#i don't think i've ever been to that street

[couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name]

okay disjointed thoughts about the wicked movie 1 day after watching it lets go

-first of all, my movie theater put speakers outside and was just blasting the entire soundtrack on repeat. we could hear it down the street as we were driving up. that's just simply insane

-the opening establishing shots of the land were great but honestly. the very clearly animated dorothy and gang really annoyed me lmfao like I'm sorry it cannot have possibly been too hard to get a few extras to stand in front of a screen for point 5 seconds lol. it was so fast that I Know I'm being dramatic about it but they looked more cartoon than the flying monkey's did

-baby elphie and baby nessa are the cutest things I've ever seen in my life...

-I kinda...like the more human/animal hybrids that the stage show and the original movie had. sorry. like I Get they were only like that bc you can't make a real life goat sing and dance but they're just more interesting to look at than normal-looking animals who happen to talk!

-jeff goldblum's face being hidden every time he had a dance number...I have a sneaking suspicion that he wasn't really dancing lmfao

-whoever decided to bleach ariana's eyebrows deserves jail time

-when jonathan bailey first showed up on screen my mother leaned over to me and whispered 'he's HANDSOME...'

-when cynthia finished the 'wizard and I' I had to actually stop myself from applauding. it felt so weird and rude for there to be dead silence after that performance my GOD.

-also omg the part where she's singing about the wizard de-green-ifying her and the colors in the suncatchers were canceling out the green so she looked normal....inspired!

-madame morrible had these HUGE crystal ball looking rings and I just want them so much lmao

-glinda's friends were really funny the bit were she was like 'I need to lie down' and they immediately picked her up like a plank of wood and carried her off while the one was screaming 'WE NEED A PASTRY!!! IT'S AN EMERGENCY WE NEED A PASTRY!!!' had me cackling

-I wish there was more time between them moving in and 'what is this feeling' starting? like I wanted more time to see them bickering and then also more time seeing them getting along after the ball??

-'dancing through life' was BEAUTIFUL however two complaints 1) why would they cut the line 'what's the most swankified place around?' I Quote That Often and 2) at the end when glinda and elphie dance together like...it's beautiful and everything but from what I remember after their solo moment fieryo joins them?? and they have a cute three way dance moment??? and I'm very pro "they're all in love with each other" so I missed that lol

-also just in general would of liked to see more of fieryo with the girls! like it felt like ball->lion cub->emerald city, in the course of a couple days, and idk I just feel like they could have slowed it down a bit?? especially since they broke it into two movies?? like I don't think that Actually all happened in the span of a week, but they didn't do a good enough job establishing how much time was passing so it Felt like it. which is dumb bc then it just doesn't seem realistic that elphie and glinda are THAT attached to each other by defying gravity like it feels like not enough time has passed for them to really know each other

-boq felt very mild tbh I know ethan can be more unhinged than that

-would've liked to see glinda in magic class!!

-I was a little underwhelmed by elphaba's costumes? like there were clearly patterns on the material but it was all the same shade of black so you couldn't make anything out. it felt a bit flat. and I love the idea behind the freckles I agree with freckles I am pro freckles HOWEVER her's looked very obviously drawn on. like, I have seen way more realistic fake freckles before. so that was a bit annoying

-other than the lunchmeat dress glinda's costumes were good! especially loved the flower shaped one she wore to the ball

-the whole trying to escape in the hot air ballon scene was cool as hell but as the flaming remains of it fell to the ground I couldn't help but be like wow...she really just killed all those guards huh!

-also lmfao the bit in the woods with the lion club and fieryo has like a scratch on his temple. genuinely thought to myself 'is that his lobotomy scar' lmfao

-still trying to get over the part in dancing through life where people were dancing on the spinning gears in the clock tower...bitch

-the flying monkeys were correctly horrifying

-when I saw the broomstick I was like 'won't that be really uncomfortable between your legs' but then she just held it next to her like they do in the stage show and I was like....okay I guess you win that one? lmfao like I don't mind it for when she's hovering but when they had her like supersonic zooming on the broom it was weird that she wasn't actually riding it

-overall I just don't understand how it's an adaptation of act 1 but it's the length of the entire stage show?? lmao like I wish they took advantage of the split and added so much more but really really it was still just such a solid great movie. 5 stars. I can't keep talking about it right now I'm gonna start screaming.

