#i got songs memes and other pop culture references from these other worlds in my head too

[savage-rhi]

The other night, I closed my eyes and woke up as another version of myself. I had this weird moment of thinking, "Where did I wander off to?". I thought nothing of it and got out of bed, and saw on my phone I was due to visit my grandma. I went through my usual routines, took my car, and split. When I reached her house I noticed there were some differences but I recalled I hadn't seen her in a month because I was on a business trip as a guest speaker on mental health, and other subjects like paleontology and biology that I invested money into.

We sat down in front of her rose garden out front, and she asked how work has been. You know, casual talk. I noticed she looked uneasy and asked what was wrong, and she told me she was dying. They found a tumor, and she was scared. We had a long discussion about what she wanted to do, and how she felt about death, hospice, etc. It was very hard but I told her we'd get through this together.

Since I didn't have to hit the road for another week, I decided to spend that time with her. We took a trip to the beach for two days, ate good food, and did things her and I used to do all the time when I was growing up. That Thursday, three days before I'd have to go back and travel, we decided to hit up the movies. Going to the theater was always something special her and I did. I wish I remembered the title of the movie, but it was good. About midway through, she took my hand and said she was going to rest her eyes for a bit since we had a long day. I comforted her, and let her know she was safe and that when she woke up I'd tell her the rest of the plot. "I know you will sweetie. You've never let me down." were her last words. I didn't realize she had passed until the credits rolled and was distraught, but also I saw the humor in it as she would've. Gram was always one for morbid jokes. Alas it didn't console me much. She should've had at least another few months from what her doctors said.

I called 911, and had arrangements made to cremate her. That was her request. I called up my team members, and other folks I worked with that did the guest speaking shows, and cancelled my future travels until further notice and spent several days planning out her funeral. My mom died six years ago, and my brother moved to another state. Everyone else was out of the state too and couldn't make it. So it was just me taking care of things. I felt deeply sad, but took comfort knowing her and I spent time together. The day before the funeral, my aunt called after she got my message about what happened and she sadly reported that my cousin was dying too and didn't have much longer. She said she was going to book a plane to come help me out with post-funeral things.

As soon as I hung up the phone, I felt and heard this WHOOSH and my body lit up like it got slammed into a rinse cycle. My life flashed before my eyes, and then I woke up and I started crying hard.

I can't emphasis enough how incredibly real everything had felt. Time moved the same as it did here, so those days I had on the beach with my gram felt like 48 hrs. I can remember everything we did, the foods we ate, etc. all of it. I had a hard time distinguishing real life from what happened, and there was also this issue of trying to differentiate between my memories and "parallel me's" memories. I had to remind myself of a few things:

Other me was 35 and single. I'm 31 and have a partner.

My mom is alive and well, and my brother never moved out of state.

I'm currently in graduate school.

My gram has been dead since 2020, and her death was caused by heart disease and covid. I didn't get to say goodbye to her, and since we were under lockdown, the family didn't have a proper funeral for her until it was lifted.

I felt like I downloaded a whole other life into my head, along with 35 years worth of memories from this other me and it's been a trip unpacking it all.

Reblog or comment with a weird dream you've had?

[rpmemesbyarat]

RP meme from Scream Queens Ep 12 "Dorkus"

"I think you did it."

"These morons need someone to tear them a new one."

"I am going to write the missive to end all missives."

"I don't want your first time to be with a murderer."

"I love you. I would never, ever hurt you."

"I promise you're safe. That was part of the deal."

"You could never be touched."

"How many lives could you have saved?"

"Our mission never involved killing anyone."

"And it's not just wearing raw chickens on their heads and calling each other gay slurs while jumping around naked."

"It was a conspiracy."

"Stop rationalizing it. You killed people. You are not allowed to just say, "yeah, but I had a super good reason for it."

"Who did you kill?"

"What, are you gonna kill me now?"

"I would never hurt you. I just can't let you leave."

"If you could just stop, hear what I have to say, to understand---please--why I did what I did, you could still love me."

"Don't try to justify it all after the fact."

"They showed up one day thinking that I was a double agent, that I couldn't be trusted. They were going to kill me."

"Hey, hey, you can trust me, you can trust me! Ask me and I'll do anything. I'll prove it."

"Don't you see that they did that on purpose?! They knew that if you actually killed someone, you would be their slave!"

"We were the good guys. We were in this together!"

"I did this for you. Don't you understand?"

"The more I hear about this whole thing, the more I'm starting to think the idea that there are good and bad people in the world is just something adults use to get children to stay in line."

"I mean, aren't we being naive?"

"You took me literally?"

"You are already a murderer, [NAME], you don't have to be a douche as well!"

"This is not a philosophy course. This is murder-- serial murder!"

"I was so young and desperate to be special and loved."

"I never had a real girlfriend before."

"I was vulnerable enough to share my darkest fetish with you, and now you're making me feel self-conscious."

"Just come in and take me now."

"You are ridiculously and laughably gullible."

"What self-respecting man wouldn't do anything to get revenge for being degraded like that?"

"Unfortunately, I don't have great aim with a crossbow and I can't see anything in that mask."

"I don't want to be here anymore."

"I feel sick. This isn't what I wanted."

"Don't judge me for what we both know had to happen."

"You know what? Let's just run away together. You and me. Forget everything."

"Don't you see what I'm willing to do for you?"

"No! I don't want to speak to your supervisor!"

"I've gotten zero swipes on my profile!"

"Do you remember any aspect of this super simple plan?"

"I literally think you should consider undergoing a surgical procedure to remove your ovaries/testicles, thereby sparing human race exposure to your DNA."

"I mean, I'm all for public shaming. I practically invented it. It's the sign of a healthy culture. But not when I'm the one getting shamed."

"I wanted to be famous, but not like this."

"To all the so-called mainstream media, including weird web sites that nobody has heard of who have used my name as clickbait, and to all the relentless unwashed hordes on Twitter, who have taken every opportunity to mock and attack me mercilessly from the safety of their stained futons, I offer the following heartfelt sentiment. You can all suck it!"

"Despite my outward bravado, I was dead inside."

"I knew my glamorous reign of terror was over."

"I ordered an asp online so I could kill myself like Cleopatra, and now I'm just waiting for it to sense my body heat and come out and bite me so this will all be over."

"I understand that what you're going through is really intense. And I know you and I haven't really always seen eye to eye, And you say crazy-mean stuff to me all the time. And I have a real problem with your casual racism,

which is something we need to work on. But, girl, I promise I got your back."

"You're young, smart and beautiful, and you got a lot of living ahead of you."

"Maybe this is one of those teachable moments, you know? Like my grandmama says. Maybe this is where you learn the lesson that words really mean something and they can hurt people, so you just can't always say the first horrible thing that pops into your head all the time."

"Why are you being so nice to me?"

"Get me out of this suit!"

"What the hell is going on? Who is that guy?"

"Everyone on campus but me is a dork!"

"I'm gonna explode."

"When I woke up, I was wrapped in dynamite!"

"Oh, my god, it's a bomb."

"Yes, a totally innocent man who seemed super nice and probably did nothing wrong at all just got blown up in our living room. Bummer. Now, let's honor his memory by moving on."

"Can you not make it about you for one second?!"

"Stop wallowing and start concentrating on what's really important here--restoring my reputation."

"I need to go on an apology tour. You know, like celebrities, when they say something offensive, they just go on tv and apologize, and everybody forgives them, even though they don't mean it at all."

"I'm gonna fake apologize, you'll record it, we'll post it online, and it'll all be fine."

"But I thought that you said that you weren't the person who put the acid in the spray tanner."

"Why do you think the devil let me live?"

"I think you saw what you wanted to see."

"You can't kill people from a loving and positive place."

"Invasion of the dad bod snatchers."

"If it's good enough for the CIA, it's good enough for me."

"Get ready to make the most important playlist of your life."

"Well, I decided to stop denying what you and I both knew the minute we laid eyes on each other. And once I did, something inside of me, I don't know, it just, just clicked. And I guess I just wanted to get a little crazy."

"So you just decided to break into my house in the middle of the day?"

"I've been a very bad boy."

"I'm just trying to figure out what your angle is. What are you trying to get out of this?"

"You know what I'm trying to get? 45 minutes alone, so I can go crazy on you."

"Turn out the lights!"

"These are my minions."

"Those are the hounds."

"How do you know I'm not the killer?"

"This whole file is made up."

"Somebody just swiped right on me on Tinder."

"Any guy swiping right on you is a miracle."

"You want a drag?"

"That was the best sex of my life."

"I think you're just relieved to find out that intercourse doesn't have to be followed by hours and hours of crying and a weird purchase of an engagement ring."

"Look, I never knew sex could be like that. At first, I was like, I was like, "wow, she's being really loud. Are the neighbors gonna call the police?" And then I was like, "wow, now I'm being really loud. why am I screaming so much? They're definitely gonna call the police." And then I was just stunned at how flexible you are. I mean, I thought you had to be a gymnast to get both feet behind your head."

"I just think that maybe you and I were meant to be together after all."

"I find her unbearably annoying."

"I recognized the island splash scent of that douche you use."

"What movie are you even referring to?"

"Don't patronize me. I look like a monster."

"Well, have you thought of a little plastic surgery?"

"What are you doing? I thought you came here to apologize."

"I apologize for nothing."

"All evidence points to you."

"I know it was you. Have fun in hell, bitch. And fyi, this is probably gonna hurt a lot."

"Stop recording!"

"I knew that bitch was a nut burger the minute I met her."

"But remember, she's armed and dangerous."

"Oh, please tell me you did not bring your insane and obviously blind Tinder hookup back here."

"I lost my virginity to a Nickelback song."

[rapeculturerealities]

Jalaiah Harmon is coming up in a dance world completely reshaped by the internet.

She trains in all the traditional ways, taking classes in hip-hop, ballet, lyrical, jazz, tumbling and tap after school at a dance studio near her home in the Atlanta suburbs. She is also building a career online, studying viral dances, collaborating with peers and posting original choreography.

Recently, a sequence of hers turned into one of the most viral dances online: the Renegade.

There’s basically nothing bigger right now. Teenagers are doing the dance in the halls of high schools, at pep rallies and across the internet. Lizzo, Kourtney Kardashian, David Dobrik and members of the K-pop band Stray Kids have all performed it. Charli D’Amelio, TikTok’s biggest homegrown star, with nearly 26 million followers on the platform, has been affectionately deemed the dance’s “C.E.O.” for popularizing it.

But the one person who hasn’t been able to capitalize on the attention is Jalaiah, the Renegade’s 14-year-old creator.

“I was happy when I saw my dance all over,” she said. “But I wanted credit for it.”

TikTok, one of the biggest video apps in the world, has become synonymous with dance culture. Yet many of its most popular dances, including the Renegade, Holy Moly Donut Shop, the Mmmxneil and Cookie Shop have come from young black creators on myriad smaller apps.

Most of these dancers identify as Dubsmashers. This means, in essence, that they use the Dubsmash app and other short-form social video apps, like Funimate, ‎Likee and Triller, to document choreography to songs they love. They then post (or cross-post) the videos to Instagram, where they can reach a wider audience. If it’s popular there, it’s only a matter of time before the dance is co-opted by the TikTok masses.

“TikTok is like a mainstream Dubsmash,” said Kayla Nicole Jones, 18, a YouTube star and music artist. “They take from Dubsmash and they run off with the sauce.”

Polow da Don, a producer, songwriter and rapper who has worked with Usher and Missy Elliott, said: “Dubsmash catches things at the roots when they’re culturally relevant. TikTok is the suburban kids that take things on when it’s already the style and bring it to their community.”

Though Jalaiah is very much a suburban kid herself — she lives in a picturesque home on a quiet street outside of Atlanta — she is part of the young, cutting-edge dance community online that more mainstream influencers co-opt.

The Renegade dance followed this exact path. On Sept. 25, 2019, Jalaiah came home from school and asked a friend she had met through Instagram, Kaliyah Davis, 12, if she wanted to create a post together. Jalaiah listened to the beats in the song “Lottery” by the Atlanta rapper K-Camp and then choreographed a difficult sequence to its chorus, incorporating other viral moves like the wave and the whoa.

She filmed herself and posted it, first to Funimate (where she has more than 1,700 followers) and then to her more than 20,000 followers on Instagram (with a side-by-side shot of Kaliyah and her performing it together).

“I posted on Instagram and it got about 13,000 views, and people started doing it over and over again,” Jalaiah said. In October, a user named @global.jones brought it to TikTok, changing up some of the moves at the end, and the dance spread like wildfire. Before long, Charli D’Amelio had posted a video of herself doing it, as did many other TikTok influencers. None gave Jalaiah credit.

After long days in the ninth grade and between dance classes, Jalaiah tried to get the word out. She hopped in the comments of several videos, asking influencers to tag her. For the most part she was ridiculed or ignored.

She even set up her own TikTok account and created a video of herself in front of a green screen, Googling the question “who created the Renegade dance?” in an attempt to set the record straight. “I was upset,” she said. “It wasn’t fair.”

To be robbed of credit on TikTok is to be robbed of real opportunities. In 2020, virality means income: Creators of popular dances, like the Backpack Kid or Shiggy, often amass large online followings and become influencers themselves. That, in turn, opens the door to brand deals, media opportunities and, most important for Jalaiah, introductions to those in the professional dance and choreography community.

Obtaining credit isn’t easy, though. As the writer Rebecca Jennings noted in Vox in an article about the online dance world’s thorny ethics: “Dances are virtually impossible to legally claim as one’s own.”

But credit and attention are valuable even without legal ownership. “I think I could have gotten money for it, promos for it, I could have gotten famous off it, get noticed,” Jalaiah said. “I don’t think any of that stuff has happened for me because no one knows I made the dance.”

