#on a completely unrelated note: new followers for the love of god put your age in your bio

[threenounname]

edited my tumblr theme on desktop, tell me if there are any issues!!

[kiarcheo]

A Whole New World    2/10

Jane and Kat find out there is more to each other…and to the new world they have found themselves in.

Read on Ao3 too

AN: I have seen Anne’s date of birth ranging from 1501 to 1507, and Jane’s between 1504 and 1509. For the sake of this story I consider Anne born in 1501 and consequently dying at 35, and Jane being born in 1508 and dying at 28.

Kat came back at 18 and Jane at 22, Anna, Cathy and Anne in their late twenties, and Catalina in her early thirties.

                               ——————————————–

It becomes a regular thing. Sometimes it’s a museum Kat has already visited, sometimes a new one on the list she keeps of places she wants to see. They often make a day of it, treating themselves to lunch (usually at Jane’s initiative, since Kat tends to forego eating in favour of whatever has caught her interest), exploring parts of the city unknown to them.

One evening, close to dusk, they are walking through an empty park when Kat stops. ‘Have you ever wanted to try them out?’

‘Try what?’ Jane follows the direction of Kat’s gaze. ‘That?’

‘They look like fun.’

‘They are for children.’

‘Who said that? Besides, there are no children around...’  Kat trails off, eyebrow raised waiting for a response.

‘You know what? Why not?’

Kat lets out a small squeal before grabbing Jane’s hand and dragging her towards the playground.

‘Remember when you said “who said that they are just for children”?’ Jane asks as they are sitting on the platform, feet dangling down, recovering their breath and cooling down.

‘You mean, like, half an hour ago?’

‘Smartass.’ Jane gives her a look, before pointing to a sign. ‘Children’s Play Area. Only children under the age of 12 may use this play area.’

‘Well, technically we haven’t been back for that long?’

Jane shakes her head amused. Kat is so cheeky and she would have never guessed before spending so much time with her.

‘So what was your favourite part?’ she asks after a bout of silence. That is another thing that changed. Before, silent moments were much more common and awkward, now their quiet spells are rarer and yet infinitely more comfortable.

‘You falling off those.’ Kat motions with her head towards the monkey bars, getting a glare in response. ‘What about yours?’

‘The slides, I’d say.’

‘Yeah, they are nice. But too short, don’t you think?’

‘I know, right? By the time you pick up speed, you’re already at the end,’ Jane agrees. ‘They should make them longer. Adult-sized.’

‘Wait!’ Kat whips out her phone. ‘Let me...’

And Jane lets her. She has learnt that Kat's curiosity is insatiable. If she stumbles upon something she doesn’t know or doesn’t understand…she has to look it up. So many times, when their fellow queens mention (usually complain, actually) that Kat is always glued to her phone, Jane has been tempted to tell them that most of the time she is learning something new...but if Kat had not told them – not even if she would probably spare herself their scolding – then it’s not her place to tell them.

‘They exist!’ Kat exclaims angling the screen towards Jane. ‘Look! They even have playgrounds for adults!’

They look together at the photos for a while before Kat taps on a Wikipedia link, her first port of call every time. ‘Amusement parks,’ she starts to read the entry aloud before being interrupted by a text notification popping up on the screen.

Kat groans as she reads it.

‘What?’

‘Curfew,’ Kat sighs. ‘Apparently it’s late and they are wondering why I’m not home yet.’ She knows it’s because they care but... ‘Did you get one too?’

Jane checks her phone. ‘No.’

Kat sighs again. ‘One dies young once and she is forever treated like a baby.’ She notices the look Jane is sending her. ‘Please don’t start.’

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘I can't make a joke that everyone freaks out thinking I’m depressed or having a breakdown or a flashback or something.’

Jane remembers clearly one of those occasions. They had been discussing nightmares and how everyone seemed to have them except Kat, who had commented that perhaps losing her head had meant losing everything that had been inside that too. She also remembers very clearly thinking that the reactions had been a bit disproportionate compared to Kat’s offhand tone and casual demeanour.

‘Sometimes a girl just wants to be self-deprecating. Or joke about her own death without being psychoanalysed and having people wanting to talk about your trauma.’

‘I get it. I said once that I had no time with Edward. I was just...stating a fact. I was not looking for pity or anything. But they tripped over themselves to reassure me that I was still his mother – which of course! – and that I’m still a mother now. And honestly. One has a child once and she is forever just a mother in everyone’s eyes. Don’t get me wrong. I wish I could have seen Edward grow up. Wish I could have been his mother. Properly. But I wasn’t. And out of all of us, I’m the one who had less time with children. Besides you, I was the youngest one to die. So I have no idea why everyone thinks of me as this motherly figure?’

Aware that she has been ranting, Jane chances a look at Kat, who has a peculiar expression on her face.

‘What?’ she asks, feeling self-conscious.

‘I’m just thinking how happy I am that you joined me that day at the museum.’

That had been the true start of their relationship, despite having lived together for many months prior to that.

‘You mean you're happy I caught you sneaking out?’

Jane knows what she means, though. They would have never thought, and even less found, they had so many things in common. Or that they could get along so well and have so much fun together.

‘I was not sneaking out.’

Jane merely looks at her.

‘I thought nobody was home. It was just out of habit.’

‘So all the other times you sneaked out.’

Kat doesn’t reply, knowing Jane is doing it just to annoy her. They had a similar talk the second time they went to a museum together, Jane asking why they were sort of hiding their trip. It was not that Kat thought they would stop her if they knew she was going out. But she just didn’t want to deal with their questions. About where she was going, why, why she was going alone, when she was coming back...Just easier to leave without them knowing and then simply tell them she had been out if they asked having noticed she had not been home. In their defence, they knew better than to pry and as long as she was home safely, they would let it go despite being curious.

/

‘I know you’re the one in charge of our museum days,’ Jane starts, ‘but I wanted to run an idea by you.’

‘Of course we can go to a museum of your choice. You don’t need to ask permission or whatever.’

‘Wait before agreeing.’

‘Is it the Tower?’ Kat winces with a grimace, trying to think of places still standing that Jane might be wary of asking her to visit.

Jane stops rummaging in her bag, her head shooting up. ‘What the fuck, Katherine??’

The younger girl is so lost in unpleasant memories that she doesn't even react to Jane’s swearing nor her full naming her. ‘Hampton Court?’

‘Why would I ever do something like that?’ Jane recoils. ‘God, no! The Clink.’

‘As-’

‘The prison! Not the-’

‘Brothels?’ Kat completes, eyebrow raised in amusement. Then she nods, almost to herself. The area had been known for two main things…the prison and for allowing usually forbidden activities.

‘Yes. I mean, they made a prison museum. You know I like true crime and–’

Yes. That had been a surprise. When Kat had asked if there was something she particularly enjoyed reading and learning about, like she loved history, that had definitely not been the answer she had expected. Jane must have known that, considering how much she hummed and hawed before caving after Kat had called bullshit – literally – on her non-committal answer.

‘–I think I’d like to– but I don’t want to, like, trigger you?’

‘What’s inside, exactly?’

Jane finally finds what she has been looking for in her bag and hands her a leaflet.

‘You know what?’ Kat takes a look at it. ‘We can go and you can...scout it out?’ She doesn’t see anything upsetting in the pictures, but there will be so much more in the museum that they can show in a single leaflet. ‘You can take a look before me and if you think there is something that might…disturb me, you tell me and I’ll skip that room?’

‘Really?’

‘I mean, you know I'm not too fussed about death and stuff like that as long as it’s not too bloody. Or neck-related.’

She is not too keen on watching documentaries with Jane, but she doesn’t mind listening to her talking about them. Or about whatever serial killer or unsolved crime she is currently reading about.

‘Thank you.’ Jane squeezes her arm, hoping Kat knows it’s not about agreeing to her request, but for her trust. ‘On an unrelated note...food?’

Jane’s constant preoccupation with food is another thing put down to her supposedly maternal instinct, a desire to make sure everyone is well-fed. The truth is…Jane loves eating. Being able to enjoy doing so without the ever-present worry of looking unladylike. Discovering new foods. She doesn’t eat a lot, but she needs to eat often, or she becomes…hangry, it’s what Kat called it. And it is only polite to ask if the others are feeling peckish too and want to join her. Moreover, she knows it’s one thing she can’t rely on Kat for, seeing as she is prone to skip meals if there is anything else she deems more important or interesting.  

‘Do you think Catalina would consider this as traditional local food or...?’ Jane wonders aloud as she dips the churro in the plastic pot holding the chocolate sauce.

‘Possibly? Even if they were not invented by Spanish shepherds but brought by the Portuguese from China like some say, I think everyone agrees that by the 16th century they existed in Spain. And look, Romans had fried pastry, so, if not exactly that, something similar. And naturally cacao came to Europe after the Spanish invaded the Americas, so it arrived in Spain first, although if it was just after Cortés, Catalina would have been already in England…so she might have never tried churros with chocolate? Not sure when they started to combine the two, to be honest…’ Kat trails off. ‘What?’

‘Next person who says you’re stupid, I’ll deck them.’

Kat chuckles, bumping her hip into hers. ‘I appreciate the offer.’

‘It’s not an offer, it’s a promise.’

.

‘Ever thought about getting a car?’ Jane asks after they have been walking for a while.

‘Why? Tired? But not really. Honestly just the idea of getting into one and driving it myself is kind of terrifying.’

Jane nods. It sounds a bit like airplanes for her. It still boggles her mind that humans can fly. And she knows they are mostly safe and all, but it doesn’t mean she is keen on trying them out for herself.

‘I thought about getting a bicycle and learning how to ride,’ Kat continues.

‘Why don’t you?’

‘Yeah, and where would I hide it?’

‘Why would you need to hide it?’ Jane is puzzled enough to ignore Kat’s tone verging on the sarcastic rhetorical question inflection that usually implies someone had just asked a very stupid question.

‘With the potential of me getting hurt? Straying away, getting lost, or whatever? I don’t know if you have noticed, but the others tend to be a bit overprotective.’

And a bit is a euphemism. Don’t get her wrong. It is nice to have people caring and worrying about her. But she spent a lifetime fending for herself. And yes, she had her struggles, and the end might have been inglorious, but Anne wound up the same way and yet nobody questions her…or her capabilities. And okay, that might have something to do with age, but nobody cared about that before, and she had been a bloody queen (and quite a successful one, if she says so herself, at least before her past caught up with her)! Still, she doesn’t want to think how worse it would be if she had come back younger than she had been at the time of her death like the others did.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Jane asks, realising she is miles away, lost in thoughts.

‘How weird it would be if we had come back the same age we died. Well, besides me, obviously.’ She hopes she’ll be there to see it in person, but she can’t really think about Catalina as a 50-years-old woman or Anna in her forties. ‘And about how there is a fine line between heart-warming care and overbearing concern.’

Because, back to the point, she might have been more or less successful, but she is used to rely just on herself and getting by, not to have four other women, Jane to a lesser extent, being overly concerned about her. For certain matters, at least. Because for other things they seem perfectly happy to…perhaps not ignore her, but surely leave her to her own devices, without trying to get her involved. And she is often more than content with it, she will admit that…except that often it also leads to remarks about how she spends all her time at home, always in front a screen, and perhaps she should go out more? And then instead of standing up all night on her phone, she would tire herself out and sleep?

‘So you don’t want to check this out?’

Kat had not even realised they were walking past a sporting goods store.

‘Look! You could easily hide that.’ Jane points out to a small, colourful, tricycle, clearly meant for children.

‘Ah ah. Very funny.’ Sarcasm is heavy in Kat’s voice, but she follows her in.

‘What about this?’

‘A unicycle? Really? Have you ever seen one of those around, in public?’

Jane takes a moment to think about it. ‘Don’t think so.’

‘Exactly. Because they belong in the circus.’

‘One might say our house is a circus.’ They certainly have some chaotic days.

‘And you a clown.’

Jane gasps in mock offence. ‘I miss the days when you were afraid of me.’

‘I was never afraid of you. I was indifferent. And thought you were a stuck-up bore. Also, I know you don’t miss it.’

‘True,’ Jane admits easily. ‘Joking aside. We could put them in the shed?’

She had said once that she didn’t mind taking care of the garden and suddenly she had been left in charge of it, gardening apparently a passion of hers she didn’t even know she had. She supposes that it was deemed an appropriate hobby for boring old plain Jane (and yes, the fact that it is her actual name and not just a phrase in her case does not escape her), just like embroidery. She enjoys both of them, sure, but she is fairly confident the others think that’s all she does, no other interests – oh wait, there is cooking, or at least making sure that everyone is eating too! – which is something she tries not to dwell on too much because that’s frankly a bit (or a lot, depending on how she feels on the day) insulting.

‘We? Them?’ Kat raises an eyebrow. ‘But yes, we could store them there, but not really hide them if anyone happens to look inside. And certainly not two of them.’

Still, they continue to peruse the store.

‘What about these?’ Jane calls Kat’s attention, holding a pair of rollerblades up. ‘I’ve seen kids with them, can’t be that hard, can it?’ she continues once the girl comes over, looking interested.

‘Shoes on wheels? We’re so gonna die.’

Jane starts to put them back, slightly dejected, but Kat snatches them up. ‘Let’s do this.’

‘Yeah?’ She looks at her, tentative grin on her face.

Kat nods with gleeful smile. ‘Absolutely.’

[cotncandyboifics]

1989 [High School AU]: Chapter 6

AO3 Link

Masterpost

Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 4 ~ Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 7 ~ Chapter 8 ~ Chapter 9 ~

Pairings: slight Logince, eventual Prinxiety & Logicality

Word count: 1,987

Story summary: Roman Prince is your stereotypical Jock, with everyone swooning after him. Every day a crowd of people follow him around, only to disperse at his personal whim. In reality, he's lucky to have such good acting skills that help him cover up the disdain he has for his life. He only wishes he could use his skills properly.

Patton Whitelock's always there to lend a helping hand, no matter who you are. If you need a favor or just need someone to talk to, go to him. In reality, he's been taught from a young age that kindness should be held above all else. No one suspects that he took it the wrong way.

Logan Montgomery is the smartest boy in the Senior class. He's stern, and most people are too intimidated to speak to him. In reality, he despises most all of his fellow students. He sticks to his studies and doesn't stray, for fear of being stuck in his father's shadow his whole life.

Virgil Black is the most emo kid in school, let alone 12th grade; everyone knows to leave him be. In reality, he's very fortunate. He has two parents who love him dearly. But everything beyond his life, everything within his mind, is utter chaos and turmoil.

what will happen when they're assigned a biology project together?

General CW: food, swearing, implied s-lf h-rm, non-graphic descriptions of s-lf h-rm scars, graphic and non-graphic descriptions of anxiety attacks and panic attacks, drug abuse, minor character intoxicated on heroin, non-graphic drug overdose description, sickness/description of sickness, blood, non-graphic descriptions of needles, (will be added to as I write more)

Chapter CW: food, (let me know if i missed anything please!)

Author notes: I hated writing this chapter because I love Logince and I'm intentionally writing this story so that Logince doesn't work and I just- my heart and my creativity have a conflict of interests here :')

...

Roman was left alone in his room, staring at the door where Virgil had slipped out silently a few minutes ago. He'd turned off his music, and was sitting up, staring, thinking.

What was even the point of asking Logan out? I didn't have any interest in him before, he was just a nerd who i never bothered, and he never bothered me... perhaps for the challenge? when I saw him in class today something just sparked, and i felt the need to pursue him. I didn't think he'd entertain it, especially so quickly. And what of Virgil?

What of Virgil?

Roman shook his head and stood, leaving his room to see what his parents were doing, and if he could help with dinner. He needed a distraction, and he knew homework wasn't going to do it.

...

The next few days at school were strange, to say the least.

Patton was the same, as far as the others could see. He tried figuring out some of the routes Logan took to different classes, just a few so as not to seem suspicious, but Roman was more often than not already there and bombarding Logan with his charms. Patton still caught him alone sometimes though, and did his best to make conversation about little things, just wanting to get to know Logan. They had an engaging conversation about Logan's surprisingly extensive knowledge about drug abuse, and Patton was thankful for the bits of advice he could get. They'd also run through proper methods for caring for various species of turtles.

