#like for example I didn’t see ANYBODY on any other side of the internet talking about why the Taylor swift/Matty Healy situation was bad

[davidtennantgenderenvy]

I think a lot of the smarter and less bullheaded people on the “anti-woke” side of the internet (patience xina for instance, I disagree with her on plenty of stuff but I think her points are generally well thought out and not just hateful Dailywire parroting) would do better if they occasionally looked at tumblr for stuff on social issues bc imperfect though it may be people’s takes on here are generally WAYYY more nuanced and convincing than stuff on Twitter, which is what usually gets looked at. It’s very easy to turn leftists into strawmen when all you see is screaming and swearing and always, ALWAYS buzzwords, but idk people on tumblr tend to actually put thought into discussing systemic inequality and stuff and it’s helped me hugely with broadening my sense of awareness (as someone who very regrettably used to watch a lot of anti-woke content). Not that you should get all your news from tumblr but

[mimieowza]

Manipulative Ways Used in Media

Modern-day media, as delightful as it can be is also known to be awfully manipulative at times. Companies, celebrities, and most other forms of influencers use their power to manipulate and twist the views of their likely young, impressionable audience to their liking. This causes very toxic people to emerge after spending far too long online, while it isn’t entirely possible to prevent influencers from doing their job, being influencing, it is possible to at the very least warn people to be warier of what they see and do their own research to form their own individual opinions rather than follow those of their favourite influencer. Currently, some examples of this would be Logan Paul and KSI’s “Prime” energy drink. As both are very well-known influencers, they have used this as well as trailers, they built up hype for their product teasing it, praising it, and they went as far as to make a short documentary-style film of some drama that happened during the process of creating and releasing the product which in turn got many other influencers to talk about it, indirectly promoting their product to cause it to be hyped up further. Come the time of the release, there was news everywhere of people physically fighting over it, buying massive stocks to profit from it themselves as there was nowhere else to get it. This, of course, created more drama which repeated the process of giving other influencers content to talk about on their channels, again promoting it and causing this cycle to repeat. It primarily happened in Britain and America at first, however, it most recently occurred in Australia as it was newly released there. This is a “prime” example of how Influencers can manipulate media into buying products, however, it should also be noted it’s not entirely uncommon for them to manipulate information as well. A recent example of how easy it is to manipulate information on the internet would be the recent “Kwite” allegations. A user by the name of “Orion” came out making terrible accusations about Kwite in order to harm his reputation, of course, all of the accusations were proven to be false however the situation overall provides a perfect example of how easily information can be either manipulated or how easily misinformation can be spread online. I won’t disclose the exact allegations as they are a very sensitive topic and I wouldn’t want to trigger anybody. However, when Orion came out with the initial allegations, more or less framing Kwite as somebody who most definitely should be behind bars, the internet was awfully quick to fully believe their side of the story without any evidence at all. Orion used the internet's naive nature, a connection to Kwite, an influencer and a false story to gain attention and attempt to take him down likely knowing very well people would be quick to take their side given the horrific nature of the allegations. The majority of people didn’t even bother to wait to hear the other side of the story, blindly following one side which again provided very, very little proof. It caused many to be hurt and irreversible damage to the reputation of Kwite, who made an hour-long video disproving every single one of Orions' allegations, providing detail and genuine evidence of his side of the story. It’s disappointing how quickly everyone switched sides. Orion tried to back up their own allegations after Kwite's video came out, however, their “evidence” was so obviously fabricated they only worsened their case, in this case for the better. Either way, that whole situation is unfortunately a very good example of how easily information can be manipulated, taken out of context or completely fabricated in order to cause harm or personal gain.

[kittymsmithwritesstuff]

if you're still doing headcanons can i get some for bloodhound??

Absolutely, sorry this is late!

*Side note that I have a LOT of simultaneous headcanons for them (so I hc that they're really into gossip but also headcanon that they're completely out of the loop/don't care, for example). Just felt this might be relevant.

-Horrible sweet tooth. I mean awful. I mean detrimental. I mean catastrophic.

-As a consequence they had a very nasty visit with a dentist in their early years and now follow a very strict brushing and flossing regimen (it's not that they didn't before it just wasn't needed as strictly with their diet).

-Also they are kind of terrified of the dentist

-Also not a fan of doctors, but is a bigger not-fan of dealing with the physical consequences of whatever dumb death-wish viking shit they did earlier.

-Also historically Vikings were huge partiers and something like that doesn't get weened out easy. They grew up brewing mead in the village and will occasionally bring a barrel to a legend gathering, much to everyone's delight.

-Loba, Fuse, Bangalore and Horizon are the only ones to have seen them actually drunk, though. And when they get drunk they fucking go for it. Every one of them has had Bloodhound crash on their floor after a night out.

-Has an alter at home but also a portable one for long hunting trips. They pray, make a small offering, and light an incense of some kind every morning like clockwork. It helps them feel grounded.

-Talks to Artur the Bird a lot. They are fully confident he understands every word and annoys them on purpose.

-Nosey gossip whore. They and Loba exchange their gossip hauls over dinner.

-Does Loba's facepaint for the games sometimes.

-Really good artist, whittling and/or drawing. Also a lovely poet but that's canon tbh lmao.

-Really confident in their physical abilities and appearance outside of their face.

-Loba got them a hefty makeup kit so they could cover up said scars and taught them how to use it. A lot of people might have taken offense, but they were so happy they cried (and made her swear up and down on her life she wouldn't ever, ever, ever tell anybody that they did).

-Called Caustic a cunt one time because they knew even Wattson wouldn't believe it if he told her.

-Has in fact fucked with people in various ways, like taking one of Mirage's French fries while maintaining "eye" (goggle?) contact, stuck a jumbo "Good Job!" star sticker to Octane's cap when they were alone, and asking Crypto what the internet was just to see his eye twitch. They thought no one would ever believe any of it, except they've done it so much everyone caught on and now they all just think they're kinda weird.

-Loba knows they're fucking weird.

-Forgot the word cat once, remembered "pussy" also meant cat without remembering the. Other meaning. Told a woman she had a cute pussy and has not visited that town since.

[lexacoolfox]

(I was about to ask you if you can do Nagito with an S/O who’s like Leviathan from obey me but since you don’t know the game, I will just describe his personality for you.)

So basically S/O is an otaku who usually spends most of their time on the internet and doesn’t usually talk to people unless if they really have to. They usually rant about whatever anime or game they’re interested in to their closest friends and they tend to use internet slang even if they’re speaking to someone (ex: “Someone go grab the popcorn lolol”) Despite them revolving their reputation around being an otaku, they don’t think very highly of themselves and is very insecure. Since Leviathan represents Envy in the game, S/O is also easily jealous and often talks about how “unfair” or “lucky” others are. They also like to invite their closest friends to events in video games. They are also a mix of shy and energetic since they have a lack of social skills but they also gets angry when they get jealous or ecstatic when they see something rlly cool happening.

I feel like that sums it all up, I hope the request isn’t too hard.

Thank you for describing the personality in such good detail! I can definitely work with this!

Nagito with a S/O like Leviathan.

You were known as the ultimate otaku! You spent most of your time on the internet. Had very pricey anime merch and manga. Your room look liked an anime paradise. You also played video games.

When you got accepted into hopes peak you weren’t the most excited. You were homeschooled mostly, you hated going out in public and being ‘social’. You were pretty awkward in public.

You knew you didn’t have to go to the school. It wasn’t necessary to attend. But your parents practically forced you to go. They threatened to take away your privilege to buy anime merch and manga for 4 months if you didn’t go. You couldn’t live that long without being able to buy the things you like. So you reluctantly went to hopes peak.

You arrived the first day and you felt extreme social anxiety. You sat in a chair and noticed a girl with a game in her hand. You saw she was playing (insert random game.) you actually really like that game.

“You play (game name)?”

“Yes. I do, I like the story and design of this game.”

“I must agree the story and design are pretty great. I personally like to play games with a story like Kingdom of hearts it’s one of my personal favorites, the first one was good and I like the second one. I can’t wait for the third.”

“I really like that game too. It’s such a fun story and the mystery behind it is so much fun. What’s your name? I’m chiaki nanami the ultimate gamer.”

“Oh I’m f/n l/n the ultimate otaku.”

“So you like anime and manga I’m guessing.”

“Yeah I do. I also don’t do to well with social interactions, unless I’m online. I honestly didn’t want to come but my parents would cutoff my ability to buy merch and manga. So I really didn’t have a choice.”

“You don’t seem to be too bad at interactions. I mean your talking to me just fine.”

“Well that’s because we’re talking about something I’m really into. Normally I have nothing to say that isn’t consider to most people as nerdy or geeky. Sorry for uh wasting your time, I going back to my desk.”

You sat back in your desk and pulled out your phone talking to your internet friends. When somebody walked next to you. You noticed but that’s all.

“Hello.”

You looked to see a boy with very white hair and a smile on his face.

“Uh hello…”

“I’m Nagito Komeada the ultimate lucky student! If I may can I know your name and ultimate?”

“Um I’m f/n l/n the ultimate otaku…”

“Oh wow! That’s mean you probably have a lot of anime merch and manga right?”

“Yes I do…Um…not to be rude…but is there something you need?”

“Oh no. I just wanted to know introduce myself even though you will probably forget trash like me.”

“Hehehehe well there’s something we have in common. I doubt you’ll remember a loser like me lol, Ugh it’s so unfair, I can’t believe I’m an ultimate for something so lame. There so many people with such better Ultimates.”

“What! If anybodies ultimate is lame it’s mine!”

“Yeah…totally… being super lucky is so much worse than a loser who just watches ‘cartoons’ and collects figures that super expensive all day.”

Before he can respond you pull out your headphones put them on and started listening to your favorite anime openings. You just wanted to go back home and play video games.

Throughout the day you overhead everyone’s amazing Ultimates, you couldn’t help but think you didn’t belong there. These people had all these amazing skills and what are you an otaku. After a while you walked out of the class and went to a hallway and looked out a window.

“Hey.”

You looked over to see Nagito.

“Oh hey.”

“What aren’t you in class with everyone else?”

“Cause I don’t belong in that class.”

“But your an ultimate!”

“So what. My ultimate is so boring compared to the others. I just want to go home and play video games.”

“What kind of games do you play?”

“Oh I play games with a story and good graphics. But I also like games that don’t have a plot like, Minecraft. It extends my creativity. I’ll also watch a random anime while playing. Normally if I’m playing the anime I put on is death note. It’s one my favorites no cap.”

“No cap?”

“Sorry I tend to use internet slang even in real life conversation.”

For the next hour or two, you mentioned the type of games you play, anime you watch, and some merch/figures you have. Nagito was mentioning a game you played very often, you told him that a event of the game was coming up. You invited him to join you and he agreed.

When joined in one the event, you sounded so much more happy and very enthusiastic. He got to see a new side of you, the both you had a quite a bit of fun. He even learned a bunch of new internet slang. (Even thought he probably not going to use it.)

You guys were now really good friends. You two just got along very well. You two would play video games, watch anime, read manga together.

When you two played games with each other online. Sometimes he glad he can’t see your face. Cause you get jealous and angry when somebody beats you. In public if your jealous which makes you mad. You silent rant on the inside of your head. But online, it’s like a explosion of yells. Nagito tries his best to calm you down when you get like that, he’s learned not to say ‘it’s just a game.’ Cause that just makes it worse.

You kinda developed on a crush overtime. You realized you liked him when he gifted you a manga, that you couldn’t get cause you got in trouble with your parents.

You didn’t know how to tell him. There was no way you could do it in person.

You thought how something cute and something he might like. He really enjoyed the game Minecraft. So on Valentine’s Day you texted him to join you in a game. You spent about maybe a week making the little Valentine’s Day confession.

“I know it’s not the most romantic thing in the world. I was also to scared to tell you in person…I really like you Nagito.”

“Aww s/o…this is so thoughtful of you. I really love it! It so you! I would be delighted to be your valentine.”

“Really! Wow! I’m just so…!! How about we meet up at our favorite cafe?!”

“Yeah that’s sounds great!”

You two went on Valentine’s date. It was great. You guys went on more dates after that, and soon became each other’s significant other.

A few relationship headcanons

He is the only one allowed to touch any of your expensive manga’s or merchandise.

You get so easily jealous of other people when they flirt with Nagito.

You and Nagito have anime marathons. Like a movie night but anime.

He loves to see your excited face when new merch for you favorite animes or a new/sequel to one your games comes out.

You and Nagito get matching anime outfits

Nagito also helps with your insecurities by showering you with compliments while also degrading himself. For example while you were saying how uninteresting you were. You told he could probably do better. he responded with ‘don’t say that, it’s amazes me that someone as worthless as me. Is given the privilege of calling someone as amazing as you my significant other!’

You also give him compliments and shower him with affection. You also do anime classics like a kabedon.

When you did do a kabedon he almost passed out by how flustered he got.

I really hope I got the character right! So komeada-simp37 if I got it wrong or wasn’t really what you were looking! Sorry! Anyway hope you have a nice day!

[sawadavampaneze]

Really don't want to come back posting with something like this (I'm waiting for Yuumori anime disc to come home so I could post the new art in there but this current issue is taking too far for my liking). Just want to make this clear with no hate feeling for anyone or any couple.

If anyone curious about why ppl hating TFP arc (I will only talk about this arc), it's mostly because:

1. The final plan of William if he thinks some fires can change anything (ppl's mind or a whole country): Look at the whole scene with a psychological view, or just let's yourself be a noble in this series. Even in the modern world, wealthy ppl can help others when in need but they won't give up their privileges that easily. Just take your time and think about it. And I will have to make a long post if I want to talk about other aspects such as economical or political views etc. Put away your emotions with the character and you will see it. I love William (he is still the love of my life) so it's really hard for me to admit that he's not a genius as he is described through the whole series and that his final plan is stupid (if you don't believe me, my older post has a pic of William's merch's shrine. I own almost every William merch so far and I also am waiting for the perfume and a 14000 ¥ ring. And not to mention Sherlock's merch because I like both of them. I don't like bragging about my collection but thats just to show how I devoted to both William and this series and still, I also find it has so many flaws).

2. Fanservice: Don't look at it with a bias shipping view and you will see why many ppl feel really cringe about that arc. I have talked with both SherLiam and non-shipping fans (most of them don't even ship Sherlock with Irene or John) and even some SherLiam fans had admitted the fanservice in it is a little bit too much (And fyi, I don't even know them at all, those are just briefly counterparts on the internet). If you only interact with other fans who share the same mind, you won't understand why because you're just in a shipdom, not the whole fandom. I'm really neutral with every couple and also is a long-time fan of this manga so I have spent a lot of time with both parties to understand each pov. And admitting something you like has flaws is hard but we're human after all and we can both love and criticize something at the same time. That's the beautiful of having a passion for something 🤗

3. The writing of this manga is weak, really weak: If it's not, then both anime and musical staffs didn't have to do the research again to change the details/plotholes or added more inner thoughts for characters in Op.3 to be more convincing if they want to make Op.4. I know many manga readers hate anime becase it cut too many scene (This series is flop so obviously the budget is limited) but if you look on other side, you will see that the staffs had to change many details so anime watchers couldn't find those flaws. It's not perfect, I admit, but I still appreciate their efforts. And I have followed this manga for years, remembered every detail/every line in it and took time to analyze plot holes so I know what I said. I also own both stage and musical disc so you can't say I take this manga lightly. This series has been a part of my heart and soul for years.

=> Everyone has different opinions and there are many ppl out there who agree with what I just said above. I know that because I have seen many posts in my country's M-A community with this topic. One has about 1500 comments and more than 700 shares. Most of them wish they could enjoy the manga but it was hard for them because TFP arc (or the whole manga) can only be excellent and enjoyable if they like the shipping. And all of those opinions are just in one of many similar posts. This is just an example but I just want to say that You might don't see it but those ppl with different pov exist. They don't talk much because they know others in the fandom might attack/criticize them for their beliefs. Judging others for some opinions they think no one agree with is extremely wrong, especially if you only see it from one pov.

Just don't let the emotional feeling you get from the manga clouding your judgment with other ppl opinions.

I know you don't think what I said is true but seriously, I've invested in this manga and the fandom for too long so I just said what I have witnessed. I was there when there was almost no content for this series and how I used to wish this manga could get more regconized. I even remember the name of every account that joined the fandom in the early days when anime first broadcasted because I was too happy for this series. At some points, I even talked with anti-fans but they usually hate it so much that they don't want to mention about it which is also why you see rarely anybody criticze this series. Still, I respect every opinion because it make me look at this manga with more diversified view!

And I'm quite salty about the fact that this manga has lose so many fans because of those issues above. I really wish things could be different and hope the plot would be better than this. Maybe It's just my fault for setting the bar too high haha

[butterflyinthewell]

To trans folks who are trying to set trolls straight about Chris-Chan’s gender: Your hearts are in the right place, but the trolls do not care. They will keep misgendering Chris to piss you off and screenshot your reaction.

Yes, I’m talking about THE Chris-Chan. CWC, creator of Sonichu.

(TW: this post will mention rape and incest.)

I know, I know… “But if we let people misgender Chris, what’s stopping them from doing it to other trans people?”

Nothing.

There’s nothing you can do, unfortunately. The thing with trolls is they aren’t here to learn, they’re here to frustrate, annoy and anger you. They throw out all kinds of little hooks by saying offensive things, or things that trick you, and it’s all a game to them when somebody bites the bait.

It wouldn’t surprise me if trolls are saying horrible things about autism, too. That’s more my lane and partly why I don’t dig too deep in the tags about this situation. Again, I stress not engaging with that to correct trolls. They don’t care, they want to offend you.

As frustrating as it is, take note of the people who use Chris’ current pronouns and recognize that there are people who make an effort to get them right. I’m sure the trans people reading what you say will see that and know you care to gender them correctly.

It’s possible Chris transitioned believing she can get with lesbians. It’s entirely possible she’s exactly the stereotype that TERFs rant about and her shitty behavior might be used in the future to argue their views. TERFs will be TERFs. Some of Chris’ trolls may be trans themselves.

As it stands, Chris presents as a woman, so I’ll use she/her pronouns unless she decides to present as non-binary or a man again. You’re welcome to do the same when talking about her. Don’t waste your time trying to correct trolls, just use Chris’ current pronouns and leave it at that.

It sucks, but that’s how trolls troll.

Moving on…

I wonder if Chris would’ve been a weird, harmless nobody if Mimms never took her photo in The Game Place.

This all started because her photo was taken without her knowledge or consent and posted on a forum, which ended up spreading to the wider web and…yeah.

Would she have been an internet sensation? Would she have transitioned? Would she be a known name on the web?

Maybe everything would’ve gone down the same, but without an audience to bear witness.

Regardless, Chris is a trainwreck of a person. I don’t say that lightly. She didn’t deserve the trolling and abuse she got, yet she isn’t innocent in this either.

I felt sorry for her at first because I’m autistic too and was bullied severely in high school, some of it included physical assault and attempted murder. I reacted to the constant name calling and mockery irl a lot like Chris reacted to her online trolls. I’m thankful that my most volatile years happened before I had internet access. I’m two years older than Chris. I had my own drama with trolls that lasted a few years, but I grew up a bit more.

But I digress…

Chris didn’t get the internet safety talk that I got before getting let loose online, and people took advantage of her gullibility, her autism, whatever mental illnesses she might have and her obsession with getting laid. She ignored warnings to the contrary and in some instances her mom enabled her while her dad tried (and failed) to reign her in.

At the same time, Chris has a history of being racist, ableist, homophobic and misogynistic. She ignores people’s boundaries even when they were clearly stated. She’s entitled and thinks everything bad is a conspiracy against her. She acts like the world operates on cartoon rules and can’t handle it when situations don’t turn out in her favor like she believes they should. It’s a strange view of “Anything I do is good because I did it, and anybody who tells me it’s bad or treats me badly is evil or a troll.”

How she comes across to others and how she thinks she comes across are incongruent with each other, and she refuses to take any correction. An example is the claw hand she used to do while railing at trolls. It’s clear she’s imitating stuff she saw in cartoons, but doesn’t grasp that it looks silly in real life. It leaves me wondering if she ever watched her videos back to see how she really looks before uploading them.

