#its just shitty because its one of their most hyped books right now

[chaoticdazefire-new]

It isn't fair 😩😩

Next month?

Next month??

NEXT MONTH!!!🎉

[skaruresonic]

I actually found a fancomic based on ABT where apparently she had nightmares about her village being destroyed and she blamed Sonic (not Eggman) for that.

Sure, it's fanart, not ABT's vision... but what's with IDW and its fans and wanting to shoulder all the responsibilities on Sonic when he really always does his best? Now who's the one saying that Sonic should go Punisher on Eggman?

And why does it seem like they want Lanolin to snap and become a villain? ... also that's just Surge. She wouldn't even be special lol

Yeah I saw that one too lol.

Like not to play trauma Olympics, but uhhh. Lanolin. Did you not see how Sonic almost ran himself to death during the metal virus?

It's not like Sonic is oblivious to the shit Eggman puts people through; he also suffers alongside the rest of you. Like I said, sometimes he's the first and most direct recipient of the consequences of Eggman's schemes. Yet he continues on being the bulwark standing between Eggman and the world.

---

Sure, it's fanart, not ABT's vision... but what's with IDW and its fans and wanting to shoulder all the responsibilities on Sonic when he really always does his best?

Honestly, I'm finding it hard not to interpret this all as the result of cynicism with the games. IDW never established Sonic vs. Eggman as a thing, let alone something done enough times to warrant such a reaction. The book assumes you know Sonic vs. Eggman is old hat and agree with the notion that something needs to shake up the series' most core dynamic. "Sonic is too much of a happy Gary-Stu, he needs to reckon with the consequences of someone else's actions" certainly is A Take(tm) in that vein.

I've read fanfics like this before, where traumatized civilians emotionally unload on Sonic.

...Dude, yeah, I get it, Sonic's the nearest lightning rod to absorb all your frustrations because you can't exactly take a swing at Eggman. But it's not like Sonic is the cause of your pain, and it's unfair to expect him to shoulder that burden. Even he cannot be everywhere at once.

Also, requiring him to take Eggman's life lest the trolley veer onto the other track and murder everyone else feels... unfair? Meanspirited, even?

"You could end everyone's suffering right now if you cared" is such manipulative phrasing, especially considering how difficult it is to off Eggman with any permanence, and how often Sonic does save the world. He frequently puts himself out on the front line for no material gain.

Dude gets dealt a really shitty hand sometimes. Nobody else got struck with the arrow of judgment and had his life burned down to a wick. Nobody else got trapped inside a capsule about to explode into what Eggman calls "floating chunks in space." Nobody else had to suffer the Werehog's curse, which is implied to be a painful transformation that occurs every night regardless of whether Sonic is prepared for it or not - and even worse still, in Eggmanland, he had to force that change via the sundial switch in order to progress.

You're over here going "hmmm Sonic, real sus how you never acknowledged the deaths of the thousands who perished when the planet broke apart," meanwhile the poor bastard is lying unconscious from exhaustion, having traversed Eggmanland, grappled with Eggman in a no-holds-barred match during a plummet towards the Earth's core, and fought a god for like a week straight on no sleep.

...We don't deserve Sonic.

Besides, for as much as everyone hypes up non-Eggman villains, do you think things will be sunshine and rainbows even if Eggman remains dead? That other beings won't cast their evil eye upon the world in the power vacuum that will inevitably appear? Will Sonic be responsible for the Black Arms too? Metal Sonic? Idk, The End?

It gets even worse because the book's writing forced moral responsibility onto Sonic to by begging the question of "Why doesn't he just kill Eggman?" in the first place. As if A.) he doesn't already fucking try on a regular basis and B.) as if it's that easy. Except now people are like, assigning moral negligence to Sonic's happy-go-lucky demeanor. God forbid the guy wants to chill once in a while, lmao.

And if you believe that Eggman doesn't actually have a body count, then this entire argument becomes moot anyway. Therefore Lanolin is potentially planning on assassinating Sonic based on the fact that he's not footing the group chat's therapy bill.

This is not that difficult. Sonic doesn't care whether Eggman lives or dies. Sonic neglects Eggman's pleas for help. Sonic acts homicidally negligent towards Eggman.

The lid, Patrick! Put your hand on the lid!

---

Now who's the one saying that Sonic should go Punisher on Eggman?

I know, right? Wasn't offing Eggman supposed to be this awful no-no thing he should never do because Principles? Now he's an asshole for not pulling a Spock-esque "greater good" moral calculation?

I'm starting to lose the plot, in more ways than one. xP

[viscountessevie]

Idk if and when you'll start answering benophie asks again but I cant help but notice how all the 🌼 that shit on aofag by saying its classist and elitist are also the same people who don't want to see that story played out on screen. It's such textbook virtue signaling and I'm tired of it. Like just say that you don't relate to to sophie or her story of trauma and abuse, just say that you want a story about two rich people going to balls and falling in love. There's nothing wrong with that. (1)

Related Ask I got about a week after(?): 

First off hii anon thank you for sending this in and waiting a while! 

Just a lot of shit happened on this blog and then when you sent this in I was trying to keep my blog ‘neutral’ because some people took offence to my post calling you-know-whos after a old timey disease and decided that we wouldn’t be impartial with our poll results which btw I apologise to everyone who is still waiting for it - I’ve been depressed (I’m fine don’t worry it just be like that sometimes) and my friends all have started school/work so life has happened we’re going to try to compile everything starting this weekend hopefully! Will come back with more updates when we’re ready to post. 

That tangent aside, that’s why I couldn’t answer right away and then everything on my blog happened but now it’s free rein, The Petty Viscountess is here and ready to answer all your anons venting and calling shit out on you know which fandom. Not even gonna bother giving them a cute nickname, they’ll whine. 

Let’s get into your ask, shall we! I don’t have more points to add to be honest - you said it all! 

Sophie saved their book!! And also we have Luke T to thank for making Ben even more likeable! Ben has his charming moments in the books but we all - even those of us who love him - gotta admit he was so creepy at times being so pushy. I think its good for us Benophines to accept that part of him in Book Canon and engage critically with that aspect of him. 

However that being said, you’re absolutely right about the way other subfandom fans can be so annoying about our ships by acting all high and mighty about their ship both being virgins. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that inherently and it can be romantic - but to act like that somehow makes their racist faves a morally better couple??? Do they realise they sound super puritan and like Church Pastors and Nuns who scared us former Christian kids into not having sex cos it was supposedly a sin?? 

It’s funny when you realise now most of them are trying to their couple out to be Kathony 2.0 in order to generate the hype for S3 its pretty sad that they don’t even believe in their own ship to let them be their own people.

To end this ask off I do wanna reiterate two very poignant points you made in your ask: 

I'm disinterested in half the bridgerton ships but I don't go around pretending to have a good reason why.  

They're already getting their season a year early, just leave us to our misery and they enjoy the content you get instead of constantly rubbing it in our faces. Every single ship is annoying but *god* their egos have inflated to the size of a bounce house lately. 

I have no idea why That Subfandom is so hellbent on everyone liking them and their ship so damn much. Like just accept that the show version have shitty versions of those characters and that majority of your fandom are racist assholes so the rest of us want nothing to do with you!! Be secure in yourselves and accept that you don’t need anyone else’s validation - yall have shown yourselves that you’re are deluded enough anyway. 

[I always say this but just a reminder: the only valid ones are most of the time Book Polins who hate the show version and are upset their fave chars have been character assassinated - I actually have a Polin who sent me an ask about this! I didn’t forget you - I’m just putting tgt a list of positive rep for you anon so hang in there <3. Also there is ONE rare person I’ve talked to who does critically engage with Show Pen so they’re okay - I just wish they would be more confrontational with their fandom tho.]

Back to you Benophie Anon: Your last line made me LAUGH OUT LOUD and LOUDER FOR THE RACISTS AT THE BACK: 

They're already getting their season a year early,... enjoy the content you get instead of constantly rubbing it in our face. *god* their egos have inflated to the size of a bounce house lately.

Check yourselves @ you-know-whos!! Another season why we don’t like you, no one likes gloater and we get it Production Loves You so just stay in your corner! Leave us the fuck alone and stop being so self-righteous and trying to make your ship Kathony 2.0, they’ll never be Lord and Lady Bridgerton. Only Mr. and Miss for you. 

Anyways last thing: @ both anons who sent in their asks if you’re anti-racist/homophobia/sexist Benophies who don’t send doxxing threats, please hit up my friends Belle aka sophiamariabeckett and Michaela aka minim236 they need more sane Benophie mutuals/friends! We’re tired of finding out some Benophies here and/or Twitters are secret racists or homophobes [this ask got long so I’ll put the red flags in the comments] 

[ot3]

What's the core appeal of orv? I know the premise but why does it make you so hyped up?

OH BOY OH BOY....... i will try to be as concise as possible here but i could write without exaggeration thousands of words about why orv is good. But I guess here's the big stuff.

- Its funny, for starters. it is extremely funny, which is very high up on my media priority list. in orv, there will be incredibly grim things that make you laugh, and incredibly cringe and silly anime bullshit that will hurt you as heavily as any other media you’ve seen. 

- it executes it’s thematic arcs with pinpoint precision the likes of which i’ve hardly ever seen anything else manage to do. regardless of whether or not the themes themselves are the sort of themes you go bonkers for in media, it’s always just delightful to see something perfectly stick it’s landing in terms of the big concepts its trying to grapple with, and orv does

- it’s got fun and fascinating worldbuilding mechanics. the core concept being ‘reality now operates on the rules of a shitty novel’ means that the worldbuilding doesn’t have to function logically, it functions thematically. it’s explicitly stated in orv canon that some of the internal rules governing this new reality are objectively really stupid and illogical, but they just have to roll with it because that’s what was in the book, and i think it’s a really enjoyable way to do it. This may at first sound like a copout, where the writer is trying to excuse their own bad worldbuilding, but it isn’t. The world building is actually incredibly deeply thought out, but it doesn’t exist for the sake of rational function, it exists for the sake of, once again, furthering orv’s thematic arcs. the rules by which this universe operate do a magnificent job of strengthening the core concepts the authors are exploring. 

- it deals with morality in a really wonderful and nuanced way. there are almost no characters in orv’s extremely large cast of characters who are just explicitly morally condemnable, and almost every conflict allows you to understand exactly why the antagonists believe they’re in the right by opposing the actions of our protagonists. the central conflicts are never pure right and pure wrong; they’re always about contrasting goals, conflicting worldviews, and different priorities between ends and means. this makes the conflicts all feel so much more dynamic and engaging than those where the only stakes are physical harm. 

- the characters interpersonal relationships are some of the most interesting ive ever seen. orv is very slow burn and it takes a long time for a lot of these to come out of the woodwork, by design, but by god once they do they fucking hit. similar to the plot conflicts, the interpersonal conflicts also almost never occur where there’s one side clearly in the wrong. the characters are almost all genuinely attempting to do their best by each other, and the tension comes from the ways in which human communication is fundamentally imperfect and part of our feelings and intentions get lost in translation. it’s very heartwrenching and heartwarming to see unfold, in equal measure. 

- following from that, it’s a narrative that really meaningfully prioritizes non-romantic relationships over romantic ones as the central focus. obviously there’s shipbait and the ot3 is real and good and my friend but if you’re looking for deep complex platonic, (found or otherwise) familial, and antagonistic relationships that never get ruined with forced romantic arcs, we got em baby!

- the pacing is unlike anything i’ve ever seen before. from a purely technical standpoint, it is genuinely a fascinating case study in how to execute a narrative that is almost constantly escalating without exception. there is very little downtime or breathing room in orv, which is insane for something that clocks in at over a million words, and somehow, it still works. i’ve never felt more like a frog in a pot of slowly boiling water than i did when i was reading orv and i can’t believe they pulled it off. it’s so interesting to read something like that.

- it is a tragedy without resorting to cynicism and a very adult narrative that’s really steeped in childlike wonder. i’m a big fan of cartoons made for children cartoons made for children are my favorite things to watch because i like media that is uplifting and encouraging. but of course children’s media will always be simplified and not very relatable to an adult. orv is very much a serious and heavy adult narrative, and a deeply tragic one at that, but this is never tragedy for tragedy’s sake. it’s a very compassionate piece of media over all, that holds a lot of reverence and sympathy for the ‘naive’ optimism of children that gets stripped down over time. if you, like me, feel more like a grown up child than an adult someday, i think it’ll hit for you. 

- if you are a person who has ever gotten deeply involved in media to ignore bad things happening in the real world, which i know you are because you are reading my tumblr blog, then there is going to be a lot about orv which resonates for you. a lot of metanarrative has attempted to comment on the voyeuristic nature of media obsession and storytelling, but a lot of it does so in a bizarre way that almost seems to shame the audience for having the audacity to... enjoy the product the creators have produced for them. orv is what i can only describe as a love-letter to its own audience, and it’s really a manifesto about how engagement with media can foster genuine human intimacy, even if initially it’s something you’re using as a crutch to replace that intimacy. the closest thing to orv’s metanarrative i can think of would be undertale. if undertale made you Feel some Things, orv is gonna make you Feel some Things as well. 

- it is extremely cathartic and meaningful. i am not exaggerating at all when i say that reading it gave me the closest thing i have ever felt to any sort of spiritual breakthrough. it helped unfuck my head a ton during some very grim times and i think the perspective it offers on the value of human life is a really really good one

- its really funny i promise

- its cringe in a way that’s hype

- please read orv please not even for me do it for yourself i want you to experience what i experienced for YOUR sake not mine

[your--isgayrights]

not sure if this is what you had in mind but i was thinking maybe kdj and hsy meeting briefly earlier in life (at 20/22 years old or sth)? maybe having a misunderstanding or an argument over something trivial (like interpretation of a book or who should take the last lemon flavored popsicle in the store) and somehow still managing to reach some recognition or understanding of each other. years later they would forget about each other but still remember that bizarre situation sometimes. i have no idea if that makes any sense but i believe in your writing and massive brain and powerful swag. xoxo

Aaaaah, Exe I'm sorry if this isn't exactly what you asked for... I was just like... what if that time Han Sooyoung and Kim Dokja almost met in the epilogue went a little differently and like... haha...

The first part is basically copied and pasted from that chapter before the twist, so go read that first if you haven't!

Han Su-Yeong staggered and walked closer to Kim Dok-Ja. Several passersby brushing past her looked back in suspicion.

Kim Dok-Ja was now walking down the subway’s steps.

Kim Dok-Ja, with earphones stuck in his ears and reading something on his phone while walking downstairs.

She knew what he was currently reading.

“—!!”

She barely managed to shout, but her voice still didn’t come out. So, she desperately chased after him.

Because of the story you wrote, author-nim, I was able to survive until now. Han Su-Yeong was also able to survive while reading the sole reader’s words.

She managed to write the next part of Yu Jung-Hyeok’s life through them.

She was able to endure her boring and stuffy teen years, the days she never wanted to go back to, thanks to those words.

This train is bound for… She spotted Kim Dok-Ja standing on the platform, waiting for the next train to arrive. A person hiding within the small world crafted out of letters to protect himself was standing right there.

Kim Dok-Ja, who didn’t know anything about the apocalypse about to happen.

Kim Dok-Ja, who’d get to live on the expansive world of the ‘Ways of Survival’.

Kim Dok-Ja, who’d get to meet the protagonist he so longed to become.

Kim Dok-Ja, who’d become the ‘Demon King of Salvation’.

Kim Dok-Ja, who’d sacrifice himself multiple times for the sake of his companions, and as a result, came to the 1863rd turn and met her.

Kim Dok-Ja, who was destined to become the ‘Most Ancient Dream’, the price he paid for loving a certain story too much.

[Your mental state is crumbling!]

[The main body’s ego is regaining its control.]

[Your Fable is being extinguished.]

Her legs grew heavy, and her arms didn’t want to move anymore. Her body was gradually becoming not hers.

Even then, Han Su-Yeong wanted to tell him.

⸢To tell him that he was definitely not at fault for this story being born. And to tell him that the things he was about to experience were not his sins.⸥

Because, her past 13 years existed solely to say those words to him.

⸢To say that, though you have grown up while reading this story, there’s no need for you to become it.⸥

She barely managed to muster up her strength, her arm coiling in on itself and preparing for her one last willful action.

[Your ego will convert into the ‘subconsciousness’.]

As she set her weak, pre-scenario body into that final decisive movement...

The twenty six year old Han Su-yeong who knew nothing of the soon to come apocalypse, woke up thrusting her fist forward into the face of some guy on the subway.

She would've thought she was still dreaming, if it hadn't been for the feeling of his soft cheek slamming against the hard bone of his teeth under the force of her balled up hand.

'What the hell? Why am I doing this?'

Han Su-yeong most likely would have asked herself these things if she had any more time to think before her punch had landed.

She got her answer, though. Despite never asking her question, that reason she was looking for became clear as the man staggered off his balance.

He made a futile attempt to right himself before being knocked to the ground. The phone that he had been holding so close to his face clattering screen-side up onto the concrete of the subway floor.

That was when she saw it.

She only had to read a snippet of the words on that phone screen to come up with an explanation for her own actions at that very moment.

[There are three ways to survive in a ruined world. Now, I have forgotten a few, but one thing is certain. The fact that you who are reading this now will survive.

-Three ways to survive in a ruined world

Author’s words: Thank you so much for reading ‘Ways of Survival’ up to here. I will come back to you with an epilogue!]

'Ways of Survival.' 'Three ways to survive in a ruined world.'

...

Yes, there was no doubt that this guy sat on the subway floor rubbing at his cheek deserved it.

Some latent evil of the world must be working to Han Su-yeong's advantage, because none of the commuter passing by spared her a second glance as she sorted out her own motives. They simply dodged around her and the man she had assaulted moments ago.

If Han Su-yeong had to write some train of thought into their actions, she might imagine these negligent bystanders saw something like an overly dramatic lover's spat. Something personal that they ought not get involved in.

Were it not for the pervasiveness of such a cliche recurrent in physical altercations between men and women, maybe they would see it for what it was. A question of honor between authors.

Because Han Su-yeong was certain that was who this man was. An author who was so shitty that he had created an alt to try and hype up his terrible novel.

That was right... It was years ago now, but Han Su-yeong remembered that unsubstantiated accusation of plagiarism on her first published webnovel, SSSSS-grade Infinite Regressor.

This shitty guy had made an alt account that was so obvious... it was something 'Dok-ja,' like he wasn't even trying to pretend he didn't make it just to pretend to 'read' his own webnovel...

If that didn't prove it, then it was also clear from the comments that he had left on every single chapter. When she was reading them, Han Su-yeong had known that if she were such a bad author that she would have to have just one reader, the words that he wrote represented that perfect amount of reader to author engagement that she would have desired.

But that sort of relationship... it was unrealistic. Han Su-yeong had been an author for something like 13 years now, and she had never had such a relationship in her entire career.

So it was obvious that a reader like that could only be written by an author with those same desires that she held.

And then he even had the nerve to wander out of his self contained fantasy, accusing her superior work of plagiarizing his shitty one just to draw in more views and commenters.

So of course he had a lot of nerve to be rereading his own damn author's note right where she could see hi-

"Can I help you?"

Han Su-yeong felt all of the hot air she had been blowing herself up with to justify her current situation deflate upon hearing that voice of his.

The man she'd injured looked up at her with hollow black eyes. Eyes that perhaps had only seemed bright while being illuminated by a screen.

His voice was mild, too. As if getting punched in the face were something that was merely tiresome to him, instead of something to stir anger or indignity. The reactions that Han Su-yeong had been mentally preparing herself to butt heads with.

Nothing about his reaction seemed to ask Han Su-yeong for her motives. There was no race to find an explanation behind those hollow eyes. No bit lip, straining to come up with a turn of phrase to become an appropriately biting retort.

This guy wasn't an author.

...

Hey...

Why had she punched this guy again?

"Sorry." Han Su-yeong found herself saying, as her body deflated, extended arm going back to her side. "From the behind, you looked like my shitty ex."

She let herself fall into the cliche.

"Ah. I see."

Han Su-yeong hated the guy's expression, just then.

It was one that said, 'Well isn't that just my luck?'

But she couldn't help but watch, as this unlucky guy stood up and picked up his phone, brushing it off instead of himself, as if it were more precious to him than his own body.

And when that Dok-ja turned around, Han Su-yeong only saw his back for a second, before the sight of him was once more swallowed up by the uncaring world of the subway station crowd.

[beeblackburn]

The Anti-TBR Tag

I was tagged by @books-and-doodles! Thank you! And poor you, for I am a long-winded bastard.

