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thecatsaesthetics · 5 years ago

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Round-Up:l Historical Fiction I’ve read in the past 6 months or so…

I wanted to do a round-up, I don’t think I’ve told people here but I got a job last December where I work from 3pm to 11pm as a data processor and I’m not allowed to have my phone or anything on me but an mp3 player. So I’ve been listening to audible books after audible books. So today I’ve going to give you a short round-up of the books I’ve listened to.

Becoming Marie Antoinette by Juliet Grey:

This book centers on the Young Marie Antoinette, through her childhood to her accession to the French Throne. It’s a rather good take on the character of Marie Antoinette, they show how underprepared she was for life at the French Court. How different the Austrian Court was. They showed how Maria Theresa had to fight battle after battle to ensure the alliance took place. The marriage of Louis and Marie was so well done. The author really took her time to slowly build the relationship up and highlight how deep there love for each other became. This book was actually perfect for a historical fiction novel, stuck to the facts, very well researched about the era and had interesting characters. The only issue I had is a series but the rest of the series isn’t available in audiobook format. I hope one day the other two books get narrated and I can listen to them.

The Romanov Empress by C. W. Gortner:

This book centers on Tsarina Maria “Minnie” Feodorovna (mother of Nicholas II), it starts with her sisters in the engagement of the future Edward VII and to WWI and the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. The book closes out on Minnie and her remaining children fleeing to Great Britain.

Now this book was very conflicting for me. The problem I had with this book was the characterization of Alexandra Feodorovna (Nicholas II’s wife). It seems Gortner is of the opinion that Alexandra caused the downfall of the Romanov’s, which frankly just isn’t true. The problem for me is, it could be Gortner doesn’t actually believe this, historically Minnie and Alexandra didn’t get along, the book is written from Minnie’s POV. So it’s natural that there is a lot Alexandra hate, but it also seemed over the top. The book blames Alexandra for Nicholas for celebrating after the Khodynka Tragedy (which literally ensured his poor reputation amongst the people). However, everything I’ve read on the topic indicates it was Nicholas’ uncles that insisted the parties continue. To blame Alexandra for every action Nicholas took is just incredibly unfair and simply not true. Alexandra certainly wasn’t a victim but we really need to let Nicholas II stand on his own. If you’re interested the History of Russian Rulers did amazing podcast episodes on Nicholas and really showed how his own actions led to his demise. Now the positives of this book are it really highlights Minnie’s relationship with her sister Alexandra of Denmark (who was the wife of Edward VII). It also shows how interconnected all the families of the first WWI was. The characterization of Alexander III is spot on, and the love between him and Minnie is incredibly believable. I also loved Alexander II in this book (his good and bad sides). Minnie’s relationship with her sister in law Maria of Mecklenburgh adds spice to the book. They were true frenemies. The book does a great job of taking you back to the late 1800s and into the last hours of Imperial Russia. They also highlight the danger the last Romanovs were truly in and how naïve they were to the challenges they were facing. It also showed how Minnie and Alexander’s parenting came back to bit them. Minnie seems to just face conflict after conflict with all of her children. But it’s also heartbreaking to read her reaction to her sons (not just Nicholas but also her son Michael) and grandchildren were murdered. Not to mention the other children she lost (to illness). Also the death of Alexander III was touching. If you’re interesting in Russian history I would give this a go, but take the Alexandra stuff with a huge grain of salt.

The Queens Vows by C. W. Gortner:

This book centers on Isabel of Castile, going from her childhood to events of 1492. Now I’m going to say this if you’re interested in Gortner as an author you should read this book. Out of the three books I’ve read by him this is the one I believe is most worth your time. His exploration into the character of Isabel is near perfect. While he does have a few inaccuracies (which he mentions at the end of the book) they only add to the story. This book was really able to capture the 1400s for me in a way no other book has to date.

The marriage between Isabel and Ferdinand in this book is extremely well done. You get to see how much they love each other and how troubled the marriage could be. I truly enjoyed the characterization of her brother Henry IV. The weaknesses he had and the struggle between him and Isabel. If you enjoyed the Isabel TV Series this would be a great add on. It’s not exactly the same (Gortner makes it near certain that Isabel’s niece is illegitimate unlike the show) but it’s a perfect add on if you have been craving more since the show ended. I think Gortner handled the Jewish expulsion of 1492 very well. He notes in the back we really don’t know what went through Isabel’s head during that decision, he chose to take one version of it. He also notes how incredibly powerful the idea of damnation was, and that even if Isabel had no personal issues with Jewish people in her realm the overwhelming religious pressure cannot be denied. I agree with him on this point, and while it’s easy for us (in the 21st century) laugh off the idea of damnation in 1492 it was a part of there reality.

The Vatican Princess by C. W. Gortner:

This follows the life of Lucrezia Borgia from the start of her father’s succession to the papacy to her entering her marriage with Alfonso d’Este. This one by Gortner was my least favorite. Like the other two, it was incredibly well researched and it does a great job pulling you back. However, I personally didn’t like the characterizations or the route he chose at times. I’m going to give spoilers for the book FYI so scroll past if you don’t want to know. He took the route of victim Lucrezia, which doesn’t appeal to me very much. Also he had Vannozza dei Cattanei hate her daughter for steal the attention of Rodrigo, it has Giovanni Sforza be an abusive ass who sexually assaults her, it has Rodrigo sending Giulia to sleep with Giovanni Sforza to keep him off Lucrezia (And sleep with Juan as well for some reason), it has her brother Juan rape and impregnate her and he does this because he’s upset Cesare killed his lover Prince Cem and wants to hurt Cesare, has Rodrigo grow to despise Lucrezia for Cesare murdering Juan, Rodrigo allows Cesare to murder Alfonso of Aragon to hurt Lucrezia like he was hurt by Juan’s death, oh also Cesare doesn’t murder Juan for the rape itself it’s more about Juan getting to have Lucrezia “first”, it also has Vannozza upset with Lucrezia for Juan raping her as well, and has Lucrezia end up despising Cesare after the murder of Alfonso of Aragon.

Now I’m not a Borgia expert by any means but the book seems to just be filled with nonsense to me. The only good parts of this book were Sancha of Aragon and Lucrezia’s friendship (WHICH BOTH TV SERIES DENIED ME OF) and Giulia Farnese massively calling out Rodrigo for basically pimping her out. While I find the latter inaccurate it was enjoyable to read Giulia talk about how Rodrigo took her when she was barely more than a child and ruined her. Personally, I’d skip this book it’s really not worth it.

The Accidental Empress and Sisi Empress on Her Own by Allison Pataki:

This follows the life of Empress Sisi of Austria-Hungary from her childhood to her assassination.

This is a series but the two books were read by different people so it didn’t feel like to me. I think all series should have to be read by the same person. To sum it up, the first book is interesting and the second book is a dud.

The first book I enjoyed so much, it follows Sisi from her childhood to the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. It follows her disasters marriage with Emperor Franz Joseph at the age of 15, her struggles with her mother in law, her struggles with postpartum depression, and her romance with the Hungarian Count Andrassy. The first book really makes you feel bad for Sisi, she struggles with a rather cold abusive man who claims to love her (but only really loves her image not her) and her struggle for freedom in the Austrian Court. Sisi is more or less pushed out of Franz Joseph and her children’s life. Franz replaces her with mistresses and her mother in law takes over the role of mother to her children. The book ends on a clear high note (Sisi gaining Hungary proper status in the Empire) and honestly the author should have left it there.

The second book is set after the birth of her final child Valerie (the only child she’s allowed to raise) and to her assassination. The book was a drag, I personally didn’t like the narrator and it took me forever to finish the book. The book makes Sisi incredibly unlikable, it makes it seem more like she abandoned her husband and family rather than being pushed out. The book opens up with Sisi having the opportunity to oversee Crown Prince Rudolf’s (And to have more involvement in his upbringing) but would rather go to Britain to ride horses. She basically is framed as being responsible for his tragedy. The author also ruins the love story she had set up between Andrassy and Sisi (which I had adored in the previous book). Now I understand you have to keep with history but you can’t set up a massive love story in the first book and they tear it down a few chapters in by the second book. The whole second book was a massive let down, I’d reread the first one but not the second one.

The Summer Queen, The Winter Crown, The Autumn Throne, by Elizabeth Chadwick: This book series centers on Eleanor of Aquitaine from childhood to death.

This series was by far one of my favorite reads of 2019. You should really believe the hype about this series, it truly is that good. Now the books span a massive amount of time so I can’t go into everything but it was 1000% worth reading. The books explore the early Medieval World incredibly well. The author takes a highly realistic approach to Eleanor (who at the end of her first novel claims wasn’t a woman ahead of her time but rather a woman of her time) with a few dramatizations. This book series should be picked up for a TV series on Starz, HBO, or Showtime. It has all the material you need to make an epic TV series. I highly enjoyed the exploration of her marriages to both Louis VIII of France and Henry II of England. How different and yet strikingly similar the relationships were. The only slight issue I have is the author does tend to go the route of King John evil, King Richard I good. Which I personally don’t believe is true. However, they do a great job showing that even though Richard is Eleanor’s favorite she does love John. Again the books take a highly realistic approach to Eleanor so the author more or less stays away from all the rumors about her (with the expectation of one which I find to add more to the series rather than take away). This is a must-read series, and I can only hope Elizabeth Chadwick will write more series like this. I also hope one day a TV network picks up the novels to adapt.

House of Rejoicing (Part 1), Storm in the Sky (Part 2), Eater of Hearts (Part 3) (The Book of Coming Forth by Day Series) by Libbie Hawker: These books have multiple points of view (GRRM style) set in Ancient Egypt during the Amarna Era. Starting at the end of Amenhotep III and to the death of King Tut. The POVs range from Kiya, Nefertiti, Tiye, Sitamun, Beketaten, Horemheb, Meritaten, and Ankhesenpaaten (I might have missed some but idk). This series is not for the light of heart, the books include rape, incest, pedophilia, violence against women, etc. I mean this book series is just a lot to take in. The author goes down the route that Akhenaten was an abusive pedophile screwing every barely 13-year-old girl he could get his hands on (his daughters, sisters, sister in law etc). The concept of this series was excellent. A multi-narrative series set in Ancient Egypt, however, the series just misses the mark. I feel like Hawker wanted this to be the ASOIAF of Ancient Egypt novels but couldn’t commit. One of the biggest writing issues I had with this was how short the books were for A. the number of POVs we had, and B. for the span of time we went through. I think this series would have benefited from more books and longer novels. The author also tries to dive into the misogyny and how it affected women. However again she just misses the mark somehow. I could see what she was attempting but it just never got there if you know what I mean. I think this series feels more a draft than a finished product. Also, the plot is a jumbled mess. Now it’s Ancient Egypt you can really do anything (especially with the Amarna era) but this series was so out there… and I’ve read Philippa Gregory. Some of the things that happened nearly had me bursting out laughing at work. I really can’t get into all craziness of this series but it’s a lot just trust me. Like I said Akhenaten is a pedophile (actually a lot of the men were) in this book, which idk I don’t feel comfortable with how all of the problematic stuff was handled. The first book was the best book of the series and the last two are really where the craziness begins. But truly I would skip this series unless you up for hours of nonsense and craziness.

#book round up #historical fiction #personal #long post

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makistar2018 · 5 years ago

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Taylor Swift on Sexism, Scrutiny, and Standing Up for Herself

AUGUST 8, 2019 By ABBY AGUIRRE Photographed by INEZ AND VINOODH

Cover Look Taylor Swift wears a Louis Vuitton jumpsuit. Rings by Cartier and Bvlgari. To get this look, try: Dream Urban Cover in Classic Ivory, Fit Me Blush in Pink, Tattoostudio Sharpenable Gel Pencil Longwear Eyeliner Makeup in Deep Onyx, The Colossal Mascara, Brow Ultra Slim in Blonde, and Shine Compulsion by Color Sensational Lipstick in Undressed Pink. All by Maybelline New York. Hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman

Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in Tribeca, and I’m in Taylor Swift’s loft, inside a former printing house that she has restored and fortified into a sanctuary of brick, velvet, and mahogany. The space is warm and cozy and vaguely literary—later, when we pass through her bedroom en route to her garden, 10 percent of my brain will believe her wardrobe might open up to Narnia. Barefoot in a wine-colored floral top and matching flowy pants, Swift is typing passwords into a laptop to show me the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” eight days before she unleashes it on the world.

I have a sliver of an idea what to expect. A few weeks earlier, I spent a day at the video shoot, in a dusty field-slash-junkyard north of Los Angeles. Swift had made it a sort of Big Gay Candy Mountain trailer park, a Technicolor happy place. The cast and crew wore heart-shaped sunglasses—living, breathing lovey-eyes emoji—and a mailbox warned, LOVE LETTERS ONLY.

Swift and a stream of costars filmed six scenes over about a dozen hours. The singer-songwriter Hayley Kiyoko, known to her fans as “Lesbian Jesus,” shot arrows at a bull’s-eye. The YouTube comedian-chef Hannah Hart danced alongside Dexter Mayfield, the plus-size male model and self-described “big boy in heels.” The Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon served up icy red snow cones. Swift and her close friend Todrick Hall, of Kinky Boots and RuPaul’s Drag Race, sipped tea with the cast of Queer Eye.

Speak Now “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” Swift says. Celine coat. Dior shoes. Fashion Editor: Tonne Goodman. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

The mood was joyous and laid-back. But by the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what the vignettes would add up to. There were shoot days and cameos I wouldn’t observe. For security reasons, the song was never played aloud. (The cast wore ear buds.) Even the hero shot, in which Swift and Hall sauntered arm in arm through the dreamscape at golden hour, was filmed in near-total silence.

