#i understand that it’s nostalgic and there ARE good songs by them i cannot lie i listen to a few

[honeywelcomehome]

when are people going to stop acting like any P4TD! that was made after rya/n ross left was any good like. oh my god. bre/ndon urie sucks ass at writing music and also just being a person in general

[egittae]

The lie, although slightly shabby, would do for now. There was a time and place for everything, and for now the need to advertise his true self and most importantly his title was none. Those who need to know, know. For Dorothea…

It seemed like she needed something else, anyway. 

Memories returned to him every now and then, quick and flowing like a lazy river. A time where he was much younger and feistier, clad in the same uniform as his son, but instead of dutifully sitting in class and listening to lessons he sneaked out of the academy’s premises to seek something else. Silver boots that didn’t crave the feeling of walking through polished stone and marble, but rather caked in mud from a small village’s little road that hadn’t been fully paved with rocks yet. A bright blue cape tugging on wood barbs and rolled up hay, rubbing against dirty walls and farm animals. The princely uniform, once pristine and proud, now roughed up around the elbows and knees from common work.

Nostrils that refused to take in the scent of centuries-old libraries, rich wood and expensive incense, instead seeking the smell of petrichor and earth and janky street food. The stink of farm and sweat from manual labor, the puffy and slightly disgusting smell from a tightly packed, joyous tavern as men and women sang folk songs at the top of their lungs after a day of hard work.

Even with his memories weak, he knew he felt no shame nor disgust in being born noble. But he too wished to understand life beyond the walls of polished ivory and silver. To wear his title with pride and use it for the greater good.

He watched her as she spoke, placing a hand atop aged pages both to keep them from being moved by the wind and as a means to ensure his attention was now fully on the songstress. A small, pensive smile took over his features as the professor looked around, eyeing corridors that seemed both nostalgic and alien. “Indeed, it is not an easy task. I must admit I do experience a sliver of whiplash when I come here.” He finished with a loose laugh, before taking a sip of the overly sweet juice and holding back a wince from it. 

A pause then, as he bided his time to take in her words.

Mirroring her actions, he too shifted his eyes to the worn edges of his book. “I fear I cannot comment much on the inner workings of Adrestian nobility for their habits and general behavior, but those of Faerghus…live to serve their people. The people are what make them into who they are, and denying them or leaving them to fend for themselves, seeing them as inferior, is a quick way to earn the scorn of not only thousands from your territory but also from your fellow neighboring lords, who will judge you for slacking in your duties. A lord who gets drunk on power and riches is unworthy of their title and must be punished at best or outright pruned at worst, because Faerghus has no room for cruelty between its own people. We all struggle the same under the harsh blizzards and poor soil, we all must help one another live.” Icy pools focused on the first words of the page, repeating them in his mind in a constant loop- ‘rebellion’.

After a blink, he looked back at her face. “In Faerghus, most of its nobility are not the most well equipped to directly communicate with their people on a more personal level. It is less out of feeling overly proud or superior and more…simply being awkward, and not exactly knowing what to say or do other than the basic concerns they are familiar with. Are you fed? Safe? Are you warm, ready for winter? Are you injured, can you fight? And so on.” A short laugh escaped his lips. “It is like…well, talking to a guard. There is care…but it feels impersonal, because their focus is often elsewhere. They look out for the things a commoner should not have to worry too much about.” So much so, that many forget they too are people.

He raised one hand in loose defense. “That is what often goes for the faerghan side of things…I sadly cannot comment much on Adrestian or Leicester nobility. I unfortunately have never gotten the chance to travel to either of those countries, so my experience is limited.” The professor straightened his back, offering her a small smile. “What I mean to say is, a true, good lord sees the worth in their commoners. You are their power, a noble with no people is just another fool high up on a ladder.”

A blond brow rose in mild surprise, though he was quick to understand her point. “I must say, I disagree. As a knight, my duty is to fight for the good of the people and the honor of my lord. I have value as a soldier…but a territory is much more than just soldiers.” 

He gestured towards her with an armored hand, letting it fall back to the book on his lap. “Envision this scenario. You have spent weeks on end in a fierce battle, and are finally able to return home. You may have lost comrades, may be suffering from injuries, are tired and jaded. Your home territory is frozen and blanketed by snow, with no lush greens or flowers to be seen, and while you have done well in staying alive…you feel as if it has become dull. All you have seen for days was violence, pain and death.”

“Your squadron goes to a tavern to eat and drink the night away, until a bard begins to play a popular tune and their partner breaks into song. Soon, the entire tavern is taken by energy and joy, and as you and your fellows join the fun…you remember why you have been fighting all along. You remember why it is worth risking it all on the battlefield, and you feel reinvigorated. Next time, you wish to fight harder than ever. Because not only you fight for your lord, but you too fight for the sake of those people. The relationship is of mutual aid.”

His smile then became warm. “An army and a territory with low morale is an almost guaranteed loss. Musicians and artists remind us that life is worth living, and that joy is worth risking it all for. A commoner like you, able to remind an army and entire villages that they must keep holding on to hope, is as valuable as a knight, such as I.”

@encantresse

a lesson in the holy land's intricacies

closed starter for @encantresse

[secndlife]

omg i'm so sorry it has taken me so long to respond, i got lost in the sauce D:

ahhh brazil to poland sounds very drastic but also very cool (no pun intended)!!!

you deserve any and all love you receive for mmf!!! it's rly so good, i can't shut up abt it lol !

mingyu IS a malewife, i agree!! and omg plz, hoshi recording the spider mv drove me crazy lajdfalfja like SIR WATER U DOING but also, carry on :) or like in that christmas in august gose where he just sat there and watched...he's the moodmaker which is very important and necessary!

yesss after i read one last time, i read one and two small petals and that one hurt almost as bad :") i'll have to check out passion (flower), i have been slacking on reading fics lately :/

jeonghan rly is so versatile!! i love enemies to lovers fics, and he truly is one of my favorite members to have that dynamic w. you definitely made sense re: characterization! i have dabbled in writing fics and so i totally understand that. i think part of why i enjoy writing fics based off of real ppl/established characters is that it gives me a template of a character, but like you said, bc we only know part of who they rly are, it gives me a basis of where i could go/explore their personalities deeper. i feel like i just rambled so lmk if that doesn't make sense hahaha

ahhhh mmf2 i cannot WAIT i saw your post re: fights and tbh i love fights (HELP) so i'm vvvvv excited for it !!! also related to that. writing rly is hard lkadjfkldaf but that's why i commend you so much, it's not easy and on top of that, you do a pretty damn good job!

ugh gyucheol sometimes -_- they fight so much and also i want to fight them too, just put me in a ring w them and let's BRAWL (but now that you mention that they're both fire signs, this totally makes sense as i am also a fire sign LMAO)

okay so you mentioned gose, which episode or episodes are your favorites? are there any you'd want to be a part of as like a member/watch as like a live audience type thing?

i feel like we can't move on without asking what your fav title tracks are! top 5 fave tracks (can include b-sides)?

- 🍳

IT'S OKAAAAY i hope you're having some rest and taking care of yourself!!!!

ok lemme add a cut and we can continue

it was indeed very drastic tbh but i have no regrets !!! it's literally going to be two years tomorrow so WOW IT'S BEEN A RIDE.

plsssss 🥺🥺🥺🥺 it's almost at 1k notes that's absolutely insane for me like literally. bonkers luv ! it makes me super happy tho that people really like it 🥺

SOONYOUNG IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE I CAN'T WITH THAT did u see vernon saying something like that on his latest vlive THIS ONE and he's totally right soonyoung's role as mood maker is so important :/ my boy :/

one and two small petals was such a big deal to me i was so obsessed !!! passion (flower) you need to dm the author tho :/ they took it out but they were still sending links through dm hehe IT'S WORTH IT I PROMISE !!!!!!

pls e2l with jeonghan HITS DIFFERENT!! it's literally a dynamic i feel suits him sosososo much! and yes same like i have some perspective and something to roughly shape it but i can also "play" with it as i go and according to what suits me. AND YES ALL OF IT MADE SENSE AND I TOTALLY AGREE 🤝

THE FIGHT SCENEALKSDJAKLAD me the other day: no mmf couple doesn't fight. also me: writes a LONG LONG scene on them fighting. i'm excited tho bc i think it's a necessary scene that adds a lot to soonyoung's character and his vulnerability bc mc's shows more in mmf and now it will be a moment for Him you know.

OMGGGG A FIRE SIGNNNNN!!!! I LOVE FIRE SIGNS !!!!!!!!! WE'RE THE BEST PLS!!!!!!! i really really love gyucheol they're so fun i love them. my friend were writing me a poly gyucheol au where i'm their gf it would be a crazy dynamic aksdjaksjkf bc i'm literally like cheol so i think it'd be so fun

OMG GOSE i fucking LOVE the playground gose that one makes me so happy it's literally a serotonin boost. i also love the ttt ones i would love to be on the hiperrealism one bc i'm 100% sure soonyoung throws up from drinking when he goes upstairs so i would like to be there for confirmation !!! i also love bungee jump even tho i would never do it. and don't lie 1 and the tag !!!!!!! HBU???

ok this is HARD. but. uh! second life (WHO WOULD'VE KNOWN), home (i have a tattoo written "i'm your home" hehe), ah! love (they did it all for me there really), together (PLS THIS SONG MAKES ME SO HAPPY AND NOSTALGIC IT HITS DIFFERENT) and odihtd (this was one of the first svt songs i really really liked it). but this is so hard tho their discography is so good !!!! hbu share yours !

[mingi-bubu]

Watch "Love O2O" With Me... Again !