[dramatic-dolphin]

Re. Your women being so scared thing. And to be clear I mostly agree with you.

I'm not sure where you're from, but I'm from New York, and I can say for sure that I'd feel more safe in the most dangerous part of the UK than basically anywhere in the US. My Parisian aunt thinks Gare du Nord too dangerous to walk near under any circumstances, but to me it seems like a normal bigger train station level of danger, and the streets around it seem normal. I lived in a university town in the UK for a year, and I never felt in danger there or in London, even alone, even in the middle of the night. I was never alone in Berlin, but I was out at night, and I felt at least as comfortable as I would in New York. So I think, at last in the places I've been and from my experience, America is more dangerous and much scarier. I have never been street harassed in the UK, and I have been harassed and followed in New York plenty, and had several people attempt to attack me. Men in the US will also often harass you from a car, which is an explicit threat. It's also important to remember that parking lots are bad places to be and most of the US has to drive, and therefore park.

That said, I know some women who won't ride the subway at night, or at all, and that seems very paranoid to me. If you're riding at a remotely normal time and are paying any attention to your surroundings, you're almost certainly going to be fine. I also know girls who, even once they're in a car, of course, will send friends their location just in case. This seems extremely paranoid to me. Maybe check you're going the right way like one time. I do still think some of the things people do can be reasonable caution - yeah, didn't go hiking on a first date - but the perspective people are throwing at you strikes me as distinctly privileged. No one who's ever had a job can think that way. I've worked with a few women who took cars home after every shift, or their dad or their boyfriend picked them up in a car, and at that point, you have a job as a hobby, because unless he works nearby, you just spent your minimum wage on gas. If you take a cab home in New York, from Manhattan to any other borough, that's most of your pay. So to me, this level of paranoia generally reads that you've never had to be alone anywhere so you don't understand what it means, and you've never had to do shit with, and if you did do it, the money wasn't important.

Yeah a lot of time I get mad at this online because it just seems overly paranoid to me, and then a woman comes in with a personal experience or anecdotes, and it hits me that maybe the US *is* actually that bad? I live in Hungary, and I really like walking alone in the city at night, or going for long walks in the forest alone, and I've never really felt unsafe doing that, but - and this is crucial - neither have most of the women I talk to. Or at least, not to this degree. So, yeah, the US is possibly worse and more unsafe? I can believe that, it's just hard to conceptualize I guess, since the US likes to portray itself as tbe baseline for a "civilized" country, and I live in *Eastern Europe*. So there's preconceptions here, lol.

But yes, a lot of these, even when corrected for this, are just paranoid, there's no other way to see it. Like, no matter where you live, you truly do NOT need to share your location every time you leave home. And there's also the matter of being disconnected from the people and community around you, like being scared to help your neighbor or someone on your street. We live in a society, you kind of have to take an active part of it.

A lot of it is just a lot of energy spent on being scared every waking moment of your life. Like, okay, in the reddit thread I saw this in, there was a woman saying that she ALWAYS puts her ID in her front pocket when she goes outside so they can easily IDENTIFY THE BODY IF SHE DIES. Like what material good does worrying about this bring to your life? It's not even a self-defense technique, doing this will not help you with staying alive!! All it does is make you think about "oh no, I could get murdered" every time you leave the house. This is NOT a healthy mindset!

It's like a strange and widespread kind of anxiety, and the worst part is, it has you convinced it's necessary, and you can't get rid of it unless you make an active effort to do things despite being scared. First you have to convince yourself that you *won't* get murdered by your date if you don't share your location, and that's the hardest part. And yeah lol, having to do things alone helps you with this tremendously, because you realize that you've just taken the subway at night alone and survived. But if you're never forced to do things alone, you get stuck in this weird fear spiral, and whenever you see a stranger, you end up thinking about how they could murder you.

[jewish-vents]

I'm an atheist. I'm not very culturally Jewish, I don't care much for the practices or the holidays. I don't even particularly agree with many of the commonly defined principles of Zionism. I've been upset with Jewish fundamentalism (think that's how you call it in English) for a long time.

