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consultingcompanion94 · 4 months

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Once Upon an Eternity

Chapter 1

Months after Aziraphale left for Heaven, Crowley finds himself waking up back in the bookshop after months of coping with his broken heart. But… is it the first time he’s been back? Why does it seem like there’s something he’s missing? When he’s reunited with the new Archangel for the first time since that day, he can’t stop the overwhelming dread that something is very, very wrong… AU of my interpretation of S3 as inspired by the show Once Upon a Time. If you’ve seen it, no spoilers for anyone who hasn’t!!! If you have, hope you enjoy my little mash-up!!!

Notes:

Hello everyone! Welcome to my first fic in the GO fandom! I fell in love with the show after binging the whole thing just in time to dive right into S2 when it aired (and experience all the devastation that brought us all). I was finally inspired enough to dive back into fanfic after a very long hiatus by the show and by Rebecca Flutter’s amazing GO podfics on Youtube (seriously, do yourself a favor and check them out!) I couldn’t stop picturing certain scenes from another one of my favorite shows, Once Upon a Time, with Crowley and Aziraphale, and this is the result! Hope you enjoy, and let’s get on with the show!

The storm must have been what finally caused Crowley to come to. Lighting lit the sky as rain beat against the windows, thunder crashing just far enough away to not be an immediate concern.

Speaking of immediate concerns…

Now that Crowley was slowly regaining awareness, he shot to his feet from his current position on the floor. Not his floor, mind you, his flat strewn with bottles as it had been for months. Not even the floor of one of the hotels of questionable quality he vaguely recalled bolting to the numerous times he couldn’t bear being anywhere near Soho since…

Since he’d last been here in the bookshop.

Tensed and alert, Crowley fled from the back room. He was fully set on outrunning the memories ready and waiting to spring like arrows notched and ready to fly, before freezing at the sight of another figure slumped near the register.

“What the…” the flash of panic and concern that struck Crowley seemed out of place (at least in its intensity), considering how comparatively little he’d had to do with the small Scrivener to warrant such a reaction on their behalf. “Muriel?”

Apparently his words did what the storm had not, Muriel shifting weakly as Crowley crossed the room and bent to help lift them from the ground.

“M-Mister Crowley?” Muriel groaned, eyes still unfocused and leaning against Crowley for support. “W-when did you come back? I- I thought you’d driven off after Archangel Az-”

“How many times have I gotta tell you to drop the Mister? I’m ancient, not old,” Crowley cut them off with a huff, and where the Heaven did that come from? As if it was a long standing argument? He very pointedly shoved aside acknowledging that his interruption also served to prevent Murial from saying his name (He included himself in the list of people he was very good at lying to.)

Frowning Muriel questioned again, “When did you get here? How did you get here?”

Having no answers, Crowley could only shrug noncommittally. His eyes darted around the room, taking in every inch as he’d done when assessing the bookshop after the Armageddon that wasn’t. He failed to find even the smallest of changes this time around, but that didn’t stop his hands from twitching uneasily as he felt the air faintly stir with an energy he could only describe as wrong.

Both beings jolted at the sound of the front door’s bell ringing, Maggie and Nina stumbling their way into the shop looking as if they were in a similar state of disorientation.

“What the hell have you gotten us into this time?” Nina snapped, marching up to Crowley and crossing her arms with a pointed glare.

“Does it look like I have any clue what’s going on here?” Crowley retaliated, only stopped from advancing on Nina when he saw Maggie place a calming but firmly restraining arm on Nina’s arm.

“She’s just tense and jumping to conclusions. Can’t blame her really. Both of us woke up in Nina’s shop with no idea how we got there, on top of it being the first time in months we’ve seen your car hanging around rather than just passing through…” Maggie paused her explanation, brows furrowing before she continued questioningly, “It.. it is the first time you’ve been back… right?”

“Course it is, what kind of question…” Crowley trailed off, matching Maggie’s state of confusion.

Now that he paid attention, he had that feeling of an unexplainably increased sense of familiarity, eerily identical to what he’d felt with Muriel and equally as uncountable. Not only that, but how was he so much more unaffected than he should have been by being back in the place he’d had his heart obliterated? He hadn’t expected his first time back (assuming he ever did come back), to feel anything less than agonizing, yet here he stood, heart still unmistakably raw and scarred over far more than he expected but not actively bleeding out.

“See, not as far of a stretch to link you to whatever's going on as you thought, wouldn’t be the first time you’ve meddled in something and caused a right mess,” Nina grumbled, still visibly on edge but less openly hostile.

“Excuse you, but if you recall, you know very well the main meddler last time was…” Crowley swallowed, flinching at coming even close to mentioning him.

“What’s that lovely human expression? Oh yes- guilty as charged,” a posh voice replied from the shadows near the front door as they all whirled to face the intruder. Crowley shivered at the familiar cadence he’d know anywhere, though not from pain as would be assumed, but from the unfamiliar iciness he’d never heard from that voice.

“Aziraphale?” Crowley breathed, frozen to the spot as he took in the figure walking into the dim lighting the storm had brought on.

“Speak of the devil as they say,” Aziraphale smirked, stopping just shy of the group clustered in the middle of the shop. The sterile white of the new suit was less surprising than the harsh, sharp angles of the design that contrasted so severely with the soft lines and curves of the Angels usual ensemble. It was nowhere near what Crowley would have imagined from the new Archangel, had he been in any state of mind to ponder such things, anymore than the flecks of dark gray mixed in with the halo of blond curls that had never changed until now.

Unsettling as all of that was, what caused Crowley's blood to freeze in his corporation was when he finally met Aziraphale’s eyes. Gone was the ocean blue Crowley had gotten lost in far more times than his sunglasses would have allowed anyone to know.

The gaze that met his eyes now was not the lavender he wasn’t sure if he would have recoiled from due to its association with a certain former Archangel, or embraced despite everything because it still would have been his Angel gazing back regardless of the hue of his irises.

What Crowley saw now was a twisted shadow of that same flowers vibrant shade, if left uncared for to grow dark, decayed, and withered, long since abandoned to rot.

“W-what are you doing here?” Crowley stammered, breathing erratic as Aziraphale slowly continued his progress towards the group, “You’ve been plenty content to piss off to Heaven without a backward glance until now, don’t let trivial little connections like ours hold you back now Archangel,” Crowley spat, doing his best not to shrink away every step closer Aziraphale advanced.

Chuckling darkly, Aziraphale lifted his hand to caress Crowley’s cheek, smirking at the shiver his touch was able to cause in the Demon even now.

“Ah, you see, therein lies the problem. I admit that you were right in one respect. My newly appointed position wasn’t exactly as I expected. Some… Changes were required,” Aziraphale paused with a curl of his lips. “However, I suppose you could say that leaves us even, considering I was also right.”

“In what way?” Crowley barely managed to choke out, stomach dropping as the Archangel snickered sinisterly.

“That you had no idea what I was offering you,” Aziraphale sneered. One of his hands fisted into Crowley’s lapels as the other rested on his face, a lovers embrace that should have been warm and tender but was instead forceful and possessive. Breaths mingling for only a moment, Aziraphale hissed quietly enough only Crowley could have heard it, “And I’m going to ensure you regret turning me down, that you beg me for another chance. And don’t worry, when you’re ready, I’ll be waiting.”

Breaking the embrace, there was a flash of blinding light, and the Archangel was gone.

Thank you all for reading! If you want to read more now, here’s the link to what I have up so far on AO3. See you all in the next chapter!

Next Chapter

#good omens #good omens season 3 #crowley #aziraphale #ineffable divorce #once upon a time #ineffable husbands

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downthe-f4ndom-rabbith0le · 1 year

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The Way Back Home (Spencer Reid x Reader) - Chapter Three

The Way Back Home (Spencer Reid x Reader) - Chapter Three Reader Insert: she/her pronouns Word Count: 3173 Warnings: major angst, major fluff, mentions of murder, graphic descriptions of dead bodies, crime scenes, near-death experiences, slow-burnish romance, death, canon violence, rape, swearing, guns, knives, prostitution, canon cuteness of the team. Spoilers: Maeve's death, mentions of previous cases or canon events from seasons 1-10.

Spencer and you have an unspoken connection with one another. Nothing has ever happened between you two, especially since everything went down with Maeve, but your love has grown and overcome and is now clear as day to everyone. However, just when Spencer builds up enough courage to ask you out officially, you're requested on an undercover mission that halts your budding relationship in its tracks.

Months go by without a word from you until bodies of prostitutes start showing up in New York and the BAU is brought in to help. Spencer and you finally reunite as both your cases collide, but your lives and your love are both on the line now.