Episode 1

i'm baaack :D

(on my bullshit al;djkf;slkjd)

i've been feeling nostalgic as of late and was thinking about re-watching a drama i already watched

it was between love o2o and rookie historian

and i guess we know who won ;alkdsj

so, just like before,

i have my water, my laptop's plugged in, i have some m&m's

as mark lee my beloved would say, lezgeddit

oh the intro T.T

i missed this song al;ksdfsj

actually i have been listening to it a lot recently so like. tea i guess

oh to be hugged and kissed on the forehead by yang yang

i missed them

i know theyre so awkwrd but like its so endearing

i still think hao mei and k.o were in love to some degree

ugh the title card is sooo pretty

also i checked with the first time i did this and literally its almost been a year exactly aldkfjas im just a few days late to the anniversary

shan't lie to you, i still think zhenshui is kinda hot esp in his mf legolas outfit

oooh weiwei with theat big ffucking sword on fire leggoooo

rip to that bridge

i wonder what the insurance salespeople make in this game

ik it doesnt exist but still like

major property damage has occurred

al;dkfjaslfd anyways

the battle scene is over and the rest of the team has been #Revived

i love how done weiwei looks constantly in this universe

jinling city..

ooOOOHHH HERE OCMES THE TEA

al;kdsfjas broooo its not that deep

;LKDJASOW WUXIANG IM SICK

love the timing of those two walking past akldsjf

ooh japanese sounds soooo good

i got indian tonight tho

l m a o

love the propaganda here for chinese university dorms

apparently they do not actually look like this

who calculates flow of electricity

i still really really want erxi's little rice cooker pot thing

oh wow from the jump shes in plaid i didnt realize ohw early this occurred

me *handshake emoji* erxi

dont get bogged down by details

erxi im sick

why would you not tell about the laptop girl what the fuck

for someone who clLOCK TH E DOOR OH MY GOD

they stress me out

xiaoling and sisi my beloveds

the Squade was so fun i liked it when the four of them were together on screen

god all computer majors are the same klajd;fksa

girl i am moving into my senior year of uni and am still single its really not that deep

consider your happiness... let me not speak on this topic anymore

oh yeah the basketball championship;LKAJ;SLDJF;LAKWEJ FUKCIGN XIAO NAI

love how they do exposition in this show

me *handshake emoji* weiwei

xiao nai simps

girl you need some time alone to uh... 'reflect'

that's what we'll call it

OH I HAVE SO MANY CONFLICITNG FEELINGS ABOUT YIRAN AND NANA

BC YIRAN IS GENUINELY A NICE GIRL BUT IS VERY NAIVE AND INNOCENT

i think that yiran and weiwei couldve been such good friends if nana wasnt involved

her tiny fucking bag im sick

as;ldkjfakd weiwei having 0 clue about what happens on her campus

girl same

aldksjflk erxi it definitely was you

erxi is .. a fruit

a huge fruit

but is she wrong ??? BUT IS SHE WRONG, ERXI

xiao nai xiao nai xiao nai xiao nai a;kdsfj;aslkdjf

he <333

im so whipped for this fukcing guy

still dont understand what's going on with the chess game but thats okay

this guy is so confident aldkj

babe sorry to break it to you but youre gonna fail my love

you cannot beat ms weiwei

you would think with the amount of times i see that chess game in cdramas i would look up the rules and how to play and yet

oh the parallels i <333

jalsdkfkjshe really said im on the clock here bud

a WHOLE ass building

hes so weird

i understand why hes doing things like this but also dude

laksdjfal the way nai is like please never compare us again

HELL YEAH LETS GO OST LETS GO

HE WITH THE SMALL ALMOST SMILE

ME WITH THE SCREAMIGN INTERNALLY

WE LOVE SEEING HIM FALL IN LOVE LIKE A DORK

i want a light up keyboard tbh

wow he just stnads there bro

idocnic

hes so handsome his fuckign side profile hlep

ITS MY WIFE

XIAOLING MY BELVOED

girl youre just snackign thats not busy

do they have assigned things to put their sheets on? so that no one steals? that doesnt mean no one will steall but still

ask;jd;lk the lil emoji boys so cuuteee

a;ldksja i love them spilling the tea

YES YOU MUST SPEAK UP

akdsjf;laskdj

al;dkfja petty and philistine

thats what they call me in the club

capacitor

;aldksj me when i hear people in my major talkking about something bc their ocncentration is diferent

sisi is also a fruit

thanks for comign to my tedtalk

i just wanna see my boy september

lmao i lvoe when the Squade is all together their chemistry is soooo fun

oh sick a discotheque on fridays

see !! yiran was so ready to be like she's nice i like her

nana were it not for the laws of this land and the fact that youre fictional i would have slaughtered you by now

speak of the devil... you and me both nana

yes i still dont like cao guang

no its not gonna change

yes sometimes i find the actor attractive in guardian

yes i am annoyed

still i do think its very cool how he played the same character in both the show and movie

wowwww

LOOKS CAN BE DECIEVING

THATS WHO NANA IS

SEPTEMBER???

IS IT MY BOY

aalkd no its just weiwei

fuck i am vicoiusly rmeinded i need to get a new job -_-'

gaming is like her life

majd;lsadj

i like how confidant she is its v cool lmao

she's right!!!

do what you want esp if youre good at it!!!

jesus christ i forgot how skinny this actress is

i know she had some sort of thing about food i think aroudn the time this was being filmed

love that its ancient times in the game and yet theres holo coms

shes like... its not that deep

mr zhenshui, really my love, it is not that deep ever in this game

akldfjls i forgot about the statue crying

iconic

MITOSIS

peace out mf <3

aksd;jf she really was like ehhh im okay with things

it's all good bro

i do like how zhenshui was sort of before all of this occurred

wedding time wedding time

not nice enough if he seems to hop out like that

oooh theyve been ~leveling~ together

alskj i love how annoyed weiwei is with superficiality as if she hasnt been alive in the world for about 20 years

girl... what did erxi give you??

love the red wedding materials

very pretty

aldksjfsl im the two guys talking about ba ba ba

oooooohhh she just standing there

bro she is *literally* just vibing

aalksdjf can they not see the "zzz" next to her name?

wow seriously what did erxi give herself and weiwei

she is LITERALLY just vibing

nobody is storming anytihgn

jesus christ e.e

backscrolling to read the chat

ah... i know the struggle..

i mean you were in there for like a while love

lets play a round of

sell

those

herbs ~!!!

dude, a;dfk;skd

gaming during work hours. incredible

ald;kfja;sldkj looooovvveee

i just noticed the guys behind the palinqin playing instruments

XIAO NAI

XIAO XNNAI

ITS MY HUSBAND

LOOK AT HIMMMM

YIXIAO NAIHE

;LFKAJSD

YOU WANT TO HAVE A BETTER WEDDING BABE???

HE CAN DO THAT FOR YOUUU

love the end crdits

lets go yang yang vocals lets goooo

we are ~~jamming~~

so sad i didnt get to see september tho :(((

as always, we have reached the end

thank you for reading!!!

stay safe and stay healthy <333

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Lygia Clark, "Óculos" ("Goggles"), 1968

* * * *

Joohn Choe

Did you know that half of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at the 8th-grade level?

It's a constraint on victory outcomes in counter-disinformation work; it's a problem when you declare war on things like QAnon or the Republican industrial lie complex.

It arises when you use a technique from military planners called "thinking backwards".

This doesn't mean "be old-school and nostalgic" (I mean, you'd think), it means "start from the outcome and work backwards".

Illiteracy turns out to be a problem when you consider the basic problem of active measures defense as an exercise in thinking backwards. You get new solutions and new problems; illiteracy, and being literate but not reading, or alliteracy (irritatingly not a word in spell-check), are some of those problems.

First, let's talk about the outcome.

The fundamental problem with disinformation studies is that you can't define what disinformation is unless you take a stance on what information is, and how it's used in society.

It's meaningless to point your finger and say "liar!" as we are wont to do in this field if you're not even clear on what role that should play in society, or how things are supposed to work normally. You can't diagnose a dysfunction in how society produces and consumes information if you don't even have a view on how it functions.

You need to have a defensible, testable theory of how America's information economy operates normally if you are going to put yourself forward as some authority on how it's functioning abnormally. You cannot be a counter-disinformation operator without being a philosopher, and to some extent, a systems theorist and, increasingly, I'd argue, an aestheticist (as in "studies aesthetics", not "aesthetician who does your nails").

This is incredibly basic. I still find it odd that even very professional people and companies in this field don't grapple with this issue. Even the data is meaningless, no matter how impressively objective it is, if you're lacking that kind of context; you end up having anomalies with no baseline, like an endless stream of singleton events.

That's no way to run a railroad, like the old saying goes.

So, back when I had a startup, with advisors, I talked to one of them who actually taught a class at Berkeley on startups about this crazy recording of a Federal crime I'd gotten in Alabama, and I asked for advice for what to do about it in terms of the fight against disinformation.

The answer he gave ended up being a lead-in to thinking about this in a systems-oriented, long-terms sustainable kind of way. I still come back to it as a recurrent point in shaping outcome scenarios.

He suggested, first off, in this sort of infuriatingly wise way that he has (he's an old Asian dude, so) that you have to ask, first: is zero percent really possible?

What kind of victory state are you after, if this is actually a lie that involves disinformation on the scale that you observe it?

He argued that you have to fit disinformation into a place with other aspects of how we talk to each other. On his account, there was potentially value in giving people the ability to create and pass on value in determining what was disinformation and what wasn't, and it verged into a discussion of a crypto-currency based anti-disinformation app that I ended up not really wanting to do.

Credit where credit is due, though: his argument about the achievability of zero percent disinformation made a lot of sense.

The outcome state we're after can't be "zero active measures" and "zero disinformation". Not only is that unrealistic, if you even did manage to achieve that, you'd have North Korea. They have no problem with differing versions of state truth and reality, because everything is state truth that excludes reality.

Diversity in viewpoints is one of our strengths as a country, too; reducing everything down to one version of truth, even as generous as the boundaries might be on that, would inevitably end up flattening society. Like, no one wants "information socialism", that just... sounds bad.

You could argue that disinformation is a flipside of a coin, actually. Disinformation is in a state of mutual entailment with socially accepted official truth; there can't be one without the other, in one way of looking at it. And that's what I think my advisor was getting at.

It's like that old cliché about "tHe sIgN fOr cRiSiS aNd ChAngE ArE tEh sAmE iN cHiNeSe" which is like, you understand, up there with Sun Tzu quotes and "your people are so hard-working!" as far as Things I Ain't 'Bout As An Asian Person, You Feel Me Though (the game show!).

And don't even get me started on people ripping off strategy ideas from theorists of Chinese stick-poking and rock-throwing warfare.

In a normal time, you could say that there's a balance between disinformation and truth, and truth is usually the winning side on that, because normally, the President and the ruling party aren't active sources of disinformation with the veneer of authority on it.

