melabeeeeee

[neverendingford]

.

[lucythornwalter]

In Greeting and Introduction:

In 1986, Pleasant Company unleashed the American Girls upon the world, and nothing has ever been the same. If you’re between the ages of 25 and 40 (sorry, Gen Z, but this is really a millennial phenomenon) and were at any point in your childhood aligned or identified as a ‘girl’, you probably have memories of decadently arranged extra-wide catalogues coming in the mail, or slim box sets of six books with names like Samantha Learns a Lesson or Changes for Kirsten, or visits to a toy store that was more like a luxury hotel, or – if you were especially lucky – unwrapping a long and heavy box on your birthday or on Christmas to reveal a much-anticipated new best friend. Even if you weren’t subjected to the rigors of late-twentieth-century girlhood, you probably knew something about this brand thanks to the way it took hold in the hearts and minds of an entire generation of – ha! – American girls who went to school with other American children and often brought dolls and books and catalogues and trip reports back with them.

So, what exactly was this brand?

1986 is a fascinating year in pop culture, and one I’ve been personally fixated on for over a decade. It’s the year of the (first) death of Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie, the year of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the year of Phantom of the Opera’s spectacular West End debut, the year of Labyrinth, the year of Hellraiser. If you outgrew American Girl and trended toward the weird and darkly gothic, this is a year you’re intimately familiar with, whether you know it or not. Fitting, then, that it’s the year the dolls were born.

The story goes that educator Pleasant Rowland, in the process of attempting to buy dolls for her family, found herself frustrated by a perceived gap in the market. While baby dolls served as proxies for burgeoning parental instinct, and fashion dolls served as more mature aspirational figures (or, in many cases, adult stars of complicated child-crafted soap operas), there were no dolls that girls could look upon as peers. I find myself skeptical of this claim, largely because mythical doll origins are often hilariously selective and inaccurate – for one thing, Barbie was not even close to the first adolescent/adult fashion doll for little girls – but it is consistently cited as one of the concerns in developing the line. With that frustration to chew on, and inspired by a visit to Colonial Williamsburg (a living history museum focused on life in America in the immediate years preceding the Revolutionary War), Rowland developed the concept of the American Girls. These would be eighteen-inch cloth and vinyl dolls portraying distinct historical figures living in different eras of American history, each with their own name and family and backstory. She worked with author Valerie Tripp to develop the identities of each girl, and then launched the brand under her new company, Pleasant Company (which is such a clever idea for an instantly recognizable corporation) with three dolls ready to go.

Now, there are American Girl stores in multiple malls, and when I was a little girl there were near-mythical American Girl Places in Chicago and New York and I think somewhere in California, but when Rowland began her business model was entirely by mail with no brick-and-mortar location to visit. Little girls and their families became aware of the existence of these dolls and their stories when catalogues that quickly became iconic arrived in the mail once every few months, and despite the high prices of everything from the dolls themselves to the books telling their stories, they bought up everything Pleasant Company had to sell. Rowland had a bona fide hit on her hands.

She had launched the brand with three characters – Kirsten Larson, a Swedish immigrant and pioneer living in the Minnesota Territory in 1854, Samantha Parkington, an Edwardian girl from a rich family living in New York in 1904, and Molly McIntyre, a Scottish-descended girl from a solidly middle-class family living in Jefferson, Illinois in 1944. Each doll, when ordered, came with a book bearing their name, and there were two additional books available for purchase alongside the collections of themed accessories and furniture. This number quickly expanded to six, all bearing similar names and reflecting similar themes across multiple decades. In 1991, a fourth historical character joined the lineup – this was Felicity Merriman, a gentleman’s daughter from 1774 Williamsburg. After her was Addy Walker, introduced in 1993, a fugitive slave who escaped to Philadelphia with her mother and lived there in 1864. Next in 1997 came Josefina Montoya, a rancher’s daughter living near Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1824 with her father, sisters, and extended family. In 2000, Kit Kittredge of 1933’s Cincinnati, Ohio joined the lineup. And lastly, at least for this analysis of my own history with the brand, in 2002 we have my dearly beloved Kaya’aton’my of the Nez Perce, living with her tribe in pre-contact years in 1764.

There are other American Girls. Mattel bought out Pleasant Company and has slowly been hollowing out the brand’s credibility, but it persists. Other historical dolls have been introduced, and many of them sound just as brilliant as the ones I grew up with. But those eight, those “original” eight, were my American Girls, and it’s their stories I want to examine, and their impacts upon my life that are still felt. Kit’s resourcefulness and adaptability when her father lost her job helped me when I was twelve and my father lost his job, Felicity’s determination to find the right balance between gender nonconformity and gender conformity inspired me to never settle for being forced into a box I didn’t fit, Samantha’s fierce loyalty to her friend Nellie was a balm to my prepubescent closeted lesbianism, and Kaya’s connection to her tribe and their traditions and culture gave me something to cling to in the midst of my rootless, forcibly assimilated indigenous childhood. (Yes, I’m indigenous, no, I’m not really going to be making my writing and blogging about an #ownvoices kind of thing, because we should get to be nerds and have the same access to privacy that white people have, but it’s relevant here and it’s relevant in my original fiction because it’s part of me.)

Of course, growing up and getting an education means looking at your past again with a wiser, more critical eye. Historical education has changed a lot since 2002, and has changed even more since 1986. The stories of the American Girls are both narrative and informative, intended to capture realistic-feeling moments in time that are grounded in real historical events and practices. How do they hold up to the standards of 2024, nearly two decades since I grew into Brontë and McCaffrey and Hugo and Dumas and Homer? How do they feel to me as an actively reconnecting indigenous lesbian whose perspective on America is very different now than when I was a child and my family tried hard to pretend we fit in? Are their books and wider stories even any good?

These are the questions I’m seeking to answer in this series of blogs, which I’ll be calling The American Girls and Me. Each fortnight (that’s every two weeks) I’ll examine a different girl, starting with her main books and going forward from there. The first series of book blogs will be published simultaneously here and on my Patreon page, completely free to read and open to the public. After that, Patreon will get things a week before they’re published here, but I’m not looking to make a serious income, so if you pay me the exorbitant price of $1 you will get to see things whenever they’re posted or you can wait for seven days to catch up. There will be some Patreon-exclusive bonus content once every couple of months, though, plus when I start publishing my original fiction it will be there alongside here, so if that sounds interesting maybe consider giving me a click?

My cutoff year is 2005 – that was the last year I asked for and received an American Girl doll as a present from my grandmother, and that was the symbolic end of the American Girl era of my life. I may take a look at the two American Girl movies that came out in 2006 and 2008 and adapted the stories of Molly and Kit respectively, but I didn’t go to great lengths to watch either of them. I was too busy rewatching The Curse of the Black Pearl and Van Helsing and The Revenge of the Sith to care about people who were now three and four years younger than me, and my own visions of both girls’ lives were too precious to me to risk a bad or disappointing adaptation.

Okay, then, what exactly will I be covering?

Like I said above, I’ll start with the stories. All eight girls, all six books + their “Looking Back/A Peek Into the Past” chapters. I’ll talk about my childhood impressions, my connections with different narratives, how those have changed now that I’m in my thirties, and places where I think the books have aged particularly poorly or particularly well.

After that, we’ll look at their short stories pre-2005, and see what those add to or detract from the canon of core story beats. These were in some cases published over a decade after the books finished up, and the tonal or thematic differences should be interesting to note.

Once the fiction is finished up we’ll look at each doll. I’ll talk about my experiences with the ones I personally own, and examine their accessories and artifacts in-person, and if it’s a doll I don’t own we’ll be looking at the catalogues from 1998-2002, which can safely be considered something of a golden age for the brand. That’s how I experienced several of the dolls, and therefore that’s what I’ll be revisiting

Next, I’ll be taking a look at nonfiction books – each of the original eight girls got a Welcome to [Name]’s World book issued for their era in American history, taking the nonfiction historical context chapters and fleshing them out to give more detail and explain more about how the lives of our girls fit into the story of the country as a whole. These are apparently extremely high-quality for children’s history books, and while I never had them as a child I definitely want them now.

Finally, having finished up books entirely, we move on to crafts and ephemera. Each girl got a paper doll set, and most of them also received a craft book and cook book. There were theater kits for pretend play as well, but I’ll be excluding those for purely practical reasons – they’re often the hardest to find, and I was never interested in that kind of pretend play with these girls.

This will be a long, involved, organized blogging project unlike anything I’ve ever really done before, but I think it will be a rewarding one. These girls are like my sisters, even those with wildly different life experiences than my own. They were a fundamental part of my childhood. They deserve to be remembered and discussed, and this era in my life deserves to be loved.

After all, I, too, was once an American girl.

[eddathegreat]

I have a kind of spicy take on the Nimona adaptation. I originally thought it was really idiosyncratic to me, and based off a lot of really positive reactions to the movie I worried saying this might pollute the narrative and create the negative effect I'm describing, and I didn't want that. But I've seen more similar opinions come out of the woodwork, after sitting on this I'm more sure of myself, and I think I can at least say this nicely.

For further preface: I didn't hate this and thought it had a lot of strong points, I heard the original handled things better, I don't think there was any malicious intent and this was all accidental, and I'm glad Blue Sky's last big thing managed to beat the odds and make it to the finish line and be seen by people.

So: I hated Nimona's ending.

Up until the climax, an antagonistic and bigoted stance is taken by the people of the city towards Nimona, with threats of violence saturating the pop culture. And that wears on Nimona, and it fucking sucked. Nimona was established really well as a really likeable character, the rebel against the system, badass, but more vulnerable than they let on.

When there is the big revelation and betrayal by Ballister at the end, I knew where the story was going, though, and I hated every second of it. The rebel goes on a rampage, and has to be stopped to protect people, then they sacrifice themselves and tie a neat bow on the story so that it doesn't have to really confront why the character was angry. The onus is put on the oppressed to be better than their oppressors and to prove themselves.

It took some particular turns that made me even more disturbed, though. Because Nimona's rampage is explicitly suicidal. Her being talked down by Ballister was a genuine tearjerker, and had me hoping the story wouldn't go the way it would, but then it did, and it was so much worse for it. Because right after Nimona's life and value is affirmed, that is when they have to heroically sacrifice to save their oppressors.

For those who don't know, suicide is a frighteningly common issue for trans youth. So the unintentional messaging here feels very weird: don't kill yourself, but throw yourself upon the altar for the sake the society that hates you.

And then Nimona is remembered well and the bigotry and authoritarianism is over and that's it. No need to deal with the mess of actually reforming a society, now that the most oppressed person with the most reason to hate the system if out of the way, everything is fine now, and the racist police officers are all good guys and laying flowers at that person's memorial.

