#i miss him. i miss my despicable vampiric old man

[dialovers-translations]

Diabolik Lovers DARK FATE ー Ayato Ecstasy [Prologue]

ー The scene starts in the guest room at Banmaden

Cordelia: ...

Yui: ( I am so glad she only suffered minor injuries... )

( Vampires really are sturdy. I was worried since I could only do first aid, but I’m pretty sure it’ll suffice... )

Cordelia: ...Karl...

Yui: ( She really must love him deeply to call out his name in her sleep... )

( Karlheinz... )

( I wonder what he is like? )

...

ー The scene shifts to the outer area of Banmaden

Ayato: ...Haah...Fuck...

( Why is she so worried about that woman? )

( Why...? )

( ...Why am I feeling this complicated as well...? )

...Lame...

ー Ayato steps away as the scene shifts back to the guest room

Cordelia: ...Nn...

Yui: ( Ah... )

Cordelia: ...Aah...

Yui: ...Um...How do you feel?

Cordelia: ...Oh...I’m not dead yet, am I...?

Yui: ...You were lucky to survive, so please don’t say that.

Cordelia: ...You...

...Hmph. There is no point in living in a world where Karl isn’t by my side...

Ayato is a fool as well...I’m sure he held back somewhat. That is why he is a failure.

Yui: ...

Cordelia: But...You are the biggest fool out of everyone. You had the perfect opportunity to get rid of me, yet you decided to be a miss goody-two shoes and treat my wounds? Do you have a few screws loose.

Yui: When you put it like that, perhaps my efforts have been in vain but...

I did not want you to disappear.

Because I can relate to you...and your strong feelings for someone else.

Cordelia: ...

...Hmph. This is exactly why I dislike having to deal with ignorant little girls who have yet to find out how this world works. Your naivety makes me sick.

Your own feelings are disgusting. Could you not group them together with mine?

My love is...My love for Karlheinz...is more beautiful than anything else in this world.

Yui: ( To think she feels for him so strongly... )

...Um...What kind of man is Karlheinz-san exactly?

Cordelia: ...Excuse me? Are you trying to compete with me?

Yui: I-I’m not!

It’s just...I’m just curious what the person you love so strongly is like.

Cordelia: Hmph...

Yui: ( I guess she won’t tell me after all... )

Cordelia: ...

...Karl is...

Yui: ...!

Cordelia: ...He genuinely was kind to me always.

He treated me quite well after our marriage. He would listen to every single one of my selfish requests.

Nfu~ I am not a fool either. I had a faint suspicion that he might have some sort of ulterior motive...

...But...

I was happy...I felt blessed just by being together with him.

Once he flashes his smile, not a single woman can escape his grasp...

Yet, on the bed, he would only talk to me...It felt like a dream.

Every time he did, I could feel my love for him grow stronger.

At some point...I began to desire his everything.

So much so that I wanted to be the one to eventually end his life, since you only get to experience death once...!

I doubt you can understand that? The feeling of loving someone to dead...

Yui: ...

Cordelia: My cruel behavior towards Ayato and his brothers was all done out of spite towards him as well.

Seeing the children of the woman you love get treated in such a way should at least do something to you, no?

I could care less about words like ‘I like you’ or ‘I love you’. 

There was only one thing I wanted. ーー His heart. (1)

I wanted his heart to overflow from emotions for me, burning with love to the point of madness.

...But...Right now, I have not achieved anything. I...

Yui: ( Cordelia... )

Cordelia: ...Uu.

Yui: ( She truly did love Karlheinz...This strongly. )

( As for him...I wonder how he felt? )

( Did he...not love her back? )

( If he could not love her, then why didn’t he just genuinely tell her so? )

( Cordelia described him as ‘kind’, but I... )

...

*Thud*

Yui: ...I-Is someone there...?

( ...Am I hearing things...? )

...

ー The scene shifts to the entrance hall

Ayato: Haah, haah, haah...

( ...What was that just now...? )

( Why was she crying like that...!? )

( You’re supposed to be a thoroughly despicable wench beyond saving, no!? )

( Yet right now, that same woman is... )

...

( ...The Old Man... )

( Does he know everything? )

( Nothing is a mystery to him. )

( Right, he knew...Yet he never gave her what she truly wanted... )

( He simply put a sweet smile on his face, continuing to keep her by his side. )

( In that case... )

( In that case, the root of all evil isーー )

Monologue

Everything Cordelia has done up till now.

I wonder how many people have been hurt,

or twisted by her behavior?

Said reality cannot be altered.

However. 

I have found out,

about Cordelia’s feelings

towards Karlheinz-san.

So...

I could no longer bring myself to resent her.

I wonder if that means,

I am betraying Ayato-kun

in one way or another?

No, I’m not.

I love Ayato-kun,

so very much.

However, I wonder how I should convey,

these complicated feelings to him...?

Yui: ( Where did Ayato-kun go...? )

( Ah, there he is...! )

( But...What should I say to him? )

...

Ayato: ...Nn...?

Oi, Chichinashi! What are you doing standin’ ‘round over there?

Yui: Ah...!

ー Ayato approaches her

Ayato: Hm? What’s wrong?

Yui: W-Well...

( I wonder what happened to him? He looks as if he got a breakthrough or something... )

Ayato: Cat got your tongue or something?

Well, there’s something I have to tell you, so you appeared just on time.

Yui: Tell me...?

Ayato: Exactly!

It’s ‘bout that shitty hag.

Yui: ...

Ayato: How should I put this...I feel like it’s gonna be kinda odd comin’ from me ...or rather I’m in no position to say this...

But...You know...

Thanks for treatin’ her injuries.

Yui: Ayato-kun...!

Ayato: Let me tell you just in case! I haven’t forgiven that old hag for everythin’ she did!

However...I can’t put it into words very well, but I came to a lot of realizations myself.

...I’m sure she must have had it rough as well.

Yui: ...Yeah...

( He hasn’t forgiven Cordelia. He can’t forgive her. Yet... )

( I can tell that he is trying his best to face her. )

( Rather than keeping it all to myself, I should have put more faith in Ayato-kun and talked to him on how I felt about the situation. )

( I’m sorry, Ayato-kun. And also... )

ーー I love you.

Ayato: A-Aah!? The fuck are you sayin’ all of a sudden...!?

Yui: I felt as if I just had to tell you that right now.

Ayato: H-Hm...Well, it’s not like I didn’t know already that you’re head over heels for me!

Yui: Yeah. But, I grew to love you even more. I really do love you, Ayato-kun.

Ayato: ...

ー He suddenly bites her

Ayato: S-Shut up! Nn...!

Yui: Ah...

Ayato: ...Haah...Nn...

Yui: ...Nn...

Ayato: ...Hah...Nn...Phew...

Hehe, what’s wrong, Chichinashi? Look at that ecstatic expression on your face. How does it feel, huh?

Yui: That’s...Well...

...It feels good.

Ayato: Wha...!?

T-The fuck has gotten into you!? What are you sayin’...!?

Yui: I-I mean...It’s you who’s biting me after all...! So...

( T-The words just slipped out of my mouth, how embarrassing...! )

Ayato: You idiot! You’re too damn cute...Nn...

Yui: Ah...

Ayato: ...Nn...Haah...Nn...Phew...

Yui: ( Ayato-kun... )

( I really...do love you... )

ー The scene shifts to the balcony

Shin: Haahー... Look at them getting it on in plain sight...Don’t they realize we’d rather not have to see that...

Carla: ...

Shin: Say, Nii-san? Why are we letting them do as they please? I’ve reached my limit. 

At this rate, they’re only going to deepen their bond and head straight towards their happy end, no?

Carla: ーー That is fine.

Shin: Eh...?

Carla: Everything is progressing smoothly. All that is left is...

ー Carla steps away

Shin: Ah...Nii-san!

ー Shin chases after him

ーー TO BE CONTINUED ーー

Translation notes

(1) 心 or ‘kokoro’ is a very difficult term to translate in Japanese because it can mean a lot of different things from ‘heart’ to ‘soul’, ‘mind’ and even ‘feelings’. In this context, I think Cordelia just wanted Karlheinz to show her any other emotion than his usual ‘gentle smile’ which charms all of the ladies. 

→  LIKE MY TRANSLATIONS? SUPPORT ME ON KO-FI!

<- [ Maniac Epilogue ] [ Ecstasy 01 ] ->

[dudebroreg]

In the isolation of this quarantine, I’m gonna resurrect THIS old ass argument. “Can Spike still rightfully end up with Buffy after his actions, and if he can’t, isn’t the same true for Angel?” and “Is Spuffy as meaningful as or even compare to Bangel?”. The following “conversation” is hypothetical and “person” represents most of the arguments I’ve seen people on the other side of this make. Person: I don’t see how anyone could possibly ship Buffy and Spike after the bathroom scene. Me: He didn’t have a soul when he did that. Once he does have a soul, the evil he did is no longer his fault unless he repeats the behavior, but their slow-burned bond and her eventual love for who he becomes in Chosen is real. It’s canon that she fell in love with him when their fingers locked before his death if you take Joss’s words as truth, and even if you don’t and need something to be solidified on the program to accept it as canon, interpreting what Buffy felt in those last moments as romantic love is no more or less provable than the “she was just saying it to make Spike feel better” take. It makes complete sense that Spike thought she was lying after all of his experiences, though. That’s part of his own tragedy. That angst is part of why we love them as a pairing. Person: Wow look at you making excuses for one of the worst things someone can possibly do. There’s no going back after that. Idc what the plot did to justify his actions, and it’s despicable to think that the show would still give them anything resembling a love story after that. Boo hoo about his little tragedy. Am I supposed to feel bad after what he tried to do to her? Me: Okay fine, I see your point. I don’t see how anyone could possibly ship Buffy and Angel after he went on a killing spree meant to emotionally torture her, targeted her friends and family, KILLED JENNY and not only got off on the pain it inflicted on Buffy’s father figure but set it up to be as devastating for Giles as humanly possible, and almost brought Hell on Earth which would have killed millions in global genocide all for his twisted amusement. I don’t see how anyone could feel bad about him having a sword driven through him and pulled into Acathla after what he tried to do to Buffy, to her loved ones, and to the entire fucking world. Oh also he tried to drive a sword into her face right before her badass comeback. Person: He didn’t have a soul when he did that. It’s not Angel’s fault what Angelus does. It’s not really him, but Bangel’s epic eternal love at first sight is real and will never die. Me: .... Person: ... It’s different because Spike is a little more human even when he doesn’t have a soul. Me: Does that mean he deserves less credit or more? :/ :/ Person: ANGEL AND ANGELUS IS DIFFERENT FROM SOULLESS SPIKE AND SPIKE. Me: Nah same lore same rules breh. Soulless Spike seems more human because William was a sentimental sap and hopeless romantic when he was sired and so Spike was a deranged version of that personality, but still a demon and still wired to do evil, no matter how deeply he feels for someone. Liam was a self-indulgent douche who lived primarily for his own satisfaction when he was sired and thus became Angelus. Like in life, Angelus in death gave into all of his wicked cravings but without guilt or remorse. Who Spike and Angel are without a soul fits who they were with a soul perfectly within the rules of Buffyverse vampirism. But Soulless Spike is still Soulless Spike, he is still supernaturally coded to be a monster, and his ensouled version deserves the same level of forgiveness or lack thereof as his grandsire. If you don’t think Buffy should be with someone who’s done unspeakable things regardless of the supernatural reason for it, fine, but that’s not what you’re saying. Me: The bathroom scene was hard to watch but an important turning point because he realized that in his chipped state he can’t be his fully monstrous self nor can he be a good man. His options were to get the chip removed and be William the Bloody again, or get his soul and attempt to be a good man. The decision he made was something Angelus would never do, which I could use to say Spike is just better, but really they’re just different people with different motives. Bangel and Spuffy present the same issues with the concept of being pardoned via soul and if either vampire is really “worthy” of her romantic affections, no matter how much you try to twist Buffy/Spike as the more unshippable pairing to suit your own preference on which character Buffy should have a future with.