We're getting out of a period of time in which that balance was badly, badly disrupted on the side of disinformation. The kind of abnormalities we see as a society - from the Capitol insurrection to how weird people around us are, compared to what they were like in 2015 - those can all be seen as stemming from that state of imbalance.

The outcome, the advisor argued, was fundamentally about balance. Not about destroying disinformation, or striking it until it wasn't a problem; the paradigm was rebalancing, he argued.

Winning isn't reducing disinformation to zero. It's achieving a new balance between disinformation and truth where the boundary favors truth more.

Almost every victory state for "The War On Disinformation" boils down to that, actually.

If you see it as rebalancing, then new ways of achieving achieving victory by restoring balance open up.

For starters, you could add to the flow of information coming out; you could even make oppositional truth part of it. That's really what "fact-checking" is on social media - Politifact and LeadStories aren't "fact-checkers", because fact-checkers are people at media institutions who run quality control on news, and they are not that. They pick and choose what stories to oppose, at times seemingly arbitrarily, at times politically, and calling them "fact-checkers" hides the essentially subjective nature of that practice.

You could create personal truth, give people new ways to be, new role models to emulate and new social roles to fulfill - "offensive fact-checker", "Nazi-hunter", "deplatformer", and the like. And you could even amplify it and try to drown out the misleadingly framed truth, and the outright mistruths, coming out of the disinformation industry.

You could mobilize the truth to create political crises, and work to reset the boundary on allowable lies. This is the core methodology of an activist, it's creating strategic dilemmas for institutions based on public perception and the pressure to do the right thing.

Outcome-focused political activism, where you're trying to get a specific candidate elected or voted out of office, is one way of specifically mobilizing the truth, instead of just sitting on ass and feeling good about having it (this is common, I'd argue). We can not only reduce disinformation better - interdict it better, ban it better, find it better, track it better - we can also get better at producing alternative presentations and modes of appeal for truth.

The problem with all these solution scenarios, though, and the area that I see where we could really stand to improve, and maybe even something that I'd work on for a minute, is our culture.

I'd argue we just don't have the kind of intellectual culture that supports a lot of these solutions. We can't, not with fundamental adult literacy the way it is; not with the state of the public intellectual the way it is.

There was a point around 2015 when people were declaring a crisis of the French public intellectual tradition; since Henri-Levy, basically, Pierre Bourdieu if you count him, there just haven't been globally notable, famous French philosophers like there used to be. That traces to any number of factors with them, but a lot of them are factors we share, like the ever-wider spread of spectacular culture and its increasing efficacy at exploiting us, drawing us into addiction loops, even, with social media and "binge-watching" TV shows.

I'd argue that the best counter-disinformational solutions we have right now come down to art and aesthetics, actually, because we are so bad as a culture at reading.

Militarized truth, and grassroots truth, and offensive truth, are forms of rebalancing between disinformation and truth, yes, but it's a reactionary, almost frantic kind of truth. The jobs that it gives people, the roles that it puts people into - content moderator, offensive fact-checker - eat people up in the long run because they're in a race against disinformation, and disinformation keeps winning.

And it ends up repeating the basic problem of piling truth upon truth without mobilizing it, positioning it in a way to get through to people.

If it takes a pretty image and a witty notion to introject a critical idea into someone's head; if it takes a song and a dance, even, to get someone to have a bullshit filter... I say, do it.

Call it less "Art of War', more "War of Art".

---

Lygia Clark, "Óculos" ("Goggles"), 1968

https://www.politico.eu/.../decline-of-french.../

https://www.wyliecomm.com/.../whats-the-latest-u-s.../

[salvatoreschool]

Legacies Boss Breaks Down That Major Vardemus Twist

We've known something hinky was going on with Professor Vardemus (Alexis Denisof) since Legacies first introduced him earlier this season, but we never considered he was as duplicitous as he turned out to be! The final moments of Thursday's episode revealed that without his special little ring on, we can see Vardemus for who he really is: Ryan Clarke (Nick Fink)!

As usual, getting one answer to a Legacies mystery has left us with about a thousand more questions. Is this act all an elaborate plan to kill Hope (Danielle Rose Russell)? Does his loyalty truly lie with his father? Why is he so adamant about pushing Josie to use dark magic? And for the love of God, was chowing down on that Shunka really necessary?

TV Guide spoke to Legacies' executive producer Brett Matthews to get answers to some of those questions as well as some insight into Josie's discovery of Landon's song for Hope.

How excited were you to do a Legacies decade dance, since it was such a staple of The Vampire Diaries?

Brett Matthews: Very excited obviously. Having written on The Vampire Diaries for so many years, that was very well-trod ground, but I always wanted to do the '80s. We tried. The only time we did the '80s on The Vampire Dairies we never saw the party, we saw the aftermath, so it was really fun to revisit it and do it right. Any time we bring in things from the old show, as someone who's worked on both, it really tickles me. It just makes me nostalgic in the same way that I'm nostalgic for the '80s having grown up in them... It's the songs, it's the movies. As [executive producer] Julie [Plec] may have rightfully pointed out, we may have leaned too heavily into the movie costumes in the episode, but for Thomas Brandon, who is my brilliant co-writer on this episode, that's just where we're from. And those movies meant so much to what we do for a living, so that's why the episode skews that way. It's also the video games, it's the music... It's a little bit of it all.

To be clear, has Professor Vardemus been Clarke this whole time?

Matthews: He has. You have never met the actual Vardemus.

What can you say about his motives for taking on this identity and especially for pushing Josie (Kaylee Bryant) toward dark magic?

Matthews: God, he probably has a plan! I think he has a plan he's working on. When last we saw Clarke, at the end of the season premiere, he was in the Void and he was angry and he was reaching out to kind of make a deal with his dad to destroy Hope Mikaelson. So he has found a very inventive way to get close to her, and we will learn a lot more about Clarke and his motivations and exactly what his powers [are] and his deal is in the coming episodes for sure. We really liked that move for him. You will definitely get more of Vardemus, who's become this very favorite character because we love the way Alexis portrays him and we love the way Nick Fink plays Clarke. So it was really fun. It was a fun way to hide somebody in plain sight.

We did get to see some humanity in Clarke in the premiere, so will we continue to toe that line of whether he's good or bad or somewhere in the middle?

Matthews: I think so. Clarke, on some level, is a pretty murderous villain obviously, but I think the difference in Season 1 and Season 2 — and I think Julie and I had to figure this out about him along with Nick and the team — is he's harder to understand in Season 1. He services a lot of plot in Season 1 and he's got some great reveals, but I think the minute we latch onto the fact that he's not just some guy who works at Triad ... the minute he's a kid who has a bad relationship with his dad, everything about the character clicks. It's a kid who doesn't feel like his dad loves him, and that's who that character is. The minute we figure that out, I think we are very excited about who Clarke is. Never good enough for his dad, I think what that does to a person, that's why you're feeling more humanity in him this year. That will remain a part of his character, as will his treachery, and the question will be what wins out in the end?

Was Josie finding that song Landon (Aria Shahghasemi) wrote about Hope in Penelope's journal the first clue that Hope was someone they've all forgotten?

Matthews: She can't remember Hope, so she cannot intellectually access those memories, but it does leave her with massive suspicions and a big question to solve. Obviously as we head into Episode 6 the following week she will be on that trail. Excitingly enough, that trail may even take her to New Orleans.

How do those doubts about her relationship with Landon and Landon's with Hope affect her emotionally moving forward?

Matthews: She's just got to figure out what it all means. I think on some deep, emotional level she feels it's obviously not good. I think her relationship with Landon this season has been real, and she needs to and will do everything she can to get to the bottom of it, starting at the top of next episode, and we'll see how that plays out for her.

Is Sebastian (Thomas Doherty) really as awful as he came off in this episode, or is there more to that story?

Matthews: Oh, there's something more to his story. He's just a vampire from a different time. Julie and I always say he's a vampire from the other show, and that's the reality. Sebastian and Damon Salvatore probably would have had a beer and a good time together, but the world has changed so much in the small space of time between the two shows. A Gothic Romance vampire is not such a happy fit into the current landscape and the current show. Our kids are so different, so he is an outlier for that reason. But to him, he is just a vampire who is doing his job and being true to his nature. But he's going to go on quite a journey, and you'll certainly learn a lot more about Sebastian, where he comes from, and why he feels the way he does in the coming episodes.

Thomas Doherty told us Sebastian's attachment to Lizzie (Jenny Boyd) has something to do with a woman in his past, so what details can you share about that?

Matthews: It's true. The name of the following episode is ["That's Nothing I Had to Remember"] and so you will learn more about Sebastian... and you will learn more about the person Lizzie so specifically reminds him of.

Given that the dark magic blast let Lizzie remember Hope, how feasible is that option when it comes to helping others remember her?

Matthews: I think that's a good question. Obviously, if it happens to Lizzie, it can happen to other people because that's just how magic works on our show. The question is will they put those pieces together? How will it play out? I think the question also is, should they? Is the world better, is it not? The awful situation you're in as a viewer is Hope coming back will make some people's lives instantly better and it will make some people's lives instantly worse. So even if such a thing was an option, what do you do? That's definitely a question I hope we explore in the coming episodes.

We haven't forgotten about these cloaked figures lurking around Mystic Falls, so what, if anything, can you say about them and their agenda?

Matthews: They're pretty mysterious, right? They're obviously working on something and that something is obviously not good. We will certainly know more. The question we hope the audience is asking is who is under that robe, and why are they under that robe? ... The answer tickles Julie and I and all of the other writers. We hope when we get to that point the audience will feel the same. Certainly much more to come on that front.

Legacies airs Thursdays at 9/8c on The CW.

[homesteadchronicles]

Title: What a Fine Wish (Beyond the Gates of Glory) Series: Radiata Stories/Valkyrie Profile Characters: Mikey & Lenneth Valkyrie Chapter: 1/3 Word Count: 1,932

Summary: Mikey's unexpected encounter with the evidently divine could both change his opinion of the supernatural and present him with a proposal he cannot refuse.

Author’s Notes: As of late, I have drowned myself in the fanmade support conversations in @unassumingvenusaur's project for Fire Emblem: Fates/Awakening. Throughout my most recent readings, I realized how well that series would work with my favorite game of all time, Radiata Stories. Having support conversations between the countless characters in this game could add an additional layer of depth to each person and their relationship with their fellow teammates. That being said, I devised a handful of potential supports between my favorite characters in Radiata Stories and decided to turn this one into a full-fledged story!

