#michigan is hers and hers and hers and hers

[glopforshort-deactivated202809]

and in addition to *this* relationship, even though it didn't singlehandedly cost her the election, it did plausibly singlehandedly cost her michigan, where she lost by a number of votes less than Uncommitted got in the primary, and Trump won a large majority of the Arab vote

i think we should be honest & realistic & acknowledge that 'palestine sunk harris' is pure cope. i understand that it is comforting to imagine that passionate support for genocide is unpopular with the usamerican electorate but the actual facts don't beat that out. what sunk harris was a shit campaign run by the same morons who tried to keep biden in as the candidate

[brainddeadd]

quinn having the sweetest relationship ever and he finally gets to have her meet his family during summer and they all can tell he’s so in love and have never seen him this way and she gets along so well with him family especially luke and jack he’s just so soft and happy

Summer Bliss

Quinn Hughes had always been reserved about his personal life, keeping his relationships private and close to his chest. But when he met you, something shifted. You weren't just anyone—you were the one who made him light up in a way his family had never seen before.

Now, as summer rolled around, Quinn finally decided it was time for you to meet the people he cherished most: his family. You were nervous, of course, but Quinn held your hand the whole way to Michigan, reassuring you with soft smiles and gentle squeezes.

The Hughes' lake house was warm and inviting, buzzing with Jack's easy laughter and Luke's playful teasing. The moment you walked in, Ellen greeted you like an old friend, Jim offered a kind smile, and Jack and Luke immediately started asking you all kinds of questions—especially about how on earth you managed to deal with Quinn's quiet intensity.

Quinn stood back for a moment, watching you laugh with his brothers, seeing how effortlessly you fit into his world. Luke was already trying to teach you some hockey moves in the backyard, and Jack had you crying with laughter over some ridiculous childhood stories about Quinn.

"She's perfect for him," Ellen whispered to Jim, her eyes soft as she watched her son hover near you, his gaze full of pure adoration.

Later that night, as the family sat around a bonfire by the lake, Quinn pulled you closer under the blanket you shared. Jack and Luke kept joking about how Quinn was never this soft, how he'd never been this in love.

"Shut up," Quinn muttered, his cheeks slightly pink, but his arm around you tightened.

When the laughter died down, and the stars came out, Quinn leaned over and whispered, "Thank you for being here. For being you."

You kissed his cheek softly, and he smiled—a rare, genuine, carefree smile that his family hadn't seen in years. He was completely, utterly happy, and it was obvious to everyone that it was because of you.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The drop in support for Harris among Arab Americans compared to 2020 was significantly higher in both scale and depth than her underperformance more broadly. For example, Biden received 82 percent of the vote in the eastern section of Dearborn alongside an overwhelming 88 percent in the southernmost parts of the city. These are overwhelmingly Arab areas, and southern Dearborn is also majority-Muslim. In 2024, Harris received only 23 percent and 13 percent of the vote in the eastern and southern parts of Dearborn, respectively. This nearly 60-point drop in support for the top of the Democratic ticket in just four years can largely be attributed to the extreme anger with the president on Palestine and Lebanon, with the Biden administration supplying the weapons Israel has used to eviscerate human life in Gaza and displace over 1.2 million Lebanese civilians. Similarly, in Paterson, New Jersey, or “Little Ramallah/Istanbul” as it is known by many of its Arab and Turkish residents, Harris also suffered losses that ran much deeper than they did on a national scale. While Biden got 70 percent of Paterson’s vote in 2020, Harris was only able to secure around 42 percent, making it clear that this anger went beyond just Michigan and impacted Arab American communities across the country. In the months before the election, some believed that most Arab Americans, despite their fury at Biden and their disappointment with Harris’s inability or unwillingness to distinguish herself in the Middle East, would eventually come home and vote for her anyway. This has been proven resoundingly false. Nor was this a case of voters’ incoherently lashing out. The relatively decent performance of Elissa Slotkin, who called for conditioning aid to Israel while Harris did not, proves that the discontent was not rooted in a total rejection of the Democratic Party but rather a particular kind of politics within the party. Most impressively, Palestinian American Rashida Tlaib easily secured her fourth term in Congress with more than 62 percent of the vote in Dearborn. We are no longer in an era where the Arab American vote can be taken as a given, especially as more people find contradictions in Democratic rhetoric and Democratic behavior regarding Palestine and the lives of Arabs more broadly.