Will you and Spencer be able to find the way back home this time?

~~~

Spencer stared hard at the map of Manhattan that was pinned to the board, eyes flickering between each location the bodies were found at. He'd circled them, hoping to visualise some sort of map or pattern between the kill spots, but nothing emerged to his despair.

He sighed, rubbing his tired eyes. The team had gone to their hotel soon after his outburst at Holt, but he'd been back in since around six o'clock. He checked his wristwatch. Quarter-to-eight it read.

'You're in early.'

Spencer swivelled around at the sound of Hotch entering the room, the rest of team following closely behind. JJ held two coffees in hand, walking around the big table in the middle of the room to hand one to him. He didnt know how JJ knew he needed the caffeine, but he smiled gratefully nonetheless and took the hot brew from her hands.

'Yeah,' he said after a deep sip, scrunching his nose slightly at the slight bitter taste he detected. It was sweet, but not sweet enough. 'I... couldn't sleep.'

How could he, when his whole world had been turned upside down in the span of a couple of hours? You were risking your life - had been for eleven months already. He wanted this case to be over, and sleeping in his uncomfortable hotel bed while you were constantly looking over your shoulder was not going to help make that happen.

The way his friends looked at him now only confirmed that he looked a little worse for wear. But before anyone could comment, Hotch intervened.

'Where are we on the unsub's comfort zone, Reid?' Hotch asked, looking at the map over Spencer's shoulder.

Spencer was grateful for the change in topic, and turned around to point at the map with one hand, the other still cradling his coffee. 'I marked out where each body was found in relation to their establishment,' he explained, pointing at each marked spot for emphasis. 'Unfortunately, they range from up to downtown, even the Upper Eastside to SoHo. Geography doesn't seem to be a factor in the killings. What does seem to be a factor, however, is that all the other girls, like Roxy, were killed either outside or not far from where they worked.'

'That could speak to the unsub wanting to deliver a message,' JJ suggested. 'If the unsub is someone who has been double-crossed by these girls or the establishments, maybe their deaths are a warning.'

'Penelope said she couldn't find anything on these girls prior to their employment,' Kate said, reading a text off her phone no doubt from the technical analyst herself. 'Y/N's intel was correct. These girls were like ghosts, but like, before they had a life.'

'They had to have come from somewhere,' Rossi said. 'They couldn't have just... invented these girls.'

'No...' Derek trailed off, hand reaching for his jean pocket. '...but they can be reinvented.'

'What do you mean?' JJ asked, but Spencer's brain worked faster than Derek's mouth.

'From the initial notes from each body find, we know all girls were quite loyal and involved with the establishment's business,' Spencer answered, feeling reinvigorated suddenly. Or maybe that was just the coffee. 'They would've had to have been isolated for a few years prior to their re-emergence back into society to be that conditioned to their owner's orders.'

'Most of these girls were around seventeen and eighteen when they started working,' Kate said. 'That's when girls usually establish their independence from families.'

'But these girls have stayed as they've entered their twenties,' Hotch noted.

'Which means they would've been taken away from society before they could figure out how to be independent.' Derek's finger pressed a speed dial button - the first person on Derek Morgan's list for all things knowledgeable.

'Greetings my love,' Penelope greeted, her perkiness like another shot of espresso in Spencer's system. 'Did you see my good morning text with all my notes - and by all of them, I mean nothing - on the girls' history? Sent with love.'

'We did, baby girl,' he answered. 'But we might have a new lead to go on and we need your help.'

'You've rubbed the lamp, and as the genie I am now at your command. What do you need to know?'

'See if you can find any missing child records from over the last decade, particularly girls,' Derek said.

'They might not be made by parents, per say,' Spencer quickly added. 'The seller is choosing girls he knows people won't look too hard for. They'll be low-risk victims, so look up any mysterious disappearances from homeless communities and even unofficial orphanages and shelters in the New York state.'

'Boy Wonder, you certainly live up to your name,' Penelope quipped, the soft pattering of her frantic typing filling the room for a moment before she stopped. 'Aha! There have been over fifty girls who've gone missing over the past decade that fit those perimeters. I almost missed some of them because they weren't officially reported, but they popped up in local newspaper adverts noting certain kids in their community had been missing for a while. I've just sent a list of places they all went missing from to your phones.'

Another flurry of fingers flying over her keyboard and she spoke again. 'And if you look at your tablets, you will find the picture a young girl, aged twelve, gone missing from a trip to an aquarium with her orphanage. A Missy Wright. She had a record for running away and hiding, so when she wasn't found after twenty four hours, police disbanded the search party and declared her a runaway. But does she look familiar at all to you?'

Spencer looked over JJ's shoulder as she looked at her own tablet, seeing the similarities before anyone else did. 'That's Roxy Vega,' he said.

'I'm running out of gold stars to give you, Boy Wonder,' Penelope quipped. 'I'll try and find more pictures of the dead girls and match them with any of the missing girls on my list.'

'Thank you mama, you're best,' Derek said.

'I know, sugar,' Penelope replied before ending the call promptly.

'Let's go talk to those establishments, particularly Roxy's old orphanage,' Hotch announced. 'Let's cover as many as we can by splitting up. Spencer and JJ, Derek and Kate, and Dave you're with me.'

Kate squinted at her phone, eyebrows furrowing in distress. 'There are over thirty addresses here. And they're spread all over the New York state. This could take days.'

'I'll get local police as well as Holt's team to help,' Hotch replied. 'We find out who these girls were before they were abducted, we find out how the unsub finds them.'

'Then we can find him,' Rossi added with an assertive nod. 'All right then, let's get going. We're burning daylight.'

Spencer downed the rest of his coffee then grabbed his satchel and suit jacket and scrambled after his team. Before he left, he turned back to the board, to the marked map and the pictures of the managers and the mutilated girls. Girls who died as different people to who they were born as.

We will find you, he silently vowed, and followed his team out the door.

~~~

The pounding music of the Pit replicated the consistent thuds in your head as you walked your way around the floor.

Three glasses of single malt whiskey balanced precariously on your tray as you made your way through the crowd of gentlemen and girls enjoying themselves. It was a fine art, one you had perfected over the eleven months you'd been undercover.

You tried not to crinkle your nose in disgust as you passed by a certain lecherous man getting handsy with one of the girls, Lavender.

She was younger than you, a pretty little thing who started around the same time as you did. You'd come to the assumption she was also one of the girls who'd been taken as a a child and reinvented, as she always dodged any questions you asked about her life before... working.

And maybe she just didn't know the answers or she just really valued her privacy as a girl in her late teens did. But the way she would always always redirect the subject or blatantly not answer didn't sit right with you.

Lavender's eyes met yours briefly, and you saw the defeat and disgust she felt as she let the man's hands grip her curvaceous hips. It was a silent cry for help - you'd seen the same look in the other girls' eyes before. Not just at the Chateau, either. At all the establishments you'd wheedled your way into.

You wanted nothing more than to slug the bastard who had to be forty years Lavender's senior, and shame him for defacing an innocent like her. For going behind his wife's back because God forbid she age like human beings do. You saw the ring tan wrapping his ring finger. That was an easy spot after being in the workplace as you long as you had. Or maybe that was just your profiler background giving you an upper hand.

Before you could do anything, however, Lavender was dragged back into a conversation with the lech, forcing a fake smile to crinkle her beautiful features. And you still had three drinks to deliver.

'There you go, boys,' you drawled out, slapping on a flirtatious smile as you placed the three glasses onto the small round table between the three occupied chairs.

'Why thank you, sweetheart,' one said, flashing your smile back at you in return. 'I've been looking forward to this all night.'

'Why don't you sit down with us,' another one said, patting his lap as he took a sip from his glass, never losing eye contact with you.

You repressed the shudder that instinctively rattled your bones, and instead you waved a hand carelessly. 'No, no. I can't. I'm on bar shift tonight, boys. I mean, who else is going to get you your drinks?'

'I'm sure someone else could cover for ya, sweetheart,' the third man suggested, hand reaching out to graze your hips. 'Come on, just ten minutes won't hurt anyone.'

Bile rose up in your throat at his touch, how it sent an uncomfortable chill through you despite the heat inside the Pit. But you were Serena Vanderguff, and this was not your first rodeo.

You gracefully yet pointedly slapped his hand away from you, laughing boisterously like you hadn't purposefully done that. 'Oh, you boys have such a wild sense of humour. But be honest... you couldn't afford ten minutes of this.'

You swayed your hips as you walked away, knowing full well they were staring after you. Wolf whistles followed your movements but none of them came after you thankfully, no doubt because they set their sights on some other poor victims.

You approached the bar and placed your tray on it, leaning on it with a sigh.

'Tell me about it,' a velvety voice said. The voice belonged to a gorgeous woman with charcoal skin, chocolate eyes, and multicoloured braids who was wiping glasses before putting them back behind the bar to use for another round of drinks. 'But I'm sad to say, but the night is still young.'

'You got that right, Ajani,' you murmured, rubbing around your eyes to avoid messing up your eye makeup. It was a little bright and bold for your taste, but it didn't matter what you liked.

It hadn't mattered for a while now.

'Hey,' Ajani said, grabbing your attention. 'Madame was looking for you in her office.'

Your eyebrows furrowed in confusion. 'For me? What for?'

Ajani shrugged, throwing the hand towel she'd been using over her shoulder. 'She didn't say what exactly, just that she wanted to see you now. Don't worry, I'll get Becky to cover for ten.'

You nodded, then cautiously turned over my shoulder to the door to the side of the stage that read OFFICE. It wasn't unusual for you to be called in to her office as of late. It was exactly what you wanted. But it didn't mean you weren't any less terrified whenever you entered, the endless possibilities of why you were in there driving you crazy.

The door opened to reveal Madame Lacroix sitting at her desk, a drink in hand, and two other men sitting in the two chairs on the other side of it. Two men, you were terrified to notice, you recognised as managers of your previous workplaces: Alfred Royalton of the Charming Times brothel, and Melton Jones from Guilty Pleasure. Their quiet murmurings silenced as soon as you came into view, their piercing gazes freezing you in the doorway.

'You wanted to see me, Madame?' you said as perkily as you could, hoping to cover your fear up slightly.

Madame Lacroix's red lips split in an award-winning smile as she waved you inside with her free hand. 'Yes, Serena. I was! How lovely of you to join us. Come in, come in!'

You quickly scurried in and closed the door behind you, happy to find reprieve in the much quieter room compared to the Pit. But that reprieve didn't last long, as you met your old bosses' curious gazes.

'You remember Alfred and Melton, Serena?' Madame Lacroix prompted after an awkward moment of silence.

'Yes,' you answered. 'It's great to see you both. You're looking well.'

'And so are you, dear Serena,' Alfred said, walking over and embracing you in an awkward hug as he tried to not spill his drink. As an older gentlemen, he seemed more like a fatherly figure to the girls in his employment. But from what you knew about the business he and the others in the room were involved in, he came off as a creepy pedophile. 'I'm so glad to see Madame Lacroix treating you so well. You know you are always welcome back at the old haunt.'

'If she's going back to anyone, it's me,' Melton said, the certainty in his words matching the intensity of his eyes. They raked you up and down, and again you repressed a shiver from the disgusting feeling it gave you to be watched like a piece of meat. Melton Jones couldn't be older than thirty-five, and was the son of one of the biggest CEO's in Eco-energy products and research.

You could only imagine what his big-time mother would think if she knew what her son was really into.

'Tough luck, boys. She's mine now,' Madame Lacroix interrupted the fight, getting up from her seat to walk around her desk and sling an arm around your shoulders. 'But why don't we get into what we really want to talk about? Have a seat, my dear.'

You didn't have much of a choice as Madame Lacroix guided you to sit in her own desk chair before joining the men on the other side. They all looked at you expectantly, but their smiles were more alarming than reassuring.

'Um... what did you want to see me for, Madame?' you asked after a moment of silence.

Madame didn't respond right away, placing her glass of wine down first on the desk. 'You are a special girl, Serena. Very special indeed.'

You raised a quizzical brow. 'How so?'

'You've impressed us,' Alfred answered, looking around at his peers. 'Your ability to keep secrets and do things without being asked has attributed to this. It's one of the reasons we've had to share you around so much and in such little time. If I had any say, you would've never left Charming Times!'

'You've done our stocktake,' Melton continued, those snake eyes of his never leaving yours. 'Kept certain... shipments under wraps. Picked up exclusive clientele that has done wonders for our business. You're like our own little personal lucky charm.'

You recounted all the times you'd hidden the secret load of drugs that were snuck into customer's drinks and food to get them so delirious they didn't realise how much money they were spending. All the times you sat in on meetings with the managers about who to target the next night, and all the shady receipts of shipments with unknown contents in them you hadn't be told about yet.

All the the illegal and dangerous deals that you'd told your Organised Crime unit about behind your managers' backs.

'That is why we would like to reward you, my dear,' Madame Lacroix said, a smile you figured to be proud gracing her lips. 'And we're not the only ones who think so too. We think you're ready to learn our... business, and so does the Boss.'

'The Boss?' you asked tentatively, not bothering to mask your slight fear. Was this the seller? Was this the guy you'd been trying to take down for almost a year now?

