#i just don’t like having a one on one conversation with anybody about any facet of my identity feelings personhood at all

[totopopopo]

genuinely not quite sure why i am so deeply uncomfortable when it comes to telling ppl abt my personal/romantic life. like i want them to know but i also don’t like admitting to anyone out loud that i have emotions, feelings, and/or relations resembling anything beyond superficial interest. i mean jesus. how cringe. they should just intuit it all psychically or something so they can know without me ever having to bring it up myself

[thatgirl4815]

Smoking & Drinking Habits

Has anybody made the comparison between Porsche’s smoking habit and Kinn’s drinking habit yet? It’s interesting because we see both Kinn and Porsche drinking and smoking for what I believe are two reasons that change significantly between episodes 1 and 5.

1) Suavity

This is most apparent in Ep1, and it’s connected to their efforts to keep up appearances (more so for Kinn, but I see it for Porsche too). Starting with Kinn, we see him drink multiple times throughout Ep1, and it’s almost always in a way that presents him as domineering. I don’t think I need to remind anybody of the sheer hotness power emanating from Kinn in his conversation with Porsche at the bar, but I’m going to include some gifs anyway because I can’t resist:

It was very intentional for Kinn to drink so much in Ep1, not for the drinking itself, but for the way he does it. It’s suavity at its finest. It’s presenting the perfect picture of what a mafia boss should be. (And let’s also not forget about the way that Kinn looks at Porsche while he’s drinking in the giffed scene). The not-so-subtle recurrance of Kinn’s drinking is equal parts intimidating, strong, and uncompromising, just as he intends it. 

Now to Porsche. Porsche also radiates power through smoking, but not with the same careful intention as Kinn. That’s not to say that Porsche doesn’t use smoking to uphold a certain kind of appearance (I’d imagine it’s part of what attracts so many women at the bar), but I don’t think he’s doing it as purposefully as Kinn. I like this fact, because it shows how Kinn is constantly making efforts to control the way he is seen by others, while Porsche naturally captures others’ attention. Porsche is in his element at the bar and he turns this comfortability into suavity. Contrast this with Kinn: while Kinn is smooth and in control, his calculated appearance and movement make it clear to us later that he doesn’t truly belong in the mafia world. In other words, he’s not as well-adapted as he hopes to be. What seems comfortable to us is really forced on Kinn’s part (at least, that’s how I’ve chosen to interpret it after the vulnerability we’ve seen from him following Ep1).

Here’s a gif of Porsche smoking in Ep1:

Even though there’s no one around to witness Porsche here, it’s all a way of establishing a sense of control. The audience grows to understand Porsche in the bar setting as comfortable, charismatic, and above all, suave. It’s clearly not calculated like it is for Kinn (he’s also clearly made it into an unbreakable habit), but it is a facet of his outward appearance that is not without purpose. Porsche likes to be the center of attention, and he’ll do anything to be seen in a positive light. This was necessary to solidify so early because it helps us understand why Porsche values Kinn’s attention so much later on. It’s less to do with Kinn personally and more to do with his status as the boss, but that’ll certainly start to change more as we proceed.

Now, all of this brings me to our second reason...

2) Comfort/Coping

We see both Kinn and Porsche start to lean into the drinking and smoking, respectively, in Ep5. This gives us deeper insight into their internal struggles, but more importantly, it provides a nice contrast with the people they were in Ep1. Starting with Kinn again, in Ep5 we see him in turmoil: he’s being forced to suppress his emotions in favor of his mafia duties. He’s just had a very intimate, emotional moment with Porsche that doesn’t allow him to simply brush these feelings aside--if anything, it has strengthened them. To cope, we see him drinking throughout the episode (I couldn’t find gifs for these, so I’ll just post screenshots):

The key point here is that in both scenes, Kinn is drinking alone. People enter as the scenes go on, but he clearly isn’t drinking to make any kind of power statement. He’s having a crisis, and he knows there’s no easy solution. This isn’t a facade, it’s just what he needs (or thinks he needs) to clear his head. 

Onto Porsche. The two most notable smoking occurrences in Ep5 are in the bathroom-flashback scene and the failed hookup scene:

We’ve seen Porsche turn to smoking in times of distress at other points, but it stands out in this episode because he is truly in a dark place. He’s alone and no one understands or even knows about what he’s going through. It’s not for comedic purposes like in Ep2; in fact, the emphasis on fire with his lighter in the bathroom-flashback scene draws more negative attention to it. 

I think these coping mechanisms are worth exploring because they make each character more real to us. Through these details, we can see their struggles without so much as a word. Smoking and drinking plus the actors’ careful expressions make their turmoil in Ep5 heartbreakingly obvious. I’m glad they chose to include these details because it rounds out the visuals in Ep5 and, as I’ve pointed out, delivers a nice contrast to the very different characters we saw in Ep1.

[therealvinelle]

Oh! Okay so what if Elana Gilbert and Bella Swan swap places, (like, swap their brains i guess, so their friends and family still think theyre the same) what would happen to them? Would Elana survive Edward’s affections? Would Bella react well to Stefan and Damon? (I kno you only saw some of the show, but i think you saw all the seasons Elana is human, and thats what matters.)

Hm, well the vampires from The Vampire Diaries are human in every way that counts, they're essentially sexier humans with a funky diet.

Elena is in love with Stefan for Stefan, his vampirism is just a facet of him. Edward will be as horrifying to her as a Twilight vampire normally is to humans.

Bella, meanwhile, is in love with Edward for all the wrong reasons. She's not going to fall for Stefan and Damon.

What happens to Twilightified Elena

Depends on when Elena is thrown into Twilight. And on when it is for Elena as well, is it at the beginning of TVD? Because if so, then she's mourning her parents and doesn't know about anything supernatural.

If so, then Elena has a terrible time because she must mourn for her parents in this world where no one knows they died, in fact the internet tells her they never existed in the first place, and there's this well-meaning stranger who wants to father her in their place. The angst would be unreal.

But, Elena of canon wanted to tough it out and stay her partying self, even if only on the surface, so she'd become best friends with Jessica and Lauren, and go with them to every party imaginable.

Somehow or other she loses the Yandere simulator, and is eaten by Edward.

If we take Elena from the end of season 2, then this is an Elena who knows about the supernatural. Bodyswaps are a thing in TVD, so she's stunned to find it happened to her and worried about Bella Swan, but she's got her bearing.

Or so she thinks.

Turns out, the year is 2005.

She tries to get in contact with someone, anybody, from her own world. She searches for the Salvatores, for witches, and in a final last act of desperation she puts on an ad on craigslist to get Elijah.

There's no trace of any of them. Not even when she gets desperate enough to post "Petrova döppelganger looking for original vampire" on her myspace.

Nothing, not even Klaus, just silence.

More terrifyingly yet, it appears Mystic Falls doesn't exist anymore.

It's a terrified Elena Gilbert who walks into Forks High the day after.

She knows at a sight that there's something wrong with the Cullens. When Edward spends an entire hour glaring at her for daring to exist, she is officially creeped out.

Elena returns home very scared that day.

She's in a new place, she doesn't know how to get home, and there are terrifying people at her school who seem to have it out for her.

She spends the following week confirming that everything she ever knew has simply ceased to exist.

Then Edward returns to school after a week's absence, and asks a series of questions aimed at finding out who she is and why she came to Forks.

Elena starts putting two and two together.

Of three things, she is absolutely certain.

One, reality has been rewritten. The people and places in Elena's life no longer exists, nor does Elena herself for that matter.

Two, no one in this world apart from Elena herself appears to be aware that this has happened.

Three, the one other anomaly in this world is the Cullens. They're clearly not human, and act not unlike pod people than everybody else, in fact they interact with no one. Except Elena herself. Who is being singled out by them.

Elena comes to the terrifying conclusion that the Cullens are an unknown species, a powerful magical one, capable of rewriting the laws of reality.

And she doesn't know if she's an accident, if she's Neo misbehaving in the Matrix, or if this reality marble was created to entrap her specifically.

She decides she's had enough.

She has no powers, no resources, no contacts.

What she does have is her wits.

And, possibly, the element of surprise.

Armed with nothing, Elena gets in the truck and drives to the Cullen house, having gotten the address somehow, and made sure to tell Charlie, Jessica, Lauren, Mike, and her Myspace where she's going.

There, she marches up their porch, knocks on their door, and asks to speak with them.

The Cullens, on their end, are stunned.

From their point of view, this is the anonymous singer who's been tormenting Edward. Yes, she has a name and all that, but they don't know anything about her.

More, she should have no interest in them.

Wanting to appear in control of the situation, Elena calls them in to the living room for an honest conversation, all cards on the table.

Well shit, the Cullens say to themselves, Edward's singer had to be the one girl in North America who knows about vampires.

Now, I do believe Elena is too intelligent to blurt everything she knows immediately and lose her leverage.

No, she asks them if she was supposed to know or not.

The question makes perfect sense to her - is she an anomaly in the Matrix, could it be Jessica is in fact amnesia Caroline and Forks as a whole is actually just nu-Mystic Fall, or is it just Elena?

The Cullens, meanwhile, wonder how on earth this girl can think she was supposed to know she was Edward's singer and that they're vampires.

She may not know what she thinks she knows.

Carlisle tells her the truth. No, miss Swan, you were not supposed to know.

Taking this as confirmation that she's in the Matrix, Elena asks if there are others. She, of course, is wondering if there are other people, perhaps right here in Forks, either with amnesia or else keeping their heads low, who have been taken from the real world.

Or, more chillingly, if everyone is living fake lives in this fake world.

The Cullens, meanwhile, wonder what others she's talking about.

Carlisle takes the plunge. Either she knows what the word means or she doesn't, if she doesn't then she'll have nothing to google because this isn't known to humans at all, plus the word is only a rough translation of the Italian term.

"Other singers, you mean?"

Elena blinks.

Singers, like sirens?

The Cullens are terribly beautiful.

But... sirens?

She stows this away for future use.

Elena decides this conversation has been cryptic enough, and point blank tells the Cullens that she means people who don't belong in this reality at all.

I imagine there comes a point where Carlisle has to call Aro. The girl knows nothing about vampires, she thinks they're semi-harmless human-looking creatures that burn in the sun and can be killed by humans. She's not a problem in that regard.

So Aro gets a call from Carlisle, explaining how a human girl showed up on his doorstep claiming he had created an alternate reality, and that her world apparently has a different worldbuilding altogether.

Oh, and Carlisle's telepath son can't read her mind.

He is in Forks practically before Carlisle can hang up the call.

I imagine Elena gets to spend years as a human, because if the body of Bella Swan is somehow a link to another dimension, then altering that into another species might sever the link.

No, Elena, Aro, and Carlisle spend the following years in a Volterra lab, trying and failing to engineer a pathway back to her world.

In the end, if they're unsuccessful, Elena is turned into a vampire, and Aro has a jolly good time reading her memories from another dimension once she has the control to let her shields down.

Elena, who only ever wanted to be human and thought TVD vampires were too spicy to turn into, cries.

What happens to TVDified Bella

Bella somehow manages to feel guilty about not being Elena. This must all be her fault. Somehow.

An optimist as always, Bonnie dives headfirst into reversing whatever spell was put on her best friend.

She never succeeds, and both women are crushed by guilt over something not their fault.

Damon, I imagine, kills Bella sooner or later during a drunken outburst.

[tenthgrove]

Hey I saw that your requests were open! I'm not the anon the same anon who requested for hcs with LS and autistic reader but it gave me an idea, how about : how each member of LS would react to a non speaking new member finally speaking to them after some time (headcanons)?? You can make it romantic/platonic if you want!! Thank you so much 🦄🦄

How La Squadra Reacts To You Becoming Verbal For The First Time

La Squadra x Reader (GN), Platonic/Romantic, SFW

Formaggio- Having a non-verbal teammate did leave him slightly stumped at the beginning, as a loud kind of guy who uses his words more than anything else to communicate. No matter, he's more than happy to learn new skills for a friend, so he'll be grasping your own methods of communication in no time. The first time he sees you speak it takes a moment to register. He nonchalantly replies to what you said with a casual 'oh sure' before snapping around a moment later realising you actually just spoke. He's shocked- having gotten used to you not being verbal at all, but pleased that you would feel comfortable with him enough to open up.

Illuso- When you joined the team Risotto sat him down to explain that your lack of speech was a facet of your autism and was not to be made fun of or taken offensively in any way. It's a good thing Risotto did this because otherwise Illuso would have made fun of you, but now he knows your silence is clinical he's not going to stoop so low as mocking it. He's not that kind of asshole. Assuming you might also have issues with noise he makes a point of lowering his voice around you, and being more observant than he usually would to pick up your non-verbal cues. Your first words are a shock to him, but a good one. You've come to mean more than he ever expected to him.

Prosciutto- He knows potential when he sees it. Prosciutto would be a fool to discount you just on the basis of the fact you don't speak, and he sure isn't going to be a fool. Out and about, Prosciutto keeps you close, speaking on your behalf with your consent so you don't have to explain yourself to people who may not listen. He encourages you to pursue yourself to the fullest. He knows that non-verbal autistic people sometimes become partially or fully verbal after settling into a new situation, but he manages his expectations with this. Hearing you speak is a pleasure, but doesn't change much in his eyes.

Pesci- Regardless of the circumstance, Pesci is always an easy friend to make when you're a newcomer to the team. It's partially due to how new he is himself. He doesn't mind that you aren't verbal, even if he occasionally forgets from a wandering mind and makes himself look stupid. He is quick to learn your sensitivities and how he can be a good advocate for you. He doesn't put much stock into it if you suddenly speak for the first time, because as long as you sound happy, that's all that matters right?

Melone- You might think that someone so eager to share his inner thoughts would have problems with someone who doesn't talk at all, but it really isn't the case. Melone is well informed about autism from having so many friends with the condition, and would never push a non-verbal person into talking. Instead, he uses gentle strategies to find alternative methods of communicating with you, led by whatever works best with you. Hearing you speak for the first time is met by surprise but enjoyment. He's curious what led you to suddenly open up by this, whether it was something someone said or simply enough time having passed. He's eager to see what he can do to keep you feeling comfortable like this.

Ghiaccio- He understands you very well. Occasionally if he's particularly stressed out he shuts down and goes non-verbal himself, so he knows the struggle. Of course, your situation is different to his given you're non-verbal all the time rather than just once in a blue moon, but it still helps him to appreciate your condition better than most. Hearing you speak for the first time causes him some alarm because he thinks someone must have threatened you into becoming verbal (can you guess what a portion of Ghiaccio's childhood trauma was?). He may need a bit of reassurance to rest easy that this hasn't been the case for you.

Risotto- He doesn't talk unless he can help it either. As long as you can convey to him if there's a problem on a mission he's fine with you on the team. Besides, this man is amazing at non-verbal cues, so regardless of your alternate method of communication, he'll be able to pick it up with ease. The two of you become very close because of how easy it is for you to form a bond without uttering a word, and you are very dear to him. When you finally speak around him, he is joyous, but makes a point not to overreact in case it frightens or guilts you too much. He continues the conversation as he did before, for however long you're able to keep speaking.

Sorbet and Gelato- Listen, these men are going to protect you with their life. Just remember that before anything else. Being autistic himself Gelato has a good idea of why you act the way you do, even if the specific symptom of non-verbalness is not one he's experienced personally. Sorbet just generally feels protective of the team's newcomers and will gravitate towards anyone Gelato does as well. Anybody, in the team or not, who gives you shit will immediately have them to deal with. Your first words to them are treated with a gentle joy. Like the others, they are pleased that you would trust them enough to hear your voice, but would hate to put you off by making too much of a big deal about it.

[moonclans]

GOJO SATORU 'RELATIONSHIP' HCS.

these are just some cracky au relationship hcs with Satoru. I've tried taking out anymore errors and mistakes but this is just an indulgent comedic piece and not anything serious so don’t expect toooo much lmao. Since, Gege Akutami (author of JJK) said he doesn’t believe Gojo to be particularly faithful to anybody, I’ve taken a liberal spin on this. Yes... I am a victim of last week's episode. If there's any errors listen... i tried ):

SFW and NSFW. Word Count: 3k

Gojo Satoru is a multi-faceted. He’s a mentor to his students, a provider to a few, a symbol of control and power in the Jujutsu society, and the strongest sorcerer in the world to the rest.

To you, he’s just the goofy-ass man who sleeps in your bed too often.

You and Satoru can take turns cooking but usually it’s him or ordering takeout. Satoru’s very self-sufficient and he makes food with the intention of feeding himself unless he’s spending the night at your place. He’s a great cook and he’ll boast about it. Oftentimes, if you’re in the kitchen he’ll be behind you following you around and making occasional commentary to annoy you. If he makes a complaint about something he sees he won’t help at all. He’s a dick like that.

He’ll take a bite of anything you make him. If you’re cooking is actually atrocious and you were really excited for him to eat it, he’ll take a bite, give you a lackluster smile, and when you’re not looking spit it out in a napkin otherwise he’d just straight up tell you something’s funky with the dish.

A love language of his is physical touch. He’s can be very handsy. I feel like everyone’s already addressed this but I feel like he can be invasive especially on days when you’re not up for it.

If you have a menstrual cycle and you’re dealing with some heavy cramps and just need some alone time. Satoru will not give you that alone time until you beat his ass off of you. He’s always attempting to get you to try kinky shit with him while you’re on it. He’d tell you about how he read articles online that insisted that having an orgasm eases your cramps. You tell him absolutely not.

You: i’m bleeding. that’s fucking gross.

Satoru: what’s wrong with a little ketchup???

