#my dreams are pretty linear

[cyandocs]

I had a dream last night where mid-way through I swear I went from living as the main character to like "I should write this down"

But I (or the main character- she wasn't actually me but I "played" her) was investigating this murder with two victims, a man and a woman. I don't think the main character knew but a big story point was that the man was actually some sort of elemental god. She was working with this detective guy who was taking pictures of the body of the man when it started acting weird, I guess showing it's true nature. Either the female victim or somebody else was able to kill him, but there seemed to be a plot to kill the woman from the other gods, as she was pregnant with the male gods baby.

I think in fact somebody else, a human, had killed the male god, and the other gods were pissy about it. Maybe it was the detective guy..?

It started to get a little dream-like and nonsensical near the end but it was very fascinating.

[ultimateinferno]

Will I ever expect Nintendo writing a Ganondorf who's trying to break the curse and end the cycle? No. I simply think their faithful adherence to the nature of fairytales about the knight rising up to face evil and save the princess is simply that strong. It's a classic (in the most literal sense cite Perseus and Andromeda). It's why I don't believe in a playable Zelda until I see it with my own eyes.

While the earnest nature of providing interesting spins on this millennia old formula is rather endearing, I would welcome earnest breaks in turn as well. Yet until I see it, I simply won't be holding my breath for when it comes.

[neverendingford]

.

[artbysconnor]

The DnD party from Wildlife SMP in Episode 1! I just couldn't help trying my hand at these designs, since it combines two of my favorite things currently (Dungeons and Dragons and the Life Series) . Lizzie - Goliath Champion Fighter

BigB - Halfling Circle of Dreams Druid

Ren - Fairy College of Lore Bard

Jimmy - Half-Elf Oath of Redemption (Or Oath of Glory?) Paladin

See below for design notes!

Lizzie:

I knew Lizzie would be a Goliath, and was torn between giving her a martial class or making her a War Cleric. In the end, party composition won out, and she ended up a Champion Fighter, but I kept the half skirt design from her cleric thumbnails and gave her a big ol' mace. Given her pink hair is so iconic I didn't want to go full bald, so I made her hair long along the scalp and tied into two buns and a ponytail (not realistic, but it works in the drawing so I'm sticking with it!). I tried to put butterfly wings in her tattoos by her eyes, and added some flowers to further the fairy vibes on her armor and bring in the light blues from her skin as well.

BigB:

I probably was the least sure about what race and class I wanted to go with for BigB. He fluctuated between a Twilight Cleric and a Druid, and between Gnome, Dwarf, and Halfling. I ended up going with a Halfling to match his easygoing attitude, and leaned into his association with the Pale Garden as perhaps a caretaker and watchful hand over the Fey-like landscape as a Dream Druid. I knew I wanted his staff to reflect that by containing a creaking heart, but I also made his armor woven bark from the exteriors of the black and white trees, with flickers of the orange creaking magic within it, and kept his palette somewhat subdued and faded compared to his more saturated normal palette.

Ren:

Our bard Ren is probably the least detailed here on account of scale, but I put just the same amount of thought into his clothes, too! I wanted to work in little details that make use of materials that would be big for his small racial size as a fairy, such as a button for a poleyn, sewing pins for tuning pegs on his lute, and oversized ribbon ties on his costume. The main costume (a doublet and flouncy pants) is inspired by flashy, slashed Renaissance fashions - I think they suit a bard with a bragadocious energy like Ren. I added a tiny 'wolf pelt' as a cape that was probably a rat or perhaps an ermine, and his sunglasses are cut and polished crystal.

Jimmy:

Jimmy, our normal-sized normal man, was always a paladin in my mind. I wanted to put him in predominantly pretty heavy plate armor, almost like he's trying to protect himself at all costs, and pull in references to canaries and birds with the wing motif and feathered plume on the helmet and cloak clasp (and sword, which is now hidden behind BigB). The gold linear details both reinforce the pieces and provide a flash of yellow in his design to balance the cool blues and silvers, and his unpictured shield in my mind has the image of a great golden bird being pierced through the heart by an arrow or spear of some sort - a tragic house crest that Jimmy seeks to bring to glory.

[thelostmagicians]

Booksmart | Steve Harrington

Summary: Steve Harrington’s head may be full of air, but his heart is full of love. [4.4k]

Fluff, comfort, slight angst, insecure Steve

♡

Steve Harrington isn’t a genius. He barely passed his classes in high school, couldn’t get into college, and can barely keep his minimum wage job. He’s been belittled by his parents too many times to care about their opinion and he knows compared to his friends he isn’t as clever or witty, but he’s okay with it - at least he thinks he is. It might sting when Robin and Eddie tease him for being too slow or when Dustin sighs in frustration because he can’t keep up, but the ache dissipates when they look at him in adoration. 

He blames his failing love life on his lack of intelligence. Although girls find his himbo-ness endearing, his relationships never last long.  Most of the dates he goes on end up as dirty hookups in the backseat of his car and on the off chance a girl stays longer than a month he can slowly see the irritation replace the endearment in her eyes. He was just something to do during the inbetween phase of graduation and moving out of Hawkins, a trophy to conquer - to finally have slept with the previously known King. He used to be okay with that at the beginning, he got his needs met while girls crossed him off their list, but over time he craved more. He saw how Nancy looked at Jonathan, how Joyce laughed with Hopper, and how Robin blushed around Vickie. He was desperate for that feeling of being wanted and loved. 

Even though he's surrounded by people who love and accept him as he is, he can't help but wonder if things would’ve been different if he was just a little smarter. 

_

“Robin I’m telling you she started speaking a different language halfway through dinner,” Steve grumbles as he’s shelving the horror section. 

Robin rolls her eyes at him, “Just because you don’t understand the words she’s using doesn’t mean she was speaking a different language, Steven. I don’t even think she knows anything but English. 

Steve sighs under his breath. 

He had gone on another date last night, but didn’t even make it past the appetizers before he made up an emergency and left. The night started off great, the Indiana summer evening had a cool breeze, he opened the door for her, and was rewarded with a kiss on his cheek when he presented her with  flowers. Valerie had been nice, beautiful, and smart - maybe a little too smart for Steve. Don’t get him wrong, Steve loves strong, smart, and capable women. He loved hearing Valerie speak about physics and graphing linear equations, he loved learning about what interested her, but as the night went on he could see the light in her eyes fading as he kept asking her questions. The final straw had been when he told her he hasn’t read a book since high school and she laughed lightly before saying “you really are only a pretty face.” 

“Maybe, I’m just destined to be alone, or like a back up plan for girls who come back to Hawkins after giving up on their big city dreams.”

Robin sighs and gives him a reassuring pat, “Steve, you’re a good man. You’ll find your one, trust me on this.”

Before he can say more the bell jingles as a gust of hot air is let in. Steve groans as he spots Dustin’s mop of curly hair and hears the chatter of 6 other teens. He holds the door open with his arm as he sees Lucas struggling with Max’s wheelchair. 

“You guys can’t keep coming in here, Robin and I actually have work to do you know.”

“We wanted to pick a movie for movie night,” Max says. 

He sighs softly as he meets her eyes. Steve’s always had a soft spot for Max ever since they’ve met and it’s only gotten softer since then, everyone knows this, but the kids tend to take advantage of this and use Max to get their way. 

“Alright two movies max and no rated r ones.”

As he hears the bell jingle again he starts his greeting in a monotone voice, “Welcome to Family Video, my name is St—” he chokes. 

“Oh my god, are you okay?” you ask softly. 

He’s still coughing and panting slightly as he tries to give you a reassuring nod. Robin makes her way to the front to hand Steve some water and finish introductions. 

“What he means to say is his name is Steve and I’m Robin. You can come get us if you have any questions.”

You nod politely, finally tearing your gaze away from Steve as you start browsing through the racks. Steve, however, can’t seem to stop looking at you. He’s seen a lot of beautiful women in his life, but none of them held a candle to you. Everything about you was just perfect to him and he didn’t even know you yet. His eyes repeatedly traced the slope of your nose, down to your plush lips, and back to your furrowed eyebrows as you read the back of a tape. 

You lift your head up and he blushes as you make eye contact. 

“Do you have any recommendations for sci-fi, I just moved to town and need something to keep me from getting bored?” you ask shyly. 

“Err- We have a sci-fi section over there” Steve points to the rack behind him where the kids are gathered and quietly arguing over which movie to pick. 

You speak as you make your way over, “Yeah, but do you have any recommendations for me? I feel like I’ve seen all the good ones already.”

Steve's face falls as he tries to come up with an answer. 

“Have you seen Star Wars?” Dustin speaks up

Max and El groan loudly as you shake your head. 

“I tend to stay away from franchises, but what’s it about?”

Before Dustin can answer, Mike beats him to it, “It’s about galactic adventures of these characters, it’s pretty cool.”

“We were planning on watching it tonight, we always have movie nights at Steve’s on Friday. You should join us!” Dustin exclaims as he tries to shoot Steve a sly wink. 

Your eyes grow wide at the sudden invitation as Steve rests his head in his hands too embarrassed to speak. 

“Is that alright with you, Steve?” You ask kindly. 

Steve’s breath hitches as he hears you say his name, he slowly meets your gaze as he gives you a slight nod trying to avoid choking on air again.

Robin smirks at Steve as she hands you a post-it, “Here’s Steve’s address. Movie starts at 7 and bring as many snacks as you’d like!”

You grab the post-it and shoot everyone a small wave “I’ll see you guys then!”

Steve feels like he can finally breathe after he hears the soft slam of the door behind you. 

_

“I can’t believe you would do that, just invite a stranger to my home like that,” Steve groans as he fixes his hair, again, in the hallway mirror. He glances down at his polo debating if he should change his shirt for the fourth time. 

“Steve, she agreed to come while seeing you in a Family Video vest, I don’t think your outfit is what you should be worried about,” Jonathan teases him as he passes him a coke. 

Steve shoots him a sarcastic smile before checking his watch. It’s 7:02, you should’ve shown up 2 minutes ago and he’s a nervous wreck. He sees your headlights before anyone else does and trips over Will’s backpack as he waits to open the door on the very first knock. 

“Sorry I’m late, the petit fours took longer than expected.” You smile at him holding out a large container filled with small cakes. 

He gives you a confused look too embarrassed to ask what petit fours are, so instead he takes the container and waves you in. 

“What brings you to Hawkins?” Eddie asks.

“I actually came here for work, Hawkins laboratory needed another scientist to look at all the crazy stuff that’s happened here.”

Everyone basks in the uncomfortable silence as you mention the lab before Nancy speaks up, “You work as a scientist? You seem pretty young.”

You hesitate slightly, folding your hands in your lap, “I am young, but I graduated college at 16 and recently got my PhD and my advisor recommended me for this job, so here I am.”

Steve’s heart falls to his stomach, you were a genius, a child prodigy of some sort and you’ve accomplished so much at such a young age. There was no way you would even be slightly interested in him, but part of him was willing to take that risk - be okay with whatever you spared him because it was better than not having you in his life at all. 

The movie is ignored as everyone pays more attention to you and your genius-ness. He hears voices all at once but all he can focus on is yours. The way your laugh ends in a higher pitch than it starts in, the way you softly reassure Nancy that college isn’t hard, but his favorite is when you say his name when you ask for his opinion on the theories the kids present to you. It makes him feel important like you care about what he has to say and you value his thoughts just as much as you would anyone else’s. 

Steve might’ve only met you today, but he was already enamored. You might’ve knowingly opened the door only to Family Video, but you also unknowingly opened the door to his heart and started to fill every corner of it with you. 

_

Steve doesn’t think he’s read this much in his entire existence as he has this month.

The first thing he did the morning after movie night was go to the library and check out as many books as he could about everything that sounded smart. He’s inhaled almost every book on poetry (specifically Shakespeare), astrophysics and European history. You’ve come to every movie night since the first one and you try your best to visit Family Video after work just to chat with Steve and Robin. He was slowly falling in love with you and he wasn’t going to let his dumb brain be the reason he lost you. He forcefully read every book from cover to cover, prying his eyes open with the memory of your impressed smile anytime he fell asleep. He’s made countless flashcards and pesters Robin to quiz them during their shift. 

After two months of revising and memorizing he thinks he finally finds the courage to ask you out. You’re the last one to leave tonight, helping Steve clean up after everyone either left or claimed a spare room. 

Steve’s hands are clammy as he ties the trash bag into a pretty bow, “I was wondering if… I mean you don’t have to… but umm, like if you wanted to go out. With me, I mean.”

Your eyes trace his face as you clench the empty red vines wrapper, “You mean like a date?”

Steve nods, unsure of your reaction. Part of him hopes you’ll say no and put him out of his misery, so he can finally stop learning, but a bigger part of him hopes you’ll give him a chance. 

Your lips upturn in a shy smile as you fiddle your thumbs, “Yeah, I’d like that a lot. What did you have in mind?”

“How about next Friday, we ditch the losers and have our movie night? I’ll pick you up at 7 and we can catch a movie?”

You respond with a quick kiss on his cheek as you grab your purse and head out. Steve rests his head on the back of the door as he pumps his fist in the air and tries his hardest to not  wake Robin and Eddie with his cheering. 

_

You’re nervous as you pace in front of your door. Steve makes you nervous, but you don’t hate the feeling. You’ve never felt this way about a boy before, boys always had a competition with you, a majority of your dates ended up with the two of you trying to up each other with accomplishments, but with Steve everything is different. Even though the facts he tells are wrong, it was still endearing to watch him try. 

You’re broken out of your thoughts with a knock on your door. You smooth down your dress and look in the mirror once more before swinging the door open. Steve stands there in all his glory, hair perfectly done, snug jeans, and a bouquet of flowers covering his stupidly handsome face. 

“These are for you,” he pushes the bouquet towards you with a surprise force that you have to step back to avoid them pressing into your nose. 

“Thanks Steve, they’re beautiful.” You set them down gently at the nearby table mentally making a note to find a vase after you come back home. 

He opens his car door for you, waiting until you’re settled in before jogging back to his side. “There’s a French movie playing tonight, I think it’s about Marie - Annette, you know the queen who liked cake?” 

You giggle quietly but opt to ignore his mistake because he just looked too fucking cute with furrowed eyebrows and a nervous smile. 

“And after the movie I was thinking we can stop by somewhere for a late night snack?”

You nod excitedly eager to finally spend time with him far away from the eyes of your prying friends, “I didn’t know you knew French?”