Nimona is shown to be alive in the end, sure, but for the intents and purposes of everyone in the work and the audience up to the literal last seconds, Nimona was dead. And then that reveal just feels cheap too.

I do think the movie was largely effective in selling a tragedy to cishets, who I think will watch this and come away angry at society and wanting to change things and maybe taking a closer look at the beliefs of the people around them. And Nimona and Ballister are on the whole really great representation and the world is better for this movie's existence. But I wish it had actually stuck the landing with its messaging.

[veronicaleighauthor]

The Heroine After My Own Heart

For awhile now, I have wanted to write a post on Jo March and the whole Should She Have Married Laurie, or Was She Right in Marrying Friedrich Bhaer? We all have different opinions and mine actually varies depending on the source. If I’m reading the book, I kind of wish Jo had remained single as Alcott originally intended. If I’m watching the 1994 or 2019 adaptations, I’m Team Bhaer all the way. If I’m watching the 2017 adaptation, I’m Team Laurie. I’ve come to realize I have nothing really new or enlightening to say on the subject of Jo’s romantic prospects or marriage. I also realized the whole Laurie versus Bhaer doesn’t even matter. In the end, what’s important is that I’m Team Jo and I should be grateful Alcott created such a fantastic heroine. Is she hetero, part of the LGBT community, Asexual? Who knows? She’s open for interpretation – and I love that. There’s no single way to view her because Jo defied societal norms from beginning to end.

This post will rather be about my love for Jo, how I was introduced to her, and the impact she’s made on my life.

I was fourteen and I had agreed to help with a church yard sale and I did. It wasn’t super busy, so I wandered about and stumbled upon a VHS copy of “Little Women” 1994 for sale. Louisa May Alcott‘s autobiographical account of her life with her three sisters in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1860s. With their father fighting in the American Civil War, sisters Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth are at home with their mother, a very outspoken woman for her time. The story tells of how the sisters grow up, find love, and find their place in the world. Intrigued by the cover and the description on the back, I bought it. When I watched it, Jo March became The Heroine After My Own Heart. I had been writing seriously for three years and was astonished that I had yet to be published (I was convinced I was going to be a best-selling author before I was out of my teens, lol!). Throughout the movie, Jo’s single-minded ambition to be a writer and published and make money, resonated with me. I wanted that. I wanted to write myself into money.

I went to my Home Away From Home, BooksAMillion, and bought a copy of “Little Women.” The movie was different from the book in many ways, but it captured its spirit. I devoured the book, a couple of series connected to it, written by modern authors. I bought the soundtrack, other books by and about Alcott, and watched other adaptations. Jo – tomboyish, odd, comical, bookish, klutzy, weird Jo – was my literary idol. She was one of the first literary She’s not like other girls. I mimicked Jo in many ways, adopted her beliefs, borrowed from her story for my juvenilia, and wanted to be her more than anything. I was much shyer than Jo and didn’t really struggle with a bad temper, but Jo made it okay for me to embrace my own interests and weirdness. Others may not understand, others may laugh, others may criticize – but there’s nothing wrong with being different.

Years passed and I met other literary heroines who I fell in love with…but Jo was still The Heroine After My Own Heart. I return to her time and time again, for inspiration and hope for my own brilliant literary career. Unfortunately for me, it took a little longer to figure out my writing niche, than it took Jo. I’m getting there. I’ve also accepted that I’m shy and an introvert and I don’t have to mimic my favorite heroine. My personality, beliefs, mannerisms, quirks, etc are fine. One of Jo’s best qualities is that she always remained true to herself, and we should too.

So, check out “Little Women” 1994, I’m sure you’ll fall in love with it.

Until next time.

[zaffreberries]

Have you ever started reading something and become utterly and irrevocably enthralled by it? Unable to stop reading, losing hours of your time in devotion to the story played out amongst these fictional characters? To have your whole world subtly shift until the only way to get back to a sense of normalcy is to finish the story. That’s what happened to me with “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”.

I was initially intrigued by the movie trailer, it starred Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig as the main characters and was released in 2011. I hadn’t watched the movie when it was first released, nor did I realise it was based off of a book (let alone a series), I just was looking for crime noir movies to watch and stumbled upon it. Then I found out it was based on a book and I wanted to read the book first before watching the movie. All the reviews had praised the movie in various ways but every review of the millennium trilogy of books spoke of how amazing the series was. My interest had been piqued, my attention was given and so I set out to read this book series.

As soon as I started reading I was obsessed. I barely looked at anything else but the screen of my kindle, I needed to know what happened next. Time happened to fall away as I lost myself in the unfolding story. Thankfully I had gotten the omnibus because I wasn’t sated with just reading the first book. I had finished it that day and I needed more. I yearned for more and could do little else but let myself become lost amongst the story. Some times it’s hard to stay focused on a book when reading, but not this. This, if anything, was the reverse. I couldn’t focus on anything but the story. These fictional characters, mikael and lisbeth, their lives were more important than my own. I cant emphasise how easy it was to read this book. I barely took breaks to eat and sleep, for me the story, the unfolding mystery and resulting drama were all the nourishment I needed. The first book quickly fell away to the second and by the third day I had finished the original trilogy and needed to catch up on sleep and eating. I was sated, I was nourished and I was at peace with the world once more, able to function and live like a normal person without my mind being drawn helplessly back to this fictional place.

Now unfortunately we come to a problem. To elaborate upon the series and its contents and why this problem effects me and why I am choosing to make a point of it, we need to establish a few things. First and foremost is that this book is about feminism. The original title of the book in Swedish is “Män som hatar kvinnor” which translates to English as “Men who hate Women” and a significant theme of this book is about violence against women. Another theme is the noted moral bankruptcy of big capital. Whilst this book focuses predominantly on the Swedish community neither of the themes expressed are unknown to anyone around the world, especially women. Secondly is that Stieg Larsson was a reporter and a noted feminist and his work was on far left journalism and Stieg died of a heart attack in 2004 and his Millennium trilogy was released posthumously. This is where the problem begins. For safety reasons relating to his work on writing about far right extremism Stieg didn’t marry his partner Eva Gabrielsson and he hadn’t updated his will in many years (clearly an oversight). This led to a situation where his possessions were given to his immediate family over his partner, including the rights to the book series. What followed was a he said/she said situation in which his partner Eva who he collaborated with in making the books, was denied any further involvement in the handling and decision making progress of the now best selling series. Eva had in her possession an unfinished manuscript of the fourth book in the series and even offered to finish the series, Stieg’s brother and Father who had control of his estate through legal means were disputing creative control of his literary works. At one point, Larsson's father and brother offered Gabrielsson roughly $3.3 million, but she continues to fight for the literary rights of Larsson's work to this day. Since legally they had control of his works they instead worked with the publisher and a decision was made to continue Stieg’s Millennium series without his or his partners blessing by hiring a new writer to write new books.

I’m not Swedish, I have never met any of these people in my life, nor spoken to them, I don’t speak Swedish and I haven’t been to Sweden. My information is coming from third hand sources who I choose to believe have accurately translated the ongoing issue. Plain and simply I am not a good source of knowledge or information on this issue, I do not have solid facts and this is not verified information and I implore you to investigate this issue yourself. I don’t have any firm idea on who is morally right in this situation or what the whole truth is. I do know that legally it is right that more books were and will be published. But morally…in my opinion (that no one asked for) this leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I haven’t read the sequels to the trilogy, I refuse to. It’s not as simple as a “I refuse to pay for this” kind of stand where I would just go and get the books through “other” means which is customary for when a writer of quality is shown to be lacking in morals. No instead this is something that hits different. It doesn’t feel right. Eva lived with Stieg for 30 years. She knew his mind. She knows him best, knows what he would have wanted and there is something tragically ironic about the whole situation in which a feminist writer dies and the literary control of his feminist book series about a left journalist and hacker who go right wrongs, to two men over his partner of over 30 years in a legal dispute and was immediately whored out for profit by the company. It is the kind of thing that the characters in the book would have been disgusted with, would have fought against. It to me is against the very spirit of the book.

*Sigh*

So for me this means the door is closed. My favourite book series ends in a different sort of tragedy. Whilst the original trilogy itself had an ending that is satisfactory, to know there is more (from a certain point of view) to know there could have been more and to have that not being realised, it doesn’t feel good. One of life’s unfortunate unfinished dreams becomes another of my dalliances into the realm of “what if”.

[sludge-wizard]

I’ve noticed lately there’s an uptick in people who write characters as being poor/growing up poor(particularly Mario and Luigi), and I love to see it because I grew up poor myself. I wanted to compile a bunch of memories I have of growing up poor as a potential reference to anybody who wants it, because i know not everybody here was broke but wants to write characters as broke and it can be hard to find resources that AREN’T just guesses at what things might’ve been like. do note my own experiences aren’t universal, but they’re what I’m familiar with since it was my own childhood.

Definitely not a totally complete list and I'll add more as I think of them, and if people want to ask me questions for any clarification, go ahead!

-Brushing our teeth by taking a mouthful of watered down mouthwash and sticking the toothbrush in your mouth and brushing with your mouth full so we didnt need to buy toothpaste

-often times breakfast was just a glass of milk because it was relatively cheap

-fancy family breakfasts were sundays only and usually simple french crepes because they’re only eggs milk and flour, and we’d have them with butter+sugar or lemon+sugar

-my mom was a waitress at nights and those days she’d send home leftovers from her job as dinner since they didnt want to waste at the restaurant she worked at

-Birthdays i always shared with my older sister and parties were every other year with a hard limit on 5 invites each. they were either at the small family owned movie theatre or the bowling alley.

-I never had a playdate at my own house. I never understood at the time, but i know now it was because our house was really run down and we didn’t have extra snacks or anything to entertain guests really

-once a month our mom would have enough change scrounged up to send me and my siblings (5 of us total) to the corner store 2 blocks down for slurpees. Highlight of the month.

-we’d have quesadillas a lot (tortillas with cheese salsa and chicken, not really authentic) because one grocery store chicken could feed everybody for 2 days straight this way

-fried rice or hash browns with bacon and onions were a common meal since onions, potatoes, rice and bulk frozen bacon was cheap at the time

-every family pet we ever had were rescues we got for free with the exception of my 2 current cats which my mom bought for $75 off of kijiji 14 years ago. I still have the kitties!

-we often had those massive flatpacks of assorted soda flavours because it was cheaper than juice or bottled water but we were limited to 2 cans a week

-we shared the bathwater up until we were in highschool, and even then we wouldn’t drain the tub if somebody else needed a bath and they could re-use the water.

-the local church would send a lot of donations our way. the most prominent were bags upon bags of day old bakery bread they couldnt sell.

