#i would say her daughters and husband are more visually interesting but i just love beelzebub and her dinkey little design

[idolomantises]

I feel flattered that people want to see my rendition of Beelzebub, but I wouldn’t be shocked if people found her underwhelming.

The idea is that she’s meant to be like those bugs that mimic other bugs to seem non threatening but her real form is an eldritch abomination.

[kagekitsuneoflight]

Hazbin Hotel criticism has been done so much by so many people about very real and serious things but I’m throwing my hat in the ring because this is something most people don’t talk about often.

Hazbin is boring and it misuses it’s setting and biblical characters/inspirations. Or rather it doesn’t use them in a way that’s actually interesting.

For a show about heaven and hell and blatant Christian setting it sure does seem to only take the aesthetics. And not even the visual aesthetics. It’s not even clear on which branch of Christianity it’s drawing from.

This is going to be done with a casual tone and it’s not very well structured because I am not being paid to write about my grievances.

Adam’s motivation as a villain is so shallow and flat. You’re telling me he’s doing this for funsies? For a laugh? Adam was made in God’s image. What does this say about the guy. For a show whose themes is about going “not everything is black and white!” It sure does make him (even visually) black and white. Which is just sooooooo. Boring. Here’s an actually interesting idea that also makes Lucifer more interesting. Adam was cast out of Eden, which was paradise on earth, all because of how Satan (aka Lucifer) tempted Eve (and thus Adam) into sin. So why not make Adam’s enthusiasm for rampaging through hell so that he’s wrecking a Lucifer’s hellish paradise in revenge? If Adam had to suffer then so too should Lucifer. It’s *Lucifer’s* fault after all.

Lets not even get into how Lucifer and Satan are technically two different people. It’s a common thing. But still if you went with Lucifer’s actual story where he’s being so jealous about humanity that he went out of his way to RUIN it all for them. it gives him more depth then him being Depressed. And loves his daughter.

It opens so much more that you can do with *both* characters. It also makes Charlie’s motivation to redeem sinners carry a more personal weight than just. Doing it because it’s right. Her dad was the catalyst! She’s taking on the sins of her father! Make her LEARN that as his child, she does not need to feel responsible for what he’s done. (And, hey, maybe have Vaggie be the one to teach her that! You know, the Angel? The one who would best be able to teach how to change from sin? And not just be “haha fuddy duddy no fun allowed” character.)

Saint Peter is in the show. Saint Peter is there. I am not going to get into Saint Peter because the implications and questions it poses is going to make me insane. And he’s probably only there because of how ingrained it is that *he’s* the one who greets you at those pearly gates. He’s pop culture Saint Peter and not the actual Saint Peter.

Now you might be wondering “what about Lilith she’s clearly going to be the antagonist in the second season.” Yeah she can still have that. We have no real basis on how much she’s done or doing. The only real motivation we have is that she wants to stay in heaven.

(My theory (aka what I think would make Lilith interesting) is that Lilith originally planned to try and outnumber and out power hell so then she could try and take paradise for herself. But obviously the yearly exterminations put a damper on the plan. I bet she was *happy* to be with Lucifer. I bet she loved her family. But she’s in hell. She’s in hell and the queen and her subjects do not respect her (if they do not respect charlie or lucifer, then they will not respect her) and when you have known what paradise on earth is, well you’d want it back. Originally you might’ve planned to take your entire family with you. But you just can’t manage it. Your husband is wallowing and tells stories but he takes no action. You start to resent him. Your daughter has heard his stories and has taken on his naïve hopefulness and maybe that’s what you loved about your husband when you fell into sin with him, but now it just reminds you of what you had and what you cannot reclaim and she looks *so much like her father* you start to resent her too. It’s Lucifer’s fault that you’re here. It’s Charlie’s fault that you stay. And then something changes. You strike a deal. You get to stay in heaven. The paradise you want.)

In a good world this is what Lilith’s motivations are. Which is a lot of words for saying Charlie should have this final “the child shall not bare the sins of the father.” Moment during her confrontation with Lilith. (This would have been something that was slowly built up during the show.)

Charlie shouldn’t be trying to redeem sinners in an attempt to apologize for her father’s actions. She should be doing it because it’s the right thing to do. (You know, for a main character, she sure does remain rather stagnant.)

What else did I want to point out the flaws for.

Ah right ass backwards way that Sinners apparently get redeemed. You are making a show about Catholicism you better get the absolute basics of it down. (We don’t know the breed unfortunately.)

Yeah so like. It should be remorse. You should be seeking out forgiveness for your sins. Not doing one selfless act and then getting killed immediately. And you can have! A very very interesting way of discovering this! You can have Charlie thinking that sinners need to become Good. (And you know, What Is Good.) She could confuse Goodness with Niceness. She could think that so long as they just Stop Being Bad, they get into heaven.

You can have Charlie lean into the whole Fire and Brimstone levels of Being Good. And then have to unlearn that! Angeldust (just using him as the example) Isn’t a sinner because he does sex work and drugs. He is a sinner because of whatever he did to get into hell. He needs to feel remorse for his *actual* sins, and seek out forgiveness before he gets redeemed. (from heaven, ig. Who the fuck is god anyways is god going to be a twink. is there a god? if not then wHY IS SAINT PETER-)

(TAKE NOTES. This is a great way to explore a character’s backstory beyond what’s told via Word of God (a la vizzie) and squinting at the aesthetics and motifs of a character and guessing what they did.)

Being redeemed through remorse can also carry a conflict! Let’s take one of the most morally reprehensible characters on the show. Valentino. Let’s say he has a sudden change of heart. Not a halfassed one. (It has to be REAL to make it an actual conflict). He realizes that what he’s done is vile, evil and reprehensible. He seeks out forgiveness. It is granted.

Because the only forgiveness you need (for Christians) is the forgiveness from god. (or heaven?? Ig?????)

Is there no sin that is beyond forgiveness? Is there no one beyond redemption? Is that whole all encompassing love from god schtick actually real, not clickbait?

I don’t know. Hazbin Hotel doesn’t want to get that deep into it. Because they just want to do a Heaven Bad????? Hell Good???? Or maybe???? Both are Bad and Good??????????? Story.

There is a lot more that I can nitpick and offer criticism to, or simply go “hey wouldn’t this be better?” To with this series. Because I think the concept can work really, *really* well. But it falls so flat on its face that it’s become concave.

[macbethz]

are you interested in expanding on the ways you think poor things falls short? I am not trying to start up any other poor things arguments but I am interested in your take.

I honestly think I have to do another watch to really solidify how I feel about it because its a film I have conflicting feelings on...on one hand I enjoyed watching it and felt the same kind of satisfaction I feel when watching a good film while it was actually running, but after thinking about it more I just felt like there wasn't enough. I don't think its a bad film by any means I just don't think its INCREDIBLE or particularly life-changing.

I just would have liked to see...more? It feels like it's missing a third act completely. Then thematically you have this woman discovering herself through sex and subverting the expectations of the born-sexy-yesterday trope but I didn't really feel like there was enough examination of WHY sex was empowering for her and what sexuality can represent in our culture. The film brings up socialism in the context of sexuality and then doesn't do anything with it!!!! That's so interesting say something about that!!!!

I think my main issue is it presented as a very artistic film, and most of Yorgos' work is, so I expected a deeper examination whereas what I got felt very surface level, a kind of baby's first female sexual revolution. A very "girlboss" movie with an art film coat of paint in some respects. And I think even that was a little too much for our sex-negative society as you can see from the outrage it received from all ends of the political spectrum.

I've also seen a few black critics talk about something I really agree with which is that the black characters in the film really only serve Bella's journey; all the characters in the film serve Bella's journey to be fair but it feels like the black characters were particularly shafted. Toinette is supposed to be one of her love interests but she has barely any traits of her own other than teaching Bella about socialism and lesbianism.

(spoilers here btw)

I also understand the choice to not have God be placed in the body of her ex-husband to thus ensure Bella as the singular head of household in the final scene but I can't BELIEVE they didn't do it because it seemed like such a clear setup for it. You would have her as both mother and daughter and then her father would be both father and son and husband. + him talking on his deathbed about wanting a life without scars COME ON. I think if that was intended to be a bait-and-switch or subversion they should have made it a little more explicit. But that's a minor complaint.

Visually beautiful tho and I have to give it props for bringing more incredibly sexual films to the mainstream as a fan of incredibly sexual films even tho people seem to REALLY not like that

[suugrbunz]

ok! can i request an excerpt with the korean restaurant? with Minah? we had a korean new years with garlic pancakes and korean movies, so intrigued 🤗 i can’t believe you’ve had so few requests for excerpts! you must have had korean food before - - can i ask what you recommend??

Oh!! Good question; I don't consume meat as it's not good imo. However, I love tofu! So some of my favourite Korean foods are kimchi, tteokbokki, tofu miyeok-guk (i currently have a container of it— it's so filling), yaksik which reminds me of sesame bars, bibimbap is also pretty popular but I cannot consume eggs without falling ill. Since, i make things at home due to kosher restrictions; I make it without the eggs or meat. I want to make vegan korean BBQ & kimbap. Kimbap is comparable to sushi however everything is cooked. I just have to find a vegan or vegetarian version of the kimbap. Here's a bit of Zosa's mum, aunts, and dad all in one. I think it's a bit funny and pretty on par for anyone who has parents interested in your love life.

Minah nodded and walked away from the assumed couple. A grin tugging her lips upwards as she headed back into the kitchen. Giggling as she looked towards her sister, Saena. Saena's eyes gawked at the sight of the duo. Visually, they couldn't be more different from each other. Yet, his eyes were warm as he looked at her. Opposites attract, that's the saying. Though Saena had never decided if she believed in such a saying; There had to be a commonality between them.

“Is that her boyfriend?” questioned Saena.

“Ah, I don't know but they're absolutely cute together.” giggled Minah, her voice bubbling with excitement.

“He looks like trouble.” remarked Dabin as she narrowed her eyes on the boy.

“No, he looks like a tree; Tall and skinny with curly hair.” corrected Saena, laughing at her own observation of the ‘couple’.

“Tree or trouble—” Minah placed rice cakes in boiling stock, “I trust my daughter's judgement.”

Lev entered the kitchen, his mouth agape as he approached his wife. That wasn't apart of his list of expectation for the night.

“Are... Are they dating?” stammered Lev, motioning towards the open doorway of the kitchen.

“I am not sure—” Minah looked towards her husband, “you're asking the same question as the rest of us.”

“Ah, there wasn't even a confirmation of their status?” asked Saena, questioning the validity of their assumptions.

“No, but they walked in holding hands.” responded Minah, tossing the steamed rice cakes into a saucepan full of a soy sauce mixture. The simmering sauce coated the rice cakes as she stirred them around the saucepan.

“Did anyone notice how his eyes were filled with affection when he looked towards her?” asked Dabin.

“Yes—” Lev spoke with eyes wide open, “I thought my daughter would inform me of her romance.”

“Some people prefer to be private about their love life.” shrugged Dabin.

“Dabin is right,” Saena pointed out the obvious, “Jieun is a very quiet girl, it'd be likely she wouldn't kiss and tell.”

[erodasfishtacos]

A Pictures Worth (Curious Gazes 3)

prompt(from kofi commission): I would love another type of curious gaze for ceorry with Ivy, Willow, Magnolia and Y/N out on a family trip maybe on vacation or like a museum or something and the kids are just really excited to be out with the whole family

warnings: light smut, language, harrys an asshole to everyone but his babies! minor dni 18+

i write for FREE - I am also trying to steer away from paetron so everyone can have access my stories - so if you would like to support my work, you can donate here.

if you liked please reblog, recommended, like, and come talk to me about it! (this is what motivates me to continue writing)!

*** <- click for visuals throughout the story

—

Heidi was relieved to be away from real life for a little bit, to take a step back from the burnout where everyday was god awful.

Her job was extremely stressful, with high expectations and strict schedules if she didn’t want her prick of a boss chewing her out.

She decided that a trip to the coast of the French Rivera was well deserved, even though her job was difficult - it paid exceptionally well and her boss was no cheapskate, just an asshole.

It was early in the morning, just about eight thirty but Heidi and her husband were early birds and already had snagged a spot in some loungers near the pool.

It was the weirdest turn of event.

She’s complaining to her husband, Paul, about her last week at work as they sip on mimosas and let the sun warm them up.

“He came into our office because Dale didn’t have the report ready,” Heidi recounts then mocking his rasp accent says, “And if you group of idiots can’t figure it out in the next five minutes, you can all be looking for new fucking jobs.”

Paul shakes his head in distain, “He shouldn’t be able to talk to you guys like that. It’s completely unacceptable.”

“He’s the owner, it’s not like I can complain to Human Resources. He’s everyone’s boss,” Heidi sighs before taking a long sip of her drink and trying to let her shoulders not tense up.

In the next moment, the same voice she just mocked - she hears from the side - her head whips as fast as a flash when she recognizes it.

And it is none other than her boss, Harry fucking Styles, in nothing but a short pair of swimming trunks and a bare chest with just gold chains decorating his neck. ***

She’s obviously never seen her boss in this state of undress, she knew he had tattoos but he was nearly covered.

Sparrows on his chest, a massive butterfly right on his midsection, ferns that looked downright obscene peeking out of his shorts on his sharp hip bones, a tattoo of what looks like a willow tree taking up his left side and what looks like vines of ivy on his other with magnolia flowers scattered around the art.

That’s not the most interesting thing though - it was a toddler who couldn’t be more than a year and a half,*** who was cradled in the crook of his one arm and a toddler, no more than three ***, was grasping his other hand and waddling next to him.

“Dadadada,” The child chanted happily as her chubby hands stayed buried in her father’s curls and she was rubbing her face against his stubbly cheek.

“Yes, baby. I hear you talkin’,” Harry murmurs to his daughter, trying to also juggling a massive tote bag that looks filled to the brim with diapers, water toys, and sun lotion.

“Where’s mummy and Vee?” The red-headed toddler lisps with a frown, looking around for the other part of her family as she stays close to her father.

“Vee is helping your mumma make some sandwiches and snacks to eat down here, lil’ red,” He replies patiently as he takes the lounge chairs right next to Heidi and Paul without even glancing their way.

He plops the baby on the chaise before popping the other one onto the cushion as well as he rifles through the gucci tote. ***

Heidi can’t help but stare as she watches the man who makes her life a living hell dig out two bottles of sunblock and squirts some on his hands.

At first he lathers it up in his palms before rubbing it all over the toddler’s arms, chest, legs before using a smaller bottle for her face.

The red-head girl giggles the whole time as her father massages the lotion into her fair skin, a likely chance she’d burn a lot without it.

When she’s done, Harry kisses her hair and tells her softly, “You're sucha good girl for your daddy. Thank you for sitting still for me, Willow Anne.”

Willow Anne.

She can’t believe what she’s seeing, the absolute dichotomy of this man is mind boggling to say the least and it’s throwing her off.

It didn’t seem like the same man who nearly fired her of a minuscule error only three weeks ago.

-

Heidi is minding her own business, typing out an email to a client when her office door slams open with force and her stomach drops when she sees who it is.

“Why has the quarterly report for sales in Dubai not been sent out? It was due at eight sharp and it’s currently nearly one in the fuckin’ afternoon,” Harry demands angrily, his jaw clench and his eyes hard as stone as they stare her down, making her feel small - like a child getting into trouble.

Heidi feels like she is about to throw up because it completely slipped her mind that it was due today and she knows she looks caught out.

Harry scoffs in disbelief, speaking sharply through his teeth, “If you don’t get that report done and sent out by midnight, I’ll have a seat ready for you in my office.”

“I’m s-sorry. I w-will, sir,” Heidi stutters out in fright, clicking off the email and opening up a spreadsheet right then and there.

He doesn’t say anything else before he’s turned on his heel and shutting door so fiercely behind him she’s surprised it didn’t splinter the wood.

She was at the office until eleven thirty that night to pump it out and have it sent - missing her mother’s birthday.

When she walked into the elevator the next morning, exhausted from only getting a few hours at home before coming back to work - her boss is slipping into the elevator next to her.

He’s on his phone, speaking quietly - just above a whisper, “I’ll be home by noon. Did Noli still have a temperature when she woke up? Give her a kiss for me.”

Then he’s replying to the person, “Of course, anything for you. Yes. Okay. I will call you. I love you, darling. Bye.”

When it’s silence in the lift now, just Harry and herself, they make eye contact when he gazes over at her - it doesn’t even look like he recognizes they meet gazes.

“Good morning, Mr. Styles,” Heidi replies awkwardly, shifting from foot to foot as he stands there as still and stiff as a statue.

He appears tired, dark circles under his eyes, and his lips turned down even more than usual - she wonders if it has anything to do with the person, Noli, he was talking about on the phone.

Heidi knows looking back that she shouldn’t have said anything but she said, “I hope your daughter’s okay.”

Harry tenses like she’s just pinched him, staring directly at her and biting out, “Don’t fuckin’ speak about my family.”

In perfect timing, the elevator dings open and Harry is striding out without a single look back.

What a fucking asshole.

-

Now that same dickhead was crouched down, trying to rub the lotion into the infant’s skin but she’s not as happy about it as Willow.

“No no no,” The baby babbles with a furrowed brow, trying to push her father’s heavily-ringed hands away from her.

Heidi expects him to snap at the baby, tell her to be quiet, and let him do it.

He doesn’t.

Harry tugs his daughter closer to him, softly asking her, “Do you want to go in the water? Want to swim with Vee and Low?”

The girl nods while leaning forward to wrap her fingers into his necklaces.

“If you want to go in the water, you have to let daddy put lotion on you. If you don’t want the lotion, you have to stay under the umbrella out of the sun.”

“Lotion, daddy,” She squeaks quickly, pushing her arms out for him to apply the sunblock.

“Thank you, sweet baby,” He responds with a fond smile while tickling her sides before moving on to her chubby little legs.

“Are you ready to get in the pool?” A female voice asks Willow before Heidi sees a beautiful - like disgustingly beautiful woman step under their umbrella with a child attached to her side.

Heidi had never seen Harry’s wife or babies before, the youngest and the oldest *** that just arrived look exactly like Harry but the middle one doesn’t resemble anyone in the family.

Harry is hiking up their littlest one of his hip and turns to his wife where she’s shimmying off her cover-up and revealing a blue one-shoulder bathing suit.***

It was a simple suit but it fit like a glove, hugging every curve of her body and Heidi admired that she wasn’t trying to disguise the small pouch of skin that came from birthing children.

Harry is watching his wife intently, almost like he’s a going to devour her, and as soon as she’s just in the bathing suit - self consciously soothing her hand over her belly, he’s stepping over to her.

“Holy shit,” He grunts with hunger, his hand knocking hers away and his hand roaming her belly, hips, and then her bum before she’s giggling and pushing him back before pulling him to her again and kissing him on the lips, “Look at you. Making my knees weak, m’heart. Gonna let me take this skimpy thing off you? Later?”

“Mmm, I think about it,” She teases before the oldest one is tugging her hand towards the pool impatiently with giggles already on her head.

She trails off to the pool while Harry secures floaty vests to the two little ones before hiking both up in a hip and heading towards the water.

Heidi has to look away to stop from oogling when she notices the rippled muscles of his back, the sharp curve at the small of it as baby hands cling to his skin to hold on.

She decides it the perfect time to get in the pool for a dip, hell, who was she kidding?

She wanted to see this man with his babies.

The pool has an underwater bench, that’s where she takes up residency while Harry corrals his little herd of children into the shallow end.

The oldest one has no issue swimming on her own.

“Ivy Elizabeth,” Harry’s wife says to her daughter while fixing the strap on her pink goggles, “You stay right next to daddy and I, okay? No more than to that line,” She informs, pointing to a marking where it’s going get deep, “You can only swim from there and back. Do you understand?”

“Yes mumma,” Ivy agrees sweetly before pinching her nose and diving under the water and swimming away but in the area.

The youngest one is too little to learn how to swim but the middle child seems to be in the process of learning, while Harry’s wife holds the youngest - dipping her down in the water over and over as she giggles and blows raspberries back up at her mum.

“S’the water nice, Noli?” Harry legitimately coos at the smiling baby before he’s leaning down to kiss her nose before murmuring, “Willow Anne, shall we try swimming?”

“No, no swim,” Willow lisps with a pout before trying to crawl up him more despite the lifevest being in the way because it’s so bulky.

“Oh, come on. M’little heart. Can we give it a try? You’ve been doing so good at your swim lessons,” Harry encourages, lowering her legs into the water just the littlest bit for her to get a feel of it.

Willow searches her father’s eyes for a moment before smiling shyly and nodding that she would like to try to swim.

“That’s my good girl,” Harry peppers a few kisses over her face to make her giggle loudly and in turn, making Harry laugh.

A sound Heidi has never heard.

It was raspy, a bit like rough gravel but a minuscule pinch higher of a pitch.

Dimples appeared deep in his scruffy cheeks and his straight white teeth were flashing in a facial expression she’d never seen from him.

No one was going to believe her at work.

Willow flails for a moment before she gathers her bearings, letting out a loud whimper of distress before Harry’s tittering encouragingly, “Stay calm, lil’ red. Y’know daddy’s got you. Nothing bad will happen.”

Harry keeps his palm under her belly to keep her steady as she begins to paddle with her little arms and her tongue sticking out in concentration.

