me, who have let the wisteria grow wild along the exterior walls. Named for the original Luddite, Ned Ludd was where the magazine held one of its annual Christmas parties, and the interior feels reminiscent of Kinfolk’s early rustic aesthetic, full of raw wooden beams and brass chandeliers, with hip-hop on the stereo and pine boughs on the bar. It’s clear that for Katie, that Christmas party belongs to not just a different era but to another life.

It has been more than four years since Katie lost Leo, saw the end of her marriage, and moved back to Oregon to give birth to her daughter, Vi; and almost a year since her boyfriend, Joe Ensign-Lewis—the doctor with whom she fell in love just after Vi’s second birthday—died in a car crash when the van he’d rented was struck by a reckless driver. He was in the midst of moving into Katie’s house, where they were going to build a home together.

At 31, Katie has survived the loss of a child, the end of a marriage, and the death of a great love, but her presence holds vitality rather than weariness: Her warmth feels grounded by a solid core of deliberate resolve, her compassionate attention is electrified by intelligence, and her luminous eyes flicker with the competing vectors of disclosure and restraint. Her friend Sarah Winward, an early Kinfolk collaborator in Salt Lake City, calls it a mixture of fire and poise. Petite and slender, almost elfin, Katie looks like a college student, but of course I don’t say this, because she also looks like a person who might get tired of being told, “You look like a college student!”

Over dishes that could have been lifted from the pages of one of Kinfolk’s autumn issues—river trout stuffed with lemons, foraged mushrooms on toast, and a maple shrub soda our waitress calls “agrarian Gatorade”—Katie tells me about her childhood growing up in McMinnville, in the middle of Oregon wine country, a town known mainly for a famous set of UFO photographs taken there in 1950.

At 31, Katie has survived the loss of a child, the end of a marriage, and the death of a great love, but her presence holds vitality rather than weariness.

CHANTAL ANDERSON

Katie’s parents divorced when she was six, and she was raised in two homes: by two lesbian moms who are former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and by a still-active Latter-day Saint father and stepmother. Growing up, Katie experienced a deepening cognitive dissonance about the fact that the church taught her that her mothers’ lesbian relationship was wrong—“Their being lovers was as close to murder as sin could be”—but that they were also the most “Christlike” people she knew. She wondered how the Latter-day Saint notion of eternal families, the belief that the devout will dwell in heaven with their families forever, would apply to her own. Her mother, Jill, remembers how Katie tried to integrate the very different worlds of these two homes—one day she came into Katie’s bedroom and saw her sitting in a yoga pose with a crystal in one hand and the Book of Mormon in the other.

Katie met Nathan, also raised a Latter-day Saint, at Brigham Young University–Hawaii. In 2009, when Katie was 20, Nathan proposed in a Hawaiian forest under tree branches strung with hundreds of battery-powered tea lights. Though she had vowed not to marry young, she said yes, because she felt the presence of a divine design larger than her own intentions. When Nathan called Katie’s mother, Jill Searle, and asked for her permission to propose, he told her that he was planning to be a doctor, and that he would always provide for Katie. So a few years later, when he quit his job at Goldman Sachs to put out a lifestyle magazine full of photo-essays on juicing, Jill remembers wondering, “What happened to that doctor thing?” But Nathan was successful at everything he did. “We used to joke that he had the Midas touch,” Jill says, though he never took any of his mother-in-law’s ideas. (She once suggested a large-print issue of Kinfolk called “Old Folk.”)

In the early days of the magazine, it was a “complete labor of love,” Katie says, with all their friends doing the photography and design. She and Nathan packed and shipped the first issue from a friend’s living room. Katie smiles when she remembers the time they photographed hydrangeas spilling out of ice cream cones: how cold it was that day—even though you can’t tell in the shots—and how that chill was part of the grit and the magic; how wonderful it was to muddle through together.

Katie embraced that sense of community, but things shifted over time. As the staff got larger, Katie moved from an editorial role to a managerial one, and Nathan’s commitment to the magazine grew more consuming. Right before they relocated Kinfolk to Copenhagen, they ran it out of the loft where they lived. Katie was pregnant and struggling with morning sickness, but she would still wake up early to get everything looking orderly before the rest of the staff arrived. “It was a nightmare,” she says. The business had invaded their home, a concrete manifestation of how much of Nathan’s life it had already absorbed—an irony, of course, for a magazine committed to the idea of slow living and work-life balance. “We were so busy with Kinfolk, it was just like a hamster-wheel situation most of the time we had together,” she says. “I didn’t really stop for one moment to pause and focus on myself.”

When I ask Katie how much she felt the magazine was her dream as well as Nathan’s, she tells me that she has spent much of her life struggling to identify her own tastes and preferences. For many years, she didn’t realize how malleable she was—how much of the patriarchy of her church she had internalized. “I one hundred percent have codependency,” she says. “And I think a lot of that stuff is from the church.” It taught that her role was to be a caregiver, so it made a kind of psychological sense to spend much of her marriage supporting her husband’s vision: “All the moves we made, all the things we did for the business, were more or less Nathan’s dreams.”

“I one hundred percent have codependency. And I think a lot of that stuff is from the church.”

As we drive on darkened highways back to McMinnville, Katie tells me about how different it felt when she fell in love with Joe in 2018. Joe was completing his psychiatry residency at Oregon Health and Science University and lived with a big-hearted ferocity that thrilled her: He enjoyed simple pleasures like fast food and video games, and got teased for saying, “Guess what? I love you” to his friends and family all the time. Her friend Sarah remembers how Katie talked about Joe in the beginning: He’s just such a dude. He’s such a bro. He’s rowdy. He wears sweatpants. “She loved the way he lived unapologetically,” Sarah says.“It lit Katie up.” Candid and unrestrained, Joe was the opposite of Nathan, who had always been quiet and private. While Nathan brought out the serious side of Katie, Joe summoned her goofy side. “When Joe came into her life,” Jill says, “it was like we got our Katie back.” He’d never heard of Kinfolk when they met, and Katie liked that. Joe didn’t want her silhouette from a Kinfolk photo shoot. He wanted her.

Chantal Anderson

Joe was devoted to Katie’s daughter from the start. Their first Halloween together, he and Vi dressed as bumblebees, and Katie was a beekeeper with a long white veil. Vi called him Joe Joe. “Joe had a lot of firsts with us,” Katie says—visiting his first pumpkin patch, cutting down his first Christmas tree—and she is glad he got to have them before he died.

The couple didn’t end up getting much time: They met in October 2018, and Joe died the following March. Katie’s grief for Joe isn’t just grieving for the loss of what they had, but for what they never got—the children they might have had, the additional father figure he could have been for Vi. “I don’t regret at all how deeply we fell for each other and how hard we loved each other,” she says. “I’m so grateful for it. We’d never felt that kind of love, and we were able to experience it together.”

Katie and Joe Ensign-Lewis—the doctor with whom she fell in love just after her daughter’s second birthday.