Logan continued to hound himself about why he had accepted Roman's courting after such a short time knowing him, let alone that they were very... different people, to say the least. He'd told his father that one of his friends had requested an outing to a cafe to study for an upcoming calculus quiz. His father was reluctant but upon Logan's presentation of evidence of such atmospheres increasing the effectiveness of studying and concentration, his father granted him permission to go. Logan knew his father would never permit any,, frivolous activities, when Logan had so much academic potential. And Logan made himself feel the same way, acquiring knowledge and more importantly incredible accolades was all that mattered until he was out of school. And yet, here he was, about to go on a date behind his parents' back with a jock, very stereotypical of a teen and yet very atypical for him. He couldn't explain to himself why he'd allowed himself to get into this situation, but it wasn't causing any immediate problems, so he decided to try and let the topic rest.

Virgil was acting stranger than ever, at least from Roman's perspective. He seemed even more cold and distant, except on occasion he'd strike up a conversation. Sometimes they got rather lively, debating about which were the best Disney movies, even if they had very... differing perspectives on what messages they portrayed. Roman was baffled, Because he didn't think someone who was previously unconcerned with Roman for the most part could become so black-and-white, switching between completely ignoring and/or glaring at him, and coming into a room and immediately proposing a topic of conversation.

Roman had his hands full with courting his new love interest, and trying to figure out what was going on with Virgil. Virgil himself was very conflicted. Any time he saw Roman, his feelings became intense and he never knew how to act.

The group's dynamic had shifted accordingly whenever they were in class together. In Biology, Logan was usually hard at work on their report, Patton doing his best to help. Roman often attempting to fluster Logan in any possible way he could, and Virgil, ever unpredictable.

...

Finally Thursday came, and Roman got into his mustang to pick up his date. He drove quietly up to a large white house, with a very systematic garden laid out in the front. He got out and leaned against the closed passenger door, and messaged Logan, letting him know he was there to pick him up.

Logan had hoped Roman would have the sense to pick him up around the block, but upon exiting his house and seeing him directly in front of the house leaning against his red mustang with a single red rose in his hand, Logan brought his hand to the bridge of his nose and massaged it, trying to keep from getting aggravated before their date even began. He walked over slowly, trying to keep an open mind instead of letting his logical self shut everything about Roman's love language down.

Roman had to keep himself from staring. Logan was dressed... well, typically his own style, but... he had gelled his hair back so it became one big dark tuft instead of it's usual gentle messiness, and he had on a silk navy button up and a black bowtie instead of his trademark necktie. He had on Black corduroy pants that accentuated his slender legs, and white and blue converse that complemented his shirt and pale skin. Roman was impressed at the attention to detail yet the simplicity of his date's outfit, and was indeed that much more attracted to him.

"Well hello there," Roman said as Logan neared, looking him up and down, "don't you look ravishing."

Logan's cheeks glazed a bit. "As do you," was all he could think to reply. Roman had on a dark red v neck and a black and gold baseball jacket, dark grey ripped skinny jeans with a silver chain, and red checkered vans. Logan realized he'd let his eyes linger on Roman's exposed collarbone a moment too long. God, why am i acting like this?

Roman just smirked and stood aside, opening the passenger door he'd been leaning on and making way for Logan. Logan sat, his knees nearly touching the dash. Roman got on one knee and dramatically presented Logan with the flower. Logan smiled gently and took it, examining it. Roman shut the door and made his way around to the driver's side and got in.

"Will you relay the whereabouts of our destination or will it remain a mystery to me?" Logan asked as Roman opened his door, not looking up from the flower.

Roman smiled with a glint in his eyes. "Well it would be no fun if i were to spoil the surprise, now would it?" He put the key in the ignition and started the car, and the engine hummed smoothly to life. "Completely unrelated to said surprise, but have you had dinner?" Roman rolled down his window and rested his forearm on it.

"Yes, unfortunately I follow a strict meal plan." He adjusted his glasses.

"Well, i wont question that, but that works for me." Roman left it at that and pulled out his phone.

"Would you happen to have a music preference?" Roman asked as Logan smelled the rose, and finally set it down in his lap.

After a moment of thought, Logan replied, "Well I suppose not. I don't listen to much music other than classical on occasion, and at this point i find it rather..."

"Boring?" Roman mused.

"Insufferable," Logan smiled.

"Alright, I'll enlighten you to something other than Beethoven and Bach," Roman reached for the aux chord, plugged his phone into it, and picked a particular song he felt was... fitting for the moment. The song intro began, and Roman pulled the e-break down and shifted into first gear, pulling out onto the road.

he said "let's get out of this town,

Drive out of the city, away from the crowds..."

I thought "heaven can't help me now,"

Nothing lasts forever...

Logan watched things pass on the road, absentmindedly tapping his ankle to the beat. He didn't recognize the area of town they were heading to, but he didn't expect Roman to kidnap him or anything, so he just observed.

But this is gonna take me down

He's so tall, and handsome as hell

He's so bad, but he does it so well.

I can see the end as it begins

My one condition is

Logan looked straight ahead at the road now, wondering if Roman had selected this specific song for any reason.

Say youll remember me,

Standing in a nice dress

Staring at the sunset babe

Red lips and rosy cheeks

Say you'll see me again

Even if it's just in your

Wildest dreams, ah, hah...

They were driving up a hill now, and the road was getting steeper. Logan was beginning to wonder if he should have just rejected Roman from the beginning.

Roman sensed his unease, and turned the music down so that it was just background noise. "I promise I'm not about to murder you in the woods," he said with a small laugh, "There's just a nice spot up here to... observe," he assured vaguely, glancing at Logan.

He nodded with a small smile from the passenger seat, returning to looking around as they passed sloping driveways and mossy-trunked trees.

Just moments later, they emerged into something of a clearing, with a cul-de-sac and a large meadow. There were clusters of small flowers and clovers all over, and the trees cleared perfectly to display the sun was crawling toward the horizon.

They parked and Logan got out, and turned to realize Roman was still in the car, seemingly reaching behind his seat awkwardly and rummaging around. He emerged with a plastic bag and a rolled up plaid blanket. Roman locked the car and led them to the meadow, where he dramatically unrolled the blanket and laid it out, after ruffling it in the wind. Logan sat cross-legged facing what would soon become the sunset, the bottom of the sun's visible sphere nearly dipping itself below the horizon.

Roman sat as well, beginning to dig through the mystery bag, Logan now paying him attention. Roman pulled out two large paper cups, with plastic tops and straws in them. He handed Logan one of the cups, and Logan began inspecting it. It appeared to be a milkshake, likely chocolate flavored due to the brown hue... It looked rather delightful. Logan took a sip and was not disappointed; he'd never actually had a milkshake, at least not since he was very young, so he had to attempt to hide his enjoyment.

"That is quite tasteful," He looked back to Roman, who was tasting his own milkshake.

"Yeah, you struck me as a chocolate type," he leaned back on one hand. "Hope you like the view. I thought it would be nice as a first date to watch the sunset and talk."

Logan gazed out at the sky that faded from blue to purple to red to orange and a bit of yellow, clouds peppered around and absorbing the hues. He certainly did appreciate the view.

"Alright, let's talk then."

...

A few hours later, it had gotten dark and stars were spattered across the sky. Logan was laying with his hands behind his head, watching the sky, and Roman was laid next to him, leaning up on his side and watching Logan's eyes. They'd talked about anything, from childhood memories to opinions and briefly about their home lives. Roman felt very... usual. Everything was going perfectly, and he could feel that fact slamming against his chest. Do I actually like him or is this all just a game to me? Am i being fake, or completely real?

Soon Logan checked his wristwatch and informed Roman it was time he be heading home. They stood, and Logan shivered as Roman collected the blanket. He sighed upon seeing Logan's arms loosely held around himself, trying to keep warm.

Roman rustled his baseball jacket off and draped it over Logan's shoulders.

They made their way back to the car, and as Roman drove them, all Logan could do was lean his head on the window and stare up at the hazy white moon.

Roman dropped him off, walking him up to his door. Logan thanked him for the evening, and tried to return Roman's jacket, but Roman insisted he hold onto it. They shared a small kiss on the doorstep, and bid each other goodnight. Roman drove off into the night, pondering heavily.

[96harmony96]

Chapter 1

I loved New York with the kind of mad passion I reserved for only one other thing in my life. The city was a microcosm of new world opportunities and old world traditions. Conservatives rubbed shoulders with bohemians. Oddities coexisted with priceless rarities. The pulsing energy of the city fueled international business bloodlines and drew people from all over the world.

And the embodiment of all that vibrancy, driving ambition, and world-renowned power had just screwed me to two toe-curlingly awesome orgasms.

As I padded over to her massive walk-in closet, I glanced at lauren jauregui’s sex-rumpled bed and shivered with remembered pleasure. My hair was still damp from a shower, and the towel wrapped around me was my only article of clothing. I had an hour and a half before I had to be at work, which was cutting it a little too close for comfort. Obviously, I was going to have to allot time in my morning routine for sex, otherwise I’d always be scrambling. Lauren woke up ready to conquer the world, and she liked to start that domination with me.

How lucky was I?

Because it was sliding into July in New York and the temperature was heating up, I chose a slim pair of pressed natural-linen slacks and a sleeveless poplin shell in a soft brown that matched my eyes. Since I had no hairstyling talent, I pulled my long drown hair back in a simple ponytail, then made up my face. When I was presentable, I left the bedroom.

I heard Lauren's voice the moment I stepped into the hallway. A tiny shiver moved through me when I realized she was angry, her voice low and clipped. she didn’t rile easily . . . unless she was ticked off with me. I could get her to raise her voice and curse, even shove her hands through her glorious shoulder-length mane of inky black hair.

For the most part, though, Lauren was a testament to leashed power. There was no need for her to shout when she could get people to quake in their shoes with just a look or a tersely spoken word.

I found her in her home office. She stood with her back to the door and a Bluetooth receiver in her ear. Her arms were crossed and she was staring out the windows of her Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment, giving the impression of a very solitary woman, an individual who was separate from the world around her, yet entirely capable of ruling it.

Leaning into the doorjamb, I drank her in. I was certain my view of the skyline was more awe-inspiring than her. My vantage point included her superimposed over those towering skyscrapers, an equally powerful and impressive presence. she’d finished her shower before I managed to crawl out of bed. her seriously addictive body was now dressed in two pieces of an expensively tailored three-piece suit—an admitted hot button of mine. The rear view of her showcased a perfect ass and a powerful back encased in a vest.

On the wall was a massive collage of photos of us as a couple and one very intimate one that she’d taken of me while I was sleeping. Most were pictures taken by the paparazzi who followed her every move. She was Lauren Jauregui, of Jauregui Industries, and at the ridiculous age of twenty-eight, she was one of the top twenty-five richest people in the world. I was pretty sure she owned a significant chunk of Manhattan; I was positive she was the hottest woman on the planet. And she kept photos of me everywhere she worked, as if I could possibly be as fun to look at as she was.

she turned, pivoting gracefully to catch me with her icy green gaze. Of course she’d known I was there, watching her. There was a crackling in the air when we were near each other, a sense of anticipation like the coiled silence before the boom of thunder. she’d probably deliberately waited a beat before facing me, giving me the opportunity to check her out because she knew I loved to look at her.

Dark and Dangerous. And all mine.

God . . . I never got used to the impact of that face. Those sculpted cheekbones and dark winged brows, the thickly lashed green eyes, and those lips . . . perfectly etched to be both sensual and wicked. I loved when they smiled with sexual invitation, and I shivered when they thinned into a stern line. And when she pressed those lips to my body, I burned for her.

Jeez, listen to yourself. My mouth curved, remembering how annoyed I used to get at pals who waxed poetic about their boyfriends’ good looks. But here I was, constantly awed by the gorgeousness of the complicated, frustrating, messed-up, sexy-as-sin woman I was falling deeper in love with every day.

As we stared at each other, her scowl didn’t lessen, nor did she cease speaking to the poor soul on the receiving end of her call, but her gaze warmed from its chilly irritation to scorching heat.

I should’ve gotten used to the change that came over her when she looked at me, but it still hit me with a force strong enough to rock me on my feet. That look conveyed how hard and deep she wanted to fuck me—which she did every chance she got—and it also afforded me a glimpse of her raw, unrelenting force of will. A core of strength and command marked everything Lauren did in life.

“See you at eight on Saturday,” she finished, before yanking off the earpiece and tossing it on her desk. “Come here, camila.”

Another shiver slid through me at the way she said my name, with the same authoritative bite she used when she said Come, Camila, while I was beneath her . . . filled with her . . . desperate to climax for her . . .

“No time for that, ace.” I backed into the hallway, because I was weak where she was concerned. The soft rasp in her smooth, cultured voice was nearly capable of making me orgasm just listening to it. And whenever she touched me, I caved.

I hurried to the kitchen to make us some coffee.

she muttered something under her breath and followed me out, her long stride easily gaining on mine. I found myself pinned to the hallway wall by a six feet, two inches of hard, hot male.

“You know what happens when you run, angel.” Lauren nipped my lower lip with her teeth and then soothed the sting with the caress of her tongue. “I catch you.”

Inside me, something sighed with happy surrender and my body went lax with pleasure at being pressed so close to her. I craved her constantly, so deeply it was a physical ache. What I felt was lust, but it was also so much more. Something so precious and profound that Lauren's lust for me wasn’t the trigger it would’ve been with another man. If anyone else had attempted to subdue me with the weight of their body, I would’ve freaked out. But it had never been an issue with lauren. She knew what I needed and how much I could take.

The sudden flash of her grin stopped my heart.

Confronted with that breathtaking face framed by that lustrous dark hair, I felt my knees weaken just a little. She was so polished and urbane except for the decadent length of those silky strands.

she nuzzled her nose against mine. “You can’t smile at me like that, then walk away. Tell me what you were thinking about when I was on the phone.”

My lips twisted wryly. “How gorgeous you are. It’s sickening how often I think about that. I need to get over it already.”

she cupped the back of my thigh and urged me tighter against her, teasing me with an expert roll of her hips against mine. She was outrageously gifted in bed. And she knew it. “Damn if I’ll let you.”

“Oh?” Heat slid sinuously through my veins, my body too greedy for the feel of her. “You can’t tell me you want another starry-eyed woman hanging on you, Miss. Hates-Exaggerated-Expectations.”

“What I want,” she purred, cupping my jaw and rubbing my bottom lip with the pad of her thumb, “is you being too busy thinking about me to think about anyone else.”

I pulled in a slow and shaky breath. I was completely seduced by the smoldering look in her eyes, the provocative tone of her voice, the heat of her body, and the mouthwatering scent of her skin. She was my drug, and I had no desire to kick the habit.

“Lauren,” I breathed, entranced.

With a soft groan, she sealed her chiseled mouth over mine, stealing away thoughts of what time it was with a lush, deep kiss . . . a kiss that almost succeeded in distracting me from seeing the insecurity she’d just revealed.

I pushed my fingers into her hair to hold her still and kissed her back, my tongue sliding along her, stroking. We’d been a couple for such a short period of time. Less than a month. Worse, neither of us knew how to have a relationship like the one we were attempting to build—a relationship in which we refused to pretend we weren’t both seriously broken.

her arms banded around me and tightened possessively. “I wanted to spend the weekend with you down in the Florida Keys—naked.”

“Umm, sounds nice.” More than nice. As big of a kick as I got out of Lauren in a three-piece suit, I much preferred her stripped to the skin. I avoided pointing out that I wouldn’t be available this weekend . . .

“Now I’ve got to spend the weekend taking care of business,” she muttered, her lips moving against mine.

“Business you put off to be with me?” she’d been leaving work early to spend time with me, and I knew that had to be costing her. My mother was in her third marriage, and all of her spouses were successful, wealthy moguls of one kind or another. I knew the price for ambition was very late hours.

“I pay other people a generous salary so I can be with you.”

Nice dodge, but noting the flash of irritation in her gaze, I distracted her. “Thank you. Let’s get some coffee before we run out of time.”

Lauren stroked her tongue along my bottom lip, then released me. “I’d like to get off the ground by eight tomorrow night. Pack cool and light. Arizona’s got dry heat.”

“What?” I blinked at her retreating back as it disappeared into her office. “Arizona is where your business is?”

