#poor billy has been living in the new islander house for So Long

[sparkylurkdragon]

At last...

AT LAST...

BILLY IS LIVING IN HIS TRASH

[lunarliza]

Fake Boyfriend | Chapter 4: Kook Conventions

JJ x Kook!reader

series masterlist | prev. chapter| chapter one

my masterlist

You’re a Kook Princess who has everything you ever wanted... until your handsome Kook Prince dumps you for a hot new fling. To save your reputation, you bribe the one person he hates the most, JJ Maybank, to pretend to be your boyfriend for the summer. All’s fair in love and war. But where do you draw that line when you’re suddenly wishing your fake boyfriend is your real one?

note: slight mention of panic attack

If there was anything you learned about JJ that Friday, it was that he was the absolute worse at sticking to the plan.

For one, he spent so much time looking for the tennis courts, instead of following your clearly written out instructions, that he ended up being late altogether to pick you up. What was supposed to be a grand gesture turned into you sitting on the front steps, while the sun was near done setting, waiting for stupid JJ while everyone else had already left.

“What the hell took you so long?!” you scolded, slamming the truck door shut in annoyance once he finally showed up.

“This place is confusing as hell! I kept having to make loops. It is called Figure Eight for a reason,” he tried to justify, pulling out of the lot.

“JJ I texted you specific instructions on how to get here!” you groused, rubbing your temple, “Anyways, it’s fine, whatever. Let’s just hurry home so I can get ready. My house is just a little bit up that way.”

“Yeah, uh, about that,” JJ mentioned sheepishly, keeping his eyes on the road, “I kinda have to help Pope and Poppa Heyward with something right now. It will only take an hour tops! I’ll just meet you at the party after I’m done.”

You groaned loudly, face-palming yourself. “JJ what the hell! I told you specifically to cancel your plans tonight. It was supposed to be our debut!”

“I did! I just,” he scratched the back of his neck, “kinda broke one of their carts this afternoon, so I have to help them fix it for tomorrow. I think they’re catering your little brunch thingy.”

“How did you even break the cart to begin with?!”

He hid his face from your dagger-eyes and admitted in a low voice, “I, uh, tried to surf on it down a hill when they weren’t looking.”

You had to fight the urge to smack him upside the head, but you didn’t want to risk him veering off the road. Lucky bastard.

“Fine,” you grumbled, “Just make sure you’re on time to the party.” You then eyed his outfit up and down. Even in the little sunlight that emitted from outside, you could tell it was all dirty from his day activities. “And please change into something a little nicer,” you added, “These Kooks would run you to the ground with that on.”

JJ dropped you off at your house and sped away as you unlocked the door into a near empty house. Looks like it would just be you and Alfred for dinner.

Your parents were headed off to the mainland for some business convention. Thankfully, your presence was not needed which saved you an entire day of pretending to be a perfect obedient daughter. It was an exhausting act.

Most teens your age would kill for a night alone, but after countless nights sleeping isolated in a big empty house, it got old and depressing. Most of the time, you’d sleep over at Sarah’s for some kind of company. You were always welcomed at the Camerons’.

Greeting Alfred your usual hello at the foyer, you darted upstairs to wash off and get ready with the little time you had left. The aroma of filet mignon and freshly seasoned veggies filled the house air.

“Oh and Alfred,” you called out over the intricate metal banister, “It’ll just be me eating tonight, so just set the table for one please.”

“Miss Y/n, your friend is not coming?” he asked with hints of concern. You just shook your head with a sad smile. “No, he had to run last minute.”

Alfred gave you a curt nod, making way back into the kitchen while you dashed into the bathroom.

—————————————————

Instead of throwing JJ straight into the shark’s tank (even though, given his already poor track record, you strongly contemplated throwing him to literal sharks), you decided it was best to ease him into the whole boyfriend role.

You figured he’d be more in touch with his aura if you invited him to a Kook party first— which was exactly where you were, furiously texting him where on earth he was.

It was already ten o’clock. The party started hours ago, and he was nowhere to be found. An hour with Pope your ass!

Flopping onto the giant living room couch in Billy Irvine’s mansion, you frowned amongst the throng of drunk privileged kids. Around you, the Glossy Posse was gossiping with other Kooks about some of the summer newcomers while sleazy guys from out of town tried to grab their attention. It never worked.

“So y/n,” Chloe asked next to you on the couch, “I have some great news! It’s no secret that you need a date to the all the fundraiser events, and I might just have one for you! My cousin, Gerald, is coming into town next week, so I can totally set you guys up!”

She proceeded to show you pictures on her phone of a lanky tall guy with discolored hair and a creepy smile. You resorted to taking a gulp of your drink to hide your horrified expression. “Thanks, but, uh, no thanks. I actually have a date already,” you informed, typing away heatedly at your phone for JJ to arrive that instant or so help you.

“Ooh, who is it?” Ivy nosily chimed in at the mention of you finally having a date. From the couch over, you also saw Anne-Marie and Warren lean their heads closer to get the scoop.

Jeez, were people really that interested in your love life?

“It’s-”

Before you could reveal the name, a loud ‘ding’ went off from your phone followed by a text from JJ to alert you that he was out front. “Oh! He’s actually here right now,” you announced, hopping up from your seat to collect your very problematic date.

“You’re late, again!” you scolded to the blond standing all gloomy at the front of the stone curved driveway. He changed into a nicer grey long-sleeve with khaki shorts and his signature red snapback, much to your relief. It didn’t quite match with your intricate white romper, but it would do for the time being.

“The guard wouldn’t let me in the gate! I ended up having to sneak through one of the fences,” JJ explained. You rolled your eyes at his ridiculous excuse. “Then why didn’t you just call me to let you in?” you pointed out.

“It was more fun this way,” he peskily grinned, earning himself a smack on the arm. The guy was impossible. “Ow!” he whined, rubbing the spot. Ignoring his complaints, you seized his hand and led him inside. It was about time!

The foyer flashed with various-colored LED lights while thundering rap music echoed from basically every corner of the house. All around, eyes gawked at you stepping through the Victorian-style entryway with a Pogue of all people. It was like walking into a cave of bats.

“Anyways,” you began, disregarding all the probing eyes, “This is Billy Irvine’s place. It’s the nicest house on the Eight. His parents are out of town right now, so we’re celebrating the Glossy Posse’s birthdays.”

It alway was a coincidence to you how all three of them had birthdays on back-to-back days. Witchcraft, honestly.

“Those bitches?” JJ grimaced at the mention of his sworn female enemies, “Ew why? They hate the Pogues.”

“Just shut up and suck it up. Here,” you grabbed a glass from the champagne tower in the middle of the spacious room, “Have a drink to get your mind off it.”

“Champagne? What the hell is this, England?” he yelped, taking a swig. Rolling your eyes, you hoped the alcohol would alleviate his irritability for the night. Fortunately, the blaring music was enough to drown out his constant bickering.

“Now put your arm around me! It’s time to make our rounds,” you demanded. He obliged and you turned on your best lovestruck game-face, giving him the grand tour of the mansion.

Billy’s mom was also one of the important people of the Island Club, so you had been going over there ever since you were nine being that your moms were friends. Still, you were always amazed by the extravagance of their house. You could tell JJ was also in shock of it all too.

It looked like a castle with two grand marble staircases circling the front with a tall vintage Tiffany chandelier hanging over everything. The floors were the shiniest white marble even with hundreds of teenagers recklessly dancing and slipping all over it.

“Damn, so this is how the other side lives,” JJ commented, marveling at how the LED lights reflected off the diamonds on the chandelier.

He slid his hand down to your waist as you stood closer to his side, taking a whiff of his teakwood cologne. Deep down, it was nice to have someone to attend parties with you, even if it was fake and with JJ.

You took him up the right staircase where plastered kids— some you recognized from school, some just in town for the summer— stumbled up and down the stairs or sloppily made out while pinned to the side walls. Realistically, it didn’t seem that off-brand to JJ’s party scene.

“We’re only staying an hour right?” JJ reminded in your ear as you approached the open bar upstairs. Yes, the Irvine’s had a literal bar in their second level.

“Yes, grumpy!”  

“Do you know if Sarah and John B are coming?” JJ continued to question. You settled on top of a retro bar stool as he leaned against the Irvine’s prized rustic bar.

“No,” you answered, “Sarah doesn’t come to these because Topper’s here. And she hates Kooks.”

“She’s the smarter one of you two!” JJ shouted among the loud music. You shook your head and whacked him again, but lightly this time. Seemed that would be you guy’s thing— hitting.

Even in their inebriated states, Kooks were still staring at you like you had grown a third arm. Which, honestly, was what being with JJ felt like half the time. From the corner of your eye, you caught a glimpse of the Glossy Posse and Warren making their way to you with either wide or curious eyes.

Oh boy.

“Y/n!” they exclaimed, shoving through the crowd. You matched their seemingly gleeful expressions, though you knew deep down they were judging you hard.

“You must be y/n’s date,” Ivy stated without much of a formal introduction.

“Aren’t you that Pogue from the Boneyard that always tries to hit on us?” Chloe brought up once she got a better look at JJ’s face. You snorted, but no one heard you.

You were slightly worried JJ would take their snarky comments the wrong way and lash back, but his cocky grin still laid proudly on his face as he held his hand out to your girl friends. “Name’s JJ. And yeah, I’m y/n’s new man.”

New man. Well, that was certainly a title. All of the Glossy Posse’s threaded eyebrows shot up at the word.

“Y/n,” Anne-Marie said in amazement, “You didn’t tell us you were dating again.”

“Yeah, well, I wanted to keep it kinda lowkey,” you lied, signaling JJ to put his arm around you again.

Expecting your friends to stick up their nose at him or give you guys condemnatory looks, you were surprised to find they were more stunned than snobby. Intrigued, you caught them eyeing JJ up and down as if he possessed some kind of magical charm.

From behind the group, you saw Warren trying to stick his hand out at JJ to introduce himself as the girls did kinda take center stage earlier, shielding him out. “Don’t believe we’ve met yet. I’m Warren, Warren Van Doren.”

JJ had to hold back a laugh at the sound of his rhyming name. So immature.

“Hey man, I’m JJ. Nice to meet you,” he greeted, shaking his hand, “Wait a sec, aren’t you that quarterback that got in that fight at regionals last year?”

Warren smiled sheepishly and looked away. “Yeah, that was me.”

You remembered that fight. The video of it actually went viral for like a week. Warren was a very nice guy, but pissed of, he was an animal. He pummeled the shit out of some of other players during that game. The topic of fighting seemed to bond the two boys as they unknowingly drifted away in their own conversation. Thank God, you were glad that at least one of the boys there would be friendly towards JJ.

“Wow, look what the cat dragged in,” Chloe announced, gesturing towards the stairway. All four of your heads turned to see Max and Anya parade up to the top step linked to one another.

That was the cue.

Furtively, you nudged at JJ’s side, interrupting his football conversation. You gave him an alerting look that said ‘look like you’re in love with me ASAP’ and he quickly enveloped his arm around you to pull you close.

Given the fact that you and JJ hardly knew each other, much less touched, it was a very ungraceful and awkward gesture. Even Warren shot you both a weird look. Either way, you figured it would be perfected after going at it a few times.

Just as the Hollywood couple sauntered in to the packed bar area, JJ dipped his face closer to yours. It was a nice touch to the act. He started whispering some stupid joke in your ear that you could hardly make out among the music and chatter, but you went along with it anyway, playfully slapping at his chest. He even placed his snapback on your head backwards. You almost yelled at him for ruining your hair, but for the sake of the show you were putting on, you pretended it was the cutest thing.

You tried not to look at Max as he passed, as you didn’t want to make things so obvious. But in the split second you did glance his way, his mouth flew agape. In that moment, you knew you had him right in the palm of your hand from twenty feet away. The evil laugh cackled inside your head while you raked your hands through JJ’s hair. It was surprisingly soft.

For the next few minutes, you could feel Max’s stare bore into you back as you leaned closer to JJ, kissing up his jawline and cheek. 

“Damn, y/n, didn’t know you felt like this about me,” JJ teased.

“Shut up. I’m giving them a show,” you hissed with an infatuated smile to mask your threats.

“They’re gone now,” JJ noted lowly in your ear. You both detached like repelling magnets.

Fortunately, the posse and Warren dispersed among the crowd while you and JJ acted out your little PDA scene— it was probably from discomfort, if you were being honest. You did make sure not to hold anything back while you were draped all over JJ.

“Is that it?” JJ droned, back to his normal whiny self, “Am I done? Can we leave?”

Clicking your tongue, you shook your head, but with a grin this time. “Yes, you idiot, we can leave now.”

“Finally!”

JJ’s hand crept to your lower back as you both weaved through the mass of people to the exit. Before you could make it halfway down the staircase, however, you heard a rumbling behind you that stopped both your tracks. Warren’s six-four gigantic self was rummaging down the stairs, leaving booms in his wake.

“JJ! JJ!” he called out, grabbing hold of your fake boyfriend’s arm, “JJ dude, you gotta check out this new game system Billy has upstairs in the game room. You can play live Madden!”

“What?!” JJ’s eyes lit up like a kid on Christmas as Warren tugged you both back up the stairs with his giant football-player muscles.

“Dude it’s fucking sick! You gotta try it out,” Warren kept insisting. You knew JJ wouldn’t be able to resist. His eyes were practically glowing with excitement when he turned back to you as if to ask for some kind of approval.

“Okay, I’m just going to stay for one game,” he swore but you were a hundred-and-ten percent sure he’d be hooked and you could stay for much longer.

“Knock yourself out, Maybank,” you responded with a knowing smile, shooing him off to some depth of the Irvine’s enormous home. When he disappeared, you took the liberty to go search for your friends and finally enjoy the party for yourself.

As you predicted, one game turned into thirty real quick. It was well past midnight and JJ was still buried away somewhere doing who knows what. You didn’t mind. Warren was very responsible and you trusted him to take care of your date.

Plus, it gave you enough time to take rounds of various colored jello shots with Billy, dance on Mrs. Irvine’s countertops with the birthday girls, and devour the four-tiered tiramisu cake with fake-puking Barbie doll toppers that you helped pick out at the bakery.

When it got around one thirty, you grew a little concerned about JJ’s whereabouts so you sent him a quick text just to make sure he was okay and not shoving his head down a toilet. Your phone chimed back instantly—

Im jus fine y/n!!! One mor game! I almos beat War Ins Ass! Fuckin kwarter back!

Oh yeah, he was definitely gone. You texted your family’s driver to come by in about thirty minutes to make sure he’d get home safely. Then, you proceeded to dig in to your third slice of cake. Unlike the rest of your friends, you embraced the joy that was carbs— especially when you were drunk and there was chocolate involved.

JJ came downstairs a few minutes later and found where you were sitting on the couch surrounded by your circle of friends. Even amid the dark yet colorful beaming lights, his hair was still its usual sweaty mess with eyes a tad droopy, indicating just how drunk he was.

“Y/n! There’s my baby!”

He walked up and collapsed right onto your lap, tossing a dangly arm around you. You kept his snapback on for the entire night, assuming your hair was probably a bird’s nest underneath it. Everyone around seemed amused at the sight, and a few girls from school even began asking how you two started dating.

Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

Well, that was until your thigh circulation began ceasing due to JJ’s bony ass on it. You immediately demanded that you switch places with him, and he sloppily obliged. The throng around you giggled, intrigued by the new lovey-dovey couple. Secretly, you ate up the attention and knew JJ did too.

He was in the middle of telling everyone a dumb Boneyard party story when Max and Anya entered the living room premises. They looked like they were fixing to leave. Your date felt you tense a little in his lap and caught on to your sudden judder.

Boldly, JJ made direct eye contact with Max and threw him one of those ‘what’s up’ nods. Then, out of nowhere, in his completely trashed state, JJ cupped both of your cheeks and planted a very brazen kiss on your lips for everyone to see. Shutting your eyes, you heard a few whistles from the crowd around you, especially when he, very obviously, added his tongue to the mix.

JJ was a good kisser, you had to admit. It quite literally, took your breath away when he pulled back. Biting your lip, you mimicked his shit-eating grin while he pressed his perspiration-filled forehead on yours. It was a huge acne-hazard just waiting to happen. But, like the snapback, you didn’t care. It was the most thrilling thing you had done in months.

“Don’t look now, but Vega and his girl have their jaws dropped to the floor behind you,” he muttered in your ear. You giggled and held onto him closer, leaning your head on his chest.

It was probably be best fifteen hundred bucks you had ever spent.

—————————————————

The next morning was your mom’s weekly Saturday brunch. By default, you showed up an hour early to help greet the guests, frequently checking your watch and phone to see when JJ would arrive.

You had a tennis tournament earlier that morning, however, you didn’t even bother making your fake boyfriend go. After the events of last night, you knew he’d be too hungover in the morning and wouldn’t wake up in time for it. He was getting to be very predictable.

At t-minus five minutes until the brunch started, everyone had already made their way into the ballroom. That left just you waiting in the lobby area for your date. The look on your face was just about ready to kill JJ whenever he walked through the door. You also didn’t see Sarah and John B arrive either, so you assumed they would be a no-show yet again.

About a minute past noon, the blond sauntered past the doors wearing a black suit that looked two sizes to big for him with hideous shoulder pads. You presumed it was his dad’s old one. He also had on jet black sunglasses to mask the grogginess from the party, but it was pretty evident he looked and felt like shit.

“You’re late again!” you hissed through gritted teeth, snatching his hand like he was an uncontrollable child. Maybe you should invest in a leash and collar for him since he could never get his attendance right.

“What do you mean? You said noon,” he yawned, unfazed at your irritation.

“The brunch starts at noon!” you jeered, “That means you have to show up early!”

“Well you failed to mention those rules,” he tried to bicker back, but you flashed him one of your bitch-looks before he could go any further. That had him shriveling at the sight.

“Whatever, just hurry up and let’s get seated,” you ordered, leading him through the majestic looking double doors, “And take off those sunglasses!”

Much to your dismay, the doors made a very loud creaking noise when they opened. Just about everyone did a double-take to see you arrive late and with a woozy-looking boy shoving sunglasses in his suit pocket.

Eyes were glued on you while judgmental whispers filled the already tense air. There was a small churn in your stomach as you weaved through the round tables. Something was also gnawing at your brain, telling you that it was a terrible, terrible idea. You attempted to brush it aside, though, as you and JJ took your seats.

For some odd reason, the Glossy Posse didn’t show the same enthusiasm towards JJ like the did at the party. They were back to their pretentious ways— you figured it was probably just their hangover attitude.

On the other hand, Warren happily greeted JJ when he sat down, exchanging one of those typical ‘bro’ handshakes. They started chatting on about the previous night while you tried to make small talk with the girls. Unfortunately, they were still being short with you and were, very obviously, throwing looks at JJ, along with their dates.

Glancing to your parents’ table, they didn’t look like they cared too much about your situation, having just flown in from their trip. They were too engrossed in entertaining their friends to really pay you any mind. Sometimes you were grateful that they were oblivious to some things. When you look over at the Vegas, however, Mr. and Mrs. Vega both sent you a disapproving look. The other families followed.

You couldn’t help but feel like you were in over your head at that point. Was it a mistake bringing JJ to this event?

The servers came out and made their rounds at the tables, setting bowls of water in front of everyone.

“Thank God, I’m starving,” JJ piped, taking his dessert spoon to sip water from the finger bowl.

“JJ,” you yelled-whispered as guests continued to stare.

“What?” he chided back with an attitude, completely unaware of his surroundings.

“The water is for your fingers.”

His face shot up from the bowl and scanned the room at people dipping their fingers into their respective bowls. “Oh shit,” he sputtered as your entire table tried to hide their snorts.

When the food finally came out, it didn’t really get any better. Baked chicken was on the menu and, well, JJ was the only one in the room who didn’t use a fork and knife. Everyone stared at him incredulously as he used his hands to gobble up his plate. Though, the boy didn’t seem to notice any of the baffled eyes.

Attempting to shield your red face, you continued to take tiny bites from your food, hoping the next hour would go by fast.

You hoped too soon.

As soon as JJ was done eating, he let out a loud belt to where the tables around you could hear. Warren high-fived him. At least someone got a kick out of it. You, along with the rest of the guests, had nothing but revolt on your faces.

Once the plates were cleared, the servers brought out creme brûlée for dessert. You were grateful it was something semi-clean to eat. JJ seemed to get a knack out of all the food. He even leaned over to you with his mouth full and muttered, “This food is fantastic! My compliments to the chef.”

You half-smiled back in embarrassment and took a spoon-full of your dessert. Thankfully, your mom waltzed over when you were half-way through to ask for your help carrying in the posters and stands from the lobby that displayed all the charity and donation information.

Immediately, you rose and scattered out, away from all the the dense room.

At the front, you began picking up the easel stands to bring inside until you spotted the jet-black locks of the last person you wanted to run into that afternoon. You almost dropped the large items in your hands when he came up to you.

“So, I see you brought Maybank here. Looks like he’s really enjoying himself in there,” Max commented dryly beside you. Mrs. Vega must have asked him for a hand as well.

You winced at the oozing criticism in his voice. It was the first time you had spoken to him one-on-one since the breakup.

”Yeah, we’re, uh, kind of together now,” you mentioned, lugging a display. He grabbed the two remaining and rushed to keep up with you, following you back in.

Out of nowhere, he let out disbelieving laugh, “You can’t be serious, y/n, you and Maybank?”

Taken aback by his brashness, you stopped right before the ballroom doors, frowning. “Yeah,” you shot back sternly, “Why not? I get along with him fine.”

“Doesn’t look like it to me. The guy’s a total tool. I’ve told you that from the beginning. Trust me, I know.”

“Know what? What’s good for me?” you pressed, growing more and more exasperated at the sound of his deep and raspy voice.

It was sexy, no doubt, but just the things that were coming out of his mouth made you want to slap him silly. How dare he prance up to you in his gorgeous light blue Armani suit and tell you what’s good for you!

“I just know who you are, y/n,” he went on calmly, with not an ounce of anger present in his tone, “And JJ’s just not a good guy for you.”

You were seeping with outrage at that point. Hiking in a breath, you spoke with the speckles of tranquility you had left in you. “Well I appreciate your concern, though I hardly understand why you have any for me. But we broke up, Max. You completely lost the right to tell me any of that.”

With that, you furiously stomped into the brunch and set the displays at the front for your mom. Max looked dumbstruck as he trailed behind. But you didn’t care.

“Everything okay? Did something happen with Vega?” JJ asked when you got back to your seat. You remained silent. It was the only way to keep yourself from screaming.

It was all too much— the piercing stares, the messy eating, Max.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” you informed to JJ as he listened to another one of Warren’s football stories, “And then we’re leaving.”

Before he could respond, you were already racing to the bathroom as fast as your Jimmy Choo wedges could take you.

You needed air. And fast.

Bursting through the bathroom door, you heaved yourself into the biggest stall and flopped down on the toilet seat, taking in deep breaths to calm yourself. It didn’t help much. The room was still twirling like you were on the Graviton at a carnival. Too nauseous from it all, you didn’t even care that you were ruining your new white Valentino dress.

You just wanted to hurl inside the antique-decorated bathroom but couldn’t. It was miserable. But at least the bathroom was empty.

All the seeming success of last night crumbled away with every disapproving look or whisper of the guests. And then Max— that fucking asshole. Your head was thumping endlessly as you felt the stress knots crawl up your spine.

What were you thinking? Maybe you were in over your head. No one was believing it. Not for a second.

Even JJ was terrible at playing along. You should’ve known it was just wishful thinking. You knew you had to throw in the towel and told yourself you would call it off once you found some way to stop the hot tears that were streaming down your made-up cheeks.

As you felt your breathing start to normalize, you slowly lifted from the toilet seat and smoothened out your dress. When the bathroom door slammed open against the wall, you immediately fell back down, wanting to avoid any form of human interaction for the rest of your life.

Titters and snickers echoed the air as two girls stumbled in, mid-conversation. They didn’t seem to notice you in the stall at all. Thank God.

“Would you believe y/n? Bringing that dirty Pogue here? She’s gone insane!” A nasally voice spoke by the sinks.

You scrunched your nose, trying to catch a glimpse of their shoes from the opening underneath the stall. You nearly puked. Nameless brand heels? Unacceptable.

“I know! He’s so disgusting and that suit is just repulsive! Does she not have an ounce of embarrassment?” the other one added.

You didn’t recognize their voices, but assumed they probably went to your school by the way they knew you and JJ. A part of you wanted to charge out of the stall and drag their pitiful selves to the ground. But seeing as you were just recovering from a near panic attack, you didn’t have the energy. And they didn’t deserve your breath.

Nevertheless, they still went on. 

“Ever since Vega dumped her for California girl, she’s completely gone off the rails. First the hair change and now she’s dating a Pogue like Sarah Cameron is. It’s so pathetic!”

“Seriously, train wreck of the year if you ask me.”

Train wreck? Pathetic? You’ll show them what pathetic is! Especially with those god-awful shoes. Do they have an ounce of embarrassment showing up here with that kind of atrocity?

You were seconds away from emerging from your ashes to put them in their place. But, lucky for them, they escaped before you could come out of confinement.

Huffing, you stormed out of the stall and towards the mirrors to fix yourself. God forbid you’d ever let anyone see you with smeared mascara!

Dabbing a wet cloth on your cheeks to soothe out the redness, you heard the creak of the door opening behind you and immediately tossed it into a bin. You pretended to fix your hair. Fortunately, the redness faded to a soft pink to look like blush.