Courtesy of Katie Searle

Halfway to McMinnville, Katie grows distracted and starts fiddling with her GPS. She has realized the route is taking us past the site of Joe’s accident, where she has not yet returned—it took her months to even get in a car. (Her mom would drive Vi to preschool.) In the early days of her grief, Katie felt pressure to perform hope at the end of every articulation of pain, to reassure people that she would be okay. But she learned to push back against her impulse to offer silver linings—to convey hope only if it was what she felt in that moment, and to accept that in other moments, she might feel like doing something else: yelling at the sky with Vi, or driving to a place called the Rage Room with her mothers, where she got hammers and mallets and all kinds of things to break (“The wine bottles were the best”).

When I ask Katie if she has ever just wanted to wail at the universe,“Enough!,” she shares that when she found out Joe was dead, she kept repeating, “ ‘I can’t do this. I don’t want this….’ ” she says. “What kept blurting out of my mouth was like, ‘I remember this. I don’t want this again.’ ” Her body remembered the brutality of grief. She wanted to push it away like a toxin, or an intruder. But driving along the dark Oregon highway, Katie clearly holds her pain close; it textures her sense of self with ragged edges and long furrows of loss. She tells me grief isn’t a tunnel, and the point isn’t to emerge on the other side. You don’t move through it. You learn to carry it with you.

Her body remembered the brutality of grief. She wanted to push it away like a toxin, or an intruder.

Under gray skies the next morning, the air smelling like pine and smoke, Katie shows me around downtown McMinnville. The streets are striated with layers of her history: the boarded-up coffee shop where she used to get steamers in high school, and the sidewalks where she’d run into childhood acquaintances when she returned from Copenhagen, three months pregnant and single. Back then, she often had the impulse to share too much in response to questions about her life: Yes, I’m pregnant, but my husband is gay and we’re getting a divorce and I’m going to raise the baby on my own.

Katie points out the entrance to the hidden speakeasy where she took Joe on their first date, and then the movie theater they went to with Vi one night a week before he died. Vi couldn’t make it through the whole movie, so they left early to get ice cream. These are the ordinary nights that become electric with significance when you realize you will never have more of them.

We eat breakfast at a farm-to-table café that Katie identifies as McMinnville’s first hipster establishment, though back when she was growing up it was a paint-your-own-pottery shop called All Fired Up. At the end of their senior year of high school, she and her girlfriends had a fancy dinner in a little loft overlooking all the pottery, and after they ate, they climbed out a slanted window onto the roof. “Just to give you an idea of how unrebellious we were,” she told me, “this was our idea of breaking the rules.”

But after a few minutes, they thought they heard the cops on the street below and climbed back inside so quickly they scraped their backs on the window frame. “We didn’t last more than two minutes out there,” she tells me. “I was very much a goody-two-shoes kid, and I’m still very afraid of authority.” This is a woman who has trouble jaywalking, and who didn’t start drinking until her mid-twenties. She didn’t cuss at all until her marriage ended; now, she cusses all the time. “I feel like I could say the f-word every few hours when I remember what happened in my life,” she says. Joe cussed constantly. She sometimes pictures him as a young child, teaching himself how: “I have this vision of little Joe standing in front of a mirror and being like, bitch, fuck, damn. Just practicing in the mirror. Seeing what it felt like.”

““I feel like I could say the f-word every few hours when I remember what happened in my life”

After Joe died, Katie wanted to break a few rules in honor of him. She told his brother she’d call him from jail, to bail her out, but her version of breaking the rules has been both less dramatic and more meaningful than breaking the law. She has stopped telling people what she thinks they want to hear, and started being honest about her own needs and desires instead. It’s part of a larger process of self-assertion that’s been happening since the end of her marriage—a process that includes the tattoo across her forearm. She got the first installment—the simple phrase “ilove,” an anagram of Leo’s and Vi’s names—when Vi was a baby. After Joe’s death, she took a group of his loved ones to get tattoos with her. (“You have to remember that a lot of these people are Mormon; it was a big deal for them.”) Hers included a J for his name, and a tiny bumblebee. Katie told me the pain felt right. She even wished it had hurt a little more.

Chad Ford, Katie’s college professor and mentor, points out that Katie getting tattoos with Joe’s family and friends is one of many ways she makes her pain communal. “She’s not just lost in her own grief,” he says. “She also has this ability to share it.” Ford flew out to Oregon a few weeks after Joe died, and though he’d seen her go through other life-altering losses, something about this grief felt more shattering: “She was really at the pinnacle of happiness, as happy as I’ve ever seen her in her life. I think she finally saw a life that she wanted, and then to watch it crumble…. It’s the only time I’ve ever heard her wonder, ‘Am I cursed?’ ”

A sketch of Katie’s tattoo, featuring the letters “ilove,” an anagram in honor of Leo, her first child, who was stillborn, and her daughter Vi, who is three, crossed with a “J” for Joe, her late partner.

Courtesy of Katie Searle

Katie lives in a quaint farmhouse-style home on the same street where her mothers have lived for decades. She bought it two years after moving back to McMinnville, and says setting it up felt like discovering her own aesthetic after years of keeping her preferences submerged. This was the home that Joe was moving into when he died, and their last argument before his death was about what couch to buy. “Nathan was all about form over function,” she says. “But Joe was the opposite.” He wanted a comfortable couch and didn’t care what it looked like.

We sit on the one Katie bought soon after his death—comfortable in honor of Joe, but also stylish, a way of staking her own spot on the form/function continuum marked by these two men—facing a fireplace full of candles, and the massive plastic trampoline that dominates Katie’s small backyard. She tells me she assembled it herself. “The moral of that story was, Read the instructions,” she says. But perhaps the moral is also that a woman who’s been called “graceful” her entire life—“It’s an adjective people are always using about me,” she says—might be other things as well: determined, competent, resourceful, capable of building a trampoline twice her size so she could jump on it with her toddler daughter. “There are two things I’ve done in my life that were physically impossible,” she says. “One was birthing Leo. Second was building this trampoline.”

We will always lose what we love. There is no deeper truth than that, no other way.

Both Jill and Sarah describe Katie as a “memorializer,” and upstairs, in her bedroom, she shows me a shrine dedicated to Leo: ink prints of his tiny hands and feet; the tiny blue knit hat they put on him at the hospital in Copenhagen; his ashes in an urn; a stuffed lion that Vi sometimes takes down from the shelf to play with (though all it takes is one look from her mom, and she immediately puts it back). Katie tells me that bringing the urn through airport security when she was coming home from Copenhagen was “the most public display of disarray and just pure grief that I have ever manifested. I just didn’t want to let it go.”

Katie wonders if it sometimes makes people uncomfortable to see these shelves dedicated to Leo, and I say that maybe it does—but maybe there’s something useful for them in facing that discomfort. There is one kind of beauty that tries to survive pain by covering it, and another kind of beauty that tries to survive pain by expressing it—by integrating that pain into daily life in a way that might allow a person to be fully present. There is a Chinese saying that before you can conquer a beast, you first must make it beautiful; and this is the kind of beauty I sense in Katie’s home—the transfigured beast, the beauty of carrying grief rather than shunning it. It’s not an easy beauty. It’s hard to look at that tiny blue hat. It’s like staring straight at the sun. We will always lose what we love. There is no deeper truth than that, no other way.