Person: ARE YOU SAYING SEASON 6 SPUFFY WASN’T TOXIC?! Me: Nah it definitely was, but Spuffy fandom in large part really doesn’t want Buffy to end up with season 6 Spike. Many of us think their “relationship” when he was soulless was *entertaining* and added character depth, and that they had real moments of connection in the midst of the ugliness, but most of us recognize how unhealthy it was and that it was no recipe for happily-ever-after. Irl there would be no turning back but also irl people are not literal demons who can go and win a soul to make up for some missing piece of them, just as Angel’s situation would also not happen in our reality. Me: A lot of us DO want her to end up with fully actualized soul-having Spike as he was by the end of season 7, in season 5 of Angel, and post series. Bangel is the passionate all-consuming first love story, but they NEVER achieved the level of understanding and full realization of the other that Spuffy ultimately did. Probably in part because Buffy was a fuckin’ high school teenager when Bangel happened, but that’s vampire genre for ya. Me: The speech Spike gave Buffy in Touched is something Angel could NEVER deliver at any point we’ve seen them, because Angel never knew her the way Spike did, and Buffy’s conceptualization of Angel is super idealistic and passion-charged, lacking the full range of understanding she has of Spike, probably because, again, she was a fuckin’ high school teenager when Bangel happened. Me: If she loves both of them, which I believe she does and the creator of the verse believes she does, it would take years for Buffy and Angel to discover and know each other to the depths that Buffy and Spike already do. Never mind that Buffy and Angel changed - they didn’t even know each other THAT well when they were together. The more Angel the Series dives into the whole of Angel, the more clear that becomes, and Buffy wasn’t anywhere near her full growth when he left for LA. Why go back and rebuild Buffy’s first major relationship when Spike is right there, the feelings are developed enough to where if she said “I absolutely do love you and you were wrong for doubting it” it wouldn’t seem wild whatsoever, and the natural romantic endpoint of her journey has more substance there? Because you just like Bangel more? Cool! You do you, but Buffy/Angel is still in no way the morally superior tv couple. Me: Also, not to be a dick on that whole love-at-first-sight deal, but it’s canon that Angel loved her the moment he saw her, which is weird to me since the first time he saw her was watching her creepily from a distance when she was 15 years-old in a short skirt and literally sucking on a lollipop.  Okay so I’m just being a prick with that last part because that too is a byproduct of 90s TV and vampire genre. “Bangel or Spuffy” is mostly a “which type of fictional relationship do I vibe with?” based debate. Bangel is one of those epic earth-shattering-consuming-my-whole-being-at-first-kiss romances, and the people who love that kinda thing will be inclined to support them, and I do love Angel as a whole. What I will always fight, no matter how old this subject and these shows get, is this wack idea that there are problems within Spuffy that make it more unshippable than Bangel, or even more hilariously that Buffy “deserves” better than Spike and yet “deserves” Angel. 

Though, if you tell me you think she’s too good for both of them, you have a much stronger case there, but that doesn’t make me love Spuffy any less, nor would it make someone else stop loving Bangel.

[tisthenightofthewitch]

I ALWAYS QUESTIONED EVERYTHING AS A KID - Tobias Forge Interview

Ghost visited Hungary on December 3, 2019, where he gave a successful concert at the Arena. Before the concert, our magazine was given a brief interview with Tobias Forge, the frontman of the band, Cardinal Copia.

YOU HAVE A COUPLE OF POINTS OF CONTACT WITH HUNGARY AND HUNGARIANS, BUT WHICH ONE WOULD YOU CONSIDER MOST IMPORTANT?

Unfortunately, I've only been to Hungary once, so I haven't spent too much time here. The first thing that comes to mind is music. From the musical background, Erzsébet Báthory is inevitable, since she is the central figure in Gothic and vampire culture. In my youth, the music of BATHORY and VENOM meant the most to me. But also my favorite is the TORMENTOR, whose singer, ATTILA, and he sings in MAYHEM , which is probably the most famous band for us, so DE MYSTERIIS DOM SATHANAS was a big influence on me. I was thirteen when I appeared ...

SO THEN IT'S JUST MUSIC STUFF?

Apart from the subcultural and historical things, there are some outstanding people of Hungarian origin in my life. My lawyer, who is also a good friend, is half Hungarian. My mother was at the same time with a Hungarian guy who was completely Hungarian. The guy who draws our turnstiles is of Hungarian origin. I have no such background, but the country is very impressive.

YOU WEREN'T ORIGINALLY A GHOST SINGER, AND IN AN INTERVIEW YOU SAID YOU COULD IMAGINE GOING BACK TO BEING A GUITARIST AND HANDING IN THE MICROPHONE. IS THERE ANYONE YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE AT THE HELM OF GHOST?

I couldn't really tell anyone that suddenly.

MISSING THE FACT THAT YOU DON'T HAVE A GUITAR IN YOUR HAND?

Yes, very much. Although I like to do what I do now, if I were in a different band, I would really play guitar, because for me, the most natural way to play music is to play the guitar or maybe play the guitar and backing it up. Once I end up in another band, I'll be really instrumental.

WHEN YOU WERE YOUNG, WAS ANYONE AROUND YOU RELIGIOUS OR ANY RELIGION?

No one in my immediate family. My mother is very liberal, very kind of… * showing a peace sign on both hands * pacifist. It is also quite spiritual, but by no means religious. The other one I grew up with was my brother, who at the time was not religious at all. He has since developed some kind of religion, which is not necessarily a 100% God-fearing fear, so he is not a completely faithful god, but he does. Sometimes it's easier to just go to a church and accept the dogma system that has been put together than to pick yourself "a bit of this, a little of what it doesn't," which I think is healthier, but I don't know what he meant.

SO HAVEN'T YOU MET RELIGION IN YOUR CHILDHOOD?

A little further afield, there was a couple of religious figures in my extended environment who influenced my behavior. Perhaps most importantly, I was my first or second grade primary school student. He was two years old from retirement, or sixty-three years old or about. You know it was thirty years ago, anyone over sixty was very old, now being 60 is virtually nothing. But in the eighties to be sixty, well… He was very backward and had all the qualities that made him perfect… smelly. She was ugly, her hair was scarred and her clothes were scarred, she was terrible and evil, and she was harsh. He couldn't really teach.

THEN NOT REALLY YOUR MAN OR EVEN YOUR FAMILY…

For a guy who grew up with such a liberal mother ... well, wow, she was quite struggling. I swore, listened to metal, waved, talked back and always questioned everything. I think he messed up the school as it is.

SO YOU WEREN'T YOUR FAVORITE…

From then on, I hated school forever, and I could never get over it. By the third, I was a better teacher, but I couldn't care less about the school, I was more interested in opposing everything and questioning things. Unfortunately, it continued throughout my school years, I wasn't a good student, and honestly, I wasn't good at being a friend either, I was really stupid and hateful, which is not a good thing. And it's all his fault! Okay, maybe not… And he was Christian. It was very, very religious. So for me, as a wicked and despicable ... If he could, he would have hit me. He couldn't have done it, but I remember saying he wanted to, and he could have done it a few years earlier. So, if he represents Christian love, I don't ask for it.

I KNOW YOUR SON AND DAUGHTER BOTH LOVE GHOST AND YOUR MUSIC, BUT HOW WOULD YOU REACT IF YOU LATER BECAME ACTIVE IN HATING ROCK AND NOT JUST BECOMING POP OR HIP HOP FANS?

Actually, it would be perfectly natural - you have to face someone, right? I've always been such a very "anti" person who has defied everyone and everyone, so if they want something like that, that's fine. What I would mention, though, is the cultural and intellectual side of the whole rock theme: I would be a little sad if they were separated from everything I love. I am convinced that if you are into rock music, from the '60s rock'n'roll, through the' 80s to the '90s, of course, to the movies and books I like in this regard - one-on-one would refuse to think I would miss out on a huge and great slice of culture, a virtually huge loss to miss. Otherwise, I am not cinematic, my taste is wide enough. If my kids were to find nothing in the culture I can offer them, I'd be really surprised. Then they may know better, and they may know something that I do not.

(Translated from Hungarian - apologies for any errors!)

METAL.HU

[alonely-dreamer]

Dangerous Creatures | Chapter 17: Untrustworthy Creatures

Summary: Mackenzie Alemaund is an unlucky 18 year old teenager whose life changes drastically after she gets kidnapped by two vampires and learns, in the same day, that she is not human.

Pairing: Elijah x OC

Words: 2642

A/N: Please, note that I am French so there might be some mistakes here and there, besides I couldn’t have it edited! I hope you’ll like it!

PS: I had to rewrite this chapter because it disappeared from my laptop (now I know I have Norton Security to thank for that 🤪). I’m afraid it’s not as good as the first version but… I hope you can still enjoy it!

Masterlist

New Series: The Valuable Sun

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16

Mackenzie usually felt bad about lying, yet when Elena asked her if she had seen any ghosts the day before, she lied. She didn’t feel like talking about it. Somehow, she knew Elena would bombard her with questions and Mackenzie didn’t feel strong enough to answer them. She wished Elijah were there. She’d have talked about it with him. She wanted to talk about it with him.

So, instead of talking about her dead mother, they talked about what they had discovered the previous night, thanks to a dead werewolf named Mason Lockwood, whom Damon had killed earlier that year. He had led the vampire into a cave where Alaric had later found carvings dating from way before Mystic Falls was founded. Given the Viking scripts they had found there, and how they translated into names, names they knew too well, they had asked Mackenzie to help them uncover the meaning of it. So, that’s how she ended up there, standing in the middle of a dark, cold, humid cave, telling Elijah’s story to Elena, Alaric and Damon.

“That’s Kol and Finn, Elijah’s brothers,” she said, pointing at the names on the wall, confirming Alaric’s translation. “Mikael is their father. Esther is their mother. They lived among the werewolves as humans before their mother turned them into vampires.”

“I take it that’s the Original witch,” Damon said.

“I guess,” Mackenzie shrugged. Elijah had never called her that. “Does Rebekah know you’re trying to wake her father?” She wished they wouldn’t. Sure, he could kill Klaus, but he also could kill Rebekah, and Elijah.

“Not yet,” Elena said. “But I’ll tell her when I ask her about all of this.”

“Are you sure you wanna do that?”

“I don’t have a choice. If we wanna know the truth, we gotta go straight to the source.”

“Well…” Mackenzie sighed. “Good luck with that.”

***

The elemental helped the history professor take pictures of the carvings and then helped him translate them once they were back in his apartment. Bonnie joined them, bringing the Original witch’s necklace with her, confirming what Alaric was thinking and translating the symbol that had the same design. Witch. Werewolf. Vampire. That wall told the story of the Original family.

They went back to the cave later that night with Elena who wanted to compare Rebekah’s story with the symbols on the walls.

“We filled in what we could,” Alaric told her. “We’ve got vampire, werewolf, slaughter, mayhem, etc,” he said as he stuck the post-it notes on the wall.

“That’s the white oak tree that was used in the spell to create the vampires,” Elena said as she flashed her flashlight over the carvings. “Which means,” she continued as she moved her flashlight over the next drawings, “that was when they burned down the tree, destroying the only way they could be killed.”

“Yeah,” Mackenzie nodded. “We already went over that. The thing I found that didn’t coincide with what Elijah told me was this,” she said, shedding light over the last symbols on the wall. “Elijah said that his father killed his mother.”

“Yeah, Rebekah said the same thing.”

“Then I can’t explain this,” the elemental said. “This is the witch symbol with a bleeding heart: Esther. And this is her, but upside-down.”

“Upside-down figures usually signify death of some kind,” Alaric explained.

“So, this must be the story of her death. But this symbol,” she said, pointing at the one in the middle, “is the symbol for both vampire and werewolf.”

“A hybrid,” Elena breathed out, coming to the same conclusion as her friends.

Mackenzie nodded. “Mikael didn’t kill his wife. Klaus killed his mother.”

“I need to tell Rebekah,” Elena said.

“Are you crazy?” Alaric asked. “She’ll kill you!”

“She deserves to know the truth! If she hears Klaus killed her mother and lied about it, she’ll turn on him.”

“Or she’ll kill you,” he repeated.

“I’ll go with you,” Mackenzie said.

Elena wasn’t her friend, Rebekah deserved to have a friend there when she heard that her brother killed their mother. Because Elena was right, she deserved to know the truth. Because Rebekah had been living with an abusive man for a thousand years and Mackenzie related all too well to it. It was time she broke free.

***

Mackenzie spent the entire night comforting Rebekah. Alaric had been right, the vampire was ready to kill Elena after she told her the truth about what really happened to her mother. Mackenzie didn’t know if it was because she was a vampire and everything was heightened for her, faster for her, but the vampire went through the five stages of grief in one night. First denial, then anger, that was when she had tried to kill Elena, then depression, when she cried all the tears in her body on Mackenzie’s shoulder, and finally, acceptance, when she agreed to help them kill Klaus. Maybe, she thought, it was because deep down she knew that her brother would be capable of it. Maybe, she wasn’t surprised by it at all.

