#i think that makes brian his producer £\>|*|€|€

[icarrymany]

idk all of what merseis swap au entails but if alex and tim are swapped maybe TIM had a passion project he was working on when shit went south. he was the music guy. maybe hed get prickly with his friends who only kind of know how to play instruments but r trying.

[brainjuicey]

dare i call tom cruise a filmmaker?

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Greenwashing set Canada on fire

On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

As a teenager growing up in Ontario, I always envied the kids who spent their summers tree planting; they'd come back from the bush in September, insect-chewed and leathery, with new muscle, incredible stories, thousands of dollars, and a glow imparted by the knowledge that they'd made a new forest with their own blistered hands.

I was too unathletic to follow them into the bush, but I spent my summers doing my bit, ringing doorbells for Greenpeace to get my neighbours fired up about the Canadian pulp-and-paper industry, which wasn't merely clear-cutting our old-growth forests – it was also poisoning the Great Lakes system with PCBs, threatening us all.

At the time, I thought of tree-planting as a small victory – sure, our homegrown, rapacious, extractive industry was able to pollute with impunity, but at least the government had reined them in on forests, forcing them to pay my pals to spend their summers replacing the forests they'd fed into their mills.

I was wrong. Last summer's Canadian wildfires blanketed the whole east coast and midwest in choking smoke as millions of trees burned and millions of tons of CO2 were sent into the atmosphere. Those wildfires weren't just an effect of the climate emergency: they were made far worse by all those trees planted by my pals in the eighties and nineties.

Writing in the New York Times, novelist Claire Cameron describes her own teen years working in the bush, planting row after row of black spruces, precisely spaced at six-foot intervals:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/opinion/wildfires-treeplanting-timebomb.html

Cameron's summer job was funded by the logging industry, whose self-pegulated, self-assigned "penalty" for clearcutting diverse forests of spruce, pine and aspen was to pay teenagers to create a tree farm, at nine cents per sapling (minus camp costs).

Black spruces are made to burn, filled with flammable sap and equipped with resin-filled cones that rely on fire, only opening and dropping seeds when they're heated. They're so flammable that firefighters call them "gas on a stick."

Cameron and her friends planted under brutal conditions: working long hours in blowlamp heat and dripping wet bulb humidity, amidst clouds of stinging insects, fingers blistered and muscles aching. But when they hit rock bottom and were ready to quit, they'd encourage one another with a rallying cry: "Let's go make a forest!"

Planting neat rows of black spruces was great for the logging industry: the even spacing guaranteed that when the trees matured, they could be easily reaped, with ample space between each near-identical tree for massive shears to operate. But that same monocropped, evenly spaced "forest" was also optimized to burn.

It burned.

The climate emergency's frequent droughts turn black spruces into "something closer to a blowtorch." The "pines in lines" approach to reforesting was an act of sabotage, not remediation. Black spruces are thirsty, and they absorb the water that moss needs to thrive, producing "kindling in the place of fire retardant."

Cameron's column concludes with this heartbreaking line: "Now when I think of that summer, I don’t think that I was planting trees at all. I was planting thousands of blowtorches a day."

The logging industry committed a triple crime. First, they stole our old-growth forests. Next, they (literally) planted a time-bomb across Ontario's north. Finally, they stole the idealism of people who genuinely cared about the environment. They taught a generation that resistance is futile, that anything you do to make a better future is a scam, and you're a sucker for falling for it. They planted nihilism with every tree.

That scam never ended. Today, we're sold carbon offsets, a modern Papal indulgence. We are told that if we pay the finance sector, they can absolve us for our climate sins. Carbon offsets are a scam, a market for lemons. The "offset" you buy might be a generated by a fake charity like the Nature Conservancy, who use well-intentioned donations to buy up wildlife reserves that can't be logged, which are then converted into carbon credits by promising not to log them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#greenwashing

The credit-card company that promises to plant trees every time you use your card? They combine false promises, deceptive advertising, and legal threats against critics to convince you that you're saving the planet by shopping:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/17/do-well-do-good-do-nothing/#greenwashing

The carbon offset world is full of scams. The carbon offset that made the thing you bought into a "net zero" product? It might be a forest that already burned:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/11/a-market-for-flaming-lemons/#money-for-nothing

The only reason we have carbon offsets is that market cultists have spent forty years convincing us that actual regulation is impossible. In the neoliberal learned helplessness mind-palace, there's no way to simply say, "You may not log old-growth forests." Rather, we have to say, "We will 'align your incentives' by making you replace those forests."

The Climate Ad Project's "Murder Offsets" video deftly punctures this bubble. In it, a detective points his finger at the man who committed the locked-room murder in the isolated mansion. The murderer cheerfully admits that he did it, but produces a "murder offset," which allowed him to pay someone else not to commit a murder, using market-based price-discovery mechanisms to put a dollar-figure on the true worth of a murder, which he duly paid, making his kill absolutely fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

What's the alternative to murder offsets/carbon credits? We could ask our expert regulators to decide which carbon intensive activities are necessary and which ones aren't, and ban the unnecessary ones. We could ask those regulators to devise remediation programs that actually work. After all, there are plenty of forests that have already been clearcut, plenty that have burned. It would be nice to know how we can plant new forests there that aren't "thousands of blowtorches."

If that sounds implausible to you, then you've gotten trapped in the neoliberal mind-palace.

The term "regulatory capture" was popularized by far-right Chicago School economists who were promoting "public choice theory." In their telling, regulatory capture is inevitable, because companies will spend whatever it takes to get the government to pass laws making what they do legal, and making competing with them into a crime:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/13/public-choice/#ajit-pai-still-terrible

This is true, as far as it goes. Capitalists hate capitalism, and if an "entrepreneur" can make it illegal to compete with him, he will. But while this is a reasonable starting-point, the place that Public Choice Theory weirdos get to next is bonkers. They say that since corporations will always seek to capture their regulators, we should abolish regulators.

They say that it's impossible for good regulations to exist, and therefore the only regulation that is even possible is to let businesses do whatever they want and wait for the invisible hand to sweep away the bad companies. Rather than creating hand-washing rules for restaurant kitchens, we should let restaurateurs decide whether it's economically rational to make us shit ourselves to death. The ones that choose poorly will get bad online reviews and people will "vote with their dollars" for the good restaurants.

And if the online review site decides to sell "reputation management" to restaurants that get bad reviews? Well, soon the public will learn that the review site can't be trusted and they'll take their business elsewhere. No regulation needed! Unleash the innovators! Set the job-creators free!

This is the Ur-nihilism from which all the other nihilism springs. It contends that the regulations we have – the ones that keep our buildings from falling down on our heads, that keep our groceries from poisoning us, that keep our cars from exploding on impact – are either illusory, or perhaps the forgotten art of a lost civilization. Making good regulations is like embalming Pharaohs, something the ancients practiced in mist-shrouded, unrecoverable antiquity – and that may not have happened at all.

Regulation is corruptible, but it need not be corrupt. Regulation, like science, is a process of neutrally adjudicated, adversarial peer-review. In a robust regulatory process, multiple parties respond to a fact-intensive question – "what alloys and other properties make a reinforced steel joist structurally sound?" – with a mix of robust evidence and self-serving bullshit and then proceed to sort the two by pantsing each other, pointing out one another's lies.

The regulator, an independent expert with no conflicts of interest, sorts through the claims and counterclaims and makes a rule, showing their workings and leaving the door open to revisiting the rule based on new evidence or challenges to the evidence presented.

But when an industry becomes concentrated, it becomes unregulatable. 100 small and medium-sized companies will squabble. They'll struggle to come up with a common lie. There will always be defectors in their midst. Their conduct will be legible to external experts, who will be able to spot the self-serving BS.

But let that industry dwindle to a handful of giant companies, let them shrink to a number that will fit around a boardroom table, and they will sit down at a table and agree on a cozy arrangement that fucks us all over to their benefit. They will become so inbred that the only people who understand how they work will be their own insiders, and so top regulators will be drawn from their own number and be hopelessly conflicted.

When the corporate sector takes over, regulatory capture is inevitable. But corporate takeover isn't inevitable. We can – and have, and will again – fight corporate power, with antitrust law, with unions, and with consumer rights groups. Knowing things is possible. It simply requires that we keep the entities that profit by our confusion poor and thus weak.

The thing is, corporations don't always lie about regulations. Take the fight over working encryption, which – once again – the UK government is trying to ban:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/24/signal-app-warns-it-will-quit-uk-if-law-weakens-end-to-end-encryption

Advocates for criminalising working encryption insist that the claims that this is impossible are the same kind of self-serving nonsense as claims that banning clearcutting of old-growth forests is impossible:

https://twitter.com/JimBethell/status/1699339739042599276

They say that when technologists say, "We can't make an encryption system that keeps bad guys out but lets good guys in," that they are being lazy and unimaginative. "I have faith in you geeks," they said. "Go nerd harder! You'll figure it out."

Google and Apple and Meta say that selectively breakable encryption is impossible. But they also claim that a bunch of eminently possible things are impossible. Apple claims that it's impossible to have a secure device where you get to decide which software you want to use and where publishers aren't deprive of 30 cents on every dollar you spend. Google says it's impossible to search the web without being comprehensively, nonconsensually spied upon from asshole to appetite. Meta insists that it's impossible to have digital social relationship without having your friendships surveilled and commodified.

While they're not lying about encryption, they are lying about these other things, and sorting out the lies from the truth is the job of regulators, but that job is nearly impossible thanks to the fact that everyone who runs a large online service tells the same lies – and the regulators themselves are alumni of the industry's upper eschelons.

Logging companies know a lot about forests. When we ask, "What is the best way to remediate our forests," the companies may well have useful things to say. But those useful things will be mixed with actively harmful lies. The carefully cultivated incompetence of our regulators means that they can't tell the difference.

Conspiratorialism is characterized as a problem of what people believe, but the true roots of conspiracy belief isn't what we believe, it's how we decide what to believe. It's not beliefs, it's epistemology.

Because most of us aren't qualified to sort good reforesting programs from bad ones. And even if we are, we're probably not also well-versed enough in cryptography to sort credible claims about encryption from wishful thinking. And even if we're capable of making that determination, we're not experts in food hygiene or structural engineering.

Daily life in the 21st century means resolving a thousand life-or-death technical questions every day. Our regulators – corrupted by literally out-of-control corporations – are no longer reliable sources of ground truth on these questions. The resulting epistemological chaos is a cancer that gnaws away at our resolve to do anything about it. It is a festering pool where nihilism outbreaks are incubated.

The liberal response to conspiratorialism is mockery. In her new book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein tells of how right-wing surveillance fearmongering about QR-code "vaccine passports" was dismissed with a glib, "Wait until they hear about cellphones!"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

But as Klein points out, it's not good that our cellphones invade our privacy in the way that right-wing conspiracists thought that vaccine passports might. The nihilism of liberalism – which insists that things can't be changed except through market "solutions" – leads us to despair.

By contrast, leftism – a muscular belief in democratic, publicly run planning and action – offers a tonic to nihilism. We don't have to let logging companies decide whether a forest can be cut, or what should be planted when it is. We can have nice things. The art of finding out what's true or prudent didn't die with the Reagan Revolution (or the discount Canadian version, the Mulroney Malaise). The truth is knowable. Doing stuff is possible. Things don't have to be on fire.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/16/murder-offsets/#pulped-and-papered

[tentacle-therapissed]

I’m so glad the Guillermo Del Toro Pinocchio movie is being received really well, because it was literally my most anticipated movie of the year! So here’s some fun facts about the crew, concept, and production that got me excited about this movie and that I think would excite much of tumblr as well:

-the screenplay was cowritten by Del Toro and Patrick McHale, creator of Over The Garden Wall and a writer on Adventure Time.

-the movie was codirected by Mark Gustasfon, who was the animation director of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)

-the primary art/animation designers of this movie (production designer Curt Enderle, art director Robert DeSue, character designer Georgina Hayns, animation supervisor Brian Leif Hansen, and photography director Frank Passingham) previously worked on projects that include Coraline, the Corpse Bride, Paranorman, Isle of Dogs, Frankenweenie, Kubo, and Chicken Run.

-Besides Netflix, it was produced by the Henson company (always a good sign when you’re doing anything with puppets) and ShadowMachine, who have produced a lot of Adult Swim shows including Robot Chicken, Moral Orel, and Tuca and Bertie, as well as the Netflix original BoJack Horseman.

-Del Toro was inspired to make this adaptation due to the similarities he’d always noticed between the original Pinocchio story and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Both are about a man-made character’s relationship with his father/creator, and his attempts to understand what it means to be human. This inspiration is why the film takes on a gothic feel at times.