'Oh don't look so terrified, honey,' Madame Lacroix doted, walking around the desk to pat at your head. She leaned in close to you, and you restrained from gagging at the smell of too much wine tainting her breath. 'The Boss is impressed by your work and commitment to the trade. So much so, he wants to meet you. Soon.'

The men looked at you expectantly, and that's when you realised how you should be reacting. 'R-Really?' you mustered out an excited response, widening your eyes to appear more innocent. 'The Boss wants to see me?'

'Yes, Serena,' Alfred said. 'All the arrangements will be made when you meet, but soon you'll be seeing him a lot.'

'Arrangements?'

Melton surprisingly was the one to answer you. 'Each establishment in the Business, as we like to call it, has their hierarchy. The Boss is above us all, and he helps keep our establishments running smoothly. From there, it goes us, then our employees. That's you right now, Serena. But there is a status in between us and the employees that is trusted more than the others, kind of like our right hand woman.'

'And that woman acts as our mediator between us and the Boss,' Madame Lacroix continued, still stroking your hair. 'Kind of like a peace offering for how generous and kind he is to us.'

'What has this got to do with me?' you asked, but you already knew what the answer would be.

Madame Lacroix let out a dramatic sigh as she stood to make her way around the desk again, rejoining the men. 'Well, our mediator at the Chateau was Roxy, but, well, you know what happened to her. So what I'm offering is a chance to become the next Roxy, Serena. Be my most trusted employee, to learn the Business, and to appease the Boss- I mean, thank him.'

She stopped mid-walk to turn and look you dead in the eye, and despite her drunken breath, you saw clarity and evil flash in those emerald eyes of hers.

'So, what do you say, Serena? Do you want to be one of us?'

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souryogurt64 · 1 month

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Hey, in which city did you see Alex Turner? We would like to know

I saw Alex Turner at Soho House in Chicago after their concert in August 2023. Soho is a hotel/clubhouse chain that is like supposed to be exclusive for people who are like in bands or fashion and stuff, but normal people in creative jobs can also be members and a lot of times your workplace compensates it because it a gym/networking

My friend/coworker had a membership because of our job. We’re both in marketing, it isn’t exciting. I don’t have a membership because I don’t live near that neighborhood. I had seen Arctic Monkeys the night before and I didn’t think they were very good so I had been complaining a lot on here. I was surprised because I saw them in 2014 and thought they were good, but they were extremely drunk and I didn’t think I could hear the bass.

Anyway, I was meeting her to go swimming. I got off the bus and was walking up the block and he and his entourage were outside the front doors smoking. It was very obvious they were important or famous or whatever because they were in suits and had black vans with tinted windows with them. I thought for sure I saw Alex Turner but I wasn’t sure so I kind of did a double take

Because it is for celebrities Soho does not have a sign outside the front door so it is a bit tricky to find. Alex saw me looking and definitely knew I recognized them. I already knew it was him but he pulled down his sunglasses while smoking so I could see his eyes. In Pete Wentz’s terrible no good very bad book that I’m obsessed with he vividly describes pulling down his sunglasses to order from a waitress in a diner and it felt just like that lol

I was really surprised and I also didn’t want to have to walk through them and disrupt them if I was in the wrong place by mistake, so I kept walking to the end of the street. Then I figured out that yes, they were in my way and I was going to have to cut through them.

So I turned around and walked back and Alex and I made eye contact again and he was smirking and obviously knew I recognized him and had walked to the end of the street and back because I was so flustered lol.

Anyway I said excuse me and went past them through the door. I ran over to where my friend was waiting in the lobby and told her and she went to look through the window but they were getting in their van to leave, possibly because they knew someone had recognized them but IDK

I didn’t ask him for an autograph or picture because I had posted that I didn’t think the show was good and didn’t want to be a hypocrite and also because of where we were I thought it might be a pretty rude.

It was not that eventful otherwise lol it was a very brief interaction

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grits-galraisedinthesouth · 1 year

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From a FAKE rented cottage at the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, CA, Harry told his good global therapist:

"Meg gives me my space."

Why wasn't the good doctor allowed to meet at their massive Montecito Olive Garden SPACE?

Byrony was allowed to conduct their interview in the so called, "guest house" (as Sparry hung family photos on the wall). Afterwards she was rewarded to step foot across the threshold of the REAL "mansion" to observe and testify to the UK of the "normal" family living behind their very own security wall.

How much "space" does a spouse need? Anderson, Bradbury, Variety and even NOoprah were denied entrance to Casa de Montecito.

With so many "lemon trees," The Meghans still PAID a HOTEL to stage:

pandemic zoom calls & interviews

BLM & pro Biden Bench speeches

40th bday juggling act

chatting with teenagers

AGT (except the meghans who have zero talent)

Spotify Spots

magazine photoshoot & interviews

The very fake mockumentary megflop soap opera filmed inside various rented hotel cottages, on rented benches

All 1 hour away from Montecito at Santa Barbara's San Ysidro Ranch for megflix.

The Meghans still expect Americans to think it's normal to request discounts at a NYC hotel while suing his grandmother's government for (FREE) tax payer funded security.🧐

How convenient for megs that everytime she moved to a new country or city, her self titled "gay husband," Mr. Markus Anderson (former Soho House Bus Boy) chose to relocate to live w/her or near her

La->NYC

NYC->Toronto

Toronto->London

London->California

In LA, Meg was known as a serial celesbian to the stars. So how did Sparry & Eugenie become bffs with Omit's former gutter guyfriend, the infamous Markus Anderson?

Does MA's influence on the young BRF begin with Misha NooNoo and her friendship with Yorkie Eugenie? It would make sense that Eugenie, was the easy workaround to Sparry. What about all the photos of the York family posing, Sarah included, with sleazy Ron Burkle🤮😖😳

Of course Sparry preferred to party at Soho House instead of working on his character flaws. No coincidence that on more than 1 occasion, Sparry was videotaped pinching or sucking the nipples of male friends & male strangers.

Over the past 12-24 months we've seen Sparry become more effeminate in his motions, walk, speech, and who can forget seeing Sparry rub the back of his male partner as they enter his alleged personal man cave.

According to Caitlyn Jenner:

"supposedly they have a place in LA"

and Harry spends his free time in San Francisco. Is it any wonder Thirsty Tyler Perry who has his own skeletons declared he doesn't want love if it isn't The Meghans kind of love.🙄

Meghan, Markus & Dorito have made all of Sparry's dreams come true.

Dear Sparry, I hope finding your freedom & freebies in CA with your new "friends" was worth the price of your soul. By the way, it's not.

Meghan must feel like she can finally see a light at the end of her failed attempt to destroy the BRF via Sparry. In the end, it was the Queen of England who accurately SUSSed out the heart of Rachel Meghan Markle: an interloper who repaid good with evil.

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foxes-that-run · 1 year

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2021 Haylor Timeline

Timeline Tag, or years 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

2 January - Harry at Jeffs wedding with OW. Holding hands at wedding photos - the Paparazzi Clint and his partner follow Olivia to a hotel in Santa Barbara. He later does an hour long podcast on following them and explains he then realised Harry was there and takes photos. After a few phone calls, the two photographers discover rumors of a romantic relationship between Harry and Olivia. 10 minutes later, photographed them together. in Nanny tell all Nanny said Olivia was still texting Jason to say she loved him, that Olivia was pretending to not have service. Nanny found out she was at the wedding online.

3 January - walking with OW in Santa Barbara

4 January - Harry hike in LA

15 January - Ted Lasso Season 2 starts filming London, in Nanny Tell all nanny said that Ted confronted her on the plane there about her telling Olivia that Jason had been crying and not coping. Jason then offered the Nanny a life coach to get info out of her and they were attending therapy with the Nanny.

18 January - Coney Island released as a single.

14 February Olivia at Harry’s LA house with luggage. Don't worry Darling filming wraps. On the 21st Taylor Lover tour cancelled.

16 February - E News Harry and OW fly to London together. DWD wraps, Harry OW cast photo

20 February - OW near Jason Sudeikis /her kids London house

6 March - Oliva posts photo of Branston Beans from Harry's Kitchen, the curtains can be seen. Lockdown laws mean she should not have been able to travel there and was bragging about it and posting inside his house.

10 March Instead of congratulating Harry on the nomination Zayn posted “F the Grammys”

youtube

15 March -Talk at the Grammys, Taylor and Harry part of small group of attendees. Harry goes over to Taylor and they are polite, Harry seems a little awkward and says “well it was nice to see you”. He keeps looking at her during his acceptance speech for record of the year.

Taylor wrote High Infidelity and WCS with Aaron Dessner while in LA for the Grammy's, when she saw Harry & J Mayer.

Niall and Liam congratulate Harry on his Grammy win, Zayn and Louis do not.

31 March - architect of Harry’s Erskine House renovations posts photos of the interior to their website. It has a black, wood pale grey palette with pink stairs

13, -25 April - OW with Harry london

April 27 - Joe leaves UK to Belfast to film.

May 11 - HS & TS both at Brit awards (the 26th was a blood moon)

May - Harry’s bassist since HS1, Adam Pendergast, leaves love band (date from his LinkedIn)

20 May - Harry and Olivia dinner at Refuel Bar & Restaurant at The Soho Hotel. ET Rumours Joe and Taylor engaged.

15 June - Harry seen with fans wearing Apollo eleven tshirt

21 June - Harry wrapped My Policeman in Italy, started in Feb. Released 1 September 2022. Holiday in Italy

2 July - renegade released

3 July - Harry at England v Ukraine game Italy

8 July - Harry and Olivia on yacht and in Italy

26 July - Charlotte Clarke (Harry’s backup singer) said she was let go and doesn’t understand why. won’t be on HSLOT

28 July - Taylor posts for folklore' anniversary, "It’s been one year since we escaped the real world together and imagined ourselves someplace simpler." with a photo from Donegal Ireland. Heavily TTPD coded with Victorian gown, like the Betty speech’s on eras tour and lakes (poets), two coffee cups too, was it already a double album?! Coffee also as in the end of the Karma MV. Joe posted photos from the same trip on July 22nd

9 August - 26 August Harry in studio maybe mixing Harry's House in the behind scenes photos here you can see outfits he wore in LA on these dates.