1. A popular book EVERYONE loves that you have no interest in reading?

On general principle, I feel like the really popular stuff (Twilight, Throne of Glass, Divergent, The Mortal Instruments) ends up being stuff I’m inherently not going to be attracted to and some of them have their own hatedoms going on, so going after them in detail would be punching down (though I don’t particular like any of the above). So I’m going to try to go off the beaten path with these seven:

A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab = nothing against her personally, though I heard her The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was baaaaad, but apparently, she’s similar to Sanderson in the magic system being better than the characterization and I heard her writing’s got a white faux-female empowerment sort of thing going that I’m growing increasingly... discontent of by itself. I might try it out later, but I also got hundreds of books to drill through first and I’m in no rush.

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo = I’ve been increasingly getting the sense that Six of Crows was a flash in the pan, Bardugo’s style more defined by fun than genuine substance. And given a rather scathing review that points out unearned shifts in characterization, lackluster supporting cast, and two really uncomfortable exploitative sexual assault fantasy scenes (one of which was underaged!), I’m gonna say no.

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik = I generally like Novik! She’s a very solid writer to me and I’ve bought most of her books, so this is purely me not taking to the Wizarding School genre. Sorry, Novik, "a twisted, super dark, super modern, female-led Harry Potter" isn’t the selling point it once was, and even then, I probably wouldn’t have taken to it. Especially when I’ve already got The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan to read.

The Alloy of Law by Brandon Sanderson = I’ve got mixed feelings on Mistborn looking back: it’s hardly the worst of his oeuvre (Elantris is that and was admittedly his first book) and The Final Empire took a few narrative risks that I admire, I also found the resulting books a tad juvenile and I don’t take to steampunk, genre-wise. I’m not even that much of a Sanderson fan, so I’d rather just read the summary for all I care.

Storm Front by Jim Butcher = given what I’ve been told about The Dresden Files’ lessening of noir roots past the first few books, how it later became more flashy-and-bang magical, and how it’s pretty sexist early on (and from what I’ve been told, doubled down on it later on and having worse treatments of its female characters), I’m in no particular rush to read them. The urban fantasy genre on them only turns me off more.

The Doors of Stone by Patrick Rothfuss = hahaha, I’m sorry, I did read The Name of the Wind, and read select parts of The Wise Man’s Fear, but everyone, instead of waiting and devoting your time for this book to come, I would suggest reading Fitz, Who Is Actually Good and Can Wring More than Disgust and an Eye-Roll out of You in Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings, given she is far better at characterization than Rothfuss.

Anything by Paul Krueger, Sam Sykes, and Myke Cole = fuck all three of these men and the idea that I’ll pay for their stuff. While I can’t demand any of you not buy from them and I’ll hardly claim to be a saint in terms of ethics, purchase-wise, I would beseech you all please don’t buy from these three authors who have a history of inappropriateness.

2. A classic book (or author) you don’t have an interest in reading?

Charles Dickens = look, I know his word count is padded because of serial installments back then, but I’m sorry, I wasn’t that impressed by the child-sanitized versions of Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. They were easily some of the most boring of out of the child-sanitized classics I read. It was the pictures that kept me going and barely at that. No thanks.

Emily Brontë =  look, if I wanted shitty people being shitty to each other, I’d much rather read Joe Abercrombie because at least I’ll get some intentional dark comedy out of dumb shitheads being terrible to each other (Best Served Cold comes to mind). And I know we’re not meant to like these self-destructive people, but I’d rather not hate everyone that much.

Alexander Dumas = Three Musketeers really didn’t age well, just from the TV Tropes page and I’m not really looking forward to an adventure that goes out of its way to valorize its protagonists being adventurous assholes who dueled, drank, and womanized harder than anyone else and we should commend that because they were men. Ugh.

3. An author you have read a couple of books from & have decided their books are not for you?

Leigh Bardugo = like I said, I feel like Six of Crows (and Crooked Kingdom, to a lesser extent) was a flash in the pan and she’s been increasingly running on fumes ever since then. Good and fun with a decent eye for characterization, but hardly revolutionary, considering how I think Crooked Kingdom isn’t quite as good as Six of Crows, and the less said about Shadow and Bone, the better.

Neil Gaiman = I’ve read some of his stuff (and I didn’t quite see the hype over his writing, but liked it decently enough) but having heard that, in his Sandman run, he wrote in a transwoman solely to get killed for an emotional ending and how he defended that choice for awhile left a battery acid taste for me to read more. He’s a formative part of people’s childhoods, so I don’t blame anyone for being fans, he’s just not for me.

Steven Erikson = really nothing against the dude, I’m sure he's probably a decent guy, but I didn’t take to Gardens of the Moon at all and skimming Deadhouse Gates and Memories of Ice (which were admittedly better) made me realize its prose was something I would need a hard and sharp shovel to crack through, and the darting around of many, many POVs made me feel not invested in anyone.

4. A genre you have no interest in OR a genre you tried to get into & couldn’t?

I’ll answer both because I have the time:

I’m not interested in romance, mostly because it’s an entire genre built around the build-up. It’s usually the story about the beginning of a relationship, not the relationship itself. I’d genuinely like to read about the story of a romance that doesn’t stop shortly after the hook-up or before the honeymoon period ends. The City Watch parts of Discworld by Terry Pratchett, The Memoirs of Lady Trent by Marie Brennan and The Sharing Knife by Lois McMaster Bujold all have romantic elements that are relatively undrenched in melodrama or frills, but none of them are pure romances, which is a huge problem. I can take romantic subplots in fantasy, but I can’t take the genre as-is.

Urban fantasy is a genre I’m not against having my mind changed on liking, but right now, I generally find it insipid, a shortcut to good world-building, short on great characterization, and an excuse to lampshade and pretense to being above fantastical clichés in a tongue-in-cheek attitude while still committing to them. I do genuinely like Rivers of London by Ben Aaronvitch, but that’s really the concession I can give the entirety of the genre. I took a crack at Rick Riordan and Cassandra Clare’s stuff, but it didn’t feel like my sort of thing. Again, would like to be convinced, but I’d much rather read a domestic or slice-of-life fantasy set in a more overtly fantasy world than the urban one. 

Also, sci-fi, but I’m trying again with the Wormwood trilogy by Tade Thompson, An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon, and either the Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie, or the Teixcalaan trilogy by Arkady Martine. I snoozed through Azimov’s Foundation and generally bored myself of hard sci-fi books, so I’m hoping contemporary sci-fi changes my mind on the entire genre.

5. A book you have bought but will never read?

A book I personally bought? Honestly, Traitor’s Blade by Sebastien de Castell. No particular reason, I just bought it at a closing-down sale at a branch of my bookstore on the cheap because the cover looked nice and didn’t really take to its blurb. I heard good things though, so if anyone else wants to read it...

I tag @vera-dauriac, @xserpx, @autoapocrypha, @kateofthecanals, @turtle-paced, @insecticidalfeminism, @secretlyatargaryen, @helix-eagle-hourglass-nebula, @xillionart, @jovolovo and whoever else that is following me and wishes to do this tag (I’d like to read your posts, so please tag me! :D)

[blee-bleep]

Though I disagree vehemently about your take I'm also very curious of your arguments for why you think Akko is such a bad character?

Anon, you have no idea what you just fucking asked of me. Time for a review! This is going to be hella’ long. 

Vanilla Character that insists that she has personality

So the one thing I’m going to start off with is; The Relatable/Vanilla Protagonist Syndrome. This is the syndrome that is used for most main characters in order to have a clean-slate character that is basically the audience in order to promote the world-building in the series by having them absolutely no clue of what is the world around them. That is what Akko exactly is, and that is what Trigger abuses her out of. 

Little Witch Academia is an anime that focuses solely on world-building, so much so that they’re willing to pile over their characters in order to show what magic can do. 

(And apparently for Trigger, world-building also means learning who the author of a 200-yo Twilight spinoff book is and who was Holbrooke’s dad)

But the point is, the anime is a pile of boring trash fire that focuses on world-building, even from its original exposition of the OVA. It uses the pattern of ‘theme/problem of the week’ in half of the series with arcs going nowhere for a while and suddenly rushes an epiphany in the last few episodes. *cough ep 15*

The point with world-building serialization is that it needs a way to be promoted, and what way for it to promote is to get Akko to fuck around with it. As her job as the protag, that’s exactly what she does for more than half of the series. She’s like a stretchy character that is carried by the plot with gross insistence from the show that she has character (which is being stubborn and clumsy that is written off as ‘passionate’).

What’s worse is Trigger has all these ideas yet none of them are polished to its fullest (like the political divide between witches and modern government) or is overlapped by some bullshit to add because Japan. (seriously, a hunting-themed episode with cool lore, and yet a third of the episode is all about robots and building it? What the fuck?)

See, that’s why I think Akko is a horribly written character, not her character itself (if that were the case then I would’ve ditched the show the first episode) but because how she’s executed with it for the show. She’s constantly pulled by different bullshit the show comes up and makes her pull the answers the episode needs out of thin fucking air just because the writers said ‘fuck you’ to development and that they need to end the problem at some point right?

If characters can’t be tied correctly to the worldbuilding then there’s a chance that the character themselves would break, because it just can’t often work with what you’ve already placed in the previous episodes you’ve set up in the first place. Arcs overlap with each other and LWA doesn’t do shit for that until it needs a banging climax. 

Akko is constantly renewed and she learns nothing from what she learned (or at least hints of it), except for the metamorphosis bullshit and Shiny Rod. Which brings me to my next point on why Akko is such a horrible character.

Shiny Rod is a Leech

This thing is basically the plot device that Akko is so tied to. If there’s ever an episode where it solely focuses on Akko herself, it’s often related to either Shiny Rod or Chariot du Nord, which is the shittiest way to limit a character with so much exposition with everything the series has thrown at her. The only other way the series doesn’t do this to her is Diana in episode 12, but it isn’t even focused on her, it’s focused on the cabbage and her Draco Malfoy syndrome.

Anyways, were an episode be connected to Akko in some way, it’s always limiting to her duty as the holder of the Shiny Rod and the occasional situation from Chariot. Not from her friends, who she clearly relates to and has more history with, but with the Shiny Rod and Chariot.

The series lazily signs this as Akko’s resolution to her character by the last episode (FUCK THAT) and does nothing else with her relationship with other characters outside of Diana and Chariot. Honestly, you’d expect that after going through Sucy’s mind and visiting Lotte’s hometown, she would’ve grown as a better character and more than being a two-dimensional ‘chosen-one’ character who only gets an episode if it focuses on the plot-device that pulled her in the magical world in the first place. 

But no, Trigger is still insisting pies, weird shops, and other boring stuff needs to be shown for the series to make it interesting, and dumps the idea to the next. An arc is never properly made for all the shit they let Akko go through because the series is so fast-paced in the wrong places. And when it does focus on what is important (more important than finding about Nightfall’s author), it’s usually done spontaneously thus eliminating the suppose suspense that the single important thing is supposed to do *I HATE EPISODE 15 WHAT THE FUCK*

The point is, Akko is just a ‘believing heart’. A holder of Shiny Rod, who managed to get under Chariot without her knowing. It’s like she’s Midoriya (My Hero Academia) but much watered down and if you take that away from her, she has nothing, when out of all the stuff she could’ve had.

What LWA’s writers hadn’t realized is that what they actually wrote for Akko is what could’ve been her focus but Trigger insists for the world-building theme is that Akko’s arc should only come in the climax and the filler episodes are for her friends because you know, it won’t be more interesting that way and now they have a main protagonist that’s actually interesting beyond their design and suppose-personality. 

Thus I’m next to my last bullshit:

Akko, the Wasted Potential™

I recently rewatched Citrus lately, and though the show is much narrow than LWA’s world of magic, I realized what actually makes it better than it in ways that the latter fails. And it’s their protagonist.

I know you guys will trash about Yuzu being a simp and all, and I absolutely agree with that, but what makes Yuzu better than Akko is not because she’s more down-to-earth, but she has a three-dimensional mindset, a mindset which is the very thing kept away from Akko. 

While Yuzu may not have been pushed into a world of magic by the neck and gets dragged by the plot as violently as Akko (and the two very different themes of the two shows of course), but if you pull those away, their passion are nearly built the same. What differs them both is that Yuzu actually acts out what she needs to do and builds a steady relationship with the other characters around her, even if it’s very subtle and small. (Like, Harumin being her wicked hot sidekick? God yes, top-tier Gyaru)

Akko, on the other hand, literally goes into one of her best friend’s mind in a poison-induced coma and gets shoved into her other best friend’s culture by visiting her hometown. You might think she’d grow from that and realize what it takes to be a better character, right? WRONG.

Of course, Trigger uses these things as filler episodes and nothing more. It doesn’t reflect on Akko’s character because she’s not allowed to think like it should. Though the show would insist she has personality, it does the opposite when Akko’s only character is only used as ‘believing heart’ for the Shiny Rod and nothing much else, because the only times when they do get her a new attitude is dropped off right after.

It would’ve been cool if they dropped the world-building theme for a bit and focus on how they should make the characters much more interesting than having their personalities as the root problems of episodes. 

When I first watched LWA, I had so much more expectation for the characters themselves, especially Amanda O’Neill after her introduction in episode 3. But came episode 5 and then she… didn’t really matter that much despite being in half of the episode. And she didn’t have another one not until 11 episodes later. Imagine making and hyping up such a unique character and barely giving her screentime of three episodes! That’s one of the grossest things you can do in baiting lesbians, Trigger! 

And it doesn’t stop at Amanda; it applies to almost every other character. Chariot is the pink-print disappointment of a hyped character that didn’t have enough time. She’s a plot-device character that everyone was anticipating but she’s barely given the after of a shitty episode 14 (that has another completely different problem altogether). Episode 15 was literally the worst you could’ve done to make a twist because a) the development leading to that revelation was undercooked, and especially shitty because the show basically used Croix as a plot device, b) it’s done nearly towards the end of the series so the timing for her hype was weirdly placed, and c) Chariot’s personality from that episode is being used repeatedly just to let Akko become a sitting duck. 

So yeah, Trigger was so focused on the concept of world-building and making magic look as interesting as possible that the idea that maybe the characters would flat-out look bleak was not in their cone of vision. Akko was fundamentally a boring protagonist because she keeps getting pulled apart and has not ingrained anything in that, and to rub salt into the wound, she becomes so used to it that when Croix set her up with the Wagandea trap, Chariot has to intervene and at the cost of her flight powers, which does not help their characters one bit.

Akko is a shitty protagonist Trigger shredded apart just for their sake of world-building and she has learned nothing from what the show has thrown at her because the writers didn’t think she needed it, because, in the first place, it’s not about her. It’s about the Shiny Rod and completing Chariot’s story (which is half-assed in its own way). Lord knows how they botched her to the point she’s blank. She’s nothing more than a ‘believing heart’ and if Trigger just keeps there, that’s forever what she is. And that, in itself, is why I think Akko is a horrible character.

[tatertotthethot]

I agree on the topic about fanfics and how some people disregard authors and how its not acceptable cause everyone is allowed to do what they want as long as they don’t hurt anyone, however I really think its not for everyone and the reason why some people make fun of it is not on the fanfics themselves but rather on the so called ,, not like other girls” or ,,quirky type” ,ofcourse authors are not responsible for that but lets say wattpad is one of the sources that contributed to building this type of character that everyone is cringing at right now. Fanfics are okay as long as you remember for what they stand for and some girls sometimes detach themselves from reality, trying to find that bad boy who will be only good for them, when crying for not being treated right. Lets even take the same After, most people dont have the problem with fanfiction, but rather with it being turned into a movie, and frankly i think the same. We see more and more romanticization towards toxic love :fifty shades, 365 , after... where guy gets away with everything by being hot and girls life simply cannot revolve without the said guy in it and normalizing it like its a normal thing. Concluding i’d like to say that its only my personal opinion and others may disagree and thats completely fine 🤷‍♀️

Yeah I’ve also ranted about the most toxic ones getting glorified the most and I also get what you mean on the stereotypical “not like other girls” cliche being popularized and used as a way to vigorously fantasize this ideology of “true love” that are basically just glorified versions of trauma bonding. I not only feel that it misrepresents the fanfic community but it also completely shits on the bad boy trope— which is one of my favorite tropes. I ain’t downing nobodies work but I hope the ones that write the stereotypical TOXIC bad boy x good girl ships eventually realize that they’re constructing an ideology that comes with an innocent, gullible person chasing an “emotional high” that follows after being abused by an ✨attractive✨ fuckboy. They also don’t realize how unrealistic and incompatible a happy ending truly is in that situation, when a guy rather throw a grenade at you and watch you explode than admitting that they have a soft spot for you. It doesn’t really correlate with the thought process that goes behind a person that’s just “emotionally unavailable”. I mean, it’d be different if they actually gave the “bad boy” more dimensional characteristics and understandable flaws where they just more-so bluntly state that they just want sex and actually mean it, by pushing the sentimental shit away to maintain a tough exterior as a form of denial/rejection prevention, rather than just making them impulsively torment their love interests just to prove.. essentially.. nothing... other than the fact that their an unstable piece of shit lmao. Because with the first one, it still leaves a realistic window open for them to change and actually form a healthy relationship. Whereas the latter shouldn’t even be promoted as a love story after the clear signs of toxicity and abuse become the main turning point to this plotted out “romance”. I rather read about a fuckboy with a cold heart having no choice but to let his guard down because he can’t deny his feelings towards the love interest, over a story about an egotistical shit head with rich-kid issues setting out to sabotage and sexually violate an innocent girl but accidentally falling in love in the process, only to shit on them even more. Like.. it still doesn’t make a crumb of sense why he even did that if he had a sliver of genuine respect towards her no matter the size of his ego. Man’s would have to be a saciopath at that point. And (no offense to anybody who relates to this, as it’s not me invalidating anyone’s struggle just stating the misrepresentation) the fact that it’s this sheltered and gullible good girl who’s most iterated background trauma is their parents being divorced that goes from someone who is self-aware and optimistic to the “yes I know he’s no good for me but I’m built different so therefore I’ll let him hurt me and ruin my confidence in the name of love cuz I’m the only one that gets him” type of bitch is pick me energy and again, shouldn’t be glorified. “After” is nothing but a tale of that with hella trauma bonding that was created by intitial deception— especially in the original Wattpad book. Like, Holy fuck. It didn’t deserve the hype and damn sure shouldn’t have been perceived as a true love story. I remember commenting on a chapter saying that and I got cussed out by hundreds of directioners for it lmao. So yeah I agree with you and understand the stigma, and at the same time I can’t really say it’s completely wrong on peoples part outside of the community when they’re just going off of what they’re seeing being presented the most, but it really ain’t fair when they just trash us up and down despite us repeatedly saying that the judgement is being based off of a very bad example that a lot of us don’t even wanna claim. Its also shitty how our work is discredited and stigmatized by this stereotype and I genuinely fear that only the problematic(and ironically most popularized) fics will keep getting promoted the most and eventually silence the actual talent and beauty that is created within the realm of fanfiction.

[iheardarumorxxx]

Midnight Sun, Chapter 9 - Port Angeles

Right. I remember this chapter from Twilight. I also have heard quite a bit about this chapter. This is gonna be a ride. 

Eddie starts off this chapter saying that he used to be the ‘responsible’ one. I would like to remind everyone that Edward Anthony Masen Cullen spent a few years eating people he percieved to be horrible criminals because he didn’t like animal blood and was being a whiny baby. But go off, Eddie.

SM is still trying to paint Jessica as a rude bitch and I still don’t buy it. It is extremely clear to anyone with eyeballs that Mike has a thing for Bella, and it is pretty obvious that this date he’s going on with Jessica is because Bella said no. So her thoughts come off as insecure. She’s a teenage girl, so I think insecure is a pretty standard thing. Not always, but SM has painted these kids as the stereotypical teens, so.

Basically, I still don’t buy the attempt to make Jessica seem evil.

Bella has wandered off to go get that book she wanted, and Eddie is simply freaking out because he let his daughter out of his sight for one minute and she wandered off. He’s about half a second away from considering getting a leash to put on her. Seriously, though, that’s how this reads. A parent frantic because they lost their child in a crowded store or park. We all know she’s gonna get a serious scolding for this one. Maybe even grounded.

a volly of snarls erupted from my throat

Okay, we’re still not to the big rant about vampire instincts in this universe, yet, but I want you guys to remember this for later. It absolutely aides in the point I plan to make there. Also a ‘volly’ of snarls. That sounds so forced and I genuinely laughed out loud when I read it. Anyway, Eddie has found Bella and she is with the Evil Bad Guys Who Have Ill Intentions. 

I would see how he enjoyed the hunt when he was the pray. I would see what he thought of my style of hunting.