Click “Keep Reading” to read the piece in full! If you would like to read the original piece on AO3, click here!

Mikey could recount from memory every ancient legend, of dragons that threatened their world and the unsung soldiers that slayed them, be they human or inhuman in origin. But songs of the gods? Tales of fictional deities? Stories of supernatural saviors? Only humans needed gods. Humanity invented divinity to supply them with the power they could not themselves manifest. Mikey knew each god by name, but believed in none. Now, he wondered whether those fairytales contained a facet of truth.

Mankind proclaimed Cairn Russell as a god amongst men - a champion of humanity, born of a bloodline fated for tragedy and triumph in kind. To stand before him in a corridor of distorted dreams shook Mikey to his core. Even Jack faltered in the face of his father. That ever-assured smile withered when confronted with a family member-turned-enemy, his hand wavering overtop the hilt of his sword. Cairn spared his son the pleasantries. Their pain was to be settled not with words, but with weapons.

Cairn nearly conquered them in but a moment’s time. His orb-blessed blade tore Fan from the sky before she could conjure a barrier to keep him at bay, her wings flickering before fading entirely. The frenzy of his former plague served as fuel for his fury, countering even Galvados in strength and in passion. Before long, the behemoth fell before his sword.

And then there were two.

Despite countless victories against unthinkable odds, Cairn still retained one tragic flaw - mortality. No man could escape his inevitable end, and Mikey intended to dig a grave here and now. In the end, Cairn proved himself a man no different than any other. He, too, succumbed to his destiny: death.

Mikey witnessed as the fabric of Cairn’s lifeforce unthreaded itself from reality, dissipating the apparition of the knight that once was. See? Mikey thought. No deities here. Just another human playing god.

As Jack stared at Cairn’s new resting place, Mikey distributed medicine to his teammates, helping each to their feet in turn. “Sooooo,” Mikey said when both Fan and Galvados stood resurrected, “where do we go now, boss?”

Mikey had expected Jack to crumble, buried in despair. Instead, he turned towards his team with that same, unshaken smile. “Not a clue!”

Jack slid the Arbitrator back into its sheath and shrugged. “How am I supposed to know where to go with all these stairs? It’d take forever to follow them all!” He huffed, and Mikey caught a glimpse at the child beneath the leader. “Maybe it’s best we split up. Everyone take their own hallway and meet back here when you find a way outta here!”

Mikey knew no worse idea than that. Had Jack Russell never read a single story? Every time that the team splits up, something terrible happens to one, if not all, of them! Then again, Jack and reading did not a realistic couple make. His teammates complied without protest. If even Fan neglected to complain, then Mikey would make no such objection. He hurried on his way with but a longing wave to his wayward friends.

Direction did not reign in the Distortion Corridor, instead surrendering to the chaos that threatened to engulf it. Even gravity relinquished its rule over reality, Mikey soon realized, as he stood upside-down atop a stairwell that led further down into this seemingly endless underworld. When the world righted itself once more, Mikey could scarcely stand. He needed any escape he could take. Yet the only option available to him came in the form of a staircase rising high into the heavens.

Mikey took the risk.

One after another, the steps welcomed his presence with a pulse of unearthly light. Each step further from the next than from the last. A trick of the mind or an enchantment to muddle it? Mikey could not say for sure. He wondered whether he even wanted to know the answer. Mikey stumbled up, step by step, until he reached their summit. He collapsed atop the apex, gasping for air.

“Are you lost, little one?”

The unexpected conversation sent a startled Mikey slipping down a stair or two. He propped his gaze up from the stairwell to find a woman of unfathomable wonder. Inquisitive eyes greeted him at the top of the staircase. He swore they shone with the same emerald radiance. Waves of silver hair adorned a head crowned with a feathered helm. Azure armor coated the length of her outstretched hand, the straps of her bracers weaving up her arm to embrace the breastplate fastened round her torso.

Mikey refused her offered hand. He had only one question: friend or foe? “No!” A lie. One they both knew, at that. “Well, I was. Not anymore.” Mikey rose to his feet, brushing the dust from his shorts.

The woman straightened in kind. The sword strapped to her waist clacked against her grieves before retreating behind the folds of her skirt fabrics. “Then you know where we now stand?”

I might be in hell, Mikey considered. Or heaven? Maybe I’m dead. Or this is all a dream! Just like in my stories. He only hoped they stood somewhere outside the Distortion Corridor.

Mikey opened his mouth to respond when his eyes caught sight of what lay beyond the woman. Golden gates, resplendent in their unrivaled glory, stood stalwart against the wall. Where they led, Mikey knew not - but he knew he wanted to.

“...maybe not.”

The woman hummed with amusement. “A good answer. Few understand it.” She continued on towards the gateway. Mikey found himself following. “Well then, what is it you seek? Me - or what I defend?”

Mikey furrowed his brow. “Neither.”

The woman stopped dead in her tracks. The heel of her grieves skirted around the stone floor. He had expected to find fury in her eyes, or perhaps confusion. Instead, he discovered something akin to sympathy. Or condescension? He could never tell between the two. “Everyone wants what I guard, child - whether they know it or not.”

“Not me. I’m looking for my friends.”

Her expression softened. “Then you’re in luck - many friends of yours lie beyond.” Her gaze rested on the bars of the gateway. Her eyelids sank, lips drooping. “They very much would like to reunite with you.”

Mikey released a sigh of relief. “Phew! I was starting to worry I’d never find Jack again!” He started towards the wall without hesitation. “Here he went, going on without me! Can’t say I’m surprised.”

“I’m afraid your Jack does not rest beyond these gates.” A moment passed, and the woman corrected her claim. “At least, not yet.”

Mikey turned towards her once more. “Then...what about Fan?”

She shook her head.

“Galvados? You know - big guy, all red, scary horns? You can’t miss him!”

“I’m afraid not.”

The hope that had lifted Mikey’s spirits disappeared. With this newfound disappointment, his heart sank deeper into his chest. “Then...they left me behind?” His gaze met the ground.

The sound of metal sweeping across stone signalled her approach. Only the careful caress of her hand on his shoulder caused him to meet her eyes. Empathy poured forth from her pupils. “Many leave before we wish them to.” She squeezed with surprising strength. “Do not fear, child. It is my sworn duty to guide lost souls home again.”

Home? Mikey could not conceive of this stranger knowing his home. He had stood guard at the gates every day since time immemorable. He would have remembered a woman of her magnitude. “You know of the Forest Metropolis?”

Silver locks spilled down her shoulder as she tilted her head. She furrowed her brow, exposing her suspicion for but a moment, before stating with the utmost certainty, “I know of a metropolis more beautiful than any forest could ever hope to be.”

More beautiful than the Metropolis? Not a chance. Mikey had dreamt that the world beyond their motherland could compare to that of their makeshift shelter. Yet his travels with Jack and company had only proven that nothing could surpass the nostalgic comfort and natural charm of the forest. If she spoke true, then that meant… “It sounds like something out of a fairytale.”

That appeared to please her. “The written word could never encapsulate its majesty.”

“And...you could take me there?”

She nodded. “If that is your wish.”

“My wish?” Mikey echoed. “Are you...a djinn?”

Melodious laughter echoed throughout the corridor. “I am much more than that.”

The woman extended her hand towards Mikey. In her presence, Mikey felt pulled towards her palm. His fingers gravitated towards hers without willing them to, yet he did not resist their draw. If a world of such wonder existed, he wanted to see this storybook kingdom with his own two eyes.

He took her hand in his.

“Miiiiiikeeeey?”

Another voice, another startle. Mikey spun to face the source, only to find none.

“Hellooooo? Anybody home?”

Such a familiar voice, yet for a moment, he could not recall its owner. With the utmost caution, Mikey approached the entrance to the chamber. “...Jack?”

With his head stretched overtop of the stairwell’s summit, Mikey found Jack none too far off. Jack stood more than halfway up the steps, his hands cupped around his mouth. His eyes scanned the horizon before finding Mikey. Indignation painted his expression. “There you are! Where the heck have you been!? We’ve been looking all over for you!”

Jack hurried to reach the top. Fan fluttered behind him on newly-healed wings. Last but not least, Galvados ascended the stairwell with all the grace of an ox in heat.

Mikey motioned towards the woman and the world she defended. “I was talking with…” Yet, when he turned to invite his newfound friend to meet his comrades, she had vanished - along with the gateway she guarded.

Jack raised an eyebrow. “The wall?” His clammy hand mussed Mikey’s hair. “You weirdo.”

Galvados howled with laughter. “Little man talk to wall. Like broody hero in fantasy story, yeah?” His gargantuan hand clutched his comparable belly as he bellowed.

“I wasn’t talking to a wall!” Mikey’s cheeks burned red with rage. Once-open hands instinctively clenched into fists. “There was someone here - a lady!”

Fan grinned with devilish intent. Mikey recognized that look - it meant trouble for whoever she directed it at. “Oh ho, imagining the ladies now, huh?” She elbowed Jack. “You must be rubbing off on him.”

Jack drew back, hands resting behind his head as he balanced on his heels. “Nah, it’s all those romance novels! Kid’s always got his head in his fairytales!”

Mikey snatched the hat off of his head, too embarrassed to engage in their games. Instead, he tugged at the loose strands of blonde that Jack knocked astray. At least his hair could hide his shame. “How did you three find me, anyways?”

“You cackling, remember?” Galvados replied.

“We could have heard it from Helencia,” Fan amended.

Jack smirked. “It was kind of creepy.”

Laughing? Mikey thought. But I never…

Mikey lost the opportunity to complete his thought as Jack tugged on his arm. “Come on, chuckles. Let’s go home. I’ve had enough of this place for one day.”

His teammates hummed in agreement, Fan already plotting her next prank with Shin and Galvados his hunt to come. As Jack dragged Mikey out of their twisted prison, Mikey could not help but look back one last time at the place where his potential savior once stood. Still, it sat empty. Had it all truly been a dream?

Yet as they descended the steps, Mikey swore he heard her laugh one last time.

