#i never know if i should keep this account limited to four very specific people or go public with the nonsense

[takeariskao3]

if i used my dormant tiktok account to do fandom/writing/personal content, would that be cute or cringe

[anika-ann]

Hell Froze Over - Pt.1

The Good (and Fast) Samaritan

Type: mini-series to a series (part 1 & part 2 & part 3 & part 4),  Avenger!reader AU.

Pairing: Steve Rogers x reader       Word count: 2750

Summary: There’s a new enhanced on a scene, showing up at places of the Avengers’ fights. She’s fast. Really, really fast. And Wanda can’t read her mind.

So far, she has been helping. But surely it’s only a matter of time before she switches switch sides – otherwise she would have approached you instead of speeding away.

You had a problem. And you needed a solution.

Warnings: violence and blood, mention of multiple characters’ death (the Snap), a bit of inuendo and language… oh and extreme fluff

A/N: This part of Melting Hearts’ verse follows after everyone was brought after the Snap. The majority of the story was written after A:IW, soooo, there are no references to Endgame and there’s canon divergence. They somehow saved them all, without building a damn time machine and all that. Just run with it ;)

Previous part of the series II Story masterlist

────── ·❆· ──────  

Aliens. 

Why was it always aliens?

And extremely annoying ones on top of that.

They had freaking tentacles – or multiple limbs, whatever they called it. The thing was, they had four ‘arms’, which made them incredibly handful, pun definitely intended. And what was making it worse? Once you cut off one limb, two grew in its place.

More than once during the fight, in which New Yorkers were being terrorized again, you wondered if these particular creatures, aka Tentacles, had been on Earth before, possibly meeting Hydra. You couldn’t imagine the Nazis’ organization getting the inspiration for their motto anywhere else, Greek myths be damned.

Apparently, these aliens loved going after Captain America too. Then again, they generally didn’t seem to be fond of the group of superhumans standing in their way of invading this planet, so perhaps Steve was not special in that respect.

Pinning two Tentacles to a wall by spray of thick icicles, you allowed yourself to breathe in after a long time. If you were being honest, you wouldn’t mind if Tentacles were the ones whose population would stay with the half of them erased from existence by Thanos. Seriously. They were obviously dickheads.

Taking few more breaths, indulging the feeling of having time to do so, you scanned your surroundings; the fight was definitely going your way, the aliens falling one after another, but the damage to the area was immense. It was a miracle no building had collapsed yet, but you had a hunch it wouldn’t take long. Wanda was helping with removing the civilians out of the harm’s way with her mental powers, but several blocks had been hit. You hadn’t had your eyes on her for a while now.

Hearing a roar by your right, you were immediately back to the highest alert. Tentacle no.39 was not coming your way though; it went after Natasha. You sent an icicle right through the creature’s belly, killing it at instant. Nat just nodded your way and threw herself back into the fight. You did the same.

Your whole body hurt, burning with exhaustion, but you knew you had to keep going. Even when a warning pinch bit the base of your spine; you were getting really fed up with this whole fail-safe trigger, because in moments like this, you simply couldn’t allow yourself to stop fighting in order to be fine. You were supposed to push yourself to your very limits, because lives were at stake.

Unfortunately, you didn’t have a choice.

You slowed down a little, trying to stay closer to Steve who was the nearest. He must have caught up on you pulling back, because he stated fighting with more ferocity – one you weren’t sure where he got from.

You noticed he didn’t have his helmet anymore and it made you bite the bullet and throw yourself back into the fight despite knowing the pain would only grow with time and at one point, it would paralyze you. But Steve had lost his fucking helmet again and he had the armour for reason goddammit!

And then, all of sudden, the battle was over. Car alarms blared all around you, smoke rising to the sky, flames licking anything they reached; you did your best to put the fire out. It was why you didn’t notice it at first – the loud creak of metal tens feet away, but then the concrete started screaming, just like the people.

You snapped your head that way, only to see a restaurant collapsing onto itself.

With people still in it.

You acted on instinct, sending the thickest layer of ice you could summon to slow down the falling debris, seeing a flush of red energy heading the same way. You felt the crushing weight of the building almost on your shoulders.

And the very same moment, you could also see that in a blink, there were no people underneath it.

They were gone; more specifically, several feet nearby, staring as incredulously as you were. Feeling unbearable sting in your back, you allowed yourself to let go, Wanda following your example.

Unlike the civilians, you knew all too well what happened. But your eyelids felt too heavy and you were too tired to be annoyed; in fact, you were grateful, because you didn’t know how long you would have been able to hold the improvised barrier.

You mentally thanked the girl who got all the people out in what seemed like a split second.

Dark spots danced in front of your eyes, your knees getting wobbly. The world threated to sway out of its place and you knew you were about to fold like a house of cards, only to wake up seconds later. It wouldn’t be the first time.

But you didn’t hit the ground. Strong arms enwrapped you securely, pulling you to your Captain’s chest, supporting you as much as you needed. You closed your eyes and breathed through the dizziness.

“Hey, it’s okay, I got you. It’s over, you can rest. But stay with me, alright?” Steve’s voice reached you from a terrible distance, slowly getting closer as you were gradually regaining your strength. The vibrations of his words caressed your own torso and you blinked your eyes open. “There you go, Snowflake. Let’s wrap it up here, okay?”

You just nodded, looking up to his face gratefully. He gave you a small smile in acknowledgement of your wordless ‘thank you for not letting me fall’.

“She was here again,” you mumbled and Steve grimaced as he cautiously let you off his embrace.

“Yeah. I know.”

────── ·❆· ──────  

You all entered the conference room slowly, some of you barely standing on your feet. It was a miracle you didn’t have to drag each other in here. After a long time of scrunching your nose at it, you reached for the energizing drink specially designed for you just like everyone else.

While no one had suffered a serious injury – serious on the Avengers’ scale, things like the cut on Steve’s forehead didn’t count –, you were all ready to just have a shower and go to bed. But no. Being an Avenger meant you couldn’t. It meant that if the work wasn’t finished, you couldn’t get rest.

You dropped into one of the comfy chairs, Steve’s body making a muffled thud as he chose the one next to you. If even Captain America was dead on his feet, things were bad.

You pushed yourself up, sitting up straight to inspect the gash on his smooth skin. It was already healing and you knew he had it treated (by you, at least), but the drying bloody line on his head just wouldn’t let you relax.

Your fingertips carefully brushed alongside it, wary of not applying any pressure. Steve smiled at you faintly.

“Snowflake, it’s okay.”

His hand caught your wrist tenderly, pulling it away.

“How did you manage to get it anyway? How did you lose your helmet again?” you questioned. He bit his lip and looked almost apologetically. Naturally, that had you frowning. “Steve-“

“He was getting too close to--- to them, alright? I admit I didn’t quite see the other three coming-“

You gritted your teeth, torn between admiring his heroics as he defended the civilians and clipping round his ear for having a tunnel-like vision and not looking around properly before jumping to the rescue.

In the end, you just huffed, letting your hand slip from his grasp.

You carefully eyed the rest of the team, glad you found Wanda mothering Vision and Bruce checking Natasha once again, while Tony, Sam and Clint were on the phone. It put a smile on your face as you saw Bucky fumbling with his phone as well – you knew he had started seeing a woman from accounting here and now he was probably wondering if he should let her know he was fine.

“We make a good team. Taking minor risks is worth it,” Steve whispered, straightening in his chair in favour of dropping a kiss to your forehead. You closed your eyes contentedly at the pure and innocent display of affection.

When his lips lingered, his hand brushing your jaw and he inhaled the smell of your shampoo – if there was any smell left after the fight and debris flying around –, his breath faltering, a realization dawned to you.

He hadn’t lost his helmet when defending some civilians, had he?

Steve wouldn’t let himself to be distracted enough to be jumped when protecting civilians. Never. He only lost his focus when protecting the people he loved. Mainly the ones he had lost before, in the Snap or otherwise; if he could help it, his gaze never left you on the battlefield, simply too scared you would disappear in a blink of an eye. He might be getting less anxious about it lately, but it was always in the back of his mind; having your loved ones wiped off by a snap of fingers and seeing them fall to ashes did that to a person.

Not that you would know – you were among the ones who disappeared.

But Steve knew. He saw it happen to you, Bucky, Sam…. And he could only watch. Nothing he could do stop it. You still remembered the burn of in the base of your spine as your powers fought to freeze the process of your body disintegrating, watching in horror as many of your friends did – and that you were about to meet the same fate. Just as helpless as Steve was.

“…I’m just stalling, Steve. I know it and you know it too. I should— I should let go-“

“No! No, Snowflake, you stay and fight-“ he practically growled, gripping your wrists with enough strength to bruise them.  

“I love you, Steve,” you whispered in response, feeling your whole body trembling in both exertion and fear. You didn’t want to leave. You didn’t want this to be your end.

The wild haunted look in Steve’s eye only made you shudder further, a painful twist to your gut.

“No-“

“Please, say it back,” you pleaded, swallowing your tears and the scream that was threatening to erupt from your throat. The burn, fuck, the burn… you couldn’t hold it any longer.

“NO! You fight this!”

Lips trembling, you understood you wouldn’t get the last love declaration you craved. You closed your eyes.

“Goodbye, Steve.”

“NO!” he yelled, pulling you to him, bodies aligned as he wrapped an arm around you, holding you impossibly close. “You--- sweetheart, please. I love you. I can’t-“

“Thank you,” you sobbed, breathing in his scent, feeling the coarse material of his worn uniform, revelling in the warmth of his touch… and you let go.

The last thing you heard was him, choking on a desperate shriek of your name.

The memory and the sheer wonder about what it must have been like for him almost brought tears into your eyes. Again.

Could you really be mad at him for being reckless?

“Thank you for saving me,” you whispered, hearing his breath hitch. You opened your eyes, only to see his resigned ones as he guesses you figured out the truth.

“No ‘you idiot’, huh?”

“No. Not this time. I can see you’re fine. You’re allowed to look out for me as long as you walk away relatively unharmed.”

“Lucky me,” he murmured and kissed you lightly on your lips, tasting after the sickeningly sweet energy drink. You couldn’t say you minded.

“I love you, Steve. I care for you too. Nothing wrong with that,” you hummed lovingly, gazing into his eyes, the rest of the world be damned. “So yeah. Thank you.”

His blues got their vivid spark back, the corners of his lips rising inconspicuously. “Always. And I love you too.”

“You two are sickening,” Bucky noted close to your ear and you honest to god yelped, almost falling off your chair.

Bucky receded with silent laugh and while you clutched at your chest, your heart too frantic in your ribcage, you noticed Steve rolled his eyes at his friend fondly.

“Lefty here has a point,” Tony hummed, making you huff and turn to the big screen as it lit up with news feed.

There were already so many images and videos on the internet that it was scary. Why people hunted down good shots instead of running away?

Unsurprisingly, Tony froze the frame in which a blur of dark blue could be seen. Hint: it was neither you nor Steve in his stealth suit.

No. It was the enhanced girl. The fast one. The one you knew too little about to your comfort.

“Hate to say it, but things could have got ugly without the Rush-girl rushing in,” Tony announced and you scoffed, mainly because you felt like he was nudging your conscience.

It felt like he was blaming you, seeing you wouldn’t have been able to hold the falling debris for long enough. You were sure Tony wouldn’t blame you, since he knew all too well you simply couldn’t beat it; after all he had been the one to install your fail-safe, preventing you hurting yourself. But you also knew he didn’t like the thought of anyone else getting hurt because of it either.

The thing was it always went like this with this enhanced girl. She would show up, help the Avengers and then puff, she was gone. No trace. Except for the people she saved. The ones you might have failed to save unless she had come.

You forced yourself to drift away from the dark thoughts.

“Tony, your nicknames are getting more ridiculous with each try,” you remarked, earning a few hums in agreement from around the table.

“I can go back to naming you if you want… Popsicle. I bet Cap here got the memo and he loves to lick and s-”

“Stark!” Steve lashed out at him, his cheeks getting an unhealthy shade of red. You choked on your own spit.

You were pretty happy with Tony somewhat reconciling with Steve (and you and others), okay, but his jokes were sometimes too much. He really was pushing it.

“Go to hell, Metalbrain,” you muttered under your breath, feeling your ears burning.

Also, yes. Yes, Steve got the memo. So did you. But you didn’t need to talk about it in front of everyone, thank you very much.

“Cute blush you have here. I hit the nail on the head, eh?” Tony continued, earning a murderous glare from Steve, who certainly was sporting a remarkable blush.

“Tony!” you called out, not less horrified than your significant other.

“Trust the advice of the elder – biologically older anyway. Hate to break it to you, but that’s not how you make a kid. Then again maybe that’s the point-“

“Tony, shut your metal mouth or I swear to god I will tell Pepper you’re being a pervert.”

A look of pure horror appeared on his face and you couldn’t help but smile smugly. This always worked.

The thing was Tony would know how to get a girl pregnant; Pepper Potts lived to tell the tale. She was in her twenty-seventh week, after all; and her hormones were misbehaving. Big time. Her emotions were like on a roller-coaster lately and no one with a shred of brain wanted to be on her bad side, ever, let alone now.

Needless to mention Pepper Potts was a strong woman, capable of handling herself, being in control. She wasn’t quite in control of herself now and what was even worse, she always had been the more rational part of the Stark and Potts-Stark duo, keeping Tony’s impulsiveness in check. Once again, not now. And it was driving her insane.

So yeah, threatening Tony with snitching him to Pepper always worked these days. It was even mean of you. Then again, Tony was being extremely pervert today, venting his frustration on you and you did not like it at all.

“Ouch. Low blow, Popsicle, low blow,” Tony said darkly, before his expression turned gleeful again. “See what I did there with the blow--- never mind, I have a place to be. Bye, kids!”

Tony took his abrupt escape, disappearing from the room, and you sighed heavily. You massaged the bridge of your nose, feeling your face burning with embarrassment. The rest of the team pretended not to watch you highly amused.

“He’s an actual infant— no, he’s worse,” you stated, your voice a little too high-pitched.

“That’s hardly any news. Now, can we pay attention to the actual problem?” Natasha interjected, switching back to professional mood.

“Sure. Let’s talk more about the Rush-girl,” Clint hummed, a smirk on his lips.

A collective groan was the answer, but you did start working.

────── ·❆· ──────  

Part 2

────── ·❆· ──────  

There we go! 

The first chapter of the last part of Melting Hearts. Hopefully, I will make it worth it your attention ;)

Thank you for reading! Happy Sunday :-*

[rachelbethhines]

Tangled Salt Marathon - No Time Like the Past

While I wouldn’t call this the worst episode of the series, there are several others I dislike more, I would call this the most ill conceived story in the show. 

All the other bad episodes have potential but are let down by poor presentation, boring predictability, or sloppy planning. This one however, is fundamentally flawed in it’s very basic premise and so ranks in the bottom of most fans lists. Even people who are far more forgiving of season three and than I am, and are hardcore New Dream stans, still dislike this episode. That’s how bad it is. 

Summary: Rapunzel discovers Old Lady Crowley tossing out Cassandra's things. She is upset and demands that they be left alone. She then has Lance and Eugene help her save all of Cassandra's mementos and personal belongings, but she becomes saddened when Eugene reminds her that Cassandra turned her back on "her". Rapunzel takes a box of her things along with, unknowingly, a mysterious hourglass. As she examines it, she accidentally drops and smashes it and she and Pascal find themselves sent back into the past. They run into a teenage Eugene and Lance who keep calling Rapunzel "Sideburns". Rapunzel realizes that she and Pascal have inhabited the bodies of the Stabbington Brothers and decide to recruit the young thieves in getting the hourglass from the castle back.

Fun Fact! That Dummy is Rapunzel’s Doing 

Minor nitpick here, but Cass had nothing to do with putting Eugene’s face on her sparring dummy. Rapunzel voluntarily did that back in Under Raps. Cas never requested it nor even expressed any joy over receiving said ‘gift’. 

Basically the show is attributing one of Rapunzel’s mistakes/flaws to Cassandra in order to introduce a very nonsensical plot point later. So I need ya’ll to keep that in mind as we go along.  

Lets Talk About the Episode’s Ordering 

We don't have production codes for season three like we did for the previous two seasons. So we can’t know for sure what order everything was originally planned in, but I would argue that this episode should have came before Return of the King. 

For starters this is a “bottle” episode; it takes place mostly in the past and the only present day characters who show up are Eugene, Raps, Lance, and Crowely. As such you could potentially slot this episode in anywhere before Cassandra’s Revenge. You can’t really do that with most of the other episodes so it could have been easily moved around when airing. 

Therefore, I would argue that it should have been the first episode after Rapunzel’s Return for three key reasons. 

It would have given Edmund time to travel to Corona and give Raps time to start up big building projects like fixing Old Corona. In fact she’s already approving building plans for the capitol city at the start of the episode. Which could even explain why she took so long getting to the castle repairs if she was taking care of the stuff that the Saporians messed up else where.  

Rapunzel’s stance over wanting to keep Cassandra’s things makes more sense early on, both in universe and in a meta context. Raps would still have hope if Cass has only been gone for a month or two instead what would now be four or five months down the line. It also makes sense that Crowely wouldn’t wait around for that long. And from a meta standpoint, the audience would still be oblivious to what the heck Cass was up to and could theoretically side with Raps better; or at least empathize with her view point more, even while disagreeing with her. 

Events in this episode better explains Eugene’s decisions in Return of the King and gives the audience more context for certain stuff.  

So Why Is There a Random Magical Time Traveling Hourglass in the Storage Vault?

Slowly but surely the series has abandoned all pretense that there’s any logical world building in the show. Magical things just appear randomly now without any explanation whatsoever. Worse than that, things like the hourglass and map to the cursed tomb are treated as if they were always there, unlike the magical beings that they happened to run into in past seasons. 

The problem with this is a lack of consistency. You can’t have sceptics like Eugene and Varian if magic is so common and wide spread that anyone can run into it at anytime. Not to mention it diminishes the specialness and importance of the sundrop and moonstone if powerful magical items can be so easily found and stirred, undermining important plot points and the tension surrounding them. 

But most frustrating of all, is that this could have been easily fixed by just stating on screen at some point that magic attracts other magic. Meaning it’s only Rapunzel herself who routinely runs into these things and not just everybody and anybody. 

None of This Stuff Holds Any Meaning

Show don’t tell!

At several points through out season three, both Raps and Cass morn over Cassandra’s left behind things. They tell us constantly that these objects hold significant meaning to them, but I, the viewer, have no damn clue as to why. 

We were never shown on screen what was so special about these things other than the fact that it was junk Cass collected. There’s no story attacked to these assortment of objects nor any previous indication that Cassandra valued them beyond their usefulness. As such, any scenes involving her stuff fall emotionally flat. 

Eugene is the One in the Right Here. 

Eugene’s right. 

Any well adjust and mature adult will tell you he’s right. 

If someone doesn’t want a relationship with you, than that’s it. There is nothing you can do but to move on. It sucks, but its life. To ignore that is to ignore someone else’s boundaries and personal autonomy; while also devaluing yourself and you’re own needs. 

In a competent show this would be a set up for Rapunzel to learn something about letting go and taking care of oneself emotionally. 

But this isn’t a competent show. 

But Lobster is for Poor Folk

Food history time!

Lobster, and shellfish in general, have been considered low class food for centuries. Especially around costal areas like Corona. It’s easy to attain, cheap, and not regulated like hunting was in much of Europe. In America, specifically, lobster was fed to prisoners and there’s historical accounts of riots being started over it.  

Heck, less than forty years ago, no one lived on the coast but poor people. That’s why there’s historical communities of black people living on the southeastern islands in the US and why my father grew up in the swamps of Alabama during the 50s and 60s. 

The gentrification of coastal property and seafood, like lobster, is a very recent phenomenon in human history, starting in the late 70s early 80s with the booming tourism industry and increasing globalization.   

So while I understand that the joke here is meant to be reflective of our current understanding of lobster being a status symbol, in universe, it’s the equivalent of Eugene getting excited for chicken nuggets instead of his usual bowl of cereal because the story takes place before the 20th century.  

This means that these kids are so poor that fucking mcdonald’s fast food would be considered a rare treat compared to the slop they usually eat. Yet again what is meant to be a lighthearted joke turns suddenly dark when you stop to think about it for all of two seconds all because the writers are so flippant about their world and characters. 

This Wasn’t Planned Out, So the Timeline Doesn’t Add Up Anymore and Resources are Wasted

Remember the flashback in The Return of Strongbow?

Now I need you to remember that season three is two years later from season one and the movie. Eight years ago then, would be ten years ago now. 

The Eugene and Lance in the bottom picture is suppose to be roughly the same age as the Eugene and Lance in the top picture; give or take a few months. 

I know teenage boys can grow fast, but not that fast. 

Eugene at 16 looks the same as he does at 26. All because the writers were too lazy to preplan things out ahead of time. 

We should have seen the teen models with recasted voices back during that first flashback if they were going to tell this story later. Or the previous plot point should have been less than eight years ago. 

In fact the first flashback no longer makes any sense being so many years ago given Eugene’s engagement and recent breakup with Stalyan, and the later reveal that he was working for the Baron during the original movie. 

Sloppy planning like this not only makes for a confusing timeline but it also wastes limited resources. I like the new models, I like the actors cast for these younger roles, and I do like the concept of seeing more of Eugene’s past. But going through all of that trouble and money for what amounts to one throw away episode is mismanagement of the budget and work schedule.  

Baby Varian Is the Episode’s Only Saving Grace 

I know people are divided on the deign here. Some love it and some hate it, but that’s a personal taste thing. The actual scene itself is golden either way, because it’s such a funny eater egg. Fans on both sides made memes out of this for days. It’s legendary. 

Personally I’m more in the ‘love it’ camp, though I can see the issues people have with the design. My main defense of it is more the fact that we got kid designs for the other OCs in the show and it’s only fair Varian got one as well. The fact that he’s in smaller versions of the S1 clothes doesn’t bother me anymore than when Lance ran around for two seasons in the same outfit, including when he was a kid. 

So if I like it, then why am I talking about it a salt review? 

Cause the most memorable part of an episode shouldn’t be a throw away gag! 

People bring up baby Varian way more than they do about anything else in the episode, and no it’s not just because the character popular. It’s because most would like to forget what comes after this scene. 

Where is Quirin, by the Way?

Why is your six year old son running around the big city unsupervised?

This wouldn’t get talk about as much it wasn’t for the fact that Quirin being neglectful in season one was a motivating factor in his conflict with Varian. A conflict that was suppose to be resolved back in Rapunzel’s Return but we the audience have yet to visually see any difference in behavior since then.  

Quirin’s absence here in the past highlights his absence in the present day and reminds the audience aware that we���ve not been given a satisfying conclusion to one of the most important arcs in the series.  

Lets Talk About Wasted Potential 

Like I said, I like the idea of exploring Eugene’s past. But we should have gotten that back in season two when it was more relevant. Part of why this episode fails is because Eugene has reached the end of his original character development. He’s now on an identity crisis arc which has nothing to do with this episode.  

But you know who still hasn’t finished developing? Rapunzel. 

Rapunzel has lots to still learn and viewing her past through outside eyes could have turned this story into something really special. Especially with the ‘inhabiting another body’ plot point. 

You have no end of options here, 

Have Raps inhabit Cassandra’s body for a day and gain insight into what motivates her. It could have been either before or after they met, both offers up possibilities. 

Have Raps inhabit Eugene’s body and experience what he had to deal with growing up and come to see his point of view. (This could have also worked with the Sabbingtons set up had the writers not been stupid.) 

And my personal favorite, send her back to right after Queen for a Day and have her stuck in either Varian’s or Ruddiger’s bodies. Force her to see what she did to him and have her acknowledge she was wrong. 

And those are just the most obvious choices, there’s other more out of left field things you can do that would still work with good writing. Like exploring Lady Caine’s past, inhabiting Arianna’s body and learning how to be a real queen, get dumped into actual young Gothel and lay out clues to the future Zhan Tiri plot, or possess one of the Brotherhood and experience the final days of the Dark Kingdom; the list just goes on and on and on. 

But I Thought You Didn’t Put Kids in Jail Frederic?

Remember that Raps and Pascal are possessing the Stabbingtons who are still teenagers here. They can’t be much older than Varian. 

This means that Varian isn’t some special case. Teens have received harsh and deadly punishments in the past for non-violent crimes like theft. 

Also teens are called kids still by the majority of the cast. They’re aren’t considered adults with the same rights as someone in say their twenties, yet they can be punished the same as an adult would. Which is horrendous in any time period. 

So in conclusion, Frederic is a fucking liar! 

Tangled the Series can’t decide if it’s in the far past or a reflection of the modern day. As such it winds up supporting the worst of both worlds. Barbaric practices like hanging for minor crimes and prison slave labor are treated as the norm and never called out for the horrific things that they are; treated as a joke even, but we’re suppose to accept that this world also somehow views adolescence through the lens of late 20th century sensibilities even as it forces minors to go through such atrocities. 

Like what are you trying to say show? What is your message on the transition of adolescence to adulthood regarding rights and responsibilities? And don’t tell me ‘it’s not that deep’ because this is suppose to be a coming of age show! That’s the entire premise of the series! 

So How Old Are Stan and Pete Again?

I was always under the impression that Pete was a newbie guard, closer to Cass and Eugene’s age than say Cap or Frederic. That’s why he screws up so much because he’s inexperienced, why he seemed to be the closest thing to a equal colleague Cass had in the guard when she was also just starting out, and why I assumed those braided girls from the movie were his sisters. 

I mean there was nothing on screen previously that would necessarily contradict this reveal, it just doesn’t feel right, that’s all. I guess he could be like 20 here and be 30 in the show. That would make him only a few years older than Eugene, but still doesn’t explain why he’s so useless a decade later. 

I’m fine with Stan being here though. I always thought of him being the older of the two. In fact I headcannon Willow as his mysterious wife that he talked about back in Monty’s episode during season one. (She’s Stan and Pete’s beard, and they’re totally in a open poly relationship. That’s why they’re allowed to stay in the royal guard despite being so incompetent cause they’re technically Ferderic’s in-laws and Rapunzel’s uncles. Just no one ever talks about it cause it’s a minor sandal for a princess to marry lower class and Willow’s hardly ever there.) 

And Why Does Xavier Have All Those Plot McGuffins? 

I know we’ll never get an answer, but at this point Xavier’s exposition fairy powers border upon ridiculousness. It’s just lazy and a waste of character. 

So How Does Time Travel Work In This?

There are three types of time travel stories in fiction. 

First is the ‘Changeable Past, Changeable Future’. You see this in Back to the Future. What you do in the past will change the future, i.e. your present. You may or may not remember that you did it, but be warned you could change things too much and break stuff. Like erasing yourself from existence, or ruining your love life ect. The only way to fix it is to go back in time again and change stuff again. But beware of paradoxes or you may destroy the universe altogether.  

The second is the ‘Alternate Timeline’, where changing things creates new realties and it’s a matter of finding the right reality again. The tv show Sliders is a great example of this. Each new timeline is a different dimension. What you do in one won’t effect your original point of origin, only that particular world. The challenge if often getting home again because the probable diverging timelines are infinite and the changes of getting back are a zillion to one. 

Third is the ‘Closed Time Loop’. No matter what you do nothing will change. The future is inevitable and whatever you do in the past was always meant to happen anyways. Gargoyles handles this really well. You can also have ‘fix points’ where certain important things are set in stone but small things can be changed like in several Doctor Who episodes. Braking a fix point breaks the universe once again, while paradoxes are often the solution rather than the threat. 

So which type of time travel is Tangled dealing with here? 

Scenes like the conversation regarding Pete’s and Stan’s mustache or the ones involving Eugene working on his smolder suggest a closed time loop. Yet the ending to this episode reveals a changed future. Further still the grandfather paradox revolving around the hourglass would make you think an alternate timeline yet, we’ve no indication that anything else changed other then Eugene’s opinions on Cass, and Raps shows no concern about getting back to her original point in time indicating that it actually isn’t another dimension.... so what is it then? 

You don’t have to have a tightly plotted time travel story to have an entertaining piece of media. Endgame is riddled with plot holes and contradicts itself constantly, but what it lacks in coherent plot it makes for with fun characters, emotional story beats, and good pacing that manages to balance the action with the drama while hiding the cracks just enough that you don’t lose immersion. 

Tangled however fails at even this because it gets the character beats so fundamentally wrong.  Like you may dislike where the characters ended up in Endgame, but can’t say that those developments didn’t match the characters’ previous storylines and logical trajectory. Tony finally becomes the selfless hero by committing the ultimate sacrifice, Steve learns self care as a mirror to Tony’s arc as they were always parallels to each other, Bruce learns to accept himself, Thor processes his grief and lets go of the role he was assigned at birth but never truly fit into, and Nat becomes the leader she was destined to be rather than the sidekick.  

What happens to the characters in this episode however makes no sense. 

This is Another Missed Opportunity to Explore Eugene’s Past

The other problem behind the episode is that we don’t actually learn anything new. If you’re going to promise a story focusing on Eugene’s past then I expect to actually glean some new insights. 

We still don’t know why he’s working with Baron or how he fell in/fell out with him, what his relationship with Stalyan is like, how he became so cynical; not just the general basics, like the orphanage, but that point in his life where decided that survival meant giving up his morals and ethics; where did he first learn his better ethics that he originally suppressed (cause it sure as heck wasn’t Rapunzel), and when did he and Lance become separated? 