For weeks afterward, I tried to sleuth out a theory. I started casually. There was a “5” on the bull’s-eye, so I did a quick search to figure out what that number might mean. Immediately I was in over my head.

Swift has a thing for symbols. I knew she had been embedding secret messages in liner notes and deploying metaphors as refrains since her self-titled debut in 2006—long before her megafame made her into a symbol of pop supremacy. But I hadn’t understood how coded and byzantine her body of work has become; I hadn’t learned, as Swift’s fans have, to see hidden meanings everywhere. For instance: In the 2017 video for “Look What You Made Me Do,” a headstone in a graveyard scene reads NILS SJOBERG, the pseudonym Swift used as her writing credit on Rihanna’s hit “This Is What You Came For,” a Swedish-sounding nod to that country’s pop wizards.

After an excessive amount of ad hoc scholarship—a friend joked that I could have learned Mandarin in the time I spent trying to unpack Swift’s oeuvre—I was no closer to a theory. Pop music has become so layered and meta, but the Taylor Swift Universe stands apart. Apprehending it is like grasping quantum physics.

My first indication of what her new album, Lover, would be about came just after midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. (It has passed the House, but prospects in Mitch McConnell’s Senate are unclear.) Swift also posted a letter to Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead (born in 1989. LOVES CATS.), denounced President Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote.

Back in the kitchen, Swift hits play. “The first verse is about trolls and cancel culture,” she says. “The second verse is about homophobes and the people picketing outside our concerts. The third verse is about successful women being pitted against each other.”

The video is, for erudite Swifties, a rich text. I had followed enough clues to correctly guess some of the other cameos—Ellen DeGeneres, RuPaul, Katy Perry. I felt the satisfaction of a gamer who successfully levels up—achievement unlocked!The video’s final frame sends viewers to Swift’s change.org petition in support of the Equality Act, which has acquired more than 400,000 signatures—including those of Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke, and Kirsten Gillibrand—or four times the number required to elicit an official response from the White House.

“MAYBE A YEAR OR TWO AGO, Todrick and I are in the car, and he asked me, What would you do if your son was gay?”

We are upstairs in Swift’s secret garden, comfortably ensconced in a human-scale basket that is sort of shaped like a cocoon. Swift has brought up an ornate charcuterie board and is happily slathering triple-cream Brie onto sea-salt crackers. “The fact that he had to ask me . . . shocked me and made me realize that I had not made my position clear enough or loud enough,” she says. “If my son was gay, he’d be gay. I don’t understand the question.”

I have pressed Swift on this topic, and her answers have been direct, not performative or scripted. I do sense that she enjoys talking to me about as much as she’d enjoy a root canal—but she’s unfailingly polite, and when we turn to music, her face will light up and she will add little melodic phrases to her speech, clearly her preferred language.

Balancing Act Later this year, Swift will appear in the film adaptation of Cats—as the flirtatious Bombalurina. Givenchy dress. Bracelets by John Hardy, David Yurman, and Hoorsenbuhs. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

“If he was thinking that, I can’t imagine what my fans in the LGBTQ community might be thinking,” she goes on. “It was kind of devastating to realize that I hadn’t been publicly clear about that.”

I understand why she was surprised; she has been sending pro-LGBTQ signals since at least 2011. Many have been subtle, but none insignificant—especially for a young country star coming out of Nashville.

In the video for her single “Mean” (from 2010’s Speak Now), we see a boy in a school locker room wearing a lavender sweater and bow tie, surrounded by football players. In “Welcome to New York,” the first track on 1989, she sings, “And you can want who you want. Boys and boys and girls and girls.” Two years later, she donated to a fund for the newly created Stonewall National Monument and presented Ruby Rose with a GLAAD Media Award. Every night of last year’s Reputation tour, she dedicated the song “Dress” to Loie Fuller, the openly gay pioneer of modern dance and theatrical lighting who captured the imagination of fin-de-siècle Paris.

Swift, who has been criticized for keeping her politics to herself, first took an explicit stance a month before the 2018 midterms. On Instagram, she endorsed Democrats for the Tennessee Legislature and called out the Republican running for Senate, Marsha Blackburn. “She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples,” Swift wrote. “She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.”

Swift says the post was partly to help young fans understand that if they wanted to vote, they had to register. To tell them, as she puts it, “Hey, just so you know, you can’t just roll up.” Some 65,000 new voters registered in the first 24 hours after her post, according to Vote.org.

Trump came to Blackburn’s defense the following day. “She’s a tremendous woman,” he told reporters. “I’m sure Taylor Swift doesn’t know anything about her. Let’s say I like Taylor’s music about 25 percent less now, OK?”

In April, spurred by a raft of anti-LGBTQ bills in Tennessee, Swift donated $113,000 to the Tennessee Equality Project, which advocates for LGBTQ rights. “Horrendous,” she says of the legislation. “They don’t call it ‘Slate of Hate’ for nothing.” Swift especially liked that the Tennessee Equality Project had organized a petition of faith leaders in opposition. “I loved how smart it was to come at it from a religious perspective.”

Meanwhile, the “Calm Down” video provoked a Colorado pastor to call Swift “a sinner in desperate need of a savior” and warn that “God will cut her down.” It also revived heated debate within LGBTQ communities about the politics of allyship and corporatization of Pride. Some critics argued Swift’s pro-LGBTQ imagery and lyrics were overdue and out of the blue—a reaction the new Swift scholar in me found bewildering. Had they not been paying attention?

Nor did it strike me as out of character for Swift to leverage her power for a cause. She pulled her catalog from Spotify in 2014 over questions of artist compensation. She stared down Apple in 2015, when the company said it would not pay artists during the launch of its music service. (Apple reversed itself immediately.) As a condition of her record deal with Universal Music Group last year, the company promised that it would distribute proceeds from any sale of its Spotify shares to all of its artists. And this summer, Swift furiously called out Scott Borchetta, founder of Big Machine Label Group, for selling her master recordings to the music manager Scooter Braun. (When I ask Swift if she tried to get her masters from Big Machine, her whole body slumps with a palpable heaviness. “It was either investing in my past or my and other artists’ future, and I chose the future,” she says of the deal she struck with Universal.)

Swift’s blunt testimony during her 2017 sexual-assault case against a radio DJ—months before the #MeToo reckoning blew open—felt deeply political to me and, I imagine, many other women. Swift accused the DJ, David Mueller, of groping her under her skirt at a photo session in 2013. Her camp reported the incident to his employer, who fired him. Mueller denied the allegation, sued Swift for $3 million, and his case was thrown out. Swift countersued for a symbolic $1 and won.

Watch Taylor Swift Take Over Go Ask Anna:

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In a Colorado courtroom, Swift described the incident: “He stayed latched onto my bare ass cheek” as photos were being snapped. Asked why photos of the front of her skirt didn’t show this, she said, “Because my ass is located at the back of my body.” Asked if she felt bad about the DJ’s losing his job, she said, “I’m not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault. Here we are years later, and I’m being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are the product of his decisions—not mine.”

When Time included Swift on the cover of its “Silence Breakers” issue that year, the magazine asked how she felt during the testimony. “I was angry,” she said. “In that moment, I decided to forgo any courtroom formalities and just answer the questions the way it happened...I’m told it was the most amount of times the word ass has ever been said in Colorado Federal Court.”

Mueller has since paid Swift the dollar—with a Sacagawea coin. “He was trolling me, implying that I was self-righteous and hell-bent on angry, vengeful feminism. That’s what I’m inferring from him giving me a Sacagawea coin,” Swift says. “Hey, maybe he was trying to do it in honor of a powerful Native American woman. I didn’t ask.” Where is the coin now? “My lawyer has it.”

I ask her, why get louder about LGBTQ rights now? “Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she says. “I didn’t realize until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze. Because my mistakes are very loud. When I make a mistake, it echoes through the canyons of the world. It’s clickbait, and it’s a part of my life story, and it’s a part of my career arc.”

I’d argue that no heterosexual woman can listen to “You Need to Calm Down” and hear only a gay anthem. “Calm down” is what controlling men tell women who are angry, contrary, or “hysterical,” or, let’s say, fearing for their physical safety. It is what Panic! at the Disco singer Brendon Urie says to Swift in the beginning of the “ME!” music video, prompting her to scream, “Je suis calme!”

I cannot believe it is a coincidence that Swift, a numbers geek with an affinity for dates, dropped the single—whose slow, incessant bass is likely to be bumping in stadiums across the world in 2020 if she goes on tour—on June 14, a certain president’s birthday.

IT'S ENLIGHTENING to read 13 years of Taylor Swift coverage—all the big reviews, all the big profiles—in one sitting. You notice things.

How quickly Swift went from a “prodigy” (The New Yorker) and a “songwriting savant” (Rolling Stone) to a tabloid fixture, for instance. Or how suspect her ambition is made to seem once she acquires real power.

Other plot points simply look different in the light of #MeToo. It is hard to imagine that Swift’s songs about her exes would be reviewed as sensationally today. I wonder if, in 2019, any man would dare grab the microphone out of a young woman’s hands at an awards show. I stared into space for a good long while when I was reminded that Pitchfork did not review Taylor Swift’s 1989 but did review Ryan Adams’s cover album of Taylor Swift’s 1989.

I ask Swift if she had always been aware of sexism. “I think about this a lot,” she says. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realized that was because I was a kid. Men in the industry saw me as a kid. I was a lanky, scrawny, overexcited young girl who reminded them more of their little niece or their daughter than a successful woman in business or a colleague. The second I became a woman, in people’s perception, was when I started seeing it.

“It’s fine to infantilize a girl’s success and say, How cute that she’s having some hit songs,” she goes on. “How cute that she’s writing songs. But the second it becomes formidable? As soon as I started playing stadiums—when I started to look like a woman—that wasn’t as cool anymore. It was when I started to have songs from Red come out and cross over, like ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ and ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.’ ”

Those songs are also more assertive than the ones that came before, I say. “Yeah, the angle was different when I started saying, I knew you were trouble when you walked in. Basically, you emotionally manipulated me and I didn’t love it. That wasn’t fun for me.”

I have to wonder if having her songwriting overlooked as her hits were picked apart and scrutinized wasn’t the biggest bummer of all. Swift: “I wanted to say to people, You realize writing songs is an art and a craft and not, like, an easy thing to do? Or to do well? People would act like it was a weapon I was using. Like a cheap dirty trick. Be careful, bro, she’ll write a song about you. Don’t stand near her. First of all, that’s not how it works. Second of all, find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he’ll use his experience with you to get—God forbid—inspiration to make art.”

Without question the tenor of the Taylor Swift Narrative changed most dramatically in July 2016, when Kim Kardashian West called her a “snake” on Twitter, and released video clips of Swift and Kanye West discussing the lyrics to his song “Famous.” (No need to rehash the details here. Suffice it to say that Swift’s version of events hasn’t changed: She knew about some of the lyrics but not others; specifically, the words that bitch.) The posts sparked several hashtags, including #TaylorSwiftIsASnake and #TaylorSwiftIsCanceled, which quickly escalated into a months-long campaign to “cancel” Swift.

To this day Swift doesn’t think people grasp the repercussions of that term. “A mass public shaming, with millions of people saying you are quote-unquote canceled, is a very isolating experience,” she says. “I don’t think there are that many people who can actually understand what it’s like to have millions of people hate you very loudly.” She adds: “When you say someone is canceled, it’s not a TV show. It’s a human being. You’re sending mass amounts of messaging to this person to either shut up, disappear, or it could also be perceived as, Kill yourself.”

An overhaul was in order. “I realized I needed to restructure my life because it felt completely out of control,” Swift says. “I knew immediately I needed to make music about it because I knew it was the only way I could survive it. It was the only way I could preserve my mental health and also tell the story of what it’s like to go through something so humiliating.”

State of Grace Dior bodysuit and skirt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I get a sense of the whiplash Swift experienced when I notice that, a few months into this ordeal, while she was writing the songs that would become her album Reputation—and fighting off Mueller’s lawsuit—a portion of the media and internet began demanding to know why she hadn’t un-canceled herself long enough to take a position in the presidential election.

On that: “Unfortunately in the 2016 election you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement. He was going around saying, I’m a man of the people. I’m for you. I care about you. I just knew I wasn’t going to help. Also, you know, the summer before that election, all people were saying was She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar. These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability? Look, snakes of a feather flock together. Look, the two lying women. The two nasty women. Literally millions of people were telling me to disappear. So I disappeared. In many senses.”

Swift previewed Reputation in August 2017 with “Look What You Made Me Do.” The single came with a lyric video whose central image was an ouroboros—a snake swallowing its own tail, an ancient symbol for continual renewal. Swift wiped her social-media feeds clean and began posting video snippets of a slithering snake. The song was pure bombast and high camp. (Lest there be any doubt, the chorus was an interpolation of a ’90s camp classic, Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy.”) Nonetheless, most critics read it as a grenade lobbed in the general direction of Calabasas.

One longtime Nashville critic, Brian Mansfield, had a more plausible take: She was writing sarcastically as the “Taylor Swift” portrayed in the media in a bid for privacy. “Yeah, this is the character you created for me, let me just hide behind it,” she says now of the persona she created. “I always used this metaphor when I was younger. I’d say that with every reinvention, I never wanted to tear down my house. ’Cause I built this house. This house being, metaphorically, my body of work, my songwriting, my music, my catalog, my library. I just wanted to redecorate. I think a lot of people, with Reputation, would have perceived that I had torn down the house. Actually, I just built a bunker around it.”

IN MARCH, the snakes started to morph into butterflies, the vampire color palette into Easter pastels. When a superbloom of wildflowers lured a mesmerizing deluge of Painted Lady butterflies to Los Angeles, Swift marked it with an Instagram post. She attended the iHeartRadio Music Awards that night in a sequin romper and stilettos with shimmery wings attached.