When she was pregnant with Leo, Katie tells me, she pictured him as fragile, a lion cub—someone she had to protect. During the period of time between learning about the fatal defects in his heart and terminating the pregnancy, she could still feel him kicking inside of her. “That was a painful time,” she tells me, and these five simple words summon an emotional crevasse that’s hard to fathom.

Before Leo’s delivery, Katie and Nathan had imagined they wouldn’t want to hold him, but of course they did. The first thing Nathan said after he was born was, “He’s perfect.” He was stillborn, but he still looked like an absolutely ordinary baby—just tiny and quiet and still. “Some people don’t understand that I have two children,” Katie says. “I have a daughter and a son.” Katie says that when you lose an infant, you are also mourning “the imaginings of that child…envisioning what they were going to be like, and experiences you’d have with them.” With Leo as with Joe, she is partially grieving what never was.

“We’re all just figuring out how to take each step within that pain,” Katie says about rebuilding her life and creating a home for Vi.

Chantal Anderson

The mussels that Katie cooks for our lunch—simmering in coconut curry, flecked with shallots and bell peppers—could have come from a Kinfolk spread on winter hospitality, but they hold the ghost of an era—its distance as much as its residue. Nathan used to make these mussels for Katie on special occasions, especially when they lived in Copenhagen, where seafood was cheap and plentiful, but she never tried to make them herself. She always felt like an inferior cook in their marriage, so it’s a milestone that she’s pulled them off today. She’s far away from the wife she was then, dressed in the elegant black clothes Nathan always felt looked best on her, and as we eat this beautiful food—tearing hunks from a crusty baguette, breathing in the humidity of the spicy broth—Katie points out the un-Kinfolk-like aspects of her life: her messy counters, the pre-minced garlic she has scooped from an economy-size plastic tub. It strikes me that she’s taken what she loved best about that world—food as a catalyst for gathering and intimacy and care, beauty as a form of holding memory—and left its more constricting elements behind.

After lunch, Katie brings me to Vi’s preschool to watch her holiday recital. Vi sings “Jingle Bells” in her candy-cane-striped dress, carefully concealing a little green bell behind her back until the time comes to raise it high and shake it. When she waves at her mom and grandmothers in the audience, the sense of joy and closeness among all three generations is palpable. But it’s not a joy that has forgotten anything. It holds everything that has come before: Jill holding the body of her stillborn grandson, and then bringing her pregnant daughter back home after the end of her marriage, or standing in the hospital room when Vi was born, punching out of Katie with one tiny fist under a stormy sky full of thunder and lightning.

“I feel really broken, but really whole.”

As we watch Vi in her special reindeer glasses, it feels like the moral of Katie’s story is that no life has a moral. Or, at least, no life has just one. Old morals are joined by new ones. Katie’s story is a story about loss, but it’s also a story about care—a mother’s care for her daughter, that daughter’s care for her own daughter; the kinds of care made necessary and possible by the strange, unforgiving territory of grief. It’s a story about losing the Latter-day Saint idea of eternal family and gaining another sense of family, just as durable, in its place. It’s a story about leaving the beauty of Kinfolk and forging a new sense of beauty in its wake; a story about losing one partnership and forming another one, and losing that one and saying “Enough!” and waking up to live another day, even when it feels unbearable. “We’re all just figuring out how to take each step within that pain,” she says.

Katie’s life is now about beauty as sustenance rather than performance. It’s about letting herself be many things at once: “I feel really broken, but really whole,” she says. “A huge part of me is missing, but I found part of me…. I’m so grateful yet feel so robbed.” Katie no longer thinks of life as a search for happiness as if it were a destination, a place where you could remain in perpetuity. Pain isn’t what you’re trying to transcend; it’s part of where life happens. So she allows the present moment to hold the residue of all the wreckage. She makes the beast beautiful, and lets the contradictions stand—broken and whole, grateful and robbed, missing and found.

A version of this article will appear in the June 2020 issue of ELLE.

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Leslie Jamison Leslie Jamison is the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering, a critical memoir; two essay collections—The Empathy Exams and Make it Scream, Make it Burn; and a novel, The Gin Closet.

The post Kinfolk’s Katie Searle Crafts a Beautifully Imperfect Life appeared first on Trends Dress.

from Trends Dress https://trendsdress.com/kinfolks-katie-searle-crafts-a-beautifully-imperfect-life/ from Trends Dress https://trendsdresscom.tumblr.com/post/614027662141358080

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claimedcrossbows · 5 years ago

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The Big Setup (Bellarke Fanfic)

So I also posted this on my Fanfiction account under MsPlotTwister, so if you want to read it there you can do that as well. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13591315/1/The-Big-Setup

Anyway here’s the first Chapter, Tell me what you think and if I should continue.

Description: Clarke Griffin just wants to do her job as New York's Matchmaker but working side by side with her infuriating Ex Husband Bellamy Proves to be a difficult task. "Oh my God." Clarke gasps looking at the news. "What?" Bellamy asks looking at the news of a escaped convict. "Don't panic..But I think I just set my client up with a criminal!" She yells. "What?"

The sound of an alarm wakes her and she already knows this is going to be a very long day. But she was excited none the less. She might not have much in life at the moment, but her job was something she always looked forward too.

With that enthusiasm and a cup of coffee she gladly approached the day by looking through her phone at the schedule she had layed out for today.

She looked at the email of one of her current clients and some of the pictures they had sent and she knew she had her hands full with this one

She quickly got dressed and headed out to her office where she was more than excited to finally meet her client.

Clarke Griffin was a strange woman in many ways.

Her enthusiasm seemed to stay on a 10, her mind was constantly coming up with new ideas, and to top it off she was a very paranoid woman with many trust issues.

At least that’s what people mostly said about her who knew her.

But then again..How could she trust them?

Her out look on life was to remain positive, until of course something goes awry, then its time to panic.

And panic she did.

She was stuck in traffic in the busiest streets of New York and her appointment was in less than 5 minutes!

“Isn’t there anything you can do!?” She shrieked at her taxi driver who was struggling to keep from rolling his eyes. But he had told this woman for what must’ve been the 10th time since she got in the car that there’s nothing he can do about the traffic conditions. Apparently their had been some really bad accident and the police had blocked off the streets. Pretty much delaying everyone who had somewhere to be.

“Uhg!” Clarke sighed looking at her phone at the time.

She released a sigh and quickly fished around in her purse for some cash, “Here this should cover it, i’m walking the rest of the way.” She said tossing him the money and quickly dashing out the taxi before the driver could even say anything.

Clarke quickly ran the rest of the way to her place of work and was regretting her decision of wearing heels because her feet were crying for an ice pack.

Clarke struggled to catch her breath as she entered the building which was actually nothing more than a condo that her Aunt had bought in order to launch her match making business.

Yep you heard that right.