Mackenzie couldn’t help but find it despicable. Using her grief like that, to get her to do what they needed from her, to get her to kill her brother, no matter how despicable that brother was himself, Mackenzie didn’t feel good about it at all. In fact, she felt guilty.

Damon and Stefan came through with their part of the plan. As Elena was shattering Rebekah’s world and destroying everything she had believed for the past thousand years, the two brothers had been making a deal with Mikael. To Mackenzie’s dismay.

Mikael was very motivated and determined. When Mackenzie left Rebekah’s bedroom in the morning, while the vampire was still sleeping, she had come across his dead body on the living room floor. He had a dagger in his chest. Stefan, Elena and Damon were standing there, like it was business as usual. And to them, it was.

“We need Klaus to believe his father is dead. We can’t risk Stefan’s compulsion selling us out,” Elena explained.

“Get Rebekah,” Damon told the elemental. “Klaus will want to talk to her.”

Mackenzie sighed, but nodded. Damon had been right, Klaus had wanted to talk to his sister. And Rebekah had come through. She didn’t stay long, though. As soon as Klaus hung up, she went back to her room. She was terrified of her father, even as he laid there, dead, she didn’t want to approach him.

Mackenzie wasn’t sure if it was because Rebekah cared that much about the homecoming dance, if she wanted to avoid her father, or if she wanted a distraction from the fact that her brother would be dead soon, but she had spent the entire day getting ready for the party. Mackenzie had helped as much as she could. Not being a fan of dances herself, she wasn’t a big help, but she tried to distract Rebekah as best as she could. Mackenzie welcomed the distraction too, as she couldn’t help but worry about what Mikael would do to the rest of his children once he was done with Klaus.

Rebekah was almost ready. And very early. She was wearing a sleeveless red dress that fitted her perfectly. Mackenzie would never dare wear such a dress, she didn’t have the confidence for it. Helping Rebekah get ready for the dance reminded her of the night when she went to the 60’s dance with Elijah. One of the last moments she had spent with him. That night too, they had tried to kill Klaus. She wondered if this night would be any different.

“Elijah took you to a high school dance?” Rebekah asked with a laugh as she admired herself in the mirror. “I would have loved to see that.”

“Getting a head start, uh?” Elena interrupted. She showed up behind them, leaning against the doorframe.

Rebekah looked up at Elena’s reflection in the mirror. “Embarrassing truth,” she said with a small smile. “This is my first high-school dance.”

“Ever?” the doppelganger asked, surprised, as she stepped inside.

“I never really had time for high school before. Nik and I were always moving around. Running,” she paused, thinking about the reason that they ran for ten centuries was somewhere downstairs. “Anyway. I didn’t want to leave anything to chance,” she paused again, hesitating. “Have you heard any more from him?”

“No. But I’m sure that when he does return, he’ll do it with flair.”

“And Damon and my father are all set with their plan?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I just want to go to the dance and leave the rest to Mikael.”

“I know it’s really hard,” Elena said as she approached. “So thank you for helping us get Klaus back into town.”

“Just be careful,” Rebekah warned her, turning around to face her. “I’ve been running for a thousand years for a reason. Mikael is not a good person and he definitely can’t be trusted. No one in my family can.”

Mackenzie would have disagreed but decided to keep quiet. After all, she had known Elijah for a month. Rebekah had been his sister for a millennium.

“Are you okay?” Elena asked.

“I’ve spent my whole life loving and hating my brother with equal measure,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I never thought that I’d be the one to help drive a stake through his heart.”

Mackenzie placed a hand on Rebekah’s shoulder and the vampire shook her head, then turned back to the mirror.

“No tears. I don’t want to ruin my makeup,” she smiled sadly. “How do I look?”

“You look amazing,” Elena told her. “But you’re missing one thing,” she said as she took out Rebekah’s mother’s necklace from her jeans pocket. “You should wear it tonight.” Rebekah smiled. “May I?” the doppelganger asked permission to put it around her neck and she nodded.

Mackenzie stepped back to give them space. She could see Rebekah was very emotional, but she was happy to see her smile.

“Thank you,” she told Elena as she brought a hand to her necklace.

But as soon as she touched it, a gasp of pain escaped her. Mackenzie jumped, startled by the sudden movement, confused by what had just happened. It took her a second to understand that Elena had just stabbed Rebekah in the back, with a silver dagger.

“What are you doing?!”

“I’m so sorry,” Elena said, “I can’t leave anything to chance either.”

Mackenzie instinctively stepped forward, trying to stop Rebekah from falling, but Elena got in her way.

“We can’t let her help Klaus.”

“She wasn’t going to help him!” Mackenzie shouted. “She trusted you! How could you do that?”

“I couldn’t risk it.”

Mackenzie didn’t know what to say, what to do, what to think. She was frozen to the spot, staring at Rebekah’s desiccated body lying at her feet. She couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe Elena would do such a thing. Rebekah didn’t deserve it. She had helped, she was on their side, she was looking forward to the homecoming dance and Elena just stabbed her in the back.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Mackenzie snarled, ignoring her blood boiling in her veins. She took a step forward and the look on her face made Elena step back, but she didn’t get the time to take another step as two hands grabbed her shoulders and pushed her against the bed.

“Now don’t make me do something you’ll regret,” Damon threatened her as he pinned her hard against the mattress.

Mackenzie effortlessly pushed him away with her magic. She heard Elena gasp as the vampire’s back met with the ceiling, leaving a considerable dent. He groaned as he tried to get up, but Mackenzie ignored him. She stood up from the bed and was about to make her way towards Rebekah, planning on removing the dagger, when someone else appeared in the room and stopped right in front of her.

“Calm down, Mackenzie,” Katherine ordered her. “This isn’t a good idea.”

“You’re right. It was a terrible idea and now I’m fixing it.”

“You can’t,” Elena begged. “She’ll work against us!”

“Maybe you should’ve thought about that before you stabbed her in the back!”

“She’ll kill me!”

“Maybe you deserve it!” Mackenzie barked at the doppelganger.

A heavy silence took over the room. Katherine watched Damon in the corner of her eye, just in case he decided to do something he’ll regret. Elena and Mackenzie looked at each other like they were strangers. They didn’t recognize who was standing in front of them. Elena spoke first.

“You’re right. What I did is wrong. And I’m not proud of it. But I couldn’t take the risk. I just… I just couldn’t. Klaus has to die tonight. He’s done too much.”

The elemental stared at the doppelganger, contemplating setting the house on fire. But then her mother’s words echoed in her head. You can’t let your emotions control you. You need to control the fire, or it will consume you. Mackenzie sighed, closed her eyes, then took a deep breath. Elena wasn’t wrong. She wasn’t right, but she wasn’t wrong. Klaus had done too much. He had daggered Elijah, he had killed Jenna, had turned Tyler into a hybrid, had turned Stefan into a ripper… It didn’t make it right, but she understood why she had done it.

“Good luck with tonight,” Mackenzie whispered before she walked away without giving anyone a single look.

***

Mackenzie was a terrible friend. On the three friends she had made this year, two of them had ended up being daggered in front of her and she hadn’t been able to help either of them. She was one of the most powerful creatures on this planet, and she couldn’t even keep her friends alive. What a joke. No matter how hard she tried to calm herself, she couldn’t. It didn’t help that she was driving back to Elena’s house.

She felt conflicted. On one hand, she wished they’d fail tonight, because of what they did to Rebekah, on the other, if Klaus died, it would be easier to get Elijah back, that is, if Mikael didn’t kill him first.

Trying to cool down (literally), Mackenzie drew herself a bath. Water always calmed her. If fire made her hot-tempered, water did the exact opposite. But tonight, even water couldn’t calm her worry. She had left so fast that she hadn’t even bothered to ask why Katherine was there. She wondered what part of the plan she was a part of.

She fell asleep in the bath and was awaken by someone knocking on the front door. When she got out, she realized it was over midnight. Whoever it was would tell her if Klaus was dead, or if everybody else was.

She quickly put on an old robe and went to open the door. She was relieved to see her friend was standing on the other side, unharmed.

“Are you still mad at me?” was the first thing Katherine said.

“Depends. Did you know she’d do that?”

“No idea. She acted on her own,” she said, like she was impressed.

“Is Klaus dead?”

“Not even a little,” Katherine sighed.

Mackenzie didn’t know if she was relieved or disappointed. “What happened?”

“Elena will tell you. I’m leaving town, I just came to say goodbye.”

“Where are you going?”

“Far, far away. Klaus will kill me on sight.”

Mackenzie nodded, understanding why her friend had to go, but not happy about it. Katherine was about to leave but before she could walk away, Mackenzie moved to hug her.

“I’m gonna miss you.”

It took a few seconds for Katherine to hug her friend back.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” was the vampire’s last words before she disappeared into the night.

**********

Thank you for reading!

Chapter 18 is already available for early access on my Patreon page! Chapter 19 to 22 are available for instant access! If you’d like to support me here’s my page: patreon.com/alonelydreamer any support is highly appreciated!!

If you can’t, it’s okay! Chapter 18 will be posted on Tumblr next Wednesday!

Have a good week!

Tags: @thepoet1975 @nerdysandwichqueen @catchmeupimgettingoutofhere @raegan-hale @captainam-erika-trash @silver424 @monetfatalia @vaniileiinkeks @valeria-winchester @favimag @colie87 @hamiltonmadesomemistakes @s0nh4dorasblog @poemfreak306 @white-chocolate-mocha-fan @thegingerthatwaited @therealwatermelon @dark-night-sky-99@aubri1313 @jardinsecos @gymnastgal1997-blog @thearaviagrace77blog

[thisvaryingexistence]

My thoughts on Code Geass: Lelouch of the Re;surrection

So I finally saw the Code Geass movie last night and OH MAN DO I HAVE A LOT OF THOUGHTS.

First of all I think I should start this out by saying this series came into my life at a very weird time I’d say. I first watched the show when I was in 7th grade (13 years old) and I don’t know why but it stuck with me. As soon as the last episode finished I immediately hit start on episode 1 (ah the good old days when Bandai had all the episodes on Youtube) to see what I was missing my first viewing. Since then I have easily watched the series over 10 times over both in English and Japanese. The show (and the fanfiction let’s be real here) got me through a lot of tough times. In my freshmen year of high school, I really took a turn for the worst and seriously thought I would die before I turned 15. That was when I met @projectcluclu and she (along with the show) became a really key part of my life. Her fics really made me fall in love with the pairing Lelouch and CC even more than I already had been with before. The pairing itself became a real comfort for me and just. TLDR: Code Geass is really important to me.

Writing now as a junior in college (20 years old), I could still say this series has my heart. Have I grown older now and seen many other things (mostly not anime related things)? Yes. Do I notice the endless plotholes in the story and how certain characters I once hated are actually okay and the characters I thought were flawless could actually be rather despicable? Yes again. But this story as a whole still makes my heart go BOOM. 

NOW TO THE MOVIE!

So when I first heard they were making a movie I rolled my eyes. I get it was an anniversary and the show had had many other specials before such as Lelouch’s Birthday, Nunnally in Wonderland, etc. However, this one was going to make or break this show. The creators seemed to know this and pulled something I laugh so hard at but at the same time THEY KNOW THEY GET TO MAKE THE CAKE AND EAT IT TOO. After realizing that “oh shit. We really did have the perfect ending. Legit half the viewers are going to be upset no matter what we do” they decided. “YOU ALL CAN THINK WHATEVER YOU WANT. This is an alternate reality.” Now, to me this was a cop out for sure. They knew no matter what they did, someone would be upset. Even I joked around with my sister and said if Lelouch got with anyone else but CC in the movie I would burn all my Code Geass merch. Still, the war still goes on from the original show whether he is dead or not. The creators wanted the ending to be ambiguous, but couldn’t even handle the inner-fandom war when the ending first happened over 10 years ago that they were like HE IS DEAD STOP FIGHTING. 