Swift announced the single “ME!” a month later, with a large butterfly mural in Nashville. In the music video for the (conspicuously) bubblegum song, a hissing pastel-pink snake explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies. One flutters by the window of an apartment, where Swift is arguing in French with Urie. A record player is playing in the background. “It’s an old-timey, 1940s-sounding instrumental version of ‘You Need to Calm Down,’ ’’ Swift says. Later, in the “Calm Down” video, Swift wears a (fake) back tattoo of a snake swarmed by butterflies.

We are only two songs in, people. Lover, to be released on August 23, will have a total of 18 songs. “I was compiling ideas for a very long time,” Swift says. “When I started writing, I couldn’t stop.” (We can assume the British actor Joe Alwyn, with whom Swift has been in a relationship for nearly three years, provided some of the inspiration.)

Swift thinks Lover might be her favorite album yet. “There are so many ways in which this album feels like a new beginning,” she says. “This album is really a love letter to love, in all of its maddening, passionate, exciting, enchanting, horrific, tragic, wonderful glory.”

In Focus Swift’s new 18-track album, Lover, will be released August 23. Hermès shirt. Chanel pants. Maximum Henry belt. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

I have to ask Swift, given how genuinely at peace she seems, if part of her isn’t thankful, if not for the Great Cancellation of 2016, then for the person she now is—knowing who her friends are, knowing what’s what. “When you’re going through loss or embarrassment or shame, it’s a grieving process with so many micro emotions in a day. One of the reasons why I didn’t do interviews for Reputationwas that I couldn’t figure out how I felt hour to hour. Sometimes I felt like: All these things taught me something that I never could have learned in a way that didn’t hurt as much. Five minutes later, I’d feel like: That was horrible. Why did that have to happen? What am I supposed to take from this other than mass amounts of humiliation? And then five minutes later I’d think: I think I might be happier than I’ve ever been.”

She goes on: “It’s so strange trying to be self-aware when you’ve been cast as this always smiling, always happy ‘America’s sweetheart’ thing, and then having that taken away and realizing that it’s actually a great thing that it was taken away, because that’s extremely limiting.” Swift leans back in the cocoon and smiles: “We’re not going to go straight to gratitude with it. Ever. But we’re going to find positive aspects to it. We’re never going to write a thank-you note.”

Though people will take the Perry-Swift burger-and-fries embrace in the “You Need to Calm Down” video as a press release that the two have mended fences, Swift says it’s actually a comment on how the media pits female pop stars against one another. After Perry sent Swift an (actual) olive branch last year, Swift asked her to be in the video: “She wrote back, This makes me so emotional. I’m so up for this. I want us to be that example. But let’s spend some time together. Because I want it to be real. So she came over and we talked for hours.

“We decided the metaphor for what happens in the media,” Swift explains, “is they pick two people and it’s like they’re pouring gasoline all over the floor. All that needs to happen is one false move, one false word, one misunderstanding, and a match is lit and dropped. That’s what happened with us. It was: Who’s better? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? Katy or Taylor? The tension is so high that it becomes impossible for you to not think that the other person has something against you."

Meanwhile, the protesters in the video reference a real-life religious group that pickets outside Swift’s concerts, not the white working class in general, as some have assumed. “So many artists have them at their shows, and it’s such a confounding, confusing, infuriating thing to have outside of joyful concerts,” she tells me. “Obviously I don’t want to mention the actual entity, because they would get excited about that. Giving them press is not on my list of priorities.”

At one point, Swift asks if I would like to hear two other songs off the new album. (Duh.) First she plays “Lover,” the title track, coproduced by Jack Antonoff. “This has one of my favorite bridges,” she says. “I love a bridge, and I was really able to go to Bridge City.” It’s a romantic, haunting, waltzy, singer-songwritery nugget: classic Swift. “My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue,” she sings. “All’s well that ends well to end up with you.”

Next, Swift cues up a track that “plays with the idea of perception.” She has often wondered how she would be written and spoken about if she were a man, “so I wrote a song called ‘The Man.’ ” It’s a thought experiment of sorts: “If I had made all the same choices, all the same mistakes, all the same accomplishments, how would it read?” Seconds later, Swift’s earpods are pumping a synth-pop earworm into my head: “I’d be a fearless leader. I’d be an alpha type. When everyone believes ya: What’s that like?”

Swift wrote the first two singles with Joel Little, best known as one of Lorde’s go-to producers. (“From a pop-songwriting point of view, she’s the pinnacle,” Little says of Swift.) The album is likely to include more marquee names. A portrait of the Dixie Chicks in the background of the “ME!” video almost certainly portends a collaboration. If fans are correctly reading a button affixed to her denim jacket in a recent magazine cover, we can expect one with Drake, too.

Eyes On Her Designer Stella McCartney on her friendship with Swift: “In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” Stella McCartney coat. In this story: hair, Christiaan; makeup, Fulvia Farolfi. Photographed by Inez & Vinoodh, Vogue, September 2019

She recently announced a fashion collection with Stella McCartney to coincide with Lover. “We met at one of her shows,” says McCartney, “and then we had a girls’ night and kind of jumped straight in. In London we’ll go on walks and talk about everything—life and love.” (Swift has no further fashion ambitions at the moment. “I really love my job right now,” she tells me. “My focus is on music.”) Oh, and that “5” on the bullseye? Track five is called “The Archer.”

Yet something tells me the most illuminating clue for reading both Lover and Reputation may be Loie Fuller, the dancer to whom Swift paid homage on tour. As Swift noted on a Jumbotron, Fuller “fought for artists to own their work.” Fuller also used swirling fabric and colored lights to metamorphose onstage, playing a “hide-and-seek illusionist game” with her audience, as one writer has put it. She became a muse to the Symbolists in Paris, where Jean Cocteau wrote that she created “the phantom of an era.” The effect, said the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, was a “dizziness of soul made visible by an artifice.” Fuller’s most famous piece was “Serpentine Dance.” Another was “Butterfly Dance.”

SWIFT HAS HAD almost no downtime since late 2017, but what little she does have is divided among New York, Nashville, Los Angeles, and Rhode Island, where she keeps homes—plus London. In an essay earlier this year, she revealed that her mother, Andrea Swift, is fighting cancer for a second time. “There was a relapse that happened,” Swift says, declining to go into detail. “It’s something that my family is going through.”

Later this year, she will star in a film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Catsas Bombalurina, the flirtatious red cat. “They made us the size of cats by making the furniture bigger,” she says. “You’d be standing there and you could barely reach the seat of a chair. It was phenomenal. It made you feel like a little kid.”

But first, she will spend much of the summer holding “secret sessions”—a tradition wherein Swift invites hundreds of fans to her various homes to preview her new music. “They’ve never given me a reason to stop doing it,” she says. “Not a single one.”

Speaking of: Inquiring fans will want to know if Swift dropped any more clues about how to decode Lover during this interview. For you I reviewed the audio again, and there were a few things that made my newly acquired Swifty sense tingle.

At one point she compared superstardom in the digital age to life in a dollhouse, one where voyeurs “can ‘ship’ you with who they want to ‘ship’ you with, and they can ‘favorite’ friends that you have, and they can know where you are all the time.” The metaphor was precise and vivid and, well, a little too intricately rendered to be off the cuff. (Also, the “ME!” lyric: “Baby doll, when it comes to a lover. I promise that you’ll never find another like me.”)

Then there was the balloon—a giant gold balloon in the shape of a numeral seven that happened to float by while we were on her roof, on this, the occasion of her seventh album. “Is it an L’?” I say. “No, because look, the string is hanging from the bottom,” she says.

It might seem an obvious symbolic gesture, deployed for this interview, except for how impossible that seems. Swift let me control the timing of nearly everything. Moreover, the gold seven wasn’t floating up from the sidewalk below. It was already high in the sky, drifting slowly toward us from down the street. She would have had to control the wind, or at least to have studied it. Would Taylor Swift really go to such elaborate lengths for her fans? This much I know: Yes, she would.

Taylor Swift Talks Googling Herself, Which Celebrity's Closet She'd Raid, and the Bravest Thing She's Ever Done:

youtube

Vogue

#taylor swift #vogue #september #2019 #cover girl

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chuffyfan87 · 5 years ago

Text

It's Not Me Is It? Part 3a

Not a word was spoken as Charlie followed Duffy into the room. He sat down on the edge of the bed and watched as she placed the tray on the desk and pulled out the chair to sit on. Reacting to her continued silence he turned his head to explore the room, his eyes quickly adapting to the low light coming from the lamp on the desk. He smiled softly as his gaze came to rest on his daughter who was snuggled up fast asleep in the bed, her hair falling over her face as she sucked her thumb.

Duffy sipped her tea and watched Charlie. Seeing the way he looked at Charlotte made her heart ache. She hadn't meant to hurt him by keeping it all a secret, she'd just... Well, she didn't know what she'd meant to do really. At first her actions had been propelled by fear but over time it had simply become habit, every passing day making it harder to come clean to him.

"Were you just going to not tell me til she was eighteen and suddenly turned up on my doorstep?" He whispered bitterly.

His tone instantly struck a nerve. "If you've just come to pick a fight then you can bugger off!" She hissed, trying to keep her voice low so as not to wake Charlotte.

"Duffy..." He sighed. "Do you honestly expect me not to be angry about this?"

"So this is all about you is it?" She scoffed, rolling her eyes.

"You saw what I went through when Baz took Louis away and yet you still chose to lie to me."

"What would you have done if I had told you?"

"I would have been there for you and them..." He began.

"You'd have 'done the right thing' you mean?" She interrupted bitterly.

"Yes! But you didn't even give me the chance." He sighed.

"I'm not prepared to be settled for Charlie. You made it quite clear who you wanted and it wasn't me."

Charlie sighed. "I thought you felt it was a mistake. I didn't want to make things worse or more awkward."

"You just left, you didn't really give me chance to say much of anything!" She shot back.

Charlie rubbed at the back of his neck. This wasn't getting them anywhere! An awkward silence fell over them as Duffy ate the toast and finished her tea.

Charlotte rolled over in her sleep but didn't wake up.

"Tell me about her." Charlie whispered, changing the direction of the conversation, his eyes fixed on the little girl once more.

"What do you want to know?" Duffy asked, a small smile pulling at the edge of her lips.

"Everything!" He laughed softly. "What does she like to do? When and where was she born?" There were so many things he wanted to ask but he didn't want it to seem like an inquisition.

"Her birthday is May 5th and she was born in Auckland. She loves looking at picture books and running around at the beach. She has lots of friends at the local playgroup we go to twice a week. She's very kind and thoughtful but can also be so cheeky when she wants to be!" Duffy laughed.

"That doesn't surprise me!" Charlie chuckled. "Is she the reason you left Cambodia and went back to New Zealand?"

Duffy nodded. "After what happened with Paul I knew it wouldn't be a good idea to give birth in Cambodia. I originally planned to go back afterwards but the boys were beginning to hate being in Thailand so I made the decision to stay in Auckland and make occasional visits back to the clinic when I could."

"She's a well travelled little lady then?" He smiled. "She looks just like you."

Duffy blushed. "Everyone says that but I see so much of you in her too. Not quite as much as I see in Paul but I guess it's just a matter of time."

Charlie looked up to catch Duffy's eye. "I really wish things had been different." He sighed.

"With the two of us trying to play happy families together?" She couldn't help the edge in his voice.

"Why are you so convinced it would have been a disaster that you weren't even prepared to try?"

"Neither of us has ever been able to make a relationship work for more than five minutes. I didn't want to risk losing you as a friend. It was too much of a gamble."

"Have you ever stopped to consider why our relationships have always failed?"

"Is this where you tell me you've been secretly in love with me for years and that no-one compares to me no matter how hard you try?" She retorted sarcastically.

"And have you laugh in my face? No thanks!" He shot back as he stood up and headed towards the door. There was just no point arguing when she was in this kind of mood.

"And you complain that I'm the one that always runs away..!" She mocked.

"There's no point Duffy. You just seem determined to punish me. I've told you I'm sorry but that's still not enough. I thought I knew you as well as I know myself but it seems not because before today I would never have thought you capable of such cruelty."

Duffy sprang to her feet. "How dare you! How bloody dare you! You think you're so high and mighty that you can just glide through life from one woman to the next unable to make up your mind and then you have the audacity to sulk when one of us decides we're done with your shit and don't want to expose innocent children to it!"

"My shit?! You're not exactly an angel yourself Duffy! You'd rather try and raise four kids by yourself like you're some kind of bloody superwoman than let someone else into your life. I shouldn't really be surprised, it's exactly what you did to Andrew too!"

This time Charlie saw the slap coming and was able to catch hold of her wrist split seconds before it made contact. They were practically toe to toe, their faces so close that despite the dim light he could see the fire burning in her eyes that matched the one that was fast igniting within him once more...

Her closeness and fire were intoxicating to him. He closed to gap between them and captured her lips with his own. Several moments passed as they became lost in the kiss, their tongues fighting for dominance before she pulled back slightly.

"You arrogant son of a bitch!" She hissed but she didn't fight to remove herself from his arms.

"You love it really." He replied smugly.

"In your dreams!" Duffy retorted as she stepped away from him and went over to Charlotte who was becoming restless from all the noise. "Ssh sweetheart go back to sleep." She soothed as the little girl's eyelids flickered open.

"Mama?" Charlotte mumbled sleepily.

"I'm sorry princess, we didn't mean to wake you up." Duffy sighed, rolling her eyes as Charlie's phone began to ring.