Chris did a lot of disgusting things of her own volition, like not leaving people alone, uploading that sexual drawing featuring Megan, using pepper spray without provocation and trying to hit someone with her car.

Trolls tricked her into humiliating herself and shared the results, like hacking into her email, sharing chats where she gave out embarrassing details about herself, prank calling her house and posting the infamous blowup doll video.

If you know “Christory”, you know what I’m talking about.

If you don’t know, it’s something that’s gone on longer than some people have been alive.

No side is innocent here. I don’t blame Chris for attracting trolls, they chose to go and harass her because she jumped when they poked her.

I’ve followed Chris’ story off and on since 2008, back when she was making her Sonichu comics and being awkward. I never participated in trolling her. I’ve only ever seen the aftermath of troll operations, but the things she endured were cruel. (The Miyamoto saga and the BlueSpike saga come to mind.) I looked her up to see if she was alive and okay. I sent her my AFBV message a couple years ago, but never got a response.

I wonder if this could’ve been avoided if Chris never got trolled and was supervised better while online. That’s where her parents failed her. I felt bad for her; she didn’t know how to conduct herself and kept falling for trolling schemes because she was so desperate to get a girlfriend. It’s like she ignored that little gut warning that says “hey, this feels like a trick” and it was like watching someone fall down the same hillside over and over.

But after what she did to her mom, I lost any sympathy I had for her. Yes, trolls have traumatized her and messed with her head for over a decade and that’s gross, but what she did to her mom was unconscionable. It’s indefensible. It’s morally abhorrent.

She had sex with (or possibly raped via coercion) her elderly mom, who may have dementia.

Chris’ autism was taken advantage of for years, and now she might’ve taken advantage of her mom’s dementia to harm her for the past month.

Think about that. There is no defending that. She finally did something she can’t just wave away or pay her way out of.

Trolls didn’t put Chris up to that, she did it all by herself.

Now she’s under arrest.

Time and again Chris has had run-ins with the law and got away with slaps on the wrist, but I don’t think she’s going to walk away from this so easily.

I hope this situation finally gets Chris the help she desperately needs. I don’t know if her dimensional merge stuff is a delusion from undiagnosed and untreated mental illness or if it’s a paracosm she’s chosen to live in and act out because she can’t handle how cruel the real world is. Please note that I don’t say mental illness lightly either, because I’m aware of the stigma.

At this point I think she needs a caregiver who will supervise her online activities and help her manage her finances. (She will likely resist this…)

Chris’ autism and whatever else she has going on appears to make it very difficult for her to see things from any perspective besides her own. I’m autistic too, so I understand this— sometimes I get this way and have to walk myself back to see other perspectives, or I ask people to give me their side of it to help me understand how they see it even if I don’t agree with their view.

Chris needed more guidance and reality checks growing up, but didn’t get them, and now she needs both more than ever as she faces the results of her behavior. If she is delusional, she needs help to navigate it and I hope she can do that away from trolls. She needs to face consequences for (possibly) raping someone.

I wonder what the legal system will do with her, and I hate that her life has come to this. It was so avoidable. 😞

Sorry, Chris…I hope you’ll get help now, and I hope Barb is okay.

[scary-senpai]

Hello! I once read your post about Bang's red flags and it was very eye-opening to me 'cause I liked his char and chose to ignore all his behaviors 😩😩 Thank you very much!🤝🌷🌷

Oh, thank you so much for writing, lovely Internet Stranger! I’m assuming you’re talking about the one from my main blog, “Bang is made almost entirely of out red flags" ^_^ You probably are, because that's literally the title... But I know I've posted about him on here, too.

I think the "red flags" essay was the first fandom essay I ever wrote? I think I hammered it out at some wee hour of the morning and went to bed fully expecting OPM-Tumblr to come for my kneecaps during the night. I was pleasantly surprised to see that most people seemed to enjoy/appreciate it.

So, I’m glad you enjoyed my essay, but I didn’t intend to guilt you or make you feel wrong for liking a particular character. I do my best to keep my language at least somewhat neutral and not to be too harsh about anything, but I’m certainly not out to yuck anybody else’s yum. Also, when it comes to the “constantly beating your disciples thing”… I sometimes wonder if I’m being too harsh considering the piece of media. By and large, the audience is here to open up a beautifully inked can of whup-ass, not to watch an estranged disciple hug it out with his former mentor (although there’s certainly a highly invested/very vocal subset that is dying to see that).

I think it’s definitely okay to like a character even if they aren’t exactly a role model (or even if they’re the opposite of a role model)—I feel like that’s sometimes the point, actually. We can dissect behavior in fiction to an extent that we can’t in real life, so it’s a low-stakes place to talk about human behavior and gain insights applicable IRL. I appreciated Bang’s character more after I put all the pieces together. I mean, which is a more interesting story? Bang is the perfect mentor, and Garou goes down a dark path anyway? Or Bang does his best to help Garou but makes some notable missteps, and perhaps comes painfully close to getting it right, only to fall victim to a longstanding character flaw—I don’t know, maybe losing his temper at a time when Garou most needed compassion and patience? The second example is more interesting, I think—it gives us something to talk about.

I try to own up to my own bias, because I do find myself projecting a lot of my own emotions on Bang and Garou’s relationship. Around the time I started watching OPM, I had transitioned out of my long-time job in a rather toxic environment. It was my first real job out of school, and I worked for 7 years under someone who was very brilliant and had overcome some of the same obstacles that I did, but unfortunately he was also quite angry and downright manipulative at points. I stayed for a long time because I didn’t know any better, and I’m still kind of untangling that, honestly. He taught me a lot about systems, operations, and human behavior, and all of the skills I learned are fine as long as you use them in a neutral way--my boss was just super mean about everything. (He had mostly worked in high-stress finance jobs although we were in healthcare/human services, and I assume he was just carrying out the cycle of abuse when he told me things like: "if you worked for me at JP Morgan, you could get fired for making a mistake like this." ...And my mistake was double-sided copies instead of single-sided ones. Like, I am a salaried employee working 60+ hours per week, and I am still barely making rent, my guy. For JP Morgan money I will gladly eat your files instead of shredding them.) In any case, I feel a little conflicted when I pull these lessons out, even if I’m using them differently… like, "ugh, ex-Boss, why did you have to be so mean and so brilliant and so right all time..." It almost seems a bit like the scene where Garou pulls out Fist of Flowing Water Crushing Rock on the Tank-Toppers because he has no other choice. So actually, instead of thinking back to my ex-mentor I try to think of that scene instead ^_^ it saves me dredging up something unpleasant.

[ordinaryschmuck]

What I Thought About "What If...T'Challa Became a Star-Lord?" from Marvel Studios' What If...

Salutations, random people on the internet who already scrolled past this! I am an Ordinary Schmuck. I write stories and reviews and draw comics and cartoons!

You know, a lot of people lost so much when Chadwick Boseman died. His family has lost a husband and a father, his fans lost an inspiration, and to fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we lost both a hero and a king. His performance as T'Challa/Black Panther is by far the best the character has ever had, nailing the essence of the character while delivering so much more. So with the second episode of Marvel Studios' What If... one has to ask: Was Chadwick Boseman's final performance his best, or did the series failed to honor his legacy? Only spoilers can answer that question, so be wary as we analyze the second entry into Marvel's most ambitious series.

Now, let's review, shall we?

WHAT I LIKED

T’Challa himself: I enjoy that because his story has changed, so did T'Challa's personality. There's this sly cockiness that we've never seen from the character before, showing how much influence Yondu and his Ravagers had on him. And it's actually pretty fun seeing a character who was so calm and collected now act so...not that. With that said, just T'Challa is now Star-Lord, that doesn't mean he's a copy of Peter Quill.

The major differences lie in the impact that T'Challa left on the galaxy. Instead of stealing for himself, he chose to steal for planets in need as his own version of Robin Hood. And that, in turn, is a way more intriguing and compelling character to me than Peter Quill ever could be. There's just something about the nobleness of choosing to be a heroic outlaw instead of being strictly an outlaw. It proves that despite having his history altered drastically, there is no erasing that perfect and intelligent King that we all know and dearly miss. It sucks that we'll probably never see him again, but at least the last time we did it was to leave one epic impression for the fans.

Korath is T’Challa’s #1 Fan: Not what I would have expected, primarily since the character never acted so goofy, but I appreciate this change nonetheless. Because it's oddly wholesome seeing how much Korath admires T'Challa, to the point where he honestly believes that they're best friends. Also, it's funny. Like, really funny. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this version of Korath is the funniest character in this episode. He's just too good.

It’s All Funny: Hey, we're on the Guardians of the Galaxy side of the universe. I'd personally be offended if it didn't have a sense of humor.

Yondu: Yondu seems to be the only one who hasn't changed that much through T'Challa's presence. Sure, he went straight because of it, but personality-wise, he's still the same. He still gives off the energy as this king of the idiots when dealing with his Ravagers, and you how he's this thief with a heart of gold. It's just that only T'Challa brought it out more than Peter did. Other than that, I personally don't mind that not much has changed. Yondu was already a fun character, to begin with, so I'm more than alright seeing him unaltered if it means we get to witness more of him.

The Galaxy is Better Because of T’Challa’s Influence: No, really, it is. Drax still has his family, Thanos renounced his genocidal ways, and Nebula not only remained in one piece but even has hair...somehow. It's impressive to see just how better everything turned out, and, in a way, it's also kind of funny when you think about it. Like, I wouldn't go so far as to say that the universe was in shambles because of Peter's existence...but it wasn't really better either, and I can't help my chuckles when witnessing how better off things were because he stayed on Earth.

Thanos: Not much to say here. It's fun seeing how chilled out Thanos is when he's not hellbent on wiping out half the universe. And I definitely chuckled a couple times when people called him out on his genocidal bulls**t. It's pretty enjoyable and made me glad we got to see his very surprising return.

Nebula: But this shocked me more. Korath becoming a T'Challa stan? Sure. Thanos acting as a respectful ally? Whatever. But Nebula becoming T'Challa's sexy thieve-in-arms girlfriend?! I don't think anybody in their right mind would have predicted that!

But putting aside the shock, this version of Nebula was surprisingly entertaining. It's nice seeing what she would've acted like without the tragedy as she acts like she's free as a bird but still a little devious. Although, despite having a much better life, that doesn't mean there isn't animosity between her and Thanos. He may not have torn Nebula apart as much as he did in the universe we know, but take notice of how she still has cybernetics in her left eye. That shows that T'Challa didn't get to fix everything, and I appreciate that the writers hadn't glossed over how much of a bad father the Mad Titan is, just because he's all sunshine and rainbows now. It allows a chance for Thanos to prove he really did change and gives Nebula an arc to forgive him. And while the pacing for that could have been better, it's still somewhat believable for me to get behind it. Thus surprising me even more with how not only did Nebula make a phenomenal appearance, but one that left quite the impact on the story.

The Collector: It's not just better heroes that T'Challa created. The Collector, for example, somehow became a genuine threat in this timeline instead of that pathetic dweeb in Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Infinity War. This again amazes me with how T'Challa miraculously created a buff-supervillain in his universe, where Peter did jack all. Maybe the galaxy really would have been better off without him...

Howard the Duck: This is the best way to utilize Howard the Duck if you ask me. He's a character that doesn't really scream "leading character" to me (unless given the correct type of writers), so it's better to let him stick to brief cameos and occasional supporting roles. It allows a goofy type of character to shine without causing audiences to roll their eyes over the idea of a talking duck saving the day.

Wakanda Theme Playing when T’Challa Found the Ship: It's just a cool callback. That's all.

Yondu Lying About Wakanda’s Destruction: A pretty solid reveal that shows how even though Yondu loves the kids he steals, he doesn't have the best intentions. What more can I add?

The Collector’s Wall of Weapons: The callbacks are nice, but I like implications from seeing Captain America's shield and Thor's hammer on that wall. It could mean that while the universe is a better place from T'Challa's influence, not everybody made it out alright.

Yondu’s Speech to T’Challa: I'm sure these beautiful and sentimental words have some implications toward Chadwick Boseman as an actor, but I was too busy being emotional to notice them. Well done.

What Happened to Peter Quill: Ok...I think we can just stop beating Peter down for dooming half the universe. Because how much lower can you get when finding out that this other guy practically saved everything with very little effort, only for you to end up as a worker at Dairy Queen? I'd honestly feel bad if I kept doing it at this point. The poor bastard…

(Sidenote: Love the implications that the world is still in danger because Ego still gets to Peter. It shows that despite the more interesting changes, not everything turns out all hunky-dory.)

The Tribute to Chadwick Boseman: A well-appreciated sentiment to cap off a perfect episode...or what would've been a perfect episode. 'Cause ya boy's got some nitpicks!

WHAT I DISLIKED

T’Challa Being Called Star-Lord: A small thing, but the reason why Peter called himself Star-Lord was because it was a nickname his mom called him. What's even the reasoning here? Because it makes no sense when you sit down and think.

The Black Order are still Boring: Out of all the improvements we've seen, it is still disappointing that these four remain as nothing more than cannon fodder for our heroes to go through before fighting the main boss. And pathetic. Immensely pathetic. I mean, for f**ks sake, THE MAW GOT KILLED BY THE PINK GIRL FROM GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY! Psychic powers and he still goes out like a b**ch!

Thanos Got Nerfed: The guy nearly killed the Avengers, with and without Infinity Stones, yet he can barely hold his own against these people who worked for him. C'MON NOW!

IN CONCLUSION

But those were just nitpicks. Despite them, I'd still consider this episode a solid A with 9.5/10. It was fun getting to see the changes T'Challa made to the galaxy, added with some pretty entertaining moments with other iconic characters. You couldn't have asked for a better final performance from Chadwick Boseman, and here's hoping that wherever he is, he knows that he shined brighter than any star in the galaxy.

[pluviophile-bookworm]

I feel like I need to talk about this...

I’m very open about being aroace. At least here on Tumblr I am. (Outside of Tumblr, I am technically out, but some issues with my mother and grandmother have forced me back into the closet. I felt miserable about that initially, but I’m learning to be fine with it.) But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, I didn’t even know what aroace meant until I was 18. So how was I supposed to know when I got my first ‘celebrity crush’ that those last words do not, in fact, describe very accurately what I was experiencing? I didn’t know I had ADHD, either. I feel like that might have helped me realise some things about my experience. But let me go back a bit and actually tell you what happened and how it happened. [side note: I’ll be starting from a bit earlier than the ‘crush’ thing happened because I feel like it’s important for whoever reads this to understand how my circumstances shaped the experience I had]

Backstory:

I had always been different from my peers, so it was not surprising to anyone that I was bullied in middle school. [side note: Judging from my and my little brother’s combined experience, I feel like bullying is, quite unfortunately, something of a universal experience in middle school - in my day, I was on the receiving end. This last school year, my brother was the bully. Gosh, I wish I could tell my story without many deviations and without crying as I type, but I’ve already thrown both of those intentions out the window.]

So anyway, things got so bad that I was driven to suicidal thoughts. One night I was just lying in bed, thinking about going through with it, but I was like, well, I’ve got a test in the morning. Maybe after that. 13-year-old me had very weird priorities. I kind of still value my work over my mental health, but I’m working on it. So that night, I didn’t do anything. The next day, right before school, I was on the internet and I found out a new show had premiered. And then, as I was watching the pilot episode, that was when it happened. I saw this boy, whom I will not be naming, and I listened to him sing. I felt nothing much at the moment, but I couldn’t get the song out of my mind all day. Up until that moment, I had had a weird attitude towards music where I’d only listen to female singers. My ‘boys have cooties’ phase, I guess you could say. But this one, he was the first one I didn’t mind at all. In fact, I felt like I could listen to his voice 24/7. I’ve had that feeling hundreds of times by now, but I hadn’t before then. So I figured, this must be what a crush means, right? This must be what all my peers are talking about. The next day, I confided in a girl from my class with whom I was kind of friendly (though not actual friends, I’d say). I asked her if she’d seen the show, if she knew this person. She said yes and we kind of gushed about the song together, and I felt normal for a couple of minutes. I never knew the difference between my experience and what is considered ‘normal’ until years later.

For the time being, the thought of this special person was what was keeping me alive. I started having visions of him walking with me through the school hallways or sitting next to me on the bus home from school. I knew perfectly well those visions weren’t real, but they made me feel better. Happy. Safe. Seen. Full disclosure: I still have such visions, I’ve had them with different people through the years as my hyperfixations change. My latest one is what has enabled me to deal with some of my worst phobias (and I have a long list of them). I’ve never told anybody what it is, and I won’t be telling because I feel like if I do tell, the vision will not be strong enough to work against my fears. But I’m getting sidetracked again. Sorry for that.

So, I was pretty much obsessed with this guy. He was all I could think about, he was keeping me alive through what was possibly the toughest time in my life to date. So naturally, thanks to my heteronormative, amatonormative surroundings, I was convinced I had a crush on him. In fact, after this experience had lasted about a year, I was sure I was in love. 

Then things changed. I started high school. I found a couple of friends, and the people in my class in general made me feel like I could finally be myself. Be open about what I thought and how I felt. So by the end of the first semester, all 27 people in my class knew about my feelings for this guy. What I didn’t know was that they didn’t know that it wasn’t exactly like I was describing it. Because I wasn’t aware that a straight/ allo person’s idea of being ‘in love’ was different from mine. I was just putting things in words I thought I understood. 

So it came as a total surprise when some people from my class started teasing me about it. It wasn’t malicious teasing, that much I could tell. I had been bullied mercilessly before. What my new classmates were doing was asking genuine questions in a slightly teasing manner. For example, it would be known that my special person had a girlfriend, and so they’d ask me ‘aren’t you jealous’ or ‘do you wish you were that’, or stuff like that. And those questions felt so weird. So stupid. I thought, wait, why would I be jealous? Why would I feel bad about this person who has made me so happy, being happy himself? Why would I want to date him? That had nothing to do with how I felt. I told my classmates so. They gave me weird looks in response. So I started feeling like there was something wrong with me. Like I wasn’t doing that ‘in love’ thing right. Suddenly, I felt like my feelings were being intruded upon. Tarnished, somehow. I had always been aware that my visions were anything but real. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. And all of a sudden, somebody was suggesting that I should want to date this person. Why would I want to date anyone, I thought? Even if it was him. Dating people was awkward. Making physical contact with anyone outside my immediate family made me shudder. It still does, though I can hug some of my closest friends without any negative feelings. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Back to my first time I questioned my experience. I was about 14 at the time (in Bulgaria, high school starts from grade 8, ages 13-14 or 14-15), and, well, I didn’t do much questioning at the time. I just told myself that they didn’t understand my feelings, and I stopped being so open about the topic. 

My hyperfixation on this person lasted long. Longer than any other I’ve ever had to date. Maybe it was because I clung to it like it was what tethered me to my mortal life. But by my final year of high school, I could feel it fading away. I was forcing myself to think about this person, to conjure up the old visions; the song that had started it all was drained of all meaning that it had held for me. I was moving on to other hyperfixations. I felt like I was betraying myself, like I was breaking some sort of unbreakable vow. It was time to face the music. So I let go. I allowed myself to move on. It was kind of made easier by the fact that my special person had changed, too, and had moved on to projects that I could not enjoy due to some triggering content. And I moved on.

Then I joined Tumblr. I discovered some things. Among them was Hellenic polytheism. It had been a while since I’d found my faith in the Hellenic pantheon, but Tumblr was where I found out I was not alone, that there was an existent religion. And step by step, I realised that... I had been projecting Apollo’s presence onto my special person. And my old connection to that person had started fading away when I had realised I believed in the gods.

This explained a lot of things. But there was still the fact that I had never been able to look at another person the way my peers were looking at each other. I had been asked out two or three times during high school. I had rejected those people without even thinking about it. My best friend at the time was a boy and most teachers seemed to ship us together because, well, let’s be real - we were constantly fighting like an old married couple. It took him getting a girlfriend and seeing how happy I was for the two of them for everyone to realise that things between us were, and had always been, purely platonic. And now I was going to uni and I had never had feelings I was apparently supposed to have. 