All that being said, I obviously knew I had to see this movie. I’ll admit the spoilers that it was a CluClu ending did give me a slight push to hit buy tickets on my online order, but I knew it was important to my sister and I. We drove an hour away to go see it and the theater was actually pretty damn packed. We anticipated being 2 of like 7 people there but it was FILLED. It was pretty cool to here people talking about the timeline under their breath and getting excited about the movie. So the movie. My God I laughed so hard. Like tears were streaming from my face. First, I saw it in English. I love my Johnny Young Lelouch so much and Kate Higgins as CC is great. Everyone else had the same voices as well but. It literally appeared everyone but CC forgot how to say Suzaku’s name and called him “Sooz-a-koo.” Legit sounded like fucking Shinjuki. The first time LELOUCH said it I was like who he is talking ab- OMFG ARE YOU KIDDING ME. My sister and I were in tears and I was shaking so bad. The new characters got me confused. Where the fuck was this big ass nation in the show? (Obviously non-existent as this is an alternate universe”) But I was like what is geass did anyone at the studio actually figure it out? In the show they got nowhere close to explaining it, but we got a very good understanding on what it does, it’s limitations, who had it and why, etc. This movie was like oh you have geass?! CHECK MINE OUT! The princess (at least I think she was a princess) was weird? That scene with her and her brother in the bath after she saw her prophecy was fucked. I laughed so hard again as everyone around me was saying WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? With these new characters, why is Cornelia now the head of them? 

My brain did not take it seriously and just laughed at how crack-fic this movie was. They showed almost every character and it was beautiful and almost bought me to actually cry no matter how weirdly they were placed and who they were placed with. Like why was Schneizel with Rakshata?? In a daycare place?? Why?? Ohgi and Viletta’s wedding though. My heart exploded Lloyd and Rakshata dancing? I approve. THE BABY? I approve. 

The main characters. I know it has been ten years and it could be seen, and there were definitely moments where they were, out of character. One thing I saw a lot of before I saw it was that CC was out of character because she cared so much for Lelouch but to me? I think she was pretty in character. It had been a long time for her and Lelouch. As soon as Lelouch died, Shirley bought his body to CC and she had to take care of him as they looked for his lost consciousness. I imagine she was a bitch in the beginning to him but quickly realized she did this. 

She did this.

She is the reason Lelouch is alive at all.

This is why I believe she was in character. It shows how she is not a stagnant character from the beginning of the story. When first knowing about her in episode five of the series, it was clear she was a stone cold bitch who made her own rules for her life (which makes her CC my favorite character so I’m not saying this as a bad thing). As the show moved forward, we saw her at her most vulnerable and how as a child she was desperate for someone to love her. After her own geass story and her immortality, she saw quickly it must have not been in the cards for her and how she was “utterly alone.” Even as she and Lelouch started to become closer to each other, she was rather distant. I don’t think she really let it show how important he had become to her until her backstory episode 15 of R2 when she would not let him take her immortality. Even when she was dying, mind you the only reason she went after Lelouch in the first place, she was crying at the thought of leaving. In the penultimate episode of the series, she and Lelouch had a very touching scene that Kallen had to ruin, but she voiced her care for him. Therefore, in the movie when it shows her caring so much for him, I do not find it out of character for her. It was already shown in the show and sound episodes that she was not sure what she thought her feelings for Lelouch were and she was confused and frightened by them. She was afraid she ruined his life by giving him the power in the first place, and she was selfish enough to do it again by reviving him knowing full well he intended to die for all the things he did in the rebellion. 

I teared up at the trailer watching CC cry trying to find Lelouch in C’s world. You could tell that man is her new “meaning for living” so to say and she realized how close she was to losing him again. I teared up when they were in the knightmare and Lelouch was about to issue a surrender. She pulled her gun on him similar to episode 7 of the show and told him this was not the Lelouch she knew and bought back. That moment of shaky tears and words made Lelouch into his self again. They are the missing pieces the other has always lacked. They are better off together and they know it. Another reason why the scene at the end hit so strong when he told her he would follow LL and abandon the name Lelouch. He was stating how he was ready to let go of his past and begin a new life with her. Her face welling up and crying. Those scenes of them together were my favorite parts of the movie for the obvious ship reason but also for the fact that I felt more connections to the original story and the characters seemed to be staying true to their old selves. 

Lelouch. He was pretty much in character. I do believe leaving Nunnally to make her own choices and let her grow up is something he would do. After all the lessons CC told him about keeping people you love at a distance. He was a little more flirty than usual but again? The scenes that mattered the most, he was Lelouch. 

Suzaku. Excuse me Soozakoo was a pretty much his character from R2. Kind of a douchebag with a heart of gold. His scenes with Lelouch were very very in character and really touching.

Kallen was a little out of character. The one scene that touched my heart is when she cried (which by the way was fucking hilarious because the English cry was so bad) when Lelouch kept staring at her with his dead eyes. That was a really beautiful scene and I could admit that even though I despise the two of them together.

Everyone else was pretty much thrown in with no explanation. Ohgi apologizing to Lelouch made 0, no pun intended, sense. Cornelia leading this new nation? This new nation of a whole? How did Lelouch know where everything was and how to work this foreign computer network and equipment? Why was mostly everyone else not phased by the fact that Lelouch was alive? So many things were not explained in this movie.

THE ANIMATION. The characters were beautiful as ever but damn. Sometimes they left blobs and mouths moving and it was so funny. The close up shot of the camels had me laughing in my seat.

THE ENDING. And I mean the post-credit ending. I feel like the creators found this famous fanart of Lelouch and CC:

And were like LET’S GO WITH THAT! They were pretty much dressed like this and looked like they were having a wedding type thing? But they gave a weird vampire feel which was hm. Okay? 

Overall, this movie was what it was. An anniversary movie to give the fans and give some more spotlight on Lelouch and CC’s relationship. In the moments it had its key characters, it was beautiful. Hell, it was all beautiful. However, it really did feel I was watching a crack-fic fanfiction in HD. That being said, I would not change anything about this movie. My heart is so full and I was smiling the entire time. So glad I got to go see it! 

[ghedahrianvampress]

Masquerade - Ch 1

I must warn you that a few of the characters (Mel in particular) are a bit different than they are in game. I guess you could call this fanfic an au ... The plot is a bit different than that of the game. So, yeah, just a heads up.

Gyendal had never felt so weak and pathetic in all the eight-hundred-and-thirty-two years that he had been alive. Not only had he been turned into a human, the very race that he had thought so despicable that he had tried to enslave, but now he found himself having to walk, talk, and act like a human. He hated every minute of it, but he had no choice. It was the only way to get to the Darkthrop Whelp.

The idea had come to him in a rather peculiar way. He had been visited by a strange specter like girl in the forest, who advised him to change his method and warned him that he would never obtain her if he did not. At first, he refused to trust her, for she looked unnervingly familiar to him, yet he couldn't seem to figure out who she was. However, as he began to consider what she had said, he realized that she was right, and that he might be more successful if he tried to earn her trust and lured her in that way.

The only problem was that he had no idea how to act like a human, having been a vampire for far too long. So, he had spent some time lurking about in the dark alleys of Peliad, observing young human men and how they behaved. Once he had learned the basics, he cast a spell on himself, changing his appearance to fit that of a handsome young thief and went to put his plan into action.

And so, he now found himself browsing through an expensive quill shop, waiting for Mel to appear. He had never been a patient man to begin with, so waiting was not an easy task for him. It did not help that the shopkeeper was basically looking down on him, claiming that his quills were far too expensive for him to afford. Gyendal rolled his eyes at the old man. If only the fool knew who he was talking too. He was sorely tempted to reveal himself and blast the man into a wall, but he refrained from doing so as he suddenly heard the door open.

Glancing over towards the door, he caught a brief glimpse of her walking in before he was forced to retract his gaze. He kept his head down, as he pretended to examine all the different Quill's on display, but he kept a close eye on the Darkthrop Whelp, watching her out of the corner of his eye.

"Excuse me, but how much for this quill?" Mel asked the shop owner.

The old man looked her up and down, his face full of scorn as he saw how grubby her clothes were. "I'm sorry, miss, but the quill's in my store are dreadfully expensive. Well beyond your means, I'm sure."

Gyendal could see that shopkeeper was treating her exactly the same way he had treated him. In the shopkeeper's eyes, they were simply a couple of worthless street urchins, and for some reason that made Gyendal think. Why was this shopkeeper looking down on members of his own species? As much as he loathed the idea of identifying himself as a human, he couldn't exactly continue referring to himself as a vampire. Regardless, he was still confused by the man's behavior. When it came right down to it, him and Mel weren't much different from the shopkeeper, aside from the fact that he was clearly dressed better.

He quickly shook that from his mind, casting it off as insignificant, as he returned to task at hand. Seeing that the shopkeeper was clearly not going to let Mel purchase one of his quills, and appeared to be quite distracted by her, Gyendal slipped one of the quill's into his pocket and quickly snuck out of the shop before anyone could notice, leaving the two to their argument.

Ducking back into one of the alleyways, he watched and waited for Mel to come back out, and fortunately for him, he didn't have to wait long. He soon heard the door of the shop slam shut, and a few moments later, Mel came storming past, cursing the shopkeeper to the other side of the moon and back. He couldn't help but chuckle as he heard all the different insults she came up with. She certainly was creative, he would give her that.

Gyendal sprung into action, scurrying out of the alley, he went around the back of the post office and was able to catch up with her on the other side. As he walked up to her, he had to repeatedly remind himself to be charming to her. He couldn't address her as the Darkthrop Whelp, or give her any reason to suspect who he truly was. He had to be convincing for his plan to work out the way he wanted.

"Excuse me, miss, but I happened to notice how rude that old man was to you in the quill shop," Gyendal said, feigning sympathy. "It wasn't right of him to treat you that way."

Mel glanced over at him, stopping dead in her tracks. Her eyes revealed that she did recognize him, probably from the shop. "Maybe not, but I'm used to it. I've been treated that way my whole life," she replied.

Gyendal was tempted to ask her why that was the case, but he held back, figuring that it might be uncharacteristic of him. After all, he was impersonating someone who was supposed to be just like Mel. He was probably supposed to understand why it was that she was treated that way. So, he simply nodded his head, not knowing what else to do.

Pulling the stolen quill out of his pocket, he reached out and presented it to her. "Anyway, I stole this for you," he said. "It might not be exactly the one you wanted, but it's better than nothing."

Her pale, dirt-smudged face lit up with surprise. It took her a few moments to accept the gift, as she appeared to be hesitant, but she eventually did. "Thanks, it might sound strange to some people, but I actually like stolen gifts. Although, I usually prefer food."

"I'll have to remember that," he said, making a mental note of it in the back of his mind.

Fortunately for him, he already had some idea of what her favorite foods were. It seemed that spending so much time spying on her through the purple haired moth had come in useful after all, even if that plan of his had failed miserably. After all, it had resulted in him loosing his immortality. He wasn't the proudest of that one.

"Anyway, I'm Mel," she said, extending her hand to him.

Gyendal reluctantly took her hand in what the humans called a handshake. It seemed like a pointless gesture to him, but he went along with it for the sake of the charade. "I'm ... Spook."

Mel raised an eyebrow at him. "That's an interesting name," she remarked.

Gyendal mentally chastised himself. Of course it was a weird name to her! He knew that he should have picked something more normal, instead of choosing the name of one of Te'ijal's old house ghosts! He thanked the Goddess that his sister wasn't currently traveling with Mel. She would have caught on to the reference right away and blown his cover.

"Y-Yes, well I chose it myself," he made up an excuse. "I didn't exactly like the name the orphanage gave me."

Mel laughed. "Don't worry about it," she assured him. "I'm not exactly happy with the name I was given either. That's why I shortened it."

Gyendal was actually surprised by that. He hadn't known that Mel was only a shortened version of her actual name. He was a bit tempted to ask her what her full name was, but decided not to, figuring that it didn't matter. The only thing that did matter was that she was a Darkthrop, and held the key to accomplishing his ultimate goal.

"Well, it was nice meeting you, Mel, but I should get going," Gyendal excused himself. "Try not to get into too much trouble."

Mel rolled her eyes. "I think that's pretty much impossible for someone like me."

Gyendal chuckled. "I believe you."

Then with a polite nod of the head, Gyendal backed away and retreated into the shadows, watching Mel for a moment as she hurried on her way back towards the library, where her friends were surely waiting for her. He smirked. His newest plan might not be the easiest, but he got the feeling that it might actually work. Mel seemed to fall for his masquerade well enough. Obviously it would take some more time and effort to gain her full trust, but it was a good start.

