#james is odd because he IS a neat freak in a way but he also likes it when arcade is stinky in the right way lmao

[nukacourier]

Yipee! Sending you James/Arcade asks-

How would they feel if they walked in on the other wearing their clothes (either for a comfort thing because it smells like their partner or simply becuase their own clothes are dirty)

I think James would wear Arcade's shirts often, partially because they're looser than his clothes (due to him being the taller of the two) but mainly because he likes how he smells. I feel like Arcade wouldn't question it until it clicked in place that he tends to uh...wear his dirty shirts. Because he genuinely likes the musty smell they get (James may be normal compared to most people but that doesn't change the fact even he is a little freak. Said affectionately). But even then I feel after his general just confusion it'd only concern him because it'd put him at risk of infection from wearing dirty clothes

Whereas on the other hand, James wouldn't acknowledge it, he'd assume Arcade just wears his stuff when his isn't clean. But that being said, he'd probably smile every time he noticed it because he thinks it's really sweet how comfortable Arcade would be with him to just wear his stuff without asking. Might end up making him more clingy than usual because he'd just be so happy about that thought

Thanks for the ask!!!

[basenji18]

Brush

She's staring at a toothbrush, trying to decide its significance. It's her toothbrush, in his holder. And she cannot for the life of her remember which one of them put it there. She has a clear memory of sliding it into the cup last night. But memory is fragile, and easy to fabricate. She has an equally clear recollection of sleepily leaving it to dry on the counter, can see him as clearly as herself coming in after her and dropping it in place. Which one of them placed it there, and what does it mean? She knows she's overthinking. But knowing it has never stopped it. It's a toothbrush and it belongs in a toothbrush holder and either of them might have done it because they're both neat freaks but her toothbrush in his toothbrush holder could potentially have very big implications and she wants to know which one of them did it so she knows if he's being hospitable or she's being presumptuous or if it's just a stupid toothbrush and it is too early in the morning for her to be doing this to herself. Her side bites her. She's tensed up and angered her bruised ribs. She grips the marble sink and purses her lips against it. She takes a shaky deep breath through her nose. She always tenses and it hurts and she tries to hide it by tensing up worse. She lets the breath out through her lips, and a little of the pain goes with it. A second inhale-exhale lets her straighten. She's off the pain meds, except for once a day, right before bed. James and the old doctor with the furry ears both encouraged her to take them longer, but she refused. Bad enough her plane is gone. Bad enough Cobra's plans are severely delayed. Bad enough the Joes are still loose. And bad enough that this feels like the first vacation she's had in...ever. She likes the drugs. She likes not being in pain. Fuck American puritanism, she likes being high for a while, nothing bothering her, dropping off wherever she happens to be and waking up six to ten hours later, no dreams, refreshed, still a little hazy. Vicodin keeps her from overthinking toothbrushes. And that's what makes it dangerous. The doctor prescribed regular ibuprofen, if she won’t take the hard stuff. If she wants to be up and working, it will "take the edge off." He doesn't understand she needs her edge. She is the knife the Commander wields to keep his empire in line, and she wants to stay the knife instead of the sheep. She'd love to float in a medicine-induced haze until her ribs don't bite and her brain isn't scrambled and she doesn't get headaches and exhaustion from thinking too hard. But it's dangerous to be caught off guard. Because off guard people don't notice who put their toothbrush in the damn toothbrush holder. Everything else is in its place, but nothing else is hers, so it doesn't matter. She didn't come planning to stay. She got off her transport with nothing but the clothes on her back. She's been provided with everything, from medical care to soft wool sweaters. The clothes she wears and the bed she sleeps in and even the hygiene products she uses because of course that would take place this week all have their places in the castle and wardrobes and bathroom cupboards. But none of that matters, because none of those items are really hers. This would bother most people more than her. Anastasia mostly does not have possessions. This sounds odd to people who do not understand what it's like to have money. She’s rich, right? So she must own things. Yes and no. She uses things. The dresses for the parties are rented. Designers pay Cobra to have her seen in their work. The plane belonged to Cobra. Her glasses were designed by their engineers and assigned to her. The houses in her name are overseen by various historical societies - more than one well-heeled old lady with a pedigree almost as long as Ana's own would laugh her out of the office if she so much as suggested where to hang a picture. Her time is Cobra's. Her energies belong to the Commander. But the toothbrush is hers. You can't scrub your mouth out with something and expect someone to want it back. The toothbrush came from the plane. A little travel case, toothbrush and passport (one of them...) and the like. Fireproof, bulletproof. Explosion proof, apparently. Recovered from the wreckage and dutifully returned. Her glasses slide up her head as she rubs her eyes, pressing her fingers in until she sees stars in the dark. This is not about a toothbrush. This is about her trying to fuck something up so she can feel in charge of the fallout. Because she fixes things. She takes care of problems. And here there's nothing to fix. She's heard of happy households. She knows they exist, in the same way she knows endangered rhinoceri exist somewhere out in the wild, though she's never seen one. For all her experience, the rhinos and the happy families might be actual unicorns. Her own parents considered their second born an accident. A mistake at best, a disgrace at worst. Most of their parenting had been a mad scramble after her brother's death, when they realized they'd have to make the best out of a bad situation and try to salvage the family line. Her ribs twinge. She's hugging herself very tight. James' parents are gone, but his household is close. The people here are a community built over generations, not hired and vetted and run like a military. And they have swept her up immediately. She doesn't understand it. When she's not playing the part of PR representative, she's not charming. Her personality is distant and cold as the best or worst Russian stereotype. But the maids and the workers are all friendly, one housekeeper who may have seen the first stones laid taking particular care of her, like she'd been raised in here, and wasn't the new wink-and-a-nudge interest of the laird. They're treating her like she's human, and she's about to crack under the strain. The other day she had her thumb on the button to call Mindbender, just to hear a familiar, caustic voice. At the last second, she...stopped.

She's never visited her parents' graves. Yet she's already seen where James' parents lie. The McCullen clan has a plot, a rolling field under the grey Scotland sky, which somehow looks less like the kind of well-manicured field of death where she's sure her parents rot than like a kind of stone-marked family get together. As if the ghosts were invisibly hanging around, staying close to their descendants. That's too much fantasy. She frowns at the toothbrush. Behind her in the bedroom, she hears James stir. They haven't had sex yet. Isn't that funny? Shared a bed every night for a week and they spoon like cats, but he hasn't even taken a feel, though he's had every opportunity. They've skipped over the hot and heavy and sexy right to the point where they're sprawled out and drooling on each other. The bed springs creak and she can see him in her mind, stretching, craning like a bear, yawning best he can in that mask. He'll be in in a minute to deal with his own teeth, an unpleasant procedure with strong mouthwash and a straw he's embarrassed of, so she tries to always be done and in getting dressed by the time he comes in. Does he watch her in the mirror? She's never caught him at it. Is this love? Even she has felt infatuation, and this doesn't feel like that. Anastasia can count on one hand the people she's sure she's loved, and have fingers left over. James has the charm and he makes such fun toys at MARS, and she'll admit, he's given her a little flutter before. But he's also blown her off back when, when he was MARS and she was Cobra and he was captain of his own ship and proud to stay that way. The mask has humbled him. Recent events have brought them both down a peg. Blind infatuation isn't necessary. Neither one of them needs more fireworks in their life right now. Her head already hurts from her thoughts spinning round inside it. She's just got up and she's making herself tired. She has only seconds until he gets here to review the facts. He calls her Nastya. Not in front of anyone, of course. She vaguely remembers asking him to, and she believes this memory because 1) it's not the nickname English speakers naturally fall to (he still calls her Ana sometimes), and 2) she wants him to call her Nastya, and she has been very drugged lately. Drugged enough to act on wants. So she believes her memory is real in this case. What does that say for her toothbrush? Eugene. Zhenya. The one person Ana knows she's loved. When she thinks of James, she thinks of him as she thought of Zhenya. Not in brotherly fashion, obviously. But when she thinks of the future, he is there. When she thinks of anything, his presence feels natural. Anastasia holds her thumping head. "Are ye alright?" He's in pajama bottoms, bare-chested, as she's wearing the top half. The stark metal of his mask ends at his throat, above a broad chest with a scattering of ginger hair. Lord help them all if they ever have to follow the Joes to a desert. Between her, him, and Mindbender, they'll have to buy a sunscreen factory for Cobra. "What are you grinning at?" The smile in his voice and eyes, tickled at her getting tickled. In answer she wraps her arms around his waist. His skin is warm, the hair lightly coarse against her cheek. Arms wrap around her in return. Who put the toothbrush in the toothbrush holder? Who cares? In the first draft, I realized I wrote Baroness' POV in the same voice I used for Destro, so I went back and reworked it. I like the result. I feel like James is more soft spoken and considerate, kind of sidling up to thoughts, while Anastasia would be blunt and direct even in her own head, but occasionally work herself into a tailspin of overthinking.