-the movie is over 10 years in the making. Del Toro announced the project in 2008 and production began in 2012, but it went into development hell and no further updates were made for several years. Del Toro has described it as his passion project, saying "I've wanted to make this movie for as long as I can remember.”

-the backdrop of Mussolini’s Italy was intended to show how Pinnochio was able to find his own humanity and will in a time where everyone else was acting like a blindly obedient puppet. Del Toro wanted to deviate from the original book’s themes of obeying authority by making his Pinocchio virtuous for questioning the rules and forging his own set of morals. (Also if you know anything about Del Toro, the guy likes to dunk on fascism.)

-Del Toro didn’t feel the need to have Pinocchio become flesh-and-blood at the end of the movie, saying all you need to be a real human is to behave like one.

I was lucky enough to see this movie in 35 mm in a movie theatre on Thanksgiving weekend. If there are any movie theatre showings near you and you’re in a position to be able to attend them, I would totally recommend it especially if you can go with loved ones. It was a gorgeous, heartwarming, and magical movie to experience on a big screen and perfect for the late fall/winter holiday season.

[man-down-in-hatchet-town]

You know, I get that not all Starkid fans have chosen to make the leap over to join the Tin Can fam as well. A lot of the newer Hatchetfield fans in particular are just here for that one particular tiny town in Michigan. And that's fine! Like what you like! Fandom how you want! Still, I would like to say two things:

1) Now is the perfect time to give all the awesome stuff TCB has to offer a chance, and

2) Starkid, and therefore our beloved Hatchetfield, owe so much specially and specifically to Joey, Corey, AND Brian.

Obviously Joey is one of the main Faces of Hatchetfield and his performances as Ted, Wilbur, Pete, Ethan, and Dan are all so iconic and beloved. Seriously, can you imagine Ted being as watchable in the hands of someone else? He’s also done great work in so many other Starkid projects.

Meanwhile Corey has been so vital behind the scenes. He designed the iconic sets for TGWDLM and Black Friday (the mind-blowing moment when the set BECOMES Wiggly? That was HIM)! Over the years this man has designed most of the sets, he has directed (VHSCC! ❤️), he has assistant directed, he has overseen social media and massive kickstarters, he has produced. As one of Starkid’s main behind-the-scenes creatives, Corey has done a huge amount of the extremely vital but not particularly fun or flashy work. His job is traditionally a pretty thankless one and we should pour gratitude in his direction.

And Brian. He gave us the Award-winning sound design for TGWDLM, but also I personally think he is one of the main actors responsible for Starkid existing the way it does. This whole company and fandom all go back to AVPM, that lightning-in-a-bottle show that was so strangely magnetic we’ve been able to build everything else on top of it. I’ve seen a lot of Potter parodies over the years, and I genuinely believe that the number one factor that gave AVPM its unparalleled magic was the Voldemort and Quirrell storyline. Without Quirrellmort, I’m not sure AVPM would have taken off as it did, and it’s quite likely Starkid would never have existed. And Brian, as Quirrel, was essential to pulling off and selling that extraordinary bit of plot.

So, yeah, even if you’re only a Starkid fan, or even just a Hatchetfield fan, you’ve benefitted massively from the tireless work Joey, Corey, and Brian have put into those things we love. If you can, giving even 3 or 4 bucks to their Tinlightenment kickstarter would be a lovely way to say “thanks” for bringing us fifteen years of Starkid magic and especially that Tiny Town of Hatchetfield.

TLDR; The Tin Can Bros have all specially and specifically contributed to the existence of Hatchetfield and Starkid as a company, and, if you can, giving to their kickstarter is a great way for Starkid fans, even those who don’t follow TCB, to say thanks!😊

[waughymommy]

MOMMY KNOWS BEST ❤️

Chapter 14

Brian walked into the house and immediately burst into tears. He crumpled to floor and cried for his mommy. “Oh baby, my goodness what’s wrong?” she asked as she sat down on the floor next to him. He nuzzled his face into her chest. She held him tight, “Shhhhh, everything is ok. Mommy is here. Do you think you can calm down enough to tell me what happened?”

Between sobs, Brian tried to tell her about his day, “I I, wet my pull-up twice today and then I lost my paci, but Samantha found and gave it back to me. And then she told me I should wear thicker protection.” His speech sounded like that of an excited toddler, as his short sentences rolled one into the next, “And, and, and then I had to go to a meeting about a new client and it was Babies R Us. I got so nervous in the meeting that I tried to pee just a little bit, but but but…”. Brian wailed like a helpless child. He was so upset that he didn’t even notice that he was uncontrollably wetting his pants again. Rebecca noticed the growing wet spot on the front of his pants. She continued to act like a concerned mother, but inside she was elated. He was becoming a baby before her very eyes, “But what honey? Tell mommy what happened.”

“I, I, I…soaked my pull-up. I am so ashamed mommy, I’m becoming a baby. I don’t know how I am going to make it through work tomorrow,” he buried his head into her chest again.

“That was very of brave of you to tell me what happened. And you know what? You are just a baby. You are mommy’s special little boy. Babies have accidents. That why I put you in pull-ups this morning. But it sounds like Samantha might be right. We might need to send you in something a little thicker tomorrow. Although you are just a baby, just imagine that when you are at work, you are pretending to be a big boy and doing all the things big boys do. But when you get home, you won’t have to pretend anymore. Mommy knows its hard being a big boy. Now, I see a very wet little boy who is desperate need of a change,” she said lifting up off the floor.

Brian let her guide him back to the bedroom. He descended into a haze again, but he knew that mommy would make everything better. She laid out a changing mat on the bed and beckoned him over. She unbuckled his belt and undid his pants, “Ok step out these for me.” Brian stuck his thumb in his mouth and followed her directions. After taking off his pants, she pulled off his soaking wet onesie. “Lay down on the changing bad for me. Oh my goodness you are soaked. You really went pee-pee,” she said as she tickled his belly. Brian giggled behind his thumb. She tore off the pull-up and wiped him down with some wipes. You know what, I think we should get you into a bath. Won’t that be nice?” she cooed at him.

She led him off into the bathroom and set his naked butt on the toilet seat, his thumb never leaving his mouth. “Now you sit here like a good boy, while I start your bath.” Brian just nodded, content to let her do everything for him. She drew he bath and added some bubbles. “Ok, hop in.” Brian sat down, the water barely coming up over his crotch, but he didn’t mind. The bubbles smelled nice and it was fun to splash. “Brian, I got you something for bath time,” she said excitedly and produced a big rubber ducky. His eyes lit up. In the past, his adult brain prevented him from truly enjoying his toys, but this felt different. He was genuinely excited about the rubber ducky. “Can you tell me what sound a duck makes?” Rebecca asked as she kneeled down next to the tub.

“Qwack,” Brian chirped.

“That’s right!”she cheered. “Now you play with that while mommy cleans you up.” Brian moved his ducky through the water and splashed about, making all kinds of silly little sounds. Rebecca smiled and laughed at her silly little boy, “Mommy is so very happy to see you playing and enjoying yourself. Isn’t that so much better than worrying about all those scary big boy things?”

Brian fervently nodded his head and went back to playing. Rebecca grapped a wash cloth and started washing him all over. He bristled a little when she washed his face and behind his ears. “Can you stand up, mommy needs to wash that pee-pee and your cute little butt.” Brian did as he was told. She rubbed the washcloth over his crotch and his bottom. Brian’s thumb returned to his mouth and she washed him up. Two days ok, if she had done this, he would have been overcome with shame and embarrassment, but in this moment it felt right. He had not a care in the world. “Ok its time to hop out now.”

“But mommy, I don’t wanna. I was having fun with ducky,” he whined.

“I know sweetheart and I’m so glad that you are having fun, but mommy still has to make dinner. And I know a big baby that needs to get his diaper on. We don’t want you peeing all over the floor,” she guided him out of the tub and dried him off. Hand in hand, the two returned to the bedroom where she diapered him and dressed him in another onesie. She clipped on a different pacifier than he was used to and he made a face at Rebecca. “Mommy has already started getting my baby lots of stuff.” Brian didn’t respond, but simply popped the pacifier in his mouth. In just a matter of two days, Brian was growing more and more dependent on his pacifier. It soothed him. He recalled his mother saying that he had a hard time letting go of it when he was a toddler.

After he was diapered and dressed, she led back to the den and laid him down on the couch like she had done the previous evening. She went to the kitchen and retuned with a bottle of milk and then placed the headphones over his ears. “Remember, this music helps you relax and be the best baby you can for mommy,” she whispered and then kissed his forehead. Brian began to nurse the bottle and in a few moments his eyes closed. When she was certain that he was content, she went to the kitchen to make dinner. But before she started cooking, she pulled out her phone. She scrolled through her contacts. She and Brian had gone out for drinks with Samantha on a few occasions. Although she didn’t know her well, they got along well. There was something about her she knew she could trust. She found her number and sent her a message: We need to talk.

[bibliophilesince2003]

Transformers One In-Depth Review

Transformers One is a must watch.

I’m tired of seeing a bad review go towards a movie that is actually extremely well done, especially if the reviewer hadn’t taken the time to watch it or considered the trailers enough content to draw a review from.

Seriously, it was so refreshing to see a new take on a franchise that has been around for years. In my personal opinion, it’s better than re-makes that offer even less room for creativity.

I am a huge Transformers fan. I grew up with Transformers Prime, and when I was older, I watched the movies. I’ve watched other shows here and there, and while I may not be a complete expert, I know the lore well enough to have been heavily, emotionally impacted by Transformers One.

I’ll start with the "non-spoiler take" followed by the "spoiler take” which will be “hidden” for those who do not want to be spoiled.

"Non-spoiler" take...

Peter Cullen’s voice is legendary. Chris Hemsworth himself acknowledged this in an interview, mentioning that the goal was to “re-create” and “do something new.” He intended to represent a “youthful, brash, and cocky version” of Orion Pax before he was known as Optimus Prime. This is a realistic representation. In Transformers Prime, Ratchet states that Optimus Prime was more like Jack in his youth. For those of you who don’t know, Jack is a strong-willed, selfless, but slightly impulsive teenager, as all teenagers should be. It is clear that Hemsworth has evaluated “hints” that other movies and shows have provided. Hemsworth wanted to “lean into” a more serious voice towards the end of Transformers One. He insisted “he wouldn’t dare mimic Peter Cullen.” I highly respect his choices, and he does not deserve the amount of hate thrown at him. Now, Orion Pax also comes across as a humble, soft-spoken character in other movies and shows. However, I can see why they would lean into his impulsiveness to better highlight and contrast the relationship between Orion Pax and D-16, especially as D-16’s true colors show. More about that in the “spoiler” section, though!

No, it would not have made sense for Orion Pax to have a deep, majestic voice. That comes with experience; that comes with hard decisions. Quite honestly, Hemsworth is pretty close to what I had imagined Orion Pax to sound like. It’s still slightly deep, and very soothing.

The character development in this movie? Oh. My. Word. Guys, as a writer, I can say that subtle character development – the best kind – is not easy to do. In Transformers One, it flowed naturally. It made me smile. It broke my heart. If you’ve seen other Transformers movies and shows, brace yourself. If you haven’t, still brace yourself. Again, more about that in the “spoiler” section.

The humor in the trailers has been re-posted so heavily I think it’s beginning to lose its effect and people, not knowing the context, are quick to judge. Yes, Bee is funny. It’s Bee. He’s supposed to be lovable, humorous, loyal, and powerful. I found no issue with most of the humor coming from him. There is more humor that is not mentioned in the trailers that is really worth chuckling over.

Finally, the fight scenes were clean, the animation was captivating, and the incredible Brian Tyler produced musical masterpieces for most every scene, some of it connecting to other movies and shows.

"Spoiler" take, now!

I expected to dislike Elita. Really, I did. I knew she was the “love interest” for Optimus Prime beforehand and expected big things from her, because Optimus Prime never struck me as having a “love interest” in the past. Not only that, but I expected her to be the female character I seem to find everywhere these days who strives to be better than everyone else without a lick of experience, complaining about the male figures in her life.

Elita, however, is ambitious. She leads. She doesn’t have to prove anything; she’s simply willing to work hard and do her job. Understandably, she gets upset with Orion Pax and the others when they interrupt her progress, though I can’t help but be amused by Orion Pax’s shy attempt to get her attention and adored his subtle acts of kindness. Sure, she’s a tad bit aggressive – she did punch Orion Pax, after all – but I really enjoyed seeing her adapt. When Orion Pax was feeling hopeless, she was there to encourage him. If she had stopped talking immediately after saying “I’m better” I would have been frustrated. Orion Pax and D-16 are the main characters in Transformers One, after all. She didn’t stop there, though. She highlighted the most important aspects of Orion Pax; his good heart, selflessness, and bravery. She told Shockwave and the others to shut up and listen to Orion Pax when they doubted his plan. She encouraged him to speak louder when others couldn’t hear him. She leaned towards the pit when Orion Pax fell.