“There you go, baby! You’re doing so well!” Harry’s wife cheers excitedly, bouncing the baby on her hip who also claps her hands too and continues to babble between distinguished words.

Harry is patient as he helps instruct Willow through how to properly doggy paddle, float, and hold her breath underwater while Ivy swims like a little mermaid in her own imaginative world.

When Willow’s ready to take a break, letting her father hold her close as he wades closer to his wife who’s gently rocking the baby back and forth through the water as Noli’s eyes get heavy.

“You are so beautiful. Hurts to even look at you,” Harry tells his wife, his hand coming to rest at her hip before creeping around to her bum and making her squeak as he roughly squeezes her cheek.

“Do you think this bathing suit is alright? It’s the only one I think looked halfway decent,” She asks a bit self-consciously, nodding down towards her stomach.

“I don’t think it’s decent at all.”

What an asshole.

Heidi was about to open her mouth, to defend this poor woman who has three of his children, and had the nerve to make a comment about her swimsuit or body.

“You look absolutely indecent,” Harry continues his hand moving from her bum to her belly, “Turns me on just looking at you normally then you go and put this thing on? If we didn’t have the babies with us, I would have pinned against the lounge chair and gave it to you so good you’d cry and-“

“Ssh,” His wife giggles as a couple floats by on a pool raft but she’s giving him a kiss as he gets a couple more touches in before the middle daughter starts to whimper that she’s sleepy.

Heidi decides it’s time to get out anyways and soak up some more sun.

Time passes where she gets lost in her steamy romantic novel, ironically about a CEO and his assistant.

She’s brought out of her concentration with the sound of squeaky, displeased whines that were turning into sobs quickly.

Harry is sauntering up to their loungers with their youngest one hip and the middle on the other, Noli is rubbing her face against her father’s bare shoulder and smacking her lips together in frustration.

“Just one moment, dove,” Harry hums to his demanding little daughter as he bends down to rustle in the tote for a binkie to pop into her mouth, “Let’s relax a little, yeah? You didn’t sleep very well for mumma and I last night.”

“My binkie?” Willow chirps with a furrowed brow at her father as he wrestles them out of their life vests and into fluffy beach towels.

“No paci. Remember? You’re a big girl,” He reminds her as he towels himself off.

Willow crosses her little arms, shouting at her father, “Want my binkie, daddy! Now! Now!”

Harry crouches down, putting his hand gently on her shoulder, looking very seriously in her angry brown eyes, “Willow Anne. You do not yell at daddy. I know you’re upset that you can’t have your binkie anymore but we don’t yell.”

As soon as Willow gets disciplined, her pout turns to distress as she begins to cry - acting like Harry had just screamed straight in her face.

Harry scoops her, along with Noli who’s still grumbling, and murmurs, “Sleepy little crabs.”

Then he proceeds to lay back onto the lounge chair, lowering the back until it’s almost down laying Willow down to his side, nestled between his ribs and arm, the baby splayed across his chest.

Noli is obviously tired as she lays her head down automatically into the curve of his neck, lips suckling furiously at her pacifier.

Within minutes, both Harry and his daughters are fast asleep on the chaise - his arm wrapped protectively around both of them.

Heidi doesn’t know what she would expect of Harry as a father - both this wasn’t it.

Heidi knows she shouldn’t but she has to show the others at the office, pulling out her phone and snapping a picture of the scene next to her.

And when she ends up drifting off for a quite a long snooze, by the tone she wakes up, they’re already gone.

-

Heidi doesn’t expect to see them again but they have another run in - literally.

It was her fault to be honest, she had been nearly four cocktails in, and was wobbling her way back up to the room.

Heidi was waiting for the elevator and when it opened, she didn’t look to see if there were any occupants before she stepped in.

However, when she did that she bumped straight into the little girl who was moving to get out of the steel doors at the same time - resulting in her being knocked on her bum.

Heidi’s heart leaps out of her chest and her instant reaction is to lean down to help up the child she’d just tripped over and she nearly freezes in fear when she realizes whose child it.

“Don’t fuckin’ touch her,” Harry booms out as soon as he sees Heidi reaching out to help, he’s quickly scooping up the sobbing toddler and bring her close to him, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

She vaguely isn’t surprised by him swearing like this in front of his child but it doesn’t scare Willow, she’s whimpering into his neck, “Daddy, cuddle,” despite him already doing so.

“I’m-I’m sorry,” Heidi stammers carefully, her intoxication obvious in her voice as she speaks to them.

“Maybe you shouldn’t drink if you handle your alcohol so poorly, pathetic,” He shakes his head as he bounces Willow on his hip and soothes her fiery curls back, “Now move the fuck out of my way.”

Heidi barely is able to take a step back before Harry is knocking her shoulder roughly in a haste to get out of the lift.

At this moment, she is extremely relieved he doesn’t remember who she is or she surely would have been fired.

-

Maria wasn’t enjoying her vacation as much as she had hoped she would. This trip had been a last ditch attempt to save her ten-year marriage.

However, her husband had drank too much during dinner and had fucked off to the casino - leaving her alone in their hotel room.

They’d gone all out, got an upgraded suite on one of the top floors, and a special spa package that was a pretty penny.

It was nearly eleven at night, there had been no sign of her husband coming back anytime soon and so she poured herself a glass of wine and trotted out to the balcony to sit and enjoy the view of the ocean.

Something catches her eye or someone.

It’s man, on the balcony across from their - it was a massive one that nearly took up the whole floor - it must have been the penthouse suite.

He’s faved away from her but she can see the carved out, chiseled muscles of his back, where he’s just in a small pair of briefs that show off his lean but strong legs, small perky bump with dimples on his lower back as he hangs up multiple different bathing suits to dry on a clothes line.

The lights are out in the penthouse and only a dim one is illuminating their balcony where a woman joins the man moments later- she’s in an expensive looking nightgown that hugs her curves, hair up in a messy bun. ***

Maria watches as she trails up to the man, hugging him, and wrapping her arms around his waist as she does, lips moving all over his skin.

The man abandons the rest of the swimsuits that need hanging up to return the embrace as his hands move down the small of her back, to her bum.

Maria’s not trying to be creepy or invasive but she is watching what she wants - what she wants with her husband but doesn’t have.

When he turns around, to gaze at all the other balconies to see if there’s wandering eyes, Maria realizes that it’s not just any man.

It’s her boss.

She was only human.

She knew he was a prick, not a nice guy, and she’s never had any pleasant experience with him in all her years working for him.

Maria should be repulsed and go inside but it’s impossible to deny how downright attractive he was, especially in barely any clothing.

Harry doesn’t seem to see Maria or anyone else for the matter before he’s crawling over the woman, who she guess is his girlfriend or hook-up or whatever, and dip down to kiss.

Her arms wrap around his neck and bring him further on top of her, his large hand move to slip up under her nightgown to her chest.

His partner pushes her chest up into his palm, spreading her legs to allow him to rest in between them, and his mouth travels down to her neck.

Maria finds herself touching the side of her neck absentmindedly, wishing that was her being given affection like that.

Harry is lightly pushing his hips down, grinding into her center between the barrier of their clothes, the woman’s legs wrapping around his waist to encourage him as his lips still descend now to her collarbones.

She’s trying to get her toes into the band on his brief to push them down off his hips but it isn’t working, Harry grips her ankle and returns it to the lounge but his hands are hiking up her nightgown.

Then Maria’s view is blocked when Harry ducks down between the valley of her thighs and Maria can tell by the way the woman’s back arches that it feels good.

Maria didn’t think Harry Styles would be the one to worry about anybody's pleasure but his own but that’s obviously not the truth.

She’s confused when they abruptly stop what their doing to look at something that’s propped up on the side table.

Harry’s standing up, snatching his shorts off the ground, and tugging them on before sauntering back inside the suite.

Maria is perplexed as she watches the woman readjust her nightgown and fix the straps that he’d pushed down to lay kisses on her shoulders.

She doesn’t seem upset and neither did he but what would have made him just get up like that?

Maria’s question is answered no more than a minute later when Harry exits onto the balcony again but with a whimpering, fussy red-headed baby in his hip.

He squeezes onto the chaise, both turning to lay on their sides facing inward and Harry lays the baby between them.

Maria watches as Harry leans over to give his partner one more kiss before they’re cuddling closer to the whimpering child who is desperately trying to get as close to their mum as possible.

Harry has one hand on his wife’s back and the other on his baby’s, rubbing up and down, as the red-headed girl burrows her head in her mum’s chest.

Not even five minutes later, another child appears at the balcony doors and steps out, she was older than the other one with wild brown locks and a seal stuffed animal tucked under her arm.

Harry lifts her up and squishes her into the middle, where she’s tucked neatly against his chest, and she nuzzles into the crook of his neck.

Maria never had those moments with her husband because he had surprised her with the information he didn’t want kids after the fact that they got married.

Harry seemed to treat his family unlike his employees, the woman she now assumes is his wife, his daughters, you could see even from a distance how much they adored him.

Maria is brave enough to admit that the image of Harry’s shoulders twitching and flexing when he pushed his hips down into his wife’s doesn’t leave her mind for a very very long time.

They don’t stay out very much longer, just long enough that the children drift back to sleep, and then they’re taking a baby each and taking them back inside.

-

Maria recognizes her boss once again but not until the next night around seven and this time he is fully dressed but more casual than she’d ever seen him in just an white tee, running shorts, and nikes.

He has the two girls that she saw the night before with him but now there’s another one that’s on his hip.

They’re all in nautical themed sleepers, which was probably the most adorable thing ever. It was funny to see this man with a permanent scowl at others being pulled down the hall by three girls.

They had him wrapped around their little fingers.

“Everyone gets one thing, not too much sugar before bed,” Harry reminds even as they head towards the vending machine, Maria was surprised that they wouldn’t have just ordered room service.

Maria then realizes that each girl has a few bills in their hands, clutching them excitedly as they arrive at the snack machine.

The oldest, the one who looks scarily similar to her father, begins to feed her first bill into the dispenser as she looks at all of her choices.

“No!” The redheaded child screams angrily, trying to bat her older sister’s hand away and pull back the bill she’s trying to get in, “Me! My turn.”

“Hey! Don’t do that, Low!” The oldest cries out as the bill tears nearly in half because of their back and forth over it.

“I get snack!” The middle child screeches before ultimately tearing the bill in half.

“Willow! That’s bad!” The oldest scolds but there’s fat tears streaming down her face as she holds her destroyed money.

Maria feels a chill run down her own back when Harry’s firm voice echoes through the hallway, “Willow Anne Styles.”

Willow looks up at her father with big guilty brown eyes and her bottom lip begins quivering when she realizes what she’s done.

Harry crouches down, let the littlest one off his hip and toddle over to where the oldest has resumed putting her bills in the machine.

“Come to y’daddy, please,” He murmurs sternly but his tone still managed to be soft enough to not be scary to her.

Willow is sobbing as she drags her feet over until she’s standing in front of her father, eyes directed down at her feet until Harry puts a finger under her chin so she’s making eye contact.

“We do not grab or try to take without permission,” Harry tells her, “That money was Ivy’s and you were not being kind to her. If you are upset that she was going to go first. We use words to fix it but we do not be unkind to others.”

“Because you ripped Ivy’s money, even after she told you not to. No snack from the vending machine. You can have a snack that mumma has for you upstairs. If you are kind then tomorrow you can come down and get something out of the machine. Understood?”

And Maria is baffled by….well, he’s a good parent.

Willow doesn’t tantrum further, she nods her head sadly and walks into her father’s arms where he gives her a big hug and a kiss on the cheek.

Maria just…the sharp contrast between him in the office, out of that balcony with his wife, and then with his children.

Who the fuck is Harry styles?

-

Heidi was actually excited to see Harry Styles - when she had come back from vacation, she had made a major effort and managed to coerce a lucrative customer to end services with another company and only utilize their services.

So being called to her boss’ office wasn’t something she was dreading, she assumed that she was going to get praises, get a promotion hopefully.

When Dorothy nods for her to go into his office, she takes a deep breath, she’d never been in her before and it was absurdly beautifully designed.

Harry didn’t look the same as the last time she saw him, he was fully dressed in a well-fitted suit that covered all of his tattoos and how fit his body truly was beneath.

His golden tan was the only remanent of the trip, his lax smile and soft voice was replaced with a stone, unempathic and a scowl that would make anyone think twice about approaching him.

Heidi smooths out her skirt before sitting down in the chair across from him, her heartrate rising steadily as she avoids direct eye contact.

“Hello, Ms. Synder,” Harry greets in his normal, deep drawl with little emotion as his hands are together on his desk - rings reflecting off the lights.

“H-hello,” Heidi manages back, wanting to kick herself for stuttering but she tried to remember that he did have a caring side - she’d seen it.

“You managed to convince Shore’s Electronics to switch completely to our services?” Harry asks although he already knows.

“Yes sir.”

“Your position here is Assistant Manger of Marketing in our United Kingdom division?” He clarifies as he moves to click his mouse around on his computer.

“Yes, it is,” Heidi swallows, fiddling with her hands and picking a thread on her work pants.

“And you’re a photographer as well?” He asks with a purse to his lips as he meets her eyes for a moment, sharp mossy green.

Heidi doesn’t know what he’s talking about, “Er, no? I don’t do any type of photography work, Mr. Styles. I think there’s be some confusion.

“Oh has there?” He smiles with not humor before he’s tilting his computer screen to show her what’s displayed.

The picture she snapped of vacation.

“You sure were a photographer when you snapped this picture, hm?” His tone is steely, angry as he watches her reaction.

It’s a shot of Harry, in just in swim trunks, splayed on his back with his sunglasses shielding his eyes as well as the shade on the umbrella.

His daughter, Noli, on his chest - fast asleep and a binkie tucked into her mouth as Willow sleeps cradled against his side.

“Had to just get a picture of your boss with his kids, right?” Harry taunts with irritation in his tone, “I don’t give a fuck about pictures of me - I’m an adult. The audacity you have to take a picture of my sleeping children.”

Heidi is scrambling for an explanation but she can’t find one.

“Human Resources will be able to answer any questions you may have about your termination - starting now. Delete that fucking photo off your phone or you will be hearing from my legal team,” He finishes before he’s moving the screen back and picking up his ringing phone, clearly ending the conversation.

[amaziana]

Rings of power rant

I never actually thought I’d do this (mainly because english isn’t my first language), but here we are but I just need to vent or I’ll explode. strap in because this is going to be long. Also keep in mind that this is a rant and I’m just getting stuff off of my chest so formating probably isn’t the best. 

First of all, I’m hard core Tolkien fan. I don’t remember time when I didn’t know the story of the hobbit and I read the lotr books for the first time when I was seven three times in a row. In my teens I started exploring Silmarillion and the rest of the middle-earths history. I know the lore like the back of my hand. It’s safe to say that Tolkiens works have shaped my worldwiev heavily and I love them fiercely.

So Rings of Power is out and it’s bad. And no, poc actors and women wielding swords is not the problem. Actually I think hawing Poc characters is great and completely in harmony with Tolkiens writings. For example, harfoots are described as being “browner of skin” that other hobbits. I’d even go as far as argue that every single actor playing a harfoot should be poc. Now as for Disa, there are seven dwarven clans in Arda, four of which originated from far east. I see no reason why one of these clans couldn’t have darker skin than the rest and why Disa couldn’t be from this clan. However I do think that it would make more sense lorevise if she was portrayed by east-asian actress due to the previously mentioned fact that four of the clans come from the far east. As for Arondir, Tolkien describes elves as being fair of skin, but I don’t see anything wrong with having elves of different skin colors. 

My problem with Galadriel isn’t that she is a woman who is in power and wields a sword. I myself am a girl and own a sword and have learned the basics of german longsword. In general I’m very interested in martial arts. Now when it comes to cannon lore elves have multiple names and Galadriel doesn’t even receive that name until she meets her husband, Celeborn, (which the show seems to have forgotten about). Her original names, ones that should be used in the Valinor flashbacks, were Artanis and Nerwen. First meaning “noblewoman” and second meaning “man-maiden”. Now she was named Nerwen because she was taller than most of the other women of noldor and she was strong of body, will and mind. She was also of “Amazon disposition” and “bound her hair as a crown when taking part in athletic feats." She even defended her mothers people when Feanor, her uncle and greatest of Noldor, attacked them for their ships. So yeah, she was a badass. The problem with her character is that by the second age, the time the show is portraying, she moves from place to place and lives in several places, including Lindon and Eregion. She is also married and gives birth to her daughter some time before the rings of power are forged. 

So no, the poc characters and powerful women do not make the show bad. What does is the fact that it shows such disregard for it’s source material and the spirit of Tolkien. It takes his work and turns it into generic, your run of the mill fantasy story without spirit. It blatantly ignores the lore in order to create a storyline that Amazon thinks it can sell. It turns Galadriel, who is a powerful woman in so many levels, both physically, meantually and spiritually, into you cardboard cutout of what Hollywood thinks is the only acceptable version of a strong female character. The dialogue is corny and often sounds like they are just trying to sound cool and wise, the costumes are bad and feel like, well, costumes and not something the people of that world would actually wear. The black goo they use to show the evil still lurking in the world/ coming back is cliche and boring. Now the visuals are good I’ll give them that. Lindon is beautiful and I like how it feels so close to nature. 

All in all, the story seems to relay more on nostalgia than anything else. They take some things from Tolkiens works, couple of things from the original Lotr movies and completely made up the rest and wrapped it in a nice golden paper with a ribbon. The result is bland and tasteless story that isn’t intriguing at all and disrespects Tolkiens work on fundamental levels. Best way I can describe it is if someone painted a picture of Mona Lisa with all the wrong colors making a duckface and it was hung in the museum besides the original piece.

[songbirdstyles]

dad!harry taking his baby to the beach

so basically someone sent me an ask for dad harry at the beach with his bub and i fell in love with it! unforeseen circumstances caused the ask to disappear but.. here it is!!

At a mere 2 years old, your daughter has, evidently, not been to the beach much. She’s only just grown out of her eat everything within reach phase, and you and Harry were too nervous for her to devour a handful of sand if you took your eyes off of her for a moment. She’s never been the greatest walker until recently, either, stumbling on air and falling to the ground, and you didn’t want to watch her try and take steps on the soft sand.

You decided for the first day of summer that you would cave and take her. Hell, there’s no one else on the beach for as far as your eyes can see, squinting down the length of the sand. And, of course, she’s fine now, sitting in between Harry’s crossed legs, baby sunglasses that are just a bit too big for her tiny face perched on the slope of her nose. You’ve only been here for an hour and Delaney has loved every moment, digging through the sand with the shovel and bucket Harry had bought her on the boardwalk, surely covering your husband’s legs with the grit, but you can tell from the grin on his face that he doesn’t care.

You lean back in your beach chair, lifting your bare foot up to tap against Harry’s shoulder, leg stretching to reach him where he sits just outside the shade of the umbrella. Your husband’s head turns, dropping back to look at you, sunglasses drooped down the bridge of his nose so that they’re surely doing a shitty job at protecting his eyes from the sun.

“It’s been 15 minutes,” you tell him, smile toying your lips upwards, and he raises his eyebrows, arms wrapped loosely around the toddler between his legs.

“Has it?” you nod, watching as he slides his hand beneath Delaney’s armpits, lifting her up to stand - she sighs, the noise soft and mingled with what must be annoyance at consistently being lifted up just when she’d settled back between Harry’s thighs. “Sorry, bub. Gotta give y’more sunscreen so your skin doesn’t burn.”

“Burn?” Delaney questions, pudgy toes digging into the sand as she toddles over to where you’re seated just a foot or two away, bathing suit strap slipping down her shoulder onto her upper arms. 

“Yeah, babe,” you confirm with a small nod, pushing her sunglasses further up the bridge of her nose as you lean over, reaching for the small tube of sunscreen you’d bought on the boardwalk. You undo the cap, squirting a dollop of the beachy smelling lotion into your palm before rubbing your hands together. “Arms out, remember?”

Delaney nods, curls bouncing where they’re slipping out of the French braids Harry had so generously attempted to craft this morning, and she obliges with your command, sticking her arms out like a t. “I remember, mommy.”

You smile, reaching towards her to begin to rub the sunscreen on her arms, watching as she crinkles her nose at the smell. You pull the straps of her bathing suit to the side to massage the cream into her shoulders before pulling them up right, and you add another dollop to your palm to begin to smear onto her face.

When you’re done, the toddler’s face and body are sufficiently tinged a pale white from the ingredients of the sunscreen, and you smile, satisfied at her protection from the sun. 

“Alright, bub,” you nod, watching as Delaney tugs at the ends of her braids in the way she always does when her hair is done - you suspect she dislikes how the hair style tugs at her scalp, but there’s no other way to contain her curls so they don’t get tangled and knotted by the end of the day. “You can go sit with daddy again.”

She hums softly, toddling away from before you to where your husband sits in the sunshine. She plops down between his open thighs, leaning her back against his chest, and even if you can’t see his face you can visualize his smile when he leans down to press a gentle kiss to her forehead.

“Can we go in the water, daddy?” asks Delaney, reaching down to dig her hands into the soft sand beneath her. You can imagine the way her tongue pokes out of the corner of her mouth, how it always does when she’s concentrated, and she buries her palms in the sand like it’s the only thing she has to worry about. “S’hot.”