“Unfortunately.”

Uh . . . whoa. Instead of risking my shot at coffee, I postponed arguing and continued on to the kitchen. I passed through Lauren's spacious apartment with its stunning prewar architecture and slender arched windows, my heels alternately clicking over gleaming hardwood and muffled by Aubusson rugs. Decorated in dark woods and neutral fabrics, the luxurious space was brightened by jeweled accents. As much as her place screamed money, it managed to remain warm and welcoming, a comfortable place to relax and feel pampered.

When I reached the kitchen, I wasted no time in shoving a travel mug under the one-cup coffeemaker. Lauren joined me with her jacket draped over one arm and her cell phone in her hand. I put another portable mug under the spout for her before I went to the fridge for some half-and-half.

“It might be fortunate after all.” I faced her and reminded her of my roommate issue. “I need to knock heads with Cary this weekend.”

Lauren dropped her phone in the inner pocket of her jacket, then hung the garment off the back of one of the bar stools at the island. “You’re coming with me, camila.”

Exhaling in a rush, I added half-and-half to my coffee. “To do what? Lie around naked, waiting for you to finish work and fuck me?”

her gaze held mine as she collected her mug and sipped her steaming coffee with too-calm deliberation. “Are we going to argue?”

“Are you going to be difficult? We talked about this. You know I can’t leave Cary after what happened last night.” The multibody tangle I’d found in my living room gave new meaning to the word clusterfuck.

I put the carton back in the fridge and absorbed the sensation of being drawn to her inexorably by the force of her will. It’d been that way from the beginning. When she chose to, Lauren could make me feel her demands. And it was very, very difficult to ignore the part of me that begged to give her whatever she wanted. “You’re going to take care of business and I’m going to take care of my best friend, then we’ll go back to taking care of each other.”

“I won’t be back until Sunday night, camila.”

Oh . . . I felt a sharp twinge in my belly at hearing we’d be apart that long. Most couples didn’t spend every free moment together, but we weren’t like most people. We both had hang-ups, insecurities, and an addiction to each other that required regular contact to keep us functioning properly. I hated being apart from her. I rarely went more than a couple of hours without thinking of her.

“You can’t stand the thought, either,” she said quietly, studying me in that way she had that saw everything. “By Sunday we’ll both be worthless.”

I blew on the surface of my coffee, then took a quick sip. I was unsettled at the thought of going the entire weekend without her. Worse, I hated the thought of her spending that amount of time away from me. She had a world of choices and possibilities out there, women who weren’t so screwed up and difficult to be with.

Still, I managed to say, “We both know that’s not exactly healthy, lauren.”

“Says who? No one else knows what it’s like to be us.”

Okay, I’d give her that.

“We need to get to work,” I said, knowing this impasse was going to drive both of us crazy all day. We’d sort it out later, but for now we were stuck with it.

Resting her hip against the counter, she crossed her ankles and stubbornly settled in. “What we need is for you to come with me.”

“lauren.” My foot began to tap against the travertine tile. “I can’t just give up my life for you. If I turn into arm candy, you’ll get bored real quick. Hell, I’d get sick of myself. It shouldn’t kill us to spend a couple days straightening out other parts of our lives, even if we hate doing it.”

her gaze captured mine. “You’re too much trouble to be arm candy.”

“Takes a troublemaker to know one.”

Lauren straightened, shrugging off her brooding sensuality and instantly capturing me with her severe intensity. So mercurial—like me. “You’ve gotten a lot of press lately, camila. It’s no secret that you’re in New York. I can’t leave you here while I’m gone. Bring Cary with us if you have to. You can butt heads with him while you’re waiting for me to finish work and fuck you.”

“Ha.” Even as I acknowledged her attempt to lighten the strain with humor, I realized what her real objection to being apart from me was—Nathan. My former stepbrother. The living nightmare from my past that Lauren seemed to fear might reappear in my present. It frightened me to concede that she wasn’t totally wrong. The shield of anonymity that had protected me for years had been shattered by our highly public relationship.

God . . . we totally didn’t have the time to get into that mess, but I knew it wasn’t a point Lauren would concede on. She was a woman who claimed her possessions utterly, fought off her competitors with ruthless precision, and would never allow any harm to come to me. I was her safe place, which made me rare and invaluable to her.

Lauren glanced at her watch. “Time to go, angel.”

She fetched her jacket, then gestured for me to precede her through her luxurious living room, where I grabbed my purse and the bag holding my walking shoes and other necessities. A few moments later, we’d finished the descent to the ground floor in her private elcamilator and slid into the back of her black Bentley SUV.

“Hi, Angus,” I greeted her driver, who touched the brim of his old-fashioned chauffeur’s hat.

“Good morning, Miss.Cabello,” he replied, smiling. He was an older gentleman, with a liberal sprinkling of white in his red hair. I liked him for a lot of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he’d been driving Lauren around since grade school and genuinely cared for her.

A quick glance at the Rolex my mother and stepfather had given me told me I’d make it to work on time . . . if we didn’t get boxed in by traffic. Even as I thought this, Angus slid deftly into the sea of taxis and cars on the street. After the tense quiet of Lauren's apartment, the noise of Manhattan woke me as effectively as a jolt of caffeine. The blaring of horns and the thud of tires over a manhole cover invigorated me. Rapid-moving streams of pedestrians flanked both sides of the clogged street, while buildings stretched ambitiously toward the sky, keeping us in shadow even as the sun climbed.

God, I seriously loved New York. I took the time every day to absorb it, to try to draw it into me.

I settled into the leather seat back and reached for Lauren's hand, giving it a squeeze. “Would you feel better if Cary and I left town for the weekend? Maybe a quick trip to Vegas?”

Lauren's gaze narrowed. “Am I a threat to Cary? Is that why you won’t consider Arizona?”

“What? No. I don’t think so.” Shifting in the seat, I faced her. “Sometimes it takes an all-nighter before I can get him to open up.”

“You don’t think so?” She repeated my answer, ignoring everything but the first words out of my mouth.

“He might feel like he can’t reach out to me when he needs to talk because I’m always with you,” I clarified, steadying my mug with two hands as we drove over a pothole. “Listen, you’re going to have to get over any jealousy about Cary. When I say he’s like a brother to me, Lauren, I’m not kidding. You don’t have to like him but you have to understand that he’s a permanent part of my life.”

“Do you tell him the same thing about me?”

“I don’t have to. He knows. I’m trying to reach a compromise here—”

“I never compromise.”

My brows rose. “In business, I’m sure you don’t. But this is a relationship, lauren. It requires give and—”

Lauren's growl cut me off. “My plane, my hotel, and if you leave the premises you take a security team with you.”

Her sudden, reluctant capitulation surprised me silent for a long minute. Long enough for her brow to arch over those piercing green eyes in a look that said take it or leave it.

“Don’t you think that’s a little extreme?” I prodded. “I’ll have Cary with me.”

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t trust him with your safety after last night.” As she drank her coffee, her posture made it very clear that the conversation was done in her mind. she’d given me her acceptable options.

I might’ve gotten bitchy about that kind of high-handedness if I didn’t understand that taking care of me was her motivation. My past had vicious skeletons, and dating Lauren had put me in a media spotlight that could bring Nathan Barker right to my door.

Plus, controlling everything around her was just part of who Lauren was. It came with the package and I had to make accommodations for that.

“Okay,” I agreed. “Which hotel is yours?”

“I have a few. You can take your pick.” she turned her head to look out the window. “Scott will email you the list. When you’ve decided, let him know and he’ll make the arrangements. We’ll fly out together and return together.”

Leaning my shoulder into the seat, I took a drink of my coffee and noted the way her hand was fisted on her thigh. In the tinted window’s reflection, Lauren's face was impassive, but I could feel her moodiness.

“Thank you,” I murmured.

“Don’t. I’m not happy about this, camila.” A muscle in her jaw twitched. “Your roommate fucks up and I have to spend the weekend without you.”

Hating that she was unhappy, I took her coffee from her and set our travel mugs in the backseat cup holders. Then I climbed into her lap, straddling her. I draped my arms around her shoulders. “I appreciate you bending on this, lauren. It means a lot to me.”

she caught me in her fierce green gaze. “I knew you were going to drive me insane the moment I saw you.”

I smiled, recalling how we’d met. “Sprawled on my ass on the lobby floor of the Crossfire Building?”

“Before. Outside.”

Frowning, I asked, “Outside where?”

“On the sidewalk.” Lauren gripped my hips, squeezing in that possessive, commanding way of her that made me ache for her. “I was leaving for a meeting. A minute later and I would’ve missed you. I’d just gotten into the car when you came around the corner.”

I remembered the Bentley idling at the curb that day. I’d been too awed by the building to take note of the sleek vehicle when I arrived, but I had noticed it when I left.

“You hit me the instant I saw you,” she said gruffly. “I couldn’t look away. I wanted you immediately. Excessively. Almost violently.”

How could I not have known that there’d been more to our first meeting than I’d realized? I thought we’d stumbled across each other by accident. But she’d been leaving for the day . . . which meant she had deliberately backtracked inside. For me.

“You stopped right next to the Bentley,” she went on, “and your head tilted back. You were looking up at the building and I pictured you on your knees, looking up at me that same way.”

The low growl in Lauren's voice had me squirming in her lap. “What way?” I whispered, mesmerized by the fire in her eyes.

“With excitement. A little awe . . . a little intimidation.” Cupping my rear, she urged me tighter against her. “There was no way to stop myself from following you inside. And there you were, right where I’d wanted you, damn near kneeling in front of me. In that minute, I had a half dozen fantasies about what I was going to do to you when I got you naked.”

I swallowed, remembering my similar reaction to her. “Looking at you for the first time made me think about sex. Screaming, sheet-clawing sex.”

“I saw that.” her hands slid up either side of my spine. “And I knew you saw me, too. Saw what I am . . . what I have inside me. You saw right through me.”

And that was what had knocked me on my ass—literally. I’d looked into her eyes and realized how tightly reined she was, what a shadowed soul she had. I had seen power and hunger and control and demand. Somewhere inside me, I’d known she would take me over. It was a relief to know she’d felt the same upheaval over me.

Lauren's hands hugged my shoulder blades and pulled me closer, until our foreheads touched. “No one’s ever seen before, camila. You’re the only one.”

My throat tightened painfully. In so many ways, Lauren was a hard woman, yet she could be so sweet to me. Almost childishly so, which I loved because it was pure and uncontrolled. If no one else bothered to look beyond her striking face and impressive bank account, they didn’t deserve to know her. “I had no idea. You were so . . . cool. I didn’t seem to affect you at all.”

“Cool?” she scoffed. “I was on fire for you. I’ve been fucked up ever since.”

“Gee. Thanks.”

“You made me need you,” she rasped. “Now I can’t stand the thought of two days without you.”

Holding her jaw in my hands, I kissed her tenderly, my lips coaxing and apologetic. “I love you, too,” I whispered against her beautiful mouth. “I can’t stand being away from you, either.”

her returning kiss was greedy, devouring, and yet the way she held me close to her was gentle and reverent. As if I were precious. When she pulled back, we were both breathing hard.

“I’m not even your type,” I teased, trying to lighten the mood before we went into work. Lauren's preference for blondes was well known and well documented.

I felt the Bentley pull over and to a halt. Angus got out of the car to give us privacy, leaving the engine and air-conditioning running. I looked out the window and saw the Crossfire beside us.

“About the type thing—” Lauren's head fell back to rest against the seat. She took a deep breath. “Corinne was surprised by you. You weren’t what she’d expected.”

My jaw tightened at the mention of Lauren's former fiancée. Even knowing that their relationship had been about friendship and loneliness for her, not love, didn’t stop the claws of envy from digging into me. Jealousy was one of my virulent flaws. “Because I’m brunette?”

“Because . . . you don’t look like her.”

My breath caught. I hadn’t considered that Corinne had set the standard for her. Even Magdalene Perez—one of Lauren's friends who wished she were more—had said she’d kept her light hair long to emulate Corinne. But I hadn’t grasped the complexity of that observation. My God . . . if it was true, Corinne had tremendous power over Lauren, way more than I could bear. My heart rate quickened and my stomach churned. I hated her irrationally. Hated that she’d had even a piece of her. Hated every woman who’d known her touch . . . her lust . . . her amazing body.

I started sliding off her.

“camila.” She stayed me by tightening her grip on my thighs. “I don’t know if she’s right.”

I looked down at where she held me, and the sight of my promise ring on the finger of her right hand—my brand of ownership—calmed me. So did the look of confusion on her face when I met her gaze. “You don’t?”

“If that’s what it was, it wasn’t conscious. I wasn’t looking for her in other women. I didn’t know I was looking for anything until I saw you.”

My hands slid down her lapels as relief filled me. Maybe she hadn’t been consciously looking for her, but even if she had, I couldn’t be more different from Corinne in appearance and temperament. I was unique to her; a woman apart from her others in every way. I wished that could be enough to kill my jealousy.

“Maybe it wasn’t a preference so much as a pattern.” I smoothed her frown line with a fingertip. “You should ask Dr. Petersen when we see her tonight. I wish I had more answers after all my years of therapy, but I don’t. There’s a lot that’s inexplicable between us, isn’t there? I still have no idea what you see in me that’s hooked you.”

“It’s what you see in me, angel,” she said quietly, her features softening. “That you can know what I have in me and still want me as much as I want you. I go to sleep every night afraid I’ll wake up and you’ll be gone. Or that I scared you away . . . that I dreamed you—”

“No. lauren.” Jesus. She broke my heart every day. Shattered me.

“I know I don’t tell you how I feel about you in the same way you tell me, but you have me. You know that.”

“Yes, I know you love me, lauren.” Insanely. Outrageously. Obsessively. Just like my feelings for her.

“I’m caught up with you, camila.” With her head tilted back, Lauren pulled me down for the sweetest of kisses, her firm lips moving gently beneath mine. “I’d kill for you,” she whispered, “give up everything I own for you . . . but I won’t give you up. Two days is my limit. Don’t ask for more than that; I can’t give it to you.”

I didn’t take her words lightly. her wealth insulated her, gave her the power and control that had been stolen from her at some point in her life. she’d suffered brutality and violation, just as I had. That she would consider it worthwhile to lose her peace of mind just to keep me meant more than the words I love you.

“I just need the two days, ace, and I’ll make them worth your while.”

The starkness of her gaze bled away, replaced by sexual heat. “Oh? Planning on pacifying me with sex, angel?”

“Yes,” I admitted shamelessly. “Lots of it. After all, the tactic seems to work well for you.”

her mouth curved, but her gaze had a sharpness that quickened my breath. The dark look she gave me reminded me—as if I could forget—that Lauren wasn’t a man who could be managed or tamed.

“Ah, Camila,” she purred, sprawled against the seat with the predatory insouciance of a sleek panther who’d neatly trapped a mouse in her den.

A delicious shiver moved through me. When it came to Lauren, I was more than willing to be devoured.