He likes curling up to you. His hands on your waist, rubbing up and down your sides. If you’ve got a heavy chest he’s fondling them when you’re not paying attention. You could be lying there and suddenly you feel a squeeze and he’s looking at you with a shit-eating grin. His lithe fingers are always trailing on you to bring out shivers. Down your neck, rubbing your collarbones as he goes up to squeeze your neck, grazing his fingers on yours (this is also a sign for sex), rubbing the apple of your cheeks, lips (both), really just anywhere he can reach. I also think he just finds comfort in touching you.

Gifts are also his love language but this can be less in comparison to the first depending on what type of person you are. When you two were just getting to know each other, he would spend on you to compensate. One time, he had just given you his card to buy something you wanted and he later got a call from his bank asking about suspicious credit card activity.

He also pays when you guys go out to eat. Yes, you have your own money, yes you were financially independent but you’ve seen his salary, he could afford to pay for the steak, lobster, and crab cakes.

On your first night out with Satoru, you told him flat-out you expected him to pay. Since he asked you out. The beginning of your conversation had just been you interrogating him for basic necessities. “Do you have a car? Do you have kids? No? Good. You’ve got your own place…? Yes?.. Perfect.”

Speaking of asking you out, Gojo is very confident and flirtatious in his delivery. Since it’s canon that he’s got a history of fooling around with women, I’m sure he uses a different approach each time but he has absolute faith in himself to snag a number. He’s definitely the type to use the “do I know you from somewhere? I do, don’t I?” line and hope it lands.

Gojo takes care of himself. So I do think he’d be into skincare. He’d probably recommend or use some of your stuff at times. I also think he’s not one to use that 3-in-1 type of soap. You can say he’s “feminine” in that aspect but I don’t think keeping a good hygiene is limited to feminine traits. He just has to make sure he looks good always.

Don’t be surprised when you find out he’s stealing your lipgloss/chapstick too. (I mean have you seen his lips in the anime??)

He’d sashay around your house in your fluffy robe and slippers when you’re not using it and you’d have to chase him to take it off. Get him a matching robe set for his birthday and he’ll tease you about it but he wears it. Ask Megumi, he caught the fucker in his house with it on.

If you teach him, he’d be good at doing your makeup. At some point, he gets better than you so now you have to deal with him critiquing and giving you tips.

Gojo: you used too much of the color corrector. just a dab would’ve been enough.

Gojo again: see, i told ya. let me do it, you only need a little bit of powder…

Also, you applying your makeup turns him on. If you’re baking your face and suddenly felt his hands glide up your ass and grope you by the hip… don’t be surprised.

Gojo on social media and on phone, in general, is a trip. I have like a whole series of hcs for this.

He’d have a ton of pictures of you. Some goofy, some not. He’d even threaten to post some embarrassing ones if you don’t comply with him from time to time. He’d probably have a picture of some popular model as his lock screen but a live-picture of your drunk self on the floor as his home screen. You’d be labeled something very stupid in his contacts. I’m gonna go ahead and say he’d label you as Crème du Meow Meow on his phone. Yes, you know about it because he calls you that.

First off, if you’re the type of person who takes selfies but crops people out of pictures or places stickers on their face for your page DO NOT LET GOJO FIND OUT.

While he doesn’t want you to plastering his face everywhere on your page if it’s a picture that has both of you and him in it and you crop him out… he’s making a scene in the comments.

You could post a photo of yourself with him cropped out and he’d be in the comments yelling in order to embarrass you. “wow you look so sexy IN THE OUTFIT I BOUGHT BTW ;)” and other humiliating shit he could say. You’re better not uploading pictures that had him beside you or not cropping it at all. Even if you do that, he’ll leave comments but he saves the corny lines for your private messages.

[ Gojo : 14: 33 ] : *sends a picture attachment of you* i’m hungry.

[ You : 14: 34 ] : *typing…..*

[ Gojo : 14: 34 ] : hungry for some Crème de la Meow Meow! lololol XD i crack myself up lol. anyway come over tonight xoxoxo 😏

[ You : 14: 36 ] : … Cream of what now.

Speaking of the phone. Gojo texts…. the way he speaks. It’s weird and he does it on purpose. His energy through the phone is the exact way it’d be in real life. He’ll annoy you if you’re not giving that same energy too.

[ Gojo : 14: 33 ] : heyyyyy, when are u off from work ❤️❤️❤️❤️ im bored

[ You : 14: 45 ] : On Sunday

[ Gojo : 14: 45.37s ] : wow. lol. feel like u’ve got an attitude with the way u just said ‘Sunday’ :/

[ You : 14: 49 ] : ?? What else am I supposed to say

[ Gojo : 14: 50 ] : idk i just feel like u could’ve been more enthusiastic. i do spend so much time with you like wtf the least i deserve is some enthusiasm. well okay since we’re playing games we can play the silent game until u start appreciating me more...

[ You : 15: 00 ] : What the hell are you talking about?

[ Gojo : 15: 02 ] : dont bite my head off!

[ You : 15: 03 ] : ??????

[ Gojo : 15: 04 ] : all i’m saying is that u’ve could’ve said ‘Sunday’ a lil nicer ):

[ You : 15: 04 ] : HOW?

[ Gojo : 15: 05 ] : with an emoji :]

[ You : 15: 08 ] : Sunday. 🖕

Gojo is a goofy partner. I think you have to tolerate or at least be on that same wavelength to endure being in a relationship with him. He likes to do things to annoy you but to also make you laugh. He considers himself a comedian and you laughing at the stuff he does strokes the ego. It’s also another love language. Being able to just randomly dance with him in the middle of the room or playful banter. Pranks are part of this too.

Gojo can speak Spanish.

Not all that well but I mean… he could if he tried but he’s not like amazing at it. It’s mostly what he remembers from language class, movies, and where he’s traveled. Still, it’s more than the usual and he can throw you off with it until the conversation becomes more complex lmao.

He sometimes starts random conversations in Spanish to throw off people, and will sometimes flair up his words in the accent (starts pronouncing ‘lemonade’ as ‘lemenado’) and that’s how you know he’s bullshitting. It’s incredibly embarrassing to be around him when he does it in public.

Gojo’s taste in music is everywhere. He also likes to blast it around the house especially on days when you guys are cleaning. You look into your music streaming service and find out that he made a playlist for “cleaning days” and it consists of the most random songs on there.

Satoru once texted you saying he had a movie night planned out and that the film is a ‘prestigious cult-classic’ with ‘five stars’. You actually went and he had snacks and everything and the movie already loaded. Here you were thinking it was a popular movie like the Umizaru series or something but then he pressed play and it turned out to be a four-hour JAV porn film titled ‘...The Invisible Man!? Is It A Ghost!? Late At Night In AN Empty Hospital, These Nurse Babes Are Getting Attacked From Behind By A Mysterious Stranger And Getting Massive Cocks Inserted Inside For Creampie Sex! "What, Did He Come From Inside The Wall!? Stoppppp!! Who Are You!?"’

You ended up finding out he had a lot of JAV films stocked at his place. You found another one titled ‘They Are Platonic Friends But Now They're Taking The Hot-Dogging-In-A-Thong Experience Together’ and you think it describes your relationship perfectly.

He likes Bollywood movies. He thinks “Wanna be my Chammak Challo” is one of the greatest songs of all time.

Gojo doesn’t drink. When you were only acquaintances he had told you that but you just assumed it was because he didn’t like alcohol, even though he looked like a person who would drink a lot. Later, you found out he doesn’t drink because he’s bad at it. A very weak drinker who would lose his composure after two or three drinks. Had something to do with his freaky eyes. Once, has he ever gone out to drink with you and it resulted in him falling out of the car seat like a ragdoll. You were drunk but not as bad as he was and you had to drag him back inside by the foot. You didn’t even make it to the bedroom when you both crashed onto the floor and fell asleep. He woke up with a migraine and a scowl on his face that didn’t lift until the next day.

Satoru’s kind of an insomniac… sort of? It depends. He only sleeps for a short period of time and usually starts his day earlier than you. It’s why he ends up at your place at strange times or why you wake up in the middle of the night, turn on the lights and find him on your couch. Since he gets tired if he doesn’t wear the blindfold or glasses I see him sleeping at irregular hours so your schedules are never really the same. He takes random naps at times but you can join him for a cuddle session.

I don’t think he’d really put a label on your relationship. It started as a one time thing, ended up happening a bit more then he asked you out to a night out of food and fun. I’m sure he told you in the beginning that he wasn’t looking for anything serious. However, the signs are there. He ends up spending more time at your place than his. You find more of his clothes at your place, or his shoes stacking at the front of your door. His toothbrushes in your bathroom, when you grocery shop you keep in mind of the items he likes and dislikes and add them to your basket, and he goes straight to your place after work. Doesn’t matter if you’re not there, you’ve already given him the code long ago…

There’s not many cons Satoru finds when he’s in your presence and to find someone that just clicks with you is enough for him to come back.

Gojo likes threesomes. He just likes sex in general. He’s picky with his threesomes, though, and if it’s any of your friends and he thinks they’re ugly he’s just gonna pass on it. I do think he’d tell you which friend of yours he found attractive if you asked.

You guys have sex between 3-5 times a week lol. It’s never consistent.

You guys do have toys. He’d make you try a buttplug and have you walk around the house with it. Eating breakfast, doing laundry, all that stuff with the buttplug in. He also has that vibrator app and you guys do play around with that in public.

He likes looking up sex toys and stuff with you and reacting to it.

He also likes when you send him thirst traps just sexy pictures of you in or out of something. He has a whole hidden folder of the stuff you sent him which you shouldn’t know about unless you’re snooping on his phone…

Speaking of his phone, he follows porn pages. He also does follow those girls with the OnlyFans. If you’re upset about this… I guess you need to step your game up… maybe make your own OF if you get what I’m saying…

He talks to you about the celebrities he finds hot or whatever. He does snoop around at the people he sees you taking pictures with. He’ll ask about them if they pique his interest or he finds them attractive.

HE HAS A SEX PLAYLIST. It’s horrible actually atrocious and the songs aren’t always sexy like yeah he’d have some D’Angelo on there or something but then you suddenly hear… Opera? Next, you’re hearing country music and trying not to burst out laughing. What’s worse is that he doesn’t need the playlist, you guys have had sex tons of times without it. He play songs when he’s feeling ‘romantic’ but you just know you're about to hear Shawty Wanna Fuck on repeat for thirty minutes.

He tried to fake an orgasm on you once and it was the stupidest thing you have ever seen him done… and he does A LOT of stupid stuff.

He thinks missionary is boring and holy but he ends up cumming in that position anyway.

He puts on a movie or show when you’re having sex and places you in reverse cowgirl so you have something to watch. He talks during films so yes there’s commentary on the movie while you ride him.

He thinks Zoe Saldana in the Avatar movie was hot and he’d hint at you cosplaying as her character for some roleplay nights…

He likes french kissing you and placing his hands on your neck to keep you in place and slowly running his palm down to your chest to caress it. Some very sloppy kissing behavior.

He’s definitely into food-play. Yes, the whole whip cream and strawberries scenario.

He has a lot of roleplay ideas, some of them are just extremely stupid and some come from his JAV collection… it’s up to you to fulfill those fantasies though.

In freaky fashion, he likes sexual voice notes or voicemails a lot more than sexts. He also likes live picture nudes and videos too. He opens these on campus or in front of his students and has a really big cheesy smile. “Hm? What’s wrong? Oh, me? Nothing…” *continues to cheese grin hard*

Satoru enjoys outdoor sex in the morning like on the patio.

I’ve hinted that Satoru likes shower sex. He also likes bathtub/jacuzzi/pool sex. He would thrive at a nude beach or something.

He talks a lot during it too. Not all the time but when he does there’s definitely a conversation following right after he fingers you into another orgasm. Only laughing softly when he pulls his fingers out and sees the strings of cum on his hand.

He avoids kissing you on the lips outside of sex. I guess he feels like it would change the status of your relationship if he did. He’s a very good kisser though.

He eats ass. That’s really all I can say. He just does and he has the enema kits to prove it.

Satoru enjoys how casual and silly sex can be. It’s not always sexy and performative, you’re sometimes laughing at the shit he pulls off, sometimes a leg cramps or a hole is missed, a poke or two at the rib, at times what was supposed to be sex ends up drifting into just you two talking… for hours. He likes it. It’s like a shedding of a film of skin and it’s during a time where you and him are at your most vulnerable. You’ve seen him all, you know about his work, his fucking JAV collection… and still you like him enough to make the sweetest noises under him. It’s nice. It’s something to look forward to each day.

There were no expectations in this relationship. You guys both knew that at any time someone could step out and the other shouldn’t have a problem. Still, it’s a conscious choice that you both find each other at the end of the night rather than some stranger. Is it love? Satoru couldn’t tell you but no reason to sweat on it.

[solomonish]

Demon Brothers Helping a Struggling MC

CW for: eating disorders (alluded to but not described - discussed in the disclaimer).

so, i want to first state that if anybody believes anything in this post is more harmful than helpful, please let me know and i will delete it. I know that for things that I deal with, fics like this are comforting, but seeing as I’ve never personally had an eating disorder or known someone with one, it’s entirely possible I missed the mark. additionally: here is a tumblr post with a variety of hotlines you can call if you need to. There are eating disorder specific hotlines for the US and UK listed, along with suicide helplines for countries around the world. if you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out and get help - especially from the professionals who know how to give the proper care. you are so worth it.

Lucifer

He keeps an eye on you, even when you don’t realize it, so he’s the first to notice that something is bothering you. Still, with how much time he spends working, it does take him a little longer than he’d like.

As solution-oriented as he is, he prefers to address you the moment he figures it out. His words are firm and straightforward - he’s not the one you want to go to if you need things put gently.

Pride is who he is, and he takes great pride in you - he makes sure to make this known. This knowledge does not make him any less proud of you, and he wants you to be able to see yourself the way he does - certainly then, you might have an easier time with the recovery process.

Even if Lucifer cannot be there directly by your side, he is always with you - in the reminders he sends you, in the rewards he promises when you make progress, in the efforts he makes to assist your transition into the Devildom. He’s the best at creating a stable environment so that you don’t have as much to focus on while he works with you to recover.

Mammon

Mammon is a hard on to hide anything from, if only because he’s around you so much. he also spends a lot of time staring after you wistfully but shhh don’t let him know you know

Still, he’s also a bit oblivious at times, so it might take him a while to notice anything is up. once he does realize that you’re struggling, he panics a bit.

Mammon brings it up himself, but only after a short while of acting antsy around you and staring more pointedly at you at random points throughout the day. he’s clumsy in his approach, but careful to be sensitive: he’s used to being told how often he messes things up, and this is one thing he WANTS to get right.

Mammon has a way of making you feel in control - with the way he allows you to tell him what you need, with the way he isn’t too pushy in helping you through rockier days of your recovery. He wants to be able to be YOUR man, your go-to guy for anything, and he’ll make absolutely sure to get it right.

Leviathan

Levi has a million things to distract himself from the world around him, so bringing him into reality can take a while.

However, he can also tell when somebody else is uncomfortable - whether it’s a facet of his pact or he’s just in tune with his best friend, he isn’t sure.

He’s the type to go to sites like reddit and ask for first-person experience advice. The clinical advice seems stuffy and he isn’t sure if he can be trusted with such formal advice.

His strong suit is distraction, so if you’re okay with it, that how he’ll help you. If anything in your recovery gets too much, he’s there to help shift your focus. He’s also good with helping you stick to some kind of schedule, if that helps you out. After all, he sticks to one religiously to catch all his shows - he’ll rearrange it for you if you need it.

Satan

Satan is perceptive, but he’s not immune to overthinking. The fact that you came to the Devildom, something to be wary of yet somehow becoming something so treasured so quickly, catches him off guard and he still has to reconcile his feelings with how he watches you.

When he does find out and realizes how long he’s gone without noticing, he’s angry with himself. He’s supposed to be the smart one, the perceptive one, and he missed something so important.

He’ll read up on everything he can in order to give you the best support. Satan will also up his attentiveness, making sure to notice any little thing you may need that you don’t want to tell him about.

Aside from maybe having to let him know to back off a bit, Satan will probably be the most likely to just intuitively know what you need. He still communicates everything with you, and he makes for good company, whatever type you may need.

Asmodeus

Asmo’s favorite things to take pictures of are as follows: himself, you, and the most aesthetically pleasing desserts he can find. When you start shying away from two of those, he wonders briefly what made you so camera shy but normally turns the camera on himself and shrugs it off. maybe you feel like you’re having a bad hair day?

Once it does dawns on him that perhaps it’s something more serious, he’ll immediately ask you how he can help. He’s holding you gently as he does, using his softest voice - he almost sounds timid, and maybe he has to be, to deal with the amount of love he’s feeling for you and only you.

You might have to tell him to ease up on the overt compliments about how you look or talking about buying clothes and “form fitting” shapes, and thought he’ll have a learning curve he’ll find lots of different ways to make sure you feel loved! He’ll take a page from your book and start complimenting things like how sweet you are, or how smart he thinks you are - things about the you inside of you that have his heart racing when you say them back.

Asmo knows a lot about the pressure to look a certain way, so even though he lives by feeding into what those people want, he’ll always back out if it gets too much for you. If it’s alright with you, you can always be his favorite photographer <3

Beelzebub

When he’s eating, he doesn’t always focus on what other people are eating. (honestly, it only makes him hungrier). However, when he offers some of his food to you - a move anybody will tell you is the most affectionate thing he can do - and you refuse, he starts to worry.

At first, he wonders if you’re upset with him - and once he finds out the real reason, he doesn’t feel much more satisfied.

Beel’s best effort is trying to structure mealtimes more so instead of gorging himself throughout the day he eats meals. He also never judges or comments on what you do or don’t eat - he just does his best to make sure you have any option you want.