“Didn’t like it last time I took you, Laney,” says Harry, leaning back on his palms as he raises his head to look towards the ocean just a stone’s throw away from your setup. And, sure enough, when Delaney had begged to go in the water when you’d arrived, she’d dipped her toes in the coldness and promptly screamed at the temperature, burying her face in Harry’s swim trunks - but, god. The water looks magnificent now, waves crashing and licking the shore, just a few steps from where Harry and Laney’s feet stick out towards the ocean. In the debilitating heat of the sun, there seems to be nothing better than splashing in the waves.

“I like it,” she tells him, soft palms pressing to his thighs as she pushes herself to stand, and you and Harry both tense, briefly concerned that your daughter will throw all caution to the wind and run into the waves without waiting for her father. She doesn’t, though, turning around to face Harry, and she leans into his chest, arms wrapped around his neck so you can see her face smushed into his neck. “Please, daddy -”

“Yeah, I got it, Laney,” and you can hear Harry’s smile in the tone of his voice - how he pronounces the words, like it’s taking all his efforts not to burst into laughter at her insistent tone. He pushes himself to stand, arm hooked beneath Delaney’s bum as he holds her to his hip, and he ducks beneath the umbrella to meet your eyes.

His face is lightly pink from the sun, curls tinged blonde in certain areas. His mouth stretches widely in a smile, bending down to press a kiss to your lips, and you crane your neck up to meet him.

“Come with us?”

“It’s okay,” you assure him, reaching a hand up to run against his bare bicep, and you can see his smile widen more at your action (if that’s even possible.) “Gonna read my book, I think. Shitty romance novel I got on the boardwalk - may as well bang it out.”

“Alright,” and he reaches down to land one more kiss to your lips before a soft whine tears its way from Delaney’s throat, arms tightening around Harry’s neck, eyes surely glued to the blue waves in front of her. “Sorry, bub. Let’s go, c’mon.”

You don’t reach for your book right away, though it sits on the ground beside your beach chair. Your eyes linger on Harry’s figure, arms wrapped securely around the toddler as he makes his way down the damp sand towards the water that wets it. He lowers himself to his knees, letting Delaney drop out of his arms where she’s clutching his torso, and you can hear her soft squeal the second the waves lick at her toes - she jumps back, nearly tripping over a shell buried in the sand before Harry catches her, a laugh tearing out of his throat at her antics. He pulls her to lean against his chest, arms wrapped around her stomach, and when the tide rushes in it hits them both full force until they’re soaked, Delaney burying her face in her father’s chest at the feeling.

In the end, you find that your book goes unread for the half hour Harry and Delaney play by the water. It’s significantly more interesting watching your loves than reading about anyone else’s, anyway.

[path-of-my-childhood]

Musicians On Musicians: Paul McCartney & Taylor Swift

By: Patrick Doyle for Rolling Stone Date: November 13th 2020

On songwriting secrets, making albums at home, and what they’ve learned during the pandemic.

Taylor Swift arrived early to Paul McCartney’s London office in October, “mask on, brimming with excitement.” “I mostly work from home these days,” she writes about that day, “and today feels like a rare school field trip that you actually want to go on.”

Swift showed up without a team, doing her own hair and makeup. In addition to being two of the most famous pop songwriters in the world, Swift and McCartney have spent the past year on similar journeys. McCartney, isolated at home in the U.K., recorded McCartney III. Like his first solo album, in 1970, he played nearly all of the instruments himself, resulting in some of his most wildly ambitious songs in a long time. Swift also took some new chances, writing over email with the National’s Aaron Dessner and recording the raw Folklore, which abandons arena pop entirely in favor of rich character songs. It’s the bestselling album of 2020.

Swift listened to McCartney III as she prepared for today’s conversation; McCartney delved into Folkore. Before the photo shoot, Swift caught up with his daughters Mary (who would be photographing them) and Stella (who designed Swift’s clothes; the two are close friends). “I’ve met Paul a few times, mostly onstage at parties, but we’ll get to that later,” Swift writes. “Soon he walks in with his wife, Nancy. They’re a sunny and playful pair, and I immediately feel like this will be a good day. During the shoot, Paul dances and takes almost none of it too seriously and sings along to Motown songs playing from the speakers. A few times Mary scolds, ‘Daaad, try to stand still!’ And it feels like a window into a pretty awesome family dynamic. We walk into his office for a chat, and after I make a nervous request, Paul is kind enough to handwrite my favorite lyric of his and sign it. He makes a joke about me selling it, and I laugh because it’s something I know I’ll cherish for the rest of my life. That’s around the time when we start talking about music.”

Taylor Swift: I think it’s important to note that if this year had gone the way that we thought it was going to go, you and I would have played Glastonbury this year, and instead, you and I both made albums in isolation.

Paul McCartney: Yeah!

Swift: And I remember thinking it would have been so much fun because the times that I’ve run into you, I correlate with being some of the most fun nights of my life. I was at a party with you, when everybody just started playing music. And it was Dave Grohl playing, and you...

McCartney: You were playing one of his songs, weren’t you?

Swift: Yes, I was playing his song called “Best of You,” but I was playing it on piano, and he didn’t recognize it until about halfway through. I just remember thinking, “Are you the catalyst for the most fun times ever?” Is it your willingness to get up and play music that makes everyone feel like this is a thing that can happen tonight?

McCartney: I mean, I think it’s a bit of everything, isn’t it? I’ll tell you who was very... Reese Witherspoon was like, “Are you going to sing?” I said “Oh, I don’t know.” She said, “You’ve got to, yeah!” She’s bossing me around. So I said, “Whoa,” so it’s a bit of that.

Swift: I love that person, because the party does not turn musical without that person.

McCartney: Yeah, that’s true.

Swift: If nobody says, “Can you guys play music?” we’re not going to invite ourselves up onstage at whatever living-room party it is.

McCartney: I seem to remember Woody Harrelson got on the piano, and he starts playing “Let It Be,” and I’m thinking, “I can do that better.” So I said, “Come on, move over, Woody.” So we’re both playing it. It was really nice... I love people like Dan Aykroyd, who’s just full of energy and he loves his music so much, but he’s not necessarily a musician, but he just wanders around the room, just saying, “You got to get up, got to get up, do some stuff.”

Swift: I listened to your new record. And I loved a lot of things about it, but it really did feel like kind of a flex to write, produce, and play every instrument on every track. To me, that’s like flexing a muscle and saying, “I can do all this on my own if I have to.”

McCartney: Well, I don’t think like that, I must admit. I just picked up some of these instruments over the years. We had a piano at home that my dad played, so I picked around on that. I wrote the melody to “When I’m 64” when I was, you know, a teenager.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: When the Beatles went to Hamburg, there were always drum kits knocking around, so when there was a quiet moment, I’d say, “Do you mind if I have a knock around?” So I was able to practice, you know, without practicing. That’s why I play right-handed. Guitar was just the first instrument I got. Guitar turned to bass; it also turned into ukulele, mandolin. Suddenly, it’s like, “Wow,” but it’s really only two or three instruments.

Swift: Well, I think that’s downplaying it a little bit. In my mind, it came with a visual of you being in the country, kind of absorbing the sort of do-it-yourself [quality] that has had to come with the quarantine and this pandemic. I found that I’ve adapted a do-it-yourself mentality to a lot of things in my career that I used to outsource.  I’m just wondering what a day of recording in the pandemic looked like for you.

McCartney: Well, I’m very lucky because I have a studio that’s, like, 20 minutes away from where I live. We were in lockdown on a farm, a sheep farm with my daughter Mary and her four kids and her husband. So I had four of my grandkids, I had Mary, who’s a great cook, so I would just drive myself to the studio. And there were two other guys that could come in and we’d be very careful and distanced and everything: my engineer Steve, and then my equipment guy Keith. So the three of us made the record, and I just started off. I had to do a little bit of film music - I had to do an instrumental for a film thing - so I did that. And I just kept going, and that turned into the opening track on the album. I would just come in, say, “Oh, yeah, what are we gonna do?” [Then] have some sort of idea, and start doing it. Normally, I’d start with the instrument I wrote it on, either piano or guitar, and then probably add some drums and then a bit of bass till it started to sound like a record, and then just gradually layer it all up. It was fun.

Swift: That’s so cool.

McCartney: What about yours? You’re playing guitar and piano on yours.

Swift: Yeah, on some of it, but a lot of it was made with Aaron Dessner, who’s in a band called the National that I really love. And I had met him at a concert a year before, and I had a conversation with him, asking him how he writes. It’s my favorite thing to ask people who I’m a fan of. And he had an interesting answer. He said, “All the band members live in different parts of the world. So I make tracks. And I send them to our lead singer, Matt, and he writes the top line.” I just remember thinking, “That is really efficient.” And I kind of stored it in my brain as a future idea for a project. You know, how you have these ideas... “Maybe one day I’ll do this.” I always had in my head: “Maybe one day I’ll work with Aaron Dessner.”

So when lockdown happened, I was in L.A., and we kind of got stuck there. It’s not a terrible place to be stuck. We were there for four months maybe, and during that time, I sent an email to Aaron Dessner and I said, “Do you think you would want to work during this time? Because my brain is all scrambled, and I need to make something, even if we’re just kind of making songs that we don’t know what will happen...”

McCartney: Yeah, that was the thing. You could do stuff -  you didn’t really worry it was going to turn into anything.

Swift: Yeah, and it turned out he had been writing instrumental tracks to keep from absolutely going crazy during the pandemic as well, so he sends me this file of probably 30 instrumentals, and the first one I opened ended up being a song called “Cardigan,” and it really happened rapid-fire like that. He’d send me a track; he’d make new tracks, add to the folder; I would write the entire top line for a song, and he wouldn’t know what the song would be about, what it was going to be called, where I was going to put the chorus. I had originally thought, “Maybe I’ll make an album in the next year, and put it out in January or something,” but it ended up being done and we put it out in July. And I just thought there are no rules anymore, because I used to put all these parameters on myself, like, “How will this song sound in a stadium? How will this song sound on radio?” If you take away all the parameters, what do you make? And I guess the answer is Folklore.

McCartney: And it’s more music for yourself than music that’s got to go do a job. My thing was similar to that: After having done this little bit of film music, I had a lot of stuff that I had been working on, but I’d said, “I’m just going home now,” and it’d be left half-finished. So I just started saying, “Well, what about that? I never finished that.” So we’d pull it out, and we said, “Oh, well, this could be good.” And because it didn’t have to amount to anything, I would say, “Ah, I really want to do tape loops. I don’t care if they fit on this song, I just want to do some.” So I go and make some tape loops, and put them in the song, just really trying to do stuff that I fancy.

I had no idea it would end up as an album; I may have been a bit less indulgent, but if a track was eight minutes long, to tell you the truth, what I thought was, “I’ll be taking it home tonight, Mary will be cooking, the grandkids will all be there running around, and someone, maybe Simon, Mary’s husband, is going to say, ‘What did you do today?’ And I’m going to go, ‘Oh,’ and then get my phone and play it for them.” So this became the ritual.

Swift: That’s the coziest thing I’ve ever heard.

McCartney: Well, it’s like eight minutes long, and I said, “I hate it when I’m playing someone something and it finishes after three minutes.” I kind of like that it just [continues] on.

Swift: You want to stay in the zone.

McCartney: It just keeps going on. I would just come home, “Well, what did you do today?” “Oh, well, I did this. I’m halfway through this,” or, “We finished this.”

Swift: I was wondering about the numerology element to McCartney III. McCartney I, II, and III have all come out on years with zeroes.

McCartney: Ends of decades.

Swift: Was that important?

McCartney: Yeah, well, this was being done in 2020, and I didn’t really think about it. I think everyone expected great things of 2020. “It’s gonna be great! Look at that number! 2020! Auspicious!” Then suddenly Covid hit, and it was like, “That’s gonna be auspicious all right, but maybe for the wrong reasons.” Someone said to me, “Well, you put out McCartney right after the Beatles broke up, and that was 1970, and then you did McCartney II in 1980.” And I said, “Oh, I’m going to release this in 2020 just for whatever you call it, the numerology...”

Swift: The numerology, the kind of look, the symbolism. I love numbers. Numbers kind of rule my whole world. The numbers 13... 89 is a big one. I have a few others that I find...

McCartney: Thirteen is lucky for some.

Swift: Yeah, it’s lucky for me. It’s my birthday. It’s all these weird coincidences of good things that have happened. Now, when I see it places, I look at it as a sign that things are going the way they’re supposed to. They may not be good now, they could be painful now, but things are on a track. I don’t know, I love the numerology.

McCartney: It’s spooky, Taylor. It’s very spooky. Now wait a minute: Where’d you get 89?

Swift: That’s when I was born, in 1989, and so I see it in different places and I just think it’s...

McCartney: No, it’s good. I like that, where certain things you attach yourself to, and you get a good feeling off them. I think that’s great.

Swift: Yeah, one of my favorite artists, Bon Iver, he has this thing with the number 22. But I was also wondering: You have always kind of seeked out a band or a communal atmosphere with like, you know, the Beatles and Wings, and then Egypt Station. I thought it was interesting when I realized you had made a record with no one else. I just wondered, did that feel natural?

McCartney: It’s one of the things I’ve done. Like with McCartney, because the Beatles had broken up, there was no alternative but to get a drum kit at home, get a guitar, get an amp, get a bass, and just make something for myself. So on that album, which I didn’t really expect to do very well, I don’t think it did. But people sort of say, “I like that. It was a very casual album.” It didn’t really have to mean anything. So I’ve done that, the play-everything-myself thing. And then I discovered synths and stuff, and sequencers, so I had a few of those at home. I just thought I’m going to play around with this and record it, so that became McCartney II. But it’s a thing I do. Certain people can do it. Stevie Wonder can do it. Stevie Winwood, I believe, has done it. So there are certain people quite like that.

When you’re working with someone else, you have to worry about their variances. Whereas your own variance, you kind of know it. It’s just something I’ve grown to like. Once you can do it, it becomes a little bit addictive. I actually made some records under the name the Fireman.

Swift: Love a pseudonym.

McCartney: Yeah, for the fun! But, you know, let’s face it, you crave fame and attention when you’re young. And I just remembered the other day, I was the guy in the Beatles that would write to journalists and say [speaks in a formal voice]: “We are a semiprofessional rock combo, and I’d think you’d like [us]... We’ve written over 100 songs (which was a lie), my friend John and I. If you mention us in your newspaper...” You know, I was always, like, craving the attention.

Swift: The hustle! That’s so great, though.

McCartney: Well, yeah, you need that.

Swift: Yeah, I think, when a pseudonym comes in is when you still have a love for making the work and you don’t want the work to become overshadowed by this thing that’s been built around you, based on what people know about you. And that’s when it’s really fun to create fake names and write under them.

McCartney: Do you ever do that?

Swift: Oh, yeah.

McCartney: Oh, yeah? Oh, well, we didn’t know that! Is that a widely known fact?

Swift: I think it is now, but it wasn’t. I wrote under the name Nils Sjöberg because those are two of the most popular names of Swedish males. I wrote this song called “This Is What You Came For” that Rihanna ended up singing. And nobody knew for a while. I remembered always hearing that when Prince wrote “Manic Monday,” they didn’t reveal it for a couple of months.

McCartney: Yeah, it also proves you can do something without the fame tag. I did something for Peter and Gordon; my girlfriend’s brother and his mate were in a band called Peter and Gordon. And I used to write under the name Bernard Webb.

Swift: [Laughs.] That’s a good one! I love it.

McCartney: As Americans call it, Ber-nard Webb. I did the Fireman thing. I worked with a producer, a guy called Youth, who’s this real cool dude. We got along great. He did a mix for me early on, and we got friendly. I would just go into the studio, and he would say, “Hey, what about this groove?” and he’d just made me have a little groove going. He’d say, “You ought to put some bass on it. Put some drums on it.” I’d just spend the whole day putting stuff on it. And we’d make these tracks, and nobody knew who Fireman was for a while. We must have sold all of 15 copies.

Swift: Thrilling, absolutely thrilling.

McCartney: And we didn’t mind, you know?

Swift: I think it’s so cool that you do projects that are just for you. Because I went with my family to see you in concert in 2010 or 2011, and the thing I took away from the show most was that it was the most selfless set list I had ever seen. It was completely geared toward what it would thrill us to hear. It had new stuff, but it had every hit we wanted to hear, every song we’d ever cried to, every song people had gotten married to, or been brokenhearted to. And I just remembered thinking, “I’ve got to remember that,” that you do that set list for your fans.

McCartney: You do that, do you?

Swift: I do now. I think that learning that lesson from you taught me at a really important stage in my career that if people want to hear “Love Story” and “Shake It Off,” and I’ve played them 300 million times, play them the 300-millionth-and-first time. I think there are times to be selfish in your career, and times to be selfless, and sometimes they line up.

McCartney: I always remembered going to concerts as a kid, completely before the Beatles, and I really hoped they would play the ones I loved. And if they didn’t, it was kind of disappointing. I had no money, and the family wasn’t wealthy. So this would be a big deal for me, to save up for months to afford the concert ticket.

Swift: Yeah, it feels like a bond. It feels like that person on the stage has given something, and it makes you as a crowd want to give even more back, in terms of applause, in terms of dedication. And I just remembered feeling that bond in the crowd, and thinking, “He’s up there playing these Beatles songs, my dad is crying, my mom is trying to figure out how to work her phone because her hands are shaking so much.” Because seeing the excitement course through not only me, but my family and the entire crowd in Nashville, it just was really special. I love learning lessons and not having to learn them the hard way. Like learning nice lessons I really value.

McCartney: Well, that’s great, and I’m glad that set you on that path. I understand people who don’t want to do that, and if you do, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s a jukebox show.” I hear what they’re saying. But I think it’s a bit of a cheat, because the people who come to our shows have spent a lot of money. We can afford to go to a couple of shows and it doesn’t make much difference. But a lot of ordinary working folks... it’s a big event in their life, and so I try and deliver. I also, like you say, try and put in a few weirdos.

Swift: That’s the best. I want to hear current things, too, to update me on where the artist is. I was wondering about lyrics, and where you were lyrically when you were making this record. Because when I was making Folklore, I went lyrically in a total direction of escapism and romanticism. And I wrote songs imagining I was, like, a pioneer woman in a forbidden love affair [laughs]. I was completely...

McCartney: Was this “I want to give you a child”? Is that one of the lines?

Swift: Oh, that’s a song called “Peace.”

McCartney: “Peace,” I like that one.

Swift: “Peace” is actually more rooted in my personal life. I know you have done a really excellent job of this in your personal life: carving out a human life within a public life, and how scary that can be when you do fall in love and you meet someone, especially if you’ve met someone who has a very grounded, normal way of living. I, oftentimes, in my anxieties, can control how I am as a person and how normal I act and rationalize things, but I cannot control if there are 20 photographers outside in the bushes and what they do and if they follow our car and if they interrupt our lives. I can’t control if there’s going to be a fake weird headline about us in the news tomorrow.

McCartney: So how does that go? Does your partner sympathize with that and understand?

Swift: Oh, absolutely.

McCartney: They have to, don’t they?

Swift: But I think that in knowing him and being in the relationship I am in now, I have definitely made decisions that have made my life feel more like a real life and less like just a storyline to be commented on in tabloids. Whether that’s deciding where to live, who to hang out with, when to not take a picture - the idea of privacy feels so strange to try to explain, but it’s really just trying to find bits of normalcy. That’s what that song “Peace” is talking about. Like, would it be enough if I could never fully achieve the normalcy that we both crave? Stella always tells me that she had as normal a childhood as she could ever hope for under the circumstances.

McCartney: Yeah, it was very important to us to try and keep their feet on the ground amongst the craziness.

Swift: She went to a regular school...

McCartney: Yeah, she did.

Swift: And you would go trick-or-treating with them, wearing masks.

McCartney: All of them did, yeah. It was important, but it worked pretty well, because when they kind of reached adulthood, they would meet other kids who might have gone to private schools, who were a little less grounded.

And they could be the budding mothers to [kids]. I remember Mary had a friend, Orlando. Not Bloom. She used to really counsel him. And it’s ’cause she’d gone through that. Obviously, they got made fun of, my kids. They’d come in the classroom and somebody would sing, “Na na na na,” you know, one of the songs. And they’d have to handle that. They’d have to front it out.

Swift: Did that give you a lot of anxiety when you had kids, when you felt like all this pressure that’s been put on me is spilling over onto them, that they didn’t sign up for it? Was that hard for you?

McCartney: Yeah, a little bit, but it wasn’t like it is now. You know, we were just living a kind of semi-hippie life, where we withdrew from a lot of stuff. The kids would be doing all the ordinary things, and their school friends would be coming up to the house and having parties, and it was just great. I remember one lovely evening when it was Stella’s birthday, and she brought a bunch of school kids up. And, you know, they’d all ignore me. It happens very quickly. At first they’re like, “Oh, yeah, he’s like a famous guy,” and then it’s like [yawns]. I like that. I go in the other room and suddenly I hear this music going on. And one of the kids, his name was Luke, and he’s doing break dancing.

Swift: Ohhh!

McCartney: He was a really good break dancer, so all the kids are hanging out. That allowed them to be kind of normal with those kids. The other thing is, I don’t live fancy. I really don’t. Sometimes it’s a little bit of an embarrassment, if I’ve got someone coming to visit me, or who I know…

Swift: Cares about that stuff?