[justicebled]

genshin verse .

basically, yuri is a traveler, just a traveler, and an infamous one at that. not much is known about yuri save his first name, and the title, the black wolf. he thinks nicknames are mostly laughable, but it’s grown on him. he is his post-game age, 22 (you can find the skit in the japanese version of the game) and his element is electro (thank you flan)  until i test out combos when i’m not obviously focusing on vesperia? unknown. but it will always be the direct opposite of his best friend’s, flynn scifo, who is a knight stationed in mondstadt.

frankly, yuri’s reputation for both causing well-intentioned trouble, going rogue in facing off against the fatui who make him cringe because they’re as he says, ‘too edgy’, or following his own pure, unrelenting code of morals and justice, walks an entirely unbeaten path. some say he’s from liyue. others from inazuma. some think he might be like the main character, he’s entirely enigmatic and not known for staying in one place for too long at all. 

details below in bullet point.

god-modding someone who has for years as very famous rpg character / fighter protag has proven to be a beast strategically / physically. basically respect my character as i will respect yours. he is entirely adaptable at any range be it in hand to hand, martial arts, random items,  using his body as a weapon or simply the sword alone, which he is a monster at. he also can use axes just as well but chooses the blade. he’s constantly experimenting weaponry in this verse, but underestimating yuri is probably not wise.

it’s certainly gotten fatui who have crossed paths with the not-quite-but-getting there wandering avatar of justice and vigilante / wanderer to an early, rather brutally quick grave. if he’s met with higher rank members and faced off, he’s also not mentioned it. to him, it’s more his personal choice to see if ‘punishing the unjust’ his personal credo, is worth involving in certain matters as a purely chaotic neutral. he can be hurt! but all fights are plotted, no exceptions. the fact he’s been involved in all this is not known to canon characters unless say diluc’s network / permission.

that said if you have a fatui character oc or canon, and they try to invade his room? please note yuri is canonly an adhd riddled insomniac and please talk to me if they know this. he’s eerily intuitive and he will not make it easy for you at all.  

can never abandon anyone in need. literally. also probably the best big brother you could ask for if you get in his graces, but don’t expect not to get moments of his kind heart leaking through his guard (more like bleeding heart) and also giving you equally tough love. you have to follow your own path, is something yuri very much believes in!

  he  is the warrior that will chase you until you or HIM are out of commission either permanently or temporarily. applies really only to the evil / adversaries of the game / fatui.

 safe to say he’s become many a nightmare fuel to those deserving. and even mentions in canon content that he has a ‘rage’ that can only be quelled until he’s satisfied in a good fight. basically screwing with yuri will land you with a broken rib or worse, unconscious for a good week or more.

yuri and flynn from time to time will as opposing elements, put on a show of a duel in the square, promising not to use any elemental abilities. with yuri’s exceeding reputation as a warrior going behind him, and also fully mastering his vision, flynn is someone who while more sheltered having lived in mondstadt longer, comes highly close to tying with yuri and vice versa, making flynn also a nightmare albeit quite a bit more predictable due to being rather straightforward in battle / ever putting chivalry first. 

for yuri, who has seen far more of the world, this is the one verse he’s a bit above the playing field instead of just tying with flynn, which pisses his best friend off to no end and makes him train harder to this time, instead of yuri catching up? it’s flynn’s turn to catch up to him.

he took up a job at the winery part-time to make ends meet while he’s lingering in mondstadt. tends to think diluc is a tightwad but genuinely is someone he respects. if he interacts with him, but generally for a man with his fair share of legends as a fighter, enjoys seeing someone equally unimpressed with the fatui / unjust. save he’s far more easy-going in nature and his low baritone drawl tends to put others at ease...or pissed off because he always tells it like it is. he’s gained a nickname of ‘one of the best temporary chefs of mondstadt’ because he can cook a wide variety of dishes, everyone ends up satisfied.

token big brother figure to many party members and a prankster, voice dripping with sarcasm. he tells it like it is but is arguably one of THE Kindest / Unselfish Characters / Party Members you will acquire and genuinely gives a damn about the protagonist and their friends. doesn’t coddle them and actually is itching to at least have a spar or exchange moves with them as  a sign of friendship. 

repede constantly follows him, usually gathering information of whatever he wills it as his partner, and has quite a reputation himself for being elusive, unable to catch, and always reporting to his partner news of things both abroad and afar. guy knows his shit thanks to his partner and his own insane street smarts. openly admits he’s an ‘orphan’.

carries a blade called second star, who he constantly makes up convincing stories of where he got it from. again, unknown. he jokes that if he were to be another ‘vigilante’ in this town ‘diluc would run out of a job save being bored behind a counter’ to those that know the information, or if yuri himself was in the loop about his uh...nightly activities and...interesting name choice. 

doesn’t care about really the whole ‘seven’ thing, respects them as people, but unless one tells him ‘hey i’m an archon’ he’s generally just like ‘well the people are happy about you. so don’t let them down ok ‘ because yuri is an individualist, he doesn’t like to be defined by systems, organizations, or even faith. not that he doesn’t think they exist, he just follows his own brand of living but he generally does believe venti exists. that said i can see him completely being friends with people like venti, and...probably bantering with zhongli. 

genuinely a really benevolent, sarcastic, tough, and disturbingly strong warrior with some stories under his belt and big brother figure who loves a challenge far more than he should.

 may bite off more than he should be chewing, but a wolf’s fangs run deep and if he bites, there will be blood. other than that? he’s just chilling and enjoying spending time with his best friend every day until the ‘itch’ of wanderlust catches him again. 

yuri’s element, thanks to flan’s reddit post link is apparently the ‘vision of outsiders / strangers ‘ electro. so yuri is an electro user, and unless a flynn or vesperia cast member joins, he would be hydro in opposition to yuri. he doesn’t use it often? but he’s lethal either way. or you know, mildly zapping flynn who accidentially zaps the whole town with the shock effect...

is actually constantly traveling due to the large fatui target on his back. back a few years ago, safe to say he killed an influential figure within the fatui / either a harbinger before there were eleven or simply someone of high influence and combat on par with one. i mostly go with the former but either are viable, and it is not something known unless you’re affiliated with them / allies. that said yuri wanders because he wants to. liyue is probably next. but as ever, he won’t ignore someone in trouble, which lands him in trouble. but he never stops.

[haus-of-wu]

Time_Slip Reaction/Analysis

i might’ve listened to this on repeat all day at work

I was a bit worried about how far they were going to take this retro/newtro concept, but this album has only been a bunch of pleasant surprises.

Thank you for putting together such a happy-making album.

1) The Crown

I knew I loved this track the moment the video came out. It’s up in the rock anthem genre that Super Junior hasn’t touched in a couple years, and I’ve been waiting and ready for something like this. The percussion at the beginning of “The Crown” is an obvious nod to “We Will Rock You”, but the instrumentation and general vibe also reminds me of Imagine Dragons’ “Believer”.

The KRY “I’m ready for you now”s in the bridge are 1000, and the lyrics really hit home for me as someone who has been an ELF for roughly a decade.

2) SUPER Clap

Not gonna lie, when I first heard the demo on SJ Returns and saw Ryeowook immediately dancing in his seat, I wasn’t sold on it. (To be air, I was still super attached to “I Think I”)

Rhythmically, this track is very interesting. The bass line and sound effects on top keep the song very dynamic and gives it a continuous sense of urgency behind the tempo.

The song also makes a good use of space/silence. Ryeowook’s solo during a relatively quiet bridge was just the right way to break things up before the dance break instrumental. Also the expectant pause before Yesung’s solo “Yeah” just adds to the hype.

3) I Think I

I knew this was going to be a bop when I saw the teaser. It’s an easy feel-good song, and you can’t help but groove in your chair with the chorus. However, after listening to it a few more times in the past week, I can understand why it was ultimately not picked as the title track. It’s great as a song that everyone can sing/hum to because it’s predictable. This pro is also a con in the sense that it can probably be easily glossed over because it lacks an extra WOW factor.

One thing I will give the composer/arranger credit for is having the two verses use completely different melodies. Donghae and Heechul’s parts in the first verse are very syncopated R&B, while Kyuhyun and Siwon’s parts more comfortably follow the rhythm. The melodic instrumental is more subdued during this first verse, and becomes brighter/more obvious in the next, which makes this switch up work very well.

The chorus is ridiculously satisfying. Mostly because the “I Think I” section builds up really well to the drop - it just resolves so well. The last chorus really brings in all the dramatic accented percussion and brass, along with the vocal harmonies.

And of course, it isn’t an SJ song unless Ryeowook is just gliding above everyone else in the last chorus.

4) Game

I also was hesitant about this one when I heard the demo. I immediately got Bruno Mars vibes from it, and I struggled to picture SJ singing this.

Bad things first: the ad-libs at the beginning of this are the worse version of the beginning ad-libs from last album’s “Scene Stealer”. I understand that they want to use the beats and the ad-libs to set up the early 2000′s hip hop vibe, but the lyrics and delivery are just not as good.

If we ignore the first 20 seconds of the song, Kyuhyun swoops in with suave vocals before rap line takes the fuck off. The lead-up to the chorus “Say whatcha gonna do?” with the increasingly fast drums really makes me think of “cuz uptown funk’s gonna give it to ya” from Bruno Mars a la “Uptown Funk”. i KNEW this reminded me of something good god

This track grew on me. It’s has a good funky chorus with fire pun intended rap bars, and Ryeowook going up high in the last chorus.

5) Somebody New

The feel good American boy bands of the 2000s called, and they want their musical style back - this song just instantly makes you happy.

My favorite part is easily Hyukjae’s rap. It’s a more aggressive accented style that still flows exceptionally well in a track where you wouldn’t expect a rap verse.

This song makes my heart soft and warm, that is all. (Is it a SJ song if Ryeowook isn’t wildin’ up there? Nope.)

6) Skydive

I think this might be my favorite track on the album. If you wanted a tropical house bop with high-pitched distorted digital background voice samples and crystal clear singing, this is the song for you.

This song has a much fresher feel to it - it sounds like something a much more rookie group would sing. Like if SJ debuted in 2019, this would’ve been a dope debut track.

On a completely unrelated note, when the beat drops, the instrumental makes me think two cursed things: the caramelldansen chorus and the instrumental of this specific remix of the Chinese “Learn to Meow” song. Those two parts might be cursed, so I really can’t explain why I love this track so much.

I’d let SJ take me to the club any day

7) Heads Up

Mayhaps the foil to “Skydive”. This is a lot more sultry/mysterious and the instrumentation is heavily influenced by the deep synthetic brass. The lead-up to the chorus has some trancey/trippy scales.

I think this is the track that “sounds” most like their age. It’s a nuanced, confident, and sophisticated track that lets you hear their many different sides.

Kyuhyun and Yesung’s timbres really complete the vibe.

8) Stay With Me

This probably my least favorite track. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, I just don’t think it’s as up my alley as all the other tracks on the album. There’s a ton of good vocal harmonies, but it’s pretty lackluster for me.

I think it takes a bit too long for it to ramp up. “Stay With Me” is probably the most repetitive track, along with “I Think I”, but the chorus isn’t as satisfying as “I Think I”, which is why it ranks lower for me.

9) No Drama

A nice chill R&B groove. It’s something you’d play in the car while on a leisurely drive. Probably also a contender on the “Repetitive Track” list, but it’s not as grating to me as “Stay With Me” - it’s something I could listen to on repeat in the background while coding at work.

10) Show

This is the type of song you play during the finale of a musical. Like it just feels like happy bowing music.

Electric guitar solo - A+. The harmonies when everyone sings together are wild.

Another song that just puts a smile on your face.

[moonstruckbucky]

Invisible

SUMMARY: The reader is, quite frankly, fed up with being second to Nancy "Goody-Two-Shoes" Wheeler.

PAIRING: Billy Hargrove x female Wheeler!Reader

WORD COUNT: 3.1k

REQUESTED: no

WARNINGS: Language [ya'll are gonna learn real quick that i have a straight up potty mouth], tooth-rotting fluff, slight Nancy-bashing [but it is not indicative of my own personal feelings towards Nancy, she’s a badass.]

Growing up as “the other Wheeler” was about as exciting as a nail through the eye. You were the middle sibling, serving to only add insult to injury. Virtually, you were the invisible one in the family, except when your father would ask why you couldn’t get grades like Nancy. Every time, it chipped away at your ever-dwindling self-confidence so that even you had begun to compare yourself to your older sister.

As for dating? Forget it. Your love life consisted of dating a boy for a few weeks until he had wormed his way closer to Nancy, and then you were history. You weren’t as pretty as Nancy, you weren’t as funny as Nancy (which was the only thing you disagreed with; you were downright hilarious while Nancy’s sense of humor bordered on non-existent).

You just weren’t Nancy.

You had a minor crush on Nancy’s boyfriend, Steve, when they first started dating, even though he barely considered the two of you to be friends. He tolerated you, as did everyone else. Nancy’s friends tolerated you when they invited Nancy out and said you could tag along too, if only out of respect for Nancy. But they never included you in conversation, never asked how your college applications were going. It was like you weren’t even there, and eventually you stopped going, and Nancy stopped asking.

The two of you weren’t particularly close, despite only being six months apart in age. She was focused on school and was too wrapped up in Steve to really worry about what her sister was or wasn’t getting up to. The only link between the two of you had been Barbara Holland, and once she’d disappeared and turned out to be dead, all ties between you and Nancy had been severed.

You went through the motions at Hawkins High School, throwing yourself into achieving the best grades you could to get into a school miles away from Hawkins, Indiana. Someplace where you wouldn’t just be known as “the other Wheeler”.

On a Thursday afternoon, you found yourself in the school library, nose buried in your American History textbook trying to retain the Gettysburg Address. You’d gotten your tests back earlier that day, and you’d just about failed. You hated the feeling of failure; every other aspect of your life was failure, so it was unacceptable for school to give you that feeling too.

The slamming of books on the desk jolted you from your position and you gasped loudly.

“Hey bookworm.”

You leered up into the face of the new kid, Billy Hargrove, who was wearing his signature smirk as he leaned on the chair across from you.

“Can I help you?” you grumbled, your heart rate slowing as you calmed down.

“Word has it you’re good at Algebra.” He pulled out the chair and sat down, completely uninvited.

“And?”

He tossed a stapled group of papers at you before folding his arms on the desk, leaning forward. You picked them up, taking in the circled red F on the page. Your eyes skimmed his answers quickly and then you tossed it back to him.

“Your formulas are wrong,” you observed before turning back to your book. The papers appeared in your line of sight again. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Help me. Tutor me?” You raised an eyebrow at his almost pleading tone. “I can’t fail another class.”

“What’s in it for me besides loss of patience?” you snarked back, setting your book down.

“I can help you bring that History grade up.” Ignoring the sassy remark, he nodded at the test to your left, the failing grade bright against the paper. You gnawed on your lip for a while, weighing the pros and cons of trading tutoring sessions with Billy Hargrove.

You weren’t friends. In fact, the two of you couldn’t be more opposite. You’d seen him in the halls, parading around like a peacock surrounded by a gaggle of rowdy boys and girls who were drooling after him. You’d heard stories about him, how he moved from sunny California, how he picked fights over the smallest reasons, how he dated girls and left them heartbroken the next day. He was everything about high school you abhorred, and yet, you somehow found yourself agreeing to his stupid idea.

“Fuck this,” you whisper-yelled about an hour later, slamming your textbook closed. Billy had moved into the seat beside you to better go over his Algebra problems before moving onto History. You shoved the book away from you, fully fed up with trying to nail down important dates of the Civil War.

Billy smirked. “Didn’t know the other Wheeler had such a mouth on her.”

Bitterness settled in your gut at his remark, and you pursed your lips and pointedly looked in the other direction. It wasn’t anything you hadn’t heard before, but the way it came off Billy’s tongue sat heavy with you. Your leg started bouncing in annoyance as you fiddled with your pen, trying to will yourself not to cry over a comment you heard literally every day.

“Hey,” Billy then murmured, leaning forward to try and see your face. “You okay?”

“Just peachy,” you grumbled before gathering your belongings. “Tutoring’s over.”

You left him in the library, staring dumbfoundedly after you, and only when you stepped foot outside did you let your vision blur with the tears fighting to the surface. You climbed into your car after dumping your books on the passenger seat and punched the steering wheel, the horn honking once.

You weren’t exactly sure why you were so upset; after all, the comment was coming from Billy Hargrove of all people, so it wasn’t as if his opinion actually mattered. But somehow, it did. It cut you like a papercut, a quick swipe that gave way to an unrelenting sting. Maybe it was your subconscious finally giving up on trying to ignore it every time it slipped through someone’s teeth. Maybe that one time was enough straw to break the camel’s back.

God, you wished high school was over.

The drive home was silent and lonely, just like the rest of your life. While high school was supposed to help you figure out who you’d become in the real world, it seemed as if it was determined to point you in only one direction: Nancy’s shadow.

The house was quiet when you got home, and you found a note on the kitchen island that told you Nancy was out with Steve, Mike was at Will’s, and your parents had gone out for dinner. You sighed. It was typical that they forgot about you, leaving you to your own devices for dinner. You called your favorite Chinese place and ordered delivery and while you waited you showered, trying to scrub away the day’s events, cried a little in the shower over your pathetic life, and then put on a pair of pajamas and parked your ass on the couch for a horror movie binge.

Nancy never understood your fascination with the genre. You tried explaining it to her once, but she just looked at you like Sigourney Weaver looked at a Xenomorph and gave up on trying to ���bond” with her sister.