[thanksjro]

Children of a Lesser Matrix: It’s Like A Saturday Morning Cartoon, But With… Genocide

Children of a Lesser Matrix is by no means a complete work- more of an outline that never got past the “slap some ideas in as they come to you” stage. Fun fact: you don’t have to write in sequential order if you don’t want to. It can actually help with writer’s block to jump around.

Let’s take a look at the writing process, shall we?  

I wasn’t kidding when I said the self-insert got the shaft in Eugenesis.

It turns out that back when the Transmasters UK club was a thing, it was pretty common for the members to have a sort of mascot for themselves, a character that would show up in their work repeatedly. You see it nowadays with fanfic writers too, so it isn’t exactly an odd phenomenon, but it’s something I found interesting.

You know who else shows up repeatedly in Roberts’ other works?

Throwback.

But that’s a topic for another day.

This story takes place in the year of 1990. No peering into the future here; this was probably set in the modern day at the time of writing. Seeing as Eugenesis was first published in 2001, it’s safe to assume that we’re looking at the work of a very young Roberts.

Our focus at present is an asteroid in uncharted space.

Oh!

Oh.

Looks like these guys are Autobots, and their ship crashed into this space rock, killing them instantly. These must be the equivalent of Transformers’ red-shirts, because it usually takes a little more to take them out. There’s also a Decepticon, but we’ll get to him in a second.

What else is on this asteroid? Oh, y’know, nothing special. Just the Creation Matrix.

AND IT’S EVIL.

And everyone knows that green is the color of EVIL.

We’ve got an interesting take on the Matrix here, in that A) it’s evil, and B) it’s sentient. Like, really sentient. Also, it can summon demons, and is gonna stuff them in these Autobot corpses it found in the ship.

No mention of what it does with Thunderwing, if anything at all.

Yep. Thunderwing. If you read the IDW Stormbringer miniseries, or the MTMTE Revolutions one-shot, you know about Thunderwing at least a little. In the Marvel UK comics, his whole shtick was that he was obsessed with obtaining the Creation Matrix, believing himself to have an affinity with it. Guess that sort of backfired on him here.

This is the first time I’ve seen something bolded like this in Roberts’ work, and I really couldn’t tell you exactly why, but it’s oddly endearing. Maybe it the mental image of this 14-year old kid just furiously getting this outline down, underlining the word “will" so hard the lead in his pencil breaks off.

We get hit with an interlude, taking place inside a robot grandpa.

Of course, I’m being facetious, but this is a little interesting. Perhaps this is referring to his base on Cybertron, and not Alpha Trion himself. It seems more likely than Roberts mistaking the name for a place.

And who’s inside Delta Triton? Why, it’s Skimmer!

You probably don’t know Skimmer.

Skimmer was actually in MTMTE #41- or at least, he was mentioned. Hailing from Caminus and serving under Thunderclash, the comic doesn’t even know what gender he is. He’s male. Probably can’t put that on the wiki, seeing as this is about as far from “canon” as it gets- an unpublished, basically unwritten fanfiction. It’ll be our little secret, just between you, me, and James Roberts.

Skimmer runs into his boss Quillion- who does not show up anywhere else, as far I can can tell- who doesn’t look terribly happy at the moment. There’s a huge blip on the radar, and it isn’t anyone they want to have over for tea.  

Language!

Quillion orders for these massive rocket boosters they’ve strapped to the moon be turned on so they can get the hell out of the way of this honestly preposterously large pile of Decepticons coming their way. They flip the switch, and moon #3 blasts off.

Oh hi, Luna 01, didn’t recognize you there!

Back at the asteroid, the Matrix went and brought the Autobots back from the dead, and proceeds to wax poetic  on the nature of life, and how its new underlings will serve it.

That’s the royal we, baby. The Matrix is making no bones about it, this thing is KING. Seems like the Omniforce is a Roberts-original idea. Wonder what that’s all about. And what of this new force of evil?

Oh my fucking god his name is Genocide.

If I were a middle-school kid reading this outline, I’d be losing my mind over how cool and edgy this was. Roberts is trying so hard here, and I’m all about it. You go, tiny JRo. You go full cowl on these evil robots.

Our Omniforce have personalities to match their new looks and identities, and it’s about what you’d expect- these boys are a drop of blood in the water away from going completely feral. Also, Thunderwing’s starting to wake up. So, that’ll be a thing soon.

Back at the interlude, everything’s settling down as the gravity rights itself. The moon almost hit light-speed- which, holy shit- but it looks like the laws of inertia in a vacuum are on vacation today.

Not that I expect a kid from the 90’s to know about that.

They’re roughly 7000 hours away from Cybertron, so they better start heading back now. Assuming that there’s still a Cybertron to go back to.

Back with the first plot, Thunderwing’s having a seizure- Roberts’ prose characters seem to do that a lot- and the Matrix is freaking out, because if he dies, they won’t have a ride off this barren space rock. There’s only one thing to do!

The Matrix zaps Thunderwing with green (evil!) lightning, saving him from the brink of death. Thunderwing is less than enthused with this turn of events.

You get redundancies like this when outlining, it happens.

Thunderwing is pissed, and the brand-spanking new Omniforce isn’t super sure how to handle the current situation. The Matrix, thinking quickly, merges with Thunderwing.

This does not help the situation.

You’ve had them for five minutes, and you’re already killing them. I know you’re new to this, Matrix, but come on now.

TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS LATER, it turns out that Quillion’s estimate of their arrival back at Cybertron was off by just a smidge. The moon runs into a tomb of all things in the depths of space, and brings it on inside to see what all the hubbub’s about.

It’s got a Mind-Krell in it.

No, I have no idea what a Mind-Krell is. Another Roberts original. He’s always been rather ambitious as a writer, it would seem.

Jumping back in time, Thunderwing’s throwing out his rawest lines, and it’s amazing.

Like holy shit, I unironically love this. I wish he’d decided to do more with this, it’s fantastic.

We get our first taste of action. Theres a lot going on here: Genocide is apparently a necromancer, capable of controlling the dead, which Thunderwing currently technically is. However, this takes time to set up, so it’s Black Fusion’s turn to step up to the plate. He shoots off a volley of Black Fusion from his eyes, knocking Thunderwing over.

Yes, they’re named after their powers. Or are their powers named after them? Anyway, they’re about to head for the shuttle, when Genocide orders Kaos to use his- you guessed it- Kaos Energy.

We’re also dealing with the “can’t just use said” phase that every young writer goes through. Kaos’ staff, which he’s had this whole time, turns into a gun? It’s not clear, but he shoots Thunderwing and then dives into the shuttle at the last possible second, Indiana Jones-style.

As the shuttle takes off, Genocide warns their resident possessor Daemon to not do the thing, even though he really, really wants to. With that, they train the onboard weapons systems on Thunderwing below- all of them.

And that’s all we got for Children of a Lesser Matrix.

Clearly there would have been more if he’d continued with the ideas, but as is we have a fascinating snapshot of what was probably one of Roberts’ first forays into writing. You don’t get to do this with very many authors, where you can go this far back and see what they were doing, what changed, what stayed the same. I wasn’t expecting to see ideas from MTMTE pop up here- and certainly not ones that were as big as the moon thrusters.

If this entry seems a little soft around the edges, it’s probably because it is. I’m of two mind about covering this at all. On one hand: it was published online for others to read, which makes it free game, and it’s a part of his growth as a writer, so of course I’m going to look at it! On the other hand: Literal. Child. I wouldn’t make fun of a kid just starting out now, and I’m definitely not trying to rag on a young writer retroactively. That being said...

