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libralita · 4 years ago

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The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Suzanne Collins

Summary: Ambition will fuel him. Competition will drive him. But power has its price. It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He’s been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined—every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute . . . and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.

Rating: ★★★★★

Review:

So, this is a bit of a “disclaimer” or more of an interesting fact: I’ve technically never read The Hunger Games Trilogy. I had to read the first book for my English class, and it was a time where I hated being told what to read so I used SparkNotes. We also watched the first film in that class but that doesn’t really matter because A) that was like 8 or 9 years ago and B) it was for my class so you can bet I wasn’t playing attention. So, for all intents and purposes, I have not read the Hunger Games. Now you may be asking why I decided read this…seemingly controversial book rather than the much beloved original trilogy. Cuz my friend said I should, the audiobook sample intrigued me, and when are you going to see a review of this book from someone who hasn’t read the original trilogy?

Before I go into spoilers with this book, I just want to say as someone who has at best a surface level understanding of the Hunger Games trilogy, I think people are being a little bit harsh about this book. This book made me completely understand why Coriolanus Snow went down the path that he did while also not glamourizing it or making excuses for it. I genuinely felt bad for this young man who has delt with so many hardship that no one would should suffer through. However, he still does horrible things and the book recognizes that he does horrible things. It is a fascinating character study with a bit of background on how the Hunger Games came to be. Perhaps my opinion will change once I read The Hunger Games trilogy (which I intend to do) however at this point I think this was an amazing book and you should give it a fair shake. Now, onto spoilers.

The only flaw I found with this book was it was a bit too on the nose with a couple of things. First some of the names. Gaul. Satyria. Highbottom. I know that Collins started off as a middle grade writer and these feel like very middle grade character names. They just describe the characters a little too perfectly. In YA, it’s more popular to make characters where their names’ meanings give an insight into their character. Not a huge problem but a bit silly.

Second, I’m a little conflicted on the political talk. On the one hand, holy shit a YA book that talks about political theory? In an intelligent way? That’s not just screaming about real world politics? Oh my! On the other hand, it’s a little too on the nose. Gaul having Coryo write about the Social Contract and then this conversation:

“‘I do. Unless there’s law, someone enforcing it, I think we might as well be animals,’ he said with more assurance. ‘Like it or not, the Capitol is the only thing keeping anyone safe.’ ‘Hm. So they keep me safe. And what do I give up for that?’ she asked.”—Page 434

Hobbes would swoon over Coryo. It wasn’t bad just on the nose. And to a degree, I get it, I’m working on getting my masters in political science and I’ve read Hobbes and Rousseau whereas most the intended audience probably hasn’t. So, I call this a nitpick for me

Other than this book being a little too on the nose, I found very little fault in this. Maybe the Post-Games story line was a little less interesting but it still wasn’t bad by any means. This book is a character study of Coriolanus Snow, so I’d like to talk about him and his dissent. While reading this, my friend asked me if I hadn’t known that Coryo would one day become President Snow, if I could see it coming. And, while it’s hard to tell exactly, I think Collins manages to balance both Coryo being sympathetic and showing how he could become the person that he is in the trilogy. There are three…phases or Coryo’s life that really illustrate how he becomes President Snow. First is his life during the War. Second, is his life During the 10th Hunger Games. Then his life Post-Games. Collins does a wonderful job of portraying what it was like for Coryo during the war. The horrors he had witness of enjoying the life of luxury at an early age and then his world crashing around him. Of his family dying. Of the struggles to survive. Of him witnessing his friends’ parents restore to something horrible like cannibalism. It’s brought up a lot because it’s something that scarred him.

Now his During-Games life/the first half of this book. Coryo and the people around him are clearly dealing with the PTSD of growing up in a war zone. He’s essentially starving through most of this section during the book and on the verge of losing of what little he’s held onto since the War ended. I feel really bad for him. There was a part of me during this section where I hoped along side him that Lucy Gray would win the Hunger Games, he could go to University and continue his relationship with her. Maybe they could have changed Panem for the better. And while in this section he was no pure angel, you could see Gaul and Highbottom pushing him to become a worse person. You could also see the red flags that become worse in the Post-Games section.

There are two major red flags I picked up on during this read through. First, is his relationship with Lucy Gray. He’s very possessive of her and he gets very jealous when she sings about another guy during The Hunger Games. This made the relationship slightly uncomfortable for me…though let’s be honest if Sejanus was pining after Lucy Gray he would be acting no different from any other YA love interest (shots fired.) He actually reminded me a lot of Jace from The Mortal Instruments. The second red flag is his treatment of Sejanus. In a meta sense Sejanus is your typical hero and the fact that Coryo is using him (and really anyone besides maybe his family?) is a giant red flag to me as a reader. He doesn’t like Sejanus or Mrs. Plinth. He just wants to use them. Which is really sad but shows that is eventually dissent into Post-Hunger Games Coryo is foreshadowed.

Now, let’s talk about Post-Games. I took a break once the Games ended because I was a little unmotivated to keep reading. I didn’t know if I would like Coryo leaving the Capital. I liked seeing the political maneuvering of the Games and his dynamics with his classmates. However, watching his dissent was great. His relationship with Lucy Gray went from slightly concerning to full blown toxic. His possessiveness of her really amped up. Coryo also isn’t really happy to see Sejanus because it’s a friendly face, it’s because there’s someone to recognize his status and for someone he can use. Again, another moment of possibility of where Coryo could have let Sejanus and maybe Lucy Gray escape and he could have gone off to become an officer. Work his way up and become the President. However, he didn’t take that path.

It was so heartbreaking to see Sejanus die, there was still a glimmer of Coryo’s humanity where he genuinely felt guilty but you could see his self-preserving nature showing its ugly head. And then his journey is cemented when he can’t handle being out with Lucy Gray so he may or may not have killed her, then he goes back where his family pictures are ruined and his mother’s powder is mush. The only thing left his is father’s compass.

Speaking of his father, one final character I’ll mention is Dean Highbottom. I wish we got a little bit more of him because his view of Coryo is interesting. It seemed like Collins gave a very subtle story about how Highbottom was worried that Coryo would turn out like his father. But Highbottom ended up created the monster he wanted to prevent. If he had shown Coryo compassion and understanding, he might have turned out differently. This ended up getting Highbottom killed which was a great way to end the book. Sad but great.

Overall, I think this is a great story. I loved seeing all the different roads Coryo could have taken and how things could have turned out differently. I am planning on buying the Hunger Games trilogy so it’ll be interesting to see how this changes things for me.

#the ballad of songbirds and snakes #the hunger games #suzanne collins #reviewsdaytuesday #ballad of songbirds and snakes #hunger games

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agerefandom · 4 years ago

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The Playtime Solution

Fandom: Sanders Sides

Words: 1,300

Characters: Logan & Patton, mentions of the other Sides

Prompt: Logan is trying very hard not to regress, but then Patton starts calling him cute names and he’s done for.

Warnings: grumpy tired Logan, a passing reference to Remus’s work (non-explicit), and I think that’s it!

It was always easy for Logan to lose himself in his work.

Thomas’s mind, like any human’s, was a vast space of unsorted information, constantly being filtered and added to. Only ten percent of external input made it through to the realms of the Sides, but it was still a tidal wave of new sensations and data that poured in every day. Along with Logan’s role in decision-making, planning, and conversation, he also had to sort all of the new data and send some of it over to Roman, to use in making Thomas’s dreams for the night.

It was an understatement to say that Logan was always busy.

Today was no exception; he was throwing memories into different areas and doing his best to organize them properly, but Thomas had been in a nostalgic mood lately and the memories were getting shuffled around, some of them thrown into Patton’s rose-coloured realm and others disappearing into Janus’s dark rooms to be consciously forgotten.

In addition, Remus was continually scribbling over old memories with overly graphic ‘what if’ scenarios, and Virgil kept sliding embarrassing memories into the ‘incredibly important’ folder that Logan tried to keep as empty as possible for maximum efficiency.

All of this to say that Logan had been working hard all day, and was starting to feel that he was fighting a losing battle.

“Logan?” Patton’s voice came from the doorway, familiar and unwelcome, breaking Logan’s concentration. “You missed dinner.”

“We are anthropomorphic theoreticals, Patton,” Logan responded, still trying to separate Remus’s fantasy about eating a fifth-grade teacher from the actual memory that it was attached to. “We don’t really need to eat.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s nice to see each other!” There was a pause, and Logan knew that Patton was taking in the chaotic room. Logan preferred to keep his space tidy, but some days the data just piled up in the corners and spilled across the floor. “Busy day?”

“Extremely.” Logan tried not to snap at him, but he could hear the frustration in his own voice. “There’s a lot of work to do, as always.”

“How long have you been working?”

“Not long enough.” Logan gave up on the memory he was working on, and threw the entire thing away. Thomas had enough vague memories of fifth grade, he could spare one or two. “I need to get the day’s data to Roman and I’ve gotten caught up trying to reorganize elementary memories. They’ve been entirely mislabelled and I only just noticed.”

“You sound stressed.”

“Ha!” Logan couldn’t hold back the bitter retort, and he could practically feel Patton wince.

“You should really take a break, Logan.”

“I don’t have time for a break,” Logan told him. Patton never understood Logan’s work. “I need to get today to Roman before Thomas goes to sleep.”

“Roman can handle a night of pure fantasy, you know he would love to. And nothing really happened today, anyways.” Patton shrugged.

“There were at least two youtube videos worth remembering,” Logan contradicted. “If I don’t get them to Roman for nighttime review, they will both be lost in the morning. Additionally, I know you store significant interactions with friends, but I need to get one phone-call back from you because Thomas needs to remember the specifics. They made plans, and he’ll forget about them if the memory stays with you.”

“You’re always trying to make things perfect,” Patton sighed. Logan would have bristled at the comment if Patton’s tone hadn’t been so sad and affectionate. “Thomas’s friends know him well enough, they’ll text to remind him about the plans. It’s okay to take a break, Logan.”

“For you, maybe,” Logan snapped, and immediately regretted it. Finally, he looked towards Patton in the doorway, silhouetted in the light from the hall. “I’m sorry, Patton. I didn’t mean that. You’re very important to Thomas.”

Patton smiled. “I know. I know you didn’t mean it. You’re just tired and stressed. And that’s why you need a break, sweetheart.”

“I don’t.” Logan turned back to his work with a definite twist of his body, trying to ignore the way that the term of endearment made his chest feel too big and too small at the same time. “I don’t need a break.”

“I think you do~” Patton said, in a sing-song voice. “I think you need some time with Sherlock Hobbes.”

Logan scoffed, drawing up his feet into a cross-legged pose. “Don’t bring stuffed animals into this.” Sherlock Hobbes was Logan’s tiger plushie, an incredibly huggable stuffed animal that Patton had dressed up with a detective hat and a magnifying glass. It was one of the best presents Logan had ever gotten, and he would neither confirm nor deny that he slept with it on most nights.