“Uh, yeah.”

The movie was… boring and bland. Steve didn’t understand anything happening so instead spent the entire time admiring you, the furrow of your eyebrows, the tilt of your head, and the gentle bite of your lip. He remembered you mentioning to Robin that you were fluent in French, so thought a foreign film would be a good idea for a first date, but now he regrets his choice especially since you spent the drive to the diner asking him questions about the movie. Questions he didn’t know the answer to. Steve has charmed his way through life, but he wasn’t sure how much longer his charm would last with you, he had an inkling that sooner or later you would be able to see through his facade and you would see him as a disappointment.

_

You had a hunch that Steve was lying about knowing French and your hunch was confirmed when his shoulders tensed as the ticket guy told him the movie didn’t have English subtitles. He played it off with a laugh and a wave of his hand, but you could tell it made him nervous. You thought the movie was alright, but your favorite part was feeling Steve’s eyes on you. You try to be mindful when asking him questions, keeping them vague and more about opinions rather than asking him questions that have a right or wrong answer. He responds as vaguely as possible, gauging your reaction to see if you’re pleased with his answer or if he needs to backtrack and fix his opinion. 

Your conversation at the diner starts to get more personal as you ask each other about your likes and dislikes. You learn that Steve broke his arm learning to ride a bike, his favorite color is green, and he’s always wanted a dog. Everything you learn about Steve just makes you like him even more and the potential of falling in love with him makes you giddy with happiness. Your hands brush occasionally as you walk back to his car. He bites his lip hesitating to grab your hand as he peeks at you from the corner of his eye. You make the decision for the both of you and take a hold of his hand swinging both your arms as he blushes. 

“You’re really cute Steve Harrington,” you say as you force him to face you before gently pushing your lips to his. 

_

You spend every free time you have with Steve now. It’s been a month since your first date and since then you’ve gone out plenty of times and if you’re not physically together then you’re talking for hours on the phone. Steve’s able to open up to you more than he has to anyone else and it’s only been a few months of knowing you but he knows he’s in love, yet he can’t ask you to be his girlfriend. He does everything a boyfriend should do, calling you during breaks, kissing your bad days away, and hugging you just right when you’re on the verge of tears, but he still can’t find the courage to ask you to be his, officially. 

You express your concern to Nancy and Robin at an impromptu girls night, thrown together after a rough week for all of you. 

“I just don’t know why he won’t ask me, I always want to ask him myself before I see him, but then I lose my nerve. Maybe he doesn’t even like me like that and I’m just reading into things,” you whine as you smear a homemade face mask on Robin's face. 

“Trust me, Steve is a goner for you,” Nancy replies as she squints to make sure her brushes on the nail polish perfectly. 

“Nance is right, Steve is in love with you, but you just make him nervous.”

“I don’t understand why though, how do I make him nervous when he’s Steve Harrington,” you sigh dreamily. 

Nancy and Robin giggle as they see the childish frown on your face. You push your face into a pillow whining into it like a petulant child. 

Nancy rubs your back gently, “Look it’s not my place to say, but Steve isn’t the smartest tool academically. And you’re this child prodigy and that makes him nervous.”

Robin nods in agreement, “Yeah, you do know he spent months reading all sorts of books just to impress you right? He isn’t actually as smart as he pretends to be. He just memorizes a bunch of stuff the days leading up to your date.”

You huff in annoyance, “Yeah, I knew that on our first date when he took me to that French film. But I don’t love him because he can tell me facts about the mesozoic era. I love him because he’s him.”

Nancy and Robin share a knowing look.

“You love him?” Robin whispers.

“What?”

“You just said you love him,” Nancy clarifies.

You breathe in deeply before letting it out, the weight of what you said finally sinking in. “Yeah, I do. I really do.”

Both girls squeal as they pull you into a hug, face masks and nail polish quickly forgotten. 

You fall asleep that night knowing the next time you see Steve you’ll tell him. Tell him how much you love him and how he means to you.

_

Unfortunately for you and Steve, you aren’t able to spend any time alone lately. Work is crazy for the both of you and any time you have off it’s spent with the group. While you love spending time with your friends, you’re dying for a second alone with Steve. A second that only you both can cherish when you finally tell him how you feel. 

You’re hoping you can finally catch a moment alone with Steve at the summer bonfire by Lover’s Lake. Almost every young adult in Hawkins comes out of hiding for this annual bonfire, usually thrown by college kids as a final hurrah before summer break is officially over. You hung out with Nancy and Robin for a while and meet some new people, but you’re aren’t able to find the one person you want to see. You finally spot him parking his car and hurriedly shoving his family video vest in the trunk, but before you call out to him you’re blocked by a freckled boy wearing a smug smile. 

“Well if it isn’t the new genius of Hawkins,” the boy teases, voice filled with malice.

You smile politely, “I’m sorry you’re–”

“I’m Hagan. Tommy Hagan, surprised Steve hasn’t mentioned me considering we used to be the best of friends before he became a loser.”

You’ve heard about Tommy, mostly through passing from Nancy and Jonathan and based on Steve’s disgruntled face every time his name was mentioned, you decided Tommy Hagan wasn’t worth your time. 

“How can I help you?” You ask in a monotone voice to show how disinterested you are. 

Before Tommy can start you feel a pair of arms wrap around your waist and lips brush against the side of your head. You turn to see Steve’s grimace at Tommy before his eyes soften landing on you. 

“Hi hon,” he whispers gently, his left arm moving from caressing your hip to soothing the ache in your shoulder. 

“Hey baby.” For a second it’s just the two of you lost in each other’s eyes, you wonder if everyone else can see how lovesick you are for Steve. Before you can whisk him away for yourself Tommy interrupts again.

“Damn, Harrington. Didn’t think I’d see you go all soft again after what Wheeler did to you.”

You rolled your eyes at the mention of Nancy. It’s been years, both Steve and Nancy were over it, being happy for each other and supporting each other as friends. Yet everyone still brought it up because they had no other dirt on Steve. 

“Didn’t know you were home for the summer Tommy,” Steve replies ready to end the conversation with his former friend. 

At this point you see Jonathan and Eddie glancing from their spot near the fire. Both of them looking at Steve, silently asking him if he needed them. Steve shakes his head at them and squeezes your shoulder readying to lead you away. 

“Yeah, summer is the only time I have off now. Between college and my internship. It’s hard out there man, but you wouldn’t know that, would you?” Tommy smirks knowingly as he pushes Steve’s buttons. He knows college has always been a sore spot for Steve especially since he was still stuck working at Family Video. 

Steve grunts in response hoping his disinterest is enough to stray Tommy away from the both of you, but with Steve’s luck Tommy turns his attention to you. 

“Surprised he can keep up with a genius like you sweetheart.”

You wrinkled your nose in disgust, the term of endearment turning sour coming from a mouth other than Steve’s.

Tommy continues to go on, swaying from the few too many drinks he’s had. “Did he tell you he barely passed high school? His dad complained to mine about how much of a disappointment he turned out to be. Can’t even get a job at his dad’s firm with the brain he has.”

Steve loosens his grip around your shoulder, cheeks flushing in embarrassment. 

“You’re telling me your girl hasn’t caught on to the kind of screw up you are Harrington? You sure she’s a genius, or maybe you found someone that aligns with your IQ.”

At this point everyone is watching the words fly out of Tommy’s mouth, some snickering others shooting Steve looks of pity. Tommy Hagan is ripping him to shreds in front of everyone and yet all he can focus on is you. A look of disappointment mixed with frustration glazing over your otherwise sweet disposition. He sees his friends pushing their way through the crowd but before they could defend him he hears your honey like voice calling out for Tommy. 

“What university did you say you go to, Tommy?” you ask sweetly.

“Indiana University of Business,” he smirks behind his beer.

“And I’m assuming your daddy paid for it? Cause you sure as hell didn’t get into school by your merit, considering you spent most of high school with your head so far up people’s asses that you couldn’t get enough oxygen to your brain. Hence, why you and your stupid ass are still playing into high school politics at your grown ass age.”

The smugness on Tommy’s face disappears. 

“And what do you want to do with your future Tommy? Join daddy’s business? Turn out exactly like him? Cause last I heard he spends more time with his new family than he does with you. Maybe he finally got a child he actually loves.”

You knew it was a low blow, bringing up Tommy’s family issues, but you couldn’t care less. After everything he said to Steve, he had it coming and you only wish you were around in high school so you could’ve put him in his place earlier. 

You heard a low whistle from Eddie, “Well guess the shows over folks. And looks like we have a clear winner.”

People start clearing out going back to mind their own business and you grab Steve’s arm leading him far away from Tommy’s frozen stance. 

“Guess the secret’s out,” Steve mumbles.

“Huh?”

“Now you know I’m not really smart, so..” he trails off.

You smile, arms twisting around his waist pulling him close. “You know, I’ve met a lot of smart people in my life, but don't you dare, even for a second take Tommy’s words to heart. Because I know you, and I know that you’re the greatest person I’ve ever met.”

Steve pinches your chin, holding your gaze before whispering out a shy “yeah?” 

You hear the insecurity laced in his voice as you nod fervently. “I kinda figured you weren’t as smart as you let on from our first date, but I said yes because even though you aren’t a brainiac you have a heart of gold. I see the way you take care of the kids, how you take care of your friends. And I love how you take care of me. I love you and everything about you, Steve Harrington.”

Steve blushes, his cheeks turn a rosy hue as he grabs your waist pressing his lips to yours in a kiss so sweet you think you’ll get a toothache. 

“You really love me?”

“I really do.”

Steve presses another kiss before murmuring out an I love you against your lips.

Yeah, Steve Harrington is stupid. Stupidly in love with you. 

[buskingalbatross]

AmazingPhil channel marathon musings

during a pre-show q&a back in november, in response to a question about what show someone should binge next, dan said they should watch all of the AmazingPhil channel from the start. I was not the person who asked this (nor was I at this show), but regardless I did decide I wanted to take dan’s suggestion seriously. just a few days ago, I finished watching all of AmazingPhil in chronological order. and now i really want to talk about what it was like and why I would recommend marathoning his channel to pretty much anyone—because it was a blast.

I watched all of the 369 currently public AmazingPhil videos over the course of 35 days, which is from my perspective a pretty casual marathon. 369/35 = roughly 11 videos a day, though due to algorithm and monetization policy stuff, phil’s videos became longer in duration around 2015-2016; for many years, most of his videos were around 4 minutes long or less, which for me meant that early on in this marathon I was watching more videos per day, and then later on my pace slowed. phil’s videos with dan are usually pretty long as well, so if I had something like a baking video or wdapteo up next to watch, I might have only watched one or two videos that day. 

unsurprisingly, watching all of phil’s videos in order in a relatively short span of time gave me a really cool perspective on how phil has grown as a person and as a YouTuber over the past eighteen years. surprising to me, though, was how I felt like watching his channel in such a linear way felt a bit like coming to know who phil is for the very first time, again. despite having watched his videos for over a decade, i feel like i understand his style and creativity and personality more fully, and in general better, than I did before. watching 2007 phil become 2009 phil become 2011 phil and so on in the span of a few days or a week meant seeing clearly how his sense of humor evolved, how his editing and creativity developed, how his perspectives on life and relationship with his audience shifted. much as when you binge an entire tv or book series and immediately afterwards feel like you’re brimming with information, and have all the context, that’s sort of how I felt. and it was new for me because I’d never done that with phil’s content before—I’d never followed the course of his life the way you might a fictional character’s. 

AmazingPhil is also an incredible capsule of 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s Western internet culture, obviously. it’s like an anthropologist from the future with a very hyperspecific thesis topic’s dream treasure horde. what a person can learn about one corner of the world, and one corner of society, from AmazingPhil’s videos is, well, a lot. I see so much cultural value in AmazingPhil, it’s insane. his videos are not sketches, essays, and commentaries on society and life like Dan’s, but I’d make the argument (as I’m sure most of you would) that they’re just as important and critical to helping people understand themselves and the world they live in. and the kind of people they want to be, too, perhaps.

there were also certain videos that stuck with me more than they had in the past. I discovered new favorite videos and videos that I considered more interesting than I previously had. (I tried just now to make a list of some of these but it rapidly got too long, so instead I’ll restrict myself to mentioning only one, a new favorite, from 2021: “I Got Catfished.” - which i think is a fantastic example of phil’s storytelling style). dnp have both said before that they view life as a performance – and phil is without a sliver of doubt a magical and incredible performer. he knows so well how to tell stories with words, pacing, structures, and effects that are hilarious and entertaining; he turns anecdotes from his life into these amazing whimsical pieces of art made in a way no other person has ever made things. YouTube has from the beginning presented him with the perfect way to be creative in a way that suits him. and more than that, i found that it was never even remotely unpleasant to watch his videos every day for over a month. there is simply not an AmazingPhil video that doesn’t bring me joy and make me sit there smiling like a fool. my cheek muscles are probably stronger than they were 35 days ago. 

so, to you I say, go: watch all of AmazingPhil, draw your own conclusions from his current oeuvre and deepen your parasocial relationship with Phil Lester in ways you cannot yet comprehend. I really recommend. 

(final notes: one side effect of watching all of phil’s videos was being unexpectedly yet thoroughly convinced he does indeed possess psychic talents. even though i don’t believe in magical anything, i do now believe phil lester inherited prescience from his grandmother.) 

(also dan is completely right that every time phil changes his hair, he regenerates into an entirely new man.)

(also also I made an AmazingPhil spotify playlist that is highly specific to my music tastes but that anyone is welcome to listen to all the same) ✨🐗💙🥱

[mostlysignssomeportents]

All the books I reviewed in 2024

I reviewed 26 books this year: 15 novels, 5 nonfiction books, and 6 graphic novels. Even though I feel perennially behind on my reading (and objectively, I do have 10 linear feet of "to be read" books on the shelf), I think this is a pretty good haul.

Books are pretty much the ideal gift, if you ask me. Of course, I'm biased as a former bookseller and library worker, and as an author (of course) – I had three more books come out in 2024 (see the end of this post for details).

I started a lot more than 26 books this year. Long ago, I figured life was too short for books I wasn't enjoying, and I'm pretty ruthless about putting books down partway through if I think they're not going to reward finishing them. I probably start 10 books for every one I finish. However, I do review more than 90% of the books I get through. It's rare for me to keep reading a book all the way to the end if I'm not enjoying it enough to unconditionally recommend it. I rarely review books I don't like – there's not really any point in cataloging the list of books I think you won't enjoy reading, and most books I don't like very much are broken in ways that are too banal to comment upon.