Charlie glanced at his phone. Why was work ringing him now? "I'll, um, I'll take this outside." He mumbled, heading out into the corridor but leaving the door slightly ajar. "Hello?" He answered, sighing as Duffy slammed the door shut behind him.

Charlotte's face screwed in confusion as she watched her mum. She rubbed at her eyes. "Mama?"

"Yes princess?" Duffy replied as she sat down on the bed.

"Who that man?"

"He's..." Duffy hesitated. "He's... My friend." She sighed.

"Why you sad?" Charlotte asked, shifting to lay her head in her mum's lap.

"I'm OK." Duffy sighed, absentmindedly wrapping her daughter's curls around her fingers.

"Love you mama." Charlotte murmured as she cuddled closer.

The little girl had almost fallen asleep again when there was a light knock on the door.

"Go away!" Duffy sighed.

"Duffy, please!" Charlie replied. "I need to talk to you, its important!"

"Charlie, I'm tired. Won't Louis be starting to wonder where you are?"

"He's at summer camp." Charlie sighed. "Please will you just open the bloody door? This is ridiculous!"

"Just go Charlie! So help me if you wake my daughter up again..."

"Our daughter, Duffy, you can't keep running away from that!"

Charlie sighed as he received no reply. He really didn't want to have to do this through a closed door but she was leaving him with no choice. "Duffy... That call was from the hospital. Megan has been admitted. It... It doesn't look good..." He choked out.

Duffy gasped. "I swear if this is a ploy to get me to let you back in..." She muttered as she opened the door. The rest of her words died on her lips as she saw Charlie's face. "No..!" She whispered, her eyes filling with tears.

Charlie held out his arms towards her as she crumpled into his embrace, her tears breaking free and running down her cheeks. "Come with me to the hospital?" He suggested softly.

Duffy nodded, wiping the tears from her cheeks as she re-entered the room, emerging moments later with a sleepy looking Charlotte.

Very little was said by either as Charlie drove the familar route to the hospital and pulled up in his usual parking space. He was about to climb out of the car when suddenly Duffy reached out and grasped his hand.

"She has to be OK. I'm not ready..." Duffy whispered, her voice small and breaking.

Charlie pulled her into a hug, placing a soft kiss on her hair. "We'll do this together." He promised.

"OK." Duffy replied before getting out of her seat and moving towards the back of the car.

"Please let me..?" Charlie asked as he opened the back door of the car.

Duffy nodded, allowing Charlie to pick up Charlotte and carry her.

Charlie's heart swelled with love as the little girl moved to wrap her arms around his neck, burying her face into his shoulder.

They entered the department and Charlie quickly located Tess. "Can you take us through to Megan?" He asked.

Tess nodded, giving Charlie a bemused look at his companions.

Noticing the look Duffy forced a smile at the other woman. "Hi, I'm Duffy. I, um, used to do your job." She explained.

"Oh, you're Duffy..!" Tess replied.

Duffy's eyebrow rose in response, her eyes narrowing as she turned to Charlie for an explanation.

"Tess, um, she was working here when I went over to help you with the clinic."

"I see." Duffy commented though her tone betrayed the fact that she wasn't completely convinced.

They arrived at the doors to resus. "Would you like me to keep an eye on her whilst you go in?" Tess offered, turning to Duffy.

Duffy hesitated. The nurse in her knew that resus was no place for a three year old but at the same time she wasn't comfortable with leaving Charlotte with someone she'd just met.

"How about if Tess stays right here with Charlotte so you can still see her through the doors?" Charlie suggested.

Duffy reluctantly agreed but she turned away as Charlie handed Charlotte over.

Charlie reached out to wrap a comforting arm around Duffy's shoulder as he guided her into resus.

Duffy looked around the room that up until a few years ago had been like a second home to her for so long. The comfort of the familar was quickly replaced by stomach churning fear as she took in Megan lying attached to so many wires and machines. Seeing the tools of her trade attached to a cherished friend was something she'd never get used to.

Charlie stepped towards the bed and gently took hold of the older woman's hand. "Megan, we're here." He whispered. Noticing that Duffy was rooted to the spot he reached out with his other hand, taking hold of hers and moving it so that it was nestled between his and Megan's.

Duffy smiled softly, taking great comfort in the familiar warmth of Charlie's hand. Despite the mess they'd made of things between them she couldn't help but feel at home when she was with him. Maybe that's why she'd pushed him away - the fear of becoming so reliant on that feeling for comfort once more. She lay her head against his shoulder. "I'm sorry." She whispered.

Charlie turned and placed a light kiss on her forehead. "I'm sorry too."

"There's so many things I want to say." Duffy sighed squeezing Megan's fingers.

"I know what you mean. Too many things have been left unsaid for too long. She said I needed to let you speak and actually listen to what you say." He sighed. "I've not done a very good job of that have I?"

Duffy chuckled lightly. "Neither of us has ever been much good at that really."

"Please let me be a part of their lives. And yours."

"How do you plan to do that?" She asked.

"Come home Duffy." He begged. "Come back to Holby and we can make things work."

"I can't just rip the boys out of school and uproot them from everything they know."

"You did just that when you originally decided to run away to New Zealand with Ryan and then again when that all went tits up and you decided to move to Cambodia."

Duffy pulled her hand away and step back from him. "You still can't cope with the fact that I decided there was a life for me beyond these walls. You're still stuck and one day very soon this is all you'll have left. You'll be a bitter old man with nothing to show for his life."

"She's got a point Charlie." Megan remarked in a croaky whisper.

"Megan!" Charlie gasped.

"Must you two fight when I'm trying to sleep?" Megan grumbled.

"Sorry." They both mumbled, chastised.

"I'd like to go home now." Megan asserted.

"I'm not sure that's a good idea..." Duffy began.

"I've spent enough of my life in this hospital, I don't intend to die here too."

"You can't go home by yourself though." Charlie countered.

"Lucky I know a couple of highly qualified nurses then isn't it?"

Duffy rolled her eyes. "Subtle Megan." She smirked.

"Indulge an old lady in her final days?" Megan smiled.

"Please stop talking like that!" Duffy begged, her voice breaking.

"Time to face facts Duffy." Megan sighed, growing tired.

"If you rest for a while I'll go see what I can do." Charlie offered.

Megan nodded, realising she'd have to play it Charlie's way if she was to have a chance of getting what she wanted.

"Keep an eye on her and make sure she behaves!" Charlie remarked to Duffy. "I'll be back shortly." He added before leaving resus.

"I don't know what he thinks I'm going to do." Megan grumbled.

"I think we've both learnt never to underestimate you." Duffy replied. "You're supposed to be sleeping."

"Hmm..." Megan retorted dismissively. Silence descended and Duffy pulled up a chair. She thought Megan had fallen asleep when suddenly the older woman spoke again. "I'm so pleased you came back."

"As soon as I read your letter I knew I'd never forgive myself if I didn't." Duffy admitted.

"You and Charlie really need to sort things out."

"It's not quite that simple." Duffy sighed.

"That's only because you two insist on making things so complicated."

"How is it not complicated? Me and the kids live in Auckland and he lives here. I can't just uproot them because he's the most bloody stubborn person I've ever met!"

"He's not the only one who's stubborn Duffy."

"So you're taking his side..?"

"I'm not taking anyone's side, pet."

"Urgh!" Duffy ran her hands through her hair. "This was all so much easier before today." She sighed.

"Easier maybe but neither of you can be truly happy til it's all out in the open and resolved."

"I don't have a clue how I'm going to resolve this." Duffy admitted.

"Well you've taken the first step by telling Charlie that he's Charlotte and Paul's dad." Spotting the look of shock on Duffy's face Megan continued. "Yes I know all about that little secret too. Anything else you fancy confessing to whilst we're here?" Megan asked pointedly.

"With Paul I honestly wasn't sure for a long time." Duffy sighed. "I know that doesn't make me sound very good so feel free to judge my 'loose morals'..."

#chuffy #charlie and duffy #charlie fairhead #lisa duffin

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aesthetic-survivor-of-twd · 6 years ago

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I've kind of gotten to like the save Violet route much better than save Louis. I don't know, just something about how they wrote the Violet scenes rubs me the wrong way. I ship them both equally, I just find the Louis captured scenes more emotional and well-written. My heart was torn with him, and with Violet I was just a little sad since I knew about her trauma beforehand, and if I hadn't, I'd have been confused or angry.

I actually agree with you (at least for episode 3 Act 3).

I’m going to be honest and say that I actually like how dark they made the Violet route with Louis.

I know that’s somewhat a controversial opinion since a lot of people hate it because they don’t like seeing Louis hurt and found it “unnecessary”, but from a narrative standpoint I love it.

I think the scene when they escape the prison cells is better played out in the Louis route (I feel like there is more development with Louis and the editing with him shooting Dorian with the crossbow just makes the scene much more dramatic and action oriented) but in terms of the actual cell scene itself I definitely prefer the Violet route more.

I feel like the scene with tortured Louis is the one moment in the season that truly represents the terrifying side of Delta as an enemy.

Plus visually I just found it hauntingly beautiful.

Seeing Louis’s pale complexion with tear stains and the bloodied mouth is so heartwrenching. Especially when he throws himself at Clem and sobs into her shoulder.

It makes the player upset and ENRAGED at Delta for harming your friend/someone you love and care about. And it acts as motivation to destroy their ship/group and save your friends.

Making the final scene with Lilly even more powerful because you feel the same pain and anger Clem must be feeling too.

#twdg #the walking dead game #twdg season 4 #twdg final season #twdg the final season #asks #twdg louis #louis twdg #twdg4 #twdgs4 #twdg s4 #twdg tfs #skybound

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takemedancingmaine · 6 years ago

Text

Stranger Things Have Happened

My footfalls were settled into a rhythm that sunk into my bones and calmed me to my core. I had come out to Lakeshore and was running an old route I hadn't done in months.

My body was sore from kickboxing and another session of Brian’s classes. We had done more cardio again this week. He was really keen on us being in shape enough to perform the moves he was teaching us, and loosening everything up with a run was all I could think of this morning when I opened my eyes.

It was perfect running weather. It was cold but not too cold to where it was uncomfortable to be out in just leggings and a T-shirt, even at seven thirty. At the moment not too many people were out. A few serious runners and cyclists would pass by occasionally, but I was alone enough to notice how good it felt.

In college, I would use running as a distraction. Often it would be around the middle of the semester, in the thick of it all, when I'd go and run the football stadium or run varying loops across and around campus until my head was clear enough to focus.

To me, running was a way of slowing everything else down. When I was out and running I had nothing but the road ahead of me and ample opportunity to think through everything.

More often than not it wasn't schoolwork that I thought through, I didn't sort out a paper thesis or try to recall key terms when I ran or anything like that, but I'd think about how free I was.

I'd think about how lucky I was to be able enough to run, to be in college studying what I wanted to, to have the friends I had. I'd make up scenarios in my head and work through them as some way to get me through what I was doing while working out my emotions.

Sometimes I'd be gone for hours running and when I'd come home Cleo would chastise me for not taking my phone with me in case something happened. I'd just take the motherly attitude while I'd make a protein shake and she gave up eventually, knowing I wouldn't change.

My problem with running while in college was inconsistency. I would run every day for a month and then not run for two. Or run every day for two weeks and not run for three. It was something I loved when I did it and something I missed when I didn't, but until I moved here I was never consistent with running daily.

It's why Cleo nags me about being so healthy. I was almost as healthy back in college as I am now, except I'm more dedicated and consistent now.

While I was home looking for jobs once I'd graduated, I'd kind of fallen into a rut of terrible thinking. I would think about how I wasn't good enough and would never get a job and would then live at home forever and would be stuck dealing with my parents and not living up to my younger sister’s achievements and would be miserable my whole life and would end up a failure and alone.

Once I had moved to Chicago I realized that although the addition of a job and friends would add purpose and goodness to my life, I still needed to work and do simple things to try and be my best. So I made it my goal to maintain daily exercise and pay more attention to my already pretty good diet.

I used running as a time to escape, to be both full and empty of thought and the world surrounding me.

Right now I was thinking about work but I was also not thinking about work. It was a bit like the exercise Louis had me do the other week where he made me go through the ‘what if?’ scenario. My mind went through scenario after scenario and sorted through each one. I was able to think more clearly without focusing too much on reality and without dragged myself down with that reality.

I was thinking about the lives of the people that ran or biked past, was thinking about the lives of the people who came into the bakery, and the lives of the people who owned the boats I passed by in the harbour. Each a small scenario that subconsciously helped me process something in my own life.

Thinking without thinking.

I was steadfastly ignoring the ‘what if?’ scenarios regarding my mugging two weeks ago. Even the made-up scenarios would be too much, would weigh me down, slow my pace and hike my breathing… I wasn't ready to sort through any of those now, and probably wouldn't be for a while.

This was the reason I'd been so upset I was injured and incapable of running. I hadn't been able to think and process without thinking about what happened at all. I hadn't been able to escape my dark reality and just feel my strength and the wind on my face as I ran. I hadn't been able to feel my elated exhaustion as I carried myself forward, one step at a time until I reached whatever goal I'd set for myself that day.

Instead, I was forced to think, to wallow, to remain stagnant in the memories of that night. It's why when Brian was hesitant about me participating in class my first week I was so insistent. It was also why that first class was so instrumental in making me feel better, if only for a little while.

I could focus on not thinking, could focus on each little scenario I'd concocted in my head that prevented me from stopping during the harder segments of the class. It was a safe haven inside my mind for the first time in a week and even Brian could see the shift, even if it was only for the length of the hour-long class.

I still had the bad habit of leaving my phone at home when I would run. Even after what happened, even after all of the chastising Cleo had done in college, I couldn't force myself to bring it with me. I wanted to be free from it all, from reality.