Beel’s strongest suit is comfort - he’ll agree with anything you do want to eat and will get rid of anything you don’t without judgement. He’s also pretty good with knowing the nutritional value of food - if you’re interested, he’d be more than happy to help you plan meals that have what you want and what you need, without making it seem too daunting a task.

Belphegor

Belphegor doesn’t pick up on a lot of things because he’s asleep most of the day. He does, however, spend a lot of his conscious hours with you, and eventually (maybe with some innocent prompting from Beel) he’ll realize that you’re starting to behave differently.

Will straight up ask you about it until he knows you’re being completely honest with him. What he lacks in tact he makes up for in dedication - he wants to help you, and his apathetic front allows him to help without seeming too involved to the point it makes you uncomfortable.

Belphegor can help you feel a sense of normalcy if you ever get overwhelmed or disconnected. He can continue conversations about really anything and help give you a moment to recuperate and breathe.

That’s not to say he isn’t proactive in your recovery. Anything you tell him or anything he brings to the table to brainstorm, he’ll say at the end of the conversation “let me sleep on it” and when he wakes up again he’ll have several game plans ready to see which helps you most in your recovery.

All

if one of them catches wind, it’s only a matter of time until the others notice how something’s changed between you and that brother

all of them will advocate for you to have easier access to the human world for therapy (in their own ways, some more helpful than others), should you choose to go. if not, they’ll all do their best to be a comforting ear when you need one.

sometimes you can find them all in the library, not discussing what you’ve told them but trying to figure out how best to communicate how much they care. (it’s one of the few times you can see them actually working together)

whoever had grocery duty or dinner duty will often check in with you to see if you have any special requests. if you mention wanting a specific snack or something throughout the day, you might end up with seven packages of it within 24 hours. (they’re all trying).

little by little, you’ll also notice how they stop fighting as much at the table. meals become more fun and enjoyable affairs, even if there’s been a disagreement earlier in the day. the brothers are all on their best behavior, and lucifer doesn’t even make any comments wondering why they won’t act that way for diavolo.

[alorenawrites]

On Words and Meaning

So I've been thinking a lot about how Loki is being discussed and the words used, particularly by Hiddleston, given his bent for using literary language in his descriptions. There are three words I want to touch on in this little post, one of them definitely rooted in his usage.

So the first I want to touch on is the term "romance." We've heard (often from Hiddleston), that Loki is, at heart, a romance. I think there's a dimension of the discussion missing in these conversations in that is important to consider.

To the layman, a romance is simply a love story, sometimes with a sexual undertone. But in the literary sense, a romance is a much deeper genre. I want to consider that this layer may also be present in Hiddleston's intent on using the term in describing the story arc. It certainly is in mine, as someone with a fascination with literary form and also with an English degree who has spent way too much time exploring genre.

So firstly, we need to define "romance." From literaryterms.net:

I. What is Romance?

In the strictest academic terms, a romance is a narrative genre in literature that involves a mysterious, adventurous, or spiritual story line where the focus is on a quest that involves bravery and strong values, not always a love interest. However, modern definitions of romance also include stories that have a relationship issue as the main focus.

II. Examples of Romance

In the academic sense, an example of a romance is a story in which the main character is a hero who must conquer various challenges as part of a quest. Each challenge could be its own story and can be taken out of the overall story without harming the plot.

Example 1

A knight who wishes to prove himself by recovering a stolen heirloom from an enemy may find himself attempting to make his way through a dangerous wood filled with thieves.

Once he has accomplished this challenge, he may find himself climbing a tall mountain on which a group of people are in trouble. He would save the group somehow, and then move on.

Then the final stage: the enemy’s kingdom. There may be a fair maiden whom he meets and somehow helps or rescues, or perhaps she helps him.

But the fair maiden is not the focus of the story – his quest is the focus. Each story can be taken out, yet each builds the hero’s strength to face his final quest. These stories tend to be serious rather than humorous and touch on strong values.

In considering this, I've thought about Loki's arc as a quest that does, indeed, involve the discovery and exploration of strong values with a three part quest, though I don't think the quests entirely stand on their own. The overarching theme is about Loki discovering his sense of self- his quest to become a full person, not just a trope for the universe to exploit so others can reach their better selves. I divide the show up in to three quests. The first, in episodes 1 and 2, is Loki finding a sense of purpose in the new world- his quest is to discover who this new variant is and where they are hiding. This is resolved by the end of that second episode. The second arc takes place in the next two episodes- Loki discovering his empathy for others is the continuation of the overarching personal development plot, while his quest is to discover Sylvie's goals and to uncover/share the truth behind the TVA. And in our third section, episodes 5 and 6, we get the culmination of the personal growth arc in his ultimate discovery of different facets of himself (illuminated by the different elements of self shown in the multitude of variant Lokis) while the quest is to uncover who is in control of the Sacred Timeline and why. The differences in colour palettes, settings, tones, etc. between the three episode pairings is a part of how I started to distinguish my thoughts on each. And regardless of the visual distinctions, I most definitely see the entire arc as exploring strong values and bravery, though the bravery is multi-layered, showing not only the visible bravery of facing down an apocalypse, Alioth, etc., but the internal bravery of challenging one's self and digging deep into discovering who one really is. This is a theme of queerness that I see lingering in this series- discovering who we are is a process, not an outcome.

I think that this definition of a romance, in the classical sense, is a little oversimplified, as there is often a theme of discovery of self or improvement of self along the way. In a Gothic romance, themes of "the people are the real monsters" come into play (Crimson Peak is an excellent example of this)- there may be elements of the supernatural, but the real thing of which the viewer/reader should be afraid is the person behind the curtain. Gothic romances also often do include a love story arc, but it is often deeply flawed on some level and often also includes some sort of sexual or romantic awakening, often by a female lead, that leads to the discovery of whatever darker is taking place (Crimson Peak turns this on its head in that it is Thomas' awakening with Edith that leads to his turning point and Edith's realization that the Sharpe siblings are the monsters, not the ghosts in the hall). The themes of discovery of self, or of the fortitude of moral values, or of the journey of a person's development, play into both a Gothic romance and its foundations in a classical romance.

So. There's part 1 of this ramble.

On to part 2!

The next word I want to examine is the term "relationship" and its companion, "love." Now, mind you, I come at this from a queer perspective as a demisexual, demiromantic individual, so these two words are ones I've spent a LOT of time pondering, in the quest to define my own identity.

We've heard the term "relationship" tossed around so often with only a romantic implication attached, but in truth, this word is so much more broad than this. You are in a relationship with your barber. You are in a relationship with your cat. You are in a relationship with a spiritual advisor, a professor, your best friend, your partner. Just because it is so heavily used in this way doesn't mean the relationship is only an intimate one (though intimate relationships are also not inherently sexual or romantic in nature, either, so let's remember this as well). Now if we break down what a relationship is, it's just a consistent interaction with someone based on some common interest or goal. It's a remarkably benign word. Its connotations, however, take it in a multitude of directions.

So let's look at it through the lens of an intimate relationship and add in the component of love. We'll start with just a blanket statement that love is not only one single thing. It isn't just romantic. It is our family, our friends, our pets, pie, the colour blue, that feeling of perfection when the waves of a warm lake brush over your calves...love is embedded in the experiences of these things. We love them. Love it as vast and broad as relationships. We love places, people, things, and experiences. We love ourselves (or we try to learn to).

In my world, through my particular brand of queerness, love changes in intimate relationships on a regular basis. I love my partner dearly. But on some days, that love is to my best friend, while other days, it is a romantic love and on others, sexual expression may be involved, but they may overlap in different ways. Sexual expression is independent of romantic attraction and the degree of each isn't tied together in any way. If we can separate these things, I think we can see the relationships in our everyday lives in different lights and with greater complexity.

I also think that looking at these things through the lens of diverse sexual and romantic experiences can inform how we interpret the Loki x Sylvie pairing and why some of us just aren't bothered by it (though certainly not the only reason people aren't).

We've been told Loki loves Sylvie. That much is beautifully clear. But love (and being in a relationship) doesn't automatically mean that 1) both parties are experiencing it in the same way, 2) both parties have the same approach or priorities, 3) the level of romance is necessarily the same between the people involved, 4) that sexual attraction exists at all.

Sometimes a kiss is a form of communication and not tied to the want to shag someone.

So this is where my interpretation of this particular pairing comes into play. I do see the story as a romance, in the classical sense, but also with a slight streak of the more modern sense involved. The focus is still on the quest, even when the love story emerges. And that is where I see the priorities of these characters and their definitions of the relationship differing and I analyze it through these different dimensions of love and relationship orientations.

Loki actually embodies one of the traits I've seen listed for demisexuals- we hold our friendships extremely close and because we hold our friendships the way we do, it isn't uncommon for us to end up with crushes on our best friends (and no, they don't generally develop into other forms of relationships, but they could). This is the phase in which I see Loki by episode 6. He has formed this intense bond, unlike any other it seems he's had, and his heart is breaking over the thought of losing her to her own rage. All he wants is for her to be OK, remember? This isn't a selfish action. But I think it is significant that while he tries to stop her, he's not the one who initiates the kiss. All his actions here are ones that a close friend would also do for their best friend. Like, I'd try to stop my besties from inadvertently destroying the universe. I'd even throw down over it. And for the exact same reasons- the risks are too great, we need to think, and I want them to be OK. Almost everything Loki does throughout his growing closeness to Sylvie is something I'd do for one of the people I've told I'd defend- as in, I literally told some of these people, "anybody messes with you, I'll cut a bitch- just tell me who and I'm there."

So because of all this, I don't see this relationship as sexual in any way. Romantic? Possibly. But not necessarily. Even being in love with one another doesn't mean a relationship has to have a sexual component.

Looking at Sylvie, I see her also as having found companionship with Loki, but her overriding goal is, ultimately, not to bond with someone- it's her mission. And she has sacrificed her entire life because of the TVA to this mission. She tells him repeatedly, in one way or another, that the mission comes first. Yes, she does care about him, but I don't think the way she cares about him is the same as the way he cares about her because they have differing priorities and needs (and hence why she feels betrayed by him when he tries to stop her). Or at least she hasn't allowed herself to express that. When she falls to the ground after she's killed He Who Remains, I think we get a glimpse of what Loki meant to her- she is alone, she grieves, and there is no meaning left to her story. She's done what she dedicated her entire life to and the person who could have given it other meaning is no longer beside her.

I still don't think that the first thing they would do upon seeing each other is suck face and have wild sex. Would that bother me? No, not really. I can headcanon something different than what actually happens, I'm fine with that (just look at all this glorious headcanoning happening right here!) I'd like it to stay a romantic friendship (queer platonic relationships for the win- they're squishes!) because I don't think we hardly ever see those types of relationships and queer platonic relationships are incredibly beautiful and powerful and yes, based on love and maybe even romance, in their own way. They are defined by the people in them, as are all relationships.

And now to address "but she kissed him!"

Yes, she did. And I've kissed my partner when there wasn't romance involved because I wanted to share a moment, to express something deeper than I had words for (yes, even on one of my aromantic leaning days), or just because it's fun. And it doesn't have to "match" up with how the other partner feels it, either, so long as the message itself is what comes across. This is how I read the Sylvie x Loki kiss. It was a message of worthiness. Loki's entire arc, including in that scene, is in discovering if he's anyone different than the monster he's made himself out to be (and encouraged others to see him as). He tells Sylvie that he can't be trusted, falling back on the habit of characterizing himself as the professional liar, the one who can't form those attachments which are built on trust. He also identifies her as someone incapable of trust in that moment, which I think is also a projection of how he sees himself. He tells Mobius he can only trust himself and the show slowly shows Loki coming to trust others, but in this moment in the Citadel, he's falling back on a different perception of himself.

This is where the kiss comes in, for me. Sylvie isn't trying to tell him she'd jump him right then and there, if things were different. Sylvie is trying to tell him that she does trust him, that he can be trusted, and that he is worthy of the affection of a friend, even if she can't have him in her way. She is prioritizing her mission, yes, but not without giving him some sort of reassurance, in her own way, that this rejection isn't personal. That he isn't too broken to be loved. It doesn't have to go into romance (not saying it couldn't, just saying it isn't a requirement). It doesn't have to go into sexual relationship territory.

Maybe I see this so vastly differently because of my experiences exploring gender, sexuality, and romantic orientation. Maybe I see this so differently because at this stage in my life, I would absolutely kiss a friend if I felt something so heavy was going to break them. I have a friend I say "I love you" to every time we talk on the phone or video chat- we've been together for 20 years. I've got photo proof of a snuggle pile of friends when I was a young adult. I've shared a bed with a friend with no reason other than that we didn't want to sleep on the floor and why not. I've had friendships that were awkward to start and intense once they got going that are absolutely still important in my life. I've had crushes on friends that have faded and just shown me another dimension of what it is to love someone. I've watched adults who struggle to make connections to other people discover those moments of awkward "how do I do friend mode?" and come out stronger for them, with that huge sense of victory hidden behind a small smile they don't want to share with anyone else quite yet.

I see so much possibility in how we interpret a television show reduced to "it's a romance and that's sick and incest and he wants to fuck himself!" and it just saddens me that so many people have such a limited understanding and experience of the depth and breadth of human relationships and of how people love one another.

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

we are our family, even if we don’t want to be.

Titans 3.07

a bit over halfway through the season, and we still don’t have all of our main characters on the board! i love this show.

as always, typing this up as i watch. live reaction, baby! *shadowboxes*

SPOILERS AHEAD

1. i don’t think i’ve mentioned this before, but i kinda miss the old ‘dc universe’ intro. it was cool! the whole idea of it was wild and waaaaay over-ambitious, but also very very on-brand because of it.

2. this is... the third time we’ve seen dick sleeping this season? that’s a record! checking another thing off my s3 wishlist...

2.5. i guess i rag on titans all the time for its wafer-thin plotting and bad pacing, but i have to admit that this season has been a step-up from the last one in this regard. titans has very reactive rather than proactive protagonists, and a lot of the last season seemed to be: x happened, the team reacted badly, then y happened, they reacted badly, etc. this time around, it’s not a huge leap up by any means, but at least they’re doing something about it. 

i do appreciate the focus on character arcs over everything else. and when i say everything else, i mean it: arcs that started two seasons ago with no big cathartic moments, intermittent payoff and multiple relapses. big bads have ranged from interdimensional demons to superpowered assassins to whatever in the world scarecrow is, but trigon’s big weapon against the titans was to... use their worst fears against them. slade’s was to... use their fears to break them up. crane’s is to... use red hood to use their fears to break them up. even the threat of gotham’s citizens being in danger doesn’t feel real: gotham is mythologised into an entity of its own, infecting our heroes like a parasite. like. this is not to say that most other superhero media aren’t big character arcs intertwined with the main plot, but titans doesn’t even make pretend that it’s anything but.

anyway. that’s my entry #2345 to ‘give a grand unifying theory for titans’. thanks. i’ll be back with more.

3. “anger is just fear in a little black dress.” god I HATE HIM

(what’s he doing with barbara’s likeness? oh... oh god. a terrible thought just occurred to me. what if they introduce hush at the very last minute for plastic surgery shenanigans? would you put it past this show?)

3.5. jason, nooooooooo

3.75. i mean, they’re making it very clear here that scarecrow is the one in control--the one who’s always been in control--and is manipulating jason and literally poisoning him, but i hope it doesn’t end up erasing nuance or jason’s autonomy. if jason’s to reckon with the issues that brought him here, then the lines of responsibility will need to be set somewhere. 

(this applies to dick as well but more on that later, i guess.)

4. just--the phrase “40% loss of income” is so funny to me. like, gotham is full of these larger-than-life characters who are idiosyncratic beyond belief, colourful and dramatic and creating chaos just for the sake of chaos, and then there’s the regular criminals and their henchmen who just want to make a quick buck sitting down with pie charts and graphs, griping about the joker reducing their returns or debating high risk investments in, i don’t know, two-face’s next scheme.

“yyyyeeeeeaaah, my financial advisor is telling me that going all-in with a guy who literally makes decisions on the flip of a coin is probably not the greatest idea.”

4.5. god i hate smug!smarmy!scarecrow so much

4.85. as big plans to “control” gotham go, it’s pretty bog-standard. clearly scarecrow has some bigger plan in mind but it really feels like we’ve got no clear insight into him and he’s this generic creepy mystery-man who knows more than he lets on and springs a twist/cliffhanger every now and then. i liked the scenes with him and dick in 3.04 where it seemed like he was genuinely on the backfoot and things weren’t going as he predicted. for all of his faults, dick is at least familiar with scarecrow’s bullshit and knows not to give what he wants.

5. i mean... i see where dick is coming from with the “he’s not jason anymore; he’s red hood” because his immediate glaring concern is scarecrow’s drug and the damage it could potentially cause gotham? i do not doubt that it’s something batman drilled into him, too, but when you’re expected to take point on a situation where the lives of an entire city weigh down on your shoulders, it’s better to simplify things and prioritise. i’m not saying it’s great or healthy! gar is absolutely right to consider this facet of the situation. it’s just dick can’t.

6. hmmmmmmm. HMMMMMMMMMMM. 

i don’t know that i’m super fond of this iteration of oracle???? it looks like a cross between cerebro from x-men and jarvis from iron man. it’s giving me second-hand embarrassment. somebody help me.

(at least they remembered dick’s middle name is actually “john”. i like to think bruce printed D in that contract because for a while he genuinely thought richard “dick” grayson was his full name. duck duck goose, dick dick grayson, i don’t know alfred, the kid was in a circus, maybe they thought it was funny. or maybe it was a test in anger control, who knows.)

6.5 “maybe you two would like some time alone?” even AI can’t help hitting on dick grayson in this universe.

“oh mr grayson, if i only had another eye to see you better...”