This are questions that series decides to raise by making allusions to them and building conflicts off of them but never wants to explain the details of where they originated from. It’s super frustrating and wholly unnecessary.  If you didn’t think the story of Eugene’s past worth telling then why did up repeatedly bring it up Chris? 

Why Are You Surprised by This Rapunzel?

Rapunzel you know Eugene’s past. You know what he used to be like. You were literally there in the movie and saw him being an ass before this. You didn’t start to like him until he dropped his guard down in the flooded cave back when you both where about to die. 

You fell in love with him when he showed you his real self and he fell in love with you when you proved that you were accepting of that. You earned each others’ trust. This here; angrily yelling at him and judging him, when you’re already hiding who you really are from him both literally and figuratively, is a breaking of that trust. 

Who the fuck are you any more, Rapunzel? 

Cause you’re not the same character from the movie. You’re not even the same character from season one. But whoever hell you are now, it’s not an improvement I can tell ya that. 

So How Did The Hourglass Go From the Treasury to the Basement Storage, and How Would Raps Know It Was There At This Point and Time?

I’m guessing the implication here is that Crowley put Cass’s stuff in the vault, but like why the fuck would she do that? We’re not talking about a family attic here, but the royal safe. The most heavily guarded room in the castle with the kingdom’s most priceless treasures and antiques. Nothing Cass owned was that valuable.  

Rapunzel Is Full of Shit

Oh let me count the numerous ways in which this whole lecture is stupid. 

Rapunzel left Varian behind. Rapunzel left Varian behind multiple times, including that time he was thrown in jail. She was not a good friend, and no, this is not a case of her learning from her past because not once has she ever admitted that she was wrong to do that. So this scene just makes Raps look like a hypocrite. 

Eugene does not need to relrean a lesson on being a better a person. He did that during the movie and has progressed beyond that point. This ‘lesson’ is a waste of time and a misuse of the characters.

This reframes Rapunzel as being in the right during her argument with older Eugene at the beginning of the episode, even though she’s not. In fact this is such a counterintuitive plot point that it boggles the mind. Who structures a narrative this way? Why so blatantly point out how the main character is wrong if not to have her learn something? Why frame the story to make the person who’s personal conflict isn’t even the episode’s focus, into the one who needs to learn something? Especially if that something is already a lesson that they’ve learned on screen beforehand.

And why, oh good heavens why, would you teach children such a toxic message? Like on the surface it sounds like something you’d hear in a children's show, but the context of it is justifying harmful behavior where you selfishly ignore other people’s wishes and boundaries just to satisfy you’re own personal desires.  

And finally, Eugene and Lance do not work as a parallel to Raps and Cass. Cassandra is an adult who left of own free will. Lance is a teenager who was arrested due to Rapunzel’s own actions. Eugene isn’t the one who is responsible here, its Rapunzel. Who also left them both behind in her carelessness. Secondly, Eugene’s decisions are spurned by years of trauma and a healthy fear of dying, while Rapunzel’s is wrapped up in her own need to always be right and to keep her immature and fanciful outlook of the world intact. As harsh as it seems, what Eugene did was based off a predetermine agreement and presumably Lance would have acted the same way or been pressured to act the same way by Eugene. In short, Eugene’s cynical world view as a teen is not the source of his disagreement with Rapunzel but an adult perspective back by common sense and a respect of others choices. It makes no sense for present day Eugene to ‘learn’ anything from this misadventure that he didn’t already know and for Rapunzel to not learn anything that would actually tie the parallel together. 

Locking Another Teen Inside a Jail Cell With Another Adult as a Joke, Does Not Erase the Inappropriateness of Varian’s Story

The episode tries to add another joke about Shorty sneaking into the prison without the guard knowing, but that still doesn’t excuse the fact someone had to have tossed Lance in there with him on purpose. Otherwise Lance wouldn’t have assumed Shorty was a fellow prisoner if he or the guard that locked him up saw Shorty sneak in before then. 

Furthermore Lance’s nonchalant response suggests this is not an out of the ordinary occurrence. Nor do any of the other guard comment upon the irregularly of teens being jailed with an adult. Now add in the fact that the show fails to clarify that previous ‘cellmate’ line from Rapunzel’s Return and now gives us more confirmation that Varian was underfed and malnourished for a year with that gruel joke and you have a horrifying picture. 

Shorty might be non-threating, but that doesn’t mean Andrew, a known attempted murderer and manipulator, is too. Nor any other adult who previously was housed with a teen before then. This is still very much not okay and no amount of ‘jokes’ will suddenly make it right.  

Raps, Who is an Adult, Just Physically Threatened Two Teenaged Boys and It’s Played as a Joke.... 

How many times do I have to say it? Humor does not fix bad writing. I’m not laughing when a heroine at age 20, threatens a couple of kids for merely annoying her. Especially when said heroine has a history of abusing children; because let me repeat once again, neglect is abuse!

This is a Lie

No you wont. 

Rapunzel never tells Eugene what happens on screen. I suspect that if she ever did, they would no longer be together, because what she wound up doing here was a violation of trust and boundaries in the worst possible way.  

And This is Now a Time Paradox 

A Grandfather Paradox to be specific. How can Rapunzel be here in the past to break the hourglass if the hourglass that sent her here is broken? 

In a competent series this would be the point of a future conflict and not the actual resolution. It’s not a closed time loop because of the paradox and the changes we’ll see in the future. 

So either she’s in an alternate timeline/dimension and just doesn’t gives a shit; leaving the real Eugene, Lance, Cass, ect. to go on without her; or she’s just broke the universe and everything is slowly unraveling around her; galaxies are dying as she whines about being dumped, people in the future are being eased from existence, and God is cursing her name for ruining his creation, all the while she carries on oblivious to the destruction in her wake, as usual. 

That’s it. Those are you’re only two options now. Is everyone from here on a fake copy or is Rapunzel the damned destroyer of worlds? You decide. 

So This Confirms That the Stabbingtons are Indeed “Family”

Another reason why I place this before Return of the King; it explains why Eugene considers the Stabbingtons ‘family’. Though if it was Rapunzel he actually bonded with and not the real Sideburns, then how much of his feelings are real and how much of them were fabricated by her? How much agency did this episode steal from him?

So What Exactly Did We All Change?

Well the dummy no longer has Eugene’s face, but Cass’s painting of the three of them still has him ripped out of the photo, soo... Keeping in mind that Raps painted the dummy anyways and considering that Moonandra tries to kill him later on; I’m going to guess that Cass’s feelings weren’t actually altered. If anything their relationship might actually be worse now, cause Cassandra keeps acting like she’s never had friends and Eugene has taken up Rapunzel’s blind devotion. 

All that development in season one is just, poof, gone. Also it’s quite possible that the first movie as well has now it has been erased from existence as Eugene got his needed character development eight years too early. How the hell that’s suppose to work, I don’t know. 

Outside of the that we get no confirmation how anybody else was effected, even though a more brainwashed Eugene running around would undoubtedly have caused a butterfly effect. Don’t expect that to be explored anytime soon. 

Though, it would explain why he’s suddenly such a doormat in season three, if this was the second episode as theorized. 

No! This is the Wrong Lesson!!!

Let me explain narrative promises. 

Everyone, on some basic fundamental level, understands how stories work. We hear them recounted to us over and over again from the day we're born to the day we die. It’s integral to how we communicate as human beings. Everyone knows innately how to tell a story even if that person couldn’t tell you how stories or structured or what certain literary terms mean, but they do it every day just through speaking. And while most audiences can’t always pin point what upsets them about a story they can for sure notice when things are off and not satisfying to experience. 

Now that doesn’t mean that everyone can write an awarding winning novel, that study of a craft isn’t important, nor that every amateurish critique thrown at any given media is valid. But it does mean that people have come to expect certain storytelling practices and can pick up on narrative cues. We’ve familiarized ourselves with the language of film, novels, comics, ect, into order to comprehend what’s going on. 

Rules of writing are just following that established language so that the audience can keep up. You can break these rules, sure, but unless you know what you’re doing and have a good narrative reason to do so, then you can easily lose you’re audience. And if you’re making money off said audience that’s something you want to avoid. 

A narrative promise is a cue; a set up that lets the audience know that ‘hey this is important, pay attention to this cause it’ll come back into play later’. Now that the audience has been alerted to the plot point they expect fulfillment of the promise. If you break that promise, either through poor set up, lack of follow through, or by breaking an established convention of writing for no other reason then because you just wanted to, your audience is going to walk away unsatisfied. 

The argument at the beginning of the episode was a narrative promise. It was a cue that set up the interpersonal conflict of the main character. For add context, I know that this is a coming of age story. Convention would dictate that the protagonist would resolve this conflict by learning they were wrong. 

That’s not what happened here. 

Convention was subverted. It wasn’t the protagonist who grew and change, it was the person they were in conflict with who did. And it wasn’t subverted because of any greater narrative reason, or future pay off, or even as effort to be shallowly ‘clever’; it was subverted because the author just didn’t want to hold the main character accountable for anything. Because said character has now become his avatar for his wish fulfillment fantasy and having the main character admit fault would be to admit fault in ones own self. Rapunzel doesn’t feel like Rapunzel this season because she’s just Chris in a wig. 

The episode broke a narrative promise to the audience; both within the episode and in the greater premise of the story, because of ego. 

I don’t claim this episode is bad just because of personal taste nor because I find it morally repulsive (even though both those things are true), I call it bad because it exhibits bad writing. Plain and simple. 

Way To Undermine The Entire Point of the Original Movie, Show

Speaking of breaking narrative promises.... 

TTS is suppose to be a squeal to the original movie. It’s even in the title of the show; both of them. In one fell swoop, the series has managed to sabotage it’s very reason for existing, as it erases Eugene’s motivation and the inciting incident that kick started the film. 

 Way to fucking go. 

To further twist the knife, it diminishes the duel protagonist of said film in order to prop up a series original character, who isn't even present in the episode itself. 

I don’t mind Cassandra’s existence. I don’t even mind her being the new deuteragonist and one of the main villains; even though she wouldn’t have been my first pick to fulfill those roles given her lack of set up. But I do fucking mind it if she upstages other characters and/or derails their character arcs in the process. 

This is the Death of New Dream 

I was still in denial when this episode first aired. I honestly believed that this and The Return of the King was build up to a third “betrayal” where Eugene finally became fed up with Rapunzel’s bullshit and joined forces with Zhan Tiri. I thought the end of the series would have Rapunzel apologize to everyone she did wrong, Varian, Cass, and Eugene, in order to break ZT’s hold on them, and that true love’s kiss would reunite the sundrop and the moonstone and that would just tie everything together into a neat little bow and give us a truly daring character study of a Disney hero. 

Oh dear merciful heavens, was I ever wrong.  

How did we go from season one’s challenging and mature storyline, complete with Disney’s first real anti-villian, to this?! 

What the hell happened!? 

Rapunzel not only disrespects Eugene’s opinions, violates his privacy and trust as she manipulates him as a teen, and then brainwashes him to think like her (even if accidentally), but doesn’t even have good grace to tell him. She instead has the audacity to look all happy and self congratulatory because she got want she wanted. She, and the show at large, doesn’t care what evil thing she does to get the desired outcome Rapunzel wants. 

Rapunzel in this show is a spoiled brat. And the image of her and her now lobotomized boyfriend staring dead eyed at a picture of the creator’s previous waifu OC with plastic smiles on their faces, sums up this series perfectly. 

Conclusion 

This isn’t even the worst episode of the series guys. I don’t know if it would even make it onto a bottom five list. That’s how much crap I have to wade through when it comes to this show. This is however the most damaging episode to the franchise as a whole. 

Not even the most hardcore of New Dream fans want to acknowledge the existence of that final scene, and Rapunzel stans won’t defend her beyond, ’well she didn’t mean too, it’s the writing that’s bad.’ Yeah, the writing is bad, that’s why the character can’t and shouldn’t be defended, not here and not in other badly written episodes where she also does bad things and never makes up for it. 

Anyways I’m finally caught up to where I left off, before the move, though sadly I don't think I’ll get this series done by the end of the month like I had originally hoped. But if you would like to help out I have a ko-fi you can drop a tip into if ya want. 

https://ko-fi.com/rachelbethhines

[mwolf0epsilon]

“Eps’s Notes on The Illusion of Living”

It's taken me nearly three months to get this done due to writer’s block kicking my sorry butt. But, as promised, here are my notes on the "Illusion of Living". Good god has this been painful… But I did have a lot of stuff I initially thought of Joey somewhat confirmed for me, and got a few extra interesting tidbits of info that I feel are very curious...

--{Key}--

Italics are my opinion

--{Key}--

--{Quick retelling of the book’s contents}--

    The Drews were among the more impoverished families in New Jersey, and Joey's father briefly worked in the silk industry to make end's meet before opening his own shoe store (that his mother oversaw profits for as the accountant). As such there were obvious limitations to a lot of Joey’s upbringing (like a lack of toys to entertain him with, and very few family vacations/trips that were memorable).

According to Joey, the shoes sold at his family’s store were primarily designed for people in the working class (clunky shoes and boots that would endure wear and tear rather than be flashy or comfortable to wear, which Joey complained never really fit him right), and had one singular design that was simply improved upon rather than any variety (I suppose the saying here would be “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” but Joey really seemed to have some sort of issue with this, as he disliked his father’s works).

    Joey's mother was a hardworking housewife and the primary parent when it came to rearing her child. She educated and played with him more than his father, so Joey was much fonder and emotionally close to her than to him and, while Joey’s father wasn’t an absent parent by any means, he was definitely more engrossed in working to sustain the family.

This family dynamic definitely had some impact on Joey, especially since his mother got him interested in the art of storytelling in general, and he seemed to have a lot more respect for her than for his father. In fact he even had a few reservations regarding his father’s mental integrity when he discovered his talent for making voices in a rather odd manner.

It should be noted here that, while Joey's father was strong, he looked deceptively frail and wasn't considered a particularly brave man by any means. He was however regarded as a bit of an entrepreneur, and Joey was very concerned that he may not be sane (which was a bit of taboo at the time, considering treatment for mental health issues hadn’t advanced past lobotomies and other disturbing medical malpractices) because he talked and sang to himself in curious little voices while he worked. Curiously enough, while a patient and loving man, Joey's father wasn't aversed to cursing around his young son (although Joey himself doesn't seem to use crass language, even if it was normalized in the household). Another curious thing to note is that Joey greatly dislikes mud, and especially hated it as a child (alluding to his later obsessive cleanliness as an adult).

    Because of the financial issues his family suffered through, Joey didn't have a radio or many books growing up, and was thus more fond of Vaudevilles (specifically theatrical comedy, tragedy, and bizarre/surreal acts) which were pretty common in his city of birth. This interest for theatrics and third person story perspectives mixed terribly with later events in his life, like how at age 10 he witnessed a potential murder/suicide (Jesus christ...). Through this event he realized that there were different kinds of people in specific situations, especially when faced with the finality of death. Joey goes so far as to describe how theatrical the death was (Almost sounding disconnected from the reality of the situation as he noted that the crowd and even his own father seemed more like characters to him than real people). However, since Joey's neighborhood was ripe with strange people, he wasn't unfamiliar with bizarre events happening around him. Seeing a motorized ambulance was more amazing to a 10 year old him than actually caring for the death of a stranger at the front of his father's store.

    At age 12, Joey went to Coney Island for the first time, and the journey excited him greatly since he didn't get to leave home very often. The trip to Coney Island was magical in a sense, and later in life he hoped to replicate it in Bendyland to a more permanent degree (the trip back home ruptured the magical effect, which he didn't want to happen with Bendyland).

Joey has his own set of rules he plays by which he considers his life’s philosophy that he calls "The Illusion of Living". This was inspired by several events in his life, including his father passing the time by playing make believe (the Shoemaker and the Elves). This unique perception of what illusion and reality are (“the same thing”), seems to point to Joey having developed a dissociative personality disorder from a young age, which got progressively worse as he grew older. This in addition with the ADHD patterns he displays in his confusing rambling writing (and Joey rambles a LOT), and the almost OCD behaviour in regards to cleaning up after himself, indicates Joey lacked impulse control and was more prone to listening to intrusive thoughts.

Joey's view of reality was often confusing to others and he greatly enjoyed poking fun out of slowly getting them to his point of view. Conversations with Joey were thus quite frustrating to some, but no less curious to others that actually tried to understand what the “Illusion of Living” was about (Like Nathan). According to Joey, only a few people ever got close to understanding it.

    Joey enlisted to fight in the first war after he lied about his age (He was 15 years old, a year younger than the required age to enlist at the time). Out of all the positions in the army, he seemed most interested in comms, and considered himself more decent in communicating than actually fighting in the front lines.

It seems like Joey greatly enjoyed how he looked in uniform, and was also particularly finicky about his looks in general despite being in boot camp.

He made friends in the army, Private Donaldson and Private Eckhart, which Nathan (who worked at the tech lab that Joey later worked for) attests to being accurately described in the book. They were slightly older than Joey and were also interested in communication tech and shared his sense of humor. They also influenced Joey's social life, and tried to get him to date some gals that he wasn’t remotely interested in (the first indication that he may not be straight).

    Another close friend Joey had in the army was Lottie (a communications officer) and he used to "chaperone" her whenever the four went out to party. He seemed to have a considerable amount of respect for her (which is likely a result of growing up observing his mother, thus understanding that women were competent in positions where other men would scoff at the idea of them working at all). As such he was quite supportive of the War's “Hello Girls” (comms female officers). Interestingly enough this contradicts Joey's sexist persona that he seems to take on in Dream Come to Life (a mask that seems to be among many others he employs to fit in with the rest of society).

Lottie was his special gal pal in the platonic sense and, while he often ate alone to be left with his thoughts, she usually sought him out to talk to.

Joey only ever empathized with people he was close to, often reserving telling stories to comfort his friends specifically. It was the only way he could brighten their day (which later supposedly helped a disillusioned Lottie when she was sent to serve in London). What one could take away from Joey’s days as a soldier was that he was incredibly perceptive in terms of studying people. He easily recognized people’s handwriting, and was greatly fascinated by others’s personalities.

He could also easily charm people just from reading into what they might be interested in, and liked the thought of subliminally impressing others (which he later incorporated into his cartoons). It’s never mentioned, but Joey was likely honorably discharged since the war ended in 1918 and didn’t need to return to the service of the military when the second world war hit (keeping in mind Joey appears to have mobility issues later in life, he might have not been fit for field duty).

    At age 19 Joey ended up involved in investigating the murder case of Walter Richmond, a signal corps soldier Joey met briefly in his service days. The victim in question was responsible for documenting the war efforts, not being necessarily that great of a photographer, but taking a certain amount of pleasure in capturing the most viscerally gruesome pictures possible for shock value. How Joey got involved was a curious thing in of itself, since he didn’t know the victim all that well, nor cared to get to know him. Detective Adam Sinclair (a tall hulking man wearing the typical trenchcoat and fedora combo, who’s most noticeable features were his aged face and unshaven 5’o’clock shadow) tracked him down to his little minimalistic (and obsessively clean and tidy) apartment to question him. Joey was initially unsurprised that an ex-soldier ended up dead (not from the war, but likely ptsd), and was instead surprised that it was a murder case. He ended up inserting himself into the case as Sinclair’s shadow to help solve it. The reason was mostly out of self-interest, but his perspective did seem useful to the detective in the end. Throughout the investigation Joey displayed a few particular traits that indicate his attentive and peculiar nature, such as the way he reads others (their way of dressing and upkeep of posture), the manner of which he judges a good handshake, his distaste for smoking (which was taught to him via the idea that if something smells bad it’s usually bad for you) and drinking (he tries to be careful with alcohol intake in general, as he’s more accustomed to beer than drinks like champagne which one could over-indulge recklessly without noticing). Joey’s fascination for taboo subjects (war, violence, and death specifically) is also noted when he observes the victim’s photographic works.

This is a prevalent theme in an art gallery event where these particular subjects seemed to linger strongly in his mind, to the point where he noticed when one of the photos he recalls having seen before during his brief meeting with Richmond, appeared to be missing from the display. A detail that appeared to be dismissed by others, but of great interest to Sinclair.

    During this same gallery event, there was an incident set up by the murderer that involved a firecracker and a crowbar that set off a lot of panic. Joey’s work at the signal corps labs saved him from the brutality of the trenches, but he's apparently familiar with the effects of severe PTSD (And ironically notes that reliving the same painful event over and over again is his definition of true horror/personal hell).

It became very apparent to both Joey and Sinclair that the murderer was amongst them, and that this onslaught of panic was a message: That the murder of the frontline photographer was personal.

They did in fact come into contact with the perpetrator and, after a while of radio silence between Joey and Sinclair, the case was solved with...Minimal success. While Sinclair knew who killed Walter Richmond, he unfortunatelly did not have enough proof to convict her (the sister of a casualty of war that could have easily been saved, had Richmond not left him for dead because it fit his narrative of the war just fine), thus allowing her to get away with literal murder. Worse yet, the resolution of the case seemed to further disconnect Joey from reality and consequence. He gained a disdain for Adam Sinclair where once he’d respected him as an authority figure of sorts, finding that he’d accomplished his role and still failed miserably. In the end, the only thing to come out of teaming up with Sinclair was learning a social skill that Joey employed later on, by mirroring back certain aspects of a person so they’d be more comfortable around him. Otherwise the detective became nothing more than a distant memory. Unimportant in Joey’s later narrative.

    Two years later, Joey started working for a bookstore where he began satiating his vast hunger for knowledge, now that he had access to all sorts of books he could never afford as a child. Joey is fairly well read with an interest in various genres, although it was previously noted that during his army service people made fun of him for especially liking fictional novels. Joey being Joey however, wasn’t overly fussed about others’s opinions on what he sought enjoyment from, especially when it came to storytelling. Aside from getting his reading quota filled out, his bookstore job also helped him develop his salesperson skills through reading his customers. Through his experiences with his father’s shop and shadowing Sinclair, he had by now understood that people were highly superficial, and that he could apply whatever knowledge he gathered from them into how he sold his pitch to them. His charisma seemed to lure in customers.

    While working at the store he met Abby Lambert who he immediately noticed had an eye for art. Joey quickly became friends with her and seemed to greatly appreciate her no-nonsense attitude towards life in general, going so far as to respect her capabilities as a working lady where other men would be disdained with her difficult attitude. In fact, he wondered why anyone wouldn’t hire her to do a job she could clearly handle, just because she was a woman (again contradicting his sexist persona). As a connoisseur of the arts, Abby was the one to fully introduce Joey to her favourite craft. He especially took an interest in Impressionism and its influences.

Abby also supposedly introduced Henry to Joey, which the latter insists wasn’t really that remarkable of an event since Henry was “unimaginative” and “lacking in talent” due to his specialty in cartoon caricatures, and not the richer awe inspiring paintings Joey seemed to prefer (basically Joey spends any given time in the book trying to make Henry seem as insignificant as possible out of pure unadulterated pettiness, which physically pains me).

Ironically, in terms of entertainment, Joey later favoured cartoons as the more appealing form of films since most other mediums didn’t really spark his interest, even if the genres were ones he found fascinating (I suppose that despite films being works of fiction most times, Joey likely thought real life actors were far too limited in their acts due to the natural limitations of the human body).

Returning to Abby, her friendship seemed to be more impactful to Joey than most others. Like with how he preferred his mother’s company to his father’s, Abby seemed to be one of few people he actually felt comfortable around, to the point where her criticism didn’t bother him. She was also mindful of him, where she could recognize Joey’s “preferences” and made it a point to clarify to him that their outings were purely platonic so he wouldn’t get uncomfortable in those situations.

    Three years after meeting Abby and Henry, Joey became a manager at the bookstore and Henry began working there as well (by Joey’s suggestion it seems), and only then did they sort of start developing a meek little friendship of sorts (although Joey seems very dismissive about it and focuses primarily on Abby).

During that time, the idea to start his own business came about from two different events that happened that year. The first being his first ever theatrical script that he wrote and performed with Abby at a gallery event. During the performance of this little play (the theme of which was an angel and a demon discussing their role in influencing a mortal’s life), Joey discovered that he greatly enjoyed controlling situations and got way too into it (even considers what he could get away with in the name of entertainment, such as if he could act out actual violent or scandalous behaviours if he proclaimed it a part of the show).

The second event was his father sending him shoes once a year (which, because Joey disliked the make of his father’s shoes, he tried to get him to stop by pretending they weren’t arriving at his address or that they were getting stolen). As a means to ensure he got them, Joey's father started sending the packages to the bookstore. A doodle and writing on the package ended up inspiring Joey to create his own studio as he wanted to take flight in the entertainment industry.

    Having thus decided that he wanted to open up a film studio of some kind, Joey immediately set off to get himself a memorable mascot. He had a vague idea of what he needed and what might be appealing to an audience, but he wasn’t particularly skilled in character design and openly admitted to this. Abby, who was also not particularly good at drawing cartoons, understood that her more realistic style wouldn’t really help (or appeal to) Joey, so she enlisted Henry’s help. Knowing that Joey was a bit picky in regards to how he evaluated art, she thought perhaps she could persuade him to take a liking to Henry’s works (which he wasn’t particularly fond of, due to Henry mostly working with pen-drawings of cartoon characters and caricatures that looked very unremarkable to him) if he could only see him actually work his “magic”. Joey was reluctant to bring Henry into his business plan, but upon actually reaching a design within a few minutes (that took a few tries experimenting with animal and human features in more detailed and then simplified ways) of Joey giving some directions, he seemed to be sold on bringing Henry on board.

Henry designing the company mascot was thus the final push to open up Joey Drew Studios.

The two began their partnership not too long after, and from then on out things got interesting very quickly.

    The history behind the studio is...Not an easy one to validate in terms of whether or not Joey is sincere or even really knows certain dates (the more I look into the beginning of the book and the later exposition of information, the more I realized either Joey was starting to trip himself up on dates or his memory was visibly failing him). There are a lot of discrepancies in the dates provided, with some going back on how long Henry remained in the studio (even claiming to have at some point surrounded him with other animators and even a lead artist a year prior to his departure), when Sammy and Jack were hired (He says he hired Sammy in 1929 during the Wallstreet Crash, but later says he hired both him and Jack after the Wallstreet Crash), among other things... Joey Drew Studios was primarily funded by Mrs. Richmond (the mother of Walter Richmond), as Joey had forged friendships with the people involved in the case he’d helped Sinclair investigate (including the murderer whom he had grown to respect).

While other investors aren’t really brought up, it’s implied Nathan also had a hand in helping the studio taking off, as Joey often met up with him at the Russian Tearoom whenever he could. During these private meetings, Nathan would impart advice on Joey. Advice which he seemed to not care for, as he already had his own concerns at the time.

It seemed that his main plan was to acquire a talented and capable team to achieve his dream. A team Joey thought he wouldn’t need to "baby-sit", as he specifically wanted to hire individuals that were as studious and capable as he saw himself (curiously Joey mentions that Henry’s work ethic was exactly what he wanted, as Henry had never held work back or needed to be checked up on, which to Joey was an invaluable attribute).

For at least two years, the Bendy Cartoons were nothing but silence and sound effects (something we actually see in-game in BatIM Chapter One when the projector suddenly turns on and we hear nothing but the clicking of the projector and Joey’s whistling), which put them at a bit of a disadvantage when it came to competing with other animation studios.

This soon changed when Joey came across Sammy Lawrence and Jack Fain at a party he was attending on his 30th birthday (which he wasn’t celebrating, the party was a completely different event so supposedly Joey doesn’t care much for his own birthday).

He was already familiar with Sammy’s musical skills (mostly playing the piano quite masterfully), as he’d seen him perform at the theater when Sammy was still a teenager. Noticing him and Jack at the party was entirely accidental and was mostly due to the fact that, while Sammy was trying to keep out of the spotlight as he played, Jack’s showmanship shone through and caught Joey’s eye with how boisterous he was in their musical performance.

Joey approached them once their act was done and managed to convince them to work for him. Jack seemed to be immediately on board, while Sammy was a little more guarded in his agreement and immediately set up his stipulations for the job. This seemed to lean Joey’s interest towards Sammy (who Joey was unhealthily fascinated with because he was clearly not an easy man to control) more than Jack (who he likely considered too easy a read in terms of character, thus not much of a challenge to sway or condition).

     By 1933 Joey officially bought the entire building the studio was set up in (which up until then was occupied by other people seeking their own ventures). Expansion and new hires likely started a year or so later and continued on despite financial instability, and between 1941 and 1942 Joey was already starting to work out how he’d get Bendyland to be just as perfect and spectacular as he had always envisioned (which was difficult because he never really got it to feel just right in his eyes, and something felt off to him).

In between listing several different projects, vaguely describing an innovative techniques (Sillyvision which seems to be linked with the Golden Ink?), and even setting up his own 7 rules on how to animate to help set up a guide for aspiring animators, Joey slowly drifts away from the studio topic and finalizes his book rather abruptly.

He insinuates there’s a lot more for him to tell but little to no connection with the “Illusion of Living” philosophy and he’d rather focus on his actual physical work with the Studio than sit down and write further, so he finishes off on a rather...Vague note.

--{On Joey Drew}--

Year of Birth - 1901 (Day and month are never mentioned, but it's possible that his favouring of the autumnal season alludes to a fall month) Year of Death - ??? (Supposedly he's died, hence why Nathan claimed the Bendy IP) Birth City: Born and raised in Paterson "Silk City", New Jersey (Joey doesn't seem to have an accent, so he likely masks it, or made an effort to lose it). Physical Characteristics: As a child he used to have curly hair (Considering the era’s general fashion and style, it’s very likely that Joey either cut his hair too short to see the curls, or simply uses too much gel to seem more presentable) Sexual/Romantic Preferences: Homosexual with Demiromantic subtones (Joey seems to be closed off in general, but more appreciative of the male figure. Could be interpreted as demisexual however, since Joey himself doesn't seem to like wasting time around people he doesn't have much of a bond with) Notes: Here are several notes I’ve compiled about Joey and his opinions on certain things and people. There’s a lot to look at as this man rambles like an old lady at a friday night bingo event, and thus I had a lot to take in!