If my mom ever found out that I didn't take my phone with me I would literally never hear the end of it. I know it's unsafe. I do. But I don't listen to music and being free from its weight, not carrying it with me for an hour or two, was a huge mood lifter.

We live in a society where most of our world happens on screens and therefore we must have some level of attachment to said screens. And then, of course, we’re made to feel guilty about the level of attachment, made to think it's inherently bad and we need to step back from our screens.

We do. Holistically we do, but I don't think we need to feel guilty about how much we do live through them. I don't think we should ignore the real life in front of our faces, but if we're making connections and learning and growing as a result of our screens then we shouldn't feel guilty.

Still, I like being away from my screen for this time. If I'm stepping back from reality when I run, that includes my app and web page reality as well. So despite my knowledge that it's unsafe, I leave my phone behind when I go for a run.

I was up in Evanston before I realized it. I could tell because not only did I know the beach I was next to, but most of the people passing by me now were clearly college students.

I was about nine miles out from my front door. I felt good like I could keep going. But I also knew nine miles back would be brutal with heavy legs, so I turned around and started my way back home.

Looking out at the lake I fell in love with the colours. The sun was rising above the horizon and the colours on the water were undeniable gorgeous. If I was an artist, I feel like I would spend my life trying to capture those colours on a canvas. There were so many different shades of blue in just one glance and the gold of the sun was creating the most delightful effect in its path.

On my way back to the city I noticed that Lakeshore was getting busier, more people waking up to enjoy the day. If it wasn't for all the wind and rain predicted for later today, it would be the perfect day to hang a hammock between two trees on the path and just enjoy the sun and the warmth.

It felt good running my old route again. The same sights I'd run past daily for weeks had changed with the seasons, but it was still the same path. The familiarity of it all was a comfort.

It was like seeing an old friend or going home for the holidays. It was like when you heard a song you haven't heard in a while and all the feelings from the time you first heard it come flooding back.

From the smell of the lake to the sound of the water lapping against the barrier wall, the breeze that seemed to come from all sides… it was like home.

I had predicted correctly about my legs when I was back in Evanston. They had started to ache.

It was a good thing I'd not signed up for the Marathon. My legs hurt worse just thinking about going for another run. Tomorrow would be an interesting run. I didn't think about it. Not yet.

When I ran back into Lakeview I could feel my feet getting heavier and heavier. I wanted to stop and walk the last mile, maybe even crawl, but I kept convincing myself I was so close and that I had to make it the whole way. Each small scenario I concocted kept me going until I was at my front steps.

It was weird. I could open my front gate, climb the steps and go inside without flinching, without flashing back to that night. I could open my gate, climb my front steps and open my front door without feeling scared or hating myself for having let it happen.

I knew when I locked the door behind me that it was nonsensical. I didn't know how to move past what I didn't understand. Because it wasn't that I felt unsafe. It wasn't that I was all that worried that it would happen again.

I just knew that I double checked the locks every night, started taking self-defence and kickboxing classes, and still felt weird about the fact that it was a secret.

I didn't understand it.

What I did understand was that my legs felt like jello as I climbed the stairs up to the second floor. I only had a little bit before I had to leave for Ana and Harry’s but I took my time stretching and cooling down from my run. I even got a chill from the sweat that was beginning to dry on me, before taking an extremely hot shower and resetting myself.

Niall was hiding behind a throw pillow.

I had gotten up to make tea and when I looked out over the dark room ahead of me--Louis and Cleo claimed it needed to be dark to set the mood--I found him hugging a pillow desperately to his chest, his face half hidden by it.

You could make out his eyes and the fluff of his hair in the glow of the screen, but that was about it.

Harry wasn't any better. The poor guy was leaning into Ana and using a blanket to cover half of his face, knees pulled tightly to his chest as if being compact would keep the demogorgons away.

I smirked at that.

We were on episode six of season one and had been in this room together for six hours now. We didn't even break for lunch, just ordered pizza and kept on keeping on. There were still a few pieces in a box that was sat on the floor between Liam and the space I’d been occupying.

We planned on ordering takeaway for dinner tonight as well. It was only just four, so we had the whole night to keep our binge up well into season two. Louis was going to leave around ten to make sure he was in good condition for work tomorrow, but we had quite a bit of time before then to properly scare Niall and Harry.

Days like these made me so grateful for the friends I had.

We could go out to the beach and play volleyball and ride bikes down Lakeshore, or we could spend all day shopping on the Golden Mile, or we could see plays and go to concerts.

Or, we could hole up in one of our apartments and binge watch a series all day.

I was lucky for knowing these people.

However, while I was in a group with all of them I could feel the weight of my secret pushing down on me like gravity. I'd never kept anything from Cleo and keeping something this big from her was making me feel itchy.

I was the first person Cleo came out to. She trusted me to set the standard for everyone else she told. I remember the moment like it was yesterday. I'd never felt so privileged to be told something so important.

Cleo had been sitting at our table when I walked into the apartment after an evening class. She looked incredibly calm as she asked me to just listen as I was in the middle of making dinner.

I was halfway through making pasta when she said it. I'd shut off the burner and walked over and sat down across from her at the table.

She was never anything but calm the whole time she was talking. And I just kept thinking about how much I admired her. She was strong and she was so sure of herself. She also trusted me.

That was the biggest moment for us, I think, as friends. We'd been so close so quickly, immediately trusting each other, and that moment for us just proved why we were so good together. We just understood each other.

I had finished making my pasta and the two of us sat at the table talking half the night away. When it was time for our morning classes the next day neither of us complained, either. We got up and made breakfast together before walking to campus and nothing was said specifically but we both seemed to just accept the shift that happened.

After all, it was a good shift.

My secret felt silly in comparison to the one she had trusted me with. Despite that knowledge, I still couldn't bring myself to tell her.

My secret was something I was ashamed had happened to me. Her secret was something she was proud of. Plus, Cleo has always been stronger than me. It was something I'd known since I met her freshman year in our writing seminar.

For almost eight years, I tried to be strong like her. I wanted to be as brave as my best friend, and I wanted to keep trying. I couldn't find it in me to tell her though.

I knew she'd be upset with me about that.

It wasn't just Cleo, either. I knew everyone would be upset I had kept something from them, especially something this big. Louis would be furious if he ever found out. He'd not be furious at me, but at the fact that he didn't realise it, that he wasn't there for me.

Harry, the most empathetic human I had ever had the pleasure of meeting, would be heartbroken I hadn't said anything. Ana would be horrified and Liam would feel frustrated that he couldn't actually do anything to help.

Which is why none of them would ever find out. Because on top of the emotional responses from each of them, I'd have to deal with constant checkups and texts and incessant reminders to let each one of them know that I was fine at all moments of the day.

I couldn't tell them. I'd rather have myself driven sick from the burden of my secret than tell them and have to deal with anything and everything that would come as a result of my truth.

It was an odd mixture of emotions. I wanted to tell them, but there was also literally no way I would ever in my life tell them because I also didn't want to tell them. Mostly I didn’t want to tell them, despite the thought of it eating me away inside.

When it came to my parents I just genuinely didn't want to tell them. At all. They were another story entirely. One that started and began with my silence on the subject, no questions asked.

While I poured the hot water from the kettle into my mug I watched as Niall, Harry, Ana, and Liam jumped up as a scare happened on screen. Cleo and Louis were glued to the screen, even with having already seen the episodes; they were too focused to even tease the others for their response.

I set a timer on my phone for three minutes and watched both my friends and the show until my tea had steeped and I made my way back over to my spot on the floor. I settled in against the base of the couch with my blanket covering me and my tea warming my hands.

Niall leaned forward from his spot on the couch and whispered to me. “This is fucking horrifying.”

I let out one quiet laugh but bit my lips to keep from laughing more. He flicked my ear but didn't say anything further. I did hear him gasp a few moments later at a scare on the show and I smiled to myself as I sipped my tea and kept on watching.

It was hours later when the Chinese food arrived that the seven of us stood up for the first time in ages.

“Harry, don't fuss,” I waved him away from the kitchen. He was trying to clean up a little mess I made when I'd spilt some rice from a carton.

Louis had startled me when he walked away. He’d leaned into my ear and whispered for me to check out Liam's neck when he passed by. I hadn't been expecting Louis to be that close and I'd jumped, spilt the rice I was trying to serve myself and had also spilt my water when I went to grab a towel.

Louis swore that Liam had a hickey on his neck. I rolled my eyes. With Liam’s beard, it would be almost impossible to see, but Liam was also incredibly forthcoming about relationships--less so than Cleo, but more than the average person--in the past. I figured we would know if something was going on.

I shooed Louis away with an eye roll and when I turned to start cleaning my mess I spotted Harry already starting to scoop all the rice from the floor.

“It's not much,” he told me as he continued to clean.

“Yes, it's not much,” I nodded in agreement. “Which means I can do it. I made the mess, I clean it,” I waved the dish towel in his face again and he reluctantly stood up, threw away what he'd managed to pick up, and went over to eat his food and wait, sitting in his fear for the next episode to begin.

It only took me a minute to clean up the floor and counter. In that time Liam walked past me and I didn't spot anything out of the ordinary. I looked up to Louis and shook my head at him. He gave me a questioning look and I shrugged helplessly. He'd been wrong.

While I was washing my hands, Niall came back from the bathroom and started in on choosing and piling food onto his plate.

“What were you talking about last night? A song?” Niall had been forced to give up his spot on the sofa when Liam jumped into the spot and started munching on his lo mein.

Niall, because he'd gone to the bathroom when the food arrived and therefore was the last to get food, lost his claim to the last spot on the sofa.

Liam was beaming as he sat on the cushions and stretched his legs out in front of him, Cleo sitting opposite him as they talked about something and ate. They looked so relaxed, so happy that I tried to force myself to feel as relaxed as them, to force myself to not think about the massive secret I was hiding from them.

We had just finished season one of the show and were about to start season two. Harry and Niall had a few more terror-filled moments, I'd heard both of them gasping a few times behind me.

I smiled at Niall’s question.

“Oh yeah,” I nodded. “So, my first day living here, I was on the train and when the voiceover announced that Fullerton was the next stop a light flicked on in my head. I'm a pop punk fan and I remembered a song called Somewhere on Fullerton.”

Niall gave me a curious look.

“So immediately I pulled the song up and listened. Anyway, from either side of the Fullerton stop, each time it was announced as the next stop, I'd click play on the song. I heard it twice a day for probably a month before I decided to look up if the band was from Chicago.”

“And are they?” He asks as he piles fried rice high on his plate.

“They are,” I nodded. “I still listen to it when on the train alone,” I tell him. “Three years on from my initial listen.”

“I'm assuming it's a good song then?” He asked.

“I love it.”

He laughed.

“Maybe we can listen on the way back tonight,” he proposed.

“I think we could pull off listening now,” I looked over at him and then over at our friends. “It's under three minutes.”

He looked tempted, but he shook his head. “It wouldn't be authentic then.”

“Oh, you're right,” I nodded. “Good point.”

He smiled and lowered his voice to make sure no one could hear him. “Plus it gives me something good to look forward to after getting my pants scared off time after time today.”

I bit my lips again to keep from laughing but it was no use: within moments I was giggling.

“C’mon, it's a genuinely scary show! I'm not alone in that opinion. And Harry is scared too,” he complained.

“I mean, it's a little scary but…” I trailed off with a shrug.

“But nothing.”

“It's not that bad,” I appealed.

He levelled a hard, disbelieving gaze at me.

“Are you enjoying it, at least? Do you like the show even if you're going to be too scared to fall asleep tonight?”

“I resent that implication-”

“Because it's probably true?”

He glared at me.

“But,” he said, even with his glare still locked onto me, “I am really enjoying the show. I think it's brilliant.”

“I'm glad you like it,” I told him as he finished putting a pile of General Tso’s onto his plate.

Together we picked up our plates and made our way to our spots on the floor. We sat side by side with our plates on the coffee table we’d moved back over for the time being and Cleo clicked play on the episode.

Niall leaned over and whispered to me. “Better or worse in terms of scary?”

“Than season one?”

He nodded.

“It's pretty much the same,” I admitted him. “In terms of scary and in terms of suspense.”

“Shit,” he cursed under his breath. “I think you were right about me not sleeping tonight.”

I laughed out loud at that and he gave me an indignant look.

Looking over at Niall, I couldn't help but think about how lonely he must've been for two years. To leave all of his friends and the life he’d spent six years building here and go home to two years of isolation… it must've been hard.

I was glad he was here, with us. He was back with his friend Louis and was rebuilding a friend group with us, and we seemed to have adopted him into their ranks seamlessly. He fit well. Plus, he had a job that wasn't an internship for the first time since he graduated.

I wondered if Louis knew why he'd done it, why he'd left. They lived together. He must know. I wondered if Louis knew how lonely Niall had been. I wondered if Niall kept that part to himself.

I tried not to over analyse it all as I snuck another glance at the Irish boy beside me. He was probably a suffer in silence type.

I took a deep breath and looked back at the television, getting lost in the show.

Louis was texting me.

Incessantly.

And so was Cleo. And Liam. And Ana. And Harry.

The five of them had snuck back into our old group chat, the one without Niall. What had begun as a conversation about how we liked Niall and were glad he’d become part of our group, had devolved into Louis making a comment about how close Niall and I seemed this evening and then everyone joining in with their thoughts and opinions.

Because of course they did. They were all just wonderful like that. The funny thing was, even with their teasing they were such good people. I loved them and I loved that they could pick up my mood even with the teasing.

I know some people who would give anything to have a friend group like mine. In moments like this, when I'm enduring their ridiculousness I have to remind myself how much I really do appreciate them, appreciate having them in the first place.