Cross-platform sharing — of dances, of memes, of information — is how things are made on the internet. Popular tweets go viral on Instagram, videos made on Instagram make their way onto YouTube. But in recent years, several large Instagram meme accounts have faced backlash for sharing jokes that went viral without crediting the creator.

TikTok was introduced in the United States only a year and a half ago. Norms, particularly around credit, are still being established. But for Dubsmashers and those in the Instagram dance community, it’s common courtesy to tag the handles of dance creators and musicians, and use hashtags to track the evolution of a dance.

It has set up a culture clash between the two influencer communities. “On TikTok they don’t give people credit,” said Raemoni Johnson, a 15-year-old Dubsmasher. “They just do the video and they don’t tag us.” (This acrimony is exacerbated by the fact that TikTok does not make it easy to find the creator of a dance.)

On Jan. 17, tensions boiled over after Barrie Segal, the head of content at Dubsmash, posted a series of videos asking Charli D’Amelio to give a dance credit to D1 Nayah, a popular Dubsmash dancer with more than one million followers on Instagram, for her Donut Shop dance. TikTok Room, a gossip account on Instagram, picked up the controversy, and spurred a sea of comments.

“Why is it so hard to give black creators their credit,” said one Instagram commenter, referring to the mostly white TikTokers who have taken dances from Dubsmashers and posted them without credit. “Instead of using dubsmash, use tiktok and then ppl would credit you maybe,” a TikToker fan said.

“I’m not an argumentative person on social media — I don’t want beef or anything like that,” said Jhacari Blunt, an 18-year-old Dubsmasher who has had some of his dances co-opted by TikTokers. “But it’s like, we all know where that dance came from.”

At this point, if a TikToker doesn’t initially know who did a dance, commenters will usually tag the original creator’s handle. Charli D’Amelio and other stars have started giving dance credits and tagging creators in their captions.

And the creators who are flooding into TikTok from Instagram and Dubsmash are leading the way by example. “We have 1.7 million followers and we always give credit whether the person has zero followers or not,” said Yoni Wicker, 14, one half of the TheWickerTwinz. “We know how important it is. That person who made that dance, they might be a fan of ours. Us tagging them makes their day.”

Onward and Upward

Stefanie Harmon, Jalaiah’s mother, learned the true extent of Jalaiah’s online success only recently. “She told me, ‘Mommy, I made a dance and it went viral,’” Ms. Harmon said.

“She wasn’t kicking and screaming about the fact that she wasn’t getting credit,” she added, “but I could tell it had affected her. I said, ‘Why do you care whether you’re not getting credit? Just make another one.’”

Jalaiah continues to post a steady stream of dance videos to Funimate, Dubsmash, and Instagram. She said she doesn’t harbor any hard feelings against Charli D’Amelio for popularizing the Renegade without naming her. Instead, she hopes she can collaborate with her one day.

Charli D’Amelio, through a publicist, said that she was “so glad to know” who created the dance. “I know it’s so associated with me,” she said, “but I’m so happy to give Jalaiah credit and I’d love to collaborate with her.”

“We’re all inspired by other people,” Jalaiah said. “We make up a dance and it grows.”

Off the internet, she continues to compete in dance competitions with her studio and hopes to one day take classes at Dance 411, a prestigious dance school in Atlanta. Ultimately, it’s the art form that she loves. “It makes me happy to dance,” she said.

[popscenery]

LMFAO, »Party Rock Anthem«

by Jake Cleland

‘Party Rock Anthem’ isn’t the best song of the decade, it is the song of this decade. The rotten nucleotides that comprise its DNA and its video’s captured everything that would define the 2010s even before the decade had properly started. JJ Abrams’ franchise dominance, cinema’s sequelitis, Malcolm Goodwin’s role in iZombie — seen in retrospect, ‘Party Rock Anthem’ makes LMFAO seem downright prescient. But as an early decade phenomenon, it’s also an epitaph to a brutally missed 2000s. The Cobrasnake-via-Dim Mak-via-Ed Banger-via-Mad Decent street party fashion makes the post-#mensfashionadvice 2010s look hopelessly conservative. 

So much of art and politics was deastheticised by the project of fundamentally reorganising how art and politics meet and whether that casualty was necessary has yet to be reckoned, although it was probably inevitable. But ‘Party Rock Anthem’ came out when hipster irony (a phrase, kids, that folks used to use with a straight face) was only uncertainly dead, with poptimism still holding the gun cautiously to its chest. The ensuing cultural/political schism ultimately wasn’t drawn on the line between left and right, but overwrought exegeses on the meme of any given week (sup) vs. pleading to just like what you like (aka Like Everything). Two fronts battling basically for the same humiliated cause of pop supremacy made the previously delicious sport of music snobbery just not very fun. The only available rebellion was to [extremely Big Sean voice] go stupid.

(This also meant the only space left for sincere irony was, like, /mu/ and /r/indieheads and Fantano’s comments section. (Pass.))

If ‘Party Rock Anthem’ came out a few years later, it might’ve been wilfully embraced, although its pariah status also left the life in it, so we take small blessings with gratitude. After all, it’s a safe song to like: it is exclusively about the unifying force of The Party. Lyrically it even reifies the previous paragraph: “Stop: hatin’ is bad.” Where it missed a trick was not predicting the trickle down stanonomics of K-Pop’s influence, but it was a utopian vision. Superficially, it’s apocalypse-pop but if so, it’s the only example that doesn’t sound hopeless or lifeless (James Murphy arrived five years late to this, but succinctly, at least, with LCD Soundsystem’s ‘tonite’.) You watch Redfoo - convincingly scared while two-stepping through a sea of Air Jordans and lame - finally succumb to The Party and tell me that the alleged zombies aren’t the good guys. NB: the only other guy afraid of them is wearing a shirt and tie. 

He’s also the only one pushing a product in the whole clip. For all the zombies-as-consumerism metaphors, who’s really a conformist consumer here? Let’s not stretch this too far, but hand-on-heart finger-tapping-forehead: makes you think.

A month before ‘Party Rock Anthem’, Tom Ewing wrote a piece for The Guardian I still think about a lot. Riffing on Girl Talk’s pointillistic reference dropping, Ewing laments the deficiency of celebrating Moments in songs/albums/patchwork sample monster mixtapes which get lost in the holistic approach. In that spirit, the Beats product placement in the ‘Party Rock Anthem’ clip created a Moment which gummed up my brain creases all through this decade almost more than the song itself. The lone survivor tells LMFAO to use their earbuds. “You got ‘em in?” he says. And Skyblu says:

“What? Vitamins?” 

No matter which way you interrogate this moment, it is downright hilarious. To research for this piece, I watched over 100 music videos. I watch a lot of music videos, so the research for this piece consisted of a lot + 100 music videos. That’s more than a lot of music videos. I also watched the ‘Party Rock Anthem’ video more than 100 times, just to make sure I was awarding this Moment the appropriate gravity. So I can say with scientific credibility that not only is ‘Party Rock Anthem’ the song of this decade, but that this moment is the Moment of every decade. It is a non-sequitur nonpareil. Was this scripted or improvised? And either way, in that moment, why would someone say to them, “Vitamins”?

The story of LMFAO concluded in another particularly 2010s way. Another victim of the neverending Scam Season, Redfoo allegedly ripped Skyblu off of all LMFAO royalties. Karma rewarded Redfoo a couple years later when he was hit with a glass in Sydney. In this, we may see ourselves, inevitably disgraced by time.

There are ways ‘Party Rock Anthem’ predicted the zeitgeist and ways ‘Party Rock Anthem’ created the zeitgeist and I was present for plenty of the latter. At least in Melbourne, LMFAO’s recycling of the Melbourne Shuffle filtered back to nightclubs in a way Klein et al. warned was already happening generally. Happy to have our culture regifted if it was also represented, it was less impossible than you might imagine to find yourself inside your own LMFAO music video. But it’s what I came home to after those nights that makes ‘Party Rock Anthem’ the song of the decade, which was: inbox notifications, gchat alerts, dashboards full of posts and replies wringing meaning from meaninglessness in the most seriously unserious way. Epitaphed plenty elsewhere, Music Tumblr doesn’t need another bouquet laid here, but ‘Party Rock Anthem’ is prominent on the playlist of associations I have with the first definitive part of the decade (other triggers: ‘Video Games’, ‘Gucci Gucci’, ‘Bangarang’, ‘What Makes You Beautiful’, ‘Furisodeshon’, ‘Hey QT’, SSSSSSSSOME NIGHTS I STAYYYYYYYY UP...)  

Coming from the Gawker/Defamer/Idolator readership to find a group of mostly-communal-but-sometimes-adversarial-but-for-the-better (via “Iron sharpens iron” - Coach Wade) weirdoes eager to unwrap celebrity looms large, I have no doubt, in the definitions of this decade for the people involved. Most have since left music writing or been pushed out and found fulfilling lives elsewhere, but although the pop of the era trended towards the annhilistic, let’s not cave. When I first started writing about music on Tumblr, old heads were quick to say the jobs were gone. Defiant and determined to prove them wrong, I made a pretty good go of it, and others are still doing as much. All the pieces are there for anyone with a willingness to be wrong to pick up. 

That’s enough navel gazing for a time long ago. Put it to bed. The revelation of ‘Party Rock Anthem’ isn’t that you should never leave The Party, it’s that the whole world is The Party. “Dancing all night isn’t legendary, only dancing all night is.” The only thing to do in the decade ahead is to keep listening attentively. Let music fill you up. It’ll get in your bones.

[batb1tch]

It’s my boy’s birthday so here are some Jason Todd head-canons 🎉

Probably 3rd to last (Alfred and Bruce) on the list of ‘understanding internet slang’ in the household. He died and just sort of fell behind on the times (including memes, pop culture references,etc..) I know he’s known for making snarky quips and sarcastic comments but I have no doubt his siblings would call him out on his outdated references. It’s likely it’d really piss him off too like, knowledge is really everything to this kid and here he is with a group of teenagers who are always on top of shit (Steph, Tim, Duke, even Dick) and he doesn’t know what they’re talking about the majority of the time. Can’t figure out how to use Twitter or Snapchat and he does not have the patience to learn. It’s a genuine sore spot for him regardless of the humorous side.

Has an inner city accent that will never leave him. Still pronounce “on” like “awn” and frequently drops his r’s (which Bruce acts like he hates but really he finds it endearing.) Drops his “ing”s like “nothing” is “nothin.”

Fantastic chef, learned from the best. Very good at making something out of nothing and making it last. Steph has been showing him how to can things like fruit and vegetables. She’s basically just enabled his doomsday prepping behavior.

Speaking of, if you think Bruce is bad with the backup plans (yes there is always a b c d — z) where do you think Jay got it from? Absolutely anal about planning and contingencies. Has a backup for his backups.

Has a small hoard of books hidden in an end-table back at one of his safe houses. His favorite classics (mostly gifted by Bruce.)

Loves the smell of paper.

Definitely could use them but refuses to get glasses. Babs teases him for his squinting when she gets the chance.

“Just join the club book-worm, promise it won’t ruin your badass reputation.”

Jason ~squinting~ “I’d rather die....again.”

Collects cool bookmarks.

Definitely names his guns.

Favorite meal is literally any Spanish/Mexican dish followed by a good chili dog & a coke.

Can pack away enough food to feed a horse and keep going, not even Bruce knows how he does it. Alfred acts like he’s a pain in the ass to cook for but loves feeding him anyways. “You’ll eat us out of house and home someday my dear boy, good god.”

While we’re at it, he is 100% taller and wider than Bruce. You might think it makes Bruce a bit uncomfortable when standing right next to him (I mean...it does lol) but he absolutely loves when Jay throws his weight around because the malnourished string-bean of a child that he met on the street could now powerlift a small automobile and he is so fucking proud and happy that he grew up to be big and healthy (that he managed to grow up AT ALL mind you) how could he be mad? He probably tears up at the dinner table after Jay fills his plate for 4th time that evening and still intends to stay for dessert because he loVES HIM.

His feet definitely hang off the end of his bed by like, the shins because his room only has a full compared to everyone else’s king/queen. It never got upgraded when he hit puberty (because he was dead) and then he wouldn’t let anyone change it once he came back because that’s his bed “don’t fucking touch it I still fit just fine.” (Even though he’s like 22 and there’s a dip in the mattress that could put the Grand Canyon to shame.)

Still has a picture of Catherine hidden away. Visits her grave on the anniversary and always brings her favorite flowers (Lillie’s.)

His hands get cold really easily and they’re always dry/calloused.

Snores. Loudly.

The Lazarus pit did NoT heal his autopsy scar that shit is there for life and it is big and it is ugly. He doesn’t like taking his shirt off because of it and the look on Bruce’s face when he sees it could strip wallpaper.

Stopped dying the lock of white hair on his head.

Has spring allergies that turn him into a giant snotting watery eyed whiny baby.

He’s claustrophobic and not a fan of the dark. It’s why his helmet has night vision.

(While we’re at it, that helmet has to be the equivalent of like, iron mans on the inside. Definitely has built in comms, scopes, analysis systems, navigation, etc etc. the WORKS. whICH he designed and created himself because he’s brilliant.) (Actually Roy might have helped a little but don’t tell him that.)

Has a work-in-progress bike in the cave that hasn’t been finished for over 2 years and it will never be finished because he uses it as an excuse to hangout and spend time with Bruce. Drives Steph crazy to see it sit there but she gets it.

During his first Thanksgiving with Bruce and Alfred he cried for 15 minutes before dinner (which he’s still embarrassed about to this day) and then ate until he literally puked. He hasnt missed many Thanksgivings since he died.

TERRIBLE at 1st-person-shooters and super pissed about it.

“That’s not even realistic, an HK-416 doesn’t even have a 200 round drum. It’s bonkers! It’s madness Tim!”

“Shut the fuck up Jason you haven’t even been facing the right way since we started.”

