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twixtandshout · 3 years ago

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Tagged by @pidgeonpostal! And not tagging anyone else because I have SOILED the original template (soiled it!!) in deference to my [brushes off skirt] mostly clean public-facing appearance.

...I’ve been making a lot of Spongebob memes lately for someone who has not seen Spongebob.

How many works do you have on AO3?

71!

What’s your total AO3 wordcount?

...306,834. Jesus.

How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Uh. Many! I do a lot of one-offs (and/or start long things I never finish) in many different places. My top three fandoms by fics written are RWBY (29), Undertale (25), Gravity Falls/Transcendence AU (4).

Bet you can’t tell where my hyperfixations have fallen.

I’ve also got some Pokémon and Sonic the Hedgehog fics back on my ff.net account, or I think I still do, anyway, but let’s never go back there pls

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

1. Sweeter Than Honey (Undertale): Taking a Completely unsurprising first place, with over 600 more kudos than the runner-up, the haphazard Underswap fic featuring a post-college self-insert I wrote just after high school! I shake my head some at how overblown and ridiculous the gap between this and all my other stuff is (c’mon, guys, I’ve written way better fics), but this is also the fic which prompted me (and at least one other person!) to start using they/them pronouns. I’ve gotten a lot of really sweet comments about how seen and appreciated it’s made people feel, so I can’t get down too far about it.

2. To Be A Hero (BNHA): I don’t count myself as part of the BNHA fandom, for a number of reasons, but for something that’s arguably the main motivation for the entire plot, Midoriya’s quirklessness is something I’ve never thought has been handled well. This fic marked the first time I (somewhat tentatively) claimed the disability label (thanks again to Sweeter Than for prompting that realization) to hold that lens over canon. It also really shot up my chart, dang! It’s the only thing here I’d consider “recent.”

3. Three-Sentence Shipping (Undertale): Self-explanatory.

4. Brothers Beyond Bonedaries (Undertale): Ah, the way-overcomplicated AU³ I got nowhere close to finishing. One of the things I really like about Undertale is the interface screw, how Toby Fox uses the medium of the video game to pull off crazy things and enhance his game, but most of the fic written for the fandom seems dedicated to explaining it away, grounding it, rather than taking it to the next step and messing with the medium of fanfiction when you keep the story going. I tried to do something cool like that here, playing with questions like narrator and authorship and breaking the fourth wall, even taking the “final boss” fight to a “totally separate” fic reached through the first by link – but, well, then I never finished it, which probably didn’t make anything less confusing for the poor folks who missed the intent.

5. Spirit and Such (Gravity Falls: Transcendence AU): A whole fic written to line out a particular image I had, which, naturally, never made it to the page. I consider it a bit of a cautionary tale for myself when it comes to writing (near-)original content; there’s a lot I look back on and cringe. I still love the characters, though – well, the important ones – and I think just stepping away from the tried-and-true Mizar formula nets it a star sticker here.

Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

>w>; I try, but a lot of the time I just don’t have anything to say? Like, oh, you liked it? Neat. There’s not much to respond to in comments like that, and then I’m weighing falling down on an ~obligation~ to respond to every message in my inbox vs annoying people with copy-paste fluff responses all down the page. Plus I know I make more of an effort to comment on things that didn’t get the attention I feel they deserve, so if I’m driving up my own comment count with nonsense, am I preventing myself from being in a position to receive more comments later? And then if I do comment, am I being too effusive or running people’s ears off explaining things they don’t actually need to know? Sometimes people just want to express interest or admiration and don’t necessarily want a whole peek and guided tour behind the curtain.

Can you tell I have anxiety? x3;

Anyway, I do respond when I can. And I keep most of the comments I’ve gotten to go back and reread.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Hm, hmm. Lots of stuff in the TQ Nonsense series would probably qualify! I’m thinking of Unfixable, Wolfsong, and Ethanol. And there’s Bursting Through A Blood-Red Sky (I Can Live, I Can Breathe), of course, but that was always intended to have a fix-it epilogue. It’s just that I wrote it in a couple of hours day-of, stared at it, and decided I didn’t wanna just then. But now that’s As Long As You’re Still Burning Bright (I’m Still Awake), and that’s probably the best romance I’ve written, so that one worked out.

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve ever written?

Now and then! When the urge strikes. Uhhh, I’ve got a series of Doctor Who x Undertale crossovers I actually made a whole dang verse for that never made it to print. Get a couple great comments on that every few months or so. I think the World Trigger x Undertale crossover is probably weirder, though, by virtue of WT being a very small fandom. My enthusiasm kinda sputtered out on that one.

Mostly I just daydream crossovers with whatever happens to catch my eye at any given moment. I have a lot!!!! Though odds are out on whether I manage to remember any of them once the initial thought’s passed, lol.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Gotten a couple eyebrow-raising comments, but I think mostly I’m just too small a writer to draw that kind of attention.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I don’t? think so? Think my tastes are a little niche for most people to bother ^^;

Have you ever had a fic translated?

I had someone apologize once for any language mistakes in their comment cause they had to run it through a translator! That’s not what you asked (the answer is no), but it’s very flattering to think that someone liked my fic enough to read and comment despite the language barrier.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yes! :D @pidgeonpostal was gracious enough to agree to co-write Five Nights at Denny’s with me off an idea about shoes. This has fulfilled a long-held dream of mine (collabing with someone, not the shoes) and also introduced me to some lovely people.

What’s your all time favorite ship?

Who has time for just one? ;3c Honestly, I care more about the characters and how the relationship – any relationship – between them changes them than I do about ~A Ship~ as a solid, bounded noun-object. I’ve got characters I like more and less and feelings about who does and doesn’t have chemistry in which directions with whom, but finding anything that agrees with those preferences is hard, harder when you take alloromanticism into account. I’ll play in any sandbox with cool toys, especially if other folks have already built sick sandcastles there.

What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

[kicks every single unfinished fic further under the bed] What nooo no WIPs here, everything on my account is either finished or does not exist

I’ve got a couple extra chapters of Sweeter Than floating around unposted, but 1. that fic’s a mess 2. high school Twixt and post-college Twixt are different people and trying to contort myself into three other me-shapes just cause people Like this fic is not something I’m super interested in 3. it’s headed for an emotional dip and I’d rather leave it where it is than post two chapters, stall out again, and leave folks with a bad end.

As for other fics... it’s looking more and more likely that v7 of my Yellow Brick Road AU will never actually make it out. >w>; I’ve got some really great ideas, but not enough to make me feel like I know what I’m doing, and that’s a big roadblock. Plus trying to engage with RT’s Atlas-Mantle worldbuilding in any serious capacity is... a headache. I can’t recommend the Happy Huntress Cinematic Universe enough, but it leaves some pretty big shoes to follow! And I’ve got small feet. <w<;

What are your writing strengths?

Dialogue’s fun, probably as an extension of characterization. I love tearing into what makes people tick, especially against the backdrop of their environment, the story they’re in, and the people they’re up against. Voice is a double-edged sword; I’ve been told my writing is really recognizable and individual, but on the other hand, I’ve been growing frustrated with with the limits of my narrative ability. There’s a strong rhythm I keep when I write (you might notice it here, even) but that leaves me feeling predictable and stale. I’m not sure I’m great at setting as a matter of course, but I’m pretty good at describing setpieces where the need comes up; that comes from my background in poetry, as does the fun I have with sublimating and abstracting complex imagery. And I think I bring some needed nuance to the universal. For good or ill, I don’t do what “everyone else” is doing.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Well, writing, for one thing. If I don’t know how something’s going to go and don’t have the urge to write it, it isn’t getting done, which means there’s a billion things that will never see the page and a few hundred more that are never getting finished. I lose momentum easily and have a hard time getting started, and I put way too much standing on finding a foothold with other people; as critical as I am of my work, I have high expectations for the stuff that passes muster, and it never seems to measure up. I’m also really uncreative. Yeah, I can mix up elements and extrapolate events, but coming up with things wholesale is really hard, which is why I avoid it wherever possible and steal/reskin stuff from other places instead.

What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

Something along the lines of “Hoo boy, I am Not qualified for this but hopefully it’s decent anyway.” Maria’s Spanish lines haven’t been a big deal – I’ve used it sparingly and, as a Latin language, it should be easy for English-speaking audiences to pick up on the gist – but I’ve had a harder time with Tai’s Chinese, both because I have Even Less background there and because it is, of course, an entirely different language system. If I write it out in English or Romanized italics, am I colonizing it or changing the meaning? If I write it out in the presumed-original characters (presumed because it’s Google Translate and who knows if I’m even barking in the right forest), am I confusing or alienating my presumed-majority-English-speaking audience? Where should I put the translations? Should I put the translations? And for Frisk’s sign language, thinking back, are the brackets I used instead of quotes alienating/infantilizing? I like that different characters give the text between a different feel, but I’m not an ASL speaker – and I’m pretty sure the word is “speaker,” which would only reinforce that that demographic would rather I didn’t do that. It’s important for all these characters, I think, that they use non-English language where it makes sense; it’s part of who they are. But as a white monolingual English-speaker, I don’t think I can really weigh in.

What was the first fandom you ever wrote for?

Thaaaat’d be Pokémon, followed closely with Sonic the Hedgehog. Whether those fics are still on my ff.net account or not (pretty sure I’ve purged them, but you never know) I’ve still got a couple saved to a folder on my current laptop, ostensibly so I can look back and see how far I’ve come and more practically to allow for the possibility of furthering group cohesion through public shaming.

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

I still like the idea behind The Man Who Is Atlas, and Burning Bright (Still Awake) gets props for being my current fic, though it’s currently in that spot where I’m excited to get new chapters posted but also quietly marking everything up in red pen. I think Harbinger gets the crown here, at least for now.

#answerin' stuff

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thewatsonbeekeepers · 4 years ago

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Chapter 8 – Dream a Little Dream of Me: parallels with Doctor Who

What’s queer film and TV without a bit of Doris Day in your chapter title?

This was never intended to be a chapter by itself, but having seen @tjlcisthenewsexy’s fantastic video on Wholock parallels here X I had to start writing. Full credit for inspiration here to @tjlcisthenewsexy, who has definitely had many of these ideas independently, and I would fully recommend watching the video before you read this. I personally only really buy Moffat era Who as a direct parallel to Sherlock, largely because Moffat wrote both, but also because 2010-17 matches up exactly with our boys. Lots of people have drawn parallels between 2005’s Bad Wolf Bay scene (by Russell T Davies) and the tarmac scene – those parallels are definitely there, but I think they’re more due to common tropes in love-declaration scenes than from intent.

The Doctor Who episodes I’m largely going to be drawing on here are Amy’s Choice, Last Christmas, The Name of the Doctor and A Good Man Goes to War. Others will feature, but if you want a really strong grip on what I’m talking about, I’d recommend taking a look at all of these, or at the very least Amy’s Choice! But now – on with the show.

Time travel has always been possible in dreams. This line comes from The Name of the Doctor, which came out in 2013. The dream in question is a psychic telepathy connecting five of our main characters whilst they sleep, controlled by Madame Vastra. Much has been made of Madame Vastra being an explicit Sherlock mirror (X) with Jenny as her wife and explicit John mirror, so using a dream state to connect people across time should already ring TAB bells. But crucially, we’re not just focusing on telepathy here – we’re focusing on the ability of 19th century characters to use a dream state to connect with the 21st century. Given that we never see where River Song is connecting from, it’s safe to say that it is the 19th – 21st connection between the other characters that is important, like in TAB. The use of the word ‘always’ is really important here – it’s not saying that time travel is possible in dreams in the Whoniverse, but that it has always been possible. There’s an implication here that before time travel was invented, in a non science fiction world, dreams can still do this – and that’s what helps us to jump across to TAB.

In the dream sequence in TNotD, Jenny is supposed to lock up before they go into their trance, but she forgets. Intruders break in, but because Jenny and Vastra are unconscious they can’t defend themselves and so Jenny is murdered. This is the spur for everybody to wake up, to save themselves. Pretty much all of our dream states in Doctor Who are focused on the possibility of dying in the outside world, but TNotD is the one which articulates the problem of EMP theory most specifically. Jenny, our John mirror, dies because her protector’s unconsciousness means that she can’t protect her wife. (Vastra’s Silurian abilities very much put her into the role of protector here – she could save Jenny where Jenny couldn’t save herself, and frequently does.)

Between the time travel and Jenny, then, TNoTD is probably the best framework we get set up for TAB. This came out only a few months before s3, in which EMP began, so it’s safe to say that these ideas are well-formed in Mofftiss’s heads at this stage. However, if we jump all the way back to 2010 and Amy’s Choice, we can see that this has been in the works for a lot longer.

The first point of note here is the casting of Toby Jones as the Dream Lord.

Casting the same actor to play dream merchants, knocking characters unconscious and altering their memories and psyches? The universe is rarely so lazy. Other mirrors in this episode are easy to pull out. The Doctor and Sherlock have long been read as mirrors for each other – characters who have existed for a long time and are constantly evolving through adaptation, super-intelligent loners, but in case that wasn’t obvious, Moffat went to a reasonable effort to style them very similarly when both tenures began.

Both of these are very conscious remodellings of old characters. Much was made of Matt Smith being the youngest Doctor ever (26!), and Cumberbatch’s youth set him apart from the Rathbone/Brett image in everybody’s heads. There’s something young and modern here – but both still dress like they’re slightly ‘out of their time’, which of course they are. Coming to terms with modernity is the central challenge that Sherlock is going to have to face. And then, of course, there’s the hair – instantly recognisable to the character in both cases, yet remarkably similar.