6.8. on one hand, it’s a bit disconcerting that the title of ‘oracle’ has gone from barbara herself to this gigantic machine; from my impression of the comics-verse, barbara had an extensive computing and surveillance system, true, but she was very clearly the brains behind the operation. on the other hand, i’m kind of glad that the ethical boundaries that this kind of surveillance violates is a sticking point for barbara. (tho let’s be real, the nsa would kill to have this in their arsenal).

6.9. also it’s now obvious that scarecrow’s big plan is to take control of oracle itself. it’s why he had lady vic take that picture of her eyes, or why he’s meddling around with it on his computer.

6.95. if only i could ‘command sleep’ anybody overstepping their boundaries re: personal information...

7. “you can just sit back and watch as the titans destroy themselves.” i mean... he’s not wrong

8. “dick’s parents were killed by a criminal mob; he won’t work with them.” it’s wonderful that you have this insight into dick, kory, i just wish we could’ve watched some of these conversations actually happen on-screen.

8.5. i’m glad that kom’s being treated with such nuance and understanding, though it’s obvious that she definitely has a Plan of her own. (and did i entirely imagine her ability to mimic other people flawlessly at the end of s2? or is that going to come into play at some point?) i think her story has the potential to be genuinely poignant, and in a universe where being Different, either because of mental health or physical differences or whatever else, leads a straight line to Evil, it’s important to acknowledge and then emphasise that the mere fact of your existence as a Different Person doesn’t predispose you to evil. maybe your act of destroying a system that has destroyed you and not scrambling to “fit in” is only evil as defined by that system. 

8.8. “you’re trespassing, i should call the authorities, i feel unsafe.” now this is a villain lady who’s definitely aware of her privilege.

8.85. kom smirking knowingly at her sister is everything.

“oooh that’s the kory i remember”

9. conner and dick working together woo!

9.25. god i hate a villain who’s always just a step ahead, no matter what. so crane anticipated dick using oracle to track his personal communications and set him up? how did he know when exactly dick would get to do this? how long did he have that poor man tied up in that van?

(the “save me, grayson” is a nice touch, tho. send dick spiralling even further! because if there’s one thing dick will do, it’s take responsibility for every goddamn thing that goes wrong.)

9.5. ahem. i’m going to need a million gifs of conner yeeting dick across that yard, fandom, thankyouverymuch.

(i understand conner is invulnerable to explosions, but how do his clothes survive??)

9.8. oooh crane is already in oracle! i’m just sitting here laughing helplessly because they’re overpowering this goddamned guy so much. he can build a lab in arkham’s basement! he has access to lazarus puddles! he has minions working across gotham, including a fully functional chemical laboratory staffed by chemists who only answer to him! he has the crime families of gotham quailing in his very presence! he has assassins at his beck and call! he’s enough of a manipulative bastard to have red hood under his thumb! and now he has enough of a tech know-how to not only be aware of oracle, but know how to hack into it! i’m sick of exclamation marks! i’ll shut up now!

9.95. dick leaving behind that smouldering grave for a person he failed to save without taking a second to process how he feels about it and running towards his next plan to corner scarecrow: a microcosm of where his head’s at right now.

10. really hammering in the themes of this season, aren’t we. 

10.25. the interesting thing is the titans repeatedly call themselves a family this season (none more so than dick) and while that found family has helped encapsulate and put away their traumatic experiences with their ‘original’ families, it’s meant that they’ve not really dealt with those issues. and dick and gar and jason come from ‘found families’ of their own: they are twice removed, traumatised two times over. they still cling to this identity however, and because of it they’re losing each other. a family isn’t static. it’s an ever-evolving dynamic and you have to put in work constantly to keep it healthy.

10.5. anyway, that’s entry #2346. i’m here aaaalll night.

11. lookit gar the detective! half-transforming and using his powers to deduce things! what a hero! i’ve said this for a long time, but gar is the bedrock of this team, and an unsung one at that.

11.25. i’m confused about him calling this room jason’s though. it seems to me that this is dick’s room that jason later used, and one that dick’s using now. so the unmade bed isn’t really jason’s fault; dick was woken by barbara that morning, and in his hurry, he left without making his bed.

(it still confounds me that bruce didn’t find jason another bedroom in that gigantic mansion of his. you really didn’t give this kid a chance, did you?)

12. oh well. so much for the oracle.

13. ... sorry, wait. you didn’t think i wasn’t going to address the bit with dick right now, did you?

12.5. i honestly don’t think it’s very complicated: dick’s been reeling from one traumatic thing to the next, and just when it seemed like at the beginning of the season, he felt happy and secure with his team and his place in the world, bruce ups and leaves gotham to him, specifically naming him a successor and calling him a ‘better batman’. he’s lost garth and jericho and donna and jason and now hank and dawn. he’s not even sure where rachel is or what she’s doing. after being told that batman was a psychopath for moulding him into a weapon, he’s also been told that his failure to be a ‘better batman’ lead to further disaster. of course he’s going to get batman-goggles. of course he’s going to be a prick. 

12.8. i don’t know what to say. i feel his frustration acutely. i don’t think he should’ve said what he said to barbara (can people stop pushing her around this season????) but that pressure to step in where your parent fails? to clean up their messes and try to think like them? to fall into habits drilled into you when you developed them as coping mechanisms growing up? I FEEL THAT. 

every step he’s taking he’s putting 110% of himself in it and scarecrow’s still playing mindgames with all of them: i absolutely feel his desperation to take control of that game and turn it on scarecrow, no matter what it takes.

and he did apologise almost immediately, and finally--finally--actually works with barbara. 

12.9. again, not excusing him! but i get it. and i think that’s a sign of great character writing.

“did you know i just reminded emmram of all of her daddy issues? what the fuck????”

12.95. i love that dick&barbara, kory&kom, and gar are all approaching solving this mystery from different angles, each as valid as the other. also, conner is there as... emergency bomb defuser man?

13. it’s like all fancy rich people in fancy rich houses do is pour fancy rich alcohol into fancy rich glasses on pristine, untouched tabletops. i wonder what it’s like to live like that.

13.25. I KNEW IT! poor michael. it was nice knowing you.

13.5. man, kory is contending with a lot of issues that she’s successfully bottled up and compartmentalised until now. the cold reality that a child can seek out their parents as refuge and they can view the child as a piece to be moved in a greater game (never out of cruelty, though, never, and somehow that makes it worse), that truth of blackfire’s treatment on tamaran because she’s different, and her own culpability in what happened. she exchanged one family for another, after all, and left that family to die and her sister to suffer. like dick, like gar, kory’s being forced to reckon with what the titans are meant to be, the larger implications of creating their found family in their own space.

14. it’s probably because it’s one in the morning and i’ve had two glasses of wine but i did not follow that bit of exposition at all and victor freeze??? what? 

anyway. look at them solving things! together! go team!

“you made a deal with the mob?” oh the sense of betrayal on his face! fuck off, dick, your issues aren’t kory’s. 

15. conner is really sweet and a bit of an awestruck crush on kom is to be expected. especially after that power rangers-esque transformation (i say this as a former huge power rangers fangirl. i’ve seen every series until 2007 including the original japanese versions and written fanfic for all of them. so i love a cool costume transformation, is what i’m saying.)

also?

FUCK YEAH

16. i love the gotham crime families just chillin’ around eating ice cream. I LOVE THEM

16.5. that was a fun fight sequence, if marred slightly by that bit of awkward flirting between conner and kom. i wonder if she’s really planning to use him in a larger scheme to get kory back to tamaran, or maybe something else. 

16.75. so i’m assuming that scarecrow has jason either so paralysed by fear that he can barely move, or jason’s withdrawing from the drug that he’s been sucking in every few minutes. 

17. it’s nice to see them chill after a successful mission! and it can be awkward, but conner’s crush on kom and him striving to impress her is also, well, uh... cute.

17.5. i guess the dick/barbara scene was inevitable, especially given the... unresolved nature of their relationship in the flashbacks? and they’ve been through a rollercoaster together this episode, discovering and then destroying an incredible tool within a matter of hours, re-discovering just how well they work together as a team. dick’s swimming in the nostalgia. i don’t expect it to last as a long-term relationship, but i totally get why this is happening now. and hey, they’re cute!

i have a weeeirrrrd feeling that kory is going to leave to tamaran at the end of the season and that dick and kory will rekindle--or rather realise--their relationship just before that. it’s going to be devastating and beautiful and painful and i will be writing essays about it which would be me just wailing into the screen.

18. gar found molly!!!!!!! MOLLY’S BACK! \o/ gar is the BEST

19. that was a fun episode! i love this silly show, even if it does destroy me sometimes <3

[funkymbtifiction]

So, I am an ENFP [redacted] and I am very enthusiastic about typology (it’s one of the few interests that have stuck with me for more than a few months). Your blog is almost my only source of knowledge, which means, of course, everything I know, I know because of you. […] Has anything similar ever happened to you online or even here, on Tumblr? Has anybody ever discredited your knowledge without providing actual arguments? Or has anybody ever questioned your type because you don’t give them “ENFP vibes”?

Okay, for the other people reading this, in a nutshell the OP tried to have intelligent discussions about character typing online, but then got flooded with shit-posts, which turned into a bombardment of troll abuse attacking her on a personal level and insisting she must not be her own type because of her debating style. :P

I’m sorry you went through all of that, and got bullied off the platform. I’m afraid that’s why a lot of forums and public discussion places (including IMDb’s discussion boards, which I loved) have had to shut down – because bored TP trolls take over the discussion and insult people and/or flood it with spam. As for not taking a public place of discussion seriously – that tells you their mindset. This is a place to troll when I’m bored, and any serious, intelligent discussion of the topic at hand intimidates me because I know nothing. So take some satisfaction in that your arguments were so good, the only tactic any of them had was to attack you personally – the classic misdirection of a beaten opponent.

I’ve been called an ESTJ many times online because I don’t fit into people’s presumed stereotypes about ENFPs being emotional airheads. One of my first discussions with an “INTJ” (debatable now) on a forum resulted in them telling me that I reminded them of their ESTJ sister and was probably an ESTJ instead of an ENFP because when they asked me to describe my thought process, instead of using a metaphor to describe it, I answered them plainly and said what my mind does. It’s funny in hindsight that they assumed an ENFP would always be living in some metaphorical place where there’s no straight answers to questions, but at the time it was very confusing and a little insulting as a newbie to the system to be told I had to be a high thinking-sensing type.

There are also still people who assume SFJ was right about me, even though I think I’ve given enough proof of always-rethinking to leave a trail of Ne-dom evidence everywhere on the internet by now. It used to bother me, but I does less these days since I know myself better than a stranger knows me.

As for discrediting or ignoring my knowledge without providing actual arguments, yes, all the time… the key tactic of someone who doesn’t know anything and cannot offer a decent argument is to make an argument personal. Once the focus shifts off the topic onto you, you know they are done / beaten, but they are hoping to use the personal insults as a distraction. In short: they got nothing. I face this all the time when I type a popular character against the popular typing for them, which is based on nothing but air. Elsa is not an INFJ, Tony Stark is not an ENTP, and way more of their favorite character are sensors than intuitives. If there’s no direct evidence, you don’t follow a generalization or a stereotype.

For what it’s worth, characters are only as good as their characterization. Some characters can be so poorly written that after 8 hours, you still don’t have a clue – and since I’m a perfectionist who tries to get things ‘right’ that can be greatly frustrating. I’m slowly learning in those cases to just make an educated guess, offer what evidence I can to support it, and if it’s wrong, it’s wrong. It’s not the end of the world.

The thing is, people like you and me take typology seriously. We want to get it right and have intelligent conversations about it and treat it in a serious and intellectual manner. But the vast majority of people don’t care that much, so to them, it doesn’t bother them nearly as much to see an ESTJ 1w2 character mistyped ENFX on a public form. An ENFP who is taking something seriously and providing evidence for it can indeed come across as strongly Te, by the force of their arguments since it’s one of their passions. It doesn’t invalidate you as being a Ne-dom, but what people are seeing in that moment is fierce Te. “Where the hell is your evidence, you are talking crap!?” isn’t what they expect from a “sparkly manic pixie dream girl” but often what they will get.

ETA: In a public space, you are also running into anti-feeler bias among uneducated thinking types who assume F in your letter combination means you are “emotional” rather than someone who makes ethical judgments. It’s sad, but another facet of bigotry within the casual MBTI community (which also devalues sensing types in favor of intuitive types). The irony is that a great many internet thinkers are not the type they assume themselves to be (aka, not INTJs) and a fair number of them aren’t intuitives, either.

[thedreadvampy]

look not to vague here particularly bc my comment about You Know did straddle the line between criticising art and being mean about a person, fair play there, it was not a simple critique of art

but my biggest beef with Fine Art as an educational establishment is that I've yet to meet a Fine Artist who's been taught to separate artistic criticism (which can be very harsh and very negative) from a personal attack.

and as I say I'm not talking about You Know here, I understand how that felt personal bc it was about his public persons not just his work. but the idea that negative comments are inherently unkind or are a suppression of the Artistic Vision are pretty endemic to my experience of Fine Artists (whether at college/university or pros in their fifties setting up shows in spaces I've helped run).

like I tend to say the thing I got from my undergrad that I couldn't have got without studying art wasn't technique or theory (you can learn those from books) but the ability to give and take productive criticism.

and that includes criticism that isn't meant as concrit tbh, like, my tutor used to say 'clients don't know shit about art but if they say something looks like a dick you need to be able to either take the dick out or make sure there's a good reason for the dick to be there.' like art is made to be seen so anybody who sees it and tells you what they're seeing in it is giving you useful information even if they're also being a cunt. this is especially true for commercial work/work to brief but like. all art you put out the world rather than keeping as a personal/practise work is a communicative medium so what is communicating Matters.

you won't always have to change it but you do have to accept that some people won't like it and some people won't like it for reasons that didn't occur to you. so taking critique effectively is about listening to what the other person is saying and deciding whether or not you think their point is valid, significant and useful. and sometimes it isn't! like I've suggested some changes to people's works in progress and been really glad they ignored me when I saw how they finished it! and sometimes we are just gonna disagree! if you put a political message in your work and I say 'i think that message sucks' that doesn't mean you're WRONG or your art needs changing it may just mean. we disagree. but art is a conversation and for a conversation to work people are gonna have opinions about it.

and btw there's a skill to giving good critique too and it means getting beyond 'i like' or 'i don't like' and trying to work out what specifically you're reacting to and why. like 'the anatomy is dodgy' is less helpful than 'the hand looks weird' is less helpful than 'the hand looks stiff and awkwardly posed' is less helpful than 'what if you moved this finger to here?'. Saying 'i hate this' is less useful than 'this colour scheme makes me nauseous' is less useful than 'i think the juxtaposition of these two colours is gross, is that intentional? if not it might be nicer with a warmer yellow'. and always giving space for the artist to consider and explain why they made intentional choices.

critique is not about instruction but about questioning. but like. also if you have to give a ten minute explanation of why you made a choice then the art probably isn't effectively communicating for itself and that's useful information in itself. like 'I'm not sure what you're trying to say' or 'this seems kind of on the nose is there something more you're trying to get across' are Very Useful Criticisms to develop your work

but a lot of people get very defensive and like not to be a dick but while there's a few in every group, every single time I've had a joint crit with fine artists they have just been dreadful at taking crits. like it's always the fine artists who get upset at you questioning their vision and burst into tears or storm out or say "why are you all picking on me" when like. the crit they're getting is way lighter than in illustration or graphic design groups.

and like. this makes me sad. because I think when it comes to art teaching, group and individual crits are like 90% of the most valuable learning. like I didn't get a lot out of my art education because I had The World's Most Amazing Artists as teachers! (some of them have been really good though) I got a lot out of my art education because group crits helped shape my work, make specific changes, and learn from 30 other minds who saw my work from different angles. and if that basic skill, to criticise and be criticised, isn't being developed in five art courses then those students are missing a vital skill to keep improving and developing their work and communicating their ideas clearly and strongly.

also uhhhhhh if they haven't learnt to take criticism from other artists in a safe managed environment like a studio or classroom then they are really gonna Struggle if they get any notoriety because the majority of people who look at art aren't thinking about how to improve it, they're criticising from the perspective of a finished work, and that's still useful critique but it's much less likely to be couched in compliments or to come with specific suggestions for improvement. and with commercial art clients they often know nothing about process or theory they just know if they Like It or Don't Like It. so it helps to have practise in interpolating vague or general criticism into actionable changes and subjective opinions, and to have had space to develop some resilience. you know. it DOES hurt when people criticise your work, particularly if it's very personal, and it takes work and practise to get past that kneejerk defensive reaction and to step back from it a bit. but somebody saying "I don't like this art" or "this art is shallow/obvious/meaningless/ugly/unpleasant" isn't a personal attack. it feels like one bc you know how much thought and effort and work and how much of yourself goes into every piece. but art is a conversation and a negative response is part of that conversation. and if your work reaches a wide enough audience someone ain't gonna like it and uhhhh. a lot of fine artists don't seem to be able to cope with that concept.

(mind you if somebody says "this art is ugly and meaningless because it was made by an ugly meaningless stupid person" then yeah that's about you and they're being a dick (but also. it is about you and it isn't about you, it's about the single facet of you that they see from your art, and they do not know you and aren't speaking to your actual worth even if they think they are). but even there like. block it out and move on bc throwing a tantrum at them, however justified, only makes things worse. their opinion is not of you the entire human person but of you the reflection they're seeing in their interpretation of the art. it's not your problem.)

like it's not that you don't get to be upset when people talk shit about your art or recieve it in a way you don't like. of course you do. but it's also uhhhhh an inevitable consequence of putting art out into the world. by putting it out publicly you are inviting 'what do you think about this' and you can't be surprised when people tell you. it's not bullying to Not Like Your Artwork. it's kind of aggro to seek somebody out to tell them you don't like their art and all the things they should change about it (and that's got pretty endemic with the internet and accessibility of artists) but it's on you if you go looking for reviews or critiques or responses to your work and then can't cope with the fact that they're not unilaterally positive and not everyone is picking up what you're putting down.