Anya strolled in the bathroom behind you. Ugh, the cherry on top of the cake.

You faked a tight smile at her. She threw a cheery one at you, walking up the sink next to yours to toss up her bouncy, voluminous hair. “So, I thought you said that guy out there wasn’t you boyfriend,” she pointed out, not taking her eyes off her own reflection.

“Oh, psh, well you know,” you sputtered, not expecting the sudden inquisition, “One thing led to another that night at the Boneyard and it just kinda… happened.”

It was the first real conversation you had with her, and you wanted to hold your breath at the awkwardness. Anya nodded at your answer, puckering her lips slyly. “I just think it’s cute that you’re trying to make Max jealous.”

You almost did a double take. It was so subtle and smooth, her comment almost flew right over your head. “Excuse me?” you shot back, turning to the blonde-haired home-wrecker.

She didn’t even flinch a muscle at your snub expression, just continued to ogle at herself. It was menacing. Evil really did take form in Anya Carmichael.

“Oh, did I need to spell it out for you?” she blinked, “Y/n, you’ve been out of the picture. If you think showing up with that god-awful guy in his dad’s raggedy suit is gonna change Max’s mind about you, I assure you it won’t work.”

She crinkled her eyes in a hateful smile.

What was with people and their audacity that afternoon? Whatever was in their water, you were not about to have any of it. No one spoke to you like that.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” you said blandly, wanting to get under her skin.  

“Yes you do,” she snarled back, placing both hands on the sink in a threatening manner, “Look. Max and I are together now. You need to get that in your tiny pea-brain head. Do not play dumb with me. I see you looking over at him every five minutes. Get. Over. It.”

“Like I said,” you responded back in a fake-innocent tone just to push her buttons some more, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Anya. I think all the hairspray is really getting to your head.”

Two can play that game.

She narrowed her almond eyes at you and straightened up proudly. Even though she was way taller than you in her six-inch heels, you still stood your ground, blinking up at her tauntingly. At least your swanky parents taught you that much.

She scoffed. “Give it up, seriously. Using that guy to try to get back at your ex is just pathetic. Max was right about you. You’re just a shallow virgin with a handbag.”

With that, she tossed her hair behind her shoulder and strutted out the door. Your blood was boiling, having half a mind to go out there and rip the bottled-blonde right off her head. You should’ve known it was all an act!

Fuming, you treaded back to the brunch table, your face doing a complete one-eighty once you stepped through the doors. A lady never showed her seething anger underneath.

JJ spotted you and promptly stood up, snatching your purse, and getting ready to leave.

“Sit,” you demanded, pushing him down by the shoulder so his ass plopped back firmly on the chair. The look of utter shock flashed on his face, but he just took it.

“I’m feeling better now. We’re staying,” you informed as if you were a commander at war. You glanced over at the Vegas’ table where Anya hung her arm proudly on Max’s bicep as he made some joke to his table. She threw over a glare at you. No one but you noticed.

You draped an arm on one of JJ’s ridiculously large shoulder pads, nuzzling your nose to his neck. He was still as confused as ever though, but still went along with it, digging his fork into your half-eaten dessert which he later finished.

If Anya wanted a war, you’ll give her one. May the best bitch win.

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note: YES SHE WENT THERE! you kno i had to stir in anya- y/n drama!!! 

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[constantlyirksome]

For Pose’s Second Season Activism is in Vogue (2x01 Review.)

The most impressive element for Pose’s second season premier is the importance given to accurately portraying some truly harrowing realities for the LGBT community and people of color during the AIDs crisis. The show has jumped forward in time to 1990, where the body count has reached an unacceptable amount, and the community is fed up. Fed up with the state, the church, and with everyone else just willing to sit and watch their chosen families and friends die. The balls are just as fabulous, camp and fun, they are the shows most joyous moments, as you watch contestants prance, preen, and get read to filth by Pray Tell, you just wanna be there. But everyone in the ballroom feels the urgency and the sorrow of the times they live in. While the main characters snatched trophies a lot of interesting, real history was covered, and it made what is already an incredible show into something cultural essential.

The first scene opens with Pray and mother Blanca taking a trip to the very real and very horrendous Hart Island to pay their respects to a deceased friend. Hart island was essentially a mass grave on an island in the Bronx, where unclaimed bodies from city morgues, and those whose loved ones couldn’t afford proper ceremonies were buried. It became a dumping ground for victims of the AIDS epidemic, their bodies separated from everyone else, lest they give the disease to other dead people, makes sense right?

The disinterested worker who Blanca and Pray encounter just makes the place sound all the more horrible with how totally nonchalantly she describes the layout and the rules. The duo is deservedly mystified. It sort of drives home the disinterest, the total dismissal of those who died by the straight communities, by those unaffected. The actual scene they encounter after is something from a nightmare. Big diggers carve out mass graves, stacked with wooden crates, each with a body inside, with nothing but a number spray-painted on top to indicate who the poor souls inside were. Knowing that Blanca and Pray both have HIV, you can see the heartbreak and terror as Billy Porter and MJ Rodriguez give a tearful goodbye to their friend.

Jump forward to the world listening to Madonna’s Vogue, that has just been released, and the people in the ballroom scene have a reason to celebrate again, believing the exposure to their world will bring positive change. Blanca, in particular, sings queen Madonnas praises the whole episode, believing blindly that the song will change their lives. Now nearly thirty years on, we know the song didn’t do that. Madonna sort of sanitized the movement and no one outside the LGBT cared to wonder where it came from. But it’s hope; hope that drives Blanca to push herself and her children to do better.

She pushes Angel, who’s been taking cute photos with Lil Papi, to pursue modeling. She has the talent and the beauty, winning the season’s first ball looking rich AF (can we talk about that titty bounce??) Indya Moore is breathtaking both in beauty and performance. Her optimism, and then her deep shame when a photographer takes advantage of her is a thing to see. The close up shot on her face, while he takes nudes of her for his “personal collection” is so sad, you don’t need to see her body to feel her shame, and feel totally pissed at the photographer, who deservedly gets beaten half to death.

Lil Papi is her guardian angel this season, the two having become inseparable in the most adorable way ever. Their chemistry is out of this world as they flirt, and he looks at her like she’s a star in the sky, and she is! Seeing him smash that guys face in, or throwing his jacket in a rage over how she was treated is amazing. He’s everything Stanley from season one wasn’t. Stan saw her outward beauty, used her to explore whatever he was feeling with little regard to how that made her feel. Papi sees her beauty and then beyond, into how special she is inside. I personally cannot wait to see that relationship bloom, long live Papangel.

Just like I hope to see more of Papi/Angel Curiel-Bismark this season, so to do I want more of Sandra Bernhard as nurse Judy. Her compassion and patience with the people she treats, coupled with her fire at rallies is incredible, and Sandra B just brings something iconic to it that’s uniquely her. She brings Pray to his first rally with ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power), is probably going to be one of the most significant incidents of the season. ACT UP is another real element Pose creators have added, including one of their Stop the Church protests, a passive lie in at a new york church led by Judy and the Evangelistas. The shots taken and interspersed that looked like real life VHS footage drew you back to the idea that while these are actors in a show, these protests were very real. Act Up was and is still an amazing group that works to fight Aids politically, religiously and medically. Pose’s decision to include these things is going to bring a lot of attention to the warriors on the front line of the AIDs crisis just like it did with ballroom, and that’s epic.

Pray Tell learns that liberation and change won’t come from a song but in radically tearing shit down and building it back up again, and he ends up screaming this message at Elektra, who decides to stay away from anything political this episode. Her time is spent planning an elaborate ballroom presentation so spectacular and choreographed Pray rips into her for misusing her time when her family needed her. He throws her trophy at her feet with the applause of everyone in the ballroom. I don’t believe Elektra is a bad person. I think there is a reason she is the way she is, and hopefully, we see more of that as she walks for the house of Ferocity, who sorely need her help.

Pray Tells call to arms is as fitting today now as it was back then, as people in the LGBT and trans women of colour are still being subjugated, murdered and treated like shit. Pose isn’t just shining a spotlight on the amazing ballroom scene, it’s also using its platform to integrate essential messages into its story, and hopefully it continues to teach in the same awesome ways as in the premier.

“We better start caring for ourselves. Show up for your lives, Wake up!”

Best Look: Elektra’s over the top, let them eat cake cotour, complete with spinning skirt and working guillotine. 

Best Read: Substitute ballroom announcer Jack (played by real ballroom icon Jack Mizrahi, “Trash bag realness darling, sponsored by GLAD. Hefty hefty hefty, wimpy wimpy wimpy!”

[youremyonlyhope]

The Last Jedi

Here we go. The most controversial Star Wars movie ever (unless Rise of Skywalker has reviews that are just as mixed. I haven’t read any so I don’t know how it’s been received yet.) I actually really really enjoyed the Last Jedi, but I haven’t rewatched it since I saw it in theaters.

Also, unrelated, but literally just a few hours ago I met Oscar Isaac. I was doing a caroling event where I work, and he came by with his son to watch. During one of our breaks, he asked if his son could try the microphone and he held him up so he could whisper and sing stuff into the mic. It was adorable.

I seemed to be the only person who recognized who he was, though one of my co-workers said he had thought so too but he wasn’t sure until I confirmed it. So I went up to Oscar and said hi, asked if he was Oscar Isaac, shook his hand, and thanked him for coming. He says that it was great and that his son loves to sing.

I always joked that I’d bump into Oscar one day since he lives in Brooklyn, but I didn’t think it’d actually happen. And not while I’m wearing a Star Wars shirt and Star Wars socks (which he obviously couldn’t see since I was bundled up in a coat and a scarf and boots but whatever). And definitely not the day before I’m supposed to see the Rise of Skywalker.

I’m still freaking out oh my god. Ok. Time to rewatch the Last Jedi.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... This was the first Star Wars movie I’d seen in theaters in like 12 years at this point. Seeing those words on a giant screen again was amazing. “Certain that Jedi Master Luke Skywalker will return and restore a spark of hope to the fight.” I love that line. I love any and all comparisons of Luke to hope. Yes I am biased. But also, restoring the spark is exactly he does in the end so yes, I love it. It’s just now hitting me that we’re picking up exactly where we left off. Having 1 night between the two movies is every different than having 2 years. ...Was that whatsherface from Game of Thrones, Catelyn’s creepy sister? (IMDB says yes) *BB8 beeps* “Happy beats here buddy, come on.” BB8 sort of said the thing! Also, OH MY GOD I JUST MET OSCAR ISAAC AND NOW HERE HE IS ON MY SCREEN WHAT THE HELL. Was today even real? Oh General Hugs. “Skinny guy. Kinda pasty.” Knowing Oscar and Domnhall are friends makes this better. Oh BB8. Very honorable of Billie Lourd’s Lieutenant Connix to make sure she’s in the last ship leaving the base so everyone else leaves before her. I forgot about the chain reaction of bombs destroying their own Resistance ships... You know, Paige dying while dropping the last of the bombs was already emotional. Rewatching it after you know she’s Rose’s sister makes it worse. First Binary Sunset of the movie. General Hugs has a very good upset face that makes me not feel bad for him at all. More like I want to punch him. Snoke can use the Force across the galaxy... forgot about that. I realized I didn’t mention this in the last one, but I remember the crew complaining that when they filmed the end of Force Awakens it was a cloudy day, but then when they went back to the island for TLJ it was super sunny. And now that it’s been pointed out, I noticed it immediately. Luke throwing the lightsaber. I can’t remember if I was spoiled for this but I feel like when I watched it, I wasn’t that thrown off by it. Something else I didn’t mention at the end of Force Awakens is that I LOVE this set. The stone houses are amazing. Oh porgs. Also, that porg looking into the lightsaber always gives me anxiety. The first words we hear Luke say in 40 years are an annoyed “Go away.” which at least is less whiney than the Tosche Station. Oh Chewie’s like “DUDE. WE NEED YOU.” “Wait... where’s Han?” Awww. Throwing in a little Vader’s theme in there. More temper tantrums. People getting mad at Luke calling a lightsaber a laser sword (in a purposefully mocking way) even though George Lucas himself called them that in some interviews. Yes, it’s not a laser sword, but Luke is trying to show how ridiculous he thinks the idea of him taking down everything is by calling a lightsaber that. I remember being like “Luke... no let’s not just milk that thing... oh ew” I do love the shot of Luke using the giant stick to cross to the other cliff and kill the fish. God that’s a steep hill. “No one’s from nowhere.” “Jakku.” “Alright that is pretty much nowhere.” That’s funny. “It’s time for the Jedi to end.” Remember when that line in the trailer made the fandom literally break down? I love knowing that behind the scenes, Carrie had to slap Oscar a billion times. Also, I do not blame Leia at all. So many people were mad about Leia and Holdo demoting Poe, but Poe was too fearless in that moment. Yes, he destroyed the ship and it worked out, but they lost so many people and they already didn’t have many to begin with. It was worth it, but at a very high cost. So I don’t blame her. Heyyyyyy it’s that girl from that Black Mirror episode and what was that other show? Chewing Gum or something? (IMDB says yes it’s Michaela Coel) See and Poe’s already learning a little by asking permission. Of course... later on he doesn’t ask permission... but whatever. Leia’s Theme... causing me pain. Oh, Kylo didn’t kill his mom. We’re supposed to be happy about that? The bar is on the ground. The utter horror I felt the first time the control room was destroyed and Leia was pulled into space. Oh I love the moment when Leia flies in. Because I’d heard that in the books and comics, we get to explore Leia’s Force abilities and stuff but we don’t get it in the movies besides “I feel that Luke’s in trouble.” Which sucks, because she is the “other” if Luke didn’t work out, so she’s just as strong as Luke if she got trained. They should have just trained both kids honestly, why did they pick the boy? Not saying Obi-Wan and Yoda are sexist... but they’re probably sexist. Also, foreshadowing. I actually noticed the hologram of the ship and Leia flying through this time. Oh Chewie. I like the porg that literally has his jaw dropped in horror. Knowing now that the dice were kind of a symbol of Kira (was that Emilia Clarke’s character?) and Han’s relationship makes me not like them as much. Still, cute throwback that they’re still on the Falcon. We can just ignore they weren’t there in Force Awakens (I kept an eye out and didn’t see them) The way Luke laughed when he said “R2!” I just... my heart. “Nothing can make me change my mind” *R2 plays the Leia hologram* I literally just went “AWWWW” out loud because I forgot that that’s why R2 started playing it. Oh my heart. That hurt the first time. Luke standing over Rey, but offering to help her. Parallels. Oh Admiral Ackbar. I love Holdo’s dress. I love the draping. Someone teach me how to make it. “Thank you for making me aware.” Yeah Poe, she already knows. Stop mansplaining. This is literally a case of mansplaining, why would Poe think he’d have to explain to a commander that there’s no fuel? Yeah it’s a little harsh, but is Holdo wrong? All of these fanboys complain about Canto Bight, but forget that it was Poe’s idea. Then they go and say Holdo was too mean should have put Poe in charge. Guys. Poe’s impulsive. We love him, but he’s the ultimate Gryffindor with no fear and will just do anything without considering consequences. I do wish Holdo had been more open like “I have a plan. You don’t need to know all the parts of it. Just let me do what I need to, ok?” instead of “Just follow my orders.” but still. Oh poor Rose. “Doing talking....” Oh she’s so cute. “I’ve had to stun 3 people trying to use this escape pod.” We love a girl who can fight. Yeah. Once again. Not mad at Rose. Finn does have some selfish tendencies, he’s well meaning but ultimately selfish (or at least, only thinking of Rey). So I do not blame Rose for stunning him.

And now I will take a nap since I have to go to a show tonight. And then I will finish the last 3/4-ish of the movie when I get home later.

Annnnd I’m back!

See. Rose has good reason to be mad at deserters. Ok so it wasn’t Poe’s idea to go to the Star Destroyer it was Finn’s. I will give him that. But still Poe went along with it. “That... wasn’t exactly my...” Oh 3PO. I wish Maz had had a bigger scene. More Lupita please. I have one question: from what angle is this hologram filmed? And how does the camera follow her? I guess it’s multiple hologram cameras, but still, it followed her as she rolled and ran around. Also, did Finn call Maz or did Poe call her? Because as far as we know, only Finn knows her. It seemed like they both had the idea to call her, but that Poe had it first. Did Finn tell Poe about Maz? I’m glad they showed Finn handing Poe the binary tracker thing, since for a second I was like “What if Rey had popped up next to Finn on the Star Destroyer?” I’m glad Rey’s first instinct is to shoot Kylo. “Can you see my surroundings?” “You’re gonna pay for what you did.” “I can’t see yours.” Why do I remember that line so vividly? Why does it make me feel so unsettled? Rey, my sweet Rey, I wish you had just told Luke that you saw Kylo. I love Luke’s explanation of the Force. And him messing with Rey was funny. I love when Rey’s reaching out and feeling life, death, peace, violence, etc. And I love Luke saying the Force doesn’t belong to the Jedi, because it doesn’t. The Jedi failed years ago. “You didn’t even try to stop yourself.” Luke’s horrified. But also, Rey’s just like an extreme version of Luke. Yoda knew that Luke’s emotions could make him vulnerable to the dark side, Rey’s already vulnerable. Yeah, I don’t blame Luke for being scared of Rey after he feels like this is Ben all over again. Oh my god. I love the porg that has a metal piece over its head. That actually made me laugh out loud. Poor Chewie.

I just had to refresh tumblr because my draft wasn’t saving. It brought me back to my dashboard. Where there was a spoiler for the new movie and it wasn’t tagged. PLEASE tag your spoilers people.

The water hitting Kylo still confuses me. Say what you will about the Canto Bight plot... the costumes are AMAZING. The costumes literally make the whole side plot worth it to me. Literally I was just in awe by all the costumes during every single scene. And the set! The set’s fantastic too! I literally just paused every single second to take in all of the costumes. Do I care if the Canto Bight trip ended up pointless? Nope! Because it gave me some of Star Wars’ best costumes. Oh... to be an extra in the Canto Bight scene... Just show up... And put on a beautiful outfit... And do nothing else but pretend to drink, talk, and gamble... That’s the dream. Oh hi Mark Hamill! That was cute that they let him voice that little thing. I remember noticing the thing and being like “...is he important?” and nope, it’s just Mark doing an extra voice. Oh I love the Fathiers. Aww and it’s the little Force sensitive boy. I have thoughts about that kid that I can get into later. The way BB8 jingles with the coins. I love it.

Rey: *Does a move with her stick* Rey: *Does the same exact move with the lightsaber* Fanboys: She’s too good too fast! Mary Sue!

As I said throughout all of the Force Awakens, she’s just applying the skills she already had. If anything, a lightsaber’s easier since it’s half the length and she doesn’t have to worry about the back of it hitting her. LOL, remember when we thought this shot was an epic shot of Luke training her? Good times. Oh that poor fish nun. Everything Luke says about the Jedi is true (also did I not say they failed earlier in the post? Luke agrees with me). Rey’s right that a Jedi got Ani to come back from the dark side, but the Jedi’s system enabled him to turn in the first place. Soooooo yeah. Oh Luke. Don’t blame yourself. Kylo was already basically gone. Sure, seeing his uncle standing over him with a lightsaber definitely didn’t help... but it’s not the only thing that made him turn. Who is this captain of the medical ship? He looks familiar. (IMDB says he’s Danny Sapani. I probably recognized him from the Crown) Oh BB8. Finn, did you learn nothing from Rey? Put the cover back on the vent! Awww the Fathiers have such sad eyes... I love the Resistance ring. Can I buy one? Ok. The shot of the bubble egg lady singing felt like it was much longer the first time, but it’s really only a split second. I. LOVE. THE. CANTO. BIGHT. SET. I know it’s a real town in like Italy or somewhere near the Mediterranean. I want to go. I love it. I love that the first thing Luke does when he decides to use the Force again is to seek out Leia. Oh poor Adam became a meme after this. He just has a very wide and bulky body, ok? God Luke looks so scary in Kylo’s flashback. “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.” That reflection scene is so visually stunning. So in a way, it’s like Luke is failing Rey like he failed Ben. He’s not helping her in the way she needs, so she’s being lured by the dark side instead. I love the walls falling around Luke. “Did you do it? Did you create Kylo Ren?” Rey, he already told you earlier that he believes it’s his fault, so the answer from him is yes. I can’t remember if we hear this story of Luke and Kylo one more time after this or not. “Then he’s our last hope.” Ok ew. No. Kylo is not allowed to be compared to hope. Only Luke, Leia, or Obi-Wan can be. Oh for a second I thought that torch was a lightsaber. YODA!!!!! I think I had been spoiled for Yoda showing up. It was definitely still exciting though. “The sacred Jedi texts!” Oh Luke. Oh memes. Not as whiney as I remembered. “But that library contained nothing that the girl Rey does not already possess.” Because Yoda knows she stole the books. Oh Yoda. I love Yoda. Oh Rose. Ok, so I will give it to Poe that at this moment it doesn’t seem like Holdo has a good plan. Abandoning ship isn’t necessarily cowardly, but on the surface it does seem like it puts them in more danger. Literally earlier today I watched a video about the layout of the Millennium Falcon, and the escape pods were mentioned. And I thought to myself, wow that must be something from the novels since we’ve definitely never seen that in the movies. Welp... I was wrong... Rey’s in one now. I was about to be like “Do they not care that an escape pod just docked?” before I saw Kylo. LOL the iron coming down like a ship. I feel like I remember being completely terrified when Rey stepped in front of Snoke. Oh BB8. Bumping into stuff. I remember being super relieved that DJ (has he told us this is his name yet? I can’t remember) gave back the medallion. Captain Phasma! Hey girl hey! Leia shooting Poe is still funny to me. Also Lieutenant Billie Connix is smart.  I love the scene of Holdo and Leia saying goodbye. Also, Holdo’s purple hair with her bright blue eyes is super striking. Good choice. Snoke puts down the lightsaber. Unknowingly sealing his fate. Literally when Snoke reveals he connected their minds, I was like OF COURSE. Because the whole time I’m like neither of them are strong enough to do this. “She was more interested in protecting the light than she was seeming like a hero.” See. And that’s the flaw in both Poe and Finn. And Rey to an extent. They’re thinking about the big picture, but in context of smaller things like seeming like a hero, saving Rey, saving Kylo, etc. But Holdo’s thinking of only the big picture. I knew DJ betrayed them, I just forgot how badly.

And here’s another annoyance (which I was sorta trying to touch on earlier). Everyone hates the Canto Bight plot, yet they complain about Holdo trying to take charge. If Poe just let Holdo take charge and ignored Finn and Rose’s idea, then her plan would have been a complete success. No Canto Bight, no DJ to betray them, all the transports make it to Crait unnoticed, and the First Order eventually destroys a ship that’s empty except for Holdo. They complain about Holdo, but don’t think about the fact that Holdo could have prevented another plot they hated if the main characters had just listened to her.

And then Snoke hits Rey and literally puts the lightsaber back to where it will kill him. Ok literally I just misread a caption that said “Lord Vader” as “Lord Voldemort” and I was very confused. Taking a second to say that I love this set of Snoke’s throne room. Been thinking it forever, but Kylo picking up the lightsaber off the ground and seeing the reflection in the smooth red floor is amazing. Kylo igniting the lightsaber through Snoke is amazing. Also, I typed “Ben igniting” before literally freezing for a second and being like “...ok that’s a lot to unpack” I guess when he does something good my brain thinks of him as Ben instead of Kylo. ALSO, arm #16 and #17, I love that Snoke’s arms were cut off too in true Star Wars fashion. And I am VERY excited to see this fight scene again. I told myself not to pause at all during the Kylo and Rey team up fight, but I paused literally a second into it because Binary Sunset yes.

And my idiot brother and my mom are texting in the family group chat so it’s popping up on my screen throughout this scene. Ugh.

All of these red knight weapons are so cool. And I forgot about the one that gets chopped up... Oh my god one is a sword that transforms into a whip. LOVE. IT. And I love the quick lightsaber ignite through the head. Love it. Woah how is there still 44 minutes? I remember this battle being much closer to the end. I was wondering when the red walls went away, but I rewinded and saw that they had been slowly burning away after Rey made something hit them. Nice touch.

Ugh my brother and mom will not stop texting.

“You have no place in this story.” Wow Kylo, harsh. Oh shoot I forgot about the lightsaber breaking until they started their Force tug of war with it. I’d always wondered what would happen if someone lightsped through something... I want to say that I realized what she was doing before they told us, but now I realize that they basically told us what she would do when the First Order guy said “they’re preparing to hyperspeed.” so I guess I just caught on to the obvious hints.

God that moment still gives me chills. The silence. The way it sort of goes black and white. The multiple angles. So good.