If the Doctor and Sherlock are mirrors, Amy as the Doctor’s companion should be linked to John. Amy ran away on the night before her wedding, and whilst she is reasonably happy with Rory in the long term of the series, this episode is about her making the decision between domesticity and adventure – a pretty clear link to John in s3 and 4. This episode is particularly important for TST however, because Amy is heavily pregnant in the domestic dream – but she is far from enthused, torn between domestic life with Rory and wanting to run off with the Doctor. However, I grant the similarity with Martin Freeman isn’t striking.

Do note, however, the similarly uncomfortable dynamic in both of these photos – hilarious.

The parallel dream!verses created broadly represent John’s dilemma from TST, and if we followed Amy’s Choice as it seems on the surface, we would end up with a pretty straight reading of TST – John spends too much time with Sherlock, they’re all in danger, Mary dies and John is suicidal because of it. Broadly speaking, this works – Rory is killed in the dream (with a really nice visual parallel to TST) and Amy crashes a bus and kills herself because she doesn’t want to live without Rory. Amy picks the domestic sphere and although it takes several more series to play out in full, this is broadly the direction the series takes us in.

In both scenes, Sherlock and the Doctor are left standing off to the right, unsure of what to do – if you watch both scenes in parallel, it’s striking. There’s a great article here talking about how the angle demonstrates the Doctor to be powerless for the first time, amongst other things. X Amy asks the Doctor what is the point of him, and John’s declaration that Sherlock has broken his vow carries similar weight – they were supposed to save them.

The title of the episode is Amy’s Choice, and this, we’re led to believe, is the moment when Amy chooses Rory. I don’t believe this. The Doctor/Rory conflict goes on for a lot longer than this, and it’s far too early in their first series to resolve it. It would leave a lot of later episodes without nearly so much tension. It’s true that Amy does have some agency in choosing – the science is questionable, as the Doctor says they’ve all tapped into some space LSD equivalent from an unmentioned offscreen adventure which has induced a mutual psychic trance, which means that we’re not sure how much agency each of the characters has in this dream. It’s not seeded, and so it sounds like a fudge – deliberately. Because a pseudoscientific explanation like this can’t explain the Dream Lord himself, Amy and Rory point out, and the Doctor admits that the Dream Lord, the architect of the dreams themselves, was actually the Doctor’s psyche. The space LSD sounded like a fudge – and Amy and Rory expose that it wasn’t just a fudge on Moffat’s part, it was a fudge on the Doctor’s part.

And, crucially, what was the first thing the Doctor said about domestic!dream, long before he realised he created it?

“Oh, you’re okay. Oh, thank God. I had a terrible nightmare about you two. That was scary. Don’t ask. You don’t want to know. You’re safe now.” X

Later, when asked how he knew that the Dream Lord was him, the Doctor merely says that no one else hates him so much. Domestic!verse, then, is a manifestation of everything that the Doctor dreads – it’s his worst nightmare, being conjured by his subconscious. That nightmare involves Amy’s suicide, Rory’s death because the Doctor can’t protect them – this maps pretty neatly onto EMP theory and TST. Although John doesn’t kill himself, he is rendered suicidal in the domestic nightmare that is left behind. As the previous chapter discusses, Sherlock not being able to protect John is definitely a nightmare, but the nightmare also maps onto reality – John is suicidal, but he’s struggling to work out why, so he has to construct it through a heterosexual lens. John’s potential death and love for Mary are the two things that form the worst nightmare in both dreams, and the nightmarish sense is highlighted in TST by the deep waters metaphor.

At the very end of the episode, the Doctor’s reflection is still the Dream Lord, suggesting that this isn’t some psychic drug phenomenon, an explanation which was frankly crap. The Doctor’s dark side is still inside him. This feels like an allegory for mental illness, and mental illness crops up aplenty in Moffat’s depictions of the Doctor, particularly the later we get – the seeds of it are here. Again, although Sherlock is being killed rather than killing himself, we have seen the suicidal side of him before and it is made clear in TAB that his opinion of himself is low. EMP s4 is about him coming to terms with how he views himself, and the cognitive dissonance that we see in Amy’s Choice is a nice separation of the psyche in two that foreshadows the immense splintering that’s going to come in EMP, but particularly between John, Mycroft and Eurus.

Another nice parallel between s4 and Amy’s Choice is the idea of predictability. Way before we know that this is the Doctor’s dream, the Doctor displays a remarkable ability to finish what the Eknodines say before they do, an ability which becomes an obvious hint in hindsight. Moving over to TLD, Sherlock has similarly ridiculous powers to predict what other people will do; because this underpins TLD, it jumps out as being something that rings very false to me, almost like a parody of who Sherlock Holmes is meant to be, and so we should pay attention to it. An uncanny ability to predict what others will do – yup, that’s a dream world.

One key similarity that Amy’s Choice has with EMP theory is that a false dream premise is set up in both. Amy’s Choice suggests that there are two worlds, and only one is a dream; their survival depends on recognising which is the real one. This is, of course, a lie – both worlds are dreamed, and that false premise is created to trap them in the Doctor’s psyche, presumably until the Doctor dies (although the threat is never clearly explained). TAB sets up a real world in the form of the modern day and a false Victorian age, but the supernatural graveyard scene is the first hint that the reality/dream binary is not real, just like Amy’s Choice. This one scene is not an anomaly – the chronology of the ‘man out of my time’ scene coming after Sherlock gets off the tarmac suggests that such mixing is still going on, and we shouldn’t trust our senses. In case that point needed hammering any more, however, Steven Moffat gave us A Good Man Goes To War.

This episode is the culmination of a series in which Amy is actually an almost-person, and Amy has been dreaming all of their adventures with a flesh avatar actually having them with Rory and the Doctor. Here it is Amy, rather than the Doctor, who is dreaming, which is a little ambiguous, but there are two key aspects that parallel Amy’s Choice. The first is that, like Amy’s Choice, the flesh avatar/dream person threat doesn’t just go away. These words of Madame Kovarian are extremely important:

Fooling you once was a joy, but fooling you twice, the same way? It’s a privilege. X

Exactly what the Dream Lord does in Amy’s Choice. Furthermore, although there’s a later meta in blindness across Doctor Who and Sherlock which at some stage really needs writing, many people have made the point that Sherlock is associated with blindness throughout series 4, and so we should note that the architect of the dream people/flesh avatars is Madame Kovarian, better known (and usually credited) as the Eyepatch Lady. However, there’s one other key message they’re giving us, which comes at the end of the clip linked above – the baby’s not real. Both Amy’s Choice and A Good Man Goes To War feature Amy’s child, and in both cases the plot revolves around the emotional recognition that that world isn’t real. Given that we know that Amy is a John mirror, and that her choice between the domestic and the adventurous is consistently paralleled to John’s choice in Sherlock, this is a pretty huge indicator that something is up with Rosie even if we didn’t know it already. Indeed, the cot and mobile that the child has in Amy’s Choice are similar to Rosie’s. That baby never stood a chance.

The last episode I want to briefly invoke is Last Christmas. If we’re looking for dreams, this episode really goes above and beyond. The premise is that there is an alien species called the dream crab which latches onto your face and dissolves your brain whilst putting you in a dream so that you don’t notice. To make this more confusing, it often places dreams within dreams to confuse you – whilst you’re dying. This episode came out on Christmas Day 2014, so a year after series 3 aired but before TAB, so in Sherlock-time we’ve just entered the mind palace. The title, Last Christmas, is pretty helpful here I think – of course it has relevance within the episode, but this episode should also get us thinking about what was going on this time last year, when Sherlock was airing.

We’re no stranger to dreams within dreams at this stage, but it’s interesting how the saving-the-companion vibe is still going strong here. Ostensibly, that’s not what the episode is about at all – it’s a classic everyone-trapped-on-a-base-working-together episode, but the last five minutes tacked on the end suggests that it’s far more about the Doctor’s relationship with Clara, the episode’s companion, than one might think. In this clip (X) the Doctor thinks he’s broken out of the final dream but goes back to visit Clara and realises that she is now old, and that he’s missed her life. It culminates in him apologising for getting it wrong, for not coming for her in time, for failing her; we get more of this with Clara’s actual death later in the show, but given that it’s a kid’s show and Christmas, this scene is a touch lighter than that. It’s then that Father Christmas comes in to tell the Doctor that he’s still dreaming, he can still save her – and his first word when he wakes up is “Clara”. None of the others trapped in the dream have needed his help to wake from the vision and survive; Clara, who as the companion is our John mirror, specifically needs saving, and the Doctor needs to wake up from his dream within a dream to do that.

Nick Frost’s appearance as Father Christmas gave us all a good laugh, but he was also used as the indicator that the world we were perceiving was a dream world. This was made a bit of a joke of early in the episode – in a sci-fi world like this, are we seriously looking for what’s not realistic as the code to crack the dream? The exact same joke is made in Amy’s Choice, and here we’re hitting a pretty silly version of the show where they joke that just about the only character who can’t be real is Father Christmas. These hints about looking for what’s not real, though, should be taken as just that – hints. From the emergence of ‘something’s fucky’ theories early on in s4, this has been the abiding reasoning for the various forms of EMP theory that have sprung up, and they’re not wrong. However, if I had to put my money on a figure like Santa Claus, something iconic which functions as a kind of dream thermometer, I’d be guessing:

You were there before me. The fucky skull that glows, almost like a warning that this is too mad. Crucially, in Last Christmas they explain that Santa is a warning that your brain is sending you, picking the most unbelievable thing possible so that you know you’re trapped, dying in your brain. Santa Claus? Well, it’s a kid’s show, and it’s Christmas. But if I were picking a dream siren to tell me I was dying, I like to think that my subconscious would pick the glowing skull on the wall; without explanation, it’s an awful lot more direct.

There is more reference than necessary made to dream crabs making one blind, and between Madame Kovarian and the blind Doctor in the later dream episode Extremis, there’s a lot more to unpack there, but I’m going to leave that for sometime down the line, or for someone else to jump into if they would like. I also want to throw out a thought I haven’t quite come to terms with yet – the elephant in the room in Amy’s Choice. Arwel Wyn Jones would be proud of the script for Amy’s Choice – twice, it mentions the elephant in the room, and so I feel I have to do the same. The first time, you could blink and miss it – the Doctor calls pregnant Amy ‘elephanty’. But the second time, we get this exchange:

DOCTOR: Now, we all know there’s an elephant in the room.

AMY: I have to be this size, I’m having a baby.

DOCTOR: No, no. The hormones seem real, but no. Is nobody going to mention Rory’s ponytail? You hold him down, I’ll cut it off? X

The elephant in the room – that the baby’s not real? Possibly, but not what we normally take it to mean. Rory’s ponytail also has not shaving for Sherlock Holmes vibes, but again it’s not quite concrete in my mind. These little bits at the end aren’t quite tied up, and I would love to hear what people have to say about them. That, however, is for another day! The next chapter in this series will be jumping back into episode-by-episode analysis with TLD – see you there.

#emp theory #wholock #tjlc #thewatsonbeekeepers #meta #my meta #mine #bbc sherlock #chapter eight: dream a little dream of me #tjlc is real #johnlock #sherlock holmes #doctor who #steven moffat #mark gatiss

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thatoneweirdnerdygirl · 4 years ago

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Template for High Tier Pastas and Original Characters:

Basics

Real Name: Athys Thomas-Wright

Nicknames: none

Pasta/Proxy Name: none

Operator: slenderman

Age: 19

Gender: female

Birthday: 10/27/?????

Species/Race: human

Sexuality: pansexual

Personality

Temperament: normally calm

Morals/Ethical Beliefs:????????

Hobbies: drawing, training,

Habits: plays with hair, imitates poses that she saw her friends do (just normally, she could be talking to someone and her stance is like Kanaya’s pesterquest sprite), ticks

Mental/Physical/Emotional Disorders/Illnesses: ADD, anxiety, depression, Ptsd, mild autism

Likes: animals, shiny things she finds in the forest, skulls, books, rain, baking sweets

Dislikes: fancy clocks, Lord English, loud noises,

Fears: spiders, lord English

Strengths: has most of Jane Crocker’s recipes memorized, fighting skills

Weaknesses(2 Minumum): Sally and nepeta’s ‘puppy dog’ eyes, social interaction.

Interpersonal Relationships

Mother Father: Timothy ‘Tim’ Wright (Masky)

Father: Brian Thomas (Hoodie)

Siblings: Toby Rogers (brother like figure/adopted)

Other relatives: none

Friends: EJ, BEN, Toby

Dating: none

Relationship Status: crushing on EJ

Physical Appearance

Height: 5’5

Weight: 122

Hair: brown, thick, gets tangled easily, long

Eyes: hazel

Skin tone: olive/tan

Outfit(Photos also accepted): t-shirt, leggings, tennis shoes, jacket (constantly cold)

Accessories: none really

Markings/Birthmark/Body Paint: scars

Abilities

Weapons/Tools: 2x3 trident

Supernatural abilities: basically a god, could be considered OP, after killing her friends she took on their god-tier traits (read more here)

Skills: also picked up some skills from her dead friends not to be OP, but because she was bored.