[elizas-writing]

When Wish Fulfillment Fantasies Meet Reality: A Re-Examination of Twilight

 **CW/TW: The following piece discusses dating violence with brief mentions to sexual assault and self-harm.**

This year, the last Fifty Shades movie finally came and went, and as its popularity slowly morphs into a bad memory for pop culture, I’m thinking again about the fiction’s effect on reality, particularly wish fulfillment fantasies, self-insert stories, etc etc.

This train of thought began with the Twilight series after watching Lindsay Ellis’s video essay, “Dear Stephenie Meyer,” where she revisits the hatred surrounding said franchise. While it’s definitely not without serious flaws, Twilight was not really as bad as people made it out to be. And most of the criticism was solely about millions of young girls and their moms liking a thing because, what a shock, our society tends to hate anything feminine. I was definitely one of those teenage girls who wanted nothing to do with Twilight, surprising no one probably. Even though I had enough plot summary from friends to pick up the actual problems of the story, I just had fun hating it for the sake of hating it and disassociating with anything feminine because I was neck-deep in my weeaboo phase.

Cut to about seven years later, I took a Vampires in Pop Culture class and Twilight (the first of the series) was on the reading list. With a more mature mind, I sat down, read it, and yeah, it really was not as bad as I thought. Yes, Bella’s too one-dimensional, Edward’s still pretty creepy, and the dialogue and prose is at best, ridiculous and at worst, stale. It knows its target audience is tweens and reads as such, which unfortunately doesn’t grip me as an adult. I gave up at the baseball scene cause I was ready to gouge my eyes out if I read one more description of the weather. And give credit where it’s due, the side characters have way more fascinating stories than Bella or Edward, and it’s a shame Meyer didn’t take a chance to further expand them instead. I couldn’t find much to be angry about with the first book, and I was honestly more bored than anything. But I also cannot deny the wish fulfillment fantasy driving the narrative which drew in a large audience all those years ago.

And wish fulfillment is fine. Self-insert is fine. Teenage girls are just figuring out what confidence is, and there is some reassurance in a fantasy where the totally out-of-league man of your dreams still finds you the most fascinating human being in the world and wants to give you all his undivided attention. Not every female lead needs to be a strong independent woman who don’t need no man. I still see people write self-insert fanfictions from time to time, and they’re very sweet and tender to imagine being loved by a favorite character. We actually consume these stories more than we like to admit.

Hell, one of my favorite guilty pleasure films is The Princess Diaries. In many ways, it hits the same notes as Twilight. It’s a pure wish fulfillment fantasy where the main girl is smart, but clumsy and awkward and just wants to be invisible. Yet she finds herself on a whirlwind journey of self-discovery where others find value in her, and she even falls in love with a boy who adores her regardless of how she perceives herself. Yet The Princess Diaries is such a popular chick flick among people my age. So why is something like The Princess Diaries fondly remembered as an integral part of a millenial/Gen Z childhood while Twilight is met with disdain and disgust?

The major differences boil down to the main female protagonists: Mia and Bella. While not an overly complex character, Mia has, well, a personality. Her journey is more personal of overcoming her social anxiety and realizing how much she can contribute to the world as a public figure if she just takes the leap of faith. Getting a romance in the end is just icing on the cake when she remembers who was there for her even when she was the awkward nerd and will love her regardless of appearance or social status. It’s cheesy and hokey as chick flicks do, but it’s a satisfying wish fulfillment fantasy where the protagonist is better off than where she started and what she was looking for was right there all along.

With Bella, I barely know who she is outside of her romantic interests. Sure, the books go into more detail of her intelligence and social anxiety, but it’s never seen in film. Her life completely revolves around her relationships to the point of obsession, but we never almost see what she’s like when not caught up in the supernatural love triangle. And unfortunately, it’s a problem which worsens with each sequel. The Twilight franchise frames romance as something Bella can’t live without to the point of shutting herself in for months when the Cullens leave in New Moon, refusing to talk to her friends and family, and getting night terrors. It’s intended to make you feel sorry for Bella, but her backwards priorities make her completely pathetic on how much of her life she misses because of some boy who didn’t hesitate to cut her from his life, and she was totally fine with him leaving if he didn’t turn her into a vampire.

Prioritizing unrequited love over your own well being is such an unhealthy idea to romanticize because there is far more to life than some dumb boy who won’t return your feelings. I saw my fair share of unsatisfying romances in young adulthood hanging on by a thread for some idealized love that’s never going to happen. Even though a break up is the simplest and most effective solution for both people to take care of themselves, they continue wasting their time being unhappy with each other and latching on to the rose-tinted view of how they first fell in love. I know some people don’t like the idea that you have to love yourself before someone else, but there’s still truth to the saying where you have to understand that being in a romantic relationship will not automatically fix all your problems and guarantee a happily ever after.

Aside from getting married and having a baby which almost kills her during pregnancy, Bella doesn’t grow as a character or develop any personality, and she just gets her happy ending anyway. The Volturi hint that Bella is special because she’s unaffected by vampire powers, but that detail is shuffled to the sidelines to get more of Jacob and Edward butting heads on who she’ll choose. Most of the story’s events are outside her control and she doesn’t explore further into what they mean about her being special, and even her turning into a vampire-- not even of her own volition, but as a last ditch attempt to save her while dying in childbirth-- doesn’t change that much about her except now she’s immortal and she can bang Edward without getting knocked unconscious again.

I know Twilight is commercial romantic fiction meant to go in one ear and out the other, but it’s still such a damn waste of great lore and  build up with no pay off. And Bella is such a bore of a protagonist to follow the entire time even for a blank slate who is meant to be easily identifiable for teenage readers. Again, not every female character needs to wield a sword or be flawless at everything they do, but having an engaging arc is the simplest bare minimum when writing your story’s protagonist. But that got lost in drawn out weather descriptions and, of course, the unhealthiest romances in fiction.

In a 2013 interview with TIME about her book, The Host, Meyer says she never thinks much about if her protagonists are good role models because “it’s fiction... I don’t think you should be using fictional characters as role models.” To that, I strongly disagree and am rather surprised to hear from Meyer given the great battles of Team Edward vs Team Jacob as each of the films released in theaters. Granted, this is an old interview, and I don’t know how much her opinion changed, but it still irks me.

Whether you like to admit it or not-- especially on the wonderful world of Tumblr.com--, fiction affects our reality. It alters our perception on politics, race, gender, lifestyles, and yes, even romance. Especially as kids and teenagers, we can’t help but find role models to base our ever-changing identities on and look up to so we can be better people for ourselves and society. It’s the reason why so many people define themselves on what Hogwarts house they’re in, why Disney milks Star Wars as long as they can, and why black communities arranged trips for everyone to see Black Panther. And unfortunately, I can’t bring myself to say Twilight is completely harmless in how it portrays the romances.

Just type in any search engine about abusive relationships in Twilight, and you get millions upon millions of analyses on how Edward and Jacob check off as abusers. They’re controlling, aggressive, easy to become jealous, and lacking any notion of personal boundaries. However, one abuser often forgotten in this conversation is Bella, who is such a despicable, emotional manipulator.

Remember how ridiculously depressed she gets in New Moon when Edward leaves? Well, she starts seeing visions of Edward checking in on her whenever she seems to be in danger. And she gets the bright idea to keep purposefully doing so-- including hanging out with shady gang members, crashing a motorcycle and jumping off a cliff-- just to get his attention and hopefully coax him to return to Forks. I’m surprised she didn’t just straight up say “If you leave me, I’ll kill myself” because it’s such textbook gaslighting. And when Edward is led to believe Bella died, then he attempts suicide! And she’s seriously surprised he would given how much needless self-harm she did over the months? What else did you think was going to happen?! I can’t even laugh at some of the badness of New Moon because Bella’s toxic behavior leaves such a sour taste in my mouth. Her severe romantic dependency went from being a damsel-in-distress to an abusive, emotionally manipulative screwball. And that’s just scraping the tip of the iceberg, folks.

Upon actually watching all the films for the first time, Edward’s behavior isn’t nearly as bad as my first perceptions when I was in middle school, but his possessiveness and lack of personal space are still incredibly uncomfortable. I know we all wrote that fanfiction where person A gets saved by person B from attempted gang rape, but Edward is so overbearingly and exhaustively protective, and it just gets worse in the sequels up until Bella’s finally transformed into a vampire. It is to the point where he hardly trusts Bella to do anything by herself knowing how massive of a klutz she is, and will pop into her home without permission, warning or respect of her personal space. As such, she never grows independence, much less learn how to protect herself or be prepared when supernatural forces come for her while the Cullens leave.

Edward may have good intentions to think of Bella’s safety with the context of other vampires mercilessly killing humans in Washington state, but he’s also on a slippery slope of controlling nearly every aspect of her life, especially when she might start feeling romantic for someone else, because guess what dude? You left for over half a year. This continuing behavior throughout the series heavily contributes to Bella’s unhealthy dependency on a romantic partner to the point where she feels like she can’t live without them. Granted, that doesn’t excuse her emotional manipulation, but because she never learns self-defense on the off chance no one else is there to save her, it’s no wonder why she has severe issues with separation and loneliness. Like I said before, you can’t have a healthy romantic relationship if you think it’s going to automatically fix all your problems. Your romantic partner isn’t your therapist or coping mechanism, especially if you can’t handle a simple break up or if said partner wasn’t even that great to begin with.

You’d think Jacob would be off the hook since he at least doesn’t watch Bella while she’s sleeping, but he’s not escaping unscathed. Despite how the series tries to explain what imprinting is, it’s glanced over so quickly on the now creepy relationship between Jacob and Bella’s daughter, even all things considered for a rapidly growing vampire child. He also has a ton of aggressive tendencies as part of the werewolf gene to the point where he will inevitably hurt Bella-- as illustrated with another pack member’s live-in girlfriend who has scars across her face--, and has zero respect for consent as he forcibly kisses her on multiple occasions. Yeah, cause painting your Native American characters-- and only prominent characters of color-- as inevitable, aggressive predators sure is good representation and definitely not some awful racial stereotype. Jacob embodies the most basic descriptors of toxic masculinity between his sense of entitlement that Bella should choose him over Edward and the “boys will be boys” mentality as though Jacob is completely incapable of any self-control, werewolf or not. Given the recent news surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination and his defenders claiming “what boy hasn’t done this” and that he shouldn’t be punished for his actions as a young man, Jacob’s character is one of the most dangerous aspects of the series to be romanticized as a wish fulfillment fantasy. He’s not only based on gross racial stereotypes, but also on harmful patriarchal ideas of men thinking they’re entitled to women without any consideration to their autonomy. Normalizing this behavior as attractive qualities in a partner allows men to run from their actions without consequence.

And this toxic masculinity only heightened when Fifty Shades of Grey entered the spotlight for pop culture to bash, but had much more legitimate criticisms to garner hatred.

Fifty Shades of Grey changes up the wish fulfillment fantasy where instead of a vampire, the clumsy and awkward female lead, Anastasia Steele, is swept away by billionaire, Christian Grey, who’s happy to spoil her with grand luxuries but has a troubled past which makes it difficult for him to love. Oh, and he’s into BDSM and writes up a questionable contract for Anastasia on all the kinky shit he wants to do. And Anastasia is so sweet and innocent she doesn’t even know what an anal plug is (like, it’s right there in the name, sweetheart. You can’t be this dumb). As you do, things go wrong, they take a break, Christian dumps his tragic anime backstory on Anastasia as a pathetic excuse to apologize, people from his past show up because reasons, and they eventually live happily ever after, married with a baby on the way.

Not only does Christian hit the same abuser red flags as Edward, Jacob and Bella on top of being the worst dom in history, but the series passes off that anyone can be fixed with the power of love. Once again, your romantic partner isn’t your therapist. Trauma may explain his behavior, but that doesn’t excuse what he put Anastasia through, and neither is it suddenly her job to fix him. And abusers like Christian are never reformed so easily with love; more often than not, they use it as leverage to manipulate and keep the relationship going for the sake of control. Sure, it sounds hot to be in a BDSM relationship with a billionaire ready to spoil you, but do the ends really justify the means of that sweet wish fulfillment? Is it really that great of a fantasy to play your partner’s therapist and humor their extreme control and possessiveness to the point where you’re almost not allowed to be an individual?