I know for a fact that I spent the rest of the movie from this point on with my hands over my mouth in a constant stake of shock/fear/anxiety. Oh BB8. Some people thought this was ridiculous. But I had just spent the last few months rewatching the prequels before seeing this, and compared to the stuff R2 does, BB8 clumsily controlling a walker is nothing. Oh how I love Gwendoline Christie. I FORGOT THAT WE SAW HER EYE IN THE MASK. I hope Phasma survived. She’s so awesome. Ok my quality is like horrendous right now so I’m gonna refresh. LOL I FORGOT ABOUT GENERAL HUGS NEARLY ATTEMPTING TO KILL KYLO. Oh I forgot how much I love Crait as a set location. OH AND THE ICE DOG THINGS! LOVE THEM! Poe petting BB8 when he comes back kills me. I like those space age two person laptops. “People believe in Leia.” *Binary Sunset plays* My heart. Ok for a second I was like “This first person camera is like a war movie” and then it turns and we see the trench and I’m like “...ok... ok fine but that was very literal.” The red footsteps. Just... guys this set is so AMAZING. Ugh, these red streaks of dust behind them are so amazing. And when Finn passes in front of the camera, it gets covered in the dust and blurs part of the lens. Just like the Rathtar goo in the Force Awakens. I wonder if that’s going to be like... the thing of the sequels. One shot that has the camera lens partially covered by something. Also, I just wasted time trying to figure out if there’s an official name for that or not... oh well. The winding stripes left behind as they weave around... just... amazing. YEAH! GO CHEWIE! GO REY! Oh my god I forgot about the porg roaring. “Oh, they HATE that ship!” I’M DEAD. Look at the salt and how it forms the crystals in the trench. I love it. I FORGOT ABOUT THIS SHOT OF THE CAVE FULL OF THE RED SALT. I LOVE THIS SO MUCH. I remember when the trailer had the first shot of the gorilla walkers, and I didn’t notice at first that there were normal AT-ATs next to them, and then I realized these things were twice as big as AT-ATs and I was horrified. See, and now Poe has learned that you can’t always be a hero and is making a good decision. I forgot about Finn’s speeder literally melting as he gets closer. I don’t understand the people who were mad that Rose stopped Finn. I for one was HORRIFIED at just the thought of Finn dying this way and thankful she stopped him. “That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate, saving what we love.” The kiss is pointless but I love the line and sentiment behind it. Oh god. Ok. Here come the emotions. Binary Sunset is playing. I was a wreck. And a little of Han and Leia’s Love Theme as she sees the dice. I remember actually noticing that in the theaters and half-sobbing. Oh god the forehead kiss. Oh and he winks at 3PO as he walks by. My heart. This is the specific shot of the gorilla walkers and the AT-ATs in a line that freaked me out. That shot of Luke standing up against all the First Order walkers and ships. Amazing. That shoulder brush though. Kylo’s so dumb, he literally just watched that lightsaber get destroyed, he HELPED destroy it. He should have known something was up, it couldn’t have been repaired that quickly. Purposeful shot of Luke’s feet not moving the salt. That Matrix back bend though. “I will have killed the last Jedi.” He said the title. Also, is that the only time it’s said? Because they say it a lot in Force Awakens but I don’t think so yet in this movie.. “And I will not be the last Jedi.” Ok so now it’s said again by Luke. Purposeful shot of Kylo’s shoe leaving a footprint as he runs to Luke. I’m pretty sure I probably shrieked when he tried to slice Luke in half.

I just now remembered that I’d actually kind of wondered if he’d be a Force projection or something when he first showed up. Because I’d just watched Return of the Jedi like a week earlier and saw Obi-Wan do it, so I wondered if Luke was doing it too. Especially when Poe said Luke was distracting the First Order. It passed my mind and was confirmed when Kylo couldn’t hit him. And here’s where I started to feel like my world was crumbling...

Oh god. My eyes are wet. It hurts. But when I watched it the first time, I really felt like my world was absolutely falling a part and ending forever while I watched Luke die. With the stupid binary sunset in front of him just like when he was a teenager and when he was a baby. One of the first things he ever saw was the binary sunset. I was like “This is beautiful, but that doesn’t mean I’m not completely in pain and dying.” That shot from above of Kylo with the stormtroopers, mirroring a shot from the prequels of Ani. Nice. So do they still have that connection even if Snoke’s dead?

HEY! Hey. Those dice were still visible to Kylo even after Luke was dead... was Leia Force projecting them to Kylo? It wouldn’t take as much work as doing it to everyone else at once from lightyears away. One person, your son, would be easier. So maybe... maybe Leia’s the one continuing the projection of the dice. I’m gonna stick with that theory thanks.

Awww BB8 asked Rey about his antenna, just like when they first met. Remember when people were like “Are Poe and Rey gonna be a thing?!?!?” and of course I’d much prefer that over Reylo thanks. The books! Somehow, that obvious shot of the books goes over so many people’s heads. So many complaints about the books getting burned, when they literally show us that Rey saved them. I had never noticed the bunks in the Millennium Falcon either until I saw that video earlier, and I’m glad I got to actually see one in use since Rose is sleeping in one.

Oh GOD the entirety of the Resistance can fit on the Millennium Falcon... that is NOT good.

I LOVE the scene of the kids retelling the story of Luke. I must have already gone in depth about this 2 years ago, but I love it. Luke became a legend in the end. He didn’t necessarily want to be one, but he’s become one. It was exactly what was in the opening scroll, he restored the spark of hope. That subtle use of the Force by that little boy. With Binary Sunset playing. And I love that last shot of him holding the broom up like a lightsaber.

I nearly forgot that they put in “In loving memory of our princess, Carrie Fisher” at the end. That’s what got me to finally cry. 40 straight minutes of covering my mouth in anxiety, then feeling like my world was crashing down around me as Luke died. Having it dedicated to Carrie made me just start sobbing so hard. Watch that happen again tomorrow.

I remember when I left the theater, at first I was like “What if the boys is Rey’s brother?!” but then... I realized that a huge point of the movie went over my head for a second there.

The fandom got so caught up in figuring out who Rey’s parents are, whether it’s Obi-Wan or Luke or Leia or even Palpatine, that they were mad when Kylo said they were no one. But like... guys... not every single Force user is related to the Skywalkers or anyone else we already know. There were hundreds of Jedi in the prequels, because anyone can be Force sensitive. Obi-Wan’s parents were nobody, Qui-Gon’s parents were nobody, Mace’s parents were nobody. They didn’t come from long lines of Force users (at least in movie lore), BECAUSE THE JEDI WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO HAVE KIDS. The Skywalkers aren’t even a long line, it’s just 3 generations at this point. So literally none of the Jedi of the past came from powerful Force users (or at least from ones who got the chance to become Jedi) since that literally goes against the code.

Luke found at least 11 other Force sensitive kids to train alongside Ben, their parents were all definitely nobodies since he’s the last Jedi. Ben is an anomaly, Luke and Leia are anomalies, the Jedi don’t have kids! The fandom got so caught up in figuring out who Rey could be related to, that they forgot that for millennia the individual Jedi were not related to anyone.

Anyone can be Force sensitive. Anyone can be a Jedi. Rey is an example of that. That little boy is an example of that. That’s why I love that the little Force sensitive boy was the final shot of the movie. He was meant to reassure and remind us after the Rey parentage reveal that anyone can end up Force sensitive. They don’t need a famous/powerful parent. They can come from anywhere and be anyone. And I love that that’s the final note of this movie.

Some people were not reassured. Some people couldn’t handle the idea that Rey’s powerful just because she’s Rey, not because she’s someone’s daughter. She HAS to be related to someone to be that powerful, right? But every Jedi before her who was just as powerful wasn’t related to anyone, so why does she have to be?

ANYWAY! I was actually worried over the last 2 years that I’d rewatch The Last Jedi and not like it as much as I did in theaters. I still like it a lot. Even the Canto Bight scenes get redeemed by the costumes and the set being so amazing. But I love the message of don’t be a hero, this is bigger than just you. And I love the message that even if you’re “nobody” from “nowhere” you could still be Force Sensitive and you could still be a Jedi. I love Luke’s send off, I love that he does end up reigniting the spark and being a beam of hope again. I love it.

And I’m excited to see the Rise of Skywalker tomorrow.

[stilljumpingback]

(via Black Sails Episode 406 - XXXIV)

Slaves being freed from their shackles is a needed bright spot in a very dark season.

Another show would make the relationship between Eleanor and Madi a simplisticly happy reunion.  Black Sails forces us to consider how privilege and inequality impacted their relationship in profoundly deep ways.

“My father didn’t mistrust Flint.  My father mistrusted all of you.”

Jack threatens to kill Eleanor and/or Flint, but Eleanor cannot be bothered to take him seriously and just walks away.  I feel like this perfectly summarizes the entirety of their relationship.

Silver giving Billy to the slaves to be tortured is…super dark.  Like, darker than anything Flint has done, right?

Silver:  I did not want this.  Flint is my friend, but I know what he is.  I have no illusions about it.  But for all the dangers he presents, for all his offenses, the one thing he’s never done is force me to choose between him and you.  That, you did.

Billy responding to Silver’s patronizing speech of ‘forgiveness’ with “You chose.  Live with it” makes me like him more than I have in a long time.

I would love to see this episode from Julius’s POV.

I continue to be fascinated by Max and Jack’s relationship.  They are business partners, sometime lovers, partners to the same woman.  Their reunion is gut-wrenching because Jack is all emotion, and Max is all logic.  Still, he rescues her (for the first of two times this episode).

Flint and Eleanor talking about their former partnership is my everything!!!

“You know, there was a time not so long ago when you shared their concern, when you saw what I saw.  The benefits of being free of British rule.  To make the new world something more than just an extension of the old.  Is it so unthinkable that that might happen again?  You were a pirate once.  Stranger things have happened.”

Although Flint has been betrayed by Eleanor just as much as Jack has been betrayed by Max, their reunion has had SUCH a different tone.  They are still civil, and they seem to still respect each other.  Why is this?  Because they always knew who the other was – someone ambitious and cunning and not above changing sides for a better outcome.  Flint and Eleanor knew each other so well that their relationship could survive betrayal.

Speaking of changing sides, in an instant pirates and British soldiers must work together to defeat the new Spanish enemy.

Silver needs to learn to read a room:  sitting in a throne in ominous lighting is not a great way to propose partnership with newly freed slaves.

Woodes Rogers gets on land, sees destruction, murder, and rape all around him…but it’s not until he learns that Eleanor is at risk that he actually begins to care.  What an asshole.

I will forever love Jack for deciding to wait for his former partners despite recently learning that they were willing to give up his cache without his knowledge or assent.

Max reunites with Anne.  Max is so defensive, but when she sees Anne’s brutalized face, she sees the full ramifications of her decision.

Max:  I loved you, and I betrayed you.  But I cannot apologize for it.  I did what anyone would have done when confronted with the same impossible choices.  If I apologize, you will know it is a lie, and I do not wish to lie to you ever again. Anne:  Leave. Max:  No.  I am going to stay with you.  I want to take care of you. Anne:  Get the fuck out.

No, Max, you didn’t do what anyone else would have done.  PLENTY of people did the exact opposite, in fact.

Eleanor:  One can be happy that way, can’t they?  A life of isolation and uncertainty, as long as it is lived with someone you love and who loves you back.  It is possible, isn’t it? Madi:  It is.

Who is Madi talking about here?  Her mother, and the life they had on Maroon Island?  Or Silver, and the life they might have in the future?  If it’s Silver, that seems to contradict her earlier silence when he asked if he was enough for her.

Silver hears the Spanish coming around the back over the din of battle?  Um, okay.

Madi and Eleanor share a smile, which is so great but FUCK FUCK FUCK you can see the Spanish soldier standing in the background flexing his hands and it’s so creepy!!!

Eleanor’s final fight is so desperate and beautiful.  She survives so much, and if that isn’t a symbol of her entire life, I don’t know what is.  I also really admire the show for how sexual assault is depicted:  we keep the female POV and never disempower her.

When she kills the Spanish soldier, she immediately goes to Madi, MY HEART.

Flint sees Miranda’s house on fire and Eleanor’s body.  The two most important women in his life.  😦

Eleanor:  Was he with them?  My husband? Flint:  No, he isn’t.

MY HEART.  Flint cradles Eleanor’s face as she dies, and his own face is just utter devastation and hopelessness.

Eleanor’s last words are: “Madi.  I tried to save her.”  But it doesn’t look like Madi made it out of the burning house.

In the wake of Madi’s death, Silver says of the rebellion, “It’s over.”  But Flint orchestrates a tactical retreat, insisting upon saving everyone.  They’re acting as good partners here, even if they are not in emotional agreement.

“It wasn’t supposed to end like this.  How can we all have sacrificed so much and none of us has anything to show for it?”

Finally, some emotion from Max.  I think her fierce adherence to calm logic is why I have felt so disconnected from her.  Now that she’s drowning, I like her a little bit.

Continuing with the theme of “emotional investment changes everything,” Max finally sees civilization’s true face and wants revenge.  But…by going to a different version of civilization.  What makes her think this time will be any different?

Honestly, I understand and almost agree with Max’s “fight civilization from the inside” philosophy.  But…it didn’t work.  Not that fighting from the outside worked either.  The moral of the story?  Changing society for the better is messy and complicated, and it takes all kinds of people fighting all kinds of battles.

Woodes Rogers finds Eleanor’s corpse.  By bringing Spain to Nassau, he murdered his wife, and none of his enemies were killed.  YOU IDIOT.

Silver is absolutely gutted and is grieving for Madi.  Flint puts his hand on Silver’s shoulder.  I can’t read whether or not Silver’s “It wasn’t your fault” is truthful or just a means to get Flint out of the room.  My poor babies!

BUT THEN.  The pirate revolution has grown enormously on Maroon Island!!  The first time I watched the series I was SUUUUPER depressed by this point, and seeing all these pirates determined to join the cause gave me hope so intense it felt physical.

“They came from other islands, the colonies, maroons from camps like this one, pirates from as far away as Massachusetts.  They heard that Nassau had fallen, and they came to join us.  The revolution you promised has begun!”

[qqueenofhades]

The Rose and Thorn: Chapter IX

summary:  Sequel to The Dark Horizon. The New World, 1740: Killian and Emma Jones have lived in peace with their family for many years, their pirate past long behind them. But with English wars, Spanish plots, rumors of a second Jacobite rising, and the secret of the lost treasure of Skeleton Island, they and their son and daughter are in for a dangerous new adventure. OUAT/Black Sails. rating: M status: WIP available: FF.net and AO3 previous: chapter VIII

Liam was stirred from a murky, circular, maddening dream by the sound of skittering. Peeling one eye open and promptly wanting to shut it again and die – he was in enough pain in the mornings when he slept in a featherbed, so spending the last week on hard, damp stone had just about done him in – he managed to catch a glimpse of the latest luxury of the Bristol city gaol: a brown rat as long as his forearm, perched near his foot and sniffing about in hope of food. Liam, with all the time he had spent on ships, was no stranger to rats, but it had been a long time since he’d had to deal with them on a regular basis, and he hated the diseased buggers anyway. With a cry of revulsion, he kicked out at it, causing it to speed through a hole in the stones to whatever nest of its brethren vermin awaited it, and sat up straight, sleepiness suddenly evaporated at the prospect of more of them lurking about. This correspondingly caused his back to hate him even more than it customarily did, and he caught short, grimacing and swearing under his breath.

The commotion had roused young Jim Hawkins, who was bedded down on some moldy old grain sacks across the way, and he squinted around with the expression of someone who was still hoping, despite the six days and counting in their current predicament, that he would wake up and discover it had just been a bad dream. “Eh? Whazit?”

“Sorry. Rat.” Liam supposed it was a mercy that it was August, though English summers were not by anyone’s standards terribly warm, otherwise the two of them would have frozen solid down here. No wonder nearly as many prisoners died awaiting sentence as they did on the gallows, which was another thought best done away with. Liam felt horrendously guilty for getting Jim into this with him, but the fact remained that it was not – for bloody once – his fault. He had no notion who had set the Benbow on fire or why Sarah had accused him of it, though he thought darkly that he could guess, and he kept waiting for Lady Murray, with or without Billy Bones, to appear and make them (or at least Liam) choose between assisting her or rotting in this miserable shithole forever.  Jesus. It had been weeks since he vanished from Paris, and Regina had to be tearing the place apart looking for him; she knew it was not in his nature to indiscriminately disappear. She might have marched into King Louis’ very privy closet at Versailles to demand answers, a mental image that summoned a grim smile to Liam’s lips. Much as her techniques might sometimes lack in refinement or concern for other people’s feelings, his wife did know how to get things done. It was one of the things he loved about her.

However, even if Regina did somehow follow the Ariadne’s-thread to find him in Bristol, it would not be nearly as soon as Liam needed her to do it. The constables had been by last evening to smugly inform him and Jim that they were to be tried on the morrow, and it was reasonably plain that any other verdict apart from “cleared of all charges” would see them taking the infamous walk up the wooden steps before the baying crowd, a hooded man waiting at the top. Nobody would shed any tears on Jim’s account, by the sound of things, and while his mother would doubtless plead for her son’s life, one widow whose house and livelihood had just burned to the ground did not possess outstanding political influence. Even if she could save Jim or arrive at a plea deal, however, this would involve convicting Liam. She had accused him of the crime in front of half of Bristol, and the crowd had to see someone punished for it, whether or not he was, strictly speaking, guilty of it. Civic order and public peace of mind demanded no less.

“Thought you were those bastards,” Jim said now, sitting up and tying his hair back in a tangled ponytail. “When they come for us, you think there’s any chance of fighting our way out?”

Liam’s heart clenched, as he could not help but hearing, and seeing, more than a passing resemblance to the young Killian. That was exactly what his brother at the same age would have suggested, and with the same disregard for the odds or the likelihood that it would just get them into more trouble as a result. “I’m not sure that would do us much good.”

“We could try.” Jim’s grey eyes blazed. “Better than sitting here like rats ourselves and waiting meekly to be paraded to a hot courtroom where they would jeer and throw rubbish at us and whisper behind their hands. I’m not going to be condemned to hang by some prick in a powdered wig, and I doubt you will either.”

“Look, lad, we have to think about this.” Liam coughed, which felt like a hot knife between his ribs. “I agree that getting to trial might already be too late for us, but we can’t just up and try to stage some improbable escape without a solid plan as to how – ”

It was clear from Jim’s face that he thought they very much could, but just then, they were interrupted by the sound of echoing footsteps in the corridor outside the cell. They tensed, turning to look, and it was then that, at last, the terrible twosome made their long-awaited reappearance. Lady Fiona was dressed for visiting, never mind that it was to a filthy dungeon, and Billy looked as stubborn and glowering as ever, though he had made some attempt to trim his beard. He stood almost a head and a half taller than his companion, towering like a silent colossus behind her, as she strode up to the bars and clapped her gloved hands. “Well. This really is quite ghastly, isn’t it?”

“Aye.” Liam did not feel in the least reprieved, or relieved that he had correctly predicted her intervention. “Though it was nicer before you arrived.”

“You know that’s no way to speak to someone who has been ceaselessly laboring on your behalf, don’t you? I would have come sooner, but I’ve spent the last several days trying to sort out this regrettable misunderstanding with the authorities. None of us want the spectacle and risk of a trial, do we? We know you haven’t done anything wrong, but it might be hard to convince the bloodthirsty masses, mightn’t it?” She giggled girlishly, which set Liam’s teeth further on edge – Good God, he loathed this woman. “They will have their pound of flesh. But if you could avoid it. . .  you’d want that, wouldn’t you?”

“You have the blue bleeding fucking hell of a lot of nerve,” Liam said, “to come down here and propose that I take your bargain if I want to avoid hanging for your crime. As if it isn’t damn well obvious who actually burned down the Benbow. I don’t know how you bamboozled Sarah into lying for you, but I intend to find out.”

Lady Fiona giggled again, but her teeth were bared, her eyes flat and black as river stones. “I think you will find that very difficult to prove, Captain. Especially after I promised the city such a useful amount of money to rebuild the poor old place and compensate everyone, Mrs. Hawkins especially, affected by the tragedy.”

“So pay her. Don’t just toy with her like a cat with a mouse.”

“Oh you see, Captain, I do so very much want to, but it is that precise matter in which I need your assistance. From where might I acquire that money?”

“Let me guess. Skeleton Island?”

“Indeed. So I can’t make amends for this sad accident, from the goodness of my heart, unless you help me to do it. Unless, that is, you wish to deprive your old friend’s widow and son. Such a pity, after Hawkins died in your service.”

Liam flinched. He did not know how much Lady Fiona knew about the circumstances of James Hawkins senior’s death, and could see absolutely no good to come of her finding out. Likewise, he had considered once or twice that he should really tell the truth to Jim, but he shrank at the prospect. From the days in which Liam had committed his first unforgivable sin in this city for his brother’s sake, he had hoped to bury the bodies deep, and no matter how spectacularly that had subsequently blown up in his face during the Jones brothers’ confrontation and downfall on Antigua with Gold, Plouton, James Nolan, and Jennings, he could not quite bring himself to it. Besides, for better or worse, Liam Jones’ first priority, his integral inclination, his heart and soul and purpose for living, had always been to protect Killian. Killian was not here and could not defend or explain the action of killing Hawkins, even when the man had been in arms and in mutiny against him, and so Liam was not about to divulge it behind his back. Even after so long living apart, in different countries and in different families – Killian with his large, loving pirate clan, Liam and Regina with only each other, as she had deliberately rendered herself barren long ago and there had been no more children since Henry and Geneva had returned with their parents – he could no more do differently than he could walk on his hands, or breathe water, or fly.

A vision of Jennings swam before Liam’s eyes, as it did every so often. You’re just like me, you know. Now you’re even getting to the place of admitting it. You may have killed me, Jones, but I will never die. How can I, when I live on every day in you?

“Well?” Lady Fiona smiled sweetly. “You could drag young Jim to trial with you, though that would be such a further cruelty to his poor mother. Or – ”

“Don’t listen to her,” Jim said. “We can outsmart a trial.”

No, lad. We can’t. Not when she had already informed them that she had bought off the entire jury, with the very money she expected Liam to help her fetch. Jim knew that they were in trouble, but it had not connected to an actual understanding of how loaded the dice were. He thought that presenting convincing evidence to the contrary would logically change men’s minds, rather than entrenching them still more firmly in their beliefs, evidence be damned. Liam had too long and bitter experience with the mood of a mob to put false and feeble hope in such a deliverance. And he had to get them out of here somehow. That was his job and always had been, no matter how much of his soul it cost. Can’t be much left by now anyway.

“Very well,” he said loathingly. “I agree to help you, and you conjure up a plea deal from your puppet jury. They release Jim with no charges.”

Jim looked at him in startlement; they had forged an unavoidable rough solidarity due to being stuck in a small cell together for a week, but that was a long way from agreeing to take the fall for both of them. “Captain Jones – ”

“Come now, don’t you want to be free?” Lady Fiona looked at him with those bright snake eyes. “It’s a very gallant offer he’s making, and between you and me, he does rather owe it to your family. All this time with just the two of you, and he hasn’t told you the truth about your father’s death?”

The air seemed to turn as cold as December. Jim looked blank, then suspicious, then angry. “My father died fighting pirates in the Caribbean. I already know – ”

“Did you ever learn which pirates? And why?” Lady Fiona turned back to Liam with an expression of mock concern. “Oh no. You haven’t told him. How dreadful.”

“Tell me what?” Jim’s voice abruptly caught in a boyish crack. “Tell me what?”

“Why, about the reason you grew up without a father.” Lady Fiona’s eyes sparkled more madly and mercilessly than ever. “Don’t you want to know?”

Jim looked between her and Liam, as if expecting and half-hoping that this was just another flat-out lie. It took him only one glance at Liam’s face, however, to see that this at least she was not making up. “What do you know about my father’s death? What happened?”

“Why,” Lady Fiona said. “That none other than – ”

“I killed him.” Liam did not even form the thought or the words consciously, just knew that they were rushing out of him with no ability to be checked or called back. “I. . . should have told you. I killed your father. It was a terrible situation, he rallied the men still loyal to the Navy after K – after we went over into piracy. I faced him in battle, and I. . . I did what was before me. I have never forgotten it.”

In truth, Liam had been far away from the battle of Nassau wherein all of this had happened, convalescing on the Maroons’ island after he had been stabbed by his younger half-brother. It struck him suddenly that Billy – who had been aboard the Walrus and fighting with the others, including Emma, Killian, and Flint, that whole time – knew bloody well that Liam had not killed Hawkins, that he had never set foot on New Providence Island or gone over to the pirates’ cause, even after Killian fell into the mad thrall of Captain Hook. Billy could open his mouth and disprove the entire story with a word.

Billy said nothing.

“You. . .” Jim, at that moment, looked exactly as Killian had that night on Antigua, when he found out what Liam had actually done to get them out of slavery. “You k. . .?”

“Aye.” Liam’s voice scraped like gravel in his throat. “I – ”

“You were his captain. His friend. My mother told you that the Jones brothers would always be welcome beneath her roof. She hugged you. Is that why you looked like that when she did? As if you could barely breathe with the guilt?”

Liam was considerably impressed with Jim’s perceptiveness, though he had absolutely no idea how to respond. This seemed, at least, a perversely fitting venue for such a false confession, already imprisoned for a crime he had not committed. “I’m a coward, lad. I know that about myself by now. I have. . . I have no excuses.”

Jim stared at him with the stunned, speechless mask of a boy who had grown up without a father, the very look Liam had seen in Killian’s eyes every day. Finally, very quietly, he said, “Get out.”

“Jim – ”

“I’d rather rot here forever than accept my freedom as a favor from you. Who knows. Maybe you did burn down the Benbow – old habits and all that?” Jim’s lip curled. “Though whatever happens to you, I think we can safely say you deserve it.”