The conversation had shifted from Niall to me not long after Niall and I got on the train together when we'd left Harry and Ana’s place. The events felt like a very similar repeat of the night before.

The notifications were so incessant that I had to turn them off while I played the song for Niall just before his stop.

He enjoyed it. The song. He thought it was pretty amazing how it lasted almost perfectly from the moment Fullerton was announced as the next stop to the arrival at Fullerton. He was even more amazed when I told him the timing worked both ways.

Louis was being ridiculous when he said Niall and I were close.

Once we’d all finished eating, Niall and I pushed the coffee table right out of the way again and settled back against the couch to watch the next few episodes. I will admit at one point when my butt started to go numb I leaned over a bit and rested my head on Niall’s shoulder, but there were pillows between our bodies and separate blankets. It was as platonic as platonic could get.

I’d rested my head on Liam, Harry, and Louis’ shoulders many times before. Something that the three of them were conveniently ignoring despite my reminding them again and again in the past ten minutes.

I was in my kitchen in my jammies--an old Michigan shirt and fluffy pants--making tea for myself as I weathered the bombardment of texts from my spot on the counter.

I had already braided my hair into two Dutch braids and taken out my contacts, my big round glasses perched high on my nose. I was ready for bed, tired enough to fall asleep the moment I'd walked into the house, but I pulled myself together just long enough to make myself some tea that would help calm me enough to hopefully fall asleep quickly.

Yes, I found Niall attractive and yes he was nice, and of course, I noticed how good he smelled when my head was on his shoulder. I had to force myself to stop thinking about it then and to stop thinking about it now.

But just because I found him physically attractive and he was nice didn't mean anything. I mean, if it did I'd also have tried something with Louis, Liam, and Harry. We were just friends and the same went for Niall. He was just trying to assimilate himself into our friend group and I was trying to help. There was nothing to it other than that.

That didn't stop the text from Ana about how cute we were though, or from Liam about how he swore Niall blushed when I was leaning on him. That was even accompanied by a too dark picture that was impossible to even make my face out from let alone distinguish anything else.

It didn't stop the innuendos from Cleo or the texts from Louis where he gloated about being a matchmaker.

Harry was sending photo after photo of movie posters where the main characters transitioned from friends to more than friends. The rom-com expert of the group was great when you wanted to watch a movie, not so great when it came to defending yourself against his pretty fallible logic when he was disregarding logic in the first place.

“Fork sake,” I breathed out seeing 12 notifications on my phone in a minute’s time. I picked up my tea and sipped it slowly before reaching for my phone and reading through the never-ending deluge of messages.

I almost choked seeing some of the things Cleo was insinuating but held myself together enough to text back that I was going to bed and would be blocking all of their numbers.

This, of course, caused them to panic and they apologized. Well, except for Cleo, but I hadn't expected her to anyway.

Louis sent me a separate text, just between me and him, after he stopped teasing me. I hopped off the counter and double checked that all of my doors were locked before I crawled into bed and looked at his message.

Louis: Is it because he's my best friend? You don't want to make it weird?

Ruby: 1. I hardly know him, and therefore have no inkling of pining as you all seem to believe, so it has nothing to do with you or him or anyone 2. You guys are the ones making it weird with all the innuendos and romcom references

Louis: In like three weeks you're going to send me a text, you don't know it yet, but that text is going to be about how much you like Niall and I'm going to show you this text as a reminder of how wrong you were

Ruby: You’re delusional, Tommo.

Louis: And you're in denial. But I've also got bread to bake early tomorrow. Love you, Ruby! Sleep sweet.

Ruby: I love you too, you giant man child.

#heyoooo #its funny because i literally just post this story for me at this point #no one reads but it keeps me on track with writing so i still post #if anyone does jump on to read: HI. WELCOME.#niall horan fanfic #1dff #fic: only ticket home #fic: oth #OTH5

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klaviergavinwiki · 6 years ago

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lookerdewitt replied to your post “i love violet but like………….Hm. I’m This Fucking Close”

what sucks is i played louis's route first so i was unphased bc i expected the one i didnt save to be very pissed at me but considering how louis loses his tongue and is just generally more fucked up in violets route it almost makes her characterization in his seem... flat? ok ur mad at me?? it feels like more was supposed to happen and i hate saying that bc ilike her a lot but it just feels like they decided to make her angery and roll with it instead of developing it

It’s REALLY bad writing honestly not really in and of itself i guess but like the juxtaposition between louis crying in ur arms and then smiling to cheer YOU up after your decision to save violet lost him his tongue and violet telling you you’re a fuckup lifesuck who ruins everything you touch makes her behavior rly hard to swallow and like you said really flat ant anticlimactic dflkfjdslj like i guess i probably wouldn’t be as upset about it if i didn’t know what happens to louis when he gets captured but it still Sucks

#lookerdewitt #replies

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stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale · 6 months ago

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Funny how just 5 years later it's finally downing on me that Louis can get his tongue cut– that if he does, he'll *never* speak again. And how much he probably thinks about all the times everyone told him they wished he'd shut up, how annoying he was, how his jokes are stupid, his singing sucks, etcetera etcetera. Not just him, I wonder how guilty everyone feels about saying all that stuff.

For the others, does he resent them? And for him, are they glad? Is there a part in all of them that think 'finally'?

And it's taken me this long to try and assimilate just how absolutely horrifying the situation actually is. we don't know how they did it but we can imagine, and it's not pretty. It's mutilation- pure torture. I know it's a videogame or whatever but everytime I think of Louis in that cell, dried blood running down his mouth and all the way down his chest, I feel sick, genuinely sick.

I was reading one of your old fics yesterday and it got me thinking, that's why Im rambling here on your asks. But yeah, no-tongue Louis should be non existent and considered a crime or something

Oh yeah, it's rough. It's brutal. I hate it.

I've only let Louis get captured a handful of times in all the years I've played TFS because 1. I'm clouis trash and I need them to be happy together in the end no matter the cost, and 2. I cannot handle Louis in the cells, I can't. He's my favorite character in all of TWDG, I don't want that to happen to him especially when I know I have the power to prevent it.

To be honest, I tend to pretend that outcome just doesn't exist. If I ignore it, it can't hurt me haha.

Don't get me wrong, I like a dose of angst in my fiction. I like tragedies. I like symbolic downfalls. I like recovery arcs. There's a lot of potential with the route where Louis isn't saved and he loses his tongue...

...But Louis is in a special category of characters where I'm like, "No, fuck you, he gets to survive and be happy! He gets to be understood! He gets to be loved!"

I think a lot of feelings come from it being a consequence of choice, too, y'know? Louis losing his tongue is only one outcome, one you can prevent. It all depends on who you save at the end of ep2. It's on you, and you can try to be like "noooo shut up, it's actually Louis' fault he got his tongue cut out because he wouldn't shut up!" when it's your fault he got taken in the first place, like... that's the game. Your choices have consequences and you can deny or justify them all you want... but in the end, you did it. You started the butterfly effect with your decision.

I also think this is why people get heated in fandom debates because "how could you NOT save Louis knowing he gets his tongue cut out, you monster!?"

I dunno, how can you not save Violet knowing that you'll find her blind on the beach? You monster?

Both outcomes are bad, it's just up to the player on which they feel is "better" or "worse."

We justify it to ourselves. We defend our choices. But that makes the choice all the more powerful, no? I save Louis knowing what fate Violet will meet. I trust AJ knowing Tenn will die on the bridge. I save Louis every time because in a game series where most of my favorite characters don't get happy endings [because they're fucking dead], I'll do everything I can to make sure Louis gets one.

I can handle an outcome with blinded Violet. As bad as it sounds, I can stomach that. I can find some hope in a recovery arc for her, and I can deal with her and Clementine having a rockier relationship after everything that happened on the boat. I can take comfort in the idea that Violet's going to survive with the help of people who care about her.

I can live with Tenn's death. It sucks, it hurts, it's bullshit... but I can live with it.

I can't handle Louis losing his tongue. There is no stomaching that for me, y'know? He's such a crucial part of Clementine and AJ's story for me that I can't fathom her not saving him in that moment during the raid, just as I can't fathom Louis without his tongue.

#asks #twdg louis #twdg clementine #twdg clouis #twdg violet #twdg aj #twdg tenn #like this is how i play so it's different for everyone but louis and clementine hhhnnnngggggggg listen okay #you don't understand--for my canon he's INTEGRAL to her story and her happy ending #ugh i don't wanna go on a rant in the tags because a lot of what i have to say is covered in the essay i'm writing right now so no spoilers #like the essay is about both clouis and violetine and how they're crucial to clementine no matter who you pick #i just have a lot to say about clouis and louis as a character but i will refrain for now

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domestic-harry · 8 years ago

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fics when the hate each other but end in love??? and fics when one of them admire/has a crush for the other but doesn't have like a close relationship (i mean that they aren't so good friends it seems they're already a couple!) thank you baby!

Hate to Love Fics

Love Is A Rebellious Bird : Louis is the concertmaster of the London Symphony Orchestra, Harry is the New! and Exciting! interim conductor/ex-cello prodigy who “has made Mozart cool again” according to Esquire Magazine (Louis hates him immediately, which is definitely why he internet stalked him in his dark bedroom late at night that one time), and Niall is the best. Zayn and Liam are around too.

Unbelievers : It’s Louis’ senior year, and he’s dead set on doing it right. However, along with his pair of cleats, a healthy dose of sarcasm and his ridiculous best friend, he’s also got a complicated family, a terrifyingly uncertain future, and a mortal enemy making his life just that much worse. Mortal enemies “with benefits” was not exactly the plan.Or: The one where Louis and Harry definitely aren’t friends, and football is everything.

Soft Hands, Fast Feet, Can’t Lose : American Uni AU. Harry Styles is a frat boy football star from the wealthy Styles Family athletic dynasty. A celebrity among football fans, he knows how to play, he knows how to party, and he knows how to fuck (all of which is well known among his legion of admirers). Louis Tomlinson is a student and an athlete, but his similarities to Harry end there. Intelligent, focused, independent, and completely uninterested in Harry’s charms, Louis is an anomaly in a world ruled by football. A bet about the pair, who might be more similar than they originally thought, brings them together. Shakespeare, ballet, Disney, football, library chats, running, accidental spooning, Daredevil and Domino’s Pizza all blend into one big friendship Frappucino, but who will win in the end?

Young & Beautiful : Louis, to his horror, attends an elitist university in which the name Zayn Malik means something, Niall Horan doesn’t stop talking, there are pianos everywhere, and Harry Styles, only son of a drug-addled, clinically insane ex-rocker, has a perfect smile and empty eyes.

Where Your Heart Is : Louis is ready for his brand new adventure. So what if he suffers from a genetic condition that prevents him from being touched? College is going to be awesome. It has to. Karma kind of owes him right now. Forget about his overprotective mother, or Liam– his entirely too chipper step brother– or his mess of a roommate. Forget about the gloves he has to wear at all times. He’s here to expand his knowledge, write and drown himself in books – No matter how distracting ‘Hallway Boy’ may be– The obnoxious, flirty frat wannabe determined to become the bane of Louis’ existence.Or, a college AU set in San Francisco where two lost boys who seemingly have nothing in common find inspiration, each other, and themselves in the process.

Learning to breathe : He’s playing football at one of the top universities in England and he should love everything about his life right now, but instead he’s moving backwards. How does your past fit into your present? Louis is still figuring it out.

Shake Me Down : Harry’s new to college, fresh out of Catholic school and conversion therapy camp, and Louis runs the campus LGBTQIA organization.

You Drive Me Round The Bend : In which Louis is a spoilt rich kid who’s always on the phone while he drives and Harry is a struggling musician making his way down the mountain. It’s just a matter of time before they crash and burn.

Wings to Break Your Fall : Strip club AU. Harry’s work and family are keeping him busy. He really isn’t looking for a relationship, doesn’t want one. He just wants Louis. Problem is, Louis has other plans.

Dance To The Distortion : Louis accidentally breaks Harry’s camera lens and in order to get it fixed, they decide to participate in a romantic couples study. The only issue is that they are not actually couple. Well that and the fact they cannot stand each other.

Resist Everything Except Temptation : The one where Louis is the commodore’s son who is forced to become a part of Harry’s crew when he is captured.

With a Whimper : Dystopian AU. Louis has been alone for too long to remember how not to be, and Harry has too much to worry about to deal with a scrawny, wild, stranger.

You’re Cold And I Burn : Louis’ love for pretty colors and aesthetics, paired with his immense passion for painting beautiful flowers has stars in his eyes and thoughts of a successful career.unfortunately, budding artists will struggle at first, so, cue the unwanted roommate. it only gets worse when the new addition is a sarcastic, flirty, and style-ignorant annoyance. all complete with a dingy leather jacket and a vast array of tattoos.

You’ve got to see yourself from far and wide: Harry and Louis meet at a very early age under all the wrong circumstances, which leads them to absolutely loathe each other for years on end. Eventually they both make it as professional football players in (very) rival teams, but are suddenly bought by the same club and depend on one another to either make it or break it at the height of their careers.With a side of sports journalist (and bridge friend) Niall, teammate Liam and wannabe football rep Zayn. They say that there’s a fine line between love and hate. That line might as well be shaped as a football trophy.

Walk That Mile : A Route 66 AU where falling in love was never part of the plan.

Tainted Saints and Velvet Vices : A self-fulfilling Hogwarts AU in which Louis is new to seventh year and Harry is the resident devil-may-care Slytherin set to make his entire experience a living misery. Due to less than favourable circumstances they’re forced to forge an unwilling, tentative relationship for their own survival. Repressed emotions, decidedly unromantic ballroom dancing, Triwizard Tournament tasks, creative jinxes and twilight flying above the Forbidden Forest ensue.