[alexandradavisonlma32]

Heathers Rehearsals: Candy Store and Script Work

The next number is ‘Candy Store’ and this song is the moment that really highlights to the audience how much bullying and nastiness the Heathers are capable of. It is a number that I am heavily involved in, as I am a Heather and so I did some research, self reflection and a lot of practice to help me achieve this number successfully. Our tutor told us that we would have to get the movements into our bodies as it’s quite an intricate dance routine with isolated positions and bitty sections where we swap and change and very rarely do the same movement at the same time except small sections, but if done right this routine will be very effective.

Script 

Before the number begins, there is a section of script that happens between the Heathers, Veronica and the Jocks. We are at the front of the stage at this point, not long after ‘Beautiful’ has ended, so it  is important we continue the mean girl approach while still getting our individual characters across to the audience. This part of the script is where Heather Chandler, who now knows of Veronica’s forgery skills after ‘Beautiful’, orders Veronica to write a note to Ram pretending that its from Veronica’s best friend Martha as Martha has had a crush on Ram for such a long time and the Heathers know it will bring a lot of embarrassment for Martha as they know that Ram has no feelings for her. Veronica’s hesitance is what starts the number, springing the Heathers into action of peer pressuring Veronica into the task. A part of the script I have is “oh my God, I totally forgot, Ram kissed Martha Dumptruck, it was disgusting”, and the way I deliver this is with a high pitched and ditsy voice, making sure to emphasise the purposeful mispronunciation of the name to highlight the bullying that the audience members have probably seen many times in their real lives and triggering a potential memory. 

There is an interesting moment between the Heathers, Heather Duke collects Veronica for Heather Chandler, and when she arrives back to Chandler and McNamara, Heather instructs Duke to bend over so she has something to write on, which made me even more sure that there was a definite difference between the treatment of Duke and McNamara, which continues throughout the number also. This lead me to continue playing my character as if she is stupid, as it works for her and means that Duke is always the one who gets mistreated as opposed to McNamara, but this could also mean that McNamara is cleverer than she lets on. When this happens and Duke has bent over for Chandler, I decide to shift on my feet and look away from what is happening after shooting Chandler a scared look from behind her and stepping backwards, as McNamara has an ongoing battle with her morals, without fully knowing how to handle them yet.

Vocals 

When learning the vocals, this number is especially finicky as there are many chops and changes as to who is singing and when, which sounds fantastic but took a lot of learning, focus and practice. In an earlier post I discussed our timetable, and this was very useful for me for this number as I could look ahead and learn as much as I could to ensure that the harmony work could go smoothly and I could focus on learning the vocals without having to worry about the lyrics, and this will also make it easier for my tutor and the rest of the cast to continue moving forward to work on bigger ensemble pieces. 

All of the Heathers were placed on the melody, so we could keep up with adding lots of character and producing a strong routine, and our version of the show has been amended to have all of the cast added onto the harmonies to make the vocals stronger, and to support us through the number and I think it makes a good improvement on the number. The final high note riffs have also been changed and we have created an innovative idea and other cast members do the high notes and form their own group of Heathers for a split second before the original Heathers wave a hand and they cut off. There was one particular part that I struggled with in the vocals, however, as on the last set of ‘it’s my candy store’s I am on the middle harmony, and was really struggling to match it without clashing to the track. To overcome this is took a lot of repetition and practising with the soundtrack to hear other voices and continue to stay on my harmony and slowly this started to improve and I now can produce the harmony successfully. Below is a link that takes you to a video where I have included the final section and the bit I was struggling with.

Dance Routine  and Acting Through Dance

The dance routine I found very challenging but I was determined to get it right and do it to the best of my ability because I understand that this number is one of the well known numbers and also the one that asserts the Heathers power and so it can’t be shaky or unsure in any way. I have to include an effortless sense of dance, that this is something that comes easy to McNamara, as she is head cheerleader whilst also adding enough attack, but not so much that it looks too much or overdone. 

I asked my tutor before we started the dance rehearsals what kind of intention she envisioned behind the dancing, as I was aware that throughout the show there has to be a difference in level between Heather Duke and McNamara and Heather Chandler as Heather Chandler is above everyone and my characterisation so far has been klutzy and stupid, and I recognised that this mightn’t be the correct intent for the atmosphere this song needs to create. My tutor suggested that we should all be nasty, sassy, mean girls in this number, and leave individual characterisations at the beginning of the number and pick them back up at the end of it. I really liked this take on the song, as it makes it more threatening and shows the audience why we’re in charge of the school. A big part of the movement of the number is moving in uniformity and as a unit, we move together whenever we move around the stage and try to keep the same triangle that we always come back to. 

In some of the dance sections, the bit I struggled with was retaining all of the movements. It’s very rare for us as the Heathers to do the same movement apart from in some sections which adds to the effect of the dance but I had to use extra focus to remember which move was on which count and not get distracted by the other Heathers and what they were doing. The only thing I found helped me with this was constant rehearsals and making sure that I had the movements well memorised so I could add character on top of this and make sure the movements looked well polished and technically correct. 

For example, the link below contains a video of the dance routine when it was first blocked and is it is a very rough version, but I felt like this helped me see where I need to improve more as it wasn’t clean and perfect. I noticed that I need to be much more muscular in my approach with my arms in certain moves like the motorbike handle section, and I spent a lot of my time off stage and at home practising the way I walk as on the video I realised I move my arms too much and it doesn’t look sleek enough, and so I used the technique from ‘Beautiful’ and made sure to lead with my chest and have my arms relatively still with only natural swing, this actually helped me to stay in character as well as letting some of the Heather McNamara character be present even though I’m quite sassy in this performance. 

A problem that I also encountered was stamina. I realised that throughout this number I was struggling to sing and dance at the same time, and this was picked up on from my tutor and it was discussed that it was something that I needed to improve, which I dramatically agreed with, even more so considering that I have solo lines that have to be delivered in the middle of the song and this song cannot show any flaws it has to be precise for the point of it to be understood. You can see in the link to the video below how out of breath I am for my solo section, and how much the energy drops because of this. To overcome this obstacle my tutor and I discussed in feedback that I should dance and sing completely full out on every run of this number and drop out on vocals where I need to, but be mindful on where that is and try to get further as I progress, and I noticed a definite change and was able to start singing my parts quite well. 

Research Into Candy Store 

Upon research, I discovered that this song had actually replaced a song called ‘Human Connection’. It is said that this version of the song made had Chandler justify her nasty ways with twisted logic that would make the audience question their morals, however, according to Playbill (2018), Laurence O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy reveal that “ this approach weakened Chandler’s character. As undisputed dictator of the school, Chandler would have no reason to lie. She fears nobody and nothing, so she readily admits to Veronica that she enjoys hurting people because she can” which confirms that the girls would have a nasty but nonchalant approach to this number because they can do whatever with a click of their fingers. Playbill, (2018) also goes on to say that Laurence O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy suggest that this is when ‘Candy Store’ is discovered: “we dug deeper and found a song that makes Heather’s cruelty feel fierce and joyful” which will be a thrill for the audience to watch as it could be confusing as to them as to why they’re thinking its a good number and song when it’s about something so cruel. That will be enticing for the audience as well as “a more retro sound that felt a bit like Ann-Margret and Amy Winehouse were throwing a party with En Vogue. A happy accident and fun to dance to too.” as it is a sound that is quite new for a musical theatre production but one that will be nostalgic and is catchy which makes it a crowd pleaser, and this as well as a good performance is one that is important.

Link To Rehearsal Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvFUI2P0TS4&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1YOobjh4pwCG-Jfim5kFa_EqIlBcz3n9fH12TN1seMgJXar3Vwyf7H4bQ

This is the link referenced throughout this post!

[lifeafterbts-blog]

Whistle to my soul

So I wanna talk about the upcoming BTS comeback song, DNA and its possible connection with previous concepts. If you've seen the teaser, then you probably saw 7 good looking guys doing suddenly some smooth moves to a whistle tune and before you realized what was happening it was over. Oh yeah, they are looking really nice for this comeback. But what I wanna talk is about the whistle as a symbol and how it can relate with previous concepts.

First, let's make clear what a whistle could symbolize: On a positive light, if done absent-minded its an expression of cheerfulness or happiness at that given moment. On another hand, it can also symbolize a call for attention and in it's more negative form it could represent an alarm or signal of danger.

That being said, let's focus on the last two meanings which are used alot through other symbols (soundwise) in previous BTS songs.

By other symbols I mean ringing bell sounds, sirens and the like. A ringing bell for instance can be heard in NO MORE DREAM as a call for attention to the youth that has no goals or dreams for their life. Similarly, you can hear a police siren in N.O. But, let's skip ahead to I NEED U cause otherwise it'll take me forever.

Btw, I advice you to read my previous post (although Jimin focused) on my interpretation connecting HYYH era until upcoming Love Yourself, since my following ideas exposed are complimentary.

So I NEED U starts with this synthetic drop like sound and as Suga's rap progresses it becomes higher pitched and it resembles more a synthetic singing/whistling bird. And well, you all know how birds play a big part in BTS MVs, so I'm not gonna go too deep in this but if we consider that "synthetic/whistling bird" = "unnatural/fake bird" then it would fit with the whole idea that in that era, they were still at a transitional point were they hadn't fully grown their own "wings" as birds that can fly, and so they were just "pretending" (check out Jimin running with spread arms in the gif above)... and thus it's a call for attention, which leads us to the whole "fake self" portrayed in Love Yourself Highlight Reel.

Forgetting about the M/V storyline though, it gives off this nostalgic cry vibe which fits with the loneliness the overall song and lyrics portray. In that sense, it's similar to Whalien52 high pitch staple sound. Let's talk about RUN though.

RUN has similar sounds to I NEED U (like other songs from the same album) but what I wanna highlight is the sound resembling a faraway police/ambulance siren. It's best heard right at the beginning (around 0:05). Storyline wise, this siren would represent an alarm or signal of danger and throughout the MV you can see various instances fitting of this meaning with Suga & Jungkook fighting, V and Rap Monster getting chased by the police, Jungkook's car accident, etc.

From an exclusive lyrics point of view, they basically talk about being chase by the truth: that (their) love was a lie and thus they run, because they're still not ready to accept it. So the sense of being chased by the truth is accentuated by that faraway sounding siren, like when a police unit turns on their siren when chasing someone. On the other hand, we can also interpret it as an ambulance siren comming to get them because they're ill from their love.