Technically a spoiler because it hasn’t happened yet in this book, but not because we’ve seen it in Twilight. Eddie literally does not do anything to this Lanny guy or his friends. He gets out of the car, makes a mean face at them, and then gets back in the car and drives off. Maybe SM has Eddie go back out and hunt them later after he drops Bella off, but that doesn’t fit in with his squeaky clean good boy persona that Daddy Carlisle puts on him, so I doubt it. The scene as we know it comes off as very ‘man, if my girlfriend wasn’t here I’d kick your ass’. Because Eddie is a lot of bloated, puffed up talk.

When SM uses dialogue tags like ‘ordered’ to describe how Eddie says things, it just really hammers home that point I’ve been making about red flags. Even if it’s practical, like him telling Bella to put on a seat belt, especially since Pires bend the will of cars to their inane and idotic physics.

We went on a tangent about one of Eddie’s kills from his Vampire Batman days, and like honestly? I watch a lot of Criminal Minds. I see a lot of this kind of stuff, and it is absolutely awful that people like that exist in the world. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be stopped. HOWEVER, this idea Eddie has that he was playing a good guy by taking justice into his own hands, I don’t jive with that. Now, I am aware of how faulty the criminal justice system is, especially with victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. I’ve lived that, myself. But if Eddie is so comfortable taking another life, no matter how he tries to justify it, he is no better than the people who he’s deciding to kill for their crimes.

a highly justifiable murder

See, this. This is why I don’t buy that SM’s Cullens are the paragons of good that she is constantly trying to say they are. There is no such thing as a justifiable murder, no matter what. Solving heinous acts with heinous acts simply perpetuates a cycle of heinous acts. 

I wasn’t giving her a chance to say no.

This is a trend that will continue throughout the entire series. I will point you to all of the times that Edward never gave Bella a choice in a matter, including leaving her in New Moon, and DISMANTLING HER CAR ENGINE IN ECLIPSE SO THAT SHE COULDN’T GO SEE HER FRIEND. That one in particular rubs me the wrong way for reasons, but we won’t do that here. Just know that Edward never actually lets Bella make a choice in this series, and even when he pretends to, he does everything in his power to make the outcome go his way.

And now we’re at the restaruant. I’ve heard some stuff about this scene and god, can I not WAIT, but for now, let’s just talk about the one off waitress character. She is clearly only here to be a rival to Bella for this scene. Brief, unimportant, underdeveloped. And honestly? One off characters don’t actually need that development, not really, but what I can’t stand about this one is that she is literally only here, both in this book and in Twilight, so that SM can puff up how clearly Bella is so much better than she is. Because, you see, Eddie doesn’t find the pretty hostess attractive, he only has eyes for Bella. Her entire point is so that Edward can look at Bella, and therefore, the audience as Bella is their SI for this world, and go on about how much better and prettier and more perfect she is than this woman. It’s just gross.

“Do I dazzle you?”

This is still, in my personal opinion, the best and most iconic line in a series full of iconic lines. Eddie the Dazzle Machine. Charming the pants off people when he’s trying to scare the shit out of them. It’s hilarious, and so fuckin’ romance novel cliche, and I love it.

This restaurant is apparently a real place in the real Port Angeles. And from what I understand, at least when the Twilight craze was in full swing back in 2008, they got a lot of extra business and a lot more people ordering the mushroom ravioli. Even put something about Twilight on their menu. Good for them, taking advantage of that free marketing. I have never been to Port Angeles, and am allergic to mushrooms, so I can’t say I’ve experienced the dish, but if any of you have, please let me know if it’s worth the hype.

Its so funny that right now, Eddie is worried about Bella being cold and going into shock, while Bella is over there huffing the fumes off his jacket like it’s a paint can, and he can’t even tell that that’s what she’s doing. The girl is doing everything short of just shoving her whole face in it and inhaling, but he’s too thick to get it. 

And here we are folks. The meat and potatoes of this chapter. The big comparison. The reason the cover has a pomegranete on it. Edward Anthony Masen Cullen has the absolute GALL to compare Bella, the boring, walking video game avatar to Persephone. Lets break down Persephone for a second here. There’s a lot to break down, but let’s stick to the basics, for fear that this rant gets wickedly out of hand before I can stop it. Persephone radiates optimism and hope. Persephone is soft, sweet, but has a temper that could kill a man. Persephone is sympathetic. When in the ever loving FUCK has Isabella Swan ever shown any of those characteristics? She is NEVER optimistic about anything. She fucking exists in a constant cloud of negative thought and assuming the worst. She isn’t hopeful about ANYTHING, not even her future with her PRECIOUS Eddie because she’s always questioning his intentions and feelings for her. She is not sympathetic in the slightest, no matter what SM tries to shove down my throat. She treats her friends like shit, she manipulates and lies her way through conversations so she doesn’t have to deal with them, she compares Mike to a FUCKING DOG. Bella is not comparable to Persephone, and it’s fucking beyond ham-fisted, it’s fucking EGREGIOUS to try to make that comparison. 

I could see more of an argument for comparing Eddie to Hades, since, ya know, Hades fucking stole Persephone to be his wife and most stories about Hades paint him as kind of a moody, brooding dickbag, but I’m still calling fucking foul on this attempt at comparison, SM. No dice.

Moving on.

Eddie describing Bella’s skin as ‘velvety’ gives me war flashbacks to those grocery store checkout novels with Fabio on the cover that my mom used to read. Eghhh.

So, Bella touches Eddie’s hand and it’s described in a way that gives me very G-rated sex vibes. Which just makes me wanna tell them to get a room because they’re in public right now, and also don’t do that in front of Bella’s salad ravioli.

Eddie is still being super controling and weird about Bella eating, and honestly, I super wish that Bella had had the good sense to get the hell out of there with Jess and Angela. Or that she would have the good sense now to excuse herself, find someone on staff, ask to borrow a phone, and call her dad. Because this guy is literally throwing out every red flag that exists. I know I say this a lot, but if Bella were a normal girl, she would not be charmed by this guy, she would be freaking creeped out and trying to get away from him. He isn’t even subtle about his creep factor or charming enough to play it off.

Edward thinking he has any edge at all is like white bread thinking it’s the right kind of bread for a hamburger.

Anyway, chapter ends with Eddie paying the bill and the pair getting in the car to head home. And the drama chord of the last sentence that’s supposed to play in your head when you read it falls flat. They’re on the way back to Forks and Eddie is chomping at the bit to hear Bella’s latest theory that we know from Twilight isn’t actually a theory so much as she heard a story from Jacob and then did some searching on some shitty Angelfire website. Or Geocities. Either way. And then she just went ahead and had a big old prophetic dream about it. 

Next time, we get the awkward car ride home and more. Thanks for hanging around guys. As always, feel free to message me (though, please note to anyone who has sent me anon messages that are rude or angry because I’m making fun of this book, I’m gonna ignore you.), recommend what books I should put on my list for my next recap series, and feel free to buy me a snack using the CashApp tag in my bio.

See you next time, babes.

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: Avengers #207: Beyond a Shadow...

May, 1981

“After countless centuries HE LIVES AGAIN! THE SHADOW LORD COMETH!”

He cometh riding upon a tornado like its a mighty sand worm. What a guy, this Shadow Lord.

Honestly seeing the Avengers tumbling about in a tornado cracks me up every time. Especially Wonder Man who looks nonchalant about it aside from being ass over head.

So I don’t think we’ve really talked about it but this period of Avengers is kind of between main writers.

Since issue 200 and its four writers, we’ve had David Michelinie and Roger Stern on the two-part adaptation of that Ultron novel, David Michelinie for that weird story with the Crawlers in the sewers; Jim Shooter, David Michelinie, and Bob Budiansky for the Yellow Claw two-parter, Bill Mantlo for the everything is on fire story and now Bob Budiansky and Danny Fingeroth for this issue and the next. We start getting a consistent writer again starting in #211.

I wonder what was going on behind the scenes around this time.

Anyway, onward.

So we start the issue with who I assume is the Shadow Lord. But he’s not riding a tornado, like Pecos Bill. He’s standing on an invisible ocean structure of some kind. Apparently a mysterious invisible ocean structure of some kind that hasn’t been seen for almost two millennia.

And yet, someone has kindly painted the title of the issue in English on the mysterious invisible ocean structure of some kind.

Some guy, maybe the Shadow Lord: “The dreaded time has at last arrived, the moment I prayed would never come... the moment I knew would surely come. He is soon to return, and only the power entrusted to me is capable of stopping him. And even that power may not prove sufficient.”

“With every passing second, my city and myself pass ever more fully into the Earth’s plane of existence. Would that the cause of my return here from the barren vastnesses of the Shadow World was as joyous as the glow of this new day’s sun.”

“But the grim responsibility of an entire race is my unwelcome inheritance. It is a duty I cannot shirk. Alas, I must take what comfort I can in knowing that no matter what the result of the coming debacle, I will at least be free to rejoin Ayshera, she whom my heart holds most dear... though whether our reunion will be in celebration of victory -- or in darkest mourning for the ashes of this planet -- none willy truly know until the final battle.”

Some Guy sure is helpfully monologuing his entire life story here. And even so he manages to be vague, inside his own mind, about the nature of the threat he faces. Way to preserve the mystery, Guy.

Also, he’s from the Shadow World so he may be a Yugioh.

Anyway, as one might expect, a city appearing in the middle of the ocean out of nowhere is of alarm so US aircraft carrier Poseidon shows up and starts yelling at Some Guy.

Some Guy decides that they sound mad but he doesn’t have time for lengthy explanations so instead he gestures and the winds and waves start whipping up.

Welp! Seems like the US Poseidon is going on an Adventure!

Meanwhile, Mt. Vesuvius!

Yup. Its that kind of story, the kind partially set at Vesuvius.

Some archeologists are digging in the foothills of the mountain in what has been a fruitless several weeks of archeology but one of the archeologists finds a hand shaped object which may be a hand.

They mistake it for a statue at first but realize its actually a perfectly preserved lava mummified corpse.

And while they’re busy congratulating each other about how wealthy and famous this discovery will make them, they fail to notice the hand moving its finger shaped fingers.

And elsewhere again, the best damn thing.

A cowboy shouts “SLAP LEATHER, YA GALOOT!” and then gets shot by a cannon.

This isn’t the Wild West of the America, this is a spaghetti western film set and the director is very upset at Black Bart’s shitty death acting. How hard is it to get hit by a cannon and then to fall down and pretend to die like you just got hit by a cannon?

You wouldn’t think there’s a wrong way to get shot by a cannon but you’d be wrong.

Simon Williams, Wonder Man: “I’m sorry, Mr. Bertolini. It’s just that, being Wonder Man, it’s hard for me to pretend those cannonballs are hurting me when I can hardly feel them.”

Mr. Bertolini: “True, signore Wonder Man, but I hired you because I thought you could-a act!”

Oh yeah, Mr. Bertolini talks like Mario. So that’s another tally for Marvel’s respect of other countries and cultures.

Aside from this being the seventh take on a ‘guy gets hit by a cannonball, beefs it’ scene, cannonballs are expensive. The cannonball that bounced off Wonder Man’s midsection looks fine but maybe you can’t just reuse them.

The filming breaks for lunch and Wonder Man wanders over to where his moral support is.

His moral support, of course, being Beast.

And he is moral supporting but he’s also multitasking with some women because even in Italy, women are just fascinated by blue fur. Furries are universal.

Wonder Man doesn’t feel supported though and this lousy spaghetti western film is a good opportunity for him.

If you remember, the last project we saw him get was as a cheetah print leotard wearing muscle man on a kids show and he got fired for making the host Uncle Elmer look ridiculous.

(Revealed to Simon’s chagrin in #194, lost to mishap in #201)

Being in an actual movie, even a spaghetti western, is the boost his career needs.

(I think we need to confront the actual possibility that Wonder Man is not a very good actor. But he might be a good stunt man if he can learn to act like things hurt)

Wonder Man’s publicist Rachel Palmer shows up as well and wow. Rachel has never appeared before and given the fillery nature of these chaotic no consistent writer times may not appear beyond this story. But you instantly get the sense of their working relationship.

And they have good banter too.

Wonder Man: “Wait. There she is -- Rachel Palmer -- the apple of my eye, the light of my life, the bane of my existence!”

Rachel: “If you delivered your lines that well in front of the cameras, Simon, you might actually keep this job -- which’ll make it just a little easier to hype you as a star back in the States.”

Wonder Man: “Your encouraging words are a constant source of inspiration, Rachel. But I’d appreciate it if you’d confine them to your press releases.”

Rachel: “You’ve got me all wrong, Simon. I hope this whole thing turns out well for you. Really.”

Wonder Man: “And for yourself. After all, if you make me a big name, you can ride along on my coat-tails and become a media hotshot -- instead of being stuck as a flak for Grade D Westerns.”

Rachel: “No, Simon. I--”

Wonder Man: “Forget it, lady. I’m a big boy. I know that all’s fair in love -- and show biz.”

And then he walks off towards his trailer, satisfied at getting the last word with someone whose job it is to make him look good. Beast says that he thinks Wonder Man was too hard on her and that Rachel probably digs Wonder Man.

Wonder Man: “Maybe you’re right. But I still can’t get over feeling that Rachel’s motivated by sheer self-interest and everything else places a distant second.”

(I’m pretty sure she does dig Wonder Man because unbeknowst to Wonder Man and Beast, she follows them to the trailer, wanting to convince Wonder Man that she’s not as self-serving as he thinks and also to invite him to a romantic dinner)

Anyway, Wonder Man’s social life isn’t important. At all. And not right now. Because when he and Beast go into Wonder Man’s trailer and discover the Avengers’ emergency signal briefcase is BEEP BEEPing.

It’s Cap and there’s an emergency situation that demands immediate investigation.

A brand new island city has just popped up in the middle of the Mediterranean slash off the coast of Majorca from out of nowhere and the government wants the Avengers to investigate.

Presumably the US government.

Because if I know anything about mysterious island cities appearing from nowhere - and I know exactly one thing - by jingo, they start wars!

Beast is enjoying his vacation so asks why the US Sixth Fleet doesn’t handle it instead. They’re actually paid to do things while on an ocean. But Iron Man just says that the fleet has had problems.

And with a little reading comprehension we can guess what problems. Because we’ve seen it. Its not a mystery.

Iron Man has a Stark plane sent to pick Beast and Wonder Man up and fly them to Majorca. Or somewhere thereabouts. I don’t know if Majorca has or had an airport.

Wonder Man bemoans that he’ll never be a movie star if he keeps leaving the set to go have exciting comic book superhero adventures.

Which is a little like complaining about being too handsome. Ya jerk.

And remember how Rachel Palmer was peeping on them? No? Scroll up a little and look at the above panels again. Back? And remember how Rachel Palmer was peeping on them?

Her media senses are tingling and telling her that she should definitely go check out the city that appeared in the middle of the ocean. She’s much intrepid for not a reporter.

Meanwhile, some slice of life filler fluff that doesn’t matter but that I find delightful.

And if this liveblog isn’t about sharing things that I find delightful then what is it about? Exhaustively recounting plots to comic books from decades ago? That’s just a side benefit!

The call to action back at Avengers Mansion comes right when Wanda is having Vision move a couch.

Vision: “Wanda, while it may be true that I am capable of moving this couch about all day, it seems a gross misuse of my android abilities to do so.”

Wanda: “Maybe if we just move those shelves then you just put it down there. We’re Avengers, not interior decorators.

This is the content I eagerly crave.

So back in not America, Beast and Wonder Man complain about the plane ride but passing over the ocean they see what trouble the Sixth Fleet was having.

Some Guy, Possibly Shadow Lord managed to strand the Poseidon aircraft carrier fully on a deserted island.

And I was wrong about the plane taking them to Majorca. Its apparently taking them to Poseidon because it lands on the ship’s airstrip so the two Avengers can consult the stranded sailors about what the heck is going on.

Captain Paul Garrison tells them that they were investigating the mysterious new island/city (not mentioning that they were also yelling at it) when a tidal wave suddenly swelled up and carried the Poseidon several miles and left it on this island.

And apparently the same thing happened to any other plane and ship that attempted to approach the island. Thwarted by winds and waves.

Damn you, nature!

Anyway, its all rather mysterious but Wonder Man figures

“Well, we were sent here to investigate. So... let’s investigate.”

And Wonder Man rockets off to investigate the city. While giving Beast a piggyback ride.

Which. Amazing image. Bless this issue for its bounty of amazing images.

Bear in mind that the captain said that the aircraft carrier was carried several miles. Wonder Man’s belt rockets have impressive duration considering he can’t be carrying much fuel on his person.

When they reach the city, they find a localized hurricane hovering right above it. But Wonder Man just flies down through the eye of the storm to get to the city.

Some Guy Shadow Lord is surprised because he had been expecting big boats and planes. Not a guy with rocket pants and a blue gorilla riding on his back.

But he’s able to shoo them away just as easily as any big thing, with a wave of his hand summoning a wind that carries Wonder Man and passenger Beast away from the city.

Meanwhile, Rachel Palmer is also here. She spent all her money renting a plane and then a boat but she’s going to get to that mysterious city and get an exclusive inside story!

So is she a journalist? Or what? She’s Lois Laneing but as far as we’ve heard her job is to convince people they want to see Wonder Man do stuff in movies.

Wonder Man spots her and tries to fly to her rescue but two water spouts spurt up to ruin this rescue plan.

The first one launches Rachel’s boat into the air and smashes it to pieces. The second blasts Wonder Man out of the sky preventing him from saving Rachel from falling to her death.

But unseen by either of the Avengers, a strong breeze safely lowers Rachel to the ground of the city.

Because what is an Avengers comic without men developing weird and intense feelings for a nearby woman.

Some Guy: “How beautiful she is, how like my own Ayshera. And, also like Ayshera, she is courageous... and more than a little headstrong.”

Cool. I hope this doesn’t get weird. Or that we’re not asked to sympathize with a guy whose only ‘sympathetic’ trait is a possessive attraction to a woman. Looking at you, Living Laser. And, I guess, Graviton.

Anyway, Wonder Man doesn’t see Rachel getting rescued by an airbender so he works himself into a lather.

Wonder Man: “That sinks it! It’s one thing to attack naval ships and planes... one thing to attack Avengers... But when he kills an innocent woman who could do him no harm -- that guy’s gonna answer to WONDER MAN!”

Honestly, I think you’re selling Rachel short. I’m sure she could do harm if she put her mind to it.  Like, what if she covered him in bees. That would suck.

Anyway, Wonder Man rages through the city’s protective winds and then gets SAFUUSH!’d between two walls of solid water.

He’s left sputtering and disoriented in the ocean. At least until some hooks hook down from the Quinjet, hook Wonder Man, and then hook him up into the ship.

I didn’t know that the Quinjet had hooks for grabbing people out of the ocean but I am thrilled.

Ideally, the Avengers would use their newfound ability to vaudeville hook people into orbit more often. I can think of so many instances where it would be useful, or at least hilarious.

Anyway, Wonder Man apprises the other Avengers into the situation.

Meanwhile, not dead Rachel Palmer wakes up and finds the Shadow Lord brood slouching in a chair and watching her while she was unconscious.

She is alarmed that he’s just sitting there staring but he basically goes ‘DON’T WORRY I READ YOUR MIND TO LEARN YOUR NAME AND LANGUAGE’ and then decides to explain his entire backstory.

Shadow Lord: “The city in which we stand is the Shadow Realm and I... I am called the Shadow Lord!”

DAMMIT I KNEW HE WAS A YUGIOH!

Anyway.

THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO! Give or take! An ancient tribe decided to move to an island to isolate themselves from “primitive, superstitious neighbors who feared [their] more advanced society.”

Off to a good start with this guy.

Free of the mundane concerns of living in a world that hated and feared them, they were able to peacefully ALL BECOME WIZARDS WHO COULD CONTROL THE FORCES OF NATURE.

Maybe the X-Men are onto something.

So the Shadow Lord’s people learned to control, winds, waves, earth, and maybe fire so what I’m saying is that it was an entire island of Avatars.

Boom, sequel idea. Give me millions of dollars, Nickelodeon.

“Though veiled in mystery, rumors of our existence spread throughout the world. We were feared and shunned by the other peoples of the Earth -- which allowed us to continue our studies undisturbed.”

“Those who mistrusted anything they could not comprehend... they called us witches and sorcerers. Those who knew and understood us called us... the Earth Lords!”

“For centuries our sole purposes were to augment our knowledge of the Earth’s forces and to maintain the natural balance between these forces. Otherwise, we had no interest in the day-to-day affairs of the outside world.”

Maybe I was wrong about them being Yugioh. Maybe they’re the Time Lords from the Doctor Who.

Anyway, the Earth Lords were happy sitting on their island being Avatars but over the eons they sensed a disturbance in the Force, for I must reference all the things.