Clarke Griffin is a professional matchmaker, people email their company and give them their background information including medical records, criminal history, finance history and just about everything else you could imagine. They contact local family members and friends and get a good idea about you and then see if there’s anyone in their data base they could potentially set you up with. But if you think that is extreme they also specialize in makeovers as well, which happens to be right up Clarke’s alley, every since she was a kid she dreamed of being a fashion designer for celebrities. She wanted to see them walking down the red carpet in her fashion ideas, so she went to school as a Designer but of course getting into the industry of fashion in a place such as New York City was incredibly difficult. New York had as many fashion designers as they did Lawyers and Doctors.

So that’s when she went to her Aunt Diyoza when she heard that she was thinking about making a Match Making Company from her very own condo.

She’s been working their every since.

The only drawback is, there wasn’t many employees so Clarke was basically running things by herself.

Okay scratch that.

There wasn’t any employees, and Clarke was definitely running things by herself.

The only other person currently working there (who’s name she refused to mention) was currently on a leave of absence (busy partying all night and day) and he never shows up.

That was until today.

“Clarke there you are.” The all to familiar voice said from the couch as he paused his video game to look at her dishelved appearance.

“Bellamy what the hell are you doing here?” She groaned, her mood worsening.

“Diyoza called me in, said we got a lot of new customers and she needs me back, I mean I can’t blame her, I am the best employee she’s got here.” He Smirked.

“Look I don’t have time for this, I have a client coming in a few minutes and-”

“Oh you mean Izzy?” He said, “Yeah she already came, I set her up with Murphy, she seems like his type.” He shrugged unpausing his game.

“You what!?” Clarke yelled.

He paused his game, knowing that she wasn’t going to let this go and turned to her giving her a shrug. “What you should be happy, I gave you the day off.” He said not knowing why she didn’t look grateful.

“Izzy is a vegetarian, Murphy isn’t!” Clarke said angrily.

“Okay, well maybe this is a good opportunity for Murphy to stop ordering KFC for dinner every night.” He shrugged not seeing the issue.

“Izzy is a sweet pollite girl, and Murohy…Well he’s Murphy!” Clarke huffeed.

Bellamy sighed running his hands through his long dark curly hair something she had loved doing once, but now the very sight of him made her nauseated.

“Uhg you make me sick.” Clarke frowned feeling the nausea build up.

“Oh yeah, here.” He said pulling something out of his jacket pocket and giving it to her.

Clarke looked at it and was surprised and irritated to see that it was a bottle of tums.

“You always say you feel ill around me, so I thought that might help.” He said smirking a mischievous look spreading through his face.

“My stomach isn’t the problem, its you.” Clarke huffed setting the tums on the table.

“Look I thought this would make you happy, I mean now you have the night off, you can relax, hang out with friends, maybe go on a date.” He said throwing that last bit in to see how she reacted.

“You know good and well i’m not dating anyone right now.” Clarke rolled her eyes at his attempt to pry into her love life.

“Really? With such a wonderful attitude I can’t imagine why.” He said sarcastically.

“You don’t get to pry into my love life, if you don’t remember, you divorced me.” Clarke spat.

“There it is, the constant reminder every time I see you, that I divorced you, Yes I divorced you Clarke, because you are a total hyperactive nut case.” He said bluntly.

“And your a playboy bachelor who wouldn’t know priorities if it bit you in the ass.” She spewed.

“Isn’t it ironic, the Match Maker can’t find a man of her own.” Bellamy rebutted.

Clarke shook her head tired of arguing with him, she walked to her office and made sure to slam the door shut to emphasize that she wasn’t happy.

She walked over to her laptop and immediately began sifting through customers who were in desperate need to find their special someone. She looked at a few of their backgrounds and started thinking of potential matches off the top of her head.

She was about to email one of her clients and tell them she might have a match for him when suddenly her door opened and a very uneasy Bellamy came in.

“What do you want Bellamy?” Clarke sighed not in the mood for any more of his help.

“There’s someone out there your gonna wanna see.” He said.

“Who?” Clarke asked standing up.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He said.

To say she was now beyond curious was a understatement, so she got up and followed him to the living room where she was met with someone she didn’t think she would ever see come through her doors.

Roan Atwood.

Famous Male Model and Actor Roan Atwood who had been missing for 5 years was standing before the both of them looking a complete and total disaster, his hair was greasy and disheveled, his clothes were dirty and in shreds and she could smell the whisky from across the room. She looked at Bellamy in complete shock and his expression nearly mirrored hers and it was in that moment she knew this was going to be the biggest set up they ever did.

#Bellarke #Fanfic #Bellamy #Clarke #The100 #Romace #Humor

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killerxqween · 6 years ago

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I Want it All- Gwilym Lee x Reader (Chapter 1/ Part 1)

Summary: You are a 19 year old student attending NYU and your life is slowly going downhill. You’re struggling financially, you aren’t happy with your major, and you hate where you live.

Your friend proposes the idea of getting a sugar daddy, like her because it’ll help with your situation. She sets you up on a date with a contact from her sugar daddy and things get wild from there.

What will happen when you find out the mystery man is Gwilym Lee and how will your feelings develop towards each other? Read to find out 👑

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Hi everyone! It’s Dani and this is my first ever fanfic here on Tumblr! I used to write and I stopped, but I decided to start writing so here I am. I wrote a lot for the first chapter, because I really wanted to set the stage. The first part is more of the setting and helping the plot develop. The second part is when Gwilym comes in 🤪I hope you all enjoy this fanfic! Follow me for more!!! Besos, my lovelies ❤️

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Another day, another struggle.

You had just gotten an eviction notice from your landlord saying you had 30 days to pay your rent or you would be kicked out of your minuscule one bedroom, one bathroom apartment. Sometimes you wondered why the hell you decided to rent an apartment instead of living on campus.

Yes, you attended New York University with a full scholarship. After years of money struggles and hard work in high school, you got into your dream school to study Psychology. But even though you had achieved one of your goals, your life was far from perfect.

The biggest issue was your family. Even though they supported you while you were in grade school, your parents started to have a fall out and eventually filed for divorce. This led to financial struggles which meant they didn’t have the capacity to send you money because they needed to care for your two younger siblings. This meant you had to take up two jobs; one as a waitress and one in your local Sephora, which was extremely difficult to maintain because you were in university. These jobs also barely made enough for you to pay your rent. Some weeks you had to decide between saving money for your rent and buying food.

The other issue was one you ultimately felt you had no control of; you didn’t enjoy your chosen major. Yes, you do have control of what you want to do but, your dream had always been to be a musician. And as passionate as you are about music, trying to get into the music industry was virtually impossible while you were studying. Your final option would have to be dropping out of University to pursue music full time, but you knew that it would be impossible to live off of minimum wage and pursue a career that was difficult to be successful in. So you decided to major in psychology, which you enjoyed but knew it was something you would never truly be happy in.

Basically, it was difficult being a 19 year old independent scholar living in New York City.

You sighed and put the slip of paper onto the counter in your small kitchen. You lifted your phone and checked the time. 12:37. You had a day off from school today so you and your best friend Carina were going to a little café for lunch at 1:00 pm. The café was a five minute walk from your apartment so you decided to grab a drink and get ready.

You arrived at the café 2 minutes early. Carina was already seated at a small table that was in the corner of the café. You sat down at the table with your friend and took in your surroundings.