That being said, both interpretation wouldn't be too farfetched if we also apply it to the MVs storyline, as we see V actually end up in a police station in STIGMA; Jungkook in a hospital in Love Yourself HIGHLIGHT Reels; and not to mention Jimin's and J-Hope's multiple introspective hospital bed /psychiatric ward scenes in RUN itself and LIE/MAMA short films.

And speaking of the Wings Short Films, throughout the series we can clearly hear sirens and eerie whistling that work as alarm/danger symbols and overall adding to the dark tone of each member's story.

Let's jump ahead to Blood Sweat & Tears though where you can also hear a siren that progressively becomes louder. The first instance it appears is through Jungkook's part right in the beginning.

For story purposes, it works as a symbol signaling that "something is about to happen". That "something" being the awakening/revelation that each of the members experience throughout the MV. Lyrics wise, that "something" is their surrendering to temptation. And speaking of temptation, alternatively that siren could be interpreted as the mythological creature "siren's voice" enchanting them. On that note, sirens were mostly depicted as a woman with bird like features that with a very sweetly voice would lull sailors to sleep and then kill them. And their name origin my come from the word "bind" in greek. Sounds familiar?

"My blood sweat & tears, my last dance take them all. My cold breath, take it away [...] Sweeter than sweet/ and Chocolate wings but your wings are those of a devil"

And the Japanese ver.: "Tie me up already baby [...] Please end it with your own hands"

Skipping further ahead into Spring Day, in the MV we can hear the departure bell for their "train of thought" which's destination is probably "where did things went wrong?" But speaking about the song itself, during practically the whole song you can hear this synthetic chord progression (is that what you call it?) Personally it was jarring to my ears at first, it's kinda like another kind of modulated siren (sorry I don't know how else to describe it). Anyway, it keeps repeating like how they keep going in circles inside their thoughts. This applies both lyrically (as RM mentions it in his part, and because of the persisting longing expressed in the hook) and visually through the members moving across different settings with each door they cross. Also, in the mv, towards the MV we can listen and see a train passing before Jungkook which could symbolize how his "train of thought" changed lanes and is no longer in a vicious closed circuit. Such change is reflected in the MV when they get off the train and lyrically in the last hook when they reach a decision (to meet on spring day) instead of just lamenting and wondering like previously.

Last stop before our final destination is NOT TODAY. For this one, you can listen right before Suga's rap a high pitch sound that fades away similar to when you have the sensation of a buzzing/ringing/beeping sound in your ears. This condition is called a tinnitus and according to google there's various causes but for storyline purposes, the ones fitting are:

-Natural aging (we see them all transition into adults)

-Certain drugs (J-hope in I need u/Mama/BST jp ver)

-When fainting (I Need U/ Save me: "save me before I fall" / Lie / Love yourself reel 3) Furthermore, it mentions drinking, smoking and stress can worsen the symptoms. In that sense, the ringing sound would represent a reminder of their "injuries and hardships" but since the sound clears out then they're "overcoming it" and Suga's rap right after matches really well with this interpretation. He goes: "No, not today, Today's too good to let it end"

So, back to my original reason for this post: the whistle in upcomming DNA. The teaser might've made it look to some that it might be unrelated to previous concepts. But personally I see a storyline progress throughout all of BTS concepts, it's just that they're just not necessarily in order and because they tend to focus more on the feelings rather than the actual events that cause them, people tend to find it confusing because they concentrate more on trying to understand the order of events rather than the feelings that are being portrayed.

But getting back on topic, recapping: in I need U there was a "synthetic whistle" which symbolized "fake love /un mature birds". Fast forward to DNA, and this time the whistle might be a representation of "real love" hearing how it's a natural sound and also holding a more positive meaning compare to previous similar types of sounds. And if we take into consideration the song title, the song could be about how "this love" defines each of them their uniqueness and/or how it's intrinsically part of them that they cannot change, in other words "unconditional".

Or I could be totally wrong and it's really just about Daegu's New Agust d (DNA) lamb skewers shop opening while Hobbie Eats Ramyeon(HER).

No, but seriously no matter whatever it turns out to be I can't wait for it. Anyway, this has been a long post of many ideas I've had for a while. Take note I don't have any formal knowledge in music nor a great hearing, so all this rambling is very subjective. So the way I described the sounds might be totally different for you, and they're not necessarily and most likely not deliberately produced that way by BTS and BigHit for the reasons stated above. So yeah, don't take it too seriously either. For me interpretations/theories are fun not because of deciphering out every single thing of what's happening and what the creator's view was but figuring out what it represents to myself.

Quick edit:

Did you all listen to the second teaser? There's that same growing siren from BST and some high fashion/classy vibes soundwise. There's some beeping sounds resembling HYYH era (check RUN and Dead Leaves for instance) and the experimental sounds in BEGIN. Visually too it looks very clean with backgrounds aesthetics similar to the wings short films. Well that's it for now, gotta get back to work.

[nebris]

Unlearning the myth of American innocence

When she was 30,  Suzy Hansen left the US for Istanbul – and began to realise that Americans will never understand their own country until they see it as the rest of the world does 

My mother recently found piles of my notebooks from when I was a small child that were filled with plans for my future. I was very ambitious. I wrote out what I would do at every age: when I would get married and when I would have kids and when I would open a dance studio.

When I left my small hometown for college, this sort of planning stopped. The experience of going to a radically new place, as college was to me, upended my sense of the world and its possibilities. The same thing happened when I moved to New York after college, and a few years later when I moved to Istanbul. All change is dramatic for provincial people. But the last move was the hardest. In Turkey, the upheaval was far more unsettling: after a while, I began to feel that the entire foundation of my consciousness was a lie.

For all their patriotism, Americans rarely think about how their national identities relate to their personal ones. This indifference is particular to the psychology of white Americans and has a history unique to the US. In recent years, however, this national identity has become more difficult to ignore. Americans can no longer travel in foreign countries without noticing the strange weight we carry with us. In these years after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the many wars that followed, it has become more difficult to gallivant across the world absorbing its wisdom and resources for one’s own personal use. Americans abroad now do not have the same swagger, the easy, enormous smiles. You no longer want to speak so loud. There is always the vague risk of breaking something.

Some years after I moved to Istanbul, I bought a notebook, and unlike that confident child, I wrote down not plans but a question: who do we become if we don’t become Americans? If we discover that our identity as we understood it had been a myth? I asked it because my years as an American abroad in the 21st century were not a joyous romp of self-discovery and romance. Mine were more of a shattering and a shame, and even now, I still don’t know myself.

I grew up in Wall, a town located by the Jersey Shore, two hours’ drive from New York. Much of it was a landscape of concrete and parking lots, plastic signs and Dunkin’ Donuts. There was no centre, no Main Street, as there was in most of the pleasant beach towns nearby, no tiny old movie theatre or architecture suggesting some sort of history or memory.

Most of my friends’ parents were teachers, nurses, cops or electricians, except for the rare father who worked in “the City”, and a handful of Italian families who did less legal things. My parents were descendants of working-class Danish, Italian and Irish immigrants who had little memory of their European origins, and my extended family ran an inexpensive public golf course, where I worked as a hot-dog girl in the summers. The politics I heard about as a kid had to do with taxes and immigrants, and not much else. Bill Clinton was not popular in my house. (In 2016, most of Wall voted Trump.)

We were all patriotic, but I can’t even conceive of what else we could have been, because our entire experience was domestic, interior, American. We went to church on Sundays, until church time was usurped by soccer games. I don’t remember a strong sense of civic engagement. Instead I had the feeling that people could take things from you if you didn’t stay vigilant. Our goals remained local: homecoming queen, state champs, a scholarship to Trenton State, barbecues in the backyard. The lone Asian kid in our class studied hard and went to Berkeley; the Indian went to Yale. Black people never came to Wall. The world was white, Christian; the world was us.

We did not study world maps, because international geography, as a subject, had been phased out of many state curriculums long before. There was no sense of the US being one country on a planet of many countries. Even the Soviet Union seemed something more like the Death Star – flying overhead, ready to laser us to smithereens – than a country with people in it.

I have TV memories of world events. Even in my mind, they appear on a screen: Oliver North testifying in the Iran-Contra hearings; the scarred, evil-seeming face of Panama’s dictator Manuel Noriega; the movie-like footage, all flashes of light, of the bombing of Baghdad during the first Gulf war. Mostly what I remember of that war in Iraq was singing God Bless the USA on the school bus – I was 13 – wearing little yellow ribbons and becoming teary-eyed as I remembered the video of the song I had seen on MTV.

And I’m proud to be an American Where at least I know I’m free

That “at least” is funny. We were free – at the very least we were that. Everyone else was a chump, because they didn’t even have that obvious thing. Whatever it meant, it was the thing that we had, and no one else did. It was our God-given gift, our superpower.

By the time I got to high school, I knew that communism had gone away, but never learned what communism had actually been (“bad” was enough). Religion, politics, race – they washed over me like troubled things that obviously meant something to someone somewhere, but that had no relationship to me, to Wall, to America. I certainly had no idea that most people in the world felt those connections deeply. History – America’s history, the world’s history – would slip in and out of my consciousness with no resonance whatsoever.

Racism, antisemitism and prejudice, however – those things, on some unconscious level, I must have known. They were expressed in the fear of Asbury Park, which was black; in the resentment of the towns of Marlboro and Deal, which were known as Jewish; in the way Hispanics seemed exotic. Much of the Jersey Shore was segregated as if it were still the 1950s, and so prejudice was expressed through fear of anything outside Wall, anything outside the tiny white world in which we lived. If there was something that saved us from being outwardly racist, it was that in small towns such as Wall, especially for girls, it was important to be nice, or good – this pressure tempered tendencies toward overt cruelty when we were young.

I was lucky that I had a mother who nourished my early-onset book addiction, an older brother with mysteriously acquired progressive politics, and a father who spent his evenings studying obscure golf antiques, lost in the pleasures of the past. In these days of the 1%, I am nostalgic for Wall’s middle-class modesty and its sea-salt Jersey Shore air. But as a teenager, I knew that the only thing that could rescue me from the Wall of fear was a good college.