(He’ll stick to Space Invaders and Mario fuck you very much.)

Really good at piano. Bruce asked him to start playing seriously when he moved in because “learning a musical instrument teaches self -discipline and versatility” but really it’s because one day during his Robin years Jay sat down and started plinking on the keys to a song he learned at the public youth-center on the “old shitty out of tune” wood one they had and it just happened to be a song Martha used to play Bruce all the time. He wanted to hear it fill the halls again.

Gets in a screaming match with Bruce nowadays and instead of lighting up one of Penguin’s underground casinos (like he might of used to 👀) he’ll disappear for a month to cool down. You can always tell when he gets over it though because he sends the family a postcard from wherever he is in the world. (Alfred puts them all on the fridge.)

Pit symptoms used to (and occasionally still do) include horrific night terrors, black-out rage, and brief moments of hallucinations or flashbacks. He had to relive the period of time shortly after he was pulled out through graphic and warped recollections (typically after not getting enough sleep or engaging in physical altercations.) He really only started to work through this after Ducra had suggested keeping a log and writing down everything he could remember. After a time he was able to piece together the things he had experienced or done (mostly to others) and as awful and horrible as knowing may have been, he could at least start to move on.

The more time he spent with Damian after he came back the more he could remember as well. He will occasionally speak to him in Arabic & not even realize he’s doing it (which scares the pants of Dames, himself, and Bruce.)

He does feel closer to the little gremlin because of it though. Talia likely had him as a baby with her the majority of the time after he was born and Jay was recovering/training, so he spent a substantial amount of time with both of them.

Bruce bought him a kindle for Christmas one of the first years he was back and he was (and still is but don’t tell the old man that) elated.

Occasionally mumbles in his sleep, usually in a variety of languages.

He does smoke, mostly only when he gets stressed out (because everyone reams him for it otherwise.) You’d think it’s a rebellious street kid thing but it’s actually because Catherine used to smoke the same brand and the smell reminds him of her.

His shoe size is a 13.

The time shortly after he crawled out of his own grave he could see ghosts (and I’m talking straight up dead people.) He can’t recall much of this or the time spent actually deceased (even after his dunk in the pit) but even now he’ll see things move out of the corner of his eye or get cold chills or feel like he’s being watched. When he hasn’t slept for like, 4 days and is bordering on manic depressive and harmful behavior, he starts seeing them again. Constantine prob finds him real interesting.

My guess is that he did see Catherine when he died but overall ended up in some sort of purgatory-like state which he can’t recall.

When he blushes it’s the hollows of his cheeks, back of the ears and neck and all the way down the front of his chest. The autopsy scar shows up white against it.

Has those hands that no matter how many times he washes them the oil/gun cleaner doesn’t come out of the cracks. Looks like a mechanic.

Tends to wear thicker work/type clothing like carhart fireproof pants and boots. Obviously his jacket too.

Not a fan of cold weather at all. His nose and cheek get really red and he shivers (as unmanly as that is)

OCD. His apartments are spotless, weapons and ammunition categorized and logged, etc.

Had asthma as a child and sort of grew out of it but sometimes his endurance suffers as an adult because of it.

Has this particular phone case 💀

[gaygwenpool]

*slams fists on table* MYSTELEON

I knew you wouldnt disappoint! :D  tho you already know most of these lmaoo  lotsa credit to @herbofoo anyway, i dont remember which of these you came up with but Patchwork wouldnt be the same without your Good Good Content! (And of course thanks for all your patience as i cry about comics lmao)

I’ve lost all shame long since ive started shipping them so brace yourself for the self-indulgent cheese that is Chameleon/Mysterio in my Patchwork verse. (its reallly. really Melodramatic. i gave up all pretense.. also under the cut cuz its long..)

ask meme

Who cooks:

Mysterio! Although Chameleon is objectively The Superior Cook thanks to the long years of being a servant to picky russian nobility BUT exactly because of that, he really doesnt enjoy it, even less when cooking for others and not just himself. So it is usually Beck who prepares meals (that are not bad either, they are just simpler) but as often as they can, they eat out. That said, Cham is very well aware Quentin loves his cooking so sometimes, he makes them something. (Being sick isnt so bad when it means Chammy bringin you a big bowl of hot borscht :)

On the other hand, Cham has quite a sweet tooth which Q notices Fast and decides to learn how to bake. It took more effort and failed tries than it could have, mostly because he got cocky, how hard could this be and just. kept forgetting he put stuff in the oven.. But now he makes quite delicious cookies n cakes which make Dmitri almost tear up because tasty + Quentin baked something Specifically for him?? 

Who does the laundry and other chores:

Mysterio’s laundry is usually booby trapped so he has to clean it himself and he doesnt even let Cham near it. And he keeps forgetting gadgets in his civvies. Not to mention that again, for the same servant reason, Cham really doesnt enjoy house chores in general, so he usually just gets his own clothes cleaned somewhere else (especially since his fancy suits and even fancier gowns are the highest quality and delicate materials, he doesnt even Know how to clean them..) 

As for the rest of the chores, its pretty balanced, although Cham has more of an eye for things that needs to be cleaned up (and Beck already has cooking duties) so he does a tad more. 

How many children do they have + Any pets:

In my Patchwork universe there’s a whole Thing about Leon, the Chameleon of the Ultimate universe but I’ve tried to type up a short summary and failed, it’s a long story lmao ^^;; and anyway he isnt exactly their kid, he is just much younger than them and they ended up sorta mentoring him. 

However, they have Celavi, the escaped ex-spy beluga.(Yes, it started as a joke based on this post that accidentally grew more and more serious until @herbofoo and me were too attached to let it go) She counts pretty much as their adopted daughter that they both spoil to hell and back, I mean no surprise, she saved Cham’s life once and sometimes, she helps out with heists. (Mostly for the show, you should have SEEN the look on Spider’s face when a beluga splashed him. He is used to humanoid sharks, to Hydroman.. not like. real life beluga that LAUGHS at him) Beck’s voice: “Dont you dare to insult her, SHE IS PERFECT AND FLAWLESS and A GOODNESS INCARNATE!! -she is literally a deserted russian spy that was trained to gather everything that could be used to harm USA-yea, i have a soft spot for those ;)“

She was always surprisingly clever so she never really counted as a “pet” and at one point, she even bonds with a symbiote (together they are Vague, again long story ah ha). They dont talk but have quite some range of vocalisations so communication isnt a problem. 

Who’s more dominant: 

They both have pretty dominant strong personalities (ok chameleon’s a bit more complicated with that but like.) with big egos who dont like others questioning their superiority. (Of course not at the level of like Doc Ock etc, they are surprisingly flexible and good team players that can be willing to let someone else take the spotlight if they are Nice) But the whole point of their relationship is that neither of them is dominant over the other, they get enough of that literally everywhere else. It’s very reassuring to be so sure that they are on equal footing, cooperating, no hidden nooses around their neck. Especially in their line of work of course! 

(Also, for the other interpretation of this question: anythin remotely sexual happens Pretty Late in the story and both of them are somewhere on the ace spectrum so it doesnt happen that often but they are both verses tho Beck bottoms more)

Favorite nonsexual activity:

MOVIES!! Sprawled on the giant comfy couch, closer than technically needed, cuddling and watching old movies with great special effects and/or great actors! Listening to Beck excitedly rant through the most dramatic speech of the story as he explains how the next cliffhanger is done with hydraulics! Focusing so hard on the stars in his eyes and his excited tone and gestures and just the tone of his voice you forgot to listen to the words themselves! Watching Cham’s face flawlessly mimic the faces on the screen in a blink of an eye and secretly guessing which one will he pick next. Feeling his head slowly fall on your shoulder, eyes closed, his mask smooth but not tense, instead just.. peaceful. Slight ping of annoyance, after all, this is A Classic movie dammit, but it’s gone in a second because Mitya hasnt slept since thursday and you are just relieved he is finally getting his rest. Feeling his warmth under your hand on his shoulders and suddenly never ever wanting to get up again.. EHM. anyway

PLANING HEISTS TOGETHER!! and more or less successfully executing them but planning is actually even more fun aside from the Big Reveals and Entrances which are actually harder to coordinate than one would think! 

Lots of shobiz/job talk actually, they really enjoy what they do! Lots of people already mentioned that in their hc compilations but i agree, they love goin to see all kinds of movies and plays and performances as well as acting various scenes with one another!  

Their favorite place to be together:

NEW YORK CITY BABEYY. Sure they love to travel and see other countries (and cause mayhem there) but.. they love their mess of a city, it’s never the same without the webhead around as well as the bazillion of other heroes n villains bashin each other’s heads. 

Any traditions:

Oh so many pop culture references and inside jokes, oh my god. One time, they spent the entire heist (and its planning period) speaking strictly in famous movie lines and titles, Max and other sixers tried to join but didnt last too long :’D 

Beck also has a habit of taking pictures of people with Interesting faces or styles he sees and sends them to Cham. Also another fanon classic: together they have a running game, disguising themselves as moderately famous people and the other guessing who..

Their “song”:

‘This is me’ from the Greatest Showman, i just live for the two of them singin it in Cham’s car,off key but fully immersed and living it. 

What they do for each other on holidays:

Neither of them are religious but that doesnt stop Beck from going ALL OUT at any opportunity, Sin Six doesn’t do any heists around holidays because you Know he’d make them dress for the occasion or worse, write them themed lines…  They still meet for Christmas and Hanukkah and sometimes other holidays too because this is my AU and you can pry festivities-related shenanigans from my cold, cold hands. It’s always at Beck’s place tho because he can turn his hideout into the tackiest holiday-themed showcase but he aint roping them into it.  

On the other hand, Cham despises American commercialized holidays in general and Christmas time especially, since it’s not a big thing in Russia and  also once again, he has family issues for days. (Although relatively speaking, he is pretty over these, he is not gonna like mope around or anything) 

Anyway, what they do for each other is that they try to compromise, Dmitri doesnt sneer at stupid kitsch decorations every 5 minutes and Quentin ..chills a little. :’D To be fair, Beck makes everything fun and having Cham there makes Beck appreciate the details more instead of just goin into BETTER!BIGGER! frenzy.

Where did they go for their honeymoon:

After the fuckin Ages of pinning, when they finally end up together for realsies, they wanted somethin Big and Flashy! (Well Beck wanted and Cham kinda too but also with the option to merge with the crowd unnoticed and take some chill time) Anyway they went on a whole world wide tour! Starting with a luxury cruise, they took their time, lots of crime sprees to plan and execute, lots of local shows to see, lots of dumb heroes to fool, they’re gonna have it all! 

Where did they first meet:

Around the time when Cham and Hammerhead had their criminal empire running Fisk to the ground, Otto decided the Sin Six should team up with them for their ressources needed on one heist or something. They agreed but Cham insisted on actually going in the field, it’s been a while since he really stretched his face legs like this and the mafia life was starting to bore him. Doc made him team up with Mysterio much to the fishbowl’s dismay because why do they need another disguise artist?? He is the Master Of Illusions dammit, he can run circles around this guy, what the fuck Otto?? So at the start, he pouts and fumes under his helmet and in general he is his v unpleasant self but… He can’t help but notice that the new guy is a real professional, he even uses Traditional masks, he likes the same movies… And most importantly, he is actually interested in Mysti’s craft, asking questions and even LISTENING to his long winded answers… At one point he even wondered if that X thing was meant as a HOMMAGE to the Y movie, the Six never did that!! (Usually the rest of the sixers dont know the reference, heathens, and when they do, they mock him for it, that he’s copying ideas and mixin them ridiculously.  BUT THIS GUY GETS IT!!) So it doesn’t take long for them to hit it off, of course at this point without any real Trust behind it but it’s a start. 

(Though Beck does pay a visit to Otto like, buddy pal i know you’ve been planning on manipulating these crimelords to your end somehow and honestly, any other day i’d be down, i actually had a robot prepared for my own backstab but i was thinking they werent that bad and maybe we Could hold our end of the bargain this time and just. leave each other on good terms? Mabye? Obviously it’s purely out of respect for our teammate Kraven since him and Chameleon seem to have some history, nothing more, definitely nothing to do with how bright Cham’s eyes were when i was showing him the back of my stage… ) 

What do they fight over:

this whole post has been a mountain of cheese but im bringing more! Honestly, goin through my notes on Patchwork, their biggest arguments have always been about.. the other one not taking proper care of himself :’D Or them lashing out because they were scared and worried about the other and they cant stand being so vulnerable while the other pretends it’s not a big deal because they dont know how to handle genuine concern directed at them. 

Do they go on vacations, if so where:

GIVE!!! BECK!!!! HIS!!!! ISLAND!!!!!!They actually do have one, it’s where Celavi spends most of the time and they visit her often. But never for too long, neither of them can actually spend too long doing nothing.. 