You had been to this café many times. It was a small space, but decorated in a way that made it feel very spacious and cozy. There were air plants hung all over the area, decorating the red bricked walls.

You smiled and spoke to your friend. “How are you! It’s been so long.”

You said excitedly to Carina. She has been your closest friend since you started classes in NYU. You had met her in your college writing class and hit it off immediately. She was a fierce 20 year old who knew what she wanted, unlike you. She had this bright, strawberry blonde hair with big, bold hazel eyes. She was extremely beautiful and confident in herself.

On the other hand, you were more reserved and less outspoken than her. Even though you were more introverted than her, you were still very confident and bold, but you didn’t show it as much as her. You liked your (e/c) eyes and you loved the way your soft (h/c) hair flowed. You just didn’t like showing it because you grew up with a family that saw self-love and self-confidence as conceited.

Carina smiled brightly at you, “I’ve been great! I went on vacation to Dubai with Rick for a week! It was so beautiful, we stayed at the Burj Al and everything!”

Ah yes, her sugar daddy Rick. Carina had signed up to be a sugar baby over two years ago and met Rick. He was a 42 year old Billionaire from Long Beach, California. He had close contacts with everyone, including famous actors and wealthy businessmen. He was handsome and Carina was very fond of him. Their relationship was strictly business, for the most part. She got whatever she wished for, including money, designer clothes, cars, and luxurious vacations as long as she accompanied Rick to parties, meetings and galas. That part wasn’t so bad, unless you took into consideration that one of the terms of being a sugar baby meant you had to sexually please the sugar daddy.

She didn’t mind it, though. She was financially stable and she got anything she desired. Not to mention Rick was not bad to look at.

“That sounds like fun, girl. I’m glad you enjoyed your trip.” You said with a sigh at the end.

“What’s wrong, babe?”

“Nothing, it’s just I got an eviction notice from my landlord saying I had to pay rent in 30 days or I’ll be kicked out. I barely have enough to feed myself, Carina. I don’t know what to do.”

She smirked. You knew what she was going to say next.

“Why don’t I ask Ri-“

“No. You may be comfortable with giving fake love to man in exchange for money but I’m not.”

“It’s not just money, though. You can’t pay rent? He’ll pay for an entire fucking penthouse. You can’t buy food? He’ll take you to 5 star restaurants. You don’t have enough money to buy a new sweater? He’ll buy you the whole damn Gucci store, baby. It’s worth it. Just take it into consideration.”

And you did. Carina had told you about the offer many times, every time you mentioned you were struggling, actually. This time, you were extremely stressed and thought about what life would be like if you had no worries at all. Maybe this proposal wouldn’t be so bad? As if you hadn’t had friends with benefits before.

“So how exactly does the whole sugar baby thing work? Do I go out with him? Do I go when he calls?” You asked curiously.

“Basically, before you sign anything or agree to any terms, you go out for a meeting. Basically, it’s a date. He gets to know you, you get to know him, and you’ll both decide if you’re interested in sugar dating. The terms differentiate for each guy. But usually they ask you to accompany them to an event or they ask for a favor and they’ll pay you back with whatever you want.”

You stared at her with a pensive face. You knew that a favor meant sex or any sexual act and you didn’t know if you wanted to go down that route. But what other option did you have really?

“Fine. Ask Rick to set me up with one of his contacts. But I’m not agreeing to anything yet, I wanna see how this ‘meeting’ goes” I said while putting air quotes around meeting. I knew that I might regret this in the future, but right now, this was my final option.

She smiled at me. “Perfect, I’ll call him when I get home then I’ll text you with details! There’s no need to worry, babe. You’re going to be fine, and if you don’t like the guy then you can decline the offer. Just have an open mind. Okay?”

“Okay” You said with a breathy sigh.

4 days later...

—————————————————

Carina texted you back about 4 hours after grabbing lunch with her.

She had gotten you a meeting with “some hot, wealthy, British guy who is interested in a potential relationship, that is completely business of course.” She has sent the specific date, time, and location of the meeting. You were shocked.

Your potential suitor had gotten you both reservations at Masa; one of the most expensive restaurants in New York City. You didn’t know why you were surprised, you expected nothing less from a wealthy man wanting to make an impression on a girl he wanted. But, you had never seen anyone waste that much on a simple meal, it astounded you.

Well now it was the day of the meeting with the mystery man and you were extremely nervous, to say the least. The days had passed too quickly for your liking and now you had to go meet him.

“What did I get myself into” you quietly mumbled to yourself while checking you appearance in the mirror.

You looked hot, if you were being honest with yourself. You had worn your most expensive outfit and your most luxurious jewelry. You picked out a black formal dress that accentuated every curve on your frame that you had saved up for over a year to get. You wore matching black, glossy heels and your diamond necklace which you had received as a 16th birthday gift from your family.

You took in your appearance one last time and thought about canceling. It wasn’t too late to say that you weren’t feeling well, you hadn’t met the guy yet. But you were desperate for money and somewhat curious about the whole ordeal. You gave up the idea of canceling and walked out the door.

-End of Chapter One/ Part One-

(Chapter One/ Part Two is now up)

-Dani 👑

52 notes · View notes

noiseartists · 5 years ago

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Loomer: Bliss from Brazil

Loomer, from Brazil, are another great Shoegaze band (or Nu-gaze band if you are timely conscious) that have emerged on the worldwide scene in the last decade.

The band is currently composed of 4 members:

Stefano (Male vocals/guitar),

Michelle (Female vocals/bass),

Richard (guitar)

Guilherme (Drums).

They are currently on the Midsummer Madness label. Looker have released two EP’s and two albums as of the time of writing this, May 2019.

Loomer certainly wear their influences on their shoes (See what I did there!) but Stefano (Lead male vocals/guitarist) insist that they do not force the music that they make and that they are different people and each member brings their own influences and ideas to the studio.

They really live up to the title of indie as they are independent in their creating and recording of their own songs. Since their 2nd EP ‘Coward Soul’ the band have mixed all of their work and mastered all of it, bar the debut album ‘You Would Not Anyway’ which was also recorded in various places ranging from the comfort of home to an unorthodox location such as a beach!

Loomer prefer to start playing tinny, trebly sounding arpeggios that are more concentrated on authentic guitar tone blended with a bit of bliss that is reminiscent of Swervedriver, in particularly, the outro of their 1993 hit from Sophomore album Mezcal Head; Duel. In fact, their inclination of rock style lead guitar playing and the tone that they select would fit well into any Swervedriver song. However, Loomer are far from being a rip off band. Their ability to stay clear from obvious guitar effects like Reverse Reverb (which has been subject to over kill in the Shoegaze genre for the last 30 years) and floaty guitar tone sucking ambience is refreshing.

MUSIC WORK

Their first EP’s were ‘Mind Drops’ (2009), followed by ‘Coward Soul’ (2010) and the two albums are ‘You Would Not Anyway’ (2013) and ‘Deserter’ (2017). The first EP’s are both raw in sound quality, like they were made in 1988 and immediately, I can hear comparisons to The Jesus and Mary Chain (Check out the tracks ‘Search On Your Own’ and ‘Damned’ with Jim Reid style deep vocals and more ear-piercing feedback than your English teacher gave you at school), damn, these guys are loud!