19 November 2024

[brandileigh2003]

Coffee shop or bakery fic recs. Let me know what I missed including self recs

please give these authors love, fandom engagement with writers is down and it means more than you know.

-Like Real People Do by @third_crow ft disability and raising Harry

-Au Pif by sreka, @yumenouveau @smodernlife pining, fluff misunderstandings

-Blue Moon Café by @lazuli-moon ft raising teddy, chronic pain/illness, non-binary Sirius

-Found Heaven by @madefortherain University texting

-what a wonder (what a waste) by peachyybabe @lavenderhaze mcd magical au ft raising teddy

-Half Moon Chocolate by @brujabanter magical au no voldy

-The Barista, the Burglar, and the Sofa by orphan_account fluff au

-Number Neighbours by @moonsblack texting fic

-Be silent like deep water by @her-smile-forges-galaxies ft deaf remus

-The Barista by ever3tt au with pining

-Leather and Cinnamon by @tracingpatternswrites raising teddy modem au

-Of Caffeine Addictions and Nail Polish by @blueAzalea ft raising teddy and moonflower friendship

-Bean Genie by bethanlovescoffee fluffy au

-Love by the Seaside by viwrites @just--vi ft fluff and chronic

-i want to build something permanent by rekindled University ft trans remus

-Fractured Skies by orphan_account ft deaf Sirius and epileptic remus

-Blends by rvltn909 pining and banter

-Best Friend's Brother by bizarrestars @starsworth love the moonwater friendship, fluff with some angst

-Tip Jar by @starling011 ft chronic illness and moonflower friendship

-labyrinth by moonymoment @mayescapade exes to lovers

-I'll paint a mural of your smile by irlhawke ft mental health, trans remus

-Finding Warmth by Moony @adashofinspiratio blind Sirius and deaf remus

-Good Old Fashioned Lover Boys by Hell_Again trans remus, disability and mental health

-Tartan Books & Longing Looks by Lia @liaskisses cute with banter

Not sure if it technically counts but I like it and they spend time together there --ten reasons (to go to michigan) by @greyeyedmonster-18

Have 2 bonus flower shops:

-The Language of Flowers by B1ackCatChatsBack ft disability and pining

-my jokes are my armour, my kindness is my sword by @littleoldrachel ft disability and trans Remus, they're so cute

Recs from others:

early morning, coffee cups by alarainai bakery

-Constellations and Coffee by AisForAlex

-The Web by @lesmardisbleus mcd

-Back to September by @WriterwithaWindow

-oat milk latte by @vinylsonthewall

-Sorry I'm Late - I Was Searching For You by @euripidestrousers

[acquariusgb]

Hillary won the popular vote by just under 2.9 million votes, with narrow margins in New Hampshire and Minnesota, and losses of less than 1 percent in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and 1.2 percent in Florida, more than enough to cost her the Electoral College. We live in the only country in the world where you can win the election and still lose the job. Election night was like a death watch. I just tried to be there for Hillary, to help her get through it with Chelsea, Marc, Charlotte, and baby Aidan. I thought back over all the years we’d been together, how I quickly decided when we were in law school that she was as gifted a leader as I’d ever met. She inspired confidence in people and made them believe they could and should make a difference. In all the work she had done since, she devoutly followed the instruction of Methodism’s founder, John Wesley: “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” She would have been a great president. I was heartsick for her and for our country. I knew she wouldn’t be broken by this. But the country might be. [...] This whole thing is hard for me to write. I couldn’t sleep for two years after the election. I was so angry, I wasn’t fit to be around. I apologize to all those who endured my outbursts of rage which lasted for years and bothered or bored people who thought it pointless to rehash things that couldn’t be changed. In this chapter, I’ve tried to calmly write about the darkest election possible in the United States, because it’s important to understand what happened. Our country had, and still has, the best prospects for a bright twenty-first century. I still want that future, and we can’t have it without a press that’s on the level. I don’t want 2016 to ever happen again.