[guernsey-island]

Please answer 1-98 >:3

Weird asks that say a lot

1. coffee mugs, teacups, wine glasses, water bottles, or soda cans?      water bottles 2. chocolate bars or lollipops?      chocolate bars 3. bubblegum or cotton candy?      cotton candy, though I don't like either very much 4. how did your elementary school teachers describe you?      I don't know 5. do you prefer to drink soda from soda cans, soda bottles, plastic cups or glass cups?      plastic cups??? 6. pastel, boho, tomboy, preppy, goth, grunge, formal or sportswear?      sportswear I guess 7. earbuds or headphones?      I only have earbuds right now, but I like both 8. movies or tv shows?      tv shows, but that doesn't mean I don't like movies too 9. favorite smell in the summer?      the ocean 10. game you were best at in p.e.?      capture the flag 11. what you have for breakfast on an average day?      whatever I can find 12. name of your favorite playlist?      "Good Songs :D" 13. lanyard or key ring?      key ring 14. favorite non-chocolate candy?      I don't particularly like any non-chocolate candy. Too artificial and sweet :/ 15. favorite book you read as a school assignment?      Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes 16. most comfortable position to sit in?      leaning back and with my legs out 17. most frequently worn pair of shoes?      white converse 18. ideal weather?      raining or a mild temperature like 80 degrees F paired with high humidity 19. sleeping position?      I fall asleep on my side and wake up on my back 20. preferred place to write (i.e., in a note book, on your laptop, sketchpad, post-it notes, etc.)?      Google docs heheh 21. obsession from childhood?      I was one of those warrior cats kids (no, I didn't pretend to be warrior cats at recess) 22. role model?      Snickers 23. strange habits?      popping my back, checking sunset/sunrise times 24. favorite crystal?     all crystals are great 25. first song you remember hearing?      Counting Stars by OneRepublic 26. favorite activity to do in warm weather?      hiking 27. favorite activity to do in cold weather?      reading 28. five songs to describe you?      Modern Loneliness- Lauv // Scared of Heights- Loving Caliber // backpack- slchld // By Now- Will Jay // Come True- khai dreams, Forrest., Biskwiq 29. best way to bond with you?      don't annoy me 30. places that you find sacred?      the beach when no one is there or deep in the mountains 31. what outfit do you wear to kick ass and take names?      ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 32. top five favorite vines?      road work ahead, jared 19, damn daniel, 2 bros chillin in a hot tub, x files theme 33. most used phrase in your phone?      probably >:3 34. advertisements you have stuck in your head?      that spotify ad about peter and jumping/skipping rope. IF you knew what an 8track tape was!! 35. average time you fall asleep?      ~2:30am 36. what is the first meme you remember ever seeing?      the pepe the frog memes 37. suitcase or duffel bag?      suitcase 38. lemonade or tea?      lemonade but tea is also superb 39. lemon cake or lemon meringue pie?      lemon cake bc I've never had lemon meringue pie 40. weirdest thing to ever happen at your school?      I don't really remember. Let's go with Mr. Rightmyer and Mr. Mikow in general (ig matrix_multiplication). or maybe the time Sami put a lamp on her head and pretended to be Shaggy 41. last person you texted?      Snickers 42. jacket pockets or pants pockets?      jacket pockets 43. hoodie, leather jacket, cardigan, jean jacket or bomber jacket?      hoodie 44. favorite scent for soap?      hmmm something tropical 45. which genre: sci-fi, fantasy or superhero?      sci-fi 46. most comfortable outfit to sleep in?      clothing 47. favorite type of cheese?      swiss or colby jack or parmigiano-reggiano 48. if you were a fruit, what kind would you be?      peaches bc they're the best fruit 49. what saying or quote do you live by?      "you become what you think about" "success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal"- Earl Nightingale "the opposite of courage is not cowardice, it is conformity" "sanity and happiness are an impossible combination"- Mark Twain "If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading"- Lao Tzu "failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough" - Og Mandino 50. what made you laugh the hardest you ever have?      let's go with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TilHylia7rE and more recently, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voncdcV648g 51. current stresses?      upcoming exams, writing essays 52. favorite font?      My current favorites are Frank Ruhl Libre, Overlock, and Rajdhani 53. what is the current state of your hands?      good, though I perpetually have a bump on one finger from writing too much 54. what did you learn from your first job?      job?? what job? 55. favorite fairy tale?      three little pigs 56. favorite tradition?      sleeping 57. the three biggest struggles you’ve overcome?      I don't know 58. four talents you’re proud of having?      Freestyling (ground moves and juggling), shooting knuckleballs, popping my back really well, running a 5-6 minute mile 59. if you were a video game character, what would your catchphrase be?      I don’t know what my catchphrase would be 60. if you were a character in an anime, what kind of anime would you want it to be?      a shonen where the protagonist is trying to survive in a crazy world, become the best at something, or master some special power (examples: tower of god or solo leveling if it was an anime) OR something with a mafia 61. favorite line you heard from a book/movie/tv show/etc.?      "Well, if you only knew how little I really know about the things that matter"- Elio in cmbyn the movie (think about this quote all the time) "Let us cultivate our garden"-Candide in Candide by Voltaire “The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.”- Sinclair in Demian by Hermann Hesse “I wanted only to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?”- Sinclair in Demain by Hermann Hesse “Know yourself and go in swinging.”- More than this by Patrick Ness “Just leave me alone. I’m not myself. I’m falling apart, and I don’t want you here.”- Charlie in Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes Tons of quotes and references from Arthur, httyd, and other media 62. seven characters you relate to?      Lance (vld), zuko (atla), okonkwo (things fall apart), nwoye (things fall apart), bokuto (haikyuu), sinclair (demian), hiccup (httyd) 63. five songs that would play in your club?      Wednesday Girl- Elijah Who, Aso, Peachy!, Kudasaibeats, slchld // Way Back Home- SHAUN, Conor Maynard, Sam Feldt // Let Me Down Slow (Acoustic)- New Hope Club // Crush Culture- Conan Gray // All Night Long- TAEYEON, LUCAS 64. favorite website from your childhood?      animal jam 65. any permanent scars?      I have a ton of scars on my legs and knees. I ran into a cart at staples once and have a big scar from that. I have a few scars on my elbows too 66. favorite flower(s)?      columbine (CO state flower) 67. good luck charms?      none 68. worst flavor of any food or drink you’ve ever tried?      I have no idea 69. a fun fact that you don’t know how you learned?      I don’t know 70. left or right handed?       right 71. least favorite pattern?      cheetah or zebra print 72. worst subject?      hmmm biology but only bc I don't put in the effort 73. favorite weird flavor combo?      I don't know. I like food 74. at what pain level out of ten (1 through 10) do you have to be at before you take an advil or ibuprofen?      I don't think I've experienced enough pain to accurately answer this question. I've only taken ibuprofen once (when I got my wisdom teeth taken out), but I didn't think it was that necessary to take 75. when did you lose your first tooth?      probably when I was six 76. what’s your favorite potato food (i.e. tater tots, baked potatoes, fries, chips, etc.)?      scalloped potatoes, hash browns, Spanish tortillas, potato salad, mashed potatoes 77. best plant to grow on a windowsill?      aloe vera 78. coffee from a gas station or sushi from a grocery store?      sushi from a grocery store 79. which looks better, your school id photo or your driver’s license photo?      school ID 80. earth tones or jewel tones?      earth tones 81. fireflies or lightning bugs?      they're called fireflies 82. pc or console?      pc 83. writing or drawing?      writing 84. podcasts or talk radio?      podcasts 84. barbie or polly pocket?      no 85. fairy tales or mythology?      mythology 86. cookies or cupcakes?      cookies 87. your greatest fear?      Accidentally biting off my tongue and then choking on it, seeing things in mirrors, being stabbed with a knife as I enter a hotel elevator, receiving emails 88. your greatest wish?      Happiness??? I don’t know 89. who would you put before everyone else?      Snickers 90. luckiest mistake?      I don't know 91. boxes or bags?      boxes 92. lamps, overhead lights, sunlight or fairy lights?      sunlight 93. nicknames?      let's not talk abt that,,, 94. favorite season?      spring or summer 95. favorite app on your phone?      google play books, goodreads, tumblr, kakaotalk, spotify, google keep 96. desktop background?      it's a slideshow. the background at the moment is a photo of Manarola, Italy taken by Peter Hegedus. It's one of my favorite photographs of all time 97. how many phone numbers do you have memorized?      three not including 911 (so four) 98. favorite historical era?     1300s in the Mongol empire or around when the spice trade was at its peak, 1800s in America during westward expansion, 1920s, ancient egypt, Harlem Renaissance 

[krystalreverb]

Something Human (Fic Preview #1)

Oh my god a fic from me that isn't xanlow I know it's the end times it's still fire emblem tho, don't get that confused so I have a weakness for master servant stuff so this is what you get I immediately had a weakness for Hubert/Edelgard I forced hubert to learn some healing magic so I could have more healers, haha I also like to make jokes so I paired them up and Hubert is just like of course I love you, was that not clear? ok I have no excuses for the ending but here we go gender neutral and pan byleth, I use the female Byleth in my runs because it makes recruiting Sylvain so much easier and he's a great unit and also i'm a huge slut for fishnet tights but this Byleth can be either one you want they use they/them pronouns and I don't describe their appearance at all so it can be either Byleth you want this takes place during the war when the black eagle strike force is still using garreg mach as a base I guess? It's vaguely sometime after they take out deirdru but before they march on fhirdiad i'm pretending byleth didn't recruit any other students into the BESF because my brain only has room for so many characters and I don't want to remember any extras nor did I want to explain why they're there Have a little body worship for your troubles this is self indulgent and shitty don't hate me this is just what I do for fun edelgard is 100% loud af in bed, don't try to tell me she's not a screamer ok so in my headcanon how this works is Byleth splits their class/training session time into two or three chunks to give the BESF a generous lunch break and give them a chance to study and train on their own for a couple hours before moving onto a different topic or training focus this is mostly focused on Hubert, there are some good Edelgard moments but this is mostly a Hubert-centric story bi king linhardt is my lifeblood, he's so jealous and catty there are multiple music and pop culture references dating back into the 90's, there are quite a few, see if you can spot them I was born in '92 I'm allowed to call myself a 90's kid dadgummit you kids these days I s2fg the first person to give me a complete list of memes and references that I put in this fic gets a hubelgard drawing by me I am not an artist but I'll do it anyway just don't expect anything good so basically Hubert is Gomez Addams and Edelgard is his Morticia, okay he worships the ground she walks on and lavishes her with affection and love and just thinks everything she says and does is beautiful and magical and she enjoys every second of it I headcanon that edelgard is an absolute unit she's just smol and Hubert kind of has the build of a guy who sits inside all day reading spellbooks

Something Human

The hallways of the monastery were dark, the night outside peering in through the windows and casting slim moonlight beams on the floor and walls. Within those moonbeams was a shadowy figure, slithering through the shadows like a phantom in an ancient opera house, a glass of water in one hand. The figure stopped, hearing something strange.

“N-no... S-stay away! Stay away!” It was Edelgard. She was in distress. The water glass shattered loudly on the floor, and the water spilled across the stone. The figure bolted across the hallway and around the corner. Protect her with your life.

“No! No, stop! Get away from me!”

The figure stopped in front of a locked door and very quickly assessed the situation. No sign of forced entry. That was good. But Edelgard was still crying out, and the bed was rocking, banging against the wall alarmingly. The figure picked up a lamp off the windowsill and lit it, lighting up his face as he knocked on the door. It was Hubert, who had gotten up thirsty in the middle of the night and left his quarters to fetch himself a glass of water from the kitchens to take back to his room with him. He was a human, as were they all, and he occasionally got thirsty in the middle of the night. This simply happened to be one of those nights.  

“Your Majesty? What's going on in there?” Hubert asked. He got no response other than Edelgard crying out again and the bed crashing against the wall violently.

Hubert spared no time. He quickly used a bit of magic to trip the lock and opened the door. Immediately he saw that there was no one there, other than a very sweaty Edelgard in her bed, eyes screwed shut, crying out in fitful sleep.”Stay away! Stay away! Leave me alone!” Edelgard cried out in her sleep, clutching her head with her hands and thrashing in her sheets. Her hair whipped about her head, creating a shimmering white halo around her head. The bed crashed loudly into the wall, and the vibration knocked her crown clean off the bedside table. Hubert let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

A nightmare. Of course. Hubert knew his lady suffered from nightmares; who wouldn't, after the life she'd led, the horrors she'd suffered? Hubert often found his dreams equally grim and frightening, on nights such as these. On clear nights, with no immediate threat present, sometimes, just sometimes, his mind turned in on itself too. It was a side effect of the rigors of war.

Hubert quickly put the lamp on her bedside table, picked her crown up off the floor, placed it back on the table next to the lamp, and shook his lady gently with one hand. “Your Majesty.” It was simple, but direct, quiet, yet audible enough to carry within the dorm room.

Edelgard's eyes shot open and she sat up straight, woken up suddenly. Her hair was a disaster and there were red rings around her eyes. The string-like strap of her thin nightgown fell pathetically off of her shoulder to hook around her arm, the neckline slipping down until her right breast threatened to fall out of the material entirely. Hubert pretended not to notice. “Ahhhh!” She shrieked, her eyes fixing on him and taking a couple of seconds to fully focus.

Hubert was almost knocked backwards by her force. “My lady, it's only me!” He exclaimed in a direct whisper.

“Hubert??” Edelgard asked, wild-eyed and terrified, clutching her blankets to her chest. “What are you doing in my chambers this late at night???”

“I heard you from the hallway, Your Majesty. You were crying out in your sleep. Is it that nightmare again?” Hubert asked, gently placing his hand on hers to placate her anxiety for now.

“Oh, Hubert... I don't want to talk about it.” Edelgard said stubbornly, casting her eyes away. Her cheeks turned a rather cute shade of embarrassed pink.

“The professor said talking about it would help.” Hubert supplied. Edelgard huffed.

“I know. But I...”

“But I won't force your hand.” Hubert relented. “At least allow me to stay by your side, my lady, for my own peace of mind. I thought you were being attacked, Your Majesty. It gave me quite the fright.”

“Oh, Hubert, don't be overdramatic. Yes, you can stay.” Edelgard shuffled over in bed and allowed Hubert to climb up next to her. Hubert immediately found himself the subject of a tight embrace, the Emperor's head resting on his chest and her arms looped around his shoulders.

“Hubert.... I will create peace, for all of Fódlan.”

“I know, Your Majesty. I know. And I will be by your side every step of the way, my lady.”

“No.... No titles tonight, Hubert. Please....”