“I bet he’s really bored up there in your bed,” Patton cajoled. “He could use a case, and I have just the thing.”

“You do?” Logan asked before he remembered that he was supposed to be working. “It’ll have to wait,” he added. “I’m very busy.”

“Sweetie…” Patton sounded so sad. Logan squirmed a little on the floor, feeling guilty. Had he made Patton feel sad? Patton shouldn’t be sad, Patton was so nice to him. “Won’t you come and at least eat some food? We can bake some cookies, if you want. You can measure everything with your super science beakers.”

“Cookies?” That sounded like a pretty good offer, but it also sounded like a bribe. What was Logan doing? He was sorting memories. That was important. “I’m working.”

“I know, little one, you’ve been working all day. It’s time for play and bedtime now.” Logan blinked around at his Realm. It was very busy and overwhelming, and he had been working for a very long time. “Come on, let’s get Sherlock so he can help us do some cookie experiments. I’m sure he’d like to help us out, don’t you think?”

“He’s the best at experiments,” Logan confirmed, and got slowly to his feet. His back hurt, and his bum hurt, and everything hurt from the way he’d been sitting on the floor for the whole afternoon. He almost stumbled when he was standing, but Patton was there to take his hand and press close, offering his stability. Logan leaned against him thankfully, humming at the warmth of the other Side so close.

“There’s my favourite little scientist,” Patton chirped at him, wrapping his arm around Logan and squeezing him close. “Ready for some before-bedtime experiments?”

“Bath?” Logan asked. Baths with Patton were the best, he had all kinds of coloured foam to make experiments with and he didn’t get soap into Logan’s eyes like Roman did.

“I have a feeling we’ll both need a bath after cookies,” Patton laughed. “You bet, sweetheart. Big warm bath, right before bed.”

“Okay.” Logan smiled up at Patton, and let him take his hand again to lead him out into the common area where the kitchen was. “Cookies and bath.”

“Cookies and bath,” Patton confirmed. “Sounds like the best night ever.”

“Best.” Logan nodded. “Like you. You’re best.”

“Awwww, kiddo.” Patton looked a little bit teary-eyed. “You’re the best too. I’m happy that we’re spending some time together tonight. I missed you when you were in your room all day.”

“Working,” Logan protested with a frown. Working was important.

“Yeah, working is important,” Patton said, like the mind-reader he was. “But having fun is important too.”

Logan thought that Patton might be right about that, after all.

#agere fic #agere fics #sanders sides agere #agere fanfiction #fandom agere #sfw agere #sfw age regression #my fics #i had a very hard time finishing this fic because my laptop's space bar stopped working!#my life as a writer is truly a trial #as always i hope you enjoy!!#rpf #sanders sides

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archiveofidentityconstellations · 5 years ago

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(Preferably all batfam related else I'd be clueless :P) 4, 8, 15, 29, 30, 37, 40 alternative ending to 'On Fashions & Small Fry' 💜💜

4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?

I literally just had an idea this morning about little snapshots in which Damian crawls into Dick’s bed to kind of show the break of outer and inner lives and what we project to the world (day) and how we feel inside (night). That sounds like a lot of hogwash bc mostly I just wanted to do a cute thing with Dick and Damian being brothers

8. Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

from birds all sing:

Several minutes passed, Tim looking at the man he had known as a father for several years, brow furrowed in consideration.

"What else?" Bruce finally said. He let his voice soften. "What else do you need?" Tim met his eyes. Bruce's fists clenched.

So young.

"...The roti."

What?

"What?"

"The roti bread?" Tim repeated. "I was thinking maybe the zucchini but no, I definitely want the roti."

Bruce stood there, adrenaline seeping out of his bones.

"That's it?" he asked brusquely, not a little annoyed to be put through the emotional ringer in under five minutes.

"Yeah," Tim nodded. He almost beamed at the thought of the upcoming food. "That's it. Thanks, Bruce!"

"Don't mention it," he growled, marching out the office.

It’s not perfect, but I like it because it makes me laugh. My humor has a lot to do with timing, so when I manage to get the timing right I find it very funny

15. If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?

Good question! I wouldn’t really choose any of my fics to be filmed, but I would love my “version” of batcat to have a film presence. Other than that, I would probably want either bratkid or star wars domestic AU to be filmed, but I would make them original work. I like the idea of family coming together and getting to love one another. It’s an after school special!

29. If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?

Oh man I’m kind of shit at imagining things beyond what the author intends. My friend Hobbs has a world she lets me play in sometimes, so I write little snippets of fanfic of her stuff.

30. Do you accept prompts?

When I say they’re open, yeah, kind of. I don’t get paid for writing, it’s not like a commission, so if I like the idea I’ll do it or incorporate it into whatever I’m writing. It’s free real estate babey

37. Talk about your current wips.

There’s too manyyyyyy

I’ll talk about what I need to do

birds all sing: start the first fight. make it organic, not off the cuff. don’t be overt but not too subtle.

crack fic: research you dumb bint. you are literally not writing this because you don’t want to research. why. normally you love research. you just don’t want to look up what writing up reports looks like. it’s probably online. just do it.

40. Write an alternative ending to [insert fic title] (or just the summary of one).

OHO, okay! Long answer

This was actually supposed to be a full fic, I had a lot planned for it but it got so large that I was like “hmmm” and didn’t do it. It had like 4 “acts” as to how the story went

Anyhow, the fic starts out how Damian wants to go to Sacramento with Bruce, because Bruce said he would take him last week, but then Bruce says no. He won’t explain why, but he’s obviously not mad at Damian, so Damian can’t figure it out. Damian ends up facecalling him and he can see Talia in the background. He promptly flips out, throws his phone at the wall, breaks it, destroys the room, then kind of has a breakdown wherein he just sits in the tub fully clothed with his shoes on 😅

Tim sits with him, then Damian basically falls asleep so Tim goes to get Dick and Dick puts his boy to bed

Second act: Several days go by, and Damian is better, but as he’s sitting on the counter while Stephanie is cooking, she accidentally says something they were all keeping from him: Bruce went to Sacramento so that Talia could sign off on custody rights, lawyers are involved and everything.

Cue to Damian being like “what” and marching off. Damian then concocts this scheme in which he tells Dick that he really wanted to see Dallas, that father was going to take him, please he wants to see the rodeo, etc. Dick gives in and decides they’ll take a brotherly bonding road trip! Yay!

But things start to go sour when neither one of them can mind their business in a seedy motel, and their relationship issues come to light. After this:

"No, damn it!" Dick slammed his hand against the doorframe. It rattled at its hinges. "You got your time, that's it, done, over. I take care of you, got it?"

"We're partners," Damian said, weakly.

Dick's eyes softened. He struggled inside himself, Damian could see. But just as a bubble of hope rose forth, it burst the next millisecond. Dick lowered his hands, head tucked low and shaking softly. "Not anymore we're not," he sighed.

then Damian uhhhh how does one say, drugs Dick so he can sneak out and take a plane to Sacramento.

He bursts into whatever meeting place Bruce and Talia are at and lambasts them for lying to him and such. Talia is like “hi sweetie” and Bruce is like “b o i” and Damian ends by saying he gets to leave first because they always leave whenever they wanted, so now he gets to leave THEM

So he angry-walks to a park and sits down on a bench and stews

Then Dick BURSTS in and is like “is he here?????” and Bruce is like “you let your eleven year old brother get on a plane himself?!” and Dick is like “that little SHIT drugged me, I didn’t let him do anything” and they all sort of talk about the best thing for Damian

Damian comes back after a day on the town in which he really doesn’t have all that much fun, and comes back and everyone is like “okay let’s all be mature about this and talk, no secrets”

And it turns out

Talia is dying

So Damian is bewildered and mad that he can’t be mad, she’s dying, she’s dying and she doesn’t even get to see him without Bruce’s approval, etc

So they work out what would be best for Damian WITH Damian’s input, thank you very much

(also Bruce is like “We acknowledge that we weren’t the best but if you EVER do that again—”)

Third act is in which the new normal is strange, because Damian is visiting Talia but it’s like when he was a very young child again, because she’s not trying to impart survival wisdom, she’s just his mom. And Damian is sort of dealing with the remnants of trauma, and is upset because why couldn’t it have been like this all the time, but he CAN’T be upset because she’s dying and despite his unwillingness to go back over his trauma it crops up and Talia has a lot to make up for. Ra’s appears in his crazy old way, because she’s his favorite child and she’s dying and Damian and Ra’s basically get to sit in a hospital waiting room together and have a stilted conversation on who they are and what family even means

Anyhow Damian is really starting to get along with Talia, which concerns Bruce because. she’s dying. Damian is going to be gutted. So he slowly kind of tries to make it so Damian isn’t as attached (dumb but it’s Bruce) and Damian gets angry and runs away to visit his mother in the French Riviera. They have a wonderful time but then Bruce goes to get him and Damian is mad at him. But Talia says “you need to listen to your father” and Damian realizes that Bruce is the only parent he’s going to have, he’s not going to have his mom anymore.

So yeah, there’s still another act that I didn’t finalize but that’s a rough summary of everything!!

And Talia was going to have an illness exacerbated by the Lazarus pits, like caused by it. It was basically going be Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease equivalent in the DC universe. So yeah, she can’t come back lol

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hoperays-song · 2 years ago

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Some of My Favourite Random Sing Canon Things

Johnny is small for both his family and for other gorillas around his age.

The mob/mafia does exist and Mike legit thought cheating them was a good idea.

Buster is left-handed (or ambidextrous).

When Ash's guitar gets unplugged, she stomps her foot, which is based off the real life occurrence of porcupines stomping their feet as a warning if they are scared.

Buster went to the Modern Drama Institute based on his diploma.

Marcus’s truck is a 1953–1956 Ford F-Series pickup truck, though he seems to have made some modifications.

Gunter literally put Johnny’s home address in his commercial for his dance studio. Why? Who knows!

Eddie apparently models?? Or does something that puts him on magazine covers (as seen in Sing 2). Leaning towards model just because I feel like he would be most ok with that.

Mike legit mugged someone in his first scene... so there’s that.

Gunter, while being an agent of chaos, is able to not cause any problems for himself personally in both movies (other characters handle it) which in this franchinse is just impressive.

Johnny reacts dramatically to things a lot and tends to be/come across as sarcastic.

It’s implied that Darius was going to be the center performer in the short “Come Home”... for some reason.

The first friend that Johnny makes outside of the theatre is, drumroll please, Nooshy, a British criminal. Because of fucking course he found one in a huge multicultural city. (This annoys me to no end.)

Mrs. Crawly’s glass eye was apparently made in China.

Adding up the totals (in terms of violent crimes) from both movies (that I remember clearly), there are five threats on a character’s life, one mugging, one hostage-ish situation, one hit-and-run, and one aggravated assault. This is a kid’s series right? Am I understanding that right? A kid’s series???

Nana Noodleman likes to play checkers with Hobbs to pass the time.