Not only that, but Orion Pax was incredibly patient with her. He woke her up when she was unconscious and immediately took a punch to the face like a champ. He gently, subtlety smiled at her when they traveled to the surface and Elita announced "it's beautiful." He cried out her name and pushed her out of the way to save her during a battle. He listened to her. He told her to beat Arachnid “gently” when Elita managed to detain her, proving he fully understood Elita’s personality.

I’m sorry, but this kind of relationship takes the cake. If they’re meant to be a couple, I can see the signs. I love how well they work together and build each other up.

Bee is an icon. One of my favorite scenes is him eagerly saying to Orion Pax “I’m going to go cut these guys up, watch! C’MERE!” It’s like a proud kid trying to get their parent to watch. I love how loyal he is to Orion Pax right off the bat.

While they changed some lore in Transformers One, they included everything that was important. Orion Pax and D-16 are miners, but it seems Orion Pax may have been a clerk beforehand. When he broke into the archives, he seemed to know where he was going. When he ran, I can’t remember exactly, but I believe he was muttering numbers? I don’t mind the small twists and can see how they were necessary for the story; key details are kept.

Jazz and Ratchet mention! I was so excited to hear their names. Kind of wish they had shown Ratchet, maybe shouting “I needed that!” to a fumbling worker. Sorry, Transformers Prime reference.

Arachnid had an incredible design.

Sentinel is a well-written, hate-worthy villain. I… did not expect D-16 to rip him in half, though.

Also… can I just mention how epic that particular scene was? The switch from D-16 reaching his peak character development – showing no mercy – while Orion Pax reached his – making the ultimate sacrifice to preserve life and do things the right way; receiving the Matrix of Leadership. The music, the animation, the slow-motion… everything was incredibly cinematic.

Obviously, D-16 took things too far. I appreciated the fact that he didn’t just wake up one day and decide to be evil. It took time. It took motivation. Obviously, any sane person would stand with Optimus Prime, though he does make mistakes from time to time, but it was incredibly neat to actually appreciate D-16’s insight in the beginning, then notice the shift and feel every bit of emotion Orion Pax felt.

People say the ending is rushed, or that D-16’s change came too abruptly without any good motivation. Sure, the ending may be a little rushed, but movies are typically structured this way. Falling action does not have a set speed; it just needs to be well done. Bad things happen in a rush, and this leaves ample opportunity for the “good guys” to react a little too slowly. As for D-16’s motivation… even a person can take their worship of an item or figure too far. Megatronus was someone to look up to in D-16’s eyes. He agreed to Orion Pax’s plans, or at least tolerated them, but his admiration for Megatronus was his own interest. Orion Pax threatened that vision. D-16 wanted to kill Sentinel to satisfy his own needs and desires, not to liberate others. Sentinel deserved death after committing murder, yes. He didn’t, however, deserve a public execution, especially as he tried to get away and was relatively defenseless. Remember, Sentinel told D-16 and Bee that he would execute them in front of everyone. We can acknowledge his promise as brutal, so shouldn't D-16's actions be considered brutal, too? No "reason" could ever justify it.

When D-16 let Orion Pax drop, he proved he no longer cared about loyalty. The least he could do was hoist Orion Pax’s body up or break down after losing what he once called his best friend, but he didn’t.

It’s ironic… D-16 said “I’m done saving you” when in reality, Orion Pax was trying to save D-16 from doing something he knew D-16 should have regretted doing. Normally, yes, D-16 is the voice of reason, but not in this case. For once, this is where Orion Pax’s true personality shines through. His spark – the spark of a Prime – is in the right place. Orion Pax puts joking aside when serious matters arise. It seems D-16 didn’t really know his friend after all. The actions D-16 committed, my friends, are not actions you want to celebrate.

I really, really hope Transformers One gains more attention. We need the sequel! Transformers fans, tell your friends. Give an honest review, which are of more value than the reviews given by those who didn’t take the time to watch it. Hype it up and roll out!

[m1ssunderstanding]

I'm halfway through Midas Man and I have to say one of my favorite things so far is the way they have shown George Martin's affinity for Paul - the way he zeros in on Paul's voice while listening to the band's recording calling it 'quite sweet' (while having no comment for the others specifically) and of course the scene in the studio, where he has critiques for everyone except Paul, I found it quite funny!

Aahhh I know!!!

The bond between George Martin and Paul is genuinely so important to Paul's development as a person and an artist, and therefore to the development of popular music as a whole. Paul desperately needed an authority figure to see him as talented, intelligent, and important. (John saw those things in him thank goodness, and that is infinitely valuable as well, but it's different coming from a central daddy figure) It seems to me, for all Jim's enthusiasm for Paul's musical pursuits as something fun that would get him into parties and make the family some money, he didn't seem to see Paul himself as particularly gifted. Then, Brian in the beginning seemed to favor John, seeing and marketing John as the intelligent, literary, witty, smart Beatle, and showing through his investments of time and money into John that he thought he was more special than the others. (Not that I'm not happy for John to have that love, he desperately needed it too) But I mean George Martin is in almost all of my Paul documents. He had a very big impact.

So it was vital that Paul had someone in his corner who could see his gifts, both as a musician/vocalist and as a creative force through writing and producing, who showed Paul he could trust him and opened so many possibilities to him. George Martin not only heard the strings on Yesterday, but knew how to coax Paul out of his box enough to really try them and valued Paul's composition abilities enough to teach him how to write for strings. And that was just their first major collaboration.

Throughout at least two decades of work, George Martin gave Paul the opportunities and the expertise and the safety to push the boundaries of how much artistic freedom a working class boy could exercise and what he could expand popular music to be.

Sorry to go off on a soapy tangent there but this is such an underrated relationship in this fandom and I'm just really glad you gave me the excuse to talk about it!

But yes. I was soooo happy to see him getting to be George's instant special baby. You're completely right. In the movie, he's basically like "why would I give these guys a chance? This isn't what I even do. Well, one of them has a very sweet voice. Okay I'll give them a shot." And then in the studio he's very obviously got a favorite on day one. I'm About to make another irresponsible statement here but isn't it true that George Martin at one point very early on suggested to Brian that they make Paul the frontman?

Anyway! Thank you very very much for thinking of me and sending this in!

[ladykailitha]

Icarus Part 15

This was really popular last WIP Wednesday so it got down before the others did. So tada! The meeting with Vickie!

If you guys aren't getting notifications for my works, could you let me in know in the comments? Because I've been seeing it's been hit or miss lately, thanks!

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14

~

Steve wasn’t sure what he was expecting when he walked into Eddie’s mansion. Both bands were meeting with their shiny new agent, Vickie Cameron. But whatever it wasn’t the woman sitting on Eddie’s big, black leather couch.

She had a stylish, curly, red bob that framed her angular face. Her bright green eyes were knowing and mischievous. Her clothes veered toward Bohemian in darker shades. Her smile was calm and welcoming.

Steve could feel the tension bleed out his shoulders as he sat down between Simon and Spence.

“You must be Abbadon,” she greeted warmly. “I’m Vickie Cameron, I understand that I called in the nick of time?”

Eddie who had come in behind him, smiled at her. “That’s right. She kept trying to shift blame on Abby here. Bob was awesome, though!”

Vickie looked to Chrissy and Robin in askance.

“The Fallen’s producer,” Robin explained. “He was there to prevent liability.”

Vickie nodded and then clasped her hands together. “I understand that not all of Corroded Coffin is here today?”

Jeff shook his head. “Gareth Hughes is currently in a ninety day program.”

“Eddie had to get special permission to talk to him about changing agents in the first place,” Brian explained. “It’s in our contract that all of us have to sign off on major changes.” He glanced sideways at Eddie and then Jeff before hanging his head.

Eddie sat down on the floor next to Shane, crossing his legs like the bassist. “But he was onboard one hundred percent.”

“That’s good,” she said with a smile. “I’m assuming it was that lovely little clause that prevented him from being replaced on tour?”

Steve looked around at the Corroded Coffin members as tension filled the air. Jeff and Eddie were radiating anger while Brian seemed to shrink in shame.

“I didn’t think it was fair that he would get replaced like he didn’t mean anything to us,” Brian hotly defended.

Jeff’s lip curled. “Dude, Gareth voted for us replacing him! He knew had made a promise and broke it. If we don’t punish him somehow, someway, he’s going to keep doing it!”

Brian’s chin began to wobble and he let out a shuddered breath. “I know. It was stupid. But it’s too late now. Let’s just focus on what we’re here for. Please!”

Steve shared looks with his band before they all agreed to just move on. But Steve made sure to make a mental note to talk to Eddie about it, because it was clear Eddie was really upset by the move even after a few weeks.

“Since you’re planning on touring together,” Vickie said, sitting up straight, “that makes the contacting for venues easy. Getting suites for two big bands might prove a little tricky at the moment as I don’t have the clout yet.”

“That’s fine,” Shane said from his perch on the floor. “We like to bunk all together if we can. It makes harder for people to try and pap us if there’s almost always someone there in the room.”

“That makes sense,” she agreed. “Will Jim Hopper be coming with you to function as your head of security?”

Robin nodded. “He’ll be the only one with knowledge of their real identities. His daughter will also be joining us as costumes director, but she has only dealt with their alter egos.”

Vickie nodded back. “That’s perfect. I’ll be just handling contracts and the legal eagle side of things, which is the main reason I need to know their real identities so no one can forge anything claiming to be a member of the band.”

Everyone nodded or murmured their agreements.

She looked at Eddie. “I know this your home, but would it be all right if I spoke to The Fallen alone?”

Eddie nodded and hopped to his feet. “Come on, Jeffy and Bri-Bri, let’s go raid my liquor cabinet.”

The other two men were to their feet in seconds and followed their lead singer out the door like ducklings in a row.

Vickie smiled after them. “They’re going to be fun. I can tell.” She turned back to The Fallen members. “Do you feel safe enough to remove your masks so that I can meet you properly?”

Steve and the other members looked around at each other before Shane took off his mask first. Then Steve and Spence together. Simon was the only that remained with his mask still on. Steve leaned over and whispered in his ear and rubbed his back encouragingly. After a moment or two Simon removed his mask too.

“It’s hard trusting someone new,” Vickie said with a reassuring smile. “Especially after harrowing experience that Abbadon went through earlier today. Giving that much power to any ex is hard, but if half of what Celeste says is true, she’s the last person in your lives that should have any kind of access to your secrets. So no judgments, okay? If you don’t feel comfortable being unmasked around me, that’s fine. I hope I’ll earn your trust in the future.”

Immediately Simon put his back on. Spence and Shane shared a glance before Spence put his back on, too. Only Shane and Steve left theirs off.

Vickie didn’t comment, only nodded her approval. “I had somethings to go over with you all so we can all get on the same page.”

“Why aren’t you calling us by our real names?” Simon asked, leaning into Steve’s side.

“Are any of the Corroded Coffin boys in on the secret?” Vickie asked, leaning forwards on her knees and clasping her hands together.

They all shared concerned glances, before Robin spoke up.

“Eddie is,” she said carefully, her shoulders squared against the tension in the room. “He guessed though, he wasn’t told.”

“But Jeff Laurence and Brian Martin aren’t read in?” Vickie pressed.

They all shook their heads.

“Then that would be why I’m not calling you by your real names,” she said clearly, sitting up straight. “There is a chance they might overhear a name or two and put it together who you are.”

Steve let out a shuddering breath and his lip quivered. “Nancy–she almost called me by my real name right in front of our producer. She almost outed me without a single thought or care. I–I’d never been more frightened in my life when she nearly slipped up. She had been so mad at me and I just wanted to get out of there, but I forced myself to stay there and listen to her.”

Vickie stood up and knelt in front of him, taking one of his hands as his friends offered their verbal support.

“I hate how much power she had in that conversation,” she murmured. “Agents like managers and PR firms are tools to help you navigate a job which constantly changing. That goes for actors, artists, athletes, comedians, and musicians of all walks of life. They should be supporting you, not making you miserable.”

She stood up. “And that goes for everyone, Corroded Coffin included. This is meant to be a partnership and it’s my job to sure it all goes as smoothly as possible.”

Simon removed his mask and looked her in the eye. “If you’ve got Abbadon’s back, you’ve got my vote of confidence.”

Everyone but Vickie turned to him, impressed. Simon was their Cowardly Lion. He was afraid of his own shadow outside of their personas on stage. It was only under the bright lights of the stage and behind his red mask that he truly came alive.

This was a big deal for Simon and his bandmates and Robin were proud as hell for him.

“So what did you need to go over with us?” Shane asked from his perch on the floor.