The list below is pretty great, but if you're looking for more, here's the haul from 2023:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/01/bookmaker/#2023-in-review

NOVELS

I. Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford

A fucking banger: it's a taut, unguessable whuddunit, painted in ultrablack noir, set in an alternate Jazz Age in a world where indigenous people never ceded most the west to the USA. It's got gorgeously described jazz music, a richly realized modern indigenous society, and a spectacular romance. It's amazing.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/04/cahokia/#the-sun-and-the-moon

II. After World by Debbie Urbanski

An unflinching and relentlessly bleak tale of humanity's mass extinction, shot through with pathos and veined with seams of tragic tenderness and care. Sen Anon – the story's semi-protagonist – is 18 years old when the world learns that every person alive has been sterilized and so the human race is living out its last years.

The news triggers a manic insistence that this is a good thing – long overdue, in fact – and the perfect opportunity to scan every person alive for eventual reincarnation as virtual humans in an Edenic cloud metaverse called Gaia. That way, people can continue to live their lives without the haunting knowledge that everything they do makes the planet worse for every other living thing, and each other. Here, finally, is the resolution to the paradox of humanity: our desire to do good, and our inevitable failure on that score.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/18/storyworker-ad39-393a-7fbc/#digital-human-archive-project

III. Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind by Molly McGhee

A dreamlike tale of a public-private partnership that hires the terminally endebted to invade the dreams of white-collar professionals and harvest the anxieties that prevent them from being fully productive members of the American corporate workforce.

We meet Jonathan as he is applying for a job that he was recruited for in a dream. As instructed in his dream, he presents himself at a shabby strip-mall office where an acerbic functionary behind scratched plexiglass takes his application and informs him that he is up for a gig run jointly by the US State Department and a consortium of large corporate employers. If he is accepted, all of his student debt repayments will be paused and he will no longer face wage garnishment. What's more, he'll be doing the job in his sleep, which means he'll be able to get a day job and pull a double income – what's not to like?

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/08/capitalist-surrealism/#productivity-hacks

IV. The Book of Love by Kelly Link

If you've read Link's short stories (which honestly, you must read), you know her signature move: a bone-dry witty delivery, used to spin tales of deceptive whimsy and quirkiness, disarming you with daffiness while she sets the hook and yanks. That's the unmistakeable, inimitable texture of a Kelly Link story: deft literary brushstrokes, painting a picture so charming and silly that you don't even notice when she cuts you without mercy.

Turns out that she can quite handily do this for hundreds of pages, and the effect only gets better when it's given space to unfold.

It's a long and twisting mystery about friendship, love, queerness, rock-and-roll, stardom, parenthood, loyalty, lust and duty.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/13/the-kissing-song/#wrack-and-roll

V. Lyorn by Steven Brust

The seventeenth book in Steven Brust's long-running Vlad Taltos series. For complicated reasons, Vlad has to hide out in a theater. Why a theater? They are shielded from sorcery, as proof against magical spying by rival theater companies, and Vlad is on the run from the Left Hand of the Jhereg – the crime syndicate's all-woman sorceress squad – and so he has to hide in the theater.

The theater is mounting a production of a famous play that's about another famous play. The first famous play (the one the play is about – try and follow along, would you?) is about a famous massacre that took place thousands of years before. The play was mounted as a means of drumming up support for the whistleblower who reported on the massacre and was invited to a short-term berth in the Emperor's death row as a consequence.

The plot is a fantastic, fast-handed caper story that has a million moving parts, a beautiful prestige, and a coup de grace that'll have you cheering and punching the air.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/09/so-meta/#delightful-doggerel

VI. Till Human Voices Wake Us by Rebecca Roque

A teen murder mystery told in the most technorealist way. Cia's best friend Alice has been trying to find her missing boyfriend for months, and in her investigation, she's discovered their small town's dark secret – a string of disappearances, deaths and fires that are the hidden backdrop to the town's out-of-control addiction problem.

Alice has something to tell Cia, something about the fire that orphaned her and cost her one leg when she was only five years old, but Cia refuses to hear it. Instead, they have a blazing fight, and part ways. It's the last time Cia and Alice ever see each other: that night, Alice kills herself.

Or does she? Cia is convinced that Alice has been murdered, and that her murder is connected to the drug- and death-epidemic that's ravaging their town. As Cia and her friends seek to discover the town's secret – and the identity of Alice's killer – we're dragged into an intense, gripping murder mystery/conspiracy story that is full of surprises and reversals, each more fiendishly clever than the last.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/16/dead-air/#technorealism

VII. The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein

Randall "XKCD" Munroe pitched me on this over dinner: "All these different people kept recommending them to me, and they kept telling me that I would love them, but they wouldn't tell me what they were about because there's this huge riddle in them that's super fun to figure out for yourself. "The books were published in the eighties by Del Rey, and the cover of the first one had a huge spoiler on it. But the author got the rights back and she's self-published it."

How could I resist a pitch like that? So I ordered a copy. Holy moly is this a good novel! And yeah, there's a super interesting puzzle in it that I won't even hint at, except to say that even the book's genre is a riddle that you'll have enormous great fun solving.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/04/the-wulf/#underground-fave

VIII. Moonbound by Robin Sloan

Moonbound's protagonist is a "chronicler," a symbiotic fungus engineered to nestle in a human's nervous system, where it serves as a kind of recording angel, storing up the memories, experiences and personalities of its host. When we meet the chronicler, it has just made a successful leap from its old host – a 10,000-years-dead warrior who had been preserved in an anaerobic crashpod ever since her ship was shot out of the sky – into the body of Ariel, a 12-year-old boy who had just invaded the long-lost tomb.

This is doing fiction in hard mode, and Sloan nails it. The unraveling strangeness of Ariel's world is counterpointed with the amazing tale of the world the chronicler hails from, even as the chonicler consults with the preserved personalities of the heroes and warriors it had previous resided in and recorded.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/11/penumbraverse/#middle-anth

IX. Fight Me by Austin Grossman

Aging ex-teen superheroes weigh the legacy of Generation X, in a work that enrobes its savage critique with sweet melancholia, all under a coating of delicious snark. The Newcomers – an amped-up ninja warrior, a supergenius whose future self keeps sending him encouragement and technical schematics backwards through time, and an exiled magical princess turned preppie supermodel – have spent more than a decade scattered to the winds. While some have fared better than others, none of them have lived up to their potential or realized the dreams that seemed so inevitable when they were world famous supers with an entourage of fellow powered teens who worshipped them as the planet's greatest heroes.

As they set out to solve the mystery of the wizard who gave the protagonist his powers, they are reunited and must take stock of who they are and how they got there (cue Talking Heads' "Once In a Lifetime").

The publisher's strapline for this book is "The Avengers Meets the Breakfast Club," which is clever, but extremely wrong. The real comp for this book isn't "The Breakfast Club," it's "The Big Chill."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/01/the-big-genx-chill/#im-super-thanks-for-asking

X. Glass Houses by Madeline Ashby

Kristen is the "Chief Emotional Manager" for Wuv, a hot startup that has defined the new field of "affective computing," which is when a computer tells you what everyone else around you is really feeling, based on the irrepressible tells emitted by their bodies, voices and gadgets.

Managing Sumter through Wuv's tumultuous launch is hard work for Kristen, but at last, it's paid off. The company has been acquired, making Kristen – and all her coworkers on the founding core team – into instant millionaires. They're flying to a lavish celebration in an autonomous plane that Sumter chartered when the action begins: the plane has a malfunction and crashes into a desert island, killing all but ten of the Wuvvies.

As the survivors explore the island, they discover only one sign of human habitation: a huge, brutalist, featureless black glass house, which initially rebuffs all their efforts to enter it. But once they gain entry, they discover that the house is even harder to leave.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/13/influencers/#affective-computing

XI. The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy

A queer coming-of-age tale in the mode of epic fantasy. Lorel wants to be a witch, but that's the very last of the adventurous trades to be strictly gender-segregated. Boys and girls alike run away to be knights, brigands and sailors, but only girls can become a witch. Indeed, Lorel's best friend, Lane, is promised to the witches, having been born to a witch herself.

Lorel has signed up for witching just as the land is turning against witches, thanks to a political plot by a scheming duchess who has scapegoated the witches as part of a plan to annex all the surrounding duchies, re-establishing the long-disintegrated kingdom with herself on the throne. To make things worse (for the witches, if not the duchess), there's a plague of monsters on the land, and the forests are blighted with a magical curse that turns trees to unmelting ice. This all softens up the peasantfolk for anti-witch pogroms.

So Lorel has to learn witching, even as her coven is fighting both monsters and the duchess's knights and the vigilante yokels who've been stirred up with anti-witch xenophobia.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/24/daughters-of-the-empty-throne/#witchy

XII. Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson

A story that will make you drunk on language, on worldbuilding, and on its roaring, relentless plot. The action is set on Chynchin, a fantastic Caribbean island (or maybe Caribbeanesque – it's never clear whether this is some magical, imaginary world, or some distant future of our own). Chynchin is a multiracial, creole land with a richly realized gift economy that Hopkinson deftly rounds out with a cuisine, languages, and familial arrangements.

Chynchin was founded through a slave rebellion, in which the press-ganged soldiers of the iron-fisted Ymisen empire were defeated by three witches who caused them to be engulfed in tar that they magicked into a liquid state just long enough to entomb them, then magicked back into solidity. For generations, the Ymisen have tolerated Chynchin's self-rule, but as the story opens, a Ymisen armada sails into Chynchin's port and a "trade envoy" announces that it's time for the Chynchin to "voluntarily" re-establish trade with the Ymisen.

The story that unfolds is a staple of sf and fantasy: the scrappy resistance mounted against the evil empire, and this familiar backdrop is a sturdy scaffold to support Hopkinson's dizzying, phantasmagoric tale of psychedelic magic, possessed children, military intrigue, musicianship and sexual entanglements.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/20/piche/#cynchin

XIII. Julia by Sandra Newman

Julia is the kind of fanfic that I love, in the tradition of both The Wind Done Gone and Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, in which a follow-on author takes on the original author's throwaway world-building with deadly seriousness, elucidating the weird implications and buried subtexts of all the stuff and people moving around in the wings and background of the original.

For Newman, the starting point here is Julia, an enigmatic lover who comes to Winston with all kinds of rebellious secrets – tradecraft for planning and executing dirty little assignations and acquiring black market goods. Julia embodies a common contradiction in the depiction of young women (she is some twenty years younger than Winston): on the one hand, she is a "native" of the world, while Winston is a late arrival, carrying around all his "oldthink" baggage that leaves him perennially baffled, terrified and angry; on the other hand, she's a naive "girl," who "doesn't much care for reading," and lacks the intellectual curiosity that propels Winston through the text.

This contradiction is the cleavage line that Newman drives her chisel into, fracturing Orwell's world in useful, fascinating, engrossing ways. Through Julia's eyes, we experience Oceania as a paranoid autocracy, corrupt and twitchy. We witness the obvious corollary of a culture of denunciation and arrest: the ruling Party of such an institution must be riddled with internecine struggle and backstabbing, to the point of paralyzed dysfunction. The Orwellian trick of switching from being at war with Eastasia to Eurasia and back again is actually driven by real military setbacks – not just faked battles designed to stir up patriotic fervor. The Party doesn't merely claim to be under assault from internal and external enemies – it actually is.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/28/novel-writing-machines/#fanfic

XIV. The Wilding by Ian McDonald

McDonald's first horror novel, and it's fucking terrifying. It's set in a rural Irish peat bog that has been acquired by a conservation authority that is rewilding it after a century of industrial peat mining that stripped it back nearly to the bedrock. This rewilding process has been greatly accelerated by the covid lockdowns, which reduced the human footprint in the conservation area to nearly zero.

Lisa's last duty before she leaves the bog and goes home to Dublin is leading a school group on a wild campout in one of the bog's deep clearings. It's a routine assignment, and while it's not her favorite duty, it's also not a serious hardship.

But as the group hikes out to the campsite, one of her fellow guides is killed, without warning, by a mysterious beast that moves so quickly they can barely make out its monstrous form. Thus begins a tense, mysterious, spooky as hell story of survival in a haunted woods, written in the kind of poesy that has defined McDonald's career, and which – when deployed in service of terror – has the power to raise literal goosebumps.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/25/bogman/#erin-go-aaaaaaargh

XV. Polostan by Neal Stephenson

Not a spy novel, but a science fiction novel about spies in an historical setting. This isn't to say that Stephenson tramples on, or ignores spy tropes: this is absolutely a first-rate spy novel. Nor does Stephenson skimp on the lush, gorgeously realized and painstakingly researched detail you'd want from an historical novel.

Polostan raises the curtain on the story of Dawn Rae Bjornberg, AKA Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva, whose upbringing is split between the American West in the early 20th century and the Leningrad of revolutionary Russia (her parents are an American anarchist and a Ukrainian Communist who meet when her father travels to America as a Communist agitator). Aurora's parents' marriage does not survive their sojourn to the USSR, and eventually Aurora and her father end up back in the States, after her father is tasked with radicalizing the veterans of the Bonus Army that occupied DC, demanding the military benefits they'd been promised.

All of this culminates in her return sojourn to the Soviet Union, where she first falls under suspicion of being an American spy, and then her recruitment as a Soviet spy.

Also: she plays a lot of polo. Like, on a horse.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/04/bomb-light/#nukular

NONFICTION

I. A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

Biologist Kelly Weinersmith and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith set out to investigate the governance challenges of the impending space settlements they were told were just over the horizon. Instead, they discovered that humans aren't going to be settling space for a very long time, and so they wrote a book about that instead.

The Weinersmiths make the (convincing) case that every aspect of space settlement is vastly beyond our current or reasonably foreseeable technical capability. What's more, every argument in favor of pursuing space settlement is errant nonsense. And finally: all the energy we are putting into space settlement actually holds back real space science, which offers numerous benefits to our species and planet (and is just darned cool).

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

II. Dark Wire by Joseph Cox

Cox spent years on the crimephone beat, tracking vendors who sold modded phones (first Blackberries, then Android phones) to criminal syndicates with the promise that they couldn't be wiretapped by law-enforcement.