Buster Moon has committed more onscreen felonies than the actual criminal gang (two for Stan and Barry, three for Marcus).

#sing #sing 2 #sing johnny #sing buster #sing nana noodleman #sing hobbs (only mentioned)#sing mike #sing gunter #sing darius #sing nooshy #sing ash #sing marcus #sing mrs crawly #the more and more i look into it this franchise becomes more and more unhinged #there's a surprising amount of assault/attempted murder #like a really surprising amount #this series is chaos #mike is absolutely an idiot

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theballadoffinchesandsaints · 4 years ago

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*SPOILERS for The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes*

Okay, “Crash” by EDEN is so wholeheartedly Snow’s internal crisis of seeing Katniss and thinking of Lucy Gray. First, links to the song, Second, analysis time.

Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/track/0uxC9yUi8uPtNPo6HRshRM?si=KKAPVc7iTUSDcOEeBbr3tw

Lyrics link (though all the lyrics are cited in order in the analysis below): https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/eden/crash.html

Strap in folks, this is going to be a long one.

“It’s been a few years since you’ve been gone/There’s been a few tears, but that was years and years ago” It’s been so long since Lucy Gray left that Snow has been able to mostly bury the memories and emotions, but it was still a heartbreak

“Yeah, I grew up to be exactly what you wanted/Yeah, I’ve been living out the dream that you dreamt up” This line is bitter in the context of Lucy Gray and Snow. In Snow’s mind, Lucy Gray betrayed him first and turned him into the callous dictator he is. In some ways, this was their real dream, though. Snow now has enough power to influence the games and save tributes if he chooses to, he just doesn’t use that power the way Lucy Gray would want him to

“It’s been a few years, but more to come/It’s been a few yeats since I’ve felt sure of what I want/And I woke up today and found that you were waiting here for me and I thought/Woah, old friend it’s bittersweet/How could you do this to me/How could you do this to me?/Yeah” This is when Snow first sees Katniss at the reaping with her big first impression and later as he sees all the other similarities between Katniss and Lucy Gray: the district partner as a close ally, the singing, the rule-breaking. It brings up the part of him that almost ran off into the woods with Lucy Gray decades ago. While most of the feelings that this bring Snow are negative, it’s still a little bittersweet. He can’t deny the couple of happy memories he has of him and Lucy Gray. It’s even relatively safe to assume that they are some of his happiest, if not the happiest, moments in life that were only tainted after the fact. Snow feels betrayed by the world. He has worked so hard to get away from the mockingjay that haunts his past and here comes a reincarnation of Lucy Gray with a pin of the birds as a district token.

“Cause you are not who you think you are/There’s no grain on these brown eyes/But they can be green if they really want” First off, the female singer that starts here is the image of Lucy Gray he conjures in his mind. These lines are similar to Lucy Gray’s Rousseauvian ideals: all people are truly good at heart, and the world may try to make you worse, but you can turn yourself back into a good person if you try. Lucy Gray tried repeatedly to get Snow to understand this while they were together in direct contradiction to Snow’s Hobbesian ideals of a strong and strict government to control the inherently faulty people that make up the world. It is an internal argument now, but Hobbes has won years ago in Snow’s mind. However, Katniss’s similarities to Lucy Gray remind Snow of the other perspective he never quite understood and still cannot truly compete with his Hobbesian tendencies.

“And I can bend your words/But they say exactly what hurts the most/But silence is better than fake laughs/Or faking were always up” This is in reference to the moment in the woods when Lucy Gray realizes Snow is responsible for Sejanus’s death. She tried to find a different explanation for Snow’s “responsible for three deaths” line, to see the good in him, but she can’t. So she pretends she’s still planning to run away with Snow until she finds a good moment to get away.

“loose grip/The world bends around you/And living through cracked screens/We fold down to what we want/Out of love/We talk through lines/We’re made of smoke/And just in time/We drift away/Diffusing light/Confusing times/Growing up/Or cascading down?” these lines are sung by both the guy (Snow) and the girl (Lucy Gray in Snow’s mind). At first they reference the confusion of their final encounter. With the mockingjays singing and Snow firing bullets haphazardly, the chaos could be compared to the world bending, screens cracking, smoke, and all the other metaphors in these lines. Not to mention the internal confusion of making a radical change as to the course of your life in an instant while the person you love tries to kill you. Both are forced to make these changes without much consideration. So they ask themselves, “is this me finally making the mature, correct decision for my life? or am I giving up my one chance at happiness?”

“Cascading down/I’m hurting now” Back to only Snow now. This is just a brief confirmation that he is not over Lucy Gray. It’s quickly replaced by anger in the next lines, but it happens

“But change comes slow/If you hate what’s in your head/The fuck would you speak your mind” All of Snow’s anger at Sejanus comes back at now. Snow always blamed his own misfortunes on a trickledown effect from Sejanus’s revolutionary tendencies. If Sejanus hadn’t gotten involved with rebels, Snow would never have shot Mayfair and felt the need to run away with Lucy Gray. If Sejanus has just stayed in his place, Snow wouldn’t have had anything to turn him into and Lucy Gray wouldn’t have had a reason to run away from him in the woods. There’s also anger towards Lucy Gray here about her idea of intrinsic human goodness that seems absolutely absurd to Snow.

“In search of lost time/Just 21 so I’m young and I’m stupid/Only 16, yeah I think you should’ve known” For a moment, Snow longs for the life that, according to him, he could have had with Lucy Gray if Sejanus hadn’t interfered. 21 isn’t much of an explicit reference to anything in TBOSAS, this is three years after the book’s events. It can be reasonably assumed that, at this point, Snow is really starting to get the hang of poisoning his enemies and allies to gain power, something he might now consider stupid with both the physical and mental ramifications of being a mass murderer. It’s not exactly that Snow wishes those people were still alive, but that he is upset his enemies found out about it and could release the information. As for 16, that is the exact age Lucy Gray is in TBOSAS. In this line, Snow tells his mental manifestation of Lucy Gray that she should have always known he’d be like he is today. He may regret some things, but he must clamp down on the world with an iron fist to avoid anarchy...and to fill his need for power.

“I think you’ve fucked me up/I think, I think you’ve fucked me up/And I’ve got nothing to say to you/It’s been a few years and I moved on/Couldn’t nake it disappear, oh I tried so hard to be strong” Snow is fed up with himself for the flashbacks and romantic thoughts he’s having. He is livid that anyone could affect him this way 60 years after they’d last seen each other. He buried the memories for decades, but a pair of tributes from district 12 have brought them all back up. In that way, Lucy Gray has “fucked [him] up.”

“But I grew up today and faced that I’m not just lonely/Don’t feel much better, but I guess that it’s a start” At the end of Mockingjay, Snow faces the fact that he is going to be brought down by victor from district 12 that reminds him so much of the girl he loved. He recognizes that the problem now goes beyond one of flashbacks and regrets. He knows he’s going to die, so he can just enjoy the show of one last hunger games.

tl;dr The male vocalist in this song is Snow who is forced to face memories of mainly Lucy Gray, but also Sejanus, during the 74th and 75th Hunger Games and the rebel war. The female vocalist is a manifestation of Lucy Gray triggered by Katniss that reminds him of both their happy memories together and their horrific falling out.

#mine #the hunger games #the ballad of songbirds and snakes #ballad of songbirds and snakes #tbosas #tbosas spoilers #tbosas meta #coriolanus snow #president snow #lucy gray #lucy gray baird #peeta #peeta mellark #katniss everdeen #katniss #finnick odair #finnick #Spotify

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random-thought-depository · 5 years ago

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Re: my last post: I started thinking along those lines when I read this section of Charles Mann’s 1491:

“Who today would want to live in the Greece of Plato and Socrates, with its slavery, constant warfare, institutionalized pederasty, and relentless culling of surplus population? Yet Athens had a coruscating tradition of rhetoric, lyric drama, and philosophy. So did Tenochtitlan and the other cities in the Triple Alliance. In fact, the corpus of writings in classical Nahuatl, the language of the Alliance, is even larger than the corpus of texts in classical Greek.

The Nahuatl word tlamatini (literally "he who knows things") meant something akin to "thinker-teacher" - a philosopher, if you will. The tlamatini, who "himself was writing and wisdom," was expected to write and maintain the codices and live in a way that set a moral example. "He puts a mirror before others," the Mexica said. In what may have been the first large-scale compulsory education program in history, every male citizen of the Triple Alliance, no matter what his social class, had to attend one sort of school or another until the age of sixteen. Many tlamatinime (the plural form of the word) taught at the elite academies that trained the next generation of priests, teachers, and high administrators.

Like Greek philosophy, the teachings of the tlamatinime were only tenuously connected to the official dogma of Tlacaelel. ... But the tlamatinime shared the religion's sense of the evanescence of existence. "Truly do we live on Earth?" asked a poem or song attributed to Nezahualcoyotl (1402-72), a founding figure in Mesoamerica thought and the tlatoani of Texcoco, one of the other two members of the Triple Alliance. His lyric, among the most famous in the Nahuatl canon, answers its own question:

Not forever on earth; only a little while here. Be it jade, it shatters. Be it gold, it breaks. Be it a quetzal feather, it tears apart. Not forever on earth; only a little while here.

In another verse assigned to Nezahualcoyotl this theme emerged even more baldly:

Like a painting, we will be erased. Like a flower, we will dry up here on earth. Like plumed vestments of the precious bird, That precious bird with the agile neck, We will come to an end.

Contemplating mortality, thinkers in many cultures have drawn solace from the prospect of life after death. This consolation was denied to the Mexica, who were agonizingly uncertain about what happened to the soul. "Do flowers go to the region of the dead?" Nezahualcoyotl asked. "In the Beyond are we still dead or do we live?" Many if not most tlamatinime saw existence as Nabokov feared: "a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

In Nahuatl rhetoric, things were frequently represented by the unusual device of naming two of their elements - a kind of doubled Homeric epithet. Instead of directly mentioning his body, a poet might refer to "my hand, my foot" (noma nocxi), which the savvy listener would know was a synecdoche, in the same way that readers of English know that writers who mention "the crown" are actually talking about the entire monarch, and not just the headgear. Similarly, the poet's speech would be "his word, his breath" (itlatol ihiyo). A double-barreled term for "truth" is neltilitztli tzintliztli, which means something like "fundamental truth, true basic principle." In Nahuatl, the words almost shimmer with connotation: what was true was well grounded, stable and immutable, enduring above all.

Because we human beings are transitory, our lives as ephemeral as dreams, the tlamatinime suggested that immutable truth is by its nature beyond human experience. On the ever-changing earth, wrote Leon-Portilla, the Mexican historian, "nothing is 'true' in the Nahuatl sense of the word." Time and again, the tlamatinime wrestled with this dilemma. How can beings of the moment grasp the perduring? It would be like asking a stone to understand mortality.