[vanessakirbyfans]

Defying expectations, challenging Hollywood’s norms and facing one’s own fear of failing emerged as central themes when Michelle Pfeiffer, Kate Winslet, Rashida Jones, Vanessa Kirby and Andra Day met virtually in December for The Envelope’s Actress Roundtable. Collectively, they represent four decades in film and more wild experiences than we can fit in one discussion — and they’re also behind some of the most complex characters in film right now.

Pfeiffer is eccentric, wealthy New York widow Frances Price in the quirky drama “French Exit,” which opens this week in limited release. When Price blows through most of her inheritance, she flees to Paris, where she attracts an odd assortment of friends. Winslet is rough-hewn paleontologist Mary Anning in “Ammonite,” a period drama that explores the hardships of a female pioneer in 19th century England’s patriarchal science world and the challenges she faced hiding her love for another woman.

Jones is Laura, the dutiful daughter of an eccentric father in the comedy-drama “On the Rocks.” Despite their complicated history, daughter and father embark on a covert mission to find out if her husband is cheating, but self-discovery may just be the biggest reveal. Kirby conveys anger, sorrow and grief following the death of her newborn baby as Martha in the emotionally wrenching “Pieces of a Woman.” And singer Day makes her film debut in “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” a period drama streaming on Hulu later this month that chronicles Holiday’s battles with law enforcement, drugs and the crush of systemic racism.

Their conversation here has been edited for length and clarity.

Your films are built around narratives of complex women, many of whom face challenges that aren’t often explored on screen. “Pieces of a Woman” is a great example of a film that is so specifically female, it would have never made it to the screen in the past.

Vanessa Kirby: It definitely feels like a different time right now ... we want to represent women that we identify as being us and the weird parts of us. In the movie, my biggest intention was to make it not a sanitized, movie version of a birth. So [she] felt super sick and burped a lot. She was really nauseous ... things that we might think are unpalatable or not comfortable. That’s all the facets of being human, and particularly being a women. I’ve read so many scripts where it was a version of a woman that I don’t know. It was a film version as opposed to my sister or my best mates or me.

Kate Winslet: That’s what is great about now ... the world is making space for all of these stories. We’ve always tried to tell these stories, but the world is more receptive to hearing them now. That is a shift.... It’s such a moving, seismic time to be doing this job.

Michelle, your character Frances Price is the perfect example of an imperfect female protaganist. She is a mess, and fantastic, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

Michelle Pfeiffer: I was just was so curious about this woman, and I thought she was so odd and not like a character that I had seen or that I had played. And then the dialogue is very stylized. So you have to give in to it but, at the same time, not too much. It was made up of these disparate tones of absurdism and melancholy, and it was funny, and it was tragic — these oddballs sort of living on the fringe of society and trying to make some sort of human connection, all of them, in some way.

Rashida, in “On the Rocks,” you play a reserved writer with a charming, flamboyant father. Your real father is Quincy Jones. What sort of parallels did you feel playing Laura?

Rashida Jones: I very much related to this idea of coming of age with a larger-than-life father who commands presence and changes the atmosphere of any room he walks into, and how that in itself can be something you have to untangle from. Because in order to be your own person, in order to find your life, in order to figure out who you are in the world, not relational to anybody else, you have to separate yourself from all that charm and the warm light of your father’s love. That part of it I very much related to. But Laura is unlike me in the sense that I’m pretty outspoken. This character, I think, has a lot of restraint. That was a challenge.

Andra, stepping into the shoes of Billie Holiday must have been a huge challenge, and this is your first film!

Andra Day: It was definitely terrifying. First of all, I’m a fan of hers. And I’ve always loved movies and had such a great respect for the craft of acting. My biggest terror was that I was going to suck. So I was like, “OK, I’m going to take two to three years off of music just to study and focus on acting.” I auditioned at the end of 2017, landed the role at the beginning of 2018, and then we shot at the end of 2019. So I had time to really live in her [shoes]. The film isn’t a sanitized version of Billie Holiday. She is raw. She is a fighter. She’s a hero, in all of her real humanness, even as a fractured figure. All of the emotional pain. It was the most challenging and rewarding thing I’ve done in my life — and the most terrifying.

Winslet: It never goes away.

Day: That’s actually my question. I mean, do you ever really, really shed all of it or let it go?

Winslet: Honestly, it does not go away. But I feel so excited for you, Andra, that in this moment you are connecting with other people, having these kinds of conversations, because we all learn on the job. All of these experiences that we are sharing are the things that will hold you up and buoy you through, and this is a time when we have to hold each other up. But it doesn’t get any easier. And I’m afraid you will always be terrified. I f—ing am.

Pfeiffer: When I first started acting, probably for the first 10 years, I literally on the first day would shake so terribly that I was sure you could see it on film. Fortunately, you couldn’t. I don’t shake any more, but I still have those jitters. I still think the first week of shooting I’m going to be fired and replaced.

Jones: Yeah. So congratulations on that, for a lifetime.

Day: This is a roundtable, but also a therapy session.

Let’s talk about the risks that jangle those nerves. Those of you who have been doing this a while have tackled a wide variety of characters and survived, and thrived. That’s unusual in Hollywood, especially for women.

Pfeiffer: Like all actors, you sort of choose the best of what is available to you, and go for as long as you can without working, until you need a paycheck. It’s also that thing where, depending on what your last role was, that’s how the industry sees you. It’s really up to you to try to find those things that shift it in the direction you want it to go. I did “Grease 2,” and that was one thing, and then was lucky enough a year later to get cast in “Scarface.” People were very upended, because nobody expected that turn. And then when I did “Married to the Mob,” that [was] another seismic shift, like, “Whoa, wait a minute; who’s that?” I remember when I met Marty Scorsese for the first time, he expected this dark-haired girl from New Jersey to walk in. That was one of the most flattering things anyone ever said about my work. It’s just looking for those opportunities, and sometimes they’re very small, but those small opportunities end up having the biggest impact on the direction that your career goes in.

Jones: I just want to interrupt and say how cool this is. Michelle, obviously, you’re an icon and a legend, but the fact that you did [those films] back to back; such different things, such different audiences, such different characters. To me, that is the success of the art form.

Pfeiffer: Well, thank you. I spent lots of time being unemployed and waiting and really stretching it out, but it is, for me, the most exciting thing about being an actor. And that’s why we’re always terrified, because we’re always trying to do something different.

Day: As music artists, people are always trying to put you in a box, like, “This is what you do,” and we’re constantly rebelling against that, because life’s not like that. I can’t be the same. This role changed me, and I wouldn’t have been the same [person] as three years ago anyway. As a fan of yours, [Michelle], it’s exciting not to know what you’re going to come out with next.

Kate, your recent leap into the unknown is playing Mary Anning.

Winslet: She was a woman of scientific brilliance who made pioneering discoveries in the fossil world. But she was an unsung hero, because she lived in the early 1800s, and the world of science and geology was, like so many worlds back then and still now, dominated by men. And those men would buy her finds and claim them as their own discoveries, actually put their names on them. But there was something incredibly stoic and accepting of her lot in life. Mary was self-taught. She was extremely working-class, actually impoverished, lived a very harsh life. I just loved her even though she is cantankerous at times and quite difficult.

Vanessa, in “Pieces of a Woman,” Martha is emotionally distant and hard to read even after going through significant trauma. Was that challenging?

Kirby: In her nature, [Martha] tries to never show anything she’s feeling. So I was really scared, because I thought, “Oh, my God, what if it looks like I’m feeling nothing or nothing’s going on?” I just had to trust that if I really felt it, and I really thought those thoughts [it would come through]. I’ve never given birth ... so a lot of women spoke to me about their experiences of miscarriage or stillbirth or losing children. I owe them everything, because they allowed me to sit with them and try and understand how it really felt. At the end of the shoot, I was like, “I hope it’s done them justice,” because it’s definitely something that’s not spoken about. There’s so much silence around it. I hope that the film will help start conversations that really need to start happening.

Andra, Billie had an exceptional life that was also quite brutal. How did you go about trying to convey that while still honoring her greatness?

Day: She is musically, my foremost inspiration. I already knew a lot about the government going after her. The early war on drugs, and the subsequent wars on drugs, were wholly entrenched in race. I was aware of that, but I didn’t know about how deeply they went after her, even up to her death. Yes, she was an addict and, yes, alcohol and drugs ... but they wanted her to die. And not just kill her, but to actually eradicate her legacy. It’s why I call her the godmother of civil rights, because she was doing it alone. Her singing “Strange Fruit” and the death of Emmett Till reinvigorated the civil rights movement. She was innately a fighter, a character with resilience and tenacity.

Kirby: Kate, can I ask what it was like being so young in “Titanic”? Did it like blow your mind after it came out and you realized that that many people were watching you in the cinema? Did you know at the time when you were making it —

Winslet: I didn’t. I was playing an American for the first time. And working with Leo, who I’d seen in "[What’s Eating] Gilbert Grape” and “Basketball Diaries.” So it was like, “Oh, my God, I’m Kate from Reading.” I was the overweight girl who would always be at the end of the line. And because my name was a W, sometimes I wouldn’t even get in the door of the audition because they’d run out of time before the Ws. And I was in “Titanic.” It’s mad.

Jones: How were you smart enough to know, even with all of that pressure and then getting hit with all of that fame, how did you know to back off and not take the big paychecks? You were so young. How did you know to shoot for longevity?

Winslet: The honest answer is I was scared of Hollywood. A big, scary place, where everyone had to be thin and look a certain way. And I knew that I did not look that way or feel like I fit there, so if I was ever going to belong, I had to earn my place. And to me, I hadn’t earned it. “Titanic” might have been a fluke. I had done “Heavenly Creatures.” I had done “Sense and Sensibility,” which I was nominated for an Academy Award for at the age of 19, but still I had this feeling of “maybe that was just luck.” When I became a mother at 25, all of that stuff evaporated completely. Then two years after she was born, I was asked to do “Eternal Sunshine [of the Spotless Mind].” I do believe that was a huge turning point in my career, because from then on people suddenly went, “Oh, she can do that?!”

Kate, what if anything did you learn from “Ammonite”?

Winslet: It really opened my eyes to wanting to take responsibility for this sort of shared voice that we have as women. To try harder to not be objectified.

Jones: But we take it for granted that things will be the way they’re supposed to be. And that’s what’s been cool about the last five years is there has been a complete and utter subversion of just having that existential moment of like, “Wait, what is it that I’m supposed to do? What are the societal norms? What are the professional norms that I’ve agreed upon that actually don’t feel comfortable?”

Kirby: I remember when I first started reading scripts, the character descriptions. The man, it would always be “articulate, intelligent, high-powered.” And then the woman would be “attractive, dark, beautiful hair, and all eyes look at her when she comes into the room.” It was so subtly objectifying. Often, the woman would be just ever so slightly moving the man’s story along, rather than necessarily having her own journey.

Day: I think we so often write this [young] generation off as like, “Oh, it’s the social media generation, and all they care about is selfies and dah, dah, dah.” But I think we can partly attribute this shift to them. I don’t think this generation wants the glossy, clean, the sanitized version of life. Also, with the internet and social media, everyone’s still connected; the globe is so much smaller now.

Rashida, you’ve not only acted, you’ve written, produced and directed. Do you think that kind of representation behind the camera is making a difference in what we are seeing?

Jones: The good news now is there definitely is an appetite, at least within Hollywood, for female content creators. And what’s nice is what all of you have been saying is the more women there are around, the more comfortable women feel advocating for themselves. If you don’t have that representation around, you’re less likely to speak up, because you don’t feel like you have any backup.

Day: One of the things we learned is that certain audiences would wince at [Billie] getting beat, but I was like, “If we don’t have that in there, then we’re continuing to retool her narrative, the thing that she’s been a victim of her entire life.” Suzan-Lori Parks cowrote this movie with Lee Daniels. Women’s stories have always been told through the lens of masculinity, through how they view us or how they want us to be. Most of our stories need to be told by women, written by women, done by women. Not to write men out of the picture, but for them to understand that it is a collaborative effort.

[overheardatthecontinental]

Talk Chapter 11

AO3 Link

Marcus had faced armies. Had gone head-to-head with mob bosses and mafiaso assholes. He’d been shot, stabbed, tortured and looked death straight in the eyes on more than one occasion. Every encounter had only made him wiser. Each scar had only made him stronger.

And despite all his prowess, his strength, his wisdom, Marcus was fairly certain he wasn’t going to survive Helen Kingston.

John had warned him.

Hell, Helen had warned him.

He’d taken it as a joke. Just because John had fallen victim to sharing his feelings certainly didn’t mean that Marcus would.

After John had left, they made small talk. They watched a movie, and then another. Helen would read until her eyes hurt and then they’d watch another movie.

It started with a simple question, asked over chopping vegetables to have with dinner.

“How’d you get involved in the Underworld?”

“I saved a man’s life in Vietnam. The son of a prominent member of the mob. When we came back to the States, he recruited me."

And Helen had seemed genuinely interested. She asked questions so casually, he hadn’t even realized that they were delving into his past. Not until their plates were in the sink and Helen was curled up on the couch, facing him in his chair and nodding along to a story from his early days as a New York City mobster.

Before he knew it, he was lost in his own past, searching to understand things he thought he had left behind.

“It just seemed like the right course to take. My father did it, his father did it. I think a part of me thought if I followed in their footsteps and joined the army, things would start to make sense. Like I would understand how my father viewed the world.”

“How he viewed the world or how he viewed you?”

The question stabs at him and Marcus looks away, “My mother used to defend him all the time. He never loved us the way he was supposed to. She said that the war had damaged him—that when they were younger, he was caring and loving. But when he came back, he had a hard time adjusting.

“I wanted to understand why he couldn’t get over it. Why he couldn’t leave the war behind. Why—” He stops himself.

“Why you couldn’t be enough.” Her voice is soft, almost hypnotic, lulling him in further.

He nods, despite himself. “He had a great job, a good house, a family… and it was never enough.”

Helen nods along, “You know, every generation has its experiences, it’s rights of passages, it’s issues, it’s stories. Your generation was built in that post-war haze that focused on going back to what had been normal before the war. Except there is no going back from that sort of cultural upheaval. Time changes, and values with it.

“And in that day and age, we didn’t really understand the consequences of war on individuals. So, your father came back, as your grandfather had a generation before, and tried to make sense of peace after having lived in a warzone.”

Marcus nods, “And I get that it must have been tough for him. I do. But then why get married? Why bring another person into your fucked-up life? Why bring children into the picture?”

“I can’t answer to your father’s motives.” Helen says softly, “At best, I can guess that he probably felt like it was his duty to rebuild America. To have a family and try to put the past behind him. But the past always has a way of catch up with us. And it wasn’t fair to the rest of your family and your father’s trauma is not an excuse for the pain that he put you through.

“In therapy, we use a term called ‘intergenerational trauma’ to explain this. It’s the idea that severe trauma, severe distress can follow each generation. Your grandfather probably brought his experiences from the Great War into your father’s life. And your father brought those experiences, combined with his own from the second World War into yours.”

“Didn’t know there was a term for it. But it’s why I don’t ever want children.” Marcus admits, jarring himself with the fact that he admitted out loud how much his father had affected him. “I couldn’t bare to pass that down again.”

“Which is entirely within your right.” Helen’s calming voice eases his anxiety. “A lot of people, particularly from the baby boomer generation and before, believe that we have some sort of duty to procreate. The remnants of generations’ past, I suppose. But the reality of the matter is we don’t owe anybody.”

He shivers at her words and wonders if she notices.

He’d laughed at John for being tricked into revealing his life to a pretty face, but it was so good to say the things out loud that haunted him at two in the morning when he was unable to sleep.

“I always thought I had moved on from all this.” Marcus shakes his head, “That I left my father back in Idaho. Thoughts creep in every now and then but when I work, I can forget about it.”

Helen nods, “We forget how broken we are when we start to fixate on something else. But, eventually, we’re forced to look back at ourselves and face the truth: distracted is not the same as healed.”

And that cuts deep, but not as deep as the thoughts simmering beneath the surface. The knowledge that he had spent decades hiding behind jobs and contracts to ignore the rejection and isolation that seemed to follow him.

“So, there is no moving on, no healing.”

Helen offers him a small, empathetic smile, “I had this conversation with John just yesterday. We tend to think of healing as linear. Something happens to us, we give it time, and it heals. But that’s not always the case. You should know as well as anybody—not every scar heals. Sometimes a bone doesn’t set right.”

She lets out a soft sigh as she tries to find a way to explain, “Try to think of it in terms of a broken leg. If your broken bone is tended to right away, if it’s splinted properly, if you’re cared for during your recovery, it will heal. Sometimes even stronger than it was before.

“On the other hand, maybe you’re alone. You splint your own bone the best you can, but there is no one with you to share the burden. No one to help you heal. The bone may mend but, oftentimes, it won’t heal correctly. Maybe you walk with a limp. Or maybe you walk fine, except on days when it rains. The trauma comes back, haunting you.

“Then, of course, your bone breaks and you ignore it. You try to stand but your leg can’t support you anymore. You pretend that nothing has happened, but all you do is injure yourself the more. So, what happens, then?”

“If you can’t heal, you’re dead.”

“In the animal kingdom, you would be.” Helen says, “But we are human. We are resilient and we can adapt and, even when we feel like we are, we are not alone. So, what happens if your bone doesn’t heal correctly?”