I ended up at the University of Pennsylvania. The lack of interest in the wider world that I had known in Wall found another expression there, although at Penn the children were wealthy, highly educated and apolitical. During orientation, the business school students were told that they were “the smartest people in the country”, or so I had heard. (Donald Trump Jr was there then, too.) In the late 1990s, everyone at Penn wanted to be an investment banker, and many would go on to help bring down the world economy a decade later. But they were more educated than I was; in American literature class, they had even heard of William Faulkner.

When my best friend from Wall revealed one night that she hadn’t heard of John McEnroe or Jerry Garcia, some boys on the dormitory hall called us ignorant, and white trash, and chastised us for not reading magazines. We were hurt, and surprised; white trash was something we said about other people at the Jersey Shore. My boyfriend from Wall accused me of going to Penn solely to find a boyfriend who drove a Ferrari, and the boys at Penn made fun of the Camaros we drove in high school. Class in America was not something we understood in any structural or intellectual way; class was a constellation of a million little materialistic cultural signifiers, and the insult, loss or acquisition of any of them could transform one’s future entirely.

In the end, I chose to pursue the new life Penn offered me. The kids I met had parents who were doctors or academics; many of them had already even been to Europe! Penn, for all its superficiality, felt one step closer to a larger world.

Still, I cannot remember any of us being conscious of foreign events during my four years of college. There were wars in Eritrea, Nepal, Afghanistan, Kosovo, East Timor, Kashmir. US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were bombed. Panama, Nicaragua (I couldn’t keep Latin American countries straight), Osama bin Laden, Clinton bombing Iraq – nope.

I knew “Saddam Hussein”, which had the same evil resonance as “communism”. I remember the movie Wag the Dog, a satire in which American politicians start a fake war with foreign “terrorists” to distract the electorate during a domestic scandal – which at the time was what many accused Clinton of doing when he ordered a missile strike on Afghanistan during the Monica Lewinsky affair. I never thought about Afghanistan. What country was in Wag the Dog? Albania. There was a typical American callousness in our reaction to the country they chose for the movie, an indifference that said, Some bumblefuck country, it doesn’t matter which one they choose.

I was a child of the 90s, the decade when, according to America’s foremost intellectuals, “history” had ended, the US was triumphant, the cold war won by a landslide. The historian David Schmitz has written that, by that time, the idea that America won because of “its values and steadfast adherence to the promotion of liberalism and democracy” was dominating “op-ed pages, popular magazines and the bestseller lists”. These ideas were the ambient noise, the elevator music of my most formative years.

But for me there was also an intervention – a chance experience in the basement of Penn’s library. I came across a line in a book in which a historian argued that, long ago, during the slavery era, black people and white people had defined their identities in opposition to each other. The revelation to me was not that black people had conceived of their identities in response to ours, but that our white identities had been composed in conscious objection to theirs. I’d had no idea that we had ever had to define our identities at all, because to me, white Americans were born fully formed, completely detached from any sort of complicated past. Even now, I can remember that shiver of recognition that only comes when you learn something that expands, just a tiny bit, your sense of reality. What made me angry was that this revelation was something about who I was. How much more did I not know about myself?         

It was because of this text that I picked up the books of James Baldwin, who gave me the sense of meeting someone who knew me better, and with a far more sophisticated critical arsenal than I had myself. There was this line:

But I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life.

And this one:

All of the western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the west has no moral authority.

And this one:

White Americans are probably the sickest and certainly the most dangerous people, of any colour, to be found in the world today.

I know why this came as a shock to me then, at the age of 22, and it wasn’t necessarily because he said I was sick, though that was part of it. It was because he kept calling me that thing: “white American”. In my reaction I justified his accusation. I knew I was white, and I knew I was American, but it was not what I understood to be my identity. For me, self-definition was about gender, personality, religion, education, dreams. I only thought about finding myself, becoming myself, discovering myself – and this, I hadn’t known, was the most white American thing of all.

I still did not think about my place in the larger world, or that perhaps an entire history – the history of white Americans – had something to do with who I was. My lack of consciousness allowed me to believe I was innocent, or that white American was not an identity like Muslim or Turk.

Of this indifference, Baldwin wrote: “White children, in the main, and whether they are rich or poor, grow up with a grasp of reality so feeble that they can very accurately be described as deluded.”

Young white Americans of course go through pain, insecurity and heartache. But it is very, very rare that young white Americans come across someone who tells them in harsh, unforgiving terms that they might be merely the easy winners of an ugly game, and indeed that because of their ignorance and misused power, they might be the losers within a greater moral universe.

In 2007, after I had worked for six years as a journalist in New York, I won a writing fellowship that would send me to Turkey for two years. I had applied for it on a whim. No part of me expected to win the thing. Even as my friends wished me congratulations, I detected a look of concern on their faces, as if I was crazy to leave all this, as if 29 was a little too late to be finding myself. I had never even been to Turkey before.

In the weeks before my departure, I spent hours explaining Turkey’s international relevance to my bored loved ones, no doubt deploying the cliche that Istanbul was the bridge between east and west. I told everyone that I chose Turkey because I wanted to learn about the Islamic world. The secret reason I wanted to go was that Baldwin had lived in Istanbul in the 1960s, on and off, for almost a decade. I had seen a documentary about Baldwin that said he felt more comfortable as a black, gay man in Istanbul than in Paris or New York.

When I heard that, it made so little sense to me, sitting in my Brooklyn apartment, that a space opened in the universe. I couldn’t believe that New York could be more illiberal than a place such as Turkey, because I couldn’t conceive of how prejudiced New York and Paris had been in that era; and because I thought that as you went east, life degraded into the past, the opposite of progress. The idea of Baldwin in Turkey somehow placed America’s race problem, and America itself, in a mysterious and tantalising international context. I took a chance that Istanbul might be the place where the secret workings of history would be revealed.

In Turkey and elsewhere, in fact, I would feel an almost physical sensation of intellectual and emotional discomfort, while trying to grasp a reality of which I had no historical or cultural understanding. I would go, as a journalist, to write a story about Turkey or Greece or Egypt or Afghanistan, and inevitably someone would tell me some part of our shared history – theirs with America – of which I knew nothing. If I didn’t know this history, then what kind of story did I plan to tell?

My learning process abroad was threefold: I was learning about foreign countries; I was learning about America’s role in the world; and I was also slowly understanding my own psychology, temperament and prejudices. No matter how well I knew the predatory aspects of capitalism, I still perceived Turkey’s and Greece’s economic advances as progress, a kind of maturation. No matter how deeply I understood the US’s manipulation of Egypt for its own foreign-policy aims, I had never considered – and could not grasp – how American policies really affected the lives of individual Egyptians, beyond engendering resentment and anti-Americanism. No matter how much I believed that no American was well-equipped for nation-building, I thought I could see good intentions on the part of the Americans in Afghanistan. I would never have admitted it, or thought to say it, but looking back, I know that deep in my consciousness I thought that America was at the end of some evolutionary spectrum of civilisation, and everyone else was trying to catch up.

American exceptionalism did not only define the US as a special nation among lesser nations; it also demanded that all Americans believe they, too, were somehow superior to others. How could I, as an American, understand a foreign people, when unconsciously I did not extend the most basic faith to other people that I extended to myself? This was a limitation that was beyond racism, beyond prejudice and beyond ignorance. This was a kind of nationalism so insidious that I had not known to call it nationalism; this was a self-delusion so complete that I could not see where it began and ended, could not root it out, could not destroy it.

In my first few months in Istanbul, I lived a formless kind of existence, days dissolving into the nights. I had no office to go to, no job to keep, and I was 30 years old, an age at which people either choose to grow up or remain stuck in the exploratory, idle phase of late-late youth. Starting all over again in a foreign country – making friends, learning a new language, trying to find your way through a city – meant almost certainly choosing the latter. I spent many nights out until the wee hours – such as the evening I drank beer with a young Turkish man named Emre, who had attended college with a friend of mine from the US.

A friend had told me that Emre was one of the most brilliant people he had ever met. As the evening passed, I was gaining a lot from his analysis of Turkish politics, especially when I asked him whether he voted for Erdoğan’s Justice and Development party (AKP), and he spat back, outraged, “Did you vote for George W Bush?” Until that point I had not realised the two might be equivalent.

Then, three beers in, Emre mentioned that the US had planned the September 11 attacks. I had heard this before. Conspiracy theories were common in Turkey; for example, when the military claimed that the PKK, the Kurdish militant group, had attacked a police station, some Turks believed the military itself had done it; they believed it even in cases where Turkish civilians had died. In other words, the idea was that rightwing forces, such as the military, bombed neutral targets, or even rightwing targets, so they could then blame it on the leftwing groups, such as the PKK. To Turks, bombing one’s own country seemed like a real possibility.

“Come on, you don’t believe that,” I said.

“Why not?” he snapped. “I do.”

“But it’s a conspiracy theory.”

He laughed. “Americans always dismiss these things as conspiracy theories. It’s the rest of the world who have had to deal with your conspiracies.”

I ignored him. “I guess I have faith in American journalism,” I said. “Someone else would have figured this out if it were true.”

He smiled. “I’m sorry, there’s no way they didn’t have something to do with it. And now this war?” he said, referring to the war in Iraq. “It’s impossible that the United States couldn’t stop such a thing, and impossible that the Muslims could pull it off.”

Some weeks later, a bomb went off in the Istanbul neighborhood of Güngören. A second bomb exploded out of a garbage bin nearby after 10pm, killing 17 people and injuring 150. No one knew who did it. All that week, Turks debated: was it al-Qaida? The PKK? The DHKP/C, a radical leftist group? Or maybe: the deep state?                   

The deep state – a system of mafia-like paramilitary organisations operating outside of the law, sometimes at the behest of the official military – was a whole other story. Turks explained that the deep state had been formed during the cold war as a way of countering communism, and then mutated into a force for destroying all threats to the Turkish state. The power that some Turks attributed to this entity sometimes strained credulity. But the point was that Turks had been living for years with the idea that some secret force controlled the fate of their nation.