“As you wish, Edelgard.” Hubert stroked Edelgard's hair softly, running his fingers through her white locks. This was familiar to them; comforting. Hubert often would let the crying little girl that was a pained and tortured young Edelgard sleep in his arms after a particularly terrible day. It always allowed her a restful sleep, to know he was always there to watch over her. Edelgard's father never knew, and neither did Hubert's. It wasn't entirely proper of them, but then again they had never quite been a proper pair. Closer than siblings, they knew each other more intimately than lovers, and touch came naturally between them as a sign of their devotion to one another. A hug, a touch on the shoulder, their pinkies intertwining as they walked their bloody path together. There was a world of words between them never spoken, but implicitly understood. What was proper and what was crossing the line. What they could and couldn't say. What they wouldn't say, not yet anyway.

“Hubert?”

“Yes, Edelgard?”

“Do you think I'm... a good Emperor?” She asked, in a small voice. An uncertain voice. A voice wracked with insecurity, disbelief, and thinly-veiled suffering in isolation.

“Emperor Edelgard von Hresvelg, ruler of the entire Adrestian Empire... yours is a reign I am proud to swear my fealty to.” Hubert answered immediately, without hesitation or second thought. “And you know me, Edelgard. I am an excellent judge of character.”

Edelgard giggled. A joke. Hubert did have a sense of humor, as much as he didn't like to show it. Her face fell somewhat, and her giggle died down. She snuggled her head deeper into Hubert's chest, holding onto him like a lifeline. Hubert allowed this.“Hubert, will you sing to me? That song you used to sing for me when I was small...” She murmured, and Hubert's expression softened. A particularly terrible event was haunting her tonight. Perhaps the night when.... no. Hubert refused to think about it. Edelgard had been through enough.

Hubert began to sing an ancient lullaby softly. It was in the ancient language of magic, one that Edelgard did not understand but found beautiful. Hubert was not particularly talented at singing, but as he was of a noble house, he was studied somewhat in the art, being capable of at least holding a tune. He was clearly not destined for a musical career but he wasn't awful. His voice carried well, anyway, and he could pass for a gravelly, underused, sinister sort of low tenor. As he sang, he gently ran his fingernails across Edelgard's scalp, scratching her head softly and sweetly, and she damn near melted in his arms. Soon she was sleeping soundly again, and Hubert very quickly came to realize that he really didn't have the ice-cold heart it would take to move her from the cozy spot she seemed to have claimed on his chest. So there they lay, curled up around one another, a tangled mess of limbs until the sun rose again.

When they roused from slumber, Hubert got up early, woke Edelgard, and then fell into his regular routine of helping Edelgard get dressed for the day. Her armor did have too many buckles, and that blasted dress, with all its buttons and epaulets. He carefully brushed out her hair, and pinned it elegantly to her head, placing her crown atop it, all in silence. That silence passed between them like a ghost through the room. She stood. And she turned.

“Thank you, Hubert.” She said softly. “For staying with me.”

“My lady, I would never leave your bed, if that is what you asked of me. I am ever your faithful servant, Your Majesty.” Hubert replied. Edelgard had to laugh a little.

“I know, Hubert. Perhaps after the professor's lecture, you'd like to share a meal with me? I'd love to hear more about that book Dorothea is making you read.”

Hubert rolled his eyes. “That drivel can barely be called a 'book', my lady. It's hardly anything more than blatant erotica mixed with stale and tiresome literary tropes. It's garbage.”

“Still, she seemed insistent. Does she quiz you?” Edelgard teased.

“Unfortunately, and at random times, so I'm forced to continue reading it until I can make her stop. She starts crying when I get a question wrong.” Hubert complained.

Edelgard laughed. “Then at least tell me about it. Share a meal with me. And tell me all about it.”

Hubert relented. “Of course, my lady.” He bowed politely, and offered his arm to escort his lady to Byleth's class.

[sweaterzine-blog]

Somewhere City review By Yvette Naomi Meyers - Nov 12, 2019

Intro

What would happen if you took power-pop and sprinkled in easycore breakdowns? Pat and Ryland of Origami Angel decided to find out. Somewhere City, their latest release through Chatterbot Records, seems like Carly Rae Jepsen, Four Year Strong, and Touché Amoré all got together and brought forth a scientifically-improbable child. Despite crossing the boundaries between the notoriously moody emo, pop, and ___core genres, Somewhere City is incredibly positive. The album is littered with odes to love and friendship, and celebrates the simple beauties like getting fast food with your pals. Every song celebrates a victory, whether over those who said you’d never amount to anything or over your own thoughts and behaviors dragging you down. Today, I’ll be exploring the album through a play-by-play of the tracks and try to measure how “objectively” good or bad it may be before giving a final rating.

Play X Play

“Welcome to…” Origami Angel never lets me down. This song serves as the perfect intro to the rest of the album, and sets the tone for the journey through Somewhere City still ahead. I’m a sucker for gang vocals. What can I say?

“24 Hr Drive-Thru” I was impressed to learn there isn’t actually a mandolin on this track. Most Likely Video Game to Have This Song On Its Soundtrack: Mario Kart

“666 Flags” Guiness World Record holder for My Longest Blast Beat Ever Best Place to Drive While Listening to This Song: Off A Cliff

“Doctor Whomst” It’s at this point in writing the review that I realize how much I want to play all of these songs on Guitar Hero. These riffs are going to age way better than the cultural relevance of the “whomst” meme.

“Say Less” F*** the haters. “Say Less” is a classic anthem to the people who were big ol’ nerdos in high school and the like. This song would be right at home on MTV in between singles from Paramore and Taking Back Sunday or on the radio after the newest Lana Del Rey Single.

“Escape Rope” This is the song on the album I’m most likely to crowdsurf to. Whenever there’s a new Origami Angel release cycle, someone should start a betting pool for how many Pokémon references there will be.

“The Title Track” In another universe, I could totally see this being a Backstreet Boys song. This is not a bad thing. Almost as good as Title Track by DCFC. (Author’s Note: This is high praise.)

“Skeleton Key” One of the most sincere odes to being In-Love-but-On-Tour Voted Most Likely to Be Heard At Emo Weddings

“Find Your Throne” Including one of the sickest pop-punk riffs of all time was a really damn good idea. Joins the canon of best platonic love songs alongside Blue and Yellow and the Golden Girls theme song

“The Air Up Here” This track reprises the entire album, resulting in the greatest array of backup vocals possibly ever. THE CITY NEVER LETS ME DOOWWWNNNNN

“Objective” Measures

Somewhere City has essentially all of what makes a pop-punk album great. The sheer musicianship is immediately evident, even if you don’t play an instrument. Pat’s drumming has incredible technical skill, and Ryland’s riffs on this album are the most creative in the history of the project so far. His voice displays the widest range we’ve seen from him, and I’m confident that almost anyone would agree that the melodies are catchy to the point of ear-worm status. All of the songs flow into each other well and the overall sound of the album is incredibly cohesive despite the wide variety of influences. Jake Checkoway’s production is incredibly punchy yet maintains clarity and a polished finish. The main criticism I have for Somewhere City lies with the lyrics. Some verses seem ever-so-slightly half baked, and I would have liked to see more of the imagery or clever wordplay that Origami Angel is known for. Even this, however, is debatable since everyone relates to poetry differently, and there is no reliable standard for how much emotional impact any particular set of words has. Overall, Somewhere City is, by all measures, an incredible work of whatever kind of pop they’ll call this eventually. If you want to dance, or listen to something you can sing along to, or if you love hectic pop guitar riffs and breakdowns, Somewhere City is an excellent choice.

Final Score

Pokémon Sword and Shield full 890-size national Pokédex out of Limited 4XX-size Galar Pokédex.

[nothingunrealistic]

oof hey i hope i'm not bothering you, and i asked jury this already (and deffo got a good answer but i need all the info i can get because i am crushingly insecure)- do you have any tips on characterizing/writing the deh characters? i struggle with it immensely and I have no idea why, and you're one of my favorite writers for this fandom. so. no pressure to respond i was just curious!

sure! the only characters i write regularly/feel confident in writing are evan, jared, and alana, so those are the characters i’ll talk about the most, but i’ll try to say something for all of them. also this will feature a good number of quotes from writers’ notes (here) and interviews because those are the main sources i draw on for characterization after, you know, actual canon

evan

Smart, sincere, and cripplinglyself-conscious, Evan prefers to hover in the background, asupporting player in his own life, too afraid to step forward into thespotlight and risk ridicule or, what might be worse, no one noticinghim at all.

this description captures a lot of the things i think are key about evan, but one big thing it’s missing is that he’s kind of an asshole. he usually has good intentions, and he tries to be inoffensive and considerate and Nice, but he sucks at that because it’s just not how he naturally is. he’s bitter and angry about a lot of things - his lack of friends, jared (ostensibly) not caring about him or taking him seriously, heidi rarely being present, and perhaps most of all, his own perception of himself as “broken” and a burden, which he genuinely believes that heidi agrees with and that everyone else would if they knew what he was truly like. he’s frequently sarcastic and occasionally pedantic (see: “president” “co-president” and “it’s sula” “what did i say?” “sulu”). but these are things he doesn’t like about himself, which is why he tries to be either Nice or invisible, especially when he feels uncomfortable. the times when he’s most comfortable acting like himself are, in my opinion, when he’s just with jared, who in turn finds it most fun to spend time with evan when he’s not putting up a front.

major pet peeves in fic: being written as a ~delicate anxious bean uwu~ or anything along those lines; dialogue with stuttering that doesn’t resemble his actual speech patterns at all; making a big deal out of him using profanity; portraying his relationship with jared as evan just letting himself get pushed around until someone (usually connor) comes in to bravely show evan that He Doesn’t Deserve That

jared

Droll and sarcastic,Jared claims to be forced by his parents to hang out with familyfriend Evan, for whom he ostensibly has nothing but disdain.Jared covers his own obvious insecurities with a well-practicedbraggadocio and a know-it-all arrogance.

I think this is the playlist that Jared puts on in the morning on the first day of school to pump himself up for the day… Ultimately he’s terrified of going back to school, but he’s trying to psych himself up. … Every one of these songs is a JAM. No ballads here. And they’re all slightly sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek songs about unrequited love. Jared can relate to that. [x]

Jared Kleinman is too cool for the music of the times. He is proudly a walking 90’s movie… but he doesn’t mind sneaking a little of his parents Manischewitz and listening to a dusty Bette Midler record. [x]

(there are like a dozen interviews with will roland that i could cite here but that’s practically a post unto itself)

the best way i can sum up all the major points of jared’s characterization is that there’s always a reason for the things he says. he doesn’t make harsh remarks to be deliberately cruel or mean; he’s either pointing out an uncomfortable but important truth, or he’s aiming to make a joke and inadvertently crossing the line. when he does make jokes, it’s often another way of delivering the truth, an attempt to get people to laugh and thereby validate that he’s clever/funny/worthy, or an effort to deflect something that makes him uncomfortable or scared. redirection, derision, and showing off are some of his major defensive tactics; he doesn’t do self-deprecation out loud, but he is, as will has said, repressed and self-hating. he and evan are similarly asshole-ish, but where evan tries to hide it, jared tries to hide behind it.

he wants people to be impressed by him in general, but he really wants evan in particular to think well of him and be his friend and openly care about him - the problem is that jared can’t bring himself to openly care about evan, because that entails emotional honesty & vulnerability that he’s just not prepared to deal with. hence their interaction on the first day of school, and then jared agreeing to help evan more and more with his increasingly complex lie despite claiming not to care. (the key word in that first quote is “ostensibly.”) when he is actually is at ease (which is pretty rare, at least in canon), he’s a bit of a drama queen, which evan may pretend to be annoyed by but quietly enjoys.

major pet peeves in fic: being written as straight and/or homophobic and/or leaping to make jokes about how evan and connor are Clearly Doing It immediately after finding out that they’re becoming friends (as if he isn’t utterly convinced that evan is 100% straight); making excessive/forced references and jokes to modern pop culture/memes (everything he shouts out in any form of canon is at least ten years old and usually decades old, and that doesn’t happen often anyway); relentlessly treating evan like shit/being incredibly domineering in their friendship; constant bickering with connor; calling evan “hansen” all the time when he only ever addresses him as “evan” (or, like, “dude” or “bro” or “son”) and even only does THAT when he’s especially emotional or letting his guard down; just generally giving him dialogue that in no way resembles his actual, very distinctive speech patterns

(i have. a lot of thoughts and feelings about jared)

alana

Alana is an incredibly genuineperson. Everything she does comes from a place of deephonesty and tremendous feeling. All of the characters inthis musical put up masks of sorts. For Alana, it’s a façadeof cheerfulness. She is always ready with a smile, a note ofencouragement. This hides the loneliness underneath. 

often prone to melodrama, high school senior Alana has few friends but lacks the self-awareness to understand why; beneath her extroverted demeanor, Alana is in fact haunted by a terrible and abiding loneliness; tired of always being an outsider, Alana seizes the death of a classmate as an opportunity finally to find a sense of belonging. [x]

Study break! … Alana spend a lot of time in the books. This playlist allows her to either kick back, have a lip sync battle, or a jam session. … We have classic up beats like ‘Uptown Funk’ by Bruno Mars cause she loves to dance and be silly. She’s also a romantic. Girl reads Jane Austen, so a nice healthy batch of love songs to daydream to. She’s also a feminist! So naturally Beyoncé has the perfect perfect pump up jams for the feminist in us all.

alana has Big Feelings, and they drive all her actions. she wants to achieve great things and succeed in life, yes, but more importantly, she wants to help people and make the world a better place. when she commits to a course of action, it’s because she truly believes that it’s the right or most beneficial thing to do in the end, even if the means themselves are questionable. much like jared, she struggles with vulnerability and connection with other people, and often tries to form connections with other people by making herself seem more impressive, but unlike jared, she also tries to build up and support other people, rather than tearing them down. she’s also committed to supporting Truth in a general sense, and struggles when this comes into conflict with Doing The Right Thing. this is especially obvious after good for you, when she resigns herself to continuing the fundraiser even though she’s certain it’s based on a lie.