Liam concurred. He had, he always had, knew it perhaps even more unshakably than Killian and his long-ingrained self hatred. But before he could remotely concoct what to say, Lady Fiona jerked her head, and a few of the prison orderlies appeared to unlock the cell and haul Liam and Jim out. Jim was marched off in one direction, while Liam’s wrists were put into irons and he was conducted down a low stone corridor smelling of damp and lined with unlit torches, through a blaze of pale sunlight, and into the narrow, stuffy office on the far side. A magistrate’s clerk squinted down at him, recorded his statement, and informed Lady Fiona that it would be duly passed along to the relevant individuals, and Liam himself was issued with a warning. Now that his bail and asylum from persecution were a matter of public record, and since Lady Fiona accordingly had actual documents to call in against him if he should flout her again, it would be extremely unwise to do so. She was tightening her grip on him, weaving him into multiple strands of the spiderweb, not counting on any one thread of guilt or deception or blackmail alone to bind him to her, but instead using as many as she could, making it harder and harder for him to think of escape. This woman is as dangerous as Jennings was, if not more. I’ll have to kill her too, if it’s even possible. He had ended one demon; asking to be so fortunate as to end two felt beyond a lifetime’s worth of luck. Then they can both bloody haunt me together.

Once Lady Fiona had gone, presumably to ensure that her cooked books were settled, and left them together to wait, Liam glanced over at Billy. Whatever the other man thought he was holding over him, Liam wanted it out now. “Why didn’t you tell Jim I was lying?”

Billy grunted. “You want to incriminate yourself, who was I to stop you?”

“Unless you’re waiting for the moment when you can? Reveal the truth, position yourself as the beacon of it, and prove whatever bloody point you’re trying to make with all this?”

“You know.” Billy looked grimy amused. “Time was, I thought just like you, Jones. Not in terms of honor – I think we both know that’s flexible, to say the least – but protection. I was so bloody dead-set to protect everybody. The crew, mostly, but also Flint. We fought like cats and dogs, aye, but I still protected him, for the longest fucking time, even after he tried to kill me. Out of some misguided sense of fairness that if I was protecting the crew from him, I must also protect him from the crew. Even John Silver, headfirst up Flint’s arse as he could otherwise be counted on to be, knew what he was. Then I realized, if I’m the only thing holding it together, if I’m the one standing there like Atlas stopping it from crashing down and crushing them, what sort of fucking existence is that? Flint’s madness drove us hither and yon, and I stood by too long. Even helped him in it. I knew what the Navy was, from Captain fucking Hume and the Scarborough – but eventually, if the Navy and Woodes Rogers were the instruments that had been given to me, why not use them? I knew Flint would most likely try to cache Vane and Jennings’ gold on Skeleton Island, if he intended to cache it at all. Silver was too busy profiting off being his confidante, he wasn’t going to help me do what needed to be done. So yes. I went to Rogers. I told him where to go. And from that day forth, I haven’t protected anyone anymore. Not once.”

“So I see.” Liam looked back at him, just as coolly. “So that is what this is? Revenge on Flint?”

“I intend to see him pay for his crimes finally and in full, yes.”

“He has lived for almost twenty-five years away from that world, in peace, with his family. You’re still bent on destroying him now?”

“If he learned about me, would he not be bent on doing the same?”

Liam was tempted to point out that this seemed a rather chicken-and-the-egg conundrum to him: nobody was about to portray James Flint as an innocent and passive victim in whatever skullduggery was afoot, but Billy had decidedly started the present difficulties, and thus far, any of Flint’s actions to protect himself and his family – the exact thing that Billy was so deriding – could appear as justified defensive measures. It was that, therefore, that made Liam feel far more of a kinship to Flint than to Billy, outward appearances aside. Billy had once protected and cared for others and felt as if he had to rue and repent the day he ever had, whereas Flint had slowly learned how to do so again, to do more than just destroy and avenge, to value his loved ones and their nearly miraculous restoration to him more than his rage. They had in fact proceeded in diametrically opposite directions, and Liam – for whom it was second nature, even now, to take the blame for Killian’s crime, forged in those floggings aboard ship where he gritted his teeth and counted strokes and told his little brother later that it wasn’t so bad, rather than see Killian go under the lash himself – understood Flint’s choices far more, and admired the strength it had taken to break the habit. Wounds made when we are young never entirely heal.

“So,” Liam said after a moment. “How exactly did you learn that Flint was alive, if that was what set you off on this hunt for vengeance?”

Billy glanced at him with a twisted smile. “Oh, you’d appreciate it.”

“And?”

“Do you think I’m a fucking idiot? We might be unavoidably working together, but we’re not allies. I know, because you’ve just shown it again, that when push comes to shove, you’ll protect Flint and the others. So I’m not about to tell you.”

“Bloody hell.” Liam knew that he himself was stubborn, knew that it was perhaps his paramount character trait, but he wanted to hope, however vainly, that he had never been quite this stubborn. “You’re not a stupid man. You can see that Lady Murray is completely bloody insane. So how do you justify working with her, selling her whatever she wants, if it gets you closer to revenge for a quarter-century-old grudge?”

“That’s the catch. I don’t have to.” Billy looked him dead in the eye. “As I said, you’re no stranger to that yourself, so if you’re asking how you justify it, that’s a problem for you.”

“She’s blackmailed me. Threatened me, forced me, used Sarah and Jim’s safety as pawns, destroyed their home, removed me from mine, cut me off from my wife, and set me up to choose between being sentenced to death or taking part in her mad little trip with you. Whereas you approached and collaborated with her willingly. I’d say our positions are not quite equal.”

“Maybe not.” Billy shrugged. “As I also said, though, you’re the one who still cares about that, is twisting yourself into knots over the apparent injustice of it. You could be the most dangerous of us all if you had any sense of self-preservation, Jones, but instead you’ll throw yourself away time and time again for your little brother. That’s not love. That’s pathetic. I spent too long throwing myself away for unworthy men before I realized that the damage could never be undone. It seems to be, however, a lesson you will never learn.”

Liam’s fists clenched, even as Billy tensed, shifting in preparation to block any potential swings taken at him. They stared each other down, air crackling, both of them clearly realizing that there would be a reckoning of some sort before this was over, and possibly of the sort that one of them would not walk away from. And that is far too bloody likely to be me. Physically, Liam and Billy were almost exactly the same age, but Billy had still been actively serving on ships and fighting and scrapping and adventuring God knew where the past decades, while Liam, with the legacy of two serious wounds and the anguished, grisly, scarring ordeal that had been his final confrontation with Jennings, had settled down in Paris and given up that life. He was not completely a decrepit old man, but he wasn’t who he used to be either, and he knew that. However he was getting out of this – if he was getting out of this – it would have to be another way.

The tension was broken by the door opening, as Lady Fiona stepped inside. “Captain,” she said sweetly. “You’ll be happy to hear that Jim has been cleared of all charges and permitted to go home – well, wherever his mother is staying. It is, therefore, time for you to hold up your end of the bargain. Our ship has been resupplied, and we’ll be leaving this evening. You’ll be serving as captain.”

“To Skeleton Island?”

“Eventually.” Her smile remained infuriatingly coy. “We have plenty of other business to do first, but yes, we will be making our way there. Oh, and the other thing. I do know where your family lives, including the little brother you are still so bafflingly devoted to protect. So. . .”

“Do you?”

“Of course.” Once again, that sickening, kittenish smile. “Savannah, isn’t it? Georgia?”

That, despite everything she had already done to him, rocked Liam on his heels. He had still been telling himself that this was some combination of spite, limited information, and lucky guesses, and that she didn’t actually know where to find them and hurt them. But hearing that comforting delusion so conclusively dispelled took all the air out of him. He had nothing left to say, no further protestations to make. He had to do whatever it took to keep her away from them, as he had with Jennings, and if this go-round killed him, well. It seemed long overdue.

“Well?” Lady Fiona said. “Ready to go, Captain?”

Liam lifted his head. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yes.”

-----------------------

Killian continued to bang on the hatch long after he knew Geneva was gone, that she had not heard him, that he had missed whatever slim, wild, impossible chance he had ever so briefly had. Rufio’s troupe of junior jackasses had duly come down to pummel him and drag him back into the darkness of the orlop deck where they had tried, more or less successfully, to contain him for the duration of the voyage. But no matter how clever they were with knots and chains and ropes and restraints, they still had not yet found one that could hold him permanently. For a while, yes, but he always worked out a way to break it in the end. That was what had allowed him to climb up when he heard them approaching another ship, planning to make a break for it if he possibly could – and then in that heart-stopping, lightning-struck moment, realizing that the ship was none other than the Rose, and his daughter was the one speaking. He’d tried to shout for her, would have torn his way through wood and canvas with bare hand and stump to get to her, but the Lost Boys (as he had heard them calling themselves) were too quick on the uptake. Geneva hadn’t known it was him. It hadn’t been enough.

The one godforsaken useful bit of information that Killian had gleaned from the whole miserable affair, therefore, was the fact that they were bound for France. Rufio had, of course, taken great pleasure in keeping this from him, and even the boys had been careful not to mention this in his hearing. Killian did not know what was in France to the wee bastards’ interest, but there was one thing in France that was very much to his interest, and that was his brother. The Lost Boys might not be taking him conveniently to Paris, but it was not a total stretch of the imagination, and if so, Killian would do whatever it took to get to Liam. Liam would know what to do, he usually did. At least, he could put the wheels in motion to get word back to the rest of the family, and possibly also help kick Rufio and the world’s worst nursery school’s collective behinds, just for the principle of the thing. If Killian could get to Liam, it might not matter that he had missed Geneva. Indeed, he all but bloody had to. Let himself be squirrelled off to some disreputable French captivity, and his goose might be cooked for good.

Of course, this assumed that Rufio had not just been inventing some sundry destination to throw Geneva off the scent, but Killian had to hope this was not the case – for one thing, he didn’t think the strutting peacock was clever enough to think that fast on his feet. Yet as assumptions were all he presently had, there was nothing for it. The trip had been one such extended fit of misery – rattling in the hold like a ballast-stone during the storm, never fed enough, obsessively working to undo whatever knot they had him in, fighting flashbacks to Captain Freeman, Captain Campbell, and Captain Silver alike, and worrying endlessly about Emma – that Killian did not care in what fashion it ended, as long as it fucking did. He had tried to keep track of time by scratching marks in the hull, one for each day, but in constant darkness, it was very hard to be sure, and he felt like something pale and spongy, a mushroom or a fungus that only grew at night. It had been a while, that was all he knew. A fortnight at least, closer to three weeks. Who knew what sort of time they were making, but it seemed good.

Killian spent the next several days, therefore, conserving his strength and lying low after the failed escape attempt – he couldn’t take these brats thumping him indefinitely, especially after being fed a diet of shit and kept in the damp and dark. He was already feeling as bloody rickety as a scarecrow, and he tried to find small exercises, ways to keep himself from rotting entirely to sludge. They had, of course, confiscated his hook, but after quite a lot of searching, crawling on all threes through the hold, he found another one, with which some invention he managed to make fit into his brace. That ascertained, he took it out again and hid it, as he did not want them tipped off that he had one. No, that was a surprise best saved for the opportune moment.

He lost track of how many days it was after that, but it wasn’t more than about another week and a half. Killian wondered if it had been his birthday at some point, as it seemed to be getting on in August, and felt another pang of rage at how negligently these bastards had filched him from his life – not as if he expected some fuss of a birthday to-do anyway, but it was another reminder of how quickly everything had gone four feet up. God, he missed Emma. The rest of them too, even Flint, but especially Emma.

At last, on a sultry, sweaty, late-summer morning, Killian heard the distinctive sound of gulls, the creak of chains and the hum of commerce, and knew that they had reached port. Climbing painfully to his lookout post, he spotted half-timbered houses lining a handsome stone waterfront, the Bourbon coat of arms flapping against the sunny haze, and crowded docks teeming with small fishing boats and larger traders. As this was where he and Emma had arrived when they came to France the first time after the end of the pirates’ war, Killian recognized it: Le Havre, in Haute-Normandie, about a hundred miles upriver from Paris. Same place my bloody father ran off to, after abandoning us. Where he remarried and had a new son and never bloody once looked back. At all costs, Killian did not intend to let that same fate befall him, even inadvertently. No matter what, he was going home.

Hearing the sound of feet descending the ladder, he quickly checked that his new hook was hidden, and more or less permitted a half-dozen Lost Boys to untie him and march him above deck. The first blaze of full sunlight in over a month was withering; he felt like some fell creature about to crumble to ash, squinting and shielding his face against it, as a jeering chorus of chortles echoed around him. “Not feeling quite the thing, Captain?”

“I’m feeling just fine, actually.” Blinking frenzied sunspots from his dazzled eyes, Killian tried to judge when he would have the best chance of running for it. His legs were still as wobbly as buggeration, and if he made a move for it too fast, they could all dogpile him again and defeat the whole purpose. “Waiting for the big prick among all you little ones, are we?”

A few of the older ones, who grasped the double insult, glared at him, while Rufio swaggered forward. “You’re still not very courteous, are you, Hook?”

“A lot of grown men far more terrifying – and far more competent – than you have tried to thrash me into submission, you preening twit. They failed, and since you’re still almost adorably naïve enough to think that putting a man belowdecks and not feeding him every day is the worst thing you can do to him, it’s no damn surprise that so did you. I’d say it’s been fun, boys, but it hasn’t, and frankly, I hope the lot of you die of a bloody flux. And so. . . ta.”

As he was speaking, Killian had been edging inconspicuously toward the railing, and on the last word, he pushed up and over as hard as he could, bending his knees to absorb the impact on the quay beyond. There were startled yells from the Lost Boys – bloody amateurs – as they crowded to the side to stare wildly after him. As they could not open fire in the middle of a busy port, it was just possible to hear Rufio bawling at them to get down there now. Doubtless his employer would be very unhappy if he let their prize catch slip the net now. Pity.

Killian sprinted flat-out up the docks, crashing into merchants like ninepins and sending a volley of fish, baskets, sacks, ropes, barrels, and other such items flying. An equal volley of furious French obscenities followed him, but at least the pandemonium (ha, see what he did there) made it extremely difficult for the Lost Boys to get through, and he dodged and weaved, grabbed a cavalry saber strapped to the saddle of an unattended horse, and would have pinched the horse as well, but that would ensure he was hanged on the spot whenever they caught up to him – horse-thievery was a capital crime everywhere. He dove around a corner, fumbled out the hook and screwed it into the brace, and turned just in time to see Rufio himself speeding up arrears with an enraged expression. He went for the sword at his own belt, yanked it free to several screams as passersby scrambled for cover, and took a vicious swing at Hook.

Finally. Killian had been waiting for this moment for the entire voyage, and he did not intend to let it slip through his reduced number of fingers. He deflected Rufio’s attacks with ease, flicked them aside and aside again – the boy was strong but untrained, there was mostly blunt fury and not much refined technique. If he wanted to cross blades with the very pirate he had been so disdaining, he could learn a thing or two about why the world had feared them in the first place, not just as tall tales and monster stories that an arrogant pup like him didn’t believe anyway. Killian did not want to kill a man in the middle of Le Havre ten minutes after his arrival, as this would add the French authorities to his currently extensive roster of enemies, but Rufio bloody well deserved it, and leaving him alive to plot more chaos in his wake might be an act of mercy, but also one of considerable foolishness. He had not done it in a long time, but it was remarkable, and unsettling, how the knack never quite left you.

Killian caught Rufio’s slashing downcut on his hook, the metal tangling in screeching sparks, and slammed his sword straight between the boy’s ribs with a horrible, grating squelch. In that instant, as Rufio convulsed, Killian could see shock and incomprehension in his glazing eyes, almost fear, and it struck him that this was a boy, not a man. That for all his affected posture and bravado and ridiculous hair, this was no hardened criminal or ruthless killer, nothing different from any other lad at this age overinflated with a sense of his own importance. Rufio was, in fact, given or take a few months, probably the exact same age as his son Sam.

Regretting it instantly, horrified at himself, Killian jerked the sword out, as Rufio swayed and went to his knees in the dirt, clutching the ragged wound in his chest. Killian caught him as Rufio fell backwards into his arms, staring at him in mute, furious accusation. He seemed to be trying to say something, but couldn’t get his tongue around the blood. He shuddered once, then died without another sound, vacant eyes reflecting the blaze of the French sun.

Killian set him down slowly, arms feeling like stone, even as he could hear shouts rapidly coming closer – more than one concerned citizen was clearly leading the port authorities in the direction of the brawl. He was almost tempted to give himself up in penance, but that would render the whole thing pointless, and he had to get out of here now. Just as two large gentlemen in brown coats, unslinging blunderbusses, tore through a curtain – “ARRÊTEZ, AU NOM DE LA LOI” – and nearly tripped over Rufio, Killian scrambled wildly to his feet and ran.

He didn’t think they had gotten a good look at his face, but there could not be many men corresponding to the description of “murderous fiend with hook for a hand,” so as he kept up his demented obstacle course through the narrow, twisting streets, he hastily unscrewed the offending appendage and stashed it in his filthy coat again. Out here in the open air, Killian was pungently aware of the fact that he had not bathed or otherwise washed for a month, unless you counted being periodically drenched in seawater whenever the Pan hit rough seas, and possibly they could just follow his stench to track him down; they wouldn’t even require a bloodhound. If he could find somewhere to lie low – Rufio had been common gutter riffraff, such sorts died every day, they would put a cursory effort into finding his killer, but no more. Aye. Common gutter riffraff, and you killed him. So what does that make you?

Killian eyed up some of the counting and money-changing houses he passed, as such institutions were ubiquitous around a busy port that handled a good deal of international trade, but seeing as he had already started off with murder, bursting into one of those as if to burgle it would be a very bad follow-up move. Besides, they were almost surely all owned by Jews. Forced into the profession in medieval times by church restrictions forbidding Christians from it, Jews had been seized upon to do the essential economic dirty work since they (again, according to the boundless wisdom of the church) had no immortal souls to endanger with the worldly sins of mammon. Their situation was marginally improved now from how it had been then, but there were still not many jobs they could legally do, and Christian society, eager to throw stones (often literally) at the stereotype of the shifty, money-grubbing Jew while conveniently overlooking the fact that they had created it, needed no help in making trouble for them. If Killian was to barge into one of their houses, and the French constables were to find a Jew apparently sheltering a murderer, it could get messy (or rather, messier) in a hurry.

Killian, therefore, did not break stride, even though he was starting to feel a horrendous stitch in his side and other symptoms of complete physical disuse and imprisonment for a month. He couldn’t keep careering about like a runaway ox-cart much longer, and even if not the Jews, he should find someone else to burden himself upon. Spotting what looked like the backside of a seedy tavern, he vaulted clumsily over the low brick wall into the courtyard, crouched down as he heard angry shouts at the head of the alley, and held his breath until they passed. Then he went to the pump, drew some water and tried to make himself look at least somewhat less like a bloodstained, mangy tramp, and when he thought he had effected some improvement (or at least wouldn’t look any worse than the rest of the tavern’s dubious clientele) he went around the front, pushed the door open, ducked under the crooked beam, and sauntered casually in.

He had spent time at several establishments of similar caliber, but it had been a while, and he told himself that it was his imagination that everyone was glancing at him sidelong – though surely the authorities in valiant pursuit of some assorted villain could not be an unusual occurrence in this part of town. He had no money to buy a drink, so they would probably chuck him out on his backside soon anyway, but he didn’t need to stay long. Just until he could wrangle some way to hitch a ride on a cart or a riverboat heading down the Seine to Paris. Liam was going to be surprised to see him, to say the least, and this was hardly the way Killian had wanted to go about the family reunion, but he couldn’t help a spark of wistful, yearning happiness at the thought of seeing his brother again. Liam might not be thrilled at the fact of his little brother already fleeing the law in France, but he, alas, would likely not be terribly surprised.

Thinking this, therefore, Killian almost did not notice the fact that one of the hooded figures at the bar looked faintly familiar. He only caught it when they turned their head, and he caught a glimpse of sleek black braids, elegantly frosted with silver, coiled and pinned up. It wasn’t a they, or indeed a he – it was a she, and one engaged in what looked to be politely threatening palaver with the scabby sea dog next to her. Killian’s French was not nearly good enough to get the details, but she seemed to be trying to haggle out the use of his vessel – and then, it hit. It had been over twenty years since they’d seen each other, but he still recognized that voice.

Another lightning bolt, of a different nature, went down his back. Then he leaned forward, grabbed her sleeve, and hissed, “Regina?”

She spun around, saw him – and, forgivably, stared. She was too self-controlled to shriek, or otherwise give any overt evidence of shock, though her eyes went wide and her lips went thin. She surveyed his utterly disreputable estate up and down, then got to her feet, seized him by the shirt in turn, and hauled him, with impressive vigor for a small woman in her late fifties, around the dim corner and up against the hunchbacked wall. “Killian?”

“Aye, it’s bloody me.” Killian disentangled himself. He and his sister-in-law had never had a terribly warm relationship, though they tolerated each other for Liam’s sake – it was not easy to forget that they had met because Regina, then a high-class brothel madam on Antigua, had hired the Jones brothers to destroy Emma, who she blamed for the death of the man she loved. But Regina had grudgingly come around, taken Henry and Geneva to safety, and she and Liam had been married for many years, so Killian refrained from any other smart remarks. “What the devil are you doing here?”

“What the devil are you doing here? And yes, bloody seems to be the operative word for you.” Regina regarded him coolly. “There’s no way you could have heard, is there?”

“Heard what?”

“Liam’s missing.” Her mouth went even thinner. “He’s been missing for weeks, he went for breakfast one morning and never came back. I’ve turned Paris upside down, and the only lead I could come up with was that someone named Lady Fiona Murray was last seen with him. She’s English, apparently, so I was intending to get passage over the Channel and ask a few – what?”

“Oh, bloody hell.” Killian had to sit down on a hogshead. He had abruptly guessed why the Lost Boys might have been charged with bringing him to France, if Lady Fiona, the other head of the hydra, had been – at least until recently – in residence here. Give him over as a plaything for her and a blackmail inducement for the rest of the family back in Charlestown, and Gideon could keep the lot of them busy, chasing their tails, while he did absolutely whatever the fuck he pleased – Killian, with his old and deeply embittered enmity against the Gold family, would be too tempting for Lady Fiona to resist. Except in paramount irony, she had already, by the sounds of things, likewise kidnapped the other Jones brother from the bosom of wife and home, and thus was not available to receive her poisoned present. Jesus bloody Christ, I hate the lot of them.

With that, Killian was tersely obligated to explain to Regina the difficulties they had encountered in Charlestown with the pestilential Murray junior, the connection to malfeasance-in-chief Robert Gold, what he had been up to the last month, and his agonizingly close shave with Geneva and the Rose at sea, as his daughter had also had her arm twisted into setting sail to England in company with the one and only John Silver. Killian couldn’t see all the threads just yet, but he was increasingly certain that they were drawing together in an ever more intricate web with his family, and Skeleton Island, at the center. “I wish we had gotten rid of all the damn treasure, as Flint was planning, what with the trouble it looks to be causing us now!”

Regina looked as if she couldn’t say that she disagreed. “So Liam was kidnapped by the mother, you by the son? They aren’t – Gold isn’t alive, is he?”

“No,” Killian said, even as it struck him that he didn’t actually know – the crocodile would be in his mid-seventies by now, but would not consider that a major impediment to pursuing a colorful and varied career of evil, especially given the formidable grudge he held against the pirates for destroying his plans to re-establish the Star Chamber and take over the world. “I mean, I don’t think so. But Lady Fiona’s his sister, as I said, and she seems even more lunatic than he was, so we don’t need him to cause more than enough trouble. But Geneva’s in England, or will be soon enough, and if there’s any chance Lady Fiona took Liam there, that’s worth trying, isn’t it?”

Regina’s expression flickered at the mention of her niece. She had, Killian knew, become quite attached to her during the months she had cared for her as a baby in Paris, and part of her likely would not have minded at all if Killian and Emma had never returned to resume parenthood. There was also the fact that it was, as she had already noted, as good a lead as any on the whereabouts of her husband, and no matter how unconventionally their relationship had begun – though no more than his and Emma’s, Killian had to admit – he knew that Regina loved Liam deeply. It was one of the few points on which they could always find common ground.

“So,” Regina said brusquely. “We just do as I was already trying to accomplish, and find passage to England? Where, London?”

“I don’t know. I assume that’s as good a place as any to start. There is, though, one small thing. I may, ah, I may be wanted for murder.”

“Really?” Regina raised a cutting eyebrow. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“I wouldn’t be chucking too many stones in that regard, love, seeing as you’ve murdered any number of men in your day. Just because you did it more indirectly doesn’t make you less guilty. In any event, it would be unwise for me to appear on the docks until it blows over. I’m not delighted about staying in this rat’s nest for any length of time, so perhaps if we could suss out more suitable accommodations – ”

“With you looking like that? Not likely. A haystack is about the best you could hope for.” Regina sniffed. “Haven’t bathed either, have you?”

“No, unfortunately, that went by the wayside while I was being abducted, chained up, half starved, and nearly drowned. Bloody hell, I know it’s in our nature to butt heads, but I also know that we both love Liam – and, I think, Geneva. So how about we both give up fighting the bit for once, and try to ride in the same direction?”

Regina studied him warily, then finally jerked her head in a nod. “Fine,” she said. “We’ll wait until your latest bout of felony doesn’t catch up with you. Who did you kill, anyway?”

“A boy named Rufio.” Killian clenched his fingers against his palm, once more feeling the sword rasp against bone. “Leader of the gang that kidnapped me.”