According to Leon-Portilla, one exit from this philosophical blind alley was seen by the fifteenth-century poet Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, who described it metaphorically, as poets will, by invoking the coyolli bird, known for its bell-like song:

He goes his way singing, offering flowers. And his words rain down Like jade and quetzal plumes. Is this what pleases the Giver of Life? Is that the only truth on earth?

Ayocuan's remarks cannot be fully understood out of the Nahuatl context, Leon-Portilla argued. "Flowers and song" was a standard double epithet for poetry, the highest art; "jade and quetzal feathers" was a synecdoche for great value, in the way Europeans might refer to "gold and silver." The song of the bird, spontaneously produced, stands for aesthetic inspiration. Ayocuan was suggesting, Leon-Portilla said, that there is a time when humankind can touch the enduring truths that underlie our fleeting lives. That time is at the moment of artistic creation. "From whence come the flowers [the artistic creations] that enrapture man?" asks the poet. "The songs that intoxicate, the lovely songs?" And he answers: "Only from His [that is, Omoteotl's] home do they come, from the innermost part of heaven." Through art alone, the Mexica said, can human beings approach the real.

Cut short by Cortes, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school. The musings of the tlamatinime occurred in the intellectual neighborhoods frequented by philosophers from Brussels to Beijing, but the mix was entirely the Mexica's own. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence - and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the disintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!” - Charles Mann, 1491.

The obvious subtext, of course, is that this is completely erased from the pop culture memory of the Aztecs, and we mostly only remember the ugliest parts of Aztec culture. I feel this section of 1491 is very poignant.

And it makes me imagine something like... the Worldwar books, but the Race won and completely conquered Earth in the 1940s, and a historian in that world writing centuries later, writing about Martin Luther and Kant and Nietzsche and German Romanticism and German Expressionism and the Institute of Sexology so on, in a world where nobody but specialist historians remembers these things, and writing about them in this sort of tone of “Did you know there was more to German culture than Nazism? Did you know that Nazi ideology was only one particularly nasty part of a much bigger, older, richer culture, and that bigger culture included very cool, interesting, beautiful things that were only very tenuously connected to Nazism or were even opposed to it? Wild, huh? Really makes you think!”

#history thoughts

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supposed2bfunny · 5 years ago

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2doc Week Day 7-First Kiss

Rating: T

Warnings: Mentions of sex, alcohol, drugs, the usual

Wow, we’re at the last day just like that. Big thanks to everyone who participated, and by all means, keep using the tag if you continue to work with any of the prompts. Hope everyone had fun and maybe met some new members of the community!! <3 <3 <3

For three days, Stuart had been losing sleep and fearing for his life, and it was starting to show.

He could blame his jittery behavior and near constant mouthful of pills on the jetlag at first. After all, he’d never been to Japan, and adjusting to such a different time zone was no easy feat. He could tell that the others were weary from it all too. But when they returned to Kong after wrapping up the first half of their tour, spent yet exhilarated from the experience, he didn’t feel any better.

It got worse.

Because back in Kong with the four of them recharging and relaxing under one roof, Stuart could not help but face Murdoc almost constantly, his head spinning with guilt at what he’d done, and at the bassist’s own cluelessness.

He was a creep, a sodding awful friend. A liar.

“This is just the beginning,” Murdoc had spoken around the lip of a bottle of cognac. He’d been saying that nonstop on the tour, though his voice was particularly querulous that night. The thrill of touring, of performing live (behind a curtain, granted, but live nonetheless) to venues full of screaming fans had electrified him, and he was living the rockstar life he’d been aspiring to for the past decade of his life like he was trying to make up for lost time.

Stuart had never seen a man drink so much, snort so much, and fuck so much, oftentimes all at the same time. Not that he minded. On this particular night, he realized that Murdoc was teetering at the edge of his limits, even for him. So, with Russel out with Noodle to try some of Tokyo’s top-quality sushi (“when in Rome, do as the Romans do,” the drummer had said, “when in Japan, eat the sea”), he found himself tasked with making sure Murdoc didn’t take himself out Bonzo style.

An especially tough task since the singer had already imbibed half his weight in Sapporos and a couple of naproxen for his migraine.

“Yeah,” he prodded the bassist along when Murdoc fell quiet, head lulling a bit with exhaustion, bottle of liquor threatening to fall from his hands onto the hotel floor. “Just the beginning, Muds? Tell me more.”

Keeping the older man talking until he sobered up was probably the best idea, he figured. He wasn’t sure how he would pull that off, but Murdoc seldom needed much prompting to talk up a storm.

“Mate, you’n’me. Gonna…gonna tour every country on the map. Then the moon.” Murdoc had a bit of a stammer, Stuart had learned. It came out when he was drinking and not as sharp-minded as usual. He stumbled over words, tended to start phrases and then change them halfway through his sentences. It was interesting to learn that even something as simple as talking seemed to take extra consideration for Murdoc. To simply hold a conversation meant clearing hurdles.

Stuart spent his time vacillating between finding these details of Murdoc’s life sad and endearing. Tonight, beer softened his sentiments, and he was leaning towards the latter.

“I’d like that. We’ll sound good on the moon,” he agreed. “Great acoustics, I hear. Right, Murdoc, the acoustics are good?” Stay awake, you stupid sod.

Murdoc’s unfocused eyes slid across the room and snagged on his, suddenly focusing so sharply that Stuart’s heart skipped and he felt himself start to sweat under his arms a little bit. How could Murdoc look at him so intensely when he was so altered?The mis-matched gaze did not let up. The bassist spent a lot of his time staring at the singer, but to hold eye contact with him like this was rare. Intimidating. Electric.

“You’ll sound fucking brilliant wherever you sing, mate,” he replied, and Stuart felt warm suddenly; he rose to open the window, stumbling over a few empty beer bottles on his way across the bedroom. “Your voice carrying across the stage. Satan, the stuff of wet dreams.”

“That’s a weird way to compliment someone.”

“I’m not complimenting…wasn’t trying to compliment you.”

Stuart took a few deep breaths of fresh air, then crossed back to resume sitting in the chair beside the bed where the older man was sprawled, but Murdoc reached out, caught his wrist, eyes defiant despite his intoxication.

“What, Muds?”

“It wasn’t a compliment.”

“Okay, I heard you.” What was it then, a come-on? He jerked his hand out of the bassist’s grip, trying to shove that idea out of his head. “You’ve sounded good too, you know. You’re good live. The fans go crazy for you.”

“Of course they do. You see what I do with my hips. Between your looks and my…zest, we carry the band’s sex appeal. It’s a two-man job. We create, we establish that tension.”

“We sure do, mate. Can I get you some water?” Because he did not want to sit around talking about his sex appeal with Murdoc any more. Especially since his heart was beating faster, and the tips of his fingers felt pins and needles prickly. Must be a result of the drugs. Mixed with the damn beers. Mixed with the fact that he felt high every time he was alone with Murdoc.

“You ever shagged a bloke?” Murdoc asked arbitrarily, and Stuart could swear that the room tilted a bit in that moment.

“Excuse me?”

The older man’s eyes were still on him. On his mouth, his hands, always coming back to his eyes. He was glazed with liquor; he didn’t care how embarrassed the singer looked. His words simply had to come out.

“Have you?”

“No, Murdoc,” he replied, again crossing the room, this time to the mini fridge, and his relief to find mini bottles of water was overwhelming. It took a long time for him to manage to twist the small bottle open. He didn’t bother to ask if Murdoc had ever shagged a bloke. He didn’t want to know. “Gotta use the loo. I’ll be right back. Don’t choke on your own vomit, okay?”

“Hm,” Murdoc responded, eyes wandering up to consider the room’s molding as the singer legged it to the bathroom.

Stuart took his time, rinsing his face with cold water, downing the bottle from the fridge and tossing the container into the trashcan. Wasn’t Japan big on recycling? Fuck it. He was practically on vacation.

He smoothed his hair, tried not to think about what in Murdoc’s confused brain would bring him to ask such a question. By the time he made it back out, Murdoc had fallen asleep; his nose made a slight whistling noise as he breathed through it, and Stuart knew him well enough to know that it was only a matter of minutes before his mouth opened so he could breath that way instead. His nasal passages were so busted that he was doomed to sleep looking corpselike, mouth hung open and loud snores imminent.

In the meantime, he was still and he was quiet. And Stuart came to stand over him, looking at the open bottle of cognac somehow unspilled in his arms, at the gleam of his gold cross, at the faint stubble on his chin. Keeping him talking had been a bad idea, the singer decided. Better to let Murdoc sleep the alcohol off and keep an eye on him.

And while he had this moment to himself…

Alone in a foreign country with no one else around, Stuart leaned down and pressed his lips very softly against Murdoc’s.

He pulled back, heart hammering, entire face hot with shame. He flicked on the television, listening to the news in Japanese for a bit.

Five minutes later, Murdoc’s mouth hung open as he snored and Stuart was working through a few more Sapporos. Ten minutes later, Murdoc was flying awake to lean over the edge of the bed and vomit all over the carpet. The sight alone set off the singer’s gag reflex, and he joined in, prompting a late-night visit from an overly polite but clearly distressed staff member.

It didn’t matter that nobody knew what had happened. Because that didn’t’ change the fact that Stuart had taken advantage, kissed Murdoc when he was asleep and unable to turn down the gesture. His anonymity only increased his guilt.

So he was dismayed when Murdoc barged into his room without knocking on the third day back from their tour, looking grumpy and exhausted.

“This heart-felt moment has been brought to you by the Russel Hobbs Federation of Social Niceties,” he spat kicking at the coils of wires that Stu had arranged around the keyboard he was tinkering with, trying to be useful, trying to keep busy.

“What does that even mean?” he asked, confused, and not making efforts to get up off the floor.

“It means Russ has been giving me a hard time. Because apparently I did something to upset you.”

Stuart had gone out of his way to avoid Murdoc since The Incident, so he was surprised to hear that Russel thought the bassist had been getting into fights with him. “No, Muds. You haven’t done anything. Can you close the door on your way out? Also maybe try knocking next time—”

“Slow down there, Crawley, Stills, and Nash.”

“How long’ve you been waiting to use that nonsensical nickname?” he couldn’t help but smile at the bassist’s wit, matched only by his lack of logic, and Murdoc caught his smile and looked pleased.

“Think that’s the first time I’ve seen you smile since we left Tokyo.”

And just like that, his expression clouded.

“Faceache. Seriously. I haven’t the faintest idea what I’ve done to upset you, but I’ve noticed it, Russel noticed it, and if the way she points her spoon at me when she eats her cereal in the morning, even Noodle’s onto it. Everyone here assumes I’ve upset you, so go ahead and let me know what I’ve done so I can decide whether or not to bother saying I won’t do it again.”

Stuart looked down at the auxiliary cord in his hand and sighed. “I promise, you didn’t do anything wrong. You’re all right; I’ve been acting a little weird. But it really wasn’t your fault. I did something I shouldn’t have. Trying to sort out what to do about it now.”