Pining (without being close friends) Fics

In This Light: Harry is a wardrobe stylist who likes to live in the moment, and Louis is a popstar who looks dreamy in double breasted jackets. Harry never stood a chance.

Way in the World : The one where Harry has a knee injury and an embarrassing crush on Manchester United’s pretty number ten.

Adore You : Against his wishes, Harry spends the holidays at his family’s summer estate, and is reluctantly pulled into a courtship he didn’t ask for. Harry doesn’t want to get married, but Louis does. They don’t fit, but then again they really, really do.

Home To You : At fifteen, Harry wrote his first song for an oblivious seventeen year old Louis Tomlinson. Ten years later he’s a singer/songwriter who cant find any words for his second album and Louis is a closeted actor tired of LA. They both try to run from the things weighing them down and in the process, they find each other.

Just Tell Me the Song and I’ll Sing It : Louis is an architecture student who can only think about the future. Harry is a baseball player who can only think about right now. Both are lonely for different reasons. Boybands bring them together.Or, this may just be a long love letter to Louis’ voice, I’m not sure.Based on the following prompt: Harry and Louis are university students who go to the same bar on the weekends. The bar has karaoke and Louis likes to sing Disney/Musical/Boyband songs sometimes. Harry thinks he’s cute so he starts singing Disney/Musical/Boyband songs and flirting with him while he’s on stage.

Sun-kissed Hurricane, Perfect Storm : Harry is the quiet kid in the back of his statistics class who writes a lot and dreams about Louis’ cheekbones . Louis needs a statistics tutor ASAP before he flunks and the quiet kid in the back of the class seems like a good choice. Harry wants to help Louis however he can and Louis wants to see how much he can make Harry blush.

#you bet your ass I shamelessly recced two of my own fic babies #asks #fic rec

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shirlleycoyle · 5 years ago

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Breaking Brad: Why Brad Rutter Is Losing Jeopardy’s GOAT Tournament

After three episodes of Jeopardy’s Greatest of All Time (GOAT) tournament, the question on everyone’s mind is: Why is Brad Rutter losing?

It has to do with Daily Doubles, the clues that let you wager your entire score—or up to $1,000 in the first round or $2,000 in the second round, whichever is higher.

Rutter, the person who has won the most money in all of American game-show history, has managed to snag 50 percent of the 18 Daily Doubles across six games in the first three matchups. However, he’s answered correctly just one-third of the time. In the GOAT tournament, Rutter has lost games of Jeopardy to human opponents for the first time in his career. (He has $4,788,436 in earnings from five regular-season episodes, five tournament wins, a third-place to IBM’s Watson, and $100,000 from other game-show appearances.)

Update: Ken Jennings has won the entire tournament.

Of his opponents, Ken Jennings (the biggest regular season winner with the longest run of shows) has grabbed four DDs and been right on each. The third grandmaster, James Holzhauer (just shy of Jennings’s winnings and at over twice the earning pace), has picked up five DDs and was correct on four of those five.

We need to be kind to Rutter, as my family is when we watch at home—this is Jeopardy at its highest level, and with immense pressure. While he’s beaten Jennings several times, he’s never played against the equivalent of two Kens at once.

What is out of my depth, Alex?

I played Jeopardy in 2012 and won twice—and let me add, by the skin of my teeth. I was happy to go home with over $30,000 and a picture of me and Alex Trebek.

I learned before and during my games that Jeopardy is not just about trivia. Contestants are selected in part for knowledge, and usually two or three of the players know a given answer. At the GOAT level, outside of Daily Double and Final Jeopardy stumpers, all three champions likely know the answer.

This is where betting and odds knowledge come in as a critical additional aspect. With control of the board, all three players are hunting for those DDs, as only the player with the ability to select can answer a Daily Double.

The producers typically place DDs as the third or higher of the five clues for each category (the $600 position in the Jeopardy round and $1,200 in Double Jeopardy). As clues disappear, the GOAT players are balancing their knowledge of a category with the potential to block a competitor by grabbing a DD and even betting on the low side if they aren’t confident, or to obtain the advantage by betting high and winning. (Arthur Chu gained a lot of enmity for aggressively playing across the board and hunting DDs, because some viewers decided it wasn’t a “fair” way to play, though given white players had chosen that route starting in 1985 and employed it since without much controversy, it seemed a lot more about race.)

In normal play, contestants may be hesitant when the Daily Double razzmatazz sound plays, one of the few sound effects Jeopardy employs. When you’re behind, it’s easy to fear a wrong answer would cost you the game; while ahead, wagering conservatively could advance your lead if correct while not knocking you out if in error.

Holzhauer went for broke nearly every time in his regular-season games. He bet most or all of the amount he had on the board, a strategy employed most aggressively previously by Roger Craig, an all-time champ who beat Jennings’ one-day score of $75,000 by racking up $77,000. Holzhauer across his weeks of play took the one-day title, too—he now holds the top 16 positions with his highest being $131,127.

That’s required Jennings and Rutter, never shy in the past from all-in bets, to hit hard when they capture a Daily Double question. It’s like watching a set of sharks hunting a small school of tuna: the first one in gobbles them all, leaving the others hungry.

The questions so far have been GOAT-worthy, especially Rutter's Daily Doubles. Watching the first game of the first day’s match, I was gobsmacked by how few clues I could answer in the form of questions, even as contestants whipped out answers faster than I could read them.

In the first game on that first day, Rutter had the clue in the “Dancing with the Czars” category: “‘We understood each other…& let the others prattle,’ said Catherine the Great of this longtime adviser & less longtime lover.” Rutter struggled for an answer and came up with Vronsky, a fictional character from Anna Karennina. The correct response was, “Who is Grigory Potemkin?”

In the second game, Rutter reasonably choked in Double Jeopardy on Daily Doubles for “Born in New Orleans, Louis Armstrong performed songs named for these 2 local “B” streets” (Bourbon and Basin; he said Bourbon and Beale, as I did, though I knew Beale Street was in Memphis) and “This double-first-name philosopher born in 1842 said that the value of a concept is in its practical consequences” (William James). These two incorrect responses reset his score to zero—twice! Even still, he clawed his way back to 10,000 points by Final Jeopardy, within striking distance of the other two players.

Because Rutter had cleared out so many DDs, Jennings and Holzhauer are engaged in a fight to grab toeholds in a rock face they’re climbing instead of taking an elevator to the top. And when they have gotten DDs, both Jennings and Holzhauer have capitalized in a way Rutter hasn't.

Just as important as finding and correctly answering Daily Doubles is finding them at the right time. Rutter has only been correct on Daily Double wagers at times when he had little to bet, often not even the 1,000- or 2,000-point alternate bet for each round.

Buzzer Timing

Rutter has seemingly demonstrated an additional disadvantage, one not seen in his previous gameplay. In addition to getting Daily Doubles wrong, Jeopardy is a game of millisecond-level reflex response. Press the button on the signal device before a producer has decided Alex has finished reading the clue and unlocked the “buzzers” (signal devices, really) and you’re briefly locked out. Click a millisecond too late in the GOAT gathering, and another of your razor-sharp competitors has won the race and gives the answer.

When the producer presses their button, lights illuminate to the left and right of the stage game board out of view the television audience’s frame. Jennings and many other champions say they rely on Trebek’s cadence to buzz in; I followed that advice, notably from the book Prisoner of Trebekistan, by another multi-tournament champion, Bob Harris. Holzhauer followed a previous champion’s advice and looks for the lights.

In the six games played so far in this tournament, Rutter has won the buzzer toss-up by far the least. With 57 questions up for grabs in each game—30 plus 30 less three Daily Doubles—Rutter has answered 10 to 12 questions for five of the six games. Jennings and Holzhauer have on average divided the rest with a slight advantage in each direction, depending on the game.

That brings us to the last overlooked element of Jeopardy play: ringing in without being sure you had the correct answer. With a Daily Double, you can bet as little as $5 if you hate the category, but few people do, and none of the GOAT contestants can afford to. (I won my first game of Jeopardy because the returning champion spoiled her run-away win by betting too much on a late-game DD—she should have wagered $5.)

With other clues, you have a moment while Trebek reads the text to figure out if you should ring in. If you answer with the wrong question, you lose that dollar amount, which can put you into the negative. Rutter’s has been wrong on 11.4 percent of his regular-question responses, while Holzhauer is at 8.1 percent and Jennings at 6.8 percent. That slight difference, coupled with Jennings's 100 percent correct responses for the Daily Doubles he’s hit tells the story of how the competition is going, though not why.

I stood at the podium three times, winning two games and a meager $31,000 or so by grandmaster standards, and I can tell you that each game is a fresh challenge and a fresh terror. I guessed my first Final Jeopardy correctly—ironically, “Who is Karl Marx?”—by elimination of other choices. I had the wrong answer but enough cash remaining to prevail in the second Final Jeopardy, vexing the only one of us three who was correct. I sealed my doom in my third game when I misspoke in a Daily Double and said “Who was George Sands?” rather than “George Sand.” (Trebek: “Ooo, sooorey.”)

I flailed in my third game, because I’d simply run out of steam. Jeopardy typically tapes five games a day, two days in a row. I had won games four and five of my first day in Culver City, and then lost game one of the second. My brain’s answering chemistry felt depleted. I saw a picture of a hibiscus, recognized it as that flower, and bizarrely said, “What is an orchid?” My sympathetic wife, who has a degree in horticulture, was supportive.

It’s an endurance contest in the best of times, and starting off on a bad pace can keep you down. We don’t know how rapidly they taped episodes for this tournament. In a typical tournament, even the final three players compete in no more than three games a day. With the two-game-per-match structure, it’s likely they taped two episodes a day or four games, to avoid the mental exhaustion of a fifth and sixth game in a row at this calibre.

They already got their GOATs

Without any advance knowledge, what’s happened so far makes it likely Jennings will win. With a slight edge in accuracy and maintaining a vigorous balance with Holzhauer on signaling, he only needs to win either one of the next two if Holzhauer prevails again, or in a dramatic showdown, Jennings can win any game up to the seventh match if Holzhauer wins just one more and Rutter picks up two.

My family is “#teamken,” because Jennings is local to us and I’ve met him a couple of times. He graciously gave me his insight in person before my first game, as did another local top winner, writer and bookstore owner Tom Nissley. But I always love the underdog, and would love to see Rutter fight back to his obvious potential.

If Jennings wins this tournament, he would also take the title of all-time American game-show cash winner from Rutter with $5,223,414 to Rutter’s $5,138,436, as Jennings has won bundles on other programs.

Nonetheless, Rutter, Jennings, and Holzhauer should each keep the GOAT mantle after this competition. The next runner-up in each of their scoreboard categories at Jeopardy are far behind, as great as that tranche of players are.

Regardless of who wins, Jeopardy GOAT has been a lot of wholesome fun. Trebek revealed he was in treatment for pancreatic cancer in early 2019, and that he had to resume treatment later in the year, making this tournament and all we Jeopardy contestants’ experiences all the more tinged with worry and nostalgia. His last games are approaching or maybe already quietly taped, too.

Producers guessed viewers wanted to know who was the ultimate winner, but I think getting to see the pinnacle of modern quiz-show performance provides just as corny and lovable an answer as the tradition of Jeopardy itself: It’s us, the viewers. We’re the winners.

Glenn Fleishman is a two-time Jeopardy champion and a veteran technology reporter who contributes to the Economist, Fast Company, Macworld, and many others. He’s also a type historian, currently assembling a set of one hundred tiny type museums, sets of historical and modern printing artifacts. He can be found at @glennf on Twitter and glog.glennf.com on the web.

Breaking Brad: Why Brad Rutter Is Losing Jeopardy’s GOAT Tournament syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale · 3 years ago

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Can we take a moment to talk about what a tragic character Minerva is? Y’all know that for the longest time I haven’t been the biggest fan of her, and honestly I’m still not? but I think I might’ve had a breakthrough on why that is.

Whenever I’ve asked around to see why people find her so appealing or why they consider her their favorite, I’ll get answers like, “she’s such a complex character and she deserved a redemption arc!” or “she should’ve come back to the school with us! Let Minnie be happy, you cowards! Telltale did her dirty! I could write paragraph after paragraph about her!” all sorts of things along those lines… but like, no one seems to want to actually talk about her. I find that interesting? Since when I do follow up with a “care to explain further?” I get nothing. Radio static. Like…. no, talk to me please, I just wanna understand-

Minerva within the context of TFS is such a tragedy. She grew up in a school for troubled youth where all the adults left them for death at the start of the breakout, they had walkers trying to eat the living all around them, and I’m sure she saw her fair share of traumatic violence and despair… but on the bright side, she always had her twin sister, Sophie, and little brother, Tenn. She had her friend and eventual girlfriend, Violet. She had music, and a dorm full of pretty paintings done by Sophie. She and Louis composed a song together to make everyone feel better. There are worse places to live than the school.

Then one day she got traded away to a bunch of raiders against her will, having no idea what the hell these people were gonna do to her and Sophie. They were made to be soldiers to fight in a war that had nothing to do with them. The delta fucking broke her. If we’re to believe Lilly’s story about the twins, they started their brainwashing process early on when Sophie was still alive, and it seems like Minerva was easier to control as Sophie was still planning a way out and causing trouble. Then, when Sophie convinced her to steal a boat and get the hell out, they got caught and the delta forced her to murder her own twin sister.

Like…. I’m sorry, not only did Minerva kill her own sister, but she was made to believe that was the right thing to do? That line she says about how she had to prove her loyalty to the place she calls home? That shit’s ingrained in her brain, you can tell that isn’t the first time she’s heard or said that very thing. That is what made her family to the delta. Delta is her home now, her family. Sophie was just a thing that needed to be dealt with. You keep your head down, do as you’re told, and you survive. You survive and you get to go home, eat a hot meal, take a shower, and be with your delta family. If not, you end up like Sophie.

