#kinda music related?

[musically-unstable-avocado]

I accidentally ordered 2 pairs of Raycon earbuds the other day. At least I'll have a backup pair???

[starry-bi-sky]

i think i'm hilarious -- aka i made blood blossom danny au memes

all of these come from my DpxDC prompt "i am pushing the batdad agenda--" and it's corresponding additions in the reblogs ksdjlf.

i am. rotating them in my head. forever and always. personally i think there should be more batdad aus in dpxdc, their dynamic could be neat. :)

[vivitalks]

Last night I saw the Great Gatsby musical. Before I went, I reread the Great Gatsby book (for the first time since 11th grade!) to get a refresher on the source material and the original story. Having the book so fresh in my mind made seeing the musical really interesting, and now I am going to do something I never thought I'd do, which is post some lengthy meta about The Great Gatsby. If you haven't seen the musical, this post may still be interesting to read, but it does contain some mild spoilers, so I leave that up to you. If you also haven't read the book, godspeed lol.

There's a lot I could talk about here when it comes to the way the book was adapted for the stage. But there's one particular thing I want to zero in on in this post, and that's the "unreliable narrator" of it all.

In the book, Nick Carraway is our narrator. He's an unreliable narrator practically by default - the idea is that he's retelling events that occurred two years prior, from memory. But even knowing that Nick is probably not reporting all events and characters with complete accuracy, it's hard to know which parts exactly are wrong, or what might have happened in reality, because even though he's an unreliable narrator, he's still the only narrator and this is the only version of events we know. We're forced to take Nick as our surrogate and take him at his word. Until the musical.

(I wondered how the show was going to deal with the fact that the story of Great Gatsby is not only told by an unreliable narrator but also by an outside perspective - generally speaking the events of the Great Gatsby aren't happening to Nick, they're just kind of happening around him. Yet he's the voice of the story, so in that way he's central to it, and I was curious how they were going to balance that fact with the fact that Gatsby is functionally the main character.

I think they struck a really good balance in the end. Nick's beginning and ending lines, lifted verbatim from his book narration, frame him clearly as the anchor of the story - I think that's the best word for it; the audience jumps from scene to scene, many but not all of which contain Nick, but we know that Nick is always going to be where the action is, or that he will at least know about it. He may not be the main character, but he's an essential character. But I digress a little bit.)

The difference between the way the story is imparted to the audience in the book versus in the musical boils down to this: in the book, Nick "plays" every character, so all their dialogue and actions, their mannerisms and the way they're described and reported, it's all informed by the beliefs Nick holds about them. Whether he means to or not, his biases paint certain characters in certain lights, and because he is our eyes and ears to the story, we have no choice but to absorb those biases.

But in the musical, every character is literally played by a different actor. Nick can only speak for himself. Nick can only tell his own parts as they happened. He may be "telling" the story, but we're watching the story. We have the benefit of an unblemished perspective on things - we can watch the events the way they actually unfold, regardless of how Nick believes or remembers they went down.

This difference - between Nick as the narrator and Nick as merely his own voice - is crucial in how the musical develops each character, some of them fairly different from how Nick described them in the book. And there's one book-to-stage change - a fairly small one, all things considered - that, to me, illustrated this difference perfectly.

There's a line towards the end of the Gatsby book. Something Nick says in narration, after his final conversation with Tom Buchanan, talking about how Tom gave away Gatsby's name and location to George Wilson (which ultimately led to Gatsby's death). Nick writes:

"I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…"

When I read this line in the book, I couldn't help vehemently agreeing. Screw those rich assholes! Money does corrupt! Tom and Daisy ARE careless wealthy people! It was easy to side with Nick, not only because he was the only perspective on the situation that I had, but also because he said this in internal response to a conversation with Tom, who, I think we can all agree, is a major jackass and a deeply unsympathetic character.

But in the musical, this line is spoken aloud by Nick. And he says it to Daisy, in her house, as she's packing up to skip town after Gatsby's death. In fact, he doesn't just say it; he shouts it, visibly and audibly outraged at her audacity to lead Gatsby on, ghost him, skip his funeral, and then move away to avoid the fallout. Nick is angry and highly critical of Daisy. But because we're no longer confined to his shoes, we also get to see Daisy's reaction - not as Nick remembers it, but as Daisy actually reacts. And because of that, we're able to really see, and confirm, that "Daisy is rich and careless" is not the full story.