Murdoc looked intrigued. “We going to have someone ringing the door in nine months time asking for child support?”

The singer pulled a face. “Of course not! Nothing like that!”

“Right,” Murdoc looked unconvinced, but now there was something else on his features. Mild alarm. Stuart realized with a rush that the bassist was getting concerned for him. “What was it then? Nobody hurt you, did they? Mate, I’m being honest when I tell you I remember about seven minutes total from Tokyo. I know you were drinking a lot too. If anyone hurt you—”

“No one hurt me!” he snapped, rising to his feet so he could loom over Murdoc, who instantly stepped back a bit so he wouldn’t have to crane his neck so much to meet the singer’s eyes. “Maybe you should go.”

“You join the Yakuza?” Murdoc asked, ignoring his suggestion, turning nasty to keep the singer from clamming up more.

Stuart took the bait at once. “No! Look I don’t want to talk about it, okay? Nothing illicit like that, got it? You haven’t done anything wrong, and since you didn’t want to be here in the first place, I don’t see why you won’t just leave me alone!”

“Well because now I’m intrigued by little Stu’s bad behavior,” he replied, smug.

“Piss off, Murdoc.”

“C’mon, just tell me what went wrong!”

“No, get out of my room—”

“I won’t breathe it to another soul!”

“Murdoc get ou—”

“You’ll feel better if you just say it, mate—”

“I kissed a man,” Stuart seethed.

Murdoc froze so dramatically that the singer could practically hear the comedic record scratch. “Well. That’s certainly not like joining the Yakuza at all. Stepping out of the closet, are you?”

“No,” he said tersely, feeling a headache coming on anew. “Just wanted to try it. So I did. And uh, it’s been on my mind ever since. Happy now?”

The bassist certainly didn’t look happy. He stared at Stu with a look akin to betrayal on his face. The singer flinched when his mouth opened, awaiting the stream of homophobic slurs that would no doubt become his new nicknames.

“Did you like it?” he asked.

The singer was caught off guard. “He didn’t really kiss back,” he admitted. “So, it wasn’t really a good, satisfying kiss. I can’t say. You uh, you probably don’t remember. But you got really drunk one night and asked if I’d ever been with a man. I had never considered it, but you made me think about it. So, uh. That’s how it happened.”

“Glad to know I inspired you to get out of your comfort zone,” Murdoc said, a lackluster smile on his mouth.

“Too bad it wasn’t a real kiss though,” Stuart said, and why the hell did he say that? As though Murdoc cared one bit for how satisfying his half-true dalliances were.

“Would you…” Murdoc took a step forward, his neck bending back a bit to hold the singer’s gaze. “Would you want to see what it’s like? A proper kiss, that is.”

There were no liquor bottles this time. No pills so he could pretend this moment was a fabrication of his drug-addled brain. His chest felt tight and his fingertips were going a little numb with adrenaline again. And there was Murdoc, smelling of cigarettes, his eyes not narrowed like they usually were, expression unreadable. They both knew the answer to the question.

He had been asking it himself since he’d blurted out what he’d done in Tokyo.

“Y…yes.”

Murdoc didn’t wait for any further social cues. He closed the space between them, jutting his face up to meet the singer’s mouth, kissed him like they’d done it a million times before: no hesitation, no doubt, just the firm warmth of lips against his.

Stuart’s head spun with the sensation, and he reached out, wanting to touch the older man, deciding against it last-minute. His hands remained frozen between their chests and Murdoc tilted his head slightly, let their lips drag against each other a bit, and the singer had to fight off the urge to moan softly. It was more than acceptable. It was intoxicating.

Just like that, the bassist pulled back, searching Stuart’s eyes like there was text there he couldn’t quite figure out how to read.

“Alright, dents?”

“Yeah.”

“You look ready to keel over.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you?”

“Yeah. No, wait. No!”

He smiled, but not even close to a sincere one. “Did I repel you, then?” he asked. “It was just a kiss, 2D. We never have to do it again, so don’t look so bloody stricken.”

“I’m not stricken. I mean, I was surprised, Muds,” he admitted, looking away, at the keyboard he had set out to fix and had only dismantled. “Like, surprised by how much I liked it.”

“Hm,” the bassist considered his answer, then his expression brightened a bit. “Well, if it wasn’t the worst thing you ever experienced, we could always try it again.”

“Oh!” he was blushing now, how utterly humiliating. Blushing and stumbling for words and taking a few steps back. “I mean, I hadn’t considered that. We just did a second ago, do you really think we should do it again so soon—”

Murdoc was following each step he took, and suddenly the singer’s back was against the wall and he knew that he was losing the chance to deescalate the situation. If he asked the bassist to back off, he knew Murdoc would.

Instead, he let his eye fall mostly closed, focusing on the bassist’s mouth.

“Yeah, alright.”

“Hm. That’s nice, pet, very nice,” he purred, voice so low that Stuart could feel more than hear it.

Then Murdoc’s mouth was on his again, and when his shoulders hit the wall seconds later and the bassist’s hands rose to pin them there, he let himself moan like he’d been wanting to.

By the time Murdoc pulled away from his wet lips, pressing a last peck to the corner of his mouth, looking at him through his fringe with his breath quickened and fluttery, Stuart knew he had to set the record straight about what had happened in Tokyo.

Not right away, of course. For the present, he could use that jealousy that he tasted on Murdoc’s tongue to his advantage. He had quite a few more kisses he wanted from the bassist.

#2doc #2docweek #2docweek2019 #day7 first kiss #2doc fanfiction #i kinda hate this piece and i may go back and rewrite it one day #but with 45 minutes to go before today ends i had to publish something!!#phase 1 stu just has a huge crush and doesn't know what to do about it!!

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imaginative-gorillaz-blog · 7 years ago

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The band with a s/o who has they're own band and it's the vocalist, your blog it's AMAZING!!!

i luv this ask thank u sm! also thank uuuuu! hope you like these babe c: and sry some are pretty short

Russel Hobbs:

- Very interested in your style of music, and wants to hear a lot if not all of your music

- He’d like it if you sung him to sleep. It would be very peaceful for him to have your voice rather than his usual background noise

- Russel tells you every time he hears one of your songs in public/on the radio. he believes you need to know and loves seeing your smile each time

- He’d really, really enjoy it if you were like 2D and hummed/sung to yourself all the time, or at least when doing household chores.

- VERY supportive, he brings your band up in interviews when appropriate and mentions how much he enjoys your vocals

- After every new song your band releases, he tells you what exactly he liked about your voice and the vocal stuff that stuck out to him

Noodle:

- Before Noodle even listens to your music she has a copy of every cd, it’s a good thing she actually LOVES it

- She gives each band member a copy too

- She makes you listen to all of them as you go joyriding one night and asks a lot of questions

- Makes you sing for her ALL the time, you’re honestly a little scared she might ruin your voice

- Like Russel, she would want you to sing her to sleep but demand that once you go to sleep you put either your music or something else on, so she doesn’t sleep in silence

Murdoc:

- Murdoc believes your band is second on the throne to Gorillaz

- He makes an effort to go to all of your shows but sometimes his conflicts with them

- He tells EVERYONE about you and brags about knowing you whenever he can honestly. After he’s done jerking himself off over Gorillaz, he brags about you a lot like “have you met s/o/n? they’re in b/n and it’s kickass’

- He’d suggest you open for Gorillaz tbh and he’d justify it like; ‘No, no, i don’t want to see you more. you guys are just good.’ but he definitely just wants to go on tour with you

- Murdoc honestly loves hearing your voice whenever your songs are on the radio or through his earphones. it’s grounding for him

2D:

- He’d heard your songs before and listened to a couple interviews but the connection between you and the lead singer just never clicked? it wasn’t until you brought up your band and he was trying to figure out where he’d heard that before that it clicked

- When it clicks, the only thing he’s really interested in is hearing your, as he calls it, ‘acoustic singing voice’. He’ll definitely ask you to sing for him and if you don’t he’ll just look up your band

- Absolutely falls in love with your music, he even tries to bring up doing a Gorillaz/your band collab with Murdoc.

- He wants to hear you sing some of Gorillaz songs, and he swears it only for him to ‘hear how your voice sounds in the Gorillaz style’

- 2D is very excited to have a vocalist s/o, he feels like you two can really connect further than he would with a non-vocalist s/o. He thinks the similar job is another factor that would bring you and him together

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thefloatingstone · 6 years ago

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If we are still on the anime topic, what’s your opinion of slice of life anime?

SLICE OF LIFE ANIME IS MY JAAAAAAAAM!!!!

And I’m gonna have to put this under a cut too because I can never shut up so this ALSO turned out really long.

My friend likes to joke I like watching shows “that are about nothing” and like... SHE’S NOT WRONG???

However, I don’t ONLY like Slice of life anime, which is important I think. because if Slice of life was the ONLY anime I watched, it would get pretty boring pretty fast. However, if I watch a balanced amount of shows, anime or not, having the slice of life anime as an added spice to my media salad that I consume and makes it all the more delicious!!!! (that metaphor came out from nowhere and I’m not 100% sure what it means)

I also find, with slice of life anime, even if there isn’t an overarching plot, I still prefer it when the slice of life story has some kind of thread through it that leads it forward to something.

I’ll use some of my favourites as an example for what I mean. (and I know these are super obvious but just bare with me.)

First, I’m a big fan of Azumanga Daioh! the anime. And Azumanga is masically as slice of life as you get. With no overarching plot whatsoever and even conflicts and situations changing up every few episodes or so as we literally just follow the girls around and the various school-related activities they’re in.

But there IS a through line to the whole show, and despite no major dramatic events happening, there IS character development as the show goes on. Most noticeably in Sakaki (who happens to be my favourite character) who starts off shy, reserved, and embarrassed of her interests and hobbies, and by the end of the show, has not only opened up about the things she enjoys to her friends, but has actually managed to use them to direct her life as she realises what she wants to do after school is to become a vet.

The series also has a through-line in that it follows the girls through their 3 years of high school, and so, it has a logical place its working towards, namely, it is working towards Matric graduation at the end of the series. So we are not left feeling as if we are in a static state regarding the Slice of Life nature. We are not trapped in limbo, we are progressing forward towards something. And I feel it’s this detail that stops a slice of life story from being stagnant. Even if there is no plot, there is forward momentum.

The other slice of life I really like a lot is Lucky Star, which is similar in many ways to Azumanga except with even LESS plot to it. As often times entire episodes of Lucky Star are just a random collection of events that sometimes have absolutely no connection to each other at all.

Which I think, is why Lucky Star works, ironically, even though it does not have a clear through line like Azumanga. Because Lucky Star, just like Azumanga, is based on a series of yonkoma manga, or “4 panel manga”. a type of manga much more like Garfield or probably more accurately, Calvin and Hobbes, with singular jokes and punchlines, sometimes with a situation or topic spanning a handful of strips before moving on to the next thing.