-a lot of times dinner were whole frozen fish we could get for cheap since they were too small to cut and sell as fillets.

-hot dogs were a VERY common meal because they were cheap in bulk frozen packs

-the fanciest appliance in the whole house was a massive, clunky kitchen maid my mom got at her wedding.

-we always made our own fresh pesto since it was much cheaper than storebought pastes. it also tastes WAY better imo

-every christmas the local church would request gifts of a certain variety, under the premise of secret santas. they’d ask for “gift for -gender- child, -age-, -interest- and then send the gifts to the appropriate family. We got a LOT of gift cards to places like indigo or EB games/Gamestop for this reason

-the year my older brother and I got nintendo DSlites for christmas was because we were donated money. we each got 1 DS game each, and took turns with them. all the DS games we got after that were second hand or donated.

-I had about 15 random Littlest Pet Shops and no houses/playsets for them because again, donations. the one year I finally got one was during a white elephant at the local church, where I got the messenger pigeon and post office.

[rplayford02]

Directing

w/ McMorran

Since Ben is also directing this trimester, he invited me along to block out a couple scenes from our scripts together.

We met at screen academy and talked through the bathroom scene where Eli meets Daisy for the first time. I feel like it will be the performance that really sells this scene and I wasn’t entirely sure how we were going to segue into Eli discovering the symbol on the wall. We talked through the characters motivations, wants, needs etc. We thought about their backstory, tried this acting exercise by Meisner which involves making observations about your scene partner and reaffirming/countering every observation they make about you. It took me a minute to get used to it and then eventually it started to feel natural. I found myself feeling really present and entirely focused on what Ben was saying and how I felt about it. We then improv-ed the scene with a rough framework of dialogue beats that we needed to hit, and it was so helpful! I've never directed actors before and I'm so terrified so being able to practice with Ben, getting his advice, answering his questions etc was amazing!

We also blocked out a scene from his film (which has since been drastically changed or cut entirely?). I hate acting in any capacity but I do think it's probably useful to try and understand the actors process - what they might need to know from me as director, the kind of language I should be using and so on.

Hopefully we're going to try and do more of this kind of thing in the future. Ben's already brought up some issues about where Eli's character motivation is coming from, which is equal parts frustrating (that he's finding holes in the film) and useful (at least I can fix them now).

As 1st AD on Ben's project, I also attended his auditions this week for the role of 'Casca'. Again this was hugely eye-opening to gain an insight into his directing style! He started both auditions by warming up with the actors - cue traumatic flashbacks to being a shy kid in high school drama lessons!! - and then used the same Meisner exercise that we did in screen academy. Honestly he's so good at making the actors feel comfortable, I aspire to be such an approachable director!

w/ Olivia

Directing classes with Olivia were really useful to reiterate the kind of language we should be using with cast and crew, the responsibilities of the director in each stage of production as well as other typical working practices. I found the rundown of cinematographic terms especially helpful since it's my least favourite discipline in practice and so I can get quite ignorant to its mysterious workings.

Recommended resources:

On Filmmaking by Alexander McKendrick (which I read most of in summer and was reminded I need to finish it! - found the discussion of writing especially insightful)

Naked Cinema by Sally Porter

Making Movies by Sidney Lumet

Her advice on working with actors was also really appreciated since this is the aspect of directing that I feel most under qualified and underprepared for.

Towards the end of this last session we acted out each others scripts (similarly to what I'd had done with Ben) and again the same problems were coming up with the dialogue - that it was too formal or else if it was trying to be stylised, it was mismatched. We're working on the script based upon this feedback.

[superjerrbear-81]

There's a story behind this. When I was about seven or eight years old, I watched most of this movie while waiting for my dad to assist me in getting dressed for school. We both woke up early because it was easier for him to get me ready before he went to work. The typical morning routine consisted of my bath, then he puts me in bed while I wait for him to finish showering and dressing. In the meantime, I got to watch TV.

IIRC, I missed the last 10 or 15 minutes of this movie. While he was helping me get dressed and in my wheelchair, I missed the ending. I was able to pay attention as I was being dressed. I was very disappointed to miss the ending, but I didn't think it wise to complain too much. But, it only took one complaint for my dad to offer up some advice. He told me I could probably catch it again as a rerun.

With this in mind, I spent the next two weeks randomly checking the Guide Channel every few hours to see if it was back on. Of course, I couldn't check it during specific times of the day, so it may have rerun while I was at school or asleep. I didn't forget about the movie, but I stopped looking for it. Then, I suddenly had an inkling to check YouTube.

I couldn't remember if it was simply called Jack and the Beanstalk or if it went by some other name, so I typed "Jack and the Beanstalk with a princess" into the search bar. Sure enough, the first result was a clip from the movie. I investigated the first result, but the movie playing immediately after the clip was the last thing I expected. I didn't even notice it in the video queue.

For the sake of argument, let's say I was seven years old. Wow, it only took me 34 years to finally finish watching this movie! It was nice to revisit something I gave up on because I couldn't catch it at the right time. This movie had more influence on me than I thought.

The first thing I noted on this second viewing is the animation style. Once upon a time, I was obsessed with anime. If my timeline is correct, this would be the first official anime I've ever seen. At the time, after seeing the princess's design, I wanted to see more cartoons in that style. Other than her design, this looks like a typical 70s animated cartoon.

I originally thought Voltron, Superbook, and The Flying House were my first brushes with anime (I still consider Vampire Hunter D my first true introduction to the concept of anime), but this movie precedes them by a year. Still, I'm not ruling out the possibility that I had an earlier brush with anime preceding Jack and the Beanstalk.

For as long as I remember, I've been in love with falling in love. The first movie to reinforce this is still The Princess Bride, but this one is the second one. Something about Jack and Margaret's interactions made me want that for myself. The romance aspect was my second favorite part of this movie.

My number one favorite part was the action. There's not much of it, but what they have is entertaining. Too bad I missed the ending the first time around because I would've loved the final act.

Jack and the Beanstalk also solidified me into a lifelong fan of the underdog. I was already a fan before this movie, but this movie caused me to be more interested in underdog stories. Although I'm sure if I hadn't seen it, something else would have made me a fan of underdog stories.

As a kid, I was very familiar with the original story, so I knew this one could only end one way. Considering the only way for Jack to see Margaret again is if he gets more magical beans to grow a new beanstalk, it's highly unlikely they'll have a full happily ever after. On the upside, at least the adventure led to Jack having a better life. He and his mother don't have to worry about money issues anymore.

One last thing, am I the only one that finds it a little dark how happy the cow is to be taken to the butcher? Animals are clearly shown to understand the people in the story, yet the cow happily comes along after Jack's mother tells him to sell her to the butcher…

[whileiamdying]

Untangling Andy Warhol

The Pop iconoclast obsessively documented his life, but he also lied constantly, almost recreationally.

By Joan Acocella June 1, 2020

Warhol would tell interviewers to talk to his assistant: “He did a lot of my paintings.”Photograph by Stephen Shore / Courtesy 303 Gallery

Andy Warhol’s life may be better documented than that of any other artist in the history of the world. That is because, every few days or so, he would sweep all the stuff on his desk into a storage box, date it, label it “TC”—short for “time capsule”—and then store it, with all the preceding TCs, in a special place in his studio. As a result, we have his movie-ticket stubs, his newspaper clippings, his cowboy boots, his wigs, his collection of dental molds, his collection of pornography, the countless Polaroids he took of the people at the countless parties he went to—you name it. We have copies of bills he sent and also of bills he received from increasingly exasperated creditors, including one (“pay up you blowhard”) from Giuseppe Rossi, the doctor who, in 1968, saved his life after a woman who felt she had been insufficiently featured in his movies came to his studio one day and shot him. In one box, I’ve heard, there is also a slice of cake, on a plate. It wasn’t just material objects he kept. When possible, he taped his phone conversations, and sometimes had an assistant type them up. He believed in the power of the banal. This faith was the wellspring of the Pop-art paintings—the Campbell’s soup cans, the Brillo cartons—that made him famous in the nineteen-sixties and changed America’s taste in art.

After Warhol’s death, in 1987, a museum dedicated to his work was established in his home town, Pittsburgh. The time capsules—six hundred and ten of them—were shipped there and lined up on banks of metal shelving, ready for the person who would work their contents into a fittingly rich biography. Seven years ago, he arrived: Blake Gopnik, formerly the lead art critic of the Washington Post. (His brother, Adam, is a writer for this magazine.) Gopnik is fantastically thorough; the book is nine hundred pages long—not counting the seven thousand endnotes, available in the e-book edition or online. But you don’t lose heart, because Gopnik is a vivid chronicler. Here is a small clip from his description of the repair job Dr. Rossi did on Warhol’s innards after the 1968 shooting. The surgeon found

two holes in the arc of the diaphragm muscle, pierced both right and left as the bullet crossed through Warhol’s body; an esophagus severed from the stomach, so that food and gastric acid were spilling out from below; a liver whose left lobe was mashed and bleeding and a spleen utterly destroyed and spilling more blood than any of the other organs. [The] bullet had also cut a ragged hole in Warhol’s intestines, releasing feces and upping the chances of fatal infection.

Reading this, I felt as though I were having the operation myself.

Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928, the youngest of the three sons of Andrej and Julia Warhola, who had immigrated to the United States from a small village in what is now Slovakia. The townsfolk were Carpatho-Rusyns, a Slavic people, and the family was Byzantine Catholic. (Warhol, as an adult, sporadically went to Mass. “Church is a fun place to go,” he said.) Slavs were much in demand in Pittsburgh, with its steel mills, because they were reputedly willing to do any kind of work, at any wage. As a result, they were also the most looked-down-upon ethnic group in the city. Andrej was a manual laborer; Julia a domestic. When she didn’t have enough work, she went door to door, often with her sons in tow, selling decorative flowers made from cut-up peach cans. Andrej died in 1942. The two older boys quit school and took full-time jobs. Andy stayed in school. For most of his youth, he was cosseted by his family. When the Warhols acquired a new Baby Brownie Special camera ($1.25), he immediately laid hands on it, and never let it go. His brothers built him a darkroom in the basement. Also, he fell in love with the movies; he said that he wanted to make his living showing films. This was an unusual life plan for a boy of his background, but Julia saved nine dollars—nine days’ wages from her housecleaning—to buy him a projector. He showed Mickey Mouse cartoons on a wall in the apartment.

Warhol liked to describe himself as self-educated, a widely accepted claim. In fact, he went to an excellent art college, the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where a number of his teachers recognized his gifts and kept the work that he turned in to them, a rare tribute. The minute he got out of school, in 1949, he packed his belongings in a paper bag and got on an overnight Greyhound bound for New York City. He was twenty.