"Over the eons, we became aware of a seemingly immortal, human force of awesome destruction, one who could potentially plunge mankind into an irreversible slide to its doom.”

“Singlehandedly he could destroy towns. With an army beside him -- countries. Time and again, he did. It was when he finally joined the legions of Rome at the peak of the Empire’s power... that we first feared the balance of nature was in danger of being destroyed. Rome could forever take over the world.”

The Earth Lords tried on several occasions to destroy this menace. We don’t get to know what constituted these efforts and that’s disappointing because of what the final successful attempt was.

By 79 AD, they knew he was on the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius so they caused it to erupt, just to bury this one guy under hundreds of tons of rock and ash and lava.

Mission accomplished.

Except for the little thing where the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius also wiped out Pompeii and Herculaneum and other cities people know significantly less about, killing over 20,000 people.

As things go, that’s pretty dire amount of incidental deaths to kill one person. And the Earth Lords realize that this was a pretty major fuck up.

So they decided that they couldn’t be trusted with their powers and that they would disperse into the outside world to live and die as people do and have their powers dissipate over the years.

But before they did that, they discovered that the seemingly immortal guy they hit in the face with a volcano was somehow still alive somehow. Just trapped. Under hundreds of tons of rock and ash and lava that cooled into rock.

They killed thousands and didn’t even permanently kill the dude they were trying to kill? That’s pretty incompetent. They really can’t be trusted with their power.

Since he eventually might get out and resume being a dick, the Earth Lords drew lots and chose one of their number, the Some Guy later known as the Shadow Lord from the Shadow Realm, to forever watch over the city alone and await the day that the immortal guy would again walk the land.

And to help him solo the dude that took an entire city of people and a volcano to deal with, the Earth Lords concentrated all of their powers into this one Shadow Lord guy and taught him how to send himself and the city into a twilight plane of nothingness which is back to being called the Shadow World.

So this might also be Twilight Princess.

For two thousand years the Shadow Lord in the Shadow Realm in the Shadow World observed Earth and waited. And now, it seems that the seemingly immortal dude is back.

Rachel: “But I don’t understand. How can one man threaten a whole world -- and live for thousands of years in solid rock?”

Shadow Lord: “This is no mere man, my dear... this is the Berserker!”

And speak of the devil and we scene transition to him because we scene transition to Pompeii.

The lava mummified human figure that seemed to move before has stopped beating about with finger twitches and has gotten up to rampage around and backhand archeologists.

Don’t feel bad though. They were in it for the money and fame, those fiends.

Back at the city of Shadow Realm, the Avengers suddenly show up as a full team and basically enter swinging. Iron Man even blasts a wall for no reason.

Rachel tries to tell the Avengers that Shadow Lord means no harm but the Avengers can’t hear her over the sounds of Wonder Man loudly reassuring Rachel that they’re here to rescue her.

Iron Man exploding a wall for no reason probably also didn’t help.

So Rachel instead tries to tell Shadow Lord that the Avengers are a force for good. While he can hear her, he chooses to ignore her.

Using his powers of being the Avatar, he tries to pull a rocks fall but nobody dies. Rocks falling is something the Avengers deal with panache and also lasers and punches.

Some panache. Beast’s skycycle gets hit by a rock and he ends up leaping onto one of the spires of the city to avoid crash. And then, like a cat who climbs a tree except its a building in this context, Beast has a hard time figuring out how to get down from there.

While the larger Avengers punch and laser boulders and jump onto spires, Wasp just flies right in and shoots Shadow Lord in the eyebrow.

Amazing. Another good use of Wasp powers, being able to get in close while the opponent thinks the team is distracted at a distance.

Shadow Lord is none too pleased to be shot in the eyebrow by a tiny insect-sized flying woman and decides that a particularly karmic punishment is required.

Shadow Lord: “An insect-sized flyling woman! What sorcery is this? But if an insect you be, then it is only fitting I ensnare you in a cocoon of living wind... a cocoon which will grow and envelop your so-called fellow Avengers!”

And as Rachel still pleads with Shadow Lord to knock it off, he summons a giant tornado that suck in all of the Avengers (save Beast stuck up on his spire).

Shadow Lord even has the tornado carry him along, the better to continue mocking the Avengers as he carries them to their doom.

Shadow Lord: “You hopeless children! Did you actually think to defeat me, to deter me from my purpose? I who who command the earth and wind themselves to do my bidding?”

Yeah, dude. Definitely not sounding like a supervillain now. Cannot fathom why the Avengers are assuming you are one.

Iron Man manages to escape the tornado by firing his boot-jets at maximum, sending him flying free with a SHA-BOOSH! but also carrying him far away because momentum.

Shadow Lord then creates a whirlpool in the ocean and has his tornado carry the Avengers towards it. The whirlpool goes to the bottom of the ocean. Which then cracks open to reveal bubbling magma.

That’s right. The Shadow Lord is going to shoot them out of a tornado, into a whirlpool and into magma beneath the ocean floor.

Its. At least more precise than hitting them with a volcano, I’ll give him that. Definitely feels like overkill to go from rocks to tornado-whirlpool-magma execution but its definitely more precise.

Somewhat more precise.

Because when Iron Man manages to slow himself down to turn back he notices that a yacht is being swamped by the waves Shadow Lord is churning up.

And because of heroism, he takes the time to scoop the yacht out of the ocean and rest it safely on an island.

Geez. There’s a lot of boats being beached in this story.

Shadow Lord actually sees this. And a thought starts penetrating his thick skull that maybe he should have listened to Rachel.

Shadow Lord: “The armored one paused in his attack on me to save those people -- innocent people... which is more than we were able to do 2,000 years ago. Perhaps, as Rachel says, they are not agents of evil...”

He decides that he’ll stop throwing them out of a tornado into a whirlpool into magma but he doesn’t get the chance to put that train of thought on the tracks.

Beast waves Iron Man over. From his perch on the spire he’s noticed that the building he’s on is cracking from the strain of all the power Shadow Lord is throwing around even though he’s not been throwing it at that building.

So Beast deduces that the city is key to Shadow Lord’s power in some way and should have the shit beaten out of it.

And as Iron Man starts punching some wall, Shadow Lord doubles over in pain and the tornado he was about to dissipate dissipates.

The other Avengers get free and decide hey, follow the leader.

Jocasta: “The battle has truly just begun. Malevolent power such as this must not be allowed to exist. We must follow Iron Man’s lead and destroy the city -- totally!”

So unnoticed by the Avengers as they level the city into a pile of rubble, Shadow Lord staggers and swoons at Rachel’s feet.

But even dying, he still has some exposition bottled up.

To be fair, he’s been isolated for 2,000 years with no one to talk to.

He explains that the powers of an entire population of Avatars was way too great to be contained in one squishy mortal body so the powers were instead imbued in the city itself.

And with the city destroyed, it can no longer serve as a source of power and also can’t keep him alive anymore.

He’s honestly not too broken up over it. Since the Avengers are valiant and worthy, they can pick up his unfinished business while he goes and dies and gets to reunite with his girlfriend who died sometime during those 2,000 years.

Shadow Lord: “But please understand... I am as much to blame for today’s events as anyone... I bear you no malice... we misjudged each other. I have done my best... no more can be expected of a man... perhaps you will succeed... where I have failed. So do not mourn my passing... for me, death is but the long-awaited door that opens to my beloved... Ayshera.”

And the Avengers realize belatedly ‘we done goofed.’

“A sad -- and confused -- group of heroes grimly watches the passing of the Shadow Lord... and only then does the cruel truth reveal itself to them: what they had thought to be one of their greatest triumphs is instead... one of their most bitter defeats.”

Oh, and as I expect they’ll soon find out, the Berserker has been kicking the Italian army’s ass near Pompeii so that’s probably escalating into a bit of a situation and they just accidentally killed the guy who could have helped with that. Although in fairness, he deliberately ignored Rachel when she told him that the Avengers were heroes.

Like he said, he fucked up too.

Still, while its a bit of a Marvel tradition to have mighty misunderstanding fights, I don’t think they tend to result in people dying. One for the history books.

Next time: the Berserker.

Follow @essential-avengers​. Also like and reblog. And send me Avengers triumphs that are way more impressive than beating up a city.

[happymetalgirl]

2019

Despite all the hubbub about year-end wrap-ups, and decade-end wrap-ups this year, it feels to me like as soon as the year is over and the next one starts people immediately stop caring about all the top tens and bottom tens.

I got really busy over this past December and, along with missing out on reviewing several albums I wanted to review, I totally missed writing the extensive year-end lists I had planned. Last year I had listed over 50 of my favorite albums and nearly 100 of my favorite songs, and I wanted to do lists this year that would follow 2018′s lists respectably. Unfortunately, time got the better of me, and it still has the better of me, but I feel like I still should at least offer some kind of closure on last year.

It’s not going to be nearly 150 entries, but I do want to very briefly give an abbreviated list of my favorite songs, my favorite metal albums, my favorite non-metal albums, my least favorite albums of 2019. I’ll be keeping the lists pretty short, but I’ll go numerically still, starting with the bad news first.

The Bottom 10 Albums of 2019:

Maybe it’s my being calloused to what’s awful, or just doing a better job of avoiding it, but I feel like I wasn’t as angry at my bottom ten this year (2019) as I was at the two that preceded it, and perhaps it’s because I feel like I got pretty much what I was expecting with most of what I heard here; not as many of these were tremendous letdowns like Bullet for My Valentine with Gravity or just horrendous beyond comprehension like Black Vale Brides’ Vale. But just because I expected the shit didn’t mean it necessarily went down any easier when I had to ingest it this year.

Like the two years before 2019 when I did worst-of lists, a lot of the worst of the genre came from obviously contrived mainstream playlist/radio bait projects from bands to which it comes as no surprise. This year didn’t include as much shitty political commentary (being that I could probably fill this list with NSBM if I actively sought that shit out) or nostalgic cash grabs as the past two years, but the staleness of the long-tired formulas by which these radio-aspiring bands adhere to in their pursuits of mainstream crossover (or maintenance) only grows more frustrating the older they get. And the amount of surrender by so many bands to Imagine Dragons’ way of dominating the rock charts has been similarly frustrating. Often cited as the new Nickelback, we now kind of look back on Nickelback with a little bit of rose-tinted hindsight with the realization that it was mostly their omnipresence that irritated us all, and the case is the same for Imagine Dragons, but I don’t remember quite as many bands trying to copy the very unoriginal Nickelback and replicate “Photograph” or “Rockstar”. But I have heard so many acts churn out knock-offs of “Radioactive”, and “Believer”, and “Whatever It Takes” in obvious attempts to get themselves into that band’s royal court on the rock charts. There was of course plenty of unimaginative atmospheric blackgaze and post-metal to be found, but even the worst of that was just ineffective and boring at worst and not so much torture upon the eardrums like the albums to follow are.

10. Bad Wolves - N.A.T.I.O.N.

We didn’t get a Five Finger Death Punch album this year, so Bad Wolves came to the rescue to fill that void in 2019, despite also releasing an album in 2018. Though I’ve seen already that FFDP are slated for a release in 2020, so, great... While I would say that N.A.T.I.O.N.’s few high points made it a slightly better project overall than the band’s debut, those highlights were not nearly enough to outweigh the bafflingly poorly arranged variety pack of trashy alt rock ballads and formulaic alt metal from ten years ago that made up the majority of this album. As erratic as its flow was, everything on this album was so predictable once you got a ten-second taste of any given song, a few too many of which reeked heavily of Nickelback (and I know I just got done saying not that many bands really copied them, but that’s how obsolete and dated this album sounds at times). It’s obvious trying to market to FFDP’s demographic and co-occupy that giant, lucrative SiriusXM niche with them, and I’m just not thrilled to have basically a clone of FFDP walking around, taking up space in the metal ecosystem to keep an eye on.

9. Municipal Waste - The Last Rager

It might seem mean to put an EP down here, but my god this was terrible. If it had gone on longer it would undoubtedly quickly make its way to the top (well, bottom) of this list. I feel like my negative review of Slime and Punishment and this EP could at face value be miscontrued as me just being a sourpuss and a way too self-serious critic or just having it out for Municipal Waste, but I love thrash, I love totally not serious music, and I wish there was more high-profile fresh thrash being released these days. I wish one of the few notable thrash releases I heard in 2019 wasn’t bottom-ten quality. But that is just where Municipal Waste are right now, lazy, run-of-the-mill party thrash that is so deficient in that real vibrant party energy that this style of music needs to work. Yeah, I get that it’s not supposed to be taken seriously, but it’s so clearly recycled that it’s not even fun, the one thing it’s supposed to be. It’s like the shit near the end of the human centipede.

8. King 810 - Suicide King

I really wasn’t expecting much from this album, and that’s pretty much what I got, with the added bonus of a weirdly amateurishly experimental flair to King 810′s usual street-cred chest-puffing brand of retro rap/nu metal. I imagine fans of the band enjoyed the added theatrics and the usual chug-backed struggle bars, but I found the whole thing to be just kind of ham-fisted and kooky. It wasn’t one of the more infuriating releases I heard all year, but I sure as hell won’t be eagerly returning to it.

7. Attila - Villain

This was another musically recycled album from a band that usually makes their appeal through fun, nasty bangers. While the music on the album was, sure, as derivative as Attila’s deathcore usually is, the primary issue with Villain was the soured attitude of the band’s usually charismatic frontman. Fronz went from being the life of the party (who, while oozing with fratboy energy that you really wouldn’t want to be around anywhere else except a crowded rager, you could at least count on to be cool and keep the party going) to that loud, overzealous asshole trying to turn up when it’s totally not the time and then getting pissy when met with resistance, making it about him and making everyone around him uncomfortable and totally. Fronz sounds like a drunk asshole challenging you everyone to chug faster than him at best and like a pushy frat bro at worst, embodying the title of the album way to much in a manner where it’s justified that he be viewed that way, if not generous given the term’s romanticized connotations. Silver lining: I listened to “It Is What It Is” during a workout the other day, and that track is a qualified banger.

6. Saint Vitus - Saint Vitus

I think this is the only doom metal album to reach a bottom ten spot for me at any point this decade, and I’m not surprised that it’s Saint Vitus doing it. The band’s self-titled record was so derivative and wholly unoriginal, it was like listening to a cheap Sabbath cosplay. It was so long ago that I listened to it in full that I honestly don’t remember anything specific about the album, but I sure remember how I felt while listening to it every time.

5. Steel Panther - Heavy Metal Rules

Probably the biggest letdown on this list, I actually really enjoyed the band’s 2017 effort, Lower the Bar; I felt like they had got a better handle on their comedic parody of 80′s glam metal than any of the three albums before it, despite it not getting as much attention as their debut, for instance. This one, however, captured the cringe and cheese of the 80′s just fine, but with the jokes falling flat or way too repetitive, it just sounded like a less subtly raunchy version of an actual hair metal album. It’s another album that’s just supposed to be fun, but wasn’t nearly the experience it set out to be, the difference being that this one’s failure seems to have come more from a bout of writer’s block than anything else, which is understandable, five albums in, to a project that specifically makes fun of one dead subgenre of metal.

4. Arch Enemy - Covered in Blood

This has to be one of the shittiest covers albums I’ve ever heard, with Arch Enemy earning record points for monotony on this one. The whole thing sounds like the band just tossed a hefty album’s worth into an Arch Enemy processor that just stripped away all the songs’ character and replaced it with low-effort growls and robotic melodeath guitar playing. At its best, the band offers up passable by-the-books rehashes of songs up their melodeath alley; at its worst they butcher songs they have no business putting so little effort into covering. And it’s fucking 70 minutes long! So they get points for the agonizing length too, as well as incompetence points (I’ve yet to hear a death-growled cover of an Iron Maiden song go well), and, yeah, laziness points too. So many of these were recorded already years ago as bonus tracks to past albums, yet the band couldn’t spare the effort to make the new recordings like a little bit exciting.

3. Papa Roach - Who Do You Trust?

I’m not even mad about this one; I knew it was gonna suck, my curiosity just got the best of me and I was treated to some of the most laughably amateurish lyricism and poorly dated rap rock and alt metal instrumentation I’ve heard since the Prophets of Rage album two years ago. Jacoby Shaddix is doing features these days with hit or miss results, but what the hell is Papa Roach going to be this coming decade? More of this? I just don’t know whose socks this is supposed to knock off. Who’s getting hyped for more Papa Roach in the 2020′s? Probably me, just to see how poorly this band continues to try to keep up with the already sluggish pace of radio rock trends as the signature style they feel obligated to keep a tether to ages poorly.

2. Skillet - Victorious

Now this one I was kind of mad about, and I was expecting it to be pretty bad too. Skillet sold their soul to the whim of pop rock radio early last decade and haven’t been interesting to listen to for a long time now, to the point where it’s so obvious that raspy frontman John Cooper started his own side outlet for his more passionate urges while he lets the winds of pop rock and Christian rock playlist curation steer his main project for little more than a paycheck. The band’s reputable touring work ethic is such a stark contrast to their transparent artistic laziness and spinelessness. Again, despite the formulaic broad-reaching rock radio fodder, embarrassingly cheesy ballads, the token heavy tune at the end for the long-time fans, and even the obviously contrived Imagine Dragons mimicry being totally predicted, it was still so frustrating how blatantly soulless and capital-motivated this thing was to hear.

1. Mark Morton - Anesthetic

I didn’t really have any expectations for this album, but my god was it the year’s quietest disaster of a collaboration project. I didn’t hear anyone else talking about this thing after it came out nearly as much as I did leading up to it, and thank god. The album is supposedly a solo project from the Lamb of God axeman, a distilled showcase of his creative voice, but the whole thing feels like it was in the hands of label execs the whole time and he was just the guy who recorded guitar tracks to all these songs. For some reason, a lot of these “star-studded”, compilation-album-feeling projects in the metal world don’t seem to come out so well, maybe because no one involved is bringing their A-game to a feature in a compilation album, and that is exactly what Anesthetic suffers from, and it suffers fucking hard, not just from the utter lack of cohesion and poor flow from track to track, but from the phoned-in performances of the guests on the variety of generic, underwritten, surface-level songs. Like, again, this is a project under Mark Morton’s name, one that’s supposed to be guided primarily by his artistic vision; you’re telling me, Spinefarm Records, that the Lamb of God guitarist’s vision of a solo album is various flavors of neutered rock/metal radio bait? And he was satisfied with everyone’s contributions to this thing? The whole thing feels like he was just along for the ride and the project was never even in his hands, like Spinefarm had the idea/opportunity to do a various artists comp. album but thought putting under Morton’s name would be more marketable or something. Maybe that hypothesis is totally off, but regardless, this album is a colossal failure on the performance and writing fronts, the worst thing I voluntarily heard in 2019.

My 20 Favorite Songs of 2019:

Okay! With the trash taken to the curb, I feel like it might be time to address before getting into my favorite songs that they might not resemble my favorite albums quite as much as previous years, one, because this is very abbreviated, and, two, because some songs really lend themselves to enjoyment outside the context of their album more than other songs. One band here lands three entries and probably would have landed a whole lot more on a slightly longer list simply because of how great of music their album this year was for me to work out to. But I tried to diversify this list a bit so that it wasn’t just my favorite additions to my workout playlist. The top albums, I promise, are a far better representation of the year in metal for me. But anyway...

20. Periphery - “Blood Eagle”

Periphery have pretty much crystallized their brand of djent now and spent much of this year’s album doing a little adventurousness with it, but the first single, “Blood Eagle”, was one of the more traditional, crushing, explosion tracks from the album, harnessing hardcore groove, punishing accents, tasty guitar tones, and emphatic vocals of both the coarse and soaring variety. The song isn’t anything new for Periphery, but it’s a tremendous example of how potent they are at their heaviest and how easy it is for them to disprove their detractors who lampoon them for Spencer’s clean singing.

19. Panopticon - “The Crescendo of Dusk”

Despite being a one-off piece kind of off the beaten path for Panopticon for a two-track EP recorded during the previous double-albums’ sessions, this song is a fantastic example of bold, cathartic blackgaze whose soulful choral climax is built up to and pays off phenomenally, and that’s not the side of atmospheric black metal Panopticon usually wanders too. It’s a gorgeous piece that is worth it for every moment of its 12-minute runtime.

18. Car Bomb - “Scattered Sprites”

Switching quickly to a much shorter and more jolting song, it was hard to pick a prime highlight on Car Bomb’s new album, but ultimately I found myself loving the tasty, effects-laden, Meshuggah-esque 8-string mathcore groove of “Scattered Sprites” and the rest of the song’s fascinating tonal jumps from Deftones-ish atmosphere to crushing distorted madness. It certainly represents very well the constantly transforming beast that the band’s fourth album was.