Laughter is important to him.

Seems to be a dog person.

Likes Cheerios (yes this was a super necessary detail I had to jot down).

Considers having his ideas disclosed without permission to be disloyal.

Seems to have some sort of dissociative personality disorder (likely brought on by trauma or another undiagnosed mental disorder).

People-Watcher by nature.

Was taught by his father that the shoe makes the man (aka the art of studying people through their shoes).

Joey believes in the saying "The Truth is in the Pudding", a saying his mother often employed.

Never had enough money to own a pair of nice fitting shoes until he was 26.

Is narcissistically vain. Easily takes insult if people assume he can't look presentable.

His service in the army gave him experience with "experimental tech".

Enjoys music a lot, and he was considered a great dancer.

Finds modern feminine fashion standards appealing.

Disliked the way those with money romanticized lacking material gains. Found it personally disrespectful in a way, since he himself came from a poor family.

Seems appalled by too much color on one's wear (Joey is the goddamn fashion police).

Very picky about the arts.

Apparently disliked Henry's art style(???).

Lets people believe Henry is the creator of the toons, in an act of being holier than thou. (You lying son of a gun, stop lying to everyone and yourself whaddahell).

Joey's analogy of Henry starting a journey but Joey being the one to reap the benefits, is likely the truest thing he's said in this nightmare of a novel (boastful bastard...).

Thinks of Bendy as his firstborn, muse and messenger.

Took an art class with Abby (likely not a full art course, just a simple class to get the gist of it?).

Considers art the doorway to immortality.

Doesn't like post-mortem success (it frightens him, even). He'd rather be successful in his lifetime.

Admits to making mistakes, but not many. He also thinks mistakes don't need to be permanent.

Doesn't know what true rest is like, and is unsure if he'll ever be content enough to rest. On that same note he seems to really hate sitting still and his mind tends to wander, which he notes Nathan recognized with ease, even reserving a specific look for him (It’s the ADHD baby).

His friend Kyle was a lazy person and a gossip, which were traits Joey found annoying.

On their first meeting, Joey described having a desire to shove Sammy off a roof to see a more human reaction from him.

Assumes Jack is jealous of the attention he gives Sammy, or that the duo's relationship is strained, despite him barging into their lives out of the blue and making him feel like a third wheel.

Seems to think of himself as some sort of a messenger (going so far as to akin himself to the god, Mercury). His life’s mission is to help those who don't know they need to be helped (mostly through spreading happiness and laughter in such a dark and dreary era of human history). Bendyland is essentially Joey's means to fulfil this desire, as well as to chase his own need for a properly realized mixture of immersion and illusion.

He wanted Bendyland to be perfect, even the plot of land it might be built in needed to be perfect, so he inspected it himself with Nathan once he bought the deed.

Appears to refuse to call Bertrum by his proper name once he’s corrected the first time. Referring to him instead as either Bertie or Bert (toying with him perhaps? Testing boundaries?)

Doesn't drive. He instead hired a personal driver, Simmons.

For a little while he was living the American Dream, but thought of how he lived as less of a shared goal and more of a personal one (again setting himself apart from others).

His days were quite flexible and he seemed to despise set routines. He also doesn't like sleeping in. He liked to take a walk in central park early in the morning.

Joey used to make his rounds around the studio but the installation of the Ink Machine changed that habit a bit.

Nonchalantly notes that Shawn Flynn got a little defensive if he needed to be corrected on his work (OCD much, Joey? He was painting a lot of dolls by hand, slipups happen...).

He had priority meetings with Sammy, "meetings" with Jack (Sir what are these quotation marks for, are you snogging Jack while no one’s watching???), then met with the art department preceding the writing department, and finally he met with Grant Cohen in accounting to discuss finances and budget.

He had the final say in ALL paperwork regarding studio affairs.

Upon reading about it, found the concept of bringing in real animals to produce Disney's Bambi as funny, and joked about how trying to do so with Bendy and Boris would be chaotic.

Noted that Abby and Sammy were likely the only two people who closely understand the philosophy of the illusion of living, but not quite…

Was terrified of being misunderstood. Joey didn’t want to only be able to show half-truths, like a mirror reflecting the world darkly. Rather ironic considering he was quite deceitful in his adult life.

His desire for the world to love Bendy seems to be a projection of wanting to feel loved himself (quite honestly if one were to apply the theory of the id, ego and superego, it seems to me that Bendy is essentially Joey’s id, while Joey himself could be considered the Superego. The chameleonic social mask he wears is thus the ego. At the end of the day Bendy and Joey are and aren’t the same entity...).

Originally he didn't want to make a memoir (likely because he can't be direct and needs to work around the truth to fit him). It could also be that Joey didn’t want to linger on the past nor in death. He wasn't sure where it fit with his philosophy and thus tried not to explore too deep into it (existential dread?).

He wore custom tailored suits, and as of beginning writing TioL he had recently taken to wearing cravats (ever the vain man I suppose…).

Despite considering revisiting the past unnecessary, he couldn’t deny doing so if the time called for it. In fact, the Archives are Joey's memories of the past and he's sentimental enough to collect mementos of bygone eras.

Joey has trophies at home, the deeply personal things he couldn’t bare part with. Like the first sketch of Bendy, a napkin with the design of Bendyland, a letter from Henry, a ticket from a Vaudeville show, and his set of shoes he wore when he was surveying the plot of land where he planned to build Bendyland.

--{On Bendy}--

Notes: Here are a few notes I’ve compiled about the Little Devil Darling himself, and a few curiosities about his creation and the inspiration behind his character.

Bendy was officially created in 1928. According to Joey he was born of a dream, supposedly out of necessity, and he always had this idea of a little devil character doing mischief.

Bendy started off as a realistic little boy with a tail and horns (Abby’s attempt to bring to life Joey’s vague idea). Then, when Henry got involved, he became a cartoonish goat creature. The concepts were quickly worked out from a toony clothed amalgamation of both previous concepts, to a more intermediate design more closely resembling Bendy, and then finally, after Joey requested a simpler more shapely and less detailed toon, Bendy became the iconic  little imp clad in only gloves and bowtie.

Joey named him upon seeing the completed design. There are two origins for his name: That of Walter Benjamin Richmond, who’s nickname in life was “Bendy” (a rather morbid homage considering what happened to him), and the mere fact that in Joey’s eyes, his little cartoon imp “bent all the rules”. Henry seemed to appreciate the name.

Bendy is meant to be the devil on one’s shoulders, much like the devil in Joey’s first theatrical play. He is however, a lot more like a little kid playing pranks on people. He is also a sort of embodiment of both the population and human morality (society at its most flawed point, but also quite relatable).

Buster Keaton was an inspiration for Bendy’s many shenanigans and movements, which were always meant to be fluid and a bit bouncy.

--{On Henry Stein}--

Year of Birth - ??? (It’s never mentioned how old Henry is, but I assume he’s around the same age group as Abby, since they were friends and likely went to the same art course. It’s likely that he’s younger than Joey, but not likely by much.) Year of Death - 1963 (It’s not really confirmed if Henry died when he was put into the Cycle, as he doesn’t seem to notice anything odd about himself, but it’s safe to assume the process very likely involves human sacrifice). Birth City: ??? (Unknown, it could be that he was born and raised in New York but Henry lacks a noticeable accent) Physical Characteristics: Average looking? (Irrelevant, he could honestly look like anyone really...) Sexual/Romantic Preferences: Presumably Heterosexual (He’s a married man in the 1930s-1960s, he’s either straight or hiding his sexuality, he seems to really like Linda however so could go either way really...) Notes: Here the few notes I could gather of the Henry info we got from TioL. It’s not much but its at least something to work with!

Henry is unremarkable appearance wise (to the point Joey forgot his face easily at first).

The way Henry dressed (mismatched and ill-fitted) indicates he likely grew up in poverty and likely only had hand-me-downs.

He mostly worked with pen-drawn cartoon character designs that were unremarkable but distinctly caricature-like (the Butcher Gang concepts were likely displayed in the gallery Joey attended, as noted by a comment he makes about them). Even if Joey apparently didn’t particularly like his style, Henry’s artwork was one of the final inspirations for the creation of Joey Drew Studios.

He is described as able to draw quite fast, great at taking directions, and as being a good animator. Overall Henry never really had any real need for someone to keep an eye on him which made him an exemplary worker.

According to Joey, Henry used to give pep-talks before he left the studio. This seemed to annoy Joey considerably for some reason (perhaps he was envious that Henry was generally a more likeable person).

Henry is remembered as forgettable, whereas Joey is flashier and more memorable.

Interestingly enough, Henry never claimed to own the design of Bendy, and was more interested in being business partners with Joey than starting a fuss about who owned the rights to Bendy’s creation (It’s very likely that he willingly gave Joey the design because Bendy was his character, and that instead the designs Joey did steal were that of Boris the Wolf, Alice Angel, and the Butcher Gang, the five other more notorious characters in the Bendy franchise).

--{On Abby Lambert}--

Year of Birth - ??? (It’s never mentioned how old Abby is, but I assume she’s around the same age group as Henry, since they were friends and likely went to the same art course. It’s likely that she’s younger than Joey, but not likely by much.) Year of Death - Possibly 1946 (Upon finally losing himself to the ink, Sammy seemed to have been actively hunting the Art Department and any stragglers that he encountered in the studio, so it can be assumed she died in the chaos) Birth City: ??? (Unknown but more likely to be born and raised in New York than Henry) Physical Characteristics: Frizzy hair, even when bobbed. Sexual/Romantic Preferences: Potentially Bisexual (She seemed to be acutely aware of Joey’s “peculiarities” so it’s possible she’s either a member of the LGBTQ community or perhaps an ally. Whatever the case it’s up for debate and interpretation.) Notes: Here are several notes I’ve compiled about Abby and some of her traits and mannerisms. There was surprisingly a lot more to work with than I expected.

She wasn’t really into the typical female fashion of the time. In fact, Abby wasn’t exactly fond of the typical mannerisms associated with women and was both notoriously rude and dressed herself in a “scandalously” modern manner (which is basically code for more practical less femenine clothing).

According to Joey, Abby is a very focused and determined person, which is why he admired her greatly. She didn’t know when to quit, however, and sometimes took things too far or involved others in situations or projects they didn’t want to be involved in.

She wasn’t very good at drawing original cartoon characters, and Joey was apparently not overly fond of her attempts at putting his ideas to paper due to her more realistic art style.

Abby was very insistent on Joey looking at Henry's works, even if he wasn't particularly interested in them (While it’s never said if she enjoys his art herself, it can be assumed she appreciates it enough that she’d want their mutual friend to see the potential Henry had).

She didn’t join the studio as the replacement Director of the Art Department until 1931, as during its founding she was still finishing art school. She and Henry never worked together. Despite this, she and Henry remained in touch even after he left for Pasadena.

--{On Sammy Lawrence}--

Year of Birth - ??? (From how Joey describes him, it can be assume Sammy was a teenager around either Joey’s early or late 20s before they officially met on Joey’s 30th birthday) Year of Death - 1946? (Sammy is one of few people who was turned without being killed first so it’s hard to tell if he’s really dead even within the Cycle since it’s a time loop...) Birth City: ??? (Sammy lacks a noticeable accent so it’s hard to tell where he’s from). Physical Characteristics: Has been described as bird-like and insect-like, with either brown or blond hair that’s kept longer than the typical fashion of the time (Not much more is known about his actual appearance but it can be assumed he’s either average sized or on the tall side considering his in-game height and build) Sexual/Romantic Preferences: Potentially Biromantic with a lot of Demiromantic subtones. Possibly Asexual? (Again this is pure speculation on my part because he did seem interested in Susie but isn’t really a people person in general. Does seem to know how to reign in people tho, so ???) Notes: Here are a few curious notes I’ve compiled about Sammy, the circumstances behind his hiring, and how much control he actually had as the music director.

He has an unusual appearance that, while not necessarily described as ugly, was clearly outstanding enough that some people were put off (Buddy) and others thought him handsome (Susie). His hair is also described as messy.

Sammy is an avid smoker.

He was among a few other musicians employed by the theater to drown out projector sounds and match the mood in silent films. Because he was good at improvising music on the spot, Sammy was excellent at carrying the story presented on screen through his melodies, which was what caught Joey’s eye when he first saw Sammy perform.

Sammy also recognized Joey and didn’t believe his dismissal that he was a “town person”. In fact, Sammy pinpointed the recognition to the fact Joey was that one loner that sat in the front row of the theater he played at.

It becomes very apparent that Sammy is suspicious of people in general. The way he observes others indicates he’s had some sort of struggle growing up. As such, he’s not big on sustaining conversations and he managed to aggravate Joey slightly by the way he addressed him on their first proper meeting.

Sammy had a songbook he shared with Jack, meaning they had a strong trust bond, which is why he only agrees to work for Joey based on Jack’s willingness to also be hired. Even so, he immediately set up professional boundaries for his position. He hired his own people without Joey’s interference, and he only ever indulged him if Joey was being particularly exasperating.

It’s very likely that since Sammy was the one hiring who worked for the music department, that he was the one who hired Norman Polk. This theory is made stronger by the fact he immediately demanded a projector and projectionist booth so he could better do his job.

Despite his surly disposition, Sammy is a no nonsense sort who wants things done and over with, rather than sit around and stall. As such Joey considered him one of the best decisions he made in terms of career.

Funnily enough, because the band seemed to be skittish around Joey, Sammy specifically prohibited his presence in the music department unless they had a scheduled meeting. This likely meant Joey was scarcely ever seen in the music department so as to not aggravate Sammy in person.

Alice Angel’s bigger (and failed) presence in the franchise is likely a consequence of another one of Sammy’s stipulations upon being hired. He had immediately noted that if the studio wanted to go anywhere, they’d need a female character (Perhaps Sammy really believed what he told Susie due to despising Bendy and actually favouring Alice as a character).

--{On Jack Fain}--

Year of Birth - ??? (Possibly around the same age as Sammy or a little older?) Year of Death - ??? (He was gone long before a few other people in the studio, likely in the first few experiments Joey performed) Birth City: ??? (Hard to tell, he doesn’t have an easily identifiable accent). Physical Characteristics: Has been described as an atrocious dresser (This man likes wearing bright colors!) Sexual/Romantic Preferences: Potentially Homosexual subtones (Not enough information provided to tell) Notes: Sadly lacking in the information department for Jack.

Jack is incredibly sociable and trusts easily. He's described as making bad jokes but laughing genuinely at them. His smiles are contagious.

Jack is an optimist sort who sees the good in any situation (even when being led around in a dark creepy room by a peculiar stranger).

--{On Bertrum Piedmont}--

Year of Birth - ??? (He was retired, so it’s likely he was around his 60s or early 70s when Joey first met him) Year of Death - ??? (It’s unknown when exactly he ended up in the Ink Machine but it’s very possible he was killed when all hell broke loose in the studio) Birth City: ??? (No clue). Physical Characteristics: Joey describes him (rather rudely) as a very portly man. Sexual/Romantic Preferences: ??? (No idea, chief...) Notes: Lacking in the information department like Jack, but what we get is a lot more substantial.

Bertrum was actually retired when Joey managed to get a hold of him. It took a bit of detective work on Mrs. Rodriguez's (Joey's secretary) part to actually find him as well, so he was not an easy man to get an appointment with.

His creative vision impressed Joey enough that the latter he ignored his apparent dislike for reminiscing so as to get him on board of the Bendyland project.

While discussing the Bendyland Project, Bertrum confidently jokes about it being quite the catch. He agrees to joining forces with Joey as long as he gets full creative control of the entire project. Although Joey agreed to this, he still managed to fight Bertrum on a few ideas, which annoyed him greatly.

It’s very likely that it didn’t take long for their initially friendly relationship to sour into open hostility on Bertrum’s part.

--{On Wally Franks}--

Year of Birth - ??? (No clue, but he was very likely in his late teens or early adult years when he was first hired as the studio Janitor) Year of Death - Supposedly still alive (I really do hope he got outta there like the letter insinuates...) Birth City: Brooklyn, New York. Physical Characteristics: ??? (All we know is he likely wears overalls and a sport’s cap) Sexual/Romantic Preferences: Possibly Heterosexual (Unless the letter is a forgery, he apparently has a wife, kids and grandkids) Notes: I’ll admit I didn’t expect to get Wally lore, but here we are!

Wally's actually quite skilled with maintenance. He can tinker with the projectors, other machinery and even plumbing. His schedule is a little off however, but Joey turns a blind eye to it because he gets the job done without question.

--{On Allison Pendle}--

Year of Birth - ??? (No idea! But she was relatively well known when she was hired!) Year of Death - ??? (She was likely lured back to the studio after everything went down but before Henry) Birth City: ??? Physical Characteristics: She’s a beautiful tall blonde according to DCTL Sexual/Romantic Preferences: ??? (She and Thomas are married but I honestly have no clue how to feel about her, she’s a mystery to me.) Notes: Extra minimal Allison lore for your Allison Pendle lore needs.

She was a famous Broadway actress before joining the studio. Interestingly enough, Joey was the one to hire her to replace Susie, not only breaking Sammy’s stipulation on the matter but also stirring Susie into becoming resentful towards Sammy and actually trying to recover her former role at all costs (even her own life).

--{On Nathan Arch}--

Year of Birth - ??? (He was likely a little older than Joey since they were in the army at the same time but Joey lied about his age to enlist earlier) Year of Death - N/A (Still alive and kicking) Birth City: ??? Physical Characteristics: ??? (I guess Boswell Lotsabucks is sorta modeled after him so go off on that???) Sexual/Romantic Preferences: Heterosexual (He has a wife and son and doesn’t give me any other vibes besides and overall instinctual distrust) Notes: Oh boy...I do NOT trust this man...

Immediately upon beginning reading TioL you get the impression that Nathan is not only trying to appear friendly and trustworthy by referring to himself as Nate A, but also that he’s trying to cover for Joey and make him appear more personable to the reader. But to what gain exactly?

Nathan is, like Joey, very narcissistically vain, and is also writing a book of his own (an autobiography maybe?)

He’s a smoker and prefers cigars.

When Joey discusses his childhood, Nathan is unable to contradict or confirm anything as he noted that Joey was always very private about his origins.

Nathan seemed truly surprised and impressed with Joey’s ability to make up uncannily believable stories, even suspecting that his accounts of “Lottie” might have been false as he couldn’t find any of the supposed letters Joey sent her when he started working on republishing TioL (it’s likely he could see that Joey often lied to himself just as much as he lied to others).

It seemed to Nathan that Joey was rather oblivious of subtle compliments.

By the manner of which Nathan phrases it, he seems to think of Joey as a professional and kind man, capable of seeing the good in others. That said, Nathan remarks that Henry's departure was a great betrayal for his friend, and that the latter shouldn't have been so "gracious" and "forgiving" towards him…

When the studio began to struggle financially, Nathan worried that Joey might not be aware of the issue at all, or that perhaps he was lying to himself to cope. He also later notes that Joey’s memories seemed to have deteriorated in his old age. He was often mixing up information and seemed rather guilty, which Nathan considering to be very unbecoming of the man he knew Joey to be.

A lot of the deeply philosophical Joey and Nathan interactions seen in the book might actually have occured between Joey and Henry (the "I think therefore I am" conversation is an especially telling one for me), hence why Nathan doesn't recall them. It also seems more likely because they contradict the way Joey portrays Nathan, but seem to fit his portrayal of Henry better.

[shihalyfie]

Ichijouji Ken, his future, and Kizuna

Having talked about Kizuna’s extremely deep relationship to 02 as a series, it’s only natural that I should probably spend some extra focus on its main central character, Ichijouji Ken. It’s no secret that, although Daisuke was the protagonist of 02, Ken was the central figure to the series itself (after all, the series was founded on the concept of deconstructing the supposed “genius kid”), and so Kizuna having such a deep relationship with 02 means that it does, inevitably, have a deep relationship with Ken in particular.

The last twenty years have been full of a plethora of meta analysis on Ichijouji Ken as a character within 02 to the point I feel anything I could possibly come up with would probably be redundant, so today I’d like to place extra focus on his development after 02 (in terms of both canonical materials and general analysis), and how it leads up to his portrayal in the recently released Kizuna. (Naturally, spoilers for the movie will be below.)

We’ll start this analysis by looking at where Ken left off during the final episode of 02.

Thanks to his interactions with the rest of the 02 crew (especially Daisuke), Ken was slowly putting his life back together, but he still had a long way to go. As late as episode 49, we learned he still had suicidal ideation tendencies in regards to his deeds as the Kaiser, and although the rest of the team did get through to him in the end, it was clear that there was still a huge path ahead of him as far as coming to terms with himself and bonding with the rest of the team went. This was especially because he ended the series with the Dark Seed still in the back of his neck -- supernatural forces may have assisted his initial downfall, but it was going to be entirely on him to make sure that he never went back there again for the rest of his life.

One thing that’s really important to put in perspective is the actual chronology this ordeal took place in. Although the Kaiser saga spanned a little under half of the yearlong series that 02 was, Christmas skewed the schedule a little bit, so a good chunk of the second half of the series actually took place in much more condensed time than the first. Taking into account the official statement that everything before Christmas roughly aligns with the time of the year the relevant episode aired, and given the exact dates in December that we know episodes 38-50 take place in, within the course of 02, Ken’s reformation from being the Kaiser and bonding with the group spanned around only four months. That is not a lot of time, especially compared to the roughly two-year period Ken went through the trauma of his brother’s loss and his transformation into the Kaiser, so in actuality, Ken made a huge amount of progress considering how little time he had to do so.

Before we continue, I should make clear that I generally count pretty much everything in the Toei-esque fashion of “everything is canon, don’t think about contradictions too hard” (which is generally their modus operandi with pretty much any franchise), so pretty much everything here is fair game. That said, obviously, contradictions and other outliers do exist, so occasionally I am going to have to omit stuff that really, really doesn’t track...so for the sake of this analysis, I’m skipping Armor Evolution to the Unknown for two reasons: one, because it takes massive liberties with characterization for the sake of crack (it’s pretty hard to believe Ken would be this degree of flippant about the Kaiser persona in a more serious situation), and two, because it was written before 02 finished airing (it was released between episodes 43 and 44) and doesn’t reflect a lot of series and characterization development that happened later in the series. (Armor Evolution to the Unknown was released during a time period when the drama CDs were really, really big on the crack -- the three Adventure mini dramas are the same -- and it wasn’t until later that actual “serious” ones would start coming out.)

Given that, our next canonical point we can work with is Diablomon Strikes Back, which takes place in March 2003.

At this point Ken’s recovery is at a little around six months, and he’s making massive progress -- even if you’re not sure about counting the actual events of this movie as canon, it’s an excellent character study in terms of watching Ken’s emotional recovery at this point in time and his relationship with Daisuke, now that he’s not directly dealing with issues pertaining to his own past trauma.

It’s already a very different Ken from the one we’ve seen in the original series, where in episode 38 the idea of him laughing was such a huge shock, but here we already see a much wider emotional range from Ken -- light cheerfulness, playfulness, and at times even a bit of petulance. His actions and dialogue still have Ken’s trademark “softness” -- being kind and gentle has always been said to be his core inner trait, after all -- but, nevertheless, he’s a lot more willing to show “superficial” emotions, especially compared to how closed up, shy, and sometimes standoffish he would be within 02 proper.

Even Ken’s own body language indicates a lot -- he’s much more relaxed and  natural. Observe how he slouches here.

In fact, if you listen to Park Romi’s delivery of his lines throughout this movie, she voices him with a significantly higher-pitched and “lighter”, soft tone through all of it, which really gives off the impression that he’s much less emotionally uptight.

We get a glimpse of Daisuke and Ken’s future dynamic and how they’ll continue to be such tight friends in the future -- Ken is someone who can keep the infamously chaotic Daisuke in check (especially since prior to Ken coming into his life, Daisuke’s closest friend was probably Miyako, and while the two certainly got along very well with each other, they had a tendency to enable each other’s chaos a bit too much at times).

But despite Ken obviously trying to be more sensible than Daisuke here, it still manifests as a much greater show of emotion than the kind you’d be used to within 02 proper. He’s much more assertive with putting his foot down in keeping Daisuke under control, which indicates not only a more comfortable relationship with Daisuke in particular, but also a general increase in his ability to be assertive.

In one of his most famous scenes in this movie, he actually outright taunts Daisuke in order to spur him on. He’s doing it totally affectionately (it’s specifically to give Daisuke more motivation to keep running), but nevertheless, he’s taunting Daisuke -- not really something you'd expect from Ken in 02 proper. The original line in Japanese even has him use the very super-casual and aggressive end particle ~ze.

He even snarks about Daisuke’s convenient bouts of luck in ways that aren’t exactly complimentary (the literal phrasing of this line has “baka mitai ni” in it, in this context "some kind of ridiculous incredible power”).

And, near the end of the movie, when he starts to lose hope, it only takes a single line from Daisuke to get himself back together -- this kind of thing would have probably taken a whole speech in 02, even from Daisuke himself, but by this point Ken’s got a much better emotional grasp on himself.

And in the end, the movie ends on both Daisuke and Ken laughing together -- very lightly.

It’s easy to pass off Ken’s characterization in DSB as an incidental thing simply because this is a “side story” movie from 02 -- especially since it was technically produced during 02′s airing -- but in fact, this portrayal is consistent with what Ken has to say about himself during his next known point in canon, Spring 2003.

Given that Takeru’s track is apparently set “three months” after Christmas, and Miyako’s track talks about having just entered middle school, I assume that this means Ken’s takes place in around late March or early April 2003 (almost exactly a year since 02′s start), but in actuality nothing really “happens” during Ken’s track. Nevertheless, it provides a lot of information on Ken’s state of mind during this time and his own self-reflection on his past...and defines in very clear words what it is that Ken needs to move away from.

You were always in a bad mood and you were cold to me, but now that I think about it, maybe you really wanted to be nicer to other people. I don’t know what happened to you that made you act like you did, but now, I finally feel like I understand a bit. You were demanded to grow up fast, weren’t you, Brother? Because we were always being evaluated and compared by someone, we didn’t get a chance to have more freedom. We didn’t have any chances to run down an alley because we felt like it, or pull up weeds, or tumble around… meaningless things, things that didn’t bring any value to us at all. Just like the cat napping on the roof… we weren’t able to fully enjoy any everlasting freedom.

02 -- especially its latter half -- dealt largely with the concept of parents imposing too many expectations on their children, acting “proud” of them but actually using them to inflate their own self-worth, and in the end effectively robbing their own children of their right to “be children”. While we don’t know a lot about Osamu based on limited information about him, Ken’s parents also lament that they might have robbed Osamu of the opportunity to be a “normal boy” in 02 episode 23.

Once Ken took the role of the “family genius” after Osamu’s death, Ken was thus likewise robbed of that “normal childhood” due to all of the expectations put on him -- and Ken’s words in his track imply that it extended to before Osamu’s death, because just because Osamu was the favored one at the time didn’t mean that Ken wasn’t subject to the same kind of expectations to at least some degree, even if not as much. (Note how he really didn’t seem to have any kind of friends at all prior to Daisuke and the others.)

Thus, Ken’s ideal trajectory is to become “a normal child” -- one not subject to expectations as a “well-behaved genius child”. That applies not only to things like his academic or sports performance, but also even his core manners -- being a “normal person” in this context meaning being allowed to show emotions, be petty, have emotional range that extends beyond just being deferential and polite, and generally do things because he enjoys them and not because others expect him to. This is consistent with his portrayal in DSB, as in said movie he really does come off as a “normal boy” -- a young child who, while certainly less chaotic than Daisuke, is still enjoying himself and interacting with the world in “his own” natural, relaxed way rather than holding himself to obligations.

Another interesting thing about DSB is that it has Ken refer to Daisuke by given name. This is particularly intriguing because up until the end of 02, Ken consistently referred to Daisuke as “Motomiya” (he did use given name in episode 39, but it wasn’t something he really followed up on). This despite the fact he went with given names (plus honorifics) for everyone else in the 02 team, but it seems like Ken was still trying to figure out his very complicated feelings about Daisuke as someone who was his Most Hated Person™ during his Kaiser days and yet is now trying to aggressively reach through his barriers that he’s constructed out of self-defense.

And yet, extremely notably, almost every single post-02 material is consistent about the idea that Ken switches to given name basis with Daisuke after 02. (The only exception is Armor Evolution to the Unknown, which, as stated before, was written and recorded during 02′s airing and not after; notably, Daisuke is also on surname basis with Ken during that drama CD, even though he permanently switches to given name basis after episode 39.) That includes “out-of-hard-canon” things like Xros Wars episode 78.

Yet they still couldn’t remember to put the highlight back in Ken’s eyes, among other things.

Honorific and surname-given name basis fluctuated quite a bit in both Adventure and 02 (especially whenever canon material changed hands between writers), but for all intents and purposes, there is no reason Daisuke and Ken should not be on mutual given name basis after 02. This is especially when you take into account the more naturalistic relationship they have as of DSB -- there’s no standoffishness at all between them anymore.