4 September – 22 July 2023 - Love on Tour, Harry has a new bassist Elin Sandberg

7 September - Taylor in Belfast visiting Joe. Red TV entirely recorded at Kitty Committee Belfast UK (her home)

9 September - Taylor at Toronto Film Festival and to premiere all too well

11 September - Harry at Toronto Film Festival to premiere My policeman, talks about wasted time being the worst thing in presser

17 September - wildest dreams TV released, TikTok about recording Red TV and a glitch. Harry and Olivia in Phili with Xander, max and family

May 11 - HS & TS both at Brit awards (the 26th was a blood moon)

May - Harry’s bassist since HS1, Adam Pendergast, leaves love band (date from his LinkedIn)

May 24 - Joe and Taylor together in Paris

3 June - Harry OW her parents London

21 June - Harry wrapped My Policeman in Italy, started in Feb. Released 1 September 2022.

30 June - H Holiday in Italy

2 July - renegade released

8 July - Harry and Olivia on yacht and in Italy

13 July - Jason sudokis GQ that he still doesn’t know why they broke up and it ended in November 2020. Harry mentioned.

14 July - HSLOT announced for September

26 July - Charlotte Clarke (Harry’s backup singer) said she was let go and doesn’t understand why. won’t be on HSLOT

7 August - OW and Harry had guests at house, Harry has moustache and greets someone.

9 August - 26 August Harry LA in studio maybe mixing Harry's House in the behind scenes photos here you can see outfits he wore in LA on these dates. Walking with Olivia 19 August

31 August - Taylor and Joe hiking Franklin Canyon

4 September – 22 July 2023 - Love on Tour, Harry has a new bassist Elin Sandberg. OW at first show.

7 September - Taylor in Belfast visiting Joe. Red TV entirely recorded at Kitty Committee Belfast UK (her home)

9 September - Taylor at Toronto Film Festival and to premiere all too well

10 September - Harry golfing in Dallas

11 September - Harry at Toronto Film Festival to premiere My policeman, talks about wasted time being the worst thing in presser

17 September - wildest dreams TV released, TikTok about recording Red TV and a glitch. Harry and Olivia in Phili with Xander, max and family

18 September - Harry seen with Olivia near her parents in DC before show there

22 September - first heart kiss since 2018! St Paul - Falling, with Two Ghosts intro (4:31). Then again weekly till the end of the year

25 September - Taylor London Lena's wedding.

youtube

29 September - & 1 Oct Harry played Nashville and wore a white satin outfit, he played with his rings while performing Beautiful. Harry plays To Be so Lonely for 9 shows then never again, including Nashville N2 and NY. In Nashville looks up. OW at shows

3 October - OW parents at HSLOT but she is in LA.

9 October - Harry in Florida dinner

13 October - fan sends to DM that they saw Harry, no OW at Pittsburgh cathedral of learning with “more police and security than I knew existed” wouldn’t have recognised him if it wasn’t for them.

16 October - Harry wore “all things must pass” hoodie NYC OW walked awkwardly holding him. One security person.

22 October - one more photo of Taylor and joe in the bathroom leaked (the proper selfie), photos from 2016 leaked in 2020

25 October - Harry seems to be in a bad mood when he first goes on stage in Boston, also wearing no rings. Heart kiss in Falling, OW there and not seen with him until harryween in a week.

26 October - Taylor posts TikTok "Autumn Lovers RISE" as a reenactment of a 27 September 2017 Tumblr post. She writes lyrics to ATW "just between us did the love affair maim you" "and Plaid stuff and ankle boots" she's wearing a skirt but says 'stuff' plaid shirts and ankle Chelsea boots is Harry in 2011-2013. And "Maroon/Hunter Green" The ATW move included a book coming out 13 years later about the love affair.

30 October - Harry dressed as Dorothy at harryween MSG NY, Olivia as Dolly Parton posted photos with exercise bike and boobs

1 November - rumors Harry and OW fighting

10 November - heart kiss in falling. Tumblr anon said about OW “I was working at the venue in Sacramento when he played during LOT. Her backstage privileges were revoked after the show prior to that...which was..I think...Portland. Our backstage security was instructed to not allow her backstage under any circumstances. She didn't even arrive to the venue with him. From what I understood from Sacramento through the end of that tour her security access was no more than say..contest winners..radio personalities etc. I was shocked at the time that they lasted another year since there was clearly trouble in paradise.”

11 November - Harry has a bruise on his back I. Love on tour backstage photo

12 November - Red TV released Harry wears red in his show on the 11th. All Too Well Short Film premiere Dylan O'Brien (who is in ATW film) is included in this footage of Austin and Dylan cheering when Jack plays Question..? in the Studio. Appears on Fallon and says she easter eggs 3 years in advance in reference to ATW.

16 November - Pleasing launch with Harry on bike photo on cover of Dazed

17 November – Taylor leaves NYC for Panama to go see Joe. Taylor posts a drunk TikTok from Panama. On the 20th she went to the national theater and leaves on the 22nd. Joe stays and films. Midnights written while gone

21 November - Last time Taylor is photographed in public for 3 months is the SNL performance for All too Well

25 November Rolling Stone noted the Haylor call and response “the long-running songwriting badminton between her and Harry Allegedly is pop call-and-response the way it ought to be”

28 November- 13 December Harry MIA. after his shows. OW seen alone in LA

1 December Taylor wore Gucci lion ring to Zoe’s kravitz birthday throwback photo shared day after YLM date identified by Jack.

5 December - You're losing me written. Love on Tour in Buenos Aires

28 December - Harry and OW Italy. Fans post they saw them Hampstead NYE, no photos.

Continue to 2022

#haylor #Youtube #haylor timeline #2021

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cesperanza · 2 years

Note

Hello! I was wondering how you feel about fanfic of your work? I recently went on a trip to London and all I could think was “4MW-verse Steve and Bucky in London on vacation and/or a (non-hero work) work trip.” It might fester enough that I need to commit it to page/iPhone notes…

Also, semi-related, but in London, I stayed one street over from Dean Street and each time I went down it my brain would chirp “COME AT ONCE DEAN ST HOTEL SOHO RM 417 BUCKY.” (Alas there is no Dean Street Hotel there anymore, if there once was.)

Hey, this is very flattering, thank you! The AO3 allows for "inspired by" fic to be posted super easily and I am fine with that--delighed in fact. People have noticed that I don't actually have a transformative works policy posted on my profile (and I do not!) But not because I'm--ha ha--against transformative works; rather, I like the talking! I like to be asked, I like the engagement, I want people to write to me and talk to me! :D I am not a showrunner for CBS, I want to be in community. So yes, write your fic, and I'm so happy to hear your story about Dean Street - I was once put into a hotel near Dean Street and I didn't know it until I opened my window and was like, OH COOL. Half of the reason to do fandom is that I make the world magical for myself like this!

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charlotte-of-wales · 1 year

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The Sussexes are frazzled, fraught and lacking romance – like any couple with young kids

Five years after their wedding, the omens are bad as Harry and Meghan seem to be heading in different directions.

It is hard to believe that five years ago today, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle rode through the streets of Windsor in an Ascot Landau carriage, cheered by adoring crowds on their wedding. At the time, household staff weren’t entirely confident the relationship would go the distance – “no one could see it lasting longer than three years”, according to one insider. Yet as the couple celebrate their “wood” anniversary, Harry and Meghan have proved their doubters wrong.

While their relationships with their own families might not be what they once were, the marriage appears to be going strong, despite the couple’s outwardly diverging priorities.

The Duchess once described them as moving together “like salt and pepper” but they seem to be heading in opposite directions – Meghan looking forward while Harry dwells on the past. The extraordinary events of this week – with the couple claiming they had been “involved in a near catastrophic car chase at the hands of a ring of highly aggressive paparazzi” in New York – seem to expose a chasm between her desire for fame, and Harry’s quest for privacy.

The couple say that after the event, they were subjected to a two-hour “relentless pursuit” by a “gang” of at least six paparazzi. New York City authorities have stated that although photographers made their journey “challenging”, “there were no reported collisions, summonses, injuries, or arrests”.

In pictures of the couple leaving the event, Harry’s discomfort was etched on his face as he used his phone to film the action from the back seat.

However, questions have been raised over how such a campaign sits with the Duchess’s plans to build her “global enterprise”. Meghan signed with leading global talent agency WME in April, amid talk of more “content creation”, a Dior clothing deal and the revamp of her defunct lifestyle blog The Tig.

Given this potential conflict, it is little wonder, then, that the couple have cut quite separate figures lately – with Harry travelling alone to the Coronation on May 6, leaving Meghan in Montecito with their two children, Archie, who turned four that day, and Lilibet who turns two next month.

The last time the Sussexes were photographed together in public was at a basketball game in Los Angeles last month, when they missed the opportunity to smooch on the “kiss cam” that pans in on couples in the stands. Some took the normally tactile couple’s reluctance as a sign all may not be well between them after Meghan’s absence from Harry’s promotional book tour fuelled split rumours.

Such is their independence from each other that the owner of a leading hotel chain in Montecito recently told The Daily Telegraph they have a room set aside for Harry where he occasionally stays on his own.

The Duke has also been known to stay at the uber-exclusive San Vincente Bungalows when visiting LA, which is a two-hour drive from the couple’s £11 million mansion.

“That seems to be his escape place,” said a source of the super secretive and selective members’ club in West Hollywood, which – unlike the Soho House chain also frequented by the Sussexes – bans journalists from joining. A refuge from the rigours of parenting two children under four, Harry has apparently stayed there after attending Barry’s Bootcamp, a high-octane cardio fitness class, at the nearby Beverly Center. One friend described the couple as “like any parents of such young kids: frazzled.”

They added: “They are really happy together and live this idyllic life in Montecito, which is essentially a giant gated community of multimillionaires.

“But at the end of the day, they’ve been through a lot and I think they’ve both felt quite ground down by it all.

“They’re like any married couple, five years in.”

As a Californian, born and bred, Meghan appears more settled than Harry who, by his own admission, still feels torn by his British ties. As he wrote in his book: “I love my mother country and I love my family and I always will.” Although he has repeatedly spoken of embracing the Santa Barbara lifestyle, it is no secret that the Duke – cut off from his family and many of his friends – is heavily reliant on his wife’s social circle.

When they first started dating, Harry was Meghan’s protector, guiding her through a royal life that was alien to her, but now the roles have been reversed and it is the Duke who appears to be struggling to find his way.

That may explain why he is still partially on British time – apparently staying up late into the night, gaming.

Yet with many of his old set still feeling aggrieved at having essentially been “ghosted” after he married Meghan, patience appears to be wearing thin even among his most stalwart supporters.

As one insider explained: “Nobody really speaks to him any more and even the people who have remained by his side have lately begun to fall away because he is so consistently negative. He’s often complaining and rarely asks after others. People had stuck with him because they blamed Meghan for isolating him and cutting him off from his friends and family. But he hasn’t done anything to help himself. Now they just see him as completely lost.”

Harry himself referred to the fact that William regards him as “deluded” – but that sentiment also seems to be shared by those in what he once referred to as his “circle of trust”. The word “narcissistic” also creeps into a lot of conversations about the couple.

According to one former military colleague: “No one in the forces has got any time for him at all, which is such a shame because he was hugely popular. You can blame Meghan, but he’s brought a lot of it on himself.”

While fully supportive of Spare, the media-savvy Duchess let it be known she raised gentle concerns about whether it was the right move. As a source said at the time: “Is this the way she would have approached things? Possibly not. But she will always back him and would never have got involved in promoting such a personal project. This was about his own life, his own journey and his own perspective.”

But with speculation about plans for her own memoir, the Duchess will want to avoid any more negative publicity diminishing the Archewell brand after the couple’s approval ratings have fallen to near Duke of York levels.