He tells the story of the FBI's plan to build an incredibly secure, best-of-breed crimephone, one with every feature that a criminal would want to truly insulate themselves from law enforcement while still offering everything a criminal could need to plan and execute crimes.

This is really two incredible tales. The first is the story of the FBI and its partners as they scaled up Anom, their best-of-breed crimephone business. This is a (nearly) classic startup tale, full of all-nighters, heroic battles against the odds, and the terror and exhilaration of "hockey-stick" growth.

The other one is the crime startup, the one that the hapless criminal syndicates that sign up to distribute Anom devices find themselves in the middle of. They, too, are experiencing hockey-stick growth. They, too, have a fantastically lucrative tiger by the tail. And they, too, have a unique set of challenges that make this startup different from any other.

Cox has been on this story for a decade, and it shows. He has impeccable sourcing and encyclopedic access to the court records and other public details that allow him to reproduce many of the most dramatic scenes in the Anom caper verbatim.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/04/anom-nom-nom/#the-call-is-coming-from-inside-the-ndrangheta

III. The Hidden History of Walt Disney World by Foxx Nolte

No one writes about Disney theme parks like Foxx Nolte; no one rises above the trivia and goes beyond the mere sleuthing of historical facts, no one nails the essence of what makes these parks work – and fail.

The history of Walt Disney World is also a history of the American narrative from the 1960s to the turn of the millennium, especially once Epcot enters the picture and Disney sets out to market itself as a futuristic mirror to America and the world. There's a doomed plan to lead the nation in the provision of an airport for the largely hypothetical short runway aircraft that never materialized, the Disney company's love-hate affair with Florida's orange growers, and the geopolitics of installing a permanent World's Fair, just as World's Fairs were disappearing from the world stage.

In focusing on the conflicts between different corporate managers, outside suppliers, and the gloriously flamboyant weirdos of Florida, Nolte's history of Disney World transcends amusing anaecdotes and tittle-tattle – rather, it illustrates how the creative sparks thrown off by people smashing into each other sometimes created towering blazes of glory that burn to this day.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/15/disnefried/#dialectics

IV. Network Nation by Richard R John

An extremely important, brilliantly researched, deep history of America's love/hate affair with not just the telephone, but also the telegraph. It is unmistakably as history book, one that aims at a definitive takedown of various neat stories about the history of American telecommunications.

The monopolies that emerged in the telegraph and then the telephone weren't down to grand forces that made them inevitable, but rather, to the errors made by regulators and the successful gambits of the telecoms barons. At many junctures, things could have gone another way.

Most striking about this book were the parallels to contemporary fights over Big Tech trustbusting, in our new Gilded Age. Many of the apologies offered for Western Union or AT&T's monopoly could have been uttered by the Renfields who carry water for Facebook, Apple and Google. John's book is a powerful and engrossing reminder that variations on these fights have occurred in the not-so-distant past, and that there's much we can learn from them.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/18/the-bell-system/#were-the-phone-company-we-dont-have-to-care

V. A Natural History of Empty Lots by Christopher Brown

A frustratingly hard to summarize book, because it requires a lot of backstory and explanation, and one of the things that makes this book so! fucking! great! is how skillfully Brown weaves disparate elements – the unique house he built in Austin, the wildlife he encounters in the city's sacrifice zones, the politics that created them – into his telling.

This series of loosely connected essays that explains how everything fits together: colonial conquest, Brown's failed marriage, his experience as a lawyer learning property law, what he learned by mobilizing that learning to help his neighbors defend the pockets of wildness that refuse to budge.

It's filled with pastoral writing that summons Kim Stanley Robinson by way of Thoreau, and it sometimes frames its philosophical points the way a cyberpunk writer would.

The kind of book that challenges how you feel about the crossroads we're at, the place you live, and the place you want to be.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/17/cyberpunk-pastoralism/#time-to-mow-the-roof

GRAPHIC NOVELS

I. Death Strikes by David Maass and Patrick Lay

"The Emperor of Atlantis," is an opera written by two Nazi concentration camp inmates, the librettist Peter Kien and the composer Viktor Ullmann, while they were interned in Terezin, a show-camp in Czechoslovakia that housed numerous Jewish artists, who were encouraged to make and display their work as a sham to prove to the rest of the world that Nazi camps were humane places.

Death Strikes was adapted by my EFF colleague Dave Maass, an investigator and muckraker and brilliant writer, who teamed up with illustrator Patrick Lay and character designer Ezra Rose (who worked from Kien and Ullmann's original designs, which survived along with the score and libretto).

The Emperor's endless wars have already tried Death's patience. Death brings mercy, not vengeance, and the endless killing has dismayed him. The Emperor's co-option drives him past the brink, and Death declares a strike, breaking his sword and announcing that henceforth, no one will die.

Needless to say, this puts a crimp in the Emperor's all-out war plan. People get shot and stabbed and drowned and poisoned, but they don't die. They just hang around, embarrassingly alive (there's a great comic subplot of the inability of the Emperor's executioners to kill a captured assassin).

While this is clearly an adaptation, Kien and Ullmann's spirit of creativity, courage, and bittersweet creative ferment shines through. It's a beautiful book, snatched from death itself.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/23/peter-kien-viktor-ullmann/#terez

II. My Favorite Things Is Monsters Book Two by Emil Ferris

The long, long delayed sequel to the tale of Karen Reyes, a 10 year old, monster-obsessed queer girl in 1968 Chicago who lives with her working-class single mother and her older brother, Deeze, in an apartment house full of mysterious, haunted adults. There's the landlord – a gangster and his girlfriend – the one-eyed ventriloquist, and the beautiful Holocaust survivor and her jazz-drummer husband.

Ferris's storytelling style is dazzling, and it's matched and exceeded by her illustration style, which is grounded in the classic horror comics of the 1950s and 1960s. Characters in Karen's life – including Karen herself – are sometimes depicted in the EC horror style, and that same sinister darkness crowds around the edges of her depictions of real-world Chicago.

Book Two picks up from Book One's cliffhanger and then rockets forward. Everything brilliant about One is even better in Two – the illustrations more lush, the fine art analysis more pointed and brilliant, the storytelling more assured and propulsive, the shocks and violence more outrageous, the characters more lovable, complex and grotesque.

Everything about Two is more. The background radiation of the Vietnam War in One takes center stage with Deeze's machinations to beat the draft, and Deeze and Karen being ensnared in the Chicago Police Riots of '68. The allegories, analysis and reproductions of classical art get more pointed, grotesque and lavish. Annika's Nazi concentration camp horrors are more explicit and more explicitly connected to Karen's life. The queerness of the story takes center stage, both through Karen's first love and the introduction of a queer nightclub. The characters are more vivid, as is the racial injustice and the corruption of the adult world.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/01/the-druid/#

III. So Long Sad Love by Mirion Malle

Cleo is a French comics creator who's moved to Montreal, in part to be with Charles, a Quebecois creator who helps her find a place in the city's tight-knit artistic scene. The relationship feels like a good one, with the normal ups and downs, but then Cleo travels to a festival, where she meets Farah, a vivacious and talented fellow artist. They're getting along great…until Farah discovers who Cleo's boyfriend is. Though Farah doesn't say anything, she is visibly flustered and makes her excuses before hurriedly departing.

This kicks off Cleo's hunt for the truth about her boyfriend, a hunt that is complicated by the fact that she's so far from home, that her friends are largely his friends, that he flies off the handle every time she raises the matter, and by her love for him.

Malle handles this all so deftly, showing how Cleo and her friends all play archetypal roles in the recurrent missing stair dynamic. It's a beautifully told story, full of charm and character, but it's also a kind of forensic re-enactment of a disaster, told from an intermediate distance that's close enough to the action that we can see the looming crisis, but also understand why the people in its midst are steering straight into it.

Packed with subtlety and depth, romance and heartbreak, subtext that carries through the dialog (in marvelous translation from the original French by Aleshia Jensen) and the body language in Malle's striking artwork.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/25/missing-step/#the-fog-of-love

IV. Bea Wolf by Zach Wienersmith and Boulet

A ferociously amazingly great illustrated kids' graphic novel adaptation of the Old English epic poem, which inspired Tolkien, who helped bring it to popularity after it had languished in obscurity for centuries.

Weinersmith and Boulet set themselves the task of bringing a Germanic heroic saga from more than a thousand years ago to modern children, while preserving the meter and the linguistic and literary tropes of the original. And they did it!

There are some changes, of course. Grendel – the boss monster that both Beowulf and Bea Wulf must defeat – is no longer obsessed with decapitating his foes and stealing their heads. In Bea Wulf, Grendel is a monstrously grown up and boring adult who watches cable news and flosses twice per day, and when he defeats the kids whose destruction he is bent upon, he does so by turning them into boring adults, too.

The utter brilliance of Bea Wulf is as much due to the things it preserves from the original epic as it is to the updates and changes. Weinersmith has kept the Old English tradition of alliteration, right from the earliest passages, with celebrations of heroes like "Tanya, treat-taker, terror of Halloween, her costume-cache vast, sieging kin and neighbor, draining full candy-bins, fearing not the fate of her teeth. Ten thousand treats she took. That was a fine Tuesday."

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/24/awesome-alliteration/#hellion-hallelujah

V. Youth Group by Bowen McCurdy and Jordan Morris

A charming tale of 1990s ennui, cringe Sunday School – and demon hunting.

Kay is a bitter, cynical teenager who's doing her best to help her mother cope with an ugly divorce that has seen her dad check out on his former family. Mom is going back to church, and she talks Kay into coming along with her to attend the church youth group.

But this is no ordinary youth group. Kay's ultra-boring suburban hometown is actually infested with demons who routinely possess the townspeople, and that baseline of demonic activity has suddenly gone critical, with a new wave of possessions. Suddenly, the possessed are everywhere – even Kay's shitty dad ends up with a demon inside of him.

That's when Kay discovers that the youth group and its corny pastor are also demon hunters par excellence. Their rec-rooms sport secret cubbies filled with holy weapons, and the words of exorcism come as readily to them as any embarrassing rewritten devotional pop song. Kay's discovery of this secret world convinces her that the youth group isn't so bad after all, and soon she is initiated into its mysteries, including the existence of rival demon-hunting kids from the local synagogue, Catholic church, and Wiccan coven.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/16/satanic-panic/#the-dream-of-the-nineties

VI. Justice Warriors: Vote Harder by Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson

Vote Harder sees Bubble City facing its first election in living memory, as the mayor – who inherited his position from his "powerful, strapping Papa" – loses a confidence vote by the city's trustees. They're upset with his plan to bankrupt the city in order to buy a laser powerful enough to carve his likeness into the sun as a viral stunt for the launch of his comeback album. The trustees are in no way mollified by the fact that he expects to make a lot of money selling special branded sunglasses that allow Bubble City (and the mutant hordes of the Uninhabited Zone) to safely look into the sun and see what their tax dollars bought.

So it's time for an election, and the two candidates are going hard: there's the incumbent Mayor Prince; there's his half-sister and ex-girlfriend, Stufina Vipix XII, and there's a dark-horse candidate Flauf Tanko, a mutant-tank cyborg that went rogue after a militant Home Owners Association disabled it and its owners abandoned it. Flauf-Tanko is determined to give the masses of the Uninhabited Zone the representation they've been denied for so long, despite the structural impediments to this (UZers need to complete a questionnaire, sub-forms, have three forms of ID, and present a rental contract, drivers license, work permit and breeding license. They also need to get their paperwork signed in person at a VERI-VOTE location, then wait 14 days to get their voter IDs by mail. Also, districts of 2 million or more mutants are allocated the equivalent of only 250,000 votes, but only if 51% of eligible voters show up to the polls; otherwise, their votes are parceled out to other candidates per the terms of the Undervoting and Apathy Allotment Act).

What unfolds is a funny, bitter, superb piece of political satire that could not be better timed.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/11/uninhabited-zone/#eremption-season

As I mentioned in the introduction to this roundup, I had three books out in 2024; a new hardcover, and the paperback editions of two books that came out in hardcover last year. There's more on the horizon – a new hardcover novel (PICKS AND SHOVELS) in Feb 2025, along with the paperback of my novel THE BEZZLE (also Feb 2025). I just turned in the manuscript for my next nonfiction book, ENSHITTIFICATION, which will also be adapted as a graphic novel. I'll also be shortly announcing the publication details for a YA graphic novel, a new essay collection and short story collection.

If you enjoy my work – the newsletter, the talks, the reviews – the best way to support me is to buy my books. I write for grownups, teens, middle-schoolers and little kids, so there's something for everyone!

I. The Lost Cause A solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency. "The first great YIMBY novel" -Bill McKibben. "Completely delightful…Neither utopian nor dystopian…I loved it" -Rebecca Solnit. A national bestseller!

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865946/thelostcause/

II. The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation A detailed disassembly manual for people who want to dismantle Big Tech. "A passionate case for 'relief from manipulation, high-handed moderation, surveillance, price-gouging, disgusting or misleading algorithmic suggestions. -Akash Kapur, New Yorker. Another national bestseller!

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

III. The Bezzle. A seething rebuke of the privatized prison system that delves deeply into the arcane and baroque financial chicanery involved in the 2008 financial crash. "Righteously satisfying…A fascinating tale of financial skullduggery, long cons, and the delivery of ice-cold revenge." –Booklist. A third national bestseller!