Citizen - My Life after the White House - Bill Clinton

[1968bullittmustang]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/15/republican-ads-false-flag/

----

Inside the Republican false-flag effort to turn off Kamala Harris voters

A multipronged dark money effort by advisers to Elon Musk targeted liberals, Jews, Muslims and Black voters with ads that were not quite what they seemed.

Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.

Get the latest election news and results

Another group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had

abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.

What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single, $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk who had previously worked on the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a presentation about the group’s efforts obtained by The Washington Post.

The project, funded with anonymous donations, micro-targeted messages across the battleground states, often with ads that appeared to be something they were not — a tactic the organizers sometimes referred to internally as “false positives.”

With digital spots, direct mail, text messages, influencer marketing and mobile billboards, the overall project was a high-tech experiment in misdirection — an old political tactic that has been sharpened in recent decades with increasingly precise targeting techniques.

Ads tested better if Muslims felt they were seeing a message meant for Zionists, “Bernie bros” felt they were hearing from the far left, and “Zyn bros” felt they were hearing from activists who wanted “a world without gas-powered vehicles,” a ban on fracking and affordable housing for undocumented Americans — policies Harris did not actually support during her campaign.

“The worst part is Kamala Harris talks out of both sides of her mouth,” said one of the ads, which was designed by Trump supporters to look as if it was advocating for leftist priorities like “free health care” and a “break on tuition.”

The entire effort grew out of research by Building America’s Future, a conservative political nonprofit that was founded during the first Trump administration by Republican consultants Generra Peck and Phil Cox. With others at P2 Public Affairs, Peck and Cox, former advisers to DeSantis, were top strategists for a separate effort, America PAC, the super PAC funded by Musk to support Trump. Musk donated to Building America’s Future in 2022, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The group’s leaders have declined to comment on their donors.

Starting in February, Ryan Tyson, a former pollster for DeSantis, began holding a series of about 25 focus groups with specific communities of targeted voters, with most of the research effort focused on likely Democrats who were uncertain about voting. The goal was to figure out how to help Donald Trump win during a campaign in which Democrats were vastly outspending Republicans on digital advertising.

“Clearly, you had a White liberal demographic that hated Donald Trump. That was without question. You could see that coalition everywhere. But once you get past White progressives, every other historical demographic stronghold from the Democrats just started to drop off,” Tyson said about the effort. “What did exist was a tremendous amount of voters on the left that were disaffected. And the only persuasion question was whether they could be persuaded to vote.”

The effort worked in concert with a separate project by the Trump campaign to depress turnout for Harris — knowing that Trump would be unlikely to drastically expand his vote totals. In 2020, Trump received about 74 million votes to Joe Biden’s 81 million votes. In 2024, Trump received a little less than 76 million votes to Harris’s 72.6 million votes. In other words, Trump’s total went up slightly, while Harris dropped about 8 million votes.

“The entire goal of the campaign was to push her numbers down,” said a top Trump campaign adviser, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal strategy.

Building America’s Future tried to focus its spending where the Trump campaign’s top advisers publicly signaled an interest, investing heavily in Muslim communities that the campaign was targeting and seeking to magnify the candidate’s appearances on podcasts with significant White male audiences.

“We studied the strategy that was put in place by Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita and James Blair very closely,” Peck said. “And we did what outside groups can do. We tried to amplify and support the direction in which they were taking the earned and paid media.”

They also deployed multiple brands to place the ads, concealing their common origin — Future Coalition PAC, Duty to America PAC, Americans for Consumer Protection and Progress 2028, according to people involved.

Democrats grew alarmed in the final weeks of the campaign as the ads started appearing on Facebook and Google. Priorities USA, a Harris-backing super PAC, made efforts to get spots taken down from both platforms because of their deceptive nature. Google eventually struck at least one spot in which one of the Building America’s Future groups took footage from a Harris ad in Pennsylvania targeting Jews and began targeting it to Muslims with the words “This is a real Kamala Harris ad” superimposed.

Other efforts to get ads taken down were not successful. Facebook, which has pared back its ad restrictions since 2020, declined to act on a number of requests to take down ads from Progress 2028 that praised the Harris agenda while also describing policies she did not support in 2024, like mandatory gun buybacks, universal health care for undocumented immigrants and “the most progressive Green New Deal yet.”