I’m not gonna lie, this is kind of a rough sit. I mean, other than it being an idea springboard that never went anywhere. There are some neat ideas, but… look, anything that’s truly made from the bottom of one’s heart, out of pure love, is always going to be at least a little cringe-inducing. That’s just how it goes, even with the best writers, and this is an outline written by a kid who grew up on 80’s-era media and was just starting out.

Still, there was a lot of potential here. It’s ambitious, it’s over the top, it’s silly and earnest. I like it. It makes me smile to read it and think about the person creating it and having fun doing it.

It just goes to show that no one starts out amazing at what they do.

Up next, a relic of a bygone era- the ‘zine! It’s The Mystery of the Transformer Decoys, a ‘zine that was printed out and sent via snail mail. We truly are spoiled by the internet.

[fuckyeslilkim]

Throwback Interview: The Mask Of Lil’ Kim

In a nondescript warehouse in Manhattan's Chelsea district, the rapper Lil' Kim is being primed for yet another fashion shoot. The theme of the day is baby-doll innocence, and the 4-foot-11 celebrity is appropriately undressed in a sheer blue and pink negligee and high-heeled sandals. With the final touches of turquoise eye shadow, pink lips and, of course, her trademark blond wig and blue contact lenses in place, the picture is complete. Sex symbol. Feminist icon. Freak mama.

Change the circumstances only slightly and you could imagine a porn shoot happening in this warehouse. The final products--the photographs that will sell Kim's raunchy lyrics and persona to the world--often come close to that. A full-page advertisement for her new album, "The Notorious K.I.M.," shows the star in the back seat of a limousine, naked except for black spike-heel boots and a safari-style hat. It's like the kind of pinup men find useful in prison cells and toilets.

But nobody seems bothered by the actual work of this shoot--least of all Kim, who patiently strips down. Quite the contrary: She considers herself a good role model--an empowered, independent woman in the highly misogynistic world of rap. Her fans include many young women who find in her an enviable example of personal strength.

To cash in on the marketing moment, corporate America has come running, showering her with endorsement offers--from Candie's shoes to Viva Glam lipstick. She earns cover treatments from mainstream and edgy magazines alike: The Source, XXXL, Vibe, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Jet, Interview (on which she appeared wearing nothing but head-to-toe Louis Vuitton body tattoos). And now, Atlantic Records has provided the 25-year-old with her own label, Queen Bee.

From the moment she was discovered by rapper Christopher Wallace (a k a Notorious B.I.G., a k a Biggie Smalls) as a round-the-way girl roaming the streets of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Kimberly Jones has set new standards for female rappers. Her 1996 solo debut, "Hardcore," made the highest-ever debut on the Billboard charts for a female rap artist. An unparalleled fusion of hip-hop and pornography, the album opens with a scene in which we hear a fan buy a ticket to a triple-X flick, and then loudly pleasure himself while watching Kim onscreen.

At last year's MTV Music Awards, her outfit spawned a media frenzy fueled by the shocked response of presenter Diana Ross, who reached out and jiggled Kim's exposed breast on national television. (Ross later offered a public apology, noting that she thought Kim "was beautiful and . . . didn't need to dress in that manner.") The incident solidified Kim's image of sexual fearlessness--and her career as a fashion trendsetter.

We've seen so much of her, and yet nothing at all. Who is Lil' Kim, really?

Talking to her, you're taken by any number of contradictions. She considers herself a devoted child of God, for example. "I'm not perfect," she explains. "I mess up. I'm not Miss Sanctified, but I believe in my Father. We have a really good relationship."

She has allowed powerful men to shape and exploit her sexpot image, but touts her own brand of feminism. "If you look at me, no man has really given me anything," she contends. "I got my own money."

She raps about the joys of fellatio, but likens herself to Queen Elizabeth, the so-called Virgin Queen of England. ("I watch that movie over and over again," she says.) Like Elizabeth, she has had an unhappy love life. "I had a lot of guys betray me," Kim says, "and she reminds me of myself because, toward the end, she really wanted a man. She was lonely. She didn't wanna be this strong woman that everybody portrayed her to be, but she had to be."

On one point the star is adamant: Lil' Kim is not Kimberly Jones.

Except: "Most of the things that I talk about [in my lyrics], yeah, they're true." In the song "Hold On," for example, "I talk about the pain of being pregnant and having an abortion."

"I talk about the things that women have gone through that they don't think I've gone through," she says. "Like fightin' with your man or losin' a man to death. Being alone. I talk about just bein' in the streets having no money and having to do illegal things to get the money."

All of which happened, too.

So, after one spends many hours with both Lil' Kim the rapper and Kimberly Jones the woman, the similarities between the two become as apparent as the differences. "We wear the mask that grins and lies," wrote Paul Laurence Dunbar, "with torn and bleeding hearts we smile."

It is not easy to remove the mask of Lil' Kim, which she wears as a brilliant defense against full disclosure. She doesn't want to show us all of the damage that lies underneath. Like many other black women, she has become so good at conjuring the mask--signifying at a moment's notice, for hire--that we no longer know where it ends. Or where Kimberly Jones begins.

In the June issue of Vibe magazine, there is a photograph of young Kim dressed in a neat school uniform: plaid dress, white blouse, knee socks. She is brown-skinned, with brown eyes and nappy hair, neatly pulled into a bun. She sits like a proper schoolgirl with her hands folded in her lap and legs crossed at the ankles, smiling and polite.

But inside, she feels ugly. She thinks of herself as too dark and too short. She has just moved to an all-white neighborhood in suburban New Rochelle, N.Y., where little blond girls tease her and confirm her monstrosity.

Her mother, Ruby Mae Jones, brought her to live there, at age 8, fleeing the ruins of a marriage. But Kim wants to go back to Brooklyn. She wants to go home, to her old neighborhood where little girls look like her. Even if it means going back to the home of her father, Linwood Jones, a former military man who enforced a brutal discipline on wife and children.

"There was a great deal of verbal abuse," she recalls. "And there was times . . . when my mother had black eyes. My father told people she had fallen."

Linwood Jones could not be reached for comment, and there is no record of his having spoken publicly about his daughter's career or her allegations of physical abuse. According to Kim, he did comment privately on her overtly sexual image, asking that she "tone it down."

After her parents' separation in 1983, Kim's life became increasingly unstable. At first she and older brother Christopher stayed with their mother, who relied on the kindness of friends for shelter--including the time spent in New Rochelle. But when options ran out, Ruby Mae Jones granted custody of her children to her husband.

"I was basically living out of the trunk of my car," Kim's mother explains over a posh dinner in a New York restaurant--a contrast made all the more striking by her fur coat and her gold-and-diamond-spangled hands. "And I didn't feel it was appropriate for [the children]. So I let Kim go to live with her father."

When he was away--sometimes for weeks, for reserve duty--the children were deposited with an aunt who was raising several sons of her own. "I grew up around . . . maybe eight guys in my family," says Kim. "I stayed with my cousins when my father went away. They lived in the projects."

"Kim had no sisters," adds Ruby Mae Jones. "She was surrounded by boys all the time. But she had such a strong personality, I never had to worry about her taking care of herself. I knew that she would be able to do that. From when she was like 2."

Despite the frequent absences, father and daughter remained on good terms during Kim's prepubescent years.

"We were very close," she recalls, "until I was about 13." Which is when Kim committed an egregious offense in her father's eyes: She liked a boy and agreed to be his girlfriend. Although the circumstances seemed innocent enough by Kim's account--the boy was 15, a schoolmate--Linwood Jones was outraged. Kim says he called her a bitch and a whore, "just like your mother."

The words had a devastating effect. "If he hadn't said what he said to me," speculates Kim, allowing the idea to play in her head for a moment, "I probably would have stayed a virgin until I was 21. But after that I rebelled."

Fights between father and daughter became more frequent--and violent, she says. On at least one occasion, Kim remembers, her morning wake-up call was a fist crashing into her face. At the age of 14, she packed a bag and hit the streets, wandering in and out of neighbors' homes. Lil' Kim has often described her life during those years as a procession of doing "whatever I had to do to survive."

She peddled drugs for boyfriends. Worked odd jobs in department stores. And had sex with the men who housed and fed her. By the time she met up-and-coming rapper Biggie Smalls at the age of 17, Kim was, by her own admission, desperately in need of protection.