Vickie cracked her knuckles with a grin. “What I understand is that because your personal and professional lives are separate you need a little help fend off the trolls and influencers, is that right?”

“Aren’t they one and the same?” Spence asked with a snort. His mask was still on despite Simon’s bravery, he wasn’t ready to take that step yet.

“Only in the way that jackals and coyotes are both dogs I guess,” Vickie replied. “They act similar but have different motives for why they’re doing it. But I’m here to handle that.”

“I’m sorry to make you take on PR duties as well,” Robin said ringing her hands together. “But the more people who know the worse it’s going to be to keep a lid on everything.”

Vickie shook her head. “This is a good thing. Because I don’t have a lot of clients to juggle, I can do the PR for you guys. Simpler is always best.” She looked around the room. “I also understand that one of you is in a high profile relationship?”

Steve raised his hand. “Ish. Eddie and Steve are dating but it’s not public and with Eddie’s past history of sleeping with anything that moved, he can’t be seen with a roadie or the tabloids will explode.”

Vickie tapped her lip thoughtfully. “That is a conundrum to be sure. I’ll put together some plans and meet with Eddie and ‘Steve’ later in the week.” She put air quotes around his name. “Now, here are the other things we need to go over.”

Talk turned to the other things on her agenda and by the time it was over with all four members of the band were maskless, and eager to take her on.

~

Vickie, Robin, Chrissy were all sitting in Vickie’s office, popping the cork of a bottle of champagne to share between them. Chrissy poured the bubbling liquid into the three glasses and handed one to each of Robin and Vickie.

“Here’s to the three baddest bitches!” Robin said, raising her glass.

“Hell yeah!” Vickie crowed.

“Damn right!” Chrissy said, as they all clinked their glasses together.

They all drank and Vickie smirked around her glass. “So the industry is abuzz with news about Nancy Wheeler and Corroded Coffin pulling out of her firm.”

Robin and Chrissy leaned in close, clutching their glasses of champagne.

“Ooh,” Chrissy cooed. “Do tell.”

Vickie took another drink of her champagne and let them sit in it for a moment. “Apparently word is out that Corroded Coffin had vouched for her to The Fallen and when she was rude and dismissive of their unique requirements, Corroded Coffin decided that she wasn’t for them. And now huge acts are pulling out too in solidarity to The Fallen.”

Chrissy winced, but Robin nodded sagely.

“She sounded so sincere when I spoke to her,” she said, shaking her head sadly, “but my boys picked up on her hostility right away. All she had to do was put the past behind her, the way Abbadon seemed to, but she let her prejudices blind her and it led her to this.”

Vickie pursed her lips together. “I can see how some heavy hitters might like the bulldog approach that she took to her work, but not everyone has that tough of a skin. And while some part of me feels sorry for her, she absolutely dug her own grave.”

“Eddie was telling me some of the things she said to Abbadon,” Chrissy said, twisting the glass her hands. “It sounded like to me that she wanted him to absolve her of all her wrong doing without owning up to it in any way.”

Robin nodded. “That’s what Bob said, too. There was no apology and it didn’t sound like she ever intended to give one. So cheers to Vickie Carmichael, who sent the dragon running back to her lair!”

“Cheers!” Chrissy agreed to Vickie’s flush of pride.

“Thank you, ladies,” she said demurely. “I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with your boys. They all seem like good people. And yes that includes Gareth. I was able to meet with him without the other boys around and while he has some real problems to deal with, he’s a good person at heart who was led away by the high alcohol promised him.”

Chrissy nodded. “I wish Brian had let Gareth heal while they went on tour. I think it would have shaken something loose to see his friends perform without him.”

“To new beginnings!” Robin said, raising her glass.

“To new partnerships!” Vickie agreed, raising her own glass.

“To friends old and new!” Chrissy said.

They clanked glasses and drank deeply to their new future.

~

Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20 Part 21 Part 22 Part 23 Part 24 Part 25

Tag List: CLOSED

1- @mira-jadeamethyst @rozzieroos @itsall-taken @redfreckledwolf @zerokrox-blog

2- @gregre369 ​@a-little-unsteddie @chaosgremlinmunson @messrs-weasley @val-from-lawrence

3- @goodolefashionedloverboi @carlyv @wonderland-girl143-blog @irregular-child @blondie1006

4- @yikes-a-bee @bookworm0690 @anne-bennett-cosplayer @awkwardgravity1 @littlewildflowerkitten

5- @genderless-spoon @y4r3luv @dragonmama76 @ellietheasexylibrarian @thedragonsaunt

6- @disrespectedgoatman @eyehartart @dawners @thespaceantwhowrites @tinyplanet95

7- @iamthehybrid @croatoan-like-its-hot @papergrenade @cryptid-system @counting-dollars-counting-stars

8- @ravenfrog @w1ll0wtr33 @child-of-cthulhu @kultiras @dreamercec

9- @machete-inventory-manager @useless-nb-bisexual @stripey82 @dotdot-wierdlife @kal-ology

10- @sadisticaltarts @urkadop

[milkycarnations]

I've been bored and can only write for shit when I want to impress someone. Since y'all are putting out good shit all the time, I think y'all deserve to read good shit while you're busy working on your book. This is your fault for making me realize I have a knife thing via Helen. Enjoy my monarchs: @itsabee @13tinysocks

Here's a link if you want to read on Ao3, otherwise it's under the cut!

Brian x afab!Reader | Whet Your Appetite | 5k words

one-shot masterlist | mdni | cw: consensual as always, knife and bloodplay, gunplay but only briefly mentioned, exhibitionism but just a threat, cunnilingus, fear play, missionary, creampie, begging, vaginal fingering, vaginal sex, sexual tension

   Thursday nights forced you into a nasty habit. 

       Perhaps “nasty” was a bit too strong; too harsh. Thursday nights grew into something shameful. Embarrassing. Your spontaneous behavior evolved into a habit you kept to yourself - because if anyone found out you’d simply die. Brian cooked on Thursdays for as long as you can remember, but everything started roughly two weeks ago. Two whole weeks of being far too horny for your own good. 

       That night, you sat across from Brian and watched him intently. From your seat at the kitchen bar, you eyed him as he wielded the knife. That was what killed you. It was a simple chef’s knife with a lengthy steel blade, perfect for sharp, quick slices. Over the couple of weeks that you watched him, it became clear that Brian was skilled. You watched as he diced an onion into perfectly uniform cubes. Now, after washing his hands, he was busy peeling carrots before cutting them into coins. 

       At first, you were only impressed at how fast he moved, slicing each coin precisely without hurting himself. That interest swelled until you became fixated. 

       Shifting your weight on the barstool, you leaned forward as you watched him prep. 

       Why did it feel so wrong to find it attractive - Brian cutting fucking produce? It made no sense in your mind, leaving you heavily embarrassed at how much it turned you on. He cooked again that Saturday. Again, on Monday. You had never given it much attention before, but now every time he pulled out the green plastic cutting board and the knife you were there looking on from the sidelines. Brian certainly noticed the change, but you were sure he had no clue as to why. It wasn’t like you could explain it to him. There was no way you could tell him the way he chopped up that red cabbage last night was sexy. Regardless, he accepted your company and sometimes chose to chat with you while he cooked. 

       After a while of trying to cope and pretending you didn’t like it, you came to a conclusion. It was all in his arms and the way his hand gripped the handle of the knife. It made his forearms flex and his biceps bulge out under his shirt. Once that first week ended, you only got worse. You were down bad and it was horrible. 

       That second Thursday, the four of you got lucky and ended up with some extra cash to spare. These days, it wasn’t often that you found someone with six hundred dollars cash in their wallet. You treated yourselves and Brian wanted quality beef cuts for dinner. He chose a stir-fry. Tim requested cold beers.        

       There, you sat pathetically as Brian cubed the raw meat, a light layer of blood speckling his hands and the knife and pooling onto the cutting board. It was fair to say you had become desensitized over the years - you had both killed people, oftentimes together. However, it had not clicked into your head until now that you enjoyed watching Brian cut into things. The blood was a bonus. You had realized that you’d never witnessed Brian do such a thing before. To be fair, wasn’t his style. Blades were more of a Toby thing. 

       That revelation made you even more confused because it forced you to come to terms with your attraction to Brian. You didn’t feel this way watching Toby do the same. You tested it and nothing came up. 

       On a mission with Toby two days later, you kept your eyes on him like a hawk. Enamored with the scene, he sliced and hacked away at the flesh with those hatchets. Skin and muscle split. Blood spilled and coated everything in vibrant, slippery red. There was nothing. Sure, you were full of adrenaline and the adrenaline always left you a bit tingly for hours after, but you decided that it did not relate to Toby. Sure enough, when Brian cooked that Saturday night - a quick meal hours after - it happened all over again. You could only feel so intensely needy with Brian in front of you and a knife in his hand. 

       From there on, you were obsessed. You ate dinner, scooping the pasta with freshly minced garlic into your mouth, and only thought of him. You took your second shower of the day that night and in the steam-filled bathroom, only thought of him. You lay in your bed, tucked under the covers, and only thought of him as you slipped your hand into your shorts. Holding back from moaning his name, you fingered yourself desperately with a heavy ache in your stomach. 

       It was your most shameful orgasm yet, cumming to a man who was sleeping in the next room over who had no clue about your weird attraction to him. Strangely enough, the whole situation was the first thing in years that made you feel depraved, and you had done some sick shit. You slept well through the night but woke the next morning with an obvious wet spot in your shorts. This time, you couldn’t fall asleep to ignore your racing thoughts. 

       As if a conversation with him weren’t awkward enough, now that you’d masturbated to the thought of him, you could barely stand to look him in the eyes. It was impossible to hide how strange you’d been acting and everyone was catching onto you. Toby gave you way too much space, practically avoiding you at all costs. He recognized how you were avoiding Brian and assumed you needed a break from everything going on in the house, including himself. Tim got way too close, assuming you needed help. Though he never asked outwardly if you were depressed, it became obvious when you found a plate of fruit cut carefully into stars and your favorite snack. Tim looked out for you more than before. 

       Brian knew that the attention was fixed only on himself, even though the others hadn’t noticed. However, he hadn’t quite pinned why. All he gathered was that it was between you and him. That led to today. 

       Exactly two weeks and three days after it all started. You had done the same thing nearly every night in a row, each time growing needier and downright lustful. In the morning, you showered in an attempt to wash off the thoughts from the previous night, which did nothing to help. The afternoon was quaint: nobody had plans, which made for a relaxing Sunday evening. You were lying in your room, the door cracked open, daydreaming about nothing in particular and enjoying the rare silence. 

       A knock rapped on your door. 

       “Come in!” you called as you sat up on the mattress. 

       Brian pushed the door in and shut it closed behind him. You hadn’t expected to see him, instead anticipating Tim to come in with a tray of snacks again. It didn’t take long for you to grow nervous. Brian walked up to the bed, his socked feet pattering softly against the hardwood floors. He paused right in front of the bed. 

       “Can I sit?” he asked, his hands hidden in the pockets of his sweatpants. 

       “Sure,” you managed to choke the words out and shifted to hang your legs off the side of the bed. Brian sat down beside you. 

       “Did I do something to upset you?” 

       Brian’s words hurt. It was obvious that he’d assume he did something wrong - you were avoiding him like the plague. Though, it was far from the truth and it wasn’t fair for him to believe it. Still, you couldn’t get yourself to tell him everything. 

       “No. You’re okay,” you spoke. 

       Brian shuffled for a moment beside you, “Then what’d I do? Tim said you’re acting fine around him and Toby hasn’t brought anything up. So I know it’s just me,” 

       You sighed. Was there a point in bringing up silly little lies to save your ass? You valued your relationship with Brian far too much to hurt his feelings over a crush, but you felt like a schoolgirl admitting it. Brian sat in silence with you the entire time, waiting patiently for you to respond. He was never a nervous person at all, but you could see him grow almost desperate as you thought of what to say. The right words never found you, so you spoke with little filter. Brian sat up a little bit straighter as you started. 

       “I think I’m attracted to you, Brian.” 

       The words fell foreign off your tongue. Brian didn’t respond. He hardly moved, but you gathered the courage to look him in the eyes. A wide smile spread across his face. Your face flushed with heat until your cheeks turned blistering hot. Brian either didn’t notice or refused to comment on it. 

       “You think?” he asked. 

       The tension broke once he talked. You breathed out a chuckle and let the anxiety shed away. 

       “Yes, I think,”

       No hesitation. 

       “Do you want me to help you find out?” 

       You wanted to scream. You wanted to squirm in your seat and kick your feet in the air, but you tried to play it off. Though you were mentally losing it, you simply smiled and looked away. 

       “I think I would like that,” you admitted. 