McCartney: Who’s got a nice big house, you know. Quincy Jones came to see me and I’m, like, making him a veggie burger or something. I’m doing some cooking. This was after I’d lost Linda, in between there. But the point I’m making is that I’m very consciously thinking, “Oh, God, Quincy’s got to be thinking, ‘What is this guy on? He hasn’t got big things going on. It’s not a fancy house at all. And we’re eating in the kitchen! He’s not even got the dining room going,’” you know?

Swift: I think that sounds like a perfect day.

McCartney: But that’s me. I’m awkward like that. That’s my kind of thing. Maybe I should have, like, a big stately home. Maybe I should get a staff. But I think I couldn’t do that. I’d be so embarrassed. I’d want to walk around dressed as I want to walk around, or naked, if I wanted to.

Swift: That can’t happen in Downton Abbey.

McCartney: [Laughs.] Exactly.

Swift: I remember what I wanted to know about, which is lyrics. Like, when you’re in this kind of strange, unparalleled time, and you’re making this record, are lyrics first? Or is it when you get a little melodic idea?

McCartney: It was a bit of both. As it kind of always is with me. There’s no fixed way. People used to ask me and John, “Well, who does the words, who does the music?” I used to say, “We both do both.” We used to say we don’t have a formula, and we don’t want one. Because the minute we get a formula, we should rip it up. I will sometimes, as I did with a couple of songs on this album, sit down at the piano and just start noodling around, and I’ll get a little idea and start to fill that out. So the lyrics - for me, it’s following a trail. I’ll start [sings “Find My Way,” a song from “McCartney III”]: “I can find my way. I know my left from right, da da da.” And I’ll just sort of fill it in. Like, we know this song, and I’m trying to remember the lyrics. Sometimes I’ll just be inspired by something. I had a little book which was all about the constellations and the stars and the orbits of Venus and...

Swift: Oh, I know that song - “The Kiss of Venus”?

McCartney: Yeah, “The Kiss of Venus.” And I just thought, “That’s a nice phrase.” So I was actually just taking phrases out of the book, harmonic sounds. And the book is talking about the maths of the universe, and how when things orbit around each other, and if you trace all the patterns, it becomes like a lotus flower.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: It’s very magical.

Swift: That is magical. I definitely relate to needing to find magical things in this very not-magical time, needing to read more books and learn to sew, and watch movies that take place hundreds of years ago. In a time where, if you look at the news, you just want to have a panic attack - I really relate to the idea that you are thinking about stars and constellations.

McCartney: Did you do that on Folklore?

Swift: Yes. I was reading so much more than I ever did, and watching so many more films.

McCartney: What stuff were you reading?

Swift: I was reading, you know, books like Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, which I highly recommend, and books that dealt with times past, a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I was also using words I always wanted to use - kind of bigger, flowerier, prettier words, like “epiphany,” in songs. I always thought, “Well, that’ll never track on pop radio,” but when I was making this record, I thought, “What tracks? Nothing makes sense anymore. If there’s chaos everywhere, why don’t I just use the damn word I want to use in the song?”

McCartney: Exactly. So you’d see the word in a book and think, “I love that word”?

Swift: Yeah, I have favorite words, like “elegies” and “epiphany” and “divorcée,” and just words that I think sound beautiful, and I have lists and lists of them.

McCartney: How about “marzipan”?

Swift: Love “marzipan.”

McCartney: The other day, I was remembering when we wrote “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”: “kaleidoscope.”

Swift: “Kaleidoscope” is one of mine! I have a song on 1989, a song called “Welcome to New York,” that I put the word “kaleidoscope” in just because I’m obsessed with the word.

McCartney: I think a love of words is a great thing, particularly if you’re going to try to write a lyric, and for me, it’s like, “What is this going to say to that person?” I often feel like I’m writing to someone who is not doing so well. So I’m trying to write songs that might help. Not in a goody-goody, crusading kind of way, but just thinking there have been so many times in my life when I’ve heard a song and felt so much better. I think that’s the angle I want, that inspirational thing.

I remember once, a friend of mine from Liverpool, we were teenagers and we were going to a fairground. He was a schoolmate, and we had these jackets that had a little fleck in the material, which was the cool thing at the time.

Swift: We should have done matching jackets for this photo shoot.

McCartney: Find me a fleck, I’m in. But we went to the fair, and I just remember - this is what happens with songs - there was this girl at the fair. This is just a little Liverpool fair - it was in a place called Sefton Park - and there was this girl, who was so beautiful. She wasn’t a star. She was so beautiful. Everyone was following her, and it’s like, “Wow.” It’s like a magical scene, you know? But all this gave me a headache, so I ended up going back to his house - I didn’t normally get headaches. And we thought, “What can we do?” So we put on the Elvis song “All Shook Up.” By the end of that song, my headache had gone. I thought, you know, “That’s powerful.”

Swift: That really is powerful.

McCartney: I love that, when people stop me in the street and say, “Oh, I was going through an illness and I listened to a lot of your stuff, and I’m better now and it got me through,” or kids will say, “It got me through exams.” You know, they’re studying, they’re going crazy, but they put your music on. I’m sure it happens with a lot of your fans. It inspires them, you know?

Swift: Yeah, I definitely think about that as a goal. There’s so much stress everywhere you turn that I kind of wanted to make an album that felt sort of like a hug, or like your favorite sweater that makes you feel like you want to put it on.

McCartney: What, a “cardigan”?

Swift: Like a good cardigan, a good, worn-in cardigan. Or something that makes you reminisce on your childhood. I think sadness can be cozy. It can obviously be traumatic and stressful, too, but I kind of was trying to lean into sadness that feels like somehow enveloping in not such a scary way - like nostalgia and whimsy incorporated into a feeling like you’re not all right. Because I don’t think anybody was really feeling like they were in their prime this year. Isolation can mean escaping into your imagination in a way that’s kind of nice.

McCartney: I think a lot of people have found that. I would say to people, “I feel a bit guilty about saying I’m actually enjoying this quarantine thing,” and people go, “Yeah, I know, don’t say it to anyone.” A lot of people are really suffering.

Swift: Because there’s a lot in life that’s arbitrary. Completely and totally arbitrary. And [the quarantine] is really shining a light on that, and also a lot of things we have that we outsource that you can actually do yourself.

McCartney: I love that. This is why I said I live simply. That’s, like, at the core of it. With so many things, something goes wrong and you go, “Oh, I’ll get somebody to fix that.” And then it’s like, “No, let me have a look at it...”

Swift: Get a hammer and a nail.

McCartney: “Maybe I can put that picture up.” It’s not rocket science. The period after the Beatles, when we went to live in Scotland on a really - talk about dumpy - little farm. I mean, I see pictures of it now and I’m not ashamed, but I’m almost ashamed. Because it’s like, “God, nobody’s cleaned up around here.”

But it was really a relief. Because when I was with the Beatles, we’d formed Apple Records, and if I wanted a Christmas tree, someone would just buy it. And I thought, after a while, “No, you know what? I really would like to go and buy our Christmas tree. Because that’s what everyone does.” So you go down - “I’ll have that one” - and you carried it back. I mean, it’s little, but it’s huge at the same time.

I needed a table in Scotland and I was looking through a catalog and I thought, “I could make one. I did woodwork in school, so I know what a dovetail joint is.” So I just figured it out. I’m just sitting in the kitchen, and I’m whittling away at this wood and I made this little joint. There was no nail technology - it was glue. And I was scared to put it together. I said, “It’s not going to fit,” but one day, I got my woodwork glue and thought, “There’s no going back.” But it turned out to be a real nice little table I was very proud of. It was that sense of achievement.

The weird thing was, Stella went up to Scotland recently and I said, “Isn’t it there?” and she said, “No.” Anyway, I searched for it. Nobody remembered it. Somebody said, “Well, there’s a pile of wood in the corner of one of the barns, maybe that’s it. Maybe they used it for firewood.” I said, “No, it’s not firewood.” Anyway, we found it, and do you know how joyous that was for me? I was like, “You found my table?!” Somebody might say that’s a bit boring.

Swift: No, it’s cool!

McCartney: But it was a real sort of great thing for me to be able to do stuff for yourself. You were talking about sewing. I mean normally, in your position, you’ve got any amount of tailors.

Swift: Well, there’s been a bit of a baby boom recently; several of my friends have gotten pregnant.

McCartney: Oh, yeah, you’re at the age.

Swift: And I was just thinking, “I really want to spend time with my hands, making something for their children.” So I made this really cool flying-squirrel stuffed animal that I sent to one of my friends. I sent a teddy bear to another one, and I started making these little silk baby blankets with embroidery. It’s gotten pretty fancy. And I’ve been painting a lot.

McCartney: What do you paint? Watercolors?

Swift: Acrylic or oil. Whenever I do watercolor, all I paint is flowers. When I have oil, I really like to do landscapes. I always kind of return to painting a lonely little cottage on a hill.

McCartney: It’s a bit of a romantic dream. I agree with you, though, I think you’ve got to have dreams, particularly this year. You’ve got to have something to escape to. When you say “escapism,” it sounds like a dirty word, but this year, it definitely wasn’t. And in the books you’re reading, you’ve gone into that world. That’s, I think, a great thing. Then you come back out. I normally will read a lot before I go to bed. So I’ll come back out, then I’ll go to sleep, so I think it really is nice to have those dreams that can be fantasies or stuff you want to achieve.

Swift: You’re creating characters. This was the first album where I ever created characters, or wrote about the life of a real-life person. There’s a song called “The Last Great American Dynasty” that’s about this real-life heiress who lived just an absolutely chaotic, hectic...

McCartney: She’s a fantasy character?

Swift: She’s a real person. Who lived in the house that I live in.

McCartney: She’s a real person? I listened to that and I thought, “Who is this?”

Swift: Her name was Rebekah Harkness. And she lived in the house that I ended up buying in Rhode Island. That’s how I learned about her. But she was a woman who was very, very talked about, and everything she did was scandalous. I found a connection in that. But I also was thinking about how you write “Eleanor Rigby” and go into that whole story about what all these people in this town are doing and how their lives intersect, and I hadn’t really done that in a very long time with my music. It had always been so microscope personal.

McCartney: Yeah, ’cause you were writing breakup songs like they were going out of style.

Swift: I was, before my luck changed [laughs]. I still write breakup songs. I love a good breakup song. Because somewhere in the world, I always have a friend going through a breakup, and that will make me write one.

McCartney: Yeah, this goes back to this thing of me and John: When you’ve got a formula, break it. I don’t have a formula. It’s the mood I’m in. So I love the idea of writing a character. And, you know, trying to think, “What am I basing this on?” So “Eleanor Rigby” was based on old ladies I knew as a kid. For some reason or other, I got great relationships with a couple of local old ladies. I was thinking the other day, I don’t know how I met them, it wasn’t like they were family. I’d just run into them, and I’d do their shopping for them.

Swift: That’s amazing.

McCartney: It just felt good to me. I would sit and talk, and they’d have amazing stories. That’s what I liked. They would have stories from the wartime - because I was born actually in the war - and so these old ladies, they were participating in the war. This one lady I used to sort of just hang out with, she had a crystal radio that I found very magical. In the war, a lot of people made their own radios - you’d make them out of crystals [sings “The Twilight Zone” theme].

Swift: How did I not know this? That sounds like something I would have tried to learn about.

McCartney: It’s interesting, because there is a lot of parallels with the virus and lockdowns and wartime. It happened to everyone. Like, this isn’t HIV, or SARS, or Avian flu, which happened to others, generally. This has happened to everyone, all around the world. That’s the defining thing about this particular virus. And, you know, my parents... it happened to everyone in Britain, including the queen and Churchill. War happened. So they were all part of this thing, and they all had to figure out a way through it. So you figured out Folklore. I figured out McCartney III.

Swift: And a lot of people have been baking sourdough bread. Whatever gets you through!

McCartney: Some people used to make radios. And they’d take a crystal - we should look it up, but it actually is a crystal. I thought, “Oh, no, they just called it a crystal radio,” but it’s actually crystals like we know and love.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: And somehow they get the radio waves - this crystal attracts them - they tune it in, and that’s how they used to get their news. Back to “Eleanor Rigby,” so I would think of her and think of what she’s doing and then just try to get lyrical, just try to bring poetry into it, words you love, just try to get images like “picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been,” and Father McKenzie “is darning his socks in the night.” You know, he’s a religious man, so I could’ve said, you know, “preparing his Bible,” which would have been more obvious. But “darning his socks” kind of says more about him. So you get into this lovely fantasy. And that’s the magic of songs, you know. It’s a black hole, and then you start doing this process, and then there’s this beautiful little flower that you’ve just made. So it is very like embroidery, making something.

Swift: Making a table.

McCartney: Making a table.

Swift: Wow, it would’ve been so fun to play Glastonbury for the 50th anniversary together.

McCartney: It would’ve been great, wouldn’t it? And I was going to be asking you to play with me.

Swift: Were you going to invite me? I was hoping that you would. I was going to ask you.

McCartney: I would’ve done “Shake It Off.”

Swift: Oh, my God, that would have been amazing.

McCartney: I know it, it’s in C!

Swift: One thing I just find so cool about you is that you really do seem to have the joy of it, still, just no matter what. You seem to have the purest sense of joy of playing an instrument and making music, and that’s just the best, I think.

McCartney: Well, we’re just so lucky, aren’t we?

Swift: We’re really lucky.

McCartney: I don’t know if it ever happens to you, but with me, it’s like, “Oh, my god, I’ve ended up as a musician.”

Swift: Yeah, I can’t believe it’s my job.

McCartney: I must tell you a story I told Mary the other day, which is just one of my favorite little sort of Beatles stories. We were in a terrible, big blizzard, going from London to Liverpool, which we always did. We’d be working in London and then drive back in the van, just the four of us with our roadie, who would be driving. And this was a blizzard. You couldn’t see the road. At one point, it slid off and it went down an embankment. So it was “Ahhh,” a bunch of yelling. We ended up at the bottom. It didn’t flip, luckily, but so there we are, and then it’s like, “Oh, how are we going to get back up? We’re in a van. It’s snowing, and there’s no way.” We’re all standing around in a little circle, and thinking, “What are we going to do?” And one of us said, “Well, something will happen.” And I thought that was just the greatest. I love that, that’s a philosophy.

Swift: “Something will happen.”

McCartney: And it did. We sort of went up the bank, we thumbed a lift, we got the lorry driver to take us, and Mal, our roadie, sorted the van and everything. So that was kind of our career. And I suppose that’s like how I ended up being a musician and a songwriter: “Something will happen.”

Swift: That’s the best.

McCartney: It’s so stupid it’s brilliant. It’s great if you’re ever in that sort of panic attack: “Oh, my God,” or, “Ahhh, what am I going to do?”

Swift: “Something will happen.”

McCartney: All right then, thanks for doing this, and this was, you know, a lot of fun.

Swift: You’re the best. This was so awesome. Those were some quality stories!

[starring-movies]

The Haunting of Bly Manor: Episode Analysis

Episode 8 - The Romance of Certain Old Clothes

Episode 8 is the penultimate episode of The Haunting of Bly Manor. This episode, as well as Episode 5, are some of the absolute standout episodes of the season and in this one we are given the origin story of who The Lady of the Lake was.

We find out that “towards the middle of the 17th century” the current owner of Bly Manor at that time had died, and he left his two daughters as his heirs to the estate. His daughters were Viola and Perdita, and Perdita was five years younger than her sister. It’s an interesting detail that in Latin, ‘perdita’ means ruined, wasted or lost. In accordance with the meaning of her name, Perdita’s life is completely wasted and lost to Viola.

In life - Perdita lost her husband to Viola (Arthur was first interested in her but Viola presented herself as the lady of the manor so that he would marry her instead), she lost most of her life to caring for Viola when she became sick with “the lung” and she literally lost her life to Viola when Viola strangled her.

In death - Perdita gets lost as a ghost when her face and memories all fade.

An amazing detail; is that when Viola and Perdita are mingling with the various suitors, no one in this scene actually opens their mouth when it looks like they’re speaking to another person. Everyone makes the physical gestures towards one another which you make when you speak to someone (like one person leaning in to be heard and the other leaning in to listen), but no one’s mouth actually opens in speech. This small detail, as well as the whole episode being in black and white, helps to immerse us into the fairytale or gothic romance-like tone of the episode.

After Viola marries Arthur, they have a child together. We discover that the origin of the phrase “it is you, it is me, it is us”, which is used to invite a ghost into a person, was first said by Viola to her baby daughter.

It’s not made completely clear, but it’s straight after Viola notices Perdita and Arthur looking at one another that “her suspicion began as small”, but also when “the tickle in her lungs” began. This may just be a coincidence, but if it’s not, then it’s strongly suggested to us that Viola’s illness stemmed from the jealousy and suspicion that planted itself within her - like an almost ‘Dorian Grey-style’ physical manifestation of the jealousy that infected her heart.

When the doctor’s treatments for Viola’s illness don’t work and her condition starts to look more terminal, Arthur calls the vicar to her bedside to preform an absolution rite. Out of sheer stubborn wilfulness Viola refuses to repeat the rites, saying to the vicar for him to “tell your god, that I do not go”. Arthur tries to covnince her to repeat the rites by telling her “it is not about your body any longer, my love. It is your soul we must treat. It is your soul I worry for”. Again it’s not made explicitly clear, but it’s strongly suggested that Viola doesn’t die peacefullly and her soul is imprisoned in the chest of clothes because she didn’t say the rites and so her soul was not properly treated before dying.

As Older Jamie is telling the story, she says that “then five times around the sun, and all is different”, as this was when Viola found Perdita dancing with Arthur and started to treat Perdita awfully. In Episode 9 Older Jamie also says that “five years would pass, and there was peace” for her and Dani, before Viola started to take over Dani’s body. It seems that Viola was given “five times around the sun” before she started to see the connection between Perdita and Arthur growing stronger and when all became different; and so Dani and Jamie were given “five years” of peace before Viola reared her head and made everything different for them.

We also see a similarity being drawn between Viola and Peter. Viola is still hanging onto her life and refusing to die and Perdita says to her that “you should think of her, Vi. Think of Isabel. What will she be left with, what memories of you will she carry? Will it be this? This version of you? Because Viola, with love, let it be anything else”. It’s clear that Viola obviously does love her daughter but at the same time, by refusing to let go, she’s acting somewhat selfishly. Perdita is right when she says that Isabel will not carry any fond memories of her mother, but only a vision of her slowly wasting away in a “living death”. In the same way, Peter does love Rebecca but his decision to drown her was a completely selfish one, only thinking about his own loneliness and what he wanted.

We then see that Viola’s soul has been trapped in the chest which she locked her clothes in. While trapped in the chest she repeats a constant cycle of “sleeping, waking, walking” as she waits to see her daughter who will open the chest when she is of age. However when Perdita is the one who opens Viola’s chest, Viola strangles her as revenge for being killed by her and for her opening the chest that was supposed to be guarded until Isabel could open it. When Viola sees Arthur’s reaction to finding Perdita’s dead body, she doesn’t see “the changes wrought of time” but she sees “only his sadness”. This is heartbreaking for Viola, to see the man who was once her husband lamenting the loss of her sister.

Thinking that Viola’s chest was cursed, Arthur throws it into the lake so that Isabel would not succumb to the same curse that killed Perdita. It is this “absolute abandonment”, this “final insult”, which breaks Viola’s heart completely, and it’s from the anguish she feels and “stubbornness alone” which stops her “being pulled towards some other place, some realm beyond”. This stubbornness that Viola had, and because she ignored the pull from the “realm beyond”, meant that “she instead made her own gravity, gravity of will”.

We find out that The Lady of the Lake’s journey through Bly Manor started when her chest was thrown into the lake. The trip that Viola makes is in the hope that she would one day find her daughter. She walks to her old bedroom in the hope that she will find her daughter but then when she doesn’t find her, she remembers that she died and that her daughter had left her. This remembering would break her heart after every single trip, and so she would sleep to forget what had happened and then would wake back up having forgotten. It is also revealed to us that most of the other ghosts which we see in the manor are people who got in the way of her path, the most tragic of whom was the Doll Face Ghost, who was a little boy that she mistook for her daughter and drowned.

Through this we are also presented the idea of the danger of becoming blindsided by anguish and stubbornness. Viola began her journey through the manor with the purpose of finding her daughter, but then as time went on and she forgot more and more, the journey just started to become a ritual, something repeatedly done mindlessly and with no purpose. Through this repeated ritual, she completely loses the purpose for which she once did this, and as a result takes the life of an innocent boy because she could only remember that she was searching for a child and so she thought that this must be the child whom she sought. Viola allows anger and grief from love to seethe inside her, and eventually it takes over her completely, leaving only that anger in control of the shell of her body.

As well as this, we find out that the reason that all the ghosts have lost their faces is due to a side effect of forgetting. As each of the ghosts gradually forget who they once were, this gets physically shown on their face. It is a visual representation of memories fading as the details slowly get lost and then they are eventually lost completely.