“There is plenty of blame to go around for another election cycle riddled with misinformation online,” Priorities USA executive director Danielle Butterfield said in a statement. “Big Tech is still unwilling to hold bad actors accountable, Congress is unwilling to step in and write new rules for the 21st century, and Republicans will continue to slander and lie to voters to make their case. Because of all of this, Democrats lose, and we need to acknowledge this reality and figure out new ways to communicate with voters on today’s internet.”

The Harris campaign also responded to the spots being geo-targeted to Dearborn, Michigan, where many Muslims live, by running their own digital ads showing the vice president discussing her concern about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Andrew Romeo, who led the creative strategy for Building America’s Future and also worked as a spokesman for Musk’s America PAC, said they decided to simply ignore their detractors during the campaign.

“People were upset on both sides of the aisle on it, said it was dishonest, disingenuous, we shouldn’t be running ads that look like Harris’s. But it worked and the numbers are undeniable,” Romeo said. “We had a ton of inquiries on these efforts from the media. We didn’t answer any of them. We just ran our strategy and we didn’t care what anyone said. I think that we learned from the Trump campaign in that respect.”

One part of the effort, under the banner of Americans for Consumer Protection, targeted 2.7 million voters with more than 247 million ads and 70 million video completions. That effort also advertised about Biden administration support for a ban on menthol cigarettes to Black voters in Ohio, where Republicans successfully defeated Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. Building America’s Future also hosted 18 events around the country, including a gathering of farmers in Pennsylvania that aimed to promote Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick, who was projected by the Associated Press as winning that race against Sen. Bob Casey (D), who has declined to concede. A recount effort was launched Thursday.

“The key to most of our creative was homing in on the idea that the Biden-Harris administration had misplaced priorities,” the group wrote in an after-action report obtained by The Post. “Instead of banning menthols, our ads argued, Biden and Harris should be focused on lowering costs and fixing the chaos of the country.”

[tinylongwing]

Vide Noir's dual narrative structure

All right, here it is, me making good on at least one of my meta threats. Lord Huron's album Vide Noir can be interpreted as an album with two parallel, contrasting narratives - that of the lead protagonist Buck Vernon, as well as that of Johnnie Redmayne.

Disclaimer: this is an interpretation I think is pretty sound and well-reasoned, but I make no claim to any of this being proven canon information.

---

For those unfamiliar or who need a reminder, the primary narrative is this: the year is 1967, and we start near the end of Buck's journey, as he awakens from being black-brained (Lost in Time and Space). Having just suffered an overdose on the drug vide noir, his memories are slow to return to him, but return they do - his fiancee, Leigh/Lee Green (from here on Leigh but both spellings have been used), left him without a word one night, and he decided to follow, heading west to Los Angeles from their home town of Detroit, Michigan. He's been struggling to find her, checking every bar in the city in case she was booked to sing at one as her move was the result of her chasing her dream of becoming a singer. He doesn't remember a lot about himself, really, after that overdose, but he remembers her, and his love for her makes him desperate to find her.

We're then taken back to the night he left to find her (Never Ever) and his journey is mostly linear from there - he meets a fortune teller, Lady Moonbeam, who tells him that pursuing Leigh will end in his ruin, but he refuses to accept her advice and pushes on (Ancient Names I & II). He laments that he's been some kind of fuckup, that maybe he chased Leigh away through his own behavior, but that he still loves her and begs for her to return (Wait By the River). At some point around here he also learns of the drug vide noir and contemplates using it himself for clues.

(Note that unlike in the movie, in the album, nothing suggests that Buck suffered from a murder attempt by Z'Oiseau's henchmen but that instead he may have overdosed himself in an attempt to find Lee. However, there's plenty of reason to suspect that the film is the canon interpretation here anyway and the henchmen kidnapping Buck just doesn't make for a song I guess.)