If her relaunch doesn’t go to plan, however, a blame game is likely to follow – and as someone who once worked for the couple noted: “When you’re that angry with the world, it leaves little time for romance.”

#tea #susx #articles

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rottenberries · 8 months

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heyoo rip not me rockin up fashionably late...... anw hi it's gemma ( s/h, 21+ ) here w my serial monogamist, serial cheater nate archibald knockoff, yoon hanbin! he's the adopted oldest son of old money philanthropists n the founder of the very popular cafe chain, angelique ( cough he also plagiarised the entire idea of angelique frm some underrated cafe during his gap yr in france ). that's the gist of it but u can read a more detailed version of hanbin under the cut! as alw, pls hit that LIKE button n ill come rollin into ur dms!! mwah!!

for my sisters in the church of astrology he is a libra sun / aqua moon / pisces rising so like im not tryna justify his tendency 2 cheat but im saying it's written in the stars

anw hanbin was born broke as shit ill b honest he was put up for adoption @ gangnam orphanage as a newborn god knows why ( jk it's prob bc he's the product of some illicit affair or smt )

he gets adopted j shy of his first bday by philanthropists slash the yoon chaebols ( specifically the ones in charge of the hotel chain!! ) who took helping the less fortunate to the next level ( think angelina jolie )!! he's currently the only adopted child of theirs and they have 2 more kids after him who are both biological children so yeah ngl hanbin has some feelins ab that

said feelins are: growin up a rich kid to chaebols often means that they're far too busy to take care of u even tho it's not like they don't want to so naturally hanbin n sibs deal w some neglect even tho it's compensated w lots of money n maids thrown at them BUT the point is despite facing the same level of neglect as his sibs he kinda takes it personally n thinks maybe ?? it's bc he's adopted OR did they j adopt him for the good publicity despite havin no evidence of this ?? yea gr8 logic

despite that overall he's honestly a p nice kid?? plays w other kids well and doesn't yk misuse his wealth or family's status for Evil or no good he kinda is just vibin frankly

one thing ab hanbin tho is that he is a serial monogamist bc of his upbringing n he kinda looks for love in the wrong places and is constantly jumpin from relo to relo ( even jumpin 2 the next relo before the prev relo is over i.e. Cheating )

finally catches up to him when he's in his high profile relo re the subplot n gets caught cheating fr n is the talk of the town : )) since then it's like the ruse is up he's a cheater n everyone sorta knows but then again everyone forgives him bc yk he's Very Wealthy n very friendly and charming and kind and ""goodhearted"" when he's talking to u

regardless my man Hates drama so by the end of his final yr he jets tf off to france for a gap yr!! the impt part comes when he's staying in this soho part of france n there's this rly small rly underrated family owned cafe near his accom called angelique!! it was named after the owner's daughter n has a rly homey vibe n is beloved by the locals, v warm and friendly and welcoming w dim yellow lights and irregular flower pots and stuff on the menu that genuinely looks like it's baked by ur mom and hanbin alm feels... at home here? it's the most at home he's felt and he frequented this cafe A Lot during his stay in france!!

when he finally makes it back to sk he finds that he rly misses the place so he asks for some money frm his parents to open up a cafe in gangnam that's Just like it so that he can have his own little angelique where he lives!! the Problem is that he never bothered to ask for their rights or anyth ( tho im p sure legally he doesn't need to since they haven't bought any rights for it in sk so he hasn't committed any crime ) but yea he literally ripped off the style n colour palette n menu items,, think red bull origin story

anw the cafe clearly speaks to a lot of ppl bc it became so super popular so his parents being rly nice 2 him kinda "'""invests"" in his cafe to make it a chain1! n within 4y he opens up a bunch of diff angeliques all over seoul and even has the latest branch in busan!!

personality-wise i would say he is genuinely a rich kid down to the core...... n by sayin this i mean he has their honestly blissful ignorance like imagine j being like oh wow i love this cafe let me open a cafe Exactly like it right down my st like no askin them for permission no nth no unds of flopping or bankruptcy to j act on a whim this is some peak rich kid bs

this extends past j business ofc n even to women like !! he is out here serial monogamist and cheating on them bc he's spoiled rotten n also somehow neglected so he looks for love in a lot of women and falls head over heels in love w them then ditches for the next shiny thing like !!! sir is ariana grande atp yes and

but when u meet him in the flesh i would say he's rather soft spoken and gentle natured,, v Pleasant to talk to in general so it's alm easy to be lulled into thinking wait ig he's a good guy?? also born to well-known philanthropists n in yoon fashion donates 50% of proceeds frm his cafe to charity so it's Very easy to think he's a good guy like even he genuinely believes he's a good guy ask any lie detector but it's like .... when ur lookin at him from afar and away frm his charm u realise wait some of the shit he does is rly .... horrendous? like imagine calling a man who chronically cheats and steals ideas a good guy ???

also kinda insecure ab his birth and ig this is also why he so desperately wants to be a good guy!! overcompensates to prove that he's a yoon by doin yoon things so a lot of him being ""good"" is not so much him being a good person but a deep need to show people that he's good and he's earned his place as a yoon, a terrible insecurity that he has zero awareness of so will continue doin thanks

idk why i can never be concise atp it needs to b studied : )) anw here r some plot ideas!!

serial monogamist needs a string of exes so prob a few frm when he got back from france frm 2017-2024!! id say his longest relo would last approx 1y bc my man is honeymoon period ONLY crowd boos

on that note im guessin he is back 2 relevancy re: gg when she posts ab him cheating on his most recent gf ,, basically jan 2024 so anyone wanna have a v fresh break up frm like 2wks ago pls lmk ... also anyone who wants 2 b the person he Cheats w lmk too...

is the type to be totally against bullies then sits w ur bully durin lunch bc that's his friend but He's not bullyin or anywhere near that vicinity so !!! : )) anw that said if ur muse is a menace it don't mean he can't be friends w u bc he will be !!

on the other hand a kid who's been bullied who he's friends w then one day u find out he's friends w ur bully wud u confront his ass !!! him tryna diffuse the tension like hey bro Relax alright ik this is rly difficult for u but we gotta remain civil yea otherwise Ur the bully ( yea he's an ignorant headass )

erm movin away frm that anyone who knows him frm france!! mayb yall didn't rly meet or bump into each other in sch bc diff circles or diff yrs but ur one of the few koreans in france so he's v thankful for that n yall make fast friends!! funny if this is where u caught whiff of angelique that cafe he's obsessed ab n brought u to then now he's the "founder" of angelique in korea n it looks Exactly like the one in france hm .....

nv did uni but i imagine he's taking of getting a cert in business this yr bc it's useful for his business but yea !! if ur muse is doin uni rn mayb they could kinda meet there thru some club or smt? prob some save the planet club lbr also funny if u know ab his cheating shenanigans and how he can be a real ignorant asshole but in the uni he's all smiles n everyone loves him n ur the only one who can see thru him ( truly,, idt he can even see it himself )

someone who frequents angelique!! maybe u got stood up on some blind date set up by ur parents n he came over n tried 2 cheer u up!!!

this needs 2 b plotted extensively but a biological half-sibling ....... im gna say im not keen to explore his life outside being a yoon too much but it'd be fun to kinda allude 2 this n them j being like my mom had a kid in 98 before she was ready 2 settle down or my dad had an illicit affair w some peasant woman n knocked her up n ditched her in 98 n he's like o that's cool hey wait a min .......

er anyth and everything else!!

#𝐢𝐯. OUT OF CHARACTER.#revintro

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mariacallous · 2 years

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In the summer of 2019, the actor Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub won a role on “Tandav,” an Indian political drama being produced by Amazon Prime. The title was clever. In Hindu lore, the tandav is the dance of life and death performed by Shiva, the god whose terrible powers can end the universe—a neat metaphor for the dark, intricate maneuvers of national politics. When Ayyub read the show’s script, he spied a handful of allusions to the India around him. In one episode, policemen barge onto a university campus to arrest a Muslim student leader. The scene recalled the government’s persecution of popular student politicians and, more broadly, the hostility toward Muslims that marks the Hindu nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.). The B.J.P. had just begun its second straight term in power, and “obviously, when you write, you write about recent things,” Ayyub said. Mostly, though, “Tandav” aspired to be splashy entertainment—the kind of show in which a Prime Minister dies after drinking a glass of poisoned wine, which happens in the opening episode. “In fact,” Ayyub said, “I even told the director, ‘If your main character breaks the fourth wall, you will have your “House of Cards.” ’ ”

Ayyub played another student leader, a tyro named Shiva Shekhar—not quite the main role, but a key one nevertheless, and a fillip to his career. A little more than a decade ago, Ayyub had been a floundering theatre actor in Delhi. “It took me four or five months, with great difficulty, to save enough money to buy a refrigerator,” he said. Then he moved to Mumbai and threw himself into its entertainment industry—into Bollywood, to use a term that many of its denizens dislike. Since then, Ayyub, now thirty-nine, has earned supporting parts both in blockbusters and in small, sparkling movies. He has a magnetic way of speaking Hindi, but he isn’t yet the sort of actor who is mobbed on the street. When we met, in June, he suggested not a luxury hotel or Soho House—the usual, discreet haunts of stars of a certain luminosity—but a café near his apartment complex. We sat outdoors, in sweaty, pre-monsoon weather, and Ayyub went through cigarettes and chili-cheese toast with the vim, if not the metabolism, of an undergraduate. After being cast in “Tandav,” Ayyub said with a laugh, he had to lose weight to look young enough to be Shiva Shekhar.

In the first scene that Ayyub shot, Shiva is onstage in a student skit, playing his namesake deity: a Shiva in a suit, newly risen from a cosmic nap, wondering how to be relevant once more. Tweet about something controversial, an accomplice proposes—something about how the university’s students, forever demanding azaadi, or freedom, from their government’s oppression, are “anti-nationals,” traitors to India. The audience chuckles; the B.J.P. rants in this vein so often that it has turned into a trope. But Shiva is surprised. How can a call for freedom be controversial? “Azaadi?” he exclaims. “What the . . . ?” The last word is drowned out by the shriek of mike feedback.

Like nudity and sex, profanity discomfits the average Indian film or television producer. This is especially true of those who make the quintessential Hindi movie—the song-and-dance melodrama, fit for all ages—but the instinct persists in those who aim to be edgier. When lawyers for Amazon Prime and an external law firm first reviewed “Tandav” ’s scripts—a customary procedure—Shiva’s line had been a full, florid “What the fuck?” One of the lawyers told me that his team had urged the showrunners to prune the expletive, but that there was more concern about “Tandav” coming off as anti-B.J.P. One character, the lawyer remembered, “was a politician depicted as a conservative, pushing for the privatization of education, which is one of the Modi government’s issues. We always said, Do it in a way where you can’t match the incidents onscreen to real incidents.” (Amazon broadly disputed this characterization.)