Biggie, who at age 19 was a 6-foot-3, 300-pound drug dealer who had already done nine months in jail, signed on for the job--bringing Kim into the fold of what everyone called the "B.I.G. family." There was Sean "Puffy" Combs, who had been working day and night to launch Biggie on his emerging label, Bad Boy Entertainment; Mary J. Blige, whose success as an R&B artist had also been strongly influenced by Puffy's hand; Damion "D-Roc" Butler, Biggie's friend and security guard; and "the boys"--James "Lil' Caesar" Lloyd, Antoine "Banga" Spain, and Money-L, who would later become members of Junior M.A.F.I.A. (Masters at Finding Intelligent Attitudes), a rap group Biggie hoped to launch on the momentum of his own success.

"She came from the streets," says 22-year-old Spain, who lives today, along with several of the other "boys," in Kim's New Jersey mansion. "I could relate to her 'cause my mom sent me to the city when I was, like, 13."

It was at Wallace's behest that Kimberly Jones assumed the role of Lil' Kim--a vulgar-mouthed emblem of what had been dubbed "porno rap." Following Biggie's lead, the young protege exploded onto the hip-hop scene as the lone female member of Junior M.A.F.I.A. at the age of 20.

Almost immediately, Kim became the showcase of the act. They were like "peanut butter and jelly," says Voletta Wallace, Biggie's mother. "Kim and Christopher were the same voice."

And that voice was determined to push the limits of gangsta rap, a genre whose biggest selling points were unabashed violence and uncensored sex.

By the mid-1990s Biggie Smalls and his crew were at the top of their game. Biggie's second album, "Life After Death," would eventually sell eight times platinum, and with the release of her 1995 solo debut, "Hardcore," Kim arrived in her own right. But the good times were not to last. Kim loved Biggie and hoped to be his wife, but he married and then quickly separated from R&B artist Faith Evans (who would also become the mother of his son, Christopher). There were rumors that Evans had been having an affair with rapper and longtime Biggie rival Tupac Shakur. One Biggie music video co-starred Kim as the defiant and loyal mistress.

Amid the lovers' quarrels and sexual betrayals, tragedy struck in the early hours of March 9, 1997. Following a Soul Train Music Awards party in Los Angeles, a still-unknown killer approached the passenger side of Biggie's GMC Suburban and unloaded seven rounds into the rapper's head and body at close range. Both Lil' Caesar and Damion Butler were unharmed as they ducked down in the back seat. Puffy, who was driving his own Suburban in front of the target vehicle, rushed to Biggie's side reciting psalms. But Christopher Wallace was dead at age 24.

Since the loss of her mentor, Kim's allegiance has remained eerily well preserved. In the immediate aftermath, she and the Junior M.A.F.I.A. boys stayed in Big's New Jersey condominium--where, according to Kim, she shared her slain lover's bedroom with her would-be mother-in-law, Voletta Wallace, and T'yanna, Biggie's daughter from a previous relationship.

In an article for People magazine, a mourning Kim posed for the camera draped in Biggie's shirt, coat and hat. Even today, more than three years after his death, she often refers to her "big poppa" in conversation and lyrics, and even credits the rapper as a posthumous producer on her new album. The bond seems unhealthy, as even Kim's friend Blige noted in an interview: a "kind of co-dependency with someone who just isn't here anymore."

It took Kim four years to release her second album, which had been held up due to conflicts with her label, the theft of material by bootleggers and her own creative process. Meanwhile, Kim's marketing machine hummed along, patiently building her image despite a lack of new releases.

"She's brilliant," says Michael Elliot, president of Source Entertainment. "I mean, here's a woman who [hadn't] had an album out in years and she's a presenter at award shows, and a successful model. She's found a way to market herself and, at the end of the day, she's a businesswoman."

"I think she's a feminist in a funny sort of way," says John Dempsey, president of MAC cosmetics, one of many packagers that hold up the Kim image as a bold new form of sexual expression. "She speaks like a man would speak."

Her fans agree. "She doesn't care what anybody has to say," says 19-year-old Teena Marie Schexnayder, a Los Angeles psychology student and aspiring singer. "She's a bad girl . . . doing whatever she has to do to survive. She's deep. I love the stuff she talks about."

While '80s female rappers like Queen Latifah and MC Lyte embraced "womanist" images, combining ancestral and gender consciousness, Kim provides a very different social commentary for young black women and men. The message behind Lil' Kim is, in fact, heartbreakingly feeble.

Sex, she believes, is a commodity. It is a way for a woman to earn money--and, in her view, respect. She learned that lesson on the streets. As for the women selling their bodies, "I don't see anything wrong with that."

"Money is power," says Kim, and "a lot of women out there are just givin' it away." Kim aims to change that. As she raps in her new single "Diamonds" (sung to the tune of Diana Ross's "I Want Muscle"):

"She says she wants a man / To buy her a Lexus Land/ Well that's all right for her / Still it ain't enough for me / I don't care if he's young or old / Just make him very rich / I want diamonds / This p---- ain't for free."

Is this really feminism?

"I'm a feminist because I love women," she ventures, graciously asking her interviewer to correct her if she misunderstands the term. "And I feel like, in this rapping game, men have been bashing women for years. But some women overemphasize that feminism word. And some of them are very male-bashing. I'm not a male basher."

In her collection of images titled "Women," photographer Annie Leibovitz captures something of the inner sorrow of Kimberly Jones, a black girl who covets blue eyes and blond hair. Juxtaposed with the image of a gloriously dreadlocked Toni Morrison, who is seen looking into a wide expanse of clouds and possibility, Kim appears small and helpless against a wall of color that threatens to engulf her--her nipples visible beneath a trashy net T-shirt. In this image, we see more of Kimberly Jones than Lil' Kim: the real woman who has masked private suffering as public defiance.

"She's just like every little abused girl that I knew growing up," asserts Asha Bandele, a poet, author and critic who is attuned to hip-hop culture. "I do not believe that Kim is in control of her image because there's nothing powerful about it, nothing rounded, nothing human. It's a caricature. Just like when you see a male presenting himself as only a gangsta. . . . We're so much more complicated than that."

But if it is icon status we're shooting for, Kimberly Jones is the real deal. Closer in spirit to Monroe than Madonna, she is a genuine enigma, which is precisely why she intrigues us. The same little girl who remembers jumping into the middle of a fight between her father and older brother (taking a chair across her stomach in the process) became the grown-up Lil' Kim, who prefers "big poppa" lovers because daddies "don't let nothin' happen to their baby girl."

"Kim needs to ask herself what she's selling," says Voletta Wallace in her Jamaican-accented, no-nonsense way. "When my son was here, that's all you would hear: Kim and Christopher [saying], 'Sex sells, sex sells.'

"But . . . when you look at Kim, the strength is there. The beauty is there. The talent is there. And she needs to let [the world] know . . . they need to see a human being. She needs to find her inner self and see what she has to offer."

At the Gazelle Beauty Center and Day Spa in Manhattan, I have requested a private room in which to interview Kim. I am trying to get closer to the real woman, to get behind the mask. But it is a busy day and there are constant interruptions from other clients (who include guests on "The Montel Williams Show"). Nevertheless, Kim and I enjoy a lunch of Caesar salads, as well as joint manicures, pedicures, massages and facials.

We are two sisters drinking herbal tea now, and Kim is relaxed, makeup-less and wearing a cozy white robe and paper slippers.

Unanswered questions have been nagging at me. Kim is like so many other women, it seems to me, who have grown up with trauma. And yet there is no talk of the long-term effects. I decide to put the question of sexual abuse to her plainly. She tells me that yes, something did happen in the home of a relative when she was a girl, but she doesn't want to get into the details. She has never talked about this before. She doesn't want to dwell on the pain. I am saddened by her admission, and the fact that so many years later, she is still so clearly devastated.

And I am saddened that even here, in a place for relaxation and nurturing, she is unable to divest herself, even for a few hours, of the blue contact lenses and blond wig.

"Think about it," she confesses when I ask her to talk about her experience of skin color. "The girls that [men] dated when I was younger were light-skinned and tall. I'm short and brown-skinned. And I always wondered . . . how do I fit in?"

Did she ever overcome the feeling of being ugly?