“He deserved it, then,” Regina said indifferently. “I wouldn’t tie yourself into knots over it. Come on. Let’s get out of here before you get me arrested too.”

Killian raised an eyebrow of his own at her back, reminded himself what was at stake, and without another word, for which he felt he should be congratulated, followed her.

----------------------

Jim had no idea where to go after his release from prison. His mother was almost certainly staying with his uncle at the Seven Stars, but if he went there, he would have to tell her what had happened, what he had learned, and he wasn’t sure he could stand that just yet. He was still reeling. It wasn’t as if he felt the grief on a personal level, since he had never known his father – and whose bloody fault is that, then? – but the betrayal was of a scale he could scarcely comprehend. He felt vindicated beyond words that he’d gotten himself thrown out of the Navy and never gone back, if these were the sorts of men they elevated to command – indeed, Jim had met enough Navy officers that he shouldn’t be surprised, seeing as a great deal of them seemed to have booked advance lodging in the deeper of the poet Dante’s circles of hell. But still. To spend all these years thinking that your father was a hero who died bravely fighting pirates, and then discover that he had been stabbed in the back by his own captain during a failed mutiny. . . Jim could feel the blood beating in his head, against his eyes, as if it was about to burst out of every orifice in a likewise hellishly appropriate spectacle. Jesus, he wanted to hit something.

He spent a completely aimless afternoon going absolutely nowhere (no different, he thought bitterly, from the rest of his stupid joke of a life) slept under a mossy piling on one of the back quays where nobody would bother him, and spent the next day trying to screw up the courage to just go face his mother and tell her the truth. But coming on the loss of the Benbow, and throwing her hospitality to Liam back in her face, it would completely break her heart, and he did not want to return without at least something tangible to atone for all the chaos and woe he had caused her, directly or otherwise. And as much as he did not want to admit it, his thoughts kept drifting to the tantalizing specter of Skeleton Island. It was a tall tale, a fantasy. . . but Billy said it was real, that he’d been there for three years, he could go back. He, Lady Fiona, and Liam bloody Jones had doubtless already departed on that very errand, seeing as that had been the condition of Liam’s emancipation from jail (maybe they’d shut him back in again when they were done), but perhaps there was a way to follow them. Not as if a single captain in Bristol would let Jim within a hundred yards of his ship, or listen to anything he had to say, so that was out. But perhaps if he just thought a bit harder. . .

Jim’s restless and unhappy peregrinations were interrupted on the evening of the sixth day after his release, as he had sent a note to his mother to let her know that he was alive and free, but was setting off to make reparations – how or where, he of course had no idea, but he hoped it would ease at least some of her worrying while explaining why he couldn’t come home, such as it was, just yet. He had taken to hanging around the docks in hopes of earning enough money for supper via odd jobs, and thus noticed the ship making her careful way up the river channel and into berth at the quay. She was a beauty, though obviously had been considerably battered on her voyage, and looked enough like a refitted Navy frigate that Jim squinted suspiciously. Sixth-rate, if he had to guess. The name painted on her stern was Rose.

Intrigued for absolutely no good reason other than that he had never seen her in Bristol before, and he knew almost all the vessels that traded out of here, Jim moved closer, watching the hands throw out ropes to tie up. Once the Rose was moored, four people descended the gangplank, two men and two women. Jim thought the older, blonde-haired man with a kind, gaunt face must be the captain, but the shorter, black-ponytailed one next to him, limping along on a crutch –

A brief, muted shock went through him. Billy had said to report it at once if he saw a one-legged man, a man named Silver, who he clearly considered a threat, and while of course this could easily be some other one-legged man, amputees being not uncommon in the world of seafaring, Jim could not help but feel that the possibility warranted at least some inspection. The third member of the party was a Negro woman, handsome and stately, long dreadlocks tied with a colorful head cloth, but Jim’s attention was immediately and then unshakably captured by the fourth, the other woman. She was about his age, with dark hair pinned up, striking green eyes, elegant cheekbones, and a cool, quiet air of command that suddenly made him reconsider if the blonde man was in fact the captain. But surely she –

Jim stared at them (all right, especially at her) as they made their way up to the street and appeared to be engaged in a low-level disagreement. When this was not sorted out in a few minutes, and his curiosity had by far got the best of him, he strolled up. “Evening. First time in Bristol, is it? Can I help?”

“Not the first time, no.” It was the one-legged man who answered, regarding him avidly. “But it has been a while, yes. What was that place you said you father and uncle used to stay, Captain? The Benbow?”

It was difficult to say which part of this surprised Jim the most – the fact that “Captain” was directed at the young woman, the mention of her familial connections here in time gone by, or that said familial connections were, yet again, entangled with his. Still, he managed not to show it. “If it’s the Benbow you’re looking for, you’re out of luck. It burned to the ground a fortnight ago.”

“It what?”

“Trust me,” Jim said grimly. “It’s a long bloody story. And one that, given which, I think I’d like to know who exactly you are.”

The group exchanged looks. Finally the one-legged man said, “I’m John Silver. This is my. . . this is Mistress Madi Scott. That is Thomas Hamilton, and his great-niece, Captain Geneva Jones.”

That confirmed his suspicions about Silver, but this last surname was one that Jim had been hoping not to hear, especially in relation to a young woman as distracting as Geneva. He reminded himself that it was very common, and yet was about to ask, before deciding that he did not want to know; he did not want to have to dislike Geneva just yet. “Jim Hawkins.”

They did not seem to take particular notice of this, which raised his hopes that this was somehow a different Jones (that father and uncle comment did not sound promising, but he ignored it). It was Geneva, however, who said, “I think that was the family that owned the Benbow, wasn’t it?”

“Aye,” Jim said, supposing it wasn’t much good to dissemble at this point. “My mother’s inn. It burned, as I said, and that’s why I’m out here on the bloody docks.”

Silver considered him for a long moment. Then he said abruptly, “Billy Bones have anything to do with it?”

Jim was not surprised by this question either, but he was canny enough to blink in confusion, as if he was. “Sounds vaguely familiar? But if you want to know more, I’d appreciate supper. And for that matter, a proper roof over my head.”

“Nobody’s taken you in from the goodness of their hearts?”

“Do you think I would be out here if they had?”

Silver smiled faintly, in acknowledgement of the point. There was something almost wry in his gaze, and quite sad, until Jim recalled that earlier comment about being back to Bristol after a very long time away. He did not think, somehow, that the circumstances of Silver’s last leaving had been pleasant, or what had impelled him to do so in the first place – as if he barely had to ask the question of whether anyone had taken Jim in, because he bloody well knew they hadn’t. But then, as if masking this momentary crack in his composure, he looked swiftly back at Geneva and Thomas Hamilton. “I’d say we could afford to provide the lad with bed and board in return for some information, couldn’t we?”

“Easier to offer when it’s not your money to spend, isn’t it?” Geneva looked at him coolly. “But I suppose you’re right. Mr. Hawkins, if you would care to come with us?”

“Oh – aye, sure, I could.” It wasn’t as if he had anything better to do, and uncertainty about the rest of them aside, he would not mind passing quite some time yet in Miss – well, Captain – Jones’ company. He really did hope, however vainly, that she was not related to Liam. As they started to walk, he suggested casually, “You know, you can call me Jim.”

“Where are we going, Mr. Hawkins?”

It had been worth a try. “There’s the King’s Arms on Broad Quay, they’ll give you a fair tariff. Food’s not bad, either.” If he was avoiding the Seven Stars, the King’s Arms was the least terrible backup option; its landlord was one of the followers of John Wesley, the itinerant evangelist and religious reformer, and felt that good deeds and social conscience, even and especially applied to such a hopeless case as Jim, was a service well-rendered to the Almighty. Even his charity, however, did not extend quite so far as putting Jim up for free indefinitely, so with no money, he had not been able to ask before. “It’ll be comfortable enough, if you – what?”

“Sorry,” Geneva said, exchanging a strange look with her uncle Thomas. “Only that putting the lot of us up in a lodging house called the King’s Arms is. . . more than a bit ironic.”

Jim sensed a story there, though he was unsure if it was wise to go digging for it, given the considerable misfortune he had already incurred by getting mixed up in the personal histories of mysterious newcomers. He led them up to Broad Quay and the King’s Arms, where the landlord was (not without considerable and not-unjustified wariness, given Jim’s recent track record) persuaded to accommodate them for the evening. The traveling party was weary from what had clearly been anything but an uneventful crossing, and as Geneva and Mrs. Scott went up to their room to freshen before supper, and Mr. Hamilton went to pay, Jim found himself alone with John Silver, the man that Bones had so suspected, or feared, as to warn him personally against. They sat there, trying to pretend that they were not surreptitiously stealing glances at each other, as Silver unbuckled the straps of his peg leg and eased it off with a grimace. Seeing that, and not sure what made him ask, Jim nonetheless said, “Does it hurt?”

“This?” Silver looked surprised that anyone would ever enquire into his physical comfort. “Not usually. I lost it years ago. Though sometimes, such as now, it barks up something terrible.”

“How’d you lose it?”

“Ask a lot of questions, don’t you?” Silver cocked his head. “Valiantly, if you like. In battle.”

Given that Jim had just discovered the last story of valiant heroism in battle to be a lie, he immediately suspected that this was some dimension of shading the truth as well, but then, it was a considerably personal question to ask anyone, let alone a man he’d not yet known an hour. “I suppose I do,” he said, in response to the first part of Silver’s remark. “In that vein, why are you looking for Billy Bones?”

Silver regarded him shrewdly. “So you have met him, haven’t you.”

“Aye. Him and a few others that I could stand to not meet again, frankly. But since one of them killed my father, I’d bloody like to – ”

“Who?” Silver interrupted. “Who killed your father?”

Jim was taken aback, but then, he himself had started this trend of rather nosy questions. “Captain Liam Jones.” He tried to keep his voice offhand, but it trembled. “My father’s old commander, of all the things.”

A most unusual expression crossed Silver’s face. He paused, as if weighing up his words, then shook his head. “No. Liam Jones has killed other men I know – other fathers, even – but he didn’t kill yours.”

“What?” Jim, feeling distinctly and unhappily whiplashed over this whole affair, stared at him in confusion and exasperation. “He confessed to me! We were in prison together, he bloody confessed to my face! How would you even – ”

“I know,” Silver said, “because your father died during the first battle of Nassau – the first one, between the pirates themselves and against Henry Jennings, rather than the second, against Woodes Rogers and Robert Gold – and Liam Jones never set foot on Nassau. He was recovering on an island of Maroons, traveled to Jamaica at one point, and then left for France from some no-account sandbar in the middle of the Caribbean. He never sniffed New Providence. So whatever he told you, he’s lying.”

“He’s – ” Jim was bloody tired of thinking first one thing, then another, and then another altogether. At that moment, however, he worked out how Silver and Billy must know each other, and from whence their rivalry originally stemmed. “You were on the Walrus too, weren’t you? Under Captain Flint?”

“Clever lad.” Silver sounded genuinely impressed. “Either that, or Billy has been talking.”

“Aye,” Jim said. “A bit. But I figured out plenty on my own.”

“Ah. Well. To make a long and tragic story short, yes, Billy and I both sailed with Flint.” Silver glanced around. “I don’t suppose he’s still here?”

“No. Left with the others a week ago.” Jim wanted to return to the previous subject, frustrating as it was. “Why the bloody hell would Liam tell me that he killed my father, if he didn’t?”

“Because,” Silver said enigmatically, “that is exactly what Liam Jones does. Trust me, I too have personal experience with the matter.”

Jim both wanted to push for more on that, and didn’t. He felt oddly relieved that Liam hadn’t – at least theoretically, he was fully prepared for the story to change ten more times before tomorrow – killed his father after all, guilty for the things he had said, even with every right to say them, and wondering in despair if he’d ever actually get to the bottom of this. But since the air had been cleared, he decided that he could at least stand to ask. “Geneva, she’s not Liam’s daughter, is she?”

“No. His niece. His younger brother’s daughter.” Something flickered in Silver’s eyes. “And her mother, by the way, is Flint’s daughter – adopted, but still. With or without  Liam, it’s a rather terrifying pedigree.”

“She’s Captain Flint’s granddaughter?” Bloody hell, that would be a terrifying introduction to the family, not that Jim was considering such a hypothetical scenario. “I’m taking it you don’t have the same feelings about him that Billy does? Otherwise you would have taken advantage of that fact somehow. Unless you already did?”

He thought for a moment that Silver was almost offended, though in what way he wasn’t sure. Then the older man said, “Her great-uncle has been vigilantly looking out for her welfare, and it was a long voyage, in more ways than one. So I’d advise – ah, Captain, Mad – Mistress Scott.”

Jim started as the two women strode up to the table, looking sufficiently refreshed. Geneva had put on a light blue lawn dress and fixed her hair, tall and elegant and calmly in command, and Jim’s throat went more than slightly dry as she took the chair next to him, her thigh just brushing his through her skirts. There was another chair closer to Mrs. Scott that he expected her to take, but as it was also next to Silver and this seemed to be a sticking point, she squeezed around the table to take the one on Geneva’s other side. This left the open chair for Mr. Hamilton, who returned in a few more minutes and did not seem terribly pleased with the arrangements, but was clearly too much of a gentleman to utter any disdain out loud. Instead, he seated himself next to Silver after only a brief hesitation, leaving Jim to wonder just what they all disliked about the man so much. “Well,” Thomas said. “Against all odds, we have made it to Bristol. Mr. Hawkins, I suppose you could be so kind as to tell us what you know?”

As their supper arrived, and Jim did his best not to tear into it like a mad wolf – he hadn’t really had a proper meal since the Benbow burned – he provided them with a concise and more or less comprehensive summary of the people he had met over the last fortnight, and what he could discern of their tangled skein of schemes and deceptions. At the mention of Liam, Geneva looked vastly startled. “My uncle’s here? He’s supposed to be in Paris.”

“Aye, well. He said Lady Murray snatched him.” Jim supposed he could be somewhat more charitable to Liam than he would have been yesterday. “And he’s not here anymore. He went with Bones and Lady Murray on their expedition. To Skeleton Island, as far as I know.”

His four companions exchanged darkly significant looks. There seemed to be a definite element of “I told you so” in Silver’s, which was odd – though he was wise enough not to rub it in overtly. “You’ve been very helpful, Jim,” he said instead. “But with what they did to you and your mother, I’m guessing you don’t want to sit back, wish us well, and wave us on our way?”

“No,” Jim said, especially conscious of Geneva’s gaze on him. “God knows there’s nothing for me here, and if I’ve been useful, I could be again. If you’re going after them, I want to come along. To this – this treasure island.”

“What man wouldn’t?” Silver once more looked wry. “We’ve only just got here, and we’ll need to do a few things before we leave again. But if Bones and the rest are ahead of us, we shouldn’t waste much time in following them. As young Mr. Hawkins says, there is none to spare, to set in search of a place such as that. Treasure Island.”

[bones-bones-bones-bones-bon-blog]

I Especially Am Slow [1/3]

[Ao3]

“Do you think you'll tell them?”

Trini looks up from her plate to see Kim watching her, leaning forward across the table with that weird, eager light in her eyes.

“About being-” A quick glance around the deli to make sure no one is listening (who would be? They are just two teenage girls, as far as most people know). Trini lowers her voice, anyway. “About being a Ranger?”

“Yeah. Why not?”

“Hah!” Trini bisects her remaining piece of cake with maybe a little more force than is strictly necessary. The screech of fork-on-ceramic does draw a few heads their way- Trini can feel their eyes prick pins-and-needles at her neck. She runs her tongue over her teeth, scowls. “Like I said- my folks like normal. They'd lock me up before believing I was a- a superhero.”

“Even if you morphed in front of them?” Kim says, full volume.

Trini winces. “They'd probably just test the tapwater or something.”

Kim snickers. “Seriously?”

“Naw, but- I dunno. Don't wanna give them a reason to move us again, I guess.” She shrugs, pushes a crumb of red-velvet across her plate. “Love to see the looks on their faces, though.”

“Well,” Kim smiles, lowers her voice only now to say, “I wouldn't want you to move, either.”

The silence lingers just long enough to be uncomfortable, for the fingers of a blush to start a crawl up Trini's neck, then Kim grins and reaches across the table to steal the last of Trini's cake off her plate.

Her smile, afterwards, is syrup-red, and she licks the frosting off her lips just a beat to slow to be anything but deliberate.

“You do know I've never cut someone else's hair before.”

“You did an alright job on yours,” Trini says, trying to keep her voice level, trying for the cool don't-give-a-fuck drawl that had the others calling her 'crazy girl' well into their friendship (she is terrified that one day they will realize how fragile she is, how scared, that it is mostly an act, that they will decide four Rangers is enough, after all, if it is her they are losing).

But.

But she is not thinking about that right now, because she is mostly shirtless in Kim's untidy bedroom, just a plain, laundry-day bra and goosebumps between her and the open air, and Kim's hand is brand-hot where it is resting on her shoulder, casually, like she doesn't even realize she is doing it.

“Yeah, well.” Kim opens and closes her scissors, experimentally, a metal snip shiver-close to Trini's ear. “I didn't really care what happened to me then, hair or otherwise.”

Trini has heard the story by now, of course- they all have, she's pretty sure, how Kim showed that poor girl's nudes to people she shouldn't have, how she paid and paid for it.

Maybe more than she should have. Maybe not.

Teenage girls can be mean, is all Trini knows, wishes it wasn't usually directed at other girls.

She doesn't say that. Not with Kim's hand on her shoulder, not sitting in her messy room, staring at the sticker-residue in the mirror of her whitewashed vanity.

She says, “Well, fuck it. Maybe I don't care either.” shrugs, and Kim's hand rises and falls with the movement, creeps a little closer to her collarbones.

(of course, she cares more about herself now than she has in a long time, but-)

“Well, you should,” Kim says, that weird easy intensity she has, 0-100 in the space of a sentence.

Trini shrugs, again. “Well, I'm here anyway. All else fails I shave it all off. Always wanted to try a buzz cut anyway.”

“You'd look good with one,” Kim says, her hand hot on Trini's shoulder a beat longer, then she is lifting it to Trini's jaw, tilting her head gently to one side and taking her sewing scissors to the 'new-girl-in-town' haircut that's growing out shaggy from Trini's scalp.

They're silent, for a while, just the metal snick of scissors to fill the small room.

“I don't think they should have done that to you,” Trini says. “Those girls, I mean. Your old friends.”

Kim stops snipping, a moment.

“You did a really shitty thing,” Trini says, already regretting this conversation. “Like- seriously. But they didn't have to go like- full Godfather on you. Metaphoric acts of violence and shit.”

“I dunno,” Kim says, “wouldn't you have?”

“I'd have kicked your ass for sure,” Trini says. “Just- been done with it. Knocked your tooth out, maybe.”

Kim laughs, at that- startled, maybe. “I'd have deserved it.”

“Yeah,” Trini shifts, keeps her eyes fixed down, at the expired eye-shadow palettes and dirty makeup brushes scattered across Kim's tabletop. “You would've.” Kim's thumb scrapes, maybe by accident, across the slope of Trini's skull, tracing a line from her ear backwards, intimate and strange.

There's a beat where maybe Kim's gonna say something- Trini kind of wants to, but she's not sure what. Can just feel it tense and growing and a little warm behind her ribs.

Then the scissors pick up their even rhythm again, Kim's hands tipping Trini's head this way, then that, gently- always gently.

“You know,” Kim says, after a while, “Jason never said that to me. Just gave me some line about- forgiving myself and moving on.”

“Hmm,” Trini says, this involuntary noise from the back of her throat.

“What?”

“Just didn't think you'd badmouth our- uh, brave and glorious leader like that.” (and Trini loves Jason, she does, their boyscout screwup of a team captain, but he can be a bit blue-eyes James-Kirk Capital-H-Hero for her, sometimes).

“What, just cause he's in charge-”

“Naw, I just thought you two were- an item, you know?”

Kim snorts. “Jason?”

Trini shrugs, again. Kim's hand is back on her shoulder, thumb warm at the join of her neck.

“No, he's- cute. Great abs. But I don't really- see him like that.”

Trini looks up, meets Kim's eyes in the mirror. “No?”

Kim smiles, a little intense- knowing, maybe, or maybe Trini's reading into things.

Trini's the first to look away. She's sure Kim can feel her pulse, loud and traitorous where it beats through her throat.

“Looks good,” Kim says, putting the clippers down with a deceive thunk on the vanity.

“Yeah,” Trini says, can't stop her hands from coming up to run through her hair- pixie-short and buzzed at the sides, the stubble prickles sharp against her palms.

It makes her look- older, maybe, or- younger, her eyes bigger, her jaw sharper- different, certainly.

“Do you like it?” Kim says, and her voice wavers, a little, like she's worried, like there is this to be scared of, after all they have done.

Trini meets her eyes in the mirror, anxious wide, her lip caught red between her teeth.

“It's- different,” Trini settles on. Rubs a hand back over the stubble.

“Good-different?”

Trini drops her hands, finally, twists to look Kim in the face for real, no mirror between them. “Yeah,” she says, “I think so.”

“WHAT have you done with your hair?” Her mother demands of her, reaching to touch, to grab without permission, and Trini jerks away, all her newly-honed fight instincts kicking in at once.

And her mother says something like I can't even touch my own daughter any more? And it is at least something they have not argued about before, novel for that if nothing else.

Trini wanders down to the spaceship, sometimes, when their house gets too crowded, not too many people but all of them too- loud, to grabby, too- the way her family is.

The ship is old and creaky and smells like rust and oil, and there's a door that squeaks in a way that startles her every damn time she opens it, but it's not her house, so it's an improvement.

“I like having my head shaved too,” Billy tells her, one of these days. He's propped up on a counter in their common area, tinkering with something Trini can't quite parse, a tangle of wires and steel in his careful hands.

“Why's that?” Trini says, offhand, digging in a pocket for her phone to pull up a game of snake (and she still feels rude, for doing it, but Billy gets squirmy if you look him in the eyes too long, in conversation, so it's not, not really).

“It feels nice,” Billy says, running a hand over his scalp like Trini's done so many times in the last week.

“Yeah,” she says. The loading screen opens with a fanfare of royalty-free music, and Trini startles, scrambles to flick on the silent.

“Is that why you like it?” Billy says into his tinkering.

“I dunno. It's- new, I guess.”

“Is that good?"

Trini laughs- the question's such a strange mirror of the one Kim'd asked her in the bedroom (though Kim had been... touchier).

Billy's heel starts to drum an even rhythm against the counter, a muted thump thump thump of rubber-on-steel; background noise to Trini, by now.

“Uh- yeah, I guess,” she says. “New is good.” She thinks, briefly, of the endless new-but-identical small towns she'd lived in. “Sometimes.” Her snake runs into its own tail and dies in a flicker of black-and-white.

“I don't like new stuff," Billy says.

They sit there a moment, in the belly of a buried spaceship, the halls literally alien and by now familiar.

“Well, usually I mean,” he amends, and Trini laughs.

“Yeah," she says. "I know what you mean. This is-” she thinks of Kim, her too-sweet-coffee-and-powder-deodorant smell, her crowded room, the white slash of her smile. “Good different.”

Billy sends a smile her way, holds his hand out for a high five, and it's so rare he seeks out any sort of touch it pulls a smile out of Trini, too.

They slap palms.

Perfect 10.

Trini pads downstairs to get a glass of water, one night, and her mother eyes her over the kitchen island, goes, “Trini, sweetie, you should take it easier at the gym”

Trini stops, mid-pour, and thinks (because she's no new hand at lying to her parents, but she's been doing it so much, now, she sometimes forgets what lies she's told). Gym, gym- was there even a gym in Angel Grove?

Her mother saves her the trouble of puzzling it out, comes around the counter and grabs Trini's arm- it'd be too hard if normal people could hurt Trini, any more. “It's good to be healthy, but girls shouldn't bee too muscular.” she says, squeezes, like Trini's an avocado she's testing for ripeness.

Trini flexes, deliberatly, and her mother pulls away, frowning.

“I only want you to fit in, Trini- boys don't like girls who are too...” she fishes, for a moment. “bulky. And with that haircut... well, people might be getting the wrong idea.” She drops her hand down Trini's arm, gentle now, a soothing gesture. “I'm just worried.”

“I don't-” want a boyfriend, Trini thinks, but her mouth's gone stale-bread-dry. Care if people get that impression, she thinks, and-

and she fights monsters, in her free time, but she is still a coward, in some important ways. She looks down at the counter, green linoleum, specks of white like dandruff.

“You need some friends and least,” her mother presses, and Trinny sets her jaw. Says, to the countertop,

“I have friends.”

She can picture her mom's expression without looking up, see her lips whiten where they'll be sucked back against her teeth, like she's eaten something sour.

Trini knows exactly how her mother feels about her friends.

“It was very nice to meet you, ma'am.” Zack says, as he's leaving Trini's place for the first time.

His spine is straighter than Trini has ever seen it, his hand politely outstretched, at strange odds with his peeling, faded leather jacket, his rip-kneed-jeans, the smell of his too-strong bodywash.

Trini's mother shakes Zack's hand with a carefully polite look on her face, like one might give a preschooler's macaroni art.

(Later, she will say, “Well Jason seems nice, and it's... sweet, of you, to spend time with that... Billy, was his name? But the others, I just- don't think they'll be good for you).

Zack, who Trini's mother thinks is some undefinable type of bad for her, waits around after Jason gives the others a ride home.