Drawing inspiration from bleak headlines—the religious lynchings, the cronyism, the autocratic acts of the state—had become a fraught enterprise. The B.J.P. and its supporters were growing intolerant of contrary views and criticism, and they were liable to react badly—through social-media attacks, targeted harassment by government agencies, or endless litigation. Outright violence was rarer, although its threat was never distant. “In the year or so before ‘Tandav,’ ” the lawyer said, “people were objecting to anything.”

When “Tandav” premièred, in January, 2021, Ayyub was on location, shooting a film. On Twitter, he noticed that he was being tagged frequently—sometimes by people praising him, but mostly amid heaps of abuse. In cities and towns far from Mumbai, people filed police complaints, claiming that the portrayal of a foulmouthed Shiva was an insult to Hinduism. (A B.J.P. official told me that, in the large family of Hindu-nationalist organizations, “an enthusiastic worker can always be found who will file these complaints to keep his bosses happy.”) Such cases usually go nowhere, but in the B.J.P.’s India, where the police and the courts are pliant, it’s hard to be sanguine. Recently, a Muslim journalist was imprisoned for three weeks because someone complained that a four-year-old tweet derided Hinduism. The account that reported him was anonymous, had one tweet and one follower on the day of the arrest, and went offline thereafter.

To be safe, Amazon cut the skit scene from “Tandav” a few days after the show began streaming. But the storm raged on. A senior B.J.P. leader wrote to Amazon, accusing its “ideologically motivated employees” of running “vicious programming.” Amazon petitioned India’s Supreme Court to protect the show’s director and producers from arrest while the cases were being heard; the Court refused to grant this reprieve. That felt unprecedented, Ayyub said, and it tipped everyone into a state of high alarm. An Amazon employee who worked on “Tandav” remembers how taxing the experience was. “It took over our days, nights, weeks, months,” he said. “And we were all working from home, because this was peak Covid. So I was on calls with the Amazon guys in the U.S. late night my time, early morning my time, because the company wanted to protect its employees.” All the discussions, he said, were about “how to keep our people safe”—but for a few months it really looked as if an Amazon executive might go to prison for green-lighting a cheesy TV show.

Filmmaking thrives in plenty of other cities in India, but “Bollywood” has become shorthand for Indian cinema as a whole, and for the thousand or so movies that the country releases annually. For nearly a century, Bollywood has also worn the warm, self-satisfied gloss of being a passion that unifies a country of divisions. Not only are its audiences as mixed as India itself, filmmakers will say, but Bollywood is a place where caste and religion don’t matter. The most piously presented proof of this is the fact that, in a Hindu-majority country, a Muslim man named Shah Rukh Khan has been the supreme box-office star for decades.

Even if Bollywood possesses this liberal fibre, the rightward swing in Indian politics has gnawed away at it. In Mumbai, people divide recent history into pre-“Tandav” and post-“Tandav” periods, reading the show’s fate—its bitter legal battles, its suspended second season—as a lesson in what can and cannot be said in Modi’s India. Their nervousness manifests in absurdities—in, for example, how Amazon Prime now discourages characters who share their names with Hindu deities—but also in decisions to put audacious film and TV projects into cold storage. Other filmmakers embrace genres that match the B.J.P.’s tastes: dubious historical epics that glorify bygone Hindu kings; action films about the Indian Army; political dramas and bio-pics, dutifully skewed. These productions all draw from the B.J.P.’s roster of stock villains: medieval Muslim rulers, Pakistan, Islamist terrorists, leftists, opposition parties like the Indian National Congress. Through Bollywood, India tells itself stories about itself. Many of those stories are now starkly different, in lockstep with the right wing’s bigotry.

Governments have tried to control Indian cinema in the past—mostly through the Central Board of Film Certification (C.B.F.C.), a state authority that can order alterations or essentially ban movies by refusing to certify them. But the B.J.P.’s disdain for Bollywood registers as something deeper—as an echo, in fact, of its animus toward the Congress and other rival parties. When Modi came to power, in 2014, he decried national politics as an élite club: upper-class, upper-caste, English-speaking politicians, activists, and journalists, all cozied up to one another in the plush pockets of central Delhi. In the eyes of the B.J.P., Bollywood, too, is full of liberals disconnected from the real India. And if the film industry is full of “nepo kids”—the children of actors, producers, and directors—then Rahul Gandhi, the Congress’s aspirant Prime Minister and the son, grandson, and great-grandson of earlier Prime Ministers, is the foremost nepo kid of all. “People like us—we’re hated,” the director Nikkhil Advani, the cousin and grand-nephew of producers, told me.

The B.J.P. began with small, typical political moves. In 2015, it appointed a B-movie actor, who was also a longtime Party member, to lead a prestigious, state-run filmmaking institute. When a C.B.F.C. chair quit, citing coercion by the government, she was replaced by Pahlaj Nihalani, a director who’d made a campaign video for Modi. Nihalani didn’t want any swearing in cinema—or violence, or sex, or, in one case, even the word “intercourse.” When Alankrita Shrivastava submitted her movie “Lipstick Under My Burkha” to the C.B.F.C., in 2016, “they refused point-blank to certify it,” she told me. In an industry known for writing larger-than-life characters, Shrivastava had told human-size, bittersweet stories about the desires of four women. The C.B.F.C., in a letter to the producers, objected to scenes of sexual intimacy, and to the “lady-oriented” plot. This hidebound reaction, Shrivastava told me, could have occurred under any government. Her point was that, back then, she was able to appeal to a tribunal, which certified the film for release. “It was frustrating and expensive, but at least there was a way of getting the decision reversed,” she said. Last year, the government abolished the tribunal. Now the only recourse available to censored filmmakers is litigation.

The B.J.P. exhibited another skill as well: an ability to whip up its base—its Internet bruisers, rank-and-file cadre, and ideological allies—into a frenzy so coördinated that it came to resemble popular sentiment. When Aamir Khan, the versatile star of several of Bollywood’s highest-grossing films, admitted, in 2015, that he was worried about growing intolerance in India, a social-media backlash began against Snapdeal, an e-commerce platform that Khan had endorsed on billboards and in TV spots. Within months, Snapdeal decided not to renew his contract; even this year, Khan pleaded with audiences not to spurn a new film because of his past remarks. In 2020, one director told me, an actor friend was put through the wringer of a boycott campaign on Twitter. “When I saw that, I went and deleted all my posts about politics,” he said. “I had a film coming out, and they’d have definitely used my tweets against it.”

Ignoring the mob felt increasingly unwise. In 2016, Sanjay Leela Bhansali—a reserved, bearded director known for maximalist costume dramas—started making “Padmaavat.” Bhansali was dramatizing a legend: the story of Padmavati, a Hindu queen from the Rajput caste, who is so renowned for her beauty that Alauddin Khilji, the Sultan of Delhi, attacks her husband’s kingdom to abduct her. Bhansali shot “Padmaavat” with his usual grandiosity: cavernous palaces, scenes teeming with extras, rich palettes of fabric. Toward the end, Padmavati and her handmaidens are besieged by Khilji’s army. Instead of submitting, they dress in red and stream through the palace, like blood through an artery, to leap into a pit of fire—a happy ending, in the moral universe of the Hindu right. Khilji is portrayed as half-mad, lustful, and a committed carnivore, stereotypes of the Indian Muslim brought to life.

Before the film’s release, though, a rumor leaked of a love scene between Padmavati and Khilji. This, it appeared, was too great a slight against Hindu honor. A B.J.P. politician announced a reward for beheading Deepika Padukone, who played Padmavati. A posse of young, angry Rajput men stormed onto the film’s set, found Bhansali, and roughed him up; then they destroyed film equipment and, in a later incident, burned down part of the set. According to Bhansali, he had to finish shooting “Padmaavat” under the protection of fifty-two policemen. “At one point, I thought, Enough. Change my profession. I can’t make films anymore,” he said later.

The B.J.P. often ascribes these events to fringe elements or faceless Hindu “patriots.” But the number of such incidents makes filmmakers assume that they’re seeing a bigger transformation, in which the average member of their audience now truly likes everything the B.J.P. likes, and abhors everything it abhors. For anyone with hundreds of millions of rupees riding on a movie, a director of lavish blockbusters said, these are tectonic confusions. “When someone thinks of a movie idea—not just me but other people who think of themselves as liberals—they think, Is it O.K. if my hero is a Muslim?” he told me. “But the darker question is: Is there even an audience out there for this kind of movie?”

“The Kashmir Files” has proved particularly vexing. Released earlier this year, the movie purports to be based on true events: the brutal eviction, beginning in 1989, of tens of thousands of Hindus from the Muslim-majority valley of Kashmir. At least two hundred Hindus were killed, according to government data, but the movie inflates the number to four thousand. Armed insurgents were responsible, but, implicitly or explicitly, the film blames many others for enabling the tragedy and for lying about it afterward. Unsurprisingly, they include some of the B.J.P.’s pet antagonists: leftist university professors, the Congress. “The Kashmir Files” has already triggered a riot, and one B.J.P. leader given to casual calls to shoot “anti-nationals” urged his Twitter followers to watch the film “so that there is no Bengal Files, Kerala Files, Delhi Files tomorrow.” Modi praised the film as another bursting of the liberal bubble; B.J.P. leaders distributed free tickets. After “The Kashmir Files” became one of the highest-grossing releases of 2022, Nikkhil Advani told me, filmmakers naturally wondered if this was the kind of thing people want to watch. “Now that it has worked,” he said sardonically, “let’s all make this kind of nationalistic, jingoistic cinema.”

In Mumbai, the quotient of Bollywood celebrity is highest in Bandra, a western suburb shaped like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. The stars who appear elsewhere in the city on movie posters reside here, amid narrow, winding roads, weathered Portuguese churches, and chic bars that they can never visit. Salman Khan, an actor who has spent most of his career playing a square slab of muscle, lives in the same apartment building where he and his two brothers—both actors now—grew up. Not far away, the actors Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan, the children of stars themselves, occupy several floors of an apartment block. The drivers of Mumbai’s black-and-yellow taxis ritually point out these landmarks as they pass by.

Mumbai’s worst-kept secret lay a few doors from my hotel, down a road facing the sea. Shah Rukh Khan lives with his family in a villa the size of a small hotel, set back from a pair of heavy gates. Above a wall surrounding the compound, Khan has erected a black metal fence with a platform, where he sometimes materializes, in sunglasses, to greet the fans thronging the sidewalk to glimpse him. The pavement is never empty; even late at night, returning to my hotel, I’d see a few straggling devotees taking selfies, talking quietly, or just gazing at Khan’s house in the dark. In those moments, nothing demarcated the gulf between their worlds—between fan and celebrity, outsider and insider—more vividly than the black metal fence.