The other EP ‘Coward Soul’ (2010) reminds me initially of Sonic Youth because of the raw octave, harmonic, rapidly strummed spring reverbed guitar playing, and the sudden outbursts of punky shouting during the refrains. This is also the first EP that features female vocals blended with Stefano’s vocals in the form of Michelle, like Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon. The debut album ‘You Wouldn’t Anyway’ aesthetically catches my eye with very 60’s psychedelic cover art that is lit up in a striking purple colour and the music is better produced than their EP’s.

The track ‘Enough (From the debut Mind Drops EP) starts with an interesting tinny slightly delayed single note riff before launching into a raucous, unstoppable and solid wall of sound that features a joyous, bouncy vocal melody encapsulated. Ethereal, fragile but endearing female vocals enter the fray in the first refrain section gliding along with the deeper, reassuring male vocal creating a balance or maybe an imbalance to the music that the band themselves admit to liking the sense of mystery in their songwriting and sound. Classic My Bloody Valentine right there, hence the name of this band. The ending mellows out but instead of the abrasive guitars transforming into ethereal, angelically ambient tools of sorcery,

On their Album ‘Deserter’, a track that grabbed me is the penultimate song, ‘Another Round’ which begins with one very fuzzed up guitar and a few abrupt un-musical jack input noises to create suspense. The guitar tones on this track are pure gorgeous and they also vary. Each section of this song has something different going on with the guitars, whether in terms of tone or chord changes or playing technicalities, it’s all evolving all of the time, sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant. The fuzz that growls and a purrs like a V8 engine in an American muscle or British lightweight sports car appears in the pre-chorus section acting as a soothing haze coinciding with the floaty vocal lines. This track is by far one of the catchiest and interesting tunes from the album without being too simple or boring.

The album finale, appropriately named ‘Opinions’ features a mind bending dentist drill guitar effect that emerges at the Thirty One, Fifty mark of the album and emerges again near the end ad sees out the remainder of the song. Again, this is a track full of surprises that gives the listener one final treat before the album ends and all of a sudden, the world seems like such a quiet and dull place.

Therefore, this album, this artist do their job as a huge aspect of the essence of Shoegaze music is to transport the listener and when the music stops, the holy experience is over and the world is bland again, and that’s when you really appreciate the benefit of this incredible genre that we call Shoegaze. Loomer certainly capture this essence.

Link to ‘Enough’ from debut EP, Mind Drops (2009) below:

Stunning track from debut EP, Mind Drops (2009)

INTERVIEW

THE BAND

Where are you from in the Brazil? Where are you living now?

I, jaquelina and guilherme were born in Rio Grande Do Sul, south of Brazil. Fernanda was born in Santa Catarina, also in southern Brazil. Richard was born in Germany. And Michelle was born in the United States. At the moment, Fernanda who played bass with us is living in Florida United States, and Michelle is living in Porto Alegre, she is our current bass player now.

What did you study?

I studied Electronic Engineering. Richard and Guilherme studied design. Fernanda studied psychology. Jaquelina is a self-taught artist. Michelle is studying civil engineering.

What is your day job at present if any?

I like my job, but I dont really want to talk about it. Sorry...

Do you dream to live from your music or is it a passion you do not want to spend your full time on?

I don’t really know. I’m following what life offers me. I really love music and cannot stop doing that.

Do you have families?

I live with my wife Jaquelina. We don’t have any children yet. Michelle lives with Andressa, her girlfriend. Fernanda lives with Kim, her wife. Richard lives with Maria, his wife. Guilherme is divorced and is the only one of us who has a son, Gabriel.

Could you tell me how the band meet and decided to do music together?

I was playing another band called Transmission. In the year 2005 Richard came to live in Porto Alegre, and formed another band called Lautmusik, as he liked my band we decided to do a tour together in 2007. But things ended up not working, Transmission stopped playing in 2007 because the singer has moved to another country. Because of that, we probably ended up making a band.

Guilherme, was already my acquaintance, we played in another band called Materia Plastica, and he came to join us as our drummer. Liege was the last one to join the band, but that gave the finishing touch in the formation, took the bass and made the backing vocals in some songs and sang others. Later in 2013 the Liege left and entered the Fernanda that already played with me in the band Parkplatz. This is the formation that resists to this day.

Can you tell me the inspiration behind your band? You can detect the influences of shoegaze and indie rock. There is also a very interesting duality with some violence in the music that is always balanced by some tranquility with the feminine voice or other means. It is a great example of ying and yang or masculine / feminine influences. Is it on purpose?

We did not try to force the music we made. I mean, at least we think so. We are different people, and each one brings their influences to the music. Sometimes the core of the song is composed at home grossly and finalized in the studio over many essays, other times it is completely developed in the studio. We like male / female duality, we think it brings a balance, or maybe an imbalance. I'm not sure, I just know we like it that way.

Was there a vision of sorts or did you know what you wanted to do when you started up? I.e. when you started the band was it always a project to create a shoegaze band? Or was it different from now?

At first, Richard, our guitarist, had the idea of making a band in the style of My Bloody Valentine. We watched TV shows, we listened to music, watched horror movies. So he had this preconception. But when we got people together and started playing, we had more influences than just MBV, and we wanted to use all of them. It was a lot more fun, and we kept it that way. After all, we do not like to sound too alike to anyone, we prefer to sound like ourselves.

Do you have any other musical side projects apart from this band?

Actually, at the moment we are not playing in any side project, but we already had many.

Could you tell me more on the band composition? Do you have plans to add new members, or is there possible departure scheduled from existing band members?

The band is me (Stefano) on male voice and guitar, Michelle on female voice and bass, Richard guitar and Guilherme drums. Fernanda moved to USA in 2015/2016. Jaquelina played with us from 2016 to 2017. Now we are playing with Michelle Franzen.

We've already had 4 bass players playing with us since initial training. Liege in 2008, Fernanda in 2013, Jackelina in 2017 and Michelle in 2018. We have no plans to add or remove band members. We are just doing music and shows, things that we love, but sometimes the circumstances of life change people's destiny.

Can you tell us more how you came to have the band’s name?

Well, in the beginning we were playing for 6 months and have a scheduled show, but we hadn`t a name yet. So we made a list of 50 names to choose one. Loomer was a suggestion made by Richard, and it was the winner. Of course Loomer is because of MBV song, but what we use to say is that we wasn't looking for anything related to MBV on purpose, it was just a coincidence that this was the best name to think of when we had to choose one.

The Creative process

Who writes the song and the music and how do you get to the final song? Is it a community process, do you have leaders in composing or arranging music?

We have a lot of ways to compose songs. Some of the songs I write at home and bring to the band. Some songs are born entirely in the studio. Some songs starts with a guitar riff, some with the drums or bass giving the idea to the band to complete the rest.

Do you listen to the advice of your band mates? What would you do if they said a song was shit but you liked it?