       Brian’s hand came out to touch you lightly on the knee, pulling your attention back to him. You looked his way to catch the hungry gaze in his eyes. Heart thumping in your chest, you glanced down at the way his hand flexed around you. It brought you back to the kitchen with that dumb knife in his hand. Between your legs, you grew more excited and could tell you were becoming wet. It made you ache - he hadn’t even touched you there yet and you wanted him. 

       “Is that why you’ve been watching me cook all of a sudden?” Brian smirked and gently squeezed. 

       It wasn’t why, but he didn’t need to know that. 

       “Sure,” you muttered, trying to subtly rub your legs together. 

       “That’s cute. I felt like you were a bit too interested. But I thought, hey, maybe you were bored.” 

       “You’re a good cook,” you complimented him back, trying to ignore what he said. You were too interested in what he did, but he didn’t have to know why. 

       “I’m curious, then. When did it happen?” he asked you, smirking. 

       You tried not to panic. You didn’t want him to find out the real reason why, maybe sometime in the future, but not now. 

       “I don’t know exactly when,” you lied. It was odd lying to Brian. He was an excellent liar and that set you on edge. It was obvious you weren’t telling the truth and it was evident he caught you in the way his eyebrows lifted as he smiled. 

       “You’re not so sure of yourself, you know.” 

       Quieting, you paused next to him as his hand trailed slightly higher. It made your stomach tighten. 

       “I wanna know what you were thinking when you were looking at me like that. Be honest.” 

       Brian’s words poured like honey. When you managed to meet his eyes, they stared deep into yours. He was an intimidating, coercive man and it was strange being on the other side of it. You froze in his touch, but he waited for you to speak. Outside the room, the sound of Tim starting dinner could be heard: pots and pans were moved and water was running in the sink. 

       “I was impressed,” you admitted. Brian pried further. 

       “Impressed with what? ‘Cuz it wasn’t the food. I saw you at the dinner table with your head in the clouds. Should’ve known something was up. What were you thinking about?” he repeated. 

       The pressure he pushed onto you was intense. You could only imagine what it was like to be on Brian’s bad side - a victim being threatened by him. 

       “I was thinking about the knife,” you finally came clean. This piqued Brian’s interest and his stare grew into something different. His hand now rested on your upper thigh and his body moved to face towards you. 

       “Keep going. Help me find out what this knife has to do with me.” 

       “I liked the way you held it.” 

       Brian chuckled at your response. Though he had caught on, he played along and continued to pry. It was clear he wanted you to say it out loud. 

       “What’s so special about me holding a knife?” 

       You were sure it was the thing with his arms and hands; the way he looked so powerful with it, but that was hard to explain without monologuing the past 2 weeks. You thought carefully about what to say and how to make sense to him. 

       “I guess the way you did it was just attractive to me,” 

       Brian took a big breath in. He had a way about him that was good at appearing disinterested, but the way he gripped onto your thigh was a major tell. He was into this as much as you were. He wanted it as much as you did. You thought about how much frustration you could’ve saved yourself from if you were ballsy enough to tell him earlier. 

       “You’re very special, you know that?” Brian’s face seemed to fluster pink down his neck. 

       Embarrassed with how he spoke to you, you shouted out, “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

       “It means, you’re into dangerous men. Especially dangerous men holding weapons, and you didn’t even notice. How long have you gone along feeling this way? If I knew you’d be ogling at me, I’d have teased you a bit more on our last mission.” 

       “Only recently,” you told him, “But the guns they don’t really do it for me.” 

       Brian looked down at you. It made you wish he were easier to read. 

       “How interesting. Perhaps it’s cause you want something a little more hands-on. Everyone knows that guns are cheating. Too impersonal, huh?” you silently nodded along, “But I like that. The fear of a gun doesn’t do it for you, you need the threat of a knife. Delicate when you want, but just as deadly when you let it touch the right places.” 

       Something thumped in your ears, the sound of your heartbeat, and the blood rushing to your head. You could feel your slick pooling in your panties and your legs slightly parted. Sweat dripped down your back, making you shiver harder as his hand traveled to your hip. 

       “But it’s my turn to be honest. I want to fuck you. So tell me, you okay getting a bit more personal?” 

       “Yes, please. Keep going,” you were shaking and your words came out as whispers. 

       Outside of the room, you heard Toby join the chatter and turn on the television. Though you thought Brian would shove you over and take you right there, he remained beside you and reached into the pocket of his jeans. As he pulled out his hand, you noticed the small pocket knife. He held it out in front of you and pressed a small button. The knife folded open with a click. It wasn’t anything fancy and it was a far cry from the eight-inch chef’s knife in the kitchen. It was black (including the two-inch blade) and it was clean - but it wasn’t like you could die of tetanus regardless. 

       “And do you mind if I use this?” Brian whispered to you, now closer than before. His breath was hot and it only made you more antsy underneath him. You had no idea he kept the knife on him, but it made sense. It looked more for utility than stabbing anyway.

       You shook your head. 

       “Tell me,” Brian urged you. 

       “No, I don’t mind,” 

       As Brian pulled the knife closer for you to look at it, you realized you’d never felt so dizzy beside him before. You were now throbbing as you waited, desperate enough to skip foreplay entirely. 

       “You like it?” he asked. 

       “It looks sharp,” it was true. The pocket knife had a more serrated edge than the chef’s knife, which came to a whetted edge across the entirety of the blade. The tiny black knife looked like it could saw into things. 

       Brian nodded in agreement, “You wanna see how sharp it is?” he said, running his thumb perpendicular across the blade. It made a chime as the metal ran across his thumbpad. 

       “Okay,” your face burned. 

       “Lay down,” he ordered you. You turned and swung your legs back onto the mattress and laid back to rest your head against the pillow. Stiff, you lay there with your legs pushed together and your hands resting on your stomach. Brian crawled over to you, the bed squeaking slightly under his weight. Breathing heavily, he sat above your legs and straddled you. At that moment, you felt like prey beneath him, but you knew he wouldn’t do anything you didn’t ask for. 

       A finger hooked your belt loop. 

       “You like this pair?” he asked you. 

       Confused, you looked down. Your shorts? They were stolen, but they were nice and fit you perfectly. 

       “They’re my favorite,” 

       With the knife still in his right hand, he unbuttoned your shorts and tugged them down. You helped him pull them past your ass and kick them out from your legs. Truthfully, you were still sheepish about being in your underwear in front of him. His fingers traced up your leg and danced along the waistband of your panties. 

       “What about this one?” he questioned. 

       “They’re old-” before you could finish your sentence, Brian eased the knife between your right thigh and the fabric of the panties. He swiftly pulled up and sliced the fabric. Tugging down the ripped cloth, he did the same to the other side, this time sliding in the knife from the top of the garment and slicing laterally just above your hip bone. He pulled the shreds of fabric off of you and tossed the destroyed pair onto the floor. 

       Closing your legs, you squirmed underneath him. The knife was held in his hands in a white-knuckled grip and it made the veins in his forearm pop. Your gaze drifted to the very obvious bulge in his pants. 

       “You like a little more than just me holding a knife, don’t you?” 

       As he asked, he fiddled with the hem of your shirt. Could you deny it? Both of you knew you had some kind of complex. 

       “I think so,” you answered. 

       Brian lifted your shirt to run the blade of the knife across your stomach. With a knife, Brian was capable of many things. 

       “You like the fear, too. You must, ‘cuz me and you both know how easy it’d be for me to gut you right now. I could get excited and slip. Then it’d all be over until you wake up again a few hours later.” 

       Moaning out, you felt yourself drip beneath him. That, you didn’t quite ping about yourself. Of course, you’d imagined Brian hurting other people with the knife, but never yourself. You were putting every ounce of trust you had into him. It strangely felt liberating, knowing you could tell him to stop or tell him to go further and he’d do it all for you. 

       “Don’t you agree?” he called out your name. Maybe he was onto something. 

       “Does it make you feel that way, too? Scared that you might lose control? Does it make you burn inside?” you turned the question back onto him and watched as he genuinely thought about it for a few moments. 

       “I’m a sadist. The thought of hurting you only makes me excited, but the thought of breaking your trust is something different. I’ll go as far as you want, but that means you have to say something if it’s too much.” 

       It could not get more perfect than that. You smiled as Brian pulled your shirt off, tossing it to the floor, and unclasped your bra before slipping it off. Instantly, your nipples hardened after being exposed to the cold bedroom. You felt vulnerable under Brian, still in his jeans and tee shirt. He continued to trace the blade across your chest with care, the chilly flat of the metal gliding over your nipples. Huffing out you clenched your hands into the bedspread. 

       “What about blood? Everyone in this damn house had a blood kink, but how do you feel about your own. Want me to see it?” 

       Trembling under his words, you nodded again before remembering to answer him properly. 

       “I like that. You can cut me a little.” 

       Brian smiled at this, but simply kept tracing the blade gently. He did so for what felt like many minutes before he shifted the pressure to the tip of the blade. It dug into your skin, but simply poked at you, not drawing any blood. You whined at the sensation as he moved the blade to your stomach, right beneath your breasts. Suddenly, you gasped as he sliced the blade in a small cut. It was swift and he was done before you noticed it had happened. The two of you watched as the blood trickled out. It was light, close to a scratch. You knew he was going easy on you, in case you changed your mind. 

       A heavy sigh rang out from above you. He enjoyed watching you like this, his cock pressing hard against your leg through his jeans. You doubted it was comfortable. This time, he grunted as he cut your flesh again. 

       “Why don’t you take your pants off?” you asked him. 

       “I want to fuck you but I don’t want to do it yet. The foreplay just started. Isn’t this what you’ve been waiting for?” he explained himself. 

       “Yes it is, but we can do it again - and I’m already wet enough I just need you now. Please.” 

       Your pleading came out meek and pathetic. You were sure you looked pitiful, but Brian seemed more pleased by your begging than he was before you’d started. 

       “Don’t worry your head over it. I’ll help you manage… but maybe if you beg a bit more I’ll change my mind.” his voice came soft and sweet but his words were far from it. Left hand pulling down, he reached to play with your clit. Moaning out again, you sounded like a wounded animal as he cut you while he rubbed, this time harder than the last. The slice left a stream of blood that trailed across your waist and met the bedspread. 

       “This help?” the circular motions of his thumb on your clit were skilled as if you’d taught him exactly how to do it. As perfect as it was, you wanted so much more. “Does it hurt?” he asked when you didn’t respond. 

       “It’s good,” you mumbled. It was hard to focus on anything but his thumb as he moved from circles to upward stroked, but the knife forced you back each time. His thumb stroked up, and your body bucked, shaking as you waited for him to do it again. Up again, and this time a small nick to the side of your left breast. The whine you let out was strangled and he stopped, leaning in close to you. 

       “You want everyone to hear you? ‘Cuz if so, I’ll open the door and invite them in. If not, you should be a bit quieter.” 

     When you whimpered this time, you pressed your lips tight together. You weren’t sure if Brian was serious about it - could that be his dark secret? Instead of playing into it, you shook it off. You’d bug him about it later. Right now, you were too focused on the way he kept snapping his thumb up and the way the knife returned - this time to your thigh. Shifting his weight, Brian moved down your body, his face close to your pussy. He was staring at it intently as he trailed the knife across your thigh and moved it inward. 

       Breath hitching, you tried not to twitch under his grasp. Yes, toying with the knife along your chest was dangerous, but there were femoral arteries in your thigh and not as much protection. Arteries spray - you’d make a mess on the bed and Tim would certainly get involved when he would inevitably find out you needed stitches from being alone with Brian. That would open a completely new doorway. It forced you back to what Brian said. You didn’t want anyone to know yet, so you sat still as he held the knife tight against your skin. 

       Instead of snapping up, this time Brian snapped his thumb down, trailing it across your entrance. 

       “You didn’t lie about being wet. You’re everywhere.”

       Holding the knife against your left leg, he played with the slick between his fingers before leaning in, propping your other leg up with his free hand. Teasingly, he took an experimental lick and laughed as your body tensed, but no noise came out. 

       “Just because we have to be quiet doesn’t mean you have to hide from me,” he said before sucking at your clit. 

       “I know,” you breathed out, “but I’m scared I’ll fucking lose it.” 

       Humming against you, he started to eat you out. You were near tears. It was hard not to cry out for him like a slut at this point, so you slapped your arm around your face and muffled your sounds. Brian knew just as well as you, so you also struggled not to shake too hard as he held the knife against your inner thigh. How could he know what you were thinking? How did he know that spot was what you worried about? 

       He sucked and lapped passionately like a dog, the sounds filling the room. He started moaning into you, each time louder than the last. You panicked. Though you were trying so hard, he was the one who was going to get you caught and he was doing it on purpose. As he moaned again, you pushed your entire body further into the bed and shot your other hand out to shove his face into your cunt. With the sounds he was making, it would be obvious that you were fucking, but he was fucking with you, so he moaned louder.