all of this makes alana seem incredibly serious, but that’s not the entire picture. she strives to be upbeat and optimistic, and even when she’s not trying, she loves to have fun! she likes to be silly and tell jokes and laugh at other people’s jokes and daydream about finding a great romance! she thought “fuck finn” was the height of comedy! she’s not a killjoy!

i also hold with kristolyn lloyd’s theory that alana was very close with her grandmother and struggled with feeling unable/not allowed to openly grieve her death, or to express any kind of loneliness or other strong negative emotion. however, i do not hold with kristolyn’s theory that alana had a crush on connor, because alana is a lesbian.

major pet peeves in fic: being written as pedantic and joyless; overly formal dialogue (she’s perfectly capable of using colloquialisms and slang) in which she is never sarcastic, ever (she absolutely can be when she’s frustrated) 

zoe

a sensitive, sophisticated high school junior; cool without realizing it, Zoe could care less about the status games and popularity rites of high school; funny and bright, she has grown up in the long shadow cast by her volatile older brother, Connor, tyrannized along with the rest of her family by his out-of-control behavior; few rooms are as familiar to her as the inside of a family therapist’s office; Zoe compensates for her brother’s darkness by striving to be warm, nice to everyone, the kind of person who goes out of her way to learn the names of the kids who sit by themselves at lunch; she feels a terrible ambivalence over her brother’s death, finding it difficult to forgive him for all he did, and at the same time forgive that part of herself that feels nothing but relief in the fact that he’s gone.

this sums up just about everything i could say, but i will add: the disembodied voice calling zoe a “stuck-up bitch” during ywbf reprise is NOT a voice you’re supposed to agree with.

major pet peeves: anything that states/suggest that zoe is a bitch; those connor/evan fix-it fics with background zoe/alana where the premise of zoe and alana’s relationship is “they’ve actually been best friends this whole time!!” even though this contradicts canon on multiple levels

connor

An angry, disaffectedloner, Connor has been a troubled kid for as long as anyone canremember, an enigma and a source of endless consternation to hislong-suffering parents and sister.

i honestly don’t have much to say about connor, because i don’t think about him very often, but i will say that:

- if your portrayal of him can be described as “edgy,” you’re probably doing something wrong. he’s just as awkward and anxious as evan, it just manifests very differently

- him addressing evan as “hansen” all the time is admittedly much more plausible than jared doing it, but still just as annoying

heidi

Overworkedand stretched too thin, Heidi loves her son fiercely, but fears theyhave begun to grow apart. She is prepared to do anything to repairthe damage.

heidi’s torn between trying to connect with evan and trying to provide a better life for him, because for her, achieving the latter currently requires spending too many hours away from home to really achieve the former. that’s why she’s so upset and demands to know what’s going on in evan’s life when he seems to be acting out of character and doing things she doesn’t expect him to do - she feels she’s being left out of the loop. much like alana, she strives for optimism, trying to find the bright side of any situation. and, as steven levenson pointed out in the annotated script (regarding the line about fabulous tips that evan’s stepmother may or may not have made from cocktail waitressing), she doesn’t have a fully developed sense of healthy boundaries, which is an interesting nuance that tends to get lost in fics that flatten her out into a generic Cool Mom. she’s trying to raise a teenager while not wanting to fully grow up herself.

cynthia

To Evan, she seems to be the perfect mother, nurturing, available,and willing to talk about anything. To her own children, it’s a bitmore complicated.

evan idealizes all the murphys, and cynthia is no exception. she tries her hardest to be a good and accessible mother, but she’s deeply dissatisfied with being just a mother. she works to support and empathize with connor, and to remember him positively after his death, but she frequently neglects and minimizes zoe and her problems in the process.  

larry

Though often tense and taciturn, Larry shows a different face tothe world, representing for Evan the dad he always wished for:strong, confident, and, more than anything, reliable, someone to becounted on.

is larry going to call his children slurs or disown them/kick them out of the house for being lgbt? no. is he going to research How To Interact With Your LGBT Child and drive connor and zoe to the local pride parade? also no. the once-popular (and possibly still popular?) characterization of him as a demon straight from the ninth circle of hell is just as inaccurate as evan’s perception of him as the World’s Greatest Dad.

i hope this helps! and thank you for asking - i really enjoyed answering this, and i’d be happy to expand on most of these points if you want.

[lifeisjustanotherstory]

To All The Boys I’ve “Loved” Before

I must be one of the very few 21 year old’s with access to the internet/uses it frequently that doesn’t have their own Netflix account. Or at least uses someone else’s. I had considered subscribing to the service to see TATBILB but thought against it, for the sake of my productivity. I already have Tumblr, Youtube and Instagram to sap it. 

What I do have access to, however, is Wikipedia. So I think if this post ever managed to find its way into the hands of the guys mentioned below; just like Lara Jean, I too would faint. Or at least feel that awful sense of embarassment. 

I have used the world love so that I could add this nice pop-culture youth reference into the post. What I have felt, for most of these boys,however, is some deep feeling at a point in my relationship with them, whether that was an intense infatuation, a burst of friendship warmth , or bitter hate.

MI - you were the first person I ever talked to online. I was just this 16 year old girl with a low self-esteem, unsure about how she felt about herself and her friends and boys. And then, there was this guy, this guy who loved books. I will never forget that flutter I felt when you named one of your bookshelves on Goodreads after mine. Late NYE we exchanged New Year’s greetings and thousands of miles away, it felt to me like we shared a special moment. 

Later on, I think you eventually got bored of me. I did something I was ashamed of to grab your attention (still didn’t work). You drafted into the army but I feel like we had drifted apart before that, and we haven’t really spoken since. I have no regrets at all - because that relationship ultimately led me to another friendship, which remains to this day. I will always cherish the comfort that your messages gave me and that sweet friendship that we once had. 

CDR - I have never been in a romantic relationship but you were the only boy to have ever broken my heart. I will never forget that feeling when I realised you unfriended me; my heart seemed to skip a beat, my breath hitched in my throat and my stomach fell , all simultaneously. Do I wish you badly? Of course not. This post is not the post for that digression but what we had, had to come to an end.

By this time I was older, and more comfortable with guys i.e. I actually used to talk to them/hang out with them. Not so cloistered in my all girls school any longer. Sure, they liked me (I’d like to think I’m a good sport, and funny). But, there was never really any depth. Then we were talking and one day, out of the blue you told me that you liked talking to me because you felt that there was no one else intellectual that you could talk to at school. What you didn’t know was that you happened to address one of my insecurities; I wasn’t athletic, and I didn’t feel like I was good-looking. In that moment, I think I fell for you - you were the first guy to appreciate me for my intelligence, which is the only strength I felt I had. For 6 months of multiple daily messages to fall away was a literal shock to the system, but I understand why it had to happen. It seems childish to say it now, but you taught me that boys really can like girls for their brains.

CERJ - You taught me that some people are a magnet for hate and negativity in their lives. However much you try to be a light, if anything, YOU will be extinguished.

Oh, how I tried. How I tried to make you happier, to be that friend you claimed to desperately want. But you moaned, and dithered and suddenly the only reaction I could elicit from you was when I became hurtful myself. Only then would your anger rear its ugly head. It was almost as if...you were just consumed by the negativity and now that was all you could ever be.

I literally had to stop myself after sending an email to you because I was shocked at how toxic I felt, how toxic I had let you make me. This isn’t me, I thought. And I finally became exactly the girl you’d warned me I’d become; blocking the hell out of you, lifting a great weight off of my shoulders.

SI - I hope you’re alive but the reality is that you’ve probably ghosted me. It was so promising at first - and then you said we’d exchange letters. You gave your address (but not your zip code, which I was able to deduce thanks to Google. My secret talent - working out Israeli zip codes without speaking Hebrew). I don’t know what was wrong - did you even get my letter (which is the first I ever sent to a penpal btw) ? You taught me that sometimes people ghost - and perhaps it’s not to do with you. And that’s fine.

GJH- You will always be the first boy (ever) that has said to me: “you’re cute”. For days after I would scroll up to your message, not quite believing it. It’s different coming from a boy your age than it is coming from your mother.

When we just about to part ways, for a few minutes...I couldn’t believe it was happening. I was typing unconsciously. Why? Because I had imagined our relationship to be something it could never be, something it never was. I painted an image of you in my head and blamed you when you didn’t live up to it. Fell in love with my mind. For that, I’m sorry.

And now, saving the best till last...

Forgotten; I can’t remember your name, sorry. But what I do remember was that I was feeling down, and you called yourself my hype man (numerous times.). That you were there for me. You just made me happy. It taught me the power of a kind word, even to strangers on the internet (especially so) and it’s how I met one of my best internet friends today.

VT: I literally do.not.deserve.you. My messaging patterns are so out of whack and they do not do you justice. I wonder why you still talk to me, really.

But I love talking to you, on the occasions that I do. It makes me happy. I know that you’re one of the guys, probably the only one actually since there’s a certain freedom to online relationships, who I can rely on to provide a solution to my problems. But also be one to whom I can send a meme, or share a joke. And that’s fucking priceless.

ERO: My emails to you took HOURS to write, and I never asked you if it took just as long for you to reciprocate. It’s charming though, thinking that across an ocean and six (six?) time zones there was someone like me, hunched over their laptop, sharing their thoughts, their dreams, the mundane (because the mundane is the best) putting aside a substantial amount of time to a relative stranger, who I hope became a friend in your eyes. Like you became in mine.

When CERJ was being a dickhead and I didn’t want to admit it to myself, you told me the truth full on. I wouldn’t have had the courage to stop it without you. 

I think I would have been able to reply more quickly to your emails had we not had the habit of recommending songs to each other, but our correspondence wouldn’t have been the same without it. “Want You Back” by HAIM, “Missing You” by John Waite and “Together in Electric Dreams” were liked by you, because by then I had gauged your taste and knew you would be a fan. Those songs, whenever they come on shuffle, throw me back to those times, will forever remind me of you, and I am GLAD.

JM: You hear people say Kik and one tends to assume...but we didn’t use it for that. We were friends, plain and simple. You asked me for love advice (me, a romantic love-less noob). You and her are still together years on, and man, I’m taking a little bit of credit for that ;)

But the real nugget is that I stopped talking to you. It was me. Shit happened and I messaged you on Kik months later, but you’d deleted it. Then I remembered your name (obviously) and the college you said you’d been accepted to (thanks freaky memory). I found your email. Taking the plunge was hard. But I took it, and gingerly sent a message; “hey, do you remember me?”. And then you said, which I nearly would have forgotten were it not for writing this post; “but of course, I could never forget you.”

JM, I don’t know if you felt like you forgave me in that email reply, but it definitely felt like you did. You taught me to give people a second chance, and perhaps even a third. And I can’t thank you enough for that. 

Thanks to all of you, who have shaped me or taught me in some way or another. You’ve all impacted me and my life in some way. Thank you. 

[the-canary]

on the right side of things.  - s.r

Summary: Out of all the trivia Steve Rogers knew. (Reader/Steve Rogers)

Word Count: ~950

Prompt: Righteousness

Masterlist

A/N: This is for @redgillan‘s birthday challenge. more on the silly side.

Please enjoy and feedback is always welcomed.

Captain America. God’s righteous man, pretending you could live without war.

Tonight the war was the trivia facts board game, and Steve wasn’t sure exactly how he got into this situation. Scratch that, he knew exactly how because on the rare night that the team had no missions, most of the Avengers had gone to deal with their personal affairs or be with their loved ones. This had left Bucky, Rhodey, Tony, himself, and you within the compound and while he thought of asking if you wanted to do anything together, he decided against it. That’s when you went to him.

“Steve, we’re gonna have a trivia game,” you smile at him from across the kitchen countertop and he can’t help but smile back just a little, “Do you wanna join?”

Steve knew that he shouldn’t. He was horrible at those type of games, especially if they were more about modern day than anything else, his own personal research had only gotten him to the late 50’s and early 60’so far. But, when you beat those pretty eyelashes.

“Sure,” he declares as your grin stretches from cheek to cheek, “Where are we setting up?”

“In the main common room with Tony and Rhodey.”

(Bucky was right, he was whooped.)   

But since Steve was in, naturally Bucky came around as well, but due to the uneven number of players, Steve and you were a team while Rhodey and Tony were another. Bucky, for safety reasons, was simply the moderator. You all gathered on the large couches of the common room with Bucky and the box of cards in the center and F.R.I.D.A.Y set to keep score, since she was “unbiased”. However, once Tony saw who he was up against, he couldn’t help but try to up the stakes a bit more.  

“How about it, kiddo? We win, and you kiss who I tell ya,” Tony asks with a smug look on his face, popping another almond into his mouth, Rhodey and Bucky shaking their heads. Steve is about to protest when you step in.

“Deal, old man,” you grin and shake his hand, as Tony scoffs like a dad that’s about to put his kid in place in front of all the other adults.

“Just you wait, kiddo.”

If this had been Pictionary or hell even charades, Steve was sure he could hope his own but this was about things he was still catching up on and Tony was a walking pop culture machine. Rhodey, as Tony’s best friend, held his own as well went it came to these types of questions, but Steve couldn’t even help you unless it was some strange trivia about the 40’s or himself (like knowing entire chorus of Star Spangled Man with a Plan). But, damn did you handle yourself well, if Tony’s expertise laid in the 80’s and early 90’s, you owned the late 90’s and 00’s. It was the only your team managed to stay in step with Tony.

“Finish and name the singer of this 2000’s song: I don't wanna be stuck up in this cold, cold world. Don't wanna mess this up, better keep your eye on me girl,” Bucky questions as he tries his hardest not to roll his eyes, as you get up off the couch and press the red button.