This ties very deeply into how 02 portrayed its characters. One thing I’ve very, very often pointed out was that it was always an explicit point of contrast between themselves and the original Adventure team was that the 02 kids were not only “friends” in terms of fighting together on Digimon cases, but “friends” in the sense of actual social-life friends who clicked well in personality and adored each other’s company. (Part of this was because of the core theme of the series; Jogress being such a huge motif, “understanding your friends” took precedence over Adventure’s “understanding yourself”.) These are the kids who hung out together in the totally-not-related-to-any-Digimon-incident (at least, not at first) picnic in episode 6 and Christmas party in episode 38, a stark comparison to the Adventure kids who infamously started drifting as early as Our War Game!.

(Note that this isn’t meant to diminish or drop shade on the Adventure kids’ bonds in any way -- I feel like their bond is more of one that’s a “transcendent” one that crosses space and links them through their shared experience, but, nevertheless, is simply not the same in nature as the “social life” bonds the 02 kids had where they were very casual and yet intimate with each other in almost all daily life respects.)

As a result, Daisuke and Ken’s relationship ended up very different from that of their predecessors Taichi and Yamato -- it’s actually hard to imagine them getting in all that many highly heated fights in the same way their seniors would be prone to, and they’d generally be on “mild banter” terms for most of it. In fact, they come off as pretty casual and in-sync with each other, and it’s to the point where it really does feel like -- especially by the point of DSB -- staying on “standoffish” surname basis really is unwarranted.

And while it’s tempting to limit Ken’s relationship to only Daisuke, this did involve the rest of the 02 group, after all -- we got significant episodes defining his relationship to the others (Miyako got a whole episode in 25, and 30′s entire events kicked off because of an attempt to get him to better socialize with Iori!), and the 02 kids as a cohesive “overall group” were integral in getting Ken to open up and show different sides of himself. Although his relationship to certain team members ended up closer than others (Daisuke and Miyako, the ones who tried most aggressively to reach out to him, ended up getting the most out of him), nevertheless, it was important that Ken ultimately cultivated a relationship with a group of friends, and not just one.

This, of course, brings us to Kizuna, which takes place in the summer of 2010. This is a massive leap of time we don’t know a lot about, and for all it’s worth, this means we have, compared to the approximately two years Ken spent suffering under the influence of the Dark Seed, a whole eight years dedicated to potential recovery. There’s a lot that could have happened during that time, and what happened in between, we can only really guess.

Well, for one, he cut his hair.

The reveal of Ken’s design for Kizuna was a huge shock for those watching, because, among all of the twelve main human characters in Kizuna, he probably has the biggest and most drastic design change -- especially because his long hair was so iconic that even the epilogue depicted him with it (and even longer, at that). Were it not for other important identifiers like Wormmon’s presence and the fact said hair is at least still indigo blue, you’d almost wonder if it’s the same character.

(I do have to at least give props to this Animedia poster, though -- that soft and concerned expression is textbook Ken-chan, so it absolutely nails the vibe that it’s the same character despite the massive design change, and it even has a small cute detail that, despite clearly trying to calm Yamato down in haste, he’s still tidy enough to lay his chopsticks neatly on the bowl. That Ken has a habit of doing this while eating hot ramen is a very specific minor blink-and-you’ll-miss-it detail in 02 episode 36, and while I’d normally pass this off as coincidence, Kizuna and its PR has had such ridiculous attention to detail that I’m not entirely willing to.)

Not only that, his actual outfit in the movie is rather unassuming -- it’s just a black shirt, pants, and a belt, compared to the more distinctive/fashionable or setting-immersive outfits everyone else has. I mean, it sure beats that godawful grey gakuran he was constantly wearing during 02, but there were certainly a lot of complaints about how...well, unassuming and plain he looks.

The thing is, though, this is very much in line with how Ken would most likely want to present himself. When you think about it, Ken himself would probably not really appreciate his fanbase status as the “sad pretty boy”; having been scrutinized, evaluated, and put on uncomfortable pedestals through all of his early life, “blending in” and coming off as an average, unassuming person would be right up his alley.

Anyway, before we get into Kizuna itself, we have the drama CD that came with its BD, Where Should We Go? While it was released after the movie, in chronological timeline, it serves as a slight prequel, and what we learn about Ken in it is certainly...interesting. Namely, that he’s apparently a hardcore fan of Japanese hot springs. And not just a hardcore fan of them, but also a complete nerd.

The hot springs *obviously* must have free-flowing water. If possible, I think I’d prefer a quiet, rural flowing hot spring that’s surrounded by a moss-covered garden. Then I want to stay the night at a historical inn that focuses more on tranquility and wabi-sabi rather than wildness or beauty. I’m not looking for a lot on the food options, but the portions should ideally be neither too large nor too small. If we’re just going to relax our bodies, then I’d like it if there was a variety of hot springs to choose from. The water quality that I recommend for the ladies would be the hydrogen carbonate spring or the alkaline simple hot spring (these are otherwise known as simple hot springs with a basic pH of 8.5 or above), but my personal favorite is the hot sulphur spring! Incidentally, the hot sulphur spring is said to treat arteriosclerosis and high blood pressure. If it were possible, I’d like to take my time there… At least stay for two nights! Ahh… Hot springs… Hehehe…

I cannot stress enough how much the audio delivery for this depicts him as being terrifyingly into it. It’s also...not exactly the most fashionable thing for a nineteen-year-old to be into (actually, it’s more of a stereotype old man thing, what with the fixation on traditional Japanese aesthetics and health nut aspects), but we have Ken being very shameless and assertive about his personal interests, even if they’re a bit unusual.

Funnily enough, this isn’t actually the first time he was demonstrated to be a huge infodumping nerd -- it’s just that the last instance was questionably canonical, but tracks extremely heavily with what was just demonstrated here. Namely, Daisuke and Ken’s Shopping Carol:

Listen, the thing about Christmas is that it's one of the most important days in the world... It was the day the Savior was born... So, you go to church and pray... Of course, you knew all of that right?

Or in other words, he interrupts Daisuke’s wistful thoughts with The Actual Nerd Facts, because he’s a nerd. He even has a bit of a smart-aleck atmosphere...and then he cheerfully and sassily dumps all of the work on Daisuke thereafter. While the canonicity for this song is hard to place since it was released during 02′s airing (and 02 itself depicted a very different Christmas), plus the ambiguity of character song canon in general, it’s interesting how Ken’s portrayal here is pretty surprisingly in line with what we’re learning about his future personality.

The rest of what we see of Ken in the drama CD is what we generally knew about him already -- he’s kind, he dotes on Wormmon (he even indulges Wormmon’s request to take him skiing!), and he still keeps up with being into intellectual studies, and even soccer (he’s described as actually keeping up with soccer to the extent he does training camp), because he was always interested in those kinds of things -- it’s just that now he can indulge in them in ways he personally likes instead of being held to other people’s standards.

But he’s also very emotional, passionate, and openly assertive -- something he could be in 02, but only when it was something he really, really cared about, because most of the time he was a little more on the shy side with others. Not anymore. And he’s happy to indulge in the chaotic trip planning and enable the others, and, at the end, gives some sentimental words to Daisuke, his best friend.

Anyway, onto the movie itself!

Notably, they do not mention Ken’s past trauma nor his deeds as the Kaiser throughout the entire movie.

That might surprise people, given that this was...well, central to the entire plot of 02, so it’s arguably a glaring omission that despite having the 02 cast here, it’s not even brought up once. The only real “reference” to it is this scene, where Ken happens to be the one who knows about Menoa’s background as a child prodigy -- and even then it’s uncertain whether this had anything to do with said traumatic events (Menoa was admitted to Liberica in 2002 itself) as much as it’s a meta nod to Ken having a suspiciously similar background and the fact he and Menoa were based on the same real-life story (the nine-year-old boy who skipped grades into Columbia University).

But, again, recall that Ken has had eight years to move on from the events of 02, more time than said events had actually spanned over. That doesn’t mean he’s easily going to forget that trauma, nor that said events don’t still have an impact on him, but rather that a true positive development for him should have him not having to consciously dwell on it if it’s not necessary, and that his friends of now eight years should probably not be still holding it over him at a time like this.

After all, 02 itself was dedicated to scolding this kind of behavior -- not being “stuck in the past” (which, well, also happens to be a very pertinent theme when it comes to Kizuna...) was basically the entire point of the latter half, and so it stands to reason that Ken, and by extension the rest of the 02 cast, would be more focused on what they’re doing now instead of what happened back then.

In the absence of any references to said past, Ken in the actual movie ends up coming off as a bit unremarkable and plain compared to the three friends who end up surrounding him, all of whom have much more extreme personalities (the chaotic and exuberant Daisuke and Miyako, and the comically poker-faced Iori). But you get the feeling that he’s perfectly fine being that way -- rather, he’s enjoying getting all of his fun from his exciting friends, without feeling a need to spice things up himself.

So when we finally do meet Ken for the first time in Kizuna, he’s cheerfully eating ramen with Daisuke and Iori in New York (which, for all it’s worth, is probably really questionably legal, considering that Adventure’s world of 2010 likely still hasn’t figured out how to deal with that whole thing with “immigration and customs” as it pertains to Digital Gates.) Emphasis on cheerfully. He’s as tidy as ever (note how he still properly keeps his chopsticks between his fingers and cleans up after himself, albeit not as well as Iori), and he’s obviously more straight-laced than Daisuke or Miyako, but he isn’t really hiding the fact he’s also totally enjoying this. He didn’t even know why they were there for ramen in New York in the first place, but he just rolled with wherever Daisuke took him.

Recall that, according to their official profiles, these three go to completely different schools now -- Iori’s in high school, Daisuke’s at vocational school getting a chef’s license, and Ken’s in university studying psychology. (Which, by the way, is not brought up at all throughout the movie nor the drama CD! It’s easy to glean how his past experiences might give him an interest in the topic, and it’ll certainly be a valuable background to have for his future known career in criminal investigation, but despite Ken previously having had a reputation for being studious, it’s not brought up at all -- almost as if hanging out with his friends and having fun with them is more important and pertinent.) The drama CD even points out that Ken would normally be busy with soccer training camp. Yet they’re hanging out. In New York. Eating ramen. So, Yamato, what were you saying about how “choosing your own path can sometimes mean being alienated from friends”? If anything, these friends seem to be going out of their way to make sure they’re staying tight.

And, as you’d expect, Ken refers to Daisuke by given name, following DSB’s precedent. Again, given the nature of their relationship right now, this should be expected. There’s other evidence that Kizuna does use DSB as reference in certain other respects as well (Takeru calls Yamato “niisan”, which had previously been exclusive to that movie), and it’s very possible that Ken as portrayed in that movie was used as reference for his potential trajectory here.

Note that he seems to be even more outwardly affectionate with Wormmon than before (which is, shockingly, apparently possible) -- he still feeds his partner before feeding himself (similar to what he did in 02 episode 37), but now he also shamelessly carries Wormmon on his head, which he never did in 02. Perhaps it’s because he’s tall enough to carry the weight, but unlike with Takeru and Patamon, Wormmon is big enough that the sight is honestly comical -- yet Ken couldn’t care less, and while we don’t see him in his own school, it’s a sharp contrast to how Taichi and Yamato scoffed at the idea of bringing their partners to school because they “have their own lives to live”.

(A nice touch is Ken carrying Minomon from his arm, which actually comes from a very obscure piece of 02 concept art -- you can find it in the Character Complete File or the Animation Chronicle -- but was never depicted in the series proper. The Kizuna design works in the April 2020 edition of Animedia actually recreated that piece of art with Ken in the exact same position, only as a nineteen-year-old this time, which was an incredibly welcome thing to see.)

He greets Miyako upfront when she arrives, which doesn’t look like much on its face, but recall that this probably wouldn’t have happened during 02 proper -- not even with Daisuke! -- and, at the very least, not with this very casual “hey!” tone. It means a lot in terms of how much more casual of a person he’s been able to become in the last eight years, and how much more casual he is with this group (well, at least with Miyako). Takeru also greets Wormmon in the drama CD, and Wormmon seems pretty unusually happy to see Hawkmon when they meet each other there, certainly implying a lot of interpersonal interaction since.

Miyako meets up with them (and, going back to how tight these kids are, Miyako would come in all the way from Spain to meet her friends even for the exact same job that she dumped on her seniors), and they end up infiltrating Menoa’s office. He gets in a line of snark, especially because the Shueisha Mirai novel indicates he’s deliberately “looking the other way” in regards to worrying about security -- looks like he’s developing some Lawful tendencies, but in the end, his friends and getting to the bottom of the real truth take priority.

And, also, it’s still pretty clear he’s totally taking the opportunity to enjoy this.

So what does this all mean, really? He’s taking a fairly passive attitude with his abundantly more chaotic friends, but he’s also not protesting, and he’s enjoying everything he can out of it. He’s a bit quieter than he was in DSB, but that could easily just be from being older and a bit more mature, and he hardly comes off as reserved, either (it helps that Daisuke doesn’t quite resort to any antics nearly as ridiculous as he did in DSB, so there’s no need to keep him in check -- yep, even Daisuke got a bit more mature himself). And he’s joining these kids in being possibly some of the most chaotic disaster adults (near-adults?) on this planet, in a sharp contrast to their seniors.

I mentioned earlier in my analysis of Kizuna’s relationship to 02 that Ken is actually a “hidden” foil to Kizuna’s main antagonist, Menoa -- they were both conceived from the same idea Producer Seki had regarding the real-life “genius boy” who ended up going to Columbia University at a young age and, in her opinion, was going to be robbed of a proper childhood experience. 02′s Dark Seed children arc was a major indictment against parents forcing this kind of pressure on children, not only in the sense of pushing them academically but also quashing out their more “childish” dreams for the sake of a more “dignified” outlook and future. Through the events of 02, Ken learned a very personal lesson on not losing his “true self” to the pressure of those expectations, and the meaning of valuing his family and friends instead.

Ken and Menoa, effectively, were originally on the same path, but thanks to the circumstances of 02, Ken managed to avert Menoa’s fate and ended up following his own way. Nevertheless, Ken was largely robbed of a normal kid’s childhood up until the age of eleven, and it stands to reason that, even at the age of nineteen, he might still be trying to make up for all of those fun experiences he never was able to have.

Funny thing about his haircut, too -- this isn’t the first time Ken’s had this haircut, actually. You know when was the last known time he did?

Hm. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

But unlike Menoa, who decided that it would be better to trap herself in her own distorted view of what “childhood” is, or Oikawa, who ended up clinging dearly to the last reminder he had of what he’d lost from his childhood, Ken ends up dealing with it in a very forward-facing manner. In fact, he’d elucidated his feelings on the issue back in Spring 2003:

There are still a lot of times when I think about how I should have “done this back then.” But I discovered that there are many things I can do over afterwards. I’ll stop counting the things that I can’t do. Because I’m sure there are many things that I can do.

Instead of living in regrets about the past, Ken simply chooses to move forward by making new fun experiences and memories with his friends, befitting those he couldn’t have when he was a kid, and perhaps even enhanced by his newfound freedom as a nineteen-year-old.

During the final battle, we get a few more emotional and assertive shows from Ken -- his concern about Miyako is pretty frantic-sounding, and the fact he steps in so quickly and frantically to help her out by his own will is pretty impressive. And then he definitively declares that they can’t afford to give up -- which is certainly in line with the nobility he had even during 02, but remember when, even in DSB, Daisuke had to be the one to remind him of this? Now he’s the one reassuring his teammates about this, all on his own. When it all comes down to it, his sense of awareness of what he wants and what he wants to do is stronger than ever.

I mentioned in my analysis of Kizuna in relation to 02 that the 02 kids are in a fairly unique position in the movie, thanks to having already practically gone through a lot of the lessons in both 02 and Kizuna, thus leading them to become very lacking in susceptibility to potentially losing their partners anytime soon (and in fact are deliberately portrayed as such). I would say of all of them, Ken is the most representative of this -- being such a direct foil to the movie’s main antagonist, one who actually came dangerously close to making some of the exact same mistakes she did and emerged with his own trauma as a result, the lessons and warnings imparted by the movie are already deeply embedded in his being.

He’s one of the most openly affectionate and intimate with his partner, having already learned the very, very hard way of what happens when you don’t treasure your partner properly. (He’s taking Wormmon jogging with him, which has got to be an awfully uncomfortable setup, but, goddammit, he’s gonna make it work. And if ~With~ is to be believed, he’s been doing this for years now.) He’s still got a Dark Seed in the back of his neck as an eternal reminder to remember who he is, and to acknowledge the love from his family and friends around him instead of succumbing to arbitrary societal expectations. Remember what I said in my earlier analysis about the true reason for partnerships dissolving, and how deeply it was tied to throwing yourself away for the sake of arbitrary standards of adulthood? Ken’s experiences and extremely painful trauma are like a giant do not do this stamp on his face, and although everyone in this cast is naturally human and may have ups and downs or relapses, Ken is possibly one of the last characters one could imagine succumbing to that kind of mistake again.

So we make it to the epilogue, and although Ken’s technical job title as given in the epilogue is literally “police officer” (keisatsukan), his form of dress (plainclothes, not uniform) and his the Character Complete File indicate he’s from the Digimon Special Investigations Unit (tokusoubu), or, in other words, he’s actually a public-servant detective. (So no, the various dubs also going with “detective” are thus not “changes” in this respect.) In short, he investigates scenes of crimes after they happen, and the Character Complete File provides an example in the form of him investigating a dead body found at the river.

This is probably why Kizuna has him major in psychology, because forensic psychology would be a pretty useful skillset for this kind of job, and a university education in general would most certainly be helpful. (The job requirements as per the Japanese system also require a very high level of athleticism and aptitude.) On the other hand, considering what we know about Ken up to Kizuna, there aren’t any indications that he treated this like any kind of major aspiration, and the psychology major makes you think he might have just fallen into this career by a series of accidents -- he took an interest in psychology (and mental health) due to his own experiences, and then decided that “discovering the truth behind things” was up his alley (much like Iori). Even more notably, his position isn’t really described in any history-making terms, not even ones like being “the first” of anything (like Jou), and it feels like he’s doing this to contribute to society in a way he prefers more than he’s trying to accomplish anything world-shattering.

But on the flip side, it’s probably no coincidence that the 02 epilogue portrays him with such a big family. Of course, it also fits with his and Miyako’s family backgrounds (they’d probably want their kids to have siblings, given their own experiences), but since the Dark Seed was described as having its effects countered by acknowledging how much you’re loved, Ken is clearly surrounded by love -- his wife is one of the most openly affectionate people out there, and his kids (or at least his middle child) use the same “Mama” kind of affectionate language Ken shared with his own parents. Once the events of 02 came to a close at the end of 2002, Ken went on a journey of discovering his own self-assertion, personal desires, and fun -- shedding the expectations and societal standards others had of him, and learning to enjoy life in ways he personally enjoys, for his own sake.

[freddieofhearts]

Bye bye, dears (for now!)

I know there have been a lot of rumours and some posts about me leaving, so here I am to set the record straight and say a quick ‘au revoir’. This post is long, and I don’t expect everyone to read the whole thing—if you just want information on how to keep in touch, or about access to my removed fics, scroll to the bottom. ⬇️

*

Why are you leaving?

Firstly, of course I’m not leaving Freddie. This is just an ongoing hiatus from the social side of fandom, because while I have some incredible friends here, who have done all they can to support me and have made this experience wonderful in lots of ways—it’s also true that the social space has become more and more toxic for me.

I get a wild amount of hate. Despite never having my ask box enabled on here, people create new accounts just to message me and tell me all the problems in this fandom are my fault, that I’m faking being sick, that I should kill myself, that I’m fat, etc. I also very regularly get hateful comments on AO3.

Obviously I realise that I’m not the only one who receives these cruel attacks, but it’s become increasingly hard to handle them—especially as some people (‘real’ accounts, not faceless anons) do continue to blame me for wider problems in the fandom. It makes me feel consistently sad, anxious, and paranoid, so that I can’t focus on anything Queen-related that I enjoy.

More pressingly, it’s affected my mental health, which is—imperfect at the best of times. As I’ve occasionally alluded to in older posts on this blog, I have a history of anorexia, OCD, PTSD, and some other overlapping issues. Most people who know me in the fandom are also aware that I’m ‘clinically extremely vulnerable’ to Covid-19, significantly immunocompromised, and have been isolating at home for eleven months.

The combination of all of these things + the constant toxic messages has really been triggering me, and leading to an uptick in disordered behaviours, which my body cannot sustain. Every new instance of hate from an anon—every time there’s another indication of groups in the fandom wanting to ostracise me further—my reaction is deeply self-punitive and unhealthy. Ultimately I need to be out of this environment for, at least, a protracted period. My therapist, my partner and my close friends in the fandom support this decision.

*

So, what went wrong?

In 2019, I expected to be an absolutely tiny blog in the Queen Tumblr landscape. The fandom was already well-established, and I have never worked to ‘build a following’ on here—I think I’ve linked my own fic a maximum of three or four times!—in fact, more or less the opposite. As I mentioned above: ya girl is nutty as a fruitcake. As a result, I often avoid extremely niche things in daily life which cause severe anxiety for me, Relevant examples here: I never look at my timeline. I never intentionally look at my follower number. Yup, it’s strange, I fully admit it, but it’s best for me to go with these things—usually. In Queen fandom, however, this avoidance both of analytic stats and of most direct engagement led to some problems... My followers grew without me realising, and way more people were reading my blog than I was aware of. I was still in a—“Wow, this fandom is very frustrating, and rife with ableism, racism, etc., so how do we fix this???”—mindset, and I wanted to share my opinions, sure! but I also thought I was sharing them with 15-20 like-minded people.

Now, intent is not impact, and I recognise that I was brusque, didn’t phrase things particularly sensitively, and absolutely did hurt some people by criticising the fandom so freely. I still regret this—and I regret just as much the fact that some assholes have used my criticising the fandom on my own blog as implicit justification for attacking authors. I have said on here many times that I don’t condone that behaviour—but I also think there’s some truth in the presumption that these anonymous malcontents felt my critiques somehow ‘permitted’ them to engage in abuse. For the first few months, though, I genuinely had no idea there was a link at all—and so I was initially slow to condemn this abusive behaviour in public, because I was taking it for granted all authors agreed it was shitty. It took someone directly telling me (shoutout to @a-froger-epic) that people had identified a connection between my posts and the anons, before everything fell into place.

I would like to offer my apologies to the fandom at large for not being more quick on the uptake about this, because I feel that had I realised sooner that these people were taking ‘inspiration’ in some way from me, it might have been easier to put a stop to it. It does seem that there is still a lot of confusion about whether I support them and which of their views I agree with. Let’s be 100% clear on this: I do not support the anonymous commenters on AO3. At times there is some, limited overlap between parts of their views and parts of mine, but even that is less than you may think—I often see anonymous comments from so-called ‘Freddie fans’ that I substantially disagree with.

Perhaps even more importantly: I do not support anyone who sends anonymous hate on Tumblr.

*

What’s all this about ‘overlap’ with the anons?

Let’s do a mini-summary of the myths vs. the truth. There are views I hold which are genuinely unpopular in the fandom—but which I own up to completely, and have never tried to hide in any way. I’ve never needed to use anonymous to share my opinions because I’m completely open about them! What people who don’t know me tend to have ‘heard’ about me, though, is usually a drastic distortion of my real opinions.

What people think I think:

- Freddie should never top.

- It’s okay to send anon hate if someone writes Freddie ‘wrong’.

- It’s more important to correct ‘wrong’ portrayals than to respect other writers.

- It’s inherently wrong to be more interested in band pairings than canon pairings.

- Freddie should be overtly written as a r*pe survivor/victim (and not doing this is wrong).

- Freddie should be overtly written as having an eating disorder (and not doing this is wrong).

- Kink fics are wrong.

What I actually think:

- I believe Freddie did have a strongly defined sexual identity with marked preferences, but I don’t think Jim Hutton lied when he said that Freddie topped. I believe Freddie did top, but this isn’t the time or place to get into my thoughts on why/when/how much. I do believe that my analysis of the sources relevant to this subject is as historically accurate as one can reasonably be in matters of sex (where historical accuracy will always be particularly limited and imperfect)—but I don’t think it’s morally wrong to write Freddie as topping more than he probably did.

- I don’t believe there’s only one ‘right’ version of Freddie (all others being ‘wrong’). I do believe it is possible to be more right or less right—but I’m also conscious of the fact that this scale of value is not one by which everyone measures fanfiction. As a result, then, I don’t think that any perceptions surrounding ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ justify sending anonymous, non-constructive criticism, or outright hate.

- I do believe constructive criticism is a good thing. I welcome and appreciate it myself; I have received it on my fics in Queen fandom, and it has made them better. I have been in writing workshops which included very forceful criticisms, and the value of such feedback has been intimately and immediately part of my life as a writer for years. However: in this case, I have accepted that my opinion differs from the general community preference, and so I no longer offer any constructive criticism (outside private beta-reading). I haven’t changed my view, but I’ve changed my practice to align with community norms.

- I do not think any single, individual writer has a personal responsibility to write about Freddie Mercury in any given way. That ranges from including the more distressing topics to which I’ve devoted attention (such as trauma)—to concentrating on ‘canon’ pairings like Jimercury—to, even, focusing on Freddie at all.

“Now, that doesn’t sound like you, @freddieofhearts,” you might be thinking. And I know it doesn’t; I think something I’ve done a poor job of articulating is the difference between how I view each individual fan—namely, as free to shape their creative experience at will, even in ways that I might find distressing or offensive; even in ways that you might find distressing or offensive—and the way I view the Collective. I think people have interpreted some of my critiques of ‘Queen Fandom’ as meaning something like: “You-in-particular, a specific Queen fan, are doing it wrong and should change everything about how you do it; also you don’t really care about Freddie.”

And—that’s not it. What any given fan, as an individual, does, isn’t a problem. And that can be true alongside—concurrently with—a multivalent critique of how the fandom is lacking in representation of Freddie’s life, with all that that (wonderful, deservedly celebrated, but also profoundly traumatic) life entailed. I still hold that view; I still have myriad problems with ‘the fandom’ (structurally, collectively, historically and presently—from the 1990s to the 2020s). Some of what I want to work on (away from the social life of fandom) is expressing those critiques with greater nuance, in ways that can’t be misinterpreted as shading any particular fanfiction author or subgenre of story.

In brief: I haven’t changed my mind, but I think Tumblr is an untenable environment in which to discuss the things I want to analyse, especially as there is an ever-present danger of hurting someone.

*

Can we keep in touch? Where is the fic?

I will drop by this account periodically to check out posts that friends have sent me, so you can always sent me a private message to ask for my contact details on the other app that I’m using now for fandom friends. Multiple Freddie conversations and projects are going on over there, off-Tumblr, with a much ‘gentler’ environment and no bad actors—I personally love it!

All my fic has been downloaded and saved. I don’t want to deal with constant harassment on AO3, but I’m happy to share a copy with anyone who missed it and wants to read/re-read something. I also saved everyone’s lovely comments and thoughtful con-crit, so none of that has been lost or erased.

Thank you to everyone who welcomed me to the fandom, made me think, taught me, shared with me, sent me into fits of the giggles, collaborated with me creatively, and otherwise made this one hell of a ride! Love you all. ❤️

[keto-diet-corner]

28 days keto meal plan reviews

The keto diet is becoming more and more popular in the community and health. Its popularity stems from the fact that it has been linked to a plethora of health benefits, including weight loss. This diet requires your body to use stored fat as its main source of energy instead of carbs. It is a low carb diet. Nowadays, more and more health risks such as obesity are caused by a sedentary lifestyle. It's no surprise that this diet is becoming a good choice for dieting.

In this article, we will focus on finding the answer to whether the 28 Days Keto Challenge program works or it's another useless weight loss program.

1. What is the 28 Days Keto Challenge?

The 28 Day Keto Challenge is designed by Keto Resource to re-regulate your metabolism to minimize fat storage so you can lose weight fast.

With a ketogenic diet, the body gets its energy from stored fat, and as a result you will notice a gradual decrease in fat intake. This is a very nutritious diet plan that includes everything you need to know when following the keto diet.

The 28-day keto challenge claims to help you see changes in your overall body weight within 28 days while also helping you lose fat.

The best thing about this program is that it is completely natural and when ketosis starts in the body, it will help you fight hunger in time.

In simpler terms, the keto diet will keep you from cravings, which means fewer calories.

The 28-day plan will equip you with all the best keto-specific recipes you need to get through the month without breaking the keto diet and you'll be amazed at how delicious the food is.

The 28-Day Keto Challenge gives you the basics of food science - from mastering macros to intermittent fasting styles to staying in ketosis - and cooking in the kitchen, with dozens of recipes. recipes for any time of the day.

The 28 Day Keto Challenge is designed by Keto Resource to re-regulate your metabolism to minimize fat storage so you can lose weight fast.

With a ketogenic diet, the body gets its energy from stored fat, and as a result you will notice a gradual decrease in fat intake. This is a very nutritious diet plan that includes everything you need to know when following the keto diet.

The 28-day keto challenge claims to help you see changes in your overall body weight within 28 days while also helping you lose fat.

The best thing about this program is that it is completely natural and when ketosis starts in the body, it will help you fight hunger in time.

In simpler terms, the keto diet will keep you from cravings, which means fewer calories.

The 28-day plan will equip you with all the best keto-specific recipes you need to get through the month without breaking the keto diet and you'll be amazed at how delicious the food is.

The 28-Day Keto Challenge gives you the basics of food science - from mastering macros to intermittent fasting styles to staying in ketosis - and cooking in the kitchen, with dozens of recipes. recipes for any time of the day.