What’s also fucked is that Minerva actually cares about these people now. Think about that. After everything they did to her and made her do, she’s been trained to see them as her family and obey. When you save Louis and he kills Dorian, Minerva actually cries out and is visibly hurt by her death. When she’s with the other raiders on land, she's screaming at walkers to get away from them. She cares about the people who made her kill Sophie… and no one ever talks about that??

She fucking hates Clementine. Clementine is just another thing in Minnie’s way. I know the part of the fandom likes to ship these two together and they think it’s hot when they fight and shit, but within the canon text, Minerva wants Clementine gone. Dead. She is the thing stopping her from having her old family merge with her new family. If Clementine hadn’t made them fight, they all would’ve been captured and they’d all be a delta family now. She would’ve had Tenn back.

Clementine is the problem, she made everyone fight back and that’s why people are dead. Minerva hates her for it… it’s not a “I hate you but like the sexual tension, y’know?” that I see people pretend it is, it’s “you are ruining everything and if I have to, I will kill you myself and I won’t give a second thought about it when they toss your body overboard.”

Like….. seriously, think about how fucked up all of this is. Minerva is a husk of who she was before she was taken away. Sure, you do have to keep in mind that when Tenn and Violet are describing her, their sights are a bit clouded, y’know? But I do believe that she was someone who was kind and cared about people, she wanted to make people feel safe and comforted.

Now she’s a brainwashed soldier who won’t help the people she used to call friends when they’re about to get limbs cut off. She won’t hesitate to knock someone unconscious or threaten a child. She’s willing to trick them into being captured with no regard for what’s going to happen to them. … all she knows is this was the mission, and now they all get to be together again back at the delta.

Then when she finds out there’s a bomb on the boat, she ditches Violet to blow up with it in order to make it to land herself. She loses her shit seeing everyone die and gets her face chewed off by a walker… and then she tries to blow Clementine and AJ up with a grenade.

Oh, and who can forget the fact that she tracks the group down with plans of murdering Tenn so that they can go to a better place together? And she’ll take down anyone who gets in her way?

Like….. jesus christ, Minerva’s waaaaay too far gone. It’s awful.

I think that’s what stumps me about why she’s so loved in the way that she is. It’s not that I don’t understand why she’s complex and well-written, I get that perfectly fine. She’s a compelling character study when you comb over all her scenes and take different factors into account.

What I don’t understand is why we tend to just throw everything interesting about her away? For what?

These days, I never see anyone talking about any of this unless they’re insisting she deserved a redemption arc which…. Eh, I’ll touch on this later. What I mostly see here and mostly other platforms is how great it would be if she and Clementine made out, or hey what if she and Violet got back together if she did come back to the school? Or they just….the best term I have for this is “uwu-ify.” As in she’s reduced to a caricature of a tall, pretty, mean, white lesbian who has “good damage.”

People insist that Telltale are cowards or bastards because their predictions of her turning on the delta to save Clem and crew didn’t happen. Instead, Minerva ends up being the final baddie you gotta get away from, and she ends up taking someone down with her. But did you really expect to just do a 180 and suddenly decide being brainwashed for over a year was lame and Clementine and friends are cool? Gonna help them out and be with Tenn again? Sure, there’s some left over trauma but love conquers and fixes everything, right?

Uh…. no? That’s not how people work? Honestly, if we entertain the idea that Minerva wasn’t bit and somehow didn’t murder Clementine when they all got back to the school…. romance is the last thing she is ever gonna think of??

I think that’s what bothers me most when reading these au’s and rants about redemption and the entire idea of clemerva as a whole. It’s the same thing that I see happen with Violet- Minerva only has value to fans if she’s in a wlw relationship. By herself, she doesn’t matter. They don’t care about her canon story, they don’t care about Sophie, they don’t care about discussing what could’ve happened if she and Tenn reunited under better circumstances or had a healing recovery together. But why?

Throwing a girlfriend at her isn’t some band aid that’s gonna cover up all the bad she went through?? Having an enemies to lovers romance with Clementine isn’t going to fix a years worth of brainwashing, trauma or the fact that she murdered her own sister and the delta told her she's proved her worth to them??

Having the support of those around her is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. The idea of the Ericson crew as a whole trying to help her out and do the best they can to accommodate her is bittersweet since there’s only so much they can do. They’re not trained therapists, which is what Minerva would need and plenty of years ahead of her to work through and come to terms with everything that happened as well as taking steps forward. I’m not saying that she shouldn’t have friends or that she couldn’t have a healthy romantic relationship someday... but that isn’t the solution, y’know?

I don’t know how else to explain this, but it makes me feel weird that all of this stuff is flat out overlooked or doesn’t appear to matter to fans of her.

Look, I get it. We all want these characters to be happy. AU’s are a thing, after all. Sometimes we want to forget about the bad things and focus on the good that bring us comfort. You wanna gush about the idea of an AU where the twins never got traded, the raiders didn’t exist, and Clementine got to meet them the way they were before? I feel that, AU’s are super comforting and fun to explore, and my point isn’t to try and shame anyone who has an AU you like this.

Hell, you think I don’t have days where I pretend mute Louis isn’t a thing because the whole concept of Louis having his tongue cut out of his mouth breaks my fucking heart? No, lot’s of days I just want to forget everything about that route, I want to set aside all the bad and just intake as much clouis fluff as I can get…. But that doesn’t mean I always ignore or refuse to acknowledge the bad just because I don’t like it. I fucking hate the fact that Louis loses his tongue when you don’t save him, but guess what? That’s a canon route you can play, just like any other route, and the possibilities that come with a mute Louis are vast and compelling.

This is how it is for me… my favorite characters are my favorite for a reason, and I take all the bad with the good. Louis isn’t perfect, and I don’t want him to be. I was to dive into his backstory about why did that to his parents, I like to talk about what he went through with Marlon’s murder and his feelings about AJ and Clementine at the point, I like to view his love of music as bittersweet. He can stand on his own, and while he is a love interest for Clementine, that isn’t his only purpose.

I know everyone’s different, they express their love for characters in their own ways, but I do have a genuine question: do you guys actually like Minerva?

Believe it or not, I’m not trying to step on toes or make everyone feel defensive which I know is how people will react to this. “You’re just saying all of this to make us feel bad for shipping clemerva! You don’t even like Minnie so you don’t get to say shit!” yeah yeah, I hear you and look, it’s true that she’s not my favorite character. I know I’ve said I hate her in the past but upon reflection and throwing out fandom interpretations.... I don’t hate her. I get it now. She’s a great character study to dissect and analyze and I think she deserves more than what the writers and the fandom have given her.

And yeah, what I do hate is clemerva, and I’ve explained why. It’s not for me, it makes me uncomfortable, but at the end of the day, who cares? Me not liking it doesn’t mean anything to those who create AU’s for them. They have their reasons, they can do as they please as long as they’re not hurting anyone. I’m just here pointing out things I see and things that bother me in hopes of starting a discussion.

There’s my ramble about Minerva. I’m gonna go make some tea now.

#twdg minerva #twdg clementine #twdg sophie #twdg tenn #twdg violet #twdg louis #twdg marlon #twdg lilly #twdg aj #twdg

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stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale · 3 years ago

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I’ve been thinking about one piece of dialogue Violet has when you’re walking back to Ericson, right before the bridge: “I've always wanted a basketball hoop.”

One of the issues I’ve always had with Violet’s writing throughout the whole season is that it never feels like she has anything to call her own. So much of her story revolves around Minerva and Clementine, which would be fine if I also felt like I got to know her more than I do.

Like... aside from survival, what gets Violet out of bed every morning? What does she like? We always hear about things she doesn’t like, but what does Violet do that is hers? I mean within the text of the story, not headcanons. Aside from her romantic relationships, there really isn’t something so tied to her character, if that makes sense. Something that’s in a more positive light.... though I guess her relationships aren’t always that positive.

I get that when the twins died, Violet shut down a little bit and turned everyone away, but do they ever make a point to be like “Violet used to enjoy doing this, but when the twins died, she stopped and hasn’t picked it up since.” because for the life of me, I can’t think of anything.

Everyone memeified the chicken nugget thing but that doesn’t add much to her character. She makes Clementine a pin, but admits that artsy stuff isn’t her thing. I get that’s supposed to make you feel special because she likes you enough to do something she doesn’t like for you, but again, art isn’t her thing. If you say that she likes stars and that’s her thing, that’s not exactly true since it was Clementine who knows about constellations and Violet admits that she knows nothing about that stuff, so they’ll just make it up. I guess you could make the argument that she took an interest in it because of Clementine, and that’s fair, but that’s the thing.... why does Violet’s romance scene take place up on the bell tower in the first place?

Like.... okay, Louis has his romance scene in the music room, right? That makes perfect sense with his character. It’s where we first meet him, and music is so interwoven with his character that it holds together his backstory of why he broke up his parents marriage, his coping mechanism, how the others view him, and how losing his tongue is even more tragic since he won’t ever be able to sing again. So having him and Clementine tune the piano, carving their initials into the piano, him naming a song he wrote after her, it’s all romantic and it makes so much sense. They didn’t do it just because they thought it would be romantic.

The thing I struggle with the Violet scene is that I feel like if I asked the devs why they chose the bell tower and how it ties into her character, they would say “well, it’s romantic under the stars.” like.... they’re only doing it for the sake of romance without thinking about anything else? because when doing that scene we get the terrible mini-game [sorry, but I reeeeally don’t like the mini-game hahaha] and it feels like we’re wasting a little too much time because I’m not learning anything about Violet through it, but we’re also not talking about anything important. The most I learn is that if I remain silent, then Violet will say that Minerva reminds her of the fish constellation: “Bright, pretty, good with other people. Always moving, tons of energy.”

Which, by they way, Clementine’s face when she says that? Oof.

By the end of the mini-game, Violet finally says something about how she didn’t mean to talk so much, and how how she’s watched people leave before and all that.... stuff that I already know about her, and it’s not that it isn’t important for her to admit that she wants us here and she can’t imagine what it would be like if we weren’t now, because it is.... I guess I just want everything to tie together better?

Okay, when we first see Violet, she’s laying up on a high wall and you could link that to the bell tower [high places], but she never mentions it or how she goes up there when she needs the quiet until that very moment. And the more I think about it, I’m like..... why didn’t they give her something?

Violet’s supposed to be this character who needs to warm up to you, who has shut everyone out for a year, she’s not a people person and has a hard time relating to others, she snarky and can come off as aggressive, she knows how to fight, she was in a romantic relationship with Minerva, she’s close with Tenn, she’s got a strained relationship with Brody and hates Marlon and...... like okay, this is going to sound harsh and I don’t like it either, but sometimes if feels like the writers neglected parts of her character for the sake of focusing on her relationships with Minerva and Clementine, that when you take them away, there isn’t a lot left... as if Violet’s only important or special if she’s in some sort of relationship with Clementine and I don’t like that.

Characters, like people, should be more than just their sexuality and relationships. If Violet and Louis are supposed to be important characters in the game, they need to stand on their own outside of Clementine.

You guys know me, you know every time I play I romance and save Louis, but in doing that, I learn pretty much nothing about Violet and that’s dumb. At least when you romance and save Violet, you know about Louis and his tie to music. The most I tie Vi to is Minnie and aggression because she and I spend two episodes butting heads about most things until she’s captured, and then she yells and attacks me in the cells and what was the plan here writers??

I get that they don’t wanna info dump about these characters and they want to leave things for when you play the different routes but that doesn’t change the fact that you didn’t give Violet anything to call her own because even when I played her route, it still didn’t feel like I got to know her and everything was done because you thought just having a queer option smothered in romance that doesn’t have to make sense was enough.

Are my ramblings making sense yet? I dunno!

This leads me to this piece of dialogue you get when Clementine says silent when Violet asks her what her favorite part of her house was: “I've always wanted a basketball hoop.”

Now stick with me a little longer and hear me out........ why wasn’t basketball Violet’s thing? I know this is a bit of a throwaway line that a lot of players probably didn’t even get, but think of the possibilities of extra layers to Violet’s character?

Instead of hanging out on top of a wall when we first see her, Violet’s off dribbling a basketball and shooting hoops when she spots you and Tenn goes to her, and she stops to stare you down as she holds the ball against her hip, or she continues to dribble but now she’s watching Clementine. A little intimidating, but enough to peak your curiosity about the girl shooting hoops.

When Louis says he used to love baseball and Violet says baseball sucks, it’s because this is an inside joke they have about baseball vs basketball.

“Basketball/baseball sucks.”

“YOU suck.”

“Not as much as baseball/basketball.”

Instead of going up to the bell tower, Clementine and Violet shoot hoops together while talking about how Violet’s feeling about the situation, let her get some of those thoughts about Minerva out so they’re not weighing down on her, and then segway into her talking about how she’s glad Clem is here and let the romance/friendship play out. Hell, you could either do this in a gym or outside if you still want them under the stars.

As far as this tying into her backstory, maybe her grandparents had a basketball hoop at their place, and after church her grandma would grab fast food and they’d go home where she and her grandpa would play while grandma watched.

Then when you don’t save her, Violet becoming blind has a whole other layer to it because now she can’t fucking see to shoot hoops, something she genuinely enjoyed and can’t anymore.

This would also compliment Louis and his tie to music. Violet’s more active, aggressive, sporty whereas Louis is musical, artsy and calmer.

I dunno, what do you guys think?

#twdg violet #twdg clementine #twdg louis #twdg violentine #whoops it got long again #ah well #sometimes I just wanna throw ideas out there #or get something off my chest

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