The Chinese was delivered not long after you popped your Alien VHS into the player and changed the channel. You paid the driver and tipped him before closing the door and setting the bag on the coffee table. You dug out your orange chicken, fried rice, and spring rolls, popped the top on your can of Coke, and hit play on the movie.

The next day at school, there were whispers in the hallway about your tutoring session with Billy. Some girls glared and scoffed, while others merely analyzed you curiously. The boys just laughed.

What took you by surprise was the fact that your sister was standing beside your locker, looking every bit annoyed once she spotted you.

“What are you doing with Billy?” she hissed. “He’s a bad guy!”

You gave her a deadpan look as you swapped out your books. “I’m tutoring him in Algebra and he’s helping me with History. Besides, it isn’t like you actually care. They all eventually come crawling after you anyways.”

You slammed your locker closed and left Nancy gaping after you. As you entered your first period class, all conversation ceased and all eyes were on you. It was an uncomfortable walk to your seat in the middle of the room, the eyes of your peers burning into your head. You sat quietly and kept your head down, trying to block out the not-so-subtle whispers of the students around you.

By lunchtime, talk was buzzing through the school like rampant bees that “the other Wheeler was in the library with Billy and left in tears”. The story, of course, had been convoluted a multitude of ways that stretched it further and further from the truth until the final version was something along the lines of Billy, you, and a scandalous affair.

Normally, at lunch, you’d sit with Nancy, Steve, and the others even though you were never formally invited into conversation with them. Today, though, the look Nancy gave you when you entered the cafeteria told you you weren’t welcome. That was fine; sitting alone at a table made you feel less alone than when you were with Nancy and her cronies.

You pulled your lunch out of your bag despite not feeling very hungry, the cafeteria buzzing with activity as everyone tried to guess why you were suddenly sitting alone. Then conversation halted altogether, and a tray dropped down across from you, the school pizza dripping grease onto the napkin beneath it.

Billy Hargrove followed the path of the tray, settling on the chair across from you and popping the top on his can of soda. He met your surprised stare calmly and easily, and he winked over the top of his drink. You felt yourself blush and looked away from him shyly, suddenly wondering why all of the sudden he was paying attention to you of all people.

The answer to that question came later in the week. You were in the living room working on History homework on the coffee table, your headphones in. Tutoring with Billy had gone better after the event at lunch, and he’d fortunately kept the conversation to a minimum if it didn’t involve homework or your notes.

Your parents were home, but Nancy wasn’t. You bopped your head along to AC/DC, not seeing your mother come down the stairs in her bathrobe.

Karen was surprised to see a spitting image of the man on the cover of her trashy novel standing outside her front door, his shirt unbuttoned and showing off a good portion of his toned chest.

“Hi,” he said, turning the charm up to a hundred.

“Oh, are you here for Nancy?” she asked, hoping that his answer was no as she leaned against the doorway and pulled her hand from her robe, letting it fall open just a bit.

“No, no, not my type,” Billy replied, shaking his head with a smirk. “I’m actually here for Y/N.”

The surprise was clearly evident on Karen’s face since a boy hadn’t come calling for Y/N since her sophomore year. The expression on her face angered Billy, as if it was so unheard of for anyone to visit or even interact with her daughter. What kind of mother is she?

“Oh, she’s, um, she’s in the living room. Um, come on in.” Karen stepped aside and Billy sauntered in, hands in his pockets as he took in Y/N’s modest home on the other side of town. He found you bent over your textbook, headphones on your head as you mouthed the words to “Girl’s Got Rhythm”.

“Honey,” Karen called feebly. She said it a few more times before waltzing over and pulling the headphones off your head just as the guitar solo was about to kick off.

“Hey! What the hell-- Billy?” You felt frozen in your spot as Billy smirked at you from the living room doorway.

“Your friend came over to see you.” Your mom did a shit job at hiding the shock in her voice, but whether it was from the notion of you even having friends or having friends who looked like Billy, you weren’t sure. “I’m just going to go up and resume my bath.”

You grimaced at the way she said bath and batted her eyelashes at Billy, who barely spared her a second glance as she sauntered away.

“What are you doing here?” you finally asked once you stood to your feet. “Better yet, how do you know where I live?”

“I have connections,” he replied with a one-shouldered shrug. “Let’s go for a drive.”

“I-I can’t. I have homework.” You gestured behind you at the books laid out on the table.

“Work on it later. Lords know you’re passing every class.” He rolled his eyes. “Including History now, thanks to me.”

“Whatever,” you grumbled as you shoved your feet into your shoes. If there was one thing you knew about Billy Hargrove, it was that he was aggravatingly tenacious. He was relentless in his tutoring, making sure you had one set of dates down before quizzing you on the next set. It was frustrating, but you were glad you were finally grasping the concept.

Billy led you out the front door and down the walkway to his blue Camaro, stopping by the passenger door to open it for you. You angled into the seat, the leather cool under your jeans, and he ran around to the driver’s side. The engine roared as he turned it over and then he floored it down the street. Your hands were balled into fists inside your hoodie pocket as he drove, heading to the outskirts of town.

It remained silent in the car as he drove and for a while, you wondered if you were about the be the victim of a classic horror movie. Until Billy stopped at the top of the quarry, overlooking the lake and got out of the car. He leaned against the hood and ducked his head to light a cigarette before reaching back to slap the hood and waving you out.

Slowly you unbuckled yourself and got out, coming to stand beside him at the front of the car. Your nose crinkled at the smell of his cigarette, but he was at least generous enough to blow the smoke away from you. The moon reflected off the lake hundreds of feet below you, rippling as the breeze disturbed the water.

Billy was shockingly silent beside you, puffing on his cigarette and leering out into the night. You spoke up when you’d finally had enough of the silence.

“Why did you sit with me at lunch today? Isn’t that social suicide or something?”

Billy blew the smoke out through his nose in an aggravated huff, his eyes becoming hard. The rest of his cigarette was crunched under his boot as he turned to face you.

“Why do you do that?” he asked. At your confused expression he elaborated. “Put yourself down like that. Why do you do that?”

Your mouth dropped open but you had no answer for him. Not a verbal one anyway, so you shrugged.

“You know, for a smart girl, you’re really dumb,” he fired off next. Your shoulders squared themselves, ready to fight back. “You let people treat you like you’re nothing, like you’re invisible, and I don’t get it.”

“I...Where is this coming from? You don’t even know me!”

“I know you’re itching to get out of Hawkins, to find somewhere you’re not being compared to Nancy. Yeah, I know all about that. I hear people talk and I saw the way you reacted in the library when I called you the other Wheeler. You’re not subtle. I’m not some big dumb brute of a guy who can’t see when someone undeserving is suffering. I see a lot more than you think.”

Your mouth snapped shut as your throat tightened, and you had to look away. The look in his eye was too much as you came to the realization that you weren’t invisible, not to Billy anyway, and it hit you like a freight train.

“You don’t understand,” you heard yourself whispering. You closed your eyes against the onslaught of emotions rising within you. “My whole life, I’ve been invisible, never anyone’s first choice. Middle child syndrome, you know? My father always asked, ‘why can’t you get grades like Nancy?’ Why can’t you excel like Nancy?’ My first A- was trumped by her fucking A+ and I didn’t stop hearing about it for a week. Any boy I ever liked just used me to get closer to Nancy. It’s always Nancy. Nancy, Nancy, fucking Nancy. Why can’t it ever be me?”

The last line was said in such a broken tone that Billy was compelled to step forward. Then you were surrounded in his warmth, and it broke you. You cried into his shirt, finally feeling some relief that you could let it all go.

“Shh, it’s okay,” Billy murmured into your hair, pressing a gentle kiss there after. “I see you, Y/N.”

At those words, you choked on a sob and wound your arms around his waist, holding him tightly to you, and he mirrored the embrace. You stood like that for a while until you were out of tears and his shirt was thoroughly soaked through. Sniffling, you leaned back a bit out of his embrace and he loosened his hold on you just enough to look down at you.

“Sorry,” you muttered, nodding at his shirt. “I ruined your shirt.”

“Fuck the shirt,” he retorted with a smirk that made your mouth quirk up at the ends. “There’s that smile. You don’t have to live in anyone’s shadow, Y/N, least of all Nancy’s. You have a light all your own; let it shine.”

The next week at school was the best week of your life. After Billy had knocked some sense into you, he was never far from your side. Usually he had an arm slung around your shoulders, or your hand grasped in his, leaving the rest of the student body to gawk and wonder what he saw in you. Your confidence was slowly, but surely, rising, though you still had your off days. On those days, Billy was right there with you, murmuring his faith in you that you would overcome it, that you were brilliant, and smart, and beautiful, and that no one could touch you.

Billy Hargrove had unexpectedly saved your life.

[ja-lin]

Just finished reading Lucien and Runa pilots for Voltage’s new series, Sweet Enchantments. I was not surprised when Voltage jumped on the food bandwagon because several other Japanese visual novel companies, such as Cybird have already done so several months prior. 

Unrelated, but sort of related...I’m a huge Anthony Bourdain fan (R.I.P. my fellow food lover, another life ended too early) and have been following him since forever. The day I learned he ended his own life, I was torn. He was a great man and amazing chef with a true passion for food. Just taking a moment to remember him since Voltage’s new series is about a food blogger. :*)

Okay, so the series, Sweet Enchantments kind of reminds me of some stuff about a rehab kitchen for ex-offenders I saw on a cooking show with some magic mixed in. There are TV shows on these type of “second chance” kitchens that help change the lives of ex-cons or those who find themselves making the sudden wrong choice in life, winding up in trouble. I think, as humans...we all make mistakes, but we all deserve a chance to make it right. So, these types of second chance kitchens are amazing! They have helped save many lives. You guys should really watch the documentaries on these or read up on Google.

The cafe seems to be some sort of second chance kitchen for the characters to learn how to become better people. There are antagonists the pilot series introduced that create obstacles for the characters on their path to bettering themselves. The antagonists try to lure the characters to the dark side, but this is where you, as the MC step in. The MC, a food blogger finds herself stuck in this magic cafe, but she is there to support the characters to better themselves. Nothing calms the soul and brings people together like food. Mix in some magic, and you basically have a magic fantasy second chance kitchen. 

I think everyone, despite what they’ve done in their past deserves help and another chance. Nobody should be left behind. We can all become better people by supporting those in need. The characters in Sweet Enchantments need your support, and as the MC, despite the risks and dangers...will you give these characters another chance and help them walk down the right path?

Ok, that’s the short version. If you want to read my wall of text, detailed, long review, continue below. (Possible triggers in full review, do not continue if you’re easily offended by critique or comments.) 

Story Plot The story takes place in alternate reality Seattle, Washington where humans, monsters, and magicians exist. Kinda’ like Harry Potter? The basis in which the MC tumbles into the magical cafe was a bit rushed in my opinion. It’s a bit difficult to tell how the overall plot is going to go, but I believe it’s similar to Love & Legends. The MC gets stuck, wants to leave, but finds that she has a major role in this fantasy world. She is not just another pawn on a chess board, but a major influence on how the game will end. While exploring the magical world, she finds the desire to want to help the other characters better themselves. While doing so, she falls in love.

It’s a typical visual novel fantasy plot where the MC gets tossed into another world, but it’s a safe plot to stick with since readers are familiar with it.

Story Themes I think what’s interesting is that Voltage is following the trends of the other Japanese companies. Before they even announced the series, Cybird had done food related stories. So, I was assuming that Voltage would do the same since they are also a Japanese company. Except, most stories from typical otome games are quite simple and designed for light-hearted reading.

Voltage takes the story theme of Sweet Enchantments up to a more mature reading level. When I was reading it, I was thinking to myself that maybe some readers wouldn’t be able to handle the extreme, mature story themes presented. But, upon checking the APP store ratings, Voltage did warn that the game had mature and suggestive content. By downloading the game, we as readers are acknowledging that we understand the game ratings and confirming that we are at least 17+ years of age. (Or, at least have the maturity to handle the stories.)

If you feel that you can’t handle mature story themes or have something in your past that causes certain triggers, then Sweet Enchantments is not the right series for you to read. I’d suggest the more light-hearted stories from other Japanese visual novel companies. Personally, I read a lot…I’ve read a lot of controversial articles and books. So, I’m completely fine with the themes presented in this series.

The MC finds out some of the characters in the cafe are actually magicians who are ex-offenders serving a sentence. The cafe is the characters’ second chance to make things right. I thought this theme was awesome as it’s never been done before and I’ve watched TV series on rehab kitchens. But, dealing with crime and subjects revolving around prison sentences is a very mature theme. I do applaud Voltage for stepping out of the visual novel comfort zone.

I think as the MC, we serve as some sort of support for the characters and help them walk down the right path using our passion of food. I think it’s universal that food is comfort, something that brings people together. Even if we come from different walks of life, we can still share seats at a dinner table.

I think this is a good combination of themes. But, some readers may not have the maturity level to handle it. This story is *not* for everyone, this is the first time that I can’t recommend a Voltage story to everyone. But, hey…the turnips are cute! I want a plush.

In summary, the main theme of this series is that despite what we’ve done in our pasts we all deserve another chance to make things right.

Overall Writing Style I really enjoyed the balanced writing style in Lucien’s route. His dialogue/narration had the right balance of coldness and warmth. Runa’s dialogue/narration was a bit of a shock to me, but ignoring the character personality and just focusing on the writing…the writing was very, very well done and detailed. But, I think the writer may want to tone it down a little bit for season 2 cause when I was reading Runa’s dialogue/narration I was like…this might scare some readers? Lol… Personally, I enjoyed it because I read a lot of seinen manga with dark themes, but other readers may not be used to this type of writing.

Season 1 was written as a pilot to impress readers, so I can tell that a lot of work was put into the writings. You could smell, taste, hear, feel things with every line you read. Overall, very talented writing as usual from Voltage.

Character After reading both Lucien and Runa routes and interacting with all the characters in the cafe, I gotta’ say that I’m more interested in Zain and Liora. Voltage releases several different personality types for characters because readers fall in love with different things. For me, I like the laid back style of Zain and the strong, comforting style of Liora. If I had to choose between Lucien and Runa though, I’d go with Lucien because his personality is more mild. Runa is a bit too wild for my tastes, but I did enjoy her quips with Zain. They seem to be friends? Anyways, this is in terms of my personal tastes in fictional characters.

I believe Runa is the first time I’ve encountered a female character that’s designed extremely dominant, rude, and rough. As a warning, going back to my notes on the mature themes, she may not be the right character for all readers to experience. Personally, it’s not the type of character I’d want to romance. But, from an artistic standpoint, she’s a very well designed and unique character!

In the end the main goal of a story is to make us feel angry, sad, or a mix of emotions. There is nothing that makes a story writer more accomplished than to invoke emotions in readers. I think that’s the goal of all artists, writers, and even chefs! Yes guys, food can also invoke emotions…remember that movie Ratatouille and that scene with Ego, the food critic? A bite of food made Ego think about his childhood. It made him cry.

The way Runa was designed definitely sent a shock through me. She’s completely different from any character I’ve encountered in games. As a fellow artist, I applaud the designers for trying to think out of the box. Again, the way her character is designed is for readers who can handle mature themes. I do not recommend Runa’s route to readers who can’t handle mature themed stories.

Visual Development Okay, a lot of work was put into the design of this series. When I was trying to draw fan art of the characters I took one look at the costumes, accessories and there were just SO MANY small details. When I was drawing fanart for Zain, I noticed several small details that most people would miss. For example the color of the bead decorations on his hair alternate and his earring designs are so intricate. He was challenging to draw accurately, but I tried my best capture all his details! The character designers did an amazing job. When you guys have the time, take a close look at each character’s accessories and costumes. They are just so detailed! Great job from the character designer on this.

The background design…oh my god, the background artists also did an amazing job. The backgrounds for the series are probably the most detailed I’ve seen in all of Lovestruck. You guys should really take a close look at every small detail in the backgrounds. Just thinking about how many details there are, and how much time the artist spent makes my wrist hurt lol…

The music! If my ears aren’t messing with me, I think Lucien and Runa have different magic casting theme songs! I really loved how all the Love & Legends characters had different theme songs. I hope this is the same case with Sweet Enchantments as Voltage missed the opportunity with Villainous Nights.