"I really haven't," she admits. "Honestly, though, I think being Lil' Kim the rapper helped me deal with it better. Because I got to dress up in expensive clothes, and I got to look like a movie star or whatever. I think doing photo shoots and seeing all the people respond to me has helped. [But] I still don't see what they see."

can't help but think of Kim as standing on a precipice, making a great leap toward transformation. In recent years, she has expressed a desire to tone down the raunch and express more of "who I really am." There are rumors that she was wary about spreading her legs for the photo shoot for "Hardcore," and she herself has said she would have rather done four sexual songs instead of seven. "You get tired of certain images," she explains.

So what's stopping Lil' Kim from showing us more of Kimberly Jones? "It's hard," she says. "Because in our world, the rap world, you have this thing called selling out. You don't want people who liked you for doing a certain thing on your first album to not like you for not doing it on the second album. So I have to stay in that realm."

Yes, there are market forces pushing her to stay in the same place, but the market is also a fickle lover and people tire of what is too easy to predict. "Notorious K.I.M." started out at No. 4 on the Billboard album chart, but has slipped to No. 35.

"How much more of her body can she show?" asks Ramon Hervey, manager for R&B artist Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds. "From Madonna to Prince, everybody has to re-create themselves at some point."

"I see the strength in her," Mary J. Blige says of her friend. "All she's gotta do is let go of the fear."

Source: The Washington Post

[hadarlaskey]

Why The Game remains David Fincher’s trickiest thriller

Coming hard upon the huge success of Se7en, although in fact conceived before it, David Fincher’s The Game presents itself as a mystery to be solved. We know this because the opening credits sequence shows a grid of animated jigsaw puzzle pieces scattering apart, signifiers of a fragmenting bigger picture and meaning in need of reconstruction. We then cut to an old 16mm home movie of a party in the massive Van Orton estate, where young birthday boy Nicholas (Scott Hunter McGuire) clowns around while his vastly wealthy father (Charles Martinet) appears before receding into the shadows.

Cut to the present day, and Nicholas (Michael Douglas) is all grown up, still living in that same luxurious estate (with the same maid) and running a high-end investment bank in a building that bears the family name and that, along with the expensive inscribed watch on his wrist he has inherited from his father. It’s Nicholas’ birthday once more, although also a rather different milestone: he has now reached the same age at which his father took a suicidal leap to his death many decades earlier before his young son’s eyes.

So this is a time of mixed feelings, of celebration and sadness – not that Nicholas does much celebrating. Fastidiously neat, divorced, misanthropic, workaholic, uncharitable and aggressively curt, this highly privileged control freak cuts a Scrooge-like figure in his self-imposed isolation from the society around him, and is visibly annoyed when a secretary has the audacity to wish him a happy birthday.

The only person for whom Nicholas does have – and make – time is his younger brother Conrad (Sean Penn), the black sheep of the family who has had a string of problems with addiction and self-discipline, and is in every way Nicholas’ opposite. Making a surprise visit from out of town for the first time in some years, Conrad has come bearing a special gift for the man who has everything: an invitation to participate in a bespoke Game run by a company called Consumer Recreation Services (CRS).

Details about both CRS and the nature of the Game are sketchy, but both Conrad and some fellow executives Nicholas meets in his club suggest it will make his life fun and open his eyes. Curious, Nicholas signs up and submits to a long series of psychological and physical tests. And then, the Game is on, and a man who has it all finds himself increasingly at risk of having it all taken away.

The mystery promised from the outset is not so much Nicholas’ identity. We can see from very early on that he is an entitled, pampered prick with daddy issues, and that there is little else to him. The real mystery here is the Game itself, whose rules are never stated, and whose boundaries are ill-defined. Once the Game is in play, Nicholas is never quite sure where it ends and reality begins – but the Game certainly does turn his life upside down. Jim Feingold (James Rebhorn), the data analyst who takes Nicholas through the initial sign-up process at CRS, tells him that the Game is designed to “provide whatever’s lacking”.

In superrich Nicholas’ case, that would seem to involve making a mess of his immaculate clothes and his perfect home, sending him into an odd-couple partnership with a working-class waitress (Deborah Kara Unger) whom he would usually entirely overlook, driving a wedge between him and his brother, and gradually depriving him of his wealth, his sense of centred control and even his will to live.

As the sheer scale of what is happening to him sinks in, and Nicholas starts to wonder if what he is experiencing is a monumental practical joke, a therapeutic intervention, or a conspiratorial scam to fleece him of his family fortune, he will, like his father before him, take multiple falls. These literal, physical tumbles instantiate both his own headlong descent from the lofty heights of the one per cent, and the death wish which just might be another of his legacies.

They also recall Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down, which starred Douglas once again as a man in free fall. Meanwhile the film’s setting in San Francisco simultaneously evokes Douglas’ breakout role in ’70s TV cop series The Streets of San Francisco, as well as the disorienting alternative realities of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The song ‘White Rabbit’, which features prominently in The Game, is apt not just for its mind-altering lyrics, but because Jefferson Airplane were part of the San Francisco alt-rock scene.

What ensues falls somewhere between paranoid thriller and social satire, as Douglas plays a character not so very far (except in the geographical sense) from his Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, and as we are both bewildered and entertained by seeing this hubristic yet damaged man brought so very low, both financially and emotionally.

Yet it turns out that the Game is an inverted parody of capitalism itself, whose structures can be manipulated and whose personnel can be toppled, but which ultimately emerges essentially intact and unscathed by all the dramas and intrigues that form its role-playing scenarios. Nicholas is repeatedly taken out of his comfort zone, but what makes Fincher’s film so much more uncomfortable for viewers is the ease with which we become willing to identify with, even root for, a character who would be very unlikely to reciprocate such empathy if we stumbled even a little.

The more we invest in Nicholas’ bank of experiences, the more we display our willing complicity with, even subservience to, a system that lets cocooned elites merely play games (on an urban, even international scale) while the rest of us must live our grubby, messy lives in a real world of real consequences. The only lesson that there is to learn about Nicholas, the film’s arch capitalist, is just how predictable his conduct is, and how untouchable his type ultimately proves to be.

As well as being about class structures, The Game is also concerned with the artificial workings of cinema itself. For the people at CRS operate like a film crew, wrangling a large ensemble of actors and extras, co-ordinating set-pieces, engaging in elaborate stunt work and special effects, and handling one narrative twist after another to lead their very private audience right where they want him. This is a film which not only constantly manipulates the viewer (Nicholas and us), but also reveals the very mechanics of those manipulations. And while this crew may be making fun of their mark and using his money and success against him, in the end they remain playthings very much in his pocket.

Anyone who has purchased a ticket to Fincher’s film is already part of this game, if merely a side player. For Consumer Recreation Services indeed serves to recreate the consumer, modelling America’s trickle-down market economy where there may be dips, blips and falls, but dramatic change only ever really affects the 99 per cent, while those at the top can brush themselves off, feel great about themselves, maybe even get the girl, have the Hollywood ending, and reassert proprietary control of the American Dream.

The Game is available on a two-disc Limited Edition Blu-ray/DVD set presented in a director-approved remaster from Arrow Academy on 27 July.

The post Why The Game remains David Fincher’s trickiest thriller appeared first on Little White Lies.

source https://lwlies.com/articles/the-game-david-fincher/

[philipronans]

come from the forest

happy (belated) birthday to the biggest and brightest star i know @gxldentrio, you honestly make my life infinitely better for being in it and i love you. i’ve spoilt so much of this for you over the past few weeks it’s a wonder there’s actually anything you haven’t seen yet, but. i accidentally deleted this the first time but it was like 1:45am and i cbf to post it again so here i am now.

also like straight up kids, this is sirius/james/lily bc i am incapable of anything else ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

.

They call her a witch. They say her name is Lily, and that she walks the woods to talk to demons.

James wouldn’t know. He’s never officially met her. He’s seen her, though. Seen the constellations of freckles staining her cheeks, chasing each other across her skin; seen the fingernails she chews on when in thought, bitten down so her fingertips always look bloody. She’s all hard plains and sharp angles, despite the softness of her cheeks and the way her mouth curls at the edges, as if she’s in on some joke the rest of the world has yet to catch up on.

He knows she apparently only owns one pair of shoes - a pair of mud-caked Doc Martins with frayed laces that are rarely tied. Knows she spends countless hours tucked in the corner booth of Bagshot’s Brews, one booted foot resting on the other knee, a cup of black coffee in front of her as she flicks through a book.