It was also thanks to Tumblr that I discovered the extent of the LGBTQ+ community. I considered myself an ally at first, and I was a passionate ally, too. I still am nothing but supportive to my fellow LGBTQ+ people of all identities, but it was not until I was 18 going on 19 that I discovered the term ‘asexual’. I knew quite suddenly that this was the term for me. I knew what I was and how I felt. I felt mature enough to know the difference between ‘I’m not experienced enough to know for sure’ and ‘I’ve just never had those feelings, I don’t even know what they’re supposed to be like’. It took a bit longer to find out there was a difference between sexual and romantic attraction, but by the time I was 19, I had proudly labelled myself ‘aroace’. I still feel at home with this label. I am completely open to the possibility that it might change with time, but this is what feels right at this time. 

Fast-forward another couple of years to about 8 months ago. I had always known that I got really invested into stuff - shows, books, hobbies, people - only for that investment to wear off after a time. The timespans varied, but I realised I had experienced this ever since I was in pre-school at least. I didn’t have a term for it, though. And then, all of a sudden, Tumblr started offering me posts tagged ADHD. I could relate to maybe 95% of them. At one point, it felt like whatever algorithm this hellsite operates on was shoving the ADHD posts in my face, as if screaming ‘DOES THIS REMIND YOU OF, WELL, YOU?!!!’ in my ears. So I did some tests. I did a lot of self-reflection. I went to a psychiatrist. I was diagnosed in March. I started educating myself on the terminology and found out that what I was experiencing is called hyperfixating. So here I am now.

Here I am now, reflecting back on my experience from 8 years ago, connecting the dots. Realising what it was that I went through, allowing myself to go through it again, with different things and people. I don’t feel the need to cling to hyperfixations anymore because I know that is what they are and I know I can’t keep them forever. Of course, I do feel bad about stopping caring about something that used to be my light and life for a time. I dread the time I’ll get over my current hyperfixation, but I also know it’s inevitable. My ADHD brain needs the change and it happens naturally. And somehow I’m ok with that.

Well, this is it. This is the story of how Tumblr prompted me to discover aspects of myself that have been there for as long as I can remember. What better place to talk about it than Tumblr itself? What better group of people to understand and accept me than my lovely mutuals and followers? If you’re reading this, thank you. For being here, for listening to me, for allowing me to be who I am. You’ve got no idea how happy this makes me, even though I can barely see what I’m typing through the tears. Thank you. 

[earlgreytea68]

A Review of the Fall Out Boy Biography Inevitably Colored by Shippiness Oops But Really Mainly By My Love for Pete Wentz

I don’t even know who the audience is for this monstrosity of a review, nor do I know the audience for this biography, though, so, like, it’s fitting lololol: 

I am a new Fall Out Boy fan. I say that because, if anybody was in need of a Fall Out Boy biography, you would think it would be a new fan. AND YET. I’m not entirely sure who the market for this book is, because it isn’t really Fall Out Boy fans of any duration, because not only can everything in the book be easily located with the simplest of Google searches but also there’s so much he leaves out. And what he leaves out is just…so incredibly telling. It’s like, the facts he chooses to highlight are often pointless and random (although thanks for telling me that Pete Wentz’s jeans were so tight he had to perform without underwear, I’m going to think about that a lot now), whereas the facts he leaves out are the ones that lend both complexity and context. Like, this whole book could be Exhibit A in how malleable facts can be. Given the same set of facts, this man and I would tell two very different stories.

At least partly this is because he’s a music critic (I glean from the book) and I’m a creative writer. I believe he is a music critic because he takes care to dedicate a paragraph of musical analysis to every song on their earliest CDs (he loses interest in them over the hiatus, and more on that later). I appreciated this, because I know nothing about music, and I learned a lot about how talented Patrick Stump really is, like, not as a vocalist, because I knew that, or as a musician, because I also knew that, but as a smart, clever songwriter. I don’t know how to critique music, and I was happy this guy was full of praise for what Patrick does. He also pointed out musical hallmarks of theirs – like their tendency to drop the music suddenly for Patrick to sing an a cappella line – and that was the first time I’d ever really thought about them.

He was full of much less praise for Pete’s lyrics, though, and I think that’s because he’s a music person, not a word person. Not that he thought Pete’s lyrics were ever bad but he tended to stay very conventional about them: emo, confessional, dramatic, and ingeniously juxtaposed with Patrick’s clear-as-a-bell voice. He’s kind of obsessed with the contrast between Patrick’s voice and the lyrics he’s singing, whereas I’m much more obsessed with the contrast between Patrick himself in sweater-paws and glasses snarling, “I am your worst nightmare,” like, sweetheart, I doubt it. AND YET HE PULLS IT OFF. Like, that’s so interesting to me, how much Patrick can make himself embody Pete, that act of alchemy where he sings on his behalf, but this book talks less about that than I think it might, mostly because I don’t think this guy really wants to think too hard about how incredibly good Pete’s lyrics actually are. The thing about Pete’s lyrics – he does this, and it’s so clever, it’s killer clever – is you can read them so easily on one very obvious and expected layer, and then there’s always one or two additional meanings tucked underneath them, and you might never stop to think about them, especially if you’ve already written him off, but his lyrics reward careful study and a lot of thought, he specializes in triple entendres, a turn of phrase that spins out into so many meanings, that’s so hard to do and he makes it look so easy that it’s such a simple mistake to dismiss it, to not even see how dense his poetry is. The conventional story on Pete Wentz is he’s good at marketing – marketing the band, marketing himself – and so he spun in circles to keep the spotlight on him and away from Patrick, and that’s definitely one take, and another take would be to point out that the same whirligig sex-symbol tabloid-fodder act also had the side effect of undercutting any tendency to take Pete seriously from a literary point of view, like, so much easier to just say that, in keeping with his goth guyliner, he wept into his inkwell and scrawled messily over parchment. So anyway: criticism #1 of this book is that they should have complemented the music-critic-ness with an English major.

Criticism #2 is that I feel like people always get wrong what appeals to girls, to speak in the massive generalizations of this topic. Like, someone somewhere was like, “Hey, girls like this Fall Out Boy band, it must be because Pete Wentz is hot.” And they’re not wrong about that, exactly, but they always seem to miss how many entangled layers often come with attraction. Like, yeah, sometimes it’s just he’s got nice abs but often there’s a million other things happening there, and one thing I cannot forgive this guy for is not just his failure to engage with Pete’s lyrics on any real level, but how little he also truly examines Pete Wentz’s genuine marketing genius. He’s a music guy: His interest is clearly in Patrick, and also in Joe and Andy, because they’re musicians, and he can wax poetic about them. Pete gets his standard paragraphs: Oh, he chose the right management, the right record label, the right deal. He can pick out a good band, like Panic! or Gym Class Heroes. All of that is true, but none of it really grasps exactly how smart Pete really is. Like, the book hardly mentions at all how much Pete realized immediately the value of internet fandom. When I first fell for Pete Wentz – that first weekend I spent Googling him – what really was the death knell for me was stumbling upon the old FOB Q&As he used to run in the earliest days. And it wasn’t actually his constant leaning into the Peterick shipping with such dead-on unerring understanding of fandom that did it for me (although that was pretty charming, ngl). It was how often teenagers messaged Pete Wentz with their problems, and how patiently he took the time to respond. My boyfriend broke up with me. My grandma just died. I don’t feel like I fit in anywhere. Again and again and again, Pete Wentz took these messages and wrote out detailed, laborious responses. And I know he was a guy angling hard to be famous but not all guys angling hard to be famous realized how important something like this is, this very personal connection, like, above and beyond the bantering and the smirks, and even if you’re doing it entirely for ulterior motives, that’s a ton of emotional labor he was performing. I finished reading those Q&As and thought, God, Pete Wentz must have been exhausted.

And I’m not sure that’s something the bio ever really wrestled with, because it never really talked about that aspect of him. I don’t actually think the bio read anything Pete Wentz has ever posted online, like, not even those basic Q&As that are the easiest thing in the universe to Google, never mind the secret blogs he still has scattered all over the internet with nuggets of lyricism buried in there for Patrick to mine. It’s just so easy to buy into the Peter-Pan, devil-may-care Pete Wentz picture, and for all I know that’s the truest of the pictures, but it’s also undeniable fact that the other side to that was either really cunning and savvy or just a nice guy, and either way it’s another layer to Pete Wentz that gets short shrift in the bio. Which isn’t surprising because although the author clearly appreciates Fall Out Boy the band, the author clearly isn’t fannish at all, whereas it’s pretty abundantly clear Pete Wentz is fannish. He’s unapologetically fannish. He speaks fan language with a fluency that is hard to fake. And he’s astonishingly well-versed in tropes. He’s instinctively good at creating a good story, not just in his lyrics (although he, like Taylor Swift, is adept at tropey lyrics, so it’s no surprise they have a mutual admiration society), but in his life. In addition to the Q&As, that first weekend was full of me being like, …How is this the tropiest thing I’ve ever read??? It’s unsurprising that the bio doesn’t point out all the tropes in the Pete Wentz / Patrick Stump / Fall Out Boy story, because the author isn’t versed in tropes, but Pete Wentz definitely is. He knows how to use words, well. And you wouldn’t necessarily know it to listen to him – he babbles and uses tons of filler phrases and never, ever ask him what his lyrics are about, it’s like trying to have a conversation in Wonderland – but that’s all part of the aw-shucks-sometimes-I-scribble-some-stuff-down-Patrick’s-the-real-genius brand.