The logo design, I mean…it’s okay. But, I wish it was kinda’ more related to how the characters’ costumes were designed. Because when I looked at the logo, it reminded me more of something holiday related, not a magic cafe. That’s my only critique for the visual development.

As a warning, I would not recommend this series to those who can’t handle fictional mature, suggestive story themes. The stories and the characters are not for the faint of heart. In my opinion, Sweet Enchantments is for mature, adventurous readers who can handle mature fantasy story themes.

[mynameisdreartblog]

Teachers

Aries: Football (unamerican) coach. I feel as though Betty Crocker's employees have been studying my movements in anticipation for something. Everyone I meet I assume is working for her, and that's not my paranoia acting up. Recently, factory locations have been springing up all over this country, and here I was thinking the hag would just stay in America where she belonged, but no. I was struck terrifyingly curious about this, so I looked on her website <excusing the modem's start-up process>, and look! It says here that she, herself, has ninety-plus different reasons as to why we still love chicken breasts. God, there's no way a human could write that much about chicken breasts; I'm terrified of each and every one of them if I'm quaint. This is a disturbing sight, but I'll abstain from doing something now until it really starts to become a problem… I fear I'm falling into old pits though. […] I hopped on the 'net today and I saw something only describable as vile. Fuck Betty Crocker and her offensive Kiss Me, I'm Irish cookies. Crocker, you liar and probably not even human; you are neither Irish nor worthy of a kiss. She's done it now, she's cross the line and struck me straight in the soul with everything she has: This witch wanted to infest my land with her polluted factories, steal my press with her spam articles, and now steal my culture too! [,,,] I know what I must do now; can anyone drive me to their headquarters? The new one they just built here, the one that's already polluting our water supply with chicken broth. God, I'm so furious, so vengeful, and so willing to vanquish this evil that I! That I… that. Wait, what do you mean we can't use Betty Crocker for this one? Some other epic internet-based literature uses this as a canonical joke? For fuck's sake, just use the Quaker Oats dude instead; we'll take the words we had already and change them to be about Quaker Oats and his offense towards Irish people. <Redmond starts to drive 'til their ride runs out of gas halfway through> For fuck's sake! GIVE ME THE QUAKER OATS MAN, I'M BEING PAID BY THE HOUR HERE!

Gemini: Sociology teacher. I can feel James Rolfe writing a letter that details all the offense that I caused him right now, and I'll be sure to refute his every claim like he refuted all my feedback. Just for reiteration: I will not apologize to him for those honest criticisms I made of his newer video-reviews, specifically of the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog game and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. If he's been going at his online profession for ten-plus years now, then he can handle a fair bit of digital criticism. [,,,] I told him that I'd prefer if he'd respect my position more after a paragraph-long explanation as to what my position was. Frankly, I thought Rolfe would be a more understanding and self-aware person to recognize that my life as a national mailperson whose work spans across the entire Indonesian archipelago. Clearly, my goal was that he'd attempt to sympathize with my working-class struggles as he'd do with any American mailman whom he is familiar with, but I didn't get any of the respect I was expecting. Not even I was spared for the decency of verbal abuse, because I was given something worse: The unrelenting silence of zero responses towards my effortful comment. That told me that Rolfe is a man who doesn't care about the issues of working-class folks like me. I'm hesitant to state, and possibly slander Rolfe, for the likelihood that he has a strong prejudice against Indonesian and Papuan peoples by refusing to acknowledge my criticism and my simultaneous first and third-world perspective. […] I just don't know what his issue with me is; after all, I've read every one of his love letters to me and I managed to enjoy them despite how sloppy his nerdy, rage-filled writing was. I think I made out his name the best of all and the thanks he granted me for sending him all of the games nobody else here wanted. «Truce, thanks for supporting my quest to protect the world from shitty-ass games. From: The fucking nerd.»

Scorpio: Public skills teacher. "Mexican-South Korean relations, from Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Mexico-South Korea relations refers to the bilateral relations between Mexico and South Korea. There are an estimated 15,000 Koreans and Mexicans of Korean descent living in Mexico. Both nations are members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, G-20 major economies, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the United Nations." [,,,] Yeah, so I pulled out a random book from the library for my book report assignment (I'm still surprised they gave me the freedom to do this), and I got a book about Mexican-Korean relations. I'm also surprised by how they can create such a thick book on a topic with little-to-no history, so I naturally assumed it was some sorta fictionalized history. As you could tell, I opened up the first page to find out that the first quarter of the book was a copy-paste job from the Wikipedia article with most of the citational numbers removed. The font was also in a very large size, presumably to fill space and not be readable for readers with impaired vision. [,,,] I tried opening the pages beyond to the rest of the book's contents, but they seemed glued shut, and the more I attempted to pull them open was I expected them to rip, but they just stayed firm to the bookcase. A closer inspection revealed that it was actually a container welded to the bookcase, and that it there was something inside of it. It wasn't alive, but it could jingle alright. [,,,] I decided to pry that sucker open and I found a mysterious note, but I was scared 'cause it addressed me directly! All it told me was that I should be in bed by 9 pm; I was so scared, but I knew the note told what's best for me, and I obeyed it. The moral of this story is that you should do your homework and follow your bedtime schedule! […] «Dear Dad, stop writing in my diaries, thanks.»

Capricorn: History teacher. You can tell the people who go to this place are from the '70s. After hauling an artificial Christmas tree into a lady's car, she gave me two quarters and said, "it's not much, but get yourself a cold drink." I felt so vintage at that moment: I felt like I was consumed with vintage appeal. My worker overalls were put onto me in that moment and I was ready to work the rest of my life in a windowless retail store. But it was before they sold all of the cool shit they have now like E-cigarettes, so they just sold regular cigarettes to teenagers who had predominant facial hair. […] Right then, wouldn’t anyone be compelled to by the working-class American luxury that is a cold soda: Preferably, whatever they sold at Becker’s? Yeah right, I used to do the same thing everyone else did except I looked aged enough to not even rely on facial hair to get one of those… cold sodas. Isn’t it so vintage that we live in a polity completely built around the idea of infinite room for exploitation resulting from the false belief that there’ll always be new lands to exploit? Isn’t it so vintage that the complete destruction of two entire continents was all done in the name of securing the existing powers in Europe at the height of the 15th century when they were beginning to crumble due to their unsustainability? Isn’t it so vintage that countless cultures, peoples, and languages were… Heh, let’s not let the blade in our mouths become too sharp and let’s get back to that vintage ‘70s lifestyle. Let’s gather me and the boys to stop by Becker’s and get some nice, cold sodas… and be called a savage by the racist clerk who made sure to call the police on me if I ever walked into that place again. Motherfucker should know his goddamn place telling me that I can’t be in the store that he built on land that isn’t his. I was a 27-year-old man and that’s how I was treated… back in sunny Halifax! Ha, I still have the fake pine on all over my hands: My bloody, beaten hands.

[wineanddinosaur]

Wine 101: Riesling

Inspired by one of VinePair’s most popular site sections, the Wine 101 podcast takes an educational, easy-to-digest look into the world of wine. This episode of Wine 101 is sponsored by Columbia Winery. As Washington’s original premium winery, Columbia Winery proudly carries a long legacy of discovering and celebrating exceptional Washington wine. Our rich history, as well as the distinct terroir of the great Columbia Valley, allows us to craft wines that embody Washington’s unique spirit and curious nature. Columbia winery offers a collection of rich and deliciously enjoyable wines inspired by the diversity of Washington’s best growing regions. Created through visionary winemaking and unrelenting curiosity: Columbia Winery.

Welcome back to Wine 101. In this week’s episode, VinePair tastings director Keith Beavers discusses the white grape varietal Riesling and its wide range of styles, from bone dry to sweet. The wine can present notes that vary from honey to lime, depending on where the vine, which is hardy and grows well in cold regions, was grown.

Riesling is believed to have been discovered in the western part of Germany in the 15th century. The grape’s vines thrive along the Rhine River, about halfway between the Swiss Alps and northern Germany. Of the 13 wine growing regions in Germany, six are in this area, all of which grow Riesling grapes. In this area, examples of Riesling’s diverse nature are apparent. Rieslings from Rheingau, for example, are very grippy with notes of honey, while Pfalz Riesling is juicy and round.

Outside of Germany, the grape is also grown in Austria, Australia, and the U.S. In 1999, Washington state began growing the varietal, and in more recent years, the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York has established itself as a prominent Riesling-producing region.

Listen Online

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Follow Keith Beavers on Instagram

Or learn about Riesling here

My name is Keith Beavers. And as a kid, Eddie Van Halen was my hero.

What’s going on wine lovers? Welcome to episode 20 of the Wine 101 Podcast. My name is Keith Beavers, I’m the tastings director at VinePair. How are you? I think we’re both good. So you’ve heard of Riesling. Do you know Riesling? Do you love Riesling? Do you want to love Riesling? People are talking about Riesling. What is this grape that’s come into our world and said, “Hi?”

Have you guys ever tried it? I’m sure you’ve heard of it. The thing is, the wines made from this grape are some of the most unique wines out there. The reason why we’re putting this in the first season is because this is a wine that’s been around for a long time.

It originated in Germany, which we’ll get to, but in just the past 10 to 15 years, it has kind of built and built and built to now, in the United States, it’s kind of a big deal. And if you’re thinking, “Really, Keith? I didn’t know Riesling was a big deal.” Well, the reason why it is, and the reason why you’re going to see more of it around, and you’re probably seeing more of it around on wine shelves, is because in the wine industry itself the popularity of Riesling has come to a fever pitch. There is this obsession with this wine, and it started in the sommelier community, the wine importing community, and the wine-buying community,  in some respects. There’s actually a wine bar in New York that had something called the “Summer of Riesling” where it was just Riesling all summer long on the wine list. And it briefly became a national trend. But when it was a national trend, it was “Summer of Riesling” all over the place. That might be how you actually learn about Riesling.

And there’s a lot to talk surrounding Riesling in terms of where it comes from in Germany. There is a lot to learn about what’s going on in Germany with Riesling and how they present Riesling to people. Then there’s the grape, itself, and its very unique characteristics and inherent material that makes this very unique wine. And then on top of that, there’s this wide spectrum of Riesling styles, from bone dry to crazy sweet. It’s a lot.

I’m going to touch on some of the German stuff. We’re going to talk a little bit about that. Not a lot because, again, it would take a whole episode. But I want you guys to understand why this wine is the way it is because, historically, in the United States we’ve come up with oaky white wine. Even though we love Sauvignon Blanc — which is sometimes oaked — and Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, and oaked white wine is how we came up in wine. And Riesling is just the polar opposite of that. Let’s just get into this.

Riesling — pronounced like Reese’s peanut butter cup — comes from Germany. Interestingly enough, it has a parent-offspring relationship with the Casanova of grapes we talked about before: Gouais Blanc. But the real documentation of this grape is a little bit crazy, but it really pops up around the 15th century in the western part of Germany. You have the Rhine River, which is a very important river in Europe, it’s one of the big trade rivers. It starts in the Swiss Alps and then works its way north through Germany to the North Sea. And about halfway from the Swiss Alps to northern Germany, the Rhine River takes a hard turn west. And in this area, the Rhine River with about five other rivers with names like, Neckar, Nahe, Mosel, Main, this is the area where Riesling has thrived for a long time. This is Riesling’s home. And this is what it looks like. You have rivers that are cutting through these mountainous hills, and the hills are very steep from the river on each bank.

And those hills are filled with very poor soil, like slate and granite. Nothing grows on these hills, except for the Riesling vine. There are 13 wine growing regions in Germany but there are six that are centered in this specific area that grow Riesling that we’re going to see on the American market, mostly. You have Mosel, Rheingau, Nahe, Rheinhessen, Pfalz, and Gutenberg. And each of these regions are pretty much terroir-driven. They all grow and make Riesling but in styles that are specific to their area. Rheingau makes grippy Rieslings that kind of smell like honey. Pfalz makes fat, round, juicy Rieslings. Mosel, which is the coolest of the regions, makes the most focused, age-worthy Rieslings. And within these terroir-driven styles, depending on when the grapes are picked, will define how sweet or how dry the Riesling will be. And if that sounds confusing, it actually is pretty confusing. And in addition to that, the Germans, in 1930, started developing their classification system, their wine laws. And then it was completely overhauled in 1971. And then through the ’80s, the ’90s and the early 2000s, it changed as well. I’m not going to get into German wine law, just can’t do it, but I want to explain Riesling to you and how unique and crazy this stuff is. And in doing that, you’ll get a sense of why there’s a wide spectrum of styles in Germany and outside of Germany. Because, even though I gave you a general idea of how some of the Rieslings are characterized in different regions, even with those generalities, there’s differences within those regions.

What I think you should know about the Riesling is, first of all, it will never see oak. Riesling and oak do not, nor will ever, get along. Another thing to know about Riesling is they���re often low in alcohol. The highest you can get is probably about 13 percent alcohol, which you’re not going to see often. Mainly you’re going to see between 8 and 10 percent alcohol. This is where the unique thing is, the grape Riesling is very high in tartaric acid.

You have the two main acids in wine: Tartaric acid and malic acid. When I talk about acidity, that’s what we’re talking about. Malic acid is often decomposed through the malolactic conversion, which we talked about in the Chardonnay episode. Tartaric acid is the acid that sticks around for a long time, and there is a lot of it in the Riesling grape. Also, the wines made from Riesling often have a very high residual sugar, which we talked about in the winemaking episode. But with the high tartaric acid, it often can hold up to the residual sugar. What you have here is a wine that is nervy and bracing with acidity, and sweet at the same time. It’s crazy. What happens is you have high sugar and high acid. Now this grape, depending on when it’s picked, can change. If you have lower acid and more sugar, it’s going to be more lush. If you have higher acid and less sugar, it’s going to be bone dry, and depending on where it’s grown, how it’s made, and when the grape is picked, will define that.

And that’s one of the reasons why German wine law was a little bit confusing. There’s a lot of levels of that. The other thing you should know on top of all that, is that it is one of the most aromatic wines out there. I know Sauvignon Blanc has a lot of aromas, my God, you cannot deny that. But there is a very distinct Riesling aroma profile. It can be described as sharp, steely, racy. Sometimes you put your nose in a Riesling and you’re literally smelling a wet rock. It’s crazy. And even though it has all that stuff — that steely, racy kind of sharpness to it — it can also have the sweetness in there. But the sweetness won’t be prominent because of that steeliness. Sometimes you smell honey. Sometimes you smell grapefruit. Sometimes you smell spicy cinnamon. It’s all over the place. And then on top of all of that, there is a compound in this grape that is only found in a few other varieties — this is the most famous grape that has it. It’s a long scientific name, but the acronym is TDN: Norisoprenoid hydrocarbon 1,1,6-trimethyl-1,1,2-dihydronaphthalene. You’re like, “Whoa, Keith, why did you just throw all those words in my brain?” Well, TDN is the acronym.

And the reason why I’m saying this is because this is very specific to this wine. As the Rieslings age in the bottle, within two to three years in the bottle, this particular compound becomes apparent on your nose and in your brain. The detection threshold is very minor, but it smells like kerosene, straight up kerosene. And in very low amounts, just above your detection threshold, you’re like, “Oh, this is very wild.” And you have all this floral stuff, some honey stuff, the minerality is happening. And then the slight little kerosene thing comes in, and it’s a very unique part of the complexity of this wine. If it’s in higher concentrations, this becomes a prominent aroma, and it can sometimes take away from the subtleties of this wine. It doesn’t often happen, but it can. Mostly, this is a part of the complexity of a wine, it’s very comfy on the nose. And it doesn’t transmit to the palate. It’s really more of a nose aroma.