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle/

[tainbocuailnge]

fairy tales are real, iris and bena explicitly say this multiple times and have the dreamland powers to back up the claim

the castle of dreams and the crimson troupe are similar entities according to shalem

iris’ grandmother is in the crimson troupe castle chilling like she belongs there + implicitly has gone to at least one of their performances, one of the books in iris' castle had a ticket to a crimson troupe performance being used as a bookmark

iris only knows the sanitised versions of victorian fairytales according to her profile

-> iris likely does not know the true nature of her own castle or what it means for it to be similar to the crimson troupe. her castle might even be the exact same castle as the troupe's without her knowledge, or it might essentially be a sanitised version of the same fairytale.

shalem is implicitly clairvoyant, multiple lines have him refer to seeing or envisioning the future and he knows things he has no reasonable way of knowing

shalem's profile also presents information that a HR employee would have absolutely no reasonable way of knowing and he's the only operator whose profile is not plausibly written by rhodes HR, even the corrupting heart has more empirically verifiable files. shalem's files are instead pretty blatantly written by the troupe

despite the troupe repeatedly claiming shalem has no talent and they don't want him back, both his profile and his nightmares involve the troupe urging him to go back on stage

shalem's skin is called "the fruition" and the description talks about fruit being best when it is ripe enough to fall, something only those who create get to taste.

the skin also has the text "flower of evil" and notably even in unofficial designs from cenm0 shalem is almost always wearing or carrying flowers in some way (his jacket has a flower pattern on the inside in his default look), and in both his skin and that unofficial fucked up shalem design the flowers are growing directly on him

-> the imagery all points to shalem having some manner of unfulfilled potential that he will reach in the future, whether he wants to or not, which will consume him in some way, and he is aware of this.

fairytale castles can take many forms including that of people, this is brought up in both iris and bena modules as well as implied by the dreambind castle collectible. the fairytale from bena's module, in which a boy's home castle takes on a form that looks like him to follow him around, is specifically mentioned to be from the same compilation that iris' grandmother is reading in her is2 encounter

the crimson troupe castle is all but explicitly sentient, several is2 medals as well as furniture items refer to the castle as something with its own awareness and will

both the castle of dreams and the crimson troupe castle explicitly operate outside linear time, and the crimson troupe castle in particular has multiple cases of one person existing in multiple points in time at once (big sad lock and the person whose soul was used for it, phantom hiding under a table while the blood diamond is walking around)

the soundtrack for the IS2 6th floor (hall of desires, no time) is called "silent abyss" with the same character as shalem's old name & to my understanding the characters for "silent" could also translate as "tranquil"

there is such a thing as a "castle's offspring," a “stage” and a “castle” are things that can grow and propagate

-> I have an idea for shalem's recursively inevitable future.

[hughiecampbelle]

Charnel House (Will Graham x Sibling!Reader)

Character/s: Will, Jack

Word Count: 1,284

Inspired By: I've Been Dying by Deadbeat Girl

A/N: I absolutely love sibling dynamics!!! I still don't know a lot of Wills past or upbringing, so I kept things pretty vague, but the idea of him being a protective older brother is too sweet not to write! So sorry it's off schedule! I was so stumped with what to write and then the idea came this morning :) Anyways, enjoy my loves!!! Feedback is always appreciated!!! ❤🥩❤🥩❤🥩❤🥩❤🥩❤🥩❤🥩

WRITING EVENT ❤️🔪🩸

Young, Will thinks, you are too young for this. Crime scene tape. Massacred families. Blood splattered walls. Small pools of red beneath their heads dripping, dribbling, down the dining room table. Pale skin. Wide eyes. You follow him like you did when you were children, close behind. Bumping into him, stepping on his heels, apologizing quietly. He resists the urge to grab your hand, squeeze it, and remind you to look both ways before crossing the street. He resists the urge to hold you back, shield your eyes, pretend like this is all one bad dream. It’s not. Beside him Jack Crawford. Next is Bev, Price, Zeller. Countless nameless faces in and out of frame. Trailing one another. Jack says something he cannot understand, his attention focused on you. You get that look in your eyes, where your pupils grow big and you get this million yard stare. What do you see? He wants to ask, but remains silent. You are not a baby in this room. You don’t need his guidance or protection. You are a guest, neither FBI nor teacher, but help nonetheless. You are working. He must remind himself you are here as equal. Perhaps not an equal, perhaps your pedestal is taller than his. He glances back at his coworkers, friends he’d say if he were stretching the truth, all of them smirking, laughing at something obviously inappropriate. He tries to smile along, to pretend, but the effort is futile. When he searches behind him you are gone. 

He’s not sure how the topic came up. Was it in therapy? Rattling off anecdotes of his youth. A crucial piece of himself is coming up. Without it, the story would be incomplete. Or, was it in passing? To Be or Alana, both is a possibility. His “gift” is neither special nor worth talking about. Not when his baby could do so much more. Stories of your childhood. Disorganized, without linear time. You are in your pajamas, so small, so scared. Crying to him about a man hanging in your closet. Another monster under the bed. Old houses, with creaky floorboards and white-haired women. Running through the hallways, your feet patting against the thick runners, screeching and giggling. Playing. Not with imaginary friends, like the women laughed. With the dead, he wants to correct, but bites his tongue. You’d been able to see them all of your life. Some are more eager than others. The children are the most trusting. People who went peacefully. Others are harsh. Vengeful. Stitching their existence to you. Unable to shake them off. Seeing them. A young woman in the bathtub, her wrists open. Splashing in the bubbles, in the red only you could see. Finding yourself wandering through fields, through trees to unmarked graves. Begging to be believed. Both of you. Someone suggested your name. Startled, his worlds colliding, his words stern. No one listened though. Each of them wary, disbelieving, and yet so desperate. He makes the call, afraid their voices, their words will somehow taint your world. Somehow they will turn you into him. 

The killer elusive. Skilled, capable, and thoughtful. Massacring entire families. They’re not innocent, though. There are always secrets keeping them together. It’s the daughter you see. Not exactly intact. Her wounds bleeding, her dress stained, though she does not react to it. They rarely ever do. Up the stairs she leads, moving through various officers. Opaque, and unfortunately very real, you squeeze past them, trying your best not to disrupt their investigation. Loony, you heard one say to the other in a low voice. This is not the first time you’ve had someone doubt you in this way. It would not be the last. At first wanting to play. A massive dollhouse sits in her room. A family much like hers lays scattered across the rug. Bodies face down. Joints bent in inhumane ways. When you look inside, it matches the very house you’re standing in. Beaming, you compliment her. It was lovely. The wallpaper from her room pasted across the walls of the toy. Her replica sits on her bed waiting to be played with. She moves to the window where she points to a swing set. It must've been built when she was a baby. After all these years, these snowy winters, it moves in the wind. Unstable, but loved dearly. A swing for her and her brother, never forced to share. Enough to go around. A slide and monkey bars. Scenic, you think. Familiar and yet so foreign.

Reaching out, attempting to grab your hand, she leads you out, down the stairs. The scene has been cleared. Only your brother stands in the dining room. He does as he has been trained to. This ability described to you dozens of times. He feels himself pull out the gun. Aim it at each of them. You want to watch, but she insists, eager to show you. You disappear into the kitchen where a set of stairs leads to the basement. Neither the son nor the parents make themselves known. You’ve been tricked before. And yet, you trust her. There’s no way to explain it. And so, you follow. Unfinished, it sits with dirt floors and cold, concrete walls. Above you, Will's footsteps move across the room. You can trace his path. The girl urges you forward. A washing machine and dryer sit behind an open doorway. She moves past it though, further. A small hole carved into the wall. Small. Too small. Tugging at a board placed over it until it falls to the floor. Right away you smell something familiar. It’s a scent you’ve grown accustomed to. Something rotten. Rotting. Just a little, though. You come to realize the body is mostly gone. She points and you follow with your gaze. A skull. Next to it, a rib cage and spinal cord. Most of the outer flesh decayed, sunken into the dirt, but small parts remain. She stares at you, trying to read your expression. This is what the killer knew. Punishing her family for taking a life. Hiding the body. Thinking they could get away with it. 

You call for Will, your voice steady and unafraid. He comes running. So does everyone else. When you turn back to thank her, this little girl, innocent alongside her brother, she is gone. There is a second body further back, but you came without a flashlight. They question you, your knowledge, but Will comes to your defense, eager to shut down their accusations. Bev compliments you, says the whole Graham family is skilled in this department. You shrug it off, trying to hide your smile. Everyone knew about your brother, amazing and skilled. Few gave you the same credit. Whoever they were, they knew about the bodies in the basement. Thinking of themself as a vigilante of sorts. A killer of killers. Before you leave, you check the backyard, hoping to see her on her swing. It moves gently from the wing, back and forth, snow piled a few inches high on the seat. Jack congratulates you on your work. Neither you nor your brother have explained exactly what you can do to him, not exactly, and he does not insist on answers. Whatever you do, whatever the both of you do, it helps in the long run. Will hopes this collaboration will be a one time thing. Let you go back to your life unscathed. Unharmed. Already there is talk of another case, another murder. You don’t mind. You get to work with Will. You get to understand the dead. Help them in ways you’re typically forbidden from. Meddling, they used to say. Now you were of value.

[glowettee]

Hey Mindy 💕 @scavengerluv here! Was wondering if you could help create a guide and or link a guide about consistency with routine and sticking to a routine 💕 Wishing you the best!

hi darling @scavengerluv! 🌸 thank you for your sweet ask about building consistency with routines! as someone who has struggled with maintaining routines myself, i'd love to share some gentle guidance on making habits stick. hopefully this cozy little guide can help you. if you have ANY more questions at all. i'll be soooo happy to help!

creating & sticking to routines: a soft guide ⭐️

building consistent routines doesn't have to feel overwhelming or rigid. think of it as creating little rituals that make your days feel more intentional and peaceful. here are my besttt tips when it comes to consistent routines.

start tiny, dream big

begin with just one small habit (like drinking water when you wake up)

gradually layer new habits onto existing ones (it's called habit stacking)

celebrate the tiniest wins because they matter so much

make it feel special

create a peaceful environment for your routine

use items that bring you joy (a pretty journal, your favorite cup)

add gentle touches like soft music or fairy lights

treat your routine as self-care rather than obligation

the power in morning & evening anchors morning whispers:

set a consistent wake time

open curtains to let sunshine in

make your bed feel like a cloud

have a morning beverage ritual

evening lullabies:

dim lights an hour before bed

put phone away (or use night mode)

gentle skincare routine

read something lovely

the secret sauce: habit stacking connect new habits to existing ones, like:

stretching while water boils for tea

reading while having breakfast

journaling right after making your bed

meditation after brushing teeth

when things feel wobbly remember love, it's okay when routines get disrupted. life isn't meant to be perfect. i value being gentle to yourself, in every way. here's how to stay soft with yourself:

if you miss a day, simply begin again

adjust routines as seasons change

listen to what your body needs

keep the core simple, let details be flexible

making it sustainable

start with 1-2 weeks of tiny changes

use a pretty tracker or journal

find an accountability friend (like me 💌)

share progress in a way that feels good

remember progress isn't linear

gentle reminders for the journey

consistency > perfection

small steps create big changes

your routine should feel like a friend

adapt and adjust with love

celebrate every tiny victory

creating your personal rhythm everyone's routine will look different, and that's the beauty of it. maybe yours includes (or can include):

morning pages

gentle movement

nature walks

creative time

restful moments

remember, the goal isn't to create a perfect routine - it's to build a framework that supports and nurtures you. start small, be patient, and let your routine evolve naturally like a garden growing in its own time. i personally tell myself this every time i feel like i'm falling off.

sending you the warmest hugs and gentlest encouragement as you build your beautiful routines! remember that i'm always here if you need more specific guidance or just want to share your journey. 🌸

with love and soft whispers, mindy x

p.s. if anyone would like to share their routine journey, my inbox is always open for your stories and questions! 💕 - mindy

[joshslater]

Frat War

Similar stories and bonus material on my Patreon.

"Sweet dreams," he said and knocked on my helmet. Then he gave me the finger straight in my face. "See you tomorrow or whenever," turned off the lights, and closed the door.

I was alone in the darkness. The only sound I could hear was the vibrator, or perhaps I just felt it and imagined the sound. I tried to jiggle around a bit to see if I could get loose, but I was securely tied up. It wasn't uncomfortable, perhaps not surprising given all the padded sports gear they forced on me, but I would probably have burning muscle aches when they eventually cut me loose. Right now it was the pungent smell of locker room from the gear that bothered me more, or perhaps even more the sock gag they taped in place. It just kept leaking a foul, sour taste. They can't be this bad naturally so it must be because of the oil.

Fuck, I'm losing it. My mind keeps wandering and not focusing. I'll take it from the start.

So someone in the linear algebra class asked if I could walk by the KAX frat house on my way home and hand over some homework to Chase. I didn't recall seeing him before, but then the class lecture hall is large and some people are watching the classes remotely. I assumed we had spoken though, because how else would he know I passed the frat house on my route? "Sure," I said and grabbed the manilla folder from him.

After one lecture in mechanics, friction more specifically, I was on my way home. The KAX frat house was a weird-looking brick building that had been some sort of school before it was converted, with a decent-sized front garden. I walked up the gravel walk to the door and just as I was about to press the buzzer the door flung open and a half dozen dudes tackled me to the floor.

"Hey! Let me" was all I managed to shout out before someone stuck a rolled towel between my teeth. I was pressed down into the floor by several hands and knees. "You find it? Is it him?" someone asked. I could hear rummaging above me. "Yeah, it's here. Schematics, codes, everything. He even put it in a folder with KAX written on it. What a fucking stealth ninja."

I had been set up! For what I didn't know, but I started to struggle and shout pleadings to them, which probably came out as muffled nonsense. "Spritz him," someone else said, and soon after a pair of hands held my head still, while a third inserted something into one nostril, sprayed a mist into it, and I blacked out.

"He's awake," someone called out far in the distance, and I wondered who he meant. There was something in my mouth but as I tried to reach for it someone grabbed my arm. Slowly the frat house and the ambush came back to me and I opened my eyes. I saw myself in a large, wall-mounted mirror, sitting relaxed in an armchair that had been placed in a home gym. I was dressed almost completely as a football player. Cleats, socks, tight pants, undershirt, and two guys were about to tie the shoulder pads in place. I had two black streaks under my eyes and duct tape over my mouth keeping whatever in place. There was a funky smell of locker room as if the uniform hadn't been washed. "Almost done. Keep calm and don't struggle, and we won't knock you out again."

I wasn't sure what was happening, but I was pretty sure I wouldn't get far if I tried to fight them. The guys put on a football Jersey in the school team's colors, followed by elbow pads and gloves. Then they helped me up from the armchair and moved me over to their lat pulldown machine, I think it's called. It looked like it came from a professional gym that I imagine the frat had grabbed at some bankruptcy auction. In the few steps over I could feel something else was wrong. I had been so overwhelmed by the sensations of a full football outfit I hadn't noticed something was weird in the groin area.

Once seated on the machine the guys started to tie me in place with thick ropes. Another pair of guys carried the armchair out of the room so the only remaining furniture was gym equipment. I was still at a loss for what the purpose, as well as the reason, for all this was. In front of me one guy rolled up a white sock that was discolored as if it had been heavily used in black shoes. He then picked up a small bottle, unscrewed it, and used the dropper from the lid to squirt some liquid into the rolled-up sock. He then tore off a new strip of duct tape, ripped off the tape from my face, replaced the cloth in there with the sock roll, and taped it shut again. I figured if I resisted they would just use whatever that spritz was again.