His hands are jammed in his pockets, one foot scuffing at the ground.

“You weren't kidding about your family,” he says, after a moment.

“No fucking shit.” Trini snaps. Drops onto the front step and tugs some early-summer grass out of the lawn, shreds it deliberately into green confetti.

Zack just laughs, extracts one hand from his pocket to clap her on the shoulder.

“Come on,” he says. “I got a bottle of Costco rum under my bed, we can spend the night at the quarry. Light some shit on fire.”

Trini barks out a laugh- something sharp and a little mirthless, but Zack gets that, she thinks. Is standing there slouching in his leather jacket, one arm politely outstretched.

Trini wipes off the grass shreds sticking to her summer-sweaty palm, lets Zack tug her upright, away from her house and forward into the creeping warmth of the June evening.

They drink too much and end up sprawled against one another, watching their bonfire shoulder-to-overwarm-shoulder.

“I just,” Zack is saying, slurring really, the fifth time he has tried to start this sentence, “I just- it's just I don't think a family should act like that, you know?”

“Yeah,” Trini says, tosses a pinecone into the fire. It is gilded along every edge, for just a moment, before it comes undone.

“Just like- if I was your mom, I wouldn't care if you- cut your hair, or wanted to make out with Kristen Stewart, or whatever.”

Trini snorts, too drunk to be very maudlin about it. “Thanks then, mom.”

Zack shoves her, a drunk-clumsy bump of hand and shoulder that wouldn't do much damage even if Trini wasn't superpowered.

“You know-” he says, “You know what I mean, though?”

Trini tosses another pine cone into the fire, watches it hiss and spit as it dies. “Yeah, man.”

“My mom wouldn't- would not do that.”

It's a fact. Zack's mom is very cool.

She had laughed, watching them smuggle the rum out of the trailer: “you be a gentleman to Trini, now,” she's said, and somehow it hadn't been judgmental, hadn't been implying anything.

“Yeah, your mom's the coolest.”

“Damn right.” Zack nods, all leather jacket and cool-boy swagger.

They lean into each other and watch the fire.

No, Trini figures, thoughts gone sort of muddled and slippery with heat and $15 rum, no family shouldn't act like that, but maybe-

maybe like this.

Like Zack passing her the plastic bottle, his shoulder warm against hers, maybe like the golden light of the fire, the smell of woodsmoke and the gentle snap of flames.

Maybe, she thinks, tosses another twig to the fire.

Maybe just like this.

“Come on,” Kim says, “Again.” There is blood on her teeth from where Trini'd landed a lucky hit and a strange, manic look in her eyes.

Trini bounces from one foot to the next, waits a beat longer then throws a punch, hard, for Kim's jaw.

She ducks, neatly, and grabs Trini's wrist, uses the momentum to slam her up against the wall of the pit.

“Nicely done,” Trini manages, the breath knocked halfway out of her, and chalks the stammer in her pulse up to the exercise.

Her mother had said, “I just don't think they'll be good for you,” and Trini's pretty sure she's right about Kim.

Kim who's letting up her hold, falling back to her starting position, pushing sweaty hair out of her eyes.

She is bad for Trini's heart, certainly, in a ratty tanktop and sweatpants, strong arms and a bloody nose.

“Come on, try me again,” she says. They've been sparring all morning.

Trini works her arm, experimentally- sore, by now, but it'll heal. “What is up your ass, anyway?” 

Kim shrugs, hands coming up to the ready position. “Beat me and I'll tell you.”

Trini grins, feels the weird adrenaline-buzz of a fight pull through her tired limbs. “Bring it on, Hart.”

Kim pins her one, two more times after that, always the same way, grabs her by the wrist and twists until Trini is shoved up against the wall, concrete-grit against her cheek, blood in her mouth.

Whoever's defending in a fight always wins, with them- those in-tune instincts that let them morph, make them a deadly team, also mean that Kim knows when Trini's going to attack, how hard to push back without hurting her.

Something about that burns a little in Trini's gut, like she's eaten something rotten, like Zack's Costco booze, about being known by other people right down to her fast-twitch muscles.

“You okay?” Kim says, backing the pressure off her arm.

Trini shakes herself, works her arm in it's abused socket. “Yeah. Another go?”

Kim grins.

(she is beautiful like this, Trini thinks, without quite meaning to, drying blood and a feral light in her eyes, a messy ponytail and workout clothes, and damn this crush, it is only a matter of time before Kim finds her out and then where will she be?)

“You ready?”

Triny tests her balance- backwards on her heels, forwards, then she throws the exact same punch she has in the last three matches.

Kim falls for it, easily, even says “you're going to have to try harder than-” before she realizes it's a feint.

Still off-balance, it's easy enough to flip her onto her back, and Trini's got her forearm against Kim's throat before the next heartbeat.

“Not bad,” Kim says, sounding a little winded herself, and Trini realizes how close they are, her practically draped over Kim's body, the thrum of pulse against her forearm.

She rocks back upright, looks away. “Water break?”

���Yeah,” Kim says, “I think I'm done for the day.”

They had carted a mini fridge into the ship in the week after defeating Rita Repulsa because cold Gatorade is, according to Jason, just as vital to their fitness as first aid and regular exercise.

The contents of the mini fridge, currently, are one bottle of $8 wine, half a pizza, and a truly embarrassing amount of sports drink.

Kim tosses a blue over her shoulder to Trini before fishing out a bottle of her own.

“Thanks,” Trini cracks the cap and takes a long swig, sliding to a seat against a wall. (Her favourite flavor used to be the yellow, but she refuses to be quite so colour-coded, honestly, and fuck what the alien-destiny-coin said).

Kim grins an acknowledgment, presses a cold bottle to her pulse point- a temporary relief against the fingers of summer heat that reach muggily all through Angel Grove, driving out the last hints of spring. She slouches over across from Kim, head tipped back against a row of lockers.

(Kim, on the other hand, had used an Amazon gift card she'd stolen from her ex to special-order the pink lemonade Gatorade by the crate-full, 'cause it wasn't carried locally.

Different strokes, Trini figures).

“So,” she says, stretching the sparring session out of her back with a satisfying pop. “I won. Wanna tell me why you were so hell-bent on handing me my ass today?”

“Hah.” Kim cracks the cap on her drink, takes a swig rather than answer right away. When she finally speaks, her teeth are stained just the slightest bit Gatorade-pink. “The fight last week,” she says. “It's been screwing with me.”

“Oh,” Trini says, and can't think of the next thing, after that, sweaty and lead-limbed and she was never that good at talking, in the first place. That was shit the superhero movies did not tell you, that coming up with inspiring speeches or witty quips was damn harder than fighting the monsters.

Across from her, Kim slides her bent knees out straight, bare feet and stubbly legs, one of her toenails painted and chipping.

“You remember,” she says, “That sea monster?”

“Of course,” Trini says, because they are superheroes, sure, but she is not yet at the point in her life where she can just forget a serpent clawing itself out of the ocean like Old Testament, yellow lamprey-eyes and bits of old ship in its teeth.

“We beat it, though.” Trini says. “It's dead.”

Kim shrugs. Trini slides her legs straight, so her ankles knock up against Kim's knees across the hallway.

“What, then?” She says, that deep-chest pressure burning in her lungs, like someone's struck a slow-match against her ribs.

There is something she needs to say, Trini thinks, or maybe something Kim is trying to say, and it is building up between them, thick as the muggy summer.

“I just-” Kim shifts, so one of her knees is hooked over Trini's leg. “When it knocked you over, I thought-” she shrugs, again,

Oh, Trini thinks. “Next time you're worried about me,” she says, “Just- you can buy me a drink, instead of kicking my ass.”

And Kim is tilting her head to the side, a little, considering, and Trini's brain catches up with her mouth, realizes what she's said- what it sounds like she's said-

“I mean-” She blurts, throat closing over, but Kim is standing, smiling, offering her hand.

“Come on,” she says. “I'm sick of this place. Walk you home?”

And so maybe it's fine, after all.

She is so relaxed when she gets home, summer heat and exercise endorphins, she nearly forgets what is waiting for her.

Does forget to put on a jacket before she walks in the door, forgets the hand-print bruises blooming like fingerpaint all over her arms, forgets what she must look like.

Her father looks up as she walks in the door and his eyes track from Trini's face to her bruises and back to his newspaper in the time it takes Trini to lever off one shoe.

He says, “Remember to take the garbage out.”

“Yeah,” Trini says, suddenly less relaxed than just tired.

In the kitchen, Trini's mother's eyes track the same pattern- face, bruises, away again.

“Remember to take the garbage out,” she says, she only says,

“I'm doing it.” Trini runs her tongue over the tender, copper places along the inside of her cheek, souvenirs from sparring practice.

That night, her off-hand keeps finding the bruise at her shoulder and prodding, like it's a missing tooth, like she keeps forgetting it'll hurt.

When she eventually falls asleep, she dreams of Andromeda, chained to the rocks, a monster looming at her out of the water.

The bruise goes a very impressive shade of green, before it disappears.

Billy uses Burt's Bees moisturizer. He always smells like engine grease and waxcomb, and he fixes the creaky door in the ship like it is so easy, to take things apart, and to fix them.

Trini finds Jason practicing his Inspirational Leader Voice in the mirror one morning, his arm in a cast after a big fight, saying “we've got this” over and over until the words run into each other like wet ink.

Kim is-

Well.

She's something, Trini is certain, she gave herself a lopsided star tattoo on one wrist and she likes a shitty, gas station beer called “Keystone Blue”. she can shotgun a can of the stuff in about thirty seconds, even though the rest of the team is pretty convinced it's just just old piss run through a filter.

And,

and-

she is the kind of beautiful that people turn to watch. That Trini turns to watch. She has a scar on one knuckle from punching out a boy's tooth (they put it back), and she bites her lip just a little when she is concentrating, and she never remembers to tie her shoes, and she is beautiful.

Whenever she is in the room, Trini's eyes catch on her, over and over, like a bad hangnail.

Zack has three different chess apps downloaded on his shitty old phone, and he runs out of free daily plays on every one of them, every day.

He understands, Trini thinks, the loud stupid fear that drums inside her head, sometimes, that makes her do stupid things just to prove it is not winning.

Is right alongside her, often, jumping cliffs and getting drunk and screaming full-voiced into the face of terror.

Trini loves all of them, fiercely, more than she has loved anyone, she thinks, their tics and habits and shortcomings, and she is fairly sure she will never tell them.

They know, already, probably, except-

She loves Kim like the rest, of course, that action-movie comrades-in-arms thing she's disgusted to find out Fast and Furious did not lie about.

Except, sometimes,

when there is that slow-match feeling in her chest, some unspoken pressure building, when Kim and her hang out alone and there is this thing between them, heavy in the air like the fog that rolls in off the harbour.

Less elegantly,

Mostly Trini is glad just to have them all but sometimes she wants Kim, specifically, to pin her to a wall and take her apart like some broken old appliance, with her hands and tongue and teeth.

She hopes Kim does not know this.

“So,” Kim says, after a fight, stepping out of her Zord and flipping up her visor, a gruesome cut above her eyebrow like she's some conquering Valkyrie, some war hero, “you wanna get drunk?”

An alarm sounds deep in Trini's gut, but she's flush with battle-high, had barely dodged the club of the giant that had staggered furious into their town- had torn its throat open with her mech's claws, like cutting butter.

Monster blood is still steaming in the air, Trini's blood is still sheeting from a rent in her suit, and she says “yes” like it is the easiest thing in the world.

[lyfestile]

“I wanna go home not sing this song but I’m forced to perform speech napalm”

—PRODIGY, “Genesis”

To be a black man in America is to be under a constant state of enormous pressure, stress and danger, from outside, from within. From outside there is the ruthless reality of racism, jabbing and stabbing at you from every angle, in the mass media culture, at school with textbooks that forever omit you, with those police encounters that put your soul on trial even if a simple traffic stop, from individual meetings with those who view you as dangerous, immoral, aggressive, violent, whether you’ve demonstrated any such behavior or not. And then if you are me or the late Prodigy of the rap duo Mobb Deep, and happen to hail from one of America’s ghettoes, your end could also easily come at the hands of people who look like you, too. Because not only is the racism mad real, but so is the internalized racism and toxic manhood we’ve digested so well, have taught each other, have gifted from generation to generation like family heirlooms for the boys in the ‘hood.

Article

This is what crossed my mind when I learned of Prodigy’s tragically sudden death at 42 years old. Another black man dead who, like me, was probably happy — and surprised, to some degree — to make it to 18, to 21, to 25, to 30, to 40, knowing that those markers of age and time defeated are, for sure, no small miracle. Add to that Prodigy’s battle since birth with sickle cell anemia, and it is little wonder his short and tumultuous life was weighted, at different stages, with alcohol, marijuana, other drugs, anything to numb the trauma and pain of an existence that feels like life matter-of-factly awaiting death.

This, to me, is why so many are taking Prodigy’s passing at such a young age so hard. For he truly was one of us, the way Tupac was one of us, the way Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest was one of us. Every generation has its spokespersons, its truth-tellers, its artists there to show us what we do not want to see, or hear, and Prodigy was undoubtedly that. It is like he had no other choice. Born Albert Johnson, his grandfather Budd Johnson was a jazz saxophonist who was there right at the tip-off of that uprising they called bebop. His mother sang for a spell with one of the great “girl groups,” The Crystals. Yet somewhere between being born out on Long Island, New York, that village of Hempstead, and teaming up, as a teenager, with a fellow rapper and producer nicknamed Havoc, something burned inside of Albert, and he made his way to Queensbridge Houses, the biggest low-income housing projects in North America, and one of the great incubators of hip-hop genius — like Marley Marl, like Roxanne Shante, like MC Shan, like Nas.

It was there as a precocious teenager Prodigy willed himself into Lord-T (The Golden Child), which is not surprising given the Golden Era of hip-hop we were immersed in during the late 1980s into the early 1990s. The dominant thread of black nationalism and the influences of Afrocentricity, the Nation of Islam and the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths were everywhere. But so was the utter destructiveness of the Reagan years on urban America, including the wholesale attacks on Civil Rights Movement victories, the deadly crack epidemic and the explosion of gun violence. New York City was the epicenter of this, and also the homeland of hip-hop, and it was just a matter of time before rap would begin to reflect, explicitly, what we were grinding through daily. You look at an early photo of Prodigy and Havoc and realize the original tag of the group was Poetical Prophets, complete with the Kid 'N Play flattops most of us sported in those days. But as the Reagan years became the age of Bill and Hillary there was no turning back from what was inside of us: hardness, cynicism, rage, an incredible need to spit truths, as Billie Holiday had done with “Strange Fruit,” as Bob Dylan had done with “Blowin’ in The Wind.” They called it “gangsta rap.” We called it reality. Prodigy, Havoc, Mobb Deep, presented us with rhymes straight outta the blacked-out hallways of an American nightmare reeking of dried piss, cheap, loose cigarettes, skunk weed and Olde English malt liquor.

The first time I truly heard Prodigy’s voice, and Mobb Deep, was the now classic single “Shook Ones, Part II.” Spare, raw, rugged, this song on that second album that broke through for them — and much of their music since, including Prodigy’s solo efforts — was unapologetically about the people we do not want to see: the single mothers, the baby daddies, the hustlers, the petty criminals, the drug dealers, the strippers, the addicts, the murderers, the men and boys doing time in prisons, the boys on the block watching life pass them by, the poor people desperately trying to make a way out of no way. Prodigy’s work was Norman Rockwell’s America rebooted with the bullets and blood of a wretched street corner. His poetry was that of Truman Capote scratching, furiously, the dead skin from America’s bloated belly. Indeed, Prodigy’s verbal theatrics were like that of an impatient spoken-word poet at an open mic, but he was also an indie filmmaker, his stream of consciousness his camera, his subway-jarring descriptions of his New York as mean and rich and unflinching as anything Martin Scorsese has ever conjured.

Where there was shine and glamour to the tales spun by Ice-T, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and The Notorious B.I.G., I think of Prodigy as a different kind of working-class hero. He could care less about being a superstar. If Tupac was Carole King then Prodigy was Laura Nyro. Those who knew, knew. And like Laura Nyro, another great but under-the-radar songwriter for the people, Prodigy had great highs with gold and platinum albums, and there were the lows of three and a half years in prison and ugly public beefs with rap rivals. But he was also a husband, a father, a step-grandfather, and he was a man battling a debilitating disease of which most folks are not expected to live past 40 or 50.

Perhaps this is why many of us, including me, have said that hip-hop saved our lives. Though Prodigy is gone now, I believe that it saved and extended his too, especially when he was at his lowest points, with his disease, while in jail, when he and Havoc had broken up for a time. In a world where countless Black males like Prodigy do not have much to look forward to, hip-hop has been our Civil Rights Movement, our self-made 24-hour news channel, our counterculture revolution to win, to make something of ourselves, on our own terms, even if it makes sense to no one except us.

Yes, much has changed since Prodigy began as a fresh-faced youth in the 1990s, but the violence and poverty and hopelessness in America’s inner cities remain the same. Those same poor people Dr. King warned us not to forget, those same poor people who created hip-hop, those same poor people Prodigy dedicated his voice and his life to, may have lost a street soldier with his death, but they forever have an asphalt angel because of the music he has left behind.

[samanthasroberts]

15 Biggest Pop Culture Disasters of 2017: Kendall Jenner, Megyn Kelly, the Oscars, & More

If there’s any sort of running theme among the year’s biggest pop culture fails, it’s a mind-boggling lack of self-awareness. The biggest entertainment disasters were born out of a clusterfuck of delusion, hubris, apathy, and, in most cases, an almost unforgivable deafness to the conversations defining this moment in our culture.

So while we’ve spent much of this last month cheering the output that challenged, invigorated, and, of course, entertained us this year, let us also grand marshal this parade of shame—in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, there will be lessons learned heading into next year. Here are 15 flops from the past year, be it commercial bombs or tone-deaf cultural grenades, from the worlds of music, TV, movies, and celebrity culture.

Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi commercial

The solution to institutionalized racism, millennial apathy, police brutality, and Trump-era anger? A nice cold Pepsi, and a tangential Kardashian to deliver it. The message of the resistance-themed Pepsi commercial was so laughably obtuse and reductive, and the reaction so brutally eviscerating, that the company immediately removed it from the internet and actually apologized to Jenner for its misguided creative direction. Seriously, though: Think of the sheer number of people who had to OK this ad before it was released. It’s mind-boggling.

Sean Spicer at the Emmys

Notoriously cowering former White House press secretary Sean Spicer finally embraced the spotlight at the 2017 Emmy Awards, making a cameo appearance during host Stephen Colbert’s monologue ruthlessly attacking President Trump. Spicer giggled and soaked up the attention and applause, an ovation for a public figure who lived out his short tenure in relentless disgrace and disgust, cheering him for “gamely” participating in the roasting of his former boss. But for many viewers, the booking of Spicer was a shameless absolution of a man who was toothlessly complicit in spreading lies by the Trump administration to the American people; the worst example of the entertainment industry’s instinct to bend any moral for a cheap laugh.

“As a father of daughters…”

This entire recap of the year’s disasters could be populated with the horrifying misconduct of the litany of Bad Men exposed this year—from Harvey Weinstein to Kevin Spacey and beyond—and the ways in which various institutions mishandled the behavior and fallout. No reactions to these revelations were more infuriating than the famous male figures, ranging from Matt Damon to Ben Affleck to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who clarified that they were horrified because they are fathers who have daughters. It’s a sign of how clueless men are and have been in processing these scandals and the nature of this predatory and misogynistic culture. As Hunter Harris perfectly wrote in Vulture, “Only a sociopath needs a daughter—or a sister, a girlfriend, a wife, or even just a lady standing in front of him at Starbucks—to make him queasy enough at the thought of a sexual predator in his industry to do something about it.”

Mariah Carey at New Year’s Eve

Maybe it was a simple mistake made in a very public forum. Maybe it was an ominous warning of the year that was to come. Nonetheless, Mariah Carey’s interminable avalanche of live disasters during the New Year’s Rockin’ Eve telecast was excruciating to watch. One of the greatest singers of all-time standing on stage pissed off, first saying she couldn’t hear a backing track to sing along to, then not bothering to lip sync the next song before storming off. It was an inauspicious way to start the new year, especially when you consider the optics of it: a woman helpless as the world, albeit in this case just the Times Square stage, burned around her, then vilified for refusing to smile through the carnage. The fallout was hardly handled elegantly with Carey’s team and the production company engaging in a public she-said-they-said over who was to blame.

The launch of Megyn Kelly Today

At Fox News, Megyn Kelly was a marketable if polarizing star presence, known for her prosecutorial manner in lines of tough questioning—always admirable, even if you didn’t necessarily agree with the direction. NBC found it admirable enough to spend $15 million to woo her away from the cable news network, rearranging its entire morning news lineup to launch a full hour of Kelly-led programming. Confusingly, however, it eschewed the attributes that made Kelly so popular at Fox. Instead, a manufactured, awkwardly fitting personality emerged that was crucified by critics at each tonal whiplash segment transition, especially during painful interviews with liberal celebrities who couldn’t bother to hide their disdain for the host.

La La Land Oscars gaffe

The phrase “Oscars mistake” is typically employed to groan about a film voters crown Best Picture that critics or fans don’t necessarily think deserved it, not for a situation in which the literal wrong winner is announced. That a gaffe both so monumental and so careless happened at the 2017 Academy Awards—Warren Beatty was handed the wrong envelope and, confused, announced La La Land as Best Picture instead of Moonlight—is already excruciating and embarrassing. But, again, the optics of it all make everything worse. The La La Land team had to cede the stage after the gaffe was clarified, about as awkward a moment as an award show can produce. But the filmmakers behind Moonlight, a film about the marginalized black and gay experience, were denied the emotion that comes from a watershed cultural moment like winning Best Picture, and the chaos overshadowed the power of the moment, let alone their speeches. While it was deserved to a measure, the amount of attention given to the La La Land team’s graciousness after the mistake only further magnified how problematic the incident was.

Marvel’s Inhumans

It’s bad enough when the phrase “worst thing Marvel has done” is used to describe your new TV show, as it was for ABC’s fall foray into the Marvelverse. But the launch of Inhumans became more dire in light of the investment made in the series and its hubris in assuming audiences would consume it anyway, despite its middling quality, just because it’s Marvel. The big-budget bet included a release in IMAX theaters of its first two episodes ahead of its ABC launch, a theatrical run that garnered a pitiful $2.9 million.

Matt Damon

It’s been quite the year for Matt Damon, who needs to fire any publicist whose advice isn’t simply, “Stop talking.” His response to the Weinstein scandal has been disastrous bordering on offensive, with the actor running out of feet to put in his mouth as he attempted to add nuance to the conversation but instead came off as defending bad men’s behavior. But even if you reluctantly put all that aside, the films he was promoting during those calamitous interviews, Suburbicon and Downsizing, have underperformed at the box office and divided critics. All that on top of the way he kicked the year off: in a riotously silly man-bun white savior-ing Chinese history in the epic box office bomb The Great Wall.

Louis C.K.’s I Love You, Daddy

In September, Louis C.K. premiered I Love You, Daddy at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s a film in which C.K.’s protagonist, Glen, in a very Woody Allen-ish plot, has a 17-year-old daughter who enters a relationship with a 60-something man who is a legendary filmmaker. In one scene, a character played by Charlie Day vigorously mimes masturbation, not bothering to stop when a female producer, used to such things, enters the room. What was purposefully provocative in the film now borders on lunacy after The New York Times confirmed an industry open secret: that Louis C.K. had masturbated in front of upcoming female comedians. Suffice it to say that I Love You, Daddy’s theatrical release was canceled.

Kathy Griffin’s Trump mask fiasco

When Kathy Griffin was made aware of how ghastly and in poor taste the photo of her holding a bloodied, decapitated Trump head was—which happened instantly—she apologized for the offense. But few celebrity controversies have spiraled this out of control this quickly. Griffin was immediately let go from nearly every entertainment job she held, and, in response, she staged a misguided press conference in which she alleged that the Trump family was targeting her. It’s a classic case in disastrous damage control, but it shouldn’t have damned Griffin the way it has. It certainly says a lot about the latent misogyny in the industry that, as recent months have brought to light, famous men are guilty of truly horrific behavior that for so long was excused—yet an atoning Griffin still can’t get representation or a footing back into the industry she made her name in. The one good to come of this: Griffin’s fed up with all of it, too, and she’s naming names.

Fyre Festival

The best thing to happen to Coachella’s reputation is the worst thing to have happened to the hoodwinked revelers who shelled out upwards of $250,000 for a luxurious VIP concert experience on a private island in the Bahamas. Rich kids arrived only for it to instead resemble, as one fooled attendee attested, a refugee camp. The entire thing was organized by rapper Ja Rule and out-of-his-element entrepreneur bro Billy McFarland under false pretenses, with no infrastructure in place to support, house, or feed the thousands of concertgoers who paid premium prices only to be met with an unfinished tent village, packs of feral dogs, mountains of trash, no-show artists, and not enough food to go around. A breaking point for the increased lunacy surrounding the culture of music festivals, or merely a cautionary tale for how not to ruin the next one?