Another thing you should know about Riesling, and this is the crazy thing. Riesling can age, as a white wine, as long as a red Bordeaux. Like 20 to 30 years. And this is a wine that never sees oak. Oak helps in the aging process, all the magic of Riesling happens in the bottle. It’s crazy. Another thing to know about Riesling, and this is what’s going to take us out of Germany and to other places in the world but not many, because the vine itself, the woody armor that develops as they grow, which we talked about in the vineyard episode, is very winter-hearty. This is a vine that does very well in extremely cold weather. The area in Germany in which it thrives, there’s just snow everywhere. I don’t know if they love it, but they can definitely handle it. So in Germany and outside of Germany, the best places for Riesling are in cool regions, that’s why it’s not all over the place. Outside of Germany we have Austria, they don’t do a lot of Riesling but the Rieslings they do are just beautiful. They’re very crisp, very clean, they’re wonderful. Outside of Austria and Germany, there’s France. The only place in France that Riesling is allowed in is Alsace, which is north of Burgundy, and it was once Germany. They have Rieslings there and they have a whole grand cru system there, which I can’t really get into but they range in style from very sweet to very dry. In the New World, there’s actually one area that’s not very cold that thrives with Riesling, and that’s Australia. The Rieslings coming out of Australia are very unique in that they’re a little more tangy, they smell like limes and honey and stuff like that. They’re not as prominent on the market as they once were, but there was a time when Riesling was a big deal in Australia. But it’s when we get to North America, that is where the sort of Riesling renaissance in the New World really took hold, and it really started in 1999 in Washington State.

There is a winemaker from the Mosel of Germany, his name was Dr. Loosen, and he tasted a wine from Chateau Ste. Michelle, which is a prominent winery in Washington State. He actually partnered with them to create a wine called Eroica, which is a Riesling that is very prominent on the American market. And that was the beginning. That was the spark that kind of brought Riesling into the United States. “OK, so we’re doing Riesling now.” And to this day, Riesling is a very important variety in Washington State. Some amazing Rieslings come out of Washington State, and actually it’s there that they started this tri-annual Riesling international conference that happens every three years in Washington State. Sometimes it happens in Mosel in Germany, and sometimes it happens in Australia. But the thing about us, as American wine drinkers, we often associate a variety with a place, and then celebrate it. We had Cabernet Sauvignon as the Napa thing. In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, it’s all about Pinot Noir. We started paying attention to the Willamette Valley because of Pinot Noir — “Sideways” helped. But that’s why we love Pinot Noir from Willamette.

And as much as Riesling is amazing in Washington State, Washington State does other wines. Cabernet Sauvignon that are very well celebrated and Shiraz. But it’s New York State that is really making a noise for Riesling. In the Northern part of New York State, bordering Canada, there’s a place called the Finger Lakes, and it’s here in this very hilly, very cold, snowy, wintery place that Riesling is thriving to the point where the quality of Riesling coming out of this area is defining New York State to the point where this is Riesling. So when you think about Willamette: Pinot Noir. Napa: Cabernet Sauvignon. Finger Lakes, N.Y.: Riesling. And it’s creating this American style Riesling out of New York. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a roundness to them. There’s a sharpness. You get that steeliness. But there’s a frothy acidity to them. You should definitely seek them out. We at VinePair every year do a top 50 list of the wines we’ve tasted this year that we love so much, and New York Riesling has made that list. I am a native New Yorker. I was born in upstate New York. I’m just very excited because these wines are being celebrated, and it’s so cool.

What’s really great is New York State has created what’s called the International Riesling Foundation. It’s drinkriesling.com. It’s a nonprofit organization that helps raise awareness of Riesling because of the quality that’s coming out in that state. And one of the major contributions they have for the consumer is they actually created a graphic that’s on the back of all of their wine labels of Riesling. It’s a scale from dry, to medium dry, to medium sweet, to sweet. And depending on where in that spectrum the Riesling that you’re about to buy lies, you can just turn around the label and see a little mark somewhere on that scale. It’s such a simple, great way to understand the kind of Riesling you’re about to buy.

And it’s not just New York that has that kind of climate. Just over the border in Ontario, they make great Riesling as well, but mostly in the ice wines. So they let the grapes freeze and they extract all the syrupy juice for them and make dessert wines. And they’re just really awesome. It’s not easy to find because it’s still a kind of an emerging wine region, sort of like Michigan. All the way in the northern part of Michigan there are some beautiful Rieslings being made. They’re very clean, steely, and mineral-driven Rieslings. They’re not as easy to find, but if you come across them, check them out.

So, that’s Riesling in a nutshell. I wish I could get into the whole German wine law because it’s a little bit mind-boggling, but it’s kind of fun, but it really takes some time. Don’t let that scare you. Definitely go and find Riesling and see if it’s a wine that you like, and what spectrum of sweet or bone dry you like. It’s definitely a journey. You have to taste a lot of them to figure out what you dig. And now you know some places outside of Germany that make fun Rieslings as well.

If you’re digging what I’m doing, picking up what I’m putting down, go ahead and give me a rating on iTunes or tell your friends to subscribe. You can subscribe. If you like to type, go ahead and send a review or something like that, but let’s get to this wine podcast out so that everybody can learn about wine.

Check me out on Instagram. It’s @vinepairkeith. I do all my stuff in stories. And also, you got to follow VinePair on Instagram, which is @vinepair. And don’t forget to listen to the VinePair podcast, which is hosted by Erica, Adam, and Zach. It’s a great deep dive into drinks culture every week.

Now, for some credits. How about that? Wine 101 is recorded and produced by yours truly, Keith Beavers at the VinePair headquarters in New York City. I want to give a big shout-out to co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin. I also want to thank Danielle Grinberg for making the most legit Wine 101 logo.

And I got to thank Darby Cicci for making this amazing song: Listen to this epic stuff. And finally, I want to thank the VinePair staff for helping me learn more everyday. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Wine 101: Riesling appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-riesling/

[johnboothus]

Wine 101: Riesling

Inspired by one of VinePair’s most popular site sections, the Wine 101 podcast takes an educational, easy-to-digest look into the world of wine. This episode of Wine 101 is sponsored by Columbia Winery. As Washington’s original premium winery, Columbia Winery proudly carries a long legacy of discovering and celebrating exceptional Washington wine. Our rich history, as well as the distinct terroir of the great Columbia Valley, allows us to craft wines that embody Washington’s unique spirit and curious nature. Columbia winery offers a collection of rich and deliciously enjoyable wines inspired by the diversity of Washington’s best growing regions. Created through visionary winemaking and unrelenting curiosity: Columbia Winery.

Welcome back to Wine 101. In this week’s episode, VinePair tastings director Keith Beavers discusses the white grape varietal Riesling and its wide range of styles, from bone dry to sweet. The wine can present notes that vary from honey to lime, depending on where the vine, which is hardy and grows well in cold regions, was grown.

Riesling is believed to have been discovered in the western part of Germany in the 15th century. The grape’s vines thrive along the Rhine River, about halfway between the Swiss Alps and northern Germany. Of the 13 wine growing regions in Germany, six are in this area, all of which grow Riesling grapes. In this area, examples of Riesling’s diverse nature are apparent. Rieslings from Rheingau, for example, are very grippy with notes of honey, while Pfalz Riesling is juicy and round.

Outside of Germany, the grape is also grown in Austria, Australia, and the U.S. In 1999, Washington state began growing the varietal, and in more recent years, the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York has established itself as a prominent Riesling-producing region.

Listen Online

Listen on Apple Podcasts

Listen on Spotify

Follow Keith Beavers on Instagram

Or learn about Riesling here

My name is Keith Beavers. And as a kid, Eddie Van Halen was my hero.

What’s going on wine lovers? Welcome to episode 20 of the Wine 101 Podcast. My name is Keith Beavers, I’m the tastings director at VinePair. How are you? I think we’re both good. So you’ve heard of Riesling. Do you know Riesling? Do you love Riesling? Do you want to love Riesling? People are talking about Riesling. What is this grape that’s come into our world and said, “Hi?”

Have you guys ever tried it? I’m sure you’ve heard of it. The thing is, the wines made from this grape are some of the most unique wines out there. The reason why we’re putting this in the first season is because this is a wine that’s been around for a long time.

It originated in Germany, which we’ll get to, but in just the past 10 to 15 years, it has kind of built and built and built to now, in the United States, it’s kind of a big deal. And if you’re thinking, “Really, Keith? I didn’t know Riesling was a big deal.” Well, the reason why it is, and the reason why you’re going to see more of it around, and you’re probably seeing more of it around on wine shelves, is because in the wine industry itself the popularity of Riesling has come to a fever pitch. There is this obsession with this wine, and it started in the sommelier community, the wine importing community, and the wine-buying community,  in some respects. There’s actually a wine bar in New York that had something called the “Summer of Riesling” where it was just Riesling all summer long on the wine list. And it briefly became a national trend. But when it was a national trend, it was “Summer of Riesling” all over the place. That might be how you actually learn about Riesling.

And there’s a lot to talk surrounding Riesling in terms of where it comes from in Germany. There is a lot to learn about what’s going on in Germany with Riesling and how they present Riesling to people. Then there’s the grape, itself, and its very unique characteristics and inherent material that makes this very unique wine. And then on top of that, there’s this wide spectrum of Riesling styles, from bone dry to crazy sweet. It’s a lot.

I’m going to touch on some of the German stuff. We’re going to talk a little bit about that. Not a lot because, again, it would take a whole episode. But I want you guys to understand why this wine is the way it is because, historically, in the United States we’ve come up with oaky white wine. Even though we love Sauvignon Blanc — which is sometimes oaked — and Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, and oaked white wine is how we came up in wine. And Riesling is just the polar opposite of that. Let’s just get into this.

Riesling — pronounced like Reese’s peanut butter cup — comes from Germany. Interestingly enough, it has a parent-offspring relationship with the Casanova of grapes we talked about before: Gouais Blanc. But the real documentation of this grape is a little bit crazy, but it really pops up around the 15th century in the western part of Germany. You have the Rhine River, which is a very important river in Europe, it’s one of the big trade rivers. It starts in the Swiss Alps and then works its way north through Germany to the North Sea. And about halfway from the Swiss Alps to northern Germany, the Rhine River takes a hard turn west. And in this area, the Rhine River with about five other rivers with names like, Neckar, Nahe, Mosel, Main, this is the area where Riesling has thrived for a long time. This is Riesling’s home. And this is what it looks like. You have rivers that are cutting through these mountainous hills, and the hills are very steep from the river on each bank.

And those hills are filled with very poor soil, like slate and granite. Nothing grows on these hills, except for the Riesling vine. There are 13 wine growing regions in Germany but there are six that are centered in this specific area that grow Riesling that we’re going to see on the American market, mostly. You have Mosel, Rheingau, Nahe, Rheinhessen, Pfalz, and Gutenberg. And each of these regions are pretty much terroir-driven. They all grow and make Riesling but in styles that are specific to their area. Rheingau makes grippy Rieslings that kind of smell like honey. Pfalz makes fat, round, juicy Rieslings. Mosel, which is the coolest of the regions, makes the most focused, age-worthy Rieslings. And within these terroir-driven styles, depending on when the grapes are picked, will define how sweet or how dry the Riesling will be. And if that sounds confusing, it actually is pretty confusing. And in addition to that, the Germans, in 1930, started developing their classification system, their wine laws. And then it was completely overhauled in 1971. And then through the ’80s, the ’90s and the early 2000s, it changed as well. I’m not going to get into German wine law, just can’t do it, but I want to explain Riesling to you and how unique and crazy this stuff is. And in doing that, you’ll get a sense of why there’s a wide spectrum of styles in Germany and outside of Germany. Because, even though I gave you a general idea of how some of the Rieslings are characterized in different regions, even with those generalities, there’s differences within those regions.

What I think you should know about the Riesling is, first of all, it will never see oak. Riesling and oak do not, nor will ever, get along. Another thing to know about Riesling is they’re often low in alcohol. The highest you can get is probably about 13 percent alcohol, which you’re not going to see often. Mainly you’re going to see between 8 and 10 percent alcohol. This is where the unique thing is, the grape Riesling is very high in tartaric acid.

You have the two main acids in wine: Tartaric acid and malic acid. When I talk about acidity, that’s what we’re talking about. Malic acid is often decomposed through the malolactic conversion, which we talked about in the Chardonnay episode. Tartaric acid is the acid that sticks around for a long time, and there is a lot of it in the Riesling grape. Also, the wines made from Riesling often have a very high residual sugar, which we talked about in the winemaking episode. But with the high tartaric acid, it often can hold up to the residual sugar. What you have here is a wine that is nervy and bracing with acidity, and sweet at the same time. It’s crazy. What happens is you have high sugar and high acid. Now this grape, depending on when it’s picked, can change. If you have lower acid and more sugar, it’s going to be more lush. If you have higher acid and less sugar, it’s going to be bone dry, and depending on where it’s grown, how it’s made, and when the grape is picked, will define that.

And that’s one of the reasons why German wine law was a little bit confusing. There’s a lot of levels of that. The other thing you should know on top of all that, is that it is one of the most aromatic wines out there. I know Sauvignon Blanc has a lot of aromas, my God, you cannot deny that. But there is a very distinct Riesling aroma profile. It can be described as sharp, steely, racy. Sometimes you put your nose in a Riesling and you’re literally smelling a wet rock. It’s crazy. And even though it has all that stuff — that steely, racy kind of sharpness to it — it can also have the sweetness in there. But the sweetness won’t be prominent because of that steeliness. Sometimes you smell honey. Sometimes you smell grapefruit. Sometimes you smell spicy cinnamon. It’s all over the place. And then on top of all of that, there is a compound in this grape that is only found in a few other varieties — this is the most famous grape that has it. It’s a long scientific name, but the acronym is TDN: Norisoprenoid hydrocarbon 1,1,6-trimethyl-1,1,2-dihydronaphthalene. You’re like, “Whoa, Keith, why did you just throw all those words in my brain?” Well, TDN is the acronym.

And the reason why I’m saying this is because this is very specific to this wine. As the Rieslings age in the bottle, within two to three years in the bottle, this particular compound becomes apparent on your nose and in your brain. The detection threshold is very minor, but it smells like kerosene, straight up kerosene. And in very low amounts, just above your detection threshold, you’re like, “Oh, this is very wild.” And you have all this floral stuff, some honey stuff, the minerality is happening. And then the slight little kerosene thing comes in, and it’s a very unique part of the complexity of this wine. If it’s in higher concentrations, this becomes a prominent aroma, and it can sometimes take away from the subtleties of this wine. It doesn’t often happen, but it can. Mostly, this is a part of the complexity of a wine, it’s very comfy on the nose. And it doesn’t transmit to the palate. It’s really more of a nose aroma.

Another thing you should know about Riesling, and this is the crazy thing. Riesling can age, as a white wine, as long as a red Bordeaux. Like 20 to 30 years. And this is a wine that never sees oak. Oak helps in the aging process, all the magic of Riesling happens in the bottle. It’s crazy. Another thing to know about Riesling, and this is what’s going to take us out of Germany and to other places in the world but not many, because the vine itself, the woody armor that develops as they grow, which we talked about in the vineyard episode, is very winter-hearty. This is a vine that does very well in extremely cold weather. The area in Germany in which it thrives, there’s just snow everywhere. I don’t know if they love it, but they can definitely handle it. So in Germany and outside of Germany, the best places for Riesling are in cool regions, that’s why it’s not all over the place. Outside of Germany we have Austria, they don’t do a lot of Riesling but the Rieslings they do are just beautiful. They’re very crisp, very clean, they’re wonderful. Outside of Austria and Germany, there’s France. The only place in France that Riesling is allowed in is Alsace, which is north of Burgundy, and it was once Germany. They have Rieslings there and they have a whole grand cru system there, which I can’t really get into but they range in style from very sweet to very dry. In the New World, there’s actually one area that’s not very cold that thrives with Riesling, and that’s Australia. The Rieslings coming out of Australia are very unique in that they’re a little more tangy, they smell like limes and honey and stuff like that. They’re not as prominent on the market as they once were, but there was a time when Riesling was a big deal in Australia. But it’s when we get to North America, that is where the sort of Riesling renaissance in the New World really took hold, and it really started in 1999 in Washington State.

There is a winemaker from the Mosel of Germany, his name was Dr. Loosen, and he tasted a wine from Chateau Ste. Michelle, which is a prominent winery in Washington State. He actually partnered with them to create a wine called Eroica, which is a Riesling that is very prominent on the American market. And that was the beginning. That was the spark that kind of brought Riesling into the United States. “OK, so we’re doing Riesling now.” And to this day, Riesling is a very important variety in Washington State. Some amazing Rieslings come out of Washington State, and actually it’s there that they started this tri-annual Riesling international conference that happens every three years in Washington State. Sometimes it happens in Mosel in Germany, and sometimes it happens in Australia. But the thing about us, as American wine drinkers, we often associate a variety with a place, and then celebrate it. We had Cabernet Sauvignon as the Napa thing. In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, it’s all about Pinot Noir. We started paying attention to the Willamette Valley because of Pinot Noir — “Sideways” helped. But that’s why we love Pinot Noir from Willamette.