17. Spirit Adrift - “Angel & Abyss”

On yet another album full of songs that would have packed a longer list, Spirit Adrift’s standout moment on Divided by Darkness was, for me, the melodically soulful trad-doom power ballad of sorts, “Angel & Abyss”. The melodic guitar leads being the obvious driver of the song’s feels, the clean and rhythm backing and the seething vocal delivery are perhaps the underappreciated foundation for the extra emotive NWOBHM-influenced guitar leads to shine through.

16. Inter Arma - “The Atavist's Meridian”

Definitely the standout track from Sulphur English, “The Atavist’s Meridian” is a menacing mammoth of a song, twelve-and-a-half minutes of brooding, towering sludge and haunting echoed throat-gurgling growls. Even when the wall of sound gets less jagged, the lour does not let up as the band maintain their fearsome, ominous presence in the song’s more atmospheric middle section and burst back so satisfyingly to round it out. There are bands out there that stick to this form of sludgy, death-y doom metal much more exclusively and religiously than Inter Arma who wouldn’t be able to top this.

15. Opeth - “Charlatan” My favorite cut from Opeth’s most ambitious album this decade, the band actually sound energized and adventurous on this song rather than just playing 70’s prog dress-up. The Meshuggah-esque bass groove on here is of course right up my alley, but the whole song is full of actual progressive dynamic that keeps you fixated on it and it’s intriguing emotive journey.

14. Sermon - “The Preacher”

Being the second-to-last song on the album, “The Preacher” kind of goes hand-in-hand with “The Rise of the Desiderata” as part of the album’s climactic ending, and it’s as meticulous and calculated as every track on the album with its small, this song being a standout for its particular dynamic between is louder and softer sections, making it such a thriller of a track that serves its role as part of the album’s climax beautifully.

13. Misery Index - “New Salem”

I’ve loved Rituals of Power all year and there have been several standout tracks for me, but “New Salem”, with its gruff refrain and relentless powerviolence aggression, has been my favorite from the album this year, one of them top workout playlist tracks for me this past year. It’s a pretty straightforward, fast, brutal track, but god is it effective.

12. Korn - “You’ll Never Find Me”

From the irksome guitar wails from Munky and the thick and tasty seven-string accents from Head, to Jonathan Davis’ volatile vocal delivery, “You’ll Never Find Me”, is one of the (several) prime examples of Korn’s committed return to their old-school sound on this album that really fucking stuck the landing and impressed. That build-up to that fucking intense headbanging crash at the bridge is exactly what made me such a fan of Korn’s early work in the first place, and this song is one of, again, several that shows why more than twenty years down the road while all their imitators have come and gone, Korn have been the dedicated champions of nu metal.

11. Cattle Decapitation - “Time’s Cruel Curtain”

It was honestly hard picking a favorite from Death Atlas, but I felt like this song captured the album’s lyrics’ overall dread and gloom in the musical sense pretty well through the dissonant clean guitars and Travis Ryan’s melodic snarling, which is particularly gut-wrenching on the chorus. And it’s as fierce, fast, and disgustingly brutal as we’ve come to expect of Cattle Decapitation now.

10. Motionless in White - “Thoughts & Prayers”

One of the many vibrant, tasty alternative metalcore bangers from the band’s fifth LP that dominated my workout playlist this year, “Thoughts and Prayers” is undoubtedly the most blasphemously in-your-face, Slipknot-influenced cut that highlights the highs of metalcore heaviness the band have no trouble reaching. The defiant attitude of the melodic chorus’ refusing of prayers for help, and really the whole song’s self-sufficient denial of religion over some of the band’s most potent metalcore to date, got me past a lot of physical thresholds this year.

9. Babymetal - “Arkadia”

Babymetal on their first two albums for me have been a project trying to iron out their vision of J-pop metal fusion in real time with the first and second albums’ primordial experiments producing the odd hit among many more misses, but this year’s Metal Galaxy was far more consistent, less stylistically clumsy, and packed full of hits. And if this list was longer, there wold be several bops and bangers from that record here. And while circumstance had just one song in my top 20 this year, what a tremendous entry it is. The album’s closing track, “Arkadia” starts out like a basic-ass Dragonforce cut, but the triumphant melodies quickly lead into higher and higher echelons of catharsis with the guitar vocalist Su-metal delivering the most powerfully soaring performance of the band’s career. It’s like a Dragonforce song that blows most (if not all) Dragonforce songs out of the water through its sheer unashamed passion. And while I know there are many in that camp who stiff-arm Babymetal and would wretch and rage-quit upon simply hearing Su-metal’s voice come in, I imagine they would have a hard time denying this song’s power if tricked into listening to a guy’s vocal cover over the instrumental.

8. Rammstein - “Puppe”

While Cattle Decapitation’s “With All Disrespect” is certainly a gut-punchingly grim outlook on humanity’s self-destruction, this standout cut from the German industrial metal juggernauts’ self-titled album is undoubtedly the most chilling cut on this list, and quite possibly Rammstein’s entire catalog. Till Lindemann’s poetic narration of the song’s dark story is expertly timed and laid out, but his gripping, manic, wholly unsettling vocal performance, coupled with the rest of the band’s brilliantly scored instrumental tracking, is what paralyzes you in terrified awe of the song.

7. Motionless in White - “Disguise”

Another alt-metal banger that dominated my workouts this year, the opening title track to the band’s fifth album isn’t really doing anything all that revolutionary or stylistically original, yet it’s somehow distinctly Motionless in White and it succeeds and makes it here simply because its execution of such a straightforward, yet often fucked-up style is so on-point.

6. Sermon - “The Rise of the Desiderata”

The grand finish to one of the subtlest, yet most magnificent progressive metal albums of the decade (spoiler I guess), “The Rise of the Desiderata”, even outside the context of the album building up to it, is a tremendous work of patient, well-measured progressive metal that exemplifies so magnificently what that band did with such a small musical arsenal on Birth of the Marvelous. The slow, brooding build-up to the absolutely orgasmic finish is hardly a mere waiting game, with not a dull second of the song, and the thematic climax of “rise! rise!” chants the song finishes on is, for me, the kind of representative of rewarding and immersive journey prog metal is all about!

5. Motionless in White - “Holding on to Smoke”

This one was the sleeper hit (in my eyes) for the band this year; in the album’s marginally weaker second half after the slew of bangers that occupied the first, “Holding on to Smoke” is the perseverant anthem among anthems that almost single-handedly lifts that second half. But outside the context of the album, “Holding on to Smoke” is not excessively heavy like “Thoughts & Prayers”, not even as catchy as the bouncy “<c/ode>”, and not even as sick in the breakdown department as “Disguise”, but it more than makes up for it in sheer performative passion and the compositional consistency that characterizes the whole album and strings the determination teeming throughout the song together into a hugely triumphant banger of a track.

4. Periphery - “Satellites”

Periphery really outdid themselves on the grand, ethereally cathartic closing track to their fourth (and best) self-titled album. Unlike the directly aggressive “Blood Eagle”, “Satellites” is a much longer, more multi-staged, moodier piece that gradually builds up from bright, somber reverb-driven ambiance into several tremendously heartfelt and instrumentally full-bodied crescendos, with the band timing their bursts of heavy energy perfectly. Spencer wildly outdoes himself in particular with his gloriously high-flying vocal performance during the song’s cathartic climax. It’s such a great ending to a great album, and such a great picture of Periphery’s constant perfecting of their sound.

3. As I Lay Dying - “My Own Grave”

It was released in 2018, but I included it here instead of that year’s list because I had the hunch at the time that it would be part of an As I Lay Dying album, and it was. But the first song the band released after their unlikely reunion was always going to be a contentious one given the situation with Tim Lambesis, and being that the song was released at a time when Tim would have still have almost two years in prison to go if he had done his full original sentence of six years, the importance of the band’s first release since that whole terrible situation transpired is hard to overstate. Everyone else in the band had to justify linking back up with a convicted felon and reentering the fold of music again, and “My Own Grave” is exactly the statement they needed to make. During his trial and after his early release, Tim had kept pretty quiet, but from the one somber video exposition he gave before entering prison, it was pretty clear he knew and finally accepted how badly he fucked up, and that awareness of his own terrible failure, succumbing to evil, and his understanding that he still has a lot to do to make things right is what makes this song so vitally confessional and the determination expressed so powerful. And this all comes through not just in the lyrics, but in the passionate performances from everyone on the song as well. It’s an emphatic triumph in classic metalcore fashion through (higher, more real-life stakes than usual for the genre) the worst of one’s own faults.

2. Demon Hunter - “Peace”

This one is kind of the enigma of this list, a more subtle, hard rock track than the rest of the heavy, boisterous bangers here, but what an excellent song it is from the mellower of the sister albums the band released in 2019. Ryan Clark’s smooth, baritone subtlety serves as a veneer of calmness in the face of collapse as he sings a tearful welcoming of the peace from the pain of a sin-ridden world that finally comes with death. There’s almost a suicidal angle to the song, but it might be more representative of one’s readiness to be taken into a divinely peaceful afterlife after a lifetime of struggle, which is pretty insightful from Ryan Clark and captures that feeling in a tangible way even for people with (ideally) many years ahead of them like me, I must say. Either way, it’s a much more sober pondering on one’s own mortality and the temporariness of everything around us than its upbeat rock tempo initially lets on, the kind of meditation that gives people hope and faith in a heavenly afterlife.

1. Rammstein - “Deutschland”

Simultaneously subtle and directly expressive, Rammstein’s lead single from their self-titled 2019 album may not have been as musically outrageous as its grand, ambitious video was, but the song itself sure stands on its own just fine as a tense, conflicted song of pleading heartbreak to a nation and its history, and who better in metal to write a threnody for a Germany caught in the middle of the rest of Europe’s refugee crisis and its own version of many nations’ recent fights against a resurgence of right-wing extremism than Till Lindemann. The tone of the song is so mournful and heartbroken, as though it’s a song about leaving a lover you still want to love, yet stern and firm in its principle.

5 Outside Albums of 2019:

I’ve made a point the past two years to highlight the music I enjoyed outside the metal sphere, usually keeping it to a few mini-reviews of five “outside” albums, and this year it was certainly hard to narrow down the immense amount of quality hip hop, indie rock, experimental rock, especially jazz (Jesus, there was so much good jazz this year), and even some respectable pop music I heard this year. The paragraphs are going to be shorter this time around, but I still wanted to show my appreciation for these albums.

Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains

Formed by David Berman, the former frontman of Silver Jews (who helped pioneer the flavor of indie rock/alt country in the 90′s and early 2000′s that got me more into indie music) ten years after the termination of Silver Jews, his short-lived return from retirement from music through Purple Mountains’ sole eponymous album only became more tragic after Berman committed suicide less than a month after the record’s release. The subject matter was as confessional and depressive as anything from Silver Jews, my favorite song from the record immediately after its release, “Nights That Won’t Happen” (a song very clearly indicating Berman grappling with the guilt of his suicidal mindset), being an even more bleak song in the posthumous context. Upon learning that Berman had come back to music, formed this project, and made this record full of emotionally retching expositions of his mental state in an effort to pay down a crippling mass of debt (which I’m sure had a significant impact on his decision to end his own life), it makes the album all the more devastating and my feeling toward it much more complicated. Much like David Bowie’s Blackstar, Purple Mountains takes on a different light in the aftermath of its creator’s death so soon after its release, the songs on Purple Mountains pretty much as prophetic as those on Blackstar, though Berman’s foreseeing of having to take his death into his own hands as opposed to Bowie’s waiting for the inevitability of the progression of his cancer gives this album a much less celebratory, commemorative feeling than that of Blackstar, though listening back through it now with 20/20 hindsight really puts the similar element of inevitability into perspective too, and it makes it hard to really enjoy this album in a sense similar to how I enjoy most of my metal and most other music. Knowing that this album was secondarily a last ditch effort by Berman to lessen the burden of the tremendous anxiety caused by his poor financial state, and primarily a means of talking himself through his decision to end his life in the likely event that the album and its touring cycle didn’t make that burden bearable enough, it’s very hard to listen to and be thankful for this album that kind of indirectly killed its creator. The existential dread of crippling debt is no light weight, however, and the art Berman made and was proud of should not bear the brunt of the blame for what the procedures of a heartless and oppressive economic system at least catalyzed, if not caused. Purple Mountains is a hard album to listen to, but its tragic surroundings aside, it is a welcome return of one of indie music’s most brilliant and influential voices, even if just for a moment.

Denzel Curry - ZUU

On a much different note, Denzel Curry made a quick return to the studio after creatively upping his game yet again on his 2018 album, TA13OO. And while not as ambitiously conceptual or dense as TA13OO, ZUU was yet another banger-packed display of pure rapping prowess. It’s been stated that good form is just that, temporary, and a mere snapshot of an artist’s trajectory, and that it takes time and consistency to prove class. Well Curry is undoubtedly in very good form right now, and has been for the past five or six years and has been making the most of it, only getting better and better across his main projects and his consistently fire guest appearances. And sure it’s arguable that he’s just making the most of his hot streak by putting out as much as possible while he’s one fire, but it’s at the point where if this was a flash in the pan it would have been over by now, and Curry’s still going. The dude put out a megamix of spare verses already this year, and it’s killer! The man at this point, in my eyes, is class, and definitely one of hip hop’s most exceptional forces now that he’s finally getting his long-deserved acclaim. As far as ZUU goes, yeah it’s quick and more about tight bars and emphatic delivery than any grand concept, but to reduce assessment of this to as if it mere turn-up music would be improper, as Curry uses this album to jump at the opportunity given to him by the traction of TA13OO to elevate his hometown and pay tribute to his friends and family who have been with him throughout his journey, and shed light on the roughness of the reality of life for the people he cares about in Carol City, Florida. And he pays tribute to those who got him here with such passion and splendor that it’s tangible and invigorating even from far outside.

Angel Olsen - All Mirrors

I saw a fair amount of people (mostly outside her fanbase) complaining about Angel Olsen’s handling of her more instrumentally dense fourth LP, which I don’t get at all. Olsen had tread the ground of minimal indie folk thoroughly on her early work and she proved she could handle a bigger instrumental pallet on 2016′s My Woman, of which All Mirrors is a well-executed expansion on that bolsters Olsen’s emphatic sonic presence without suffocating her out of her own songs, which I never had any worries about with the raw vocal power she’s showcased convincingly before. And Olsen remains at her open, heartfelt best in terms of lyricism and songwriting on the album, no drop-off in emotional potency or sonic beauty, so I’m a little confused with some of the griping over this album. I love it and highly recommend it.

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah - Ancestral Recall

It was hard to pick a from the several great jazz records this past year (so much great afro-percussion-driven stuff coming from the UK lately that has been scratching my itch like crazy), The Comet Is Coming had an LP and a similarly impressive follow-up EP both in 2019 that made thrilling use of electronics amid the energetic jazz madness and Matana Roberts had put out an intriguing spoken-word concept album tied together with some of the most eccentric avant-garde jazz instrumentation I heard all year. But I ultimately went with the dynamic and delicious Ancestral Recall from Christian Scott, whose impressively holistic weaving together of traditional jazz elements with hip hop and modern jazz atmosphere, despite not being as quite up my violent jazz alley as other records this year, I could not deny the magnificence and accomplishments of. The electronics are kept to a minimum and used only to highlight the work of the piano, horns, and percussion typically associated with the genre, but none of it feels at all unnatural or clashing, rather a cooperative interplay between old and new that elevates both and shows what they can achieve in harmony. And yes, there are plenty of boisterous trumpet performances from the main man to quench that thirst. But it’s an album about respect for the foundational work of the genres incorporated and expanding on it rather than demolishing and rebuilding it.

clipping. - There Existed an Addiction to Blood

My favorite non-metal album of the year, clipping. really took the campy genre of horrorcore to far more cinematic and tangible realms through their signature noisy/industrial approach. And There Existed and Addiction to Blood is a project where after hearing it, it left me with a sense of “well, duh”. Of course clipping. would absolutely nail an actually immersive and not totally laughable horrorcore album. The members’ experiences in cinema serve as a tremendous asset to this album as William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes produce an industrially enhanced horror score to soundtrack Daveed Diggs’ gripping rapped storytelling, which takes so many of the genres tropes and breathes fresh air into them to make them far more vital and consequential in this day and age. And the songs (many of which are serious bangers) are immersive, cinematic, and intense in a way that I could see a lot of metalheads enjoying. I could seriously go on about the chilling bursts of distortion on the twisted club turn-up track, “Club Down”, or the cold swagger of Diggs’ delivery on the industrially tense “All in Your Head”, or the suspense of the more instrumentally traditional house-hideout cut “Nothing Is Safe”, but I would be going on for paragraphs, and I said one. If there’s one album for people reading this section to check out, it’s this one.

My 30 Favorite Metal Albums of 2019:

Yeah, 30 is keeping it really short here; I feel like I could have included a couple dozen other very praiseworthy metal albums here, but this post is massive enough and I don’t have time for that. As far as patterns or trends go, metal’s respective subgenres largely continued to mind their own business as the divergent evolution that the genre has been undergoing since the passing of its peak of mainstream limelight has progressed. The metallic hardcore revival is still going strong with a lot of bands outside that scene taking notice and influence from these vibrant younger bands (Code Orange being the obvious prominent example) and their ancestors. I heard a lot more hardcore-influenced breakdowns and noisy industrial-ish guitar work this year than usual, and even though it graced that shitty aforementioned Bad Wolves album, the metallic hardcore song was a highlight and most of the hardcore influence I’ve heard outside that scene has been implemented well. The year also saw a lot of big, storied names in metal releasing high-profile projects and really coming through and exceeding most realistic expectations (with one quite notable exception), so a good portion of this top 30 is going to contain your basic bitch, Loudwire-type picks, but, you know, those acts delivered and earned their way here in my eyes. This whole thing has gotten pretty out of hand, and what was planned as a quick year’s recap is now a gargantuan mega-post, so I’m going to TRY to make these quick.

30. Full of Hell - Weeping Choir

It’s hard to complain about a pretty continuous sequel to one of the most addictive deathgrind albums in years (Trumpeting Ecstasy); I’m sure not griping about it. Weeping Choir may not have as high of peaks as its predecessor, but it’s a similarly compact, dizzying, and forward-thinking release that definitely earned similar respect.

29. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Infest the Rats’ Nest

Thank god King Gizz released this, otherwise there wouldn’t be a bonafide thrash album in this top 30. Despite not really being a “thrash band” or even a “metal band”, King Gizzard’s adventurousness and versatility makes their adaptability to this style come as no real surprise. In fact the naturalness with which the band play shows that they have clearly always had a true reverence for the genre and have wanted to make this album for a long time. The album is as fuzzy as King Gizz usually is, taking on a very old-school vibe in tribute to the genre’s progenitors without being mere nostalgia. I doubt they’ll do it, but I can dream of more of this from the Gizz.

28. Knocked Loose - A Different Shade of Blue

Knocked Loose have quickly established themselves as one of the strongest forces in metallic hardcore these days, with each album improving significantly off the last, and A Different Shade of Blue being the latest in a string of stronger and stronger releases from them, embodying pure hardcore aggression with precision accuracy and efficiency.

27. Lord Mantis - Universal Death Church

Looking back through this band’s catalog (I hadn’t heard of them before this album), they’ve always taken a very sinister and esoteric approach to experimental black metal that makes them and Profound Lore a match made in heaven as a prime representation of the boundary-pushing ethos the label does well to curate, and Universal Death Church is a fine example of the band’s signature incredible capacity to make black metal nastier and more nightmarish than it already is.

26. Infant Annihilator - The Battle of Yaldabaoth

The Battle of Yaldabaoth is such a ridiculous album and such a treat for it, the unreal, gratuitous techdeath wankery so obscene, it’s impossible to take too seriously and not love for its absurdity. It’s a fun album and one that fast-forwards much of the increasingly fast and techy death metal straight to its next musical checkpoint.

25. Venom Prison - Samsara

A far more holistic death metal album than Infant Annihilator’s, Samsara is just teeming with performative power and calculated technicality. I had said at first that it wasn’t really much of a step up from Animus, but as I’ve listened to it more throughout the year, the band’s subtle maturation really began to show and the album grew on me more and more, so it’s definitely one of the year’s best death metal records.

24. Misery Index - Rituals of Power

Even more emphatic than Samsara was Misery Index’s reaching the pinnacle of their form of powerviolence on their best album to date, Rituals of Power, which suffers no loss of intensity in its incorporation of infectious (though still hardly melodic) hooks, and it puts them at the top of their league.

23. Demon Hunter - War

I had originally cited the more measured, hard-rock-driven partner album, Peace, as the better of the two records Demon Hunter had released this year, but over time, so many of the tracks on the intentionally heavier War that I thought might wane on me stayed strong and some of its other tracks grew on me. The album and its counterpart were such a refreshing pair of releases for the band that I hope revitalizes them going forward.