But right now, at this point in history, as someone who was born and grew up in Israel, who has had my family history questioned by leftists and was called a colonizer simply by virtue of existence and watched people I used to look up to calling for me being bombed to death and had to look at street flyers and graffiti saying my country should be destroyed ever since I moved to the us, I WILL call myself a Zionist, and I WILL stand by my Jewish identity for as long as there are people who will want me dead for it, because I'm not willing to let them win. Not like that.

.

[kissorkill16]

My Little Animal: A Hello Neighbor Fanfic

By JJ

Summary: Mr. Murtaugh catches Nicky out late at night and escorts him back home.

(P.S., for @ghostly-writers !)

Murtaugh quickly took off his headband and threw it into the passenger seat of his car.

"What a day.", he mumbled to himself.

He started the car and began to drive down the road.

Half an hour or so had passed, and when he finally got to his street, he was about to turn the corner. But then he saw a familiar silhouette behind one of the trees in his rear view mirror.

He adjusted the mirror a bit, and he caught a glimpse of who it was.

Nicky.

One of his students. And...well...his patient.

Murtaugh slowly drove to the curb in front of one of the trees, and he saw Nicky crouched down behind one of the bushes, holding some kind of phone walkie talkie thing.

He got out of his car and slowly tip toed to Nicky, making sure he couldn't hear him or see him. As he was sneaking over to him, he heard a few things he said.

"Trinity, I've been waiting for half an hour. I don't see him.", said Nicky. He yawned, "No, I'm not tired. I'll wait out here all night if I have to."

"Nicholas?"

Nicky jumped up and nearly dropped the phone he held, and he turned around to see his science teacher. He looked back at his walkie talkie.

"I'm good.", he said, "Everything's fine, nothing's wrong. Just trying to -"

"Nicky, what are you doing here?"

"I'll call you back."

Then he set down the phone and looked back up at Mr. Murtaugh.

"Nicky, answer me.", said his science teacher. Nicky looked down at his shoes, "Me and my friends were just...out. Nothing much."

Murtaugh gently pressed the bridge of his nose, "Nicholas, I thought we agreed that you would go straight home after school.", he said. "You remember our previous sessions."

"And you remember trying to poison me."

Mr. Murtaugh's eyes widened when he said that.

"Yeah, after that afternoon, all those sessions went out the window. Don't try to act so innocent after what you did.", he said.

Nicky picked up his phone and was about to walk away, but then he felt one of Murtaugh's hands grab his arm.

"Nicholas, you shouldn't be around these woods. Ever. Especially at this time at night.", he scolded. "You never know what's lurking around in the darkness of these places."

Nicky snatched his arm away, "And just who do you think you are to tell me what I can and can't do? Fuck off, creep."

Murtaugh tried not to get angry, but this boy was really testing his patience. Once again, he grabbed his arm and pulled him to his car.

"I'm taking you home right now.", he said sternly.

Nicky tried to break free from his grasp once again, but Murtaugh's grip kept tightening with each struggle.

"Let go of me!", Nicky kept screaming, but his science teacher didn't let go.

He went to his trunk and took out a long pile of rope, then he held Nicky down on the ground and bound up his wrists and ankles.

After that, he put him in the back seat and got into his car. He started the car again and adjusted the rear view mirror to look at Nicky.

"I grew up on a farm with my family, Nicky. I had four siblings, two brothers and two sisters. My dearest father used to hunt and he taught me how to restrain animals that would get too fussy.", he said to the boy.

"I'm not an animal!", Nicky yelled at him.

Murtaugh just ignored him and kept driving, ignoring that Nicky kept trying to get out of his tightly bound ropes and kept screaming at him to let him go.

After a while, Nicky seemed to have calmed down. He stopped struggling and screaming, and now he was just laying down in the backseat of the car.

"Did you do this to every kid you found out at night?", he asked.

Murtaugh shook his head, "No, dear. You're the only one I've had to do this to.", he said.

A moment of silence passed by.

"Now, what were you doing in the woods in the first place?", he asked.

"But I told you in the -"

"The truth, Nicholas. I'd like the truth, dear."

Nicky looked down at his wrists, feeling ashamed. "We were investigating the cult.", he said.

Murtaugh felt his blood run cold, and he clutched onto the steering wheel. "Cult?", he asked.

"The Forest Protectors, the people I've told you about our last meeting.", said Nicky. "Me and my friends thought there was only one Crowface, but apparently, there's more. But unlike the original Crowface, these guys have white beaks and -"

"Nicholas."