This means Lucky Star has no TIME to start feeling stagnant and in limbo because its just moving from joke to joke and situation to situation without any of it to linger for too long.

As a result, it also means Lucky Star can focus on small slice of life details to devote and entire joke to them, which means many situations end up being MUCH MORE RELATEABLE on a real life level than an anime that had to worry about plot or character development.

Things like Konata’s ongoing struggle with sitting down and actually studying for once in her life. Or Miyuki’s problems regarding her love for sweets and candy but her penchant for getting cavities and her crippling fear of the dentist. Or the character Hiyori who is an up and coming Yuri manga artist and who is already making her own comic strips (inspired by her rather problematic “I ship it” personality regarding two of her classmates, however she acknowledges that she is bad for doing this and honestly feels guilty for it. But she channels it into inspiration for her stories with her own characters)

(Please enjoy the most relateable moment in all of anime)

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(also it doesn’t hurt that Lucky Star has shockingly good animation for an anime, which further helps the “Real life” situations, even though the characters themselves are hyper stylised. As well as it being clear the animators have a lot of life drawing in their repertoire, especially concerning hand poses)

Also just a side note; Lucky Star is absolutely my sense of humour in a meta sense. I can’t find out who exactly because the internet is garbage, but literally EVERY SINGLE EXTRA in the show is voiced by the same Seiyuu. Who himself was a very famous voice actor at the time. and he voices EVERYONE of the incidental characters. Doesn’t matter if they’re young high school girls. He has to voice them. It’s incredible.

Not to mention the ending credits which is different for EVERY SINGLE EPISODE, starting at first with the main characters singing Kareoke to famous songs from other anime, including Dragon Ball Z and Doraemon, before becoming live action as the crew went out to film the same voice actor who does all the voices for the extras just walking around tourists spots and being a weirdo, to which they then added things in post production to make it even stupider.

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Lucky Star was making shitposts before shitposting was even a thing. And they put it into an anime that aired on television.

Also I am sorry I know I’m rambling but please enjoy my favourite outro EVER.

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(this is my entire sense of humour in a nutshell right here)

However, I do want to mention an example I had recently of what I felt was an extremely disappointing version of a slice of life manga in this case;

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō

Kaidashi as I’ll call it for short, is a post apocalyptic manga about a robot girl who runs a coffee shop out of her house for any travelers wandering through the area, after an unspecified disaster has caused the earth’s enviornment to drastically change, specifically with oceans slowly rising each year and swallowing what was in the past entire cities.

But the post apocalyptic nature of the setting is not what’s important in the manga. It’s what I’ve heard call a “soft apocalypse”. There are no roaming bandits, or mutant animals or radioactive fallout or none of that. It is merely a world which the ocean is slowly encroaching on the land, and the human population has plummeted in numbers. Meaning the communities that remain are small and close knit, with “larger towns” resembling normal functionality, with us not even being aware that what we see as a middle sized town is in fact in the setting, the largest gathering of humans living in one place.

The manga follows our main character, Alpha (the robot coffee shop owner) and her dealings with about 3 or 4 other characters. Specifically an old man and his grandson. The old man runs a petrol station nearby and has more or less taken Alpha under his wing as she is otherwise on her own, her house sitting on the outside of the small town they live in (which we never really see as a result)

I started out really enjoying this manga, which is why I ended up reading all 100+chapters of it. But as I got near about the last quarter of it, it really fell apart for me.

The manga had set up certain things which would crop up now and then throughout its run. Like where Apha’s owner had gone and why, or who really developed the Alpha series of robots, or why Alpha has a strange quality to her that seems to ground other robots she meets into becoming more human, or why she dreams about fish so often, or who the strange immortal creature who lives by the waterway is. It sets up all these interesting ideas and mysteries as we follow Alpha in her day to day life... and by the end of the manga answers NONE of them. Not even one.

On top of this, whereas the manga started following Alpha with a very clear situation following upon situation, Her getting struck by lightning one evening and needing to be repaired by a local doctor, her reluctance to use her camera to take photos because she only has so much film she can use etc, and suddenly the timeline between events stops being a matter of days or at most a month, and suddenly YEARS are just jumped over. Turning the last quarter of the manga in a disorientating mess where we’re never quite sure WHEN we are, or what’s happened in the YEARS we apparently skipped over. Or where ANY of the characters now are because it’s suddenly 15 years later and somehow now characters are in a completely different place in their lives???

Not to mention the art started degrading rather shockingly by the end of the manga. It had slowly been turning to a more streamlined style as the chapters went on (the manga ran for 12 years) however, near the end there was a very jarring and sudden downgrade in quality. Robbing the manga of all its life and making the characters look flat and bland and unrecogniseable compared to where they use to be.

It just felt, overall, like the mangaka completely lost interest in his own story.

Art for Chapter 5

Art for chapter 139

It really soured my entire perception of the story as a whole. Because although I was reading it as a slice of life story, the story itself had presented situations and characters and questions I did not ASK it to have. But then at the end, it did not follow through on one single thing it set up. Coupled with the degrading art quality, AND the sudden fractured timeline where I had no idea when anything was happening any more, it felt as if every part of this story which had so much care and love put into it, was now just trying its best to get itself over with already. Because it had completely lost interest in itself, and was just trying to get to SOME feeling of conclusion so it could end, without taking time or effort to get there naturally.

I was supremely disappointed by what had started out as a very enjoyable series.

There are 2 OVAs adapted from the manga, one in 1998, and one in 2002. ANd just from looking at screenshots and gifs I can tell which one is the better of the two

And maybe the 90s OVA will do wonders for the story, without having to worry about the ending that I consider to be broken. And I can fully see how the slice of life nature of the show would be wonderfully suited to an anime adaptation, given that it gives the same care and attention to its real life honesty the first 3/4 of the manga did.

Because that’s what a slice of life story boils down to; How accurately it can capture the honesty of real life situations and experiences. Even in post apocalyptic settings. The setting is not important. What’s important is how well a slice of life story can portray actions, emotions and experiences we take for granted in real life. Things we do every day or things we have encountered and didn’t really think about as being anything special.

Slice of life stories’ strength lies in their ability to pump effort and care into bringing the mundane to life through art, and thereby shining a light on these taken for granted experiences, and showing it in a way that turns it into art. Which, in turn, then helps us look at our own realities a little closer, and we gain a deeper appreciation for our own lives and the every day experiences.

Even though his movies all have plots, Miyazaki does this a lot, in his glorification of the everyday mundane. Especially with food. But in other things as well. All the real world details he puts into his films, which is why they seem to breathe with so much life, and why I often find “ex Ghibli animators”, despite perhaps having the technical skill, are still not able to capture the living breathing feeling Myazaki and Takahata movies have to them. They understand what makes a Ghibli story and Ghibli characters, but they don’t understand what makes a Ghibli FILM.

Anyway this is an obscenely long post AGAIN. But that’s I guess “my opinion on Slice of Life anime”

#C-Puff answers #anime #Slice of Life #long post #image heavy #gif warning #video #Anonymous

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elfnerdherder · 6 years ago

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Ill Intentions: Chapter 15

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Chapter 15: Plot Twists

The next morning, Will Graham crept into his house after remembering to tip his Uber driver. Molly’s bed was only a full, but it fit them both just fine. He didn’t wake up sweating and shouting. The meat with the suspicious dates sat wrapped in a grocery bag in her freezer, a testament to how easily she accepted him back into her life.

A new Samsung charger for his watch wasn’t cheap, but that was alright. He had enough money for a charger, although he’d have to find a new wristband soon. Although he hadn’t had to rip it off, it had just barely managed to remain unscathed, and he could almost feel the Ripper’s skin pressed to the plastic –surely if he wore the same band, he’d become something like the same person? Could the two become one if they tried hard enough?

The white van was parked in the alley just across from him, and Will avoided looking at it as he walked up the stairs and hesitated by the door. His key got stuck in the lock; he jiggled it and wondered if he was walking into a trap, if he’d overestimated his ability to read the Ripper’s intentions as they shared such close proximity and whispered dark things that –

Will Graham paused in his doorway and stared at an immaculately clean apartment.

No body occupied chairs that sat evenly spaced around his shabby dining room table. The decimated remains of a kitchen had been rebuilt, nary a toaster cord out of place. There was a distinct scent of lavender wax burning in a Scentsy that Will Graham most certainly didn’t own, and centered just-so on his table, a letter rested.

Dear Will,

You handle victory and loss much the same; how many challenges are going to be thrown your way before you’re declared the winner, you wonder? Surely there is an end to this chase?

Your readers can hardly stand themselves, can’t they? This is the most exhilarating thing that’s happened to them as much as it’s the most fun you’ve ever been able to enjoy. How would they feel to know you don’t really care about them; what would they say if they could see that it’s the hunt that excites you, not their adoration? Would their twitter tags fade; would their admiration turn to censure? How soon until you become what they most hate as opposed to me?

On wind I sit,

My voice the melody you sing,

Such shiny things I take and keep,

my secrets I hide well.

I am both as tall as trees

or as small as fists,

My grip punctures;

I lay draped in radiant hues.

What am I?

You have 3 days.

-Avid Fan

Will wandered the apartment, letter gripped tightly in hand. A bird, it meant. A bird, and birds ate fish. Was the Ripper the fisherman, here, or was Will? He went to his dresser where every sock had been set with care, and Will wasn’t at all surprised to see that the knife he’d used to gut the man in the alleyway so long ago wasn’t there. He pressed the embroidered letters on the handkerchief to his lips and exhaled slowly against it as he stared.

In its place, Will’s calling card had been left.

I wonder where you keep your secrets, he’d asked the Ripper. Or Hannibal Lecter.

Both; surely both? This confirmed it. Unless the Ripper merely followed him there to observe. Unless this was all just a wild goose chase, and Will was going to find himself behind bars for breaking and entering into an innocent man’s house.

Will crumpled the paper up and tucked it into his pocket. On his wrist, his watch beeped with victory.

“You found your watch,” Abigail observed.

She looked much the same, standing across from Will at the Subway in which she worked. Her visor was cheerful, her nametag sat perfectly straight, and she wore a small choker underneath the collared shirt. There was no scent of cigarettes on her breath or uncertainty in her stance. She could have been a seasoned worker, if Will didn’t know better. Everything smelled like mayonnaise and vinaigrette with a hint of burnt bread. Will inhaled the taste of it and coughed. He hated Subway. You could get an almost-authentic pulled pork sandwich just down the road that reminded him of Louisiana seasonings and hot summer days when he was just desperate enough, and it was half of the price.

“How’d you know I lost a watch?”

“Beverly mentioned it.” Abigail accepted his card and slid it through the reader, passing it back with an unnecessarily long receipt. “She said you were a pain in the ass for it.”

Will took the Subway to-go bag and scowled. “They let you cuss here?”

Abigail took a long, exaggerated look around the empty fast-food joint, then cocked her head to the side and smiled toothily. “I can tell you’re happy about it. You keep looking at it every minute or so. Someone dead give it to you?”