It’s one thing to have guilty pleasures and wish fulfillment fantasies. But after a while, you wonder what it is about a certain piece of media which makes it a guilty pleasure. It’s one thing if Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey are guilty pleasures in some of the enjoyably bad writing, unnatural dialogue or squandered potential. But upholding these romances as ideal and disregarding all the blatant warning signs of abusive relationships? That’s where we really need to take a step back and wonder why this is remotely okay to normalize, especially for impressionable teenage girls. Even though I was mostly amused by the films’ bad writing and these poor actors pushing through for their paychecks, there was also a fair amount of content which was too uncomfortable to laugh at-- Bella’s emotional manipulation, the portrayal of werewolves, and the unsubtle anti-abortion message in Breaking Dawn: Part 1 just to name a few. It’s baffling how these properties became cultural phenomenons for their “romances of the century” when most of these character really need couples’ counseling.

Thankfully, these franchises didn’t made too lasting impressions and for the most part are forgotten. Stephenie Meyer quietly retired to continue taking care of her kids, and EL James just kinda disappeared from the media spotlight since the last film released. Maybe Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey aren’t the worst series to happen to mainstream media, but they still heavily reflect a society which to this day hesitates to call dating violence what it is. Where finding love in another takes priority over self-care. Where people still struggle to define abuse because “if that’s abuse, then everyone I know has been abused.” Where despite sexual assault survivors’ testimonies, polygraph tests, supporters, and grueling mental exhaustion to tell their stories, their abusers roam free without consequence and are still allowed power with their nasty holier-than-thou attitudes to silence anyone who dares question their character.

We’re slowly getting better in these kind of fantasies for teens with films like Love, Simon and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before with genuinely health romances where the characters have to confront their flaws and grow. We’re a lot more critical of relationship dynamics in film than we were over a decade ago, especially with #MeToo in the last year. But part of me is still worried if we’ll have another trend like Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey where it’s blindly defended because it’s fiction and disregard when people romanticize the severely problematic elements which don’t guarantee happily-ever-afters for couples’ in reality. As the possibility of reverting to pre-Roe vs. Wade days becomes more of a likelihood, at what point do we finally acknowledge that a simple fantasy isn’t automatically above criticism?

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[hellosaltysaladcollectionstuff]

WHORE. IT WAS the word that triggered a million tweets, the closing line of Kristen Roupenian’s short story sensation “Cat Person.” The accusation was singular, sent via fictional text from Robert to Margot, but it seemed to have come from a misogynist Muse. Robert became a symbol for how coercion can masquerade as benign loneliness; Margot, for how a reluctant “yes” is not allowed to become a “no.” In a different year, these archetypes might not have secured the story second place in The New Yorker most-read rankings, but this was 2017 and the dawn of #MeToo. Landing first on that list was Ronan Farrow’s chilling reportage on the women sexually assaulted and harassed by Harvey Weinstein; a second article on the case came in at number four. “Cat Person” was close but not too close to the other stories affiliated with #MeToo. Neither personal history nor polemic nor news exposé, it was a fiction laced with ambiguity, even pathos, and its pithy ending hit just the right note — Whore.

That epigram helped secure Roupenian her $1.2 million book deal, but the resultant collection, You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories has little in common with the tale advertised in its subtitle. In terms of genre, aesthetics, and even gender politics, “Cat Person” is the exception, not the rule. Indeed, the collection’s first story, “Bad Boy,” announces its distance with aplomb. In a grim first-person plural, a deviant couple recounts how their bum-of-a-friend starts crashing on their couch after a bad breakup. Realizing he can overhear their nightly escapades, the couple starts fantasizing, then teasing, then after a deluge of alcohol, goading him to watch. “Friend” soon becomes a euphemism for sex-slave, as the narratorial “we” imposes elaborate rules and punishments, then loses “our fucking shit” (and sex-drive) when he flees. Finding him back with the girlfriend, they ruthlessly collect themselves and order she be stopped. Read: Strangled. Clearly, we’ve left the psychological realism of “Cat Person” far behind, as well as its well-bounded, hashtag-able ethics of consent. We’ve entered a murkier realm of libertinism and pseudo-horror, one where the eponymous “Bad Boy” comes off as both predator and prey. Sex remains Roupenian’s preferred site to explore human villainy, but the evil has grown more Manichaean — and it’s distributed across gender lines.

The subsequent 11 stories stay near, if never quite reaching, that high watermark of relational violence. They swerve across genres, from the grimmer-than-Grimm fairy tale “The Mirror, the Bucket, and the Old Thigh Bone” to the medical case history “The Matchbox Sign.” Their literary influences are eclectic — traces of Stephen King, Carmen Maria Machado, and Ray Bradbury have been noted — and the results will confound many readers. Some lambaste its “desire to seem shocking,” but they are missing the game being played. For shock is not simply a by-product of horror or fantasy; it’s a device used to signal these storytelling modes. Judgment, be it aesthetic or ethical, can only begin in a second stage, after that genre is established, its internal logic clearly defined. If “Cat Person” lays claim to realism and “Bad Boy” to the Sadean libertine, “Sardines” wanders into magical realism, recounting how a singing birthday candle helps an adolescent retaliate against her frenemies and father’s new girlfriend. “Scarred,” meanwhile, plunges into fantasy, with a grimoire that demands the protagonist draw blood, then tears, then an organ from her spell-shackled man-slave.

The villains, you’ll notice, are quite often women, and this is where murky aesthetics starts to make for murky gender politics. Without epigrams like Whore to clearly vindicate or condemn these characters’ machinations, the line between victim and perpetrator starts to blur. And without the framework of realism, a strange power imbalance crops up: more often than not, men are assigned the role of pathetic mortal, while women receive that of the supernatural femme fatale. In those cases, unlike in “Cat Person,” readers could find a discomfiting dose of sympathy elicited for the Roberts of the world.

Take the collection’s concluding story, “Biter.” Its eponymous heroine Ellie spends the tale equivocating on whether to chomp or not on her elfin co-worker Corey Allen. When he makes a sexual pass, Ellie sees an opening and pounces. Her overeager jaws accidentally maul him, but since he’s been groping the other women in the office, Ellie unexpectedly ends up a hero. Instead of staying put to reap the glory, however, she quickly moves onto her next job and next assailant/assailee. “There was one in every office,” writes Roupenian — one man ready to grope, and thus ready for Ellie’s teeth to strike without fear of repercussion. In recalling the way the “Cat Person” reaction split along gender lines, Roupenian quipped “the story threatened to become the blue-dress/white-dress moment of the #MeToo era.” With “Biter,” the litmus test could give more unsettling results. Some will see Ellie as literary scaffolding to unveil the ubiquitous nature of workplace harassment. Others will find warning of how disfiguring deviance can get an ethical free pass. Roupenian’s tone throws a wrench in the whole ordeal: the ending to “Biter,” that image of a vampiric Ellie nonchalantly rotating through office jobs, is crisp enough to be funny. It stands in stark contrast to that final word of “Cat Person”; there, the range of reactions did not include laughter.

Some readers will forgo these more finicky cases by focusing on the collection’s longest tale, “The Good Guy,” which shares the clear-cut aesthetics and gender politics of “Cat Person.” Here too, we have a man, Ted, for whom sex is violence: at 35, his only way to stay stimulated is “to pretend that his dick was a knife, and the woman he was fucking was stabbing herself with it.” The rest of the story is told in retrospect, after his ex-girlfriend qua fantasy-stabbing-victim Angela cracks his head open with a glass tumbler. We learn, through a tale of two women, Rachel and Anna, about Ted’s gradual realization that his sheen of meek “goodness” can be wielded to entrap women. This is sentimental education at its most despicable — and thus most welcome to readers seeking more variants of “Cat Person.” They’ll find refuge also in “Death Wish,” another strictly realist story, and notably the other one Roupenian penned after her 2017 rise to fame.

Isolating these “Cat Person” derivations, however, doesn’t quite do justice to a collection so committed to scampering across genres, and to showcasing evil in both male and female forms. In its more fantastical moments, You Know You Want This reminded me of a similarly daring experiment penned over a century before: Vernon Lee’s collection Hauntings. Most famous for her art criticism and travel writing, Lee was long maligned as the shrill sister to fin-de-siècle male aesthetes like Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James. Virginia Woolf compared her to a “garrulous baby”; Bernard Berenson claimed she “showed a lack of self-control.” The same will perhaps be said of Roupenian. But Lee’s example shows how excess can be an asset in the supernatural domain.

Because for all its eccentricities, You Know You Want This remains tethered to recognizable lands, to text messages and New Year’s champagne and westward moves to San Francisco. It opens a space for readers to sympathize with the “scarred” as well as the scarrer, the bitten as well as the “biter.” Hauntings, on the other hand, takes cognitive estrangement as its premise. In “Amour Dure,” a Polish scholar becomes obsessed with a 16th-century femme fatale; in “A Wicked Voice,” a Norwegian composer can’t stop hearing the trillings of an 18th-century castrato. Lee’s images can be just as gruesome as Roupenian’s, her characters just as diabolical, but her worlds are so self-contained, and so unorthodox, that they evade our affective intrusions and ethical scalpels.

Henry James pinpointed the power of such world-building in a letter to Lee: “[T]he ingenious tales […] are there,” he wrote, “diffused through my intellectual being and within reach of my introspective — or introactive — hand. (My organism will strike you as mixed, as well as my metaphor — and what I mainly mean is that I possess the eminently psychical stories as well as the material volume.)”

For me, Roupenian’s best stories are the ones capable of total diffusion, those like “Sardines” and “The Mirror, the Bucket, and the Old Thigh Bone,” which define their own outlandish worlds, then lie there, waiting coyly for our act of possession.

Yet it was identification, that close sibling of possession, that drove “Cat Person” to stardom, and at points You Know You Want This seems crafted to repeat the effect. By eschewing explicit references to race, class, and even sometimes sexuality, the stories seem aimed to encourage as much reader-recognition as possible. It’s a technique that can backfire. Though the genders of the “We” in “Bad Boy” are technically ambiguous, the collection feature just a single explicitly queer character: Kath in “The Boy in the Pool.” The story is woven with her latent attraction to childhood friend and bride-to-be Taylor, and it culminates with both a boy and a girl in a pool: Kath pushes Taylor in. But those details are swathed in the most hetero of hetero plots: a bachelorette party struggling to compete with the bachelors’ Vegas debauchery. I couldn’t help but think how the last New Yorker story to create such a sensation was Annie Proulx’s 1997 “Brokeback Mountain.” In 2019, queer desire might merit more than one poolside shove.

So, while the collection’s title may be tonally appropriate — flippant and flirting with danger — many readers may find themselves wanting something else. Those who sought Cat People, a set of realist tales whose feminism can be hash-tagged and tweeted with ease, will find it both aesthetically and ethically disappointing. So too will those who crave more engagement with the diverse forms cruelty takes when refracted through the prisms of identity.

Roupenian is undoubtedly capable of tackling intersectional issues head-on. After graduating from Barnard College, she spent two years with the Peace Corps in Kenya, an experience that informs the story “The Night Runner.” While teaching Public Health, she learned Swahili and discovered the literary magazine Kwani? that would become the topic of her English PhD dissertation at Harvard. That background has remained oddly absent in the discussion around her fiction, but it seems relevant that Roupenian once taught tutorials entitled “How to Write About Africa” and “The New Global Novel.” Engaging more fully with those questions would be a worthwhile direction for her fiction: a zone still ethically daring but requiring more circumspection, and more craft. Such work might not have the same self-evident market-value as Roupenian’s upcoming HBO series, but sometimes, as she knows only too well, readers might need to be told what they want.

¤

Colton Valentine (Harvard ’16, ENS ’18) is an Ertegun Scholar in Oxford’s Faculty of English.

The post But Are You Sure?: On Kristen Roupenian’s “You Know You Want This: ‘Cat Person’ and Other Stories” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2JIDRX0

[englishmansdcc]

I recently read the first 3 volumes of Stephen Franck’s SILVER, and today it was announced that the 4th (and final) volume titled THE SEARCH FOR DRACULA’S LOST TREASURE is now on Kickstarter. SILVER is a “globe trotting graphic novel series” that Franck has been working on for the past four years, and the new volume will wrap up the series.

For those not familiar with the series (like myself until I read it), it’s about a a vampire hunter (Rosalyn) who just happens to be a descendant of Professor Abraham Van Helsing, with the story taking place 30 years after Van Helsing visited Dracula’s castle with Rosalyn teaming up with some con-men to rob rich vampires in Europe.

More information as well as art is below courtesy of their press release.