22. Opeth - In Cauda Venenum

And we’ve got the most basic pick of the list so far here, post-Watershed Opeth. That term has annoyed, frustrated, and infuriated so many within the band’s fanbase who have, at this point, given up (either out of acceptance or intolerance) on hopes of the band’s death metal sound ever returning to the progressive music they make, and I myself have found the band’s lack of ambition beyond simply eschewing growls and metallic elements on the band’s past three albums to be a bit underwhelming with the clear 70′s-prog LARPing finding them punching pretty below their weight. Wow, that was an annoyingly long sentence too. But Opeth finally came through with an album that did more than just imitate the likes of their prog idols like King Crimson, Styx, Yes, and Pink Floyd. In Cauda Venenum is a theatrically big album that puts the band in the kind of creative context in which they’ve proven to succeed in and established themselves in their career in it as the death metal pillar of the prog palace, and the band came through with a rewarding progressive rock album without needing to bring their death metal elements out of retirement.

21. Deadspace - Dirge

Dirge was not the album I expected from Deadspace, but it shifted them from their more somber atmospheric style of black metal into something so much more suffocatingly dark and sinister that they went on to produce another full-length album and an EP in the style of before the year’s end, and I have been loving the Australian band’s more menacing side since the transformation. The band’s first album in this newly terrifying style for them is a masterpiece of vile, demonic black metal that still features what has made Deadspace a worthwhile figure to follow in the worldwide atmospheric black metal scene, and I imagine there is plenty more to come from the tenacious Australian group and have been so proudly supportive of, which I am eagerly looking forward to.

20. Uboa - The Origin of My Depression

This is the first not-completely-bonafide-metal-album entry on this list, but it is a worthwhile and impressive one that I think a lot of fans of the kinds of experimental and black metal that incorporate dark ambiance, industrial elements, and harsh noise could get into. But it is an album as intensely depressive as its title suggests, a meditation on the turmoils associated with its creator’s gender dysphoria and the efforts to cope with and mitigate it that comes through in all shades of pain, from melancholic-ambiance-backed stone-faced recitations of doubt about self-worth to seething, agonized screams of torment for release from the hell of the creator’s condition over abrasive industrial noise. It is not by any means easy listening, and its lyrics demand a lot of emotional energy. Be advised. But also it’s really painfully cathartic and expresses an important and often quieted perspective for those not affected by gender dysphoria to hear.

19. Blood Incantation - Hidden History of the Human Race

I do like this album a lot, I really do, but it has to be the most overrated album on this whole list. So many people wetted their britches over this damn album and jumped to call it a perfect masterpiece of death metal. It’s a very very good death metal album, but it’s not beyond improvement. And, again, it’s good and I don’t want to be tempering the jubilee over this thing in this list where I’m supposed to be highlighting my appreciation for it, but it makes me wonder if this is how people who aren’t that into Meshuggah see the band’s adoring fans (like me). But Hidden History of the Human Race, mind-blown ancient aliens sci-fi concept aside, is a great continuation of the semi-psychedelic modern twist on early death metal that started on Starspawn, and the band’s progressive compositional abilities certainly do deserve a lot of praise, and I do hope that they continue building on this.

18. Inter Arma - Sulphur English

Another band making continual improvements on their sonic foundation, Inter Arma have never let their labels of death or sludge or doom or post-metal box them in or make them feel forced to pick one and stick with it, and Sulphur English is a fantastic example of how wide the band’s capabilities span, with elements of all the aforementioned subgenres mashed together in so many different configurations together and on their own, and it makes for such an overpowering record whose wall of sound really takes a lot of spins to withstand the continuous impact of.

17. Fit for an Autopsy - The Sea of Tragic Beasts

Okay, I’m gonna have to really start being shorter now, because now we’re getting into the top of the list, the cream of the crop of the cream of the crop. And I’ll be here until 2021 if I don’t slow down. Anyway, Fit for an Autopsy reinforced their melodic supplementation to their brand of deathcore on The Sea of Tragic Beasts, and clearly put the work into making sure it meshed well with their style. And the work paid off. While a lot of deathcore these days is kind of departing from that original “core” core that the genre’s early contributors established for more straight-up death metal and other progressive or techy styles (basically just retaining the affinity for breakdowns), albums like this are a fine example of how beneficial this evolution is for the genre.

16. Rammstein - Rammstein

It’s hard to be brief with an album ten years in the making, featuring the best song of the year, but I’ll try. Rammstein’s long-awaited follow-up to Liebe ist für alle da does very much pick up where the band left off in 2009, feeling like a natural successor rather than some contrived nostalgia trip to Sehnsucht or Mutter to appease fans for their patience. And for as much as I unpacked every song in detail in my review, the album as a whole is hard to sum up beyond simply a solid offering of Rammstein tracks, several of which have grown on me since my write-up, like the ballads “Diamant” and “Was ich Liebe”, and especially the whimsical “Ausländer”. Lindemann’s lyricism remains a strong point for the band, and the tight compositions another positive on the album. I just hope it’s not so long until the next one.

15. Slipknot - We Are Not Your Kind

Like I had said in my review, every new Slipknot album is one of the biggest events of the year for metal, if not the biggest, and aside from Tool’s underwhelming return to the studio with Fear Inoculum, We Are Not Your Kind was definitely the year’s biggest release. As has become kind of the norm for them now, Slipknot’s sixth album was steeped in its own turmoil, this time being the confusingly ugly departure of Chris Fehn. Nevertheless, the rest of the band pulled through with a solid album that did quite well to highlight the band’s various strengths and a good balance of classic Slipknot aggression with forward-thinking experimentation with their sound. Yet another big name delivering the goods this year.

14. Korn - The Nothing

And speaking of success from storied bands, Slipknot’s supposed nu metal rivals also really came through this year with one of their best albums in a long long time, and this is coming from someone who has been a fan of Korn’s later era, their untitled album, See You on the Other Side, etc., but the band’s increasingly more committed return to their old-school sound this decade, after the flop of The Path of Totality, has culminated magnificently on The Nothing, which essentially sounds like a modern-produced Untouchables or Issues. The songwriting is consistently well-measured and Jonathan Davis’ chilling performances in the wake of the loss of his wife especially give the album such a real sense of turmoil that heightens the intensity of everything around them. As therapeutic as music is in times of great pain and loss, and as great as this album is, I hope Jonathan’s grief wasn’t exploited or exacerbated for this art, and I hope he is doing okay.

13. Baroness - Gold & Grey

This album got a lot of flack for its indeed frustrating production, with a lot of critics not being able to get past the blown-out, fuzzy, lo-fi crackle that blurred a lot of the songs’ finer details away. And I agree that the band certainly could have put their sonic strengths in a better light with clearer production and probably should going forward. Nevertheless, underneath the hazy veneer of grainy mixing, Gold & Grey boasts great songwriting in the styles of Purple and Yellow & Green, as well as treading newly segue-heavy ground for them. And after a few listens getting used to (or getting over) the album’s production, the sharp-as-ever songwriting and booming-as-ever vocal performances from John Dyer Baizley really come through and are worth appreciating.

12. Pensées Nocturnes - Grand Guignol Orchestra

Arguably the weirdest album to come out of 2019, yet so much more than a novelty project, Grand Guignol Orchestra takes the creepiness of the often-mishandled dark carnival aesthetic and applies it to the band’s twisted brand of avant-garde black metal to make something truly weird and unsettling, yet fixating. The psychotic clown-like screams and wails across the album reinforce this aesthetic to the point of perhaps creating a new subgenre of metal: carnival metal perhaps.

11. Waste of Space Orchestra - Syntheosis

The work of two whole bands (Oranssi Pazuzu and Dark Buddha Rising) joining forces in their entirety, Syntheosis is a surprisingly cohesive and immersive project, as synth-driven as its name suggests and cinematic in its massive sound. It’s a weirdly atmospheric form of experimental, psychedelic black metal that is both serene and crushing; the artists involved clearly had this ambitious project in mind and they worked meticulously to make sure their vision was realized.

10. Spirit Adrift - Divided by Darkness

Again, really trying to keep it short here, but what an album from Spirit Adrift. Divided by Darkness is the album that sounds most like and reminds me most of the most recent perfect album I heard (2018′s Desolation by Khemmis), and the emotional potency bubbling up to the brim of this album’s doomy melodies and soaring vocals is similarly enriching, while not as ridiculously perfect as Khemmis’ latest release, Divided by Darkness takes Spirit Adrift to new heights and makes them one of modern doom-influenced melodic metal’s most promising figures.

9. Nile - Vile Nilotic Rites

The departure of longtime guitarist/vocalist Dallas Toler-Wade was arguably a blessing in disguise for Nile, with their ninth album, Vile Nilotic Rites, being a roaring comeback from the relative lull of their previous two albums, much of which is due to the reinvigorating performances of new guitarist/vocalist Brian Kingsland, whose more traditionally roaring growls breathe new life into and provide a fitting new angle to the band’s Egyptian-themed brand of extremely fast, technical old-school death metal. It’s great to have them back in such emboldened form.

8. Lingua Ignota - Caligula

This is the album that just got me. Very much in a similar, yet more neoclassically-inspired vein of industrial darkwave as Uboa’s album, Kristen Hayter herself has said that Caligula is also not a metal album, and she’s right, but holy shit does it hit harder than a lot of metal tries so hard to hit. I had been trying for months to write a review for this album, but it never came, partly because the subject matter from which the album is pulled is tender and not easy at all. But it’s incredibly important to talk about, and I want to give Caligula some of the written attention it deserves from me. Sure if I just put the album on for unassuming listeners, they probably wouldn’t immediately pick up on the manically shrieked and operatically wailed languishing and biblically proportioned defiance being curses of the project’s creator toward her sexual abuser, but the resilience she puts forth into these proclamations of insubmissive survival is certainly tangible even without knowledge of the heartbreaking history that birthed it. And while it makes tremendous compositional strides from All Bitches Die and Let the Evil of His Lips Cover Him, Caligula, like the two albums before it, is such an enigmatic album that feels wrong to consume in the conventional sense or without anything other than pure undivided attention and empathy for what Hayter is so courageously pouring out of her mind and body for the music. It feels wrong to just put music on as a background for room-cleaning or even working out that comprises real, unbridled emotion about its creator’s rape. Yet I know that everything about Caligula and Lingua Ignota has been about surviving that and overcoming that suffering, so it certainly deserves to be listened to and respected; I would posit, though, that if you’re going to enjoy the sounds borne from Kristen Hayter’s subjection to sexual abuse, its candid portrayal of its aftermath should at least serve as further deterrent from committing such abuse to another person, if not convicting you to stop doing so if you are or actively seeking to prevent it where you know you can.

7. Periphery - Periphery IV: HAIL STAN

Periphery have been a band who I have gradually come to realize I quite respect and rate very highly. Their Juggernaut double-album in 2015 was the major catalyst in this and has become one of my favorite albums in djent (if not my favorite if you don’t count Meshuggah’s music as djent). And while I wasnt as into their 2016 album, Periphery III: Select Difficulty, I have definitely seen this band’s continuous improvement and strong upward trend that their fourth self-titled record has continued. The band went for more than just thick, tasty djent on this album, though the thick tasty djent that is here (like “Chvrch Bvrner” and the aforementioned “Blood Eagle”) is some of their thickest and tastiest. But the band expanded their sound to more ethereal corners that produced impressively cathartic results (such as the aforementioned “Satellites”, and the swaggering “Crush”, and the bright “Garden in the Bones”). Major respect to this band that keeps getting better and making it harder on their stubborn detractors.

6. As I Lay Dying - Shaped by Fire

To say this album was controversial would be an understatement, and to point out that it was important that As I Lay Dying  come through in several big ways would be as well. Yet for every bit of vocal disapproval and expression of how irredeemable Tim Lambesis was there seemed equal rejoicing about the metalcore legends’ return. It was important, though, that the band come through with and album the showed their understanding of the heaviness of the context and didn’t come across as trying to bypass it or sweep things under the rug, and they did a tremendous job of rising to the occasion. The band continued where they left off before their disbandment as the strongest force in metalcore, sounding even more impassioned and vital upon their return, clearly enriched by the real-life consequentiality of their music. And while it certainly looks even more impressive given the withering state of NWOAHM metalcore in 2019, let that not detract from the incredible power of the genre’s juggernauts’ return to and improvement upon their best form of themselves before their disbandment.

5. Motionless in White - Disguise

When this album came out I honestly didn’t have a lot of hope invested in it. I had hoped that the band would expand on the best tracks from their previous album, Graveyard Shift, the alternative metal bangers, and focus on what worked well for those songs, and to my surprise that’s actually what the band did on Disguise. I had initially said that the high points on Disguise were not as high as the peaks on Graveyard Shift but after listening to Disguise so much this year, it’s shown itself to me to be such a ln impressive improvement on the direction that Motionless in White we’re heading in, and to put it any lower on this list for the sheer fact that it’s not a particularly critic-friendly album would be dishonest. But after getting more into their catalogue I think that this band are one of the best in their field, and sure, they’re very much an amalgamation of their influences, but goddamn do they channel those influences so effectively into so many flavors of delicious, nu metal, gothy, metalcore bangers. And it’s totally accessible too, I wish more of the bands who are trying to achieve more mainstream success would take the approach Motionless in White are taking, because this shit is actually really fucking enjoyable and full of soul.

4. Numenorean - Adore

Making strides from their debut full-length, Numenorean’s sophomore album is a great example of atmospheric blackgaze at its best without resorting to cheap Deafheaven imitation. Numenorean have found their own way to harness the power of blackgaze into emotionally vibrant compositions that come through triumphantly. I just hope the band can keep this up and expand on what they did here.

3. Car Bomb - Mordial

I had this as the number one album for a hot minute, and even teased about it maybe being a perfect release in my eyes as well, and even though it’s neither of those things, Car Bomb’s deeper foray into melodic and slightly atmospheric territory with their Meshuggah-esque brand of technical mathcore produced some seriously impressive results that I can’t wait to hear more of in the coming years.

2. Sermon - Birth of the Marvelous

I already said so much about this debut album, and it was so close to clinching that top spot, but Sermon deserve to be basking in so much more acclaim than I have seen for them, as this album is a nearly perfect prog metal example of how to do a lot with relatively little. I had expressed my disappointment in Soen’s and Tool’s albums this year, but I think this album really fits nicely into that cleaner section of progressive metal and knocks it out of the park. I know I’m repeating myself a lot from my review, but every little detail and accent is expertly calculated to make as positive of an impact as possible on the album, every note is arranged with both microscopic precision and with the grander scheme in mind, and I cannot get over how mind-blowingly well done this album is with so few bells and whistles or shortcuts. This is THE new band to keep an eye on.

1. Cattle Decapitation - Death Atlas

I don’t know if I like giving the top spot to such a grim, hopeless album, but fuck have Cattle Decapitation earned it, and I can’t blame them for their pessimism either. After aptly applying the disgustingness of goregrind to commentary on human mistreatment of animals and the ugly underbelly of the food industry, Cattle Decapitation turned their sound and their scope to even grander proportions, expanding the boundaries of deathgrind and the possibilities of dirty vocal technique to criticize humankind’s fucking up of the entire planet and foretelling the catastrophe that science has long foreseen. Despite their already bleak outlook on Monolith of Inhumanity and The Anthropocene Extinction, Cattle Decapitation somehow sound even more hopeless in Death Atlas, and Travis Ryan’s greater expansion of his melodic vocal application helps facilitate this, and the band takes their ever-furious rapid grinding battery through so many channels to enhance its epic scope. I should probably try my best not the just regurgitate my very long review of this album, but the band are essentially reading humanity its eulogy in advance and beckoning the end of our species in no romantic fashion, beckoning the universe to ruthlessly purge the species they refer to as a shit stain and move on like we never even happened. This is obviously an exaggeration of their frustration at the inaction and denial of many of the consequences our actions are inviting into our future, but it’s so fitting for the grave circumstances at hand. If there’s any band whose lyrics and sound represent humankind’s self-inflicted ecological apocalypse, it’s Cattle Decapitation, and of there’s any album that paints an adequately dismal picture in fittingly horrifying bluntness of where the world is headed that needs to be understood, it’s Death Atlas. The best and most important album of the year.

And that’s it. 2019, great as always for a genre that refuses to go quietly into the night. A lot of people have been doing decade-summarizing lists, but seeing how long this was, I don’t think I’ll be doing that. Maybe I’ll just post a quick tribute to a few of my favorite albums of the decade that I didn’t get to write about before. But for now, 2019 is over, here’s to 2020, it’s going to be a big year, and I have a few things about that I need to say about that, so that’ll be coming soon too.

[peanutbutterisland-blog]

Lui- A short story by Owami Jackson

Chapter 1: Franks intro

So, how do you start one of these things? Do I tell you my name, the backstory of my character, where I am from? How and why I killed Lui?

*Fuck I ruined the whole story didn’t I? Oh well. Guess we have to start somewhere

Okay boys and girls, to save you the suspense and inner turmoil, yes this is the story of how I killed a girl named Lui. This is not an attempt to bait you into reading a story. You could easily go watch a reality show about this kind of stuff, I mean you’d be surprised at how much of this shit happens, and is televised. honestly I could give two fucks about you or the author of this short story who saw it fit too conjure me from his imagination because he couldn’t sleep or because of his “anxiety” but since we are here I’ll give you the 411. This is not a story about murder nor is it a story about romance, I’m sorry if you wanted a sequel to “A fault in our stars” but this is unfortunately not the place, go rent it at a DVD store like the rest of the perverts who still go to DVD stores. As you will come to find my personality borders on asshole territory. This is not a trait I am particularly fond off but I’m not the author here. So if you are ready for a nihilistic, self-centred, self-deprivation kind of story, buckle up your seat belt ladies and gentlemen, its time for a ride. Oh and my name is Frank.  

Chapter 2: Why is it so hard to find a good blowjob in Paris?

It’s a beautiful city Lyon, dead middle in the heart of it all, who would’ve thought a piece of shit like me would make it to a place like this. Don’t get me wrong I much rather be in my shitty apartment, with my noisy ass neighbours but every once in a while you find something that gets you out of the house and gives a rational explanation to the world. You might be asking yourself why I’m in Paris or where I’m from. Let’s just say I’m here for a permanent vacation and I can’t disclose where I’m from because I don’t know you guys like that.

*or the author is a lazy fuck who can’t give me a decent enough back story because his writing this dead late in the middle of the night and doesn’t have any depth.

The thing about the city of Lyon is that you actually start to believe the romantic hype. Its covered by water as if it was being hugged by Atlantis, the air is warm, the noise is music and the music is art. The afternoons, oh God the afternoons, the sky turns a light navy blue with small stokes of the pink sunset embellished on top of it. Sitting outside of a hotel restaurant and eating what could only be described as an orgasm in my mouth feels like paradise.  

Waiter: can I get you anything else monsieur?        

Just top me off on the wine would you. No, matter of fact bring me the bottle and add a gin and tonic while you’re at it

Waiter: aucun problème

Okay back to you lovely annoying readers; yes Paris, Lyon a beautiful part of fucking civilization, if I wasn’t going to blow my head off in the next couple of days I would have moved here  

*is it me or did I ruin another vital part of the story, Fuck!

Okay let’s make this quick, we’ve wasted enough time talking about a city that you can just google. I came here because out of all my travels it is the most beautiful place I have ever been to. This is where I plan to kill myself, everything is already planned, I’ve booked an exquisite hotel in the presidential suite with an extraordinary balcony view, I know what my last meal will be and I’ve hired enough prostitutes and drugs to give Charlie Sheen a boner. While your reading the story please don’t act like you care and even if you did, I did tell you that I’m a piece of shit so that says a lot about you weirdo. This will not end with a coming to Jesus moment; I will not tell you a sad backstory as to what lead me to this decision. The only thing I can say is that I am okay, I’m just not happy. I figured shooting myself in the head would be quicker and as a last ode to me being an asshole someone would have to clean my mushy brain and skull fragments and that brings me so much joy. Now back too regular proceedings.

Concierge: sir I have been informed to tell you that there is a female waiting for you at the front desk

Oh yes, the first of many lovely prostitutes that will be joining me, send her up Garson

Concierge: yes sir.

Time for my first act. I’m guessing you weirdos are going to stay and read about my sexual escapade, just don’t masturbate to it, it’s hard enough giving a good performance to an A list prostitute from Paris and having you weirdos jacking off to it, this is not 50 shades and you are not a middle aged housewife, grow up. What I can tell you though is that I’ve frequented some of the ladies of the night in Paris and despite their beauty they can’t give a decent enough blowjob, I mean it’s like they are  physically trained not to produce decent fallatio. It’s a question that has plagued me for years but nonetheless I digress. So yeah this whole backstory shit has been fun but it’s time for me to go, see you in the next chapter.