Nicky stopped talking.

The science teacher took a deep breath.

"Nicky, I know what I did.", he started, "And I really regret it now, and I promise I'm not trying to kill you like those birds are. I genuinely care about you, dear. So that's why I'm taking you home."

After a while, they pulled up in front of Nicky's house. The lights were all off, so either no one was home, or everyone was asleep.

Murtaugh went to the backseat and untied Nicky's wrists and ankles. Nicky gently rubbed his wrists as he got out of the car, worried that he might've gotten a little rope burn with how much he's been struggling to get out.

"You go to your room and get some rest.", said his science teacher, "I won't say a word about this to your parents about tonight, but I don't want to see you outside past midnight ever again."

Nicky rolled his eyes, but he nodded and walked to his backyard.

Murtaugh got back into his car and drove off, resisting the urge to bang his head on the steering wheel.

"What the hell is wrong with me?!", he screamed, "I can't keep risking my life for that boy! He...he..."

He slowly calmed down and lessened his grip on the steering wheel.

"He's just a child, and he doesn't know anything about this town despite being here for over a year.", he told himself. "The boy will get himself killed if an eye isn't kept on him. I must make sure he stays safe."

Thankfully, he was thinking these things, because he was scared that his master might hear him.

[autistic-beanmonster2]

well i'm about to have an interesting day

[xx-j4nu5-c4t5-xx]

pascal and nervous in bert and ernie's sweaters

this was supposed to be a joke post but the demons took hold of me and now it's a fully finished drawing

[heros-shade-fanclub]

actually i'm not done talking about termina. do you think that even years after majora's mask link wakes up to rain and instinctively thinks "2 days left"

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?

I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.

disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.

this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.

what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.

with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.

from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.

with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)

[ibetittering]

Fuck all of y'all in Florida how dare you misrepresent my liberal king that man loves women (not in that way) and he would not STAND for this smh

[icewindandboringhorror]

I have found a beautiful perfect humble rock specimen that is light yellow with a weird dark yellowy brown lining, somewhat resembling a chunk of smoked gouda cheese... effervescent

[memento-morri-writes]

It's been well over a week now (maybe two??) but I'm still plugging away (ever-so-slowly) at this vignette about Zara and Rook. Zara's POV is a lot of fun to write, now that I have a better sense of her character. Writing this has really solidified in my mind the kind of person she is and how she acted when she was Rook's captain and mentor. She's very calm and collected in comparison to Rook, even when under a lot of stress.

Anyways, have a little snippet that I'm proud of from today, featuring the origins of the coin trick!

Pacing back and forth across her cabin floor, she rolled the coin back and forth over her knuckles again and again. The motion was easy, almost mindless, more muscle memory than real intent. The coin trick had been her favorite way to soothe her nerves for years now. She’d picked it up out of idle curiosity after watching a street performer dining in a tavern in Bon Largo, who had chatted with her for over an hour as she fretted about something mundane, never once dropping the coin from their fingers. The same performer had later tried to steal her coin purse and ended up with nothing but a new scar for their trouble, but Zara had learned two important things from the encounter: Not to trust a warm smile and a pretty face, and that keeping her hands moving kept her mind from dwelling too much on worrisome things.

one-time tagging @space-writes because they commented on my tags about Rook learning the coin trick from Zara in one of my other snippets from this piece.

[nexus-nebulae]

got myself a little pocket radio bc you never know when severe weather might knock out the power or cell towers but apparently there aren't any weather radio stations i can pick up :/

[obstinatecondolement]

Having a random panic attack about my stupid Work Trauma from this year. It never fucking ends.

[giantkillerjack]

As time goes by, I find I am less likely to wake up in the middle of the night to needlessly hate on myself for some random awkward harmless thing I did 10 years ago.

I'm still up in the middle of the night feeling a deep primal urge to needlessly hate on things from years ago, but now it's more just things like

MAN I SHOULD PROBABLY MAKE ANOTHER POST ABOUT HOW MUCH I HATED BLY MANOR HUH

[neverendingford]

.

[1007xf]

Hm? Is it last week of August?? Looks like it's be depressed about how you've not done anything the entire summer and are still the same stunted loser time. Again.