The Russ Manning Award-nominated SILVER Graphic Novel Series Concludes

The Fourth and Final Volume of Stephan Franck’s Graphic Novel Caper About

The Search for Dracula’s Lost Treasure is Now on Kickstarter

Stephan Franck has worked on some of the most beloved animated films of all time, including The Iron Giant, How to Train Your Dragon and Despicable Me —and his passion for storytelling extends from the silver screen to comic books and graphic novels. Over the course of the last four years, Franck has been writing, illustrating and self publishing SILVER, a globe-trotting graphic novel series that mashes up the world of Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula with action, adventure, humor, pulp storytelling and modern sensibilities. Told over the course of 4 volumes (and a stand alone novella), Franck has created an unforgettable cast and a compelling caper that picks up 30 years after Professor Abraham Van Helsing visited Dracula’s castle. Now Van Helsing’s descendant, the mysterious vampire hunter Rosalyn, is teaming up with a ragtag group of con men for a high stakes heist to rob Europe’s richest vampires. Will they succeed, and live off their take from this one last job? All will be revealed in the fourth and final volume of SILVER, which Franck and his company Dark Planet Comics are funding via a Kickstarter campaign.

In SILVER, a group of criminals discover the late Jonathan Harker’s secret ledger, which discloses the existence of an exotic treasure of silver hidden in Dracula’s castle. Finnigan, the group’s leader, knows a retirement plan when he sees it, so he’s willing to do whatever it takes to pull off the biggest heist of the last ten centuries—even if that means allying himself with the mysterious, sword-wielding vampire hunter Sledge, aka Rosalind Van Helsing.

  This year, Dark Planet Comics released a Free Comic Book Day Edition of the first issue of SILVER. “My hope is that fans who love old-fashioned storytelling that’s chock full of action and adventure, mystery and humor, discover SILVER in time to be a part of the epic finale.” The series has already attracted the notice of comic book creators including Tim Sale, Bill Sienkiewicz and Jim Lee, and has been widely praised with coverage from an array of outlets including NPR, THE NERDIST, HORROR NEWS NETWORK, NEWSARAMA and COMICON.

Fans who back the new Kickstarter can get digital editions, all four trade paperbacks individually, a signed slipcase featuring all four trade paperbacks, the acclaimed novella ROSALYND, an audiobook of ROSALYND and limited edition prints by or done in collaboration with three incredible artists: Marvel comics and Kickstarter sensation Takeshi Miyazawa (Ms.Marvel, Spiderman, Code Monkey Saves World), animator and bandes dessinées artist Rodolphe Guenoden (Kung Fu Panda, Ma Reverence), and superstar illustrator Mel Milton.

  When he’s not writing and drawing comics, Franck is an Executive Producer and the Head of Story for the PLAYMOBIL Movie for Lionsgate. Previously, he worked as a supervising animator on the cult classic film THE IRON GIANT and as a key story contributor to DESPICABLE ME. Franck also co-created the award-winning animated TV Series CORNEIL & BERNIE (Nicktoons, Hub Network), and received an Annie Award nomination for Best Director in a TV Program, for the special SMURFS: THE LEGEND OF SMURFY HOLLOW.

If funded through Kickstarter, pledges will be delivered to backers this fall. The SILVER Volume 4 Kickstarter campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/darkplanetcomics/345093214?ref=492299&token=9308655b) is live as of May 22nd and runs for 30 days.

For updates, follow Dark Planet Comics on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

This is what people are saying about Stephan Franck’s SILVER:

“Writer/artist Stephan Franck is firing on all cylinders…. Stylish black-and-white art, and a smart, charmingly roguish point-of-view-character draw you in.” —  NPR

“With SILVER, Stephan Franck shows how much excitement can be packed into a fast-moving, thrill-filled story… a really, really fun ride.”—Tim Sale (Batman: The Long Halloween)

“Stunning.”—NEWSARAMA

“SILVER is so big, bold, and juicy! I absolutely love this book!” — Bill Sienkiewicz (Elektra: Assassin)

“Spun out of Bram Stoker’s literary classic Dracula, SILVER retains the original novel intact at its core, while extending its world in every possible direction.” — HORROR NEWS NETWORK

“Great book!”—Jim Lee (Batman)

“A beautifully drawn and masterfully told noir/heist story with a teasing side of the supernatural that constantly kept me surprised”—Takeshi Miyazawa (Ms. Marvel)

“Franck knows his customers, what they expect, and he gives it to them in spades.”—AIN’T IT COOL NEWS

“SILVER has all of the elements you crave and with a story that you’ll simply devour.”—David Gallaher (High Moon)

“May be the ultimate gothic noir comic saga.”—COMICON

“Impressive. A Mignola-esque reshuffling of history with a fanciful legerdemain that keeps the story light on its toes.—Samuel Sattin (Legend)

“You’ve seen adaptations and re-imaginings of author Bram Stoker’s seminal work Dracula, but never quite like this. Writer and artist Stephan Franck has taken the Dracula mythos and the foundation that Stoker built to create a unique yarn of horror and heist in his story Silver. The conceit sees an Ocean’s 11-esque caper that has con men and women eyeing the ultimate score: treasure from Dracula’s castle.”—FREAK SUGAR

“There may not be a better original vampire comic book in America than SILVER.”—COMIC BOOK BIN

ABOUT SILVER: VOLUME 1 (2014):

1931, New York City. Meet Finnigan, ethically challenged master-thief, and his partners in crime Mullins and Brantley, as they rob the mysterious Harker foundation. What was supposed to be their last job turns into a narrow escape from the FBI, and Finn loses the team’s retirement money. However, Finn discovers a mysterious ancient silver bar, and the late Jonathan Harker’s secret ledger, which discloses the existence of a fabulous treasure made of silver, hidden away in Dracula’s castle. Finn assembles a crew of talented but broken misfits to pull off the heist of the last ten centuries. On top of Mullins and Brantley, the team includes Rosalynd “Sledge” Van Helsing, who continues the family tradition, but has fallen on hard times, Hamilton Morley, a washed out burlesque actor/con man, Maitre Moineaux, an old forger who may not live long enough to see the job through, and Tao, a ten year old boy with the gift of second sight.

ABOUT SILVER: VOLUME 2 (2015):

The team boards the Orient Express, which is filled with Vampires travelling to Dracula’s castle. Romantic tension builds between Finn and Sledge, but she may have an ulterior motive for being on the team. We also learn more about Finn’s broken past, as it quickly becomes clear that Tao needs a role-model in Finn…something that Finn is not equipped to provide. Nonetheless, the team succeeds in pulling off the first steps of the plan in spite of Hamilton having a panic attack at the worst possible time. The team reaches the castle, and we find a powerful, but broken Drac, who never got over the loss of Mina Harker. For years, Drac has been in a funk–caught between his morbid obsession for the Heart Of The Dragon (the missing silver bar stolen by Harker) and his feelings for Mina, which are still haunting him. To pacify his subjects and prove he’s moved on, Drac has agreed to take a bride. Lillian Duvalier, a cruel and ambitious vampire princess is scheming to become the one, adding even more intrigue and volatility to the situation. As volume 2 ends, Finn and crew have managed to infiltrate the court, passing themselves as vampires, and successfully baited Dracula with a chance to regain the coveted Heart Of The Dragon.

ABOUT SILVER: VOLUME 3 (2017)

Silver Vol 3: The con is now in full swing and James Finnigan’s uniquely talented band of grifters is deep undercover. But talent comes at a price. Secrets and agendas emerge, and characters are pushed past their breaking points. While Finnigan struggles to keep his team on track, thrilling action, suspense, and drama ensues in the most intense and gothic volume yet.

ABOUT SILVER: VOLUME 4 (2018)

Everything ends.

About ROSALYND:

Rosalynd is a one-shot 244-page hardcover novella which dives deeper into the Silver Universe, and explores the mysterious past of one of Silver’s most beloved characters: Rosalynd “Sledge” Van Helsing as a child. Secrets about her family will be revealed, as well as young Rosalynd’s first-person account of the events that put her on the road to becoming the acerbic vampire-hunter from Silver that we know and love. This earnestly moving story is great whether you are already fan of Silver, or new to Rosalynd as a character.

ABOUT STEPHAN FRANCK:

Stephan Franck was a supervising animator on the cult classic THE IRON GIANT, a key story contributor to DESPICABLE ME. He co-created the award-winning animated TV Series CORNEIL & BERNIE (Nicktoons, Hub Network), and received an Annie Award nomination for Best Director in a TV Program, for the special SMURFS: THE LEGEND OF SMURFY HOLLOW, the first ever hand-drawn version of the beloved characters done at a feature-animation quality level. Stephan has worked for all the major feature animation studios as a supervising animator, story artist, writer and director, and has closely collaborated with talents as diverse as George Lucas and Adam Sandler. In addition to being attached to several features in development, Franck is currently Head of Story for the PLAYMOBIL movie for Lionsgate and lives in Los Angeles.

In 2013, Stephan reconnected with his lifelong passion for comics by creating the graphic novel series SILVER. Three years later, with two collected editions out, and a third one on the way, SILVER has connected with a very diverse and devoted fan-base, garnered glowing reviews from blogs big and small, nabbed a nomination for the prestigious Russ Manning Award at SDCC 2014, a 2015 Geekie Awards nomination for Best Graphic Novel, landed on ComiXology Submit’s ESSENTIAL READS list.

Fourth & final volume of Stephan Franck’s SILVER now available on Kickstarter I recently read the first 3 volumes of Stephen Franck's SILVER, and today it was announced that the 4th (and final) volume titled 

[bornfromscarletcords]

A Dragon’s Paradox

Well I suppose introductions are in order, I’m pretty famous in certain places so I don’t know if you know me or what name you might know me by, but I’ll just play it safe and start from scratch. Most people know me as Shadowsky, which is short for The Dragon Who Shadowed The Sky, or The Wings of Darkness, or Night Cloak To The World. Still that’s a little formal and as I’m trying to make a fresh start so to speak, really turn my life, well since I’m sort of dead, I suppose we can call it “my existence”, around. So you may know me as Benjamin Aldhurhaven. You may have seen my antithesis, or perhaps my “match” or “foil”, who goes by James Wolkinder, but who is more well known and hated, in my circles at least, for his other alias “The Silver Wolf”. I absolutely despise him, which is why I always cherish the moments when we can really go toe to toe, pouring or potent molten emotions into our blades, fists, and occasionally, poisons. I’ll admit James is weary of the latter, but I don’t mind to much, some people deserve to have their innards melted out from the inside. Our rivalry goes way back, or forward depending on your view of time or optimism vs pessimism, the short version is we exist in a type twisted duality or fated bond of confrontation. When we do collide or whatever, it’s pretty entertaining, and usually we fix more things than we destroy, though I admit there is more than your average amount of explosions and swooning young maidens. It would be hard to thank us for this work as most of the resulting benefits were mostly only hypothetical consequences in our mind from the moment we arm our souls to the moment we fall, burning and bleeding, like clashing torrents of heaven and hell. Supposedly we look similar, though as a person who deals more in essences and aura’s I’m pretty good at telling the difference between myself and that other aforementioned bastard. Then again I’m pretty tricky so who knows. As far as physicality goes, I’m fit I suppose, like a football player or perhaps a secret agent man. Generally my skin runs on the darker side being a lord of shades and horrors and all. My hair tends to be longer than James’ and perhaps that has to do with my natural wildness and roguish charm. Someone said I was attractive once or twice, and I in the mind to accept any compliment about my bearing as fact, and I dare you to argue with my hardwon evidence of hearsay. My eyes are purple, violet or lilac if we’re getting fancy. Don’t worry there’s nothing wrong with them besides being gorgeous and charged with emotional depth. I like armor, and large swords, as well as the screams of my captured and shamed foe’s to lull me to bed at night; it makes the cookies and milk that much sweeter. I drive fast cars with the top rolled down to show that I got it more than other people, and so that when I drive off into the sunset it looks like I’m in a movie or something.