You can read my previous The Haunting of Bly Manor posts here:-

Episode 1 - The Great Good Place

Episode 2 - The Pupil

Episode 3 - The Two Faces, Part One

Episode 4 - The Way It Came

Episode 5 - The Altar of the Dead

Episode 6 - The Jolly Corner

Episode 7 - The Two Faces, Part Two

——————————————————————————

[writing-in-april]

Converging Parallels

Spencer Reid x Female Single Mom Reader (Spencer’s POV)

Summary: Spencer goes to a support group Penelope suggested after the death of Maeve. He quickly connects with a single mom who’s experiences have been similar to Spencer’s.

A/N: I’m prefacing this by saying I know shit about math and am horrible at it lol 😂 so my math analogies might be horribly off 😂 This is my fifth fic for my 30 fics in 30 days for April- this one was requested by @samuel-de-champagne-problems- this is the request- (go check out there fics too!!) I tweaked it a little bit so I hope you enjoy it 🥺 a lot of it is confined to Spencer grappling with his thoughts- but there is dialogue I promise lol 😂I had a good time writing it ☺️Thanks for all the love recently and if you want to drop me an ask for any reason you can do so here- I’m always looking for some new friends on here (I promise I don’t bite lol) Thanks again and hope y’all enjoy 🥰

Warnings: Angst with a hopeful ending, General dealings surrounding death and grief, Mentions of Maeve’s death, Reader’s a widow, Guilt about moving on, Reader’s child is a daughter

Main Masterlist Word Count: 1.6k

Parallel lines were never supposed to meet, they were set on a strict path following in a similar direction with no hope of ever converging. At least that’s what was the widely accepted definition by anyone with any authority in the field of mathematics.

My own math degree was being contested by a set of two lines set on a collision course with each other, though they were not supposed to. Logically I knew that the two lines were not beholden to any mathematical equation as I was referring to two human lives.

We were set on a similar course, only slight differences that seemingly were leading us to different destinations, or at least I tried to convince myself that. I tried every night to convince myself that she was only a friend, that it wasn’t what she wanted and I was desecrating the memory of the person I still claimed to be the only person I loved.

Logically I knew that by forcing where I wanted our relationship to go, what I thought the universe wanted to happen wasn’t what I truly wanted. The reason I had boxed us in so vehemently was only because I was scared and guilty, I knew it too. I wanted us to converge, but logic doesn’t always win out when dealing with guilt.

It had all started with Garcia mentioning that I should consider going to a grief support group after the death of Maeve. Every action I took was being weighed down by her death, whether I cared to admit it or not.

Garcia had good intentions when she suggested going to this meeting to me, of that I was sure. It isn’t that I saw no reason to go to the support group, I just knew that it would dreg up all the unwanted feelings that bombarded me enough already.

The flier in my hands felt heavy even though it was made of paper it weighed my hands down enough where I almost dropped it. I could have let it go then to have it fly away, being taken by the wind, that would let me forget about it. But, I knew it would have only made me forget for a short while, I’d inevitably get questions from Garcia and my own mind wouldn’t let me forget the reality of what had happened. And, logically I knew that it would most likely help. So instead of letting the wind take it away, I crumpled the paper slightly in my hands out of frustration, moving my feet forward one step at a time to enter the building.

That’s where I had first met her. When I first walked in I didn’t immediately lock eyes with her or anything, my eyes were too fixated on the ground for that to happen.

I only noticed her when she was invited to tell her story. Her strength instantly captivated me, almost making me feel like a failure at first. Her story of how she lost her husband was eerily similar in some aspects, especially the cause of his death. The feeling of failure on my part to be strong swirled in my gut as she recounted her struggles that were so starkly similar to mine. She even had a young daughter to take care of as well, she often spoke of her whenever she told her story, almost neglecting herself sometimes- which she admitted she knew she needed to work on.

However, when she came up to me to talk after the meeting was concluded my opinion switched to view her as inspiring. We began getting coffee after each meeting, sometimes talking for hours, sometimes sitting in silence. Whatever I needed she was there to give it to me, whenever she needed help I wanted to be there too.

To see our almost parallel lives begin to converge at first felt like someone had driven a car into traffic about to collide straight into my path. My mind would not stop arguing about whether or not I should pull away from her or not, like guilt was on shoulder and my potential happiness was on the other.

—-

Guilt was eating away at me from the inside out slowly, that part of my mind would not stop clawing away any good aspect of my relationship with Y/N. The relationship between us had shifted in recent weeks, tension invading what had once been a simply platonic connection formed through our shared experiences. When it became clear to me what our lingering stares and touches were leading to, guilt had reared its ugly head to burrow its way down deep and take root.

It had disrupted my sleep even more than usual, nightmares ranging from Maeve guilting me to the visuals of her death. The images of Maeve and any time I had shared with her invaded my brain at all hours of the night, haunting me. I scrunched my eyes up tight, maybe that would banish the images from my brain. That only made the guilt worse it seemed as I now felt double the guilt for wanting to banish the thoughts about a person I still claimed to love.

My hand hit the pillow in frustration, then grabbing it and throwing it to some unknown location across the room. Sitting up, no longer being able to tolerate laying down knowing that sleep would never come, made my exhausted joints beg me to lay back down. I leaned forward to put my head in my hands, also tangling my curls with my fingers. I tried to think about what Y/N had said to me at one of the first meetings I had attended, my normally impeccable memory struggled as the memory of Maeve’s bloodied face would not leave. Screaming internally was the only thing that seemed to work to push the words I was looking for forward,

“I try to think about something my therapist told me- Although it's difficult today to see beyond the sorrow, May looking back in memory help comfort you tomorrow.”

The quote wasn’t something groundbreaking or new, though the origins were unknown. But, the words still struck me deep everytime I forced my memory to call back on them.

The words she had spoken in the meeting when talking about her husband made me want to try too. She inspired me whenever she told snippets of her story to me or the rest of the group, her story had been similar to mine- with the added element of having a daughter to raise on her own.

Her strength was what had drawn me to her initially, like a moth to flame. Our relationship wasn’t even a friendship at first, just two people sharing advice (more her giving it to me) about how to deal with crippling grief.

What had blossomed since then from death and decay had thrown me for a loop. I hadn’t been expecting for this to happen, I never even thought romance would be an option for me again. I thought that I would have one great love and that our time in the sun had ended along with any option for romantic interests in the future.

Then she came along and spun my thinking upside down, not that I blamed her at all for it. She originally had just reached out to help me, not to pursue any romantic connection purposefully while I was vulnerable.

She continued to stay with me to help despite my urge to push her away even though that’s not what I wanted. I tried hard to convince myself that our lives were never meant to connect, that we were destined to remain apart.

It took many more sleepless nights for me to realize what I hadn’t seen for so long, even with Y/N reassuring me at every turn. Maeve would want me to be happy, I was sure of it. So I’d try to let myself, no longer letting myself get hindered by my own swirling thoughts of guilt that Maeve wouldn’t have wanted me to feel.

—-

Asking her out on a date had been surprisingly easy once I had let go a little of my guilt. We had chosen to go somewhere different than a coffee shop, since we already did that often. I took her out to more of an upscale restaurant than she was used to, which may be too fancy for some for a first date, but she deserved it. She worked so hard to take care of her daughter and even me to some extent.

At the end of the night we were both standing outside her door ready to go in to relieve the babysitter for the night. I had already given her a chaste kiss for the night, even though my nerves kept trying to talk me out of it. I was about to say goodbye when she grabbed my wrist to hold in her hands. She looked afraid at first, almost like she wondered if I wouldn’t like her touching me. Touch may bother me with most people, but she wasn’t most people, I’d happily share germs with her. When I did not pull away relief was evident in her eyes, then taking a big breath before speaking,

“Would you like to meet my daughter?” Her voice was shaky, understandably full of worry.

“Of course.” In the past hesitation would have littered my voice if she had asked me the same question. But, my thoughts had been slowly shifting to want our lines to converge fully and with no fear. Sure, Maeve would always capture a place in my heart, but I was ready for our lives to collide. Our parallel lives converged into one line, with a set path forward. It may get derailed from its intended path, but we would be stronger together than apart.

Ask me anything

—-

Tag lists (message me if you want to be added):

All works: @shotarosleftpinky @oreogutz @90spumkin @kyra-morningstar @s1utformgg @takeyourleap-of-faith (damn tumblr just let me tag them)

All MGG characters: @muffin-cup @willowrose99

Spencer Reid/CM: @calm-and-doctor @destiny-tsukino @safertokiss @slutforthegubes @onlyhereforthefanfics @jareauswifey

[sgt-paul]

MUSICIANS ON MUSICIANS: Paul McCartney & Taylor Swift

© Mary McCartney

❝ During the shoot, Paul dances and takes almost none of it too seriously and sings along to Motown songs playing from the speakers. A few times Mary scolds, ‘Daaad, try to stand still!’ And it feels like a window into a pretty awesome family dynamic. ❞

interview below the cut:

Taylor Swift arrived early to Paul McCartney’s London office in October, “mask on, brimming with excitement.” “I mostly work from home these days,” she writes about that day, “and today feels like a rare school field trip that you actually want to go on.”

Swift showed up without a team, doing her own hair and makeup. In addition to being two of the most famous pop songwriters in the world, Swift and McCartney have spent the past year on similar journeys. McCartney, isolated at home in the U.K., recorded McCartney III. Like his first solo album, in 1970, he played nearly all of the instruments himself, resulting in some of his most wildly ambitious songs in a long time. Swift also took some new chances, writing over email with the National’s Aaron Dessner and recording the raw Folklore, which abandons arena pop entirely in favor of rich character songs. It’s the bestselling album of 2020.

Swift listened to McCartney III as she prepared for today’s conversation; McCartney delved into Folkore. Before the photo shoot, Swift caught up with his daughters Mary (who would be photographing them) and Stella (who designed Swift’s clothes; the two are close friends). “I’ve met Paul a few times, mostly onstage at parties, but we’ll get to that later,” Swift writes. “Soon he walks in with his wife, Nancy. They’re a sunny and playful pair, and I immediately feel like this will be a good day. During the shoot, Paul dances and takes almost none of it too seriously and sings along to Motown songs playing from the speakers. A few times Mary scolds, ‘Daaad, try to stand still!’ And it feels like a window into a pretty awesome family dynamic. We walk into his office for a chat, and after I make a nervous request, Paul is kind enough to handwrite my favorite lyric of his and sign it. He makes a joke about me selling it, and I laugh because it’s something I know I’ll cherish for the rest of my life. That’s around the time when we start talking about music.”

Taylor Swift: I think it’s important to note that if this year had gone the way that we thought it was going to go, you and I would have played Glastonbury this year, and instead, you and I both made albums in isolation.

Paul McCartney: Yeah!

Swift: And I remember thinking it would have been so much fun because the times that I’ve run into you, I correlate with being some of the most fun nights of my life. I was at a party with you, when everybody just started playing music. And it was Dave Grohl playing, and you…

McCartney: You were playing one of his songs, weren’t you?

Swift: Yes, I was playing his song called “Best of You,” but I was playing it on piano, and he didn’t recognize it until about halfway through. I just remember thinking, “Are you the catalyst for the most fun times ever?” Is it your willingness to get up and play music that makes everyone feel like this is a thing that can happen tonight?

McCartney: I mean, I think it’s a bit of everything, isn’t it? I’ll tell you who was very … Reese Witherspoon was like, “Are you going to sing?” I said “Oh, I don’t know.” She said, “You’ve got to, yeah!” She’s bossing me around. So I said, “Whoa,” so it’s a bit of that.

Swift: I love that person, because the party does not turn musical without that person.

McCartney: Yeah, that’s true.

Swift: If nobody says, “Can you guys play music?” we’re not going to invite ourselves up onstage at whatever living-room party it is.

McCartney: I seem to remember Woody Harrelson got on the piano, and he starts playing “Let It Be,” and I’m thinking, “I can do that better.” So I said, “Come on, move over, Woody.” So we’re both playing it. It was really nice.… I love people like Dan Aykroyd, who’s just full of energy and he loves his music so much, but he’s not necessarily a musician, but he just wanders around the room, just saying, “You got to get up, got to get up, do some stuff.”

Swift: I listened to your new record. And I loved a lot of things about it, but it really did feel like kind of a flex to write, produce, and play every instrument on every track. To me, that’s like flexing a muscle and saying, “I can do all this on my own if I have to.”

McCartney: Well, I don’t think like that, I must admit. I just picked up some of these instruments over the years. We had a piano at home that my dad played, so I picked around on that. I wrote the melody to “When I’m 64” when I was, you know, a teenager.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: When the Beatles went to Hamburg, there were always drum kits knocking around, so when there was a quiet moment, I’d say, “Do you mind if I have a knock around?” So I was able to practice, you know, without practicing. That’s why I play right-handed. Guitar was just the first instrument I got. Guitar turned to bass; it also turned into ukulele, mandolin. Suddenly, it’s like, “Wow,” but it’s really only two or three instruments.

Swift: Well, I think that’s downplaying it a little bit. In my mind, it came with a visual of you being in the country, kind of absorbing the sort of do-it-yourself [quality] that has had to come with the quarantine and this pandemic. I found that I’ve adapted a do-it-yourself mentality to a lot of things in my career that I used to outsource.  I’m just wondering what a day of recording in the pandemic looked like for you.

McCartney: Well, I’m very lucky because I have a studio that’s, like, 20 minutes away from where I live. We were in lockdown on a farm, a sheep farm with my daughter Mary and her four kids and her husband. So I had four of my grandkids, I had Mary, who’s a great cook, so I would just drive myself to the studio. And there were two other guys that could come in and we’d be very careful and distanced and everything: my engineer Steve, and then my equipment guy Keith. So the three of us made the record, and I just started off. I had to do a little bit of film music — I had to do an instrumental for a film thing — so I did that. And I just kept going, and that turned into the opening track on the album. I would just come in, say, “Oh, yeah, what are we gonna do?” [Then] have some sort of idea, and start doing it. Normally, I’d start with the instrument I wrote it on, either piano or guitar, and then probably add some drums and then a bit of bass till it started to sound like a record, and then just gradually layer it all up. It was fun.

Swift: That’s so cool.

McCartney: What about yours? You’re playing guitar and piano on yours.

Swift: Yeah, on some of it, but a lot of it was made with Aaron Dessner, who’s in a band called the National that I really love. And I had met him at a concert a year before, and I had a conversation with him, asking him how he writes. It’s my favorite thing to ask people who I’m a fan of. And he had an interesting answer. He said, “All the band members live in different parts of the world. So I make tracks. And I send them to our lead singer, Matt, and he writes the top line.” I just remember thinking, “That is really efficient.” And I kind of stored it in my brain as a future idea for a project. You know, how you have these ideas… “Maybe one day I’ll do this.” I always had in my head: “Maybe one day I’ll work with Aaron Dessner.”

So when lockdown happened, I was in L.A., and we kind of got stuck there. It’s not a terrible place to be stuck. We were there for four months maybe, and during that time, I sent an email to Aaron Dessner and I said, “Do you think you would want to work during this time? Because my brain is all scrambled, and I need to make something, even if we’re just kind of making songs that we don’t know what will happen…”

McCartney: Yeah, that was the thing. You could do stuff — you didn’t really worry it was going to turn into anything.

Swift: Yeah, and it turned out he had been writing instrumental tracks to keep from absolutely going crazy during the pandemic as well, so he sends me this file of probably 30 instrumentals, and the first one I opened ended up being a song called “Cardigan,” and it really happened rapid-fire like that. He’d send me a track; he’d make new tracks, add to the folder; I would write the entire top line for a song, and he wouldn’t know what the song would be about, what it was going to be called, where I was going to put the chorus. I had originally thought, “Maybe I’ll make an album in the next year, and put it out in January or something,” but it ended up being done and we put it out in July. And I just thought there are no rules anymore, because I used to put all these parameters on myself, like, “How will this song sound in a stadium? How will this song sound on radio?” If you take away all the parameters, what do you make? And I guess the answer is Folklore.

McCartney: And it’s more music for yourself than music that’s got to go do a job. My thing was similar to that: After having done this little bit of film music, I had a lot of stuff that I had been working on, but I’d said, “I’m just going home now,” and it’d be left half-finished. So I just started saying, “Well, what about that? I never finished that.” So we’d pull it out, and we said, “Oh, well, this could be good.” And because it didn’t have to amount to anything, I would say, “Ah, I really want to do tape loops. I don’t care if they fit on this song, I just want to do some.” So I go and make some tape loops, and put them in the song, just really trying to do stuff that I fancy.

I had no idea it would end up as an album; I may have been a bit less indulgent, but if a track was eight minutes long, to tell you the truth, what I thought was, “I’ll be taking it home tonight, Mary will be cooking, the grandkids will all be there running around, and someone, maybe Simon, Mary’s husband, is going to say, ‘What did you do today?’ And I’m going to go, ‘Oh,’ and then get my phone and play it for them.” So this became the ritual.

Swift: That’s the coziest thing I’ve ever heard.

McCartney: Well, it’s like eight minutes long, and I said, “I hate it when I’m playing someone something and it finishes after three minutes.” I kind of like that it just [continues] on.

Swift: You want to stay in the zone.

McCartney: It just keeps going on. I would just come home, “Well, what did you do today?” “Oh, well, I did this. I’m halfway through this,” or, “We finished this.”

Swift: I was wondering about the numerology element to McCartney III. McCartney I, II, and III have all come out on years with zeroes.

McCartney: Ends of decades.

Swift: Was that important?

McCartney: Yeah, well, this was being done in 2020, and I didn’t really think about it. I think everyone expected great things of 2020. “It’s gonna be great! Look at that number! 2020! Auspicious!” Then suddenly Covid hit, and it was like, “That’s gonna be auspicious all right, but maybe for the wrong reasons.” Someone said to me, “Well, you put out McCartney right after the Beatles broke up, and that was 1970, and then you did McCartney II in 1980.” And I said, “Oh, I’m going to release this in 2020 just for whatever you call it, the numerology.…”

Swift: The numerology, the kind of look, the symbolism. I love numbers. Numbers kind of rule my whole world. The numbers 13  … 89 is a big one. I have a few others that I find…

McCartney: Thirteen is lucky for some.

Swift: Yeah, it’s lucky for me. It’s my birthday. It’s all these weird coincidences of good things that have happened. Now, when I see it places, I look at it as a sign that things are going the way they’re supposed to. They may not be good now, they could be painful now, but things are on a track. I don’t know, I love the numerology.

McCartney: It’s spooky, Taylor. It’s very spooky. Now wait a minute: Where’d you get 89?

Swift: That’s when I was born, in 1989, and so I see it in different places and I just think it’s…

McCartney: No, it’s good. I like that, where certain things you attach yourself to, and you get a good feeling off them. I think that’s great.

Swift: Yeah, one of my favorite artists, Bon Iver, he has this thing with the number 22. But I was also wondering: You have always kind of seeked out a band or a communal atmosphere with like, you know, the Beatles and Wings, and then Egypt Station. I thought it was interesting when I realized you had made a record with no one else. I just wondered, did that feel natural?

McCartney: It’s one of the things I’ve done. Like with McCartney, because the Beatles had broken up, there was no alternative but to get a drum kit at home, get a guitar, get an amp, get a bass, and just make something for myself. So on that album, which I didn’t really expect to do very well, I don’t think it did. But people sort of say, “I like that. It was a very casual album.” It didn’t really have to mean anything. So I’ve done that, the play-everything-myself thing. And then I discovered synths and stuff, and sequencers, so I had a few of those at home. I just thought I’m going to play around with this and record it, so that became McCartney II. But it’s a thing I do. Certain people can do it. Stevie Wonder can do it. Stevie Winwood, I believe, has done it. So there are certain people quite like that.

When you’re working with someone else, you have to worry about their variances. Whereas your own variance, you kind of know it. It’s just something I’ve grown to like. Once you can do it, it becomes a little bit addictive. I actually made some records under the name the Fireman.

Swift: Love a pseudonym.

McCartney: Yeah, for the fun! But, you know, let’s face it, you crave fame and attention when you’re young. And I just remembered the other day, I was the guy in the Beatles that would write to journalists and say [speaks in a formal voice]: “We are a semiprofessional rock combo, and I’d think you’d like [us].… We’ve written over 100 songs (which was a lie), my friend John and I. If you mention us in your newspaper…” You know, I was always, like, craving the attention.

Swift: The hustle! That’s so great, though.

McCartney: Well, yeah, you need that.

Swift: Yeah, I think, when a pseudonym comes in is when you still have a love for making the work and you don’t want the work to become overshadowed by this thing that’s been built around you, based on what people know about you. And that’s when it’s really fun to create fake names and write under them.

McCartney: Do you ever do that?

Swift: Oh, yeah.

McCartney: Oh, yeah? Oh, well, we didn’t know that! Is that a widely known fact?

Swift: I think it is now, but it wasn’t. I wrote under the name Nils Sjöberg because those are two of the most popular names of Swedish males. I wrote this song called “This Is What You Came For” that Rihanna ended up singing. And nobody knew for a while. I remembered always hearing that when Prince wrote “Manic Monday,” they didn’t reveal it for a couple of months.

McCartney: Yeah, it also proves you can do something without the fame tag. I did something for Peter and Gordon; my girlfriend’s brother and his mate were in a band called Peter and Gordon. And I used to write under the name Bernard Webb.

Swift: [Laughs.] That’s a good one! I love it.