Now I am not qualified to write a Fall Out Boy biography and also I don’t know these people and also everything I do know comes from Google but that said, I feel like I do know for a fact some primary source materials that the writer just chose to leave out that really does display how malleable stories can be depending on what you highlight or not. Like, if he didn’t want to draw psychological conclusions based on the facts that’s fair enough. But he also pared back the narrative so drastically that it left off the true meat of it, like, if you read this book you would not necessarily think there was much interesting about these people, whereas if you really dig into everything they’ve got out there, well, you could start to think they’re super-interesting people. But I am a creative writer and this biographer was a music critic. He settles happily into the song analysis but I’m busy connecting dots into a narrative, and life is complicated, it is not a simple narrative, but that impulse underlies most biography, the idea that we can assemble the facts into something that has something to say about a human life. But that act really exists in how you assemble the facts.

 ~~~~~~~~TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE DISCUSSION~~~~~~~~~~~

A really good example of this is the way the biography deals with the Best Buy incident. Here are the bare facts: Pete Wentz, in a Best Buy parking lot listening to Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah,” took too many Ativan. In a phone call, his manager noticed he was slurring, called his parents, they rushed him to the hospital, he lived. These are the facts that the book gives you, and these are true facts.

If you want to expand slightly upon these bare facts, Pete has given many, many interviews about this incident because he is very open about mental health issues and his bipolar disorder and depressive episodes and anxiety. Pete has said that he’s not sure he was trying to kill himself so much as just make his head quiet for a little while. Pete has said he felt like he was too busy being Pete Wentz for everyone else and he just wanted to rest. These are also facts, although ones I don’t think the biographer truly believes. He does dutifully quote them but he also clearly has his own belief about how much Pete’s telling the truth. Because this is inevitable in any telling of the facts.  

If you want to expand slightly upon these facts, you could point out that Pete’s lyrics reflect how noisy his head is (“when this city goes silent, the ringing in my ears gets violent”), which might color how you understand him when he says he just wanted some peace and quiet. You might also point out that, as the bio has already said, Pete was the driving force behind the band’s strategy and it was about to culminate. You might remind the reader that Pete walked away from other possibly very successful careers to do this band (there is much made in the book of the theoretical ease with which Pete could have achieved a soccer career, which made me raise my eyebrows a bit but, you know, Patrick does say Pete’s really, really good at soccer). You might recall that Pete has these kids relying on him whose parents he literally had to persuade to trust him. You might say that so far everything had gone exactly as he planned and he just needed to stick the landing. You might mention the fact that they kept rewriting songs and rewriting songs and rewriting songs; that Pete was in such utter meltdown mode that he was sliding lyrics under Patrick’s door and then retreating, so that the rest of the band never even saw him; that they had scrapped half the album and were furiously writing new music right up until the deadline – all of which are facts not even mentioned. You might say all of those things, because they are indeed all true facts.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It is appropriate at this point to note that many of these things were simply not germane to the story this biographer was telling, which was a music-critic-focused story. But these things are all incredibly germane to the story *I* would tell, about these four people who found each other, lost each other, and found each other again, and the two people at the center whose creative alchemy was by turns either too dazzling or too explosive and in both incarnations needed to find a way to balance to keep the band afloat. This is the story I would tell, but, to be totally honest, Pete and Patrick’s creative partnership doesn’t really seem to interest the writer of this book. He mentions it vaguely, in passing, once or twice, fairly standard surface proclamations about Pete handling lyrics and Patrick handling music, and Pete drawing the spotlight away from Patrick who didn’t want it. Or he’ll say that the true secret to the band’s success is Patrick’s voice and Pete’s lyrics, like Patrick could be any pretty-enough voice, which I think just isn’t true, there’s so much more to the way they clicked together. I read this great New Yorker article once about how, through history, genius exists in pairs, that often two people need to find each other to push each other to be better than they would ever be apart.

It’s fine to not want to get into that too intensely, it’s just that that means that half the story of Folie goes away, if you’re not focused on how the band was creating. Like, there’s so much about the lead-up to Folie to talk about: Patrick’s control over the music to the exclusion of everyone else, Pete’s worsening prescription pill thing, and the way that their creative partnership seemed to disintegrate while simultaneously leaving no room for Joe or Andy in the band. The book mentions really none of this – nothing about the fact that at one point they had descended into physical altercations over chord progressions; nothing about the story the producer tells that Patrick would get so frustrated after phone calls with Pete that he’d throw things around the studio; nothing about the story that Patrick once told Pete, “I don’t care, I’m going to write a song and call it ‘I Don’t Care,’” such a telling little tale when later Patrick comes to hate the song “I Don’t Care” – so the hiatus feels like it descends out of nowhere, with a paragraph about the fans not liking the album. Which, again, is a true fact, but without the other true facts of the way the entire creative process was crumbling around them, around all of them, it sounds less compelling. The bio does get into Joe wanting to flex his creative muscles more but doesn’t connect it back to the Folie era of being shut-out. The hiatus becomes entirely about Patrick not liking being booed.

Even worse to me is the book devotes a lot of time to each of their music videos, which is awesome, because their videos are important and great, but it devotes exactly zero time to the video for “What a Catch, Donnie.” And I’m so bewildered by that, you can have a field day with the symbolism in that video, even if you want to just make a true factual statement about its plot: Patrick collects all of the detritus of Fall Out Boy and all of their friends come and party with him, while Pete goes down with a sinking ship all alone, to a medley of the words he’s leaving behind. Like. That is literally what happens in this video. And then the hiatus starts. To me this is one of the most ridiculously angsty things ever, that they would go out to their own triumphs echoing back at them and the literal death of captain!Pete Wentz. To the story I would tell, this is the most germane. It merits not a single mention in the bio (other than praising the song itself for being one of the strongest on the album, and talking about the Elvis Costello cameo).

Because he’s much more interested in them musically than as people or relationships, he seems to lose interest in them post-hiatus. He details each of their hiatus-era projects with his typical attention to the music criticism side. And then he spends, like, eight pages talking about the guy who wrote the article that triggered Patrick’s “We Liked You Better When You Were Fat” blog post. I’m not even exaggerating. It’s an entire chapter dedicated to the article and the guy who wrote it. Patrick’s response is described and quoted and even praised, but not in nearly as much as detail as the original article, and Pete’s reaction to Patrick’s blog post gets literally zero attention. Which is fascinating since, in some tellings of the story, that’s the entire reason the hiatus ended. Pete has said on multiple occasions that he read the blog post and was upset Patrick was so upset and called him up and asked him to try writing with him again. But if you’re not actually interested in that creative relationship as a relationship, then you don’t see a reason to explain the motivation behind trying again.

You also don’t really see a reason to tackle why they initially struggled to get back into it. Like, truly grappling with the Pete/Patrick relationship leads to more depth than the surface “Patrick doesn’t like the spotlight, so Pete takes it for him.” That’s too simplistic a formulation, as Pete himself has said. It also discounts Patrick’s obvious dedication to Pete, his complete willingness to step in and publicly defend him on many occasions, like, Patrick’s no shy, retiring wallflower when it comes to Pete, Patrick can let loose viciously on behalf of Pete. Their protectiveness is mutual, although the public narrative often glosses over that. (In one of those “why leave that out” details, the biographer notes that Hemingway was Pete and Ashlee’s ring bearer but not that Patrick was Pete’s best man, Idk.) At any rate, I point that out because the struggle they had to find their groove writing together after the hiatus mirrored their initial struggles, to find their way into trusting each other’s strengths, but the book is just kind of like, “The first session wasn’t successful but the next session was. They were out of practice.” They weren’t out of practice with songwriting, not really, especially not Patrick – they were out of practice with each other. And that wasn’t just a hiatus-era souvenir, that went back to Folie, but we didn’t get that part of Folie.  

The biographer also, annoyingly in my view, loses all interest in them at this point. He devotes almost no time to the post-hiatus era, which is fascinating to me, since their ability to launch a comeback as successfully and relevantly as they did is striking, and to do it not by relying on nostalgia but by generating genuinely new hits with a genuinely new audience, and he’s not interested in that at all. Even worse than not being interested in this is the fact that he fails to close the Folie loop, like, he devotes lots of time to Patrick coming to hate Folie because of how much the fans hated it. Then he makes a little note, like, “Maybe someday Patrick will come to love Folie again,” or something, and the thing is, I know the book was written a few years ago now, but there was definitely stuff available about how much Folie had become a fan favorite in the hiatus years. Patrick gave an interview somewhere where he talked about the reunion show and how he read fan reviews of it and the fans were like, “They should have played more songs from Folie!” I always think at that point And then Patrick looked into the camera like he’s on The Office. But, at any rate, Patrick got to see Folie become beloved and that loop could have been closed better and he just leaves it dangling. (I’m almost like, Did he really write most of this book while they were on hiatus and then when they came back he was like, …Goddamn it?)

He doesn’t at all get into the shock of the immediate level of success of their comeback, like, that’s another thing that’s documented, that they were unsure anyone would care and they were so startled by the response that they had to actually add larger venues onto their tour because they’d thought no one would want to come to their shows. He could have talked about how people waited hours outside in the Chicago cold to get into the comeback show, how they started the show with “Thriller” and Patrick says the response was electric and it must have been amazing and he’s just not really interested in it, you can tell that he’s bored. He doesn’t talk about how Patrick hadn’t really thought about having to perform the new songs live because he didn’t think anyone would really care about the new album, so they had to really think about how they were going to make it work, and how he almost permanently damaged his voice having to sing “Alone Together” live and that’s what finally finally drove him to pursue actual voice lessons, like, he mentions none of this, he’s just like, “They wrote Save Rock & Roll, and then they wrote American Beauty / American Pyscho.” He’s just clearly, at that point, bored. Whereas in the story I would tell, that is the most satisfying part, the happy ending beyond their wildest dreams.

Okay, omg, this is SO LONG, but here are some other random thoughts:

·       He never – not once – goes back to source Pete’s lyrics to their original blog entries, which can be very interesting. This is because he’s not interested in the lyrics really, but it’s very frustrating to me because, like, SOMEBODY TAKE THESE LYRICS SERIOUSLY, PLEASE, THEY’RE SO GOOD. It also means that he misses things like “Miss Missing You” and the way it echoes Pete’s poem with the line “I miss you missing me,” like, that’s just a fact ::shrug:: He also says “Hum Hallelujah” is about teenage romance, and that is the most straightforward, surface-level reading, like, “Oh, it says ‘teenage vow in a parking lot,’ that’s what it’s about.” This pains me only because “Hum Hallelujah” might be the most perfect lyrically constructed song Fall Out Boy has, every line is golden and stuffed with meaning and emotion, and he’s just like, “teenage romance,” so dismissively, and I wince, like, “I could write it better than you ever felt it” is a line that deserves more than that. Not to mention “I love you in the same way there’s a chapel in a hospital,” god, or “One day we’ll get nostalgic for disaster,” ugh, do not read this book for lyrical analysis. He also terms the best lyrical line on Cork Tree as “To the ‘love’ I left my conscience pressed / Between the pages of the Bible in the drawer” and, while there’s nothing wrong with that line, I don’t even think that’s the best line in XO (I mean, leaving off the follow-up of “What did it ever do for me? I say” undercuts those lines immediately, imo). (He does at least point out that “Keep quiet, nothing comes as easy as you / Can I lay in your bed all day?” is a devastatingly sexy couplet.)

·       Can I just say, the entire debacle with Hey Chris gets precious little time in this book, which in a way is fine but in a way is like, just by Googling I got way more information on what went down and the weird, weird words that were being flung back and forth (at one point the term “heterolifemates” is used which makes zero sense at all in this context), but this book does spend a lot of time with Chris and Pete pre-Patrick (fascinating, right???) and there’s this weird part where Chris says he hated Pete before he met him and is like, “He should wear pants that fit,” which is just…such an interesting reason to hate Pete Wentz, like, Idk, Chris, coupled with your heterolifemates thing and weird thing about “whose name do you say every night???” which is also weirdly sexual phrasing and also being like “no one knows how to break a heart like he does,” like, everything about this entire situation has so much queer subtext but the book doesn’t touch any of that, ever, in any circumstance, with a ten-foot pole.

·       EVERYONE, THE BORDERS WHERE JOE AND PATRICK MEET IS LOCATED IN EDEN PLAZA AND I AM SO UPSET I DIDN’T KNOW THAT WHEN I WROTE THE DEVIL FIC.

·       I did not know that the producer wanted them to change the “We’re falling apart to halftime” line in Dance, Dance because he thought it was too incomprehensible and I’m just like, That’s the lyric where you thought you were going to lose people??

·       From the bio, describing the Live in Phoenix performance: a strange moment where Wentz inexplicably gets changed onstage. A strange moment? Inexplicably? Okay, like, germane to my telling of the story is how much those dick pics affected Pete Wentz’s public persona, how much he knew exactly what he was there to sell and he sold it with gusto, and how much of a spiral that ultimately sent him on. Instead, this biographer finds it inexplicable that Pete Wentz would take his shirt off onstage, and his analysis of the music video for “This Ain’t a Scene” gives the dick pic storyline only an offhand reference, calling it “making light” of the scandal, instead of really digging into the obvious pain there, like, that’s not a joyful lark there. (Later, much later, years later, Brendon Urie will manage to actually make light of the dick pic saga, both in the Drunk History and also in the joke of the dick pic being the photo that comes up when Pete calls him, as seen in the promos for the tour they did together, and that feels much more genuine. But that bit in “Arms Race” is kind of heartbreaking.)

·       Pete says of their failed attempt to get the Guinness record of the first band to perform on all seven continents that it was the worst feeling he’d ever felt in Fall Out Boy, and the biographer is like, “Really, Pete? Really?” and I kind of want to shake him because Pete Wentz is obviously a dramatic person and he feels disappointments keenly and he made that statement literally just as they were finding out they wouldn’t be able to do it, like, of course it’s just hyperbole! The biographer is weird through that whole section of the book because he never once mentions that, as a consolation to Pete, Patrick stayed up all night with him so they could get the record of most interviews by a duo in a twenty-four-hour period, like, that’s what I would have said about that story instead of trying to get way more out of Pete’s off-the-cuff self-pity (which is just so Pete Wentz, it’s like this writer hasn’t just spend a hundred pages writing about him…).

·       Whenever I read about how many songs Patrick shows up with when it’s time to record an album, I always feel this little twinge of solidarity with him, like, sometimes that’s just how it is in your chosen creative medium, you’re just always endlessly writing.

·       I had never thought before about the fact that Pete says all the time that he was too selfish pre-hiatus, all the time, a lot, that’s how he describes his problem – and the fact that there’s an entire song on Truant Wave called “Love, Selfish Love” with the line “God bless the sad and selfish” and I’m just going to…sit here and think about who in Patrick’s life could be described as sad and selfish.

·       From the bio re: Soul Punk: It’s disarming to hear this garrulous boy-next-door sing so candidly about sex. Yeah, I don’t think you were paying attention to the way Patrick smirks at the camera in the music videos, buddy.

·       Detail I knew but had never really thought about before: that Pete got Patrick to really click into songwriting with him again by giving him a puzzle. Patrick says that sometimes Pete gives him homework assignments, “I want a song that sounds like x, y, and z,” and Patrick will be like, “That’s impossible,” but also so intrigued that he ends up sitting and writing the thing. The fact that Pete knew, after a few mediocre songs neither of them liked, like, “You know how I snag him? This way,” is adorable. Also, the fact that it was Pete who adored the song to come out of it, “Where Did the Party Go?,” and that it was his excitement over the song that made Patrick think, Okay, maybe we can do this, like, it was Pete’s joy that drove Patrick’s optimism, they’re so creatively linked, these two.

·       He does include the detail that Pete was worried he’d fallen behind during the hiatus because he didn’t spend much time playing music and so he committed himself to practicing and improving with metronome work, like, Pete Wentz ugh <3. In a very recent interview that I cannot blame the bio for not including, Pete said that Patrick helps him with the bass because he’s so musically talented and everything about that offhand statement just kills me.

·       I did not know that one of the leaks of their reunion was on a blog that wrote “You can stop refreshing for a journal update,” and I’m in love with that, sorry.  

·       Ugh, can I just say, the fact that Patrick sang all of his vocals for Pax AM Days live with the band is just so unbelievable, he kills me.

·       From the bio: “We were fireworks that went off too soon / And I miss you in the June gloom, too,” Stump sings here, and you can’t help but wonder if the words refer to his public but brief marriage. …I have indeed helped the wondering of that because I have never once thought that about this song lolololol

[stereogeekspodcast]

[Transcript] Season 1, Episode 9. Detective Mode – Let's Talk Future Disney Properties

Disney Investor Day was a lot! We break down the biggest announcements from the event, focusing on our two favourite franchises, Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What are we most excited about from Disney's upcoming slate? What aren't we completely sold about? Which properties have us concerned? Find out more during this episode!

There will be spoilers for The Mandalorian Season 2, so keep an ear out.

Listen to the episode on Anchor. 

Read Mon's round-up of all the Star Wars news on Bam Smack Pow.

Read Ron's round-up of all the Marvel film and TV news on GIQUE Media.

[Continuum by Audionautix plays]

Ron: Hello and welcome to the first Stereo Geeks Detective Mode of 2021.

I’m Ron, and today we'll be discussing Disney Investor Day.

There will be some spoilers here for The Mandalorian Season 2, so keep an ear out.

[Continuum by Audionautix plays]

Mon: What did you think about the Disney Investor Day format?

Ron: Well, four hours is a long time for anybody to be invested in Disney Investor Day. But, for the most part, I think it worked. I liked how they divided the different studios; I didn't feel like anybody spoke for too long. It flowed quite well.

But it definitely felt like there were certain sections which were more interesting for certain audiences whereas others, not so much. It felt very DC FanDome to me, as well, because of the blue. I'm not sure why everything is blue.

But for the most part, it went off without a hitch, so that was good. I mean I guess it had to, because this wasn't really for us, it was actually for Disney investors.

It did feel a bit like an overload of information.

Mon: I also found it a little bit corporate, especially in the beginning when they were talking about all their mergers and their new initiatives and stuff. As a fan you sort of think that ‘oh, what exactly is Disney doing?’. They really feel like a giant, don’t they, when they're coming at you with ‘we've got this going on in this country, in that country, and basically they’re encompassing it all.

I was a bit frustrated by the fact that they'd be like, ‘here's this exclusive preview or a sizzle reel’, and then suddenly you're looking at two minutes of blank screen. They got clever after a while by trying to include quizzes, though we weren't really invested by that point. So, I found that a little bit frustrating because at the end of the day it’s the press, it’s the fans who are bringing you all the street cred. So, why leave us out?

Ron: Yeah, I found that very frustrating as well. In fact, I was actually wondering whether it was just us that was having a problem with that. And then I went on the internet and pretty much everybody realized that the general public weren't getting a lot of the exclusive sneak previews. I understand, in a way, maybe these aren't finished products. I mean, we know that things like Obi-Wan Kenobi are not even in production so whatever they had ready for that was not ready for public consumption. But it still felt a little bit frustrating to look at a timer or listen to a song, when you were actually expecting to see something.

I mean, for Cassian Andor they added some concept art because they don't really have any production footage to share with us. But with the big stuff you really felt like, oh my god, we’re missing out on stuff. Thankfully, there was a lot of information sent out soon after. I don't think we got the whole picture, but we got a good enough picture.

Ron: Actually, there was a lot of information going out and for the average person, keeping track of all that, it's a lot.

Mon: And if you're only invested in part of Disney, parsing through all that information is mind boggling.

Ron: Yeah, you and I had to write separate news pieces on particular Disney properties and just putting those together, it took a lot of time. But all in all, I thought it was an interesting event.

I'm actually fascinated by the fact that Disney is able to open up a corporate event like this to the general public. They must be in a really comfortable place to let the average person who would generally be buying a ticket or buying a subscription to Disney Plus, attend something like this.

Mon: Well, I'm glad because after the year that we've had where there's been so many production delays, so many shows and movies have had to be pushed back, it's good to have that kind of excitement among the press and among the fans.

They have so many projects in the pipeline, some of them which were rumored, some of them which we knew about, and others which really have blindsided us, in the best way possible.

Ron: I think, one thing that I would have liked was a little bit more interactivity. I think that's something that they can possibly bring in, in the future. This was obviously not planned. So, the way it worked, I think it went off quite well. But for future events, I see them bringing in more interactivity for the general public.

Mon: We have to remember this wasn't a convention. This was an investor meeting. So, the format is going to be different. But if they are planning to open up this event, then maybe don't have it as an Investor Day. Have that as a separate section on that particular day which you invite only the investors for, and they had that section at the end where there was an investor Q&A. Most of us had dropped off by then—we had news to cover.

But the beginning parts, for sure, they can have more interactivity, more fun.

Considering how much has gone digital, I think a lot of people may have realized how much is achievable by going online.

Ron: I would really love to know the viewership numbers for Disney Investor Day, because a lot of people tuned in.

Mon: Despite it not being that heavily promoted among the average person.

Ron: So anyway, it's good that we all got to participate in some way or the other. And I'm hoping that other corporations also take a leaf out of Disney's book because it's really good to find out what is happening behind the scenes, because just looking at the initial Disney announcements during that event. My gosh, Disney owns a lot. It's actually a little bit creepy how much of a monopoly they're becoming, but at least we know about it.

Mon: So, let's talk about the announcements, because at the end of the day, it was still really, really exciting time to be a fan.