I have to credit Eva Noblezada for a phenomenal performance (duh). Daisy in this scene is emotional, grieving, and it's clear she has been trying to contain these feelings for the sake of her husband and her own sanity. She's remorseful, not that Gatsby is gone necessarily, but that she allowed herself to entertain the fantasy of running away with him, only for it to be torn from her. She is trying to make the best of her unavoidable reality. And then Nick tears her a new one, calling her careless, accusing her of destroying things and being too rich to care.

And as I watched that scene, I was no longer wholly on Nick's side. I understood that this situation was so much more complex than Nick's chastisement acknowledged. Sure, Daisy wasn't innocent, but she also wasn't the callous rich girl Nick made her out to be. She did love Gatsby. And she also had a whole life with Tom. She had a daughter. She was a woman in the 1920s! That's a kind of life sentence even wealth can't erase.

The way Daisy responded may not quite have landed with Nick (if we consider the kind of fun possibility that the musical is the events as they happened and the book is Nick retelling those events as he remembers them two years later, then clearly Nick's disdain for Daisy's actions overtook whatever sympathy he felt for her), but the musical gave Daisy the opportunity to appeal to us. The audience. Having this omniscient perspective of things allowed us to draw our own conclusions, and I found myself a lot more sympathetic towards Daisy when I could both see and hear how she responded to Nick's verbal castigation.

In the book, Nick is the narrator. In the musical, Nick is a narrator. But he's no longer the sole arbiter of the story. The audience got to make our own judgements on the events as we witnessed them. Every one of us was a Nick - beholden to our own biases, maybe, but at least not beholden to his.

[sunanthrope]

Her: wow I really like that one particular patch on your vest

Me: do you want it

Her:

Me: rips it off my vest

Me: here

[oceanwithouthermoon]

my autistic ass watching anything: haha this is so saiki k

[ripplethepickle]

Hey so like. I’m not really big into shipping, at least with canon characters but like. Dude I fuckin love Discopop-

I could like go into the whole fucking rollercoaster of a relationship I’ve written for em in my head but the world isn’t ready for that so uh you just get a silli lil digital painting I did of them getting one of those cheesy kinds of family photos. You know, the kind where everyone’s in sweaters for some reason and they slap that photo on a Christmas card? Yea those ones. God… I love my middle-aged man yaoi…

[thewhizzyhead]

I don't have the proper words to like describe it aptly, but the song 'same train home', despite it coming right after a gruesome tragedy, is just so fuckin soft and warm and comforting and not just in the 🎶"Oh let them stare in judgment, let them witness this/ Swan leans into Mercy, pulls her deep into a kiss" 🎶 sense (though I will argue that section is one of the best written parts of Warriors). I mean it in the sense of the train being the only constant among the lives of new yorkers in the story and how both the warriors and us, the audience, enjoy brief respites in it. I dunno how to fuckin describe really I'm at a loss now, but I like the brief comfort everyone involved takes in it as both the audience and the characters near the end of the story. oh and it also does help that the song is like genuinely fuckin beautiful

[activatebutterflyshield]

I was compelled last night and I’m quite honestly scared of whatever 11:59 PM me intended for those middle sections. At least I still know my colors when sleep deprived, and I’m sure someone else on here can fill the blank spots out better than I can on a full eight hours of shut-eye.

[theallianceofcelestials]

Tinder Anon back, I had a few funny ideas for the hypothetical tinder arc for Kc-

The first one, he gets super obsessive over the family phone and doesn’t let anyone use it/touch it. Ie, hiding it somewhere in the kitchen or just somewhere high where the others can’t reach, or just keeping it on his person at all times (maybe in neck ruffles somehow? If he even has those, I don’t remember his design XD)

And second, one of the animatronics he messages on Cindr just… ghost him. And he gets confused and he’s just like Why? And of course his family notices because he’s just sad and confused that he’s being ignored online. Then he finally says that he got a dating app and Eclipse and Lunar are having complete opposite reactions (because Lunar is probs the only other one of them who knows what dating/dating apps are)- Lunar is dying laughing and Eclipse is just panicking because his father is trying to date someone.

Anyways I just thought I should share my silly goofy ideas

Hey Tinder Anon! Been a while!