“I’m so cold, I’m so cold,” you grin as Bucky shakes his head, as Steve tries not to laugh, “Ice Box by Omarion.“

“Did you actually listen to this?” the former Winter Soldier questions in disdain.

“That was my jam in the club, Ice Box,”  you declare with a light laugh, as Tony laughs in the background. Steve just shakes his head, as said freezer geezer moves the game forward.

The game keeps going  until both teams are tied and there is one card left. Tony and Rhodey are eager to answer, as Bucky starts with the last question, “What is considered the powerhouse of the cell?”

The wording seems to catch Tony and Rhodey off guard as they talk it about amongst themselves, but you’re all ready to push the button, if only Steve  wasn’t holding you back with his hand over yours. You frown as he starts talking.  

“Listen, I just don’t want you losing and having to…” Steve starts, as you giggle before squeezing his hand and leaning in a bit more than what friends should.  

“You don’t want me kissing anybody else, huh?” you grin as the slight red flush covers his face, “Listen, when we win,  I’ll kiss your face silly.”

He nods and as you grin at him. Steve gets that reference. He remembers Sam showing him that strange “meme” the other day.

“The Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell!”  he yells after suddenly pushing the red button, as both Rhodey and Tony look at him in a mix of horror and confusion, while you can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the one thing he seems to know.

“That is….correct!” Bucky declares in amazement but with a silly grin on his face, “Stevie and his powerhouse are the winners!”

Tony calls bs, as he goes over to look at the card as you’re jumping around and yelling out “winning”. You grin at the blond before he pulls you down and presses his lips softly on yours, ready to pull away quickly, but your hands on his cheeks make the kiss last longer as he sighs softly at the moment he seems to have been waiting forever for.  

“Guess you’re the only one I’m kissing silly now, huh?” you asks after pulling away from a moment.

“Definitely,” he sighs before bringing you in close again.

The fighting stops as a chorus of FINALLY rings throughout the living room. Because maybe sometimes, you had to lose a couple of battles to win the war in the end.  

[lunapaper]

Album Review - The Nasty Tape’ - Nasty Boi

Lil Bobby used to be a good boi. Together with his brother Nathan and girlfriend Jordanne Leigh, he earned thousands of views on YouTube as a film critic-cum-pop culture commentator as well as showing off his own original work. Hell, even I became a fan after watching his hilarious review of God’s Not Dead 2.

And then, something terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible happened.

With big city dreams in that scraggly lil head of his, Bobby decided to use his YouTuber Manipulation video as a playbook instead and headed to LA with his ~skwad~ (sans Nathan). He tried collaborating with YouTube OG Shane Dawson, ‘confronting’ him after Burns criticised Dawson in a video regarding conspiracy theories (which many saw as a stunt). Then Shane gave Bobby a car. Then the collabs suddenly stopped for reasons that still haven’t been fully addressed, though a lie detector test did confirm he was only using Shane for views. Bobby then reinvented himself as a vlogger, flexing harder than RiceGum at a Supreme 50% off sale as he smoked blunts, perfected his Marilyn Manson cosplay, partied, spent up big on designer clothes, got tattoos in tribute to XXXTentacion and smoked more blunts, as well as suffering a mental breakdown and coming out as bisexual. Disillusioned viewers unsubscribed in droves.

Adorkable Jordanne, meanwhile, did a total teen movie montage, taking off her glasses and undoing her ponytail to transform into… a part-time Instagram model? A vlogger? I’m not sure. She also likes telling everyone how much she loves weed. Loves it. Did you know Jordanne loves weed, guys? #420blazeitlol. Cue obligatory Smoke Weed Everyday memes…

And thus, Bobby Burns has now transformed into Bobby Burns 5.0: The Clout Monster, or the ‘personified version of his worst fears’ known as Nasty Boi (dance, dance, dance!) ‘cos you know what this world needs? Another jaded Soundcloud rapper/walking meme that sadgirls can claim ownership of in their Twitter bios as their ‘smol emo boi,’ that’s what (Or as Burns refers to himself in his YouTube bio, a ‘cute boy’ who’s also a ‘paradoxical enigma’ – though he quickly assures ‘no one needs that pretentious of a label’). 

And yet, The Nasty Tape is as dull and transparent as any Bobby Burns 5.0 stunt. ‘The Slime’ oozes with contempt, opening with a warped spoken word before Middle Eastern rhythms give way to thudding trap bass as Burns brands himself a sellout in some half-hearted attempt to assure fans he’s not serious (but he totally is). ‘Welcome To Hell’ sees Burns pitch-correct his voice in an effort to sound ‘menacing,’ I Love You (x2)’ has no love for… well, anyone, backed by those fucking stuttering beats you hear in every fucking trap song as Burns ‘come[s] back with a gun on my hip,’ envisioning himself as a school shooter ‘cos Lil Bobby is nothing if not the edgiest of lords, while ‘LEMONADE!!!’ samples audio from the infamous Lemon Stealing Whores porno for extra meme-age.

‘Live From The Crypt (Nightmare),’ on the other hand, evokes lovely images of ‘midgets on a pogo stick’ and a bitch whose ‘ugly as fuck,’ ‘missing half her teeth’ and ‘piss[es] in her sleep,‘ like Eminem circa 2000 when rapping about midgets on pogo sticks and ugly as fuck bitches who piss in their sleep still meant something, dammit. It’s kinda like a horrorcore 12 Days of Christmas, except Christmas is dead and there’s six dick suckers sucking dick under the tree instead of that Nintendo Switch you wanted. At least Bobby admits he’s a fraud on this track, so there’s that.

As the shallowness of The Nasty Tape proves, Bobby is not an enigma. He’s not even a maze on the back of a fucking cereal box. From listening to SUICIDEBOY$ once to committing career suicide, I pray, being the movie buff he is (or was?), this is just Bobby pulling a Joaquin Phoenix a la’ I’m Still Here, trolling the YouTube world with his rap career until ‘lol j/k!’ a year from now before introducing us to Bobby Burns 6.0, 7.0, 8.0... The Nasty Tape marks the sad decline of a once-promising talent, nothing more than the tired, self-indulgent ‘rebellion’ of a sheltered small-town boy dying to be recognised by the cool kids. It’s the sound of selling out, and hard. 

Above all else, Nasty Boi’s debut represents the kind of ugliness that permeates throughout YouTube, Instagram and the like, with many ‘influencers’ thinking they’re entitled to an unholy amount of fame, fortune and tacky merchandise just for churning out low-quality content. Nah, man. You’re not that special. We don’t owe you shit. 

The thirst for clout isn’t worth this much embarrassment no matter how ‘fake’ your persona is...

- Bianca B.

[saintpuffy]

@papa-uma-ma tagged me, so sweet!

rules: answer the questions and tag 20 blogs to get to know them better

nickname: Puffy, Poofy, Kaizerina, Kase, Kassandra (not my real name), Chomper, Smacker, a golden retriever

gender: ♀️

star sign: Virgo Sun, Leo Moon

height: 5′9.5″

time: 4:54 PM

birthday: September 15th

favorite bands: Hole, Daft Punk, Kero Kero Bonito, Scissor Sisters, ELO, Queen, Justice, C2C, Spice Girls, Die Antwoord, Nero

favorite solo artists: Bjork, Iglooghost, Kim Petras, Sia, Sophie, Allie X, Grimes, Poppy, Tove Lo, Brooke Candy, Mystery Skulls, Sigrid, Lady Gaga, Marina and the Diamonds, Lana Del Rey, Florence and the Machine, Sky Ferreira, Kerli, Kreayshawn, Kitty, Madeon

song stuck in my head: September - Earth, Wind & Fire

last movie i watched: The Killing of a Sacred Deer

last show i watched: Dragula

when did i create my blog: 2012, i think

what do i post: mostly The Aesthetique™, color-wise it’s a lot of white and pastels (especially pink), content-wise it ranges from angelic, witchy, fantasy, haute couture, creepy, cutesy, i really like contrasting elements, prim/punk, angelic/goth, cyber/witch, etc.

i also reblog a lot of funny text posts

occasionally nsfw, but never anything graphic, especially when it comes to gore, i use this blog to really soothe myself a lot

i designed it to be a window into my soul, as cheesy as that sounds

last thing i googled: “iphigenia adah” because i watched the Killing of a Sacred Deer which is inspired by the Greek myth of Iphigenia and I wondered if there was any connection to the Biblical Adah

do you have any other blogs: only a few

@kekett is my informal blog for memes and a darker more disturbing aesthetic, i’m actually really proud of it and it’s another interesting side to my personality (it has like zero followers though lol)

@valkywitch is mostly used for cataloging references for drawing or design ideas or historical fashion and trivia that inspires me for the novels i want to eventually write

it’s also a fandom blog, a really random one too, mostly for Sailor Moon but Final Fantasy and Riverdale pop up a lot, among others

@occultpop is a project i’ve been meaning to really launch, basically i want to document and detail all the occult and mind control references that can be found in media and pop culture, especially ones i’ve never seen addressed before like Sailor Moon which i’ve drafted posts for

it’s all in good fun, if anyone has any pop culture ideas for what else i should cover just send asks there or here on my main blog

do you get asks: occasionally, usually guys flirting because of my selfies lol

one time there was someone in my asks calling me antisemitic because I pointed out the overwhelmingly pagan elements of Easter ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

why did you choose your url: i don’t remember what it was originally, but it used to be Puffy-the-Werewolf-Layer which i always found cute and hilarious because i’m a Buffy fan and have loved werewolves since i was little

but after a while i found it too porny-sounding so i changed it to Saint-Puffy, because saints fascinate me and i wouldn’t mind becoming one

in retrospect St. Vincent probably helped inspire the choice, she’s amazing

i got the irl nickname of Puffy years ago and it perfectly encapsulates me for various reasons 

(i love when people try to guess the context for me being named it)

following blogs: 3,095

i like a wide variety

favorite colors: white, silver, pink, holographic, pastels, denim, fringe, black 

average hours of sleep: very unstable circadian rhythm, usually like 12 at a time i think because i stay up for a couple days before crashing usually

lucky number: 11, 999, 3

instruments: knees, mouth, hands

what am i wearing: denim bustier, Kardashian ripped jeans (because i am extra af, even when lounging around)

how many blankets do I sleep with: i have two blankets and a sheet on my futon, lately i’ve been using all three but usually it’s just a light blanket and a sheet

dream job: novelist and artist

dream trip: a European tour

favorite food: Unakyu sushi

nationality: American

favorite song now: can’t pick just one lol, Little Dark Age - MGMT, When I Rule the World - LIZ, Ponyboy - Sophie

I tag my most recent mutuals! @la-nerveuxfille @goghless @laurynlawler @holisticsapphic @elysianmoonglade @hvwll @ourfoundingliars @reliquarii @ditzy-dreamerr @lighght @ermendrud @defaneges @pincurls-and-handcuffs @marshmallowmblog @mormeth @thesigilist @del-rey-queen @misslovebun @zielonemorze @unatristezafrecuente

[muzakmaker]

Madeon Achieved Fame Through Copyright Infringement, And That’s Okay.

Hugo Pierre Leclercq is a French Producer, DJ, and Singer-Songwriter and just generally a typical EDM artist. Better known by his stage name Madeon. While he had some prominence in the EDM community, winning some remix competitions, Leclercq started his rise to fame when he released a 39-song mashup/song (the two will be used interchangeably in this case) known as Pop Culture. The song was created live online on a 64-button drum pad (also called a launchpad, the name brand) from samples of various popular songs, all of which, according to my research, were at least popular in France and parts of Europe if not also more globally including the United States. The genres and styles of the artists included are widespread. There’s safer, poppier pieces from all eras including Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Katy Perry while also using rock artists like Linkin Park and Coldplay and Hip-Hop and R&B Artists like Gorillaz and the Black Eyed Peas. Even more interesting, Madeon also included samples from his fellow EDM artists, using Deadmau5 tracks and other artists’ remixes of popular tracks. To top it all off, Madeon sampled himself using his own remixes of Deadmau5’s Raise Your Weapon and Yelle’s Que Veux Tu. Madeon’s masterful blending of all the different sounds of these artists and producers into something entirely new and cohesive is a testament to his skill as an artist. This high level of skill coupled with the popularity of songs created an entirely unique listening experience that employs juxtaposition and pure joy which then pushed Madeon and his mashup into the spotlight and launched his career even when copyright and royalty restrictions kept the song confined to the Internet.

Song Breakdown

The song first opens with a short sample that neither I nor Whosampled.com can seem to identify, it is played first forwards, then backwards, then forwards again. Then the opening hard-cuts to several openings combined, the main two being the now “meme-song” Bag Raiders’ Shooting Stars’ simple snap pattern of an opening and a sped up version of the piano opening to Capsule’s Can I Have a Word, then jumping into the one of the primary beats of the song. This core loop is a little long and kind of strange to describe, For the sake of time, I will refer to the first part as the “Around the World” section, as its main hook before it repeats is a sample of Daft Punk’s Around the World. This section appears throughout the song and changes slightly every time to add a little flair for this live performance. After a few trips around the world (pun intended) we get the first taste of some cohesive theme lyrically to the seemingly random mish-mash of pieces. Madeon Plays the “Missing you” hook of of One-T + Cool-T’s The Magic Key

After that, the majority of the music drops out and leaves the listener floating while Madeon throws in the chorus of Boys & Girls by Martin Solveig, using this chorus brings the overall song sound closer to a remix rather than a mashup but the prevalence of other songs makes the song’s qualities as a mashup much more apparent.