The biggest challenge of keto is the fact that the world around you doesn't really support it. If you've ever tried to eat out, sticking to the keto diet can be a big deal, and you'll likely inconvenience the friends and family you eat out with.

But the 28-Day Keto Challenge makes a unique keto diet a reality you can actually live with, with easy (and delicious) recipes along with the educational content you need to stay on keto. I keep active no matter where you eat.

2. Who is the 28 days keto challenge for?

You may be interested in the 28 Day Keto Challenge if…

You're looking to lose a few pounds and want a fun and new way to do it

You want to make major changes to your lifestyle and body, not just for the sake of weight loss, but for your overall health

You tried the keto diet before but couldn't do it because you lacked the right recipe and some basic tips

Your body is starting to feel unhealthy and you want a new and effective way to get your fitness back

You want to lose weight without feeling like you're on a restrictive diet and you want to be able to eat delicious meals and desserts without messing up your diet

You are interested in learning more about food science to enrich your understanding of food and your body in the long run, from macro diets to intermittent fasting

You've been on the keto diet before and you want a structured plan that works for hundreds of thousands of people

You want some really delicious avocado recipes!

Simply put, the 28 Day Keto Challenge is for anyone who wants to put in the effort and really commit to the keto lifestyle, even in just four weeks.

3. Pros and cons of 28 days keto challenge

Advantages:

According to a study, there are many benefits that you can enjoy with the ketogenic diet. These are as follows: reduced triglycerides, increase good, cholesterol (HDL), limit bad cholesterol (LDL), minimize blood sugar spikes

Easy to use and fits your lifestyle.

The expected weight loss is about 2-3 lbs per person, this is completely natural.

No need to buy canned and prepackaged foods, as you get detailed information about the meals you should eat.

This is a grain-focused and beam-based diet plan for natural transformation in the body.

Comes with a money-back guarantee.

Both nourish your body and help you achieve your desired weight loss goals.

Defect:

You cannot access the program without an active internet connection.

Only available for sale on the official website

4. What do you get with 28 Days Keto Challenge

4.1 10 Expert Guides

The 28 Day Keto Challenge consists of 10 different tutorials that cover different aspects of the Keto lifestyle. One book is about intermittent fasting and how it can boost your metabolism and improve your results, while another is about macronutrients and how to measure them.

Other books include

The Keto Diet Basics

The Keto Diet Basics, Including 13 Quick Tips and How It Gets Started

Eat Well on Keto

Your recipe companion for success. You get 10 breakfast, 14 lunch and 14 dinner recipes. You will receive two free dessert books (Keto Peanut Butter Treats & Keto Chocolate Treats).

Maintaining Ketosis

This is the most important aspect of the ketogenic diet. This guide offers helpful tips to make sure all your hard work doesn't go to waste.

Mastering Macros

Fat is just one of three important macros to measure. This guide teaches you how to achieve and maintain ketosis by eating the correct balance of fats, carbs, and protein on a daily basis.

Beating the Keto Flu: Your Guide to Getting Over the Inevitable Keto Flu as Quickly as Possible.

Intermittent Fasting: A quick supplement to intermittent fasting and its role in maintaining ketosis.

Social Situation: Probably one of my top three guides in the series. It helps you navigate outings with friends while staying consistent with your diet.

Delicious avocado recipe

Guide to Keto Supplements

This challenge sets you up for success by giving you all the information you need to know so you can only make informed and sustainable decisions in the future.

4.2 Tutorial from start to finish

When done correctly, the keto diet can lead to significant changes in your body composition. But when done indiscriminately, you may see an increase in bad cholesterol, which can be detrimental to your health.

Getting into ketosis is especially difficult, especially if you're doing it for the first time. With the 28 Day Keto Challenge, you feel more confident knowing you're on the right track. The program comes with a 28-day meal plan. It never feels too restrictive or too new, which makes it easier to stick with it.

4.3 Control the keto flu

The keto flu is a normal part of the keto diet. Some people face more adverse reactions when switching to a low-fat, low-carb diet, while others experience it to a milder degree.

Common symptoms include irritability, constipation, brain fog, headache, and fatigue.

So, if you've heard things about the keto flu and wondered how your body would react to it, the 28 Day Keto Challenge will guide you from start to finish, from flu to weight loss.

5. Where to buy 28 Days Keto Challenge

The 28 Day Keto Challenge is an online program by Keto Resource that is only available for purchase from the Official Website. Your account will be active as soon as your payment is successful.

You need an active internet connection to access the meal package and other program content.

6. Is The 28 Day Keto Challenge Worth It?

So, after reading all the reviews, is it a good idea to start the 28 Day Keto Challenge? The answer is yes!

The program is easy to follow and you get all the details you need to incorporate it into your lifestyle. With each step of the program, you'll get closer to your weight loss goal, which can make a significant difference.

Finally, the program comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee, and you can get a full refund if you don't think that's something you can try.

The article 28 days keto meal plan reviews first appeared on DUNOGE.

Check out the source of DUNOGE's article at 28 days keto meal plan reviews

[sanstropfremir]

I absolutely LOVED reading your kingdom review. You gave me such an insight in things I never even considered, especially since our rankings are so different from each other. The Boyz was my favorite, the narrative was about RTK. How they felt bad for having to compete against their friends but eventually the groups only lifted each other up and it helped TBZ grow into the group they are now through the hardships and mental dilemma, falling into the next challenge right after they reached the top. It should have been more obvious though, I agree, it wasn't really visible for anyone who didn't know. I was wondering how you felt about the dancing in general? my reason for not ranking BTOB high was lack of choreo (and Peniel's verse), same goes for SF9. Mostly because I don't feel the hype when watching, it doesn't keep my focus on the stage. As a baby-performer myself, my goal is to make the viewer curious about what's next. is that the wrong way to look at it? that's what I've always been told, building the tension up and down to create focus. would love to hear your feedback on that! thank you so much for sharing, we need more reviews of people who actually know what they're talking about.

i'm glad that you got some insight from it! like i answered in the previous ask im here to hopefully bring some more depth and understanding for people that care and are curious!

you unintentionally proved my point about tbz’s performance: that is way too complicated! even the most talented solo dancers i can think of would have trouble distilling that down to something readable in 100 seconds, much less a group of like, a dozen people! the introductory stages are meant to show us the character of the group and their abilities in the most concise way possible, it's not the stage to do deep philosophical and emotional introspection. for a full stage? absolutely, go hog wild! but for this stage it was too ambitious and ultimately was ineffective to anyone that isn't a fan of them specifically. 

by dancing in general do you mean like, every group? i put most of my opinions on the dancing where i had them in each of the individual rankings but honestly? unless there is something that really stands out positively or negatively, a lot of ‘average’ kpop dance looks the same to me. i know it’s not, obviously, and if pressed i probably could do a more serious breakdown, but dance is only one element of performance. it has equal weight with all the others in my mind, and therefore i notice when it is either 

very good

does something unique

very bad, or

interferes with another element

which is the same as how i evaluate every element, if that makes sense. 

hmmmm. i thought about this a lot in the shower and turns out i had more opinions that i expected so i'll put them under a cut.

firstly, i don't think lack of choreo should be penalized or considered an ‘incomplete’ performance. at the end of the day, these are bands, and a part of their brand/product they sell is the music. complex choreo does not need to be attached to that to make it a successful performance. also, btob did have choreo. any movement on stage is technically choreography. but this terminology can cause confusion so usually non-dance choreo is referred to as ‘blocking.’ but they also did include the song’s original point choreo at 1.41. the blocking in their performance was well thought out and suited the arrangement, by placing spatial emphasis on each part of the song that needed it. obviously it comes down to personal taste if the performance is ultimately ‘successful,’ because all art is subjective, but just because something isn't as visually complex as something else doesn’t mean it doesn't have the same level of thought. think of it like this: one is a super clean-lined post-post-modern grey/white living room, and the other is a kitsch goth basement. both share interior design principles and have obvious care put into the space, but they are vastly different styles that appeal to different tastes.

part of the job of production designer/AD is to decide what gets emphasis. a question you're always asking yourself is ‘is this important to the story that we’re trying to tell?’ and btob/their AD made a very smart choice with their introductory stage because it says a lot about them and their abilities in a short amount of time. that stage said ‘our foundation is strong, we have the training and experience and confidence to be up here and not rely on visual tricks.’ because they know they physically cannot do the things the 4th gen groups can; they're a decade older and they only have four members, it's just not feasible. something you learn with experience is the power that specific and pointed emphasis holds, which segues into my answer to your last question. i don't necessarily think that ‘building hype’ is the wrong way to perform something, but i do think it is a flawed way to approach creating a performance.

i think that ‘hype’ is flawed concept at its core, and one that focuses on the idea that there’s always being something more, something next, beyond the work itself. now there’s nothing wrong with playing with tension within the internal structure of a piece, that's exactly how constructing a narrative happens. however, the flaws come once we extrapolate beyond the boundaries of that individual work. the idea of ‘whats next’ implies that you have to constantly be promoting, have a sequel coming, building hype etc so people will keep engaged with your work. which is deeply capitalistic in nature and operates on the assumption that art exists purely as a product to be sold. and in order to keep selling you need to keep making a bigger and better and more spectacular product. and this is not the case at all. marketability is not the essence of art, it merely a factor of creating it under this insufferable system. kpop in particular suffers from this because the industry is specifically fabricated to produce capitol. we can have discussions all day about idols and their artistic integrity but at the end of that day, they are all cogs working with a system that was specifically made up by essentially one person to be culturally exported and to just print buckets of money. so in following that train of thought, there is a constant attitude of bigger and better because shock value (whether positive or negative) gets social media attention and therefore it sells. and it has become exponentially easier (and also seemingly required) to make things that are bigger and better than ever before. i remember being blown away by the projection floor at the sochi 2014 olympics because something of that scale and complexity would never have been possible without literally having the funding of the olympics. now that technology is easily accessible to anyone with an amazon account and the time to learn how isadora works. in comparison, it took 2400 YEARS for just the job of a ‘theatre designer’ to be even become a job at all.

because of kpop’s fan culture it is especially prone to ‘hype’ behaviour. in general with the accessibility of the internet and social media, everything has turned into a competition, and who can generate the most buzz ‘wins’. but ultimately that has taken away the general public’s ability to recognize that you can enjoy something quietly and you can enjoy something slowly. that the enjoyment of something doesn’t need to be all exclamation marks and keysmashes and trending hashtags on twitter. there is value in a work engaging in an emotion within you that is not just excitement. most of the artists and companies that i consume the work of i don’t do so because their work makes me excited, i do so because i liked the experience of engaging with that work. several years ago i saw the eternal tides by legend lin dance theatre, which you can watch a really short clip of here. that is not slow motion, that is actually how slow the dancers are moving. and 90% of the show is performed like that. and its two hours long. and it was one of the most incredible performances i've ever seen. if i ever get the chance I will go see another one of their shows again, not because i care about how they can top that experience i had, but because i know they can produce that experience, and that is enough to make me want to seek them out again. the speed of the internet has also loosened the general public’s understanding of just exactly how long creating a performance work can take. the lead dancer in the eternal tides was with the company for eight years before she and the piece were ready enough to be performed. large scale operas, musicals, and plays often have a year or more of pre-production before they even get to rehearsal. smaller theatre companies workshop new pieces for years at a time. performance is hard and it takes time. you can eliminate some of that with sheer amounts of money and people, which is what the kpop industry has done, but it speeds up the cycle of consumption to a degree that is not sustainable, especially for companies and creators who do not have that kind of access. performers and performance makers often don't put enough trust in their audiences. if they like what they see, they will come back. they dont need to be constantly bombarded with content at all times.

now that i’ve said a bit about why i think hype is a flawed concept, let's bring it back to kingdom. sf9 did something very interesting with their stage in that they actively chose to limit their dance time. and this plays very well off the performance film stage that taeyang did a couple of weeks ago. taeyang is talented and confident (for good reason), and his solo was incredible. but when it came to the intro stage, instead of trying to one-up the solo stage, the group instead said ‘well people are going to be looking at us because taeyang is insanely talented, so let's show them that we ALL have the confidence and the attitude to be up here.’ no need for flashy theatrics, they had the foresight to do something that would make them stand out from the rest of the groups. even if i was just casually watching the stages without doing any analysis on them (like i did for rtk), i would still be able to distinguish them because they had the stones to stand around for half their stage time. now i recognize them and would like to see what else they can do. same principle as what btob and also what ikon did. there is a fine line between anticipation and hype that gets equated in media consumption nowadays, but the two are not the same.

i think the tldr on this is that you dont need to ‘build hype’ or ‘go all out’ to make an interesting work. just focus on telling the narrative that you want to tell, and the people that recognize that will come. i could have a lot more things to say about peoples shrinking attention spans and the constant stream of information that we consume on a daily basis that devalues the labour done by artists in the eyes of the public and promotes hustle culture that is burning out and damaging creators at a rate that is both exponential and frightening, but that’s probably for another time, because this is SO LONG

[necrowriter]

monday thing: april 20th (somewhere else? part one)

It was the summer between my sophomore year and junior year in college when I went and got myself lost between worlds.

I was on a road trip when it happened, which I'm given to understand is when this sort of thing happens most often. Not always on road trips specifically, that is--but during travels. When you're in-between leaving and arriving, that's when the roads that go Somewhere Else are just visible enough even to normal sort of people like me that you might catch a glimpse of one, just long enough to turn onto it by accident. By the time you realize it's not the road you meant to be taking, it's usually too late to turn around.

That's how the barista explained it to me, anyway.

All I could think to say in return was, "Oh."

And then, after a moment, "That sounds...metaphysical."

I didn't yet know how lost I was when I first entered this place. I thought I was just the normal kind of lost that you get when you find yourself in the middle of rural fuck-all several states away from anything you recognize, on a road with more weird little turn-offs and side-jogs than anybody could reasonably be expected to keep track of, and no cell service. I was miles from the last road sign that had meant anything to me and Wayz had long since given up on me.  

That was all bad enough as it was, but as I stood with my car pulled over onto the grass and me leaning against the side, desperately hoping I could either pick up a shred of a signal or get someone to stop and give me directions, it started to rain.

It came on fast. I could have sworn it was a nice, clear afternoon not fifteen minutes ago, and then suddenly I could barely get back in the car in time to avoid getting soaked. For a few minutes the rain fell thunderously loud against the roof of the car, so hard you'd think it had a grudge against the ground. Then it began to let up just enough to become the kind of steady, rhythmic rain that can go on for hours.

That really tore it. A cloudburst I could have waited out, but I had an awful gloomy hunch that this rain wasn't moving on anytime soon. I didn't want to get any more lost than I already was, but I also didn't want to sit there until it got dark, either. I was hungry. I had to pee. And a lonesome country road at night is no place for anyone to be alone for too long.

Just as I was preparing to bang my head against the steering wheel in frustration, I saw the headlights of a truck coming up behind me.

I couldn't tell you exactly what the plan was as I started up the car--really, calling it a plan is much too generous. It was just some vague sort of thought that there was another person and maybe I could catch up to them and get some kind of useful information about where the hell I even was. At the very least they had to be going somewhere, so if I followed them long enough I'd get somewhere too.

Look. I never said it was a good idea.

But it was all I had, so I pulled back onto the road and followed the taillights like twin lighthouse beacons through the rain. And, looking back on it, that was probably when I got lost lost.

I kept a close eye on the truck as I drove, partly because I didn’t want to lose it but mostly because in all the rain it was really the only thing to look at. It was a big black thing, with a tarp tied over the bed. There was definitely a license plate, but even though I glanced at it more than once, I couldn’t tell you what the number was, or even what state it was from. I’d look at it and think “Oh, right—of course,” and then as soon as I looked away the knowledge slipped away again.

Probably I should have thought more about that at the time, but I was distracted, because after a few minutes the passenger side window rolled down and an enormous black dog stuck its head out. It lapped at the rain happily, then turned and looked back at me. Its eyes were so green I could see them even from over a truck-length away.

I caught myself shivering. I’m not scared of dogs. I like dogs. I’m the sort of person that will immediately be distracted from all else the moment a dog enters my vicinity—which accounts for the license plate thing somewhat. But something about this dog was...weird. Not frightening, exactly, or at least not outright so. But weird. If nothing else, I’d certainly never seen a dog with eyes like that.

The dog eventually shook itself and pulled its head back into the truck, but I kept an eye on the passenger window after that.

The rain poured on. An occasional glance at my phone, still laying in the passenger seat, told me it was moving on toward four o’clock when I saw lights in the distance. Not enough for a city, but surely enough for a town. My heart skipped. Was it possible this dumbass not-plan had worked out after all?

When the truck pulled off, I pulled off too, hoping it wouldn’t lead me astray. The road dipped and curved, then plunged through a lane of trees, branches tangling close together above us. I held my breath. And then, glory be, the trees fell away, and there were houses.

It was not much of a town. The houses were all quiet and still, with no sign of life. There were street signs, but I couldn’t make out what they said through the rain. But the truck led me on through one gray neighborhood after another until I suddenly, without being quite sure how it happened, found myself turning onto what looked like a main street. It was narrow and it felt like the buildings were leaning over me, but amid all the gray I saw lights pooling from windows.

That was where I found it. The coffee shop. Or at least, it looked like a coffee shop from the outside. Now, I’m not so sure.

Parking wasn’t a problem; there wasn’t a single other car on the street, aside from the black truck, which kept right on driving down the street, around a corner, and out of sight. I was relieved by that, since I’d been starting to worry whoever was driving it was going to stop and get out and demand to know what my problem was any time now.

Still, as I watched it drive off I said, “Thanks, man. Owe you one,” out loud. To nobody, and for no good reason. All I can say is it’d been a long day.

I found my jacket in the backseat and tugged it on awkwardly in the limited space, gathered up my satchel from the passenger seat, and splashed hurriedly through the rain toward the coffee shop. I figured I had enough money for coffee and a pastry or something, which I desperately needed right then, and if I could just get some wifi I could figure out where the heck I was, and how to get back to my actual route. For those few steps between the car and the door I was feeling more optimistic than I had all day.

But as soon as I stepped inside I felt my optimism curdle, because everybody inside immediately turned and stared at me.

I say everybody, but really, the place was pretty empty. There were two people behind the counter, one sitting at the counter, and one sitting at one of the tables. But even four people is a lot when they’re all looking at you like that. I was suddenly very aware that I was a stranger in this small rural town that I knew absolutely nothing about, and every one of those sets of eyes seemed to be saying you don’t belong here.

I thought about going back outside, but by then I really needed to pee. No one had actually done anything more than look so far, so I decided to take a chance that I could at least make it to the bathroom and back.

The eyes followed me as I rubbed my feet on the mat and slunk over to the counter.

“Um,” I said to the two baristas. “Bathroom?”

One of them was a middle-aged woman, tall and plump with strong-looking arms and silver threading through her brown hair. The other was a young man with several piercings, short platinum-blond hair, and a “he/him” pin on his apron. That put me more at ease. So did the kind smile the woman gave me as she gestured towards a doorway in the back wall and said, “Back there, second door on the left.”

I nodded at her gratefully and headed back. After the way the rest of the day had gone, I was a little concerned I’d manage to get lost on my way to the bathroom, but thankfully I was spared that last indignity. I came out feeling rather better, and settled awkwardly in one of the chairs in front of the counter and hung my satchel off the side.

“Can I get uh, just a black coffee,” I asked the woman, who was looking at me expectantly. “And...” I eyed the nearby glass case of pastries. “One of those chocolate chip muffins?”

She nodded to the other barista, who started making the coffee. The man sitting at the table had gone back to his laptop, but the man sitting down the counter from me was still looking at me. He was wearing a heavy coat—too heavy-looking for this weather, I would have said, even in the rain—and, I now realized, he appeared to be soaking wet. Water was slowly dripping into a puddle around his chair. I shifted uncomfortably.

“So um,” I said. “I’m afraid I’m lost.”

“You sure are,” the man down the counter said.

“Behave,” the older barista told him.

I watched her plate a muffin that I was now not entirely sure I wouldn’t be too nervous to eat. “Sorry but, could you tell me where I am?”

“You’re lost,” the man down the counter said, and grinned at me.

“Halfway to the afterlife,” the other barista said. “Might be dead yourself.”

“No,” the man sitting at the table said without looking away from his laptop. “Not one of mine.”

“You stop that, the pair of you,” the older barista said sternly. She put the plate down in front of me and smiled apologetically. “You’re in-between, I’m afraid. Muffin and coffee’s on the house. You’re going to need it.”

[khelsale]

13 Essential Badminton Tips for Beginners

Badminton is an adolescent, well-disposed game; even still, if you're getting the game inquisitively, it's dependably imperative to several pieces of information. Here are 13 top Badminton tips for novices that will assist you with improving.

So in case you're a juvenile hoping to improve quickly, continue looking for some top Badminton tips.

Perpetually warm-up fittingly

Our first Badminton tip is to attempt to heat up appropriately is so basic for any game. It very well may be ideal if you got your muscles warm so they can connect with no issue. This will help keep away from unreasonable wounds and will set you up for some quick Badminton.

Ideally, it may be ideal if you got some amazing growing close by running or avoiding done before you play. See our Badminton warm-up direct for a model warm-up arrangement that will kick you off up.

Gain ability with some fundamental footwork

Badminton is a quick game; it requires a decent extent of accessibility and speed to play well. It very well may be ideal if you had reasonable and beneficial footwork to have the choice to get around the court with no issue. yonex shuttlecock

Badminton doesn't utilize a ton of headways that individuals are utilized to. In Badminton, you occasionally utilize any running or running. Badminton depends upon much truly pursuing, influencing, and bobbing. Getting a basic view of how to utilize these headways will help an unfathomable plan.

See the video from Badminton Famly under where they disclose moving to the four corners of the court.

Get settled with your hold.

The fundamental thing to get not some time before you can get any shot right is the hold. Regardless of whether its forehand, strike or ask handle, it's key to get settled with how you hold the racquet in every manner.

Practice it reliably at home. Get your racquet and work on changing from forehand to strike and two or three fundamentals shots. The more you do it, the more standard exchanging and discovering your grasp will change.

Lee Jae Bok from Coaching Badminton has an incomprehensible video on getting the Badminton to deal with right. It's something you change once the correct way, and it winds up being so standard you don't need to consider everything.

Know the rules

This may seem, by all accounts, to be an evident one. Yet, you can't expect to get a considerable amount of wherever playing a progression of Badminton if you don't have even the remotest hint about the norms. As of now, this doesn't mean knowing the rulebook everything being equal. In any case, it recommends understanding the essentials of scoring, serving, what's in and out, and what you may have the choice to.

Nothing can be more overwhelming for adolescents by, at that point, learning the guidelines unusually. That is the clarification we set up or control Badminton rules. It covers the rules in a wonderful adolescent manner with a relationship with more isolated helpers if you need to find extra.

Watch some quality YouTube content

We're fortunate these days to push toward such a huge load of amazing substance on essentially any subject you could need to learn. Badminton is no exemption; YouTube makes them flabbergast, illuminating Badminton channels. This has, as of late, improved all through the long stretch, particularly in 2019-2020.

You can discover Badminton content on any piece of the game. Regardless of whether you need to get settled with the strike serve or the strike cut drop shot, there is a video showing you how. Head over to our total guide on the Best Badminton YouTube channels and look under the illuminating area to begin.

Keep your racquet up.

This tip is extremely annoying. Ordinarily, individuals need to drop their arms to their sides when they're not dynamic. It very well may be ideal if you combat the motivation to do this a great deal of the time, particularly in case you're playing at the net in copies.

Right, when I say keep your racquet up too, I don't mean over your head; I mean having up and gazed upward and outwards so that arranging is speedier. Raising your racquet from your side each time is moderate so keep your racquet up.

We alluded to duplicates of netplay; take a gander at this video, including Kevin Sanjaya Sukamuljo. He's consistently orchestrated his racquet up. If he's near the net, he may have his racquet much higher to block. By the by, dependably have your racquet up fairly.

Take the necessary steps not to try to be awesome.

Various adolescents present the error when securing some new significant data to get each viewpoint heavenly. Take the necessary steps not to center in an especially colossal aggregate on getting everything right, decently rotate around gaining ground.

In case you're learning one more shot, center around learning the individual pieces of the strategy. Now, welcome a comparative proportion of energy on going along with them all. The odds are you will not have managed each point, and that is fine. Zero in on predictable updates that will amount to immense overhauls over the long haul

Flawlessness itself is distant; the best players who whenever lived never accomplish impeccability. Perceive that you'll submit botches and that you'll find several things harder to overpower than others. In any case, long you spin around little updates that will impact.

Play with an elevating viewpoint

It is inconvenient; nevertheless, players beat themselves under the careful gaze of their progression on the court a ton of times. If you understand you're going up against a more grounded player, don't think, "smart gosh I will get wandered now." Rather, consider it a chance to learn. In the current circumstance, you don't have anything to lose and all to acquire; the other player is expected to win, go out there and play wholeheartedly.

Positive reasoning can be hard for a couple. It isn't easy to stand up and hold your ground. It very well may be ideal if you built up an uplifting outlook on and off the court.

Remove up when hitting.

By a long shot, most imagine that power in Badminton comes all from the muscles and strength. They see top players that play with such animosity without a doubt. They're applying a particularly extraordinary arrangement of power. Young people build up the tendency for pushing superfluously, making a reasonable undertaking.

Your muscles should be allowed to move straightforwardly; you can't make an enormous heap of racquet speed if you're holding your racquet tight and focusing before hitting. You're making the fundamental strides not to lift weight here; you're attempting to make power through advancement. Stay loose up when hitting, and let the racquet and your swing accomplish more vital work.

Recuperate back to the middle

Badminton is about control; you, generally, ought to be answerable for the vehicle and the social occasion. You might not want to be the one running any place on the show to get the van back. You ought to be the player dependably in the point of convergence of the court, picking where to play right away.

When you play, you overall need to consider returning to the mark of the union of the court after each shot. The mark of the union of the court can change contingent on the condition, yet that is for some other time. From the mark of the union of the court, you're a practically identical parcel away from each corner. This works on it to appear at the going with a shot.

Have a defense for each shot

Right when you're from the outset start, it's more insightful to zero in on the essentials and decide to return the vehicle reliably. As you improve, begin to consider which shot you should play and why. This winds up being critical for a more significant approach when you play.

Play each gave a reasonable result, regardless of whether it's trying to urge your foe to play it back to a specific spot or through and win the point. You will not, overall, get what you're seeking after at any rate. It's more tricky to an essential procedure than no strategy in any capacity whatsoever.

Develop your steadiness and get fit

Badminton is an irksome game. Beyond question, even as an adolescent, you'll sweat quickly. Developing your general prosperity levels will help you improve; you'll have the decision to play longer, resuscitates, and get around the court less perplexing.

As a novice, you can develop your steadiness in various propensities:

Do some light running/running 2-3 times each week.

Avoiding bit by bit for 30 minutes

Play more Badminton

Cool-down and stretch in the wake of playing

Also, as immense as heating up effectively before playing is chilling off and unwinding up in the wake of playing. As a young person, it's so major to promise you to cool down continuously and stretch your muscles in a little while.

A decent cool-down will consistently slash down your inside warmth level, recommending that your muscles will not set up and turn into a web sensation superfluously quickly. Extending your muscles this way while they're warm will help improve adaptability and lessen the headway of lactic ruinous, inciting muscle endurance and squashing.

If you don't have even the remotest clue of what to remember for your cool-down, look at our guide for a reasonable Badminton cool-down step-by-step practice.

Related solicitations

How could I improve my badminton limits?

Try and practice at any rate 2-3 times each week, without help from some other individual or partner, and work on unequivocal limits pondering a conspicuous objective. By and large, the quicker procedure to improve your abilities is to set up considerably more dependably with mindful practice.

[alarawriting]

Inktober #5: Build

The Diwar are famed throughout the galaxy (well, to be pedantic, the general area of the Local Arm) as engineers and inventors. They are well known for the quality of their work, their scientific advancements, and the skill with which they implement theory into practical reality. (Also, their great love of beer, which has led to an unlikely friendship between the Diwar and the newest species to develop spaceflight in the Local Arm, Humans.) Their interest in engineering and creation is so great that, where Humans, Kai, Luffen and other species celebrate competitions of physical skill, the Diwar’s great planetary competition is The Great Build, an engineering competition.

Remember that the person at the bottom of the medical school graduating class is called “doctor”, and you will have some idea what the Proud-Crested Hyperpurples are like. Every competition has a large number of teams involved, and someone’s got to be on the bottom.

The Hyperpurples are the team of Fillit Province, a northern, rather chilly and rocky demesne on the homeworld which is primarily known for fishing. Yes, this is not a bad Human speculative fiction where all the people of a planet have the same professions and behave the same way. Not all Humans work in the fiction industry, not all Kai are warriors, and not all Diwar are great engineers. The people of Fillit Province are proud of their Build team, though; despite the fact that the Hyperpurples have literally come in last in the last four competitions, Fillito are loyal. After all, for a tiny fishing province without even a great university to be able to field a team at all, let alone one that even made it into The Great Build, is an amazing accomplishment. The accomplishment is not that the fisher-Diwar are great engineers in comparison to the rest of their people, but that they are engineers at all.