Extra(Optional)

Theme Song: The Pheonix by fall out boy

Voice Claim: My own voice?

Catchphrase: none

Killing style: doesn’t really kill, only if she has to, typically impaling the victim with trident.

Background

Place of birth: Ectobiology Lab

Age at Death: which death?

Chronological Age: 19

Backstory: ‘Born’ via ectobiology to Tim and Brian, after two days, she disappeared from their lives altogether. She grew up in a ‘normal’ non-killer family in a reality where the pastas were fictional characters. {redacted event. Little is known. Aka Author cannot figure out a good storyline for this part}. But unfortunately, that plan was not able to stop the creation of Lord English. Running out of time and ideas, she gathered the dream bubbles along with creating new ones. She made a replica of the tumor, a large bomb to wipe out null sessions. in the guise of dueling practice, she killed her friends, making sure they did not revive. When English arrived, her plan was to kill herself, attempt to kill English, and destroy the universe. This backfired though and as the bomb detonated, she was warped to ‘Slender Forest’. Her original universe. On the brink of death, she stumbled her way to the mansion, where she was healed and used as a hideout. Unbeknown that people lived there. Found soon after by Toby, who interrogated her, brought her to slenderman. Requesting advanced medical care, she was taken to the creeps who studied some sort of medicine and treated. Blood was drawn and DNA was taken. A week later the results came back. Athys, who never received a copy of the report, was confused when Tim and Brian were crying and hugging her (Toby calls it a ‘really weird yet emotional family reunion’) and Tim apologizing for his aggressive and hostile behavior the week leading up to it.

Extra Notes For Reviewer:

‘Athys’ was actually supposed to be a fake name, and her real name was my original name, later I just liked the idea of that being my internet alias.

Because the author is not good with names, she used Fantasy name Genorator.com to help choose a name.

‘Athys’ is from the Sylph name Generator under female, this is a reference to Athys/the creator’s god tier, SYLPH of LIFE.

The idea of Toby being adopted by Tim and Brian actually came from a cosplayer known as ‘Toby’ (master_of_cringe on Instagram, Fnaf_Creepypasta on tictok).

When crossing dimensions/universes the dead from the CP realm got added to the Earth dream bubble, meaning Jay, Alex, Amy, Lyra, and others are there, all dead can actively travel the bubbles hopping from one to another. Toby’s dad is there too, currently getting “SW33T R1GHT3OUS JUST1C3”, meaning both the Pyropes and Maryams are making sure he “Never co+mmits such ho+rrendo+us actio+ns again”.

On Alternia all trolls from friendsim and Hiveswap ‘live’ as ghosts, this includes the ancestors as well along with lussi, both Joey and Jude live on Alternia as well.

On the extended zodiac, her lunar sway is Derse and a potential hero of Life.

Technically her ‘true’ sign would be Scorsces, sign of the Allevaiator. But both the author and her claim that ‘she is much closer to a Fuchsia than a Cerulean, her true sign then becomes True Pisces, sign of the Cleric.

In any game she is usually the healer/support, in DND, her class is a cleric.

Very few people know about her crush on EJ, they are Toby, Tim, Brian, Nepeta, and Meulin.

Both Meulin and Nepeta have it as an OTP on their shipping wall.

Nepeta was actually the one who reached out to athys, telling her “:33 < i updated my shipping wall, mew are meow on it in the red quadrant with jack.”

As a joke toby got her this shirt for Christmas/Gristmas/twelfth peregree, she rarely wears it.

a character sheet for an OC? Self insert? i dunno

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sweetescapeartist · 4 years ago

Text

Since there is barely anybody that looks at this blog now, imma say some things now that I'll reveal later on Twitter (maybe). Also this is gonna be a long read so you can read if you wanna or not. Its kinda a rant.

I started this blog because I liked Dragon Ball and wanted to share my ideas and things I liked with other fans. I enjoyed that. Krillin is my favorite character so I wanted to show him some love & maybe get more ppl to like him. Then eventually I started drawing nsfw art.

I began doing so because there's a great lack of Krillin positive nsfw art. Eventually on my Twitter, I gathered a following that like to see Krillin getting some love. I also went from sfw with my OC Tobi to drawing nsfw. The problem I have with both is that I don't have time as much to draw what is like to. Nor do I care as much for nsfw art.

So this is what I'm trying to say. I have other things I want to do. I draw for free and accept some requests. I'm not getting paid and I feel like I'm wasting my time somewhat. The positive is that more ppl have come to like Krillin and hopefully more will later. There aren't a lot of nsfw artist that promote Krillin. Its all about Saiyans and I understand why. I like Saiyans too. But its always at the expense of human characters that I like especially Krillin.

"Vegeta got beat up by 18 so he deserves to dick her down"

"18 should be with anyone else but Krillin. She should be with a Saiyan."

I'm seriously tired of it, ya know? Its just such negativity. I've tried to combat it with positivity and that does work but that's not what most ppl seem to care about or see. Krillin means a lot to many of us. Yes, we know he's a fictional character but he's someone we can latch on to and see ourselves in. How he constantly tries hard and doesnt give up despite having low self-esteem. He is very relatable and an encouraging character. So understand that it frustrates me and others when ppl keep making fun of a character we love just because of memes that are very innacurate, he's short, he's married to what most of the fandom consider the most attractive female in the series (so they're jealous of him to an extent), or when ppl downright degrade his character.

Why? Why treat a positive character so negatively? Ppl make fun of Krillin because he has PTSD but won't make fun of Future Trunks. They trash his marriage and make it seem as if 18 doesn't care for him because he has the most stable marriage in the series. They call his daughter an ugly troll but want to see her in hentai with some Saiyan. Such hypocrisy. That's why I've drawn some of the things I have.

There are drawings I've done that I haven't posted because they are so disrespectful to characters like Vegeta or Gohan. And I love Gohan so that's a reason why I never posted them. I'm a positive person but it seems many ppl only respond to negative. So here's what I've done/plan to do.

I have some comics planned to draw along with some pictures. The pictures vary on what they will be, but the comics... Here's what they are.

I will be making NTR comics starring Krillin but he is the main character. There are too many of him being portrayed as a wimp or punk that lets everybody get with 18 besides himself. Or its done behind his back. So I'm going to have Krillin taking other character's ladies from them. Yeah its negative in a way but also positive for Krillin. Maybe this can get the point across to ppl? Idk.

But I will make a comic where Krillin gets Videl, Bulma, & Chichi. I will make others where he gets into "situations" with characters like Kale & Caulifla, Cheelai, & others. I also plan to make a comic about Roshi basically being cucked by Krillin (you'll have to wait and see to understand that one). So that's what I have planned. Hentai comics with Krillin as the lead. Its unpopular and that is why I do it.

I'll make other more positive comics too. Like a comic about Krillin getting advice then marrying 18. Ill draw stories with my OC Tobi as he lives with Krillin and his family & dates Marron. It will focus on the Chestnut family and have father/son moments with Krillin & Tobi. And ill introduce other characters too.

But here's the big thing that contradicts everything I said prior. I don't want to draw DB anymore. The fan base has kinda wore me out but so has the direction the series has gone. In bored of the writing for DBS and it being solely about Goku & Vegeta when there are other characters like Gohan & Piccolo. Its a fighting anime so why would we only want to see 2 characters? God ki was introduced so that's an easy way for everyone to get stronger and involved. But its too corporate now and lazy. And the DBS manga... so terrible. Toyotaro is a much better artist than I am and not to talk bad about him but I think DragonGarowLee is much better for the position that Toyo. DGL knows how to choreograph fights better and understands Toriyama's comedy better. Toyo doesn't know how to write the characters. He makes Goku an uncaring idiot, makes Vegeta a poorly written Goku clone, makes fun of Krillin for no reason except he doesn't like him (seriously! He has called him ugly, weak, scared, useless, & had ppl like Goku and Roshi insult Krillin. Wtf?!), he doesnt know how to create a unique character without ripping off a character Tori has done much better. And the fanboys (& girls)

Gosh! The Vegeta fans are great but they can be crazy sometimes. They ignore all the evil Vegeta has done and ignore his flaws as if he's a perfect angel. Vegeta's flaws is what makes him such an interesting character! And him being different than Goku is a good thing. But there's a weird and false understanding of his character. "Vegeta is a better dad than Goku" sure. Vegeta just knocked up Bulma then left her as. Single mother and didn't care if she or his infant son died, never hugged his son until he was 10+ yrs old & didn't love Bulma until sometime during the 7 yr time skip. He was a terrible person in a terrible relationship! THEN he became a better person and actually loving to his family. That change is what make Vegeta great. Not his power level or how many kills he has or "cool moments."

That same twisted misunderstanding of Vegeta is similar to the misunderstanding of Krillin. Ppl think he's weak and a coward. But he fights aliens & beings stronger than him and even injures stronger opponents. He smiles in the face of danger and even gets excited during fights but is smart enough not to risk others lives. Krillin nearly killed Nappa, he would've finished Vegeta with the Spirit Bomb if Yajirobe didn't alert Vegeta that Krillin was attacking him, smart enough not to fight on Namek when they're outnumbered, took on aliens stronger than him, outsmarted them & escaped, protected both Gohan & Bulma, more skilled than Ginyu when he was in Goku's body, sacrificed his safety for others like Dende & Gohan, (for real tho, Vegeta didn't see 2nd form Freeza move but Krillin was fast enough to throw Dende out of the way and sacrifice his life. Krillin saw Freeza attacking and Vegeta who is supposed to be stronger did not see Freeza move!), he was the first person to actually damage Freeza and then taunted the Emperor of the Universe, he's always there for his friends, knew better than everybody else that if the androids defeated Vegeta & Trunks then he shouldn't get involved. He saved 18 who was innocent in this timeline, helped 16, wished for the bombs out of 17 & 18 so they could live normally. Then fast forward to DBS he fought to protect his family & planet & 18 calls him "cool", he conquers his PTSD and gained new power he always had but laid dormant, he defeated someone who actually hurt 18. & there are things he's done I didn't even mention.

And ppl constantly saying Goku is a bad dad. He's waaaaaaaay better of a father compared to Vegeta if were being honest.

I guess I've seen a lot of the negative side of the fandom and its disappointing. So I'm at a point where I kinda don't care. I'll make my comics but after I'm done with what I have planned, I'm just done with DB. I won't stop drawing entirely but I won't draw any requests unless I feel like it, I won't keep up with much DB news and content. I just want to come back to Tumblr, draw Krillin fanart, draw Tobi, write some rewrites, draw Tobi's story & that's it. Ill be a part of Chestnut Fest every year tho. That is one of the greatest things to come out of my time on Tumblr & Twitter. So big thanks to @chestnutisland!

But basically I'm tired of the fandom and I still enjoy parts of it but I want to do my own thing. So I'll partially be a part of the DB fandom but not in it too deep. Look forward to what I have in store. If some of my future content isn't to your liking, hopefully you ccan find something else I've done that you'll enjoy. But its still been fun & I've enjoyed the ppl I've talked too & friends I've made.

#my thoughts #dragon ball #dragon ball z #dragon ball super #rant #krillin #comics #my plans

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ladylynse · 6 years ago

Note

Hello, I apologize if you have already answered what I am about to ask. When you write a story how do you develop the plot? And do you ever think about plot holes? If so how do you prevent those?

Hi, Anon. Thanks for asking!

I start with my idea. Sometimes it’s as simple as “it would be hilarious if Maddie saw Phantom get hit with the Booo-merang when she knows it reacts to her son”. Sometimes it’s a paragraph or two or ten of random ideas smushed together(technical term)--this is more or less the stage my DPxML fic is at. There’s a lot of me going, “Oooh, this would be fun” or “ooh, or I could do this”, and I’ll actually talk to myself like that in my notes. It’s long, ramble-y, grammatically incorrect, and basically the equivalent of me brainstorming some sort of initial idea, the root of the story. (I’m already rambling, so the rest of the answer will be under a read more.)

I then start doing a bit of research on stuff I’ll need to write the story. Depending on how long I’ve been in a fandom, this can be very basic stuff (people’s names) to more specific things (what day does Adrien have fencing?) and will always include some sort of cheat sheet for myself if the characters use slang (like Randy. And Jake.). If I come up with any ideas--or potential ideas--while doing that, I jot them down. Even if it’s a couple lines of dialogue or a way to end a scene, at some point, if I can write that scene into the story (eg Gwaine saw Merlin’s eyes glow gold.) All of this starts in my initial fic document and eventually gets moved to a scrap file associated with that fic. Do not delete ideas/scenes/dialogue/anything even if you aren’t currently using it. You might be able to recycle them into a different fic or later in the current story.

Then I start writing. To see if it’ll work. Even if I don’t have a very clear idea of where things are going yet, and certainly no idea of the end. Sometimes I need to try a few different ways to start a story (Reflections went through various iterations. Mockingbird and my DPxML fic are still in that stage) before I find one that seems to flow. That’s when I look at the situation the characters are in (or about to be in) and try to figure out their actions and reactions to the stuff I’m putting them through. And then I try to let that drive the plot. It’s something I’ve gotten better at over time--making it less obvious that the characters are doing that because that’s the way I want the story to go--but my best plots tend to be character-driven. (This may or may not help you avoid some plot holes. Depends on what the plot hole is. It’ll hopefully help you cut down on the “well, why didn’t they do that like they always do?” sort.)