       The vibrations from his mouth made you cry out, the noise muffled by the crook of your arm. Hard, you gripped Brian’s hair and pulled on it. This time, he groaned out, but it felt less purposeful and more accidental. Once more, you tried not to buck your hips into him. 

       “Okay, really. Stop teasing.” you begged him, but he made no effort to move, “Please, I need you inside me I can’t take it anymore!” 

       Once the harsh whispers fell off your lips, Brian dropped your right leg onto the mattress and you let go of his hair. At first, you were confused that he still hadn’t pulled away, until he pushed two fingers into you at once. Arching your head back, you gasped. You could easily take one, but both were enough to stretch you a little bit. This far in, you were so wet and needy he could slip in without fingering you. Still, he began to work his fingers in and out. 

       “That’s not what I mean and you know it. Dammit!” 

       A tongue flicked across your clit. 

       “Just making sure you’re ready…” 

       “Fuck!” you choked out as the pressure built. The pace was quick and steady; you knew it wouldn’t take long. You were panting now and you took both hands to grab his face. Looking him in the eyes you begged again. 

       “Please, I want you to fuck me! I don’t want to beg for it anymore, I want your cock inside of me.” 

       Each word came out between gasps. Your entire body felt like a spring coil ready to burst back into place. Brian pulled his fingers out of you and tore the knife away, tossing it beside you. His shirt came off first, followed by his pants - which he barely managed to pull off. Once his boxers were out of the way, his cock sprung up. In the light of the bedroom, you could see the gleam of precum leaking from his tip. Grabbing onto your hips, he yanked you towards him. Without being asked, you bent your knees and held your legs in the air. 

       Pushing his body in between your thighs, he picked up the knife beside you and flashed it, placing it against your neck just as fast. He didn’t give you time to think about it before he pushed his dick into you. Leaning your head back, you whined; it was much better than two fingers. He set a harsh pace, fucking deep into you as he held the blade to your neck. His other hand grabbed your shoulder and pushed you into the mattress. 

       You were dizzy all over again. Fear. Your cunt clenched around him and he groaned, hardly able to keep his eyes open, but boy he loved the sight of you. 

       “Fuck!” you cried as your orgasm crashed around you. Though you felt it building, the release was sudden. With no warning, your pussy fluttered around him uncontrollably. 

       “Oh shit,” he breathed out panicked, and tossed the knife off the bed, away from your neck. It clattered on the ground and slid across the floor, hitting your desk chair with a ping . Gripping onto you tighter, he set a ruthless pace as he rode out his orgasm, pumping his cum into you. 

       With the two of you spent Brian collapsed onto you like a human-weighted blanket. Sighing, you closed your eyes. There was no way they hadn’t heard you, but for now, you would ignore it. Brian hadn’t caught his breath, but he was cocky, “So, did you figure it out?” 

       Smiling, you laughed, “Yeah and we’re gonna do that again.” 

       Arms wrapped around you and you sunk further. 

       “I still think you look hot with a knife in your hands.” 

       “I’m glad. Next time, you can help me figure something else out, huh?”

[slippytapeworms]

Jonathan Davis + Head + Munky -> scenarios/head cannons

Jonathan Davis -> head cannons

before jonathan and you got together, he would always be a bit of a shy and self doubting king. always listening to you whenever you talked and pitching in on your conversations as you were on the record producing team.

jon was always overjoyed whenever you would head over to the studio during the early days of korn. (he always tried to hide his bright smile whenever he saw you sitting on a couch in the recording booth.) man was grateful for your supportiveness towards the band.

after their successful self titled album, he decided to finally ask you out with some encouragement from his fellow band mates and he asked you out when he had gotten drunk and you were dragging him home.

scenario :

jon's arm was slung over your shoulders while you held him up as he was drunk off his ass where he could barely walk. it was the celebration for their first album's' release and everyone decided to get drunk at some bar.

unfortunately you had to get stuck with dragging jonathan home as he was a bit of a lightweight. jon was leaning heavily onto you and muttering about something that you couldn't quite hear, however you could see his face was flushed red from your closeness.

"hey y/n?" he called out to you, his voice slurred obviously as he looked up at you, a gleam in his eyes. you let out a hum, noting that you were listening. "you know i've been thinking about you a lot, and i..."

he stops walking which makes you stop too as he looks down at the ground, flushed. "is something wrong?" you ask before he cuts you off and just kisses you. the kiss was gentle and not forceful at all, him giving you ways to pull away if you wanted to.

as he pulls away he looks into your eyes with the most sincere look in his eyes. "you don't have to say anything... i understand if you don't like me like that, but I just want you to know that I like you." he looks back down at the ground again and kicks his feet slightly. "I hope this doesn't make things awkward between us."

you take him by surprise and you give him a kiss of your own, he, surprised at first, kisses back sloppily.

after that you two became a couple. jonathan loved holding hands and you giving him small pecks in public. he felt like the luckiest guy on the planet around you.

sometimes when you two were cuddling he would start twirling your hair around his fingers instead of his own hair. once in a while kissing your brow.

jonathan wasn't that much jealous of a person. he would never be jealous of his friends being friendly with you, because he trusted them whole heartedly.

while the band was recording their second album 'life is peachy', the band had written a song called a.d.i.d.a.s. (😬) no, that song wasn't about promoting adidas. whenever you were in the studio as the band was performing the song, jon would give you subtle looks as he sang the lyrics. you always noticed whenever he did that.

whenever he came back from tour, his first priority would be getting in bed with you and ya know ... he kissed every single place he could reach and kept whispering how much he had missed you. after that it would be showers, kisses, hugs.

Brian ''Head'' Welch -> head cannons

you had met brian while the both of you were at a guitar store. brian was there because he needed to buy guitar strings since all his backups had snapped. him and his starting out band was touring through the area.

scenario :

as he was browsing through the sections, he noticed you struggling to pick out a guitar pick. brian walked up beside you. "you play?" you turned to look at him, surprised that someone was talking to you. you shake your head, no.

"it's for a friend of mine. they asked me to buy one suitable for their guitar, but i have no idea what kind they want..."

brian smirks. "what kind of guitar does your friend have?"

brian helped you pick out a guitar pick and you two engaged in friendly banter until the two of you went to the cash register. you paid for the pick but when it was brian's turn, he didn't have enough money to buy the strings.

he knew this touring didn't give the most money, but he couldn't play without guitar strings. that's when you decided to pay instead of him.

brian was shocked when you offered to do that. you didn't even know him for christ sakes. however he accepted it and decided to pay you back somehow.

you two kept in touch over the months, sometimes meeting eachother, you going to his band's concerts, getting high together, you persuading him to play his guitar for you. (he always thought it was a bit embarrassing but when he saw your dreamy gaze while he played, he quickly got over it.

after a while of hanging out, he developed a crush on you. (all his friends thought it was about time.) so when you two were getting high, he decided to be bold.

scenario :

you were laying sprawled out on the couch while brian was sitting on the floor next to you. he was pulling at your fingers as he was holding your hand. brian was just admiring your hand in his high state.

"what are you doing??" you ask him, but he doesn't stop.

"nothing..." he drags out the ending of the word, smirking at you. as he's thinking, he takes off one of his metal rings and slips it onto your finger instead, it being a perfect match. "keep it." you just look at him a bit surprised.

"are you serious? i can keep it?" brian nods and looks up at you, his smirk still permanent.

"it'll always remind you of me, won't it?" he teases before leaning in slowly. you reciprocate the gesture, leaning in two and the two of you share a kiss.

brian was super happy when you agreed to be in a relationship with him. for some reason he was a super clingy fella. he would hug you from behind and place his chin atop your head. if you two were sitting somewhere he would place his hand on your thigh even around his band mates.

he adores kissing you all over your neck, it's just your sweetest part for him. kissing your stomach, kissing anything really.

you had mentioned how he had a huge ass tongue and because of that he loved teasing you with it. licking your lips while making out, licking your neck and thighs.

he would always let you take the wheel if you wanted to be the dominant one. brian didn't mind one bit, he still loved you all the same.

James ''Munky'' Shaffer -> head cannons

the cutest son of a bitch.

you met munky working as a staff worker, setting up equipment for concerts and shows. munky was a bit shy to approach you first so he would just stare at you from afar, silently admiring you. once you caught him watching you and he quickly turned away, going back to tuning his guitar with a flustered face.

one day he decided to finally talk to you, once he did he became way more confident talking with you. munky would come up to you many times before the shows, giving you small gifts. some of them were small rocks with cute little paintings on them. (which he did himself.)

at home you had a specific shelf for all of his gifted rocks and sea shells.

he absolutely adored being around you. he would focus on all of your small habits that you had. how you played with your nails and twirled your hair around your fingers, how you kept your hands in your pockets, playing with your keys slightly.

once he finally confessed, you, of course, accepted. for the first few weeks of dating he would always hold your hand while going anywhere, showering you in kisses, taking you backstage after shows and just making out.

he would love having small little romantic dates together, either if it would be going to a cute café or having a movie night at home with you.

munky loved giving short but passionate kisses, never failing to miss a single spot on your face. he would kiss the ends of your hair strands, almost like he was worshipping them.

his go-to place to put his hands would be to tangle them in your hair and never let go.

speaking about hair. you sometimes convinced him to let you untie his hair and when you did, his hair would be all frazzled out and poofy. you always combed his hair down, being mindful not to comb roughly. he would just sink into your hands as they worked away at his curls, closing his eyes and relaxing.

-> that was all for this post, I'm definitely gonna do a lot more of these in the future. they just take real long to do... hope you guys liked it!!

[mceraki]

So. I have some things to say about this scene, and in particular this piece of dialogue between the finalist duo and cobs.

I've been thinking about how inherently unsettling the way cobs says this is - "you both are safe", "there has to be a winner". cobs basically views the show as if he was the one who made it, and treats the contestants like characters. he has shown through 'killing' the contestants that he does not see them as real people, and acts like he’s the show’s... producer or director, toying with/manipulating MePhone and seeing himself as pulling the strings behind the curtain. Brian Koch said during one of his livestreams that he even has favorite 'characters' (Knife and Cheesy), which just dehumanizes them more.

So the fact that Cobs is talking about how he basically has plans for the season finale, to give it a ‘proper ending’ - plans for Knife and Suitcase, when he doesn't even view them as real and simply as just an extension of MePhone's immature nature, cannot mean anything good. He's keeping them both 'safe' only to finish the show, which who KNOWS how he intends to end it!! Maybe he hangs the finalists and the other contestants' safety over MePhone's head, blackmailing him into coming back to Meeple Headquarters. Maybe he pits the finalists against each other in some messed up way, maybe even violent! Maybe he manipulates the duo into being infuriated at mephone, and he leverages that anger against him. Would he even let them go back to the hotel?? They're stuck in Meeple Headquarters basically, stuck with HIM.

Cobs is essentially showing that he is in control now, that he intends to end the show HIS way. He even explicitly SAID that the only reason they aren’t in danger (from MePhoneX) was because there 'has to be a winner'. And for me that just gives off extremely Unsettling Vibes.

Idk if this makes any sense - basically, the knifecase duo are probably in trouble, and I am ANXIOUS to see what cobs is cooking up for them.

[hauntingofhouses]

Taigen x Mizu mentioned in the The Making of Netflix’s “Blue Eye Samurai”

Taken from the livestream organised by Gnomon

Jane Wu:

Next slide, Taigen...

Brian Kesinger:

Everyone's favourite samurai, uh, Taigen. Uh, so, he was designed a bit over the top. The, the, peak of male samurai, even down to the quite prodigious hair bun, which he doesn't have on screen for much. Uh, but, um, he is the visual opposite of Mizu, right, so it was fun to kinda let her design dictate what his design should be, and, you know, I think that, you know, especially for all you Taigen x Mizu fans out there, I think that might be one of the reasons why he's attracted to her. Um, or in my brain, he's attracted to her, uh, is because she is who she wants to be, and doesn't have to put on airs. Uh, and that's a lesson that he has to learn and he literally, I mean, it's on the nose but, he lets his hair down. And that's the start of his journey of discovery, um, which he needs to go. He's, he's got a lot of growing still left to do. Um—

Jane Wu:

I also think he has a, has a talent—he has like a... sword crush on her right, he has like a martial arts crush on her, yeah. Talent crush, yeah.

Brian Kesinger:

Right, yeah. Talent crush. Yes. Yes, for sure.

---

For context, Jane Wu is Blue Eye Samurai's supervising director and Producer, while Brian Kesinger is the lead character designer. Others presenting for this livestream were production designer Toby Wilson and art director Emil Mitev.