One way or another, he winds up black-brained, where some deep existential truths of the universe are revealed to him (Secret of Life - namely that everyone and everything dies in the end, and that a human life is brief, fleeting, and ultimately meaningless within the context of the universe as a whole). He somehow reawakens rather than dying (Back from the Edge) and, again, understands that nothing he does will ever matter, has never mattered*, but that *even though* he's suffered greatly already on this quest, he's still committed to trying to find Leigh, pitting himself against that careless universe (The Balancer's Eye).

So he keeps searching (When the Night is Over) until he finds a clue, or a helping hand of some sort, that leads him on the right path to his beloved Leigh (Moonbeam). We get one more reminder of the forces at work here - vide noir is some awful stuff, it nearly killed him, Leigh herself is hooked on it now, it shows you terrible truths and nightmares beyond human comprehension (Vide Noir) - and when all is said and done, as Buck thinks he's about to "rescue" Leigh from her fate and bring her back to his fantasy of a perfect happy life together, she rejects him. He came all this way through time and space, and she doesn't love him at all in the end (Emerald Star).

---

I consider this the primary narrative here because it makes use of all the songs on the album, it has a clear start and ending and a mostly linear structure, and the album basically serves as a soundtrack to Buck's fool's errand. The film agrees - every scene is centered around his journey, after all. But we have context from Lord Huron's other albums, as well as the lyrics and musical stylings of multiple songs on Vide Noir, that show us that Buck isn't necessarily the only narrator on this album. Strange Trails, of course, came out three years prior, and features songs by multiple fictional bands performing songs which serve as narration for a diverse cast of characters. Unlike on Strange Trails, where each track has a writer or band specifically named and assigned to it as well as a character narrative, Vide Noir does not give us such conclusive information, but we can still put clues together to understand at least some of who the in-universe performers might be on Vide Noir.

Most likely, multiple of these songs are by the Buck Vernon Band - this is pretty obvious. Buck's semi-autobiographical music is all over Strange Trails, usually referencing a girl he loves, sometimes referencing that the girl left him, often giving her different names, all starting with L (Fool For Love's "Lily", and "Louisa").

But the other band that we can easily identify as performers on Vide Noir are the Phantom Riders. For those who need an introduction, this is the band composed of four members of the World Enders gang, with Dale Redmayne at the helm as lead writer. They were seen previously on Strange Trails as well, with banger surf/rockabilly hits like Hurricane, Until the Night Turns, and The World Ender. As a storytelling tool, they are primarily brought in to tell us about the man-turned-undead horror entity known as The World Ender himself, and then otherwise mostly we get their songs about Dale's brother Johnnie Redmayne, who is introduced to us in Strange Trails as a fun-loving and presumably fairly young guy, a thrillseeker and hedonist, who lives for the moment as if the world could end any day. The Buck Vernon Band jumps in between some of these songs with an interjection to tell us that wait, Johnnie is dead, or was, but he got back up. In Dead Man's Hand, Buck speculates that Johnnie could have been murdered or may have killed himself, accidentally or intentionally, upon first seeing him. It's in Vide Noir that we actually learn more about the circumstances of Johnnie's death.

Before we get to that, let's first identify which Vide Noir songs are by the Phantom Riders. This isn't all that hard to do. Any song that references The World Ender is presumably theirs - that gives us Secret of Life right away ("I sit alone in the dark, and I try to remember the words you spoke when you summoned the Ender"). This is reinforced in the Alive From Whispering Pines webseries, episode 423 - Secret of Life, when played, shows a skeleton prop the band has jokingly referred to as Cobb Avery on their social media posts in the past, and after the song ends in this episode, the tune continues in a slowed and distorted fashion through a clip of a WBUB movie version of Dead Man's Hand showing Johnnie rising from the pavement when Buck is about to bury him.

Ancient Names Parts I and II are presumably written by the same band as a two-part song. In the Vide Noir film, the Phantom Riders are performing Part II in the underground club. Additionally, in Alive From Whispering Pines episode 426, after Tubbs Tarbell is done reminiscing about the band and their nihilism, Ancient Names Part II is the next song covered - and often in this series, the structure of the segments between songs are intentional and related to either the song they precede or the song they follow, so it's likely that the placement of the Phantom Riders' appearance followed by a track they're associated with is meant to help confirm them as the performers. In addition, Ancient Names Part I references a fortune teller, and we know from the film that the fortune teller in question, Lady Moonbeam, is associated with the World Enders and knows the Redmaynes.