Ron: If you're a fan of Disney live-action, Disney Animation, Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, Hulu, ESPN, HotStar, Star, there's just so much stuff, and it's all connected to Disney. There was going to be some announcement or the other that got you excited.

For us it was definitely the Star Wars and Marvel news that was most interesting, but there are other things as well that piqued our interest.

There wasn't much live-action news from Disney. There were a few films as I mentioned—we already knew about some things like The Little Mermaid, Cruella. A bit disappointed at the lack of Aladdin 2, not sure why we've been holding out hope for that. We love the first Aladdin live-action film, and we would love to see them again. So sad, but let's wait for that.

Aside from that, there was some interesting Pixar news as well. Lightyear, which will be about Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story films but going to be voiced by Chris Evans.

Mon: Yes, that's because Chris Evans is playing the actor who the Buzz Lightyear toy is based on. Yes, it's confusing.

Ron: We were very confused. I had to check with a lot of people about it, and then that's how we finally figured out who Chris Evans was going to be actually voicing. So yeah, who knew Buzz Lightyear had that backstory? Definitely not me.

There were also interesting animation films and TV shows that were announced. I was actually quite excited by how many characters of color we’re going to be seeing. We’ve got, Raya, Tianna, Iwájú, Encanto, they all have characters of color in the lead. And that's really cool, because Disney’s slate has usually been quite white. Still no Indians. Mon: Someday! Ron: We need South Asian representation. I'm hoping, with Disney having bought up Star Plus, there was a lot of talk about locally-made Indian content. I'm hoping that some of that comes this side so that we can actually see that.

Mon: And that it's good and representative of more of India than just Bollywood.

Ron: Yeah, that's an important point, because there's a lot in India than just Bollywood or Mumbai. So, when they say local content, we need to see pan-Indian local content. And not just with high production values, with good stories and more representation from diverse communities in India. But nothing's been confirmed yet, so we're going to have to wait a long time.

On the live-action side, though, I don't feel like there were that many people of color on screen.

Mon: I was disappointed. I mean, you were pointing out a very important fact that it seems like the live-action does tend to veer towards safer casting and safer stories, whereas the animation is much more diverse, much more varied. I'm not sure why it can't be the reverse. Why can't we have live action Moana, for example—I'm not saying you need to have a live-action Moana, I'm just saying—or, you know, Encanto can't be live-action or Iwájú, but I guess one step at a time?

Ron: It's a start. We didn't have anything much before, so it's something to be excited about. But yeah, it does seem like they're still taking baby steps and seeing the lineup of people who were speaking at Disney Investor Day, that's actually not surprising.

Mon: Yeah, I am impressed by the fact that the animated series and films that have been announced, also have diverse creative teams behind the scenes. That can really lend itself well to the quality of storytelling that we see on the screen.

Ron: Yeah, definitely. So I guess we can move on to talking about Star Wars.

Mon: Yeah.

Ron: So Lucasfilm had a ton of announcements, and they started off by saying they had 10 Star Wars series in the pipeline for Disney Plus. Considering, till now, we've had just two seasons of The Mandalorian, that's a huge task.

So, quick rundown of what shows they've announced we've got Rangers of the New Republic, Ahsoka, Andor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, The Bad Batch, Star Wars: Visions, Lando, The Acolyte and A Droid Story. If you're counting properly, that's nine, because the 10th one was a surprise that we only found out after The Mandalorian Season 2 was done and dusted.

If you stayed for the after credits scene, you would have found out that the 10th series was The Book of Boba Fett. We got to say, we're excited.

Mon: Definitely.

Ron: So, thoughts on that extensive lineup?

Mon: I'm so excited. Ron: There’s so much Star Wars. Mon: I know, it such a great thing!

Ron: I'm excited, but I'm also full of trepidation. And I’m annoyed that I feel that.

Mon: Oh, why?

Ron: Well, as much as I enjoyed The Mandalorian Season 1, there were issues with it. The lack of female characters—Cara Dune was pretty much the only female character and she came in a few episodes into the first season. We don’t see as many people of color, not that we want to see that many people of color on a show that's really about bad guys. So that was kind of confusing as well—whose side are we on?

Season 2 was much better in terms of storytelling, we got to see people of color, we got to see some badass action scenes with ladies. Awesome.

But, it's the discourse. Let's face it, it's the Star Wars discourse. It just makes you want to not be a fan.

Mon: Maybe Disney's plan is that they will bombard fans with so much Star Wars, that people will not have time to discuss it.

Here's the thing, you’ll have some good shows, you’ll have some bad shows. There'll be some good episodes, there'll be some bad episodes. We can just hope that the end product is as good as they can make it, and that we enjoy it. That it’s relevant, it is topical. Star Wars has never only been about entertaining us, it's always had a message—doesn't have to be in your face, sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't—but each show should make us go away with some kind of feeling and some kind of change in perspective. In a good way.

Ron: When we think about The Mandalorian Season 2, it really felt very Star Wars. It felt like it went back to the original series; the aesthetics, the action scenes, the way we met characters, how we got to spend time with them, it felt very much like the originals, while still diving into all these other Star Wars properties. We got stuff from the books, the movies, the games, the animated shows, it was pretty exciting. And I realize that for casual fans, it was way too much and they did feel like they were just being bombarded with stuff that they had to research, but for fans who have watched and played all these things and read these books and comic books, this was great.

Mon: It really feels like it's part of a larger universe, and I appreciate the fact that they tried really hard to do that, they pulled it in.

And I think that nowadays it's easier to find out a bit of information about properties that you haven't been engaged with, so that makes sense.

Ron: So, I guess it makes sense that we're getting all these shows and that some of them are tied into The Mandalorian.

Mon: And perhaps even the Extended Universe.

Ron: It definitely feels like some of these are going to be Extended Universe stories, we just don't know how close.

The Rangers of the New Republic, I don't know what this is about.

Mon: Yeah, I agree. The assumption is that it's going to be about Cara Dune and the other Marshals, but they’re called marshals not rangers, so I'm a little bit confused. Ron: Yeah.

Mon: It does sound like a cop story or something, but at the same time what is it? I mean, it make sense, it is the New Republic, and they need somebody to…

Ron: Keep an eye on the Galaxy. We're gonna have to find out more about this when they make more announcements.

Ahsoka, I guess we have a pretty good idea of what her show is going to be about. When we met her in The Mandalorian she was very obviously looking for Grand Admiral Thrawn, presumably that's going to be her mission in her show. Will we see Sabine Wren, will we see Ezra Bridger? Will we see Hera Syndulla? I don't know, I would really love to see that.

Mon: Only if they cast them well.

Ron: Yes. Good point. Mon: I’m excited for that show. It's a limited series as far as I could tell, but you never know, a limited series could turn into several seasons if something is popular. But I'm excited for this, because we like this character—I'm still not sure about the live-action version—but I'm excited. Even more so if they can bring in the Rebels cast.

Ron: Yes.

With Andor,we got a sneak peek of the concept art, and it feels like the supporting costs seem to be very white, once again.

Mon: Yeah I'm not entirely sure about it. It sounded very exciting when they first mentioned it. Now I feel like maybe it's already feeling a little bit over-bloated with so many people thrown into the cast. Well, let's see. I mean Diego Luna is so excited to be back in the Star Wars universe and I'm hoping that his enthusiasm and excitement just screams off the screen, and pulls us all in.

Ron: Yeah, because Rogue One is probably my favorite Star Wars film. I love those characters; I would love to spend more time with those characters. I'm really hoping that they make Andor well, that it’s well received, that the fans really enjoy it, and that it gives them impetus to create a solo series for the other characters. I would love to spend more time with Jyn Erso, and Bodhi Rook and Chirrut and Baze.

Mon: I agree with you.

Ron: The Obi-Wan Kenobi series, we didn't get to see anything from that because…

Mon: We got to see the logo!

Ron: Yeah, we got to see the logo. Yay.

But they did make the surprising announcement that Hayden Christensen would be back as Darth Vader.

Mon: Yeah, I'm really confused about that because they specified Darth Vader, and not Anakin Skywalker.

It doesn't make sense to me, because Hayden Christensen is Anakin, Darth Vader is some guy in a suit voiced by James Earl Jones.

Ron: Yeah, that's definitely got me confused as well, because James Earl Jones's voice as Darth Vader, there is no other version. And putting him in the suit doesn't make much sense—he was in the suit in the final act of Revenge of the Sith, but what's the point then?

Mon: Yeah, not sure. I feel like they have a plan. They wouldn't be telling us that it's specifically Hayden, specifically playing Darth if there wasn't a reason for it. Ron: Yes.

There is some speculation that it might be part of Obi-Wan's quest to become one with the Force, and he sees Anakin. We don't know. From what we understand of the process, it's mostly Obi-Wan communing with Qui-Gonn Jinn and maybe Master Yoda, but Anakin isn’t really even mentioned in this part of the process. But he could be.

Mon: Kathleen Kennedy mentioned that it's going to be the rematch of the century, between Obi-Wan and Darth. So, let's see. I'm excited for the show. I think it might be one of the more pensive, cerebral shows in the Star Wars universe. Ron: Yeah I'm definitely excited for that.

The Bad Batch, what are your thoughts?

Mon: I was excited mainly by the confirmation that Fennec Shand will be showing up, and she’ll be voiced by Ming-Na Wen, that the actual Bad Batch themselves.

Ron: When we met with in The Clone Wars Season 7, like they’re interesting, but I didn't quite take to them enough for me to want to watch an entire series about them.

Mon: There was something about the trailer that really threw me off, which was that the Bad Batch appear to be working with the Empire and the Imperials. They're definitely in cahoots with Tarkin. So, are we watching the series about the bad guys? Ron: The Imperials are interesting in their own way because whenever we meet them they seem to be cowardly, they seem to be a bit stupid, so that's quite fascinating. But an entire series of superpowered clones helping them out? I'm not sure about that. The reason why The Clone Wars worked for me was that they made me really care about those clones. Like, 99, I mean, come on. We wept. We wept at that episode. It was so sad. But everybody else, like Rex and Fives and that entire contingent, you really cared about them.

And despite the fact that most of them looked alike, they had these little personality traits, they did things that were different so that they could stand out from each other. I think the Bad Batch is too far away from the clones that we're used to seeing. And the time that we got to spend with them, it wasn't very meaningful. And the other thing is that we watched The Clones Wars Season 7 after the announcement that The Bad Batch is going to get a spin-off. And I remember being like, ‘okay, we have to see what these guys are all about’. And they weren't very interesting. So yeah, I'm a bit unsure about this. Mon: My biggest worry is that they won't have a good enough foil for us to be invested in these characters. With The Clone Wars series, you had these armies of clone troopers, and you'd be like, ‘oh, they're all these guys’, but they had the foil of Ahsoka, of Padmé and the other Jedi, so you felt like yeah, there was some balance in there. I don't know if just Fennec Shand can do that. She's just one character.

Ron: Yeah. Mon: Look, you know, if they've got a supporting cast of diverse and varied characters, we could be in for a really fascinating show which shows us the darker side of the Star Wars universe, which we always like, but we don't get as much. Or, it could be the Bad Batch, if they don't have the same chip which makes them go Order 66 on people, maybe they’re double agents.

Rob: Oh, that’s interesting. Let's see.

Mon: I'm still excited because the production values on that animation, wow! There's no doubt about the kind of quality that we're going to get, it's the quality of storytelling that we’re worried about.

Ron: Yeah.

So, we also have the Lando series. There's so little information about this.

Mon: Is it live-action? Is it animated? Which Lando are we going to be following?

Ron: For some reason, when I heard the announcement my first thought was, ‘oh this is totally about Donald Glover's Lando’. But then when I was reading up about it later on, everybody was like is this about Billy Dee Williams, is this about Donald Glover? And I was like, oh okay so we're not sure about that.

We need a Lando series, in all honesty. He was the best part of Solo, that film was a disaster, and we need more Lando—that movie needed more Lando. So yeah, a series is a great idea, but I don't know what we're gonna get.

Mon: I hope that whatever they do, they make him fun and outlandish, but also a really complex character because we know that Billy Dee Williams’ Lando he's always been like that. He's so layered. So, let's hope that the series itself does justice to that character and his legacy.

Ron: Yeah. So, we also have a couple of other series that were mentioned. Star Wars: Visions, The Acolyte, A Droid’s Story, there's not much information about these and they don't seem to be tied in directly with the properties that we've already seen.

Mon: Yeah, so A Droid’s Story seems to be like a family-friendly animated show. It's gonna follow C-3Po and R2-D2, and they're going to be guiding a new hero in the Star Wars universe. Not sure what that means but I'm sure it'll be family-friendly fare.

Ron: It’s definitely going to be made to sell another new little droid toy. Mon: Oh, god not another D-O. [laughs]

Star Wars: Visions, that's a really interesting one. It’s going to be anime creators creating their own versions or visions of Star Wars characters and worlds. I'm really interested to see what they do this, Star Wars has always borrowed heavily from Asian cultures, Japanese culture especially, so this is a nice way to give back. I'd like to see their take on it.

Ron: Yeah, I don't quite understand the concept, but it seems like something that might be interesting to watch. So, let's see where that goes.

And The Acolyte is the only show that's really set outside of the time period that we're used to watching in the live-action and animated series and films. I don't mind getting to know a little bit more of the universe, before and after the periods that we’ve seen. The Mandalorian is set shortly after the Battle of Endor. so that shows you how well that concept can work. The Acolyte is going to be a little bit more about the Sith, which should be interesting.

I quite like the Sith, they’re quite fascinating. But I don't want to feel like I like the Sith, if you get what I mean.

The 10th series in the lineup, which was not mentioned was The Book of Boba Fett. Boba Fett appeared during the second season of The Mandalorian. Temuera Morrison is back as the character, and I think it's awesome. He's awesome in it. He looks like he's having a gala time playing the character. I can't wait to see more of him and Fennec Shand taking over the Hutt Empire.

Mon: I foresee them doing good in the galaxy far far away.

Ron: We also got a hint of some of the Star Wars movies that we can expect in the next few years. We know the Taika Waititi is going to be working on a Star Wars film, but there are no details available on that.

And the surprise announcement was Patty Jenkins is making a Rogue Squadron film. I love the video announcement that came out just after the Disney Investor Day. It's just Patty Jenkins talking about her father who was a fighter pilot and how she wanted to make a movie about pilots, and she also loves Star Wars. And now she gets to bring both her two loves together, and it was just great.

I'm really excited to watch a Rogue Squadron movie. I used to love the Rogue Squadron books in the Star Wars Alternate Universe. So yeah, a film would be great.

Mon: And I can imagine that she’ll bring all that unique depth and diversity that she's brought to Wonder Woman. Let's just hope that Star Wars and Disney really let her spread her wings. Ron: Yes, absolutely.

So that was a lot of the Star Wars announcements, but another studio that we're really excited about, of course, is Marvel. The Marvel announcement was massive.

Mon: We have to ask ourselves, at this point, what isn't happening in the Marvel Universe?

Ron: Oh my gosh, it's all happening, dude. It’s all happening. Now, Marvel was supposed to debut a few series this year on Disney Plus, but of course the pandemic came in the way, so that did not happen.

We're actually going to get our first Marvel Disney Plus series on January 15, 2021 with WandaVision. I am really excited about that. We got to see another brand new trailer for the show on Disney Investor Day. It looks very kooky, and kind of fun, but also seems to be a little bit dark. At least the latest trailer definitely shows that it's a bit darker than we thought. And you know what, it's been a long time since he saw Vision, I miss him.

Mon: Yeah, I'm intrigued by this series. It seems to be a combination of the multiverse and time travel. We've not seen a lot of that in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Any chance to give Wanda some extra screen time and to really grow into her powers and her character is awesome.

Ron: Wanda is one of my favorite Marvel characters in the MCU. I think she is great. She is so powerful and she's… she's really cool. She's just really cool. She and Quicksilver are twins so, of course, you and I are going to like that. But, yeah, Wanda is amazing and I can't wait to see more of her.

Mon: Yeah, and that's tied into Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.

Ron: Yeah, I'm totally excited about this. I know a lot of people didn't take to the Doctor Strange movie—I kind of liked it. I have seen it a couple of times after that, but I haven't seen it in a couple of years. But, I think Doctor Strange is really cool and his aesthetic is awesome.

Like, in Infinity War, every time Doctor Strange did anything, I was just like, ‘that is so cool’. And a friend told us that the golden things he makes in the air, they’re called Mandalas. So yeah, those are awesome. I totally want some more of that.

Mon: Yeah, I think it's nice that the Marvel Universe is really expanding on its own mythos. Like in Avengers: Endgame, they totally went into time travel. Now, we're gonna actually have some multiverse and not the fakey stuff that Mysterio talked about. So, let's see, I'm excited.

Ron: I think that's gonna be so fun. But I also think the MCU needs it. Avengers: Endgame kind of messed everything up. We've been tearing our hair out for two years now trying to figure out what state the Marvel Universe is actually in, because the Avengers made a mess of the 2012 timeline. We need these movies to fix them.

And if WandaVision ties into Doctor Strange 2, and fixes that, that's awesome. One of the interesting things is that WandaVision is also going to be tied into Spidey 3.

Mon: Considering Spidey 3 has basically turned into Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but live action and with Peter Parker, yeah sure, that makes sense.

Ron: I don't know how I feel about all these announcements. Spidey 3 really wasn't mentioned much during Disney Investor Day.

Mon: Yeah, that's because most of those are unconfirmed rumors. We don't actually know what is going to happen, who's gonna be in there. People are just conjecturing left, right and center. I don't want it to be over bloated. I don't want them to forget about Peter Parker, and the rest of the crew, because they want something big, but we do have to remember that Marvel is playing ball with Sony once again, so we may have a change in temperament and quality and storytelling.

Ron: But I also don't want a live action Into the Spider-Verse when we have an animated Into the Spider-Verse which is really good!

Mon: Which is awesome and hello, it won an Oscar.

Ron: Exactly. And it had Miles Morales as the protagonist. Peter Parker has already stolen like a lot of Miles’ comics stuff for the live-action series in the MCU. We don't need him to steal this. As much as I love the MCU Peter Parker, that still stands.

Mon: Yeah, he needs to be unique in his own way and I'm really worried that they're just jumping on the more popular bandwagon—which is really funny to say that. But anyway, so be it.

But it was interesting to note that there was no Spidey information or confirmation at Disney Investor Day. So we'll have to see.

Ron: Yeah.

Mon: So, moving away from those guys, we have The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Now this series is what half the universe is excited about because everybody loves Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

We got our first proper look at this show. It looks dark and grim. And lots of action. And then there’s some banter shoehorned in because they have to. Man, that trailer was not good.

Ron: I was hoping you would say that because I didn't feel like it did anything either. This trailer does not make me feel excited.

Mon: I'm really hoping that they just slapped something together because production was delayed, and they had a deadline to meet. So, you know, we all feel you Marvel trailer people. But yeah, I was not sure, I just didn't feel that kind of chemistry that we are so used to seeing from Sebastian Stan and Anthony Mackie from the MCU films. Ron: Yeah, the chemistry did not come across; the banter that we saw was very forced. It just looked like it was not well made. Mon: Yeah, the production values look amazing.

Ron: Always

Mon: like Falcon flying—looks so good! It takes you back to when you first saw Falcon flying.

Together: So good, so good.

Ron: The rest of it, not so much.

Together: Yeah.

Ron: Why’s Bucky so grumpy?

Mon: Yeah, what’s his problem? Like, smile a little bit! Well, his friend, kind of… it doesn't matter.

Ron: Steve was both of their friend. So, yeah.

Mon: I don't want them to be like Falcon’s got this huge weight on his shoulders—quite literally because the shield is probably heavy—and like that's why he can't smile anymore. Sam is funny, he is such a sweetheart…

Ron: Yes!

Mon: And Bucky, he has this really snarky sense of humor. And I didn't feel that.

Ron: It didn’t like it was them.

Mon: We’re gonna give them the benefit of the doubt, because I really do feel like they had to put in whatever footage they had to give some character and action, you know, they just follow the notes. I think that the show is going to be better than what the trailer showed us. Ron: It had better be. Mon: Also, what was up with that weird, long joke about Bucky’s positronic brain. Bucky’s human!

Ron: His brain doesn't have any machinery in it.

Mon: Yeah, I mean, unless in Wakanda he became an Android.

Ron: I don't know. Man, I hope this stuff gets explained.

Mon: This is like six episodes of a Marvel film—basically that's how they said it—but it better have the quality of the writing too, not just the look.

Mon: Yes. Okay, so, Loki. This is the other half of the universe who's excited for the show.

Ron: Yeah, people are losing their minds over this Loki trailer.

Mon: Were you underwhelmed?

Ron: I loved it.

Mon: No way! I was so not into it!

Ron: Okay, so when I first saw it, I was like, what is going on? Then I did some research and I found out more about the timey-wimey stuff. And then I was like, okay, you know, this is kind of exciting. But yes, I did need to do some research.

Mon: Okay, because like Kevin Feige introduced the Loki trailer by saying, if you're confused watching it, don't worry, Loki feels the same way. And I was like, I am more confused than Loki watching this. It didn't make any sense to me and I'm like, who are these people, what are they doing? And I'm like, I don't understand Loki either. Loki is an understandable kind of guy, but I didn't feel him. So, I don’t understand.

Ron: I was surprisingly excited to see Loki again. I thought I had said my goodbyes in Infinity War. And then when I saw him again in Avengers: Endgame, I was like, awww, Loki. And then I was like okay, now I’ve said my goodbyes again. When I saw this trailer. Oh, Loki, you’re back.

Mon: We have to, as fans, sort of change gears, about which Loki this is. This is because the Loki who was killed in Infinity War, he was the kind of guy, like we're bleeding hearts for him. But this one? This one's the meanie.

Ron: Yeah, this is a different version. So, I'm interested to see how that goes. It's got time travel in it and so I'm excited.

Mon: Look, time travel is your boo! So, they do it right, this could be something spectacular.

Ron: Yeah, and I really hope that this is also a kind of a way for Loki to be reintroduced into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I don't know, but that's my hope. It'll be good, you know, Thor and Loki together again. That'd be great. He misses his brother.

Mon: Yeah, Thor’s kind of had a bad time. He really deserves to have his brother back.

Ron: Now, a series that I am excited about is What If…?

Mon: Oh my god, I couldn't believe it. When they first announced it I was like, no way, they’re actually going to do this? And then we saw the trailer. This was a good trailer.