Well, this has not happened yet. But what usually happens is that sometimes the members do not have ideas to play certain music, and it is put on the shelf to be finished later. Sometimes when a song takes too long to complete, it may happen that we lose the spirit it initially had.

There’s a degree of unconventional songwriting with you guys. Was it kind of intimidating going to record knowing people might not be engaging with the songs in terms of hooks and such and trying to deliver an engaging sound on record?

We just try to make songs that we think are good. We do not know how many people will like it but if we like it it was already worth the effort. Everyone in the band is free to contribute to the composition, and this already provides a greater degree of creativity.

Personally I like songs that confuse the head but that are simple after you understand it. But I will not impose anything if it is not working. I can not say for sure. I think what we do has to be worth it to us, somehow.

You have a great way about your guitars, with tones and melodies answering each other, almost like discussing. Could you tell us more on how you work together on this?

Well, we've played so loud that many times we can not hear what others are doing. It is often a pleasant surprise when we will listen to the recording. Maybe our guitar dialogue is just two guitars talking to the walls. Another important detail is that we try not to interfere with what each one creates. Anyway we think it works.

Talking about the lyrics: who write them? Is there a common thread in them, a theme?

Usually I write the lyrics. But usually I write only what I sing, and when Liege sang, she wrote the part of it. Fernanda has not yet felt comfortable writing her songs, although we encourage her to do so. But she helped me in the lyrics on the last album. I do not think of a main theme when I write, at least on purpose. I think this ends up appearing naturally according to what I am experiencing at the moment.

Do you labor over your lyrics? Is that something that comes easy?

I do not consider myself good at writing. I think I'm better maybe in the melodies. I admit that several songs I leave to decide on the lyrics only during the recording, although I already have an idea of what I would like to talk about. Anyway we like the voice as being just another instrument of music, not being something in the foreground.

Do you have a message that you want to get across in your music? If so, what are some of the messages you want to spread?

I do not have a message. When I start to write I do not know what I'm talking about. And if I have enough time to this initial process the whole letter appears and I am quite happy with the result. But if by chance I leave the lyrics to finish later, then I will need to understand the subject to be able to conclude. These are the hardest to finish.

Did your listening habits changed over the years and does it affect what you write?

Yes, my habits change a little over time. And I think it's natural that what I write also changes. But I do not try to do anything on purpose. What I want to say is that I do not try to listen to something new in order to incorporate this into my music because it's a new trend. What I do is dig old and new bands for something I really enjoy. And when I write, it's always the old thing I've always done.

How is your recognition going in Indonesia and Abroad? Is it growing? Are you happy with it?

Did you mean in Brazil? Yes, in Brazil we have some recognition that has been growing slowly. We are happy with this, because it is a musical style that has no space in the mainstream media. Time helps reward that.

The path to music

Is it easy to find producers and studios in Brazil for indie-rock?

It is not very easy to find, so we produce ourselves. We like to do this because we can keep the result close to what we would like it to be. But we lost in the aspect of an external opinion that could enrich the music.

Your recorded sound is very good, which is not easy. Did you engineer the sound yourself, or did you have a sound engineer with you? If yes could you tell us more about him/her?

The first EP "Mind Drops" was recorded by Lucas Pocamacha, guitarist of Superguidis, a very cool indie-rock band here in Brazil that is not playing anymore. He did this in exchange for a sound card we bought for him. The second EP "Coward Soul" was recorded in the DUB studio that we usually do our rehearsals and we did the mixing and the mastering.

The first LP "You Would not Anyway" we recorded ourselves at home, on the beach, in the studio, in different places. We mixed and the mastering was done by Paulo Casaes (Fujimo).

The last album "Deserter" we recorded in the studio Dissenso and in the studio DUB. I mixed it myself and mastered it. We've been looking for a sound engineer but we still can not find it. We thought it would be very good for us. In the meantime, we're doing things ourselves.

Was it a community work to try to have the best sounding music possible or mainly driven by the sound engineer or by the band?

It is a work mainly directed by the band. We spent a lot of time mixing the result. Recording usually does not take long. But it is not so because we want it this way. It's because the recording (mainly the drums) is usually in the studio and paid per hour. I still believe it's best to spend more time recording and less time mixing. The result would be even better.

Can you tell us how the recording process was?

We are still learning. But what we usually do is record the drums first. Our drummer likes to record with us playing together, without a metronome or guide track. In this sense I think it can be said that each band has an ideal way to do the recording.

Anyway the drums is the one that takes more time to be recorded in our case. And it's worth it because if it gets well done it makes it easier for the rest of the process. It needs to do in the studio. After that we recorded the bass, and it can be recorded at home if we want to save money. It's something quick to record, so it would also be okay to record in the studio.

After the bass comes the guitars. What takes in the recording of the guitars is not so much the execution, but the choice of the tones, the pedals, the regulation of the effects. Many hours of tuning and testing for 4 minutes of noise. But it's worth.

Since it takes a lot of time to adjust the tone of the guitar, it is best to record several songs at a time when you find the right tone. It is possible to record the guitar at home, but it gets better in the studio since we play loud. At last we record the voices, and these we can do at home as well. It's good to have a condenser microphone for this.

The rest we solve in the mix, where we do all the magic. But that is not a rule. We like badly recorded things too. Whistles, voices and guitars out of tune. What does not work can fit in very well. You need to hear what's coming out. I think it's the ear that's in charge after all

How did the recording work differ over time?

We recorded all of our albums. With this we learn over time new things, new tricks. I think you should not give too much importance to mistakes, or avoid doing something because you do not know enough.

More important than that is to let work flow, to enjoy the flow of inspiration because it matters more than the quality of work. But the recording is also part of the work, the two things complete themselves, the recording and the composition.

Is the recording material yours when you are out of a studio or do you borrow/rent it?

We have our own recording material. That is to say, we acquire over time equipment that we understand that would add to the sound of the band. But we also try to stay free to enjoy what we find at the recording location. It may be the noise of the wind, the trees, the water, in a studio we take advantage of some old equipment, a tape recorder, a tube or tape microphone, things that may sound a bit strange, or that inspire us.

Any interesting anecdotes on some recording session you would like to share?

I'm not very good at trying to be funny. But in our first EP Mind Drops we did the recording on a farm improvised. We took the sound table, the microphones, the amplifiers, the drums and everything else. We made the loudest noise, played really loudly and recorded separately, on separate tracks. Could not understand the result at the time.

Back in town, when we went to mix the result, we could hear horse whinnies, the noise of chickens and other strange things on certain channels. When I put everything together I could not see it. It was like this. I think this is funny in a way...

Did getting the live experience across on record create any pressure for yourselves in the recording process?

I think it creates a pressure yes. But we are not very organized to create the songs, or sometimes we take a lot of time to finish them. So some pressure helps us. They push us forward.

Instruments: you seem to be mainly a Fender band. Could you tell me what inspire you to use fenders rather than other brands?

We really like the Fender sound. I think what motivated us to use so many Fender outfits are our influences like Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, My Bloody Valentine among others. We thank them, because we like the result.