Marcus feels a shiver travel through his body, “We re-break the bone.”

“Very good.” Helen rewards him with a real smile this time, “We re-break the bone and we try again. And, most of the time, trauma isn’t quite so severe. Most of the time, we’re stuck somewhere in the middle. Our wounds heal, but they still come back, aching on days when it rains.”

He sighs, “But what does that mean? That even if I make peace with my father’s memory, I’ll still feel him haunting me now and again?”

“There are no guarantees, but it’s likely. We all experience trauma differently but it seldom disappears all together.”

Idly, Marcus hears the sound of a car on gravel but he shakes his head, still lost in his own thoughts, “And what, there’s no way to make it disappear?”

“Not permanently. There are skills you can learn to help cope with the memories or to restructure your experiences. But trauma engrains itself within us.”

“It’s stupid.” Marcus spits out, “I came out of ‘Nam without feeling a thing. I’ve killed more people than I can count, and I don’t think about it. But the thought of my father’s voice makes me want to scream.”

“The events that happen in our formative years leave far deeper scars than what comes later. You spent your childhood seeking the approval of a man who probably lost sight of who he was long before you were born.”

The door opens and Marcus catches sight of John, carrying a couple grocery bags and a suitcase.

“And you can’t hold yourself responsible for that.” Helen adds softly, checking over her shoulder. Her eyes scan John, assessing for injury before she asks, “Is that your blood?”

“No.”

Marcus swallows, forcing the heaviness weight on him back down his throat and motioning to the bags John is carrying. Still, his voice is gruff as he asks, “You go shopping?”

“Just picked up a few things. Soap, a toothbrush. Better coffee.” John reaches in the bag and pulls out a pint of ice cream, reveling in the way her eyes light up as he hands it to her.

“Oh, fuck yes.” She takes it and undoes the plastic wrap locking the lid on, looking at Marcus as she does, “Do you need some. too?”

“Marcus won’t eat that much sugar.”

“What I need is Cognac.” Marcus mutters.

Helen hums, “Was Cognac also your father’s drink?”

Marcus looks up sharply, “Pass me the damn ice cream.”

Helen tosses the pint to him and John sighs, “Hels, I thought I said not to break him.”

“I didn’t! We were just having a discussion.”

“Uh huh.” John watches as Marcus slips into the kitchen for a spoon, “I’ve never seen Marcus eat refined sugars. Ever.”

“Physical health is only one facet of being. Ice cream tends to the mind and the soul.” She says knowingly.

Marcus plops down on the couch next to Helen and hands her a spoon.

John raises an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Fuck off.” Marcus says, digging the spoon into the ice cream, “I have unprocessed trauma.”

He looks from Marcus to Helen, the latter of whom just shrugs.

“Couldn’t last one day without breaking somebody’s psyche?” John teases.

Helen swallows a mouthful of ice cream, “I can’t turn it off any more than you can stop counting exits, looking for weapons.”

Marcus nods, “I say next time we have a tough case, we just send her in.”

Not a chance in hell, John thinks even knowing that Marcus is largely joking. Still, he couldn’t deny that it would be hilarious to drop Helen in the middle of the Continental and just watch.

She leans to the side on the couch, looking up at him with her warm brown eyes. “Did you have dinner?” He shakes his head and Helen sighs, “We saved you a plate, just in case. Go shower, I’ll heat it up.”

“It’s okay—”

“Go shower.” She says again, leaving no room for argument as she stands, “And change in the bathroom! I don’t want you getting blood on our bed.”

Our bed. He tries not to read to much into that but holy fuck the way that sounded… The casual way that she said it felt so fucking right even if he knew he was reading far too much into the innocent statement. He pushes it out of his head as he acquiesces with a soft, “Yes, ma’am.”

She swats at his side the best she can from her seat on the couch to prompt him forward. John sets the grocery bags with actual food on the counter and heads to the back. He tosses the suitcase on the bed and finds his own sleepwear from the night before.

Grabbing the bag with the hygiene products, he disappears into the bathroom.

He showers quickly, watching the tub stain red then wash clear as he cleans the blood from his body. It had been a long day, as he had known it would be. And while John had hoped that DeLuca would change his demands, he had been correct in assuming that he wouldn’t.

Already, a clock was moving against him.

Three days until Senor D’Antonio and Gianna returned to Rome. Three days in which to kill him and his heirs.

Marcus had said they would find a way out of it, but John wasn’t so sure.

He’s run every scenario he can think of in his head on the drive home. For four hours, he contemplated possible courses of actions that he could take. They all resulted in either Helen’s death, which was unacceptable, or his own, which was unfortunate.

He cut the shower short, anxious to see Helen after spending a day dealing with people who wanted to do her harm. See for himself that she was safe and uninjured. Let himself feel a glimmer of joy at the sound of her voice, the energy of her presence.

Cloak himself in her scent and sound and sight. Memorize it all just in case he was unable to make it through this week with his life.

He changes into his sleepwear and quickly towels his hair.

There’s food sitting in front of the armchair when he returns to the living room. A plate with vegetables, potatoes, and chicken. Helen and Marcus share the couch and are passing the ice cream back and forth to one another.

John idly wishes he could use his phone to snap a quick picture for Sofia. Marcus with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s in his hand, a spoonful of chocolate ice cream aimed for his mouth…

Sof would have a field day with that.

Helen’s eyes meet his and he wonders, for the millionth time, what it would be like to kiss her.

He’s probably going to die anyway, already set for Hell. Would it be so wrong to steal a kiss before going to his death?

“Did you meet with DeLuca?” Marcus asks, snapping John out of his thoughts as he sits down with them.

He nods once, his eyes flitting to Helen. Not wanting to discuss it in front of her, John adds, “We’ll chat later.”

It’s clearly the wrong thing to say he realizes as her eyes flash.

“Oh, no. We’re not doing this.” She bemoans, “You don’t get to shut me out of this.”

John shakes his head, “Helen...”

“I have every right to know what’s going on.”

“You don’t need to be worrying about this!” He insists and watches as her entire body tenses.

“Marcus,” She says, and her voice is just a little too sweet for John, “Would you mind stepping out for a moment?”

Marcus, ice cream in hand, looks between them, “I mean, I’d rather stay and watch you demolish him but—”

“Marcus!” Helen and John say together and the older assassin laughs, sliding to his feet.

“Guess I’ll just go downstairs and see if anything new has magically appeared since yesterday.” He pats John on the shoulder on the way to the basement, “Good luck.”

Helen waits for the door to close before she speaks, “We are not doing this, John.”

“Doing what?” He asks, resigned.

“You’re not leaving me out of the loop! I know that you think you’re protecting me by keeping me in the dark from what is happening, but I can handle this.”

Again, he shakes his head, “It’s not about what you can handle, I know you can handle this, but you don’t have to. I don’t want you to be worrying—”

“You don’t get to decide what I’m allowed to worry about.” She snaps, not unkindly. Helen pauses, sighing to herself. She moves down the couch so that she’s closer to where he sits and, gently, tries again, “John, I am doing what you ask. I’ve cut off contact from the world, I’m staying hidden. Meet me halfway here.”

His leg is shaking, she notes. His face is tense.

She reaches out across the space to where his hand sits on the armrest and lays her own atop. “I know things are going to get worse before they get better. But you trying to deal with this all on your own, without support, isn’t helping.”

He hesitates again, gathering his thoughts together before he admits, “I don’t want to let you know how bad it’s gotten. And not because I don’t think you can handle it,” He adds before she can say anything, “But because I don’t want to expose you to that. You might not like some of the things I might have to do.”

“We got to this point together.” Helen argues, “Hell, I’m more accountable than you are for this fiasco.”

John snorts, “No, you’re not.”

“I’m a licensed professional. I was the one in the position of power. I had a moral obligation to ensure the boundaries between us stayed clear. I knowingly violated that, okay? I got us to this point, too. So, please, let me help fix it.”

John lets out a breath, his shoulders settling. “I don’t like it. I don’t like involving you in this world more than you already are.”

“You don’t have to like it.” She reminds him, “But you’re going to deal with it, because I’m not going to let you carry the weight by yourself.”

There’s such force behind her words. And Christ, she would be pissed if he laid it all out. She would demand that he ignore DeLuca, even at the cost of her own life. And they would argue and fight about it, but ultimately, he would do whatever it takes.

But she’s not backing down and, while John has never been good at compromising, he is more than capable of recognizing when an opponent is going to fight until their last breath. She has that same look in her eye now.

“Okay.” He agrees. “Okay. But tomorrow? I… I don’t think I can handle that tonight.”

She nods and her hand tightens on his, squeezing momentarily, “Thank you.”

For a moment, she stays in place, looking at him. A small smile of thanks graces her face. He forces himself to look away from her lips.

“Marcus!” She calls, letting go of his hand and sitting back in her corner of the couch, “You can come back in.”

Marcus comes back up and makes a show of checking his watch, “Not even five minutes? Come on, John. That’s just sad.”

John smirks at his friend, “You think you can win an argument against her? Be my guest.”

Marcus winks at Helen and holds up the ice cream, “You want more?”

“Not now, thanks.” She replies and he puts the ice cream back into the freezer.

John takes a bite of his leftover, noting that this might be the first time anybody had ever thought to save dinner for him. It’s a little bit better knowing that Helen had thought of him when putting it away, certain it was not Marcus’s doing. Not that Marcus didn’t care, but he was more from the school of everybody fend for themselves.

Marcus settles on the couch and looks to Helen, “What did I miss?”

John finds himself smirking despite himself, “What, is she in charge now?”

“Have been since the beginning, but glad you’re catching on.” She says with a heart-stopping smile before looking back at Marcus, “Discussion is tabled until tomorrow.”

Marcus nods, “Fine by me. My head still fucking hurts.”

John smirks as he raises his fork, “Welcome to the club.”

Marcus shakes his head, “And you do this with her every week? Willingly?”

“It gets easier once you know what to expect.”

The older assassin looks to Helen, “We’re not making a habit of those discussions.”

“We don’t have to do anything you’re uncomfortable with.”

John recognizes the look in her eyes. She’s an expert at subtle manipulation—letting you think you’re in control right up until the moment she snatches the rug out from under you. And by then, you’re too addicted to her kind words and soft stares to leave.

She’s magnificent.

Marcus sighs and glances at John, “How screwed am I?”

“Very.” Helen shoots him an amused glance and he feels his own gaze soften as he looks at her, “You know I wouldn’t change a thing.”

At least, about her.

Their circumstances on the other hand…

Her lips twitch slightly and yeah, John thinks, he’s going to do it. Not now. But before he goes off to face death, he’s going to kiss those soft, pink lips. He’s going to carry the taste of her with him to the next world.

Let that be how she remembers him—not as a broken man or as a murderer. But as someone who loved her completely.

That wouldn’t be so bad.

“Me, either.” She says and it takes everything inside of him not to fly across the room to her now.

“Yup!” Marcus says, very loudly, interrupting the moment that passes between them, “Therapy is not for me.”

Helen looks away, her cheeks tinged with pink. He watches her swallow before looking up at Marcus, “It’s not for everyone.” She admits, then teases, “Some people just can’t handle the weight and strength needed to address their inner battles.”

“Listen, Kingston…” Marcus says but there is humor in his voice, “If assassins actually started addressing the issues we all have with our parents, we wouldn't have the time kill anybody.”

She laughs at that, “God forbid.”

Marcus looks over her head, “Don’t you just want to set her on Winston? I want to know what’s going on in his head.”

“That’s the guy who operates New York, right?” Helen asks and John nods.

“That’s him. And, frankly, Marcus. I’d rather not know what’s going on in Winston’s head. Or anybody’s.” Looking back to Helen he adds, “I don’t know how you deal with knowing so many people’s thoughts.”

She shrugs a shoulder, “We all have our stories, but the same themes come up again and again.”

“Jung?” John asks.

“Very good.” Helen says, “Did you ever end up reading The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious?”

John nods, “I did.”

“Nerd alert!” Marcus coughs into his hand.

Helen and John both glare at him before she looks back to John, “I mean, you know my feelings on listening to anyone labeled an ‘expert’ but, at the very least, I agree that if you look close enough at peoples stories, you’ll find the same themes prevailing over nearly all of it.”

“And what are your thoughts on listening to experts?” Marcus asks.

John smirks, already knowing the answer, “Helen believes very strongly in subjective truth. Nothing can be taken at face value.”

Helen nods, “And people in the psych community tend to stick to their niches. The psychoanalytics stick to Freud, the REBT people stick to Ellis, Cognitive Behavioralists stick to Skinner. The reality is, they all work in their own ways. But to put all your stock in one school of thought, you’re going to miss out on a lot of relevant shit.”

Marcus smirks, “You talk with that mouth in your office?”

Helen inclines her head, “Only with John. But he’s got a thick skull. Sometimes you need to do things to catch his attention.”

“That thick skull is necessary to protect the small brain inside.”

John flips him off.

“He’s had a lot of undiagnosed concussions.” Marcus adds, ignoring the gesture.

“I’d smack you,” John comments, humor in his voice, “But I wouldn’t want to damage your hearing aids.”

Marcus smirks in response, glancing to Helen, “You don’t get to be my age in the Underworld without some wear and tear. You spend enough time around munitions and guns, your hearing is the first thing to go.” He looks over at John, “This one laughs now, but he’ll be exactly where I am in fifteen years. If he lives that long.”

Helen rolls her eyes, “Well, on that note, I’m going to get ready for bed.” Helen stands up, her hand brushing along John’s arm as she walks by. “Come to bed soon, okay?”

He nods, forcing himself to remember to breathe when she talks to him like that, “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“Good. Night, Marcus.”

“Night, sweetheart.”

She disappears down the hall, watching her long after she disappears. There’s the sound of a door closing and a sink running. He can still feel where her fingers grazed his arm.

“Henry.”

John looks up at Marcus, blinking in confusion.

“Henry.” Marcus repeats, “It’s my middle name. Good strong name, you know, if you’re starting think of what you’ll name your children.”

“Fuck off.”

Marcus laughs, “Jesus, John, you’re fucking gone.”

John glares slightly, “Really? Calling her sweetheart?”

The older assassin rolls his eyes, “Calm down, Romeo. I prefer my women not have the ability to psychoanalyze me. I meant exactly what I said—she’s a sweetheart.”

He nods, relaxing slightly. He’s well aware of Helen’s allure, even platonically he understands the way she manages to pull people in. A kind word from her is enough to hook anyone and, before you can remember to think, you’ve bared your soul. A search for absolution that can only be found in the quiet of her eyes.

“She is.” John agrees.

Marcus nods, “I, uh, wanted to talk to you about the marker.”

John raises an eyebrow.

“I don’t need it. Not for doing this.”

“You’re doing me the favor of a lifetime.” John states the obvious. This was no small thing that Marcus was doing for him.

Marcus nods, “I was. But, truth is, I’m happy just to do this for her.”

John huffs a small laugh, “I get it. She pulls you in, doesn’t she? So fast you don’t even know you’re sinking.”

“She does that.” Marcus pauses, thoughtfully. He looks to John and asks, “How long the two of you going to keep playing this game?”

He looks away, “Marcus…”

“You are both way too smart to be playing stupid to the looks, the touches. If I didn’t know the two of you and we just met, I’d assume you were married with the way you act around each other.”

Shaking his head, John looks to his friend, “Let it go.”

“John—”

“Let it go.” John says again, “I promised her we wouldn’t talk about it without her but… things aren’t looking good. And, if by some miracle, I’m still alive at the end of all this, what can I offer her?”

“She knows exactly what you are and she doesn’t care. She still adores you.”

John can’t even begin to address that so he ignores it, “She’ll never be safe so long as her name is associated with mine.”

Marcus stares at him incredulously, “I think that particular ship already sailed.”

John pushes his hair back, frustrated, because Marcus is right on that note. Everything was already fucked. But there was still something looming over John that forced him to add, “She deserves better.”

“Definitely. But she still wants you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“My ears may be shot to hell, but I’m not blind.”

John takes his plate, shaking his head as he stands up, “Goodnight, Marcus.”

“Night, dumbass.”

[intoxicatingimmediacy]

Blood and Justice

[...] There's a particular kind of fandom that grows around bands like clipping., whose every facet – from lyricism to aesthetic – is meticulously considered. The trio insist that they don't want to erect unnecessary barriers to people discovering them (Hutson argues that one of the reasons they don't like the term 'noise rap' is that they don't want to be “ghettoised” from what others consider more accessible sub-genres). And at the same time, they often approach things theory-first. “We are all fairly academic,” says Diggs. “You're pretty much sitting in on what it's like to make a clipping. song.” Snipes grins. “It's like four hours of this and playing each other music and arguing and then, like, 30 minutes of actually making a song.”

“There's never been a moment where we were just jamming one day and we came up with this,” Diggs explains. “If a song gets made, we worked really hard to make it. But I'm not trying to bar anybody's entry into [our music]. It's like, this is a good ass song we enjoy listening to. You don't have to nerd out to it in the same way that we do to also enjoy it... we hope.”

[...] It's clear from a quick scan of YouTube – where clips of “Run For Your Life” are accompanied by compliments from fellow engineers and sound designers – that many listeners do give them credit. But, as Diggs points out, making art means surrendering meaning to your audience. When I ask them about being misinterpreted, they laugh a little too hard. Hutson remembers a time when they were first starting out, and Diggs used to open their shows with the phrase 'It's clipping., bitch'.

“When we got signed to Subpop, we started playing for people who weren't our personal friends or people in our music scene. And all of a sudden, we're this harsh 'noise rap' group that's going out on tour and people don't necessarily recognise that's a reference to Britney Spears and are like, 'Oh, I don't like the use of that word'. And we were like, 'Yeah, we don't either. That was... never-mind'” he laughs. “'We will stop. You're right. You're right'.”