McCartney: As Americans call it, Ber-nard Webb. I did the Fireman thing. I worked with a producer, a guy called Youth, who’s this real cool dude. We got along great. He did a mix for me early on, and we got friendly. I would just go into the studio, and he would say, “Hey, what about this groove?” and he’d just made me have a little groove going. He’d say, “You ought to put some bass on it. Put some drums on it.” I’d just spend the whole day putting stuff on it. And we’d make these tracks, and nobody knew who Fireman was for a while. We must have sold all of 15 copies.

Swift: Thrilling, absolutely thrilling.

McCartney: And we didn’t mind, you know?

Swift: I think it’s so cool that you do projects that are just for you. Because I went with my family to see you in concert in 2010 or 2011, and the thing I took away from the show most was that it was the most selfless set list I had ever seen. It was completely geared toward what it would thrill us to hear. It had new stuff, but it had every hit we wanted to hear, every song we’d ever cried to, every song people had gotten married to, or been brokenhearted to. And I just remembered thinking, “I’ve got to remember that,” that you do that set list for your fans.

McCartney: You do that, do you?

Swift: I do now. I think that learning that lesson from you taught me at a really important stage in my career that if people want to hear “Love Story” and “Shake It Off,” and I’ve played them 300 million times, play them the 300-millionth-and-first time. I think there are times to be selfish in your career, and times to be selfless, and sometimes they line up.

McCartney: I always remembered going to concerts as a kid, completely before the Beatles, and I really hoped they would play the ones I loved. And if they didn’t, it was kind of disappointing. I had no money, and the family wasn’t wealthy. So this would be a big deal for me, to save up for months to afford the concert ticket.

Swift: Yeah, it feels like a bond. It feels like that person on the stage has given something, and it makes you as a crowd want to give even more back, in terms of applause, in terms of dedication. And I just remembered feeling that bond in the crowd, and thinking, “He’s up there playing these Beatles songs, my dad is crying, my mom is trying to figure out how to work her phone because her hands are shaking so much.” Because seeing the excitement course through not only me, but my family and the entire crowd in Nashville, it just was really special. I love learning lessons and not having to learn them the hard way. Like learning nice lessons I really value.

McCartney: Well, that’s great, and I’m glad that set you on that path. I understand people who don’t want to do that, and if you do, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s a jukebox show.” I hear what they’re saying. But I think it’s a bit of a cheat, because the people who come to our shows have spent a lot of money. We can afford to go to a couple of shows and it doesn’t make much difference. But a lot of ordinary working folks … it’s a big event in their life, and so I try and deliver. I also, like you say, try and put in a few weirdos.

Swift: That’s the best. I want to hear current things, too, to update me on where the artist is. I was wondering about lyrics, and where you were lyrically when you were making this record. Because when I was making Folklore, I went lyrically in a total direction of escapism and romanticism. And I wrote songs imagining I was, like, a pioneer woman in a forbidden love affair [laughs]. I was completely …

McCartney: Was this “I want to give you a child”? Is that one of the lines?

Swift: Oh, that’s a song called “Peace.”

McCartney: “Peace,” I like that one.

Swift: “Peace” is actually more rooted in my personal life. I know you have done a really excellent job of this in your personal life: carving out a human life within a public life, and how scary that can be when you do fall in love and you meet someone, especially if you’ve met someone who has a very grounded, normal way of living. I, oftentimes, in my anxieties, can control how I am as a person and how normal I act and rationalize things, but I cannot control if there are 20 photographers outside in the bushes and what they do and if they follow our car and if they interrupt our lives. I can’t control if there’s going to be a fake weird headline about us in the news tomorrow.

McCartney: So how does that go? Does your partner sympathize with that and understand?

Swift: Oh, absolutely.

McCartney: They have to, don’t they?

Swift: But I think that in knowing him and being in the relationship I am in now, I have definitely made decisions that have made my life feel more like a real life and less like just a storyline to be commented on in tabloids. Whether that’s deciding where to live, who to hang out with, when to not take a picture — the idea of privacy feels so strange to try to explain, but it’s really just trying to find bits of normalcy. That’s what that song “Peace” is talking about. Like, would it be enough if I could never fully achieve the normalcy that we both crave? Stella always tells me that she had as normal a childhood as she could ever hope for under the circumstances.

McCartney: Yeah, it was very important to us to try and keep their feet on the ground amongst the craziness.

Swift: She went to a regular school .…

McCartney: Yeah, she did.

Swift: And you would go trick-or-treating with them, wearing masks.

McCartney: All of them did, yeah. It was important, but it worked pretty well, because when they kind of reached adulthood, they would meet other kids who might have gone to private schools, who were a little less grounded.

And they could be the budding mothers to [kids]. I remember Mary had a friend, Orlando. Not Bloom. She used to really counsel him. And it’s ’cause she’d gone through that. Obviously, they got made fun of, my kids. They’d come in the classroom and somebody would sing, “Na na na na,” you know, one of the songs. And they’d have to handle that. They’d have to front it out.

Swift: Did that give you a lot of anxiety when you had kids, when you felt like all this pressure that’s been put on me is spilling over onto them, that they didn’t sign up for it? Was that hard for you?

McCartney: Yeah, a little bit, but it wasn’t like it is now. You know, we were just living a kind of semi-hippie life, where we withdrew from a lot of stuff. The kids would be doing all the ordinary things, and their school friends would be coming up to the house and having parties, and it was just great. I remember one lovely evening when it was Stella’s birthday, and she brought a bunch of school kids up. And, you know, they’d all ignore me. It happens very quickly. At first they’re like, “Oh, yeah, he’s like a famous guy,” and then it’s like [yawns]. I like that. I go in the other room and suddenly I hear this music going on. And one of the kids, his name was Luke, and he’s doing break dancing.

Swift: Ohhh!

McCartney: He was a really good break dancer, so all the kids are hanging out. That allowed them to be kind of normal with those kids. The other thing is, I don’t live fancy. I really don’t. Sometimes it’s a little bit of an embarrassment, if I’ve got someone coming to visit me, or who I know…

Swift: Cares about that stuff?

McCartney: Who’s got a nice big house, you know. Quincy Jones came to see me and I’m, like, making him a veggie burger or something. I’m doing some cooking. This was after I’d lost Linda, in between there. But the point I’m making is that I’m very consciously thinking, “Oh, God, Quincy’s got to be thinking, ‘What is this guy on? He hasn’t got big things going on. It’s not a fancy house at all. And we’re eating in the kitchen! He’s not even got the dining room going,’” you know?

Swift: I think that sounds like a perfect day.

McCartney: But that’s me. I’m awkward like that. That’s my kind of thing. Maybe I should have, like, a big stately home. Maybe I should get a staff. But I think I couldn’t do that. I’d be so embarrassed. I’d want to walk around dressed as I want to walk around, or naked, if I wanted to.

Swift: That can’t happen in Downton Abbey.

McCartney: [Laughs.] Exactly.

Swift: I remember what I wanted to know about, which is lyrics. Like, when you’re in this kind of strange, unparalleled time, and you’re making this record, are lyrics first? Or is it when you get a little melodic idea?

McCartney: It was a bit of both. As it kind of always is with me. There’s no fixed way. People used to ask me and John, “Well, who does the words, who does the music?” I used to say, “We both do both.” We used to say we don’t have a formula, and we don’t want one. Because the minute we get a formula, we should rip it up. I will sometimes, as I did with a couple of songs on this album, sit down at the piano and just start noodling around, and I’ll get a little idea and start to fill that out. So the lyrics — for me, it’s following a trail. I’ll start [sings “Find My Way,” a song from “McCartney III”]: “I can find my way. I know my left from right, da da da.” And I’ll just sort of fill it in. Like, we know this song, and I’m trying to remember the lyrics. Sometimes I’ll just be inspired by something. I had a little book which was all about the constellations and the stars and the orbits of Venus and.…

Swift: Oh, I know that song — “The Kiss of Venus”?

McCartney: Yeah, “The Kiss of Venus.” And I just thought, “That’s a nice phrase.” So I was actually just taking phrases out of the book, harmonic sounds. And the book is talking about the maths of the universe, and how when things orbit around each other, and if you trace all the patterns, it becomes like a lotus flower.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: It’s very magical.

Swift: That is magical. I definitely relate to needing to find magical things in this very not-magical time, needing to read more books and learn to sew, and watch movies that take place hundreds of years ago. In a time where, if you look at the news, you just want to have a panic attack — I really relate to the idea that you are thinking about stars and constellations.

McCartney: Did you do that on Folklore?

Swift: Yes. I was reading so much more than I ever did, and watching so many more films.

McCartney: What stuff were you reading?

Swift: I was reading, you know, books like Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier, which I highly recommend, and books that dealt with times past, a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I was also using words I always wanted to use — kind of bigger, flowerier, prettier words, like “epiphany,” in songs. I always thought, “Well, that’ll never track on pop radio,” but when I was making this record, I thought, “What tracks? Nothing makes sense anymore. If there’s chaos everywhere, why don’t I just use the damn word I want to use in the song?”

McCartney: Exactly. So you’d see the word in a book and think, “I love that word”?

Swift: Yeah, I have favorite words, like “elegies” and “epiphany” and “divorcée,” and just words that I think sound beautiful, and I have lists and lists of them.

McCartney: How about “marzipan”?

Swift: Love “marzipan.”

McCartney: The other day, I was remembering when we wrote “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”: “kaleidoscope.”

Swift: “Kaleidoscope” is one of mine! I have a song on 1989, a song called “Welcome to New York,” that I put the word “kaleidoscope” in just because I’m obsessed with the word.

McCartney: I think a love of words is a great thing, particularly if you’re going to try to write a lyric, and for me, it’s like, “What is this going to say to that person?” I often feel like I’m writing to someone who is not doing so well. So I’m trying to write songs that might help. Not in a goody-goody, crusading kind of way, but just thinking there have been so many times in my life when I’ve heard a song and felt so much better. I think that’s the angle I want, that inspirational thing.

I remember once, a friend of mine from Liverpool, we were teenagers and we were going to a fairground. He was a schoolmate, and we had these jackets that had a little fleck in the material, which was the cool thing at the time.

Swift: We should have done matching jackets for this photo shoot.

McCartney: Find me a fleck, I’m in. But we went to the fair, and I just remember — this is what happens with songs — there was this girl at the fair. This is just a little Liverpool fair — it was in a place called Sefton Park — and there was this girl, who was so beautiful. She wasn’t a star. She was so beautiful. Everyone was following her, and it’s like, “Wow.” It’s like a magical scene, you know? But all this gave me a headache, so I ended up going back to his house — I didn’t normally get headaches. And we thought, “What can we do?” So we put on the Elvis song “All Shook Up.” By the end of that song, my headache had gone. I thought, you know, “That’s powerful.”

Swift: That really is powerful.

McCartney: I love that, when people stop me in the street and say, “Oh, I was going through an illness and I listened to a lot of your stuff, and I’m better now and it got me through,” or kids will say, “It got me through exams.” You know, they’re studying, they’re going crazy, but they put your music on. I’m sure it happens with a lot of your fans. It inspires them, you know?

Swift: Yeah, I definitely think about that as a goal. There’s so much stress everywhere you turn that I kind of wanted to make an album that felt sort of like a hug, or like your favorite sweater that makes you feel like you want to put it on.

McCartney: What, a “cardigan”?

Swift: Like a good cardigan, a good, worn-in cardigan. Or something that makes you reminisce on your childhood. I think sadness can be cozy. It can obviously be traumatic and stressful, too, but I kind of was trying to lean into sadness that feels like somehow enveloping in not such a scary way — like nostalgia and whimsy incorporated into a feeling like you’re not all right. Because I don’t think anybody was really feeling like they were in their prime this year. Isolation can mean escaping into your imagination in a way that’s kind of nice.

McCartney: I think a lot of people have found that. I would say to people, “I feel a bit guilty about saying I’m actually enjoying this quarantine thing,” and people go, “Yeah, I know, don’t say it to anyone.” A lot of people are really suffering.

Swift: Because there’s a lot in life that’s arbitrary. Completely and totally arbitrary. And [the quarantine] is really shining a light on that, and also a lot of things we have that we outsource that you can actually do yourself.

McCartney: I love that. This is why I said I live simply. That’s, like, at the core of it. With so many things, something goes wrong and you go, “Oh, I’ll get somebody to fix that.” And then it’s like, “No, let me have a look at it.…”

Swift: Get a hammer and a nail.

McCartney: “Maybe I can put that picture up.” It’s not rocket science. The period after the Beatles, when we went to live in Scotland on a really — talk about dumpy — little farm. I mean, I see pictures of it now and I’m not ashamed, but I’m almost ashamed. Because it’s like, “God, nobody’s cleaned up around here.”

But it was really a relief. Because when I was with the Beatles, we’d formed Apple Records, and if I wanted a Christmas tree, someone would just buy it. And I thought, after a while, “No, you know what? I really would like to go and buy our Christmas tree. Because that’s what everyone does.” So you go down — “I’ll have that one” — and you carried it back. I mean, it’s little, but it’s huge at the same time.

I needed a table in Scotland and I was looking through a catalog and I thought, “I could make one. I did woodwork in school, so I know what a dovetail joint is.” So I just figured it out. I’m just sitting in the kitchen, and I’m whittling away at this wood and I made this little joint. There was no nail technology — it was glue. And I was scared to put it together. I said, “It’s not going to fit,” but one day, I got my woodwork glue and thought, “There’s no going back.” But it turned out to be a real nice little table I was very proud of. It was that sense of achievement.

The weird thing was, Stella went up to Scotland recently and I said, “Isn’t it there?” and she said, “No.” Anyway, I searched for it. Nobody remembered it. Somebody said, “Well, there’s a pile of wood in the corner of one of the barns, maybe that’s it. Maybe they used it for firewood.” I said, “No, it’s not firewood.” Anyway, we found it, and do you know how joyous that was for me? I was like, “You found my table?!” Somebody might say that’s a bit boring.

Swift: No, it’s cool!

McCartney: But it was a real sort of great thing for me to be able to do stuff for yourself. You were talking about sewing. I mean normally, in your position, you’ve got any amount of tailors.

Swift: Well, there’s been a bit of a baby boom recently; several of my friends have gotten pregnant.

McCartney: Oh, yeah, you’re at the age.

Swift: And I was just thinking, “I really want to spend time with my hands, making something for their children.” So I made this really cool flying-squirrel stuffed animal that I sent to one of my friends. I sent a teddy bear to another one, and I started making these little silk baby blankets with embroidery. It’s gotten pretty fancy. And I’ve been painting a lot.

McCartney: What do you paint? Watercolors?

Swift: Acrylic or oil. Whenever I do watercolor, all I paint is flowers. When I have oil, I really like to do landscapes. I always kind of return to painting a lonely little cottage on a hill.

McCartney: It’s a bit of a romantic dream. I agree with you, though, I think you’ve got to have dreams, particularly this year. You’ve got to have something to escape to. When you say “escapism,” it sounds like a dirty word, but this year, it definitely wasn’t. And in the books you’re reading, you’ve gone into that world. That’s, I think, a great thing. Then you come back out. I normally will read a lot before I go to bed. So I’ll come back out, then I’ll go to sleep, so I think it really is nice to have those dreams that can be fantasies or stuff you want to achieve.

Swift: You’re creating characters. This was the first album where I ever created characters, or wrote about the life of a real-life person. There’s a song called “The Last Great American Dynasty” that’s about this real-life heiress who lived just an absolutely chaotic, hectic…

McCartney: She’s a fantasy character?

Swift: She’s a real person. Who lived in the house that I live in.

McCartney: She’s a real person? I listened to that and I thought, “Who is this?”

Swift: Her name was Rebekah Harkness. And she lived in the house that I ended up buying in Rhode Island. That��s how I learned about her. But she was a woman who was very, very talked about, and everything she did was scandalous. I found a connection in that. But I also was thinking about how you write “Eleanor Rigby” and go into that whole story about what all these people in this town are doing and how their lives intersect, and I hadn’t really done that in a very long time with my music. It had always been so microscope personal.

McCartney: Yeah, ’cause you were writing breakup songs like they were going out of style.

Swift: I was, before my luck changed [laughs]. I still write breakup songs. I love a good breakup song. Because somewhere in the world, I always have a friend going through a breakup, and that will make me write one.

McCartney: Yeah, this goes back to this thing of me and John: When you’ve got a formula, break it. I don’t have a formula. It’s the mood I’m in. So I love the idea of writing a character. And, you know, trying to think, “What am I basing this on?” So “Eleanor Rigby” was based on old ladies I knew as a kid. For some reason or other, I got great relationships with a couple of local old ladies. I was thinking the other day, I don’t know how I met them, it wasn’t like they were family. I’d just run into them, and I’d do their shopping for them.

Swift: That’s amazing.

McCartney: It just felt good to me. I would sit and talk, and they’d have amazing stories. That’s what I liked. They would have stories from the wartime — because I was born actually in the war — and so these old ladies, they were participating in the war. This one lady I used to sort of just hang out with, she had a crystal radio that I found very magical. In the war, a lot of people made their own radios — you’d make them out of crystals [sings “The Twilight Zone” theme].

Swift: How did I not know this? That sounds like something I would have tried to learn about.

McCartney: It’s interesting, because there is a lot of parallels with the virus and lockdowns and wartime. It happened to everyone. Like, this isn’t HIV, or SARS, or Avian flu, which happened to others, generally. This has happened to everyone, all around the world. That’s the defining thing about this particular virus. And, you know, my parents … it happened to everyone in Britain, including the queen and Churchill. War happened. So they were all part of this thing, and they all had to figure out a way through it. So you figured out Folklore. I figured out McCartney III.

Swift: And a lot of people have been baking sourdough bread. Whatever gets you through!

McCartney: Some people used to make radios. And they’d take a crystal — we should look it up, but it actually is a crystal. I thought, “Oh, no, they just called it a crystal radio,” but it’s actually crystals like we know and love.

Swift: Wow.

McCartney: And somehow they get the radio waves — this crystal attracts them — they tune it in, and that’s how they used to get their news. Back to “Eleanor Rigby,” so I would think of her and think of what she’s doing and then just try to get lyrical, just try to bring poetry into it, words you love, just try to get images like “picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been,” and Father McKenzie “is darning his socks in the night.” You know, he’s a religious man, so I could’ve said, you know, “preparing his Bible,” which would have been more obvious. But “darning his socks” kind of says more about him. So you get into this lovely fantasy. And that’s the magic of songs, you know. It’s a black hole, and then you start doing this process, and then there’s this beautiful little flower that you’ve just made. So it is very like embroidery, making something.

Swift: Making a table.

McCartney: Making a table.

Swift: Wow, it would’ve been so fun to play Glastonbury for the 50th anniversary together.

McCartney: It would’ve been great, wouldn’t it? And I was going to be asking you to play with me.

Swift: Were you going to invite me? I was hoping that you would. I was going to ask you.

McCartney: I would’ve done “Shake It Off.”

Swift: Oh, my God, that would have been amazing.

McCartney: I know it, it’s in C!

Swift: One thing I just find so cool about you is that you really do seem to have the joy of it, still, just no matter what. You seem to have the purest sense of joy of playing an instrument and making music, and that’s just the best, I think.

McCartney: Well, we’re just so lucky, aren’t we?

Swift: We’re really lucky.

McCartney: I don’t know if it ever happens to you, but with me, it’s like, “Oh, my god, I’ve ended up as a musician.”

Swift: Yeah, I can’t believe it’s my job.

McCartney: I must tell you a story I told Mary the other day, which is just one of my favorite little sort of Beatles stories. We were in a terrible, big blizzard, going from London to Liverpool, which we always did. We’d be working in London and then drive back in the van, just the four of us with our roadie, who would be driving. And this was a blizzard. You couldn’t see the road. At one point, it slid off and it went down an embankment. So it was “Ahhh,” a bunch of yelling. We ended up at the bottom. It didn’t flip, luckily, but so there we are, and then it’s like, “Oh, how are we going to get back up? We’re in a van. It’s snowing, and there’s no way.” We’re all standing around in a little circle, and thinking, “What are we going to do?” And one of us said, “Well, something will happen.” And I thought that was just the greatest. I love that, that’s a philosophy.

Swift: “Something will happen.”

McCartney: And it did. We sort of went up the bank, we thumbed a lift, we got the lorry driver to take us, and Mal, our roadie, sorted the van and everything. So that was kind of our career. And I suppose that’s like how I ended up being a musician and a songwriter: “Something will happen.”

Swift: That’s the best.

McCartney: It’s so stupid it’s brilliant. It’s great if you’re ever in that sort of panic attack: “Oh, my God,” or, “Ahhh, what am I going to do?”

Swift: “Something will happen.”

McCartney: All right then, thanks for doing this, and this was, you know, a lot of fun.

Swift: You’re the best. This was so awesome. Those were some quality stories!

[gins-potter]

Casting Thoughts

Yes, I did a long post when the rumours first dropped but hey now it’s confirmed plus we have characters descriptions, and I’m bored so let’s do this all over again people.  Under the cut because it got long

Sisi Stringer as Rose Hathaway

I said this in my other post but I’m pretty happy with Sisi as Rose.

Visually I think she’s a great fit, I love that they casted a WoC in the main role, and I think if she can bring Rose’s humour and sarcasm to the role, she’s going to do great.