Warhol lived in a series of roach-ridden sublets, usually shares, while trying to break into commercial illustration. Once, when he was showing samples of his work to the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, an insect crawled out of his portfolio, to his mortification. The editor felt so sorry for him that she gave him an assignment. Warhol was not shy. In the Museum of Modern Art, he went up to a staffer and proposed that he design Christmas cards for the gift shop. (He got the job.) A friend remembered seeing him in a bookstore, flipping through the record bins to see which labels were doing the most interesting jackets. Then he went home and cold-called the art directors. “He was like a little Czech tank,” another friend said.

Many people who met him in those years, and later, found him strange—a “weird little creep,” in the words of one. He was unabashedly homosexual, and in the early fifties that was weird enough. He liked to do drawings of nude boys, their nipples and crotches dotted with little hearts, like soft kisses. If he met a man who appealed to him, he might say that he liked to photograph penises, and would this man mind? “No, of course not,” one self-possessed British curator replied. “What are you going to use them for?” “Oh, I don’t know yet,” Warhol said. “I’m just taking the pictures.” The man unzipped.

Three years after Warhol arrived in New York, his mother turned up on his doorstep. She explained to one of his friends, “I come here to take care of my Andy, and when he’s okay I go home.” She stayed for almost twenty years. The household had a large, smelly collection of Siamese cats. At one point, there were reportedly seventeen of them, mostly named Sam. (But Julia, pointing, could introduce them separately: “That’s the good Sam, that’s the bad Sam, that’s the dumb Sam . . .”) Between the cats and Julia’s late-life drinking problem, Warhol seems to have been hesitant to introduce her to his friends. On the other hand, one boyfriend said he thought Warhol was grateful for her presence, because it gave him an excuse not to have sex. He would explain to his guest that he didn’t want to make any bedroom noises as long as his mother was within earshot.

Warhol claimed that he was a virgin until he was twenty-five, and some people would say that that was no surprise. All his life, he was pained by his looks. He was cursed with terrible skin, not just acne but what seems to have been a disorder of pigment distribution, so that his complexion was lighter here, darker there. He also had a bulbous nose, or so he thought, and he got a nose job. By the time he was in his thirties, he had lost much of his hair. Thereafter, he glued a toupee to his scalp every morning. His most celebrated wig was a silver one, which he usually wore with a fringe of his brown hair peeping out at the neck. These difficulties boded ill for his sex life, and he was widely said to be lousy in bed. He thought sex was “messy and distasteful,” a friend reported. He’d do it with you once or twice, and that was it. Gopnik, as is his practice, also gives competing evidence: “Within a few years Warhol was having surgery for anal warts and a tear, and a decade later he was taking penicillin for a venereal disease.” Warhol’s friend and collaborator Taylor Mead said that Warhol “blows like crazy.”

Warhol lied constantly, almost recreationally. He lied about his age even to his doctor. He told Who’s Who that he was born in Cleveland, to the “von Warhol” family. (He had traded in Warhola for Warhol soon after arriving in New York.) He adopted a gentle, whispery voice, into which he might then drop a little grenade. If someone asked how he was, he might say, “I’m okay,” and then, coming closer, he would add, “But I have diarrhea.” Some people thought he was stupid. Not those who knew him well. “Warhol only plays dumb,” a friend said. “He’s incredibly analytical, intellectual, and perceptive.”

His commercial specialty was drawings for women’s-wear ads—above all, shoes. In 1955, the high-end women’s shoemaker I. Miller gave him a contract for a minimum of twelve thousand dollars’ worth of work per year, a lot of money at the time. He also did window dressing, notably for Bonwit Teller. But already he was looking beyond this: he wanted to be a gallery artist. Teachers and classmates from Carnegie Tech provided some connections, and Manhattan’s gay community supplied more. He also had a few special godfathers, attracted to him, it seems, by his charm (not everybody thought he was creepy) and by his drive. Perhaps his most important guide was Emile de Antonio, an artists’ agent, who introduced him all around; he knew John Cage, whom Warhol revered, and lots of collectors. (“I gave a little party for a terribly rich woman I knew,” de Antonio recalled, “and I served just marijuana and Dom Perignon, and Andy did a beautiful menu in French.”) Another useful person was Ivan Karp, the director of the Leo Castelli Gallery, Manhattan’s most prestigious art mart. Through Karp, Warhol eventually met Henry Geldzahler, a curatorial assistant at the Metropolitan Museum, whose job there was to find out who the hot new artists were and tell the curators.

In the fifties, the United States already had a pocket of conceptual art, but the star painters were the Abstract Expressionists, above all Jackson Pollockand Willem de Kooning, with their effortful drips and impastos. At the Ab Exes’ heels were the young Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, part conceptual, part painterly, and edging into “Pop,” a style that used imagery from mass culture—comic strips, movies, advertising—and adopted a light, playful tone, the very opposite of the Abstract Expressionists’ heavy lifting. Warhol, too, was interested in this popular matter and manner, and he was annoyed that other people were, as he saw it, stealing a march on him. According to a famous story, he was complaining about this to friends one night and asked if anyone could think of pop-culture images that no one else had used. A decorator named Muriel Latow said she had a suggestion, but she wanted fifty dollars, up front, before she would reveal it. The unembarrassable Warhol sat down and wrote a check. Then Latow said, “You’ve got to find something that’s recognizable to almost everybody . . . something like a can of Campbell’s Soup.”

Gopnik calls this Warhol’s “eureka moment,” and it is typical of the book’s sophistication that the crucial, seedling idea of Warhol’s Pop art should be attributed, without apology, to someone other than Warhol. Often, artists who are praised for birthing a new trend are not the actual originators but the ones who made the trend appealing to a large public. Warhol had as much of the latter gift as of the former; Gopnik calls him “the Great Sponge.” In any case, the day after Latow shared with him her little brain bomb, Warhol (or his mother, in another version) went to the Finast supermarket across the street and came home with one can of every kind of Campbell’s soup on sale there. By the following year, 1962, he had produced “Campbell’s Soup Cans,” a montage of all thirty-two varieties. Today, this painting hangs in the Museum of Modern Art—“the ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’ of the Pop movement,” in the words of Henry Geldzahler. It is both a slap in the face and a great joy: so fresh, so brash, so red and white, so certain that it has covered every kind of soup in the world, from Pepper Pot to Scotch Broth.

In rapid succession, the Campbell’s Soups were followed by Warhol’s other now famous Pop paintings: “Green Coca-Cola Bottles” (1962), “192 One Dollar Bills” (1962), “Brillo Soap Pads Box” (1964), the Marilyn Monroes and Elizabeth Taylors and Marlon Brandos and Elvises. For some, you can easily construct a background narrative. The “Marilyn Diptych,” comprising fifty silk screens of Monroe, fading from garish color to spectral black-and-white, was exhibited just after her death. But I see no story lurking behind the Liz Taylors or the Elvises or, for that matter, the panels of twenty-four Statues of Liberty (1962) or thirty Mona Lisas (1963). All of these ladies, not to speak of Elvis and Brando, were stars, and Warhol, from his childhood until the day he died, was enthralled by celebrity.

He soon became a celebrity himself, if an unusual one. In his thirties, he was famous, in TV interviews, for putting two fingers over his lips and saying things like “er” or “um,” but not much more, as the cameras rolled. (You can see this on YouTube. It is discomforting to watch.) For live interviews, he would often bring along Gerard Malanga, who worked with him, and say, “Why don’t you ask my assistant Gerry Malanga some questions? He did a lot of my paintings.” There was some truth to this. Of the works listed above, all but the 1962 “Campbell’s Soup Cans” were silk screens, usually based on photographs that someone else had taken, and made with Malanga wielding the squeegee. From 1963 to 1972—the period during which he made most of his Pop art—Warhol produced no hand-drawn work.

Running parallel to Warhol’s iconoclasm about authorship was a certain coolness toward his subjects. “For an artist with a lifelong reputation for sucking up to stars,” Gopnik writes, “Warhol also had a lifelong knack for making art that underlined their shortcomings and hollowness.” Probably the most important discussions of Warhol’s work are the books and essays that the philosopher Arthur Danto wrote on him from the mid-sixties onward. These are not exactly art criticism. Their scope is broader. Danto says that Warhol’s work, by disposing of modernism’s assertions that painting should be about the nature of painting, liberated it to go its own way, while the art critics stayed back in the schoolroom, arguing. Danto doesn’t say he loved Warhol’s work, but I think he did. I’m sorry that he liked the Brillo carton—it supplied the title of his book “Beyond the Brillo Box”—better than the Campbell’s soup cans, but he probably enjoyed the irony that the Brillo box Warhol immortalized was designed by an Abstract Expressionist painter, James Harvey, doing a money job on the side. The Ab Exes looked upon Warhol with hatred. At a party in the late sixties, a drunken de Kooning said to Warhol, “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, you’re even a killer of laughter.”

Warhol didn’t kill laughter—he would have been less famous if he had done so—but his humor is muted, deadpan. In 1964, he produced a series of nine silk screens of Jacqueline Kennedy’s face, based on press photos: one that showed her in the famous pillbox hat, just before J.F.K. was shot; the second as Lyndon Johnson was being sworn in, on the airplane back to Washington; the third at Kennedy’s funeral. There was nothing overtly mocking about these works. But in 1964, when, in the public mind, Kennedy’s body was not yet cold, they raised a question: What was Warhol saying? Viewers might have asked the same of his earlier “Death and Disasters” series (1962-65), worked up from photographs of bloodied corpses hanging out of wrecked cars, mangled bodies of people who had jumped to their deaths, the electric chair in which Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, were executed, and so on. Like the soup cans, the silk screens were often cheerfully multiplied and, like the Marilyns and the Liz Taylors, covered with washes of bright color: blue, red, violet, yellow.

In the same year as the “Nine Jackies,” Warhol unveiled silk screens of his “Flowers,” big, blobby hibiscus blossoms against a grassy field. They looked like wallpaper or, as Gopnik suggests, Marimekko dress fabrics. In any case, they were something that, unlike a picture of an electric chair, you might be willing to hang over your living-room sofa. This was what they were apparently designed for, because Warhol (or Malanga) turned out more than four hundred and fifty of them, in different versions—different sizes, different colorways, to use Gopnik’s inspired word—and they sold like hotcakes. Warhol claimed to be proud of them. If I’m not mistaken, Gopnik doesn’t believe him. He quotes Warhol announcing, the following year, that he has retired as an artist. The “Flowers,” Gopnik writes, were “pretty much his last notable Pop paintings.” But, as the author does not flat-out say but repeatedly implies, they were also pretty much Warhol’s last notable paintings, period. “I hate paintings,” he told a reporter in 1966, adding, “That’s why I started making movies.”