"We have a private cannabis oil blend with some other shit mixed in that gives you these amazing sexual highs. Just rock hard for hours while you can space out to your favorite porn. Very dangerous to use too often or too long." He pressed a helmet on my head and locked it in place with the strap. "With the concentration you're getting, and released over such a long time, you'll end up forming completely new sexual attractions to whatever you're subjected to." He pressed something near my hip and I could feel what might have been a cockring starting to vibrate. "To what is however the question." He was about to leave when one of the other guys pointed at something on the floor.

He reached down and plugged in an air humidifier. "We put so much effort into this, and I almost forgot it. We've been pulling moisture out of gym clothes for months to create this experience for you. I'm really interested in what the outcome is. The original idea was to turn you gay for football jocks, but I think it's more likely you'll end up sexually attracted to locker rooms. Or bondage. Well, tell your bros at the frat we won the prank battle this year."

My mouth was filled with bitter, sour taste and my eyes started having trouble focusing on him.

"Fuck, it stinks. Let's leave boys before it sticks in the hair. I bet it takes weeks to get out. Sweet dreams," he said and knocked on my helmet.

[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!

[embroiderling]

Embroidery for the @monsterfucktoberbingo - Square: Cyborg.

Original artwork by @designtheendless (which is art for A Waking Nightmare by the amazing @kydrogendragon)

Ok, a note for this one. First, of course I know that people in wheelchairs are not monsters. This is a free interpretation of the prompt. I think that's pretty obvious, but just in case.

And keep reading for a few words about being disabled, pain and mental health.

I was talking with my friends from the discord Dreamling con Ñ about the definition of cyborg —a creature composed of organic elements and cybernetic devices usually intended to enhance the capabilities of the organic part through the use of technology.

We were thinking about Dream or Hob with an orthopaedic leg or arm, but we didn't find any Sandman drawing like that (I hope someone do it, because it deserves representation!) And then I remembered this beautiful art. So we have Hob here, using a kind of technology that helps with his organic living...

I had an accident two months ago. I had to wear an orthopaedic boot for a month because I wasn't able to walk without risking worsening my injury. My body had to learn to walk differently, and I went (still go) through a lot of pain because my body posture changed and I lost muscle strength in my legs. My sense of balance was affected and I still walk like a pirate —quite useful for a costume party. I had 30 kinesiology sessions (and there'll be more). Rehabilitation isn't linear. There are ups and downs. One day you get up and feel like new. And the next 5 days you feel terrible. And when the body hurts, it's easier for the mind to hurt, too.

As you might suspect, this isn't about me. This is about anyone reading this who isn't having a good day/week/year/life. Life isn't linear, and I can't promise you that everything will be fine, but I can tell you that tomorrow will be a different day. That you're not alone. And you are loved. If you feel like the sadness won't leave home, ask for help. If you think someone you love is feeling that way, try to be there because maybe that person doesn't have the energy needed to ask for help.

Please, be safe. Take care of yourself. You're loved. And the world is better because you're here.

[m1ckeyb3rry]

── PEREGRINE // TWO

Series Synopsis: The ways that you and Seishiro Nagi fall together and fall apart over the years.

Chapter Synopsis: You and May hang out at the mall before going to dinner with Reo, Ryosuke, and Nagi.

Series Masterlist

Pairing(s): Nagi x Reader, Kira x Reader

Chapter Word Count: 6.1k

Content Warnings: unhealthy relationships, cheating, non-linear narrative, probably ooc, angst, nagi is endgame, kira sucks, alternate universe, original characters

A/N: ok so i lowkey hate writing nagi atm simply because he is a character who (imo) NEEDS a build up to feel like he actually cares abt someone instead of being generally apathetic. but in this part of the story we’re like…past that build up if that makes sense?? so he feels weird to me rn since he’s the product of character development that’s happened chronologically but not narratively. idk that was a long rant for no reason LMAO i hope you guys don’t hate the chapter.

divider credits: @/benkeibear

You were awoken from a pleasant dream whose contents you could not remember by banging on the room door. When Ryosuke only groaned and mumbled something violent in response, you realized that it fell to you to see what was happening. Yawning and rubbing your eyes, you rolled out of bed and stumbled over to the entrance, swinging it open to find a straight-faced Reo and a playfully irritated May.

“What happened to not sleeping, huh?” May said, poking you in the forehead.

“We weren’t sleeping,” you said, though your statement was punctuated by another yawn, somewhat detracting from its validity.

“That’s believable,” Reo said.

“Oh, that’s enough out of you,” you said. “What’s up? Why’re you guys here?”

“We were going to show you around, remember?” May said.

“You weren’t answering our texts and calls, so we came to see how you were doing in person,” Reo said, his expression uncharacteristically sour.

“Don’t mind him,” May said. “He’s just mad because he lost one of our bets.”

“What was it this time?” you said. For as long as they had been acquainted, Reo and May had constantly been making lighthearted bets against one another, and it seemed that even with their wedding looming so close, their games had not ceased any.

“It was a stupid bet,” Reo grumbled. “I was so sure I was going to win, but my own best friend betrayed me!”

“Me?” you said, pointing at yourself. “What, because I fell asleep? Did you seriously bet I was going to stay awake? You should’ve known better.”

“So you were asleep!” May said.

“Er,” you said. “Well, there’s no point in hiding it. Yeah, we were.”

“Shame on you,” May said.

“Actually, I’m talking about Nagi,” Reo said. “I bet that he wouldn’t come to dinner with all of us later tonight, because it would be way too much of a chore.”

“That’s a pretty sensible option,” you said. “He doesn’t really do things unless they’re easy for him.”

“Exactly my point!” Reo said. “See? I’m not stupid!”

“Maybe neither of you know him as well as I do,” May said with a mysterious shrug. “I guessed he was going to come, and guess what? He is!”

“It’s just not plausible for you to know him better than me!” Reo said. “Y/N, sure, that makes sense. She barely ever talked to him, so it’s not impossible for you to have the upper hand if you’re betting against her. But me? Me? That’s — it’s — it’s just preposterous, that’s what it is!”

“He’s taking this pretty personally,” you observed.

“I know,” May said. “It’s really funny. Every time I pretend like I might know more than him about you or Nagi, he freaks out. The trick is that most of the time, he actually does win bets involving the two of you. I just really ham up the few times that I do win, so it seems like I’m some kind of clairvoyant genius or something.”

“Maybe you’re not clairvoyant, but you’re definitely comedic,” you said. “I’m grateful you’re the one marrying him. He needs someone that keeps him on his toes.”

“It’s a duty I take seriously,” she said. “Anyways, is that fiancé of yours going to come with us or not?”

“Oh, right,” Reo said, his anger dissipating entirely. “That was the other question. Will he want to be there?”

“I’ll make him come to dinner for sure,” you said. “I don’t know if he’ll want to go shopping, though. I can ask.”

“You don’t have to,” May said.

“True,” Reo said. “The three of us could just hang out. It’d be like old times.”

“I’d feel embarrassed third-wheeling you two,” you said. “What would I do when you started getting all lovey-dovey? It would be really awkward if I didn’t even have anyone there to commiserate with.”

“You’re such a baby,” May said. “It’ll be fine. We’ll keep our PDA to a minimum.”

“I’ve known Reo for too long,” you said, pointing at where his hand was already intertwining with hers. “Asking him to refrain from PDA is a cruel and unusual punishment that I could never inflict, even if it was for my own personal comfort.”

“That’s true,” she said, leaning against him slightly. It was the kind of love that was so assured they did not even have to think twice about it. It came naturally, simply. There was no facade to be maintained, no perfect image that was always mere seconds away from shattering entirely.

“Right, so let me just wake Ryosuke up and see what he says,” you said, though of course, you didn’t need to. Perhaps there was not as much love between you and him as there once had been, but your understanding had only grown in the years that had passed, so you could predict his answer with perfect accuracy before you had even asked the question.

He was already stirring when you returned to his side, running his fingers through his hair and drinking from the bottle of water that the hotel staff had so kindly left on our bedside.

“Morning, babe,” he said to you.

“It’s actually afternoon,” you said.

“It’s morning somewhere,” he said. You rolled your eyes.

“Sure,” you said. “Look, Reo and May are here. They’re going to take us to the mall and show us around, and then we’ll all go to dinner together.”

“Okay,” he said. “Give a minute and I’ll meet you all outside.”

“You’ll come shopping?” you checked.

“Of course I will. I need to make sure you don’t buy anything unfashionable,” he said, winking at you cheekily. You did not respond in kind.

“We’ll wait in the hotel lobby,” you said. You wanted to badly to believe that he was being like this because seeing Reo and May had reminded him of what your life used to be like, but the truth was probably just that he had not had the chance to see another woman in some time and was therefore feeling fonder of you because you were his only option, as he was yours.

“He’ll meet us in the lobby,” you said to Reo and May, taking your purse off of the hook by the entrance. The strap rested on your shoulder as you made sure you had one of the copies of the key in your wallet before shutting the door behind you, trusting Ryosuke would lock it.

“If he takes too long, we’ll leave without him,” May said. Reo did not say anything, but considering his policy of being as polite at all times as he could manage, it was as good as an agreement on his part. You supposed May must’ve made clear her dislike to Reo, although if you were recalling correctly, Reo had never exactly been Ryosuke’s number-one-fan, either. He was just better about hiding it than May and Chigiri, both of whom were all but open about their true feelings towards him.

“He won’t,” you said. “He’s basically ready. He just had to use the bathroom, I think.”

“I was just saying,” she said. “It would be in character for him to take forever, is all. What did Chigiri always call him? A peacock bastard or something?”

“Believe it or not, he still calls him that,” you said.

“To his face?” Reo said, eyebrows shooting up. “That’s gutsy, even for him.”

“I knew I liked him for a reason,” May said.

“Not exactly to his face, considering he refuses to even look at Ryosuke. Apparently, it breaks him out,” you said. “And you know how he is about his skin care, Reo.”

Reo, who had been Chigiri’s roommate just as you had been May’s, made a face in acknowledgment, likely recalling as you were the bottles upon bottles of expensive lotions and hair products that Chigiri had invested most of his allowance and, later, salary in.

“He’s not wrong, per se,” May said. “I can feel an itch under my skin as well, just from being around him for so long.”

“I hope that you can get over your allergy on this trip, then,” you said. “Considering he’s going to be at your wedding, and you’ll be at mine.”

“He’s only here as your plus one,” May said.

“That doesn’t change the fact that he’s here,” you said slowly, like you were explaining the concept to a child.

“No, but it does mean that I didn’t invite him,” she explained. Reo tried to cover his snicker by hiding his mouth behind his hand, but considering his eyes still scrunched at the corners and glittered with mirth, he was overall unsuccessful.

“Just be nice to him, please,” you said. “It’s my life you’re making harder. At least with Chigiri, there’s that old rivalry to explain it, but you’re just going out of your way to be rude.”

“You’re right,” Reo said, suddenly guilty, shoving his hands in his pockets and shrugging up his shoulders high as a defense from your disappointment. “We’ll call a truce for the duration of the wedding.”

“We will?” May said.

“May, she promised to get along with Nagi for us,” he said. “It’s the least we owe her.”

“Stop bringing Nagi up,” you said, shifting from foot to foot uncomfortably.

“Sorry,” Reo said. May pursed her lips but nodded, though she looked more contemplative than unwilling, as if some new information had suddenly been revealed to her. You couldn’t be sure what information that might’ve been, exactly, but since she did not reveal her hand, you were left to guess.

Ryosuke stepped out of the elevator a few moments later, wearing a new set of clothes and an easy grin. He waved at the receptionist when he passed her, and then he crossed the room to stand at your side, though you noticed he did not even try to put his arm around your body or his hand on your own. He seemed more like a particularly close friend than a lover, and you trained your gaze on the ground instead of reaching out for him as you could have.

“Hope I didn’t keep you guys waiting for long,” he said. May shook her head, smiling at him as best she could. She must’ve picked up that political savvy from Reo, who had a natural-born charm which endeared him to all.

“It’s not a problem,” she said. Ryosuke seemed taken aback by the sudden switch in her demeanor, but he took it in stride.

“Alright,” he said. “Should we get going, then?”

“Yes, that sounds good. Should we take one car or two?” Reo said.

“I vote two,” you said, wanting to give Reo and May the privacy that would be hard-won in the coming weeks. May nodded.

“Agreed. I call having Y/N with me!” she said, wrapping herself around your bicep and batting her eyelashes at Reo.

“Okay,” he said through gritted teeth. “Looks like it’s you and me, Kira.”

“Fine by me,” Ryosuke said.

“Wait, May, don’t you want to spend some time with Reo?” you said. “You guys are going to be so busy getting ready for the wedding soon, so you’ll barely have any moments alone with him.”

“We have our entire lives to spend together,” she said, smiling fondly at Reo. “And I haven’t seen you in years. Of course I want to go with you!”

“If you say so,” you said.

“We’ll meet you there,” Reo said, walking towards the first car waiting in the pickup lane of the hotel, Ryosuke following after him. You and May waited for them to drive off and the second car to pull up before you, too, exited the hotel lobby and got into the backseat together.

“Alright, now that those two are gone, let’s get to the real stuff,” May said, rubbing her hands together.

“What real stuff?” you said. She beamed.

“I want to know what’s up with you!” she said.

“I always text you whenever something happens,” you said. “So you’re pretty much all caught up. Not that there’s really much to catch up on.”

“Why haven’t you picked a wedding day?” she said.

“It’s always straight to the point with you, isn’t it?” you said. “I don’t know. I just don’t feel ready to get married yet.”

“You’re the one who’s holding back?” she said.

“I’ve always been the one holding back,” you reminded her. “Even when we were in college. If you’ll recall, he had to try quite a lot to get me to agree to go out with him.”

“That’s true, but now that the two of you are together, I would’ve said for sure that Mr. ‘I’m-Scared-of-Commitment’ would’ve been the one making a fuss about having to actually get married,” she said.

You almost caved. You almost opened your mouth and told her that it was because you resented Ryosuke, resented him as much if not more than you loved him, and you could not marry someone like that. But neither could you leave him, and so you were stuck in this strange, endless limbo, which you could not escape from nor meaningfully exist in.