[randomfoggytiger]

CHRIS CARTER'S MISCOMMUNICATION: "Platonic", "Cerebral and Sexy", and the Romantic Dynamic of The X-Files

(Credit to: Melissa Walker)

**Disclaimer**: This writeup won't focus on character flaws, only on delving a little bit deeper to understand a perspective.

In this post, I explore Chris Carter's "cerebral" use of the word "platonic", and parcel out his MSR opinions during the first six seasons of The X-Files.

PART I: WILL-THEY-WON'T-THEY OR PLATONIC?

In August 1993, Chris Carter conducted his first promotional interview of The X-Files. Amongst other inspirations for the show, he drew namely from The Avengers's John Steed and Emma Peel as the cornerstones of the "Fox and Dana" partnership. “David and Gillian are very bright,” Carter said. “They truly are the characters. Their relationship is cerebral and subtly sexy. Fox and Dana remind me of John Steed and Emma Peel in ‘The Avengers.’”

To a generation who grew up watching one of the (then) most widely known will-they-won't-they in television, that comparison signaled allure, attraction, and simmering sexual tension. As @observeroftheuniverse's post here highlights, The Avengers often blatantly played with the romantic pull between Mr. Steed and Mrs. Peel. This article particularly articulates how freely the writers and actors discussed the indisputable fact of "something" going on between them: Peel’s verbal interactions with Steed range from witty banter to thinly disguised innuendo. Regarding the constant question of whether they had a sexual relationship at any time, Patrick Macnee [Steed's actor] thought the characters went to bed on a very regular basis (just not in view of the camera). However, Rigg [Peel's actress] thought they were most likely engaging in an enjoyable extended flirtation that ultimately went nowhere. Writer/producer Brian Clemens said he wrote them with the idea that they had an affair before Emma’s first appearance in the series,[6] and they certainly appear to already know each other very well when Emma is first introduced. And my own post here draws descriptions and quotes straight from each characters' Wikipedia page (and notes the similarities between Scully and Peel.)

However, after years of mixed responses, one clever reporter was able to get a clearer answer out of Carter in 1997:

RS: I’ve always wondered if you watched a show called “The Avengers.”

CC: Sure. Loved it. Mulder and Scully come from those characters, Emma Peel and what’s-his-name — Patrick MacNee. He was older than she was, so it was a sort of May-September, whatever you call it, relationship. It lacked sexual tension because of that quality. But I loved that sort of platonic thing.

And now you must be wondering: how? How did he not notice Steed and Peel's dynamic while remaining a big fan of the show, especially when he described their dynamic as "cerebral and sexy"?

Chris Carter, I posit, uses "platonic" when he means to say "sexual tension without decisive follow-through."

A bold claim. I'll prove it, too.

PART II: PLATONIC DOESN'T MEAN WHAT WE THINK IT MEANS

For the longest time, I assumed this double speak of Carter's was a form of outright lying. Don't get me wrong, he has and will lie when ego becomes involved, or when he wants to bait the "mystery" longer but can't think up a cleverer sleight of hand in the moment. But the truth, from the 1990s to the 2020s, is much simpler: he is telling the truth when he refers to Mulder and Scully as platonic.

Because "platonic", to Chris Carter, means "intellectually driven, sexually interested, non-sexually equal" all rolled into one. And, since he can't find a word that means "sexual without involving sex", he settles for one that strays from making a definitive either way.

In his interviews from 1993 to 1997 (which I explore in Part IV, see below~), he insisted that Mulder and Scully were friends, yet also stipulated they wouldn't end up together "on-screen"; and when comparing them to other sexually-charged partnerships, he repeatedly underscored his preferences for relationships that weren't "overtly sexual."

The nail in the coffin was a 1995 interview for Season 3--

AD: When you first explained Scully and Mulder to FOX, was it a point of sale that this was going to be purely working relationship, no love interest.

CC: I wanted it to be that way from the get-go, although I did want there to be sort of an underlying tension between the two of them because my feeling is when you put two smart people, a man and a woman, in a room, I don’t care whether or not they’re passionate about their life and their work, you’re going to get sexual tension out of that naturally.

AD: Yeah, the sort of Harry-met-Sally-with-brains-scenario.

--and its follow-up in January 1996--

Interviewer: How important is the sexual tension between the characters?

CC: I never wanted them to jump in the sack together because it was uninteresting to me. To me, the most sexual relationships are often the ones that are never realized, consummated or even spoken about. So I wanted this to be two smart people who work together, who happen to get along very well. Through their shared passion in their work, there is a natural chemical sexual tension that comes out of that, that doesn’t ever have to be spoken about, but it works.

Well then, why the double-speak and general lack of clarity?

Chris Carter often claimed he quite literally trusted no one, a self-protective measure that sprung from two alcoholic parents. One was sometimes-abusive, the other "ditzy" and detrimentally loose-lipped; and together, they always held rank, never backing down or apologizing for their wrongs. Humor and obfuscation, then, became his primary tool-- one minute he'd proclaim, “We can’t prove that it [abductions or paranormal activity] happened, but we can’t prove it didn’t”, and the next he'd seriously aver, "I’m a natural skeptic...."

The key to the truth lies in the repeatability of his claims: his oft-voiced skepticism in the paranormal far outweighed his infrequent, one-off jokes.

PART III: WHAT CC MEANS WHEN HE SAYS "PLATONIC"

The most telling piece of information-- the dirt on top of the coffin, if you will-- was a surprisingly open interview promoting Millennium.

Chris Carter's sincerest answer to the question of the "platonic" dichotomy was also his most vulnerable; and, upon realizing this blunder, he swiftly abandoned reflection and escaped through the realms of exaggeration-- a sign that his clarity was mixed with a little too much vulnerability.

February 20, 1997:

Interviewer: In both shows, I noticed, the male-female relationship is central and idealized. In “The X-Files,” it’s platonic. In “Millennium,” there’s a sort of idealized marriage between Frank Black and his wife.

CC: My feeling is that the most powerful relationships you have in life are … not sexual. You haven’t seen Lance Henriksen and Megan Gallagher in a sexual situation on Millennium. Between them, love is understood. Love is gesture and feeling and trust, and all those things, and it’s not necessarily a physical thing.

Interviewer: And the relationship between Scully and Mulder?

CC: It’s also like my kind of idealized romantic relationship. It’s two smart people in a room, arguing something when each one has a valid point of view. It’s like good dinner-party conversation. It’s what makes me feel alive — and good about myself. And I think there’s too little of it in most of our lives and particularly in romantic situations.

Here, the interviewer turned his questions from philosophy to possibility, leading Carter to quickly disengage and strike up hyperbole:

Interviewer: You were talking a second ago about gesture, and how Gallagher and Henriksen don’t really hug and kiss. What would happen if Scully and Mulder were to hug and kiss?

CC: They have hugged. They’ve never kissed. They could kiss if it was the right time for it. They could never give big French kisses. People say, “Will Mulder and Scully ever go to bed?” And I say, “You really don’t want them to.” Because the minute they do, then, basically, when they’re in that motel on their assignment, you know, investigating the appearance of extraterrestrial life somewhere, and they decide they’re finally going to get it on, they’re going to lie there sort of googly eyed in the morning, and those aliens are just going to be running amok. They will become more interested in themselves than in the things that they need to be doing.

He wasn't entirely wrong, either: their partnership and relationship would require-- in 1997, at least-- a lot of communication to get anywhere close to romantically stable. Fight the Future's "But you saved me" hadn't been uttered canonically; and neither character had the downtime of Season 6 yet to sort through and shift their priorities. As easy as it would be to slough off his exaggeration as another example of how little he understood the characters, Chris Carter's statement-- in truth-- pointed to how well he knew their dynamic.

Still, there remained a grain of truth to Chris's drama. He viewed (views) Mulder and Scully as two characters whose sexual attraction served to aid their quest, not detract from it; and feared that anything overtly sexual or "changed" between them would inevitably distract them from saving the world.

A challenging dynamic to understand until I realized it was one he shared it with his wife, Dori.

February 13, 1996:

But the demands of his work wear on his private life. “This is the first time Chris has seen me vertical in a few weeks,” said his wife, Dori, an elegant former screenwriter who flew up from Los Angeles to squeeze in a little private time with her husband.

August 2, 1998:

I work until at least 9.30 and I always work weekends. My wife’s staying in Santa Barbara is nothing to do with any kind of marital break-up. We’ve been together 16 years. It’s more that she’d rather be there and not see me than here and not see me. We speak all the time and its actually very romantic: I’d suggest it to anybody as a way of creating connection and desire.

She would like it if I were home more often, but she knows that I tend to feel a little obsessive and understands that I would probably be miserable if I had to live my life any differently right now. I’m not a workaholic, but when something hits and it’s good, you have to obey its demands.

For Chris Carter, obsessive focus-- as confirmed and reiterated by everyone in his life during The X-Files's run-- was lived without distraction.

During another 1997 interview, he doubled down (humorously, then solemnly) on the pathos of Mulder and Scully's situation.

1997:

Question from Dublin, OH (Sunil Karve): Hi Chris. On that terrible day when the series comes to an end, are you planning on having Mulder and Scully finally get to the “truth” (and more importantly, be able to prove it?)

Carter: They’ll be too busy jumping each others’ bones.

Question from Los Angeles, CA (meredith): Recently you likened M & S’s relationship to the one in the movie “Remains of the Day”. For those of us who didn’t see that movie, what did you mean? Thanks.

Carter: I just meant, I thought it was more powerful that those two characters didn’t get together....

Question from North Syracuse, NY (Ellis): Will a romantic relationship develop between Mulder and Scully?

Carter: No romance.

PEOPLE: Ah the QUESTION…Why not?

Carter: More alien stuff is coming soon.

And yet, he took care to hint (blatantly at times) that Mulder and Scully would end up together after the nebulous, victorious conclusion. Not only as a possibility-- an inevitability.

PART IV: DESCRIBING MSR THROUGH CARTER'S EYES

Carter's descriptions of Mulder and Scully's partnership through the years didn't change... in substance, at least. His answers shifted depending on his devilish mood; but the underpinnings remained the same, all pointing to a similar, looming conclusion.

To illustrate this point, I've included as many statements as possible, barring repetition, dating from 1993 to 1997.

WRITING AND CASTING THE PILOT

"The Truth About Season One", post The Truth:

"It was very easy to cut Ethan out because he just slowed down the scenes where you would see Mulder and Scully together, which is where all the heat really was."

September 23, 1994:

I loved both David and Gillian from the start. And, yes, I chose them from hundreds of other actors who auditioned. The chemistry between them is just pure luck.

February 20, 1997:

[On casting Gillian Anderson] "You knew the chemistry was there with Dave and Gillian. That’s something you pray for, because you can’t manufacture it."

June 14, 1998:

“At the original auditions, I saw dozens of people but the moment David and Gillian walked in the room, I knew I’d found my Mulder and Scully. It was as if the skins I’d created fit these two people like gloves.”

SEASON 1

August 18, 1993:

“David and Gillian are very bright,” Carter said. “They truly are the characters. Their relationship is cerebral and subtly sexy. Fox and Dana remind me of John Steed and Emma Peel in ‘The Avengers.’”

November 30, 1993:

The relationship between Mulder and Scully is particularly promising. So far, it’s a low-voltage attraction. If it gets stronger, it won’t be because that’s the standard TV formula.

“It’s a relationship I’m not seeing on television,” says Carter. “It’s based on mutual respect, not something overtly sexual.”

SEASON 2

September 23, 1994:

LANGER: Chris, You brought back Tooms. Are there any plans to bring back the Eves or that guy who starts fires?

CARTER: Again, anything can happen. Except that Mulder and Scully sex scene.

MOONFERRET: Chris, We all know that the Mulder / Scully thing isn’t going to happen. I’m curious though– why exactly are you so opposed to this? You and the rest of the crew are great storytellers- I’m sure you could pull it off exceptionally. Why so opposed? (Do you get the feeling I’m one of the few that would love for it to happen? Call me vicarious…)

CARTER: Oh, Moonferret. If I could only make your dreams come true.

October 28, 1994:

“I had decided sometime after learning that she was pregnant (last winter) to shoot around Gillian’s pregnancy,” Carter said....

Carter considered making Scully a single mother, but he resisted domesticating the show. “I have chosen not to make the show about the characters’ lives,” he said. “The show works best as two FBI agents investigating paranormal or unexplained phenomena, and that’s what drives the show. If the stories don’t drive the show, then we’re working backward.”

December 1994:

Another source of praise for the show has been the unique relationship shared by the two main characters. Though there is chemistry between Anderson and Duchovny, the writers and actors take pains to maintain a tender but nonsexual relationship.

...As far as the sexual tension between the two goes, everyone involved in the series seems to agree that a full-blown romance is out of the question.