He had made his first film in 1963. Titled “Sleep,” it was five and a half hours long, and all it showed was his boyfriend, John Giorno, sleeping. The next year, he followed this up with “Empire,” eight hours, overnight, of the Empire State Building, shot from a window in the nearby Time-Life Building. Thereafter, until the mid-seventies, he made scores of movies, some of them pure and severe, like “Sleep” and “Empire,” and others, such as “The Chelsea Girls” and “Lonesome Cowboys,” shambling and funny and dirty, with drag queens sitting around licking bananas or people having dilatory conversations about sex, or having sex.

But the movies were not just movies. They were the motion-picture wing of what was by now a whole “scene.” In 1964, Warhol moved his professional headquarters into a vast space he came to call the Factory—it had housed a hat factory before he moved in—on East Forty-seventh Street, just west of the United Nations. The place was filthy, but Warhol’s friend Billy Name (né Billy Linich, but Linich was a name, right? So why not just go by Name?) moved in with a pack of fellow speed freaks and transformed the space with tinfoil and spray paint, so that in the end every surface was silver.

Just as Warhol’s movies were not merely movies, the Factory was not merely a place where things were made. It was also a showcase for a certain group of people who clustered around Warhol. Billy Name was one; Gerard Malanga another. Also important was Ondine (Robert Olivo), wild and vicious. Best known to outsiders was Edie Sedgwick, a sweet-faced and rather hapless rich girl who, in black tights and expensive sweaters, often went along on Warhol’s outings, as his “date,” and paid the tab. These and a few others were Warhol’s superstars, as he called them.

In 1966, he also became the manager of a proto-punk rock band, the Velvet Underground, hatchery of Lou Reed, John Cale, and others, all pretty much unknown at that point. One of its members described a typical show: “Some sailors or something were in the audience of five, and we played something and they said, ‘You play that again and we’ll fuck the shit out of you.’ So we played it again.” “Our aim was to upset people,” one of the band’s founders said, “make them vomit.” Warhol knew little about music, and he and the Velvets broke up in less than a year. (“Always leave them wanting less,” Warhol said.) But for a while Warhol’s film showings and performances—notably, “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable” and “★★★★”—were multimedia events, featuring the superstars bopping around in a desultory fashion to the Velvets’ discordant strains while two or more films were projected side by side or, indeed, in superimposition.

It hardly needs to be said that drugs were involved here, and this fact, augmented with reminiscences of Warhol’s associates, has contributed to a portrait of him as a sort of Mephistopheles, luring his young friends to their ruin. A key story is that of Freddy Herko, part of the West Village postmodern-dance scene in the sixties. One day, a while after he had stopped hanging around the Factory, Herko took a bubble bath, and some LSD, at a friend’s apartment, danced naked for a while, and then, to the strains of Mozart’s “Coronation Mass,” threw himself out a window. When informed of Herko’s death, Warhol commented that he was sorry not to have been there to film the fall.

This story won him an enduring reputation, with those so minded, as an emotionless person, a sort of freak—an image reinforced by his paintings of soup cans and electric chairs. Cold heart, cold art. Gopnik doesn’t say whether or not he believes the report, but he concludes that, if it is true, it says as much about Warhol’s desire to shock as about his supposed lack of feeling. He also points out that Warhol used the joke more than once. When his relationship with Edie Sedgwick was coming to an end—she ran off with Bob Dylan—he said to a friend, “When do you think Edie will commit suicide? I hope she lets us know, so we can film it.” If this was nasty, it was also clear-eyed: six years later, Sedgwick died of a barbiturate overdose. Warhol also applied the joke to himself, saying that he always regretted that no one had been there, in 1968, to film him being gunned down.

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas emerged from the elevator at the Factory. She was a local eccentric, the founder and sole member of a feminist organization she called scum, the Society for Cutting Up Men. She was also, apparently, suffering from an acute mental disorder. She had previously drifted into Warhol’s studio a few times and he had put her in a sexploitation film, “I, a Man,” in 1967. She felt he should have used her more, and this was the reason for her visit. Entering the studio, she fired several times at Warhol and also put a bullet in a friend of his who was visiting. Then she turned around and stepped back into the elevator. A few hours later, in Times Square, she told a bewildered cop, “The police are looking for me. I am a flower child. He had too much control over my life.” (She got three years. “You get more for stealing a car,” Lou Reed said.) Meanwhile, an ambulance had taken Warhol to Columbus Hospital, where he was laid out on a table for Dr. Rossi’s ministrations. His mother, summoned by one of his associates, stood in the lobby, praying for her “good, religious boy.” The doctors had her sedated and taken home. After the surgery, Warhol stayed in the hospital for two months, eating candy, talking on the phone, and trying to manage the studio from afar.

Gopnik describes the assault by Solanas as the dividing line between Warhol’s “before” and his “after.” He slowly got rid of his disreputable entourage, or they, feeling less valued, left him. He acquired fancier friends, like Lee Radziwill and Mick Jagger. He bought an estate in Montauk, and a chocolate-brown Rolls to go with it. In 1969, he founded Interview, a publication that was advertised as being devoted to movies (the original title was inter/VIEW: A Monthly Film Journal) but soon became a magazine about celebrities. Apparently, he did not often work on it—one of the early editors said he never read it until the printer delivered it—but it helped to snag clients for another department of his activities, the manufacture of silk-screen portraits of friends, patrons, and assorted big names: Dennis Hopper, Dominique de Menil, Gianni Versace, the Shah of Iran, Chris Evert, Dolly Parton, Imelda Marcos.

Seeing Warhol’s brush with death as a watershed has obvious narrative appeal, but, on the evidence of Gopnik’s chronicle, the “after” had been coming for a while. Like most of Warhol’s Pop paintings, the great majority of his films were made in less than five years. Then, it seems, he got bored. He fielded a few works in the I-dare-you-to-say-this-isn’t-art manner of his hero and friend Marcel Duchamp, who, by exhibiting a signed urinal, in 1917, more or less invented conceptual art. In 1972, at Finch College, in New York, Warhol did his “vacuum-cleaner piece,” which involved his vacuuming a patch of carpet in the college’s art gallery, signing the dust bag, propping it on a pedestal, and going home. But, as Gopnik points out, “Where Duchamp’s urinal had involved a transformation of the banal into art, if only by the artist’s say-so, Warhol’s update involved jettisoning transformation altogether so that banality itself, left to do its banal thing, could count as high art.”

Some years before, Warhol had placed an ad in the Village Voice: “I’ll endorse with my name any of the following; clothing AC-DC, cigarettes small, tapes, sound equipment, rock n’ roll records, anything, film, and film equipment, Food, Helium, Whips, money!! love and kisses Andy Warhol, EL 5-9941.” This comically blatant announcement—the phone number was Warhol’s real office number—can’t seriously have been intended to bring in cash. Rather, it proclaimed that, henceforward, “selling out” would be, for Warhol, an aesthetic move.

But gradually the sellout pose stuck. When, two years later, Warhol told a reporter that his artistic medium was “business,” he meant it. In Gopnik’s words, this declaration “launched a new approach to his life and his art that would mold both for the following two decades, and then shape his reputation for all the years afterward.” Reverting to his I. Miller days, he began designing ads: a sundae for Schrafft’s, a limited-edition bottle for Absolut vodka, and the like. He also had an idea for a chain of Andy-Mat diners. “They’re for people who eat alone,” he explained. “You sit at a little table, order up any sort of frozen food you want, and watch TV at the same time. Everyone has his own TV set.”

Warhol’s new enterprises didn’t take up much of his time. Gopnik says that the artist gave maybe two days each to the later silk-screen portraits—and that it showed. “Ever more vacant,” Gopnik calls these paintings. Unsurprisingly, Warhol’s star fell. By the time, in the early eighties, that he began doing collaborative paintings with Jean-Michel Basquiat—Gopnik guesses that the young prodigy reminded the older man of his earlier self—the association was enough to damage Basquiat��s reputation. A critic for the Times wrote that their work together looked “like one of Warhol’s manipulations, which increasingly seem based on the Mencken theory about nobody going broke underestimating the public’s intelligence. Basquiat, meanwhile, comes across as the all too willing accessory.” Basquiat soon distanced himself, which hurt Warhol. Gopnik feels, too, that Warhol was not as indifferent to artistic quality as he made himself out to be. Soon after the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, opened, Warhol spent a day looking at its modern-art masterworks and wrote in his diary, “I wanted to just rush home and paint and stop doing society portraits.”

Still, many rich people were happy to have him do portraits of them. This third arm of his empire fell into a neat synergy with the others—the fancy Montauk house, the celebrity magazine—and made him a lot of money. He enjoyed spending it. He liked to buy loose diamonds and walk around jiggling them in his pocket. In his later years, he went antique shopping most mornings and eventually bought around a million dollars’ worth of heirloom furniture. He had no space for most of it in his living quarters and therefore had to stash it in empty rooms upstairs.

Warhol once tried to give an old friend one of his Marilyn Monroe silk screens, and the man, who disliked Pop, said, “Just tell me in your heart of hearts that you know it isn’t art.” Warhol, imperturbable, answered, “Wrap it up in brown paper, put it in the back of a closet—one day it will be worth a million dollars.” He was right, Gopnik says, but off by two orders of magnitude: in 2008, a Warhol silk screen sold for a hundred million dollars. There was no huger reputation than Warhol’s in the art of the sixties, and in late-twentieth-century art there was no more important decade than the sixties. Much of the art that has followed, in the United States, is unthinkable without him, without his joining of high culture and low, without his love of sizzle and flash, without his combination of tenderness and sarcasm, without the use of photography and silk-screening and advertising.

If any artist of the past half century deserves a biography as detailed as this one, then, it is Warhol. Still, the long tail end of Warhol’s career forces Gopnik into some tight corners as a critic. He acknowledges that, even by the end of the sixties, Warhol was treading water as an artist. I believe that’s true, and that Gopnik thinks so, too. Yet elsewhere, and often, he tries to defend Warhol against the charge of having made inferior work in the seventies and eighties. Most frustrating are the instances when he excuses mediocre paintings by saying that mediocrity was what Warhol was going for, and that we should congratulate him for having achieved his goal.

At times, the defenses reminded me of the philosopher Karl Popper’s famous objection to Freudian analysis, on the ground that it was “unfalsifiable.” (If you said that you’d never wanted to have sex with your mother, this was instantly interpretable, via the theory of repression, as an admission that you wanted to have sex with your mother. If, on the other hand, you said that you wanted to have sex with your mother, voilà: you wanted to have sex with your mother.) Gopnik writes that, in the sixties and seventies, “ ‘Andy Warhol’ may have promoted some banal popular culture. Andy Warhol, the brilliant artist inside those quotes, could be counted on to turn it into art.” Really? How can you tell the difference between the two? “Anything bad is right,” Warhol declared, and Gopnik calls this “as close as he ever came to a guiding aesthetic principle.” But is it a good principle—not just for Warhol, but for us? Better, surely, just to acknowledge that the bad stuff was bad than to try to turn its badness into a postmodern triumph.