The character description mentions Rose being “fiery and outspoken”, happy to jump into the action, and the strongest fighter in her class but struggling to toe the line, which is all very Rose-esque, especially in the first book.  It sounds to me like they have a good grasp on her character.

I’m a little disappointed we didn’t hear more about Rose as a character since she is the lead - it felt like the descriptions for Lissa and Dimitri both gave us a little more to go on - but it is only a very preliminary description so I’m happy to wait for more.

Daniela Nieves as Lissa Dragomir

Daniele is another one who I was happy with straight away.

She’s probably not what I imagined for Lissa visually but that’s not a bad thing either; I will be interested to see if they dye her hair a lighter colour (like a caramel-blonde) but personally that’s not something I need to see for her to be a great fit for Lissa.

I think she has a very sweet face which works well for a character like Lissa but I think she’s also going to be able to stand up in Lissa’s more fiercer moments which is nice to see as well.

The character descriptions mentions her as being “carefree and kind-hearted” who “coasts” through life until a death in the family thrusts her into a new role.  That sounds a lot like pre-series Lissa so I wonder if we’re going to see a bit of that in the show before Andre (and her parents??) die and see that change.  

It’s curious though that she’s described as the younger sister of the heir apparent - which would be Andre - so it sounds like they’ve changed it so Andre was supposed to be King.  Obviously a deviation from the books but I don’t hate it?  I don’t think it would change Lissa’s arc all that much because obviously she was always going to grow up to be an influential royal figure, this just slightly changes the dynamics of it.

The description also specifically mentions that she’s uninterested in “political machinations” and the “hypocrisy of the moroi royal society” which sounds very accurate to book!lissa as well.

All in all I’m very happy with what they’re doing with Lissa.

Keiron Moore as Dimitri Belikov

This is one who’s really grown on me since the rumoured cast list started circulating.  At first I was kind of eh about him but I can really see him as Dimitri now.

I will be curious to see if he grows out his hair or not though.

As far as I know Keiron is not Russian, there’s not a lot about him online, but there’s some instagram activity on his account linking him to UK based companies so that would be my guess as to where he’s from.  They’ve kept Dimitri’s incredibly Russian name so I guess we’re to assume Keiron might be doing an accent and they’re keeping Dimitri’s backstory relatively the same?  I’m not gonna be super mad if they change it just because I think it’s doable for him not to be Russian (I know, I know a whole book is set in Russia but lbr here they could make him from anywhere and just send Rose there in that book).

The biggest thing for me will be his chemistry with Sisi, Danila and Zoey had great chemistry (imo anyway) which saved the move a little for me, so it’ll be important that Sisi and Keiron do as well.  They’ve interacted a few times online which is cute so I’m hoping they were able to do some chemistry reads and that will translate on screen.

The character description mentions Dimitri as being “lethal, disciplined, discreet, and totally committed” as well as living by “a deep moral code” but with more going on “beneath his stoic, watchful surface” which sounds exactly like book!Dimitri to me.

They don’t really specify what his role at St Vlad’s is going to be but they do mention that he is a guardian so I’m assuming they’re keeping some sort of age gap between him and Rose.  They also don’t mention anything about their relationship in the description, be it student/teacher, platonic, romantic, whatever, but they do say he has “an expansive spirit that could threaten to expose the underlying tension between his sense of what’s right and his formal duty to the Moroi.” which seems like a nod to their relationship.

Andre Dae-Kim as Christian Ozera

This was one of my favourite casting choices from the original rumoured cast list and I still love it.

The idea of a non-white Christian makes a lot of sense to me and I think Andre could do a great job of Christian’s aloofness (in the first book) as well as his sarcasm and growing confidence across the other books.

His character description confuses me a bit though: “Intelligent and thoughtful, Christian is the pariah of the school and royal court, due to his parents’ unforgivable societal sins.” sounds accurate enough to the book (although idk if thoughtful is quite the word I’d use for Christian - maybe they mean it in the sense that he’s quiet and keeps to himself?).

Even “Well-read and hungry for knowledge” doesn’t sound that far off, idk if he was *that* particularly studious in the books, but it doesn’t necessarily not make sense either you know?

But “he searches for faith-based answers and discovers a kindred spirit who is also looking for the truth” ??? My cynical, irreverent asshole Christian is now a man of faith? I’m assuming Lissa is the “kindred spirit” (again weird word choice but maybe they mean she’s feeling lost because of the death of her family?) but I just cannot see Christian as being particularly religious.

I’m trying to keep an open mind about these changes because you never know they might play out totally different on screen, but I really hope they didn’t make these changes, particularly that Christian is studious and religious, just because they cast an Asian actor as him (because they feel a little like Asian stereotypes).

J August Richards as Victor Dashkov

This is one that didn’t appear on the original rumoured cast list (as far as I saw) and it’s so different to his description in the books that I kind of don’t have an opinion about it as a casting choice.

I’ve never seen him in anything before so purely on a visual level I think he could be a great fit for Victor, I just think it’ll really come down to how he plays it.

As for this character description: “Victor is a Moroi noble vampire with a heart of gold who’s highly regarded for his role as advisor and political strategist to Moroi dignitaries.” as well as mentioning that he has intelligence and influence, sounds pretty accurate to the book.  Obviously if Andre was the heir to the throne, Victor had to be shifted out of that role, but I think his book 1 arc could still work if they wanted it to.

The “heart of gold” bit obviously made me chuckle and I really hope they threw it in there as a kind of decoy to throw non-book-readers off the fact that he’s actually the villain in book 1/s1.

As for giving him a husband and two daughters, my thoughts are: why the fuck not? He didn’t have a love interest in the original books and I’m always down for more lgbtq+ rep.  My only concern is it maybe playing into the trope of evil/villain characters being queer-coded.  And as for having two daughters, well as long as one of them is Natalie I don’t mind.

Anita-Joy Uwajeh as Tatiana Vogel

Okay this is the most bizarre one imo, not because of the casting, but just the character description.

I mean “Tatiana is a Moroi vampire and political underdog who slowly takes the royal court by storm. Motivated by love and a sense of justice, Tatiana has a unique skill of making herself seem of no consequence until we realize much too late that she was always the one to watch.” sounds extremely Tasha Ozera to me, so like why not just make this character Tasha?  Nothing about this sounds like Tatiana, and Tatiana wasn’t even a Vogel anyway (well Vogel wasn’t even one of the 12 royal families), she was an Ivashkov.

In terms of Anita-Joy herself, well I mean we don’t really have a character to compare her to, is she supposed to be more like Tasha or Tatiana?  She looks fairly young, so my guess is actually on Tasha, but we’ll have to wait to see I guess.

Mia McKenna-Bruce as Mia Karp

This is another one that I was instantly a fan of.

I was so not a fan of Mia’s casting in the movie (I can’t even remember who played her tbh but I really didn’t like it) so this Mia is a lot closer to how I imagine her.

I think she’ll be able to carry Mia’s transformation from bratty social-climber to badass fighter really well.

The character description is interesting though.  “Witty, cutting, and just the right kind of ruthless when necessary, non-Royal Mia has a long-term plan to social climb her way into the ranks of royalty, with all the privilege and freedom that entails.” sound pretty bang on to Mia in the first book.

“A plan complicated by her instant chemistry with Meredith, a Guardian-in-training, as Mia struggles to reconcile her attraction to Meredith with her lowly status.” is an obvious deviation though, and one I kind of love???  Give me all the queer rep, and if we get to see Mia confront the issue of comp-het I’m so here for it.  

It’s kind of funny though because I’ve seen theories that Meredith is a replacement for Eddie and Mia/Eddie has always been my sort of rarepair ship.

The last name Karp is weird af though.  Is she supposed to be Sonya’s daughter?  And if that’s the case I wonder if we’re going to actually see Sonya turn Strigoi in the show’s first season or something and that triggers the change in Mia?  Interesting concept but I’m not sure how the timeline will work.

Rhian Blundell as Meredith

So this is another new one, and tbh I hadn’t given Meredith *that* much though in the past but she’s probably close to how I would have pictured her which is cool.

The elephant in the room with this casting is that Meredith’s role in the books was relatively minor - she was just kind of that character that got brought up whenever R.M needed a dhampir who wasn’t Rose/Dimitri/Mason/Eddie.  So clearly she’s going to have a bigger role in the tv show which I don’t mind but I do wonder if we’re going to lose a character - probably Eddie lbr - in order to have her.  They haven’t casted an Eddie yet as far as we know, but I have seen it pointed out that Eddie’s role in book 1 was pretty small so maybe they just aren’t announcing it.  But there’s also the possibility that maybe Meredith will sort of replace Eddie and be the third part of Rose and Mason’s friendship.

I’m very interested by this part of her character description though, “She has little patience for Rose’s volatility or Mia’s elitism, and regularly calls both of them out.”

Jonetta Kaiser as Sonya Karp

I don’t necessarily dislike Jonetta as Sonya but I am confused by this choice.  She looks fairly young, which tbf Sonya was young-ish I guess, but if Mia is supposed to be her daughter she doesn’t look old enough to have a teenaged daughter.  So maybe Sonya and Mia are sisters? Cousins? Just have each other’s last names for no reason? I really don’t know.  They also look nothing alike.

Other than that, I don’t really have an opinion about Jonetta as Sonya.  Obviously looks nothing like how Sonya was described but that’s not new nor a massive concern for me.  

I can’t really tell just from looking at her, and I haven’t seen her in anything, if she would play a good Sonya.  I think with a lot of the characters it’s going to come down to the personality they bring to the part and the writing.

I looooooove her character description though:  “Quiet, careful and decidedly odd, Sonya is not of royal bloodline and sits out on the fringe of Moroi society, preferring to spend her time in the library or her gardens. Not a person who likes a scene, nonetheless she has a quiet but profound power of her own. She is taken by surprise when a Dhampir Guardian named Mikhail shows interest in her, a relationship that will expose both the brightest and darkest parts of her heart.”  It’s everything I would probably want from a description of Sonya and I’m more and more convinced that we’re going to see Sonya’s descent into madness and transformation into a Strigoi play out in maybe the first season which I am so curious how they’re going to work into the timeline.

Andrew Liner as Mason Ashford

Our last one and another one who doesn’t look remotely like his description but again? Not a surprise and not a problem for me.  He looks like he could play Mason’s goofiness really well as well as be a solid contender for a love interest for Rose.

“Charming, loyal and popular, Mason is Rose’s main competition in the quest to become the No. 1 Guardian-in-training. Though their relationship is casual on her side, he is hopeful she will finally look at him and see him as something more.” His character description makes a lot of sense, maybe him being Rose’s main competition is a bit of a deviation? But I think that’s more an indication that he’s supposed to be a strong fighter which isn’t inaccurate to the books.  The rest sounds great.

Other Thoughts

Descriptions of the show specifically mention friendship and classism as major themes which I am very happy to hear about because those are the two parts of VA that I love the most.

Am a little more worried about it being described as “sexy” though, if they shove a whole bunch of meaningless sex scenes in it just because it’s a YA show I’m not gonna be happy.

Seen the show compared to “Game of Thrones” and “Bridgerton” which at first had me like oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck not good not good not good.  But thinking about it more and trying to understand where Plec’s coming from with that description I wonder if means similar to GoT as in the cut-throat nature of the Moroi/Dhampir society cause I can kind of see that.  And as for Bridgerton I wonder if she’s referring to the kind of social-climbing aspects of it, because again that makes sense and it seems like a theme she really wants to concentrate on.  I hope that’s what she means by those comparisons, or that she just wants to compare it to popular shows to get people to watch it.  The worst would be if she tries to throw in a lot of unnecessary sex scenes to make it like those shows, because I hate when they do that, especially when the characters are teenagers.

Interesting to hear that Plec has known about the series since before Twilight or TVD - not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

Seems like it’s actually mostly (or all??) written by Marguerite MacIntyre which is interesting because I know people were worried about Julie Plec - I’ve never watched anything by either of them so I’m neutral at this point.

[petri808]

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

Inukag AU

There was a genuine smile on Kagome’s face as she sat on her bed quietly while her family and friends did what they could to try and jog her memory. It was about 3 months since the accident and today the bed was littered with photo albums, old letters, newspapers from her college days that Sango had saved, or her mother pulled from her old bedroom, really anything they could think of to provide visuals. She didn’t want them to feel bad for her predicament, so thought it best to go along with it. They probably knew— she didn’t recognize any of it but bless them for playing along as she nodded or chuckled at appropriate times or patiently waited as she stared at certain items longer than she should have. Because Kagome really wanted to remember.

But in reality, all the words and images were viewed through a strangers lens. Yes, she recognized certain people, but not everyone or the situation in the photos. For Kagome, her last recollections end shortly after graduating college. She knew Sango since they’d been friends, but barely remembered Miroku. To her Miroku was still the boyfriend of less than a year, not a husband and certainly not a father to the couples 1 year old twin girls. Sango was her best friend, so to not remember the wedding or the birth of the twins who based on the photos were precious to her... hurt. There she was in those pictures holding one newborn in each arm, beaming at becoming an aunty, and no recollection of it.

“Tomorrow is the weekend, so we can video chat with Sota,” Mrs. Higurashi reminded her daughter. “I’ve been keeping him updated by text.”

“Where is he again?” Kagome asked.

“In Hawaii, at the University of Hilo.”

“Oh... right,” Kagome chuckled. “I forgot.”

“That’s okay, dear. Sota is in his senior year now and will be coming home in December after graduation.”

“I hope I’m well enough to fly there for the graduation.”

“I think you will be,” her mother smiled softly. “There’s always hope.”

Yeah... hope. It was the only thing keeping Kagome from breaking down. Each night as she drifted to sleep, she’d remind herself of the temporary nature of her condition. Truth or not, it was worth clinging to. Earlier her mother told her of how she’d flown to Hawaii to help Sota settle into his dorm. As the big sister, she was so proud of him, but again Kagome had no recollection of this event and only Hawaiian vacation pictures to prove its truth. Still, she was happy that her brother had grown up so much. The sense of pride she must have felt at the time was renewed in the new knowledge.

She didn’t remember a lot, but there were moments that brought tears to her eyes for more than one reason. Take the other day when Sango and Miroku brought the twins for a visit. The children remembered their Aunty Kagome and quickly reached out with their small hands to her. It brought out tears from the happy emotions such adorable faces could provoke in anyone, yet also tears of frustration for not knowing them at all. Clearly, they loved her, and she wanted to love them too. Bless them, showing concern for her tears, reaching out to Kagome’s face as if to soothe the adult. So, realizing her effect, she quickly smiled and told them she was just happy to see them.

“It’s still a little weird,” Kagome confided to Sango one day, “because my only memory of Miroku is of an annoying guy following you around while still checking out other girls.”

Sango laughed, “he still an annoying guy at times, but it’s true, he has settled down since those days.”

“What was it that finally changed your mind about Miroku?”

“Oh, um actually we’d had a fight... a really big fight over his behavior and I put my foot down. It was me or them because I wasn’t gonna put up with it anymore. I guess the proverbial slap to his face woke him up.”

Kagome chuckled. “It does appear to have worked. But it was obvious how much he loved you despite the stupid things he did.”

Sango nodded. “True. If I didn’t think so too, I would have just walked away and not looked back. Sometimes guys literally need a harsh wake up a call to realize what they’re about to lose.”

That made Kagome think about the supposed fight with Inuyasha on the night of her accident, because it resembled the predicament Sango went through. She frowned. “Why are guys like that?”

Sango shrugged. “If we ever found an answer to that question, we’d be rich.”

Kagome snorted a laugh. “Agreed. We could make money writing self-help books.”

The girls shared a laugh before moving on to other subjects, but as the day grew late, Kagome suddenly sank down on the bed. There was a question she’d been wanting to ask, and though Inuyasha would be the better one to ask, he was still a strangers in her eyes. At least with Sango, she knew she could trust her friend to tell her the truth.

“Before you go, Sango, I have something to ask about.”

“Sure, what is it?”

“Could you tell me how I met Inuyasha? Tell me what you know about our relationship?”

Sango’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “Hasn’t Inu told you anything?”

Kagome looked down. “He has told me things, but I— I still don’t know if I should trust him. I mean... I know my mom loves him and that tells me a lot, but it doesn’t change the fact he’s just a stranger at this point for me— it’s,” she shrugged, “awkward.”

“Oh... Guess I never thought of it that way.” Sango reached out and took her Kagome’s hand. “I’d be happy to answer your questions. It’s okay that it’s awkward, that’s understandable so don’t push yourself to accept things just to accept them, but even I would agree with your mom, he’s probably told you the truth.”

“You think so?”

Sango squeezed her friends hand and chuckled. “Yeah. I didn’t like him at first, but the guy really grew on me. Try it, test me,” she coaxed Kagome. “Ask me about something he told you and let’s see if my answers are the same.”

Kagome smiled and sat back for a moment in thought. “What’s something questionable...” she tapped her chin. “The first date he took me on was to a ramen restaurant. Which is not very romantic if you’re trying to woo someone. So, it sounds true and preposterous at the same time. He said he was so nervous that he accidentally spilled a drink on me. I wondered if he told me that just to be funny and endearing, but it never actually happened.”

“Oh,” Sango burst out laughing, “it definitely did happen! You’d told him to pick somewhere he loved to go and Inu’s favorite meal is ramen, so that’s what he picked. And the drink. It was a pink cocktail that stained your dress. You were so annoyed!” She giggled again. “But it was obvious how nervous he was, and I remember how you told me it was cute to see him get all flustered.”

“Oh, wow,” Kagome laughed too. “I guess I have to believe it now. Tell me more.”

“Hmm,” Sango pondered. “He was so nervous to even ask you out, Miroku had to ask you for him.”

“What?!” Kagome gasped and snorted a laugh. “And I’d still said yes?!”

“Yeah, because by then you liked him too. It took... if I remember correctly a year of interactions just for him to gain that much courage.” At that point Sango’s voice quieted. “I don’t know if he’s told you this part yet but, Inu was a broken person when you’d first met.”

“No, he hasn’t.” Kagome leaned forward with interest. “What do you mean?”

“At the time he’d already been broken up with Kikyo for 4 or 5 years I think, but he hadn’t fully moved on yet. I can’t say he still loved her. I think it was more just loneliness. His mother died when he was young as well. So, I think the combination of losing the two most important women in his life left him depressed.”

“Wow...”

“I knew him as Miroku’s brooding coworker, how my husband tolerated that I have no idea, but they were close friends. When we’d introduced you to him, things slowly began to change. You almost made it a mission to help him get out of it.” Sango chuckled lightly. “You know how you are, always trying to help people. At first, Inu resisted, but you didn’t let up and slowly but surely broke through his defenses. He became a puppy dog around you, totally head over heels in love.” She smiled. “It was fun and so cute for us to watch it all happen.”

“I wish I remembered any of this,” Kagome sighed.

“You will. You’ve never been a quitter, so I truly believe you will get your memory back.”

“Thanks, Sango. All of your guys help really means a lot to me.”

Sango reached out and hugged her friend. “I know you’d do the same for me.” She sat back in her chair. “It’s tough now, and I know you described Inuyasha as a stranger, but treat it as if you’re dating a new guy with all those heart racing, excitements that come with it. I see how you look at him.” She teased. “You must at least thinks he’s cute?”

Kagomes cheeks flushed pink. “Is it that obvious?”

“Oh, yeah,” Sango giggled and squeezed her friends hand. “If all you do is focus on this situation, you won’t start to live again. They’re releasing you to go home in a couple weeks, so have a little fun with him. Create some new memories.”

“Maybe you’re right... maybe I will try to think about it that way.” Kagome tips her head slightly. “It is kinda fun to feel those giddy girly emotions when I see him.”

Speaking of. The girls hear a knock at the door and turn to see Inuyasha walking in with a bouquet of flowers and a bag of take-out food. “Hey gorgeous and Sango.”

It set off another rush of heat to Kagome’s face. “Hi,” she squeaked out.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” Sango stood up with a wink. “See you tomorrow.” She hugged her best friend and left the room.

Inuyasha took the seat beside Kagome and handed her the flowers. “How are you feeling today?”

“Mmm, it was good chatting with Sango.” She held the flowers up to her nose to smell them while keeping her eyes on him. “Thank you for the flowers, they’re beautiful.”

“Beautiful women deserve beautiful flowers,” he smiled back and held up a bag. “Hope you’re hungry. I brought dinner since hospital food must be getting boring by now.”

“Aww, that’s thoughtful of you, cause yes,” Kagome sighed, “it is.”

Inuyasha chuckled, then pulled out the containers of food. He handed Kagome a plate. “It’s salmon nitsuke.”

“Oh, yes!” Kagome almost moaned in delight as she opened the container and surveyed the food. “And it smells so delicious!” But before Inuyasha opened his container. “Wait! Let me guess what you got.”

“Okay?” Inuyasha chuckled.

“Ramen.”

Inuyasha’s eyes widened. “How?!”

Kagome giggled. “Sango told me it was your favorite.”

To her guessing was funny, but she didn’t expect the pained expression that instantly fell over Inuyasha’s face. It didn’t take her long to realize. “Oh my, I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to make you think I got my memory back!”

“I-It’s okay, really,” he tried to reassure her. Yes, it hurt, but, “it’s nice to see you smiling and happy.”

“Are you sure? I’m really sorry, I wasn’t thinking.”