“I think that's the main thing to be learned right now from a lot of these social justice movements,” adds Snipes. “That intent is important, but it's not enough. It's not an excuse to say, 'Oh, I didn't mean to hurt anybody.' You actually have to acknowledge that whatever you meant, you hurt somebody, and then change your behaviour.”

[...] When I ask the others how they've been managing, Snipes gestures to the studio around him, with synths stacked on worktops and suspended from the walls. “I really don't leave this room,” he says. “I haven't been further than our mailbox in like... two weeks?” Hutson nods. “I don't know, really. I annoy my cats. And I cook a lot. That seems to be what we do. It was funny, there was another interview we did a couple of days ago with someone from New Zealand. And he was like, so what's the vibe like in LA? I was like, 'No idea. We can't go outside. What's the vibe like here in my apartment?' Like that's, that's all. That's all that I get to see, man. Like, I don't know. Cats are cool.”

There's a subtext to our conversation: that life in the US today provides an experience to rival any fictional nightmare. And because clipping. make work that centres more on concept than creator, the fact that they're a trio goofy nerds who value empathy and respect doesn't really stem its impact. “I think when you listen to a lot of the artists we listen to – like Killer Mike, like 2Chainz – the way you feel about what they're saying is coloured by how you feel about them,” says Diggs. “But whether you like me or not can't really come into play when you listen to these songs.” He shrugs. “I'm a nice guy. But that's not going to help you feel comfortable.”

[liw-the-melancholic-apple]

The First One - Bonus scenes in traditional written word

This is a smau and a zukoXreader, although i haven't decided how this ends yet.

Y/n has recently transferred to Ba Sing Se from Omashu university and meets the gaang through a schoolproject they do with sokka and suki.

Masterlist

Bonus 4: Good Morning

The sound of a machine of some sorts woke you up. A look out the window confirmed two things: It was still rather early and Haru’s parents’ neighbours had no idea what an appropriate time for high-pressure-cleaning patios was. Sighing you sat up and looked around. You found your shoes and thought you remembered where the bathroom was.

The short night definitely left its traces on you: Your clothes and hair looked deschevelled, you didn’t smell as fresh as you would like, you had dark circles under your eyes and your voice was rather hoarse. You did what you could without rummaging through the drawers of the bathroom, then you wandered through the house.

There were fotos everywhere. Most of them were of Haru, who you guessed didn’t have any siblings, but some had a very kind-looking couple on them. A wedding picture in which they both laughed at something happening out of frame. It seemed genuine, a true candid shot. He had his hand around her waist and her hand was in mid-air, presumably on its way to fix his tie for the actual wedding picture, but something must have had happened. They both were bending over laughing pointing out of frame looking at each other.

You studied the picture. I made you like the couple. It made you believe in their love and their relationship. It made you want to get to know them. Be a part of that happiness and trust and joy. There was no question why they chose to display this picture. It was amazing!

You watched the couple become parents, buy a house, get older and go through the decades that saw Haru grow from a baby into a smiley toddler, distracted child, unimpressed teenager and openhearted twenty-something. They seemed a happy family. Truly.

The journey through Haru’s life had left you at the front door and wanting some coffee. You found the kitchen empty but quickly discovered a coffee machine. While it was entirely too sophisticated for the broke student you were, you did manage to get it to spew out some dark and caffeinated goodness into a cup you found in the second cupboard you opened. With it you kept on strolling through the house until the living room introduced you to the French doors that lead into the garden. And boy, the garden!

You sat in that little paradise when your phone buzzed and Zuko begged you to talk to him. Apparently, he was at his uncle’s shop working the early shift and there was not a lot to do as it was Sunday. You texted back and forth for a good while.

Yesterday you hadn’t talked to him a lot, outside of him apologising for his uncle and the Sokka-rum-discussion. You know learned that he was a good nephew and studied International Business and International Relations. When you called him out as ambitious, though, he was quick to bring up the words pressure and expectations. You didn’t know him. And whatever those expectations and that pressure were about it seemed you weren’t competent to comment on it or them. Zuko struck you as a private person. You contemplated telling him exactly that. You didn’t. You conveyed the message, though. He seemed relieved. And he liked politics and diplomacy which told you a number of things: 

Be wary of any promises he makes. He might be doing that politician thing where he doesn’t keep them

If you ever want to ruin somebody’s life or career, ask him how to do it, he will have learned about it and remembered

If you ever don’t know how to handle a conflict ask him, he’s into figuring out compromises and status-quo-situation

He probably gives good advice. The kind that will be good for you and not too offensive to others

He is smart

He is into reading

He can find the good in the bad.

After all it sounded like his parents made him study those subjects and if he had had a true choice he would have gone for something else. Yet, he found aspects that he enjoyed, that he could use in his life and that he could be passionate about.

He liked travelling

All in all he was intriguing. A lot of layers to peel back. Whether it be the interest in politics – which were a lot of smoothtalking, manipulation, using popular opinions AND ideologies, the fate and future of countries and people and so many struggles or the family history. You could probably have real conversations with him. And you decided you would like to as well.

Another thing you learned about Zuko was that he was Sokka’s secret source for his part of the Worldhistory project. In the past couple weeks Sokka had gone on and on about how much information he had gotten form an anonymous sponsor.

“Sokka made it sound like you were the discovery of a century!”

“Am I not?” No, for all you knew he wasn’t.

Yes, he was intriguing and most likely multi-layered; yes he was tall and dark and handsome and that scar on his face added several facets to that handsomeness; yes, he had that tea-loving angel of an uncle, but he was no discovery of a century. He was some good-looking guy with an interesting background.

“To be determined” Better not alienate him by telling him he wasn’t all that special. You still wanted to be his friend.

Could you have gone on for two more hours talking to Zuko? Yes. Yes. You could have. But you didn’t because there were footsteps in the house. And it sounded like they were coming from the kitchen. You got up to investigate. Hoping you’d find Sokka, Suki, Toph, Aang or Katara in the kitchen, you would have been okay with Haru, but instead you found an agile white haired gentleman. From the fotos you recognised him as Haru’s father. He was doing something to the sophisticated coffeemachine and congratulated himself. Then he turned around, saw you, got scared and nearly let his cup fall and crash on the kitchen tiles. Instead he just made a weird move with his arm that resulted in a wave of hot liquid jumping into the air and splashing on the floor.

“Ouch!”, the man screamed. “Who the hell are you?”

“Sorry, Sir. Y/n. I’m friends with… I know your son. Haru. We helped him pack up the party yesterday and he told us we could stay here. I assumed you knew…Excuse the intrusion, please.”

“Tyro”, he extended his hand. You shook it.

“You’re not intruding. Haru told us that some of his friends might stay over. I just didn’t expect anybody to be awake yet. And we don’t know each other.”

“Again, sir, sorry.”

“That cup empty?” Tyro pointed at the mug you had brought with you.

“Nearly. I took the liberty of drinking your coffee.”

“Do you want more? I can offer you black coffee and black coffee with milk from the fridge. The thing is supposed to be able to come up with all kinds of fancy drinks, but that’s more my wife’s department. I didn’t bother learning about that.”

“Black coffee would make me really happy, Sir.”

Tyro filled your cup and gestured for you to follow him back into the garden. So, you did. He asked about who you were and how you knew his son.

“To be honest, Sir, there isn’t a lot to tell. I moved to the city for this semester. Transferred from Omashu University. I’m studying anthropology. One of the classes I take together with Sokka and Suki, who are friends with Zuko who used to be Haru’s roommate. Aaaaaaand they brought me to the party yesterday. There I met Haru. The end.”

“You helped him tidy up the speakers and all that jazz after having only met him that night?” You nodded your head yes.

“Commendable.”

You carried on talking to Haru’s dad, brushing on the subjects of family, education and music. The band Haru played in was called “Grounded”. According to Tyro they were “just having fun” but they also “sounded like actual musicians”. This band needed to be inspected.

You told him about Gray Sky and Tiff on the Rocks, the pub you used to play. It turned out that Haru inherited his passion for music from his father. Dad all but interrogated you on you average guitar playing and experience with piano lessons, when his wife walked through the French doors.

She introduced herself to you and asked if you wanted more coffee. As she was the coffee-maker-whisperer, you now were offered the entire range of coffee-drinks and gladly accepted a Cappuccino the size of your head. After she mad you happy with that, she sent you back out, with the intention of preparing breakfast. You offered to help but were quickly shut down.

The moment you sat down in the lounge chair by big tree, Haru entered the kitchen, got a cup of coffee from his mum and was surprised to find you in musical discussion with his father. Thankfully, he did remember you and was delighted to hear that you were a fellow guitarist, even though he was likely a lot more skilled than you were. In fact, you said this multiple times, resulting in Haru running inside and grabbing one of his dad’s guitars.

You  started by playing some of the 90's hits that Sokka had massacred the night before, proving that Haru was better than you. You handed the instrument back to him. 

"How about You Oughta Know?", he suggested. You looked at him, blinking. 

"You said you used to sing in Omashu. Let's hear it."

"Uhm…", you hesitated.

"I'm with stupid", Tyro chuckled. "I'm curious."

"Fine."  You let Haru play a few tacts before you started the verse. He harmonised with you in the chorus, during which Tyro got another guitar.

From Alanis you moved to the Verve; from "Nothing compares 2 u", to "Loser". Haru and his dad loved the 90's. Nirvana, Take That, TLC, Blur, Oasis, Britney, Beasty Boys, you named it they had it. Aang, Katara, Suki, Sokka and Toph joined you three out on the patio, all carrying cups of various coffees and plates full of food. While harmonising to Tyro's lead you remembered that his wife had talked about preparing breakfast. From what you saw on your friend's - yeah friends! - plates, she had not held back. There were eggs and bacon, pancakes, bread, cinnaminrolls and meats, cheeses, jams, butter and honey.

When she herself came out to join the table, she carried a  bowl of yoghurt and nuts, that she assured everyone was an option for everyone. Tyro got his own plate and dat down next to Sokka. He motioned for Haru and you to come eat but you two were determined to finish the decade. So, you did. And then you entered the 2000s. Every now and again you'd pick up the second guitar, while alternating with Haru singing lead and harmonising. You had the time of your life!

Haru's mum topped off your coffees and although your stomach was screaming at you to give it some of the wonderful smelling food, you played and sang for more than two hours. The others enjoyed your efforts and sang along when they were done eating. Tyro relieved his son of guitar duties and jammed with you while Haru diminished the pancakes. 

He then took your spot and you praised the eggs, bacon and cinnamonrolls.

"If you're ever desperate  for something to do, you're welcome to my appartment and put on breakfast!",  you said, all but crying, after noon when you had finished. Haru's mum blushed. But die didn't say no.

After you had finished your breakfast, everyone helped clear the table and load the dishwasher. Tyro insisted you all had another round of coffee, during which there was more music and Sokka got the recipe for the hangover cure smoothie that Mrs Haru  had made him as soon as he entered the kitchen.

You left around 2:30 with many "thank yous" and "you're the bests" and "we can help some mores". Although you hadn't slept much you decided to hit up the Jasmin Dragon to see if Zuko had  died from boredom already. 

[spookyold-saintjm]

Care - Part 2

[gif: @starsfleets]

Javier Peña x female reader

| Part 1 | | Part 3 |

Warnings: language, sexual references

Word Count: 1.9k

Summary: The day after your conversation with Javier, things are bit tense between you in the office.

a/n: So I decided to make this one a short series! Probably only another couple chapters, but I’ve been dying to write a little Javi again so here we are. If you’d like to be tagged in future updates don’t be afraid to ask! Much love. x

———

“You look fresh back from a trip to hell.”

Jesus, you had just walked into the room. Your hair was at least somewhat disheveled, your shirt probably wasn’t tucked in all the way, and your head was slightly tilted downward both because you wanted to avoid drawing attention to the dark circles under your bloodshot eyes, and because the lights in this building were so damn bright and jarring. Who the hell thought this lighting was a good idea? Could you get them fired? Fuck them. And fuck Steve, too.

You stopped in front of his desk, as he stared at you with furrowed brows despite the twitch of a smirk threatening to break across his face. Apparently, it was quite obvious that you’d had a rough night.

You rested your hands flat against his desk, your head drooping all the way downward before slowly rolling it back up so that you could meet his eyes and reply flatly, “Shit, Murphy. You could charm the pants off damn near anybody with talk like that.”

From behind you, you heard Javier snort at your words as he sifted through files at his own desk. Your muscles tensed at the sound, but you pretended as if you hadn’t heard him.

Steve only blinked back at you, his smile almost widening as he rolled his pen between his fingers. “What brings you in here?”

“I’m out of smokes.”

He let out a small sigh before reaching for the drawer in his desk to pull out the carton of cigarettes he kept there. You held out your hand as he dropped one of them into your palm, then mumbled a low thanks as you reached for your lighter in your shirt pocket.

“Glad to be of service,” Steve replied, looking back down to his paperwork. “I thought you were supposed to be sitting in on a meeting downstairs?”

“I’m headed there next,” You replied, sitting on the corner of Steve’s desk while you lit the cigarette between your lips. 

You couldn’t help it; your eyes flicked across the room to where Javier sat as you took the first long drag, but you didn’t bother to actually acknowledge him beyond letting your eyes lock for the seconds that you released the smoke from your lungs in a slow exhale. “I wouldn’t dare skip out on a date with Coronel Carrillo.”  

Javier had opened his mouth to speak, but his jaw suddenly clamped shut. You then turned your gaze as if you’d never seen him sitting there at all.

Steve had looked up long enough to catch this silent exchange between the two of you before he replied. “Yeah, well, try not to linger too long so that the three of us can finish going over these tapes when you’re done.”

“No promises.” You kept your voice even as you joked. You stood from where you’d been perched at the edge of Steve’s desk, and slightly raised the hand that held the cigarette between your fingers in an appreciative gesture. “Thanks for your contribution.”

Steve shrugged. “Any time.”

As soon as you were out of the office and out of sight, Steve’s head jerked over toward where Javier sat, stone-silent, staring hard at his desk with a pen in his hand but having yet to write a single word.

“You gotta be kidding me, Javi.”

Javier didn’t look up. “About what?”

“Don’t start that shit.” Steve sighed. He jerked his head toward the door you’d walked out of just moments before. “How long has that been going on?”

Javi was shuffling through files in his desk drawer; whether he was actually working or just trying to look busy could have been up to anyone’s best guess. “There’s nothing going on.”

Steve sighed and dropped his head into his hands with an exhausted chuckle as Javi only further confirmed his suspicions. “Jesus Christ, Peña.” Even for Javi, getting involved with someone in the office, someone in such close contact almost ever hour of every work day…it was risky. If not just flat-out stupid.

Steve lifted his head, looking back over to his partner. “You know how much trouble you could get in if somebody finds out you two are—“ Steve raised his eyebrows, lifted his hands in the beginning formations of a gesture most definitely not embassy-appropriate, but Javier cut him off with the loud thunk of him slamming his desk drawer closed.

“I said it’s nothing, Murphy.” Javi stood, gathering together various papers on his desk into a single stack in his hands, forcing him to keep his head down. “It was a one-time thing.” A pause. “You saw it yourself. She didn’t say a single word to me.”  

“Nah, you’re reading it all wrong.” Steve leaned back into his chair and crossed his hands together behind his head. “I saw how she looked at you. And we both heard what she said. How she said it?” Javi’s eyes flashed up at Steve, almost as if he were considering but decided against it, as he continued. “She’s tryna rile you up, bud. Win the argument.”

“We didn’t—“ But instead of finishing he sentence, Javi gave up with a short sigh as he put out his cigarette into the ash tray on his table before picking up the papers again, tapping them on his desk a couple times to straighten the edges. “Whatever, man. I don’t have time for your love doctor shit.”

Steve’s eyebrows rose, a lazy, amused grin splitting across his face. “Love, huh?”

Javier was half-tempted to throw the papers at his partner’s head as he stepped over to the door with them. “I’m taking these down the hall,” he grumbled as he swung open the door. “And going to ask for a fucking transfer while I’m at it.”

Steve only chuckled in reply as he dropped his feet back to the floor and leaned over his desk again to continue his work.

Javier was never known for being the best liar.

—

Shortly after your meeting, you were staring blankly at the coffee maker in the break room nearest your office, watching the thin stream of near-black miracle liquid pour into the empty glass pot, waiting for the familiar, safe smell of it to fill the small room. You had one hand rested on the countertop, the other pushing back stray strands of your hair before rubbing small circles in your temple with your index and middle fingers.

You felt a bit better on the whole, but the meeting had been…a lot. The situation with Escobar’s empire wasn’t getting any better, and his cunning relentlessness and the chaos it caused trickled down all the way through both this chain of command and through every facet of the Colombian government’s oppositional forces; one lead’s trail ending at nothing and another coming unraveled with more and more innocent people dead in the streets.

Not only that, but there was also the fact that your mind kept going back to the way Javier’s eyes had tried to silently plead with you in the split-second you’d looked at him while in he and Murphy’s office just a couple hours earlier. For what, you weren’t sure. And you didn’t particularly care to know. But that didn’t mean you’d be able to stop thinking about it, about him, any time soon.

“y/n.” As if he could read your thoughts from down the hall, his baritone voice floated through the room from behind you.

“What do you want?” You asked, unmoving.

Javi took a couple steps further into the room, leaning against the wall as he pushed a hand back through his dark hair. He waited for you to eventually turn around, your coffee cup now waiting in your hand to be filled as you stared back at him expectantly.

He sighed before meeting your eyes earnestly. “I wanted to…apologize.” He swallowed quickly, watching you blink at him as he spoke. “I should have minded my own business last night.”