Killcode would probably become obsessive over the family phone because he's being secretive. And he doesn't want any of his family members to accidentaly see a text from his 'beau'. He'd be mortified and forever humiliated if any of his brothers found out he was trying dating. Especially after what happened with the last time he dated, back before the prison, where he ended up in tears pathetically crying face-down in the grass.

(Here's a little part from the first chapter that describes him: His casing split in an incriminatingly familiar fashion, between a stark white and a black so deep, it shone blue. Dark buttons sitting under a deep red ruffle, nightcap a bruising dark blue trailing behind him, dirtying the cute fat little sickly yellow stars, fur trimming illuminated by deep red optics, thorn pants, the same colour as the facsimile of a sleeping accessory sporting suspicious stains.

Just your basic KC design with the slightest tweaks. Lunar's design is the most unique out of the entire family, cuz Eclipse uses the body that he did when he had the star and in which he died, Bloodmoon is first iteration, everyone else is the same and Lunar is a mix of all his designs actually, even the thumbnail one)

If someone ever ghosted him he'd lose it. He'd start rage cooking+baking, beating the dough to whatever he's making with such fierceness he scares at least Eclipse, who hasn't ever seen that before. He'd come to the prideful conclusion that the person who ghosted him is an idiot, because first of all, he was honest about his looks, second of all, he didn't lie about his family situation so he put it in his profile he has kids, and third, he's a catch thank you very much!

If they found out, Lunar would alternate between laughing his ass off, being grossed out, or just staring blankly ahead, because a potentional partner of his dad is a threat.

And yeah, Eclipse would just keel over from stress and anxiety by that point, and he'd cry to Bright about it. Who'd maybe try pretending to be understanding.

[musically-unstable-avocado]

Replying with my Music related ALT

Big Fun - Heathers the Musical

Your Stupid Face - Kaden MacKay

Boys Will Be Bugs - Cavetown

Oh No! - MARINA

The Bidding - Tally Hall

There's so many other songs I like, it was really hard to choose !

Tagging (not forced to respond): @mayormargaret @y2kconcerto @draco-the-chaos-dragon @massivemilkbags @cardboard-tophat

🎶✨when you get this, list 5 songs you like to listen to, publish. then, send this ask to 5 of your favorite followers 🎶

Alright game on

A little heart - The Stupendium

They don't really care about us - Micheal Jackson

Idol - YOASOBI

Turn it down - OR3O

Tagging: @when-is-tuesday @mentally-unstable-avocado @xionandpluto14 @endless---possibility @daylit--l0ve

[protect-namine]

see I think cs lewis would be on board with rock n roll-ified narnia... whatever that means. like, this is the guy who said to his readers to make fanfictions about what happened to susan after the series. he wrote jesus and santa and dionysus co-existing in the same setting. there's a lamppost purely to annoy tolkien.

and I mean, I think greta gerwig can make a good narnia movie, but like... saying "it's all about rock n roll" doesn't come across as genuine but instead comes across like saying, "narnia is brat." like what are you saying. what does that mean. give me something to put my confidence in here

[radlegowaffle]

i just really like drawing characters laying in water

[hellishgayliath]

Mrnnnn brain is cooking, don't take any of this too seriously, I'm just putting characters into the roles I'd think fit them best so not everyone is gonna have a match

Rottmnt and epic the musical crossover

Draxum as poseidon and his golem in the first ep as Polyphemus with Leo as Odysseus cuz he's coy and clever but also so dumb and would let his hubris be his downfall

Mikey would be Polites and Donnie or Raph as maybe Eurylochus

Big Mama as Circe (without thinking too hard on the relationships these people have with each other just take it as face value, i don't wanna envision her flirting with leo cuz ew gross, but just taking on the puppeteer and backstabby aspect cuz i believe she was trying to stab him during that song)

Karai maybe taking on the role of Athena, but also kinda fitting for Junior being Telemachus

Aaaaand I think my baby Clem would be a good Aeolus

[ayara-resara]

.

[raamitsu]

ONE is like the other guy that I know...

[gay-mike-wheeler]

reminder that will byers has a little shop of horrors* poster on his wall. theatre kid will byers is canon. ty for listening.

*not to be confused with the 1960 non-musical film, the little shop of horrors. this poster is literally for the 1982 musical. there’s no disputing it.