“He’s happy,” you said. “He actually brought up choosing a date the other day. I’m the one who’s being weird about it.”

May made a noise of sympathy. “Why?”

You leaned your head against the tinted window, watching the familiar sights of your childhood flashing by, so different and yet still the same. That girl who you had been when you had lived here last…you wondered what she’d think of you now. Was this what she had imagined her life would look like one day?

You didn’t need to ponder it for very long. You knew the answer already — no.

“Why did you say yes when Reo asked you to marry him?” you said instead of responding, thinking back to the day he had proposed to her.

“Because saying yes meant spending the rest of my life with him,” she said.

“And that was something you wanted?” you pressed.

“Of course,” she said. “Even now, my life with him is so wonderful. I want to share as much of myself as I can with him. Isn’t it the same for you? Isn’t that why you said yes? After all, Kira proposed first. If anything, I should be asking you these questions.”

“I guess so,” you said. No. No, of course not. The thought of spending the rest of your life living like this was akin to an imprisonment. It was a great burden weighing down on you, but then again, it was better than the alternative, which was the reason why you still could not bring yourself to leave.

“I’m not judging you or anything,” May said. “And trust me, I could, but I’m not, because I really just want you to be happy. Are you?”

“Am I what?” you said.

“Happy,” she said. “When you were a kid, is this what you dreamt your life would look like?”

You laughed bitterly. “Of course not. People outgrow dreams, May. I was an idealistic girl when I was younger, and there’s no place in this world for that. I have a stable job and a fine home. I have a fiancé who does not mistreat me. I have a cat of my own and a friend who lives only minutes away. Maybe I’m not as happy as I could be, but I’m satisfied.”

“I see,” May said. “If that’s the way it is…I’m glad for you. After everything, you deserve it.”

You exhaled heavily, unsure of what to say. “Thank you.”

Reo and Ryosuke were waiting for you in the front of the mall, and you could not help but take notice of the marked difference between the two of them. Ryosuke was looking around, his lively eyes settling on every girl as they walked past, his posture inviting and casual. On the other hand, Reo was closed off to any approaches, entirely focused on scanning the entryway, craning his neck every time the doors opened in case the next person to walk through would be May.

Unfortunately for him, the people you entered behind were taller than both you and May, so you escaped his notice until the two of you were behind him and May was grinning devilishly. Abruptly, she placed her hands on his shoulders, shaking him back and forth as he shrieked in surprise.

“May!” he said, clutching his heart as he fought for breath. “You scared me. I thought I was being kidnapped.”

“Maybe you are,” she said. “Y/N, I’m holding your best friend for ransom. Give me lots of money and I’ll let him go!”

“No, thanks. You can keep him,” you said.

“Wow, Y/N,” Reo said, pretending to wipe away a tear. “It’s heartwarming how much you care about me.”

“Oh, you guys are here,” Ryosuke said, finally tuning into the conversation. “Took you long enough.”

The joking mood vanished immediately. Suddenly, you were a child again, your mother shaking her head at you in disapproval every time you did something wrong, your father sighing every time you asked him why he was upset, as if you should’ve known just from the way he looked at you what he was feeling.

“We had to make sure you got a taste of waiting, too,” May said before looping her arm through your own. “Though you really had no reason to. You boys can go do whatever, and Y/N and I will go through every single store together!”

“That’s not fair!” Reo said. “I want to help you guys shop.”

“I know, but don’t you think it would be rude to leave Kira on his own? Anyways, this way we can surprise you with what we get,” she said.

“Kira wants to go, though, right?” Reo said, turning to Ryosuke, his eyes wide and pleading. Ryosuke, who had been gazing at a girl as she laughed with her friends, jumped at the mention of his name.

“Huh? Nah, it’s okay. May will make sure she doesn’t buy anything hideous, won’t you, May?” he said. Out of his sight, Reo’s face crumpled, and you thought he genuinely might start sobbing. Reaching out, you patted him on the shoulder comfortingly.

“I would never let her walk around looking ugly,” May said. “Come on, Y/N. Let’s get started — this is a big mall, and we only have so much time before we have to meet back up with everyone for dinner.”

“Bye, guys,” Reo said forlornly, the tendons in his hand flexing, like he was considering reaching out and forcing you to stay back. He must’ve decided against it, though, as he only waved before trudging behind Ryosuke, giving you one last, desperate look over his shoulder before rounding the corner.

Surprisingly, you didn’t buy as much as you thought you might. Without Reo there to insist you and May try on half of every store’s merchandise, you both ended up spending more time making fun of the clothes you saw than anything.

“That sweater is so fucking ugly,” you said, pointing at a strangely posed mannequin. May pretended to gag.

“I think designers have this thing where they purposefully try to design the most horrendous clothes possible, and then, once they genuinely cannot look any worse, they put a brand name and a massive price tag on them and watch people go crazy,” she said. You giggled in agreement.

You had forgotten what it was like to have a friend like this. Your relationship with Chigiri was different — no less important, but different. Being with May was exactly what you needed to calm the turmoil of your mind, and for her part, May was happy to just spend time with you, even if your discussions were more superficial and silly than anything.

The restaurant that Reo had booked a reservation at was in a five-star hotel across town. It was an upscale place, and you spent the entire drive over fidgeting with your clothes, hoping that you were wearing something appropriate for the occasion.

“You look fine, seriously,” May reassured you as you got out of the car.

“Are you sure? I feel underdressed,” you said.

“I’m the same level of dressed as you, so if they’re going to judge you, they’re going to judge me, too,” she said. “We’re in this together. Feel better?”

“A little bit,” you said.

“Good. Excuse me, miss, but we have a reservation for five? Some of our party has arrived already,” she said.

“What’s the name?” the hostess said. She was pretty, with long, smooth hair and innocent features.

“Mikage,” she said. The hostess’s eyes widened, but to her credit, she did not otherwise freak out. Beckoning you to follow after her, she led you to the table where Reo and Ryosuke were sitting.

“Here you are,” she said. “Will the final member of your party be along shortly?”

Reo pinched the bridge of his nose. “He’ll be here at some point. Being on time isn’t exactly his strong suit. Knowing him, he’s probably asleep right now. Say, May, if he ends up being a no-show, does that mean I win the bet?”

May paled. “I’m calling him.”

“That’s cheating! May — May, that’s cheating, stop!” he said as May held her phone to her ear, waving him off.

“I already won the bet, so it’s not cheating if I’m just ensuring my victory remains secure,” she said.

“What are they talking about?” Ryosuke said to you.

“They made a bet about whether Reo’s best man will come to dinner tonight,” you said. “He agreed to earlier, which meant May won, but now he hasn’t shown up, so Reo’s gunning for a comeback victory.”

“Interesting,” Ryosuke said. “Aren’t you glad we’re not so childish?”

You looked at the plush carpet beneath your feet when you answered. “Yes.”

Ryosuke, who was sitting beside you, rubbed your thigh, clicking his tongue as Reo tried to grab May’s phone from her. She barely warded him off with one hand, holding the cell up to her ear with the other.

“Hello? Nagi?” she said. “Mhm, this is May. Yes. Yes, we’re all here. Oh, you’re on your way? Well, sorry, asshole, but you being so late has been more of a hassle for me than answering this call was for you. Okay. Yep. See you soon, I guess. I’ll tell him.”

She hung up with a sly smirk, poking Reo in the cheek. He hung his head in defeat, though of course, he was smiling the entire time, belying his true amusement. They never had any stakes for their bets, and this was on purpose: the competitions were just a silly way for them to liven up how mundane everyday existence could be.

“He was seriously already on his way?” he said.

“Yeah, and he wanted me to tell you to just order the appetizers already. He’s apparently so starved that he might die if he doesn’t eat within the next few minutes,” she said.

“For helping you win the bet instead of me, he deserves it. Traitor,” Reo said, though he waved the waitress over and began listing off the many appetizers he wanted for the table regardless.

“Looks like I’m finally going to get to meet the infamous Nagi,” Ryosuke said, giving the waitress a brilliant grin that forced a blush out of her as she scurried back to the kitchen.

“How do you know him?” you said.

“I’ve heard his name around,” he said. “Once or twice. There was that whole scandal a couple of years ago, too, don’t you remember? When he lost that game and then quit soccer for good?”

There was no way you couldn’t remember. That was the last time you had been back in Japan. You had been in this very town when it had happened, but despite your proximity, you had never found out the reason for it all. You had never understood why he had done it. But, then again, there were so many things about him that you had never understood, so it wasn’t a shock. To you, he would always be an enigma, and one you had no interest in unraveling anymore, to boot.

It was a few minutes later that he walked in. You were dimly aware of Reo high-fiving May in congratulations, never one to be capable of even pretending to stay angry for very long, and also of Ryosuke straightening his back in interest at the newcomer, but none of these things could hold your attention when it was Seishiro Nagi standing in front of you.

He looked almost the same as he had when you saw him last. His pale hair was still kept in the same messy style, though it was soaked for some reason, water dripping down the strands and splashing onto his cheeks. He still wore that same sleepy expression, though something sparked in his dove-colored eyes when they met yours. His shirt was wet, too, the fabric clinging to his muscular body as he draped his jacket over the back of his chair and sat down across from you.

“It was raining,” he said by way of explanation, and though he was speaking to everyone, you could tell he was waiting for your reaction, specifically. You pursed your lips and avoided his heavy stare as best as you could.

“You’re so dumb. Why didn’t you just use an umbrella?” Reo said with a groan, reaching over May’s lap to hand him a napkin.

“Don’t like them,” he said, accepting the napkin and using it to dry off his hair, giving him the frazzled appearance of a mad scientist. “It’s too much work carrying them around.”

You swallowed back the lump in your throat, wanting to say something but finding yourself completely unable to. Thankfully, Ryosuke spoke up, leaning forward with an uncharacteristic interest.

“The falcon of the field,” he said. Nagi’s face was impassive at the mention of his old nickname, from back when he was still one of the top players in the league. “It’s good to finally meet you.”

“Who are you?” Nagi said, pulling out his phone — you were impressed he had lasted so long without it — and began to play a game that, judging by the movement of his fingers, was either Candy Crush or some variant of it.

“Ryosuke Kira.” This earned him a grunt from the clearly uninterested Nagi. “You went to high school with Y/N, right?”

Nagi glanced up at him. “Yeah.”

“I’m her fiancé,” Ryosuke said, wrapping his arm around you in a way that implied possession more than affection. “We got engaged a few years ago.”

“That’s great, man,” Nagi said, returning to his game. “Congratulations.”

“I’m lucky. She’s really the perfect girl,” Ryosuke said.

“Mhm,” Nagi said. His phone vibrated, indicating he had cleared another level. A smile flickered across his face. He was like that, you remembered. Never happier than when he had won a game.

“Ryosuke, stop,” you said. “He doesn’t care.”

“I’m just trying to be friendly,” Ryosuke said. “What about you, Nagi? Anyone special waiting for you back at home?”

Nagi’s phone let out a sad sound. You could picture the screen, the mournful characters and the swirling font, which would read something along the lines of You Ran Out of Moves! He frowned, clicking to restart the level.

“Nope,” he said.

“Wow, that’s a surprise. Well, don’t worry about it. It may seem hopeless now, but the right person will come along when you least expect it!” Ryosuke said.

“Probably not,” Nagi said. “Reo, I’m hungry. How much longer until the food gets here?”

“I’m not sure,” Reo said. “I’ll go speak with the waitress and ask her about the delay.”

“I’ll come with,” May said immediately, springing to her feet and dashing after Reo. You didn’t blame her — if you had a way to escape the awkward situation, you would’ve taken it in a heartbeat.

“Don’t be so pessimistic!” Ryosuke said, in what you were sure he thought was an encouraging tone. “It really does happen like that. Take Y/N, for example.”

“Or don’t,” you said.

“She had never even dated anyone before meeting me,” Ryosuke said. Nagi snorted.

“Really?” he said.

You kicked him under the table, your foot coming into contact with his shin as hard as you could manage. Unfortunately, it had all of the effect that a fly landing on him would’ve, as he only peered over his phone at you for an instant before returning to his game.

“Yup, and now we’re going to get married. All of that is to say we never know what’s going to happen and who we’re going to meet,” Ryosuke said. It was a speech that you might’ve found inspirational, if the circumstances were different. As it was, though, you could only sink down into your chair in embarrassment.

“Sure,” Nagi said. “I’ll keep my eyes open.”

“That’s the spirit. Who can tell? Maybe your future wife is sitting right in front of you!” Ryosuke said.

“Doubt it,” Nagi said. “Considering it’s your fiancée sitting right in front of me at the moment.”

You kicked him again. He blinked at you innocently. You glared at him, begging him to keep his mouth shut. Shrugging his shoulders only slightly, he set his phone to the side as Reo returned with the waitress, who murmured apologies — mostly to Ryosuke — and set your food down in front of you.

“Apparently, they had sent our food to the wrong table,” Reo said. “Go figure. Nagi, you had better not go on your phone while you eat, or else you’ll get bored of chewing and May will have to do the Heimlich on you again.”

Nagi, who had already put his phone face-down on the table, muttered rebelliously to himself but did not pick it up again, as per Reo’s directive. For her part, May inched her chair away from his, obviously not too keen on being volunteered as the resident Heimlich-maneuver-performer.

“Say, Y/N, I’m feeling a little full already,” Ryosuke said, pushing his plate towards you. “And I’m tired from earlier. Do you mind if I go back early?”

“Go ahead,” you said. “Do you want me to come?”

“No, no, I wouldn’t want to take away your time with your friends,” he said. It was then that you realized the hostess who had greeted you had left her station, presumably to change out of her uniform, and your shoulders slumped as you nodded.

“That’s good. I was actually going to ask if I could sleep at May and Reo’s, so it works out,” you said.

“Huh, what?” May said. “I’m alright with it as long as Reo is, but why?”

“For old times’ sake, I guess,” you said. “Although I’m sure just the closet alone at your house is twice the size of our old dorm room.”

“Probably,” she said. “Reo?”

You thought for a second that he might protest, but in fact, Reo actually looked like he might burst into tears of delight.

“Yes!” he said. “Of course — but on the condition that you let me finally talk to her for a bit!”

“Oh, sure,” May said.

“Then it’s a deal,” Reo said.

“That works out,” Ryosuke said, stooping over to press a kiss on your temple. “Now I won’t have to worry about how you get back.”