If special pleading for the late period is the book’s one real weakness, its great strength is its tone. In his time, Warhol was very controversial. Some people thought he was a genius; others, that he should be arrested. Gopnik, though he does believe that his subject is a genius, treats him fairly, calmly, and fondly. If Warhol tells a good joke, Gopnik relays it. In the hospital, soon after he was shot, Warhol said to a friend, “You know, we gotta get some bigger things to hide behind.” When the artist stuffs a photograph of Brando down the front of his pants, we hear about it. As for Warhol’s love life, Gopnik manages to convince us, without sentimentality, that, however many cute guys Warhol went through, he always just wanted to fall in love with somebody and settle down. He did fall in love, often—usually with someone who loved him less—but it never worked out for long. The last boyfriend, Jon Gould, a young vice-president at Paramount, declined to sleep in Warhol’s room with him, saying that the artist’s dachshunds farted on him in bed. Gould died of aids within a few years.

Then, there is Warhol’s mother, with whom he lived for most of his life. By the time he was courting Jon Gould, Julia, now in her late seventies, was downstairs, going bats, hiding food in secret places around the house. In 1971, she moved back to Pittsburgh, living first with one of Warhol’s brothers and then in a nursing home. A cousin repeatedly wrote to Warhol, telling him that Julia survived only in the hope that Andy would visit her before she died. He didn’t visit, nor, eventually, did he attend her funeral, though he paid for it. One day soon afterward, a reporter asked him what was on his mind. He answered, “I think about my bird that died. If it went to bird heaven. But I really can’t think about that. It just took a walk.”

Fifteen years after his mother died, Warhol, fifty-eight, followed her. It’s a wonder that he lasted that long. All his later life, he suffered from an infected gallbladder. He wore a girdle—there’s a collection of them, dyed in pretty colors, in the time capsules—just to keep his guts in. He was in constant pain. Finally, one day in February of 1987, he checked himself into New York Hospital. When the surgeons pulled out his gallbladder, they found it falling apart with gangrene. He died the next morning. ♦

[forthechubbies]

What's Wrong With Secretary Park?!

Synopsis• If balancing work and a stubborn ex-husband isn't hard enough, Let's add the boss’s seven sons falling head over heels for her to mix.

Category's• Romcon, Comedy, Office Au.

Duos• BTS X Reader

A spin-off of the original series ‘ What's Wrong With Secretary Kim’ Bangtan Edition! Starring the Handsome, Seo-Joon Park as the Ex husband.

There will be more parts but I didn’t want the title to be to long.

EP. One Two

“ Mrs. Park, Good Morning!”

“Mrs. Park, What does my schedule look like today?”

“Mrs. Park, Your coffee keeps me alive.”

In case you haven’t noticed, Park Yn, I’m the secretary to Jeon Sung-ho, the CEO of Dnd Parmatech, 85 percent of the time, newly build hospitals or centers use our funds as kickstarts. Daily I make schedules, appointments, filing documents, answering calls, and blah blah blah.

Is it boring? Yes, I know. However, quite refreshing coming from my hectic marriage. Once upon a time, I was wedded to the marvelous actor Park Seo-Joon for three years. I sat in the limelight and even had the privilege to play the part of his wife in movies. Sigh. Although the attention and riches were grand, no amount of expensive counseling could save our marriage. We never saw eye to eye on anything, and his short temper wasn’t helping.

Knowing my worth, I packed up and left without a doubt in my head. However, The documentation of our separation wasn’t finalized due to a certain one refusing to sign off on the divorce agreement. So physically, I’m still Mrs. Park but ain’t no piece of paper telling who I belong too.

Whatever! I have too much to focus on already! Game on, Game on! First, I got to get these papers approved and signed by Mr. Jeon then-

Buzz Buzz Buzz!

Who’s calling-

Speak of the devil. I could have sworn I deleted his contact a long time ago! “ What Seo-Joon? I’m busy-“

“ When is this little temper tantrum going to end? Darling, I think you made your point.”

“My point?! Listen here, You slimy son of-” Now, Now Yn calm down calm down don’t let him get a rise out you that just what he wants. A quick exhale should do the trick. “ Seo-Joon, I believe we reached an agreed on no type of communication unless it revolves around the settlement for the divorce.”

How is it possible I can physically see his snarky face?

Seo-Joon stretched out his list of complaints.” It’s been over a year. I miss your kisses, soft skin, that cute birthmark on your-“

“ You will not talk about such embarrassing things over the phone!” Thank goodness, Nobody was around to hear me shot like that.

“Why is this divorce still an issue?!” There goes that temper again-How whinny can one man be? “ If you don’t stop this, I will take matters into my own hands.”

I laughed. “ Ha, Seo-jerk, I’m not scared of you! Do your worst because It doesn’t matter if you drag me back home; it doesn’t subside the problem being over our marriage.” I feel like a broken record at this point. “ If this isn’t about the papers, this conversation is over, Mr. Park; please refrain from calling me again, goodbye.”

He chuckled and mumbled something along the lines of, “ Your cute acting cheeky like this.” The rest he continued louder “ Those delicate hands of yours were made to indulge in the finest silk and satin I can obtain, not working nine to five at whatever job hired a housewife with zero work ethic. I just know I haven’t touched your side of the room since that night- I love you, Mrs.Park, I always will.”

He hung up. You know, after he finished insulting my new lifestyle and calling me a useless housewife, the ‘ I love you’ bit at the end sounds sincere, but he is an actor! Of course.

Hmph! Just because I’m working for myself for one doesn’t mean I’m miserable. I’m actually in love with my job, It pays well with benefits, and I sat on my butt all day. If that pompous little bedazzled turd thinks making me the butt of his jokes will get me back in his arms, he has another thing coming!

“Um, Mrs. Park?”

“ What!” I snapped. “ Oh, Hoseok, I’m sorry!” I bowed my head; the poor thing nearly jumped out of his shoes.

Hoseok beamed his warm heart-shaped smile at me. “ Oppa is having a family meeting today; I guess I’m the first to show.”

I wasn’t informed about a meeting today from Mr.Jeon, maybe because it’s a family affair.

“Tada!” He cutely squeaks. A tasteful package breakfast alongside a tall cup of what I presume is a coffee from..’ Thanks Nature’!

“Oh my- Hobi, this cafe is across town-”

“I overhead Oppa scolding you for skipping meals one day and I’m here to do the same, don’t skip meals or else We will be hurt if something happens to you.” Hoseok pointed at the pack. “ Eat every bit.”

Hoseok displayed a small heart using his index finger and thumb, hopping off to his father’s double doors.

Mr. Jeon has seven sons in all. The man is a true saint; men like him and his sons are why I still believe not all men are dogs. After losing his wife to heart cancer, He just about went bankrupt, donating all he had to have found cures to multiple diseases hoping nobody else had to suffer his same heartbreak.

Love found him again in an orphanage just north of here, ‘Seoul Children Home.’ His first son, Kim Seokjin, at the time Jin was already in his teenage years, making it difficult for him to find a family due to the high demand of couples wanting a single-digit child. His birth family mistreated him, but he was beaten everywhere except his face to keep his handsome appearance. The family decided to put his money-maker to fair use and attempted to sell him. Seokjin saw his opportunity and high-tailed, landing himself in the orphanage where he happily lends a helping hand every chance he got. He learned how to read, write, cook, clean, and even tend to the tots when the nuns were busy.

This is how he met his slightly younger brothers, Min Yoongi, Jung Hoseok, and Kim Namjoon; when being chosen for adoption, Seokjin refused to live without his baby brothers by his side.

“ Hello, Noona!”

Oh, Look just in time, “ Hello, You’re father is in his office.”

Namjoon eyed my edible gift from Hobi and raised his eyebrow as well as a question. “ So this is why Hyung left so early in the morning for-and I hope you’re having a good morning, Noona.”

I’m not older than them. Why do they call me Noona? Do I look old!?

“ Yn, Good morning! How are you!” Jin greeted me with English this morning. He must have been practicing with Namjoon lately.

“ I’m Fine. Seokjin.”

“Chu.” He blew a kiss my way. “ You’re not fine. You’re amazeing.”

“Amazing.” Namjoon corrected for the sidelines.

“Same thing.”

“Pronunciation is everything, Hyung.”

They stopped halfway from their dad’s office. Jin grinned. Wait, I know that smile; oh no, here comes a dad joke.

“ Hey, Namjoon-You know the reason I took the elevator instead of the stairs?”

Namjoon sighed. “ No, why?”

"I don't trust stairs. They're always up to something." Jin burst out laughing and clapped his hands.

I giggled not from the joke, but Jin has a contagious laugh.

“See, Yn has good taste.”

A slow deep groan entered the office belonging to Yoongi, lagging. “ I heard that terrible joke from the elevator.” Yoongi waved and leaned against my desk. “ Good Morning.”

“Good Morning.”

There was an awkward pause before Yoongi tapped my desk and pointed to his dad’s office from walking that way.

“Yoon-Yoongi!?”

He turned back towards me.

“ I have something for you. I packed it up on the way here.” Getting off my butt, I walked up and gave him a bottle of his favorite black ice coffee. Ew. I don’t know how he drinks it with no cream or sugar.

Yoongi smiled his gummy smile. “ Thank you for thinking of me.”

“You’re welcome.” And off he goes into the office as well.

Yoongi isn’t the biggest fan of human interaction, but he put forth an endeavor towards me, whether it’s a light ‘ Hi or Hello” or the simplicity of a wave. I admire his gusto. Sidenote, He’s so adorable-I know I know I shouldn’t be gushing over my boss’s son, but his chubby cheeks and almond eyes melt my heart like butter on toast!

Ahem-I better get back to answering those emails and drink this beautiful cup of expensive mud before it gets lukewarm. Yummy, The delectable taste is a boost of serotonin! I really should get to work buuut Hobi did command me to get every last bit and technically he is my boss through some type of weird relative aspect. He is the boss.

Just in a moment of seconds, The breakfast and drink was trash. Something that good should be sinful. I feel terrible I should have saved some for the babies; they would have some, especially Jungkook.

The babies should be here any minute.

[angellesword]

YOUR EYES TELL | JJK (03)

Summary: You live in a world where people see in black and white. The solution to finally see the colors? It's simple. You need to meet your soulmate and look at him in the eyes, but what if the person bound to you is already contented with the monochromatic world? What if...Jeongguk, your soulmate, is already in love with someone else?