The last track on Vide Noir that is most likely theirs is the title track, Vide Noir. We have two points of evidence for this - one lyrical ("Many evils have I enjoyed, prowling the night raising hell with the boys" which feels like a pretty direct reference to the World Enders' nighttime violence) and one musical - the main melody of Vide Noir is identical to that of Ancient Names (and Fortune Teller's Theme, actually). In Strange Trails, using the same melody for multiple songs was an easy way to tie Frankie Lou's songs together, and here we can see that it ties two Phantom Riders tracks together directly, indicating that not only are they both by the same band, but that Vide Noir is a followup to Ancient Names part I, in which our fortune teller did warn us things would go very, very wrong.

(And besides all of that, the Phantom Riders tracks on Vide Noir all tend to be similar in musical style - psychedelia-flavored garage rock with a heavy bass line, in contrast to other songs on the album.)

With those songs identified, we should also be aware of just how much Lord Huron seem to love their dual narratives. In Strange Trails, we have a really concrete example of this with The Night We Met. This song was in-universe written by Frankie Lou, presumably about her doomed relationship with Z'Oiseau and how much she wishes she had never met him to begin with (as she echoes in her dialogue in the Vide Noir film when speaking to Buck in her dressing room). However, the music video for this song shows not Frankie and Z'Oiseau, but instead Buck, driving west, while reflecting on his own failure to keep Leigh, wishing he could go back in time and fix things, and meanwhile kind of hallucinating her as he goes. In the album Long Lost, we get another dual narrative in I Lied, which is performed by Donny and Midge but is also sung by Leigh in Vide Noir, foreshadowing her breakup with and lack of love for Buck. There are certainly other dual narratives in both of those albums to be found as well - so what we should keep in mind here is that often, songs can be written and performed by a character or band in order to narrate for themselves or someone close to them, but that just as in our real-world movie soundtracks or our favorite character playlists on spotify, those songs can be applied to other characters in different (but somewhat similar) situations than the ones they were written for.

So! We have four Phantom Riders tracks on Vide Noir, all of which were presumably not written originally in-universe about Buck Vernon, because why would they be, Buck and the World Enders only briefly cross paths and at the very least we know that Ancient Names Part II was written well before he ever met them. Instead, it makes the most sense if like the bulk of the Phantom Riders songs, these tracks serve Johnnie's narration instead.

---

If that's the case, what does that give us? Winding around and through Buck's journey is this second storyline. Johnnie Redmayne, having used and enjoyed vide noir himself abundantly ("I had a vision tonight that the world was ending" as one probable example), decides it's time to get his hands on bulk quantities so as to get the Enders in on controlling the flow of the drug in LA rather than letting Z'Oiseau maintain a monopoly, thereby also increasing revenue for the members of the gang.

It's Moonbeam who warns him to knock it off first. We know, thanks to the film, that he'd spoken to her at some point about his plans to investigate the source of the drug at Tobey's arcade and try to get his hands on some to sell. Whatever his exact plan was, in Ancient Names Part 1, Moonbeam warns him that pursuing this is going to get him killed. Vide noir isn't just a drug, it's something extremely dangerous, tied to dangerous people, and he needs to get away from "her" (and note that frequently throughout music history, drugs have been personified as a "her" or an unnamed lover, whether for poetic reasons or to evade censorship that might come from talking directly about drug use - and Cursed, off Strange Trails, is one more in-universe example, where "her" refers both to Leigh Green and to drug use, specifically vide noir).

Immediately afterward, Ancient Names Part 2, in addition to serving as a very classic sort of World Enders nihilism anthem, can easily be interpreted as Johnnie saying "fuck that, I do what I want, you only live one life anyway and even if it kills me, I want to make my mark before I go out." Death is something hypothetical - sure, it'll get him some day, it gets everyone, and maybe Moonbeam is even right, but he isn't going to let her warning stop him.

On Strange Trails, Buck and Johnnie cross paths at Dead Man's Hand. On this album they only cross thematically, and the pivotal moment of intersection might be Secret of Life. This song may be the point at which Buck learns some forbidden secrets revealed by taking vide noir as discussed above, but its lyrics speak a lot more specifically to Johnnie's experience, implying some connection between him, vide noir, and the World Ender.