The problem is that the competition keeps itself from getting stale by kicking out any team that is in the bottom 10th percentile for five competitions in a row. If the Hyperpurples don’t perform better than at least ten percent of the other teams this year, they’re dead in the water. Loyal followers in their hometowns will be deeply disappointed. (Diwar are known for their passion as much as for their love of engineering. Disappointing a Diwar usually results in unpleasant consequences, such as finding that your personal conveyance has been disassembled and its parts strewn about your property.) Family members will declaim at length about the tragedy… and how members of the team who scraped and saved to leave Fillito Province to get a good education at a decent engineering school should have stayed home and caught fish for a living. Funds that were flowing into the Hyperpurples’ bank accounts from the sales of merchandise to their loyal fans will dry up.

“We could try to do something safe. Something respectable,” Irta said, nervously pulling at the feathers along the shoulder of his large-arm. There weren’t many left. Irta, like all of them, had been under a lot of stress lately. “Maybe a conveyance for a non-standard environment? Something that would work in, I don’t know, 20 g?”

“Boring!” Bakoon declared, with a wide wave of his own large-arm and a fluff of his crest. “We need to capture the imaginations of the public! To come in 11th percentile or higher, we can’t do something mean and pedestrian; beyond a contest of engineering skill, this is a contest of ideas!”

“Besides, it’s not as if we can win on our engineering skill,” Rikwaal said sardonically, her small-arms busily occupied with inputting because Rikwaal liked to look as if she was so important to the team, her work never stopped. She was actually a project manager, so the truth was, without a project to engage in, she didn’t have anything to do either.

“Speak for yourself,” the team’s other female, Enshru, snapped. “You can’t win on engineering skill because you are not an engineer.”

“Judging from our performance the last four years, neither are the rest of you,” Rikwaal said.

“Guys, could we stop arguing? This isn’t getting us any closer to the prize,” Le’ir said. He was young, and very earnest, but well-respected for his comportment, his friendliness, his alcohol tolerance, and his ability to go for three days without sleep at crunch time and still have his work come out as competition-quality. “We need a really new idea. Something to shake things up.”

“I agree!” Bakoon said. “Regardless of our skill at engineering, one of our metrics is viewership. Get enough Diwar to follow us and it won’t matter if we fail spectacularly and blow something up. We’d at least come in higher than 11th percentile, if everyone following the competition followed us as a focus-team.”

Enshru snorted. “It sounds like you think this competition is one of those Human things where the Humans with big muscles pretend to wrestle each other! This isn’t about show business, it’s about making something that makes people take notice of us!”

“Which we have never accomplished before,” Rikwaal said, “and therefore, it really seems implausible that we’d manage it this time.”

“I like the idea of making a conveyance,” Irta complained. “We could make it a really sleek one. Give it some real power and maneuverability.”

“We’re not manufacturers of conveyances, dear boy,” Bakoon said in the most patronizing tone imaginable. “We’re manufacturers of spectacle. We’re here to impress! To have audacious ideas that no Diwar has had before – or has succeeded at, or has done as well at – and then to implement them in a tremendous way!” Every time he spoke with emphasis, Bakoon’s crest fluffed. His large-arms gesticulated wildly as he strutted. “We need something fantastic, something spectacular!”

“So that, even if we fail miserably, everyone tunes in to watch us blow ourselves up?” Enshru said.

“Well, by preference I would rather not explode, but yes, that’s the idea.”

“Can I make a suggestion?” Le’ir said. “This may sound like a stupid idea…”

“Oh, go ahead,” Enshru said. “It can’t be worse than Irta’s conveyances.”

“Hey!”

“I think we should bring in a Human.”

Bakoon, who’d been dipping his beak-like snout into his wine glass, spat out everything that was in his mouth. “What?”

“You’re right,” Irta said. “That does sound like a stupid idea.”

“Hate to agree with Irta,” Enshru said, “but when he’s right…”

“Please share with me the name of your supplier,” Bakoon said. “It’s evident that your drugs are of the highest quality.”

Rikwaal cocked her head to the side. “Well, now. You wanted spectacle, and let’s be honest; it’s not as if adding a Human could make this team any worse.”

“Hear me out,” Le’ir said. “All sarcasm aside, we know our skills aren’t up to 11th percentile; we’ve come in last for four years.”

“We did better five years ago,” Enshru said.

“That was five years ago. Either the competitors are getting tougher or we’re getting weaker. Not the point. Now, the metrics are based on three factors, right? The creativity of the idea, the skill of the implementation, and the degree to which the audience is following us specifically.”

“Thank you for explaining things we all already know.” Enshru lifted her head and tilted it sideways, her sharp eyes focusing on Le’ir. “I am sure none of us had any idea how this competition we’ve been performing in for nearly a decade now works.”

Le’ir huffed. “Let me talk, Enshru.” He glared back at her. She reached her left small-arm over to her left large-arm and began grooming the feathers there, backing down while pretending not to have lost face. “So. Skill of implementation’s worth the most, obviously, and that’s where we have our greatest weakness. But if we could do really well on the other two, we’d have a chance. And Humans are well known to take shortcuts, and use, mm, creative means of getting around limitations.”

“You mean human-rigging their stuff?” Irta smirked.

“That’s racist, Irta,” Rikwaal said coolly, making it clear that she didn’t care but as the project manager she had to pretend to.

“Oh, come on, they’re so known for it we named it for them.”

“Yes, that would be the racist part.”

“So they’d be a focus of interest just for that. What crazy idea will the Human come up with? What stupid and yet feasible methods will they implement? Will they go the long way around in a really entertaining way? Will they use nonsensical materials and overengineer it so they work? Or is it going to blow up in their, and our, faces?”

“Hmm,” Bakoon said. “I’m beginning to see where you’re going with this.”

“Plus, a Human has never been on one of our teams before. I think we’ve only ever had two aliens, ever, and neither of them were Human. So they’ll be interesting for that reason.”

“Do you think we can possibly get enough points just from views that it’ll compensate for poor skill and lack of creative ideas?” Rikwaal asked – not sarcastically, but as if she genuinely thought he was considering that idea, and wondering if she should too.

“No, because lack of creative ideas won’t be a problem. We’ll have a Human. Creative ideas are what they’re known for.”

“Creative, completely impractical ideas,” Enshru said.

“But gloriously impractical!” Bakoon said. “Yes, I see what you’re thinking, Le’ir. A Human’s creativity, plus the engineering skills of a team of Diwar… even if our implementation fails spectacularly, we’ll gain enough from creativity and from the curiosity value of a Human competing that we’ll stand a chance! And if we should not fail at implementation, because the Human gives us ridiculous ideas that work nonetheless and then we work them out with Diwar rigor, we may enter the 20th or 30th percentile. Comfortably.”

“I don’t like it! It’s making a mockery of the whole competition!” Irta complained.

“Well, let’s vote on it,” Le’ir said reasonably.

Le’ir, Bakoon and Rikwaal all voted yes. Irta and Enshru voted no.

“That settles that, then,” Rikwaal said.

“Wait!” Irta said. “We never asked Mip! For something like this? Working with a human? Having to make sure they have the right food and the right bathroom facilities available? We have to give Mip a vote!”

Mip was an engineer of a completely different type – he was the facilities guy, managing the computational arrays, the food service, the cleanliness of the workspace. Irta had a good point – Mip would be one of the ones most impacted by the presence of an alien.

However, when they brought him upstairs to vote and explained the situation to him, he said, “You dragged me away from my work for this? Unbelievable.”

“But you get a vote,” Irta said. “You’d be the one to have to do all the extra work if we bring on a human!”

“I’d be doing extra work if you expanded the team to add another Diwar, too,” Mip said, “and don’t pretend you care about my workload, Mr. I’m-going-to-shed-my-feathers-all-over-the-arrays. Do whatever you guys want, I don’t care if you want a Human or a giant frog.” (Technically he did not say frog; the creature he was referring to was an aquatic reptile rather than an amphibian, and usually the size of a Human head, but in most other respects it strongly resembled a frog.) “Just let me get back to my work.”

As he stomped off, making sure they could hear every clatter of his talons on the deck plating, Bakoon said, “So, Le’ir, my boy. Let’s talk. How were you planning to recruit your Human?”

“I hadn’t really thought that far,” Le’ir said. “I wasn’t sure you guys would agree.”

“And personally, I don’t,” Enshru said.

“Yes, yes, we know, Enshru. You’ve made your opinion abundantly clear,” Bakoon said. “Well. My family has trade dealings with Humans; I’ve dealt with them often. Let me be the one to find a Human for the team.”

“This is a bad idea,” Irta said, “and it’ll probably end badly.”

Rikwaal smirked. “But it’ll be such fun to watch before it does.”

[bma-2020]

Okiedok here’s the delio. I have a list of all the blogs from the last six months who’s actively either responded to a meme i sent, responded to a message ive sent, replied to something regarding mally herself, has actually written with me, written a starter for me from my liking a starter call, has at least liked a starter i wrote for them to awknowedge it exists, all that jazz, i have a lot of open field so it’s not just a possible tumblr didnt let them no option anymore, because i send memes to everyone who posts them that i see. I reply to most peoples ooc posts. I like most starter calls I pass by. I try my darndest to actually interact bc i know how it feels to be ignored and its… i’ve been called one before so i’m using the word, thats fluffing cunty behavior, and honestly if you complain about not being interacted with but never even try when i try with you, ya being cunty, end of. I gotta list. That list only entails Mally because she’s who I care about the most. I’m probably gonna start instilling a new rule in all my blogs that if you ignore Mally and/or Darcy( @tasedandconfused ), since I would say they’re my two main blogs tho darcy gets ignored even more than mally does, probably bc i denied canon and left it entirely we know fandom hates that, if either of them is ignored then… Ya out of luck, I’m gonna unfollow you. I’m debating soft blocking everyone who ignored me on both of them but I don’t want to like be mean and deny the chance to eventually try again but at the same time i shouldnt feel bad for taking a stand and saying this is bullsheet, idk my anxiety says im awful for giving a fluff about myself but also i should give a fluff about myself probably, ive nearly died in the last three months, my brain almost exploded, i just had three root canals on one corner of my face, i have to potentially get surgery on my inner ear which i cant even afford, i dont got time to deal with only being used for like smut memes or like as a resource blog or utter bs like that, i dont got time for it. So new rules here. 1: If Mally or Darcy are not acknowledged, written with, responded to, viewed as more than just their fluffing bodies? ya dropped, im unfollowing, potentially soft blocking, which means blocking and unblocking for those not in the know, on all accounts I follow you on. Every single one. I know most of my muses are on sideblogs but despite not being able to send memes from sideblogs you can block people from sideblogs fun fact, i will do that if i have to. 2: I’m gonna be posting SCs, PCs, memes, etc. I like and respond to plotting calls, starter calls, i send memes, all of that. If I don’t get any response within.. I’m giving one week for people who don’t run on a queue and a month and a half to people on a queue based system, if i dont get anything within that time like at least an im being like ‘its posted’ or ‘its queued i wanted to let you know in case tumblrs a fluffbutt’ (i do this sometimes if i dont get even just a like on the starters i post so i at least know people saw it since i know tumblrs bs, i wait until the day they’re active to do so in case theyre busy yknow) basically i need acknowledgment at all. No you can’t claim this is abt follower count bc when you unfollow someone they inevitably unfollow you too, thats gonna drop my following, not as quickly as soft blocking would but i wanna be fair i guess, which leads to: 3: I’m basing this on your activity too, like if i like a think and you’re gone for a month after that its fine, im not gonna unfollow you unless you never come back or youre online and posting others just not mine because that tells me youre specifically ignoring me and im gonna drop you for that end of. I’m done with the bullsheet im done w the dillish behavior, i love friendship but if im giving and never receiving thats extremely one way and not gonna work. I check through my follow list weekly and i go back about five-10 pages on someones feed before i unfollow them to see their actual activity and see if theyre here or if its a q so. I’m thorough basically. 4: You dont have to be active with me on all your blogs, i mean i’d prefer it but thats hard as fluff so essentially if you have like five blogs and are just like trying w me on two or three thats fine. Ten blogs, four or five with at least a plot formed is cool. Multis just one muse is all I’d need. I’m not gonna unfollow the blogs youre not writing w me on if you at least write w me on some. Again, specifically Mally and/or Darcy. If you ignore both of them, we’re done. I havent been active on darcy because of being ignored and its a huge butt mess and im just tired i wanna use my babies, you don’t get to have my ‘better’ muses like i know a lot of ppl only follow me for my boys or my villains, you don’t get them if you ignore my baby. But, there is a limit there too. 5: If you never respond to a meme or thread even once with Mally or Darcy, or post a starter, i reply, its never replied to again after a month, I’m unfollowing and/or soft blocking for that too. Bc that means youre just raising my hopes to fluff with me or get someone else and honestly, youre even more cunty than than the people just flat out ignoring me if you do that. And this isnt a specific person, this is five of the people actually on my list. Yes, my list is also annotated with specifics again I was very thorough on this yesterday, I hyperfixated I’ll admit it, I’m in a fluffing depressionary bubble and being told to get over it because people want something they dont deserve to have to. I am a believer that people deserve good things but if youre purposefully being cunty… no you dont. 6: No I’m not releasing my list, maybe I will and I’ll omit the urls because I don’t want people being buttholes to each other too but otherwise, yall not seeing it im not giving a callout because… really thats just unnecessary here. I don’t think yall are toxic people or something i just think yall are unintentionally being cunty. And no I don’t mean everyone that follows me i mean the ppl that add up to what i’ve documented so far and fit the bill of butthat that i’ve shown, its behaviors yall gotta check before ya wreck. Yes there will be some people who have priority, everyone has those people, I write w kathryn on other platforms since she doesnt go on here as often but when Kathryn returns from war here (if she does cause she also agrees most ppl on this platform are cunty, i feel really bad saying that word so often but im gonna keep doing it i recently deleted an ask saying I was a huge cunt for not sending someone smut memes when I didn’t even follow them or know they existed so, again the travesty of this place is nutballers) same with owly, alex is here too, my most active partners are always going to be priority because theyre the ones who show the most interest and the most care. I understand that with others as well which is why I have the timeframe set up, because I want to be as open and shizz as possible while atill being firm i guess. I don’t want to have extreme double standards like its impossible for double standards not to exist at least a little bit but I want to avoid a golden chest full of them I guess. 7: I don’t have a seven rn, this was an even number and it bothered me. Seven is nust my warning that I’m bittery writing this on mobile so formatting is not real but i tried my dandest to make this look like something people might actually mind. I dont want to be butty, i dont want to be awful, i dont want to start drama or have drama but that shizz comes around anyways so i might as well make my space as okay for me as i can cause im supposed to avoid stress so my brain doesnt almost explode again, like again i almost fluffing died i dont need ppl fake being my friend or anything, i want stuff to be real and clear. I want to be happy to be on here again and have fun like i used to since my health is plummetting and I’m not allowed to go outside near plants by myself anymore because i welt up. I have plants outside my work place and im surrounded by chemicals all day long I’m welted from here to new york constantly and never comfortable in my own skin because of it and constantly see people online acting like these actual real problems are pretentious because ‘its an excuse’ when, im a fluffing sagittarius, do you know how much i want to magically be a millionaire so i can pay for friends and my own medical stuff and go on traveling and adventures, be outside probably not camping bc as a pagan i know thats a death sentence but like be outside, lay on grass, go back to swimming because i used to swim competitively and due to health reasons i can barely even go in a pool anymore because theres too much sunlight which, bit plot twist i know, im fluffing allergic to vitamin D and the rays of the sun, so go figure, attempts to be healthy kill me more, i also cant eat most plants and am constantly dying from just eating food, they dont know whats wrong with me. i cant fix it by going ve/gan for a month inf act i tried and it almost made my heart stop thanks society. These arent excuses these are the lives of disabled and diseased and to a lesser but still very real point, ethnic lives every fluffing day. This is real shit and its murder and online and gaming? It may be all I have soon since I can’t just go out and make new friends cause, again, I’d fluffing die. I get sick going to the mall or the movie theater, I miss theme parks so much but have to minimize it to weeks i dont have work so i dont get fired for having a welt while working in the beauty industry. I may have to get a degree online and change my field entirely because of my illness that nobody understands. People even make fun of it constantly online and I wish I could just drop online entirely because of how unbelievably ableist the entirety of the world is, i wish i could drop humans in general for their ableism, but i cant. I don’t have choices in most cases, but throwing away people who maybe purposefully maybe unintentionally thats why i’m giving you this warning and will be repeating this warning for awhile, this is where i have choice. I have to use what little choice I have in life while I can since everytime i go to movies or a concert or a theme park i almost die because of not having an immune system that functions or being in certain air qualities pr being near plants or unclean people, I may not have much time and I gotta do whats best for what little mental health I have, and if that means dropping people i care about and really want to write with and do things with but who ignore me then, i guess so be it.

[awesomelephuoclocblog-blog]

WHSR Web Hosting Reviews

https://lephuocloc.com/three-for-one-hosting-review/

There are six essential perspectives we examine when we assess a web have: Server execution, fundamental features, customer administration, usability, association reputation and verifired customer analysis, similarly as cost. We plan test areas at encouraging associations ourselves and use a 80-control plan toward rate the idea of an encouraging organization. You can get acquainted with how we rate a web have here.

* Earning Disclosure: WHSR gets compensation from our site content. We get paid when our customers make a purchase by methods for our referral joins.

How to Choose the Right Web Host?

How might we pick if a web have is worthy? Do information move limit and plate accumulating features regardless of everything matter these days? Which sort of encouraging organization would it be a smart thought for you to go with?

Let me help you with finding the reactions to these requests and that is just a hint of something larger. I'll control you on the way with a complete walkthrough to ensure all you know exactly how to pick the right web encouraging.

Web Host Selection Checklist

There are such colossal quantities of factors drew in with assessing and picking a web have - that it could overwhelm by far most. Here are 16 concentrations to encounter before you get your new web have.

1. Know Your Hosting Needs

You can never get the right web have without grasping what you need. So before you go any further – put everything in a safe spot (checking this guide you are examining) and consider what you genuinely need.

What kind of site would you say you are building?

Do you need something typical (a WordPress blog, possibly)?

Do you need Windows applications?

Do you need support for a specific substance (for instance PHP)?

Does your site need extraordinary programming?

How enormous (or little) can your web traffic volume go?

These are a bit of the basic requests you need to react in due request in regards to yourself.

Picture in your mind what you need your site to be as of now, by then develop that idea until you're around a year before that. Don't just consider what you have to offer, yet likewise what may need or need.

This in the long run boils down to one outstandingly clear assurance. What measure of advantages will your site need? In case you are running an individual blog or little to medium webpage, it is outlandish that you will require the extra capacities of a VPS have.

In case you are keeping up a colossal business server or doing a lot of eCommerce works out, by then a VPS or submitted server may be relied upon to manage a greater volume of traffic similarly with respect to the extra steadfastness.

At the day's end, each choice has its own cost level and features, even among the two classes of web encouraging I've portrayed here. Thought ought to be paid to detail and composed with the necessities of your site.

If you are totally new…

For fledglings, the direct standard is start little with a not too bad shared encouraging record.

A typical encouraging record is humble, easy to keep up, and sufficient for most new goals. It moreover lets you base on building your site without worrying over other server-side assignments, for instance, database backing and server security.

Alos, in light of the fact that encouraging plans are versatile nowadays, it is more intelligent to start close to nothing and work your way up as your site traffic increases. It will be more cost-capable and grant your organization capacities to scale typically with your site traffic.

2. Server Reliability/Uptime Scores

Nothing is a higher need than having a 24×7 working web have, taking everything into account, your visitors may go to your site from time areas wherever all through the world. You need a web have which is consistent, both seeing their servers similarly as framework affiliations. 99.95% is seen as a standard these days, regardless, for shared encouraging records; anything underneath 99% is inadmissible. Premium records often brag of 99.99% or better uptimes.

There are different ways to deal with get web have uptime information. The least perplexing way to deal with do so is by examining our encouraging studies – where we disseminate uptime records from time to time (see tests underneath).

Of course, you can essentially follow your web have with server checking instruments – an impressive parcel of these contraptions are available either to no end, or in any occasion offer a period for testing. They are viable and especially easy to use.

Models: Uptime tests circulated at WHSR

We underscore uptime a ton in our encouraging reviews, underneath are some past records we gathered using Uptime Robot. We have moreover impelled HostScore (an automated uptime following mechanical assembly) back in September 2019, I propose the people who need certifiable uptime record go take a gander at.

3. Server Upgrading Options

There are different sorts of encouraging servers available in feature: Shared, VPS, submitted, and cloud encouraging.

Basic encouraging

Basic encouraging is routinely the best choice for students, bloggers, and individual website owners since it's the most economical kind of web encouraging, costing around $5 – $10 consistently.

With shared encouraging plans, you'll be conferring your server resources for various customers, which suggests you pay less for the encouraging since its cost is shared among various customers.

Who should go with shared encouraging?

All around, if you're getting under 5,000 visitors for consistently, by then it's more brilliant to go for shared encouraging. Right when your site gets more noteworthy and you're getting more visitors, you should move to an even more great server.

What Is Shared Hosting?

Basic Hosting: Cheaper, easy to keep up; obliged server control and power.

VPS encouraging

A Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting resembles common encouraging in that it shares one physical server. What is important is that you have your own server resources that is discrete from various customers.

With VPS encouraging, it's basically a phase up from shared encouraging the extent that power and speed yet is up 'til now more affordable than getting your own submitted server. Dependent upon the CPU and memory (RAM) that you get, VPS encouraging can cost wherever between $50 to $200 consistently.

What Is VPS Hosting

VPS Hosting: More server control and power; pricier than shared encouraging.

Cloud encouraging

Cloud encouraging consolidates a few individual servers to function as one goliath server. The idea with cloud-based web encouraging is that you can without a very remarkable stretch scale up and overhaul your server needs when fundamental.

For example, on the off chance that you're suddenly stood up to with a peculiarly colossal proportion of web traffic, you don't have to worry over being shut down since the encouraging association can without a doubt suit the surge of traffic by including more server resources.

The assessing for cloud encouraging will by and large vary as they usually use a sort of a remuneration for-what-you-use esteeming structure.

What Is Cloud Hosting?

Cloud Hosting: Extremely versatile and cost capable; increasingly extraordinary desire to retain data to start.

Dedicated encouraging

Given server encouraging is where you have an entire physical server that is focused on your site. Notwithstanding the way that you have full control of your server resources, anyway you similarly don't have to worry over various destinations taking up your advantages and moving back your site down.

For destinations that are greater and have a more prominent proximity, a dedicated server is regularly endorsed in order to manage the high proportion of traffic. The cost of a submitted server is out and out higher than shared encouraging and you can plan to pay from $100 or all the more consistently.

What Is Dedicated Hosting?

Submitted Hosting: Great server power and full server control; require most prominent cost and capacities.

Important Tip:

Common web has are momentous and ordinarily satisfactory for new customers. If you envision that your site ought to grow genuinely brisk, by then consider getting a virtual private (VPS) or committed server for increasingly vital dealing with power, memory limit, circle storing, and perhaps updated security features.

Good encouraging associations that offer every one of the four encouraging other options (Shared/VPS/Dedicated/Cloud) include: A2 Hosting, InMotion Hosting, and SiteGround.

4. Distinctive Addon Domains

Territory names are humble – so unobtrusive in actuality that it is routinely hard to contradict not having mutiple.

I without a doubt own more than 50 territory names in my GoDaddy and NameCheap accounts – and I'm not alone. As demonstrated by this Web Hosting Talk's review – 80% of the voters own more than 5 spaces and over 20% of the voters own more than 50!

To oblige these extra territories, we need extra encouraging space. This is the explanation it is basic to have a web encouraging record that licenses including various regions.

Quest for web have with more than 50 addon region

Generally speaking, most spending arrangement very much arranged shared encouraging associations license at any rate 25 addon domains* in one record nowadays yet you can never be sure. A couple of years earlier I was unwise and joined on a web have that grants only a solitary zone. Deplorably, I was holding more than 10 halted regions around at that point. Do whatever it takes not to go over my slip up – check as far as possible before you make a purchase.

https://lephuocloc.com/three-for-one-hosting-review/

https://lephuocloc.com/

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Moth Work Intro + False Idol | Writing Update

Hey People of Earth! 

Today I thought I’d do a writing update on a project I’ve mentioned a lot in my vlogs but haven’t mentioned as of yet on here! This is a personal ‘passion project’ that I’ve been picking away at since January and have recently taken on as my transition project from Rewired to my next book.

So yee! MOTH WORK (or ‘boys on a boat’ for those who keep up with the vlogs lols) has been my current project for the last few weeks since finishing REWIRED. I didn’t really mean to expand it as much as I have as it simply started off as a spinoff story of my boys Lonan and Harrison which I write every few months when I’m having a breakdown and need something to cheer me up. :-)

I’ve mentioned a few of these stories in the past (like Fishbowl and Mandarin), though this story is a bit different, as I’ve expanded it quite a lot more than I intended to! If you aren’t super caught up with Rewired, I’d definitely scroll through a few of my last updates so this one will make more sense! 

What’s it about? 

Moth Work is a FOSTERED spinoff story following Lonan and Harrison (dumb+dumber) at the peak of their relationship. I *was saying* that the plot went loosely as follows: after finding a photograph of a woman in Lonan’s father’s dark room, they set out to find her, HOWEVER, because I never stick to plans, I have yet to follow through with this main plot thread, lol. Vaguely, I’d just say the most important part of this story is their relationship at its most fragile because who is plot I don’t know her. 

Moth Work follows the events after REWIRED, and is a bit of a bridge between it and the next book. This makes it kind of hard to explain because a) it’s in a different POV, and b) context, but hopefully that makes sense! In essence: Lonan + Harrison’s relationship is big sad and Harrison tries to make it less big sad and it gets even more big sad. 

I’ll share a very quick profile of both of the boys so there’s some context for the following excerpts I’ll share!

Harrison

My boy

Generally very outgoing, tho around Lonan this fizzles. Only wants the best for Lonan despite their history. He’s the ‘main’ narrator of the piece (third limited to him though I’m guilty of head hopping lol), so the work has a softer tone than I’m used to. Though Harrison tries to be a Macho Man, around Lonan he’s most himself--mellow, a lil stupidly romantic, and vulnerable. 

Lonan

My problematic son/probably should be cancelled 

The “issue” in the relationship loool. He’s emotionally immature and lacks accountability, but because of his past, lacks the ability to recognize these faults and work on them. Because of this, he’s fundamentally stayed the same for the last few works he’s been in (if not gotten worse). Lonan requires a lot of emotional assistance, though he isn’t self-aware enough to recognize this. This is often the cause of much conflict. 

Conception:

Like I mentioned, I often write short spinoff stories following these boys because it’s a safe happy place for when I’m feeling stressed. This is basically how this piece started, though I’ve continued it for different reasons which I’ll get into. I don’t remember how the first scene was brainstormed, but I do know when I started writing this a few months ago, I wanted it to be a lot longer than my previous stories--a place where I could just dump my writing, even when it wasn’t good. I think I did this to cope with the stress of my writing class honestly, lol, I think I needed a break from ‘serious’ writing AKA a place I could just goof off and have some fun. 

The writing bit: 

Writing this story has been a bit inconsistent. I’ve been drafting it in little pieces since the beginning of the year, and only recently picked it up as more of a ‘full-time’ work. This is subject to change depending on whether or not I get more of book 7 done. I’ve gone from writing 20 words a day to 0 to 1000--there’s really no consistency with the drafting process here. 

I have recently decided that I’ll most likely expand this into either a novella or novel itself because there is literally so much tea left to explore and it’s surpassed 10k words. Drafting Moth Work has been so helpful in easing me back into the world of FOSTERED and piecing together the huge time gap from the end of book 6 to the start of book 7. I’ve been a bit anxious to really dive into book 7 for the fear of the unknown, so inching myself closer to that timeline through this project has been very helpful!

The editing bit:

I recently did an edit around the line level for this entire piece (it’s about 12k words right now) because a) it really needed it b) I was losing steam/starting to get embarrassed and c) I needed a refresher of what had happened because je suis tres forgetful. This edit made me feel so much better about the project. It initially started off as a work where the writing didn’t actually matter and this mentality was working until I got so embarrassed of the prose I found it difficult to read through old scenes to refresh myself and thus couldn’t productively draft. 

This project isn’t written exactly in my usual style--it’s pretty stripped back and actually reminds me a lot of how my style would’ve been in book 3 had I been a better writer four years ago lol. I think the looser style works for the voice/the story itself but I def wouldn’t categorize this as litfic (what I usually write). Although the prose isn’t very complex, it took me a really long time to get comfortable enough to edit?? But once I got into the rhythm of it a few days ago, I completed the edit fairly quickly, and I’m 100% feeling better about the project overall! Though the prose is still not my top priority I’m not as embarrassed of it currently lols. 

I also divided the project into chapters because it was getting pretty long to just be one mass of text. I currently have 3 chapters. This update will cover chapter 1. 

Playlist:

Yo this is literally the best part of writing this project, lol, I get to listen to so much different music?? I’ve made a comprehensive playlist for this story with a character by character breakdown (if anyone wants to see that/highlights, let me know!). This playlist pulls from every song from my library, so we span genres and artists like crazy. Nothing But Thieves has been the primary artist for this story (specifically their self-titled album). These songs (all NBT oop) are the most relevant if you want to get the general tone lol (anything with a star has explicitly inspired the project):

Excuse Me*

Honey Whiskey*

Tempt You (Evocatio)*

If I Get High (II)

Gods

Lover, Please Stay*

I Was Just A Kid*

Get Better

Hell, Yeah*

Afterlife

Reset Me

Particles

Sorry

Number 13

Excerpts:

I don’t have *many* because prose hasn’t really been a top priority for this project, but I’ll try to include at least one per scene. 