If you need a character to do something that’s not in character for your plot to go the way you want, you need to give them a reason to act out of character (eg Danny not telling Jake his secret because there’s a paranormal studies/ghost hunters convention in town--and because Jazz keeps ragging on him). If you can’t give them that reason, then you need to find another way to achieve what you want to happen without them doing that--or change your initial idea for the plot. Even if you start with a plan in mind, you will probably have to tweak it at some point. This is normal. You’re just adapting to your story. Sometimes, a story will get away on you--it’ll write itself in a direction you weren’t expecting or past the point where you’d initially figured it would end (hello, Treachery)--but, at least in my experience, if it’s the characters driving the story that way, and you let them, it can actually turn out to be a better story than what you’d initially planned. (Again: Treachery. The unplanned part ie second half is much better than the planned part.) It’s just a matter of keeping them reasonably in character so that things don’t get too out of hand.

I only think about plot holes once I notice them. Honestly, I’ve gotten good at patching. If something doesn’t occur to me, I can’t prevent writing it in. It’s not so much plot hole prevention for me as adaptation of the story to make it more acceptable once I realize it’s there.

Sometimes, when I’m editing a chapter or rereading something to remind myself of the story thus far/what’s happened, I’ll see something that doesn’t work that I’d missed before. (Random note on the ‘remembering what’s happened’ bit: if you plan a long fic taking place over multiple days, do yourself a favour and make a timeline for yourself in your scrap file. So much easier. That’ll allow you to make accurate references like “last week” and “three days ago”. I did this with Shattered and regretted nothing.) Once I notice a plot hole, I consider the damage. Have I posted something where it’s already stated? If I haven’t, repairing it typically isn’t that hard, though of course it depends on what it is--you just need to give it some justification, shaky or otherwise, or do a bit of rewriting to patch it up. Once it’s firmly written in and you don’t notice it until chapters later, your best bet is writing in justification for it later. In some cases, this involves you turning your plot hole into a plot point. It may be a small plot point or it might be a significant one that will actually shift your intended story a little bit. I did this a lot with my earlier Doctor Who crossovers. I got quite good at retroactive patching there, and my plot hole turned into foreshadowing, although in all fairness all of those involved time travel to one degree or another so that made things a bit easier; I didn’t have to stick to the rules of the actual universe.

So here’s a plot hole of mine that’s recent that you might have noticed if you’ve read Down the Rabbit Hole: the note on Toby’s bed. Why...why are they communicating that way? Why go to the trouble of sending a note to him that way? Why not just phone or text or email? I missed that initially. And now I see it. And now I have justification (that hasn’t yet appeared in-fic) for not communicating by normal 21-century means. Depending on how things go, it might be hinting at something bigger, or it might just be a small one-off thing.

Now, in case you’re interested in my disaster of a ‘planning paragraph’, this was how Masks began--and please bear in mind I’d seen ten episodes, subbed, at this point and wasn’t entirely sure on what stuff was called:

Blademaster. Fights with knives. Unless it’s someone fromAdrien’s fencing class; the transformation could make that thing deadly sharp.That’s better, actually. Go with that. Marinette actually beats Adrien to thetransformation because she was skulking around waiting for him to come outafter class/lesson/club/whatever it is is over (to just ‘happen to be there’and try to ask him to catch a movie or something in casual conversation) andheard the commotion, while he got caught up in the fleeing people beforemanaging to sidestep and transform. Ladybug hasn’t managed to get the swordaway from Blademaster in the meantime and nearly gets the cord of her luckycharm thing cut for her trouble. Chat Noir shows up and pretty much fences withhis quarterstaff thing until Blademaster starts to cheat, at which point hevaults over him and tags him from behind, hoping the distraction is enough forLadybug to free herself from whatever she ended up in. Evil moth guy isdemanding the gems, so Blademaster starts trying to take a slice out of ChatNoir, who evades rather than parries, trying to draw Blademaster awayfrom…something…and Ladybug takes over when he’s backed into a corner and needsto turn to scale the wall. She yells at him to get the something away if he’sfigured out what Blademaster is after—she hasn’t, yet; just that the blade isprobably what the akuma is in—and Adrien, being there for the transformation,knows exactly what happened and can oblige. But he isn’t long out the door whenhe hears Ladybug scream; Blademaster had either grabbed another blade orsomehow acquired something sharp—I’ve never fenced; I’m not entirely sure howsharp those things are—and while avoiding one blow, she jolted off the courseof the other and got her earlobe sliced off/the gem ripped out. Blademaster hasa gem—moth guy is rejoicing and demanding he now get the other one—andMarinette, with one hand clamped to her ear, has to get out of there despitethe pain because as much as she needs to get Tikki (?) back, she doesn’t wantto risk her identity and—more importantly—she’s not sure how much longer shecan remain upright. She hits the change room or office or something, aiming fora first aid kit or at least a wad of toilet paper, and Chat Noir is shocked theLadybug is gone. He manages to defeat Blademaster and retrieve her gem, but itis inactive, and while he manages to catch the dark butterfly in a fencingmask, he doesn’t have the means to banish its evil OR to erase the ill that hashappened here; that’s Ladybug’s turf. But how is he supposed to return hergem—return her—when he doesn’t knowwho she is, and his own transformation is wearing off? (Marinette will bepulling a new hairstyle or modelling a hat or just plain skipping school—ifthere IS school; what day was fencing class again?—and getting Alya to coverfor her with her parents on the pretence that she’s trying to work up thecourage to do something with Adrien, perhaps, and she really doesn’t want tohave that conversation with her mom,when in reality she’s just trying to find Tikki. Not sure what happened withTikki, exactly. Needs to regain energy, which Plagg (?) would know and informChat Noir accordingly, but with them trying to keep secrets from each other….)

and that will give way to notes like this:

Tikki, PlaggMiracle Stones/MiraculousHawkmoth

Ladybug – lucky charm at end, always ends up with somethingshe doesn’t know what to do with at first and then figures it out; yo-yocompact; BOTH EARRINGS for the miracle stones…but maybe ripping one out woulddeactivate the other. She is the ONLY ONE who can cleanse the akumas. Chat Noir – (allergic to feathers), ancient destruction/cataclysm; batonYeah, if that ring comes off, the Kwami is forced out and the detransformationis right awayPlagg is SUCH a glutton, he’ll even chase after stuff he thinks is food

----

Okay. Adrien picks up Tikki and Miracle Stone, so Marinettefinds nothing and tries to track down Chat Noir, but Tikki, once recovered, canjust tell Adrien who Marinette is. Problem solved. That’s not fun. Unless Tikkidecides to respect Marinette’s wishes?

Or maybe they each find one earring, and Tikki isn’t wellbecause they’re divided?

Adrien and Marinette can both find nothing—Marinette because she hasn’t achance to look, Adrien because he doesn’t know TO look—but unless Tikki’strapped there, she gotta be able to get out.

Wait, Adrien’s chivalrous. He’ll respect Ladybug’s wishes.Even if he hates it

----

If Plagg can’t see, when they transform, Adrien won’t beable to see, either.

“What do you mean, I can’t transform?”“If we transform, this thing would get sucked in, too, and you won’t be able to do anything.” [lines from the Rogercop episode]

Statue set on green stone (granite?) with the top edgejutting out about chin height for Adrien

-------------------------Nope, gonna have to go back and change Blademaster’s restoration to Phillipebecause that DOES seem to be after Ladybug’s restoration. [turns out I was right the first time with this, but I’d checked with someone else and they’d thought no one changed back until after the Miraculous Ladybug bit, so I’d changed my initial plans here, and a few months later we got an episode that confirmed that, no, the magic link just needs to be broken, things don’t need to be fixed yet.]

#ladylynse #asks #my writing #writing advice #kinda #the don't delete your scrapped ideas is writing advice #my writing advice #for what it's worth #Anonymous

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novantinuum · 6 years ago

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A Link Beyond Memory (ch 2/4)

AO3

Fandom: Trollhunters, 3Below

Rating: T (for minor language in future chapters)

Words: 600~

Pairings: Jim/Claire, but not focus

Summary: Shortly after the events of the Eternal Night, memories of a day that never happened somehow resurface in Jim’s mind in his sleep- and upon recalling the friendship he and Aja formed, he decides to pursue that connection again. Slice of life, and kinda a slow burn friendship reunion. A hybrid of prose and chat fic (to be seen in later chapters.)

Previous chapter

Next chapter

Note: Unfortunately, fic circulation online is getting harder and harder as the months pass. Please, if you read to the end and enjoy, consider helping me out by reblogging this post, or even commenting/giving kudos over on AO3. Thanks! :D

Chapter 2: Transit

Transit- The instant when a celestial object crosses the meridian, thus reaching the highest point in the sky.

T: hhhh miss ya already. tbh i dont know what im supposed to do this summer now ahah

T: i was all looking forward to hangin with you and claire and everyone else in trollmarket and now…

T: i mean i still have aaarrrgghh. and darci and eli too i guess but

T: really starting to wish i came along.

T: i know you said to watch over the town while youre gone and i know thats a good point but honestly i just wanna be with you

T: jim?

T: yoooo ? did u die

T: god i hope not after all the end of the world chaos thatd be really anticlimactic

J: Sorry no I lost signal for a bit!! Miss you too gahhh.

T: pls know if you so much as say the word ill crawl on the first airplane i can find and launch myself directly at your face

T: jim liSTEN jim im not even kidding

T: screw arcadia

T: if you need me im there

J: Omg I’ll defo keep that in mind

T: ..jk dont screw arcadia tho i love this place. also its already screwed enough at this point so

T: hey but you think merlin could make me another warhammer for my growing arsenal?

J: Yeah I think he could be easily convinced.

J: He’s kinda sucking up to me now hahah

J: He already made Claire a sorta necklace amulet to store her armor so a magic hammer should be no problem

T: awesomesauceee

J: Any particular reason lol?

T: i dunno i just think itd look wicked cool to double wield, like general orzan from gun robot three. also lets be real after all the crap he put us through we deserve S W A G

J: I’ll ask tomorrow. Hey quick Q for you though

J: Well okay not exactly quick

J: It’s actually a long story but-

T: ye?

J: Do you happen to have Aja’s number or anything?

J: We took her and her bro down to the Janus Order, lightning in a bottle, remember her?

T: ye i know- lively! and uhhh don’t think i do? havent really talked to them since why

J: I get the strangest sense we’re supposed to know them more than we do. Had a really weird dream but it felt more like a lost memory. Think it’s an amulet thing, like that alternate timeline it made me live through once?

T: huh funky

J: Also supposedly according to the dream/memory both Aja and Krel are… not from Earth?

T: dude no offense but are you sure it wasnt just a normal dream

J: Seriously.?

J: Merlin turned me into a fucking TROLL and aliens are where you decide to draw the line

T: okay yknow thats fair

T: i take that back

T: okay so,, aja and krel are MAYBE aliens. got that. go onnn

J: What I saw honestly felt so real, I swear. It was two weeks ago, at the science fair. We were fighting a troll in the planetarium with them, and the troll kept combining magic with some alien tech, which kept reversing everyone back to the beginning of the day, like a time loop or something. But I could remember everything bc of the amulet. Aja remembered bc of some energy shield she had. We lived through the same day almost a dozen times.

T: whoa…

J: And get this- in some of those loops we even went to their house and got to look around inside their spaceship! But none of us are supposed to recall any of it bc technically the entire day never happened? It’s how we defeated the troll, that bit’s a little fuzzy. A lot of technobabble sorry.

T: goddd out of all the days to forget huh

J: Right??

J: I guess… if she remembered all of this before I’m kinda curious if she still remembers now too. If it really happened. We were friends in that memory. It’d be nice to maybe get to know her again, y’know?

T: okay you’re prob gonna hate me for suggesting this but i THINK steve has her number

T: bc i was talking to darci and she said that mary told her that aja and steve are like, a thing now

T: a Thing thing

T: i believe her exact words were ‘staja’ ?

J: Oh my god how’d that happen is he even capable of proper flirting

T: well if shes an alien like you think then maybe she doesn’t know what human flirting looks like

J: Haha maybe indeed. I’ll go talk to him thanks

J: G’night Tobes love ya

T: night buddy <3

(my notes from ao3:)

Admission, I had far too much fun with the text format. I've never attempted anything like it, but I especially wanted to create unique "character voices" that extended into the way they each type- which was a cool challenge.

I imagined Toby as the sort of person who types out his thoughts far too quickly to care about punctuation, and IMO if Trollhunters was set just a year later (I generally just imagine it all set in 2016) he'd be keymashing. Jim is more of a full sentence type of guy who never turned off auto capitalization.

ALSO, a note on the contact photos- (Jim's which I directly took from a screenshot from Claire's phone, and Toby's which I edited from some 2D concept art)- That's the photo Jim uses for Toby's contact, and I imagine there's probably some inside joke where Jim took a really derpy photo of him at one point and they laughed so hard about it that he immortalized it as his contact. Jim's personal contact photo is... well, as this all takes place post s3 of course, a rather sad reminder of his loss of humanity. He can't bother himself to change it currently.

Future chapters will likely be a mix of text AND prose, instead of one or the other. Hope you enjoyed!

#trollhunters #jim lake jr #toby domzalski #trollhunters fanfiction #my writing stuff

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pretty-little-liars-hints · 7 years ago

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#PLLENDGAME finale predictions

Please dont let marlene and friends “confirmations” keep u closed minded.