Ron: This was a good trailer. This got me excited. We got to see little bits. I feel that there's definitely more to this particular show than they're letting on. That's definitely exciting. Whatever we got to see, we are certainly looking forward to seeing more. So, what did we get to see in the trailer? We see a different Starlord. Not exactly Peter Quill. Now, it's T’Challa, and is voiced by Chadwick Boseman in one of his last roles. We also get to see Peggy Carter as Captain America. We get to see Bucky facing off against a kind of zombie Captain America. And we see Stephen Strange facing off against a dark version of himself. Looks exciting.

Mon: It does. Because the What If… stories in the comics really allowed the creators to investigate and examine alternative points of view, and alternate decisions by the different characters. We always used to love reading the What If… stories, and I'm glad that Marvel Studios is really using their resources to create as many stories as they can. I mean, they’re milking it, we understand, but we get a little more entertainment, we get to see different perspectives. Peggy as Captain America is such a novel concept and I love that idea.

Ron: I mean, it makes you wonder why Peggy wasn’t Captain America in the first place.

Mon: Exactly! And the animation was so different from the other Disney animations that we'd seen throughout the day, but it's beautiful.

Ron: Yeah, I like that style. It looks good.

Mon: It does. It looks like a comic book come to life and, of course, that's the point. But if they're able to execute it as brilliantly as they did in the trailer, we are in for a good show.

Ron: Yeah, I'm really excited about this one. I love alternate stories, as well, so this is definitely up my alley.

Mon: Yeah, and I hear that the late Chadwick Boseman actually contributed his voice for several episodes. I'm not sure how often T’Challa appears but he does voice T’Challa, so that’ll be great. I hope they’re nice stories.

Ron: We also got a glimpse of the Ms Marvel show. We got news about the casting of Iman Vellani just a few months ago, so they must be shooting during the pandemic. That's exciting. We also got to see some of the supporting cast. There's a lot of controversy around this. And it just makes my head hurt. I don't understand why a company as big as Marvel and DC can’t do a little bit of background research when they cast people. Regular people on the internet can find out information and Marvel and Disney didn't find it out?

Mon: Or did they choose to ignore it? But the thing is that in today's internet age, you really need to be careful about who you're choosing, who you’re giving opportunities to. Especially in a show like Ms Marvel, which you make such a big deal about because she is so important to demographics in the US and around the world. And yet you keep making misstep after misstep. You need to be careful.

I will say that they seemed to try very hard during the Investor Day announcement to veer away from the rest of the cast and talk only about Iman Vellani. It could be because this was all shot and prepared well before the controversies began and the rest of the cast were chosen. But at the same, time I do wonder if they're trying to rethink. I need to give them the benefit of the doubt because I'm hoping that they rethink and recast. It might be too late, and we’re stuck with what we've got.

Ron: Yeah, but sometimes it takes something as simple as just putting out a statement acknowledging what people are concerned about. Like, Rosario Dawson, she does know about what people are saying about the allegations against her, and she did mention it in that interview with Variety. It does make me feel a lot better. I know a lot of people still don't really take her word for it, and that's completely an understandable reaction, but at least she's saying something. The thing is, I wish she had said something earlier. But I understand that she couldn't have because, despite rumors circulating from what, the beginning of the year, that Rosario Dawson was going to be playing Ahsoka, the lead up to the actual episode was all hush-hush, and it was only when we got to ‘The Jedi’, that we met Ahsoka Tano. It did make me feel better though.

Mon: Okay. But there are other problems.

Ron: There are. There's Gina Carano and her wildly insensitive and dangerous tweets about the pandemic and mask wearing and what she put as her pronouns. The thing is that these aren't things that happen in a vacuum. People are very vocal about it, a whole bunch of us, because of Gina Carano’s nonsense, ended up putting our pronouns in our bios, because we were like, okay, this is definitive, this is what we feel. And maybe we’re not very comfortable with our pronouns at this moment, but that's the one we're going with for now.

Mon: I just think that if you're a celebrity in the 21st century, you know how influential you are. You also know how far and wide every tweet goes. You need to be more careful about who you're hiring. And for Marvel, Disney, and DC to be so blinkered about it is quite shocking. Now we don't know how far the controversy around Miss Marvel and the casting goes, we can only hope that by the time the show actually does reach our screens that it does right by the fans who are so eager to watch it.

Ron: If you want more information about the controversies around the Ms Marvel casting, you can check out the Twitter hashtag #FixMsMarvel.

Mon: All right, let's be a little bit more positive here. We've got a few more announcements for the other shows, for example, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, Hawkeye has got Kate Bishop and yes, she's being played by Hailee Steinfeld. Everybody knew it. Somehow Disney did not think to surprise us. Or maybe people just have too many cameras nowadays, because we have the images and everything.

Ron: Yes.

Mon: Lots of people are excited. I am underwhelmed by this show. I don't know why. I like Hawkeye in the movies, but Jeremy Renner is a problem.

Ron: And the thing is, the Renner problems happened after he was in the MCU. Literally, in the last year, since Avengers: Endgame, these issues with him have come to light. How is he still here?

Mon: I know. You could have moved completely away from Hawkeye and just concentrated on Kate Bishop, but no, Hawkeye is still there.

Ron: Maybe he’ll die in this show.

Mon: He should have died in Endgame! Having talked about Hawkeye, Black Widow is still not coming to Disney Plus. We do not know if Disney is actually going to change their mind about this. I understand why. I understand that they want it to hit theaters. Because, let's be honest, in a couple of years when the gurus of film sit down and talk about how Wonder Woman and Black Widow and Mulan didn’t actually hit the theaters, they’ll come up with some hogwash about why these women-led films didn't make it to the theaters, ignoring the fact that we were in a pandemic.

Ron: I still think this is a terrible decision. You know why? Vaccine or no vaccine, how comfortable are we really going to be going to a theater to watch a movie, sitting next to a person, you don't know it they’ve washed their hands?

Mon: Can you imagine if somebody coughs?

Ron: Oh gosh, the entire theater will evacuate. This has been nine months of paranoia. This is a pandemic. It's unprecedented, the kind of situation that we're living in right now. It's scary. There are some people who willingly go out there thinking, for some reason, that they are immune to COVID-19. But most of us with brains know that we have to stay home. We're not gonna run into a theater. If you put it on Disney Plus, the chances of more people seeing it are huge. You're not going to make that much money if you put it in theaters. That's what I think.

Mon: Unless they’re going around actually sabotaging this film. Wow, I’m negative. I'm hoping for the best. I hope Disney sees the light if this situation continues. And listen, with the new regime taking over in the US, it's still going to take time. Because people need to be making a difference in their daily lives. Till a substantial amount of change happens globally and in the US, trying to insist on having a theater release seems premature.

Ron: And also, let's not forget, the Disney higher-ups may be getting the vaccine first, but people who actually go to theaters, it's going to be months before we get it. Yeah, I really don't understand. Maybe they're holding out hope, but I feel like they're going to have to change their decision eventually.

Mon: Yeah, I think a year of languishing in theater-hell will make them change their mind eventually.

Ron: Yeah

Mon: And also, maybe the anticipation is built up. It’s anyway been built up for a year. Then, once we get into the groove of the MCU once again with the TV shows, maybe they'll think, okay we've got enough eyes and subscribers, people will start coming and it’ll be worth putting it on the channel.

Ron: Well, hopefully, because I'm actually beginning to forget the Black Widow movie exists.

Mon: Yeah, they have to keep reminding us.

Ron: Seriously. They need to do something. Speaking of the movies, we’ve got confirmation that Captain Marvel 2 is going to be happening. And Nia DaCosta is going to be directing it, which is great. Also exciting, Ms Marvel from the TV show is going to be appearing in that, and so is a grown up Monica Rambeau, who we are going to be meeting in WandaVision. This pretty much tracks with the timeframe. Because Captain Marvel, the first one, took place in the 90s. Monica was still a young girl then. Presumably, Captain Marvel 2 is going to be set after Avengers: Endgame. So, Monica should be grown up by then.

Mon: Yeah, I'm excited to see what this film can be. We really liked the first film. It may have been a little bit safe storytelling-wise, it was a bit formulaic, but it's definitely different from the usual so we’re hardly going to complain. I feel like a brand new voice in Nia DaCosta? Can't wait to see what she can bring to the plate.

Ron: Yeah, absolutely.

Mon: And that's what I really liked about the announcements from Marvel. It's that we get to see diversity on the screen, but there's also diversity behind the scenes.

Ron: Absolutely. Like the Ms Marvel TV show is being directed, and the showrunners are all people of colour. So that's really exciting.

Mon: Yeah. And we even have Moon Knight, for example, has an Egyptian showrunner.

Ron: Yeah, no confirmation about who will be playing Moon Knight. There's a lot of talk about Oscar Isaac taking on the role but then Moon Knight is supposed to have Egyptian roots. Feige even mentioned that there's going to be a lot of Egyptian iconography in the show, so maybe they are holding out for an Egyptian actor. I really hope so, because there's no point having somebody who's not Egyptian in a TV show that is full of Egyptian aesthetics.

Mon: Let's be honest. Oscar Isaac does not make a good Egyptian, as we saw with X-Men: Apocalypse.

Ron: He tried, poor man.

Mon: That was such a terrible film! How do you take Oscar Isaac and apocalypse and make a disaster? But anyway, moving on. She-Hulk. Oh my god, what's happening with this show? First of all, we got confirmation that Tatiana Maslany was going to play She-Hulk. But then she rescinded? And now they’ve confirmed that she is She-Hulk.

Ron: There were so many rumours this year before Disney Investor Day, and they’ve all pretty much got confirmed at the event. Is Disney even trying to hide any of this stuff or what?

Mon: I'm just trying to figure out what is going on. Why are all these rumors reaching people, whereas Disney is still waiting to make the announcements?

Ron: I don't know. It was kind of weird. Like there are certain things which I was just like, huh, yeah this is not a surprise. That was probably the one aspect of Disney Investor Day that didn't work for me because we were already writing these pieces up.

Mon: Yeah, I mean, I think that when they were making these presentations, they probably didn't know that this was going to be the reaction because people had already seen the rumors, or they'd been confirmed. I don't know how long ago they actually put this stuff together.

Ron: But Disney needs to look into their sources! Who is leaking all this information?

Mon: So, She-Hulk is also going to have Tim Roth, returning as the Abomination.

Ron: What? Why?

Mon: No idea. Mark Ruffalo will be back as the Hulk. I really hope he's just Bruce Banner, not Hulk, or worse, Professor Hulk.

Ron: I didn't take to Professor Hulk either.

Mon: Yeah, I know some people really like the character and I appreciate that, but oh no, I don’t like him. So, I read recently that it's actually going to be a half hour, law comedy. I am so intrigued and I want to watch this show.

Ron: Oh really? That sounds fun.

Mon: Yeah. I mean, Tatiana Maslany’s so talented. She can do anything so I'm really intrigued to see what they can do with it.

Ron: Yeah, Feige did mention that, since it's going to be about lawyers, we should probably expect other Marvel characters to appear on the show. So of course, everybody's got excited thinking Daredevil is going to be coming back.

Mon: Oh, I was thinking Jessica Jones. She's not a lawyer, but she's a PI, and that’s kind of connected.

Ron: Listen, just bring my Defenders back somehow. I want my Defenders!

Mon: So, a really fun, and really good, exciting announcement was Ironheart! I’m so happy that this legacy character is getting her own show. And it’s going to be live-action, which is even better.

Ron: Yes.

Mon: Hopefully, it won't be all about, oh, I miss Tony, I miss Tony. Because, you know what, I love Spider-Man, and I love Peter Parker, but he is way too wrapped up in Tony. And I understand that when you're watching the movies, you're already very into it. But when you come away from it, then it's like, Peter needs his own characterization, which isn't attached to Tony.

Ron: He doesn't have a life outside of Tony. It's extremely frustrating.

Mon: Yeah.

Ron: So, what do you think about Armor Wars?

Mon: I am all for seeing Don Cheadle back as War Machine. That character is so cool. Don Cheadle is just so effortless as a superhero.

Ron: He's awesome.

Mon: This story is based on a comic run, and of course, that has more to do with Tony. Here, from the synopsis, it appears that this is one of Tony's worst nightmares, but War Machine has to deal with it. So, my assumption is that, obviously, somehow Tony’s tech, his armor, has got into the wrong hands. Who could it be, we don't know. I’m assuming Sam Rockwell is coming back.

Ron: Oh really?

Mon: That is my assumption. People really like that guy so he might come back.

Ron: Isn’t he in jail?

Mon: Endgame happened. Lots of things have changed!

Ron: Okay, that's a good point.

Mon: This is just me speculating. So, I just feel like it will be interesting because if it’s Tony’s nightmare and War Machine’s got to deal with it, then that changes the whole perspective altogether. So, I’m intrigued, I’m intrigued. Also, more War Machine is a good thing.

Ron: Yes.

Mon: Okay. What do you think about Secret Invasion.

Ron: Dude, I have no idea what to think about this.

Mon: Disney is really running with the chemistry between Talos and Fury. But you know, the premise is pretty interesting. Because if the Skrulls, who are shapeshifters, have taken over every layer of humanity, it's really fascinating to see the whole ‘who can you trust’ issue.

Ron: Yeah, that angle, definitely quite interesting. I'm actually quite surprised that Talos and Fury are getting their own run. I like Talos. I think he's cool. And Nick Fury, you know, we really haven't got to see as much of him as we would have expected. He was great in Captain Marvel.

Mon: Just so much fun to see him.

Ron: My only concern about Secret Invasion is I don't want them painting the Skrulls as bad guys.

Mon: Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with you. Because the whole point of Captain Marvel is that the film really turned on its head who we think the bad guys are. I'm really hoping that it's just a faction of Skrulls. Because you have bad guys in everything, right?

Ron: Yeah.

Mon: There's a faction of Skrulls who are sent on Earth and they just take it the wrong way.

Ron: Yeah, I'm hoping that it's something like that. Because the refugee storyline in Captain Marvel was really hard-hitting. I thought it was really lovely. I'm not sure how I feel about Secret Invasion. We have to see it.

Mon: Yeah, there's no other species, per se, in the main Marvel Universe that they can play with in this fashion. I hope that they’re still sensitive to the topic, that at the end of the day, the Skrulls who were saved by Mar-Vell are still refugees who require and deserve to get a peaceful life. But there's always some bad eggs. Fury and Talos are dealing with them.

Ron: Yeah, yeah. We also got some Guardians of the Galaxy news. There is going to be a Holiday Special before the third film comes out. I don't know how I feel about that.

Mon: Sometimes I feel like Marvel milks the wrong things.

Ron: Do we want more Guardians of the Galaxy?

Mon: I think that having a third part is bad enough. The second film was just underwhelming to me. I have not gone back and seen it.

Ron: You know what I would like to see? A movie about Gamora and Nebula. That's all I want to see. I don't care about the others, just those two. Oh, and throw Mantis in there! Yeah. Mantis, Gamora, and Nebula, all I want to see.

Mon: I hope Disney is listening.

Ron: We're also going to get an I Am Groot series.

Mon: This is definitely a reason to sell toys to kids and make a Seedling-Groot version which is cuter than baby Yoda, so we have more Christmas decorations.

Alright, so back to the films, because we forgot a few things, didn't we? So, Ant-Man and the Wasp is going to be called Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.

Ron: I think that sounds fun!

Mon: I love the name so much! Paul Rudd is back. Evangeline Lilly is back. She’s apologized for her pandemic snafu, so that's great.

Ron: Oh, thank goodness.

Mon: Yeah. Michael Douglas is back, and so is Michelle Pfeiffer. So excited. I love those four, they are so good in the films. Can’t wait to see them again. I am upset that they recast Cassie!

Ron: Why do we have now an older Cassie, than the older version that we already saw in Endgame?

Mon: I have no idea. The actress who played Cassie is also upset. She found out the same day that the Disney Investor Day announcement happened.

Ron: Oh, that's so mean.

Mon: That is mean! I don't like people who do that. At least let her know that she's not coming back and she's been replaced.

Ron: That's a bit disappointing.

Mon: They are going ahead with Black Panther 2. They've mentioned that they're not going to recast T’Challa, which people had anyway surmised. I'm very glad for that. Ryan Coogler is hard at work, we were told, rewriting the script. So, let's see what they can do. Eternals, there’s no new news about that, but we’re finally going to see it in theaters. “Theaters” in quotes.

Ron: Shang-Chi is also expected to be in theaters. Looks like Marvel is just going with that tactic. Let's see. These films, Black Widow, Shang-Chi, and Eternals, they are ready for release.

Mon: Yeah, Shang-Chi finished late in the Fall.

Ron: Yeah, so they're probably gonna finish off their production and everything and be ready to go.

Mon: They’ve got a really good cast over there. So, yeah, can't wait to see how the movie turns out.

Ron: Yes.

Mon: Thor 4: Love and Thunder, now has its villain. So Christian Bale is playing Gorr. Don't get excited. Gorr is a really weird-looking creature. I have no idea about this weird casting.

Ron: I just hope they let Christian Bale have fun and be funny. We need to see a funny Christian Bale. That's all I'm saying.

Mon: Is that something that exists?

Ron: It will when this movie comes out!

Mon: Amazing. All right. So, the big news which had fans actually going insane, is that Marvel is now going to make a Fantastic Four film.

Ron: Please just let them die.

Mon: Listen, Fantastic Four are the first family of Marvel. We’ve gotta hold out hope that this is going to be something spectacular. I don't know who they're gonna get to write this film, and who they’re going to get to direct this film. I'm really worried about the cast, but I want them to do something really, really good. Because the cartoon series was a lot of fun, but it was also a cartoon. The Chris Evans movies were campy fun, there were really very silly. It was supposed to be the comic book ethos and they captured that.

Less said about Fan4stic is better. How you can take such a spectacular cast of Michael B Jordan, Jamie Bell, Katie Mara, and Toby Kebbell, and make that film is still beyond me. I'm so glad that Michael B Jordan got a second chance as Erik Killmonger. I'm hoping the others also get a second chance.

But yeah, let's see what they can do. I think that Marvel is going to do something spectacular with Fantastic Four, which we've never seen before. I say this with the confidence of somebody who knows that that's not gonna happen but I can hope.

Ron: Man, I don't know. I think some properties are just cursed.

Mon: No! Don’t say that.

Ron: Fantastic Four seems like it is. It's a mess.

Mon: I feel like there is so much expectation that comes with Fantastic Four. I mean, just think about it. Just because you and I aren't that attached to Fantastic Four, doesn't mean that we don't understand how people who are feel about this. If Marvel had announced that they were making X-Men, I don't know how we would react. The weight of expectation and the amount of history that is attached to these characters, it's huge. How do you take all of that and filter it down into one film, or one franchise? And at least, Fantastic Four is only four characters and one villain, for the most part, Galactus is also there.

If they were the X-Men, oh my god, it’ll just blow your mind. They’re clever not to have announced X-Men. Let them get through this roster because it's an extensive roster, we've been talking about it for a while now. It's a huge roster! And they’re smart to leave something which could potentially be a huge golden goose for them. But yeah, Fantastic Four, I feel good about it. And I feel good about it because I'm not attached to them.

Ron: I'm totally on the fence about Fantastic Four. I do not know what to expect. The problem is not just what has come before with Fantastic Four in the live-action universe. It’s with the characters themselves. Reed Richards is a dick!

Mon: No, but that's true. But listen, can you make somebody who is like that be a teachable moment for the character, for people who are watching him?

Ron: So, where I'm coming from is that I am now at the point where I can't stand watching or reading something about a character who's unlikable. I think they get too much time in the sun.

Mon: Okay. No, that's a good point.

Ron: Like, I just watched Mank. And I was like, why are you asking me to spend two and a half hours with this man who sucks? I don't want to. And it's not fair that I'm being asked to do that. I want to hang out with people I like.

Mon: Yeah, that's true. Maybe they should turn the tables and make Invisible Woman the dick, and Reed is the poor brow-beaten spouse in the relationship.

Ron: He will find a way to make even that annoying!

Mon: Let's be positive here. I really have a good feeling about Fantastic Four coming from the MCU. I'm telling you.

Ron: I don't know where your positivity is coming from because I have none.

Mon: Well, Marvel has had an extra year of thinking about this. Because they didn't actually do like actual work during this year because of the pandemic. So, I'm thinking that's just brewing a lot of good ideas for them.

And on that positive note, we want to know which of these Star Wars, Marvel, and Disney Productions are you super excited about? Which ones do you really not want to be watching at all? What did you expect to actually be there which wasn't and you’re super-disappointed? Let us know. Send us a tweet, send us an email and happy watching!

Ron: You can find us on Twitter @Stereo_Geeks. Or send us an email stereogeekspodcast@gmail.com. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And see you next week!

Mon: The Stereo Geeks logo was created using Canva. The music for our podcast comes courtesy Audionautix.

[Continuum by Audionautix plays]

Transcription by Otter.ai, Mon, and Ron.

[heyyyharry]

My Girl Series: Chapter 2 - Homeward Bound

…in which childhood friends meet again, this time, at a funeral.

Series description: Y/N falls in love with the older boy next door who doesn’t feel the same, years later they meet again at a funeral.

AU: actor!harry, older!harry, younger!y/n; (4-year age gap)

Chapter 1 - Treehouse: Y/N falls in love with the older boy next door who doesn’t feel the same.

wattpad link

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Four years had gone by, and the small town called Holmes Chapel had partly faded from Harry's memories. He had his own life now, which was more than the life of any ordinary 22-year-old, and of course, he must make room in his mind for new, bigger, and better things.

Many years ago, had anybody told him he was gonna get a massive movie contract, and turn famous before graduating from university, he would've laughed and called them crazy. Now his face was everywhere on billboards, on televisions, on the internet. People followed him around and took photos of him. He had all the money to spend, got invited to exclusive parties, and won big awards with his name on them. So there was no reason for him to come back to his little house in Holmes Chapel.

His family still lived there, but he flew his mum out to stay in London for most of the time, and his sister now had her own life with a boyfriend. The Styles hadn't sold that house because it still had emotional value to them, but they were rarely there anymore. Harry couldn't even remember most details of his childhood bedroom, let alone the treehouse in his backyard, or the girl who came there every single day, waiting for him to come back.

He did come back. But it was for a different reason, one he had never expected.

A funeral.

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"Look at all of these paparazzi on the street."

Celine heaved a sigh as she peeked through the window curtains to take a look. The heavy silence in that living room was the opposite of the loud and intrusive crowd waiting in front of the house next door.

Eighteen-year-old Y/N was sitting on the bottom stair with her head in her hands, her eyes were red and swollen, while another girl was comforting her. The girl was Amala, Celine’s girlfriend. They had been dating since junior year, now both graduated from high school and were still together.

Even though Y/N wasn't the only special girl in Celine’s life anymore, she had never felt deserted, knowing her tiny best friend would always be by her side and she would also do the same. Now with Amala in the picture, the three of them were inseparable. Those two had been Y/N's rock since her mother's death, and she could never thank them enough for just being there for her.

"Why did he have to come back?" Y/N exhaled, fingers gripping her own hair. "I don't want all these people at my mother's funeral."

"Calm down, I'm sure they'll get tired and leave in no time," said Celine, who quickly exchanged looks with Amala, because they both knew those paps wouldn't leave until Harry did.