One morning, a man with a polite mustache joined me at my hotel for breakfast. Once a consummate outsider, he is now trying to become a new kind of insider. I’ll call him Ramesh, because although he belongs to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the mother ship of the B.J.P. and other Hindu-nationalist groups, he was keen to stress that he was meeting me in a personal capacity. The R.S.S., a volunteer organization that’s nearly a hundred years old, isn’t a political party. It’s the custodian of a belief that India is, first and foremost, a land for Hindus; it aspires so much to a literally muscular Hinduism that its members often receive paramilitary training. Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin was once a proud R.S.S. man. Modi joined the R.S.S. when he was young, as did many other B.J.P. leaders. Ramesh denied, though, that the R.S.S. wields any undue influence over the government. “It’s like there’s a college—let’s say, Harvard,” he said. “A hundred students of Harvard become senators in the U.S. Now, every time they go to their professors to ask something, would you say Harvard runs the government?” He framed this as a rhetorical question, but I suspect that we had different answers in mind.

In 2019, the R.S.S. formed a media unit in Mumbai, ostensibly to liaise not just with the film industry but also with journalists, the music business, and other trades. Ramesh cherishes this work. He’d come to Mumbai the previous year, from a town in southern India, where he’d grown up as a film buff. He still remembers the first movie he watched with his father in the cinema, when he was four years old: a pulpy mystery called “Hatya,” or “Murder,” dreadfully inappropriate for his age. In scrupulous daily accounts of expenditures, his father used to include the title of every film he’d watched, along with the price of the ticket. “I still have the list of hundreds of movies that we’ve seen,” Ramesh said.

Ramesh’s work with the R.S.S. involves many meetings—often half a dozen a day, with directors, producers, writers, and studio executives around Mumbai. He solicits these on WhatsApp. (A director sent me screenshots of one of Ramesh’s texts: “Your debut film was an internationally acclaimed movie and also won several awards here. . . . We would love to meet you for an informal interaction at your convenience & comfort.”) Ramesh’s mission, he said, is to nudge filmmakers toward subjects close to the R.S.S.’s heart. He wouldn’t care for a drama about conflict between Hindu castes, for instance: “Look at the great history of this country—and what do we show? We show all bad things.” But conflict in itself is not a problem. He often suggests tales of India’s military and intelligence agencies, or stories about the battles won by Hindu kings. He told me about a seventeenth-century Hindu general who, according to legend, held a pass against a Muslim king’s army with the help of just a few hundred troops—“you know, like ‘300.’ ” That would make for an excellent movie, Ramesh said, because it would encourage people to feel good about India. “Every story should end sukaant—that is, happy.”

Happy endings are relative, though. If a film conforms to the R.S.S.’s vision of India, Ramesh excuses any manipulations of fact; if it departs from that vision, Ramesh believes that its creators seek to “tarnish” India’s image. He cited “The Empire,” a show on Disney’s Indian platform, about Babur, the Muslim warrior who founded the Mughal dynasty in India, in 1526. Why make a show that humanizes Babur, Ramesh wondered. He doesn’t consider Muslim rulers to be Indian, even if they were born in the country. “They were invaders,” he said. “Sacred Games,” a noirish Netflix series, depicted a Hindu man plotting an act of terrorism. Ramesh thought that it was propaganda: “You want to show Hindus as terrorists because you don’t want to acknowledge Islamic terrorism.” “Tandav”? Also propaganda. But he forgives directors who invert history, depicting Hindu kings defeating their Muslim foes in battles that they actually lost. “You have to show something that will inspire people,” he said. And when I asked him about “The Kashmir Files”—about how brazenly polarizing it was, how its tenor was far from sukaant—he claimed unflappably that it was all fact. “You should know the history,” he said.

The B.J.P. likes to attribute its success to a Hindu awakening. Ramesh, similarly, thinks that Bollywood would be wise to heed a newly aware public that will brook no offense. If Amazon feels daunted by the lawsuits against “Tandav”—if it feels compelled to make shows and movies for Hindu partisans—that doesn’t worry Ramesh: “They must be happy that we do court cases. We don’t go and destroy their buildings.” His own efforts to set Bollywood right were minor, but they represented the importance that the R.S.S. vests in cinema. “We recognize that this is the most powerful medium, which controls minds, which influences the opinions of people,” he said. “A film is a mirror of society,” he went on—a tired, tedious idea, although it struck me that the Hindu right, to obtain the precise reflection it wants, is recasting not just society but also the mirror itself.

The writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who crafted some of the darkest, funniest short stories of the twentieth century, once adored the cinema, sometimes watching three films a day. In the late nineteen-forties, just before the British Raj ended, Manto joined Bombay Talkies, the first great Indian studio. The subcontinent was bloodily being pulled apart into India and Pakistan. “Hindu-Muslim riots had begun,” Manto wrote later, “and as wickets fall in cricket matches, so were people dying.” In these precarious times, one of the studio’s heads, Savak Vacha, a Parsi, set about reorganizing Bombay Talkies, promoting several employees who, like Manto, happened to be Muslim. “Vacha began to receive hate mail,” Manto wrote. “He was told that if he did not get rid of the Muslims, the studio would be set on fire.” Manto felt responsible; how would he face his colleagues if the studio were visited by violence? His friend Ashok Kumar, Bollywood’s earliest superstar, tried to reassure him. “ ‘Manto, this is madness. . . . It will go away,’ ” Manto recalled him saying. “However, it never went away, this madness. Instead, as time passed, it became more and more virulent.”

There was, perhaps, never a prelapsarian India—an India resounding with religious harmony—but “in many ways Bollywood, in its beginning, was one of the most cosmopolitan employers,” Debashree Mukherjee, a scholar of South Asian cinema at Columbia University, told me. In part, this was a political alignment with freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who wanted India to be a plural country. But it was also born out of necessity, Mukherjee said, because the movie industry was created as a patchwork of many other trades. “Some of the earliest financing came from Gujarati Muslims, and some of the earliest writers were from the Parsi theatre scene,” she said. Lyricists wrote songs in Urdu, a language inflected with Arabic and Persian and fostered by Muslim nobles as a medium of high culture. On a set, the dress dada might be a Hindu tailor and the art dada a Muslim painter. “The workforce was diverse, which remains the case today,” Mukherjee said.

Onscreen, Indian Muslims tended to be typecast, but in mainstream Bollywood this wasn’t so unusual: every character tended to be typecast. When Muslims led the story, they often figured as Mughal nobles, as courtesans, or as players in what the film scholar Ira Bhaskar calls the “Muslim social,” in which older, feudal ways of life tilted at the twentieth century. The stock of secondary roles included the benevolent Muslim elder (Khan Chacha, or Khan Uncle), the soulful poet or composer, and the best friend.

The Muslim type appeared even in “Amar Akbar Anthony” (1977), a landmark film that enshrined the ideal of religious tolerance. “Amar Akbar Anthony” is unabashed Bollywood—long and exuberant, with a baroque plot and half a dozen musical numbers. Three brothers, separated in childhood, are adopted into different faiths, and grow up to be the film’s dashing heroes, each neatly falling in love with a woman from his own religion. The movie’s conclusion is never in doubt. Its energy springs instead from the question of how its various ends are obtained: how the brothers realize that they’re brothers, how they find their long-lost parents, how they win their women, how they defeat a crime lord who has tried to destroy their family. The film ends in a joyful, syncretic reunion—the Nehruvian nation transposed onto the family in the clearest possible fashion. In this idyll, Akbar, the Muslim brother, could have clerked in a bank or run a magazine; instead, he sings Urdu qawwalis, and his love life is its own little Muslim social.

“It’s only in the late nineteen-eighties, and really with greater and greater frequency in the nineteen-nineties, that mainstream films start showing Muslims as gangsters, smugglers, and then terrorists,” Bhaskar said. Not by coincidence, she pointed out, these were also the decades when the B.J.P. grew as an electoral force. In 1992, after calling for the destruction of a mosque in the temple town of Ayodhya, B.J.P. and R.S.S. leaders watched as their followers tore the building down in a matter of hours. The demolition ignited riots, ushering India toward its present condition of chronic, quivering polarization. In 2010, Bhaskar met the director Yash Chopra, who had made many staunchly secular movies between the sixties and the eighties. “We couldn’t make those kinds of films today,” he told her. The plural ideal had withered too much. “Back then, we had faith in it.”

But perhaps it has been a mistake to regard cinema as a moral compass, to treat it as anything other than what it is: a machine to make money by pleasing as many people as possible. “Some of the criticism that Bollywood is frivolous or misogynistic has come from the well-meaning liberal left, which looked down upon the form,” Nandini Ramnath, a film critic for the Indian news Web site Scroll.in, told me. Ramnath believes that Bollywood’s prime confection—the family entertainment—appeals to audiences not despite its vanilla universality but because of it. “If the left was anxious that such films weren’t prescriptive enough or noble enough—well, now the right wants films to be prescriptive in its own way,” she said. The leaders of the B.J.P. are “brilliant at creating the impression that they’re omniscient and omnipotent,” she added. “And I think the clearest signal is: think twice before you say or do anything, because you don’t know who it’s going to offend, and you can assume it’s going to offend us.”

In Bollywood taxonomy, the director Dibakar Banerjee makes “gentry films”—films for people whom the industry regards as the “thinking public, classy folks,” Ramnath told me. (A second kind, she said, are “mass pictures”—movies for everyone.) Banerjee’s sly, charming début, “Khosla Ka Ghosla,” or “Khosla’s Nest” (2006), featured a young engineer who postpones his plans to immigrate to the U.S. so that he can thwart a local don’s schemes to annex his family’s land. Another movie, “Shanghai” (2012), which kicks off with a deadly attack on a leftist academic, is broadly inspired by Vassilis Vassilikos’s novel “Z.” Banerjee, who is fifty-two, waited out much of the pandemic with his family in their house in the Himalayan foothills. On Zoom, he tends to stare into the distance and gather his thoughts before answering a question, a habit that often made me think the image had frozen. Then he’d slap at a mosquito on his arm, and I’d know he was still online.

In 2017, Banerjee felt an itch. He’d been reading with horror about the lynchings of Muslims and about the murder of a journalist named Gauri Lankesh, all at the hands of Hindu extremists. This was, he said, “a special eruption of the poison”—and yet much of the country seemed not to sense its dreadful import. “The middle class was aware only of a daily, ubiquitous ‘othering’ of people in our lives,” he said. “I really wanted to make a film about it.” The following year, Banerjee signed a contract with Netflix, for a movie tentatively called “Freedom,” and shot the bulk of it in the course of thirty-six days at the beginning of 2020, largely in Mumbai. “We had another five days of exterior sequences left, but that didn’t happen, because the Indian lockdown started,” he said.