Tulip Fever

Maybe it’s schadenfreude that Harvey Weinstein’s swan song as a Hollywood mogul included this long-gestating, notorious disaster of a period film, riddled with false starts and re-castings and shuffled release dates and, most notably, Harvey Weinstein’s constant tinkering. Perhaps the lowest moment in the botched release of the film, which starred Dane DeHaan and Alicia Vikander and earned a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 9 percent, was when Weinstein himself penned an essay defending it, citing the fact that Vikander’s mother’s friend called her to say she enjoyed the movie as evidence.

Kid Rock’s “Senate run”  

The music industry’s resident American Jackass dialed up his reign of terror this year with the threat of a Senate run, to be launched on his tried-and-true values of cheap beer and racism. In the end, it was nothing more than a barely veiled publicity stunt. Nonetheless, breathless headlines blared the preposterous idea, and, considering the trajectory to public office mapped out by Donald Trump, seriously considered it. Of course, we can hardly fault anyone for, against their better judgement, giving credence to the nonsense that Kid Rock says. We still can’t get over his bigoted use of “gay” as a pejorative—let alone his embrace of the Confederate flag.  

Baywatch vs. Rotten Tomatoes

A bad movie is a bad movie. That’s fine and inevitable, and Baywatch was a bad movie. But shining a spotlight on this turd in particular came reports of industry insiders pissed that critical reviews decimated the movie’s box office haul, as well as that of the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It’s not the fact that these movies were shit you could smell from miles away that made audiences not want to buy tickets. It’s Rotten Tomatoes! If you ever want to know how little Hollywood studios think of you, the audience, just read this quote: “The critic aggregation site increasingly is slowing down the potential business of popcorn movies. Pirates 5 and Baywatch aren’t built for critics but rather general audiences, and once upon a time these types of films—a family adventure and a raunchy R-rated comedy—were critic-proof.”

The Mummy and the Dark Universe

Tom Cruise’s The Mummy wasn’t just supposed to be a franchise reboot cash-grab using a familiar property and a big Hollywood star. It was supposed to launch an entire shared cinematic universe, dubbed the “Dark Universe,” for Universal, filled with monsters including Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll, Javier Bardem as Frankenstein, and Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, as well as Sofia Boutella’s Ahmanet from The Mummy. It was a whole big plan. They all posed for a photo together and everything! But following disastrous box office returns for The Mummy, not to mention abysmal reviews, plans for the interconnected Dark Universe, at least as far as they were in motion, were scrapped and its architects, producer-writers Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan, jumped ship for other projects.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/15-biggest-pop-culture-disasters-of-2017-kendall-jenner-megyn-kelly-the-oscars-more/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/12/27/15-biggest-pop-culture-disasters-of-2017-kendall-jenner-megyn-kelly-the-oscars-more/

[adambstingus]

15 Biggest Pop Culture Disasters of 2017: Kendall Jenner, Megyn Kelly, the Oscars, & More

If there’s any sort of running theme among the year’s biggest pop culture fails, it’s a mind-boggling lack of self-awareness. The biggest entertainment disasters were born out of a clusterfuck of delusion, hubris, apathy, and, in most cases, an almost unforgivable deafness to the conversations defining this moment in our culture.

So while we’ve spent much of this last month cheering the output that challenged, invigorated, and, of course, entertained us this year, let us also grand marshal this parade of shame—in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, there will be lessons learned heading into next year. Here are 15 flops from the past year, be it commercial bombs or tone-deaf cultural grenades, from the worlds of music, TV, movies, and celebrity culture.

Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi commercial

The solution to institutionalized racism, millennial apathy, police brutality, and Trump-era anger? A nice cold Pepsi, and a tangential Kardashian to deliver it. The message of the resistance-themed Pepsi commercial was so laughably obtuse and reductive, and the reaction so brutally eviscerating, that the company immediately removed it from the internet and actually apologized to Jenner for its misguided creative direction. Seriously, though: Think of the sheer number of people who had to OK this ad before it was released. It’s mind-boggling.

Sean Spicer at the Emmys

Notoriously cowering former White House press secretary Sean Spicer finally embraced the spotlight at the 2017 Emmy Awards, making a cameo appearance during host Stephen Colbert’s monologue ruthlessly attacking President Trump. Spicer giggled and soaked up the attention and applause, an ovation for a public figure who lived out his short tenure in relentless disgrace and disgust, cheering him for “gamely” participating in the roasting of his former boss. But for many viewers, the booking of Spicer was a shameless absolution of a man who was toothlessly complicit in spreading lies by the Trump administration to the American people; the worst example of the entertainment industry’s instinct to bend any moral for a cheap laugh.

“As a father of daughters…”

This entire recap of the year’s disasters could be populated with the horrifying misconduct of the litany of Bad Men exposed this year—from Harvey Weinstein to Kevin Spacey and beyond—and the ways in which various institutions mishandled the behavior and fallout. No reactions to these revelations were more infuriating than the famous male figures, ranging from Matt Damon to Ben Affleck to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who clarified that they were horrified because they are fathers who have daughters. It’s a sign of how clueless men are and have been in processing these scandals and the nature of this predatory and misogynistic culture. As Hunter Harris perfectly wrote in Vulture, “Only a sociopath needs a daughter—or a sister, a girlfriend, a wife, or even just a lady standing in front of him at Starbucks—to make him queasy enough at the thought of a sexual predator in his industry to do something about it.”

Mariah Carey at New Year’s Eve

Maybe it was a simple mistake made in a very public forum. Maybe it was an ominous warning of the year that was to come. Nonetheless, Mariah Carey’s interminable avalanche of live disasters during the New Year’s Rockin’ Eve telecast was excruciating to watch. One of the greatest singers of all-time standing on stage pissed off, first saying she couldn’t hear a backing track to sing along to, then not bothering to lip sync the next song before storming off. It was an inauspicious way to start the new year, especially when you consider the optics of it: a woman helpless as the world, albeit in this case just the Times Square stage, burned around her, then vilified for refusing to smile through the carnage. The fallout was hardly handled elegantly with Carey’s team and the production company engaging in a public she-said-they-said over who was to blame.

The launch of Megyn Kelly Today

At Fox News, Megyn Kelly was a marketable if polarizing star presence, known for her prosecutorial manner in lines of tough questioning—always admirable, even if you didn’t necessarily agree with the direction. NBC found it admirable enough to spend $15 million to woo her away from the cable news network, rearranging its entire morning news lineup to launch a full hour of Kelly-led programming. Confusingly, however, it eschewed the attributes that made Kelly so popular at Fox. Instead, a manufactured, awkwardly fitting personality emerged that was crucified by critics at each tonal whiplash segment transition, especially during painful interviews with liberal celebrities who couldn’t bother to hide their disdain for the host.

La La Land Oscars gaffe

The phrase “Oscars mistake” is typically employed to groan about a film voters crown Best Picture that critics or fans don’t necessarily think deserved it, not for a situation in which the literal wrong winner is announced. That a gaffe both so monumental and so careless happened at the 2017 Academy Awards—Warren Beatty was handed the wrong envelope and, confused, announced La La Land as Best Picture instead of Moonlight—is already excruciating and embarrassing. But, again, the optics of it all make everything worse. The La La Land team had to cede the stage after the gaffe was clarified, about as awkward a moment as an award show can produce. But the filmmakers behind Moonlight, a film about the marginalized black and gay experience, were denied the emotion that comes from a watershed cultural moment like winning Best Picture, and the chaos overshadowed the power of the moment, let alone their speeches. While it was deserved to a measure, the amount of attention given to the La La Land team’s graciousness after the mistake only further magnified how problematic the incident was.

Marvel’s Inhumans

It’s bad enough when the phrase “worst thing Marvel has done” is used to describe your new TV show, as it was for ABC’s fall foray into the Marvelverse. But the launch of Inhumans became more dire in light of the investment made in the series and its hubris in assuming audiences would consume it anyway, despite its middling quality, just because it’s Marvel. The big-budget bet included a release in IMAX theaters of its first two episodes ahead of its ABC launch, a theatrical run that garnered a pitiful $2.9 million.

Matt Damon

It’s been quite the year for Matt Damon, who needs to fire any publicist whose advice isn’t simply, “Stop talking.” His response to the Weinstein scandal has been disastrous bordering on offensive, with the actor running out of feet to put in his mouth as he attempted to add nuance to the conversation but instead came off as defending bad men’s behavior. But even if you reluctantly put all that aside, the films he was promoting during those calamitous interviews, Suburbicon and Downsizing, have underperformed at the box office and divided critics. All that on top of the way he kicked the year off: in a riotously silly man-bun white savior-ing Chinese history in the epic box office bomb The Great Wall.

Louis C.K.’s I Love You, Daddy

In September, Louis C.K. premiered I Love You, Daddy at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s a film in which C.K.’s protagonist, Glen, in a very Woody Allen-ish plot, has a 17-year-old daughter who enters a relationship with a 60-something man who is a legendary filmmaker. In one scene, a character played by Charlie Day vigorously mimes masturbation, not bothering to stop when a female producer, used to such things, enters the room. What was purposefully provocative in the film now borders on lunacy after The New York Times confirmed an industry open secret: that Louis C.K. had masturbated in front of upcoming female comedians. Suffice it to say that I Love You, Daddy’s theatrical release was canceled.

Kathy Griffin’s Trump mask fiasco

When Kathy Griffin was made aware of how ghastly and in poor taste the photo of her holding a bloodied, decapitated Trump head was—which happened instantly—she apologized for the offense. But few celebrity controversies have spiraled this out of control this quickly. Griffin was immediately let go from nearly every entertainment job she held, and, in response, she staged a misguided press conference in which she alleged that the Trump family was targeting her. It’s a classic case in disastrous damage control, but it shouldn’t have damned Griffin the way it has. It certainly says a lot about the latent misogyny in the industry that, as recent months have brought to light, famous men are guilty of truly horrific behavior that for so long was excused—yet an atoning Griffin still can’t get representation or a footing back into the industry she made her name in. The one good to come of this: Griffin’s fed up with all of it, too, and she’s naming names.

Fyre Festival

The best thing to happen to Coachella’s reputation is the worst thing to have happened to the hoodwinked revelers who shelled out upwards of $250,000 for a luxurious VIP concert experience on a private island in the Bahamas. Rich kids arrived only for it to instead resemble, as one fooled attendee attested, a refugee camp. The entire thing was organized by rapper Ja Rule and out-of-his-element entrepreneur bro Billy McFarland under false pretenses, with no infrastructure in place to support, house, or feed the thousands of concertgoers who paid premium prices only to be met with an unfinished tent village, packs of feral dogs, mountains of trash, no-show artists, and not enough food to go around. A breaking point for the increased lunacy surrounding the culture of music festivals, or merely a cautionary tale for how not to ruin the next one?

Tulip Fever

Maybe it’s schadenfreude that Harvey Weinstein’s swan song as a Hollywood mogul included this long-gestating, notorious disaster of a period film, riddled with false starts and re-castings and shuffled release dates and, most notably, Harvey Weinstein’s constant tinkering. Perhaps the lowest moment in the botched release of the film, which starred Dane DeHaan and Alicia Vikander and earned a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 9 percent, was when Weinstein himself penned an essay defending it, citing the fact that Vikander’s mother’s friend called her to say she enjoyed the movie as evidence.

Kid Rock’s “Senate run”  

The music industry’s resident American Jackass dialed up his reign of terror this year with the threat of a Senate run, to be launched on his tried-and-true values of cheap beer and racism. In the end, it was nothing more than a barely veiled publicity stunt. Nonetheless, breathless headlines blared the preposterous idea, and, considering the trajectory to public office mapped out by Donald Trump, seriously considered it. Of course, we can hardly fault anyone for, against their better judgement, giving credence to the nonsense that Kid Rock says. We still can’t get over his bigoted use of “gay” as a pejorative—let alone his embrace of the Confederate flag.  

Baywatch vs. Rotten Tomatoes

A bad movie is a bad movie. That’s fine and inevitable, and Baywatch was a bad movie. But shining a spotlight on this turd in particular came reports of industry insiders pissed that critical reviews decimated the movie’s box office haul, as well as that of the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It’s not the fact that these movies were shit you could smell from miles away that made audiences not want to buy tickets. It’s Rotten Tomatoes! If you ever want to know how little Hollywood studios think of you, the audience, just read this quote: “The critic aggregation site increasingly is slowing down the potential business of popcorn movies. Pirates 5 and Baywatch aren’t built for critics but rather general audiences, and once upon a time these types of films—a family adventure and a raunchy R-rated comedy—were critic-proof.”

The Mummy and the Dark Universe

Tom Cruise’s The Mummy wasn’t just supposed to be a franchise reboot cash-grab using a familiar property and a big Hollywood star. It was supposed to launch an entire shared cinematic universe, dubbed the “Dark Universe,” for Universal, filled with monsters including Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll, Javier Bardem as Frankenstein, and Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, as well as Sofia Boutella’s Ahmanet from The Mummy. It was a whole big plan. They all posed for a photo together and everything! But following disastrous box office returns for The Mummy, not to mention abysmal reviews, plans for the interconnected Dark Universe, at least as far as they were in motion, were scrapped and its architects, producer-writers Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan, jumped ship for other projects.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/15-biggest-pop-culture-disasters-of-2017-kendall-jenner-megyn-kelly-the-oscars-more/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/181456618922

[allofbeercom]

15 Biggest Pop Culture Disasters of 2017: Kendall Jenner, Megyn Kelly, the Oscars, & More

If there’s any sort of running theme among the year’s biggest pop culture fails, it’s a mind-boggling lack of self-awareness. The biggest entertainment disasters were born out of a clusterfuck of delusion, hubris, apathy, and, in most cases, an almost unforgivable deafness to the conversations defining this moment in our culture.

So while we’ve spent much of this last month cheering the output that challenged, invigorated, and, of course, entertained us this year, let us also grand marshal this parade of shame—in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, there will be lessons learned heading into next year. Here are 15 flops from the past year, be it commercial bombs or tone-deaf cultural grenades, from the worlds of music, TV, movies, and celebrity culture.

Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi commercial

The solution to institutionalized racism, millennial apathy, police brutality, and Trump-era anger? A nice cold Pepsi, and a tangential Kardashian to deliver it. The message of the resistance-themed Pepsi commercial was so laughably obtuse and reductive, and the reaction so brutally eviscerating, that the company immediately removed it from the internet and actually apologized to Jenner for its misguided creative direction. Seriously, though: Think of the sheer number of people who had to OK this ad before it was released. It’s mind-boggling.

Sean Spicer at the Emmys

Notoriously cowering former White House press secretary Sean Spicer finally embraced the spotlight at the 2017 Emmy Awards, making a cameo appearance during host Stephen Colbert’s monologue ruthlessly attacking President Trump. Spicer giggled and soaked up the attention and applause, an ovation for a public figure who lived out his short tenure in relentless disgrace and disgust, cheering him for “gamely” participating in the roasting of his former boss. But for many viewers, the booking of Spicer was a shameless absolution of a man who was toothlessly complicit in spreading lies by the Trump administration to the American people; the worst example of the entertainment industry’s instinct to bend any moral for a cheap laugh.

“As a father of daughters…”

This entire recap of the year’s disasters could be populated with the horrifying misconduct of the litany of Bad Men exposed this year—from Harvey Weinstein to Kevin Spacey and beyond—and the ways in which various institutions mishandled the behavior and fallout. No reactions to these revelations were more infuriating than the famous male figures, ranging from Matt Damon to Ben Affleck to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who clarified that they were horrified because they are fathers who have daughters. It’s a sign of how clueless men are and have been in processing these scandals and the nature of this predatory and misogynistic culture. As Hunter Harris perfectly wrote in Vulture, “Only a sociopath needs a daughter—or a sister, a girlfriend, a wife, or even just a lady standing in front of him at Starbucks—to make him queasy enough at the thought of a sexual predator in his industry to do something about it.”

Mariah Carey at New Year’s Eve

Maybe it was a simple mistake made in a very public forum. Maybe it was an ominous warning of the year that was to come. Nonetheless, Mariah Carey’s interminable avalanche of live disasters during the New Year’s Rockin’ Eve telecast was excruciating to watch. One of the greatest singers of all-time standing on stage pissed off, first saying she couldn’t hear a backing track to sing along to, then not bothering to lip sync the next song before storming off. It was an inauspicious way to start the new year, especially when you consider the optics of it: a woman helpless as the world, albeit in this case just the Times Square stage, burned around her, then vilified for refusing to smile through the carnage. The fallout was hardly handled elegantly with Carey’s team and the production company engaging in a public she-said-they-said over who was to blame.

The launch of Megyn Kelly Today

At Fox News, Megyn Kelly was a marketable if polarizing star presence, known for her prosecutorial manner in lines of tough questioning—always admirable, even if you didn’t necessarily agree with the direction. NBC found it admirable enough to spend $15 million to woo her away from the cable news network, rearranging its entire morning news lineup to launch a full hour of Kelly-led programming. Confusingly, however, it eschewed the attributes that made Kelly so popular at Fox. Instead, a manufactured, awkwardly fitting personality emerged that was crucified by critics at each tonal whiplash segment transition, especially during painful interviews with liberal celebrities who couldn’t bother to hide their disdain for the host.

La La Land Oscars gaffe

The phrase “Oscars mistake” is typically employed to groan about a film voters crown Best Picture that critics or fans don’t necessarily think deserved it, not for a situation in which the literal wrong winner is announced. That a gaffe both so monumental and so careless happened at the 2017 Academy Awards—Warren Beatty was handed the wrong envelope and, confused, announced La La Land as Best Picture instead of Moonlight—is already excruciating and embarrassing. But, again, the optics of it all make everything worse. The La La Land team had to cede the stage after the gaffe was clarified, about as awkward a moment as an award show can produce. But the filmmakers behind Moonlight, a film about the marginalized black and gay experience, were denied the emotion that comes from a watershed cultural moment like winning Best Picture, and the chaos overshadowed the power of the moment, let alone their speeches. While it was deserved to a measure, the amount of attention given to the La La Land team’s graciousness after the mistake only further magnified how problematic the incident was.

Marvel’s Inhumans

It’s bad enough when the phrase “worst thing Marvel has done” is used to describe your new TV show, as it was for ABC’s fall foray into the Marvelverse. But the launch of Inhumans became more dire in light of the investment made in the series and its hubris in assuming audiences would consume it anyway, despite its middling quality, just because it’s Marvel. The big-budget bet included a release in IMAX theaters of its first two episodes ahead of its ABC launch, a theatrical run that garnered a pitiful $2.9 million.

Matt Damon

It’s been quite the year for Matt Damon, who needs to fire any publicist whose advice isn’t simply, “Stop talking.” His response to the Weinstein scandal has been disastrous bordering on offensive, with the actor running out of feet to put in his mouth as he attempted to add nuance to the conversation but instead came off as defending bad men’s behavior. But even if you reluctantly put all that aside, the films he was promoting during those calamitous interviews, Suburbicon and Downsizing, have underperformed at the box office and divided critics. All that on top of the way he kicked the year off: in a riotously silly man-bun white savior-ing Chinese history in the epic box office bomb The Great Wall.

Louis C.K.’s I Love You, Daddy

In September, Louis C.K. premiered I Love You, Daddy at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s a film in which C.K.’s protagonist, Glen, in a very Woody Allen-ish plot, has a 17-year-old daughter who enters a relationship with a 60-something man who is a legendary filmmaker. In one scene, a character played by Charlie Day vigorously mimes masturbation, not bothering to stop when a female producer, used to such things, enters the room. What was purposefully provocative in the film now borders on lunacy after The New York Times confirmed an industry open secret: that Louis C.K. had masturbated in front of upcoming female comedians. Suffice it to say that I Love You, Daddy’s theatrical release was canceled.

Kathy Griffin’s Trump mask fiasco

When Kathy Griffin was made aware of how ghastly and in poor taste the photo of her holding a bloodied, decapitated Trump head was—which happened instantly—she apologized for the offense. But few celebrity controversies have spiraled this out of control this quickly. Griffin was immediately let go from nearly every entertainment job she held, and, in response, she staged a misguided press conference in which she alleged that the Trump family was targeting her. It’s a classic case in disastrous damage control, but it shouldn’t have damned Griffin the way it has. It certainly says a lot about the latent misogyny in the industry that, as recent months have brought to light, famous men are guilty of truly horrific behavior that for so long was excused—yet an atoning Griffin still can’t get representation or a footing back into the industry she made her name in. The one good to come of this: Griffin’s fed up with all of it, too, and she’s naming names.

Fyre Festival

The best thing to happen to Coachella’s reputation is the worst thing to have happened to the hoodwinked revelers who shelled out upwards of $250,000 for a luxurious VIP concert experience on a private island in the Bahamas. Rich kids arrived only for it to instead resemble, as one fooled attendee attested, a refugee camp. The entire thing was organized by rapper Ja Rule and out-of-his-element entrepreneur bro Billy McFarland under false pretenses, with no infrastructure in place to support, house, or feed the thousands of concertgoers who paid premium prices only to be met with an unfinished tent village, packs of feral dogs, mountains of trash, no-show artists, and not enough food to go around. A breaking point for the increased lunacy surrounding the culture of music festivals, or merely a cautionary tale for how not to ruin the next one?

Tulip Fever

Maybe it’s schadenfreude that Harvey Weinstein’s swan song as a Hollywood mogul included this long-gestating, notorious disaster of a period film, riddled with false starts and re-castings and shuffled release dates and, most notably, Harvey Weinstein’s constant tinkering. Perhaps the lowest moment in the botched release of the film, which starred Dane DeHaan and Alicia Vikander and earned a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 9 percent, was when Weinstein himself penned an essay defending it, citing the fact that Vikander’s mother’s friend called her to say she enjoyed the movie as evidence.

Kid Rock’s “Senate run”  

The music industry’s resident American Jackass dialed up his reign of terror this year with the threat of a Senate run, to be launched on his tried-and-true values of cheap beer and racism. In the end, it was nothing more than a barely veiled publicity stunt. Nonetheless, breathless headlines blared the preposterous idea, and, considering the trajectory to public office mapped out by Donald Trump, seriously considered it. Of course, we can hardly fault anyone for, against their better judgement, giving credence to the nonsense that Kid Rock says. We still can’t get over his bigoted use of “gay” as a pejorative—let alone his embrace of the Confederate flag.  

Baywatch vs. Rotten Tomatoes

A bad movie is a bad movie. That’s fine and inevitable, and Baywatch was a bad movie. But shining a spotlight on this turd in particular came reports of industry insiders pissed that critical reviews decimated the movie’s box office haul, as well as that of the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It’s not the fact that these movies were shit you could smell from miles away that made audiences not want to buy tickets. It’s Rotten Tomatoes! If you ever want to know how little Hollywood studios think of you, the audience, just read this quote: “The critic aggregation site increasingly is slowing down the potential business of popcorn movies. Pirates 5 and Baywatch aren’t built for critics but rather general audiences, and once upon a time these types of films—a family adventure and a raunchy R-rated comedy—were critic-proof.”

The Mummy and the Dark Universe

Tom Cruise’s The Mummy wasn’t just supposed to be a franchise reboot cash-grab using a familiar property and a big Hollywood star. It was supposed to launch an entire shared cinematic universe, dubbed the “Dark Universe,” for Universal, filled with monsters including Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll, Javier Bardem as Frankenstein, and Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, as well as Sofia Boutella’s Ahmanet from The Mummy. It was a whole big plan. They all posed for a photo together and everything! But following disastrous box office returns for The Mummy, not to mention abysmal reviews, plans for the interconnected Dark Universe, at least as far as they were in motion, were scrapped and its architects, producer-writers Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan, jumped ship for other projects.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/15-biggest-pop-culture-disasters-of-2017-kendall-jenner-megyn-kelly-the-oscars-more/

[bestmovies0]

15 Biggest Pop Culture Disasters of 2017: Kendall Jenner, Megyn Kelly, the Oscars, & More

If there’s any sort of running theme among the year’s biggest pop culture fails, it’s a mind-boggling deficiency of self-awareness. The biggest recreation calamities were born out of a clusterfuck of hallucination, hubris, apathy, and, in most cases, an almost unforgivable deafness to the conversations defining this moment in our culture.

So while we’ve invested much of this last month cheering the outputthat challenged, invigorated, and, of course, entertained us this year, let us also grand marshal this parade of shame–in the hopes that maybe, simply perhaps, there will be lessons learned heading into next year. Here are 15 duds from the past time, be it commercial bomb or tone-deaf culture grenades, from the worlds of music, TV, movies, and celebrity culture.

Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi commercial

The solution to institutionalized racism, millennial apathy, police brutality, and Trump-era anger? A nice cold Pepsi, and a tangential Kardashian to deliver it. The message of the resistance-themed Pepsi commercial was so laughably obtuse and reductive, and the reaction so brutally eviscerating, that the company immediately removed it from the internet and actually apologized to Jenner for its misguided creative direction. Severely, though: Think of the sheer number of people who had to OK this ad before it was released. It’s mind-boggling.

Sean Spicer at the Emmys

Notoriously crouching former White House press secretary Sean Spicer ultimately espoused the spotlight at the 2017 Emmy Awards, making a cameo appearing during host Stephen Colbert’s monologue ruthlessly attacking President Trump. Spicer giggled and soaked up the attention and applause, an ovation for a public figure who lived out his short tenure in relentless disgrace and abhorrence, applauding him for “gamely” participating in the roasting of his former boss. But for many spectators, the booking of Spicer was a shameless absolution of a humankind who was toothlessly complicit in spreading lies by the Trump administration to the American people; the worst example of the entertainment industry’s instinct to bend any moral for a cheap laugh.