The smile she gives him when he serves her her coffee is big and bright enough to challenge the sun. It strikes him as odd that someone so radiant could be so unquestionably… disliked by the people around her.

The day she calls him ‘James’ is the day he swears the stars align. It shouldn’t, seeing as he’s wearing a name badge, and she’s pretty much a permanent fixture now, she’s here that often. It startles him though, to the point where his brain virtually short circuits on him. It leaves him so confused that he mumbles “thanks” as he backs away, and then sighs when his brain catches up with his mouth.

The smile Lily gives him makes him think maybe, just maybe, he’s part of the joke.

.

It becomes a bit of a thing; talking to Lily Evans. Oh, it starts out as nothing particularly life changing. Unless pointing out that it’s pissing it down outside again is life changing. James doesn’t think it is, anyway.

But one day she’s sitting in her usual spot, reading a book. That in itself isn’t odd, as she’s always got her nose stuck in a book. This one, however, is an old, dusty tome that looks like it belongs in a museum far more than on a coffee stained table that tilts to the side at the slightest touch. She has a habit, does Lily, of muttering under breath, especially when she’s reading.

So it’s not James’ fault when he recognises what she’s saying. The subsequent freak out isn’t his fault either. The fact he almost drops the cup of coffee he’s carrying onto the book very much is, however. It’s only quick reflexes on both their parts that stop disaster from striking. The look Lily gives him is one of betrayal, as she gently lowers the arm she’d curled over the pages.

“Sorry.” James mutters, shrugging as he places the cup down beside her elbow. His shoulders are tense as he runs a hand through his hair. “The Discoverie of Witchcraft, huh? Isn’t that pretty heavy reading for a Sunday afternoon?”

“Oh, shush.” Lily says. She’s not looking at him, index finger dragging across the page as she reads. He sees the moment his words sink in, because she pauses, finger lifting off the page before she tilts her head to frown at him. “You’ve read it?”

James smiles, and he can tell it’s on the borderline of sheepish, but there’s no way in hell he’s admitting he’s read it, cover to cover, at least six times. Instead, he shrugs again, and this time his shoulders relax a little. “Once or twice. It’s an interesting read.”

“‘Interesting’,” Lily scoffs with a small shake of her head, “it’s so much more than that. It’s… incredible. What Scot did, in a time where talking about this stuff could get you killed, is inspirational.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t believe in it.” James counters. He hears an old woman tutt to herself somewhere behind him, but he doesn’t particularly care. “He just said it wasn’t real. Nothing groundbreaking in that.” If the last sentence is aimed at the old woman, then no one needs to know but himself.

“Maybe so, but he was still vital in pointing out how corrupt it all was.” Lily’s answer is quick, as if she’s always wanted to have this conversation and so has every possible variation planned for.

“Yeah, alright, fair point.” He says and breathes out a sigh. He can feel the eyes of Bathilda, his boss, boring into him from her perch at the counter. He shuffles his feet, ready to go back to his place behind the till, when Lily reaches out. The move itself is this aborted thing, like her hand got halfway to his arm before she realised and stopped it, but it’s enough to make him pause.

“Sit with me?” She asks, scooting the chair over and taking the book with her. She’s careful to avoid knocking the coffee mug, spending a few extra moments straightening the coaster. She’s still looking at the table when she mutters, “I’ve never met anyone who’s even heard of it, let alone read it.”

James looks over his shoulder, meets Bathilda’s eye as she shakes her head at him, and sits down in the chair next to Lily. “I’d love to.”

.

Apparently the fact that he’s spoken actual words to Lily Evans means that he’s in mortal danger now. Which wouldn’t be so bad if the old ladies of Islip would let him live out the rest of his seemingly numbered days in peace.

The Olds apparently haven’t got this message however, and, either through hive mind or some age restricted memo, have taken it upon themselves to try and ‘save’ him. This mostly involves accosting him in the middle of the high street to tell him he better ‘watch out’. Which, honestly, sounds more like a threat in itself than anything, but James kind of appreciates the sentiment? Moreso when it doesn’t make him late for the hourly bus into town, he’ll admit, but.

It’s on one of these days, as he’s hurrying down the main street to try and catch the bus, cursing Mrs Fenwick under his breath, that he catches Lily coming out of his house. It’s such a strange collision of two very different parts of his life, that it takes him at least thirty seconds to wrap his head around what he’s seeing.

It isn’t until he sees Sirius that it really sinks in. Sirius’ leaning against the front door of their house, hair suspiciously… he wouldn’t go as far as to say ‘messy’, but it certainly isn’t neat. Tousled. That’s the word he’d choose, if his brain was approaching anywhere near functional.

He watches, far enough away that he doesn’t think they can see him, as Sirius slouches against the door with one hand shoved in the back pocket of his jeans. If James didn’t know him better than he knows himself, it would look natural. From this distance it’s even somewhat believable, but there’s a straightness to his spine that isn’t usually there, and the smirk he’s giving Lily doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

Lily reaches the end of their garden path, and turns as she reaches the gate. She tilts her head, letting her hair fall down over her shoulder. She smiles and offers Sirius a cocky salute. “Thanks, Black.”

“Anytime.” Sirius calls back. He uses his shoulder to push himself off the door, and steps back into the darker hallway. Before he shuts the door, he pauses. “Same time next week, Evans?”

“‘Course.” Lily answers. She waves, turns on her heel and begins walking down the street.

Whatever James had wanted the bus for has completely left him, and he watches as its taillights disappear into the distance. He makes the split-second decision to go home, mostly because he’s tired and hungry, and Sirius had promised to buy him Chinese for dinner.

The gate squeals as he shuts it, black paint flaking off on his fingers. He wipes them off on his jeans as he stomps up the path to the front door and fishes his keys out of his pocket.

The house is quiet, or at least as quiet as it ever is, when he steps into the hall. He kicks his shoes off, not bothering to straighten them, and starts to pad across the old floorboards towards the kitchen.

Sirius sits at their table, head resting on folded arms. His eyes are closed, but his fingers tap against the tabletop. “Afternoon, love.” He says, opening an eye to look at James. “Y’just missed Evans.”

“Oh, yeah?” James asks, his voice as casual as he can make it, but he knows Sirius is onto him with the way his mouth quirks at the corners. “She want anything interesting?”

“A nice cup of tea.” Sirius says, just to be a shit. “Honestly, she wanted to know if we had any books on runes.”

“That all?” James can’t help raising an eyebrow dubiously because Sirius looks like he’s come out the satisfied side of a shag. It’s not jealousy, exactly, that he feels creep up his spine. Sirius has never been the kind of person for monogamy, and that’s okay. James knows Sirius loves him more than anyone, will always love him most, because saying otherwise would be like saying he doesn’t need air, or water, or anything else vital to living.

“Well, I mean…” Sirius trails off, and runs a hand through his hair. “She’s really hot? And nice? And she knows almost as much as you do about ‘The Occult’.” He snorts, and rolls his eyes.

James feels himself smile, and turns around so he can fiddle with the kettle. “D’you give her any?”

“Plenty.” Sirius says dryly, before breaking out into laughter. It grows when James throws a tea bag at him, and then Sirius is behind him, playing with the hem of his t-shirt, mouth very close to the back of his neck, and Lily tucks herself into the far recesses of his brain.

.

James has a soft spot for trouble. He’s known that since he was six years old and he punched Davie Johnson in the face for making fun of “the girly boy”. Sirius still calls him his knight in shining armour for it, much to his embarrassment. So it doesn’t really come as a surprise that Lily fits into the bizarre narrative that is his life as if she’s always been destined to be there. It’s almost seamless, the way she inserts herself into their lives.

That is, until the post starts arriving through their letterbox. The Olds of Islip have been spying, it seems. Which, James assumes, is because they have nothing else going on in their dreary lives. Letters of ‘neighbourly concern’ start finding their way into his entryway. He’d wanted to stop it, when it first started, but as Sirius had said “who do you complain to when everyone’s in on it?”. So he’s grudgingly come to accept that this is just a part of life now, and that the only consolation is that the paper is excellent for starting the fire in the living room.

“‘Evans is trouble, and you should cut her out of your life before she curses your cat’.” James reads one afternoon, strolling into the living room. He’s got the letter, pages upon pages of the thing, held up in front of him as if he’s addressing a royal court, ridiculous voice included. He lowers the paper, enough to see Lily dancing on the coffee table, socks rolled down around her ankles and a bottle of whiskey gripped in one hand.