A question for a future paper I have in mind: if you use often a Fender Jaguar, could you tell me more about what makes it good to play (sound, neck, …). I find there are lot of noise artists that are using this guitar and I am interested to know why.

In my case, what I like most about this guitar is the sound of it. I think the combination of her sound with distortion and fuzz pedals gives a very engaging effect. Besides I consider a very beautiful guitar. I personally like old, vintage things, working fine.

Do you have one favorite instrument or do you change often?

We do not usually switch instruments. We have a fixed formation, with bass, two guitars and drums. In the recording sometimes we risk playing other things, like acoustic guitar, synthesizer, tambourine. But anyone can say or suggest ideas.

The funny thing to note is that we are a band in which we are all guitar players. Guilherme our drummer is actually a guitarist, and our bass player Fernanda is also a guitarist. I always use the same guitar, the Fender Jaguar. Although you have already modified some things in it like the keys, the pickups and the bridge, it's always the same.

But what I change with some frequency are the pedals. As I have more pedals than fit on the pedalboard, I do some kind of rotation to test everyone. In the end of course there are some favorite pedals.

Tell us what you are looking when trying to achieve your sounds? Do you experiment a lot or have a clear idea of what you want?

We experiment a lot, and we've tried to take advantage of everyone's idea. Maybe this will end up making the song a bit unconventional. But I like strange and uncomfortable songs. I can not say what we are looking for, because each one actually puts it in its own way. We eventually discovered what we ended up creating. I do not know if it's the best way to compose, probably not, but that's how we do it.

Who is the more knowledgeable with pedals? You use them a lot, to great effect.

Thank you. We ended up getting a lot of pedals. We do some research and we end up getting some. In the end we want to use everyone, which is not possible of course. But I think they help increase the possibilities of the songs. Me and Richard are the most interested in pedals, we've been researching what some bands we like have used on albums we like and we're going after them. It's a form of judgment because there is a very wide variety of pedals.

How many concert a year would you do on average and what would be the size of the venue?

We do not do many shows. We do 5 to 10 shows per year. But that depends a little on the season, since we've been focused on finishing the album in recent times. The size of the venues depends a bit on the event, we have already played in venues for 10,000 people, and we have already played in venues for 50 people. The smaller ones are more suitable for us, because our public is not so big, besides, small places are cooler.

Would you mind sharing some good anecdotes from your concerts/touring?

In respect to the reader, it may not be a good idea. =)

What are some places around the world that you hope to take your band? Do you have any plans at present to tour in other countries than the Brazil.

We think of going to countries here near Brazil, like Uruguay and Argentina. We also have plans to go to the United States, after all our bass player Fernanda lives there. We also thought about going to the UK, we even staged a show last year but we couldn’t go. Japan too. It's good to have plans, don’t you think?

Is there any reason in particular that you want to go to these places? Is there something about dream pop/shoegaze in those places that makes you want to go there?

We really like to write songs. Besides composing, recording them, it's very cool. In addition to recording, being able to play them around, and checking people's connection to our songs, this is very motivating. Sometimes we go places far away from where we came here in our huge country and have some people who know our names, follow our trajectory.

They thank us for doing that. I think there is a natural process of an artist wanting to expose their creation. These countries we mentioned before, we are very curious. We have a strong connection with them as well, as these are places that really enjoy shoegaze music, or that have created the style. You know, we're just living.

The Scene

Brazil have a thriving indie scene that is not very well known internationally. Could you tell us more about it?

Brazil is a huge and beautiful country. It's hard to know everything. There are many bands that come and go, and some are really good, but that for some reason are not very well known. In fact the indie scene is something that is self help based on the friendship, and in the musical taste of course, since there is no support of the larger media. We have some blogs and independent radio programs on the internet that have helped. It's really a fun aside.

Is it easy for a Brazilian indie bands to be known internationally? Do you have any example?

I think it's not easy, not because the bands do not deserve it, but because the outside public would probably think 'look, a Brazilian band singing indie rock. it must be bad.'. I do not know. Maybe not. It's all a matter of taste. I do not think much about being known or succeeding outside (or inside) Brazil. I think only of making songs that I consider important, maybe cool, or worthwhile for us to record or play at shows.

With respect to bands, there was an indie band that was relatively well known abroad 'Cansei de Ser Sexy'. With respect to Brazilian shoegaze, I know of two bands that lived in London for a while, Wry that is in Brazil now again, and The Tambourines who still lives there. Our seal, the Midsummer Madness, is now in London as well.

Has the scene changed since you began, and if so how?

The scene changed a lot, many times. In the 80's and 90's, many people went to the shows without even knowing who was playing, local bands had space on some local radios, record companies invested in new bands. In the 2000s there was a lot of variation, difficulty in publicizing the concerts, closing bars and independent rock show venues.

But you can go play in other cities, or on the other side of this immense country. With the internet and social networks, you can promote the shows in distant places. Even though there are few, there are always one or two pubs to play.

Nowadays still appear spaces for bands, because the bands help themselves based on the friendship. It's a way of life.

Is there any Brazilian band(s) you want to recommend in the indie/shoegaze/post-rock genres?

There's a lot of cool bands here. I can cite a few such as Herod, Twinpine (s), Wry, Labyrinth, Sileste, Justine Never Knew The Rules, Firefriend, Lava Divers, Juna, Carne de Monstro, Churrus, Space Rave, The Sorry Shop, Lupe Lupe, Low Dream, Fellini, Second Come, Pin Ups, Patife Band, This Lonely Crowd, Bruxas, Duelectrum, The Soundscapes, Blear, The Cigarettes, ruido\ mm, Proud Beggars, Walverdes

Economics

Do you have a label? Could you tell us a bit more if so.

We have two labels currently, Midsummer Madness and Sinewave. Both help us in spreading the record. Midsummer Madness also helps us in the pressing of physical disks. They both also help us to schedule shows here in Brazil.

How did the funding worked for the LP? Did you invest a lot yourself? Was your label supportive in that respect?

Yes, the label helps with a portion of the money to make the LP, and it returns in LPs to be sold. The other part is paid by us and we have the equivalent in LPs to be sold as well.

Where does the majority of the money go when you’re paying your own way?

Most of the money goes in the beers.

Do you make a decent revenue from your music or is it still very much a hobby?

We do not have enough revenue for considering it a professional work. In the best of situations we can pay the expenses. But that does not mean that we will change or give up, because we do what we love.

How do you sell your recordings (shops, online, …)?

Our label, Midsummer Madness, sells a part of the discs online. We sell online also through bandcamp and at shows.

The Future

What is the next album due?

We're thinking of making a single or an EP now. But we do not have a definitive date yet. It would be good to be this year, but...

Any other project (ie movies soundtrack, …) or plans

Richard plans to make a horror B movie. He really likes 80s-b-horror-movies. Maybe I'll do the soundtrack. Something with synthesizer or noisy bending guitars. It can be funny.

Do you plan to continue music for a long time or are you tired of it?

We do not intend to stop playing music ever. While it is possible to step on the pedals, they will be busy. I do not think it's possible to get tired of something that you love. Circumstances change, sometimes they get difficult, but that's what makes things worth it. I could get tired of not loving anything.