Chapter 3: Baby! Baby! Baby!

Even in the desolate night where the room is quiet and covered by luminance moonlight, the air in Paris is still warm. I mean I am sleeping next to two prostitutes with nothing on but the air is still comfy. If you’re here to find out if the blowjob was good, yes it was. Turns out when you use two girls the tongue ratio is rationed and abracadabra you have a good blowjob now back to the story pervert.

I’ve never been one to have a good night’s sleep. the last time I slept a full night was when I was blacked out drunk and even then I woke up to take a piss but fell on my own vomit and hit my head on the toilet seat thus inducing a slight concussion but it was a good night’s sleep nonetheless. When I can’t sleep I tend to take a walk, luckily this was a city made for mid night walks and I needed to go buy more condoms. As if only the day was replaced by the moon, the city of Lyon was still vibrant and full of life. bars where open, jazz players where still playing on the road and couples walked around freely as if they were at a market in the middle of the day, I asked one of the locals for the nearest convince store and the fucker told me it was three blocks away. I didn’t mind, it seemed the further I walked the further away my problems became, I got to the convince store and started browsing as one does when in a foreign convince store. Everything is the same if you don’t count the different cereals and sodas. I was the only one in the store at least I thought I was until I heard the softest voice talking to the store clerk. I’ve heard French before I mean how can’t you when you’re in the middle of fucking Paris but this sounded heavenly, almost extra-terrestrial like an instrument yet to be created but sounded like something sweet from your past. I walked in front of the store, as one would do upon hearing the voice of an angel and in awe, I saw her. I’m not going to give you the whole rom com speal because like I said this is not a fucking romance. She was just there, like she was meant to be there as if she was there for me. She had a little back pack and short dress complimented with airforce 1 sneakers and a tiny hat. I had to say something; I had to fill up the space that was between us. “Bonjour, what adventure are you going to? Fuck do you speak English, sorry I mean uhhm fuck never mind” she smiled and said “Hey my name is Lui, yes I do speak English and do you have any adventure we can go on”. I paid for my shit, left the condoms of course and we walked around the city the whole night talked about our lives and our past and…

*fuck this is turning into a romance isn’t it

Fast forward to the end of the night we found ourselves next to a fountain talking about shit we knew we weren’t going to remember, she told me she lived near the hotel I was at ,a tiny apartment full of paintings done by her and her eccentric friends. She said she was having a party later into the day and invited me, I mean a night with pretentious art dealers and middle-aged drunks didn’t sound half as good as a night of sniffing cocaine up a hookers ass but she intrigued me and I wanted to go. The great thing about hookers is that they never run out so I could spare some debaucherous time to be a social human for one night, I mean semi social.

*relax we’re going back to the plot of the story in the next chapter you impatience fuck  

Chapter 4: Expiry date.  

It was the tiniest apartment I have ever been in but with some miracle, it was able to house 15 drunken belligerent artsy fartsy bearded and incense-smelling individuals. The music switched from pop rock to electric folk to some weird shit that can only be described as LSD in liquefied form and everybody in the room seemed to know everything about the musician or band. It was as if I joined a cult unknowingly and we were about to fuck a goat and eat celebratory rice cakes. From the minute, I entered the room I immediately regretted calling off my nightly escapades with hookers and cocaine until I saw her. She had a short poker dotted skirt on with the harshest BDSM boots I’ve ever seen in my life, her hair was shaped like a mushroom and she had glitter all over her face.

*can somebody tell this Disney ass author that this is not A FUCKING ROMANCE NOVEL

The minute I clocked eyes with her she gestured me towards her friends, I put my hand up as if to say no thanks, she saw my reluctance, smiled and came right over to me

Lui: thank you for making it, I didn’t think you would come

Frank: yeah, I haven’t listened to pop rock in a while so I decided to pop in

*Good she’s smiling  

Lui: would you like something to drink?

Frank: yeah what do you have on the menu?

Lui: this is Paris so we have wine obviously, I can make you a gin cocktail and we have beer if you’re trying to be a prude

Frank: I’ll be a Prude thank you.  

Lui: ill be right back, just don’t move

Frank: I’ll be right here

I scrolled through my phone looking at pictures I’ve already seen before as one does in a socially award situation. A pixie girl with pink hair came up to me and proceeded to bombard me with a verbal avalanche of gypsy talk and indigo gibberish. I entertained her for a while until Lui came back to save me. Lui and I sat on the sofa together and besides the interruptions of people telling us how high or drunk they were we had a very in depth conversation. Within an hour we were making out, we decided to go up the roof of her apartment for some fresh air.

Frank: i expected a bed looking unto the stars but I guess this will do.

Lui: I’ve had sex on harsher and more abstract places

Frank: London 2003 I had sex in a cemetery while people where burying my father.

Lui: Wow! Impressive, Paris 2012 I had sex in a church with the youth pastor while the service was still in progress. The pastor’s wife walked in on us and told the whole church, my mother didn’t talk to me for years.

Frank: Wow, I didn’t take you in for a church person.

Lui: what can I say Youth pastors are hot.

The sky was bare with sprinkles of stars. the stars were clear and vivid as if they wanted you to look at them. The moon was not shy as well. a crescent moon held the sky together and on top of the roof, it looked larger than life. As always the air was warm, I laid the big trench coat I had, on the floor and well yeah we had sex.

*I’m sorry but what’s this author’s obsession with my sex life like fuck, has he heard of porn before?

Lui: Fuck! Oh my God. Ahhhhhh, wow you’re amazing.

Frank: You’re not too bad yourself. Wow, thank you, I guess.

Lui: you’re welcome. Im gonna miss this

Frank: I mean we can do it again.

Lui: no I mean sex, intimacy, love, passion just life

Frank: are you transferring to a nun school tomorrow?

Lui: I have Lupus and not to get into the nitty grittys of it all but yeah im going to die in a couple of months, I’m in pain every day and I want to kill myself everyday but I never find the strength to do it

*well this just got awkward.

Frank: one way to kill the romance Lui

Lui: I’m sorry but were never going to see each other again so I just thought id lay it all onto you

Frank: well if there’s an afterlife, which there isn’t, ill be sure to pop you in a visit

Lui: I’ll be next to Jesus and the youth pastors trying to get some dick

Frank: You’re hilarious, life shouldn’t take people like you, you deserve to grow old and have kids and grandkids and share your light and lessons with them

Lui: I’ve made peace with it, I mean I don’t have control over it but I do have control on how I want it to happen

Frank: oh yeah?

Lui: I want my last moments to be in an island at a beach somewhere looking Over the horizon with wine in my hand a blunt in the other and a smile on my face

Frank: wow that’s a very specific request

Lui: I read it on those cancer books those white people read, you know the ones where one teenager is dying of cancer and the other does something romantic for them

Frank: like ‘A fault in our stars’?

Lui: Exactly! But  I know I’ll probably die in a hospital or in my house if I’m lucky.

Frank: I never thought I’d have sex and talk about a terminal disease right after

Lui: stick with me baby and you’ll be introduced to a world of new sexual dialogue.

We walked back into the party, I had every reason to leave but I wanted to stay, so I stayed. The party ended at 3 in the morning. The host blacked out and I had nothing to do so I cleaned up her house, I went to a local coffee shop at 6 in the morning, came back to the apartment to find her awake, blushing and with a terrible hangover. I gave her coffee and waited for her to come out the shower, I didn’t know what I was waiting for but it seemed like the right thing to do, I heard a gut wrenching scream from the bathroom. I ran in and there she was naked, convulsing in pain, I held her and tried to cradle her to health but it didn’t work. I called the ambulance and spent the rest of the day in hospital. Throughout the day her friends and her family showed up. They all asked who I was and I just kept on saying I was an acquaintance. The doctor came in and told us that She was responsive but she was in immense pain, she could make out words and she kept on telling the doctors that she was in pain and she just wanted to go. The doctors said there was nothing they could do but wait. the pain wouldn’t stop. She could go home and wait to die there or die in the hospital. A decision was made for her to go home. I walked passed the doctors as secretly as I could, grabbed a wheel chair, went into her room and took her out the back of the hospital. I called out a cab and told him to drive to the beach, it was 5 o’clock in the morning and the sun was coming up. We pulled up to the beach, I gave the cab driver a thousand Euros and told him to wait for us. We pushed the wheel chair onto the sand close to the water, I took off her shoes and put them in the water, I cradled her and we watched the sun rise. A tear fell from her eyes, she tried to mumble out a thank you but she couldn’t move her mouth, I looked at her and kissed her on her head. I took her back into cab and told the cab driver to drive back to her apartment, laid her on her bed. Took a pillow and smothered her the fastest way I could. Her hand shaking with pain from her Lupas, stopped and for a while it seemed like her body was at peace, I left a note on top of the kitchen counter next to the cold coffee detailing what I had done and why I did it. I told her parents they could hate me or blame me but this is what she wanted. I also gave them the address of my hotel. I took her phone, called the first contact I found and told them that she was at her apartment.

*I told you this is not a fucking Disney story

Chapter 5- Walking with the lights off

I honestly don’t know how you stayed through out the story but you’re here now, you’ve made it, I would say I’m proud of you but I don’t really care. I guess the author wanted the last chapter to be a mushy moment that would provoke me to come to a Jesus moment and not kill myself

*pussy

And he was right, I think my character arch was cemented in the last chapter. I found something that I cared about and realized that life is meaningful and watching a life fade away in-front of my eyes, she made me realize that I have so much to live for, Sike I’m still going to kill myself. I told you that I’m a nihilistic asshole and things would come to this, you read on and I told you not too, so now that we’re here time to end this chapter with a bang.

I waited in the hotel for 4 days and no one came, no police, no family member and no friends. Sometimes blue lights would flicker outside and I would get myself ready but they never came. I don’t know what I was waiting for, redemption, pain, punishment, I don’t even know why I left my address in Lui’s apartment. All I know is that in the days and nights I spent with Lui I felt a sense of belonging that I had never felt before and doing what I did to her made me realize that maybe I do have a moral compass. Within 5 days I figured the family had understood the letter and how she was in pain, I hoped that they understood that I didn’t do anything maliciously. Until I got a visit from a middle aged women in all black attire with sunglasses on. It was Lui’s mom. We sat in the garden of the hotel and I didn’t know what to say, I mean what do you say to the mother of someone you’ve killed. She looked at me, and said “Your eyes carry pain, just like my daughters eyes” I didn’t say anything. That was not something I was expecting her to say. She continued  “I’ve been fighting with my family the whole week on whether we should arrest you or kill you ourselves”. I then replied “Since there are no police here I’m thinking you decided to do the latter?”

“No, I convinced them not to do both, you see I knew the pain my daughter was going through, I think I just got selfish and wanted her to stay a little longer. I want to thank you for helping her with her pain, although you’ve brought my family great pain as we couldn’t say goodbye to her the way we wanted to, you’ve closed a chapter that needed to be closed. I wanted to see you before you disappeared, I don’t know why but I wanted to see your eyes and now that I’m here I realize that there is no one who can save you from your turmoil, your eyes long for a rest you can’t have, I pray that you find solace in this life or the next” and just like that she got up, shook my hand and left. I didn’t know what to feel afterwards but I knew what I had to do.

I grabbed a gym bag, walked out the hotel room at 3am in the morning, I hired a cab to drive me to Lui’s apartment, I left flowers on the entrance of her apartment I then told the driver to drive to the beach, I waited till the clock hit 4:30. The sun came up slowly. It was beautiful I didn’t deserve the view . I kneeled along the shore and took out the gun

*you see, one thing I know about myself is that I’m very self aware. I know my wrongs and I know my rights(as little as they may be). I understand that I’m probably a sick individual, I understand that sometimes someone like myself needs help but I think I’ve ran enough, from my past, my demons and myself. I don’t remember a time I was ever happy and I don’t resent God, my family or myself for it. I have limits and I just happened to run out of them. Sometimes you just have to take the brunt of your inner turmoil and throw them in the fire. As much as I am an asshole, I have a soul and I hope somehow I’ve been able to leave a positive peace of myself attached to someone and changed their lives cause it would be a shame living such a shitty life to not impact at least one person, anyway....

BANG!!

End.

[janiedean]

Do you think hollywood will ever get out of its “woke” phase or will it only get worse from here?

... I sat on this for a while and I honestly don’t know how to take it, because woke means absolutely nothing put on like that and it’s not like if movies address social justice issues or start caring about accurate representation or whatnot or what we mean for woke it’s automatically a bad thing, but like the problem with any hollywood production is that hollywood makes movies thinking about money first and artistic value later unless we count a handful of directors/people who can go a good movie that will make money (spielberg/zemeckis etc) or who are at a point in their career where their CV is so out of this world good that they can afford to do whatever they want and/or are huge names who made history who have their own money/circle/clout or their own production company (scorsese, clint eastwood etc). also the second contingent problem is that most people only watch mainstream movies that were released recently which means that everything that comes out these days is supposedly groundbreaking when in truth it’s not 99% of the time.

ps: this rant has very vague spoilers for the 2019 joker so like... thread carefully but it’s really really vague xD

now, since I apparently decided to go at this pseudo-seriously even if I think the question means all and everything, I’ll try to, but basically:

if by woke we mean performative representation/performative social justice themes/*insert-token-character-here*, it’s a 100% question of what the studios think the audience wants vs what makes money vs milking the thing until it’s dry. I mean, I’m talking in general about a genre no one on tumblr cares about, but as someone who loves bad/trashy testosterone-driven action movies every single time I see one with the Badass Female Character Inserted By Force Because The Studio Said They Needed At Least One Quota Because Otherwise People Say It’s Not Feminist I roll my eyes a lot because if I’m watching a genre which is the male equivalent of the female empowerment romcom (ie: if romcoms are the-empowerment-fantasy-for-girls the trashy action movie is the same for guys) I don’t need the Fake Strong Female Character in it because I’m not watching it for the feminism, but until people will worry about the bechdel test as the ultimate proof a movie is good then we’ll get the token character that makes no sense, but since these days the hype is there, you’ll get it because the studio wants the money;

on the other side, if we mean people want actual representation and should push the studios to have it/not whitewash characters etc it’s an entirely legitimate complaint and I don’t think hollywood should *get out of the woke phase* or whatever, but my issue is that most of the time it ends up turning performative as well. as in: you know the dark tower movie? (yeah, yeah, I hate it, I earned the right to trash talk it) when they racebent the lead everyone was screaming at how woke and progressive it was... except that they didn’t wanna hear/didn’t want to discuss the fact that the only reason they did that (imvho) was that they adapted seven books in one movie, cut the female disabled character who’s also mentally ill who’s actually black in the original canon and since they didn’t want to get called out on having done that, they racebent the lead so they looked progressive, but do we really think that doing that rather than adapting the actual black character they had which would have required at least some effort is more progressive? idk but I think it’s not. anyway: i’m all for people pushing for this, but they need to be coherent. in the sense that for all I don’t agree with clint eastwood’s political views, if you watch gran torino where the protagonist becomes friends with his vietnamese hmong neighbor, all the hmong characters were actually cast from hmong actors and if you look at interviews online with hmong people about that movie the opinion is that even if the script could have been better for some of them, they were delighted that he cast from their community and didn’t cast from another asian ethnicity that for any producer would have meant the exact same thing because figures if producers gaf about accurate casting when it comes to that. but like, hollywood won’t gaf about that until people are vocal about needing good and specific rep and not just generic ‘as long as it’s X it’s fine’;

that also goes for wanting more movies with minorities having a role - hollywood will go for giving minorities roles as long as it gives them good money/clout, but it won’t care for good movies about minorities or minority actors having good roles until people are vocal about it and/or it means money loss if they do it wrong;

(caveat: this obviously excludes actors from minorities whose work transcended that - meaning, for example will smith gets cast 85% of the time based on part and not on his skin color because he’s uber famous and he made his name in a specific genre and so on, but like we’re talking about the people who made the Upper Level of Superstar Hollywood)

anyway tldr: hollywood american movies were always 95% made for the money and reflect what they think the audience wants to pay for, which means that if hollywood producers think that people want fake woke movies then they’ll give them the fake woke movies.

this also goes hand in hand with the other problem I mentioned ie that people don’t watch movies that aren’t recent so hollywood can get away with pretending to be original when it’s actually not. now since we don’t wanna diss anything, i’ll mention a movie I actually did like *drumroll*... joker.

or, to specify what I mean:

tldr, I thought that joker was a very well-executed and planned and shot movie which had a good idea and went down well on it and was basically the batman movie nolan dreamed he was doing with the black knight and whose point was telling you that a sick system that abandons the weakest people in it (poor, mentally ill etc) and mocks them as if it’s their own fault that they aren’t better than that eventually breeds chaos and hurt and crime and it’s the fault of the system/the people in charge who don’t see it. now: that’s the least original idea in existence and I’ll go on it in depth later. except that..

when I go look at recs especially from american media, there’s a polarization between ‘OMG THIS INCITES VIOLENCE IT’S HORRIBLE IT’S DANGEROUS’ and ‘OMG THIS IS A NEW MASTERPIECE I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE IT BEFORE GROUNDBREAKING AMAZING NO ONE EVER DID IT BEFORE’, which to me is imvho showing very clearly where we have the issue;

as in, issue one: OMG IT INCITES VIOLENCE BLAH BLAH it’s the oldest excuse in existence that has been disproved over and over and it’s just another proof of how puritan/calvinist is the viewership because the point is not inciting violence, it’s showing that as stated not giving a fuck about people who need help means growing discontent that then explodes... which again, you don’t need to read freud’s theory about the masses to know that if the majority of the population lives in shitty conditions you get revolutions;

issue two: the only original/innovative think joker has going for itself is that it’s a movie that has a way wider audience than usual *and* an actual comic book/genre film to discuss the aforementioned issue going in depth into it and not sugarcoating it. but other than that... the deconstruction of the hero/villain in a corrupt world was already in watchmen if you want a genre movie and there have been endless others pointing that out except not that mainstream (because again everyone knows what batman is and who’s the joker, watchmen is a lot more niche), the spectacularization of THAT THING on television was already in network that came out in the year of the lord 1976 and the entire movie was basically an homage to taxi driver when it came to how it was filmed/structured and I guessed 95% of what was gonna happen in the first fifteen minutes. it’s nothing groundbreaking whatsoever, but apparently everyone thinks it is because they haven’t seen either of the above movies or any other that predated this one;

now, joker is a movie I actually liked so I don’t see the lack of originality as a bad thing because that wasn’t the point, but like just to say one, hearing people say that mad max fury road was revolutionary feminist action movie and nothing else ever happened before it when there have been four alien movies before, the valid terminator movies (one and two obviously), kill bill and so on, as in stuff that existed in the eighties was honestly meh because I did like MMFR but again it was hardly groundbreaking (maybe it is for this decade and for other reasons but not for the plot). now, both of these are good movies, but like....... 95% of nolan’s movies are hailed as top originality masterpieces and imvho he’s good but not that good and if people think dunkirk is the best war movie ever it’s because they haven’t ever seen an actual effective war movie (like I can’t even believe some people said it was like two hours of saving private ryan’s first twenty minutes, five minutes of SPR were endlessly better than all of dunkirk and SPR is hardly the best war movie out there), same for about anything he does. now, that’s way beyond the wokeness discourse, but the point is that if people don’t watch other movies and then think that hollywood’s performative woke stuff is peak progressive movie when it really really really is not then hollywood isn’t going to bother producing better stuff that’s both progressive and quality (which can happen I mean have we all seen philadelphia, even if that is like... not exactly mainstream hollywood and it was a risky movie to make but anyway not the problem). tldr: people need to stop acting like the last ten years of movies have been the only era in cinema where you got progressive movies because it’s not true and for one I can 100% assure you that for all its faults tied to the era, the defiant ones is a lot more seriously woke and effective when it comes to discussing racism in the US than 85% of the contemporary stuff I see.

so, idk what you meant with the original question, but imvho: hollywood will produce fake-performative woke movies until the audience contents itself with fake-wokeness instead of actual good material or until people decide to finally stop watching only blockbusters and also give money to indie filmmakers or like nonamerican filmmakers and anyway hollywood goes where the money goes.

which mean that if the activism irl doesn’t stop being performative and becomes serious and therefore automatically turns into people asking for serious rep and not the token character/plot, you’ll keep on getting fake woke movies. (also the day people stop saying GO WATCH THAT MOVIE BECAUSE IT’S WOKE without having even seen it and having read the summary on tumblr will be amazing, but that’s not the day.)

that said, since the idea behind a lot of the fake wokeness is actually right (ie: we need more women/minorities of every kind in movies or television/we need more rep that aren’t blonde blue eyed tall white guys/we need to cast ethnical minorities properly etc) we can hope that people actually grasp the message and we get more and more movies that cast people correctly or who have good rep for the good reasons and I’m all for it because that is a good thing. fake wokeness is not. 

but anyway: hollywood stops being each single trend it is when that trend stops selling. that’s your answer. and until we all think that the oscars are top cinematography choices in existence, it’s not gonna happen.

to end it all: no one is obliged to watch hollywood movies. actually, it’s highly advised to spend your money on either foreign movies or indie movies or independent movies or riskier projects rather than hollywood blockbusters if you don’t want fake progressive stuff also because those movies usually gaf about the issues they touch and if they get money maybe it means more of them get made.

and this was my rant, idk if that’s what you wanted to hear but I guess that’s what I had to say on the topic.