So they confirmed a time jump btwn 719 and 720.. bullshit They also confirmed toby was “pure evil, bad intentions” and no they wont go the transgender route

They cant make a year later and the girls dont know who A is and Ezria still arent married. It will most likely be after the reveal and answers then we get a time jump and see where the girls end up.

Mona is seriously ill. She ends up back in an institution face 2 face with A. Im so afraid she will die

Aria finds out something devastating about Ezra. Clearly she is the most distraught from all the girls. Even goes as far as to say they cant marry. Too obvious to make him A. Could he be the sperm donor? Ie. Emisons baby daddy. He had a sick obsession with Alison, the book, the lair (with the creepy ass blown up photos), dating her. Mona was on track to find baby daddy and we know Ezra is tech savvy. Is this his sick way of fulfilling an even sicker Alison fantasy. After all his masters degree in American literature will help him with dead bodies (wtf was that about)

Melissa and Wren are back.

Wren.. sweet baby wren. I stand by my theory that he is Bethanys brother. He could know mona hit his sister and shoot mona. We know he plays a big part in the end. After all isnt bethany the basis of everything? It was her dead season 1 after all. Perhaps he knew about her drawings, jessica, mary, spencer, melissas involvement in ultimately killing her (dirt in lungs)

Melissa is here to please fans. Did she know about Mary? Spencer? ABSOLUTELY. “I did this to protect u spencer, since before it started.” Even garrett mentioned protecting Spencer on the train.

Jenna can see. We see that in the promo. But the question is, for how long?

Im all for a TWINCER storyline but how much more unrealistic can we get. There was already a hidden sibling (charles) a hidden twin (mary) they cant do that again. Spencers moodswings addictions and odd behaviour could just be genetics. Her lineage has a history of mental illness. Take Ali for example, remember when she had a bloody lip? Crying and opening up then BAM back to bitchy Ali! Doesnt mean much except they have some issues.

If there is a twin i am all for it! I love Spencers character and Troians acting so i will take it… but i highly doubt it.

I feel like they went big, outside the box with charles… cece… charlotte. This reveal needs to be simple, clear, devastating.

Paige- no way. People will be pissed Lucas- accused too many times. Cant be him Melissa- already a killer and made to look like A too much already. Too obvi Wren- will be involved in something but isnt A Parents- is nothing sacred Toby- we need spoby for endgame Caleb- we need haleb for endgame Ezra- too obvious from the promos Charlotte- cant bring another person back from the dead Bethany- same as charlotte Who is left guys???

Jason.

My sweet, gorgeous Jason. He is the center of all things major on pll.

- he is a dilaurentis (raised) - he is a hastings - NAT club - odd scar possibly from Halloween train never explained. - always travelling - has the money to be A - slept with Ashley Marin yet A never told Hanna that yet? p.s. he slept with pastor teds girlfriend.. charlottes birth father, was it revenge?? - dated charlotte - really close to charles. - Jenna was almost killed in his house - gave Spencer a bag he found of alis things (even though mayas family owned the house alis shit was still around) - he likes Arias pink hair. In the dollhouse she was forced to dye it. - liked aria. Notice A always tried to break Ezria up and Aria was not physically harmed by A (wilden and meredith hurt her) - NAT was his idea.

- cece and jasons breakup was complicated… ya learning your girlfriend is your long lost brother/cousin is complicated. - he paid lucas to find out who stole the body and acted shady ever since that day. Possibly when he joined Charlottes game.

In the vault there were 2 ppl. One was watching Ali on screen the other stood there and looked at Emily when the girls burnt down the vault. The prom scene?? Why the hell would a transgender female dress like a man??? Spencer even said something seemed familiar like a cousin. Lmfao jason is her brother and her cousin.

Think about it. AD wanted to know who killed Charlotte. Why? Archer loved her, Mary was her mom, why would AD care? Another family member

Cast members said fans from day 1 will be pleased, it answers a lot of questions, you can go back to thr beginning and see hiw it happenned. Even if he joined Charlottes game. He has always been shady from day 1! If i had to guess right now. It would be Jason . Just putting him in the hoodie answers so many questions without actually answering them. Did he learn something back in his NAT days to fuel this? He started having people film for him watching these girls... over the years it escalated to this sick game of life or death with people working for him... watching and playing with these girls

“I never would’ve guessed it was you”

I would be very happy with this. Tell me what you guys think!!

#pll #pretty little liars #pll 7b #pll endgame

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brigdh · 8 years ago

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Reading Wednesday

Color of Love by Anita Stansfield. A Victorian romance starring Amala, an Indian woman adopted by a white family and raised in England, and Henry, a white Englishman recently returned from India. I can't figure out how to talk about this book without spoilers, so if you really want to be surprised, skip the rest of the review. Otherwise I'm going to talk about everything right up until the very end. Despite their instant attraction and obvious suitability for one another, Amala refuses to marry Henry because she's unwilling to deal with the difficulties of an interracial marriage in their stuffy country town. She vows instead to be a stylish independent single woman like her aunt the world traveler, and insists that Henry move on and forget their relationship. Which he does – by marrying her (white, adopted) sister. Amala is at first dismayed, but the years pass and she settles happily into traveling around Europe and doing good. And then her sister develops cancer and calls her home. The sister has one last wish before she dies: for Amala and Henry to promise that they'll marry one another. It turns out that despite their efforts to keep their former relationship a secret, the sister has known all along and doesn't hold it against them. She dies, and Amala and Henry go through a lengthy grieving period, their healing impeded by their resentment against the sister for forcing the promise out of them. They only are able to move out of the mourning period when they finally acknowledge how angry they are at her. Amala realizes that her exposure to the greater world, as well as the inclusion of more Indian people in her life (via the presence of Henry's servants), has changed her attitude toward interracial marriages and she's now willing to marry Henry. Henry, though, now has to get over the fact that Amala broke his heart years ago when they first courted. But, of course, he eventually comes to see that he's still in to her, and they marry and live happily ever after. Whew. I have such mixed feelings about this book! On the one hand, Stansfield does a better job of handling the racism of the period than I honestly expected. She's fantastic at depicting how Amala's isolation from any other people of color has had lasting, detrimental effects on her self-image, confidence, and personality, even when no one is actively being mean to her. Stansfield also is sensitive to how privilege has blinded Amala's white family and Henry, leaving them unaware of much of what she deals with and prone to making mistakes despite having the very best of intentions. On the other hand, HENRY MARRIES AMALA'S SISTER WTF. And yet again Stansfield is so careful and gentle that it never comes off as the sister being fridged for the sake of advancing their relationship! In fact, the section of the sister's illness is probably longer and written with more detail than any other part of the book. There's even a gruesomely long death-scene, with last words and tears and medicine side-effects and doctor intervention and sleeplessness and a fucking death rattle for god's sake, that was almost certainly more realism than I have ever needed for a romance novel's angst. Not to mention the year of grief that comes afterward. I can't deny that this plot point was handled as well as possible, but I also can't get over the fact that this plot point exists in the first place. Now, all of this attention to detail and thoughtfulness might lead you to assume that at least the craft of writing is well done – pretty sentences, gorgeous descriptions, and so. Sadly this is not the case. In fact Stansfield has an odd habit of skipping entirely over things that really need to be on the page; everyone knows 'show don't tell', but this is the worst case of it I've ever seen. For example, this is the first conversation Henry and Amala ever share, immediately after meeting one another: She was glad when he began to talk about the things he’d loved about living in India, as opposed to asking her questions about her own memories. He also talked of the things he’d hated—most specifically the heat and the bugs. She enjoyed listening to every word that came out of his mouth, until the sense of how much time had passed shocked her to her feet. No actual lines of dialogue from the conversation that will prove pivotal to drawing them together! We don't actually get to see these characters fall in love, how they talk to one another, what attracts them! This is basic Romance Novel 101, people: show how the love happens! For another example: Finally, Amala found the courage to break the wax seal and unfold the letter. She had to move closer to the light in order to more clearly see what was written. At a quick glance she was able to see that the letter began with My Dearest Amala, and that it ended some pages later with, All the love my heart possesses, Henry. The problem was that in between was such a beautifully detailed expression of his devotion that Amala kept having to dab at her eyes to keep her vision from blurring so that she could continue reading. When they had spoken in the garden, she had told him plainly and clearly where she had to stand on the matter of their attraction to one another, but she was now reading a genuine and sincere rebuttal to her every argument. It became evident through his words that he knew a great deal more about the issues of prejudice behind her motives than she’d given him credit for. He declared his firm belief that no matter what governments or society might try to dictate in this world, God surely saw all of His children equally, and that in God’s eyes, surely they could find a way to be right with this. Amala was completely taken off guard by how much her resolve had melted by the time she finished reading the letter, and after she’d read it through a second time, she was filled with doubt and confusion over matters that had previously seemed completely clear. One might assume that with such a plot-important and emotional letter, we'd get to read it ourselves, right? No. Those two phrases up there are literally all the reader gets to see of the letter. Similar problems happen throughout the book, though they're more common in the early pages. I suppose with a novel that covers as many years and has as many plot twists as this one, it's got to be forgiven for skimming over some of the details. But then again, it's the details that I most wanted to read! I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual – And the Modern World Began by Joan DeJean. The premise of this book is that during a single century (1670-1765) in France, many of the things we consider basic to life were invented or came into use: cotton clothing, clothing designs with the emphasis placed on comfort as opposed to imposing court dress, sofas, armchairs, bedrooms and bathrooms as separate rooms instead of one corner of a grand hall, flush toilets and running water, large paned windows to let in light, nightstands and writing desks, hardwood floors, and more. Part of this was a reaction to the grand magnificence of Versailles – after a day in a boned bodice that wouldn't let you sit down, surrounded by strict rules of etiquette, who wouldn't want to relax in cozy privacy? Another part was simply a consequence of the historic moment: increased trade with India, a newly rich merchant class eager to commission their own architect-designed houses, increased technology in various crafts, Enlightenment philosophers coming up with new ideas for improving "the art of living". It's a fascinating argument, to show how all these disparate things are linked, and DeJean makes her case very well, though I don't know enough about it to say if she missed anything obvious. DeJean has a entertaining, breezy style that makes the book more fun to read than you might suspect. For example: From the start (and the stories about [the Marquise de Pompadour] started right away), her biographers agreed that she set her cap for the king, having been encouraged to believe since childhood that she was somehow destined to become his mistress. (Her will contains a curious, and curiously touching, bequest of six hundred livres to "Madame Lebon for having foretold when she was nine years old that she would one day become the king's mistress"). Describing newly curved seating: And for "those who write" and therefore "spend long periods" leaning forward, [Roubo, a furniture designer] shows how the seat's curves could be adapted to this particular distribution of body weight and thereby help writers "resist fatigue". (I only wish someone would think like this today.) Describing an early toilet: Since it was not hooked up to waste piping, it's hard to imagine how well it performed its function. (In the fixtures he created for Pompadour, Migeon did at least use a wood then new to France, mahogany, because of its odor-resistant properties.) It's a surprisingly quick, easy read, with lots of illustrations and a really intriguing central premise. I recommend it if you have the least interest in the origins of mundane things. The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch. YES I GOT TO READ THE NEW RIVERS OF LONDON NOVELLA EARLY! :D :D :D In this fairly short and light story, ghosts are harassing morning commuters on the Tube, and Peter has been deputized to put a stop to it. Abigail is a major character, with Jaget and Toby playing important supporting roles along with Nightingale and Molly. Pretty much no one else appears, unfortunately, though that's what happens when you only have 144 pages to fill. I was so glad to see more of Abigail, who is totally my favorite part of this novella, and I love how her role is developing: her Latin (now better than Peter's), her odd relationship with foxes, her pseudo-job as the Folly's intern, and of course the question looming ever closer: how to (or if to) teach her magic. A subplot about a new river is adorable, and I can't wait to see where it goes in the future. The writing is, as always, funny and clever and full of odd little facts about architecture and history, with a few moments of surprising emotion. I absolutely love the way the mystery developed – which is why I'm trying not to spoil it here – but my one complaint with the book is that I wish there'd been just a little bit more resolution at the end. I wanted that last thread tied up, even if it is probably more realistic to leave a few dangling. And again: only 144 pages. Overall it's a charming and memorable story, even if it doesn't advance the series's overall plot arc any. Highly recommended, though I'm sure all the Rivers of London fans plan to read it already. :D I'm not sure how well it would work as an introduction to the series – on the one hand, there is that fairly small cast, but on the other there's plenty of unexplained backstory and worldbuilding. It could go either way, I suppose. But if you're not familiar with Rivers of London, get on that! I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

(DW link for easier commenting)

#books #book reviews #Rivers of London #anita stansfield #joan dejean

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edc-creations-blog · 6 years ago

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Follow the journey of an interracial couple who are not only from different worlds but worlds that goes beyond the color of their skin.

Tobias Benton – a handsome, white rich and successful businessman who is soon to inherit his father’s billion dollar company. Tobias has been dating Sharon English, a beautiful and wealthy lady who owns several Art Galleries. From the world point of view, they are the Barbie and Ken couple who are destined to marry and have a wonderful life together that is until…..

Brylane Robinson – a beautiful, bright and intelligent black sister who lives in the housing projects on the South side of Chicago, steps into the picture. Brylane fights for survival and a better life for herself in the hood.