After two repetitions of the line, it does one last one while building back up to jump back into the Around the World loop, again slightly changing every time. The song then drops out again, this time using a slightly modified version of The Who’s Baba O'Riley and begins another build up. First starting with the opening lines to Madonna’s Hung Up, her lines talking on the passage of time over the subtle sound of a ticking clock coupled with the floaty feeling of the song give a Sci-Fi time-travel type of sound. This is then followed by even more buildup from the “Missing you hook” again and vocals from Gossip’s Heavy Cross. Then the real drop for the song comes in with possibly the only part that is completely original to Madeon. He wails away on a synth he plays on the same launchpad. As stated before, this solo is the only completely new composition Madeon has in this song. Lastly, the song fades out in a way very similar, but, as usual, not quite the same as fade in from the beginning.

    A technical breakdown is all well and good, but what does it all mean? The truth is, Pop Culture does not have much, if any, deeper meaning to it. One could make an argument that Pop Culture was created as a critique of mainstream music by taking the typical pop sound and transforming into a EDM banger but that poppy influence is still very prevalent in the song, youredm.com went so far as to call the song “sweet, sugary, bubblegum ear candy.” It is also important to mention that EDM was arguably on the cusp of being mainstream or being very much in the mainstream by time Pop Culture was released in 2011. My evidence in the lack of Pop Culture’s meaning is rather strange: a lack of mainstream evidence. Basically every article I’ve found on Pop Culture is a more or less a puff piece that boils down to “Hey, check this out.” or just lists the songs samples and reminisces on its release nearly seven years ago now. Pop Culture is very much about having fun and just enjoying yourself. It uses its juxtaposition of very thick and very thin textures to give the listener distinct rises and falls to sway and dance to and keeps most of the parts on the line between predictable and random so the audience can keep up but remain surprised. The reception of this song on youtube and other forums is much better evidence of this song’s significance and impact. I have three youtube videos that show how the Internet Community latched onto the song to give it more depth. The first being the unofficial music video for the song:

Released a couple years after Pop Culture, This video is visually very interesting and, more importantly, helps to illustrate just how many songs that Madeon used. By splicing together the music videos of every song that is present in Pop Culture’s aural foreground (i.e. the pieces that are easier to hear, lyrics, riffs, and hooks as compared to just beats.) This splicing adds to Madeon’s already choppy and contrasting styles. The song that truly brought the song into the spotlight is Nathan Barnatt’s dance video to the song.

Being released soon after original Live Mashup video, this video pushed Pop Culture into the spotlight and it exemplifies the pure fun of Pop Culture in addition to bringing in EDM culture’s general love of self expression and just letting go. By depicting a rather plain guy just dancing in a wide variety of locales, the video also illustrates Madeon’s love of juxtaposition. Barnatt’s carefree attitude of just dancing wherever he pleases coupled with the occasional person in the background joining in really illustrates the song’s poppy fun aspects and self expression. Compounding on that, the moment right before the synth solo, where our protagonist thinks he’s about to be ridiculed and alienated. by deviating from the norm is instead embraced and internet illustrator Jenny Fine joins in on Nathan’s fun.

The last video I have to show is a bit of a left turn from the last two. It still shows Pop Culture’s two main elements of pure fun and contrast but in a different way. This video is titled Fan.tasia and is a modern take on Disney’s Fantasia set to Pop Culture.

This video is technically part of a broader class of youtube culture known as AMV’s or animated music videos, the majority of other AMV’s typically use clips from Anime, hence why you may often see the “A” stand for anime instead of animated. Fant.asia is what introduced me to Madeon’s song and his work in the first place. The exemplary video editing greatly adds to the song but in a different way from the other two. Fan.tasia typically uses much smoother cuts and transitions than Barnatt’s or the spliced-together music video. The juxtaposition instead lies in the wide variety of clips across Disney’s decades-long catalog and using scenes from Disney’s many musicals in a different context played against a style of music very different from the source material. The video content absolutely drips with childhood joy and nostalgia which is adds to Madeon’s music choices that themselves are fairly nostalgic by time Fan.tasia was released in 2016.

The three videos above illustrate just how much of an impact the song had in the Internet sphere but that begs the question: “Why on earth didn’t such a massive hit get more mainstream attention?” The unfortunate answer to that is never expressly said but seems rather apparent with enough thought, copyright infringement. A 39-song mashup most definitely infringes upon the copyrights of every song involved. Especially the more prominent songs like Magic key and Boys & Girls which are very much the standing dead center of the song. The inherently illegal nature of the song is potentially also the reason why the song got very little mainstream media attention outside of EDM news sites. Fortunately for Madeon, he still got several offers from record labels as a result of the song and the song is protected on the internet under fair use rules but likely cannot be released on a mainstream music platform, be it physical or digital, but that doesn’t matter. Pop Culture will remain in the digital consciousness for years to come through its creative editing, its unique fan-made videos and through the pure raw joy that it represents. That is the reason why I think that this song is a significant work and why I chose it to write for this project.

[thesoftkitty42]

I’m posting original content???

Hey there friends. So, I never actually post anything on my blog, but I wrote this for my Creative Writing class and I thought that people might like it, so I’m gonna share it with y’alls. Basically we had to write a How-To article, so I wrote one about How to be Emo. It’s really long and really stupid but it’s still kind of entertaining. Here it is lol

How to Become a MySpace Ready Emo God/Goddess Overnight in 5 Easy Steps: Welcoming yourself to the Black Parade

By Grace Burns  Feb. 7, 2018

You know that feeling when you log on to the oh-so-popular website, MySpace.com and you see a super cool, badass, edgy emo queen on your feed, and then you look at your sad, boring, “normal” profile and it just looks lame in comparison? And then you start to think of how cool you would look if you attempted to take sick pictures at that same awesome angle, but when you try you just look like dumbass? Well, I’m here to teach you exactly what steps you can take to become the saddest, baddest, raddest emo of your nightmares.

1 Wardrobe is Everything

Alright, first things first. You can’t have that MySpace fame unless you look the part. You need to start off this journey with a trip to every emo’s favorite place on Earth (other than Warped Tour) Hot Topic. Hot Topic is a safe haven for our kind, housing all the band merch and aesthetically pleasing accessories that you could only dream up in your head. As you walk into the shop, notice the music they’re blasting through the speakers? If you recognize the song, dance along to the music in the store. This is an easy way to make a friend if you both happen to be rocking out to the same artist. Your first stop should be the jeans section. They’re all black skinny jeans, so you better get used to having all your leg fat squeezed into your body. But, you do have the option of whether or not you want jeans with or without rips in them. This will all depend on the aesthetic you are trying to achieve. For someone who is just transitioning to the emo lifestyle, I would suggest starting slow and steady and picking out some plain black skinny jeans without any rips in them. After you grab your bottoms, it’s time to consider the tops. Hot Topic has a cornucopia of band shirts at their disposal, so you have a lot to choose from. Again, I’d suggest starting off easy by picking a shirt from a more popular emo band, preferably something from the holy emo trinity, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! At the Disco, and then as you continue your transition you can start branching off into other bands. The last essential part of your wardrobe is the accessories. Chokers, studded belts, and lots of piercings are all good choices. And you can always get fake piercings to try things out before you commit to piercing lots of holes in your body. The last part of your clothing look is shoes. There are a few different options here. You could go with Vans or Converse, but many debate over which shoe encompasses the emo look more effectively, so to be safe I would go with a classic pair of combat boots. You can never go wrong with combat boots.

2 Hair and Makeup

The next step in becoming the emo nightmare you’ve been dreaming up is the hair and makeup. This goes hand in hand with your clothing and helps complete the whole look. The first thing to change is your hair. If you have soft, wavy, shiny hair, that is the first to go. Your hair needs to look like it’s been beat to shit, much like you have been beaten by your emotions over the years. Do you have bangs? No? Get bangs, they help block out the haters. Is your hair black? If not, you should probably dye it. And of course you need to buy a hair straightener so you can destroy your hair even further. If you aren’t experiencing long-term hair damage, you aren’t doing it right. Now, onto the makeup. Firstly, foundation. You need to make your skin look as dead inside as you feel. Buy a foundation a shade or so lighter than you normally would, and apply to the face and set with a powder. While your pale complexion is essential, your most important tool is and always will be your eyeliner. Eyeliner is what blinds you from the world’s sorrows. It is what gets you into character. Eyeliner is the single most important part of your emo look. Here’s how to apply it:  

Grab a pencil or gel eyeliner from your local makeup store (you could even grab eyeliner from Hot Topic)

Apply along upper and lower lash line, making the lines fairly thick.

Smudge eyeliner to perfection

If you need extra tips or inspiration, look at pictures of pre-hiatus Pete Wentz, as he is the unofficial king of emo.

You could just leave your eye makeup as is, or you could take it one step further by adding eyeshadow. You could go for a dark black that matches your soul, or you could do a classic emo eyeshadow color, red. Emo God Frank Iero was famous for his red eyeshadow during My Chem’s “Revenge Era”. This era should be the inspiration for a great deal of your aesthetic. To apply the eyeshadow, all you need to do is take a fluffy eye brush, dip it in the shadow, and sweep/swirl the makeup all over your lid, almost touching the brow bone, and don’t forget to put some of the eyeshadow along your lower lash line as well. After your eye makeup is complete, add mascara to the lashes to finish it off. Lastly is deciding if you want to wear lipstick or not. Many emos choose not to wear lipstick and tend to leave the lips plain, but times are changing, and of you feel like adorning a color on your lips would complete your look, go for it! A big part of the emo mentality is expressing yourself and being who you are free of judgement. You could easily sport a sexy red or black lipstick, or if you dye your hair a fun teal color, you could pick up a matching lipstick from your local Hot Topic.

3 Music

The single most important part of becoming an emo is listening to the right music. The bands that you choose to listen to will be like a safety net. They will comfort you in times of need. The most important bands to listen to are, of course, the three bands that make up the holy emo trinity of music. Chances are you have probably heard the chart topping music created by My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! At the Disco on the radio over the years. Fans of these bands, myself included, have claimed that these artists have saved their lives with their music and their words. You must listen to all of their music like it is your religion, and slowly it will become your religion. You must obsess over these bands and their members. Gerard Way is your inspiration and reason that you are not afraid to keep on living, Patrick Stump is the small adorable man with the kindest words that make you feel better on a bad day, Brendon Urie is a talented man with lots of advice on how to deal with your problems. But, the most important thing to remember as you slowly slip into the bandom culture is that every band member is just as important as the others. Fall Out Boy is much more than Pete and Patrick, Joe Trohman and Andy Hurley are just as amazing as their fellow members. The same goes for My Chem, while Gerard and Frank are fantastic people, don’t discredit the utter beauty of Mikey and Ray because they are just as worthy of your praise. When it comes to Panic! At the Disco, even though Brendon rapidly lost all of his members and can’t seem to make anyone stay in the band anymore, don’t forget about those who have fallen from Panic!. Ryan Ross is still an inspiration, and without him we would never have gotten the sheer beauty that is Pretty. Odd. which is debatably the best album Panic! has ever produced. You will listen to this music to the point that you know every last lyric, guitar riff, and drum beat. You will constantly thank God for Esteban and reference every single song on a daily basis. The majority of the things you say are emo references that no one else understands. You will be sad when you stumble upon a phenomenal emo meme on the internet and have no one to share it with. But that’s okay, because you can always cheer yourself up by watching old band interviews and by re-watching the same music videos that you’ve seen countless times before. You will count down the release of new albums, and you will cry when bands decide to call it quits. It will be a rollercoaster of emotions that will slowly consume your life.

4 Attitude

Your attitude is important. If you’re going to try and live that emo lifestyle you crave, you need to have the right attitude. Long gone are your days of cheerful comments and a sunny-disposition. The way you present yourself is a major part of living that dark, gloomy emo life. If you go about talking about pop music, or things that the general public find enjoyable, you will never be able to pull off being emo. You need to walk about as if you are dying inside, and present yourself as a self deprecating, pessimistic,  depressing person that brings the mood down in social situations. If you are the token emo in your friend group, you have to try and convert your friends into the lifestyle. Start by getting them into newer Panic! At the Disco and Fall Out Boy songs which are more pop punk than they are traditional emo, especially compared with their earlier works. Once you butter them up with the more modern and radio playable songs, slowly start introducing them to older songs and see if they like it. If they do, you’ve got em. It’s only a short time before they too are emo with you. Along with converting your friends, you just need to talk about emo things nonstop to the point where your friends either need to convert, or they are constantly annoyed by your antics. If you go a whole day without mentioning the new Fall Out Boy album, are you really a fan? If you don’t own merch from every era of My Chemical Romance, can you even call yourself emo? You need to make sure that you have the right mentality, or you will never be able to be a true emo. Another important thing is making sure you have the right tools to protect yourself from harm. Haters are everywhere, and you can fend them off by just blowing them off, or you could spit a bunch of facts about why the emo culture is very important to you and many others.

5 Actually Becoming Emo

Last but not least, an essential step is actually becoming emo. While you might start off doing this ironically, or just to try something new, you will become trapped in the culture. By researching the bands and listening them to fit in, you will actually begin to become obsessed with them and you will really believe that they are the most wonderful people that God has ever created. The emos will trap you, there is no escaping once you start. Eventually you might buy some clothes will color in them, or some jeans that are a little baggier, and you might lighten up on the eyeliner, but anytime you hear that ear-piercing g note that opens up the song Welcome to the Black Parade, you won’t be able to control yourself and you will probably start getting emotional remembering the good old days. You might open up your closet and see that Hot Topic sweater with the safety pins in the sleeves hidden away behind your favorite top, and all you’ll be able to do is laugh at your old style, but you’ll still secretly love it. And years down the road you’ll drop your kids off at school and turn on the classic rock station. You recognize the song that’s playing, but you can’t quite place what it is, and then you hear the lyrics “Am I more than you bargained for yet?” and you will be taken back to your emo days and you’ll drive home and pull out you old albums and put them on, remembering how this music and lifestyle made you feel. You will always be just a little emo on the inside.