Sirius lifts his head from where he’s laying on the sofa. “You don’t say.”

Lily sticks her tongue out at him, and takes a drag from the bottle. “You don’t even have a cat.”

Sirius lets his head thump back against the cushions and sighs mournfully. “Not anymore. The move from London didn’t agree with him.”

“Neither did you trying to resurrect him in the back garden.” James says mildly, crumpling the letter up and throwing it at the fireplace. He lifts the cushion Sirius is using as a pillow, and rolls his eyes at Sirius’ grumbling as he sits down.

Sirius sighs when James starts stroking his fingers through his hair and closes his eyes. “Mistakes were made, I’ll admit.”

“Wait, did you really?” Lily asks. She steps down off the coffee table, accepting the hand James offers her, when her foot slips against the glass. She sits on it instead, bottle discarded on the floor as she watches them. “You actually tried to resurrect a cat? Are you mad?”

“No,” Sirius says, as he begins playing with James’ wrist, fingers tapping gently against his skin. “Overconfident.”

“You thought using a spell you found on the internet was good idea.” James mutters with a slight shake of his head.

“They’ve worked before!” Sirius protests, craning his neck so he can frown up at James.

“For smaller things, sure.” James says. He shudders. “I can still smell that bloody garlic.”

“So you’re actually…?” She leaves the question open-ended, gesturing at them with her hand.

“Well, yeah.” James says, a little dumbly.

“I know it looks nice, Evans, but it’d be a bit pointless if we weren’t, wouldn’t it?” Sirius says around a yawn. He wiggles a finger at her. “Now are you coming over here, or not? ‘M tired.”

Lily virtually leaps across the gap, and then stands there uncertainly when Sirius doesn’t move to make room for her. Eventually she just clambers up next to him, pushing him around so she can spoon behind him. He protests a little bit, until she wraps her arm around his waist.

James looks down at them, watches as they kick at each others ankles and grumble at each other. Lily reaches up from where her hand’s tucked under Sirius’ hip, and wraps long fingers around the hand James has in Sirius’ hair.

James strokes his fingers across the back of her hand, and smiles.

.

They call her a witch. They say her name is Lily and that she walks the woods to talk to demons. They’re mostly right. Lily doesn’t talk to demons. And they forget the part where James and Sirius walk with her.

[tinglingandnumbness]

A Bullet Post: The Final Problem

LONG POST AHEAD.

This would be my third time viewing it now and I think I gathered my final thoughts on it.

●Literally Bond Air though. 

●Mycroft watching family video clips though. (No matter he wasn't as freaked out by his movie interruption though)

●IT'S A SWORD.

●And it was at this point the first time viewing it I thought "what the actual fuck am i watching?" Plus I laughing my head off as well.

●NO IT'S A GUN. 

●Trying to justify the umbrella sword gun and basically it's just Mycroft wanting toys and to protect himself in the most James Bond way possible...because he's the fucking British Government. No matter how hilarious this is.😂

●I can't justify WHY killer clowns though.

●And it was here where I genuinely thought it was a nightmare and that Sherlock will turn into a vampire.😅

●"HEY BRO!😄" But Sherlock is one to be...eccentric and elaborate. Killer clowns, though.

●Now...tranquilizer. And just...John laying there in that office. A person like Eurus doing that. Never mind kidnapping him for the game or anything. That's a little anti-climatic and a wasted opportunity really. (Not that I want anything bad happen to John or to be the damsel in distress but should the stakes be higher?)

●Client!Mycroft finally.

●TWINNING BECAUSE OF MRS. HUDSON. DON'T LET THIS GO.

●THE HAIR GAME IN SEASON 4 IS STRONGER THAN ANYTHING.

●There was no way in hell that they didn't know about Eurus' brother Zephyrus.

●"John stays." "This is family." "That's why he stays!" DON'T LET THIS WONDERFUL THING GO.

●IT'S NEVER TWINS IT'S GONNA BE TRIPLETS FROM THE SHINING IF SHE JOINS THAT CREW. SHE FITS IN.

●"In the early days I suppose he was an emotional child." DUDE, THAT CHILD'S BEST FRIEND WAS BASICALLY MURDERED BY HIS SISTER. NOT A DOG. ANOTHER BOY. DO YOU KNOW WHAT TRAUMATIZED IS?!?!? (Apparently he does in that first Eurus Challenge.)

●Ohhhhh. That's not Sherlock then. Neat, neat.

●Wish we could learn a lot more about Rudy Holmes. 

●HELLO, TOM HIDDLESTON. ARE YOU GONNA BE PLAYING JAMES BOND TOO?

●For some reason...no, I don't feel threatened. Question: So are Sherrinford people doing this for her? Like somewhere manning this drone.

●Season 4 is Mrs. Hudson's season I tell you.

●Ok...ok. Did Eurus had the full intention of killing those three right there and then? What if they could've moved to the kitchen for tea and then the aproximate distance to those windows wouldn't be enough for 3 seconds. And no, Eurus couldn't even predict that. I don't care how cool it looks or badass or how expensive without any casualties after and we were not given any aftermath of that like "John and Sherlock on the pavement holding in to their sprained limbs and bodies smoking along with their flat. They will make his sister pay." I have an assumtion they just added this scene to follow up on their ending, could always be wrong of course.

●I'M BATMAN.

●Their camera work is always impeccable when it needs to be. I love it.

●EVERYTHING IS COMPRIMISED. Also once again a Eurus parallel play with Mycroft's lines about disguises to what she said in TLD.

●A call back to Moriarty in Baker Street when Sherlock was playing and took a pause knowing his presence. 

●Unnerving.

●With Sherlock completely forgetting about his sister and re-written his memories (so this is what they were implying all season about Sumatra and editing evidence) he has done it before, the solar system and all.

●"Didn't notice in the heat of the moment and afterward well you really couldn't tell. Is that vibrato or is your hand shaking?" *Eurus smirks* Hmm. Making a decision: Parallel moment but with emotional diferences on this regarding Sherlock.

●Sherlock took a break from deducting for a moment because this is the first time he has thecnically "met" his sister. He got carried away like the rest of them.

●Sherlock's clever boy, Watson dropping those truth bombs.

●First reaction: FUUUUUUUUCK YAASSSSSS😭🙌😭🙌😭

●Second reaction: Fuck.

●I don't know why the hair color was nesessary. He hasn't changed his hair color in the last five years before. For the initial realization before the shock of the 5 years bit?

●I DON'T CARE IF YOU'RE DEAD. THE SHOW NEEDS YOU.😢

●Given that this scene is beyond odd as it is but then again these two are just out and beyond this world weird anyway but that was the general impression of it.

●Makes me wonder where did he find the time to do this? Makes me wondeer how the conversation went? Makes me wonder who filmed it all?

●Sherlock does know John. He knows he's not going to do it.

●By this point I was feeling their stress. Jaws were dropped and breathing heightened. I just couldn't believe they got themselves into situations like this. Or better yet that situations like this are presented to them in this way as we move forward.

●I think we already know waaaay before about what the last challenge was for sherlock with that one bullet. And I have Moriarty in my head like "No NO NO THIS IS TOO EASY SO PREDICTABLE"

●"She's very clever" "I'm begining to think you're not" Basically.

●"We have more to worry about than her choice of color scheme" BUT WE CAN. I'm thinking someone else did it. So...I'm guessing there still are people on this island. And did she really talk to every single employee to cast a curse on them? A big chunk of how it all happened is missing. The full on take over. Shame.

●"This is inhuman! This is insane!" ⬅ Eurus Holmes. And this episode is insane! We know.

●It was usually John to call Sherlock into order. They lean on each other. (Bless ya, Martin)

● In every challenge they have done...they are MEANT to loose. And he did. And he was so angry about it. Molly is who Molly was in the beginning ever since. Kind, observant, quiet but a force. There is nothing wrong of her loving Sherlock but it is how Eurus used her. How Eurus used Sherlock to cause more damage to everything and he had enough right there because it was to someone he truly cared about. Why he was so upset? Because he wasn't sure as he would like to be. Mycroft and John knew how hard that was for him. Eurus knows what she did. As a mild sherolly shipper as myself, no, this is fucking depressing. I can't find no beam of light in this. She deserved better. I'm not done with this yet.