One morning on her way to work, a handsome man literally runs into her. When their eyes met so did their hearts. Will Brylane and Tobias venture into Something New?

Book Reviews – Something New: An Interracial Romance

Bayoubabe 5.0 out of 5 stars Oooh weeee!!! What a hot story. The drama has me reeling. When a man has a crazy obsessive witch on his trail, his life is pure hell. Tobias Benton is finding out just how evil Sharon can be when she does not get her way. His poor mother Carolyn is just as sad by staying with his philandering father James for years.

CJM 5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyed Something New Looking forward to part 2. Definitely looking forward to you putting an end to Sharon’s shenanigans and for Tobias and Brylane to get together. I must say my two problems was Tobias and Toby… the same name to me…also I would love to see at least one other black male character doing well besides Demetrius…Brylane’s brother…like Desmond…maybe he can become more than what he is and not be murdered or go to prison…turning a negative lifestyle into a positive one. Don’t make me wait too long for part 2…thanks

LadyBurger 5.0 out of 5 stars Surprising read I thought I wouldn’t like it but loved it!! Very well written and the plot draws you in. The family in drama on both sides keeps you on the edge. Can wait for the follow-up.

EXCERPT: Something New: An Interracial Romance by Janie De Coster

Brylane treated herself to a nice hot bath. Then, she put on her favorite pink cotton pajamas and got into bed. Her mind began a replay of the day’s events. Mr. Tobias Benton was certainly at the top of the list. Closing her eyes, she envisioned his handsome face, those deep blue eyes of his staring down into hers as the wind blew through his short wavy hair. Her breath quickened as she thought about his lips and what it would have felt like to kiss them. Turning over on her stomach, she propped her chin up on her soft pillow. Sighing, she wondered, was Vonita right? Could such a man be really into her?

Somehow, she just couldn’t accept the fact as easily. After all, they were from two entirely different worlds. Vonita saw things through a different set of lenses because of how she was raised. Here in the hood, if a white man looked your way, it was either because you owed him some money, or it was the Po Po locking your ass up. Brylane tossed and turned. Her mind continued to race, scrutinizing her attraction to this man and wondering if anything would come of it.

After several attempts at reaching the Sandman, she gave up. Sitting up in bed, she reached over to her nightstand and retrieved the remote, turning on her nineteen-inch TV. She surfed the channels, hoping to find a good movie to take her mind off of the handsome man. Finally, she found an old love story, and she began to immerse herself into the storyline. The lovesick woman ran into the arms of the knight in shining armor, and the next thing Brylane remembered was her mom waking her up to a phone call.

Pulling the covers over her head, she murmured to her mom to tell Vonita she was tired and would call her tomorrow.

“Honey, it’s not Vonita.” Frances sighed nudging her again. Brylane let out a soft groan but made no attempt of getting up.

“It’s some man. He says his name is Tobias,” Frances said, looking down into her daughter’s sleepy face. Brylane’s eyes popped open like a dollar store doll. She pulled the covers away from her body and jumped out of bed. Is this really happening, she thought as she ran to the phone. She paused for a brief moment, cleared her throat, and took in a whiff of air. Exhaling slowly, she picked up the kitchen phone.

“Hello.” She greeted in a low tone.

“Good evening, Brylane. I’m sorry to call so late. I had a business meeting that lasted longer than I expected. I didn’t wake you, did I?” Tobias asked pleasantly.

“Oh no. I was… just watching an old movie on TV,” she uttered softly. For a brief moment, there was total silence on both ends of the line.

Tobias spoke up as he asked, “Are you free tomorrow? I… uh… would love to take you out to dinner… if that’s possible.”

Brylane felt light as a feather. She couldn’t believe he was actually asking her out.

“Um… sure. That would be nice,” Brylane found herself saying. Tobias let out a sigh of relief. He’d never been so nervous about asking a girl out since high school. He was hoping she would accept his invitation, and she had.

“Is seven okay?” he asked.

“Um… yes,” she answered slowly.

“Great, I’ll see you at seven then,” Tobias said. Brylane was about to hang up when she heard his voice again.

“Wait, Brylane. I think it would help me out a lot if I knew where you lived.” He chuckled lightly.

. Brylane’s blood began to run cold. Here it is, truth or dare, she thought. I might as well come clean here and now. That way he can let me down easily, and I could go on with my life.

“I… um… live on the east side of town…Village Town Apartments on Riverdale, apartment 5 B,” she stammered. There was another awkward silence as she waited for the letdown she knew was coming.

“Alright. I’ll be there at seven. You have a good evening, and enjoy your movie.”

And with that, he hung up. Brylane slowly placed the phone back on its cradle. She looked over at her mom who was standing in front of her with a blank look on her face.

“I have a date tomorrow!” Brylane squealed as she hugged her quickly and then ran back into her bedroom. Brylane had a smile on her face that could outshine the glorious sun. That is… until a little voice whispered into her ear, a nice dinner and your car repaired. After that, you will never hear from him again. Her smile slowly faded as she fell into a deeply troubled sleep.

( Continued… )

© 2019 All rights reserved. Book excerpt reprinted by permission of the author, Janie De Coster. Do not reproduce, copy or use without the author’s written permission. This excerpt is used for promotional purposes only.

Purchase Something New: An Interracial Romance by Janie De Coster https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DBCJVYQ

Something New 2: An Interracial Romance by Janie De Coster

In Janie De Coster’s Interracial Romance Something New, the journey continues with even more twists and turns for the couple Tobias Benton and Brylane Robinson.

After a publicized engagement was announced, Tobias fights to clear his name and get Brylane, his true love, back into his life. However, it will not be easy thanks to his jilted lover, Sharon English.

Brylane Robinson had the fairytale romance that most women dreamed of, but it fell apart right at the seams. She found out that her knight in shining armor was already involved with another woman and that she was just his side chick. Brylane feels that she should have listened to all the people who told her that she was being a pawn in a white man’s world.

Will Tobias be able to convince Brylane that she has it all wrong and that she is the woman for him, or will the bombshell Sharon English has up her sleeve seal any chance of them ever having a future together in Something New Part 2?

Purchase Something New 2: An Interracial Romance by Janie De Coster https://www.amazon.com/Something-New-2-Interracial-Romance-ebook/dp/B07DBCJVYQ/ Fiction > African American > Women’s Fiction > Romance > Multicultural & Interracial

Black Pearls Magazine Intimate Conversation with Janie De Coster

Janie De Coster’s love of writing began in her high school years with poetry. It wasn’t until many years later she heard a spiritual voice instructing her to write a book. Having no idea as to what genre it would be, she just put pen to paper. Janie De Coster writes not only to entertain but to educate as her topics shine a light on today’s society such as Mental Illness, Domestic Violence, Infidelity, and Self-Esteem. In her spare time, she loves to travel, shop and spend quality time with her family.

BPM: It is such a pleasure to have you join us to discuss Something New: An Interracial Romance. Describe yourself in three words. Passionate, Spiritual and Witty.

BPM: What drove you to publish your first book? How long have you been writing? What drove me to write my first novel, believe it or not, was God’s voice telling me to do so. I’ve always read romance novels but I never imagined that I could have written one myself. I had no idea how to begin let alone what to write. But the Holy Spirit led me and several books later here I am. I’ve been on this writing journey for over thirteen years.

BPM: Introduce us to the people in this new book! Give us some insight into your main speakers. The main characters in this novel are Tobias Benton, a white billionaire who’s looking for true love in his life while Brylane Robinson, a sister from the streets of Chicago struggles to make a better life for herself.

BPM: What’s so unique about their story-line or voice in the story? What makes each one so special? This story has probably been told hundreds of times. What I think makes it unique is I wrote the story in such a way that it sheds light on not only on the couple’s relationship but the effect it has on their friends and family.

BPM: Share one specific point in your book that resonated with your present situation or journey. What resonates with me in this story is that I experienced first hand the challenges biracial couples go through since I am a grandmother of a biracial child.

BPM: Do you ever have days when writing is a struggle? Yes, especially if the story is complex or I am pushed for a deadline.

BPM: Have you written any other books that are not published? Yes, I have one in my desk drawer collecting dust but I hope to bring it to life soon.

BPM: What projects are you working on at the present? I just re-released a novel FRIENEMIES. I invite readers to check it out now on Amazon.com.

BPM: What legacy do you hope to leave future generations of readers with your writing? I want my children, grandchildren, and others to know that with God you can do all things. It’s not going to be easy. You may have to put in a lot of prayer, sweat, and tears. But the race is not given to the swift but to the one who perseveres.

BPM: What is your preferred method to have readers get in touch with or follow you? You can contact me through my website: http://sweetsmells2003.wixsite.com/janie-decoster

BPM: How can readers discover more about you and your work? Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JanieDeCoster Check out my novels on my Amazon Page: https://www.amazon.com/Janie-De-Coster/e/B00547Y2DA

Something New: An Interracial Romance by Janie De Coster Follow the journey of an interracial couple who are not only from different worlds but worlds that goes beyond the color of their skin.

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adambstingus · 7 years ago

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The age of banter

The long read: It used to be just a word now it is a way of life. But is it time to get off the banter bus?

Its the most fucking ridiculous story, isnt it? We went to watch fucking dolphins, and we ended up in fucking Syria. Last summer in the Mediterranean party resort of Ayia Napa, Lewis Ellis was working as a club rep. I mean, it was fucking 8am, he told an Australian website soon afterwards, and the last fucking club had closed, and we thought, We can still go dolphin watching. Well blag our way on to a fucking boat and go dolphin watching.

But when the boat sailed so far that Cyprus disappeared from view, Ellis explained, they started to worry. Why are we so far from land? they asked the crew. Were fucking miles away and weve got no fucking wifi. Something, Ellis said, had been lost in translation; his exuberant season as a shepherd for the resorts party pilgrims had gone terribly awry. The crew wasnt taking them to watch dolphins: they were going to a Russian naval base in the city of Tartus, on Syrias Mediterranean coast. Yeah, it is a little ridiculous.

It was, nonetheless, a story that had legs. Hungover lads boat trip boob lands them in Syria, wahey-ed the Mirror; British holidaymakers board party boat in Ayia Napa and end up in war-torn SYRIA, guffawed the Express. If you saw these headlines at the time, you may dimly remember the rest. A stubborn trawler captain, chugging doggedly onwards to Tartus, where he turfed the friends out upon landing; interrogation at the hands of Russian intelligence officers; mutual hilarity as the Russians realised what had happened; and, after a hot meal, a quick tour of the area, and a good nights sleep, spots on the next fishing vessel headed back to Cyprus. It was never made clear why the captain had let them on the boat in the first place, but whatever. Everyone lapped it up.

Reflecting on the whole thing five months later, Ellis, a 26-year-old with a business degree and a marketing masters, couldnt totally wrap his head around it. I think I found 35 stories about us, he told me. I read about myself in the Hawaiian Express, do you know what I mean? (Notwithstanding that there doesnt appear to be any such newspaper, yes, I definitely do.)

What made it really weird to see the media pile in with such unstinting enthusiasm was that the story was total cobblers. I could not believe how gullible they were, Ellis said, a top note of glee still in his voice. We were just having a laugh! It was banter!

Lads: this is the age of banter. Its long been somewhat about the banter, but over the last few years, it has come to seem that its all about the banter an unabashedly bumptious attitude that took up a position on the outskirts of the culture in the early 90s and has been larging its way towards the centre ever since. There are hundreds of banter groups on Facebook, from Banter Britain (no memes insinuating child abuse/dead babies!!!) to Wanker Banter 18+ (Have a laugh and keep it sick) to the Premier League Banter Page (The only rule: keep it banter). You can buy an I banter mug on Amazon for 9, or an Archbishop of Banterbury T-shirt for 9.99.

There are now four branches of a restaurant called Scoff & Banter. When things were going badly at Chelsea FC under Jos Mourinho, it was reported the team had banned all banter in an attempt to focus their minds, and that terminology appeared in the newspapers, as if you would know exactly what it meant. Someone has created a banter map of London using a keyword search on the flatshare website SpareRoom, showing exactly where people are looking for a roommate with good banter (Clapham tends to feature prominently). When a 26-year-old man from Leeds posed for a selfie with a bemused aeroplane hijacker, Vice declared it the high-water mark of banter.

Lewis Ellis (left) and friends in Ayia Napa, pretending to be in Syria. Photograph: Lewis Ellis

If you are younger than about 35, you are likely to hear the term all the time. Either you have banter (if you are funny and can take a joke) or you dont (if you arent and cannot). The mainstream, in summary, is now drunk and asleep on the sofa, and banter is delightedly drawing a penis on its forehead.

As banter has risen, it has expanded. Long a word used to describe submerged expressions of fraternal love, it is now also a word used to excuse uninhibited displays of masculine bravado. Today, it is segregated by class, seized on by brands, picked over by psychologists, and deplored by cultural critics; it is dominant, hotly contested and only hazily understood.

And so, whether he intends it to or not, Ellis use of the term raises some questions. Is he throwing his lot in with the most pervasive branch of the blokeish mainstream, a sanitised and benevolent hilarity that stretches from lad-dad panel shows to your mates zinger about your terrible haircut? Or is he lining up with the misogynist imitators of the Bullingdon club, a sprinkling of racists, and, as we shall see, an actual murderer purveyors of a malicious and insidious masculinity that insists on its indivisible authority and calls you a slut if you object?