“It’s an expensive watch,” he groused. Then, “Did Freddie Lounds talk to you?”

“No, but I got your text.”

Will wasn’t sure why, but her lack of reassurance didn’t do anything to settle the nervous jumping in his gut. Charlie thought he was doing footwork for Will Intentions. Beverly thought he was taking the day off. Freddie knew damn well he was hiding something, but he’d used Todd from Marketing to fend her off before he made a quick getaway. He’d found himself here before he knew why. Less than three days. He needed to get to work.

“She won’t pay you,” he said lamely.

Abigail didn’t seem bothered by the statement. Instead, her eyes roved over his collared shirt and coat, as though she could see every wrinkle and random thread come loose.

“What happened to your neck?” she asked.

“Cut it shaving.”

She met his gaze, and he stared back unabashedly. “That’s a big cut for shaving,” she said.

“I’m not good at it.”

“No doubt,” she agreed, “since you didn’t seem to get any hair, just a chunk of skin. They’ve got Youtube channels for that, you know.”

“A lesson for next time,” he replied. Ridiculously expensive twelve-inch sub in one hand and a cup of water in the other, he headed towards the exit but stopped with his shoulder into the door, a random thought striking him. “Agent Crawford knows you’re here. He asked about you.”

It was then that her carefully constructed mask slipped, and Will was able to see the edges of the real Abigail beneath. First, it was the fear; that was easily seen, and it hit him like a waft of pungent perfume. Then, there was suspicion; it was something that lurked in the way her mouth tightened and her shoulders turned in.

She wasn’t quite able to return to the perfect veneer of calm from before as she asked, “What’d he want?”

Will shrugged and took a sip of water. Four waters so far into the day. He’d even remembered to mark it on his watch. “Wondered about you. Asked me to get a read on you.”

“What’s the read?” she asked –demanded.

“He’s not taking you in for questioning,” Will assured her. “But if you start cropping up in the spotlight, doing interviews and spouting off about things, he might. You put a target on your back leaving home to come find me here.”

“No one leaves home unless there’s no home to leave behind,” Abigail spat back, “but thanks for the tip.”

She was right, wasn’t she? Freddie said she lost the house to the grieving families, the checking cleared out as a meager restitution for their suffering. He didn’t know how to say it, though; how could he truly convey that he knew, he knew what she’d lost and what she’d done to get to him? That he could feel her defenses and knew why she was sharp and cruel; how else was she to survive with a father like that? There was no home because her father had razed it to the ground around them and left her to sweet up the ashes. Much like Garrett Jacob Hobbs, Will left her with the stench of too much salt in the sauce intermingling with a perpetually running air conditioner, and he marked the first stop on his phone. He had a lot of work to do.

There were seven bird sanctuaries in the general DC area, the Washington, DC Zoo, and too many pet shops to count. Will visited all of the bird sanctuaries in the first day, the pet stores in the second, and by the third day he found himself touring through the Zoo with an ‘all access’ pass and an overly expensive pizza slice. It wasn’t barren, but he was one of maybe nine that meandered the walkways throughout the zoo, making his way to where the birds sat chirping, fluffing feathers, and being a general nuisance as they fought to be heard over one another. He traced over their beady eyes and gaping maws, and he wondered what he’d have written onto paper to convey their depth of rippling sunset hues, how their voices both clashed yet blended into a loud and raucous melody. His fingers tapped in beat on the side of his trousers. Maybe this would be written into the article, should the need arise for what Freddie referred to as ‘good filler”. Journalist Will Graham Spends an Extensive Amount of Money on Pizza to Catch Bad Guy.

“Will Graham?”

Will tensed without meaning to, and he managed a grimacing smile as he turned to shake hands with who he too-late recognized to be Tobias Budge from the gala. A good friend of another one of his ‘avid fans’. The one with the knowing smile.

“Mr. Budge,” he greeted. A brisk wind passed between them, chilling. The freezing, drizzling rain threatened to turn to ice, but only just. His fingers were stiff.

“I wasn’t aware that a journalist could find inspiration for murder in a Zoo of all places,” Tobias said with a short laugh.

“Writers find inspiration in all things,” Will replied. “What brings you here?”

“As a musician, I too find inspiration in all things,” said Tobias, and he gestured. “After all, wasn’t it Mozart that found the music of the birds as an inspiration to some of his most successful pieces?”

Will’s fingers stopped drumming to the tune the birds sang for him. Something itched, but he didn’t know where to reach to scratch.

“You’re a musician?”

“Well, a violin instructor and shop owner in Baltimore,” Tobias reiterated with a warm laugh. It felt too rich a sound for the modest correction. “I string my own violins.”

“How do you do it?” Will asked. The birds squawked, sharp and reminding; you’re looking for a body, Will. These niceties won’t help you do that.

“Well, it’s far easier to show you than to tell you, so if you come by the shop one day, I’ll show you.”

“I don’t get to Baltimore much.”

“Just for the occasional gala attendance?”

And the occasional, tense exchange between myself and a psychopath. “Yeah.”

“Well, even if it’s not for my shop, you should find the time. Baltimore has a lot to offer tourists.”

Will hummed in agreement and looked down the rows of birds in large, spacious cages, each one more vibrant than the last. Where would there be a body hiding in the zoo?

“I’m sorry, you were looking around, weren’t you?” Tobias asked.

Will’s laugh sounded more like relief. “Yes, I’m here for the birds.”

“The birds,” Tobias mused. “Do you mind if I trail along? This is my last stop before I head home.”

Will minded very much, but he wasn’t sure how to say it. Could he program the watch to remind him to practice tact a little more often? Could someone time that?

“Only if you know a little more information about birds than I do,” he managed, and it was the wrong thing to say. Tobias fell in step beside him and kept pace as Will stared at the birds. There wasn’t a zookeeper in sight, no surly teenage employee handing out fliers with maps to new attractions. He wondered where he could pry Tobias off of him and leave him behind. Whereas before he’d been a mild aid in keeping his friend from bowling Will over –what was his name? Francis? Frank? –now he was the problem, walking too close and smelling of dusty books and cold weather.

“I sadly don’t know much about birds apart from your basics,” Tobias said regretfully. “Crows remember everything, Ravens make good voice impressions, and Magpies take shiny things and hide them.”

“They do what?” Will asked, pausing beside the Magpie exhibit. The bird, huddled in a fluffed mass in the back, paused and considered them, head tilted.

“The Magpies?”

“They take shiny things and hide them,” Will murmured, and he reached into his pocket, fumbling for some spare change. When he found a quarter, he pulled it out and shined it against his coat, eyes on the bird as it hopped about on a branch, watching them. Its feathers ruffled into the cold misting rain.

“I’m not sure if you’re supposed to do that,” Tobias said, but it was a lost statement, something far away and echoing too faintly to catch.

Will stood just on the ledge of the cage and held his hand out, offering the quarter. No zookeeper nearby. No zookeeper, but there was a melody of birds and a magpie.

My voice the melody you sing, Such shiny things I take and keep, my secrets I hide well.

“Mr. Graham –”

“Investigative journalism, Mr. Budge,” Will murmured, and when the magpie flew over to him, his heart stuttered. Its claws clung to the chicken wire that kept it captive, and as its beak clacked, wanting, Will smiled.

“Hello, Mr. Graham,” the bird greeted kindly, in the garbled sort of voice that all birds have. Throaty. Mocking.

Will was over the small guard rail and rushing between the cages before he had enough time to consider his actions, before he could truly recall Mr. Budge’s feeble attempt at warning him.

The door to the employee walkway was unlocked and mildly ajar; Will stepped into the humid and enclosed space with the same trepidation that he would stepping into a lion’s den. The birds still sang, and he palmed the quarter indecisively, looking about. Where the front of the enclosures were bright and engaging to meet the needs of their inhabitants, the back of the enclosures were grey and cement-walled. He dragged a palm along the damp grey, and once he reached the entrance to the magpie’s enclosure, he grasped the handle, unsurprised to feel it turn with ease.

Just inside was much of the same grey walls, although they’d thought to add perches, hiding holes, and a few plants for the magpie to tuck himself into. The opening that gave the birds freedom to move between the social part of their enclosure and the private part was open rather than shut; normally they were closed during open hours to ensure that the birds couldn't hide from the public.

Will opened it, his pulse pushing through his neck with a burning sensation in his veins.

The magpie knew; he was inside of the back of the enclosure within just a few seconds, his knowing stare so much worse off because how was it that of all the things to see, all the people to see, he knew exactly which one was Will Graham?

“Where are they?” he asked breathlessly.

“Hello, Mr. Graham.”

“Where?” he demanded, a little more firmly.

The magpie tilted his head, and he clacked his beak.

In response, Will lifted the quarter, and he scowled back.

“Please?” the bird asked.

“Please,” Will agreed.

The magpie flew to the small supply closet, and it took only a few curses and a conveniently nearby hammer before Will was breaking the lock off of it just in time to catch the dead body that dropped from the roof of the enclosure in order to land on top of him.

“Hello, Mr. Graham!” the Magpie shrieked.

He was waiting with Tobias Budge at the back of an ambulance.

Will wouldn’t say that he enjoyed waiting with Tobias Budge at the back of the ambulance, but since he’d hit his head on the concrete and blacked out for seven seconds, the medic wasn’t letting him leave anytime soon. Jack Crawford will want to know you’re okay, he’d said. He has all information from the local police routed over to them. He’ll know you’ve been hurt.

His watch beeped; it’d been almost an hour since he’d last taken a step.

The Magpie in the enclosure wasn’t the Magpie that the Zoo had ‘borrowed’ from the Atlanta Zoo for a series in birds. Will had already texted to inform Beverly and Freddie of the drama that was sure to unfold at the Atlanta Zoo demanding their bird back, but he was mostly concerned about what would happen to the Magpie that’d been left behind, the one trained to say his name.

“He will probably be taken to the FBI,” the first officer on the scene had said.

“Evidence and all if the Chesapeake Ripper owned him,” her partner had added.

Evidence and all. Will had come to just in time for Tobias to almost drop him with a startled shout as he tried to free him from the grotesque corpse whose stench had left a couple of cops gagging up their lunch.

“Is this common for journalists, or is this just our lucky day?” Tobias asked. Blood was streaked along the starched white collar underneath his shock blanket, and there was still some on his neck. Rancid blood from the veins of a dead man. Will wanted to bathe until he scrubbed his skin off.

“Comes with the territory,” he said.

“Sounds like a stressful job,” said Tobias. He huddled further into his shock blanket, and the flash of red disappeared. “Was it like that before you started this column?”

“Mostly it was forcing myself to eat a lot of fondant and pretend to be excited about interviewing Great Uncles from the war,” Will replied. “I can’t say which one I prefer more.”

Tobias’ smile was pleasant. “First the Chesapeake Ripper, then the Maestro –you’ve got your hands full.”