This is one of the opening paragraphs from chapter one which I’ve titled ‘False Idol’. In short, the chapter follows the boys first attempting to destroy the dark room and then getting distracted and eventually not pulling through after Harrison finds a picture of Ominous Lady. 

The chapter’s chronology is wild so we can break it up as follows:

Scene A

The boys enter the dark room with the intention of burning it down

Harrison reaches for his lighter and drops it which prompts him to find the photograph of Ominous Lady

Him and Lonan mildly argue about Ominous Lady until Lonan takes it too seriously and throws a tantrum :-DD

Scene B

Not really a full scene, just a bridge between scene A and C.

Harrison has been waiting for Lonan to return to their campsite for the entire day and he decides to at the very last moment

“hey so i’m unable to apologize for anything but also! cigarette! let’s share it! lungs!” 

Scene C

The boys exercising their canoeing skills

This leads us to our first “beat”.

Lonan interrupts Harrison’s peaceful evening by having a mild crisis

This takes place right after the events of Lolita, Lolita (chapter 16 of REWIRED). We then jump back to the fictive present.

 This alternates like 5 more times lol then the chapter is done!

The following excerpt describes their entry into the dark room. Don’t know how smart it is to be smoking in a room full of highly flammable material but we out here.

I don’t think she’s particularly special but I also don’t hate her so!! hoping an aesthetic photo will make it read better :’)) I ! don’t ! think ! it does ! but !

Harrison shoulders the door first, traps it open with the clip of his boot. Dust and streaks of light rake behind him as he pushes through cardboard boxes, mountains of photo paper on the ground. Lonan follows silently, still wearing Harrison’s jacket. Trails of smoke from his cigarette catch in the negatives hanging by the clothespins, chemical peel between the layers of ink. In one hand he tends to his cigarette, and in the next, lugs in the canister of gasoline they found in the cabin’s cellar. As Harrison fumbles for his flashlight, Lonan sets it down by the table so it sloshes like the Pacific. 

This is a bit of when Harrison finds the photograph of Ominous Lady:

He turns the photograph over, and shines the flashlight on it. It’s scratched and developed wrong, little bits of orange obscuring the woman’s face, but it’s very much a woman. A dark bob and bangs in her eyes, jewelry hanging from her septum. Sunshades enough to reflect the European street behind her. The discreet jet of ink on her skin, blues and greens peeking out from under her sleeve. Izzy, he recognizes. Lonan’s mother. 

Nudging Lonan with an elbow, “I didn’t know your mom has tattoos.” 

Lonan takes the photograph cautiously, holding it by the corners like it’ll burn him. His brow trembles, but it takes him only seconds to say, “That’s not my mom.” He takes the flashlight from Harrison and examines it closer, fingers nimble and tracing the edges. In the grey light of the dark room, he looks nullified. Just a monochromatic hum of chromosomes and skin. 

that’s not my MOM

After the boys find the photograph, Lonan gets triggered at Harrison’s suggestion to find the woman (he presumes her to be someone involved with his father) and promptly has a tantrum and exits. This leads us into the next scene where the boys! actually! get! on! boat! In this scene Lonan tries to say sorry for his tantrum by offering Harrison a cigarette (lol) and because Harrison is hopelessly romantic and also hopelessly dumb, says yeeeees sir! They go for a canoe ride on the water. Thought it was going to be sweet, ended up being a shitstorm but!

This paragraph is kind of toast but:

The canoe isn’t hard to get into the water. After a few nudges from the dock into the slow dip of tide, it stabilizes easily. Harrison is convinced it will capsize but Lonan knows it won’t. They take one ore each, and ignore the life jackets at the back of the shed.

The moon is large and mesmerizing. As Harrison and Lonan take turns pushing the canoe into the water, mast first, then its entire belly, it colours them silver. Lonan’s protected the cigarette in the pocket of his shirt. Harrison stares at its faint outline stretched under the fabric. Lonan steps into the canoe first, rocking with the current, and extends a hand for Harrison. He pulls him in and they row until the cabin is the size of a fingernail, the wave steady and dense. Each cut of the paddle feels like plunging a scalpel into flesh and Harrison watches Lonan do it easily. In the distance, the cabin doesn’t look so menacing. Reeve has left the lamp on by the loft, and it glimmers back like an eyeball, effervescent and tiny. Nothing but a reflective penny in the distance.

Here’s some Harrison being lame:

The water laps at the base of the canoe, and Ris reaches over and touches it like it’s holy. He makes the sign of the cross and it feels perverse, cold water dripping from forehead to chin.

For a while it’s quiet. Just the distant hum of crickets, the slash of the paddle, and the off-chance flash of something in the distance; an animal, a flashlight. Ris tries not to think about Lonan’s dad, like a dead man slithering through the water, following their boat. He picks at a saltine, sucks it between his tongue meditatively. Against the sky, Lonan is backlit and lovely and flecks of his hair peek up from around the jacket’s collar. Harrison wonders if as a child, everyone said he looked just like his father. 

On top of lacking accountability, Lonan is also a professional canoeist so he takes over while Harrison eats saltines and reminisces about an encounter they had weeks prior. This leads into the solid chunk of backstory that I weirdly jump in an out of for the entire chapter. :)

Backstory consists of drunk Lonan having a crisis while Harrison tries to have a peaceful evening of taping up his drawings to his bedroom ceiling. The following excerpt describes the moment right after Lonan enters the room.

Harrison’s lips secured around his cigarette, his hand mid-air with packing tape and line drawings of the moon. A tinny country song dribbled through the radio. The minute-meal he’d heat up in the microwave lying forgotten and cold on his desk. Harrison set the pile of drawings down and turned off the music.

“Emily left?” Lonan asked. He kept his face upward, stared clumsily at the ceiling. Harrison watched his eyes trace the new drawings, following the uncalculated pattern. 

This paragraph is made up of 5 similes and this is the only reason I’m sharing it :)))):

Lonan has stopped paddling. The canoe sits in the middle of the lake, lifeless, like a bone in the water. He’s turned so Harrison can see him in profile, and Ris can’t tell if it’s relieving or worrying to see his face. Lonan’s jaw is taut, like there are words he wants to say there but can’t. Filling up the hollow bone. He blinks slowly, like he’s trying to re-centre himself, his chest quivering with breaths meant to steady him. The water laps at the base of the canoe, whirling. Dark hair tangles down his cheeks like the fingers of a poltergeist. 

I think that’s a pretty good way to end this post lol! How many similes have you put in one paragraph? What’s your record lol this is probably mine!

Hope y’all enjoy the intro to MOTH WORK. I have two other chapters already written which I’ll update on in a separate post! For now I hope you like this more laid back project, let me know what you think!

---Rachel

[shaylaraquel-blog]

Is Cheerleading A Sport?

Ever wonder who thought of the idea to have girls cheering with pom poms in front of fans at a football game? Would you be surprised that it was accidentally founded by a man in 1898. Since early 1900’s  women have dominated cheerleading and have since incorporated the 4 elements that make up cheerleading; Dance, Stunting, Tumbling and Jumps.

Despite all of the hard work it takes to be a cheerleader there is still a large controversy on if cheerleading is a sport. So what makes a sport a sport? And can something that was not intended on being a sport develop into one? My answer is absolutely. Have you noticed that there are some “Sports” at the Olympics that you have never seen or heard of before? That doesn’t mean they are not a sport. Some may argue that there is not a Cheerleading event at the Olympics therefore it is not a “real” sport, well there are so  many other sports such as Football, lacrosse or the “American Sport” baseball who are not included in the Olympic games. Does this mean that they should not be considered sports but rather “ Activities”. Maybe it's the bias stereotype that cheerleading holds that it cannot be taken serious enough to be considered, maybe not making it an official sport is protecting the sport itself or maybe it doesn't meet the qualifications for it to be considered a sport, but if so what are the qualifications to have a sport considered an “official” sport? 

So what is a sport? Well according to The oxford dictionary it defines the word “Sport” as “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment”  Let's break this down, “an activity involving physical excretion”, cheerleading is very active between the four  major elements it contains. Dancing: which is movement of the entire body and uses a lot of cardio. Tumbling: being able to through your body into the air over your head and being able to land back onto your feet. Stunting: which is using your body to hold and keep another cheerleader in the air and catching them on the way down. “ Skill in which an individual or team competes” Cheerleading does involve skill and not everyone has the skills to be a cheerleader. This is why competitions started, to judge the skill level of a cheerleading team. These skills can be tested on both a school- sponsored and all star competition level as they have different rules for each. “Others for entertainment” Cheerleading started to encourage the crowd whose team was down or apart of a losing streak. As all things evolve, it became known as purposely for entertainment on the sidelines and performing during timeouts and half-time breaks. I mean part of going to watch basketball or football games is the entertainment such as the “ Laker Girls” or “ Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders”  you get to enjoy their presence and you can always count on the cheerleaders being there to be the entertainment on the sidelines regardless of how the game is actually going. Most half time performances involve cheerleaders or a collaboration with the cheerleaders and another form of entertainment. So according to the oxford dictionary’s guidelines, cheerleading is considered a sport. 

With all sports there is a risk of injury and cheerleading is not different. The American Medical Association thinks, “in the name of safety that cheerleading should be considered a sport”. Cheerleading is the only physical sport that its surface changes. Cheerleading can be done on a mat (Competition) on a hard surface such as cement ( Parade), hardwood (basketball) or track flooring (Football) and risk of injury changes depending on the surface.Part of cheerleading is stunting which has cheerleaders hold other cheerleaders above their head and even sometimes on one foot, there is definitely a high risk for injury with gravity not being on our side. Did you know that Cheerleading accounts for 65% of all direct catastrophic injuries to girl athletes at a high school level and almost 71% at the college level according to a report from the American Academy of pediatrics in 2012. Those numbers alone should draw concern to how dangerous cheerleading is and it needs to be taken more seriously. So with an activity that is potentially so dangerous why has this not been considered a sport yet? 

Unfortunately since it is not considered a sport, schools nor colleges support or claim to be liable for the safety of cheerleaders who are cheering for their own school. Did you know that there is no insurance provided to cheerleaders by the NCAA at a college level. All collegiate cheerleaders are required to have private insurance or if the school is wealthy enough the private “Club” will have insurance that is ran by their own organization or boosters. Cheerleaders are at risk of the same injuries that could happen to a football, soccer or basketball athlete that is covered by the NCAA, but they do not consider cheerleading a sport due to its “supportive, noncompetitive role in galvanizing fans to support other athletes” (A direct quote from the NCAA) while that is true, the job of a college cheerleader is to cheer on and support other athletes as well as encourage fans and student body, but in the second statement given by the NCAA is false and college cheerleaders also compete against other college cheerleaders in the college championships and therefore should be recognized as a sport.

  Could cheerleading not being recognized as a sport have something to do with the fact that it would be one of the only sports with men and women on the same team and not divided by their sex? The only other sports are pairs ice skating, pairs tennis, and luge. But unlike those sports cheerleading does not have to have an equal male to female ratio for a team to compete against another team. Maybe it's because cheerleaders are 97% women? If we look at this at a sexist standpoint, it could be because this sport is made up of mostly women.If it was recognized as a real sport more men would be inclined to join and the percentage would change. May come as a shock to some but  Cheerleading was invented by a man named John Campbell in 1898. John was very enthusiastic at a college game and on the spot made up the first ever “Cheer”.  After that cheerleading became huge first within the college community but it then grew to high school and youth levels. How exciting as that is, it was not until 1923 that they even allowed women to be cheerleaders, and women have been fighting for equality in this sport ever since. Some may argue that gymnastics is also mostly women which is also true, but 21% of gymnasts are males unlike in cheerleading where there are only 3%. So maybe cheerleading needs more men to have it be considered a sport. But if that's the case its setting women equality back 100 years.

  Some people think that cheerleading is not a sport because they think they don't have rules and regulations like traditional sports do. Cheerleading may not have a referee to enforce rules but cheerleading does have rules just like any other sport. There are time limits, legal moves, and you can be disqualified the same way you would be for a red or yellow card.  Cheerleading in fact has its own safety association called American Association of Cheerleading Coaches and Administrators ( AACCA)  as well as NFHS. They decide what stunts, tumbling and moves are legal from year to year. Movies such as a the “Bring It On” saga dramatize the rules that real cheerleaders have to follow, so all of the 3 men high stunts, belly rings and crop top uniforms are not allowed in traditional school level cheerleading.  Bring it on also makes it seem like a club and not a sport because it doesn’t show a coach but just like any other sport, cheerleaders have to have a coach. There is a try out process, practices, summer boot camps, dress uniforms, and uphold academic and honor codes. There are other rules such as; all routines can be no longer than 2 minutes and 30 seconds, there are specific stunts that they cannot do on certain surfaces ( football track vs basketball hardwood) they can stunt and tumble while the ball is in play at football games but not while in play at basketball games and those are just a few of the rules that cheerleaders have to abide by, just like any other sport.

Some people in the cheerleading community are happy that cheerleading is not officially considered a sport. Most high schools have a limit on the amount of hours a team can practice or gather together each week, since cheerleading is not considered they do not have a limit. Besides taking time to learn dances, cheers, stunts and tumbling cheerleaders have to set aside time to make posters for their school and school athletics. They prepare and plan school events such as pep rallies, homecoming, alumni and end of the year dinners. Did you know that cheerleaders do not just cheer for football and basketball but also volleyball and wrestling which makes cheerleading a year round sport. If it was considered an official sport and had the limited 12 hour a week practice/gather time limit on it, cheerleaders would not be able to do half of the things that they do for their school and their schools athletics. 

I believe that cheerleading is a sport because it requires an amazing amount of athleticism. From practices to competitions, cheerleaders face the same physical, mental and emotional obstacles that all other athletes in recognized sports face. It may not be in the Olympics or recognized by the NCAA but cheerleading is a competitive sport that will continue to evolve until the world recognizes it as what it is, a SPORT

[youknowmymethods]

Content Creator Interview #6

Hello again and welcome to our sixth interview. This time, it’s the turn of @ashockinglackofsatin to put @sunken-standard ‘s writing under the microscope. Together they chat about the early days of the Sherlock fandom, how music can influence writing, and why the I Love You scene helped end sunken’s own great hiatus.

For those who don’t know me: I am @ashockinglackofsatin on tumbr, satin_doll on AO3. My test subject...erm, sorry - interviewee - is the notorious sunken_standard, probably most famous for her two epic, novel-length stories Longer Than The Road That Stretches Out Ahead and Fumbling Toward Ecstasy, which can be found on AO3 (along with her other wonderful stories) and should be required reading for anyone aspiring to write fanfiction.

 You should know, first off, that I’m crap at doing interviews, which I discovered years ago when I had to interview musicians and various personalities as a job. I didn’t last long at that job.

 So here is Kat’s Idiotic Interview with @sunken-standard.

  satin_doll:  You’re very good at writing Sherlock’s emotional cluelessness without making him seem like an idiot or an ass. Can you talk a little about the way you see Sherlock’s character that allows you to do this?

 sunken_standard: Thank you :D  So the answer to this is going to carry through to some of the other questions, but basically, I write Sherlock as a version of myself.  I feel a kinship with the character, a highly intelligent person surrounded by idiots and so, so frustrated by it, but even more frustrated by his own brain and the inability to control it.  Probably autistic, just like I'm probably autistic (and I don't want to get into it but I'm not trying to co-opt an identity here or anything; I've tried to get a diagnosis and found out that's just not possible with my current healthcare options).

Anyway, one of my probably-autistic things is being hyper-aware of other people's emotions, but also having trouble identifying them and the appropriate responses.  At times I do lack empathy, like I honestly can't understand why someone is feeling what they're feeling because I wouldn't feel that way in the same situation and it doesn't make sense.  Sometimes I can empathize so much that it's overwhelming and I just kind of short-circuit, especially when it comes to grief or loss, and I end up being insensitive or just not saying or doing what a normal person would.

 So basically, I approach his responses to other people's emotions the way I would my own, only stripped of female socialization and self-awareness.

  satin_doll:  How much do you draw on your own life and experiences in your fics?

 sunken_standard: For scenarios and specific scenes, not a lot.  For emotional and sensory experiences, more. I haven't done very much or lived to my full potential, so it's not a very deep well on either account.  Every now and then anecdotes or details creep in (like Mars Cheese Castle and the “call me Daddy” during sex thing [which, for the record, was skeevy as fuck irl]), but most of it just comes from nowhere or stuff I saw on TV.

  satin_doll:  Both “Longer than the Road…” and “Fumbling Toward Ecstasy” are novel length stories. “Road”, however, is written without breaks/chapters. Did you ever consider breaking it up into parts or chapters? How hard was it to keep it all in one piece and how long did it take you to finish it?

 sunken_standard: When I write, I usually just start and then go 'til it's done or I burn out.  I got through three or four chapters' worth of FTE (and was on the verge of giving up until maybe_amanda convinced me not to).  Since the story wasn't nearly finished and I wanted to start putting it out into the world (mostly because I have no patience, but also because I knew there was a window to stay relevant and a large number of people were looking for a longer, meatier [cough] post-TFP fic), I decided to start posting what I had and just write as I went because I was, in hindsight, probably hypomanic and I was keeping a good pace at that point.

 I dunno, I think there was a lot more of that long-format thing happening in fic back then, where you'd have a 40k piece that only had breaks because of the word limit per post on LJ.

 As far as how long it took, I don't remember.  I know I started it February of that year and had probably a good 75% of it finished (all written at a tear, over the course of probably ten days or so, because when I was still smoking actual cigarettes I could and did do 3-5k words/ day), but then I dropped it and went on to try other ideas.  I went back to it when those other stories fizzled, and I finished it in maybe another 2-3 weeks with editing and beta reading.  I had some real problems with the ending and it was never good enough for me, but I just got to a point where I was sick of it and it was good enough.

 So basically, it's harder for me to work in chapters than it is one long piece.  There's more discipline to a chaptered work; each chapter is its own story, in a way, and each one needs to end on a certain kind of beat.  I still don't feel like I have a knack for it, and I think if I did anything long like that again I'd have to write most of it without breaks and then shoehorn them in where I could later on.

  satin_doll:  You took a long hiatus from Sherlock fic after S2, and came back for S4. What was it about S4 that sparked your writing again?

 sunken_standard: I don't really know.  I mean, the ILY was a big thing, but I think S4 gave me more to work with for the kind of things I write (all the angst and inner monologue) than S3 or TAB.  I had mixed feelings about S3.  I didn't like Mary much for a long time because she was one of Moffat's women (and anyone who's seen my tumblr knows how I feel about that), but I finally unclenched after a while because I like Amanda Abbington a lot and Mary was preferable to Sarah Sawyer (who I'm more ambiguous about now, but really didn't like for a long time because there was something about her that I read as smarmy, though now I see her reactions as more subtly uncomfortable and kind of like “what's going on/ this is weird/ John's a nice guy but is everything around him always this weird?”).  Anyway.

I did try writing a bit after S3, but I never finished any of it; I didn't really feel like there was a place in the fandom or much of a community at that time, either—at least, not like what I had been used to from the early days.  The tribe that existed wasn't my tribe (any of them).  I think I need a certain degree of shared enthusiasm to motivate me to keep writing.  Like, I have a lot of ideas for fic in other fandoms, but they're dead or never existed in the first place.  And I know I'll have some audience for the small fandoms and people will read and kudos and everything, but there's no one around to geek out with or bounce ideas off of, so it just isn't as appealing.  If I'm going to be miserable and alone while writing something, it's going to be something I can at least make money off of, y'know?

  satin_doll:  Do you edit as you go or finish the story first and go back over it to edit?

 sunken_standard: Edit as I go.  When I get stuck, I break that cardinal rule of writing and go back over what I've written and nit-pick it to death.  It's a bad habit, but at the same time, small changes have led to big developments in the course of the story later on.  I mean, I think sometimes this is why I have so many unfinished things, but I've tried just writing through and that doesn't work for me either. Once I get to the end of something, I've already made most of big cuts and done a lot of the reworking, so the beta polishing isn't as labor-intensive.  I'm one of those people that when I feel like something's finished, I don't want to have to go back to it again.  And if I didn't edit as I went, it would kind of feel like redoing the whole story and that's extremely unappealing to me.  It's kind of like baking—it's always better if you clean as you go, rather than waiting until the cake's out of the oven to do the dishes and put stuff away (which I do when I'm low on spoons, but it ends up seeming like double the work).

 satin_doll:  Do you proof it yourself or rely on someone else to proofread it for you? I’m talking technical details here, proofing as opposed to simple beta reading.

 sunken_standard: Mostly proof myself, since I edit as I go (and proofing is inevitably part of that when the mistakes just jump out).  My beta catches everything else (and she's amazing; I misuse words and just legit don't know spelling differences for a lot of things [stationary vs stationery] and I'm not great with grammar and prepositions because I'm an ignorant fucker with no education).

  satin_doll:  When did you first start writing? When did you first discover that you COULD write?

 sunken_standard: I remember writing stories as a kid, but I burned them all when I was a teenager so I don't even know what most were about or anything.  I do remember that I wrote one when I was in like 4th or 5th grade that was ST:TNG self-insert fanfic and I think the plot was me working with Data to bring Lal back. I know it was Data, because I had a huge crush on him as a kid.  I really thought I could grow up to write ST:TNG novels at that point.

 And as for CAN write—jury's still out on that one. Ask my 12th grade English teacher, who laughed in my face when I told him I was thinking of pursuing English so I could be a writer.  But before that, I had some other teachers that used to give me A+s on my creative writing assignments (despite all the spelling and grammatical errors).  In 11th grade, I had a really great teacher, Mr. Lansing, who turned me on to the good parts of American lit and really encouraged me to read (and write) what I liked, not just what other people told me I had to.  He encouraged me when I applied for the Governer's school, too. (The Governer's School is this program in PA for kids who excel; it's like a summer camp for the elite nerds.  They have a bunch of them, each for different areas—math, science, medicine, I think one that's like history/ government/ civics, and then one for the arts.  For creative writing, they take a total of 20 kids—10 for poetry and 10 for prose.  I tried for the poetry category and made the first round of cuts and went for a regional interview (with about 50 other kids, so like maybe 150 kids state-wide); long story short I didn't make it.  I was the first alternate, meaning if somebody couldn't attend, I would get their spot.  #11 out of 10.  I was so crushed, because it basically reinforced what I'd been told by other people—I was a big fish in pond too small to even piss in and there were always going to be people better than me.  I was already mostly checked-out when it came to academia and aspirations; after that there was just really no point to keep going.)

 Anyway though, I did write bits and pieces here and there even after school, thinking one day I'd get my shit together and write my own Confederacy of Dunces and then off myself (it's still a viable plan). Then, in 2008 I was recently unemployed and everything in life was shitty, so I wrote a big happy-ending fic for The Doctor and Rose.  It was kind of the right bit of media at the right time that inspired me.  More about that later though.

  satin_doll:   What/who do you think has had the biggest influence on the development of your style?

 sunken_standard: I've been asked this before, and I always feel like I'm a little pretentious and I trot out the same names (both fanfic authors and book authors), but I had a realization a while ago that I'm always missing one person—Vonnegut.  I think he's got this kind of no-bullshit way of saying things that still manages to be poetic and delicate and that's what I most aspire to.

I think a lot of my style is influenced by film, too. Some influences are probably Todd Solondz, Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, and John Waters, as far as the way I approach the reality within the story.  I think I tend to focus on a lot of the same things—the weird, the mundane, the mildly uncomfortable—but I don't go nearly as far in any direction.  I think even the way I string scenes together and the shifting of focus within my scenes between action, dialogue, and inner monologue are influenced by cinematography.  I always say I'm just transcribing the movie in my head, so I mean, there's bound to be some kind of influence.

  satin_doll:  You’re noted for the banter between your characters, humorous and otherwise. Do you have rules/profiles for characters that establish their voices for you? Are there things, for example, that you think Sherlock or Molly simply would never say/do or would always say/do? How structured are these characters in your head when you start writing?

 sunken_standard: It varies slightly from story to story/ universe to universe, but I think I have patterns for the banter (and I have a different set for Sherlock and John, and Sherlock and Mycroft, but there are common threads throughout).  As for comedy, it's not quite straight man/ funny man, but I tend to default to Sherlock being more literal and deadpan and Molly being more expressive and emotive. I use the scraps of the dynamic the show's given us and just build on that.  It's kind of formulaic, actually: Sherlock does a not-good thing (degree of severity varies), Molly reacts with a blend of annoyance and amusement while going along for the ride.

 I have a kind of mental file for things I think would be out of character for each of them, but sometimes I like to try to find a way to get to one of those things and slip it into a fic organically.  One of the reason I liked doing the one-line prompt fics so much was that so many of them could easily have been intros to the kind of fluff that makes me gag; I'm no fool, though, and I love me some low-hanging fruit, so I just adjust it to my tastes.  I'm a never-say-never kinda gal.  Mostly.

 That being said, there are a lot of things that I think would take a lot of doing to make them be in-character.  I don't think they'd ever use pet names for each other unless it was through gritted teeth or with at least a bit of irony (like how I used “yes, dear,” in FTE, and I think in some of the universes in Ficlet Cemetery).  I can't see Sherlock ever doing housework unless it was for a case (though dishes and sanitizing surfaces are an exception, because both those chores are tangent to the kind of cleaning up after oneself one does in a lab setting, and imo that fits with his logic).  I can't see him being very affectionate in public, except under rare circumstances when he might do an arm around the shoulders or a guiding palm to the small of the back.

 And as for structure, I think they all start with the same scaffolding, but in every new universe they get draped slightly differently according to variations in backstory or tone or genre or whatever. Or like, they're already sculpted, but the lighting changes.  I think that as I write, they take on different nuances and acquire more depth, though.  Like it wasn't really until a few chapters in to FTE that I got a fuller picture of the Molly I was writing, even though I had the rough idea of her backstory from pretty much the beginning.  Same with Longer Than the Road, too.  As I come up with details of someone's past, I experience those scenarios and it makes me rethink and fine-tune everything about them in what I've already written, and adds more texture as I keep going.

  satin_doll:  You’ve listed a playlist for “Longer than the Road…” Do you write to music? How much does music inspire your writing? Does every story have a playlist?

 sunken_standard: It's funny, but I don't listen to music nearly as much as I did even 5 years ago.  Not sure why, honestly, maybe something to do with my mental health and overstimulation?  So I don't write to music much anymore.  Not every story has a playlist or songs attached (I don't think any of the FC stuff does, at least not in any significant way), but it seems like my best work is inspired by music in some way.

 FTE didn't really have a soundtrack, but I listened to a lot of the music I had in common with the version of Molly that I was writing—very 90s alternative and pop rock.  Lots of Pulp (which I picked as Molly's favorite band because I think they're Loo's favorite, or one of her favorites).  For the proposal, I had “Dreams” by The Cranberries on a loop as I wrote.  There's just something musically about that song that's full of anticipation and the wavy kind of guitar (I don't know the music terms and it's been so many years since I was into anything instrument-related that I'm not even sure how the sound is made, like a whammy bar or wiggling their fingers on the frets or whatever but anyway) just has this kind of wavering emotion that makes it feel like it's on the cusp of something.  And also it's the big romance song from every coming-of-age thing ever, and so just hearing it is like an auditory shorthand for breathless, adventurous romance, at least for women of a certain age (namely, my age, and I'm only a year younger than Loo/ Molly).  There was another scene—I can't remember what it was without rereading the fic—that I spent like three days listening to nothing but “The Way” by Fastball.  It might have been the thing with the drink testing and then the sex on the sofa and the cake baking.  (As an aside, I just started listening to the song and immediately got hit with a sense memory of night-wet spring air blowing in my window, because that's what the weather was when I was writing to this and it gives me a weird yearning pull in the back of my throat, like nostalgia almost but something else in it. Like, did you ever hear a pop song that taps into some deeper part of the human experience, both musically and lyrically, and you just feel like there's some universal truth in it that's too much to totally grasp?  That's how I feel about both of those songs.  Anyway.)

 Another story that had a few songs attached was Stainless, Captive Bead.  Radiohead's “Creep” was what they were listening to in the tattoo parlor, and a lot of the sex bits were written while listening to Nine Inch Nails' “Closer” (look, if it's set in the 90s and there's fucking in it, I'm going to find a way to relate it to “Closer,” because that song is just dark sex and angst set to synthesizers and a high hat).

 Also, sometimes when I write I listen to ambient noise stuff, cityscapes or rain or whatever fits the tone of the piece and my mood.  I can't listen to anything for too long, though, because I get listener fatigue and I burn out faster.

  satin_doll:  Have you ever considered self-publishing your stories as a book or series of books?

 sunken_standard: I've tried to file off the serial numbers on the Girlfriend series, but it was harder than I thought it would be so I back-burnered it.  I still like to think that one day I will, it's a life goal, but if I put too much pressure on myself I only make it worse and nothing gets done.

  satin_doll:  You seem to have a detailed backstory for every character in your stories, from Janine to Molly’s mother. Do you work these out beforehand or do they just happen in your head as you write?

 sunken_standard: Both?  I kind of touched on it earlier, but I usually have an idea of the backstory, the bones at least, and then as I write it gets richer.  I have multiple headcanons for every character, so I just start off with one of those.  Like I have five different families for Molly, all things I was coming up with when I was writing other stories.  Hell, I've got like five different Uncle Rudys (most of them highly unpleasant and most likely triggering).