” As a parent of daughters …” strong>

This entire summary of the year’s disasters could be inhabited with the frightening misconduct of the litany of Bad Men exposed this year–from Harvey Weinstein to Kevin Spacey and beyond–and the ways in which various institutions mishandled the behaviour and fallout. No reactions to these revelations were more infuriating than the famous male figures, ranging from Matt Damon to Ben Affleck to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who clarified that they were horrified why i am father-gods who have daughters. It’s a sign of how clueless men are and have been in processing these scandals and the specific characteristics of this predatory and misogynistic culture. As Hunter Harris perfectly wrote in Vulture,” Merely a sociopath needs a daughter–or a sister, a girlfriend, a spouse, or even just a lady standing in front of him at Starbucks–to attain him queasy enough at the believed to be a sexual predator in his industry to do anything about it .”

Mariah Carey at New Year’s Eve

Maybe it was a simple mistake attained in a very public meeting. Perhaps it was an ominous warned against the year that was to come. Nonetheless, Mariah Carey’s interminable avalanche of live catastrophes during the New Year’s Rockin’ Eve telecast was excruciating to watch. One of the greatest singers of all-time standing on stage pissed off, first saying she couldn’t hear a patronage track to sing along to, then not bothering to lip sync the next carol before storming off. It was an inauspicious lane to begin the new time, specially when you consider the optics of it: a woman helpless as “the worlds”, albeit in this case only the Times Square stage, burned around her, then vilified for refusing to smile through the carnage. The fallout was scarcely managed elegantly with Carey’s team and the production corporation engaging in a public she-said-they-said over who was to blame.

The launch of Megyn Kelly Today

At Fox News, Megyn Kelly was a marketable if polarizing star presence, known for her prosecutorial behaviour in lines of tough questioning–always admirable, even if you didn’t necessarily agree with the direction. NBC received it admirable enough to expend $15 million to wooed her away from the cable news network, rearranging its entire morning news lineup to launching a full hour of Kelly-led programming. Confusingly, however, it shunned the attributes that attained Kelly so popular at Fox. Instead, a manufactured, awkwardly fitting personality emerged that was crucified by critics at each tonal whiplash segment transition, especially during painful interviews with liberal celebrities who couldn’t bother to conceal their dislike for the host.

La La Land em> Oscars gaffe

The phrase” Oscars mistake” is typically employed to groan about a movie voters crown Best Picture that critics or fans don’t necessarily reckon “ve earned it” , not for a situation in which the literal incorrect win is announced. That a gaffe both so monumental and so careless happened at the 2017 Academy Awards–Warren Beatty was handed the wrong envelope and, confused, announced La La Land em> as Best Picture instead of Moonlight — is already excruciating and embarrassing. But, again, the optics of everything there is construct everything worse. The La La Land squad had to concede the stage after the gaffe was clarified, about as awkward a moment as an award demonstrate can produce. But the filmmakers behind Moonlight , a film about the marginalized black and gay experience, were denied the emotion that comes from a watershed cultural instant like winning Best Picture, and the chaos overshadowed the power of the moment, let alone their speeches. While it was deserves to additional measures, the amount of attention given to the La La Land em> team’s graciousness after the mistake only further magnified how problematic the accident was.

Marvel’s Inhumans

It’s bad enough when the phrase” worst thing Marvel has done” is used to describe your new Tv present, as it was for ABC’s fall foray into the Marvelverse. But the launch of Inhumans became more dire in light of the investment attained in the series and its hubris in presuming audiences would consume it anyway, despite its middling quality, just because it’s Marvel. The big-budget gamble included a liberate in IMAX theaters of its first two episodes ahead of its ABC launch, a theatrical operate that garnered a pitiful $2.9 million.

Matt Damon

It’s been quite the year for Matt Damon, who needs to fire any publicist whose advice isn’t simply,” Stop talking .” His response to the Weinstein scandal has been disastrous bordering on offensive, with the actor running out of feet to put in his mouth as he attempted to add subtlety to the conversation but instead came off as defending bad men’s behavior. But even if you reluctantly set all that aside, the films he was promoting during those calamitous interviews , Suburbicon and Downsizing , have underperformed at the box office and subdivided critics. All that on top of the route he kicked the year off: in a riotously silly man-bun white savior-ing Chinese history in the epic box office bomb The Great Wall . em>

Louis C.K.’s I Love You, Daddy

In September, Louis C.K. premiered I Adoration You, Daddy at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s a film in which C.K.’s protagonist, Glen, in a very Woody Allen-ish plot, has a 17 -year-old daughter who enters a relationship with a 60 -something man who is a legendary filmmaker. In one scene, a character played by Charlie Day vigorously mimes masturbation , not bothering to stop when a female producer, are applied to such things, enters the chamber. What was purposefully provoking in the movie now borders on lunacy after The New York Times supported an industry open secret: that Louis C.K. had masturbated in front of upcoming female comedians. Suffice it to say that I Love You, Daddy ‘ s theatrical freeing was canceled.

Kathy Griffin’s Trump mask fiasco

When Kathy Griffin was made aware of how ghastly and in poor taste the photo of her holding a bloodied, beheaded Trump head was–which happened instantly–she apologized for the offense. But few celebrity contentions have spiraled this out of control this quickly. Griffin was immediately let go from nearly every amusement undertaking she comprised, and, in response, she staged a misguided press conference in which she alleged that the Trump family was targeting her. It’s a classic occurrence in disastrous injury control, but it shouldn’t have damned Griffin the way it has. It certainly says a lot about the latent misogyny in the industry that, as recent months have brought to sun, famous humankinds are guilty of truly horrific behaviour that for so long was excused–yet an atoning Griffin still can’t get representation or a footing back into the industry she made her name in. The one good to come of this: Griffin’s fed up with all of it, too, and she’s naming names.

Fyre Festival

The best thing to happen to Coachella’s reputation is the worst thing to have happened to the hoodwinked revelers who shelled out upwards of $250,000 for a luxurious VIP concert experience on a private island in the Bahamas. Rich kids arrived only for it to instead resemble, as one fooled attendee testified, a refugee camp. The entire thing was organized by rapper Ja Rule and out-of-his-element entrepreneur bro Billy McFarland under false pretense, with no infrastructure in place to assistance, house, or feed the thousands of concertgoers who paid premium prices only to be met with an unfinished tent village, packs of feral bird-dogs, mountains of litter , no-show artists, and not enough food to go around. A breaking point for the rise in lunacy surrounding the culture of music festivals, or simply a cautionary tale for how not to ruin the next one?

Tulip Fever

Maybe it’s schadenfreude that Harvey Weinstein’s swan song as a Hollywood mogul included this long-gestating , notorious tragedy of a interval movie, riddled with false starts and re-castings and shuffled liberate dates and, most notably, Harvey Weinstein’s constant tinkering. Perhaps the lowest moment in the botched freeing of the cinema, which starred Dane DeHaan and Alicia Vikander and earned a Rotten Tomatoes score of merely 9 percentage, was when Weinstein himself penned an essay defending it, quoting the fact that Vikander’s mother’s friend called her to say she enjoyed the movie as evidence.

Kid Rock’s” Senate operate”

The music industry’s resident American Jackass dialed up his reign of terror this year with the threat of a Senate run, to be launched on his tried-and-true values of cheap brew and racism. In the end, it was nothing more than a scarcely veiled advertising stunt. Nonetheless, breathless headlines blared the ludicrous mind, and, considering the trajectory to public agency mapped out by Donald Trump, seriously considered it. Of course, we can hardly fault anyone for, against their better judgement, giving credence to the nonsense that Kid Rock says. We still can’t get over his bigoted apply of “gay” as a pejorative–let alone his espouse of the Confederate flag.

Baywatch vs. Rotten Tomatoes

A bad movie is a bad movie. That’s fine and inevitable, and Baywatch was a bad movie. But glistening a spotlight on this turd including with regard to came reports of industry insiders pissed that critical reviews decimated the movie’s box office carry, as well as that of the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It’s not the fact that these movies were shit you are able fragrance from miles back that made audiences not want to buy tickets. It’s Rotten Tomatoes! If “youve been” want to know how little Hollywood studios think of you, the audience, simply read this quote:” The critic aggregation site increasingly is slowing down the potential business of popcorn movies. Pirates 5 and Baywatch aren’t to construct critics but instead general audiences, and once upon a time these types of films–a family escapade and a raunchy R-rated comedy–were critic-proof .”

The Mummy and the Dark Universe

Tom Cruise’s The Mummy wasn’t just supposed to be a dealership reboot cash-grab use a familiar property and a big Hollywood star. It was supposed to launch an entire shared cinematic cosmo, dubbed the “Dark Universe,” for Universal, fitted with monsters including Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll, Javier Bardem as Frankenstein, and Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, as well as Sofia Boutella’s Ahmanet from The Mummy . It was a whole big plan. They all posed for a photo together and everything! But following disastrous box office returns for The Mummy , not to mention abysmal evaluations, plans for the interconnected Dark Universe, at the least as far as they were in motion, were scrapped and its designers, producer-writers Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan, jump-start ship for other projects.

Read more: https :// www.thedailybeast.com/ 15 -biggest-pop-culture-disasters-of-2 017 -kendall-jenner-megyn-kelly-the-oscars-and-more

from https://bestmovies.fun/2018/01/01/15-biggest-pop-culture-disasters-of-2017-kendall-jenner-megyn-kelly-the-oscars-more/

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Tagged by @saxrohmerwon ages ago on my brief other blog and just noticed it, thanks bruh ily <3

Rules:  Always post the rules, answer the questions given to you, then write 10 questions of your own, and tag some friends!

1. Favorite city (or town/small island/et cetera) in the world and why?

I guess it’d be Avalon. I basically spent every summer of my life there with family and it’s really small (only seven miles long) so you wind up going to the same few ice cream places or antique stores or pizza shops all the time but you never really get bored of it. The whole place has a quiet, old-timey shore town nostalgia to it too that’s super sweet. And like some of my all time favorite memories were staying on the beach until sunset when the lifeguards were gone so we could swim wherever we wanted, or climbing on the outfall pipe and walking to see how far out I was brave enough to go (it got “higher” ((read: the sand started to disappear)) the further out over the water you went), or walking on the beach at night. That was my favorite part, the nighttime. It’s weird how quiet but how alive everything got after dark, and I could hunt for ghost crabs or watch fireworks and the lights from town on the water, and the sand never bothered me as much when it was cool from the dark.

2. Describe your favorite scent/s.

Autumn, if that counts as a smell. But the combined scent of really brisk air and smoky burning leaves and fresh damp ones and hay and I guess plant life generally decaying, but in a sweet way? I also like flower smells obviously, and food smells, but those are boring to talk about. Gasoline, the specific kind of fake (cotton) paper money is printed on. Coffee. I’ve learned to kind of like the smell of cigarettes on clothes, because my boyfriend smokes and I like waking up in the sweater I wore the night before with that smell still on it. People have smells too. Like my mom smells like perfume even when she isn’t wearing any, and it’s nice. And babies smell rad and trigger ALL of my maternal impulses (cannot wait to reproduce, it’s gonna be gr8). And the boy smells really nice... Not even in like a what-deodorant-are-you-wearing kind of way but like skin and sweat and waking up warm in a cold house on Wednesday mornings. And when he comes home from work smelling like fresh cut grass and wet dirt it’s v nice.

3. Who is/was your favorite teacher and why?

My Romantic Lit professor currently, because he teaches exactly what I want to teach and I have a career crush on him. He’s also just super excitable and enthusiastic (let’s talk about that WEIRD weekend in Geneva the Shelleys took guys! Blake was an EDGELORD!) which I love.

I also had a professor at my old school who was super cool and helped me through a lot of shit? I took her personal essay class right as I was sort of in recovery for depression following a terrible, low key emotionally unhealthy (abusive? I still don’t know if I can use that word? Either way, OVER-SHARING YAY) romantic relationship and I explored that and a lot of other stuff pertaining to my childhood and relationships and discovering my queerness in my work for her class, and she was super supportive and involved in helping me experiment with new formats and really use writing as a therapeutic tool and it helped me heal a lot. She was also just a super cool lady (lots of tattoos and wispy blonde hair and a quiet voice, kind of a hipster fairy) who hung out with me at a local music festival in town when I was like fresh out of the hospital and having trouble being around my normal friends. She just always made sure her door was open and went out of her way to make me feel better, and to this day I appreciate that.

4. What is your favorite poem?  (Substitute with “song” if you don’t have a favorite poem.)

Oh my GOD, don’t make me choose. I’m obsessed with the Romantics and a few contemporaries have my heart, but I guess I’d have to say “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. It’s just beautiful and hopeful and simple enough that tiny me could fall in love with it and appreciate it almost in its fullness when I was too young to grasp other works.

5. Weirdest thing you’ve ever heard out-of-context?

Ever? I don’t tend to remember stuff like that for a long time unless I’d like hypothetically overheard a murder or something, but last night some girl was walking back from our student center with her friends and angrily shouted that she wanted to “put her dong through a snare drum” which made me laugh.

6. Best concert experience?  (If you have never been to a concert, what do you hope your first concert will be?)

Still gotta say Green Day after just turning 15 years old. I’d never been to a concert before and they were my favorite band at the time. I was so proud to be there because I had 0 dollars to my name and no one would hire me because I was underage, so I had to earn every penny for those tickets doing gross menial work like removing and scrubbing window frames that hadn’t seen soap in maybe a decade (SO MANY SPIDERS), and teeny bopper me thought that was 'punk.’ And at one point Billie Joe Armstrong, who my pathetic little emo self wanted to MARRY told the audience he was proud of everyone who’d worked their ass off to afford to come see them play and I remember turning to my dad and screaming “HE MEANS ME!” It was so wholesome.

7. Favorite holiday (or other special occasion) and why?

Christmas! My house was THE Christmas house growing up. My parents put so much effort into it and it was the cutest thing. Besides the outrageous amount of decorations and the amazing food that takes all week to make and the cute tradition of having my grandparents spend the night to watch us open presents first thing in the morning, the best part of Christmas growing up was definitely the effort my family put into making us kids believe Santa was real for way longer than necessary. One year my uncle got a flashlight and a red solo up and climbed trees in our yard so we’d see “Rudolph’s nose” if we looked out the window. We put out reindeer food every year. My dad would stomp around shaking jingle bells and someone always climbed on the roof making noise, and my mom knew calligraphy, so she’d write us scrolls from Santa on legit parchment and toast it in the oven so it would curl. One year we had an old, old family friend who was a Santa impersonator show up with a legit sleigh and a giant book with all the family member’s names and the years they were naughty and nice in it and stories about why and it was so cute. So whereas most kids found out around like 8 my parents went to extreme lengths so that I believed it until I was like 11 and honestly, I’m really glad they did, because it was a kick ass childhood. I definitely want to be that level of extra when I become a parent.

8. Did you ever play an instrument growing up?  If so, how did it go for you?

Guitar, bass, after I learned guitar I could play pretty much anything pluckable with strings, so I had a Romanian lap harp (I was such a cool kid) and I would sometimes play my sister’s viola (often incorrectly and like a guitar, but it was fun to sample when I recorded stuff). I haven’t sang or touched an instrument in like seven years though. I kind of gave up after sad life stuff happened but I want to pick it back up again. I really miss music.

9. If you were given $100 today, what would you do with the money?

Use it toward Christmas presents for loved ones. Since I’m basically not allowed out of the house after I go home for break I have to do Christmas early with the friends and boyfriend.

10. What’s the scariest movie you have ever seen?  (Define scary however you like.)

I love scary movies so this is hard, but I guess anything in which children are genuinely evil? Like not even in a supernatural way; it’s not horror but watching We Need To Talk About Kevin fucked me up. I guess being a mom is like so much something that I want, and imagining that happening would def keep me up at night. Especially because I would not know what to do.

Now, for questions:

1. What’s your favorite article of clothing?

Dresses but also plain black leggings. And I have very soft sweatpants that fit just right.

2. Do you still sleep with a stuffed animal?

Nope. I can’t sleep with the live one either lol, Bynx likes to sleep RIGHT where I want to roll over and screams and puts his paws in my mouth when he wants attention.

3. Do you believe in heaven? Hell?

Both, Catholic.

4. Do you listen to podcasts? What are your favorite ones?

Not really, but I’d like to, in theory. It just seems like more effort somehow than watching TV and I am always tired.

5. What was your go-to game during recess?

Four square.

6. Where do you see yourself in the next ten years– not in a job interview kind of way, but actually?

Awwww this is cute to think about. I guess I’d like to be living in like a really woodland but not isolating place, somewhere where my house can be on a lake or by woods or mountains but if I drive ten minutes there’s a cozy-sized town with all I need. Maybe in like Virginia or Vermont. I’m a professor of Gothic Literature at the local college, and my students are engaged and inspiring and call me by my first name. I’m in a pretty and not-too-big house, but it’s warm and smells like our fireplace. I’m married to my lovely guy, and both our jobs are flexible enough that we can have dinner as a family and spend time with our brood of kids. And they pay well enough that we might not be wealthy but we never have to worry. The cat’s still with us and we’ve got a dog, too. We go on camping trips and The Lumberjack teaches the kids how to build fires and tie knots and dad stuff like that. One of the kids at least loves reading and the house is full of books - I’ve got a home office full of bookshelves and a reading nook. We’ve got a porch where we can bundle up and drink wine in the evening after the kids are in bed. We’re not rich but not poor, and our families get along and come to visit. My parents still ask us over for Christmas every year. Wherever I teach, my kids can go there for free.

7. Do you have a favorite visual artist? Who are they?

Oh lord, I don’t know. I mean I like art but I hate the process of liking art. It’s so much more involved than “I like how this piece makes me feel” and I don’t enjoy that. I like individual pieces and I don’t know enough about art to really speak on it.

I guess, though, I like Dali and Khalo as people. They seem unpretentious and fun. Which is surprising because I guess the way their work is talked about you’d think the opposite.

8. Do you really like a food that most people think is disgusting? Or, do you like a popular food to a disgusting degree?

Not really but like I put too much hot sauce / jalapenos on everything and it disgusts people. And I put way too much sugar in coffee, and creamer too.

9. What music did your parents play in the house/car?

My mom is a New Wave junkie like me and my dad had more complicated taste. He was never big into music, so he only really likes a few artists for their voices and some songs for nostalgia. So we listened to a lot of oldies and swing and Judy Garland, but he also loved Blondie and Boston.

10. What would you tell your 15-year-old self?

I’d tell her she’s a lot stronger than she’s going to think she is one day and to tough it out. That people love her and will love her. That when you get older, family is hard, but it’s worth it to work on things. That she’s smarter than she thinks she is and should try harder in school, because when she finally does have faith in herself, it’ll pay off. 

Tagging whoever else wants to do this - it’s cold and rainy (here at least) and we could all use a day of warm socks and procrastinating with asks, honestly.

[robertmcangusgroup]

The Daily Thistle

The Daily Thistle – News From Scotland

Friday 13th October 2017

"Madainn Mhath” …Fellow Scot, I hope the day brings joy to you…. End of the week is with us, and this time with a 13 to go with it, but don’t worry it’s only a number…. Bella and I walked down to the ocean this morning, good to be able to do it without glasses, a gentle breeze was blowing in across the water and it had hints of exotic spices …. After all this is Spain and Africa is just across the water.. we watched the waves break on the sand and then turned for home….

COURIER CAUGHT IN £400,000 COCAINE RAID…. An unemployed man accepted £300 to transport cocaine worth more than £400,000 between Glasgow and Dundee, a court has heard. Ryan Stewart, 41, was arrested after detectives acting on a tip-off searched his car in a Dundee car park in March this year. Officers found a bag containing more than a kilo of the drug, which was found to have a purity of 80%. Stewart, of Dundee, admitted being concerned in the supply of cocaine. He will be sentenced at the High Court in Glasgow on 3 November. The High Court in Edinburgh was told that cocaine seized at street level normally had a purity of 10%. Prosecution lawyer Maryam Labaki said: "Should the 80% cocaine be cut to the average purity of 10%, it could realise 8113.6 grams, which if sold at £50 per gram would have a maximum illicit value of £405,684." Ms Labaki said that Mr Stewart was the only person in the car at the time of his detention and was taken to Dundee's police headquarters. Ms Labaki said: "During the interview he admitted to being paid £300 to act as a courier." Judge Lady Scott deferred sentence on Stewart for reports.

THOUSANDS OF SALMON ON LEWIS KILLED BY INFECTION…. Lorry loads of dead fish are being collected from a sea loch on the Isle of Lewis after suffering a bacterial infection, the BBC understands. Salmon farmers Marine Harvest said the infection affecting fish at Loch Eireasort was "completely harmless" to humans. Locals have raised concerns about the smell of rotting fish at the shore. The infection is believed to be pasteurella skyensis, though a final diagnosis is yet to be confirmed. It was earlier reported that the salmon could have been attacked by a virus. Steve Bracken, from Marine Harvest, said: "The health issues we have at Loch Erisort are the result of a bacterial infection, not a virus. "Our vet believes it is pasteurella skyensis, although we are awaiting final confirmation from the laboratory results. "We would like to reassure local people that this infection only affects fish and is completely harmless to humans. "The salmon are responding well to treatment and we are hoping that we are close to resolving the problem."

LIBERTY HOUSE BUYS LIVINGSTON FIRM SHAND CYCLES…. Industrial and metals group Liberty House has stepped up a gear in its bid to "rejuvenate" bicycle manufacturing in the UK by acquiring West Lothian firm Shand Cycles. Livingston-based Shand, which has been making hand-built custom and production bikes since 2003, was bought for an undisclosed sum. The deal marks Liberty's second major acquisition in the sector. Last year it bought Midlands-based mountain bike producer Trillion. Liberty is owned by Indian tycoon Sanjeev Gupta, who began his working life selling bicycles on behalf of his father's manufacturing firm. In a statement, Liberty said it intended to expand Shand's manufacturing capacity at Livingston, and help Shand and Trillion grow by "developing innovative products". Both firms will retain their brand identities within a newly-created Liberty Cycles division.

CAIRNGORM MOUNTAIN: CAN SCOTS SKI CENTRE 'GUARANTEE' SNOW?.... Skiers could be guaranteed snow at CairnGorm Mountain ski resort this winter, after the firm revealed plans to install a snow-making machine. It wants to fit a Snowfactory unit which can produce large amounts of snow at virtually any outdoor temperature. If the planning application is successful, it believes it will be first time this technology has been used at a ski resort in Scotland. Low levels of snow last winter meant snow sports were limited. Adam Gough, of CairnGorm Mountain, said it was a "really significant" move for the business. "It is no secret that last season was poor in terms of snowfall and we simply weren't able to open for snowsports as often we would have liked," he added. The new technology is made by TechnoAlpin and it will cost more than £90,000. CairnGorm Mountain plans to trial it during peak season, from November 2017 and January 2018, when it will be used to form a beginners' area. The machine is able to produce 45 tonnes of snow a day which can be pumped and sprayed up to 200m (218 yards). Mr Gough added: "Being able to trial the Snowfactory for two months is crucial to understand whether this is a viable option for the resort in the long-term. "If successful then we believe it will noticeably enhance the snowsports experience at CairnGorm Mountain." Sarah Smith, head of business development with Highlands and Islands Enterprise said: "This technology looks set to offer skiers and snowboarders a guarantee of snow being available whenever they want to visit. "For an outdoor business in Scotland, that could be a real game changer."

THE SCOTTISH SISTERS TAKING CLASSICAL MUSIC UPTOWN…. Two Scottish sisters, who shot to prominence with their version of Mark Ronson's Uptown Funk, are topping the UK classical music charts with their debut album. The Ayoub sisters have included their violin and cello version of Ronson's funk track on the new album but they first posted it online when they were starting out two years ago. Sarah Ayoub, 24, told BBC Scotland's Timeline programme: "Uptown Funk was the first pop cover that we ever attempted to play and upload on to YouTube. Mark Ronson invited us to Abbey Road studios to re-record it for the Brit Awards 2016." Her younger sister Laura, who had her 22nd birthday on Thursday, says: "It definitely allowed us to get a foot in the door and helped us manage to show our music to a lot more people and gain a lot of opportunities, so we were very grateful for that." The sisters grew up in Bearsden on the outskirts of Glasgow and went to the Douglas Academy School of Music in Milngavie. They were both classically trained, with Sarah graduating from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow and Laura studying at the Royal College of Music in London. Their parents are both Egyptian and moved to Glasgow shortly before they were born. Cellist Sarah says: "We are Scottish-Egyptian so traditional music from both countries played a part in our influences." Their debut album, recorded at Abbey Road with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, is an eclectic mix of tracks, ranging from Michael Jackson's 'Billie Jean' to Shostakovich and Johann Strauss.

On that note I will say that I hope you have enjoyed the news from Scotland today,

Our look at Scotland today is of The Ayoub sisters…

A Sincere Thank You for your company and Thank You for your likes and comments I love them and always try to reply, so please keep them coming, it's always good fun, As is my custom, I will go and get myself another mug of "Colombian" Coffee and wish you a safe Friday 13th October 2017 from my home on the southern coast of Spain, where the blue waters of the Alboran Sea washes the coast of Africa and Europe and the smell of the night blooming Jasmine and Honeysuckle fills the air…and a crazy old guy and his dog Bella go out for a walk at 4:00 am…on the streets of Estepona…

All good stuff....But remember it’s a dangerous world we live in

Be safe out there…

Robert McAngus