Alternatively;

"A future without you is a world without color."

Genre: soulmate au, e2l, slow burn, angst, fluff, roommate au

Pairing: Artist!Jungkook x Lawyer!Reader

Word Count: 2.4k

SERIES: CHAPTER 2 | CHAPTER 4

Note: OC is a lawyer but the author knows nothing about law except the three law subjects she took last semester. errors. ah. there will always be errors here bc english isn’t my first language. anyway!!! enjoy!

Jimin wasn't lying when he said you were a mess. This was evident to Jeongguk the second he stepped inside your apartment.

Pile of cardboard boxes and papers were cluttered all over the floor, causing him to feel uneasy. The faint colors visible in his eyes didn't help to calm his nerves. It was as if he suddenly became hypersensitive to his surroundings.

He assumed that your house wasn't really that untidy, but as stated, the colors made it seem like it was untidier.

"Hi there, buddy." Jeongguk forced a smile at the cat glaring at him. He remembered Jimin telling him that your cat was a bitch. The fury pet was making this strange, scary sound. Jeongguk suddenly wished you were here to stop the cat from attacking him.

He wasn't expecting you to lock yourself inside your room the moment you realized that he was your soulmate.

He was so startled by your reaction that his first instinct was to run after you. The thing was, your cat was blocking your bedroom door—stopping him from intruding your personal space. It was obvious that the little animal didn't like the fact that Jeongguk invited himself inside your home.

Jeongguk didn't know why you were hiding from him. In your defense, you were embarrassed. What were you supposed to say to your soulmate? How were you going to explain to him that the reason why you looked like a mess was because of your demanding job?

Being a civil lawyer was exhausting. One second you're negotiating settlement with the other side's attorney, then you would just find yourself filing motions in court and of course, there were many instances where you're standing before the jury and judge to present a case.

Expertise wasn't the only thing necessary in law. You also needed a great amount of empathy so that you could understand your clients. You cared for them a lot; this was why it was such a big deal for you whenever they choose to omit facts.

You hated it when your clients were being dishonest, you didn't need them to be innocent. You only wanted them to tell you the absolute truth so that you could properly defend them. It wasn't like your job was easy. The fact that most people living in your world see in black and white was already a pain in the ass. Earlier this day, you had a client who was suing a businessperson for selling fake whitening products. She claimed that she spent a whopping two thousand dollars to get that fair skin tone. Sadly, it didn't work.

The opposing side asked your client this: how can you say that the products don’t work when you can’t even see colors?

You were shocked to learn this. Your client was subject to a color test for eyes. She said she could see colors when in fact, she couldn't. Actually, the only reason why the vendor sold your client the whitening products was because she also lied to the seller. The latter's rule was that she wouldn't allow people who see in black and white to purchase her products. This was so she could protect her business' image from fraudster like your client.

Things like this often happened in court. The one you encountered were usually easier to resolve, unlike what criminal lawyers face. This, however, didn't mean your job should be taken lightly.

What happened in court today actually took a toll on you. Your boss humiliated you in front of your colleagues, saying that he couldn't believe an experienced lawyer like you would make such rookie mistake. This made you feel like a loser that's why you decided to go home early to rest. You knew you couldn't work when your heart was this heavy.

You ran yourself a bath the moment you reached your apartment. Jimin was bombarding your phone with text messages to remind you that Jeongguk, a friend of his, was going to drop at your place later today since he was interested to be your roommate.

You simply replied 'Yes, I haven't forgotten. Stop pestering me,' to your best friend. Truthfully, Jimin hadn't shut up about this guy named Jeongguk since last week. He kept telling you that he was the perfect replacement for Seulgi, your former roommate.

You just shrugged it off. Honestly, you didn't care if Jeongguk was the perfect roommate or not. At this point, you would take anyone in. You seriously needed someone who could help you with the household chores.

The warm water grazing your skin made you feel sleepy. Before you knew it, you're off to dreamland; however, your little slumber was disrupted by loud knocks coming from your front door.

"Shit!" Your eyes went wide upon realizing that your supposed to be new roommate was already at the door. As if to confirm the horror, your phone rang.

Jimin was calling.

"Where the hell are you? Jeongguk is in front of your door!"

"I know. I'm so sorry! I fell asleep." You got out of the tub, hurriedly putting on your bathrobe.

"Talk to you later!" You ended the voice call, rushing towards the door. Unfortunately, you slipped on the wet floor.

You whined in pain. Luck was truly not on your side today, but instead of getting annoyed, you simply stood up and went your way to the door.

"I'm sorry, I was in the shower. I swear I heard you the first time you knocked, but I was panicking so I slipped down the floor and I..." You were already blabbering right after opening the door. You hadn't seen your future roommate's face because it was easier to lie without looking at someone in the eyes.

You didn't know why you told him you heard his first knock, when in reality, you didn't. You guessed you just hated disappointing people. What happened with your boss today was something you couldn't let to be repeated again. You couldn't bear to irritate another person.

You kept yourself busy as you reasoned out. You ran your hand through your wet hair, eyes widening when you saw your fingers covered in soap suds.

"Oh, my God!" You were panicking again. This time, you finally looked at Jeongguk to see his reaction.

It was like the world stopped.

No. You did not see colors instantly. What you felt was something strange—mystical perhaps. It was just like how they described it in books and movies.

You thought people were exaggerating about what they claimed they felt when they met their soulmates.

Apparently, they were not.

You know the feeling of finally seeing the rainbow after the strong storm? It was like that. Except this was way better. Your young self was probably rejoicing now. Being able to meet and look in your soulmate's eyes was dazzling.

The colors were becoming visible now, it was faint—this was in contrast to the embarrassment you were feeling.

You suddenly became very self-conscious with what you looked like. You were wrong. Your young self wasn't that happy because she wasn't expecting to meet her soulmate like this.

You were aware that you looked awful. The bags under your bloodshot eyes were probably so deep. The soap suds in your hair made you appear ridiculous. The most horrifying of all? You were wearing a bathrobe designed with the face of your favorite cartoon character.

"Uh—"

You ran away, locking yourself in your room before Jeongguk could finish what he was about to say.

Your heart was beating so fast as you stared in the mirror. The disgust you felt intensified. God. You looked horrible. You mentally cursed the brand of the mascara you were wearing. So much for claiming to be smudge proof! Curse yourself too because this wouldn't happen in the first place if you only refrained from crying over your boss' mean words, but it seemed like you never learned. You just scolded yourself from crying easily, but here you were, tears were painting your cheeks once again.

"No..." Your lips quivered. You were stronger than this. You weren't going to ruin your chance with your soulmate.

Determined, you quickly changed into a sage dress. Your hands were trembling because of your new found excitement. You loved colors ever since you were a kid. The fact that you couldn't see them didn't stop you from learning its meaning. You studied good color combination before. You were aware how to aesthetically match the hues. For instance, you knew that you would look ridiculous if you wore a neon green shirt and bright pink jeans. You were always careful in choosing what to wear, so now that you could finally see colors without referring to your color palette generator, you were beyond happy.

When you looked decent enough, you decided to finally face your soulmate. The first thing you saw as you opened your bedroom door was Jeongguk sitting on your couch—this was a very shocking scene. No. You weren't surprised because he was casually plopped down on your sofa, what you didn't expect was to see Miri, your bitch of a cat, to be so comfortable on Jeongguk's lap. Your pet looked at peace; the usual hiss she was making was replaced by a silent purring. Her bambi eyes mirrored your soulmate's same big, doe eyes.

You cleared your throat to get Jeongguk's attention.

"I let myself in, I hope you don't mind." You couldn't decipher what he was feeling. Jeongguk's voice was soft, but there was no hint of emotion there. His expression was also unreadable.

Jeongguk tore his gaze away from you when he realized that you were staring. As if this wasn't already awkward for him, you went on to say something that made him more uncomfortable.

"I've been waiting so long to meet you! Are you going to move in with me now?" You plopped down beside Jeongguk, squeezing your body between him and the arm of your sofa. Miri hissed since she was astounded by your sudden action. Actually, Jeongguk was surprised too. Your couch was pretty spacious; he didn't understand why you had to press yourself beside him.

Jeongguk also didn't know why you sounded so hopeful. The sparks in your eyes caused him to scowl; however, this didn't stop you from speaking your hopeless thoughts.

"We could do a lot of things together! I had planned everything since I was young!" You giggled. You didn't know why you were so comfortable telling him things. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that you two were soulmates.

However Jeongguk was confused with your weird idea of wanting to do all of this romantic stuff with him. The uneasiness he felt couldn't be contained anymore when you abruptly talked about dating—as in dating him.

"Whoa, whoa..." He cut you off, arching his brow and moving away from you. "Slow down, will you? I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Oh." You blushed, immediately realizing that you had gone too far. "I'm sorry I got carried away. I was just excited to meet you." You couldn't help but beam at him.

Jeongguk continued to raise his brow at you.

"Why? Are you really that desperate to find a roommate?"

It was your turn to raise a brow at him.

"N-No, I just..." You breathed in, unsure of what to say. "I'm just happy to finally meet my soulmate."

"Soulmate?"

You flinched because of the bitterness in his voice. His innocent eyes turned dark, he was glaring at you. Miri was startled once more. She jumped on your lap because she was getting scared of Jeongguk.

"I'm sorry to break it to you, but I don't believe in soulmates." The word 'soulmate' sounded so rough coming from him, making you flinch again.

Many people had told you that you were good at gauging the feelings of other people, this was why your heart skipped a beat when you saw pain and anger crossed Jeongguk's feature. It was as if he was betrayed by someone.

"It's the most absurd thing I've heard in my entire life. Only stupid people believe in soulmates. I mean—" Jeongguk sucked in a breath. He was so annoyed that he didn't even know how to express his thoughts without breaking apart. "It's limiting the possibilities for people. Why am I required to fall in love with someone I barely know? Why should I leave the person I truly love just because a person meant to be the love of my life," he paused, quoting the words love of my life in the air. "Helped me see colors? It's like forcing me to do something I don't—no, I can't do. It's such a burden. Love can't be bought. I refuse to be with people just because they helped me."

There was silence after Jeongguk's long speech of the reasons why he didn't—or as what he claimed—couldn't love you.

Jeongguk wetted his bottom lip. The silence was making him hate himself. He hated himself because he saw the tears forming in your eyes, an obvious sign that you were hurt because of what he said. But most importantly, he hated you.

It was unlikely of him to hate someone he just met—or to simply hate anyone at all, but everything about you was making him mad as hell.

He hated your hopeful eyes, he hated your beliefs, he hated that you were the person hindering him from being with Red.