“Kagome, it’s really okay.” He smiled with eyes clouded over. “You’ve been... stand-offish till now, so it makes me feel a lot better that you’re comfortable enough to joke with me again.”

“Yeah... about that... I’ve been talking with Sango and she’s been encouraging me to give you a chance. I do want... to take her advice, but...” her voice softened, “could I be honest with you?”

“Of course.”

“For me, this is all like meeting a new guy and, you know, the whole crush, dating steps, and such whereas for you, it’s different and must be frustrating.”

“If I’m being honest, yeah,” Inuyasha scratched his head, “it is, but I don’t know, also a bit exciting too, like a challenge, but a fun one if that makes any sense. I get to date you all over again— I-I mean if you’ll let me.”

“They’re releasing me soon, so I think...” Kagome’s cheeks flushed. “I’d love to go out on a date with you Inuyasha.”

“Whoo Hoo!” He pumped his fists in the air. “I feel like a teenager again,” Inuyasha laughed.

At that, Kagome giggled, her mood significantly lightened, and a weight lifted. It was the first step towards a sense of normalcy. Forget the fact she couldn’t remember a chunk of her past and live in the now where a handsome hanyo sat waiting.

[antiloreolympus]

11 Anti LO Asks

1. Zeus would make a much more compelling character if RS grounded his obsession with gaining respect in the context of his childhood: He could’ve been Rhea’s favourite kid and grew a huge ego/sense of entitlement as a result while feeling deeply under appreciated by his brothers and Hera for his instrumental role in rescuing them and his care for her respectively, unable to look past his own trauma and ego to see that they too are struggling with their own demons rather than neglecting him.

2. I’m gonna have disagree with that one anon saying narrators are always a sign of weak storytelling because that’s not always the truth. Hades the game for example has a narrator and it’s used very effectively to give it an fairytale-like feel, a funny thing for zag to comment on because he can hear them and he will often comment on the rude things they say, and also provides a bit of world building. A narrator is also good if it’s established beforehand who is saying the narration, such as a storyteller or prophet, and it can establish to the audience they are viewing something from the past, and they can speak when there are major shifts in the story, not throughout the whole thing. A narrator in LO isn’t even a bad idea, the issue is it should have been established much earlier, maybe even episode one is we’re being honest, instead of just coming out of nowhere to speak of stuff in the future? It’s also pretty purposely only being there to be a cliffhanger instead of even putting in effort to make it interesting enough for anyone to care or come back without the narration there basically begging them to care what’s going on. It’s very strange and shows a lack of confidence and effort in her writing to be so literally spelled out like that.

I agree with the other comments too. The font is atrocious. LO is usually really good with fonts and they picked one that was visually very ugly and hard to read with an even worse color. I didn’t even think the fonts would degrade too like the art, and yet here we are!

3. I love how rachel dropped the cover for vol 2 of LO and its just a treasure trove of book design failures. her name is on top, giving the impression both she is the title and she cares more about getting her own name out there over the actual story, empty space where the title should be, the title covering most of hades, the title being cramped so much to cover him, persephone being covered by volume two, the list goes on. the first cover wasnt much better, but this is much worse.

4. RS is willing to change aspects of the story according to fan speculation but isn't down to do anything that would retcon out the offensive stereotypes, the homophobia, or the character-assassination of apollo.

5. I’m pretty sure Hera and Echo will have an infidelity arc followed by betrayal thanks to Echo’s role in Zeus’s meddling. It’s already established that Hera is just as willing to cheat as Zeus is and Echo’s blue colouration and short hair is clearly reminiscent of Hades. Given how RS has stated that character colour palettes are symbolic, I wouldn’t overlook this detail (the one instance of RS actually sticking to her colour rules lol). Also, Ares’ comment just seems to imply it!

6. Yo I just saw RS Insta story- SHES ALREADY MAKING A VOLUME TWO BOOK???? When the first volume isn’t out yet?????? Tbh, I never expected this 

7. Daphne has more personality than Persephone. Though both came from the same deprives mortal realm background, Daphne is thriving. Unlike Persephone, she’s confident and willing to take control over her own life (though this is only illustrated in the context of her dating life which is sad af, female characters never get any other kind of agency in LO). Perse would be a more interesting protagonist if she had Daphne’s (still limited af) personality.

8. There seems to be a lot of infighting here regarding Myth Hades and Persephone and it's 'modern retelling' or butchering by RS.

All fighting aside on whether Hades was a good husband and Persephones role (or lack of agency) in the myth of the Kidnapping - what is actually wrong with appreciating the myth as is?

(Isn't the myth there to give an explanation as to why the seasons change? As well as being a story of a mother in grief over her lost daughter? And her fight to find her?)

Also, in that context, is there really something wrong with liking the... lets say more "modern" adaptations of the Myth where Hades and Persephone loved one another, so long as one understands and respects the original canon (sources) and culture from which it originated?

9. The way Daphne is drawn went from sweet girl-next-door to model with overfilled lips and too many surgical alterations to increase her sex appeal.. Her lips look like they’ve been stung by several bees in the latest FP what is up with that? It’s especially irksome since RS normally draws very nice looking full lips (I.e Persephone) but they just look so off on Daphne.

10. So Minthe being in the story so early on (and already dating Hades) is lets say an "interesting" narrative choice. Mainly because it feels like RS did this because she doesnt want to acknowledge that Hades may have loved someone other than Persephone.

Because (as far as I am aware) Minthe does not show up until after Hades and Persephone are already married. And Hades did care about Minthe (as I believe one anon mentioned - he named a mountain after her?) - and she was stomped on by Persephone for daring to say that Hades liked her more.

It feels like RS made this narrative choice because she wanted to (mess with the myths) showcase that Persephone is Hades 'One True Love' and the only way she could think do to that was to make Minthe a vicious abuser. Which is unfair.

11. Uh …. Why are they already publishing a volume 2 or LO only four months after the first one? If they keep that rate up won’t they catch up really quick to the actual comic and run out of stuff to publish? I would be pissed to get a book with a cover with effort put into it just to get rushed nonsense in the actual book. Girl take a break.

Also the logo is literally covering up half of the couple while there is a giant empty space above them so her name is the main focus. Either Rachel is shit at book cover design (likely) or she needs to stroke her ego real bad and make sure her own name is the main focus. Good lord. 

[ninjastormhawkkat]

My Crazy Wordgirl Theory #2

I will get to writing stories for my version of the Becky Boxleitner au. I just really need to get this out of the way. After going through sites for the canon facts of the Wordgirl television series and re-watching old Wordgirl episodes to help me write some stories for my version of the au, I sort of discovered something interesting. In a scene from “The Rise of Miss Power” we see an image of a male and female Lexiconian superhero duo painted on the ceiling of the room in the episode special. Now about everyone in the fandom has speculated that image is a painting of her biological parents, or an idea of what her parents would look like. But what if that were not true? What if that painting was just a symbolic image of what the humanoid people on Lexicon typically looked like? Back in the episode, “Wordgirl Makes A Mistake”, Becky mentions that she accidentally crawled onto the ship of Captain Huggy Face, a famous (Lexiconian) Air Force Pilot when she was really little. For about 10 or 11 years, Bob and Becky have been raised on earth with no attempts to get back to Lexicon, and no one from Lexicon has come to find them. I am not trying to paint Becky’s biological parents in a bad light, but why was no Lexiconian searching for their lost child? From looking at Wordgirl’s Spaceship Hideout, it appears that people from Lexicon have the technological resources to track down the crashed ship of a famous pilot and find him and a lost child. This would take them only a few years. Also looking at Wordgirl’s origin story, it seems that Lexicon is not lightyears away from Earth or Becky and Bob would have been a bit older than when they were found in the origin flashback. (I know it is a cartoon, but some rules of science still apply to the show). I don’t know how far the planets are from each other but I think they exist in the same solar system if indicated by the alien tech that Lexiconians are able to travel faster to planets without aging much. Again I ask if this is possible, then why has no one come to rescue Becky and Bob? What if it was because Becky was meant to have crawled onto Huggy’s ship and never be found? We don't know the strength of Lexiconian’s memory at a young age. We know they can remember everything they read since Becky knows every word in the dictionary, but we don’t know how early they maintain a photographic memory. I believe that Bob may have told Becky the story about how they came to earth when she was old enough. From watching that scene, we can assume Becky only has memories of crawling onto a ship and falling asleep, then waking up to a startled pilot. Bob even has no clue how a child with no business being near a spaceship about to take off so he tells her what he only knows. Could it be Becky was never meant to be found by anyone else from Lexicon? Why so? Why hide from a planet of heroes? Here is where the conspiracy I formulated in my head starts. Let’s consider this question: What if Becky was only half Lexiconian?

We first need to look at Lexicon’s political structure. About everyone who has watched or watches the show must have thought at one point that Lexicon was a planet of heroes which is why Becky wanted to use her powers for good and become a superhero at an early age. What we may not realize is that the term hero could apply differently on Lexicon than on Earth. In the flashback of Wordgirl’s origin, Becky refers to Huggy as a famous air force pilot. He is even called Captain Huggy Face. Also in the special, “The Rise of Miss Power”, Huggy gives Wordgirl a book titled Super Advanced Secret Battle Moves of the Planet Lexicon in order to help her in the final battle against Miss Power. Now I don’t know about you, but this makes me think that Lexicon had some type of military control and the term hero on their planet was a military term. One of the statues of a Lexiconian in that special was wearing a Roman-style helmet, something a soldier in the Roman army would wear. I don’t know if Lexicon has a military government or just a government with a strong military influence. I don’t know what type of rule Lexicon has, but it definitely has a military of some sort. From the statues and painting we seen of Lexiconians, Wordgirl’s outfit is typical outer clothing for Lexicon. This also sparks an idea of a common uniform for Lexicons which would make sense if there is some type of military influence on the planet. This ties into my theory about Becky. Now from what I have learned about aliens from all the sci-fi themed shows and movies such as Doctor Who and Monsters Vs. Aliens, most aliens seem to view the human race as a lesser species compared to them. We can see that with how Miss Power acted toward the villains and the citizens. Even though she was not a Lexiconian, Miss Power still viewed everyone as lesser and as servants to herself. In my opinion with Kid Math, before Wordgirl set him straight, he seemed to view heroics as a game or something interesting that he could copy for himself. He was friendly, but he appeared to take what Becky was teaching him about being a normal kid as a learning experience at first. I don’t know if this also applied to Lexiconians, but I think that due to the implications of military themes shown in the series, there are some that might have had a purity complex. There could have been Lexiconians might have wanted only their species to be the “heroes” and keep that in their own bloodline. I don’t think every Lexiconian held that belief since in one episode we see Bob on a date with Bosco, but maybe some in higher social classes strongly believed in purity, or would never consider marrying a human. With the evidence of military themes, it is possible they have class structures on Lexicon. Now what if a high class Lexiconian, broke that purity thinking and mated with a human. Here is my theory on Becky’s Parentage.

A woman from Lexicon, someone with military training like huggy has and in a high position, was put in an arranged marriage with someone she did not love at all nor could ever love. This person, a military man, possibly with a higher rank than the woman and have strong familial ties on Lexicon, was a corrupt person. She tried everything she could to get out this arranged marriage, but even her family was pushing her to do it because of reasons such as tradition or importance of appearance or something that only concerns them and not the woman. The woman soon takes an exploration opportunity and uses it to get away from all the drama she is facing and for her own mental and emotional health. She soon lands on planet earth, specifically a place called Fair City, and explores around for a while. This woman soon spots a distracted human male about to cross onto a busy road. This woman already has a good nature and quickly pulls the man out of danger without anyone noticing her unusual super speed. The man, grateful, turns to thank the woman. According to how love works from the Hotel Transylvania movies, they immediately zinged. This man and woman get to know each other a little bit more over the time the women was allowed to stay away from Lexicon. She does not give every detail about herself (her alien background), but she feels free with this man who respects her emotions and loves her for her. They get more intimate over months and everything is going great. Then she feels ill one day and under the guise of going to a hospital, the woman goes back to her ship for a medical scan. To her surprise, she is pregnant with her boyfriend’s child. This is bad because her time on exploration is about to be up and if she returns any time later, they will find about about her hybrid offspring and her corrupt fiance may kill her and her child as “punishment” for finding true love. She doesn’t have the option to not come back because they can and will do anything to find her and this would put her lover in danger as well. With a heavy heart she soon leaves her lover and returns to Lexicon and marries her corrupt fiance. She does this to protect her lover and child. This woman soon gives birth to a daughter that has her human father’s eyes with her mother’s facial features, hair color and style. The top parted bangs is a possible mixture of her human father’s and Lexiconian mother’s hair style. Her husband soon becomes suspicious about his wife’s time away and “their” child. About a year later, her husband discovers the child’s human lineage and goes into a dark rage. This woman hurries and escapes the dome city she lived in and soon encounters Captain Huggy Face about to take off. She sees that her husband and his men are about to catch up with her. She puts down her child and urges her to walk towards the ship. In a last ditch effort to save her child, she sacrifices herself and holds back her husband and his men long enough so the ship takes off and there is nothing that can be done. The fate of the woman is unknown.

In regards to Becky’s human father, let’s go over some canonical evidence. It says on the Wordgirl wiki that Becky has light brown skin. I believe Becky might be biracial. She could possibly be an offspring of an African American Woman and a white ethnic man. I googled what biracial kids look like and Becky looks similar to a biracial child born of a African American parent and a white ethnic parent. (I don’t know the what proper term I should use for referring to White ethnicity and I do not want to offend anyone by accident.) (I am just basing my conspiracy theory on visual evidence and scientific fact.) For about everyone, except one person, on Wordgirl, they have black eyes. I have seen fanart of the characters with different eye colors. For Becky’s dad, while I agree he could have blue eyes, it is also possible for him to have brown eyes as well, the eye color Becky inherited. Another thing I noticed that Becky could have inherited from her human father is his personality. Let’s review Becky’s personality and behaviors. Becky does not enjoy her family singing on the road or doing about any family car activity on a constant loop. Though not often, Becky is able to use gadgets and seems to have an understanding of how each part should work in a machine. She was able to make sure the egg and apple slicer that was entered in the Young Inventor’s competition was able to still function as intended after pressing them together using her super strength. Another thing is that she gets irritated when the spotlight is taken off her every time she accomplishes something as Wordgirl such as with Tiny Big and Granny May when she was an undefeated bingo champion. Wordgirl/Becky also tends to get a bit sassy when she is irritated just like her dad. She also acts proud of herself and her accomplishments as Becky and Wordgirl which border on the line between humble and prideful. Like her dad she does get distracted and a little absentminded such as when she leaves Huggy behind after a crime or when she gets too focused on her interests such as Pretty Princess and boy crushes. There are times when Becky wants to accomplish something, either for her own desires or to just impress people, she will become inconsiderate of others. Examples include Becky interrupting Violet’s rehearsal for the Romeo and Juliet play and revealing Scoop’s personal tooth secret when she took over running the school’s paper for a day. Becky also sometimes feels she “needs to always be the winner”. It can be assumed that she copies that behavior from Tim Botsford who gets very competitive and upset when his family does not win. The thing is that Tim is almost immediately humbled afterwords when he puts into perspective that he did his best and is a winner in his family’s and his own eyes. Becky may also share that perspective sometimes, but she will still tend to fret over her mistakes until someone calms her down. As I said, Becky sometimes still needs to feel as the winner, more so in her battles as Wordgirl against villains. We have also seen Becky feel upset when people don’t like her work such as when Violet and Bob hid Becky’s horrible painting in the janitor’s closet when they were decorating the school gym for a dance while Becky was fighting evil as Wordgirl. Becky is also seen to be clever and tricky when she needs to such as in the episode “Bend It Like Becky” when she was trying to get Dr. Two Brains to agree with a soccer match that would determine which group was going to enjoy the field for the next 3 months.

One final thing before I finish is that throughout some episodes, we can see Becky similarly imitate her human dad’s facial features and body gestures when he is there. Now I leave off with this question. Do Becky’s personality and behaviors I mentioned remind you of any cheese loving, villain scientist? I will let you think about it.

[cybernaght]

We have dubbed it at home as “the trauma drama”

Here’s my review of sorts of To Dear Myself/亲爱的自己

This one is a 2020 contemporary slice of life series about thirty-somethings living in Shanghai: struggling with money, trying to negotiate with their families, getting betrayed by their friends, getting their hearts broken by their lovers, failing in their professional ventures, encountering day to day hardships as they try to find themselves in the big city. It’s low-key anxiety inducing and not at all escapist, and I somehow got drawn into it still. Watching it was at times was a bit like pulling teeth: there is only so much pain you can take, only so many little drawbacks and injustices, only so many long shots of people breaking apart before you need to have a breather.

The story centres around three women. The protagonist, Li Siyu (Liu Shishi) is a career woman, daily taking high risks hoping for high rewards. She is also balancing her high intensity life with a relationship with her down on his luck boyfriend, who is wonderful in many ways but fails to understand how being self-sufficient is part of her identity, taking it as a personal affront. Watching their relationship was a little bit like watching a train speeding towards a cliff in slow motion. The most beautiful thing about it was that you can see both of their perspectives: in his eyes, she is impulsive, reckless, and needs to be stopped for her own good; in her eyes, he is envying her success and wants her to be a housewife. Both of them are wrong. Both of them are right. 

Li Siyu’s half-sister Gu Xiaoling (Cheng Miqi) just wants to find a wealthy Mr Right to look after her, as she is constantly hiding her mischievous, vulnerable self behind a mask of superficiality. She sees her own beauty as her only asset. She likes pretty things, but she is also incredibly lonely. Her partner on screen is a man with a massive crush on her, whom she does absolutely not want to date: partly because he is not rich; partly because his sense of entitlement to a relationship with her is grating as all hell. 

Their cousin Zhang Zhizhi (Hang Qingzi) is a married woman, working, raising a daughter, desperately trying to elevate her social status in the eyes of others, all while trying to breach the gaping void stretching between herself and her terrible husband. None of the men in this show are particularly endearing, but between claiming that he is his wife’s career and blaming her for his unfaithfulness and violence, he has to do a lot of work to deserve the viewer’s grace.

It’s just like this - the story of three women, and their romantic interests, living their lives. Nothing more, but also, nothing less. The script is written by a woman as well - and it shows. Admittedly, my cdrama watching experience so far mostly consisted of BL series and loud, dumb, action-y type things, but this is the first time I have seen a text which could be said to have an explicitly feminist reading. It tells you in no uncertain terms that no, you don’t need to get married, and no, you don’t need to have another child, and yes, you can actually just settle on living your own goddamn life. 

To Dear Myself is well plotted for most of its 45 episode run, with a sense of push and pull between all the various little storylines. Ups and down of every characters’ lives are woven together in a way which resembles a dance, it’s harmonious and satisfying, and the pace of the show sits between leisurely and achingly tense. Unfortunately, in the last ten episodes the rhythm of the show falters somewhat: the plotting becomes contrived, and the narrative steamrolls ungracefully to a barely satisfying conclusion. It’s truly bizarre, how something that has been so soft and so meticulous for so long gracelessly falls on its back in the last couple of episodes. 

Some of it has to do with the antagonist, such as there is. She is not a villain, but she is the originator of a lot of the misfortunes for the majority of the characters. You wait, and you wait, and you wait for her crimes to come out and for her to get her just deserts, but her last actual scene is the one of comfort. We are told in the narration that something bad happens to this person, we are neither witnessing it, nor the aftermath of it.

On one hand this tracks with the fact that this is a feminist text: said antagonist is just a woman whose agenda clashes with the characters we care about. On the other hand, she has been set-up to be a manipulative, cunning person for the entirety of this show. The audience has been told not to trust her in the way she is framed; the audience has been told that she is trouble in no uncertain terms. I don’t quite understand why the show would frame someone as a villain and then refuse to give them a resolution the villain would get. That’s just not satisfying. 

As for Zhu Yilong - this is probably my favourite role of his so far. 

After a pretty terrible year I have found myself connecting with his character, who spent the first half of the show show unemployed, lonely, and scraping to find some kind of dignity as he suffocates in the city which is sucking him dry. Watching his journey was a little bit frustrating - especially in the second half - because apparently one dysfunctional relationship was not enough for this man, but it was still exhilarating. Besides, after seeing this actor in a whole bunch of roles where his characters would do their absolute best to hide their hearts and use a selection of masks to keep people at arms length, it’s delightful to see his Chen Yiming wear his heart on his sleeve. It’s wonderful to witness him insecure, scared, giddy with joy, butterflies-in-the-stomach in love, achingly tender, utterly devastated. He is still a brilliant actor, and, once again, the camera does love him quite a lot. 

The visual aspect of the show is great: it’s high budget and incredibly pretty. The costuming and makeup are wonderful. I have never been to Shanghai, but it’s framed so lovingly I want to go now. 

So, is this one worth watching? I… honestly can’t tell. It is for the cast - and I’m not just talking about Zhu Yilong, all of the cast have done a tremendous job here, very impressive acting all around. It’s worth for genuinely well written story of self-discovery as a thirty-something struggling with a mass of pressures. But, not going to lie, it’s not an easy watch, and the final couple of episodes left me kind of feeling dead inside. 

P.S. The narratively significant product placements were cracking me up lots. There were.. a lot of important thermoses is what I’m saying. Also, the amount of alcohol the cast consumed on set was quite alarming.