  ●This is the scene where I actually thought it has to be a dream, it has to be. What the fuck was Mycroft saying? 

●He did a double take to John when he said he should take the bullet. Sherlock wasn't even considering it, of course.

●RELEASE THEM FOR THIS HELL. WHAT IS THIS? WHAT IS THIS STILL? (My god, Ben)

●And then Mycroft. A character has layers and layers and it was nice seeing him weak in this episode and very flawed to which he doesn't consider himself so and with a heart at most.

●.....Listen, I can't even justify this even if these two are in shock right now. Why the fuck doesn't anyone move between the two of them or at least shout at Sherlock and then mayhem insues and arguments and such. I would imagine that she would find it entertaining. And then Eurus just tranquilizing them because at that rate things are not getting done. I was expecting that instead of them just standing there at least.

●WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN? 

●The bones: you guys, it was dark. Yup, that's all I can think of to back that up. But damn you, inconsistency.

●Sherlock still keeping his voice leveled and soft for the girl though dispite his heart hurting. Bravo, Ben👏

●Best friend = pet. I think that's the point for me to be upset by this? Also the water filling up the well, HOW?

●Supposedly this was the rug pull of the finale? I think a vast majority knew that it wasn't a dog but it still hurts though because of Ben's performance showing Sherlock's pain. But it wasn't surprising.

●The deep waters clip thing was an attempt for us to connect this moment to years of writing before that it was just hinted at on season 3 like it's Doctor Who. Ehhhhhhhhhh....

●Sherlock loved Victor, loved him so much and it fucking hurts where it hurts because Sherlock had filled that hole after so many years with John coming into his life. And then he got so much more from John which is what he needed after a loss that was so special to him. So much more was possible. *SCREAMS*

●Second time watching it I was looking for her equipment. But nothing, okie dokie then.

●I loved this moment. Caring is an advantage for one. But it was brought upon us too soon though. Eurus could've been more leading up to this moment. Not done with this yet. But bless Ben and Sian for their amazing performances.

●The rope: you guys, it was just misguided directing. They should've just thrown down metal chain clippers and a rope, or a rope and a person going down on it. One of many errors of this season as it is.

●GREG.😢❤

●"He's a great man sir." "He's better than that he's a good one." Thank you, Greg. Kinda sucks they made this moment all about Eurus though.

●THE ENDING SOUNDTRACK SOUNDED BEAUTIFUL. 

●"I know you two and I know what you can become."

●AND THEN THE NEXT MOMENT LATER "Listen to me. It doesn't matter who you are. It's all about the legend, the stories." Umm. No? Who they are MAKES the stories? How they had evolved and changed MAKES the legend. RIGHT? 

●NEVER LET THIS DIE. FOR THIS I AM STILL GRATFUL. SHERLOCK IS A PART OF JOHN'S LIFE NOW ON A WHOLE NEW LEVEL BECAUSE OF LITTLE ROISIE. This is what it is then.

●I'm forever thankful for them no matter what happened or will happen.

My jumbled up feelings and last thoughts of messy paragraphs of emotion are under the cut because no post can be this long already as it is. Imma sorry.✌

Final thoughts on everything: 

My first reaction to it was that it was clever, it was strange and it was tense. I didn’t cry surprisingly in my first viewing than in my second one but I was hella stressed and pulling on my hair with my heart beating miles a minute. But then...maybe it was a bit too much of everything and to a point it became an entirely different show. And they were trying to avoid that but...all throughout I was thinking “what am I watching?” and “what the fuck is going on?” every few minutes. Was that the desired effect? The episode was not terrible, it visually looked stunning as always to display the creepiness of it which they were going for (I don’t know why they were going for that) and the depth and it was emotional, it played with you and gave you anxiety and made your skin crawl for the middle part of it because of how the actors performed and my God were there were some performances here that were so awesome. 

Now, OOC performances on the other hand is another story which many are telling already and which I agree upon, that they just turned a 180 when season 4 started on some circumstances that I mentioned and seen throughout here. This final episode seemed out of character for the entire series even. It was different, it wasn’t awful, but it didn’t feel like Sherlock. It doesn’t feel separate it just feels metaphorically like you got an arm amputated and then have to get a new one that’s not your own but it’s still an arm and you need it but you’re unfamiliar with it and have endless hours of therapy to make it work for you. *SIGH* I’d like to argue that T6T still felt like Sherlock regardless of those reviews but TFP feels stuffed with ideas that it all clashes but at the same time it lacks the time to breathe. Were we supposed to breathe? The characters they are their own, they have the right to be flawed or damaged. But it’s about how anything gets resolved or the lack of it that puts me a off a little.

I’m not even talking about Johnlock I’m talking about Sherlock and John themselves. Their years of the relationship that they’ve built barely survived this season without somebody telling them to do this or do that and practically force them back together and thank god for Sherlock that no one needs to tell him to go over and comfort John at least for that hug. It’s unfortunate that it doesn’t translate to TFP that it was a poor decision for either John or Mycroft not do or even say anything to get the gun out of Sherlock’s chin and made it like Eurus had some humanity instead when she killed 5 people on the same day. Why were they that hasty to make us sympathize with her? But save that Victor=John part because that hits well. I’d to think John filled the hole from to Sherlock’s childhood when John came into his lonely picture and gave the man so much more.

I knew it wasn’t going to happen. Was I hopeful though, yes, but still forever in doubt. But what disappointed me is how they handled these boys like they were so worried about everyone else and let, Mary, Victor and Eurus revolve around Sherlock and John instead of it just being about them. They don’t want to give the “wrong impression” (Edit: I don't think so with the impressions thing. They don't mind us and just let us do what we do anyway) because of the “running joke” that they consider they were doing on the show for these past years. Implied sexuality isn’t a “running joke”. A running joke is when The Doctor mentions how cool his bowtie is, that’s a running joke. You just don’t do that and be oblivious to your own writing. I feel bad for those fans that people say they’re wrong, that there wasn’t any thing between the lines and even directly in the line itself to begin with. No one is wrong it’s just how you see it through the layers and this show has layers and layers and you just can’t look at something and just go “Sure. Ok.” unless there is nothing else to see. Because what’s the fun in that?

But that’s why we loved the show in the first place it’s because of these two men, give them a crime scene and watch them dance together through it and around it while learning more a little bit about themselves ad each other every time. I love Molly Hooper. And I want the best for her. That scene wasn’t the best for her. Was that the point? It was meant to be depressing and tense it was meant for them to break no matter how that means and for me both of them lost. Molly wasn’t sure if Sherlock meant it and Sherlock wasn’t sure himself but cares a lot for Molly and had no choice but to use it against her to save her own life or so he thought. I mean the first scene they considered was Molly should be inside the fucking coffin and solve a puzzle but still meant to lose, I presume, because that’s how the other two challenges went. But I’m proud of Molly though that she stood up for herself countless of times against Sherlock and did the same thing here. But why do I think she doesn’t deserve this is? Because again there is no resolve. And that interview, holy shit, no. NO. She shouldn’t be fine after that and probably got over it and shagged someone. That’s the most thick answer ever. Pretty upset by that. 

Their decision on what they did to Eurus. I was damn excited and floored when I knew she was three people. She was a better chameleon than Moriarty was. She was dangerous and sly. But then they reduced her so quickly as being helpless and more mentally unstable as I thought. The main antagonist is helpless and I thought there would be more to it. I’m not saying that Sherlock shouldn’t forgive her. I just wish they didn’t do it so soon. She could be compared to Moriarty and almost an be equal from how she was in TLD and how ruthless she was in TFP. How can they jump back on that when she was there enjoying a violin duet with her big bro?

But the thing is...I want more. I want to see what they will do, and how they will improve with their characters and with the relations they have towards each other. What stories they would tell. I’m still thankful for series 4 because we have something at least, it’s not perfect, not by a long shot but it’s a comforting thought to know that Baker Street is home, Rosie has two incredible dads (PARENT!LOCK IS CANON) in her life and that the boys consider themselves as a family and as home I should say as well. I’m hoping for a series 5. Hell, the conspiracy theories about a 4th episode are damn smart though very, very unlikely at this point that’s saying something that the audience wants improvement. I’m so grateful for this show and to the people involved as well though they are not perfect, but who is? I’m not giving up or letting go.