And as much as Riesling is amazing in Washington State, Washington State does other wines. Cabernet Sauvignon that are very well celebrated and Shiraz. But it’s New York State that is really making a noise for Riesling. In the Northern part of New York State, bordering Canada, there’s a place called the Finger Lakes, and it’s here in this very hilly, very cold, snowy, wintery place that Riesling is thriving to the point where the quality of Riesling coming out of this area is defining New York State to the point where this is Riesling. So when you think about Willamette: Pinot Noir. Napa: Cabernet Sauvignon. Finger Lakes, N.Y.: Riesling. And it’s creating this American style Riesling out of New York. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a roundness to them. There’s a sharpness. You get that steeliness. But there’s a frothy acidity to them. You should definitely seek them out. We at VinePair every year do a top 50 list of the wines we’ve tasted this year that we love so much, and New York Riesling has made that list. I am a native New Yorker. I was born in upstate New York. I’m just very excited because these wines are being celebrated, and it’s so cool.

What’s really great is New York State has created what’s called the International Riesling Foundation. It’s drinkriesling.com. It’s a nonprofit organization that helps raise awareness of Riesling because of the quality that’s coming out in that state. And one of the major contributions they have for the consumer is they actually created a graphic that’s on the back of all of their wine labels of Riesling. It’s a scale from dry, to medium dry, to medium sweet, to sweet. And depending on where in that spectrum the Riesling that you’re about to buy lies, you can just turn around the label and see a little mark somewhere on that scale. It’s such a simple, great way to understand the kind of Riesling you’re about to buy.

And it’s not just New York that has that kind of climate. Just over the border in Ontario, they make great Riesling as well, but mostly in the ice wines. So they let the grapes freeze and they extract all the syrupy juice for them and make dessert wines. And they’re just really awesome. It’s not easy to find because it’s still a kind of an emerging wine region, sort of like Michigan. All the way in the northern part of Michigan there are some beautiful Rieslings being made. They’re very clean, steely, and mineral-driven Rieslings. They’re not as easy to find, but if you come across them, check them out.

So, that’s Riesling in a nutshell. I wish I could get into the whole German wine law because it’s a little bit mind-boggling, but it’s kind of fun, but it really takes some time. Don’t let that scare you. Definitely go and find Riesling and see if it’s a wine that you like, and what spectrum of sweet or bone dry you like. It’s definitely a journey. You have to taste a lot of them to figure out what you dig. And now you know some places outside of Germany that make fun Rieslings as well.

If you’re digging what I’m doing, picking up what I’m putting down, go ahead and give me a rating on iTunes or tell your friends to subscribe. You can subscribe. If you like to type, go ahead and send a review or something like that, but let’s get to this wine podcast out so that everybody can learn about wine.

Check me out on Instagram. It’s @vinepairkeith. I do all my stuff in stories. And also, you got to follow VinePair on Instagram, which is @vinepair. And don’t forget to listen to the VinePair podcast, which is hosted by Erica, Adam, and Zach. It’s a great deep dive into drinks culture every week.

Now, for some credits. How about that? Wine 101 is recorded and produced by yours truly, Keith Beavers at the VinePair headquarters in New York City. I want to give a big shout-out to co-founders Adam Teeter and Josh Malin. I also want to thank Danielle Grinberg for making the most legit Wine 101 logo.

And I got to thank Darby Cicci for making this amazing song: Listen to this epic stuff. And finally, I want to thank the VinePair staff for helping me learn more everyday. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity.

The article Wine 101: Riesling appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/wine-101-riesling/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/wine-101-riesling

[photographasdocumentspring14blog]

Essay by Michael Almereyda, Filmmaker

Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out. —Martin Scorsese

We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it. —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

In Cameraperson (2016), Kirsten Johnson has made a buoyant film about the weight of the world.

She lays out her process in a paragraph presented up front. What we’re about to see, she explains, has been patched together from material she has shot as a cinematographer for films directed by other people, in the course of a career spanning twenty-five years. “I ask you to see it as my memoir,” Johnson insists.

A memoir, yes, but one that is scant on autobiographical facts. You have to turn elsewhere to learn that Johnson studied painting and literature in the late 1980s at Brown University, where she had a political awakening, stirred by the anti-apartheid movement roiling the campus. Upon graduation, making an uncommon move, she transplanted herself to Senegal and interned there on a film written by the great Ousmane Sembène. In 1991, she was the first American to enroll at La Fémis, the French national film school, where she entered the camera department and discovered a vocation. She landed early cinematography jobs in France and Brazil.

Evolving from this global trajectory, Cameraperson is a nonchronological collage of raw and repurposed footage: forty-four distinct episodes (by my count) made up of sounds and images gathered for (but generally not appearing in) twenty-four separate projects. Most of the episodes are bridged by breaks of black frames, during which anticipatory sounds prepare for oncoming images. Locations are identified by title cards, and eleven people are given names and job descriptions, ranging from “Jacques Derrida / French philosopher”—a quick cameo, as the famous man impishly holds forth on a Manhattan street—to “Aisha Bukar / nurse, midwife,” a more substantial, recurring presence, granting us access to a natal unit in a Nigerian hospital, where the film arrives at one of its most harrowing sequences. We get scraps from high-profile documentaries—Laura Poitras’s The Oath and Citizenfour, on which Johnson served as a principal shooter, and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, for which she received an “additional camera operator” credit—but most of the movies cannibalized here are not especially well-known, and Johnson accomplishes her most probing portraiture by focusing on people encountered as strangers. Her inclusion, at regular intervals, of her own home-video footage confirms an impression of inspired and intimate rummaging. (This is a memoir that blurs the line between professional and private experience.) Ultimately, like a lavish quilt, or a bird’s nest, the film subsumes its source material on the way to becoming a complete and organic new thing.

More often than not, Johnson’s work takes her to places stamped by violence, death, and destruction, sites of collective grief and dread. Even if the worst of the mayhem has occurred in the past, she’s there to absorb and collect the residue, talking to survivors, bearing witness. Johnson supplies a few grace notes, musical interludes, flashes of scenic splendor, but for a film made by a cinematographer, there are bracingly few images that are merely pretty or picturesque. People are plainly what Johnson cares about most, and in this film she candidly prizes and examines her ability to use her camera to get close to whoever is in the frame. “Gettin’ close to everybody,” she murmurs, disarmingly, to an initially wary man in a Brooklyn boxing gym. The man smiles and relaxes, as if Johnson has cast a spell. She coaxes equivalent looks of complicity and acceptance from a boy in Kabul whose left eye has been blinded in a bomb blast; from an elegantly wizened Muslim woman in Bosnia and Herzegovina who, with a tight, tart smile, denies that the Serbs’ campaign of mass rape ever affected her family; and from her own mother, diminished by Alzheimer’s, regarding Johnson—and Johnson’s camera—with a mix of tenderness and fright.

The film has been crafted with self-reflexive knowingness. Shots that feature fumbling and reframing are integrated the way a confident painter builds a picture around bare canvas, loose brushwork, spattered drips. And there’s a steady pressing of a central nerve, a nagging question implicit in the most searching documentaries as well as the most trivial: At what point does the camera’s scrutiny become exploitative, invasive, voyeuristic, damaging? The question hovers throughout the film, despite Johnson’s evident gift for putting people at ease, respecting the pressure and pain of true confession. In sequence after sequence, she invites and captures intimacy, even or especially when her subjects don’t want their faces shown. (In these cases, Johnson’s camera follows their uneasy hands, and we see Scorsese’s axiom at work; what’s not in the frame adds eloquence to what is.)

As a self-portrait, Cameraperson is intriguingly elliptical, oblique. Early on, we see Johnson’s striding shadow, her camera rising from her shoulder like a jagged branch, an extension of her body, but in the course of the film she appears full-on only briefly, near the end. She doesn’t spell out a credo, or spill any outright confessions of her own. (In an overconfiding age, this may account for a good deal of the film’s power.) But Johnson’s overheard voice—a quick, open, guileless voice, quintessentially American—is there from the start, behind the lens, giggling and almost giddy. When her camera catches lightning slicing down from a wash of blue-gray Missouri clouds, she gasps, then stays steady and silent enough to take in the emptiness—a crash of thunder, its echo, a defiantly serene bird—then Johnson sneezes, twice, jostling the frame, undercutting any self-important claim to authority as the film’s title comes up.

Soon after, in Sarajevo, speaking offhandedly to an unseen collaborator, the cameraperson sketches her MO, talking like a teenager: “I always try to have some kind of relationship with people, like I’ll look them in the eye like ‘You see me shooting you, don’t you?’”

She shows us her twin toddlers in her Manhattan home (without giving a glimpse of a significant other) and spends time with her parents, inevitable augurs of mortality. Johnson’s father, on a casual walk, cheerfully displays a dead bird to the grandkids, while images of Johnson’s mother give way to shots of a container holding her ashes. (For the latter, Johnson keeps rearranging objects in the frame, adjusting the composition, as if trying to come to terms with the unadjustable limit of her mother’s life.)

In interviews, Johnson has expressed guilt and self-reproach about photographing her afflicted mother against her wishes. Yet, as she must know, some of her film’s most poignant moments emerge from this betrayal. How could Johnson resist recording her mother’s stunned face, trying to hold on to an identity slipping away before her eyes? Circling back to Scorsese, we can recognize that Johnson is confronting a larger fact: human presences are always fragile, fleeting, on their way to being out of the frame.

*****

You can entangle across time. You can entangle into the future, into the past. You can entangle through space. That’s what quantum entanglement means. It means that there’s another underlying layer of nature that we haven’t discovered yet. —Dr. Eric W. Davis, in Cameraperson

At some point in the editing process, Johnson seems to have taken her cue from the astrophysicist quoted above, riffing on the notion that we’re all entangled; time and space can’t always be taken literally; recorded reality can be reorganized to comply with memory and imagination. By this logic, less scientific than intuitive, people and places in Johnson’s memoir become entangled in occasional shared chapters, tethered by free-associational edits. The harsh wind in Wyoming, flashing through tall grass on the Johnson family ranch, makes Johnson’s mother stagger, wince, and seem to dwindle into a Giacometti figurine. With the grace of a cut, the same wind sweeps through a yellow hillside in Foča, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the rural village where a Muslim family has returned to their farm while contending with memories of genocide and war.

Similar associative links and leaps flicker throughout the film, but, halfway in, there’s a sequence that’s starkly explicit in its insistence on interconnectedness. Johnson serves up a series of landscapes where historic atrocities have occurred, now mute and tranquil crime scenes, mundane places conjoined by invisible carnage and, for the most part, a shared look of dreary ordinariness. The sequence includes sites of mass execution, torture, and rape, plus forensic shots of the drab interior of a pickup truck identified as the vehicle that dragged James Byrd Jr. to his death in the otherwise unremarkable town of Jasper, Texas. In this stretch, Johnson expresses a sustained note of anguish, like a war correspondent admitting to a case of secondhand PTSD, but she’s stoic about it, and, as her film offers a range of locations and perspectives, she’s irrepressibly alert to the bigger picture—a picture that includes antic dancing in Uganda, a woman embracing a fierce and humiliated young boxer after a lost match in Brooklyn, the flow of life around a roadside market in Liberia. It’s fair to say the “wonderful” God hailed by nine-year-old Kirsten in a preserved handwritten poem—“Your love never ends! / And my love to you will never end!”—has been displaced, in the grown cameraperson’s mind and eye, by a pantheistic understanding of the world, a sense of immanence and mystery that competes with evidence of unrelenting bad news. And so Johnson counterbalances bitter and abject scenes with proofs of compassion, consolation, even joy. And it’s no fluke that many of the film’s brighter moments involve children.

*****

Down with bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios . . . Long live life as it is! —Dziga Vertov

Cameraperson has been showered with sympathetic and insightful reviews, and hailed as a film without precedent. It doesn’t diminish Johnson’s work—its integrity, freshness, and force—to recognize that antecedents do exist. Dziga Vertov, the pioneering Soviet director of newsreels and kaleidoscopic documentary features, would not be spinning in his grave to consider his legacy extended and fulfilled in Johnson’s audacious and self-aware doc/essay/travelogue/memoir. Indeed, Cameraperson would make a provocative double bill with Vertov’s equally unclassifiable Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a dazzling chronicle of urban life channeled dusk to dawn through the lens of an itinerant cameraman, a tale told without intertitles or narration. (Vertov’s spectacular “day” was in fact filmed in four cities over a period of three years.) Man with a Movie Camera’s propulsive editing and hyper-aestheticized photography don’t jibe with Johnson’s levelheaded approach, but her anchoring ambition is aligned with Vertov’s: to record and elevate common experience, to uphold film as a reflection of reality rather than an escape from it, and, further, to create movies that open idealistically outward, providing a means for people to see their lives valued, honored, and in effect returned to them, even as they become part of a larger collective story.

In Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), we can find another singular, self-defining, soaring hybrid “documentary” experiment, a collage of fragmentary episodes candidly jigsawed together from a cinematographer’s accumulated outtakes. Marker uses magisterial narration to explicate his images, to question them, to expand their reach, constructing a philosophical inquiry into the nature of seeing, memory, time, consciousness; but strip away the voice-over and you can still take in Marker’s generous regard for the people he encounters, respect for their vulnerability, their otherness, their unique place within a vast human family.

All the same, Vertov and Marker, assigning their authentic, unstaged images to fictional cameramen, avoid the level of personal risk embraced by Johnson, who unabashedly (if incompletely) reveals her history, her unmistakable self, as the source of every frame. By the time we catch sight of her in Cameraperson, we can be forgiven for presuming to know her. She aims the camera at herself, standing beside her unsteady mother, sharing the older woman’s worried smile, and her eyes look haunted. The image emerges within a flashback, an editorial surprise, and it suggests that Johnson would agree with a primary Marker aphorism: “Being a photographer means not only to look but to sustain the gaze of others.” The gaze of others, we can see, carries a corresponding weight.

*****

I said to the wanting-creature inside me: What is this river you want to cross? —Kabir

Voyeurism is related to cinema as lust is related to love. You can separate them—you can try to separate them—but to what end? The urge to look, to see and share private experience—whether displays of intimacy, acts of violence, the urgent facts of another person’s pain—is seldom pure and simple. How do we, filmmakers and film viewers, transcend voyeurism? How can a filmmaker’s craft and conscience elevate images from voyeurism to revelation?

Cameraperson reaches a kind of climax back in Foča, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the place Johnson visits most within the braided strands of the film’s structure. She documents her return five years after her initial journey, with music from the resulting 2011 film, an episode of the PBS series Women, War & Peace, brimming over into Cameraperson, the movie we’re watching while the gathered family watches themselves on a laptop screen. Johnson, of course, records this rapt audience, their charged attention, then the rich homemade meal that follows, coffee, a cigarette. The Möbius-strip circuit of giving and taking and giving back—the process of seeing, sharing, and accepting—brings Cameraperson to an ideal summit of reconciliation, peace, hope for the future. “We hope someday she can come back with her son and daughter,” a woman tells Johnson’s translator, “to see how peasants live.” Exactly the response Vertov was hectically hungering for.

One of the film’s most arresting and resonant images, for this viewer, occurs earlier in Foča, when an unnamed Muslim woman lifts a bowl high above her head, confidently spilling berries into another bowl held below her waist. The free-falling fruit makes an ecstatic blur, and the next cut shows the berries as they’ve landed and settled, as if artfully prearranged: a ready-made bouquet of whorled color—red, black, white, yellow—an instant metaphor for plenitude and renewal, raw experience transformed into poetry.

“Wow,” says the woman behind the camera. “It’s like magic.”

Yes—wow—it is.

Michael Almereyda’s documentary films include This So-Called Disaster, William Eggleston in the Real World, Paradise, and the forthcoming Escapes.

I have copied this essay from the site linked above.