I have a habit of just sitting and thinking about a character, like “what would make them this way?” armchair psychoanalysis stuff. And if I can establish a plausible-sounding backstory, I have a better foundation for introducing non-canonical traits or details.  I think that's the downfall of a lot of fic authors—they just write a canon character as they would an OC and expect us to play along without demonstrating any internal logic.  Maybe I'm just picky; there's certainly an element of that, too.

  satin_doll:  How detailed is the story in your mind before you start writing it? Do you work from plans and outlines with every story?

 sunken_standard: It all depends on the story.  Sometimes I have a whole series of detailed scenes just waiting in my head to be written out.  Sometimes I only have one thing and I just keep going.  I say I use an outline, but it's not a proper outline.  More like a collection of notes and bullet points of what I want to happen and what kind of beats I want to hit.  I usually keep it at the bottom of my working document so I don't have to switch to another doc to look at it if I need to.

  satin_doll: Where does a story begin with you? What constitutes the “urge” to write? You once mentioned (in a comment reply I think) that you know the ending of the story first and then write the rest of the story to get there. What do you do when a story goes off track? How do you get it back to the way you planned it, or do you even try to do that?

  sunken_standard: (I don't know why my document formatting went tits-up here, so I'll answer 1 & 2 both here)

 So stories are a visceral kind of thing.  I always have ideas.  Seriously, give me a theme or a title or something and I can spit out a summary and details in as long as it takes to type it out.  But actually crafting prose (can I sound more pompous?) is best likened to the urge to poop.  Classy, right?  I said it was visceral.  Really though, it's that same kind of state of heightened awareness/ arousal (in the strictest medical sense of the word, not sexual arousal), something is happening and if it doesn't things are going to get weird and I'm going to be very uncomfortable for a very long time.  Also, like pooping, if it's not ready, no amount of grunting or straining is going to make it happen, and it might even make it worse in the long run.  As you can tell, I've been very, very constipated for the last year.

 Anyway.

 Stories going off track... a lot of the time I just let it happen because it's taking me to a better place than where I thought it was going to end up.

  satin_doll:  Quote from you: “I spend way too much time thinking about who Molly is as a person. Writing porn and comedy both have their appeal, but I really like sitting down and thinking about what makes any given character tick and how they might feel about what's happening around them. 30s and single has so much baggage to it, even if all the women's magazine articles and whatever-wave-we're-up-to-now feminist thought pieces say it's a myth or a stereotype or whatever. It's a truth we don't want to be true because it's not fair. I mean, it's not the thing that solely defines any woman, but it's there, just like cellulite and brand new and worrying moles and our favorite brand of whatever suddenly being discontinued (or significantly changed) because some marketing person decided it was too 'old.' But anyway, such is life. And I like putting that in fic.”

 Do you write character studies to use as a reference for your stories, or just wing it for each individual piece?

 sunken_standard: The character study is dead, isn't it?  Like, as standalone fic.  Never see them anymore, which is a real pity.  I used to write them (or, well, start them, heh) before I took a break from writing/ fandom, mostly to try to get some of my headcanons down in some kind of usable way.  But I haven't really written a character study (in prose, at least) since 2012 or so.

 So when I write, I keep two documents open—the working copy that's a first-through-final draft and a “notes/ cut bits/ things to work in somehow” document.  In the notes document I usually keep any character details (backstory or how I want them to react to something later, whatever).  There are themes I go back to over and over, like a cluster of traits I reuse in some fashion because I think they fit the character (Mycroft and disordered eating, Molly as a middle child in some fashion, John as the child of alcoholics, etc.), so a lot of that just lives in my head. Any bits of characterization specific to a story go in the notes doc for that story, while any generic thoughts or something that I think I might want to use later gets stuck in another document full of random ideas, snippets of dialogue, jokes, AUs I'll never write, that kind of thing.  I've got a few of those docs from different writing periods.  They're mostly just a way to externalize a thought so I don't lose it; I hardly ever go back to them for anything.

  satin_doll:  What was your first involvement with fanfiction? Where did it all start?

 sunken_standard: I started to answer this in another question; basically, fanfic's been in my wheelhouse in one way or another since I was a kid (Star Trek novels are fanfic, period).  I discovered fanfiction back in the days of eXcite searches and webrings while looking for translations of Inu Yasha manga scans; I stumbled upon an English-language fancomic/ doujinshi called Hero in the 21st Century and it was so well-written, funny and poignant and well-researched I was just drawn in.  I still think about it and the author's other works to this day.  I did pick at the idea of writing myself, sometimes even put down scenes or outlines and did hours of research, but never did the thing.

 And then, in 2008, the stars aligned and I started a thing.  Journey's End spawned a ton of Doctor Who fic, and that was good, because I could just kind of slip mine in there and I probably wouldn't get a lot of criticism or attention.  So I wrote like two chapters without any idea of how it was going to end, and I submitted it to Teaspoon and an Open Mind (which was the Doctor Who fic archive at the time; it was curated/ moderated and where you went when you wanted to read something you knew would be good, or at least conform to certain standards, unlike The Pit [which is still garbage today]).  And I got rejected.  My grammar and spelling were awful (I didn't even have spell-check in whatever program I was using) and they said the whole thing had good bones, but I really needed to work on the English before they'd look at it again.  Getcherself a beta, they suggested, and I think they had a forum where writers and betas could connect.  So I got myself a beta and she stuck with me for like 30 chapters, answering questions and keeping my characterization on-track and basically re-teaching me the rules of written English.  I tried to email her a few years ago to thank her again, but her email bounced back. Her name was Julia and if she sees this, thank you Julia.  You're a wonderful person.

 Anyway, I wrote lots in that fic universe for like 2 months, then got another job and tapered off.  I abandoned it completely after a year.  Life got in the way of a lot of things, and the next time I was really inspired to write anything was a couple years later, for Supernatural.  I only put it on my LJ, never posted to a community or anything, and no one read it.  Literally, I don't think the post got any hits at all and for sure no one commented.  I sometimes think about putting it on AO3 just because.  And then Sherlock happened and here we are.

 satin_doll:  Do you think writing fanfic has hurt or hindered your original work? Why or why not? (that looks like a high school test question - sorry!)

 sunken_standard: Lol @ test question :D

 I'm not really sure, tbh.  On one hand, I only have so much creative energy—it's definitely a finite resource, and a scarce one—and devoting it to fanfic diverts it from any original work.  On the other hand, all writing is practice.  The only way to improve is to keep doing, no matter what it is.  So in that sense, fanfic's certainly helped me to find a comfortable voice and a prose style that works for me.  There are still problems to solve, figuring out the best approach to a scene or story from a technical standpoint (stuff like tense and perspective and all that), so I'm always learning something as I go. Mixed bag, really.

  satin_doll:  What was it about the Sherlock/Molly dynamic that got you started on a piece like “Longer Than the Road…” What did you see there that made you want to explore it in such detail?

 sunken_standard: So I always talk about how Sustain was my come-to-Jesus moment with Sherlock and Molly. Here's something I've never told anybody, not even maybe_amanda (because I was kind of ashamed, but not for the reasons people might think): before ever reading Sustain, I started a story that was Sherlock/ John and Sherlock/ Molly.  I had it roughly outlined and a few pages written, but I just kind of lost the feeling of it and it was starting to get problematic for character motivations, yada yada, so into the scrap heap it went.  It had a passing similarity to Sustain because of a platonic-sex-for-pregnancy element (hence why I never talked about it), but the major difference was that it was going to end up as a kind of polyamorous arrangement, Sherlock loving both of them and having a kind of co-parenting triad.  In mine, John wanted a baby, and Molly wanted her own baby, and Sherlock thought “best of both worlds!” and why do IVF when you can write awkward angst-fucking instead.  But yeah, I never finished it.  

 Anyway, I always saw something there, but I couldn't make it work in a way that was consistent with my own characterization of Sherlock until after Series 2.  Even in Series 1, he looks at her with a kind of fondness and a sort of bewilderment that just lends itself to nerds in love.  At the time (and even now, tbh), I kind of attributed that to BC having a crush on Loo (and oh man do I have theories, which are gossipy and gross and not the kind of thing I usually even bother having opinions about, but have you listened to the S1 commentary and some of the interviews around that time? there's something more there) and that kind of just spilling over onscreen and it working for the editor because it makes BC look sexy.

I mean look, I make no secret of the fact I started off shipping Sherlock with John almost exclusively (though I'd read just about anything), and after S1 aired it was just a different time.  I get really annoyed when people talk shit about the pairing and the people who still ship them, because most of them weren't even in the fandom at the time and didn't have the same experience as the OGs. When Series 1 aired, hardly anyone knew who BC was, and Martin was just the guy from The Office and some other shows that were kind of unremarkable; most of the fandom was composed of old-school ACD Sherlockians and a few stragglers (like me) that got there from Doctor Who or were just general mystery/ thriller fans that got sucked in. We had a different perception of it because we weren't led into it by Star Trek or Hobbits or MCU; the characters didn't have that baggage attached for us.  A lot of us already had a perception of Holmes and Watson as some shade of gay, so it was no great leap to see the very obvious romance (and yes, they all called it that in interviews at the time) onscreen as a romantic one. Martin, when asked, said basically that he'd play the next series (S2) however they wrote it, and if romance was there he'd go down that road.  Whatever, I don't need to defend it because people think what they think anyway.

.

Anyway, getting back to the actual question instead of a million tangents and rants, I think I saw a lot of the things that have since become like backbone tropes of the pairing (even in canon, with the whole “alone, practical about death” thing).  Their interactions in S2 were great; everything hinted at more than what was on-screen.  And I really liked the idea of exploring the dynamic that was pretty much already there, as far as Molly having both a crush and self-respect and Sherlock suddenly having to rely on this person (that he picked because she was reliable to begin with) who's a friend, but also kind of a stranger in the way that a lot of the people we consider friends are (at least, friends made in adulthood; work-friends, church-friends, club-friends, gym-friends).  Past that, I really saw the potential for character growth stemming from their interactions, but not like her humanizing him or whatever; both of them gaining insight about themselves, with the other person (and their relationship) as a vehicle for those realizations.  I think I could have done better on that front, but hindsight blah blah.

  satin_doll:  How familiar were you with the Sherlock Holmes character before the BBC series aired, and what made you want to write about him?

 sunken_standard: So I wasn't very familiar at all.  Just what was in the general cultural lexicon, maybe a few episodes of the Granada series on PBS as a kid, a few of the stories that I just couldn't get into when I tried to read them because I hate Victorian prose (hate it, everything about it, I won't read anything written before 1920 or so because I just hate it [Wilde being the singular exception, but I even get bogged down by him]).  Oh, and the RDJ movie, which wasn't really Sherlock Holmes to me, but just like a Victorian-era action movie.  After S1, I just devoured canon (though, full disclosure, I still haven't read all of it, probably only about 80%), then moved on to other adaptations and canon-era fic and pastiches, read a bunch of extra-canon material on the internet.  So as far as that goes, I'm very much a poseur and newbie in the greater Sherlock Holmes fandom.  At least I did my research?

 Anyway, it really took the modern adaptation and BC's performance to make the character resonate with me.  The aspects he chose to play up—the frustration and impatience and frantic mental energy—just hit a nerve.  He really channeled the “gifted” experience (which I suspect was just a lot of BC himself bleeding through).  Finally I could use a fictional character to bemoan how stupid everyone around me was and sound like a complete asshole and be completely in-character!  The heavens smiled upon me.

 Really though, I was initially attracted to how cerebral it was and how smart the fandom was overall.  It was the early fandom (and I mean early, like days after episode 1 aired) that drew me in, at least to a participatory (vs. consumptive) level.  Lots of very clever, very educated, very queer people having these deep, insightful discussions about everything (sometimes only tangentially related to the show).  When I did start writing, I didn't have to dumb anything down; the challenge was to sound smarter than I actually am.  And, I mean, I got to dredge up a lot of my own emotional baggage from being a perpetual outsider, which is always cathartic (and probably not very healthy, long-term, because it's not resolving anything, just exploiting myself, but that's a can of worms).

  satin_doll:  Are you more drawn to Sherlock or Molly as a character, or both equally? Why?

 sunken_standard: Sherlock, I think, for the reasons described in the last question.

I don't generally identify with female characters in fiction, since my own identification as female is tenuous (and in general they're poorly written and poorly realized, but that's another story). I mean, I can draw from my own experiences as a (mostly) female-shaped person with female socialization, but I have a hard time intuiting feminine and it's harder for me to write a “normal” woman.

Paraphrasing something I read in an interview with another fic author I admire, writing a woman is always a self-portrait, and how much of yourself do you really want to reveal?  Since I don't know how to woman correctly, I'm always afraid I'm going to slip up and hit the wrong beat for what a normal woman is and end up ruining the characterization.  I do manage to channel a lot of my own frustrations with men, relationships, being a single and childless woman over 30, and the patriarchy into Molly's character, though.

 I mean, don't get me wrong, I really love Molly (and always have—I was one of the first to use her as a main character and not just a punching bag or a punchline).  I love her sense of humor and her job and her fashion sense, all of it. She's not one-dimensional.  It's just easier for me to write Sherlock than it is to make decisions about who Molly is.

  satin_doll:  You are “internet famous” for Longer Than the Road (rightfully so!) What about that story do you think is so affecting for fans? How has “Road” influenced subsequent work you’ve done in the Sherlolly ship?

 sunken_standard: You know, I'm really not sure why it seems to resonate with people.  Maybe the homesickness or the exhaustion that comes with impermanence (and I mean, we all feel that on an existential level, everything's always changing and it's faster every year, just existing is like trying to walk in an earthquake).  Or the healing/ recovery aspect of it (I tried to balance both sides, the affected and the caregiver).  Or maybe I just wrote it at the right time (when there wasn't much else out there) and people kept coming back to it because it was familiar.

 As for how it's influenced subsequent work... I'm sure it has, but I don't know how, exactly.  I still think it's the best thing I've ever written and the closest to something literary I'll ever get, so in a way it's an albatross (no one ever wants to be reminded that they already peaked).  I get frustrated when my newer work doesn't live up to the standard I set for myself with it.  That frustration doesn't make me a better writer, it just makes me tired, so everything I do now is paler.

 One thing it did do was cement my characterizations of Sherlock and Molly and the dynamic between them.  I tend to write them a certain way and don't deviate from that, and that all has roots in the push-pull, love-hate thing I established in Longer Than the Road.  I can't write Molly without a degree of contempt for Sherlock and I can't write Sherlock without a degree of shame and contrition in his feelings toward Molly.

  satin_doll:  How does feedback affect what you write? How important is it? Is it more important that a reader “get” the point of the work or just that they like it? What kind of reader do you write for?

 sunken_standard: I try not to let feedback affect my writing.  I mean, I only get positive feedback, really, so it's a high.  I'm not trying to brag or anything; I count myself lucky that I don't get the shit others do (though I honestly think anybody that posts on The Pit is opening themselves up to it because it's a garbage dump, but I've never liked the site, so).  I try not to let it go to my head or anything though.

 I also try not to let it influence the direction my writing takes; I might do a comment fic or write a silly HC or something, but I like to keep my substantial pieces pure, so to speak.  Though sometimes a comment sparks something and a whole other fic grows out of it, so I fail there, I guess.  Sometimes it's a lot of pressure when people say they want to see more of something, or want me to write a kind of specific scenario, so I usually just don't, and then I feel bad about not giving nice people what they want and it starts this whole weird spiral of guilt and obligation and then swinging the other way and getting (internally) belligerent over not owing anybody anything.  I uh, have a complicated relationship with my work being acknowledged in any capacity.

 As for people “getting” it...  I don't know if they really do or not.  Sometimes I get comments and I can tell they're definitely on my wavelength and they picked up on an allusion or a detail or just saw or felt everything in the scene like I did when I was laying it out.  Once in a while I get a comment that has a different interpretation than what I was trying to get across, and that's really cool because it makes me re-examine my own work and see it from a different perspective (which I think makes me stronger for the next thing).  It's really validating when someone “gets” it, but at the same time, I write to entertain other people (as well as myself), so as long as they like it, I feel accomplished.

 It's cliché, but I write for an audience of one. I've tried to write outside my taste and it doesn't end well.  Sometimes I write tropes that aren't my bag (like the Wiggins “the Missus” thing, or kidfic/ pregnancy), but it's kind of like a nod and wink to people who do like it, rather than outright pandering.  At least, that's what I tell myself.  Sometimes you need to try on every bra in your size, even the ones you know you hate, just to make sure you're getting the right one, y'know?

  satin_doll:  Do you think fanfic has changed since you began writing it? If so, how?

 sunken_standard: Yeah, but I don't think it's a good or bad thing. And it depends on where you look and what you consume.  

 In the last like five years, Tumblr's purity culture has shamed a lot of kink back into the closet, I think, and people (in my fandoms, at least) aren't really writing on the edge.  I see darkfic, but it's about as dark as the night sky over Hong Kong.  I think people are afraid to go really dark anymore because they don't want the backlash from a generation fed on a diet of pink princesses and promise rings.  And I think everyone's desire for happy-ending escapism has ratcheted up because the real world is shit and TV shows are all playing Russian roulette with surprise deaths to add drama (thanks, The Walking Dead, for making that element so ubiquitous that the rest of the mainstream picked it up and ran).

On the other hand, I'm not seeing near the amount of badfic as I used to.  It was never as much of a problem on the old platforms and AO3 (compared to The Pit), but there were always some.  I mean, there are still lots of turds out there, but they all seem a bit more polished these days.  As far as the English goes, at least.  Maybe my fandoms are just maturing.

 I think people interact a lot differently now, too. This is going to kind of tie into the next question, but the types of feedback are different now and I think authors have changed what and how they produce to kind of chase the dragon of positive feedback.  Like, when I started, most public archives (read: not just one author's own website with all their fic, like you found in webrings a lot)—both completely open and curated—had some way to submit comments and allowed author replies. There was really no other way to let an author know you liked their work.  I mean, some sites tracked numbers for bookmarking features or hit counts, but those weren't as... active(? I guess), they weren't really participatory for the reader.

 Then AO3 came along and started the kudos thing (which people still bitch about because they think they get fewer comments; like be happy you get anything, ya fuckin' ingrates).  Kudos count became a de facto rating system, thanks to the sort feature. Whenever I start reading for a new fandom, I pick a pairing, pick a rating, and sort by kudos.  Sure, popularity isn't the best way to find good fic, but in any decent-sized fandom you can assume that the stuff on the first page is going to be written to a minimum standard.  Anyway, one of the ways to game the system a bit on kudos is to do a multichapter fic; I've seen works that are like 80+ 200-word chapters (don't get me started on omnibus fic across fandoms).  They aren't the best fic by far, but they pick up kudos every chapter, often from guests that are just people not signed in or on a different device.  I'm not knocking it, exactly, since it front-paged me for more than one fic. Part of me still feels like it's disingenuous, but I also recognize that I should pull the stick out of my ass. Anyway, the kudos count was kind of the death of the one-shot longfic (which, when I wrote Longer Than the Road, was a pretty common format).

And now, it seems like the Tumblr fic culture is writing ficlets (under 1k words) and posting without a beta (and I do it too). Fic consumption has become a social activity.  Reblogs aren't always about one's personal taste, they're a social signal of group affiliation.  If you don't reblog certain things, you're suspect and given a wide berth.  Woe betide the poor fucker that crosses party lines and posts one of the verboten ships.  And I mean, this isn't just one fandom, I've seen complaints about it from all corners—Supernatural, Star Wars, MCU, Steven Universe ffs.  I think when you have predominantly female spaces, you're always going to have an element of Mean Girl culture, y'know?  I'm probably going to get my fingernails pulled out for being misogynistic or some kind of -phobic for saying that.

Whatever.  It's true that a kind of hive-mind develops and all kinds of tropes and HCs get repeated until they become fanon.  I mean, that kind of thing's always happened, but the whole culture of Tumblr forces you to identify yourself and your group affiliation by what fanon you subscribe to, probably because it's harder to find your tribe without dedicated community spaces like LJ had.  With Tumblr, you basically have to trawl tags until you find your echo chamber.

I'm old and I fear change.

Tumblr ain't all bad, though.  It's very collaborative, kind of like the old-school round-robin fic people used to do.  Authors and artists riff off each other and a lot of really cool stuff comes out of these casual collaborations.  And I do like the prompt lists; I remember kinkmemes and prompting communities back on LJ, but it feels more off-the-cuff and spontaneous to just give someone a numbered list and let them roll the dice for you.

You know what else has changed?  We're kind of in a new era of epistolary storytelling with memes and shitposts; stories emerge that aren't prose (though might contain a prose element).  I mean, people did mixed-media epistolary in 2008, but it was a lot harder then (create graphic, hand-code into text piece, hand-code all the italics and bolding and font changes to denote various media types, if you're really a wizard add in-line text links to audio clips to add ambiance).  It's a lot easier to add a new thing on each reblog now, like someone does a video, followed by a 3-panel comic sketch, followed by a ficlet, and then a gif, you get the idea.  I like it; it's just a shame that it's so ephemeral.  Maybe that's part of the charm, though.

  satin_doll:  You’ve talked a bit about your experience with LiveJournal in the “old days”; what other platforms have you used in the past? Which ones did you like best?

 sunken_standard: I went into it a little in another question, but I first posted fic to A Teaspoon and an Open Mind (www.whofic.com).  Honestly, I don't remember much about it.  I'm not sure, but I don't think they had a richtext editor at the time (2008) and I had to hand-code some or all of it.  I vaguely remember having to do HTML for italics and paragraphs.  I know I had to do that on LJ sometimes because the formatting from whatever word processor I was using at the time did some hinky shit sometimes on a copy/paste.

 Next came LiveJournal (and DreamWidth, but I really only used that to back up my old LJ blog).  It wasn't better than Teaspoon, just different.  Teaspoon is niche, only fanfic and only for one fandom (well, one universe of fandoms, really, with all the spin-offs), where LJ was all kinds of stuff under one roof—personal blogs, communities with various intents and levels of participation, fanfic, fanart, gossip blogs, you name it.  I liked the friendslist view thing; it was like proto-Tumblr.  And you could talk to people on the threads; even personal blogs were like a forum.

 I joined AO3 in 2011, after waiting like six months for more invites to open up, but I didn't post anything there until 2012.  I'm really happy with it as a platform for posting fic.  I like the editor and I like the tags, ratings, and sort features.  I never even considered posting to ff.net because I'm a snobby fucker (and they can blow me with their whole “adult content ban” that still continues to be selectively enforced).  Anyway, I preferred having my fic on AO3 before I even left LJ, since I didn't have to split my stories into parts because of character limits.

 And then Tumblr took over and I kind of hate it, since you can't have conversations anymore, it's like leaving passive-aggressive post-its and there's no editing something once it gets reblogged, so typos and bad links and all that are always there.  And even when the original is deleted, the reblog keeps going, which I really hate from a creator's standpoint (though the archivist/ curator part of me likes it because it doesn't get lost in the ether [the recent purge notwithstanding] like so much of the early days of the web did). Tumblr's really bad for posting anything but ficlets and links to fic on other sites.

  satin_doll:  What would your ideal fanfic publishing platform be like?

 sunken_standard: Honestly, AO3 is just about as close to ideal as I can think of.  I just wish you could directly upload images instead of having to do code jiggery-pokery to link to something hosted elsewhere.  I've tried a million times and followed all the tutorials in an attempt to add the cover art to Longer Than the Road (gifted to me by @thecollapseinwonderland), but it just never works.  It shows on the preview, but not on the live version and it's frustrating because I'm computer literate, goddamnit.  Anyway.  And I mean, in an ideal world there would be better ways to find quality fic to my taste, but there's no real way to add a rating system (like 5-stars) independent of kudos without discouraging authors (and I mean the potential for abuse and bullying is just too great).

 Additional reader questions from @ohaine:

 Stylistically, Longer than the road is quite different from the other fics at the top of the AO3 Sherlolly ratings; stream of consciousness at the beginning, and the nested internal thoughts. How much of that was a deliberate departure, and how much was you just channelling the story as it came out of you?

 sunken_standard: At the time I was really influenced by a Sherlock/ John fic (I can't remember the title or author, it was 7 years ago, but I feel bad about forgetting). It was originally on LJ and their journal was a lightish blue color and the font was small (if anybody remembers this... there was something with an EKG and I think something with shooting up blood as a romantic gesture?). It was Sherlock POV and the author had a really unique way of presenting internal monologue. Anyway, at that time there was a lot of experimental writing going on on the slash side of things, it was great. To be perfectly honest, I hadn't read a lot of Sherlolly fic at that time because what did exist (as far as happy-ending/ happy-for-now stories vs like darkfic/ angst) was really, really not to my taste (the exception being Sustain). So it was only deliberate in that—even when I wasn't being experimental—I didn't want to write Harlequin books.

 I wish a story like that would just come out of me. I mean, to a degree it did, but doing the thoughts and sub-thoughts was work. I mean, I've always been a brackets-and-footnotes kind of person because I like reading it, but the way I did the thoughts was more like writing HTML than a regular rambling narrative.

  I think I read recently (maybe on a blog post?) that Riders on the storm was the original inspiration for Longer than the road. Was the scene in the storm your starting point with the story, or where did you begin?

 sunken_standard: That was the first scene I wrote; at that time I had a really nebulous idea of the story. The imagery was really clear in my head, though the very earliest concept took place in the desert—the classic American image of the road going on forever and rusty sands and the heatwaves rising up off the asphalt. I'm not sure how it morphed into North Dakota, I might have seen a picture of lightning over the plains or something.

 So after S2 aired, I just kind of sat and chewed it over for a month before any really strong ideas emerged for a story. I had to find the internal logic for the kind of plot I wanted to write—namely, them on the lam together. Making Sherlock have a breakdown seemed pretty natural at the time; in ACD canon (and many, many pastiches) he was always having them and going off to the country to recuperate. But he was supposed to be dead and he was all over the tabloids, so it's not like he could just move to some sleepy little village and hope no one recognized him.

I thought about sending him to Europe, using the places ACD Holmes went after Reichenbach (and I did start more than one with them in Florence, a few incarnations of which were Molly/ Irene wanklock PWPs, I actually think one of the Rusty Beds stories came from that, but I digress). The only problem with Europe is the language barrier; I thought it was too convenient to make Molly fluent in another language (she might have some conversational Spanish from a holiday or something, but that's it), so I had to make them go somewhere where English was common enough. I also didn't want them too far from the UK; I wanted Sherlock to be able to get on a plane and be back within half a day (I realize this isn't the reality of flying, but deus ex Mycroft, so). So Asia, Australia/ NZ, and even South Africa were out, leaving Canada, the US, or parts of the Caribbean. I didn't want them to by happy, so they didn't go to the Caribbean. Canada's great, but it's too nice and they also don't have deserts. America it was; it also really added some background tension because I think a lot of non-USians have a love-hate with us. Movies are okay, music too, and of course the tech and consumer innovations, but everything else is garbage and we're all just rude, ignorant, obese Yosemite Sams. For someone like Sherlock, I think the US is the last place he'd want to go (even though canon ACD Holmes was really into America). And I mean, write what you know, so that was that sorted.

 Once I got them here I needed them to do something; I wanted to tell a very intimate story, and that would be boring if they were just living in a 2BR cape cod in Jersey. And I mean, what city would really suit Sherlock? Where could he have a life that wasn't London? Anyway, the inside of a car is just about as intimate as two people can get, and the greatest tradition in American literature and film is the road trip, and that was when I knew I had a solid foundation for a story. After that, it just kind of flowed as I planned the route.

  Perfect, not perfect-perfect is a beautiful, brave piece that I think has a real air of authenticity to it. It was a very tough read, purely because of the journey the characters are on, and I wondered how difficult it was for you to write? Was it catharsis or an emotional black hole?

  sunken_standard: You know, I'm not really sure if it was either catharsis or black hole. A lot of the particulars and even the emotional places in that story aren't mine, but an amalgam of some other friends' experiences with polyamory. My own experience with it was pretty shit and pretty unremarkable, but I learned a lot about the human heart and how some people can lie to themselves because they can't let go of their ideals and their identities (I'm also still a little bitter), but that's got nothing to do with the price of tea in China, so moving on.

 Since a lot of those experiences weren't mine, it wasn't raw, so it wasn't very hard on me, personally. I think I wrote it in like three days? I don't think I wanted it to be a slog, so that's why it's in present tense and very sparse and matter-of-fact. Dispassionate, even. There are times when I'm writing really emotional stuff that I'm disconnected from it (which is a fuckin' mercy, because most of the time I'm right there going through it, over and over for days sometimes until I get the scene right and can move on to the next thing), and this was one of those times. I was writing this alongside the Girlfriend series, so there was some overlap there; I'd already done the emotional labor for everything up to Mary's death and I was thinking of different angles of approach for later installments of the series.

The most “me” part of it is near the beginning, writing my way around the bisexual experience from someone else's point of view. I don't have a lot in common with any of the characters; they're a higher social class, urban, products of a more liberal culture, yada yada, but there are some things that are just kind of universal and misunderstood about bisexuals, the stereotypes that we have to contend with and end up internalizing.

Oh, and the perpetual alienation is all me, too. Molly's feelings of being left behind are mine, how I felt every time friendships drifted apart or when female friends got married and then had kids. So a lot of the fatalism and insecurity are me projecting how I would feel or react. I kind of like depressed Molly, more than the perpetual ray of sunshine/ cinnamon roll at least.

 *********

 Many thanks to sunken_standard for taking the time to answer these questions!

 And many thanks and much love to OhAine for all her hard work putting this project together! It’s been fun and enlightening!

Next week, Friday 29th March, it’s the turn of @ellis-hendricks and @geekmama