In fact, elements of the deep state were rumoured to have had ties to the CIA during the cold war, and though that too smacked of a conspiracy theory, this was the reality that Turkish people lived in. The sheer number of international interventions the US launched in those decades is astonishing, especially those during years when American power was considered comparatively innocent. There were the successful assassinations: Patrice Lumumba, prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1961; General Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, also in 1961; Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, in 1963. There were the unsuccessful assassinations: Castro, Castro, and Castro. There were the much hoped-for assassinations: Nasser, Nasser, Nasser. And, of course, US-sponsored, -supported or -staged regime changes: Iran, Guatemala, Iraq, Congo, Syria, Dominican Republic, South Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina. The Americans trained or supported secret police forces everywhere from Cambodia to Colombia, the Philippines to Peru, Iran to Vietnam. Many Turks believed that the US at least encouraged the 1971 and 1980 military coups in Turkey, though I could find little about these events in any conventional histories anywhere.

But what I could see was that the effects of such meddling were comparable to those of September 11 – just as huge, life-changing and disruptive to the country and to people’s lives. Perhaps Emre did not believe that September 11 was a straightforward affair of evidence and proof because his experience – his reality – taught him that very rarely were any of these surreally monumental events easily explainable. I did not think Emre’s theory about the attacks was plausible. But I began to wonder whether there was much difference between a foreigner’s paranoia that the Americans planned September 11 and the Americans’ paranoia that the whole world should pay for September 11 with an endless global war on terror.

The next time a Turk told me she believed the US had bombed itself on September 11 (I heard this with some regularity; this time it was from a young student at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University), I repeated my claim about believing in the integrity of American journalism. She replied, a bit sheepishly, “Well, right, we can’t trust our journalism. We can’t take that for granted.”

The words “take that for granted” gave me pause. Having lived in Turkey for more than a year, witnessing how nationalistic propaganda had inspired people’s views of the world and of themselves, I wondered from where the belief in our objectivity and rigour in journalism came. Why would Americans be objective and everyone else subjective?

I thought that because Turkey had poorly functioning institutions – they didn’t have a reliable justice system, as compared to an American system I believed to be functional – it often felt as if there was no truth. Turks were always sceptical of official histories, and blithely dismissive of the government’s line. But was it rather that the Turks, with their beautiful scepticism, were actually just less nationalistic than me?

American exceptionalism had declared my country unique in the world, the one truly free and modern country, and instead of ever considering that that exceptionalism was no different from any other country’s nationalistic propaganda, I had internalised this belief. Wasn’t that indeed what successful propaganda was supposed to do? I had not questioned the institution of American journalism outside of the standards it set for itself – which, after all, was the only way I would discern its flaws and prejudices; instead, I accepted those standards as the best standards any country could possibly have.

By the end of my first year abroad, I read US newspapers differently. I could see how alienating they were to foreigners, the way articles spoke always from a position of American power, treating foreign countries as if they were America’s misbehaving children. I listened to my compatriots with critical ears: the way our discussion of foreign policy had become infused since September 11 with these officious, official words, bureaucratic corporate military language: collateral damage, imminent threat, freedom, freedom, freedom.

Even so, I was conscious that if I had long ago succumbed to the pathology of American nationalism, I wouldn’t know it – even if I understood the history of injustice in America, even if I was furious about the invasion of Iraq. I was a white American. I still had this fundamental faith in my country in a way that suddenly, in comparison to the Turks, made me feel immature and naive.

I came to notice that a community of activists and intellectuals in Turkey – the liberal ones – were indeed questioning what “Turkishness” meant in new ways. Many of them had been brainwashed in their schools about their own history; about Atatürk, Turkey’s first president; about the supposed evil of the Armenians and the Kurds and the Arabs; about the fragility of their borders and the rapaciousness of all outsiders; and about the historic and eternal goodness of the Turkish republic.

“It is different in the United States,” I once said, not entirely realising what I was saying until the words came out. I had never been called upon to explain this. “We are told it is the greatest country on earth. The thing is, we will never reconsider that narrative the way you are doing just now, because to us, that isn’t propaganda, that is truth. And to us, that isn’t nationalism, it’s patriotism. And the thing is, we will never question any of it because at the same time, all we are being told is how free-thinking we are, that we are free. So we don’t know there is anything wrong in believing our country is the greatest on earth. The whole thing sort of convinces you that a collective consciousness in the world came to that very conclusion.”

“Wow,” a friend once replied. “How strange. That is a very quiet kind of fascism, isn’t it?                 

It was a quiet kind of fascism that would mean I would always see Turkey as beneath the country I came from, and also that would mean I believed my uniquely benevolent country to have uniquely benevolent intentions towards the peoples of the world.

During that night of conspiracy theories, Emre had alleged, as foreigners often did, that I was a spy. The information that I was collecting as a journalist, Emre said, was really being used for something else. As an American emissary in the wider world, writing about foreigners, governments, economies partaking in some larger system and scheme of things, I was an agent somehow. Emre lived in the American world as a foreigner, as someone less powerful, as someone for whom one newspaper article could mean war, or one misplaced opinion could mean an intervention by the International Monetary Fund. My attitude, my prejudice, my lack of generosity could be entirely false, inaccurate or damaging, but would be taken for truth by the newspapers and magazines I wrote for, thus shaping perceptions of Turkey for ever.

Years later, an American journalist told me he loved working for a major newspaper because the White House read it, because he could “influence policy”. Emre had told me how likely it was I would screw this up. He was saying to me: first, spy, do no harm.

Adapted from Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World by Suzy Hansen, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on 15 August

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/08/unlearning-the-myth-of-american-innocence?CMP=share_btn_fb

@catcomaprada @evaannapaula @sissyhiyah

[venenix]

i had nothing to do today (it’s a lie, i have like a fuckton of things to do and i’m not doing any even at this very moment) so here a list of fics i deeply enjoyed and that y’all should read because they are The Good Shit™

By Any Other Name by APaletteFullOfYou: okay, so this fic has it all. you like flowers? this fic got ya. you like the deep bromance between yuuri and phichit? bam, the fic got your back. you like flowers and puns? j a c k  p o t. guys i’m telling you this is so good and i hope to see more in a very near future because i just can’t wait (if you’re reading this, whoever you are, author, please, update, my crops are dying, my soul is leaving my body, give me something.,)

Storge by FullmetalChords: everybody loves a good family fic with all the bonding between yuuri and yuri, all the fluff, but like the very good fluff, the one that leaves you lying on the floor gently sobbing onto the tiles because you cannot believe that your own two eyes could read something like that. i loved it, it’s one of those 5+1, so a good bonus!!! everybody loves it, i love it, you’ll love it too!!!

Never Look Away by gabapple & mamodewberry: listen to me. and listen very carefully. i dread the fics where their goal is to retrace all the canon stuff by writing it down and adding things up as you go. but this. this is 120k+ words fic (still going!!!!!) of pure happiness and fluff and angst all together and i cannot understand how. it tracks the canon episodes while giving all the introspection i crave and the good and natural interactions i desire between viktor and yuuri. it’s long but you’re not gonna regret it, believe me. also, child viktor owns my life, my soul and my bank account.

Katsudon by azriona: you know how hard it is. to find fics. based on pure motherly love. and the unstoppable force of fluff and family love. while still giving you the sweet and nice viktuuri everyone crave? guys, this fic is like eating a pie. but not any pie, it’s the pie of your dreams. it’s the pie you regret not eating at the shop you passed by thinking ‘eh, i don’t need it right now‘. it’s the pie that smells like cinnamon and it is served with coffee or your favourite tea while outside is pouring and you can hear your favourite song at the radio, guys, do you understand how good can it be this fic? yeah, i don’t think so, go read it now

Closing Shift by yaboykatsudon: it’s a retail au. it’s the au that silently everybody wants because everyone undeniably understand what it’s like working in a job where you are really close in losing your shit because of dumb clients and you silently like to project on fictional character who can, in an ideal world, say ‘fuck you’ to rude people. even tho in this viktor is a lovely cashier who likes to talk to old people and yuuri had just started his job. also, please, if you’re reading this, update, my crops are dying,,,

The Carnage of the Art by ExorcisingEmily: before we start, kudos to that title because it’s #verygood. so the fic is yuri p. centric and it revolves around how he’s dealing with a career theatening injury and it’s a w o n d e r. there’s angst but then!!!! there’s fluff!!! the angst is cured by love and the power of family!!!! go read it, it’s 10 chapters of Very Good Shit

the nostalgic feeling of the familiar by myoue : HOLD THE FUCK UP, BECAUSE THIS IS GONNA GET REAL GOOD. so for those who don’t know i really really love the fake engaged au. and guess what is this!!!!!! a very long fic still in progress with a fake engaged au!!! their relationship may be fake but their slow burn is not!!!! nor my raging need for more unpdates after the cliffhanger!!!! also, their writing is #goals so please go read it

just like insects by synthpopp: and guess what else i really really like!!! ghost presence au!!!!! and guess what is this!!!! a fic where yuuri dies after an incident an remains in his apartment which happens to be bought by viktor who just happens to have the ability to see ghosts, H O W  W O N D E R F U L and you know what else would be wonderful? an update, because i’m dying

 After Everyone Else by dance_across: the summary for this fic is f u c k literally and metaphorically speaking. this is a chris/viktor/yuuri so idk if you’re interested but i assure it’s really good, it has a wonderful introspection, wonderful characterisation and i love everything about it because it is written so well

cast off all my bandages and see what happens next by infiniteandsmall: kudos to you too for the title because it’s !!!!!! tiny viktor again owns everything i have, including my own beautiful nana and my bank account. the interaction between viktor and chris are beautiful and i want to drown myself in my own tears because they’re so good and cute and i want for them eternal happiness and good things

anarchy for sale! t-shirts only ten dollars by spookyfoot: will it ever come a day where i won’t like puns and bad humour and really bad shirt with really bad puns as a trope in a fic? no, never, and i bet neither will you, because this is so good, yuuri wearing embarassing t-shirts and phichit totally down with that because he totally thinks it’s his style and viktor indulging into this, hands down to the best comedy, 10/10 would probably read again

soldier boy, tripping over himself to win my praise by thissupposedcrime: okay, i’ll start saying that from these point these are all otayuri and are all good. but this one. this one is like Heaven™ the writing is #goal the characterisation is something out of this world the titles of every chapter, including the general title, are taken from hamilton the musical lyrics, i mean, what could you ask for more???? nothing because this is perfect??? i cannot believe also, i suggest you to check everything they wrote, so also blowing kisses to hurt you and everytime i try, everytime i win

we got soul and we got gold by barricadeuse: this is an on going series and i hope she got more in store for me because i want more of this writing and this awkward yuri and i want more of what in italian we call “disagio”