Earlier this year, Banerjee sent me a Vimeo link to his finished film, which confronts the bigotry infecting India. Banerjee approaches his theme slowly and sideways, through the story of one Muslim family. The family’s first generation, living in Kashmir during the unrest in 1990, finds itself sundered from its Hindu friends. In the second generation, a young woman wants to buy an apartment in present-day Mumbai, but no one will sell to her. (Muslims in Indian cities commonly struggle to find places to live, a form of discrimination practiced by Hindu homeowners and residents’ societies.) In 2042, the woman’s son, a novelist, lives in an even more ghettoized Delhi—a geofenced city where the state machinery determines what people can do based on their social-credit score. The wretchedness of this future spills out of the movie; later, I seemed to remember every frame as being gloomy and grim, even though several scenes are brightly lit. “We’ve lived through enough history to understand what’s going on now,” Banerjee said. “Now we can extrapolate, which is what my film does.”

During the years that Banerjee wrote and shot his movie, the takeover of Bollywood quickened. By 2019—an election year—new power brokers had emerged in the industry, seemingly from nowhere. One of them, the son of a legislator allied with the B.J.P., directed “The Accidental Prime Minister,” which pilloried the Congress leader who had governed India before Modi. (“It felt like propaganda even as I was making it,” Arjun Mathur, one of the film’s actors, told me. “I really regret doing it.”) Another produced a fawning bio-pic of Modi. One director told me about Mahaveer Jain, a producer who “was a nobody” but who now partners with some of Bollywood’s biggest studios and filmmakers. Jain, who said that he couldn’t meet me because he was unwell, is often described as the B.J.P.’s chief Bollywood liaison. In January, 2019, he helped choreograph a meeting between Modi and a band of A-listers, which yielded a selfie that blazed through the Indian Internet. Conspicuously, not one person in the photo was Muslim.

Sometimes there are more deliberate flexes of muscle. In the summer of 2020, under the pretext of probing an actor’s suicide, federal authorities launched an investigation into the drug habits of some of Mumbai’s most famous stars. Among them was Karan Johar, the city’s most influential filmmaker—a director who runs a sprawling production firm, a TV host who jokes on his talk show with his Bollywood friends, and, as the son and the nephew of famous producers, a twenty-four-karat nepo kid. Kshitij Prasad, a young executive producer who was then with Johar’s company, was called in for questioning, and he later said that the officers seemed keen to pin something—anything—on Johar or on another celebrity. “They kept insisting I was supplying drugs to the industry,” Prasad said. (The investigating agency has denied Prasad’s version of events.) When Prasad refused to coöperate, he was sent to prison for ninety days, then released on bail. The threat of a tax raid has also become a weapon, one director told me. When he was raided himself, investigators noticed that he’d been donating small monthly sums to news sites like Scroll and the Wire, which often criticize the government. “They said, ‘Don’t contribute to any of these publications,’ ” he said. “So I had to stop.”

Even these events, though, were reduced to mere prologue last October, when drug inspectors arrested Aryan Khan, the twenty-three-year-old son of Shah Rukh Khan. A team of agents, under the orders of the same officer who’d imprisoned Prasad, stopped Aryan in a Mumbai port terminal, where he was preparing to attend a party aboard a cruise ship. The agents found no drugs on him, yet they held him in jail for nearly a month before allowing him bail. Earlier this summer, they dropped all charges against him—which made it impossible not to speculate about what had happened. Had a government agency really imprisoned Aryan Khan without proof, as pure intimidation? Shah Rukh Khan said little during those weeks. The rest of Bollywood, meanwhile, absorbed the news as the most cautionary tale of all: if they could do this to the king, imagine what they could do to us.

By mid-2021, after a series of lockdowns, Banerjee had finished postproduction on his generational drama. Like a punctilious gardener, he’d offered to trim some of the movie’s nettles himself, unwilling to have Netflix stung more than necessary. (According to an internal memo, these changes included cutting images of the Indian flag. The memo also suggested, “In one of the shots, one person is walking in the background during National Anthem—remove that person.”) Toward the end of 2021, after Banerjee showed Netflix the film, something shifted. “There’d been a discussion about releasing the film in late 2022,” he said. “But an executive told us that they couldn’t commit to a release plan.” (Netflix denied this characterization.) The government had issued new guidelines for streaming platforms, obliging them, for instance, to pull a show or a movie within thirty-six hours if a court or a state agency ordered it. As Netflix kept dithering, Banerjee felt that he had just a few options left. “Wait indefinitely for the release to happen, or look for a producer who has the interest to release it in India—for the audience that I meant it primarily for—or look for a producer who doesn’t release it in India but releases it everywhere else,” he said. That last possibility was “very, very horrible—but what choice do I have?”

Banerjee’s film joins a growing trove of content that studios and filmmakers are reluctant to air. One director told me that he’d shot a love story about a couple who run away from home to be together. No one wants to release the film, he said, because “it just so happens that the boy is Muslim and the girl is Hindu.” According to two sources, a miniseries based on “Maximum City,” the popular nonfiction book that recounts Mumbai’s religious riots in 1992, has been frozen. (The production company denied this.) “Takht,” a Karan Johar extravaganza set in the Mughal period, began gestating around 2018. Two people who worked on the film described it as a celebration of secular values—which, they suspect, is partly why it’s effectively comatose. (Last year, Johar denied that he has abandoned the project.) Nikkhil Advani, who made the series about Babur, told me that he’d never experienced any censorship himself. But when I asked if he’d planned a season on Humayun, the second Mughal emperor of India, he said, “I had, but it’s not going to happen.” Humayun had waged persistent war against Hindu kings, but Advani found it dull to compose him in the shrill key of the bloodthirsty Muslim. And although there were other obstacles—the first season’s wan performance, rights issues with a source book—Advani knew that a humanized Humayun wasn’t worth pitching to any platform. “There’s no way they will allow me to make this,” he said.

More than once, I heard filmmakers liken their circumstances to those of their Iranian counterparts—in a tone that was plaintive but also, I thought, a little wistful, as if they hoped that these travails would burnish their artistic cachet. An ex-Amazon Prime executive classified the dismay over shelved projects as “whiplash—from writers and directors who assumed streaming platforms would give them the freedom and funds to tell whatever stories they wanted, without any checks and balances. If these people are just going to roll over and die, they don’t have the right to bitch to you about it.” A former executive at another streaming service described many of these filmmakers as people “who’ve never been in a room where someone else is more important than them,” and said that the recent encounters with political might were mere jolts to that privilege.

But that wasn’t necessarily a refutation of the belief, harbored by so many writers, directors, and producers, that their work was being iced because of its politics. In a conversation with a former Netflix employee, I asked why Banerjee’s film had suddenly stalled. “There’s a huge sense of fear,” the employee admitted. “No one wants to take the political risk of releasing a project like that.”

In contrast, Bollywood is glutted with movies and TV shows that align with the B.J.P.’s politics. There’s a series on a 2019 terrorist ambush of Indian troops in Kashmir. A film about Vinayak Savarkar, an architect of Hindu chauvinism. A bio-pic of Nathuram Godse, the erstwhile R.S.S. member who assassinated Gandhi. (Its producer promised that the film would “explore the mind-set and journey of a freedom fighter.” He was referring to Godse, not Gandhi.) Two vocal Modi supporters, the actors Kangana Ranaut and Anupam Kher, are collaborating on a film about the Congress leader Indira Gandhi and her two-year suspension of democracy, between 1975 and 1977. One director showed me a four-minute video that he’d received on WhatsApp—a teaser for a production about a Congress corruption scandal in the eighties. The clip interleaved old news footage and fresh footage so deftly, the director said, “that you feel like they don’t have an agenda. Then you read the names of the people involved.” At the end of the video, a logo popped up: Anupam Kher Studios.

One day, I met Sandeep Singh, the producer of not only the film about Modi but also the upcoming Godse and Savarkar bio-pics. His office was in a suite on a high floor of a hotel; for a while, the hotel’s power failed, the afternoon warmed the room, and we sweated gently into our coffee. Singh, who moved to Mumbai in 1992, worked as a film journalist before breaking into the industry, and, in accounts of not being invited to awards ceremonies, he let slip his resentment about being an outsider in Bollywood. He didn’t come off as a rank B.J.P. apologist, like Kher and others often do. Rather, Singh is that more common phenomenon: a producer who wants his films to ride the B.J.P.’s success. He made his glowing, airbrushed movie about the Prime Minister, he said, because “the character of Modi excites people.” His Savarkar film similarly exploits a fierce public debate about a right-wing ideologue who is being championed anew by the B.J.P. and the R.S.S. Savarkar is “a misunderstood hero,” Singh said, and his reputation had been sullied by rival politicians. “For today’s youth,” he went on, “it is very important to know what our past is.”

The first week I was in Mumbai turned out to be a representative one, as far as Bollywood releases were concerned. One new movie, “Major,” was about the life of an Indian Army officer who died trying to rescue hostages from the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, in Mumbai, after Pakistani terrorists seized the building, in 2008. Another film, “Samrat Prithviraj,” sang the glories of a twelfth-century Hindu ruler, Prithviraj Chauhan, who was killed after a battle against Muhammad Ghori, a king venturing eastward from present-day Afghanistan. “Samrat”—or “Emperor”—had been affixed to the title at the eleventh hour, after members of Chauhan’s caste protested that calling the film “Prithviraj” was insufficiently reverential. This was the same group that had vandalized the set of “Padmaavat”; it was perhaps easier to just give in.

I watched “Samrat Prithviraj” on the morning of its release—“first day first show,” as it’s called in Bollywood—with Nandini Ramnath, the film critic for Scroll. Ramnath was excellent, acerbic company for a movie with plenty to be acerbic about. In the lead role was Akshay Kumar, an aging action star with a face as lean as a greyhound’s. Kumar’s Prithviraj is a self-righteous bore, forever harping on about Hindu tradition and the need for Hindus to stick together. (The film’s obviousness won it tax exemptions in several states ruled by the B.J.P.) His sandstone palace is bathed in a golden light—the perfect venue for his wedding to an ingénue of a princess. But Prithviraj can spare little time, and just a couple of song-and-dance sequences, for love. Most of the film is taken up either by his councils with advisers about battles or by the battles themselves. In the climax, Prithviraj dies—but not before he rewrites history by killing Ghori. (Lions in a coliseum are involved.) The film’s epilogue calls Prithviraj the “last Hindu ruler in north India” (a falsehood) and laments that, after his death, India recovered its honor only when it gained independence from the British, in 1947—thus conflating homegrown Muslim rulers with European colonists in a sweep of rhetoric.

When the lights came up, there were barely a dozen people left in the theatre, down from the twenty or so at the beginning. In the weeks that followed, “Samrat Prithviraj” proved to be a box-office dud. It’s the sort of fact that some filmmakers cited to me in hopeful tones, as if to say that the Hindu-nationalist playbook doesn’t guarantee a hit—that the whims of the audience will ultimately thwart any ideological conquest of Bollywood. But this idea ignores the sheer volume of oxygen taken up by films like “Samrat Prithviraj,” and their accretive psychic weight. And it overlooks the movies that aren’t being made, the stories that aren’t being told, the things that aren’t being said. “The worrying aspect,” Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub told me, “is that, out of fear, you draw back and you draw back and you draw back, until you step on the very people you ought to be defending.”♦

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