"Why couldn't he just stay gone?" Y/N mumbled, mostly to herself, and she really meant it. She wished he had never returned. She'd gone as far as avoiding all the news about him and she'd been doing so well in the last four years. But her mother's death seemed to be just the calm before the storm. With his unwanted return, he would bring a whole crowd of people with cameras to her mother's funeral.

"When is Blake gonna be here?" Asked Amala, but Celine shook her head fast to tell her girlfriend not to mention that name. It was too late since Y/N had already heard her.

"He's not coming," she replied, eyes glued to the floor. "We broke up."

The hurt was still etched in her voice when she talked about him. Even though she would never admit it, her two friends both knew she had really loved that boy.

Blake Roman was Y/N's first official boyfriend. He had treated her so well, and even though she'd lost her first kiss in the treehouse four years ago, Y/N had given all her other firsts to Blake. But two foolish teenagers fell in love at seventeen, what did they know? It wasn't until graduation and facing big decisions of futures and dreams that they realized it wasn't going to work. They weren't going to work.

Blake went to America to become a lawyer, but Y/N wasn't bitter or depressed because she also had plans of her own. Her mother had told her that everything happened for a reason, and that was what she chose to believe. Had they stayed together, a long distance relationship would tear them apart eventually. Take her parents as an example, they had lived under the same roof for that many years but they didn't make it still.

"Y/N..."

The girls turned their head to the kitchen doorway and found Y/N's father with hands in his pockets, dressed in a black suit and a tie. The last time he was that well-dressed was at his wedding, sadly now it was his wife's funeral. He told them it was time to go then grabbed his keys and walked out of the house without saying another word.

Once he had left, Celine asked Y/N how her father had been dealing with her mother's death, and to be honest Y/N didn't even know. She had never known the man well enough to give her best friend an answer, but there was one thing she knew for sure, it didn't hurt him as much as it did her.

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Y/N's mother funeral was held at a funeral home in the town central, and only those who were close to the family had been invited, so it was a very small gathering.

Though a part of Y/N didn't want Harry to show up and bring in chaos, during the ceremony her eyes still searched around the room for his face. She saw his mother Anne, and his sister Gemma, but she didn't see him. Maybe for some particular reasons, he'd changed his mind and decided not to go; or maybe he couldn't get past those paparazzi to get out of the house. But without his presence on her mother's sad day, Y/N felt awfully incomplete.

After the burial, all the guests headed back to her house for a wake. There was a small dinner, and the people at the table talked about what a lovely woman Y/N's mother had been. They told stories about her, saying she'd always been wise, and kind, and tolerant, which Y/N knew were all true. But as she stole a glance at her father, who was sitting at the end of the table, focusing on his own food rather than the stories about his late wife, she felt like none of it mattered to him, and that just broke her heart.

Thankfully, dinner was over soon, but the guests stayed for a few drinks while carrying boring conversations to keep the atmosphere indoors alive. It was getting late, a few had left and Y/N couldn't wait for the rest to follow so she could call it a day. The last thing she would expect at that moment was for a new guest to show up, but as soon as her eyes turned to the left corner of the living room by accident, she spotted a familiar face. It wasn't her imagination doing tricks on her like she'd thought at first, it was really him.

Y/N swore the moment their eyes met in the crowded living room, everything else besides them immediately faded away. The background noise was muted and the living room sank to utter silence, so silent that she could hear her blood flowing through her veins and her heart beating all out of rhythm. It almost felt like a scene in those cheesy romantic films she had watched too often.

He was there in person, dressed in a simple black suit but he looked so expensive compared to all the others. His hair was much longer than the last time she saw him, all tied up in a small bun at the back of his head. That new hairstyle almost turned him into a whole different person.

There was a strange kind of familiarity as well as ignorant in that look he was giving her. Then he pressed his lips into a smile, for a second neglecting what the white-bearded man was telling him. She didn't know what to do but smile back and instantly look away as she carried on the conversation with her relatives, acting as if she wasn't bothered at all by his presence. Deep down inside, however, the girl wasn't as calm as she was pretending to be.

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Y/N mumbled quick apologies as she grabbed Celine by her elbow and pulled her away from the unfinished conversation, to the back of the staircase.

"How did he get in here without anyone knowing?"

At first, Celine didn't know whom her friend was referring to. But a face like Harry Styles' couldn't just blend into any crowd, especially one as depressing as that. It literally took her less than a second to spot him in the far corner of the living room.

"He must've used the back door," she said, seemingly as shocked as Y/N had been. "Maybe he didn't want to cause a scene, maybe that was why he skipped the funeral."

"Maybe..." The taller girl let go of her friend's arm, keeping her stare fixed on Harry.

"Will you talk to him?" Celine asked.

"I don't know."

"What if he talks to you?"

"I...don't know," Y/N repeated the same three words, eyebrows furrowed at the boy next door.

His name was still Harry Styles, his smile still shone like the sun, and he was still the most beautiful person she had ever seen, but she didn't know him, not anymore. It had been four years since they last saw each other. She was obviously not the same fourteen-year-old girl who had begged him to be her first kiss; and he, now a famous actor, must be very different too. So instead of walking up to him and starting a conversation, Y/N chose to stay away, hoping that he would also do the same.

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As the last few guests were heading out and so were her two best friends, Y/N came to her backyard to be alone. It was a long day after all, she needed to recharge herself by spending some time with her own thoughts, and the only place that she could come to think, was the treehouse in her neighbor's backyard.

Unlike people, it never left her.

With her feet dangling in the air as she sat on the edge of her childhood fort, the girl let her thoughts wander with the summer breezes to faraway places, but mostly to the past, to the things she couldn't change, to when her mother was alive and Harry was her friend. Then she couldn't help but wonder if he was still talking to her dad in the kitchen. Was he thinking about her too? Probably not. But a tiny part of her secretly hoped that he was.

"Bambi."

The endearing sound of that nickname got Y/N's head turned in a split second. She hadn't heard it in so long. She hadn't heard that voice in so long, and her heart felt the same warm fuzzy feeling she used to feel whenever he called her that. She rushed to the other side of the treehouse, to the entrance, one hand on her heaving chest as she looked down.

There he was, standing in the middle of his backyard, eyes on her, and the scene was all so familiar yet so foreign. He was different, she was different, and their surroundings were also different.

His garden was no longer the magical place she had always fantasized about when she was a kid. Now that nobody was taking care of it, all the flowers had wilted, the grass had grown much higher, and the sprinklers didn't come on at 6AM anymore. Somehow she felt like it represented what was left between them, absolutely nothing.

He waved his hand to get her attention as if she couldn't see him, and so she did the same, not a single word was exchanged. There was a long pause when they just stood still and stared at each other like two strangers meeting for the first time, probably to take in the new appearance of the other person. She probably had changed more than he had, so she would kill to find out what he thought of her now that she wasn't a kid anymore.

It was Harry who said the first words.

"May I join you up there?"

She hesitated. Fourteen-year-old Y/N would never.

"Uhm...S-Sure," she said at last and watched him make his way towards the tree. Harry struggled to step on the rope ladder and somehow she found it quite funny. When he heard her laugh, he shot her a playful glare, and told her that she was distracting him from his climb.

"Oh God, I'm really getting old."

The man sighed in relief once he had made it to the treehouse in one piece as he took a bow, making the girl shake her head and giggle at him. Once again, they sat side by side with their bare feet dangling in the air like the night he had left. This time, however, she was staring blankly ahead and he was looking at her. He was second-guessing what she was going to say, but she remained in silence until he was once again the first to speak.

"Bambi," he said. "Are you okay?"

She turned to look at him, flashing a single smile. She didn't need to say anything else after that, since he already knew she wasn't okay. She took a deep breath, letting it all out as her eyes turned to focus on her fingers toying with the hem of her black dress.

"Bambi's mother died in the movie too, right?"

That one question shattered Harry's heart at once. He was so used to seeing her as a happy and positive little girl. Now she wasn't little anymore, and she wasn't happy either. He used to know everything about her because she had never kept a secret from him, now he had to try and read her mind because he knew there was more than she was willing to confess.

He waited for her to tell him about her plans after graduation, which university she'd got accepted in, fill in the blanks about all the things he'd missed in the last four years. However, she gave him nothing. Maybe she didn't even trust him anymore. He couldn't blame her though. He'd been gone for too long.

"The car accident happened right before my graduation. She didn't get to hear my speech." Y/N lifted one hand to wipe the tears running down her cheek though she didn't want to cry, at least not in front of him. But the girl had been holding back for too long now and that moment was her breaking point. "Had she been there...she would...she would've been so proud of me..."

Harry quickly wrapped his arms around the girl's shoulders and pulled her close to his chest. She let him hold her, drowning her in the unfamiliar scent of his expensive cologne, which made her feel as though she was in the arms of a complete stranger. But right now she needed that hug more than anything else.

"Your mother didn't have to hear your speech to be proud of you, Bambi. She'd always been proud of you," he mumbled into her hair, one hand stroking her back.

It took Y/N a moment to quiet down and pull away a bit to look at him. They were face to face again in four years, this time, in the kissing distance. She had never sat this close to him before, and he had never looked at her that way before.

The childhood best friends held each other's gaze as if trying to recollect each memory of their past, to form the complete picture of the many years they had left behind. There was a quiet moment, followed by awkward hesitation, as they both leaned in, eyes closed. Neither was thinking when their lips attached.

This time, they were really kissing.

She felt his fingers tangled in her hair as he deepened the kiss and she kissed him back with as much passion, like she had never been kissed before, like it was their first. For a second there, she wished it had been.

The sound of his ringtone broke them apart, and it was only then that they realized what they'd done. She expected silence from him, or at least something else, but instead what she received was, "I have to take this. I'm very sorry." 

Just like that, he stood up and hurried his way back to the rope ladder. The first time they kissed, she was the one to run away. This time, it was him.

He set his feet back on the ground and picked up that call as he hurried to his house, without a second look back. Y/N was still sitting there, not sure what had happened. It didn't even feel real, though she knew it was, because she could still taste his lips on hers. She didn't know who had called, and why it was so important that he couldn't stay and give her an explanation for that moment between them.

If that was revenge for that kiss she had stolen from him four years ago, when she was only fourteen, then it just wasn't fair.

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The next morning, Y/N came to Harry's house to talk to him, and once again, his mother said he had already gone back to London; but afterward, the kind woman gave Y/N his phone number and told her to give him a call.

Maybe Anne could see how much her son still meant to the girl, and that she needed his comfort now more than ever. Y/N wondered why Harry couldn't see that as well. Was it really because he was a boy? Or was he just denying everything he saw because he didn't want to believe it was real, that her feelings for him were real? There were too many questions needed answers, and Y/N couldn't be patient anymore.

That night she decided to call him and talk about that kiss. She wasn't gonna sit there and second guess his next moves like Rapunzel in the high tower, waiting by the window for her prince to come back on his white horse. Because this wasn't a fairytale with a happy ending, she was never a princess, even though in her eyes he'd always been the prince.

The girl started biting on her nails while her heart was beating in time with the beeps on the phone. It took a couple ones until someone finally picked up, and she didn't even hesitate.

"Hey, Harry, it's Y/N," she said. "Your mum gave me your number and—"

"Sorry? Who is this again?"

That wasn't Harry's voice. That was a woman. Y/N double-checked the number on the piece of paper Anne had given her, and as she was sure she had put in the correct one, her heart fell to the bottom of her chest.

As Y/N remained silent, the woman on the phone went on, "Harry's in the shower right now, is this urgent?"

"No..." Y/N faked a soft laugh. "I...uhm...Could you please tell Harry that...Y/N called and...please tell him to call me back when he's free?"

"Sure," said that woman, and it was a lie. Harry never got to find out about Y/N's call, but Y/N didn't know about that, so she waited. She waited for that entire week, and by the end of that week she'd made up her mind, this time, to give up on him for good.

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(two years later)

"Hey little girl, get up."

"No...One more!"

"Enough, time to go home," said the big fat bartender as he refused to sell the girl another pint. Normally he wouldn't care if his guests got so drunk they forgot their own names, but since that girl had come to the bar every night that week, and got wasted almost every single time, he felt like it was his responsibility to stop giving her what she thought she needed.

"I'm not a little girl" Y/N grumbled, lifting a finger as she narrowed her hooded eyes at him. "I'm turning twenty next month! You're a little girl!"

The man shook his head and took the empty glass in front of her away before she drunkenly smashed it like she had before.

"Do you even have a life, kid?" He asked.

"I do!" She shouted with her eyes closed, pointing a finger to the ceiling. "I'm a...uh...a college student...and a writer..."

The big man rolled his eyes when she said 'writer' but he hadn't got time to argue with a drunk 19-year-old that owning an emo online blog (he assumed) didn't make you a writer.

"Look, kid, this is London. There are plenty of other fun places for young people to hang, you shouldn't be spending this much time here, drinking your ass off."

"But I want some more!"

"Trust me you don't."

"I do! Now give me another..." She trailed off, then cracked a weird smile at him.

The man raised an eyebrow, waiting for her to finish that sentence, but she never did. Y/N dropped her head down on the counter and just lied there like a dead body. Of course, the bartender knew she didn't die, she was still breathing. But he couldn't just leave her there because the bar was closing soon. So he asked a waitress to search for her phone in one of her pockets and called one of her emergency numbers.

That same night, Harry received a call from a bar not so far from his home in London, telling him to pick up a girl named Y/N.

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When Y/N opened her eyes, she found herself in a room she had never seen before. At first, she thought she was dreaming, that in her dream she'd become rich and finally got a bedroom twice the size of her current flat. But everything seemed too real to be just a dream. She could actually feel the softness of the mattress she was lying on, and the pillow beneath her head was so comfortable that she didn't want to get up. But she must get up, because Y/N soon realized she wasn't dreaming and it was somebody else's bedroom.

Quickly, she kicked off the duvet, and sighed in relief to see that she was still wearing her clothes from the night before. She thought if she'd been kidnapped, then her kidnapper must be a decent man. But why would anyone want to kidnap a lonely and depressed university student, who could barely pay her own rent? If that person didn't want her or her money (which she didn't even have), what did they want?

The answer to her questions showed up at the bedroom door just as she sat up and threw her legs off the bed.

"Harry?"

Y/N blinked fast because she couldn't believe it was him. But it was, unfortunately. He was standing there, staring back at her with the same dimpled smile on his face. It'd been two years so she'd expected him to look different, yet she was still surprised. His hair was shorter and one could hardly imagine he used to have hair so long that he could put it in a man bun. Overall he still looked good, the opposite of what a mess she was at that moment.

Harry didn't wait for her to ask, he went ahead and explained the situation last night, saying he had to drive to a bar at 1:30 AM just to pick her up, and bring her to his house because she was too drunk to remember her own address. She was glad he didn't ask her why he was in her emergency contact list, because she didn't even know what had been on her mind when she put his number there. Maybe in case something bad ever happened to her, she wanted him to know as well. She just had never expected it to be like this.

"How bad was I?" She asked.

"You threw up all over my shoes." He slightly chuckled.

"I'll get you another pair, I promise!"

"It's alright. You don't have to."

"They're very expensive, aren't they?" She scoffed, and he nodded his head to confirm it was true.

"They're Gucci," Harry emphasized the brand name with a funny grimace to make her laugh, but all that he received from the girl sitting on his bed was a nervous frown. "So..." He trailed off, taking a deep breath. "Mind telling me why you drank to the point you passed out last night?"

"I don't have to tell you anything."

"You don't." He agreed. "But I'd appreciate it if you do."

The girl turned her eyes away from him and let the silence take over once again. Harry prayed that she would say something, anything. She could just start yelling at him if she wanted to, even though he knew she never would.

"Thank you for everything. But I think I should go now," Y/N finally said and rose up from the bed. But the older man didn't move out of the way for her to walk out.

"You expect me to let you go after what happened last night?" He asked, giving her a stern look as he shoved both hands into his pants pockets.

"What?" She scoffed. "So you're gonna keep me here?"

"If I must. Yes."

"Don't try to be my dad, one is enough already," said the girl as she tried to get past him, but he quickly placed both arms on the doorframe to block her path, forcing her to finally look him in the eyes.

"Bambi, talk to me," he pleaded, eyebrows knitted together, looking more serious this time.

Y/N took a step away from the older man with her head held high and her arms crossed as she told him they didn't have anything to talk about. "If you really wanted to talk, you would've done it two years ago."

Just like that, she pushed him aside to head out, but Harry was quick to grab her elbow and stop her before she left.

"I owe you an apology, I—"

To his surprise, Y/N cut him off by yanking her arm away from his grip. Then she looked up, eyes to eyes with him this time. He knew that look so well, she used to give the same one to the bigger kids who had always teased her on playground, but that was actually the first time she had ever looked at him that way.

"We don't owe each other anything. Goodbye, Harry," she said, and he knew better than to try and convince her to stay. Once Y/N had made up her mind, she wouldn't change it for anyone, not even her mother, and certainly not him.

So he had no choice but to let the girl go even though it was painful to watch her walk away like that, it hurt him even more now that he began to think about her cold look from earlier. Maybe that was the moment Harry realized the part of him in her was barely there anymore.

.

.

.

Not until Y/N had walked a pretty far distance from Harry's house did she finally stop and burst into tears. She had never got so emotional that she ended up crying in public before, but now the girl was too upset to care who might be judging her. It wasn't only Harry, it was the entire series of unfortunate events, a circle, all leading back to him.

When she saw his face again, it hurt her so much because she wanted to tell him about everything, why she had been at that bar, why she had been drinking. Y/N wanted to hear him say everything was gonna be okay, and that he would be there for her through it all. But the last time he tried to comfort her, he left a bigger hole in her heart, so maybe this time she should deal with the problem on her own.

The girl told herself to stop crying, and all of a sudden, she heard the camera sound as someone had taken a photo. Y/N looked up and saw a tall man holding his camera, she assumed he was a paparazzi and had seen her walking out of Harry Styles' house.

"Did I give you permission to take pictures of me?"

Her loud voice caught the stranger by surprise, causing him to instantly lower the camera as he apologized, and swore he was just a street photographer. He probably thought that she saw him as a creep, but he didn't seem like one at all. It wasn't just the fact that he had a pretty face, but also because the look in his eyes was genuine.

Y/N's first impression of the man was that he was tall, very tall. She guessed he was the same height as Harry, but his thin build created an illusion that he was at least two inches taller. She didn't consider herself as petite, still, she felt so small standing next to this stranger.

The man, probably just a few years older than her, had smooth, dry skin with little freckles sprinkled here and there across his nose and his cheekbones. His blonde hair looked even more golden in the sunlight. It was short and unruly, yet perfectly framed his face.

Now that Y/N had made eye-contact with him, she couldn't look away anymore. Those were the bluest eyes she had ever seen. The shade resembled a cloudless sky in the spring, full on Prince Charming kind of blue. The more she looked the more prominent they became.

Maybe it was just an illusion, but Y/N swore she could see a bit of green in them.

"This is for a small project I'm working on. I'm taking photos of random scenes and people I come across," the stranger explained as she approached him, and didn't hesitate to show her the proofs on his camera. "Here's an old man feeding the birds, a cute puppy, uhm....a lady who sells flowers on the sidewalk, a kid with his new soccer ball...and a pretty girl crying on the street."

Y/N glared at the young man for what he'd just said, but his cheeky smirk remained as he shut down the camera and introduced himself. He told her his name was Isaac, and he was a professional photographer. Since he'd already shown her those photos he'd taken that day, she could confirm that he wasn't just boasting.

"I'm sorry if I offended you, Miss..."

"My name's Y/N."

"Alright, Y/N, I'm really sorry." Isaac paused to bite his lip, waiting for the girl to speak, and when he was sure she wasn't gonna say anything else, he went on, "I could just delete the photo."

"It's okay, keep it," she said, sighing. "If you wanted to take pictures of me, all you had to do was ask nicely."

"Really?"

"Sure. Why not?"

"Okay then, Y/N." His emphasis on her name made the girl smile and roll her eyes. "May I take a few more photos of you?"

Y/N actually thought twice about that offer. She had just met the guy, for all she knew he could still be a psychopath, a very charming one if that was the case. But since she had nothing else to do on that Sunday morning, and needed a distraction from reality, getting to know a good-looking stranger didn't sound like a bad idea. If he turned out to be a real psychopath, then maybe she was just very unlucky.

"Okay." She nodded, turning her face to the right. "But only on my good side, got it?"

"Got it," Isaac said with a grin, and quickly snapped a shot of the smiling girl.

[paralianprince]

1, 6, 10, 17, 20, 25, 31, 38

oh holy shit 

1. What does your writing process look like? 

answered here!  but tl;dr it is pathetic. 

6. What kind of research do you put into your writing?

i’m ... a little bit obsessive actually!  though i think in this rpc that’s actually quite common.  ... as obsessive as one can be about researching a micronation of all things, anyway! 

i ordered a bunch of old radio essex interviews / broadcast excerpts on CDs (a few small pieces of which i’ve actually posted!! 1 2 3 4 5), i have prince michael’s book, there’s this really great look into internet crypto in the form of a gigantic pdf titled “sealand, havenco, and the rule of law” in case anybody’s into That, i post so many photos of the place that i once got an anon asking if i LIVE THERE, i’ve found transcripts of certain legal proposals / communications regarding sealand, i’ve dug pretty deep into learning about fort madness and pirate radio... that sort of thing!  i do have a history page where i paraphrased basically all of it, but i havent got off my ass to update it since 2014 and i think i have the occasional detail wrong in there, like specific dates and such. 

or, literally, ask me anything about sealand, i dare everybody 