It may be that as we see with Buck in the film, perhaps Johnnie too has suffered the effects of being black-brained prior to taking it due to the time and space-bending effects of the drug (notice, for example, in Strange Trails we get Johnnie's story in a scrambled chronological order) and here he's confronted with the harsh truths of what those past visions of his possible future mean for him: he has been set on a path that is no longer avoidable due to his eventual future overdose. So perhaps it's at this point that he acknowledges that he is going to die sooner rather than later and that his life and death will not have meant anything to the greater cosmos, but this information, which was new to Buck, is not something Johnnie fears. Johnnie is hardly new to this point of view. He's seen past echoes of the knowledge imparted by vide noir throughout his life, both in his future visions of the end of the world (again see Until The Night Turns) and in the knowledge passed on through other World Enders, including their own motto ("The fair, the brave, the good must die", or in Secret of Life here, "The darkness comes for all of us").

(As an aside, there's still a lot to unravel with Secret of Life that I haven't touched on here. It's a fascinating song with some really mysterious lyrics. I've speculated at length in the LH discord about some additional interpretations this song could yield but won't veer off topic here.)

And yet despite what looks like a very certain and dire end, Johnnie maintains hope that perhaps he, too, will live past this. Because if Cobb Avery did, why can't he? This is part of the gang's core mythos - their founder is a dead man. He clawed his way back out of the grave for revenge, they thought it was just so fucking cool that he was unkillable that they had to join him, and together they dismantled the Winthrop Corporation, one murder at a time. When the police finally caught up to him, they lynched him - but the noose did nothing, for he was already dead, and now in the form of a skeleton, he called the gang to his side (see Strange Trails: The World Ender comic book). In the ensuing chaos, he flees, the gang heads west and relocates to east Los Angeles, and in the time contemporary with the events of Vide Noir, he is still present among them but this appears to be unknown to the public (Daily Trails prop, by Kim Berens, used in both Vide Noir and Alive From Whispering Pines where it was modified to Ten years later).

Whether The World Ender is readily visible to and known by most members of the gang at this point is unknown, but we know that those who were black-brained can see him (in the film, Buck sees him approaching, bumps into him, plunges into a hallucination of his own future, and when he comes too, the Ender is gone). Given the Secret of Life lyrics, it's reasonable to guess that Johnnie at least can see the World Ender just fine and one way or another, in speaking with him and in conjunction with consuming vide noir, has learned enough secret knowledge to make some kind of choice - and this is what later enables him, too, to drag his way back to the world of the living.

Fate catches up to Johnnie and as we learn in the film, his death was at the hands of Z'Oiseau's henchmen for trying to gain access to dealing in vide noir. Like Buck, he is black-brained - forced to swallow enough of the drug to kill him. And so the track Vide Noir opens with the Fortune Teller's Theme previously heard in Ancient Names Part 1, and that tune is woven through the track - Moonbeam's "I warned you, I told you so" to both of these fools who disregarded her advice. Although, again, the lyrics are clearly meant primarily to narrate for Johnnie - "Many evils have I enjoyed, prowling the night raising hell with the boys, getting high on a pure black void" sounds a lot more like what Johnnie gets up to than Buck. We are given a glimpse of his last words and final thoughts as life slips away and his consciousness is sent straight to the final edge of the cosmos.

---

So ultimately, this is what we're left with:

Vide Noir is an album that tells the story of Buck Vernon, whose fiancee has left him. His journey culminates in a near-brush with death, in finding Leigh, and in learning that she does not love him and that he's nothing, his life is worth nothing more than dust and that none of it mattered or will ever matter, that once he eventually dies he will vanish and be forgotten in time.

Vide Noir also tells the story of Johnnie Redmayne, who for once tries to do something that isn't just for his own hedonistic pleasure but that might actually help bring in money to support his friends and family, but he's too headstrong and impulsive to listen to the warnings he's given, and is killed in the attempt.