Well I suppose that’s enough about my more basic traits, I suppose we can get into the meat of why we’re here today. You see, life, and death, are pretty complicated, full of contradictions, trials and tests, that make you want to quit or check out early, the only problem is, from what I’ve seen checking out just checks you in to somewhere else so if you really want things to change you usually have to do it yourself. I suppose you could summarize the dilemma with the following rumination. A people are give the ability to shape the world, their reality, with the power of their words and the strength of their core. Because of this one people says it is their obligation to be truthful in all things, lest the world deem them false and unworthy, subject to being forgotten by existence itself. Another people says, well that’s all well and good, but if words create as they are spoken, then a lie becomes true as long as it is believed or as long as it is feared as being possible. The latter bit has a lot to do with the fact that emotions are not black and white subjects, and are prone to tipping the simple into complicated extremes as feelings are not limited by logic. You could even say liars are some of the most faithful people in existence, though I’m sure James would want to clock me on my noggin just for suggesting it. Bringing it home a little bit more, a person could lie about something as in believe inside that it is false and still say it, and come to find that their lie was in fact a truth upon further investigation. A person could always tell the truth, believing inside that what they say is right or correct, and come to find out their truth was wrong or false, though not necessarily a lie. I suppose you could say it’s almost like asking, is it more important not to do bad things or not to be seen as a bad person. Bad things can help a lot of people when good things will not, and good people sometimes commit the most awful atrocities. Just something to mull over as we drift through the unknown for a little while.

Well, James, being a total goody two shoes tends to leave a lot of the more questionable work to me, I mean to his credit, it’s not like I give him much time to intercept, people are fond of their habits after all and evil does become me. I’d hate for him to think of me as predictable, but when we raise our forces, when it’s the whole pot on the line and we both got the hand we’ve been dealt to our name, well then I can’t say I hate having my familiar despicableness at the ready. I should say that my sleeves are usually lined with spares, in case I fear he might start cheating, the lazy bum. Oh don’t give me that look, he pulls his out of thin air half the time. With this said, I suppose I should tell you a little bit about our destination. Well, in many of the cultures I’ve visited, female werewolves aren’t always that common, it’s not an absolute, it’s just a bit of a subtlety that surfaces a little more clearly depending on how you look at things. So...I went to a world where male werewolves were uncommon. Pretty swank right. Well I thought so. 

First step in I faked a car accident, well in truth it was a real car accident, I even heard guy shout “my leg!!!” in the background which really sold it for me. The fake part was that my car was more or less sentient and can regenerate itself from a shattered windshield shard, so the fanfare of me going to find a mechanic, and limping around and chatting up the pretty paramedics about the wonderful daughter and family I’d left behind so I could find a job, here in the land of the free and home of the brave in order to provide for them. Oh how difficult this would all be with a seemingly shattered hip and missing eye. I died that night at 12:30 am, on a saturday. I know what you’re thinking, I blame the sabbath and the jewish god as well. My car swung around a couple hours later so that I could get a good siesta in, before I had to well, be a little different than I was before. I will say it wasn’t a huge change but most of the dynamic things are pushed into motion with the subtlest of actions. Devil’s in the details as they say, well I heard someone call them “deets” at some point and I figure, that’s pretty neat, pretty avant garde cha know. To hammer it home a little it’s like the subtlety of stunt doubles, or a magicians sleight of hand, it works partly because people want to be fooled, or need some doubt, the truth of it all might destroy them.

So I woke up, my luscious locks shorn like a wooly lamb out to pasture, I looked so un-kept so in need of refinement, so poor-esque. If I were a black man I could have been a call back for the audition of Toby, I mean kunta kente in the reboot of Roots. Ah but lo and behold I was merely a native american man-ish. I was fit, which was good, it’s always a burden when you have to try to impress people, looking pretty, even if a vagabonds prettiness, always inspires people to see you as more redeemable, or possessable. And goddamnit I was a pretty beast. My eyes were still purple which was great, though humans wouldn’t notice if I didn’t want them too, just like that paramedic I was thinking of kidnapping wouldn’t notice what should have been a startling resemblance I would bear to the dead man she’d pried from the car wreckage. Let it be known children, ignorance kills.  

Speaking of bears, I decided that I was a werebear. I know what your thinking, Benjamin, stop fibbing, but guys bear with me for a sec. I am a shapeshifter, and I have shifted into something resembling a bear before, and most importantly, I am handsome. So it wasn’t exactly a lie. I picked up some shades from the lost in found, as well as some clothes nobody would miss mostly because they smelled of the grave, and proceeded to sneak my way out into my dragon-mobile. Let it be said children, never trust a man in glasses.

Well, although I was incredibly eager to search out those lovely wolf babes, I also knew that it would be best if I pay my respects to my fellow darklings...and or blow up their stuff. A quality explosion goes a long way. Although I could have chosen from dozens on dozens of night creatures, I decided vampires would be pretty entertaining. The sun wouldn’t be up for about five more hours, and I could hear the trouble calling my name “Sadam” it said “I mean Shadowsky” it corrected.

I have a pretty good nose, and though vampires are good at hiding their resting places from the more sinisterly challenged, I can sniff out evil from sea to shining sea. It always smells like home to me, all that fear, all that hilarious blood shed, like skeleton kittens laughing, it’s just precious.

I was nearing my quarry, so I parked the dragonmobile in some old man’s backyard, it’s okay, if he didn’t expire that night, he’d probably be too blind and senile to care. I love when things just work themselves out, it’s the joy of nature’s sado masochistic design of heinousness. I felt like that guy who got killed by that stingray on the animal channel, ya know he had like that blue dog that used to hide clues all over the house or something, ah well, suffice to say I was the man. I put on my super secret agent vision, by cupping my hands around my eyes and making super cool and super funny noises and observed two vampires arguing in their natural habitat, pseudo suburbia at night time.

“He said he sensed something.” Said one vampire. She looked like she could have been a teenager, or one of those adults who always seem to smack of innocents no matter how decrepit they were inside. I liked her immediately. She had tawny hair a dark t-shirt and a coat that looked too big for her. There were other nuances, like the hand cut jeans, or the feather in the hair that looked more out of place than necessarily stylish. It was all the little things, all the slight yet potent nods of evil and tyranny that just set my ol’ soul a flutter. I nearly shed a tear, “god curse her heart”, I whispered inside.

“This isn’t star wars, last time he said that we nearly gutted for his candy cause you said it may have been a bomb.” Said the other vampire, she had long dark hair and though she looked pretty enough, she also looked she’d spent much of her life and afterlife slaughtering those who just happened to be in her way, for better or worse. I got the faintest impression of a suit of mail surrounding her, like a knight or a templar or something.  

“It was quality candy.” said the younger looking one.

“I’m not an errand boy.” Said the  army looking one.

“Yes you’re an errand girl, I’m glad you’ve finally accepted this. You’ve opened up a whole new chapter in your life, well unlife, the world is your oyster. Eat it, fuck it, sell it, or some combination of all three, I don’t know go nuts.” Said the younger looking one. She licked her wrists not unlike your common house cat might before stretching in very interesting ways, to be honest I’d forgotten bodies could bend like that, ah a sleazy lesson a day keeps the genocide away.

“Sabre, please do not make my first act of this, ‘new’ discovery as you put it, be to chop your head off.” Said the army looking one.

“Sandra, please do not insult me by implying I couldn’t simply reattach said head upon separation. I don’t mind violence, but an insult to my know how, and resourcefulness, that just hurts my feelings.” Said the younger one who must have been Sabre. She started climbing up a tree, and lounging in the leaves with low purrs.

“Sabre, get down from there, get down now.” Sandra said.

“Maybe in an hour or two, It’s pretty comfortable.” Sabre said.

“Well if the firemen have to come to get you down, don’t say I didn’t offer my assistance.” Sandra said.

“All you do is shout and pout and stuff, that’s not helping that’s just being bleh…” Sabre said sounding half asleep. Sandra clenched the air for a frustrated moment before stomping off. That was when I made my approach, wish me luck...what? The tense doesn’t make sense...you’re wondering how I could request assistance, for something that’s already happened...well can’t I just want some moral support...well I understand that but if I’m being honest, it is magic.

I approached the very sexy, most likely underaged, at least in appearence, vampiress who was more and more reminding me of a cat. Sometimes it was a simple creature, like your common alley feline felon, and other times it was something more like...oh I don’t know… a sabre toothed lion. Opened her eyes slightly at my approach.

“Hey you’re the guy aren’t you, darn, Sandra already ran off, and I’m indisposed right now. Could you like come back tomorrow or something so that we can fight or like extort you or chase you off or something. I know it seems like a lot to ask but boss’s orders ya know,” She sniffed the air, “You smell good, I mean bad, but tasty,” Sabre said.

“I’m sort of a jack of all trades, I sort of taste where I’ve been, or what I’ve eaten like in that old saying or something. I’m sorta a bear though if you wanted my resume, a werebear.”

“A warbler, that’s nice, I like those.” She said sounding half asleep and mewing yawns with teeth that both looked cute and primally deadly all at once.

“Hey, I got a nice place, that’s warm and I’m pretty sure there might be a mouse or two to eat, want me to take you there, you can sleep for as long as you want.”

“Gee mister, you sure are nice,” she yawned again turning onto her back and exposing a bit of her luscious girl stomach, “I guess I might not eat you then, whisk me away to from this jungle.” She said rubbing her forearms across her face and wiggling here or there. I half climbed the tree and petted her stomach gently, because cats need firm tenderness, then I sort of grabbed her around the waist and by the scruff of her neck and took her to my car, all the while she muttered “I’m flying, dude are you seeing this, it’s a miracle, like it’s so crazy, but if this is possible maybe vampires and werewolves exist or something. I know it sounds impossible but, I mean wow.”

I got Sabre into the car and she lounged on the leather seats, and though I was mildly afraid she might start tearing at the fabric, I knew I needed a pad and some paper more. I jotted down a message “I have stolen your cat, if you do not bring me a box full of a million dollars, and or a peanut chocolate caramel pretzel treat of your choosing, her safety is forfeit. I’d make some reference to eating her but if you didn’t sense the imminent sexual innuendo approaching then I am disappointed and you should be ashamed at tarnishing the title of vampire.” Then I let Sabre leave her signature on the note, it was a single “meow”. I left the note on the tree and drove off real dramatic like so that the tires screeched and everything, if this was a movie this is where all the kids would secretly start routing for me.     

[cmg10372]

*´¨✫★) ¸.•´¸.•*´¨★)✯ ¸.•*★¨) ✮★ (¸.•´✶ (¸.•`COVER REVEAL•´✶★ ★★Devlin's Desire★★ by Elaine Barris A TULSA IMMORTALS NOVEL ADD TO YOUR GOODREADS TBR! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34909313-devlin-s-desire ★ Jolie ★ Armand saved me from a despicable man, Devlin Wick. What a name. It sounds like ‘devil’ and ‘wicked’ to me. I wasn’t sure why, but I couldn’t remember the specifics of what Devlin had done to me, though I did recall the sheer terror I felt the last time I saw his face. It was smoky... or foggy. I’m not certain which. If I really concentrated on that moment, I could faintly hear a male voice crying out, but Armand didn’t want me to think about that. As much as I tried to obey him, I found myself wondering about that man and that night, even though Armand insisted that he had gotten me out of an awful situation. Armand was a vampire, and he loved my blood. He said there was something unique and special about it and that he would protect me at all costs. He said he treasured me. That was what I knew to be true, and that was my life. Armand had changed me from the woman I was—the kind who would fall for such a hurtful person. I hated Devlin Wick. ★ Devlin ★ Each night without Jolie was torture, and I couldn’t help wondering if in some small way, she was feeling the same, missing me. The second that thought crossed my mind, I saw her screaming in fear of me, clutching Armand to her fiercely, while the witch closed the incantation, removing me from her life. I’d tried reaching out to the Twin Ravens Motorcycle Club, since I heard that despite their outlaw persona, they were secretly the good guys. But if they were, they would’ve taken up the battle, rather than refuse to help me. Nothing in their decision made sense, considering the rumors floating around, but I had to move on if I was ever going to get Jolie back. With no other choices available, I went to The Decrees to stand before Zane Thornton and beg for his help. I would’ve dropped to my knees if that was what it took to rescue my girl. But rather than Zane joining me, his Maker, the ancient vampire Reese Kelley, agreed to fight to free Jolie from the rogue MC Soldiers of Strife, specifically their president Armand Glaceau. The members were all Stone Cold vamps, exceedingly strong and faster than any vampire I’d ever encountered. With a team made up of Reese, some of my old crew from Corruption, Inc., and a gibbering maniac who thinks he’s the prophet Elijah, we devised a plan to rescue Jolie and eliminate as many of the Soldiers as possible in the process. But even if we save Jolie, and she’s in my arms again…will she be the woman I loved and love me in return?