“Yeah. You should’ve,” you replied simply, though you let your expression soften somewhat. “I’m a grown-ass woman, Javier. If I make a stupid decision, the consequences are on me.”

Javi slightly cocked his head at the undertone of admission about your actions the night before. God knows he was just as guilty of the same things, and far worse for that matter, but…

“I just don’t want you getting hurt.” He said, his voice coming out quieter than he’d meant for it to. He looked down to the floor, collecting a thought before he lifted his head again. “I don’t…I don’t make a lot of friends these days.” A slight shrug tugged his shoulders upward, though his dark eyes were filled with intent sincerity as he looked to you. “I’d like to keep the ones that I do have.”

You allowed the stiffness in your shoulders to lessen as you sighed. Dammit, you hated how easy it was to forgive him. It was always like this.

And yet, you could see the sincerity in his face, his lips pressed tightly together and the focus in his brow, and you’d caught the almost nervous curling of his hand that wasn’t jammed into his pocket into a fist as his side when he’d spoken. 

He really did mean it. Of course he did, and you were glad to know someone who truly did care about your safety in a place like this, at a time like this. You just wished you could figure out what else it was that hung in the air between you as he waited for you to answer him with an anxious humming in his chest.

“Fine.” You nodded once before you turned back around to reach for the now-filled coffee pot. Javier’s presence lingered behind you, and you considered your next words with a grimace as you poured the steaming-hot liquid in your cup. “He was shit in bed anyways.”

Javier snorted a laugh, relief flooding him at your forgiveness as he pushed himself off the wall and walked over to stand by you, placing his hand on the counter next to yours as he looked over to you. His hand was close, almost too close to yours, and he’d quickly slid a few inches backward.

“You busy tomorrow night?” he asked. It was an innocent question, truly, nothing beyond a friendly invitation. “It’s been a while since we just…talked.”

You hoped he didn’t notice the slight falter in your grip as you put the coffee pot back in its place and turned to look at him again.

He was right. It had been a while. But the last time you’d “talked,” the night had soon shifted to the both of you becoming a mess of wandering hands and mouths and tangled limbs before you were even able to unlock the door to your apartment.

You could sense his acknowledgement of that reflected in the way he slightly pulled back from where you stood as you leaned back onto the counter and took a sip of your coffee, not wanting to appear overbearing. But you could also see his intention to make up for his intrusion the night before flickering behind his eyes.

You wanted to hate yourself for it, but you only shook your head, a weak smile crossing over your face once you pulled your coffee cup away from your lips.

“Not at all.”

| Part 3 |

[thecoleopterawithana]

Your quote: "So perhaps, when in 1989 Paul asks “Did I ever take you in my arms, look you in the eye, tell you that I do” the part that he “never did” was the latter"( with John according to your perspective??)--I saw a video where Paul says he's talking about how the workaday life meant he sometimes took marriage and Linda for granted--like we all do our spouses at times--and that was why he wrote that song. Your take please? Respectfully inquiring--thanks!

Hello, anon dear. Thanks so much for your respectful request! Especially considering that every opportunity I get to talk about “This One” is a personal pleasure.

I believe the video you were referring to is this one (eheh), where correspondent Bernard Goldberg interviews Paul for the TV series 48 Hours. The episode follows part of The Paul McCartney World Tour, which marked not only his first major tour outing in ten years, but also the first time in his solo career that a substantial number of Beatles songs were included in the setlist.

Paul is asked about “This One” near the 8:30 mark of the first video and his answer continues in the second part.

Here is a transcription of the segment in question:

-

Q: Let me ask you about one of the new songs, “This One”. Is it about a marriage?

Paul: A relationship, yeah.

Q: And about, not expressing emotions and feelings?

[Paul performing “This One”]

Paul: You get those moments, sort of late at night or when you’re feeling good and you think, “Oh, you know, it’d be great to kind of— I hope I tell her I love her enough, and all that.” And then come the morning, when you’ve got to get off to the office and it’s [yawns] “Okay, goodbye, love you!”, and so on. And, you know, life’s like that. And there’s never kind of enough time to— If you like your parents for instance, to tell them, “God, just what you meant to me.” 

[Paul performing “This One”]

Paul: You always think, “Well, I’m saving it up. I’ll tell ‘em one day.” And what happens with a lot of people is— Something like John, for instance, getting back to that subject. He died. 

I was lucky. The last few wee— months that he was alive, we’d managed to get our relationship back on track. And we were talking and having real good conversations. Real nice and friendly. But George, actually, didn’t, I don’t think, get his relationship right. They were arguing right up to the end. Which I’m sure is a source of great sadness to him. And I’m sure, in the feeling of this song, that George was always planning to tell John he loved him. But time ran out. And that’s what the song is about. There never could be a better moment than this one, you know, now. Take this moment to say, [hesitates] “I love you.” [Laughs] It’s not quite the same. 

-

Now, about your question. I take you were wondering why in the post you quoted me on I used an excerpt of this song to hypothesize about a facet of Paul and John’s relationship. 

Allow me to begin by saying that, as the wonderful @amoralto pointed out in the aforementioned post, one should be cautious about what kind of information we’re extracting from an art form like songs. The sources of inspiration can be multiple, and the exact meaning of the piece elusive even to its author. So it’s probably best to be prudent about taking the lyrics too literally or extrapolating the entire song as to be about a single situation/person. 

Nevertheless, there are still certain patterns and themes that keep emerging, and I am curious about examining those. And being songs one of the places where they more openly communicated and truly laid bare their feelings, I believe the tumble down the rabbit hole of speculation might be worth it, just to see what we may find there. 

As Paul put it:

The idea is that what I’ll leave behind me will be music, and I may not be able to tell you everything I feel, but you’ll be able to feel it when you listen to my music. I won’t have the time or the articulation to be able to say it all, but if you enjoy composing you say it through the notes.

Of course, John also said:

When Paul and I write a song, we try and take hold of something we believe in – a truth. We can never communicate 100 per cent of what we feel, but if we can convey just a fraction, we have achieved something. We try to give people a feeling – they don’t have to understand the music if they can just feel the emotion. This is half the reason the fans don’t understand, but they experience what we are trying to tell them.

So maybe we can experience the emotion they infused the song with, but not always be able to understand the circumstances that gave rise to it in their own lives.

To find that last crucial piece of the puzzle, one has to truly contextualise the song. And that’s where all the other more tangible sources of information come in, such as quotes and timelines. 

Of course, drawing conclusions from any kind of data is, in itself, an interpretation. And an inescapably personal one at that. 

The only way to approximate objectivity is through critical thinking and emotional intelligence. Continuously question your own assumptions and those of others, and don’t be attached to any one answer. Be willing to change your views based on new information and be open to considering new perspectives. I find that input from others is invaluable in drawing my attention to an angle I’d previously missed. For if our personal experiences sometimes blind us to certain facets of the subject we’re examining, they also give us a more intimate understanding of other sides of it, as we’ve walked in those same shoes before and know precisely what it feels like.

What I essentially mean with this disclaimer is that this is my current interpretation of the information. And my answers are usually so slow and long (my apologies) because I try to provide the data so that you can draw your own conclusions.

That settled, here is how I interpret Paul’s explication of “This One”. 

The interviewer begins by asking if the song is about a marriage and Paul sightly corrects him that it’s about a relationship. 

Then Goldberg posits his theory regarding the theme: “not expressing emotions and feelings.” And Paul goes on to explain, in his usual inclusive and generalising fashion: 

You get those moments, sort of late at night or when you’re feeling good and you think, “Oh, you know, it’d be great to kind of— I hope I tell her I love her enough, and all that.” And then come the morning, when you’ve got to get off to the office and it’s [yawns] “Okay, goodbye, love you!”, and so on.

He uses the second person to emphasize how the reporter must share his feelings — ‘you know what I mean, right?’ — thus making his experiences not only more relatable and perceivable, but it also slightly removes the focus from himself. You put it best when you said, “like we all do […] at times.”

He does start by giving the example of an apparently marital routine. And though it could have been chosen as something the interviewer would more quickly relate to, it may also be that he had difficulty “expressing emotions and feelings” in his marriage with Linda. He has spoken of such hurdles in his relationship with Nancy, which he expressed in his 2013 hidden track “Scared”. 

Well, I’m just like anybody else, man! You know? You get those moments. I don’t normally write about them; but it’s a good thing to use. I was feeling it, as well. I was newly in love with Nancy, and I was finding it a little difficult to say, ‘I love you.’ Number one, I’m a guy, and that’s a big excuse, I know, but it is a bit true to form…

— Paul McCartney, interview with Miranda Sawyer for The Guardian (13 October 2013).

So I slightly disagree with your assessment that the song is about “how the workaday life meant he sometimes took marriage and Linda for granted”. I don’t think he took his relationship with Linda for granted as much as he was unable to openly express how much it meant to him. He got inundated by “those moments” of love and appreciation, but then kind of used the hustle and bustle of everyday life as an excuse not to dwell on the discomfort of having to confess them.

I think it’s perhaps more accurate to say that the matter of “expressing emotions and feelings”, particularly actually saying “I love you”, is something that Paul has struggled with all his life and pervaded most of his relationships.

He even goes on to give the example of his parents, and how he wished he’d tell them, “God, just what you meant to me.” Which is a similar phrasing to the one he uses in “Scared”, more than two decades later:

I’m scared to say I love you / Afraid to let you know / That the simplest of words won’t come out of my mouth / Though I’m dying to let them go / Trying to let you know […]I’m still too scared to tell you / Afraid to let you see / That the simplest of words won’t come out of my mouth / Though I’m dying to set them free / Trying to let you see, how much it means to me / How much you mean to me / How much you mean to me now

But the relationship in which this theme of not expressing emotions and feelings seems most stark, at least as Paul expressed it publicly and in his music, is in his relationship with John.

He puts it quite plainly in another quote about “Scared”:

Paul: You can actually say, “I love you,” to someone, but it’s quite hard. And so that’s why it’s usually easier when you’re a bit drunk. It’s like ‘Here Today’ [on 1982’s Tug of War], which was for John, and there is the line, (sings) “Du du du du du du du, I love you,” and it is a bit of a moment in the song. It would be a bit like Keith Richards saying to Mick, “I love you.” I mean he does, but I’m not sure he’s going to say it. I’m sure the Gallaghers love each other on some level, probably quite deeply, but that certainly isn’t going to get said soon. I think it’s quite an interesting subject and I felt it most recently with [wife] Nancy, I knew I loved her but to actually say, “I love you,” you know, it’s just not that easy.

— Paul McCartney,  interview with Pat Gilbert for MOJO (November 2013).

Note that even here, in a quote about a song he wrote for Nancy, he harkens back to his experiences with having difficulty saying “I love you” to John. 

Paul even mentions that it’s easier to do it “when you’re a bit drunk” — I want to tell her that I love her a lot / But I gotta get a bellyful of wine — which seems to be a reference to “the night we cried”. That night in Key West in 1964 was an “important emotional landmark”, not only because they exposed themselves emotionally by crying, but they also may have actually said the big ‘I Love You’.

One night, we got pretty drunk and argued and laughed, and it ended up us both crying, because it was, you know at the height of your drunkenness, when you’re all, “Hey man, I love you, man. No, I love you, man.” That was probably the only time we just got that kind of intimate with each other. It’s a male machismo embarrassment thing. I mean, you might say to a girl, “I love you”, but in my case, within the group, The Beatles, it would have been difficult, even though we all did love each other. You just all had to be guys to the full. We were all rough, tough cream puffs.

— Paul McCartney, interview with the Daily Mail (4 June 2016).

He attributes his difficulty to a “male machismo embarrassment thing”, and that he could say “I love you” to a girl but not to his mates. But in his 2013 interview for The Guardian, he also points to the fact that he is a guy to explain his difficulties verbally expressing his love Nancy. 

But adding to the “stiff upper lip” imposed on northern lads, Paul himself is especially guarded about his feelings:

It’s funny because just in real life, I find that a challenge. I like to sort of, not give too much away. Like you said, I’m quite private. Why should people, know my innermost thoughts? That’s for me, they’re innermost. But in a song, that’s where you can do it. That’s the place to put them. You can start to reveal truths and feelings. You know, like in ‘Here Today’ where I’m saying to John “I love you”. I couldn’t have said that, really, to him. But you find, I think, that you can put these emotions and these deeper truths – and sometimes awkward truths; I was scared to say “I love you”. So that’s one of the things that I like about songs.

— Paul McCartney, on the challenge of giving too much of himself away when writing meaningful and truthful songs. Asked by Simon Pegg and interviewed by John Wilson for BBC 4’s Mastertapes (24 May 2016).

More than the pleasure associated with creating something out of nothing — “songwriting is like sex” — music also offers the utter relief of unburdening Paul of his feelings, which he finds great difficulty in exorcising in a more direct way:

Songwriting is like psychiatry; you sit down and dredge up something that’s inside, bring it out front. And I just had to be real and say, John, I love you. I think being able to say things like that in songs can keep you sane.

— Paul McCartney, interview with Robert Palmer for the New York Times (25 April 1982).

There was an inescapable need to come out, be real, and say to John, “I love you”; even if he has to “write it to the great record player in the sky”. 

Because more than speaking of a fear of expressing emotions and feelings in Paul’s day to day life — like in “Scared” — “This One” is clearly about the regret of doing it too late:

[L]ife’s like that. And there’s never kind of enough time to— […] You always think, “Well, I’m saving it up. I’ll tell ‘em one day.” And what happens with a lot of people is— Something like John, for instance, getting back to that subject. He died. […] And I’m sure, in the feeling of this song, that George was always planning to tell John he loved him. But time ran out. And that’s what the song is about. There never could be a better moment than this one, you know, now. Take this moment to say, [hesitates] “I love you.” [Laughs] It’s not quite the same. 

Even with his usual emotional distancing by projecting onto George and using “we” instead of “I”, Paul plainly explains the song is about cautioning people to take this moment to say “I love you”, at the risk of having time ran out on them as it happened with him and John.

And one can see how determined Paul is to get this message spread, as he often reiterates it when introducing “Here Today” in concerts — a song written in part out of his need to clearly say “I love you” to John — a frequent presence in his live performances for the last 20 year.

Paul McCartney’s One on One World Tour in Detroit, Michigan, at Little Caesars Arena on October 2, 2017.

Paul: One of the other things I say on our shows is that sometimes you want to say something really nice to someone, or pay them a compliment, or you feel a bit shy and a bit embarrassed, so you think, “Ah, I’ll say it tomorrow.” You put it off to another day. You know, you can put it off. And sometimes that’s too late; you’re too late. I wrote this next song after my dear friend John who passed away. Let’s hear it for John! And you know, when you’re kids, particularly — I mean, when we first started the Beatles we were in our early twenties, kind of thing — and you’re a bunch of guys, up in Liverpool at that time… There’s no way you’re gonna say to each other, “Hey, I love you, man.” It just didn’t happen, you know. You just didn’t say things. But you know, when [unintelligeable] we didn’t say it, so when John died, you know, I wanted to kind of say it somehow. So this next song is in the form of a conversation we didn’t get to have.

The fact that Paul has often connected the theme of not verbally expressing his feelings, and in particular of being too late to do it, to his relationship with John, is what led me use “This One”, in that post and in others, as an expression of that dynamic between them. 

In the post you quoted me on in specific, I say that perhaps the part that they “never did” was outright “tell” each other “that I do [love you]”, given that they have embraced — “take you in my arms” — and made intense eye contact — “look you in the eye.”

The song is basically a love song – did I ever say I love you? And if I didn’t it’s because I was waiting for a better moment… ‘There could never be a better moment than this one…

— Paul McCartney, in “Club Sandwich 52, Summer 1989″.

Paul goes on to repeat this sentiment of emotional frankness in the rest of the verse: “Did I ever open up my heart / Let you look inside?” A phrase that, in my opinion, so aptly encapsulates the issues Paul brought to the relationship, that I use it as a title for Paul-centered posts in the Don’t Let Me Down | Trust Issues series.

But to be honest, the thing that really convinced me that song was about him and John, was a moment in this session:

After singing the lines “Did I ever touch you on the cheek / Say that you were mine, thank you for the smile”, Paul mimics one of John’s characteristic smiles, as the wonderful @vairemelde illustrated in this post.

With all that said, it appears that all there is to do is to appreciate this wonderful piece of music.

Did I ever take you in my arms, / Look you in the eye, tell you that I do, / Did I ever open up my heart / Let you look inside?

If I never did it, I was only waiting / For a better moment that didn’t come. / There never could be a better moment / Than this one, this one.

The swan is gliding above the ocean, / A god is riding upon his back, / How calm the water and bright the rainbow / Fade this one to black.

Did I ever touch you on the cheek / Say that you were mine, thank you for the smile, / Did I ever knock upon your door / And try to get inside?

If I never did it, I was only waiting / For a better moment that didn’t come. / There never could be a better moment / Than this one, this one.

The swan is gliding above the ocean, / A god is riding upon his back, / How calm the water and bright the rainbow / Fade this one to black.

What opportunities did we allow to flow by / Feeling like the time it wasn’t quite right? / What kind of magic might have worked if we had stayed calm, / Couldn’t I have given you a better life?

Did you ever take me in your arms / Look me in the eye tell me that you do? / Did I ever open up my heart, / Let you look inside?

If I never did it, I was only waiting / For a better moment that didn’t come. / There never could be a better moment / Than this one, this one.

The swan is gliding above the ocean, / A god is riding upon his back, / How calm the water and bright the rainbow / Fade this one to black.

-

Tangents

I’m Scared To Say I Love You

What About The Night We Cried

Did I Ever Take You In My Arms 

The Surrealist