10. What’s the most challenging thing about writing replies for you?

starting!!  even if i know exactly what i intend to do in my reply, figuring out exactly how to start takes up most of my time.  i usually cheat this by starting off with a line of dialogue, if possible 

17. Does writing energize or exhaust you?

answered here, but tl;dr unfortunately it tires me out!  and that’s a big part of why i’m Pretty Slow and don’t usually involve myself in time-sensitive threads or Dash Awareness type interactions.  i get tired really fast! 

20. What inspires you to write?

aside from an overpowering love for my son and shining star who i will love forever and ever for my whole life until death and well after, i really love seeing how my partners react to my replies, and i like getting reactions out of them! 

among other things of course, but that’s what’s coming to mind currently. 

25. Do you put parts of yourself into your writing or muse? Can you give an example?

to an outrageous degree, yes!  i don’t think any of my characters are remotely close to self-inserts, but i really can’t write a character who i don’t at least 40% relate to - though, i think this is true for a lot of people? 

mk helped me with the examples so ... TALKS A LOT, wants to be entertaining, apparently the way i describe his posture or gestures are things i also do (which i didnt realize!), and the way he reacts to being angry or upset, being physically knocked to the ground with the force of how hard he’s laughing, etc.  that kind of thing! 

31. How different is your muse now compared to when you first wrote them? 

i really didn’t have a clue what i was doing when i first started - of course - but i did know that i wanted him to a bit more combative than he was usually portrayed, because i just thought it felt more fitting, and even when i first started i knew i wanted to distance myself from the sort of... Stock Annoying Child Character Personality with all the Child Character Tropes tacked on for no reason other than he was, for a time, the only young character and only micronation in the cast, so all Child Tropes got attributed to him, and even after other micros got introduced, the effect of this still persists - that almost everybody gives sealand before ever considering what his personality would actually be like. 

so i thought if i made him a bit more disagreeable, it might surprise people into paying attention to how i’m writing him, and not just go off of fandom assumptions.  (this was 2012, so that kind of thing happened!)

this is a whole other rant that i’m apparently just chomping at the bit to go off on, but i need to actually finish this post omg 

anyway, he went thru a time where he was sort of being attacked and derided on almost all sides even by his friends, fighting with people constantly and not being listened to in any capacity about it, and over time it wore him down and it resulted in him being VERY defensive, stern, panicky, and irritable.  he’s much better now! 

38. Do you have a wishlist? Can you share what’s on it?

you know ... this is weird, but, i actually can’t think of anything!  lmao sorry !! 

[makistar2018]

Taylor Swift on "Lover" and haters

John D'Amelio August 25, 2019

You might say Taylor Swift's happy place is at the piano in her Nashville home. "There have been so many songs that were written at this piano," she said.

"And it's often the middle of the night?" asked correspondent Tracy Smith.

"It's usually in the middle of the night," she replied. "Or if I'm trying to get to sleep and I can't and then I get an idea. And I'm, like, 'Well, I'm not tired anyway!' And then kind of wander over here."

Taylor Swift at her piano, with correspondent Tracy Smith. 

It's kind of a rare sight, not just because "Sunday Morning" was there ("I haven't serenaded someone in a while, hope you know that!"), but because, for the moment, Taylor Swift was actually sitting still.

I promise that you'll never find another like Me-e-e, Ooh ooh ooh ooh I'm the only one of me Baby, that's the fun of me – "Me!" by Taylor Swift, Joel Little and Brendon Urie

And there never really has been another like Taylor Swift. After only 13 years in the business, she's become a musical force of nature, with an armload of #1 hits, more Grammy Awards than The Rolling Stones, and (according to Forbes) the distinction of being the highest-paid celebrity on the planet.

By any measure, she's an amazing young woman. But there were times, she says, that being young, and a woman, worked against her.

"You're always gonna have people going, 'Did she write all her own songs?'" she said. "Talking about your personal life, talking about your dating life.

"There's a different vocabulary for men and women in the music industry, right?"

"Gimme an example," asked correspondent Tracy Smith.

"Okay. A man does something, it's 'strategic'; a woman does the same thing, it's 'calculated.' A man is allowed to 'react'; a woman can only 'over-react.'"

And it seems her usual reaction is to get to work. Swift writes or co-writes all of her songs. And what's more, her music videos are all her vision, from the pastel wonderland in "Me!":

…to the giant dollhouse in her latest video, "Lover." 

That's also the title of her critically-acclaimed new studio album, her seventh. She wrote "Lover" on her piano at home, and polished it up in the studio. And once she recorded the music, Swift (accompanied by and her cats) went to Hollywood to make the music video, and she invited Smith along to watch.

There's a love story here, and like a lot of Swift's work, it's an echo of her real life.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Swift discovered her love for music as a toddler. She set her sights on a career in country music, and eventually her parents and younger brother moved to Nashville to help her do it.

"My brother's a real bro for doing that," Swift said.

"Yeah, they all upended their lives," Smith said.

"For sure."

"It worked out well!"

"Yeah, I buy 'em lots of presents," she laughed.

The rest reads like a fantasy: Swift became a country music phenomenon, and, in the last few years, a pop icon. But the superstar is, by her own admission, as emotionally fragile as any other 20-something, "I'm still someone who is the first to apologize when I'm wrong," she said. "But I think I'm better at standing up for myself when I've been wronged. So, that's something that I think also comes with growing up."

Which brings us to Scooter Braun. Earlier this summer, Braun, a talent agent with whom Swift says she has a contentious relationship, acquired the rights to her previous recordings – her masters – when his company bought Scott Borchetta's Big Machine Label Group for a reported $300 million. Borchetta, who worked with Swift for years, says she and those close to her (including her dad, who was an investor), knew about the deal in advance, and that Swift had previously been offered the chance to buy her own masters.  

She remembers it differently, and told Smith she didn't see it coming: "I found out when it was online, like, when it hit the news."

"Nobody in your inner circle knew?" Smith asked.,

"Nobody knew."

"And you didn't smell it?"

"No. I knew he would sell my music; I knew he would do that. I couldn't believe who he sold it to, because we've had endless conversations about Scooter Braun. And he has 300 million reasons to conveniently forget those conversations."

With the sale of the masters to her first six albums, there has been speculation that Swift might re-record her back catalog, in order to control the recordings of her songs.

Smith asked, "Might you do that?"

"Oh, yeah," Swift replied.

"That's a plan?"

"Yeah, absolutely!"

Scooter Braun may not agree with her side of the story, but he did reach out to Swift in a tweet last week, calling her new album "brilliant."

It's clear that Swift wants to control her music:  When it's time to release one of her new songs, she does it personally, talking to her fans live on Instagram. This personal connection has earned her a loyal following. But her openness comes at price: She's followed just about everywhere she goes these days, by people who are crazy about her – or just plain crazy.

Smith asked, "Where is home for you now?"

"It's a very good question," she said. "I try not to ever really say where I am the most, because since all my addresses are on the internet, people tend to show up uninvited. Like, you know, dudes that think we have an imaginary marriage."

"And you mentioned that you keep wound dressing with you?"

"Yeah. I've had a lot of stalkers show up to the house, armed. So, we have to think that way."

And she's come under attack in other ways: You need only glance at the tabloids to see some very well-publicized feuds, and she often hits back at her haters through her music. For instance, in "You Need to Calm Down," she calls out anti-gay protesters and online trolls:

You are somebody that we don't know But you're comin' at my friends like a missile Why are you mad? When you could be GLAAD? Sunshine on the street at the parade But you would rather be in the dark ages …

Control your urges to scream about all the people you hate 'Cause shade never made anybody less gay – "You Need to Calm Down" by Taylor Swift and Joel Little

Smith asked, "I'm curious, because I feel like almost every album, you have a song where you address the haters, at least one song. Sometimes more than one song."

"I probably do have that habit. I imagine that I might have that habit, yeah."

"Why is that? Why sing to the haters?"

"Well, when they stop coming for me, I will stop singing to them," Swift replied. "You know, people go on and on about, like, you have to forgive and forget to move past something. No, you don't. You don't have to forgive and you don't have to forget to move on. You can move on without any of those things happening. You just become indifferent, and then you move on."

"Do you believe in forgiveness?"

"Yes, absolutely, like, for people that are important in your life who have added, you know, who have enriched your life and made it better, and also there has been some struggle and some bad stuff, too. But I think that, you know, if something's toxic and it's only ever really been that, what are you gonna do?"

"Just move on?"

"Just move on. It's fine."

Taylor Swift's music is always personal, sometimes intensely so. "There's one song on the album called 'Soon You'll Get Better' that it's, I can't even really hear. I can't even listen to it."

She won't talk specifically about her inspiration, but it comes at a time when her mother Andrea, who was battling cancer, suffered a relapse.

Swift said, "It's really interesting because I don't think I have written a song quite like that before. And it's just sort of, like, it's just a tough one."

"I can imagine. But I can also tell you, having listened to it, that it's universal."

"It's just not something that we deal with until we have to, until we see it, until we experience it, until someone close to us is going through something like that. And so, writing about it was really emotional. And I'm just gonna stop talking about it now."

She's more comfortable plunging into her work. On the Hollywood set, a large glass tank will become a symbolic fish bowl in the "Lover" music video.

Taylor Swift filming the fish bowl sequence from her music video "Lover."  CBS NEWS

"I very oftentimes remark that my life is like a fish bowl, and that, like, if I were to, like, fall in love, you know, somebody's choosing to be in that fish bowl with me. To jump into the fish bowl with me and live in that world just with me – it's not as depressing as it sounds, I promise! It's just symbolic!"

Talk about fish bowls: she's been dating British actor Joe Alwyn for three years. Seems he's up for a swim.

At the moment, Swift is, well, fully immersed in today. Beyond that, she says she doesn't know … and doesn't really want to.

Smith asked her, "Do you think about, you know, 'What am I gonna do in 20, 30 years?'"

"No, 'cause that puts me into what I call a panic spiral," Swift replied. "Like, I cannot do that. I've never been able to do that."

Why? "It just freaks me out. When I zoom out too far, I freak out. Do I know where I'm gonna be or even wanna be in 20 years? Absolutely not. Like, not taking a single day for granted."

"So, how far ahead do you look?"

"Six months. Just 'cause I have to plan shows and stuff. But I don't know what I'll do after this album. And I think that's great. I tell myself, like, it's actually really ungrateful to just assume that you have 20 years. Like, be stoked that you have today."

CBS News

[radfem-reviews]

Review #1: Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH)

With Isabelle as my avatar, this only felt appropriate as my first review! (Please note that I am speaking only to the content of the game itself, not the fanbase, fan works, or other unofficial things.)

System: Nintendo Switch

Summary: Play as one of the first residents moving to a deserted island. There, you can engage in activities such as making friends; catching bugs, fish, and sea creatures; filling out your museum; creating clothing, flags, and town tunes; decorating your house; and gardening.

Overall: ACNH presents somewhat of a utopia for many of us: freedom and safety. Beyond that, it’s cute and the islanders have many funny lines. There are also many things for you to collect, but there’s nothing forcing you to engage in parts of gameplay that don’t interest you once you’ve done enough to unlock everything. Gendered personality types and a lack of variety in female NPCs remain, but allowing your character to be as GNC as you’d like is a nice step toward removing gender roles.

---

Tests (see terms list for explanation): Anti-Freeze: Pass. No characters are injured or killed, barring the player character hitting them with a net or something. Bechdel: Pass, to the small extent NPCs talk to one another. Mako Mori: N/A as there are no narrative arcs. Sexy Lamp: Pass, although there’s no real plot.

Please choose your style.

Let’s start with a big talking point in certain circles: “Please choose your style.” In the original -- and most likely every single version of the game except English -- this was a choice between playing as a boy or a girl. They changed it in English due to threats and harassment from TRAs. 

[the choice as it appears in English: “Please choose your style. You can change this later.”]

[the choice as it appears in Japanese: “Please choose one! *You can change this later.   boy / girl”]

The odd thing about the fuss around this is that it actually functionally does not matter whatsoever. I don’t think I’ve seen it come up even once in dialogue. That said, I’m not sure if other languages’ versions have characters refer to your character’s sex. On the bright side, it does mean that male and female player characters would be talked to and about in the same way. On the other hand, there was never a problem of animals treating you differently based on your sex in previous games anyway that I ever saw, so to see it that way is fixing a problem that didn’t exist in the first place.

I’ve noticed that the animals will use “they” to refer to someone they’re talking about. My guess is actually that this is an ease of programming thing rather than a woke thing. Because Japanese uses personal pronouns quite infrequently, and some of the lines are random ‘fill in the blank with a random islander name’ types of statements, sometimes previous English releases ran into a problem where the translators had no way to know whether the character would be referring to a man or a woman, and iirc, seemed to go with male by default... Ironically, using “they” is incorrect 100% of the time, though.

Self-Expression

Unlike previous games in the series, your character’s facial features and beginning hairstyle options are not determined by your character’s sex. It’s a nice change of pace that your character can be as GNC as you’d like from the beginning, although your starting outfit may be somewhat gendered. You also can freely change between hairstyles and facial features whenever you want once you’ve acquired a mirror, so you aren’t locked into one type of self-expression.

Also, any player character can wear any outfit without commentary. In New Leaf (the previous main-series game), you could wear anything as well, but some clothing options were gendered. For example, Labelle (the porcupine who sold accessories) might say things along the lines of, “That’s made for women, [player name], so it’ll look good on you!” or “That’s usually made for men, but I bet you can pull it off, [player name]!” In New Horizons, these lines are no longer present, at least that I’ve seen in the English version.

In terms of self-expression, I see these as strengths. There’s nothing in the game that encourages or discourages “feminine” or “masculine” expression for anybody.

Gendered Personalities

While gender roles do not apply to the player character, they can be seen in the NPCs.

One thing I will say in the series’ defense is that in the Japanese versions of the game, every personality type uses a different personal pronoun. In Japanese, personal pronouns are almost all quite gendered and, in fiction, tell you a lot about the character’s personality. It would actually feel a bit formal and odd to have all the characters use ‘watashi’ (a less gendered personal pronoun, but for men I think it’s a bit formal). Each personality type has a different pitch to their voice, with higher pitches for female personalities and lower pitches for male personalities, too. None of these are insurmountable barriers if they committed to breaking free of these stereotypes, but they are relevant factors.

The personality types are as follows: Normal (F): Friendly and kind characters who want to help you out. Peppy (F): Cheerful, energetic characters. They may come across a bit “ditzy.” They dream of being idols (actresses/singers in English). Snooty (F): Haughty, vain characters who value fashion and beauty. They can be standoffish at first, but are loyal friends once you’ve gotten close to them. Big Sis (F): Similar to normal types, but more mature. Jock (M): Athletic characters who are obsessed with sports and muscles. They can often come across as lacking in intelligence and one-dimensional. Cranky (M): Rude, standoffish characters, though they can be protective and kind once you’ve befriended them. Lazy (M): Most likely self-explanatory. Lazy characters want to lounge about and not work too hard, mentally or physically. Smug (M): Conceited, ostensibly "charming” characters.

Overall, the female personalities are kinder and more intelligent. However, even this “positive stereotyping” is still putting us in a box, and these “personalities” are indeed very much stereotypes.

The situation with special characters (shopkeepers and such) aren’t much better. There are a variety of male special characters with a variety of different traits: intelligent with good business sense, sneaky, timid, friendly, daydreamer, cheerful, artistic... Meanwhile, female special characters are basically sweet, shy, and/or fashionable. The only exceptions that come to mind are Saharah (who was a man in the Japanese version, but changed to a woman back in the original GameCube game due to long eyelashes, I can only assume) and Luna (who has so few lines it’s hard to even describe her personality).

On the bright side, ACNH did get rid of the gendered speech bubbles. It used to be that male villagers’ names would have a blue background and female villagers’ would be pink, save for special characters for whom it would be green. Now in ACNH, the color seems to be determined by the character’s aesthetic, which is a nice change.

Little to No Sexualization

Unlike many forms of media, ACNH is pretty free of sexualization as far as official content goes. (Obviously the internet is another story entirely, but that’s not Nintendo’s fault.) Only one character has any form of secondary sex characteristics (Luna has breasts), and while I question the need to give a tapir breasts, her outfit is modest, there are no “jiggle physics,” and there are no sexualizing camera angles or dialogue.

I’ve heard that the smug characters flirt with the player character. I don’t like them so I can’t say with confidence whether this remains true in ACNH, but as far as I saw in New Leaf, all they said in that regard would be like “you’re looking as cool as a cucumber.” It was enough to weird me out, but still, it’s obviously quite tame.

I haven’t seen any official* clothes that are sexualizing, and there are many clothing options that aren’t heavily gendered. (*I’m sure someone somewhere has designed clothes that are sexualized, nude, whatever, using the clothing design feature. I don’t think this is technically allowed by Nintendo, so if you encounter this you are able to report it however.)

[ucullix]

Isfp & why i love the 16 types .

Entj: because you get me you understand me very very verrryyy well you toughen me up when I’m at my weakest You are my soulmate.

Enfj : because you are too good because i love your acceptance for people and doing lil things for them but sometimes I feel like you should speak your opinions don’t let people use you . And sure all the conversations are never boring with you guys i love your fashion too 3rd Se .

Esfj : because you like enfjs take care of everybody else’s needs . Because you make me feel safe . I love how you care about everyone but sometimes you need to let others care for you . You can’t be superman supergirl to everyone let others care for you please.

Estj : even if i hate you sometimes because you don’t have strong values or let’s say you are not aware about who you are or you might hurt others without realizing with your words but you just want to help everyone and yourself. You are practical i get it . But sometimes like entj it okay to feel it is not a weakness. I can’t deny the fact that I always trusted you and yeah sometimes it’s ok to brake the rules specially when you know that they are bad really rly rly bad .

Istj : you are always there. You are super loyal you are my robin when I’m Batman and i like that feeling. and yeah action speaks louder than voice.

Isfj : you are lovley you are like esfjs a Mom friend but i like the fact you are introverts it helps a lot i get exhausted from all those social events you know ? . I feel comfortable being me with you .but but but a lil but here you guys need to speak up your friends can’t step over you always pls . I love your kindness but don’t let others take everything from you and yeah you are perfect just the way you are . You don’t have to prove anything be happy with what you have now . Leave tomorrow for tomorrow.

Entp : i don’t know any in real life but i love the ones on the internet . i like your memes . And it’s okay not to be loved by everyone specially when they give you fake love ;) and yeah your mind is itself an adventure. You have sexy brain . And funny really funny jokes

Enfp : youu guyyyss my heart melts just by thinking of you when i see you I just want to hug you all day you are soooooooooooooooooooo lovely so accepting i can see myself in you sometimes I don’t why but i do . You are the one who make the unreal real not me . You make me believe in magic. Sometimes I just want to give you all the love I have in my heart & i love your music taste you just need to believe in yourself that’s all . You made me a good person from day 1

Intp : I respect you even when google says you are my ego. Yeah sometimes I want to be like you . You are smart really brilliant. I’ll just say this you have sexy brain. I love youu but please don’t criticize me I get hurt easily you know . When you trust someone you really do trust them i get you when you get to the low Fe side it’s same when i get to my low Te . I love you ❤️

Infp : art , poetry, quotes , music. I like talking with you about those topics you get me we are kindred spirits. We may act differently but we understand each other so well. Be strong don’t try to explain everything just love yourself if someone truly loves you they will explain themselves because you know you will do that if it was you in that situation. And yeah you always told me that our thoughts are is our true enemy. Just think of that.

Estp : you guys just need true love. When you have strong morals you are so like I just love you . Know this too when you feel sad it’s okay don’t hide it or think about others or try to find a solution pls 3rd Fe don’t fake it like entps if someone loves you truly they will accept you for being you . Just be honest and magic will happens trust me .

Istp: you are my twin but that twin who is born a lil early than me ;-; you fix everything even when you do it for yourself you end up fixing everyone else without realizing. I get the vibe of big brother i like having adventures with you . You too know that actions speak louder. So next time when you bring me cup of coffee don’t think that I don’t know i know you love me you don’t have to say anything ;) . We both don’t like to be controlled and sometimes we wish the world just get that. We will do what we want to do the time we want to .

Esfp : you are my twin you are my mirror when I talk with you i get this feeling like I’m in a beach and the sun is warming my body and the wind slowly hitting my face and building sand castle like there’s no tomorrow . Just seeing your bright smile makes my day really. You are my coffee ☕️. You are my power ! You light me up

Isfp: yeah for sure I’m gonna talk about us

- love yourself

-don’t try to fit in

- your key word that can change your whole life is *YOLO* .

- speak up when you feel something doesn’t go with your morals. Don’t run don’t hide . I’m saying this from experience.

-don’t try to fix or control things because you are truly bad at it :P

- you have lovely tuned voice that can make people close to you calm and relaxed .

-don’t lie to yourself that you are not enough you are . Really.

- your sensitive nature is what acutely makes you you don’t hate it . It what makes you good person.

Intj: i dont hate or love you i just see you as you like istj you are loyal and we are opposites i like emojis you don’t but i like having conversations with you . For example talking about how blood connected to our personalities . You advise me about how to keep my art clean but I don’t listen and then complain sorry “-“ i like talking with you i like playing ps4 with you . But please don’t try to force me into anything because if I want to I’ll do it myself I know you care I really do and I appreciate your honesty if I’m a taurus you are my scorpio i need you you complete me . I guess from writing all this it means i love you .

Infj : i don’t know any really but Carl Jung is infj ? Mahatma Gandhi too I think ? I love hearing your stories. It makes me believe there’s good people in the world. If you have opinion say it . You are not bad person . I like listening to you . And I don’t regret any second listening to you because you changed my whole world and I don’t know what to do other than to say “ thank you” .

I hope I didn’t offend I just wanted to do something nice for anybody having a bad day i want you guys to be happy just the way you are you don’t have to fit in or change your type.