[daddycardan]

I started reading tcp because I was curious about the hype surrounding the series but I have...mixed feelings about it. but I really enjoyed twk and I thought it was much better than the first book. can you do a review on both books and include things that you liked and things that you didn't?

Okay, so I’m obviously pretty happy with the series since I’ve been fangirling over it for quite a long time, BUT I don’t claim that it is perfect. It has its flaws. Recently I convinced my friend to read it, and now that she finally got into the first book, she pointed out a few pros and cons as well, so I think I can see it a little more clearly than I used to.

So first on the Cruel Prince. I love this book. L O V E it. It is one of the best books I’ve ever read, okay? But it was not an instant love, not like I opened it and immediately was obsessed. When I started reading it, it took me like a month to slowly work through the first 5 or so chapters. Not that it was boring but it… but it didn’t quite drag me in either. Ok, I’m gonna say it, the beginning is not a literary masterpiece. I love the world, I love the mood, I love cruel faeries, but it kinda just drops you into the middle of it, without explaining much, and suddenly an inky eyed, clawed imp is braiding Jude’s hair, and they are just about to head to the revel which takes place inside of a hill, full of weird, colourful, long-eared creatures that I’ve never even heard of. What the is an imp, to begin with? Is this common knowledge and I’m just dumb, or what? I cannot imagine this creature, can u at least describe it? And like what the hell, are they inside a hill? Hills are filled with fucking earth, right? What is happening??? So, yeah at first I was a lil confused about it, and I missed the descriptions of these different kinds of imps, goblins, brownies, nixies and pixies and motherfuxies,,,

also Jude’s narrator voice is a little unsteady and confusing at first. So there is a chapter at the beginning, where Jude tells about her childhood memories and starts to talk directly to us, readers, and it seems like she knows that we are listening to her thoughts. But other times, we hear her thoughts as she is talking to herself, and she is not aware of us witnessing it. So this was a little weird for me, but I got over it quickly, and the story just sucked me in as the plot moved forward. The things that I really loved is mostly the the characters. They are so unique and interesting, and always developing unlike in most books where u get the basic teenage Mary Sue who falls for the hot blonde six-pack guy for the first sight and ahhhh I’m so fucking sick of that! I loved that Jude is like a real person, Holly doesn’t try to make her perfectly beautiful or clever and all that crap. Jude makes mistakes and does stupid things and screws everything up, and I love it because it’s actually relatable but also really inspiring, seeing how she works hard and gets to the top like the badass queen she is. And she doesn’t manage that by falling in love with the guy, or being the chosen one, or possessing superpowers, no fuck it, Jude earns her place by sweat and blood and I’m fuckin here for it. Ok this “review” went into a rant real quick sorry lol

But to mention a few more things I didn’t like: it’s kinda insignificant, but I’ve actually read TCP for the first time in Hungarian and the translation was legit embarrassing. Just shitty on a whole new level. Like, no joke, even I could do better than that. (Any other people who’ve read it in other languages? Are they any good??) Also, this is a personal preference, but the bloodshed wasn’t gruesome enough for my taste. (I was kinda wishing for Game of Thrones style descriptions.) Like the slaughter of the royal family or Jude’s parents, they describe the thing like “his blood was dripping like rubies”, but c’mon this is kids mode. They should say something like “he pressed his hands against his slashed stomach, trying to stop his insides from spilling out. He was fighting for his last breath while choking on his own blood” ANYWAY. 

Alsoo another con, and this is a huge one. Okay, so u guys remember that one chapter towards like, the middle? When Jude sneaks into Hollow Hall and kidnaps the mortal servant Sophie for no apparent reason other than empathy??and tries to get her out of Faerie but she falls into the water and “dies”? So, that chapter made literally no sense. Sorry, Holly, but dis is tru. I felt like Jude was so OOC in that scene, I don’t think she would take such risk only out of empathy. I genuinely thought that Holly was foreshadowing or like planting a plotline with this, but we’ve never heard about Sophie again. Oh, only once, in the next revel when she was standing there with the Undersea court, turned into a weird sea monster. But like, in TWK, she is never mentioned again. And will she play a role in QON? I don’t know. Maybe. But for now, it just looks like Holly dropped or forgot about this plotline.

So now, moving on to the Wicked King, I cannot say too much about it, because this book was nearly perfect. Sorry, I’m just really biased with this little paper baby. I definitely think that TWK was better than TCP, but like, don’t get me wrong, they both are excellent. So in TWK I really loved how fast paced it was, full of emotional tension and political intrigue and OF COURSE plot twists. The faerie world widened even further with the involvement of the Undersea and we could see more of the High Court as well. Character development was on  f l e e k  especially with my boi Cardan, whom I’m really proud of (also kinda hating him). The only con that I can think of from the top of my head it that mayyybe it was a lil too fast-paced. Maaayyybe it was a little too overwhelming at times. I would have appreciated if Holly put some breathers in, u know, some chilled moments, with characters just bonding, banter, possibly some more Jurdan moments, and to just calm my nerves down a little, because this was a wild ride.

[ffillory]

I've only had this blog since like a little before 4x10 and theres already so much on my blog. That's honestly cool to me?? like thats just wild how in the span of a few weeks I've been able to see this amazing community that I'm allowed to become an adult in. I don't feel like a child in this fandom. I don't feel like I have to hide who I am either.

I wrote that around the time that 4x12 was airing. Now its been over a month since 4x13 aired and I witnessed something that's haunted me since, and it's been half a week since i've finished my senior year of high school. Throughout this time I've been afraid to follow my own personal rewatch schedule. Today is the day that I am supposed to watch episodes 1x09 and 1x10, but I'm just now feeling okay enough, and finding the proper time, to make an attempt to rewatch 1x01 and 1x02, and there's the familiar feeling of tingles in my spine hearing Julia say "I am the angel protecting your future, Coldwater" for the fourth time and the familiar twinge of disappointment when she says "You can't run away hard enough, can you? What happened to giving up on the Fillory crap?" yet again and it reminds me why i fell in love with the show in the first place. I love the feelings the show makes me feel, i love seeing all of the magical creatures and all of the magic. I love being able to know that Cozy Horse is real. I love so many aspects to this show. I love seeing episode one and feeling like part of that has some foreshadowing to season three. When I found this show my brother had just left for texas to avoid some pretty bad shit. I got hurt but this show told me that it was okay to get hurt and that i was allowed to be hurt. I spent the entire night awake watching the entire show only to need to fall asleep halfway through season two. I only stopped watching out of necessity, and it drew me in completely, not many shows, or movies, can do that to me. Luckily the way our kitchen in that apartment was set up i was still able to cook for myself while watching the show. I put s3 above my social and academic life for about seven school days in october because we didnt have internet at home. I watched it off of a random site because the syfy website didnt have all of the episodes. I remember getting hyped up for season four. I remember the chills when i saw my first s4 promotion ad. I remember knowing i wasnt going to get home on time on wednesdays due to rehearsals so i set the season to record. I remember finally deciding to make a tumblr blog for this show, and I do not regret anything I did for this show. With all this said I know most of us aren't going to go into s5 feeling hopeful, or even going into s5 in the first place, but I want to be hopeful. Yes the writers hurt me with Quentin, they hurt us all and thats shitty. Yet, I'm pretty fucking hopeful that they'll buck up like maybe they'll be able to right their wrongs. I want to hold out hope for season five. Why? Because its what's helping me. This show to me is EXACTLY what the books were to quentin. So I want the series, and the fandom, to see me standing in the wake of season four making it to eighteen and ready to tackle season five, if they hurt me this bad before i can take another hit as bad. I've said all of this before, and I'll always be able to say it again. So to everyone just staying here with me, thank you. Maybe if we watch enough of it we can make it to season six, i know some of you may not want that without Quentin, but I'm still hopeful for what the show can be.

[xanderuwu]

for whom it may concern; here’s a letter

i wrote this long fucking rant about voltron, enjoy (click here to view on google docs)

My name is Alexander, I’m 23, and here is my sob story. I’m a bisexual trans man who grew up in a tiny village where people believed that being LGBT+ was just as bad as being a child molester. I spent the first 20 years of my life hiding my truth because of the fear & shame that was ingrained in me as a child; I was disgusted by myself. I have never gone a week in my‬ ‪life without contemplating suicide - I’ve tried to kill myself 9 times, the first time was when I was 8.‬

‪One of the main things that kept me afloat during my childhood & teen years were stories in any medium; film, TV, books, I swallowed them whole & they kept me sane. But they never made me feel goof about myself or my life. I didn’t experience the impact of good representation until I saw the first season of Glee in 2009 when I was 14 (that show went downhill as it went on too, wow). One of the main characters on Glee was gay & had an arc in the first season where he came out to his father, & his father … embraced him.‬

‪… I remember crying in bed, watching the coming out scene over & over in shitty quality on the Youtube app on my old iPod. I had never seen anything like it. Sure, I’d seen LGBT+ people in media before, but they were always either stereotype-ridden jokes, or they led miserable lives & never got a happy ending. & in so so so many cases … they died. Or their partner died. Or they got AIDS. Or they were framed as disgusting degenerates.‬

‪I’d never seen a parent accept & embrace their gay child. I had never seen a gay character who “made it” with loving friends & family. It gave me courage, it made me hopeful.‬

‪Hope is the most powerful powerful tool we have when it comes to suicide prevention within the LGBT+ community. Every day, thousands of people toe the line between life & death, & THAT is why our representation is so important. Yes, it helps normalize LGBT+ people to the cisgender & heterosexual audiences, but you have no idea how much hope & joy can blossom in the hearts of vulnerable LGBT+ people from good representation that shows LGBT+ characters being embraced & loved, finding partners, falling in love, getting that happy gay ending we so rarely get to see in media. I’m certain that that gay kid from fucking Glee of all things, saved me from the brink a few times.‬

‪In December of 2014, when The Legend of Korra made Korra & Asami the romantic endgame, I cried. Cried for all the LGBT+ kids who would, perhaps for the first time, feel good about themselves. I also cried for the child in myself who still struggles with the shackles secured around his feet from a childhood of isolation & self-hatred, because he needed it too. & then we got record-breaking amounts of well-rounded LGBT+ representation on Steven Universe, a show that not only features same-gender romances, but also explores gender & challenges toxic masculinity. & last year, Disney Channel, the fucking DISNEY CHANNEL, had a character on Andi Mack come out as gay! Freakin’ DISNEY, man! & Korra was on Nickelodeon, Steven Universe is on Cartoon Network - those are all huge traditional television broadcasters where shows have to be assessed by a whole lot of boards in order to make sure they’re suitable to broadcast.‬

‪Netflix, on the other hand, has more freedom. Many of their live-action shows have had explicit LGBT+ representation. Watching as more & more mainstream TV shows & films with prominent LGBT+ characters get released makes me believe in the change, from when i was a kid in the early 00’s to now.‬

‪I first encountered Voltron: Legendary Defender in the form of gifs, fanart, & screencaps on Tumblr. The first thing that caught my attention was Allura’s design; she’s gorgeous & I’m weak. I found out that she was from the Voltron reboot which, not gonna lie, sounded kinda dumb to me at first. I watched Voltron: Defender of the Universe as a kid, not because i’m old enough to have been a child in the 80s, but because we were a family with six mouths to feed & no disposable income that could be spent on cable TV. So we got public service television, & they ran a lot of cartoons from the 80s because they were cheap to license I guess.

Anyways, I was obsessed with VDOTU (we’re using abbreviations now because this is getting stupidly long & typing is hard) as a wee lad, Allura was my favourite character because she had long hair & a pink uniform - as I said, I’m weak for pretty people. So in late June of 2016 I watched the first season of VLD & I was so pleasantly surprised. VLD is animated by Studio Mir; one of my favourite animation studios, & the show has writers & producers who have also worked on Korra, so that, in addition to the show being distributed by Netflix, made the possibility of clear-cut LGBT+ characters & storylines seem more plausible. ‬

‪I loved the first season of VLD. I very quickly latched onto Keith & Allura, but as I kept watching I found myself adoring the whole team. Having Pidge be a girl was cool, & I was so excited when I found out that she was voiced by a gay actress! & whoever came up with the idea of making Allura, Hunk, & Lance brown deserves a high-five. ‬

‪(We’re getting to the real meaty LGBT+ rep rant soon, just stick with me here because I wanna talk about some other gripes I have with this show first).‬

‪So, we had a show with a diverse main cast of characters, good writing & pacing, a good balance between character & plot, & gorgeous animation. I was excited to see the second season.‬

‪However, the second season was when some of the show’s main flaws popped up for the first time. That nice balance between character & plot from the first season seemed to have driven right off its tracks and straight into a bio-hazardous lake. In the first season, each character got a fair amount of attention, but in season two Hunk & Lance were just … barely there? Keith is my favourite character & I liked the Blade of Marmora stuff, but Keith’s amount of screentime came at the expense of other characters, especially Hunk & Lance. Having Keith’s entire arc in season two pretty much only involve himself & Shiro did every character a disservice. & the reveal that Keith was Galra was so underwhelming. We only saw two characters react to Keith’s alien heritage. The episode with Keith & Hunk in the Weblum was lovely, but we haven’t really gotten team bonding episodes like that since season three so :/ And oh God, the whole subplot of Allura, a black-coded character, being “racist” against the Galra is a WHOLE other mess that I don’t think I can adequately explain. Just, why. ‬

‪Season three was good, the balance between character & plot seemed to be getting back on track & the lion switch-up made for some good character development, especially for Lance & Allura. Episode four was a mess though like y'all could’ve been just a liiittle more sensitive with that kind of stuff. Also it is embarrassingly obvious that in the first two seasons, Allura was portrayed as being around Shiro’s age & the two of them shared moments that seemed to be hinting at a future romance - until, suddenly in season three Allura is at the same maturity level as the other paladins? What, is it because that was when you decided to have Shiro be gay because you weren’t allowed to kill him after season two, & so instead of doing Shiro/Allura you started pairing Allura with Lance? That’s just absolutely stellar mate.‬

‪Season four - character/plot balance swings off the rails once more & to this day it hasn’t been recovered. This was the season where y'all’s plot became way too fucking convoluted & too damn big! The plot takes so much room, OF COURSE character development suffers! Season five had the same problem, & whoops Allura has a new love interest! It’s Lotor, a grown-ass man! Great! Totes loved it!‬

‪Season six had some good moments but again, y'all’s plot left no fucking breathing room for the characters! Also, Lance’s crush on Allura is suddenly True Love now? At this point you need a fucking Excel sheet to keep track of the plot & subplots. Lotor was an asshole all along & betrayed Allura? BITCH WE BEEN KNEW! Lotor’s betrayal could be seen from miles away. Bad.‬

‪SEASON FUCKING SEVEN HERE WE GO.‬

‪You ruined Keith’s entire character. Plain and simple. Keith & Shiro’s backstory was the highlight of the entire season. And in those flashbacks we see Shiro’s BOYFRIEND! Shiro is GAY! Shiro being gay & having a partner was revealed at San Diego Comic Con in July, & fans were so fucking happy. Remember at the start of this monstrosity of a letter where I talked about LGBT+ representation in media igniting hope? That was what you saw from fans after SDCC; pure joy & hope. It was amazing, people cried because they were so happy! & the showrunners said we’d learn more about Adam & get to meet him, shit I was so hyped!

Was Shiro, the character who has struggled the most in the show, going to get a … happy ending? As a gay character? With his partner of the same gender?‬

‪…‬

‪Y'know,‬

‪There’s still probably hundreds of thousands of LGBT+ kids who are growing up in a similar environment to where I grew up. They feel the same way I felt. That … indescribable loneliness that pierces through your bones, the self-hatred & hopelessness that weighs too much, you are the deer and the headlights is every person whose approval & love you need most. ‬

‪& then you see someone like you in a story, & they are happy, they aren’t alone, because people like us aren’t destined to be tragedies.‬

‪It gives you hope.

‪VLD could’ve given that to people y'know? And maybe that’s the saddest part, that instead they chose to kill the man Shiro loved, & thus put their only remaining confirmed LGBT+ character through even more suffering. ‬

VLD killed 50% of their confirmed LGBT+ characters. ‬

‪Imagine if they’d killed 50% of their female characters.‬

They killed Adam to show the gravity of the situation, to show that with war comes death. But LGBT+ viewers don’t need that reminder. We die every day. We know war, we know that war walks hand in hand with death.‬

‪And we didn’t even really have any feelings about Adam aside from “Shiro’s boyfriend!!!” We only got a tiny snippet of his & Shiro’s relationship. From a basic storytelling standpoint, killing someone like Colleen or Sam Holt would have been so much more effective because we know a lot more about Pidge’s relationship with her parents than we know about Adam & Shiro.‬ Adam’s death fell flat because we never knew him or his & Shiro’s relationship.

‪So why did they decide that the gay characters had to lose? VLD could have made something beautiful, something that would help people. But you didn’t.‬

‪Why didn’t they?‬

‪And why, in the same season, did they suddenly make Allura show signs of returning Lance’s feelings, despite her having shown zero romantic interest in him for over a third of the series? Why did they push Keith & Acxa together, two characters who had never spoken before this season? ‬

‪They take away the prospect of a same-gender romance, & then shove some half-assed straight relationships in our faces? It’s as if they’re doing this to be intentionally cruel.

‪Even if Adam somehow returns, that doesn’t repair the anxiety & hurt they caused their LGBT+ fans. With this season, VLD gave us the same age-old tale we’ve been told since we could understand words.‬

‪Happy endings belong to straight people. Gay people are doomed to live through tragedy after tragedy until we die young.‬

‪I believed in this show. I honestly thought the slow-burn romance would be Keith & Lance. Already in season one they had the “bonding moment” that was a textbook example of how to convey romance through visual storytelling. In that scene, Lance said “We are a good team” to Keith, & that was supposedly just bros being bros? But in season six, Lance says the exact same phrase to Allura as a flirty line, so what’s the deal here?

Are Allura and Lance the slow burn? Allura had never shown interest in Lance before now, when she suddenly noticed that Lance is … nice? What … is this? Honest to God, what is happening? VLD really decided to do the guy-likes-girl-girl-doesn’t-reciprocate-but-if-guy-keeps-trying-she’ll-like-him-back-eventually thing? Ah yes, If you flirt with a girl & she ignores your advances, you shouldn’t stop & move on, you should keep pushing, that’s how VLD staff want people to treat women I guess.‬

‪Keith & Axca … looked at each other three times & now they’re in love. Very good slow burn, I cried, 11/10.‬

‪Had the straight romances at least been well-developed I might’ve been slightly less angry. But no, you killed the man Shiro loved & then presented us with some gourmet heterosexual nonsense - no really, where are your Michelin stars because this hetero bullshit is top notch, truly.‬

‪I’m not saying this as a bitter shipper. I’m saying this as someone who invested so much time into your show, only to be severely let down. VLD has had some incredible episodes, but season four & onward was a massive display of incompetent storytelling. It’s as if seasons one through three were created by a different team!

Not to mention the showrunners themselves, who have consistently been dismissive of valid concerns from fans, & when given chances to confirm that Keith & Lance’s relationship was strictly platonic, they instead remained vague, instilling hope in fans - giving people false hope to string them along so they’ll keep watching your show is cruel.‬

‪There are so many other things I could say here, but I’m running out of time.‬

‪Y'all could’ve done extraordinary things with this show & these characters. You could have made something amazing, your show could have been remembered as a trailblazer. But instead, it’ll only be remembered as a clusterfuck & as an example of what not to do, for future creators to learn from.‬

‪I don’t know how or why y'all ended up turning your show into a damn mess. I don’t really care. I just wish you hadn’t exploited the fragile hopes of LGBT+ people.‬

The only thing that can save y’all now is if season eight makes me physically shit hundred dollar bills so I can buy a fucking boat, sail to the middle of the ocean, and just scream for a good six years or so.

Thanks.‬