“Right,” you said, and you were so practiced that the lie came to your lips easily. “I’m glad.”

“I’ll go call the driver for you, Kira,” May said, excusing herself from the table and striding out of the restaurant. A few seconds later, Reo’s phone buzzed. He glanced down at it before groaning.

“Ugh, they keep doing this!” he said.

“What happened?” you said.

“Sometimes, people get it into their heads that just because May is from a different country and isn’t officially married to me yet, they can get away with treating her as less than a Mikage,” Reo said, standing up and pushing his chair in. “If you’ll excuse me, there’s someone I need to fire. Come on, Kira; I’ll just drive you myself. Y/N, Nagi, will you be alright on your own for a bit? I’ll come back with May once we’ve dropped off Kira and she’s calmed down a bit.”

“No,” you said.

“Yes,” Nagi said at the same time, giving you a quizzical look. “It’s alright, Reo.”

“Be civil,” Reo ordered. “I’ll speed a lot, so it won’t be long.”

“See you tomorrow, babe,” Ryosuke said, kissing you again, this time on your lips.

“Ew,” Nagi said.

“Ah, excuse me?” Ryosuke said politely.

“You’re excused,” Nagi said.

“No, that’s not—” Ryosuke looked around for help, but of course none was forthcoming. “Never mind. Um, I’ll just go, then. Reo, do you mind if I stop in the bathroom first?”

“Whatever. I’m going to go check on May and yell at that driver, so meet us there,” Reo said, already storming off. He was so good-natured most of the time that it was easy to forget just how quick to anger he was as well. He had a fearsome temper that he had only recently learnt to control, and on the occasions it reared its head, someone almost always regretted their actions immensely.

As soon as the others were gone, you were unabashedly scowling at Nagi, who did not visibly react.

“Stop it,” you said.

“Stop what?” he said.

“Stop provoking my fiancé,” you said.

“I’m not provoking anyone,” he said, admiring the depths of his drink instead of looking at you. “That would take a lot of effort.”

“You are,” you said. “You keep saying these things that anyone could misinterpret!”

“Misinterpret?” he said. “Uh, you do know what that word means, right?”

“Nagi,” you hissed.

His mouth rearranged itself into a small pout. “The others are gone now. You can just call me Seishiro.”

“I’m being serious,” you said. He let out an aggravated sigh.

“No, you’re just being a hassle. Whatever. Call me Nagi, if that’s what you want. I’m still going to call you Y/N,” he said.

You rolled your eyes. “Whatever.”

“Very original,” he observed.

“Look, I don’t care what you do,” you said. “Just leave me out of it. I’m going to get married soon. I don’t need you acting odd and complicating things the way you always do.”

“I’m not acting odd,” he said. “You’re acting odd.”

“No, I am not!” you said.

“Yeah, you are,” he said. “Also, you suck at kicking. And your fiancé is a pain.”

“Maybe he is,” you said. “But at least he wants me.”

“Is that so?” he said. “I dunno. It looked like he wanted that waitress, too. And that hostess. And May. But I don’t think he’d go after her, because, y’know, Reo would be pretty mad, and he can definitely afford a better lawyer than Kira can if it comes down to it…”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” you said.

“Sure,” he said. “Fine. I don’t know anything. You know everything. This is such a pointless conversation.”

“I agree,” you said. “Let’s finish it. I promised Reo I’d get along with you for the sake of the wedding, but please, Nagi, I’m begging you…once it’s over, let’s just go back to being strangers. That’s the best way.”

“This is the first time I’ve seen you since you left,” he said. “You never once messaged me or called me. I thought you would apologize or something once we met again, but you’re not apologizing. You’re saying you want us to be strangers. Do you mean it was on purpose?”

“Of course it was on purpose,” you said. “What good would it have done for me to message you? To call you? It wouldn’t have changed anything.”

“It would’ve,” he said quietly, picking up his phone again. “For me, it would’ve.”

“But I didn’t,” you said.

“You didn’t,” he agreed. He was playing Candy Crush again, but though he seemed entranced by the game, you knew he was listening to you still.

“Look, dwelling on the past doesn’t accomplish anything,” you said. “For better or worse, this is where our lives have led us. This is the culmination of all of our decisions. Okay? Stop pretending like any of it can change. It can’t.”

“Mhm,” he said. “Look. I cleared the level.”

He showed you his phone. Just as you had thought, he was playing Candy Crush, and true to his word, the characters were smiling and dancing on the screen, the congratulatory message written in a sweet, bubbly pink.

You Won!

For some reason, it didn’t feel like either of you had.

taglist (comment/send an ask to be added): @mariyumemi @naatggeo @prettyarsxnist

[inthemaelstrom]

So we're about six weeks out from another "most important election of my lifetime" and it's predictably making me literally sick to my stomach. When Trumpacabra got elected in 2016, I threw myself into politics in a way I never had in my lifetime and it almost wrecked me. I was one of those people who never voted for religious reasons (long, separate story) and I felt I had to make up for lost time. By the time 2020 rolled around, I was an unhealthy mess. I had stopped reading. Everything. When I wasn't watching MSNBC and political commentators obsessively, I started consuming absolute junk TV: home improvement shows, crack paranormal ghost hunter crap, etc. Things with no plot, no emotional investment, no danger. No fear.

Right before the 2020 election, old fanfic friends from my days in the Master and Apprentice Star Wars listserv found me and saved me.

They dragged me back into fandom, introduced me to Discord, and got me writing again. I updated a story I hadn't touched in 5 years. I made new friends online and in RL. I got some great fiction and fic recs from those friends and discovered a subgenre called Hopepunk—low stakes fiction with very little if any violence and fear and with happy endings. (Becky Chambers writes a lot of what I read, and Amy Crook has also become a favorite.)

One morning, I had one of those really vivid, realistic, linear plot dreams that literally dragged me out of bed to the keyboard. It was a meet-cute modern au of The Phantom Menace's characters, set in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I cranked out about 2000 words the first day. Then another 2000. Then another 2000. Then another 2000. And so on every damn day for the next four years until I had four novels, about 668k words, several timestamps written by three other collaborators who've come on board, some beautiful art I've been allowed to use, and now a fifth book in the works.

This is the Yooperverse.

It's not just The Fic That Saved Me, it's the place where I'm writing a vision of what the world could be like into being. A place where people with fucking obscene amounts of money don't spend it on themselves, or hoard it, or exploit other people to get more, but use it to help other people. It's a place where people who are bigoted dicks either get their comeuppance and crawl back under their rocks, or learn better and do better. It's a place where abused kids get rescued, everybody gets therapy and healthcare and is paid a living wage, people learn to value themselves and each other, and protect each other and defend each other. It's kinky and queer (although I'm neither) and above all, if not entirely safe to be both, I'm trying to write both things as just being another setting on the dryer. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's not a utopia, by any means, because there are still assholes and the government is still ... the government, and capitalism is still a thing. There's some danger, especially in the first book, and there are accidents and illnesses and the vagaries of life. In the middle of the series, I had spinal surgery and was out of commission for a few months and that made me start thinking more about my main character dealing with aging and the limitations thereof. There's a LOT of mental health issues and the working through thereof, and a lot of ongoing process. Nobody's perfect. The world outside is still pretty much what it is. But in the little corners where my characters dwell, life is pretty dang good, sometimes great.

It's a vision of a life we all deserve. It's the thing I loved about Star Trek's universe, where people's basic needs are cared for and the obstacles to them developing their best selves removed. It's what I've loved about science fiction in general, especially Ursula LeGuin's: that opportunity to explore possibilities that are better than the present. It's modeled on the MacArthur Genius grants, but you don't have to prove your worthiness first. My main character invests in people's potential, young or old, with scholarships and grants and a steadying hand. His partner builds low or no-cost housing for people in need. There's an informal network of queer and straight kid rescuing going on under the noses of unfriendly governments and failed social service safety nets. The main characters build refuges, literal and emotional. They love each other fiercely and respectfully.

Right now, we're living in a country that is almost the antithesis of these ideas, for far too many of us. People are being manipulated by their fears, which are stoked by unscrupulous, lying shitbag politicians whose all too real evil would never make it past the pitch if you were going to try to sell it as a TV show or movie. They're consciously turning us on each other with lies about our common humanity, about the state of our country, about who and what's responsible for many of its faults, sewing suspicion and hate. And though the Yooperverse started as my personal comfort fic, I'm trying in my very small way to counteract what's happening in the world right now.

I've always believed in the power of story to change people's minds and lives, and I've experienced it myself. When I talk about story, I don't just mean fiction, though. I mean the narratives we tell ourselves and others about our own lives as a whole and day by day or moment by moment. I mean the stories we tell about each other when we're together, at the bar, at wakes, at a party. I mean the stories we invest in as fans in whatever kind of media we consume. I mean the stories we spin for ourselves and others to explain what the everloving fuck is wrong with the world.

Stories aren't separate from the world, they are the world. They tell it into being. They give it shape and purpose and meaning and a sense of possibility. Whatever stories we tell ourselves or each other about how things should be or how we should act as human beings (also called our "beliefs" or "morals" or "ethics"), they shape us, and we shape society. We are society, both together and as individuals. One person with a big voice and a story can tip a mass of people into either violence or solidarity.

I have no illusions that the Yooperverse will ever have that kind of power. It has a tiny audience on AO3 and Discord and it's mostly written for me to explore the things I feel deeply about, and wish I could do, and to teach myself to be a better person and live up to my own ideals. It's a world I'd like to manifest, to call into being, even in a small way. Even if it's just a story.

[blitz0hno]

Mikoto's amnesia, denial, and the order of events in MeMe

So my theory about the memories detailed in MeMe, as per Milgram's record of Mikoto being the "guilty one," is pretty simple. The events in the outerworld are completely jumbled, and I believe the bulk of them take place right after Mikoto's "first" murder if there were indeed multiple victims. This is gonna be a very basic look at the "flashback"/"real-life" sequences in MeMe. I feel like this may have been done before but I mostly just see analysis on the headspace/symbolism in the video and not the implications of the real-world bits, but this video has been discussed to death so I can't be the only one who's thought about it lol

In the first part of our timeline, we see lots of static and Mikoto swinging a bat at someone as the train goes by. I imagine the tracks were where the body itself was disposed of. Mikoto's "dream" shows faraway 3rd-person angle and it's almost as if he's watching "himself" commit the crime. However, the face of the victim, his own expression, and the injuries inflicted are obscured from his view the whole scene.

It abruptly cuts to him entering his house after this, which is where I believe Mikoto's memory starts to get patchier. The moments after a trauma are when the brain is still reeling from shock, after all. After his first dream sequence where he expresses confusion, I believe the second verse is filling in the gaps of what happened between finishing the crime and changing his clothes. You can't lie in Milgram though, and sharing a brain means sharing memories, no matter how deeply they are buried. The memory gets more detail as he is examined more, and it's already common for brains to remember things out of order. Mikoto is shown to be in-and-out of his headspace in MeMe; the memories of how "he" saved "him" (the other alter, likely a big part of who John would become) are not all his own, even if the choice to kill was.

I believe that chronologically, this is the next scene.

Presumably John, processing what they've done, recognizing himself as "not Mikoto" for the first time. Mikoto, then, is seeing "himself" from yet another angle, completely upside-down.

It abruptly cuts again, his jacket having been taken off. His face is once again obscured, like Mikoto remembers doing it but not as "himself."

The angle here is more first-person, implying that Mikoto clearly remembers "dreaming" this part.

This is right before he goes home. He's disposed of the beanie, and presumably the jacket and bat.

Mikoto walking in his door immediately after the confrontation is likely exactly how he felt at the time. I believe this next line of dialogue is an alter, likely John or pre-John, speaking to him. "You don't have to keep it in and hide it away, 'I' will save 'me."" (Worth mentioning that "Boku" is used both times here.) It's the first time in the song he refers to himself as "you," which I feel like is pretty common for alters to do to each other even before they realize that they're completely separate ego states. This cut from the first verse, where it jumped right after the murder, shows him in the same pants and shirt he took the trash out in. This implies that Mikoto blacked out most of the way home, which tracks for an event as traumatic as killing a guy.

This part abruptly cuts to him on the couch, in new clothes and no longer covered in blood. As I said earlier, I believe Mikoto's memory begins to come back in bits and pieces as Milgram scans it, which is why the second part is where we actually see him getting cleaned up.

Just as he realizes he's fading in and out, and there seems to be someone on the other side who "doesn't care" that they've killed someone, he gets kicked back into headspace. Since he's in Milgram, that space could be defined as the present moment, while the memories themselves are reflecting more like flashbacks than a linear story.

That's why we see this next part so early, even though it happened after his clean-up work.

Here we see Mikoto's alter, either John or "Midokoto" (plausible 3rd alter show urself challenge impossible likely literally impossible look at that trauma-holding sonofabitch) banishing Mikoto to the shadow realm /j. No blood, new clothes, numb to the world and very clearly trying to forget. "That had to have been a dream" type shit.

Ironically, alters who the host doesn't notice know when they're controlling the body better than the host, who takes it for granted like they're supposed to. If you don't know what DID is, it's easy to be aware that you are technically "working together" with yourself but not understand why it feels that way.

We're also shown this scene where he comes home from work, in the instrumental between Mikoto's Denial choruses. This is the answer to his question of "why?". He was running himself ragged and literally watching himself fall apart from the stress. Assuming he threw out that jacket, this could be interpreted as the days leading up to the murder.

Given that he doesn't have his beanie despite retaining the rest of the outfit, it could also be him continuing to go through the motions and act like the event didn't happen in the days after. I sure wouldn't throw out that shirt, it's a cool shirt. (Actually, it's such a cool shirt that I personally think it further proves the lack of pre-meditation, but like he still did it lol)

I think that in Mikoto's case, the farther away the camera is, the farther "our" Mikoto is from the front. It all happened so fast that his decisions were carried out for him, despite Milgram and his own sense of guilt determining that he himself was the one to take that path.

I don't think he's just talking to Es when he becomes more intense/angry about "why am I here?". I think he's speaking to his alter(s) as well. But I'm only allowed 10 images so I'll post about that later. The line "You don't have to keep it in and hide it away" from when he walks in his door contrasts directly with "Hurting it, holding it down, it doesn't change a thing does it?" Says a lot about how he dismissed his own stress and desire for change, unwittingly dismissing the pain of the people trying to help him.

He literally knows not what he does grrrrrr how dare this project be so fucking cool and good