December 1994:

How close will Scully and Mulder get to the final truth in the current season of X-Files? Carter’s answer is as nebulous as any of last season’s answers. ‘I don’t think there is a final truth,” he says with a laugh. “There are problem final truths. We’ll just keep pushing."

SEASON 3

1995:

AD: When you first explained Scully and Mulder to FOX, was it a point of sale that this was going to be purely working relationship, no love interest.

CC: I wanted it to be that way from the get-go, although I did want there to be sort of an underlying tension between the two of them because my feeling is when you put two smart people, a man and a woman, in a room, I don’t care whether or not they’re passionate about their life and their work, you’re going to get sexual tension out of that naturally.

AD: Yeah, the sort of Harry-met-Sally-with-brains-scenario.

1995:

Q. Did you always have in mind a two-person cast, male and female?

A. The Mulder-Scully idea was there from the start. And I wanted to flip the gender types, so that Mulder, the male, would be the believer, the intuitive one, and Scully the skeptic, which is the more traditional male role. It was also important that Scully be Mulder’s equal in rank, intelligence, and ability–because in real life the FBI is a boy’s club–and I didn’t want her to take a back seat.

October 1995:

**Note**: Carter teases a lot during this interview, but his last answer is serious enough.

Melissa: The chemistry between Mulder and Scully is great. Will their relationship ever develop into more than just being partners and friends?

Chris Carter: They’ll find out they’re actually third cousins, four times removed.

Naber: With Mulder getting a girl [a topical Season 3 rumor], will we be seeing Scully having more of a personal life or a date?

Chris Carter: Scully will join a nunnery when she learns that Mulder has strayed.

Mary Paster: Rumors about a girlfriend for Agent Mulder have a lot of fans worried that this will ruin the “sexual tension” between him and Agent Scully — can you tell us anything about it to calm our fears?

Chris Carter: ...About Mulder’s girlfriend… don’t worry, I won’t let anything “ruin” Mulder and Scully.

December 24, 1995:

Q: As you know, there has been a lot of speculation that Scully is Samantha. [Agent Mulder’s sister, Samantha, was abducted by aliens when she was a child and never seen again, causing Mulder to become obsessed with UFO’s. If she were alive, she would be the same age as his partner, Dana Scully.]

A: [Chuckles] People with too much time on their hands.

Q: Can you tell fans that is definitely not the case?

A: That is not the case.

Q: There’s also speculation that Scully is a lesbian and that’s why there have been only fleeting mentions of past romance for her. Is Scully gay?

A: That is not the case either. I hate to answer anything definitely. But Scully is heterosexual.

January 1996:

Interviewer: How close to your original vision is what we get?

CC: I have to say that it’s extremely close to what I imagined. Of course, when I was sitting and writing the pilot, I never imagined episode 73, which is where we’ll be this year. Anyone who creates a show, I don’t think, can look that far down the road. But I did, indeed, have an idea about how the Mulder and Scully relationship would progress. 

Interviewer: How important is the sexual tension between the characters?

CC: I never wanted them to jump in the sack together because it was uninteresting to me. To me, the most sexual relationships are often the ones that are never realized, consummated or even spoken about. So I wanted this to be two smart people who work together, who happen to get along very well. Through their shared passion in their work, there is a natural chemical sexual tension that comes out of that, that doesn’t ever have to be spoken about, but it works.

May 13, 1996:

Since the very first episode, the slow-burn chemistry between Mulder and Scully has had fans in a delicious torment, debating the pros and cons of a romantic/sexual relationship, analyzing the details of each gesture, each word spoken by the characters.

On this subject Chris Carter is adamant. In numerous interviews, he has stated that there will be a relationship between the two main characters “when hell freezes over,” as he recently said in USA Today.

May 16, 1996:

Interviewer: Do chat types want romance between Mulder and Scully?

CC: They do and they don’t. They want elements of it without them jumping into the sack. There are these “relationshippers” who kind of dominate the online chats. I’m a little dismayed because I don’t want to do a show about fuzzy warm Mulder and Scully. Never.

SEASON 4 - SEASON 5

1997:

Question from Dublin, OH (Sunil Karve): Hi Chris. On that terrible day when the series comes to an end, are you planning on having Mulder and Scully finally get to the “truth” (and more importantly, be able to prove it?)

Carter: They’ll be too busy jumping each others’ bones.

Question from North Syracuse, NY (Ellis): Will a romantic relationship develop between Mulder and Scully?

Carter: No romance.

PEOPLE: Ah the QUESTION…Why not?

Carter: More alien stuff is coming soon.

February 20, 1997:

Interviewer: If the show is ever in trouble, don’t you think Fox would push you to have a romance?

CC: Oh, sure.

Interviewer: And how strong do you think you’ll be when that call comes?

CC: As I say, I may not be here by then, so I don’t know. But I would resist it, as I think the characters would. Or the actors that play them. That’s what The X-Files movies are going to be for.

FIGHT THE FUTURE

March 14, 1998:

[John Shiban] "Chris Carter has said that Mulder and Scully, in a way, are having a romance. Even though it’s not a sexual romance, this is a relationship and it is complicated. And sometimes they are at odds, sometimes they don’t agree, sometimes they are concerned for each other, they are worried that one is going to endanger themselves, etc. Sometimes those things aren’t resolved and we like to leave it lie(?) because it makes them more real to us and more interesting people if they have that kind of long-term up and down that you go through in a relationship like this."

May 1998:

TVG: There has also been a lot of buzz in the press about a scene in which Mulder and Scully kiss. You’ve often said you wouldn’t play that card, that they will never really take their professional relationship to an intimate, romantic level.

CC: Nor should they. I’m not saying it would never happen, but I think the characters, if they’re being true to themselves, would be careful about finding themselves in that entanglement.

June 1998:

Y’know, like do Mulder and Scully kiss?

“I think it would ruin the show,” Carter says, then adds, “I think it would wreck the X-Files if they had a relationship.”

Anderson chuckles: “What? Before we spot an alien, what are we going to do? Smooch?”

Reports Duchovny: “There is way too much history to be developed for them to have a carnal meeting.”

Besides, says Duchovny, smirking, “America wouldn’t stand for it.”

SEASON 6

October 1998:

[Talking about FTF's almost-kiss]:

“I think it’s a natural expression of the love these two people obviously have for one another. And that was an expression of that love, it’s not necessarily a perfectly…” Carter drifts off for a moment, stumbling for the right words to describe his thoughts on the matter. “It’s not a sexual expression. That they almost kiss isn’t stepping over a line that I think that neither of them are quite prepared to step over. But it’s a quite believable one,” Carter insists. “That it doesn’t happen, that’s part of the fun.”

Although Carter says Mulder and Scully’s relationship will be dealt with in Season Six, he does stick firm to one of his former proclamations: “I don’t see Mulder and Scully getting in the sack.”

December 1998:

“They are VERY complex characters. We played with Mulder and Scully’s belief systems in the fifth season. They’re both unmarried. They’ve both lost parents, and they’ve both lost them in a tragic way. Mulder and Scully have a lot to learn about life, I think, and they’re things that people have to learn as they move through their 30s and on into their 40s,” CC observes. “So, I really do think we’ve got a lot more to learn about our characters and about the conspiracy. I don’t think we’ll run out of ideas anytime soon.”

CONCLUSION

I started this exercise as a way to understand Chris Carter's thinking. Seeing the early days of his vision-- poking around in the limitations of his verbiage, finding that a deeper relationship was always in the cards (even if kept back from the table)-- was informative and intriguing.

(What really interested me-- which I couldn't include here-- was the revelation that Gillian Anderson was of the same mind concerning Mulder and Scully's partnership. It was actually David Duchovny who later became curious to explore a more personal relationship between the two. Which explains The Unnatural, I'd bet.)

And that's where we leave off on this platonic miscommunication.

Thanks for reading~

Enjoy!

[riaaanna]

I haven't seen this getting hyped up in this corner of the fandom so... hello we might be getting a Queen I boxset in the near future!!

This came from a series of FB posts by John Anthony, who produced Smile's single "Step on Me" and later the debut album "Queen" with Trident. I had my reservations about boosting this here because. well. clearly Brian and Roger are not aware of how much JA is giving away on his page and I'm trying to not jinx it but welp, man should've known what to and not to share lol. This is insanely cool news!

Starting from this post last year which used to be public but is now friends-only. JA posted that Brian emailed him mentioning that they are remixing Queen I...

And then Roger apparently jumped in the conversation, saying that they would love to hook up.

About four months later JA posted that he has an on-camera interview scheduled for May 1st to talk about the early days of Queen, and mentioned that the band has done a remix of Queen I!

The day finally came and they finally met up, even though it didn't turn out to be an on-cam interview but rather just a long discussion that will be in the liner notes of - he said it - "an upcoming definitive boxset"! He also listened to the remixes of their demos, so that's one thing we're definitely going to get. I think that's worth getting excited about!

Just as a disclaimer, I didn't have much knowledge of JA or his character until recently. I scrolled down a bit (more than a bit) and found that he hasn't always had the best opinions or sentiment about Queen. Maybe he's changed, cause people change, or maybe it doesn't matter anymore... but it's interesting to learn how he perceived the dynamic of their working relationship.

Here was something he said about Tim Staffell... (I haven't had time to trace back Tim's comment about him.)

And there was this post further back (I'm not sure if he has beef with RT Baker? lol) with these comments underneath.

It's just interesting to see the changes over the years, obviously I'm glad he's in better terms with the band now and spilling us all the tea with how the boxset is developing. Which, going by this interview with Greg Brooks, might be a combo with Queen II or even Sheer Heart Attack - the reason being they need enough "hits" materials for the mainstream audience to make sure the boxset can even sell, and Queen I alone wouldn't be sufficient.

Since certain people were doing it recently, please don't boost this (I'm not allowed to say repost now cause I don't own anything here!) to FB or other places where it could round back to JA or, God forbid Brian or Roger. Yes it's been discussed elsewhere, but it seems to just be lowkey simmering so far, let's not heat it up to a full boil so he doesn't get in trouble and we can keep getting these sneaky updates throughout the year. 😁

Anyway, I'm managing my expectations but I can't help getting excited! I would love to hear more demos, or a studio Hangman if that exists, or even, in my wildest dreams, that Imperial College show Brian has been mentioning since 2021. Fingers crossed 😍

[buffyfan145]

So glad "The War of the Rohirrim" NYCC panel had a live stream today as I was able to watch it and I'm even more excited to see it!!! 😀 Stephen Colbert moderated and revealed he got to see the movie already and loved it. Am tagging as spoilers but from what the writers, director, producers, and cast talked about today mostly does match what is in the LOTR appendices. Also tagging "Rings of Power" as they actually mentioned it when talking about Héra.

First off the creative team talked about the movie and how they wanted to expand of Helm's daughter Héra, as she was unnamed in the books but the story does revolve so much around her since the war all starts because of the rejected marriage proposal from Wulf's father to unite her and Wulf and their people.

Brian Cox, who voices Helm Hammerhand, said Helm and Héra's relationship is a very loving father/daughter one and sets up things that happen later in the story. Brian also told some funny stories too and loved being able to be part of a LOTR movie.

The producers want us to love Wulf before we hate him and he's very different at the beginning of the movie before his father's death. Sounded very similar to the "ROP" creatives about how they made Sauron/Halbrand on the show. Stephen also said he was impressed with how amazing Wulf's hair is the whole movie. LOL

Gaia Wise and Luke Pasqualino then both talked about Héra and Wulf's relationship and confirmed there is a whole "What if?" situation with them as it's hinted at they likely would've married anyway if what happened between their fathers never happened. They teased about it being similar to childhood friends growing up and falling in love if the worst hadn't happened. I had also seen from a preview of the upcoming artwork book that Wulf is in love with Héra, but for her character only teased that she never realized it and till that point never thought of it. I'm very curious where this is going to go as I've also seen she tries to use their friendship to get him to stop the war. This is also why I keep tagging my posts about this movie as Haladriel as it does feel similar to them on "ROP" and even some of our AU fics where we kept him as human.

Gaia also confirmed she used a few LOTR characters as inspirations for Héra including her descendant Éowyn (Miranda Otto also narrates this movie as her too), but she also named Galadriel. I've noticed this too not just from "ROP" but from the books and how younger Galadriel is described to be.

The producers also said they are thinking of other LOTR anime movies after this. Depends on how successful this movie is and they will be making live-action movies like "The Hunt for Gollum" too.

They also showed some clips but us watching the live stream couldn't see. One of these clips showed that there is a Ring of Power involved. I don't think it's the One Ring but very curious what that means, especially since Wulf usually does end up recruiting some of the Easterlings that work for Sauron.

There was a motion tapestry of scenes from the movie released and a new song by a well known singer called "The Rider" will be released in November.