“I’m not worried about the Maestro,” Will replied automatically, but he instantly regretted it. Tobias’ laugh was too loud against his ear, and he leaned away from it instinctively.

“That’s the first time I’ve heard someone say that about a serial killer,” he said.

Will shrugged and looked down to his feet that hung off of the ambulance. His left foot swung in time with the flashing blue lights on the cop car. “I guess he just doesn’t have the same…tone.”

“How so?”

That was the problem, though, wasn’t it? Will dreamt of the stiffened bodies the Maestro had left behind, yet standing before them he could only focus on the Ripper and how close he pressed his mouth to Will’s ear, whispering wicked things. His watch vibrated again, and he dismissed the shoe notification whose laces trailed into a lazy ‘Zzz…’ He’d have to work harder on his step goal tomorrow.

“He wants me to want it the way he does,” Will said at last, when he could find the words. “It’s off, it’s…showy. Not clever. I’m a journalist, not a psychopath with an obsession with music or complex anatomical modifications.”

“Yet here you are, breaking into Zoo enclosures,” Tobias said with a laugh.

“Here I am,” Will agreed glumly.

“How do you know that he wants you to want it the way that he does? How do you know it’s a he?” At Will’s perplexed expression, he continued, “I’m sorry, am I asking too much? I could always wait for your column to come out.”

“He won’t be in the column.” Will looked back to his swinging shoe. The silence after left him wanting. “It’s showy, isn’t it?”

“Him putting it on your doorstep, you mean.”

“Yeah, that.” Doorsteps. First work, then home. He’d be hiding them underneath Will’s normal seat on the bus if he wasn’t careful. “He very obviously wants to be in the column, and I’m not one for entertaining things like that.”

“The Chesapeake Ripper gets that sort of entertainment though.”

Will hummed non-committedly. How could he, with all of his vast limitations in speech, even begin to explain how very wrong that sort of estimation was? That the Ripper gave zero fucks about the column, how that was just the conduit in which they first communicated, how it was through that and that alone that Will first began to wake up?

This is the most fun you’ve had in years.

“Do you think he’s going to escalate his crimes if you don’t give him the attention he’s seeking?” Tobias pressed.

“It’s not my fault if he does.”

“Isn’t it? If he’s only doing it because you’re not giving him what he wants, I’d personally wonder about repercussions.”

“Will Graham.”

Over the years, Will had grown accustomed to the many ways in which he was addressed. More often than not, there was a level of exasperation to it –mostly from teachers or authority figures. Sometimes, there would be laughter in their voice at something particularly funny he’d shared, sometimes nonchalance. Most times, something pressing and prodding managed to snake its way into their voice, something that let him know that he was probably a little too far detached from reality at the moment.

Despite the aggravated weariness, Will could honestly say that he was more than happy to be rescued by Agent Jack Crawford.

“Agent Crawford,” he greeted, and his foot stilled the swinging motion. The lights on the cop car kept flashing, and he felt disjointed from it, out of time. He glanced to his watch. The seconds kept ticking.

“Walk with me, Mr. Graham,” Jack prompted.

Will hopped off of the back of the ambulance and shot Tobias Budge a look that he hoped conveyed some sort of regret at their conversation being interrupted.

“Mr. Budge.”

“Mr. Graham. Best of luck to you. Your life seems very exciting.”

They shook hands, and Will found himself casually rubbing his palm into his work slacks as he turned his back and walked away.

“You look relieved to see me,” Jack said suspiciously.

“Out of everything going on, Jack, I can safely say that you’re the most constant in my life,” Will replied cheerfully. “You were saving me from an apparent fan.”

“An Avid Fan?”

They considered one another as they paused just on the other side of the police line. The mist was becoming rain at a slow and agonizing pace. It clung to Will’s cheeks and left his nose pink.

“An avid fan, but not that avid fan,” Will said slowly.

“You sure about that?”

“You could investigate him if you want. I did think it was weird to run into him here.” Will glanced back to where Tobias was giving another agent his testimony. “He lives in Baltimore and owns an instrument shop.”

“Well unless he’s making violins out of bodies, he’s not my problem.” Jack’s brow deepened into a divot, and he glared impressively at Will. “You are.”

“I found the body,” he protested.

“What’d I say about leaving me out of the loop, Graham?” Jack asked in a low growl. “Didn’t I say I’d have you brought in for obstruction of justice?”

This wasn’t happening. Will looked across the police line to the agents milling about with intent, their probing gazes not once turned his way. This was supposed to happen, his standing here with Jack. The agents knew not to wander by and interrupt.

“You’ll never catch him that way,” Will warned. His stomach was doing something funny in his gut, wrenching tight, tight, tight. He coughed to dispel the pressure. “He’ll just bide his time or disappear altogether. You won’t draw him out that way.”

“No, apparently all I need to do that is walk a very thin line between abiding by the law and getting in the way of the law,” Jack snarled. “If I’d known that years ago, I’d have caught him by now.”

Will thought of his meeting in less than two weeks’ time, how close he was to seeing Dr. Lecter in person and ending this once and for all. He thought of Abigail, how she was listless and had nowhere to turn, no one to lean on now that she was so utterly, utterly alone. He thought of the column, of Freddie looking at him across the coffee shop table with the oddest expression in her eyes, like she could finally see him and both loved and hated what she saw.

He thought of Beverly and how mad she was going to be after this.

“You arrest me, and you’ll never find him,” said Will, voice lowering to a soft murmur. He tried to make it coaxing, gentle. “He’d think it was funny you were so busy coming after me in a blind rage that you missed him entirely. He’d laugh all the way to the bank, Agent Crawford. Neither one of us want that.”

Jack Crawford managed a very small, sly smile. “I’m willing to take that bet. Will Graham, you’re under arrest for obstruction of justice and impeding an investigation. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be used against you…”

#LiaS scribbles #ill intentions #hannibal fanfic #hannibal au #hannigram #slowburn hannigram #will graham x hannibal #dark!will #grey!will #journalist!will #tobias budge

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whispelanix · 7 years ago

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Proof as to why Murdoc would murder someone (and other horrible theory shit)

Wow. I never expected my previous theory to get as much recognition as it did. I just thought everyone would see it as a bit of an over-analysis, which is EXACTLY what I did. So I’ll do some more stuff on it because I’m stupid... :)

The title might be a bit of a stretch, I think, but just bare with it.

I just want to clear one thing up - I never said Murdoc DID kill anyone or that 2D IS dead, but at this point of time I believe an ATTEMPTED homicide is likely and if Murdoc were to kill/attempt to kill any band members, it would most likely be 2D.

This first one was posted to The Guardian on January 22nd, 2006 (that was my 4th birthday lol) Murdoc clearly states he can get away with some shit

Yep. He can get away with murder. He doesn’t say he COULD get away with murder, meaning he’s done it more than once...

Next up is an interview from Redbull on June 13th, last year.

It’s not Murdoc murder, but it talks about 2D dying. Going up in flames, because that boy is on FIRE!

Here’s another one, a quote that is. I believe I’ve seen it somewhere in Rise of the Ogre

“Kids, eh? Little treasures, I love ‘em... couldn’t eat one whole though.”

Yeah, this might be a one-off thing, but I found a 2017 interview relating to Plastic Beach. I’m currently failing to find a link, but there was something mentioned about bread and then Murdoc mentioned cannibalism, idk. I can’t find it ANYWHERE.

Lol, Murdoc wouldn’t CANNIBALIZE a member of his band, EVER. I’m just pointing that out

Here’s another one - page 143 of Rise of the Ogre:

Murdoc exploded, lunging at 2D. Grabbing his twig-like throat with both hands he began throttling the hapless singer, squeezing the very life out of him. Russel stood up, raising himself to his full height.

Russel: Put him down Muds. Now

Murdoc, oblivious to the potential danger of a riled-up Russel Hobbs, continued his vicious and merciless assault. 2D's head was thrown from side to side.

Russel: I said PUT HIM DOWN, MURDOC. BEFORE I DO SOMETHING WE'RE ALL GONNA REGRET.

Noodle too lept to her feet, throwing herself between Murdoc and 2D. She bit hard into Murdoc's hand trying to get him to release his stranglehold, but the red mist had come down and Murdoc held on tight. 2D's face had now turned a deep shade of blue, matching the colour of his spiky eyes. If he'd had eyes they'd have been popping right out of his head by now.

Russel: I AIN'T GONNA TELL YOU AGAIN. DROP HIM!

That’s only half of it on the page. But Murdoc eventually says this:

Murdoc, his eyes ablaze with vitriol and venom, pointed his bony nicotine-encrusted finger right into 2D's face.

Murdoc: And you, you little blue-haired pigmy sod boy, are way to stupid to be alive. Let this be known, you've been a curse of banality since I first laid eyes on you. If it weren't for your precious vocals, I'd have strangled you into a box years ago.

So yeah. Back then the only thing practically keeping 2D alive was his vocals. Not even for talking, just his singing. Murdoc literally tells him he’s too stupid to be alive. He’s not afraid to kill 2D.

MURDOC. IS. NOT. AFRAID. TO. KILL. 2D.

This is why Gorillaz first split as a band, because Murdoc tried to strangle Stuart to death. That in itself is obvious from the constant abuse.

(Shit, I’m just going off the rails now.)

This is all getting really random, but I’m just trying to point out related stuff here. Like the fact that 2D has bad dreams as said by Noodle in a Dazed interview.

It’s understandable. 2D wouldn’t have bad dreams, or maybe nightmares, if something bad wasn’t going on in his life. Murdoc still treats him like shit.

I mean, just look at this from the Spirit House App:

His rooms a mess as well. Looks like it belongs to a mentally unstable person...

Also, here’s a list of things Murdoc has been doing to 2D:

- Making him work late hours in a sweatshop

- Getting him to dress as a fox so he can pretend to shoot 2D (with something) without hurting a real animal

- Gets him to wake him up with an electric shock, before proceeding to punch him in the face

Murdoc just treats him like an animal in general. I shouldn’t have to explain things, but I guess I will. He gets him to “go for walks”, throw a stick and chase ducks.

Old image of 2D wearing a fucking leash:

Also, Murdoc wants to fly 2D to space. Permanently. And chloroform.

Ok. I should ACTUALLY stop. Uhhh... kill meeeee?

Sources and shit:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/jan/22/popandrock.gorillaz

https://www.redbull.com/au-en/theredbulletin/gorillaz-were-the-most-real-band-out-there

https://aminoapps.com/c/gorillaz/page/blog/ayyy-i-found-rise-of-the-ogre-on-reddit/kwJj_dxaFGu7jR2XEnlleQKGg1ne7xMjxbb

http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/35725/1/we-skyped-every-member-of-gorillaz

https://aminoapps.com/c/gorillaz/page/blog/2ds-bedroom/aVqg_YB5h0uWV75zXbalr3VKaB7mWBw6QQ

#gorillaz #theory #here we go again #oh boy #cringe #music

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