Ellis isnt preoccupied by these questions, but for what its worth, he does say that he and his friends never had the slightest intention of going to Syria. We werent really trying to fool anyone, he told me, although Im not sure thats entirely consistent with the facts. We were out for a stroll, and we came across this area that looked really run down, we thought it looked like Syria. So we put it on the club reps [Facebook] page that thats where we were. And everyone started liking it. And then one of the people who contacted us was from LADBible which is like the Bible, but for LADS so we said, well have a mess around here. Well tell a completely ridiculous story, see if the media believes it. See if we can become LADBible famous.

It did, they could. Eventually, the truth came out, not thanks to any especially determined investigative journalism, but because Ellis cheerily admitted on Facebook that his tale of magnificent idiocy was a fiction. Hahaha what a prank, he wrote, with some justification.

The confession only brought another cycle of attention. Publications that had picked up the story in the first place resurfaced it with new headlines to reflect the audacity of the invention; social media users adduced it as evidence for their views of young men, or the media, or both. The Russian embassys Twitter account called it a telling example of how many Syria (and Russia) stories are made up by UK papers, which was great geopolitical banter. The attention entertained Ellis, but he says it wasnt the point. We just thought it was funny, he said. People are too serious. I keep being told to grow up, but I still want to have a good time. Ive had the jobs, Ive got the education. But when Im off work, I want to escape.

Ellis is an enthusiast and an optimist. He is, he told me late last year, desperate to take every opportunity, just to say yes to everything I can. We were on a night out in Manchester with his friends Tyson, John and Chris. In the course of the evening, the following things found their way into my beer: fingers; salt; vinegar; mayonnaise; a chip; saliva; a 10 note; and, I hazily remember being told after the fact, at least two shots of vodka.

Everyones got a thing in the group, Ellis said, as we walked from one bar to the next. One guy, hes not even that ugly, we say he looks like a Peperami. Tysons got this mole on his face, its like a Coco Pop, so youve got a Coco Pop on your face. I looked like Harry Potter when I was a kid, so they call me Potter, thats my nickname. Every single one of us has something. So you youve got Chinese eyes. Youre Chinese.

For the record, I didnt think this was OK, but coming after such a harmless litany, it didnt seem malicious enough to confront. Of course, tacit endorsement is what makes such offensive epithets a commonplace, and so it troubles me that it made me feel mysteriously welcome, just as it had when John punched me lightly in the balls when I arrived. There was no doubting Elliss sincerity: as he spoke, the sheer daft beauty of male friendship seemed to amaze him, almost to the point of physical pain. We just take the piss out of each other, and thats how we show our love, he said. So many group chats on the phone, and you just take the piss until they cry. And its like, when youre really killing them, you go, Ill stop if you want, because you know they cant say yes, so you just keep going. Then we arrived at the next bar, where I was made to drink something called a Zombie.

Early in the evening, before any of this had undermined my ability to take useful notes, Ellis broke off from talking as we walked down the street and sidled into a window display at Next Home, where he Tracey Emined a carefully made bed by climbing into it and rolling around. Everyone cracked up. Give the world a laugh, Ellis tends to think, and the world will smile back at you. Jump on a boat, and youll end up somewhere great; make the boat up, and youll get there faster. Its all about having fun, its all about the banter, he said, after hed rejoined us outside. Banter is about making the world a more exciting place.

If nobody can agree on what banter is, thats hardly a new problem. The first usage of the word recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from noted Restoration lad Thomas dUrfey, also known for his hit song The Fart, in a satirical 1677 play called Madam Fickle. Banter him, banter him, Toby, a character called Zechiel urges, which may be the first time that someone called Toby was so instructed, but certainly wasnt the last.

The OED also notes early attempts at a definition by Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. (Swift mentions a banter upon transubstantiation, in which a cork is turned into a horse, and fair enough, turning a cork into a horse would be classic banter.) Both are a little disgusted by the word, and neither unearths much of an origin story: by their accounts, banter is so coarse that it emerged, fully formed and without antecedent, out of the mouths of oafs.

As it turns out, though, the OED is not at present fully able to handle the banter. According to Eleanor Maier, an associate editor on the dictionary, a search of earlier English texts reveals that a number of previous examples are missing from the dictionarys definition, which was first drafted in 1885 including a quote from a 1657 translation of Don Quixote. (After examining the history, Maier told me that she would be adding banter to the list of entries that are up for review.)

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In recent years, banter has barged into our lives at a remarkable clip. Googles Ngram Viewer, a tool that assesses (with some limitations) the frequency with which a term appears in a large database of written sources, finds that banter popped up about twice as often in 2008, the most recent year covered, as it did in 1980.

But banter plugged away for a long time before it became an overnight success. In the 19th century, it often denoted a kind of formal sparring. Even as the term evolved over the 20th, it continued to seem a little prim. In the House of Commons in 1936, Ramsay MacDonald, the former Labour prime minister who had returned in a new seat after losing his old one, was subjected to a good deal of banter Dear old Granny MacDonald!, among other witticisms.In 1981, a Guardian report that chess champion Anatoly Karpov and his handlers had successfully protested at his challenger Viktor Korchnois constant cross-board talk ran under the unlikely headline: Chess banter banned.

Such stories do little to prepare us for what banter has become. Consider the viral video that became known as #bagelgate earlier this year. In the recording, a minor scuffle broke out on the 00.54 train from Kings Cross to Huntingdon, and then for no obviously related reason a woman who had a large bag of bagels decided to put one on the head of the guy sitting in front of her, and then another after he took it off and threw it out of the window, and another and another, and then everyone in the carriage started chanting hes got a bagel on his head, and eventually the slightly spoddy victim who is me when I was 13 and someone filled my pencil case with Mr Kipling apple pies (squashed, oozing) because I was fat lost it and screamed Get the fuck out of my face!, and then another fight broke out on the platform, and then the police got on to the train, and every single person fell into not-me-guv silence: this is not Granny MacDonalds banter any more.

If it is hard to understand how these activities can fall under the same umbrella, it should be noted that a phenomenon may predate our choice of term to describe it its just that the act of definition makes it more visible, and perhaps more likely to be imitated. At some point, though, banter became the name for what British men already regarded as their natural tone of voice. There is a very deeply embedded folk culture in the UK of public ribaldry, extreme sarcasm, facetiousness in other words, of laddishness, says Tony Thorne, a linguist and cultural historian. What you might think of as banter now is rooted in that tradition.

That tradition first lashed itself to banters mast in the early 1990s, and controversy soon followed. In June 1992, a Guardian story headlined Police fire sex banter officer, about the dismissal of a sergeant for sexual harassment, recorded an early skirmish in the modern banter wars, and an important new layer to its meaning in the wild: The move is seen as part of the Metropolitan polices desire to reassure women officers that what has previously been tolerated as banter is no longer acceptable. Two years later, the lads mags arrived.

The first edition of Loaded magazine appeared in May 1994, with a picture of Gary Oldman on the front smoking a dog-end, under a banner that declared him a super lad. What fresh lunacy is this? the editors note read. Loaded is a new magazine dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of sex, drink, football and less serious matters Loaded is for the man who believes he can do anything, if only he wasnt hungover.

If banter dismays you, James Brown, the magazines first editor, is quite an easy bogeyman. As he acknowledges himself, he created a title that defined a genre. Loaded was swiftly recognised as a foundational text for a resurgent and ebullient masculinity that had been searching for public expression. While it was always overtly horny, the magazine was initially more interested in a forlorn, slackjawed and self-ironising appreciation of A-listers (one reversible poster had Cindy Crawford on one side and a steam train on the other) than the grot-plus-football formula that successors and imitators like Maxim, Zoo and Nuts milked to destruction. But it also flirted with something murkier.

To its critics, Loaded and its imitators aimed to sanitise a certain hooliganistic worldview with a strategic disclaimer. Banter emerges as this relentless gloss of irony over everything, said Bethan Benwell, senior lecturer in language and linguistics at the University of Stirling and the author of several papers on mens magazines. The constant excusing of sexist or homophobic sentiments with this wink that says you dont really mean it. Benwell pointed to Loadeds emblematic strapline: For men who should know better.

Brown denies that his magazine invented banter. Instead, he says, it captured a zeitgeist that the media had previously failed to acknowledge; the folk culture that Tony Thorne refers to, brought out into the open. Before Browns intervention, GQ had run John Major and Michael Heseltine as cover stars, for Gods sake. I took the interests and the outlook of the young men that I knew, and I put them in a magazine, Brown said. Im not responsible for the tone of the later entrants to the market. We were criticised because we fancied women, not because we belittled them.

The thing about Loaded was that the way we wrote reflected the way we were with our mates, he went on. Theres definitely a thing that exists in the male outlook: you take the piss out of the people you like, and you ignore the people you dont.

Accept this as your starting point, and objections become exhausting to sustain: what youre objecting to is an act of affection. Of course, this is what makes it insidious. Because Browns account rests on the intention behind the magazine, and Benwells on the effect it had, they are impossible to reconcile. Its a very difficult thing to resist or challenge without looking like the stereotypical humourless feminist, said Benwell. But by laughing, you become complicit.

Loaded gave this new kind of banter escape velocity, and it began to colonise other worlds. On BBC2, for example, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner were staking out their own territory with Fantasy Football League, a mixture of sketches and celebrity chat that managed to be enthusiastic and satirical at the same time, and reached its peak when the pair became national icons, thanks to their Euro 96 anthem, Three Lions. While a long-running joke about the Nottingham Forest striker Jason Lees pineapple haircut seems flatly racist in retrospect Baddiel did an impression of him in blackface by and large, the tone was milder and more conventional than the magazines were: this was the sensibility of the university graduate slumming it before embarking on grown-up life.

Baddiel implied that laddism could easily occupy a spectrum from ogling to literature, drawing a line to Nick Hornbys memoir of life as an Arsenal fan, Fever Pitch. Hornby once said to me that all this stuff you know, fantasy football and his book is men talking about things that they like and for a while in the mid-80s they werent allowed to, he said in 1995. Ive always liked football and Ive always liked naked women, and its easier to talk about that now than it was eight years ago. Those comments reflect a kind of sneer at its critics that you could often detect in Fantasy Football League, even as its hosts protested that they were just having a laugh though Baddiel himself denies that view. Twenty years on, he, like Brown, is at pains to draw a line between the approach that he and Skinner popularised, and the forms that came later. I guess me and Frank did specialise in banter, he said in an email. In a time before it was known as bantz.

Over the next 10 years, two things happened that ushered in the age of banter. (You might call it mature banter, except that its also the opposite.) First, instead of just being a thing that happened, it became a thing that people talked about. Then, as it became a more tangible cultural product, everyone started trying to make money out of it. The watershed moment, the forms equivalent to Dylan going electric, was the invention of Dave.

Like most good ideas, it looks simple enough in retrospect. Before Dave was Dave, it was UKTV Gold 2. The predecessor channels audience share was 0.761%, and no one could tell who on earth it was supposed to be for. But we had the content, says Steve North, the channels brand manager in 2007 and content of a particular kind that the existing name did very little to communicate: Have I Got News for You, They Think Its All Over, Top Gear. Viewers said they loved the repartee, the humour. It reminded them of spending time with their funniest friends.

The first issue of Loaded magazine, from May 1994

The target audience was highly specific. It was men married or in relationships, maybe with young children, not going to the pub as much as they used to, says Andy Bryant, managing director of Red Bee, the agency brought in to work on the rebrand. And they missed that camaraderie.

Their purpose thus fixed, North started to run brainstorming sessions at which people would shout out suggestions for the name. One of the ones we collected was Dave, he says. We thought, great, but we cant call it that. But then we thought, Its a surrogate friend. If the audience really sees it as that, if they see it as genuinely providing the banter, maybe we can really give it a name.

They put their hunch through its paces. The market research company YouGov was commissioned to test Dave alongside a bunch of other names (Matthew and Kevin were also on the shortlist), but nothing else had the same everyman resonance. For us, Dave is a sensibility, a place, an emotion, a feeling, said North, his tone thoughtful, almost gnomic. Everyone has their own sense of who Dave is, thats the important thing. Its hard to find anyone who doesnt know someone called Dave.

Now the channel had a brand, it needed a slogan. Lots of people claim they played a part in the naming, says Bryant. But it was just as important to encapsulate what the channel was all about. And at some point someone, I dont know who, wrote it on a board: The home of witty banter. The rebrand added 8m new viewers in six months; Dave saw a 71% increase in its target audience of affluent young men.

Conceived by the first generation of senior professionals to have grown up with banter as an unremarkable part of their demographics cultural mix, the channel crystallised a change, and accelerated it. In 2006, The Ricky Gervais Show, in which Gervais and Stephen Merchant relentlessly poked fun at their in-house idiot savant Karl Pilkington, became the most popular podcast of all time. In 2007, the year of Daves rebrand, Top Gears ratings shot from below 5m to a record high of 8m. The following year, QI moved from BBC4 to BBC2. (A tie-in book published the same year, QI: Advanced Banter, sold more than 125,000 copies.)

North saw the kind of fraternal teasing that was being monetised by his channel, and the panel shows that were its lifeblood, as fundamentally benign. The key thing is that its two-way, he said. Its about two people riffing off each other.

But like his 20th-century forebears, he can see that something ugly has evolved, and he wants to keep his brand well away from it. Bants, he said with distaste. That thing of cover for dubious behaviour we hate and despise it massively. When we launched, it was about fun, being light-hearted, maybe pushing each other without being disrespectful. When people talk about Ive had a go at that person, great banter no, thats just nasty.