One lives who probably shouldn't have and comes out at rock bottom and now has to work out how to move on from here, and one dies a nihilist who should presumably just accept the inevitability of death, but has the knowledge and absolute stubborn determination to enable his eventual return, following in the footsteps of Cobb Avery.

And what happens to both of them afterward? Well, we don't know. Hopefully some day (SOON?? BEN PLEASE) we'll get the opportunity to find out!

[hellenhighwater]

Whereabouts do you live, roughly speaking, and what drew you to that place in particular?

I'm in Michigan, and that's as specifically as I will answer that question! We have really lethal lakes.

[mapalssyrup]

Here again but now with some BAT guys

Will is just 80s new wave idk

His theme song is AUDIT by Weevildoing

He would listen to popular new wave music of the time, the songs that are on the radio. I think he really liked David Bowie and Men At Work

E.X.E. is slasher coded 80s music like Psycho Killer by The Talking Heads and Don't Fear The Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult

His theme song is Mesmerizer by 32ki

He listens to anything that resembles 80s music, even modern songs like A Human's Touch by TWRP. He also really likes the soundtracks of 80s films, like Gremlins. We all know his favorite band is Oingo Boingo, though

Charlie is Mother Mother

Her theme song is Little Pistol by Mother Mother

Mother Mother. That's it. That's the post. Everyone go home. Also 80s punk like Dead Kennedy's and Alice In Chains. I think she's also a casual ICP fan. I think she would also like Penelope Scott and the Dresden Dolls in TBN Security Breach. She really likes music though so there's a bunch here I haven't thought about yet

I have no idea how to explain this but Henry is cryptidcore. Madelyn Mei, The Woods by San Fermin, Scavenger on the Wind by Mangy Bones and Cosmo Sheldrake

His theme song is Sharks by Imagine Dragons

Henry probably liked punk and alt music in the 80s and sort of introduced that to Charlie through his cassettes after he died. Juggalo Henry is a really funny thought to me

Will-O is Possibly in Michigan. Slasher coded, weird, 80s synth but still underground, distorted and also gay people music

Their theme song is Harpy Hare by Yaelokre

They would listen to analog horror oldies like Old Yazoo by The Boswell Sisters and Masquerade by Jack Hylton and his Orchestra; really any oldies that just sound creepy for no reason

Sam is just her music taste basically

I really need to develop her more uh. The Ballad of Hamantha by Jack Stauber? I haven't thought like at all about this

Followed in her father's music taste in most of everything, but also leans very modern. I have the strong feeling that she would love TV Girl. She super likes music but I haven't thought about it much yet. She would definitely see the amazing commentary and craft in Barbie Girl by Aqua and be super excited when it plays (me fr)

GUYS I THOUGHT OF A THING

WHAT GENRE OF MUSIC BEST FITS OUR OCS

I'm making a reblog chain cuz I feel like it >:)

Crecher: Vocaloid (specifically ghost and pals)

Faazar: Hyperpop/krushfunk

Revika: Breakcore (Probably?)

Marigold: Whatever genre of the music the song ''animal cannibal'' is I genuinely do not know

Nathaniel: Pop rock

sneezes on everyone here

@spacee-pop @plxtypusbearr73 @gravitywasneveranoption @void-primal-aspid @hyperfixozone @liliotl

[supercutofbuck]

when the battle ground states are actually battle ground states and are still too close to call

[spacebugarts]

MICHIGAN MIKU IS DONE LETS GOOOO

[horrorlesbians]

i should be able to queue ten thousand posts and then throw my phone into lake michigan

[tinystrawberryshifter]

*world is mine plays as Miku kills thousands of Aperture science employees*

[ibetittering]

FREAKING OUT THE MUSIC IS BACK I'M SO HAPPY

[michibites]

mission success?

they hold hands and stuff. i’ll introduce Delilah soon enough.

sketch/ concept below

[hellenhighwater]

why is ontario no business of yours? -sincerely, someone who lives 15 minutes from its shore

I live in Michigan; please observe which Great Lakes are in contact with Michigan. Ontario is a Great Lake, but it's not Michigan's Great Lake. We get four out of five; I can get to any other Great Lake without leaving my state.

I would need to go through Canada or several other states to get to Ontario. It's lovely, but it is very literally no business of mine.