By the turn of the decade,as other branding agencies mimicked the success of Dave, banter was everywhere, a folk tradition that had acquired a peculiar sort of respectability. The men who celebrated it werent just lads in the pub any more: they had spending power and establishment allies on their side. But they were, by the same token, more visible to critics. Aggression from an underdog can be overlooked; aggression from the establishment is serious enough to become a matter of public concern.

Take Richard Keys and Andy Gray, Sky Sports brand-defining football presenters, who got themselves up to their necks in some extremely bad banter in 2011. Keys blamed dark forces, but everyone else blamed him and Gray for being misogynists. We knew this because there was footage.

The firestorm, as Keys called it, centred on claims that the two men had said and done heinously sexist things off-air. Most memorable, at least for its phrase-making, was the clip in which Keys eagerly asked his fellow pundit Jamie Redknapp if hed smashed it it being a woman and asserted that he could often be found hanging out the back of it.

Gray went quickly. In the days before he followed, Keys burned hot with injustice in a series of mea-sorta-culpas, particularly focused on the tape in which he expressed his derision at the idea that a woman, Sian Massey-Ellis, could be an assistant referee in the Premier League.

It was just banter, he said. Or, more exactly, just a bit of banter, as he said Massey-Ellis had assured him she understood in a later telephone conversation in which, he added, much banter passed between us. She and I enjoyed some banter, he protested. It was lads-mag banter, he insisted. It was stone-age banter, he admitted. We liked to have banter, he explained. Richard Keys was sorry if you were offended, but also, it wasnt his fault if you didnt get it. It was just banter, for goodness sake!

Up to their necks in some extremely bad banter Andy Gray and Richard Keys in 2011. Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex

Keys insistence that his mistake was simply a failure to move with the times was nothing new: banter has always seemed to carry a longing for the past, for an imagined era before male friendship was so cramped by the tiresome obligations of feminist scrutiny. But while his underlying views were painfully dated, his conception of banter was entirely modern: a sly expansion of the words meaning, and a self-conscious contention that it provided an impregnable defence.

The Keys variation understood banter, first, as a catch-all means of denying responsibility if anyone was hurt; and, second, as a means of reinforcing a bond between two people by being cruel about a third. The comparison wouldnt please a couple of alphas like Keys and Gray, but both strategies brought it closer to a style of communication with classically feminine associations: gossip. Deborah Cameron, the Rupert Murdoch (lol) Professor in Language and Communication at Oxford University, argues that the two modes of interaction follow basically the same structure. People gossip as a trust game, she said. You tell someone your unsayable private secret, and it bonds you closer together. Theyre supposed to reciprocate with a confidence of their own. Well, banter works in the same way now. You say something outrageous, and you see if the other person dares to top your remark.

The trust game in banter was traditionally supposed to be: do you trust me when I say were friends in spite of the mean things Im saying about you? But now theres a second version of the game: do I trust you not to tell anyone the mean things Im saying about other people? I think originally it was a harmless thing, said Cameron, whose analysis is rooted in an archive of male group conversation, mostly recorded by her students, that goes back to the 1980s. But then it started to be used as an excuse when men were caught out engaging in forms of it that werent so harmless.

It comes down to context and intent, says the comedian Bridget Christie. The gentler form of banter is still knocking around, she suggested, but now it exists alongside something darker: I found The Inbetweeners adolescent banter hilarious, because it was equal and unthreatening. But there is obviously a world of difference between a group of teenage boys benignly taking the piss out of each other, and a bigot being racist or misogynist and trying to pass it off as a joke.

Trace the rise of banter, and you will find that it corresponds to the rise of political correctness or, anyway, to the backlash against political correctness gone mad. That phrase and just banter mirror each other perfectly: one denoting a priggish culture that is deemed to have overreached, the other a laid-back culture that is deemed to have been unfairly reined in. Ironically enough, just banter does exactly what it accuses political correctness of, seeking to close down discussion by telling you that meaning is settled by category rather than content. Political correctness asserts that a racist joke is primarily racist, whereas banter asserts that a racist joke is primarily a joke. In the past, the men who used it rarely had to define it, or to explain themselves to anybody else. Today, in contrast, it is named all the time. The biggest change isnt the banter itself, says Bethan Benwell. Its the explicit use of the word as a disclaimer.

By sheer repetition and by its use as an unanswerable defence, banter has turned from an abstraction into a vast and calcified description of actions as well as words: gone from a way of talking to a way of life, a style that accidentally became a worldview. He bantered you, people sometimes say: you always used to banter with your mates, but now it often sounds like something you do to them. Once it was directionless, inconclusive chatter with wit as the engine that drove it, said the comedian Russell Kane. Now, if I trip you up, thats banter.

You might think the humiliation suffered by Keys and Gray would have made banter less appealing as a get-out, but not a bit of it. Banter, increasingly, seems like the first refuge of the inexcusable. In 2014, Malky Mackay, who had been fired as manager of Cardiff City Football Club a year earlier, was caught having sent texts that referred to Chinese people eating dogs, black people being criminals, Jewish people being avaricious, and gay people being snakes all of which were initially optimistically defended by the League Managers Association as letting off steam to a friend during some friendly text message banter. The comedian Dapper Laughs, whose real name is Daniel OReilly, established himself as banters rat king, with his very own ITV2 show, and then lost it after he suggested that an audience member at one of his gigs was gagging for a rape. A man was convicted of murder after he crushed his friend against a wall with a Jeep Cherokee after an argument over badger-baiting, a course of action that he said had been intended as banter. Another slashed the throat of someone he had met in a pub and described the incident as a moment of banter after 14 or 15 pints. Both are now in prison.

By any sane measure,banter was falling into disrepute, as often a disguise for malice as a word for the ribaldry of lads on the lash. Still it did not go away: instead, the worst of it has mutated again, asserting its authority in public and saving its creepiest tendencies for the shadows or, at least, for the company of five, or 10, or 20 of your closest mates.

At the London School of Economics, it started with a leaflet. Each year at the universitys freshers fair, LSE Rugby Football Club distributed a banterous primer on rugby culture. In October 2014, says the then-president of the student union, Nona Buckley-Irvine, a student came to her in tears with a copy in her hand. The leaflet talked about trollops, slags, crumpet, mingers, and the desirability of misogyny; there were passing references to the horrors of homosexual humiliation and outright homosexual debauchery. Anyone charmed by all this was invited to sign up for the club and join the banter list, entitling them to participate in the exchange of chappish email conversation.

To anyone with a passing knowledge of university laddism, it was hard to imagine a more ordinary iteration. Still, after the unreconstructed chappishness of the leaflet came to light, the club knew it had a problem. It issued a collective apology acknowledging that we have a lot to learn about the pernicious effects of banter, and promised to organise a workshop. But there was reason to be sceptical about the depth of that commitment.

When Buckley-Irvine and her colleagues published a report on the incident, they noted a string of others, including an antisemitic assault on a university ski trip to Val dIsere in 2011. And there were other indiscretions it didnt mention. According to two people who were present, one club dinner at an Indian restaurant on Brick Lane ended with a stripper having bottles thrown at her when, already intimidated, she refused to take her clothes off. She hid in the toilet, and had to be escorted out by a member of staff as the team vandalised the restaurant.

Photograph: Alamy

According to five people who were either members of the rugby club or closely associated with it, one notorious senior member was widely thought to be responsible for the leaflet. (He did not respond to requests for comment.) But when they came to defend themselves to the student union, members of the club fell back on one of the most revered pillars of laddism: all for one, one for all. Theyd clearly worked out a line, says Nona Buckley-Irvine. No one individual was responsible. They were sorry. It was just banter. Thats what they all said.

The accountancy firm KPMG, which sponsored the universitys wider Athletics Union, decided that banter was not an especially helpful brand association, and withdrew funding worth 22,000. The students union decided to disband the club for the academic year. The decision moved some observers to disgust. It was a gross overreaction, a former team member told me. We were the best-behaved team when it came to actually playing rugby but they banned that bit and they couldnt ban any of the rest.

Others took a less measured tone. I had old members emailing me and calling me a fascist, says Buckley-Irvine. Asking me if I didnt understand that it was just banter. Rugby players chanted abuse at her on nights out, she told me. They shoulder-barged her, and called her a cunt.

These kinds of interactions would tend to take place on Wednesdays, also known as sports night, at a bar in Leicester Square. Sports night was the apotheosis of the rugby clubs bleak solidarity. In deference to what you might call the wingers-before-mingers code, for instance, members of the club who were expected to dress in suits werent allowed to speak to women before 9pm. So they would just shout abuse instead, one female former student, who Ill call Anna, remembered. One chant, she said, went, Nine nos and a yes is a yes. At the time, Anna thought that it was all a joke. People would say, Its just banter all the time. After everything. Absolutely everything, she said, sitting in a cafe in south London. If you were meeting someone new, saying they had good banter, that was a pretty high compliment. Whereas if you dont go along with that stuff, its seen as, you cant take the chat, you cant take the banter. And its not seen as having a stance against it. Its seen as not being able to keep up.

After the rugby club was disbanded, nothing much changed in sports night social life. Many members of the club still went on the same nights out; they just colonised other teams. They still addressed girls as Sarah 2 or Sarah 8 depending on how attractive they considered them out of 10; they still had shouted conversations about their sex lives in front of the women they had slept with but refused to acknowledge.

That culture was not confined to Wednesday nights. Anna remembers a guy who took her picture as she slept, naked, in the bed they were sharing, and circulated it to another non-university sports team via WhatsApp. She wasnt meant to see it on his phone.

Ask anyone well-informed where banter resides now, and theyll give the same answer: WhatsApp groups and email threads, the safe spaces of the lad class. What youd get out of those WhatsApp threads, its another world of drama, one former member of the football club said. The details of girls bodies that youd read, a few funny jibes, that was the limit for me. But when it moved on to, like, really, really bad stuff, always about sex it was too much. Those threads are the source of everything.

If the threads were an outlet, they were by no means the limit. Banter, by common consent, wasnt confined to mocking each other: it was about action. If you dressed up for a night out, one female student remembered, it was just kind of status quo that you could have your arse grabbed. It was just like, Oh, that was kind of weird, but OK, thatll happen. Like everyone else willing to speak about it, her view of that culture was perplexingly nuanced, sometimes contradictory. It sounds scary, she said, but that being said, some of my best nights were there, and like it was fun. But then she said: What was defined as serious just got so pushed. I think for someone to lodge a complaint they would have to be actually hurt.

Anna remembers lots of sketchy incidents. She recalls nights when her choices faded into a blur, and she wondered if she had really been in control. But at the time, I would never call it out, she said. And then, youre all living in halls together, and the next day, its like: What did you do last night? Thats hilarious. Thats banter.

When Anna thinks about the behaviour of some of the men she knew at university, she finds it hard to pin down exactly what she thinks of them. Theres one in particular who sticks in her mind. On a Wednesday night, he was a banter guy, she said. He was a Wednesday animal. But the rest of the time, he was my friend.

Controversial though all this was at the time, no one seems to think that it will have cost the perpetrators much. Ive tried so hard to leave all that behind, said the former member of the football team. But those guys theyre all going on to run banks, or the country, or whatever. The senior rugby man who many held responsible, by the way, has landed on his feet. Today, he has a job at KPMG.

In 2017, every new instance of banter is immediately spotted and put through the journalistic wringer. (Vices Joel Golby, who wrote the definitive text on the bagel thing, has made a career from his exquisite close readings of the form.) But when each new absolute legend emerges, we dont usually have the context to make the essential judgment: do the proponents tend towards the harmless warmth of Ellis and his mates, or the frank hostility of the LSE rugby boys? Is their love of irony straightforward, or a mask for something else?

As Richard Keys and Dapper Laughs and their cohorts have polluted the idea of banter, the commercial entities that endorsed its rise have become uneasy with the label. They wanted it to go viral; they hadnt expected it to go postal. Dave, for example, has dropped the home of witty banter slogan. Its not about classic male humour any more, its a little bit smarter, says UKTVs Steve North. We definitely say it less than we used to.

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samanthasroberts · 7 years ago

Text

The age of banter

The long read: It used to be just a word now it is a way of life. But is it time to get off the banter bus?

Lewis Ellis (left) and friends in Ayia Napa, pretending to be in Syria. Photograph: Lewis Ellis

dougie stew (@DougieStew)

Welcome to London #BagelGate pic.twitter.com/KcJoz0ycZU

February 26, 2017

The first issue of Loaded magazine, from May 1994

Up to their necks in some extremely bad banter Andy Gray and Richard Keys in 2011. Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex

Photograph: Alamy

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from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/08/02/the-age-of-banter/

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allofbeercom · 7 years ago

Text

The age of banter

The long read: It used to be just a word now it is a way of life. But is it time to get off the banter bus?

Lewis Ellis (left) and friends in Ayia Napa, pretending to be in Syria. Photograph: Lewis Ellis

dougie stew (@DougieStew)

Welcome to London #BagelGate pic.twitter.com/KcJoz0ycZU

February 26, 2017

The first issue of Loaded magazine, from May 1994

Up to their necks in some extremely bad banter Andy Gray and Richard Keys in 2011. Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex

Photograph: Alamy

<source media="(min-wid

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/08/02/the-age-of-banter/

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