He knew it was unfair to blame you since Red chose to leave on her own, but he still couldn't help himself because the idea of soulmate was what urged her to leave.

You were Jeongguk's soulmate and for him, it meant nothing. So with a furrowed brow, he stared hard at you as he said this:

"I'm making you choose right now. Either accept me as Jeongguk, your tenant or Jeongguk, your soulmate. But just so you know, I will never stay with you if you treat me like a soulmate."

His word stung, though you were aware that the only way to make him stay was to choose the former option. At least this way, you got to be with your soulmate.

The colors you see were starting to fade away and it was okay...

[absolutebl]

This Week In BL

May 2021 Wk 2

Being a highly subjective assessment of one tiny corner of the interwebs.

Ongoing Series - Thai

Lovely Writer Ep 12 fin - that was a long arse final ep, but solid performances. I liked that we focused on the fallout amongst the side characters. (Very clever of them to depict Chap with Tae, his Y-Destiny pairing. Especially as both actors are slated for new BL roles with different partners again, The Tuxedo and You’re My Sky.) The camera certainly enjoyed wallowing in Sib & Gene’s separation, but that’s an Asian drama for you. They like to DWELL. (Frankly, I like a bit of wallowing myself.) I thought the inclusion of the “actual” writer at the very end thoroughly unnecessary. I don’t think they had to beat us over the head with the 4th wall meta quite that much. Still, this is probably one of the best BLs we’re getting from non-GMMtV Thailand this year. RECOMMENDED 

Y-Destiny Ep 8 - (Thurs) I found the first half uninteresting but once Casper the Friendly Gay showed up it was fine. The ghost reminded me a bit of Fuse from MIR. 

Close Friend Ep 4: (Just One Life) - is it just me or is Talay insanely charismatic? Anygay, the director got ahold of a drone for this one and would like us to KNOW ABOUT THAT FACT. Look, I just don’t think YoonLay have great chemistry but this was alright, cute enough. 

Fish Upon The Sky Ep 6 - This was a better installment than we’ve had in a while. I like the obsession vs love explanation from Mork, insightful if creepy. Meen & Duean are okay, I guess. A bit annoying. Everyone in this show is a bit annoying. But the wipe toothpaste then wipe eye crud got to me. Toothpaste in the eye, yech! And then I was all, oh that’s basically this show: toothpaste in the eye. It just reviewed itself. (Also why do they keep switching aspect ratio between the two pairs? It’s like they were filming with two completely different camera types... oh. ah. Weird, GMMTV usually doesn’t make mistakes like that.) 

Call it What You Want Ep 6 fin - I skipped to the last ep on this, I told you I do that sometimes to find out what happened. So CIWYW ends happy for the main couple, but trigger warnings on: eating disorders, suicidal thoughts, depression, mental abuse, and a few other things. If you don’t mind your BL dark, gritty, self aware, and honest then you should be okay with this show. But if your preference is for fluff, then there are other fish in the sky. Speaking of... 

Nitiman Ep 2 - Giving me My Engineer vibes. This is OLD school Thai uni BL. I kinda feel like it was meant to come out in 2018, the gap year that was, but I am SO GRATEFUL we’re getting it now. Pay TF attention FUTS this is how you redeem a tsundere uke. Also I love that Bboom is just a terrible flirt and the football match twist was great. I love this show.  

Top Secret Together Ep 1 - it’s out there but no eng subs. It’s an office set romance with multiple couples all tangential to one building. A bit stilted and low production values but I’m intrigued. I hope we get subs... eventually.  

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

HIStory 4: Close To You (Taiwan) Ep 9 - gets the safe sex gold star for lube + condoms AND a verse discussion? Not to mention asking for sex advice from queer fam? Is this a first in BL? Might be. (I still think it’s weird that product placement hasn’t jumped on the lube bandwagon, too slippery perhaps?) I like the embezzlement drama. I always enjoy good outside conflict playing to setting, and this is the kind to be easily resolved in next week’s finale. What a roller coster this series has been. 

Papa & Daddy (Taiwan) Ep 5 - I LOVE THIS SHOW. A heartbeat after i thought, “they better address what he’s doing to the girls he’s dating,” they did it. Clever scripting that. The messaging is gorgeous, the idea that pride and media coverage and knowing about a changing world can broaden minds and lead to acceptance was basically Taiwan making a case for itself paving the way for marriage equality in Asia. Genius. 

Most Peaceful Place 2 (Vietnam) Ep 1 (AKA 4) - dropped with subs and improved production values, someone is learning (or got more dough). The younger brother’s drama is a bit confusing, but I am here for cute boyfriends being cute boyfriends together. And I love that they took the seme’s previous pair (from Nation’s Brother) to be the faen fatale, very crafty of them. Even though it’s not a trope I like, there’s great chemistry all around. 

My Lascivious Boss (Vietnam) Ep 6 - I weirdly love this show, okay? I’m just hoping Long has known Minh’s secret all along and is playing a reverse long con cat & mouse game, waiting for Minh to tell him the truth. Because that would be THE BEST. I could do without the faen fatale but ya can’t have everything. (I’m so glad it’s not the standard 6 ep arc, MOAR!!!) 

Gossip 

Rumor is GMMTV Thailand started shooting Baker Boys (here’s the teaser trailer). This is a remake of Antique (AKA Antique Bakery) a 2008 Korean movie (you can watch it on Viki) which is a remake of Antique (a 2001 Japanese series) with is an adaptation of wildly popular manga Antique Bakery. Knowing the plot I’m not sure this will qualify as BL. I’m still predicting Lee gets his first gay kiss in this series from Singto. More details about this series here. 

Breaking News

Love Area release pushed out, reportedly due to C19. (source DramaCool) 

Be Love In House: I Do (Taiwan, of course, with that title) got a new softer trailer (no subs). It drops next week, May 19, 2021 on Viki. All the information I have is here. 

Tangential to BL 

Two BL-adjacent shows, both from Taiwan. 

I’m watching Love is Science? on Viki which has a het foundation, but it’s a good one. There’s a BL side couple who are on an enemies to lovers slow burn trajectory; featuring a disaster bi slut meets elegant bad ass super gay. So there’s THAT. The mains are an older career woman and the sweet boy from her distant past who has pined for her for years. (He is the softest sweetest service sub you ever saw.) Props to Taiwan for a seriously underused het dynamic. As usual in Asian rom coms the straight boy love interest is a Perfect Cinnamon Role (yes I’m looking at you True Beauty & Love O2O) but I find Taiwan’s version more palatable than Korea’s or Mainland China’s. It’s not finished yet but... RECOMMENDED. 

Starting this week is Love Outlet a 50 (?!) episode show about a mall that sells relationships. It is supposed to have a main gay romance, but it might be a side dish. Very little else known about it. Coming to Line TV.

Honestly, I’m at the point where if Taiwan makes it, I’ll probably watch it. 

Next Week Looks Like This:

Some shows may be listed later than actual air date for International accessibility reasons.

Starting:

Be Loved In House: I Do (Taiwan) 

Golden Blood (Thailand) we think, like Love Area this may be delayed due to surging C19 cases 

Love Outlet (Taiwan) we think 

Upcoming 2021 BL master post here.

Links to watch are provided when possible, ask in a comment if I missed something.

[madtickler39]

Welcome to Club T’s

One of my fan favorites from the old blog, enjoy:

One could look at Emily and assume her life was perfect A nice home, well off family that was well known in California.  Naturally blonde hair, a petite little figure and long legs all around a smile that could turn a man to stone. Going to movie premieres, sports events and mingling with LA bigwigs, Emily was never long without something to do. Oh dont get me wrong, Emily never complained. She loved her family, loved her friends, loved her job. She’d never complain for a second. But still something was missing.  That’s why Emily found herself where she was, in a taxi outside a new and mysterious club in downtown LA.  She stared at the door for a long time before the driver finally asked “Are you gettin out or what?” Emily came back to reality and paid the driver, and stepped out of her car as confidently as she could.  What she couldn't sell her blue dress and black heels could. She walked into the club like it was nobody’s business, and was an instant bombshell to the eligible young men at Club T’s.   What made her walk into this particular club that night? Well, to understand that, we have to go back a little bit.  Emily had a friend named Stephen, and one time not too long ago Stephen did something she couldn’t get out of her head.  He tickled her.  It wasn’t her first time being tickled, not by a longshot.  For some reason, the feeling she got when he finally stopped kept coming back to her head like a drug, needing to come forward again and refusing any lesser pleasure. She had no trouble finding a man to do anything she wanted, but for some reason this one request proved elusive to her charms.  After a brief search on the internet, she found out that club T’s was the place to find what she wanted.  It wasn’t easy to find out how to get in, the people she was here to see were very secretive.  The main club was just like any other club. The music was too loud, the drinks were too expensive and you couldn’t see or move anywhere.  After a few minutes of moving around she found the specific corner that housed the VIP section of the club, she said the codeword to the bouncer, and with a smirk he let her in.  It was the look a wolf gives a deer after a day without food, and it unsettled her. Inside, the VIP area was another world.  The clothes were different, the lights were a bit brighter, and you could hear yourself over the music.  The men were dressed in anything from suits to T-shirts while the girls were wearing some pretty revealing clothing, anything that exposed the belly, shorts, mini skirts and few of them wore heels.  They wore colored wristbands, green yellow and red.  Green was an open invitation, yellow required an ask, and red meant not to approach.  Emily had a yellow wristband, fastened around her ankle like the website advised. There was more seating space than at any normal club here, couches and chairs everywhere.  The dance floor had some people, but others were chasing each other around the floor, and in a couch by the corner a man had a captive girl in his lap.  Her hands were bound and her feet were in his lap.  As he grabbed the toe of her sock, her bound hands came up to her face to conceal her smile and she shook her head.  He grinned evilly and slowly pulled the sock off, revealing her bare foot. At the edges of the dance floor were a few suspended cages, each with a girl inside and a person outside sticking a feather duster in.  Emily asked the bartender “What’s all that about?”  A cute redhead in a black corset said “Those girls work here.  The customers pay to use the feather dusters for a time.  They can also pay to remove clothing or lower the cages.  It breaks the ice for the newcomers.  Speaking of, is this your first time?” “Why yes” said Emily looking around. “Is this actually for real?” The bartender, whose nametag read “Sam” said “It sure is.  I can lock you in that cage if you’re too nervous to get started on your own?”  Emily blushed, and suddenly a voice came from behind her that said smoothly “Sam, hasn’t your boss told you not to mess with the new talent? Or do I have to tickle you for your tips again?” Sam blushed now, and backed towards the liquor shelf nervously.  Emily asked the tall, suit clad stranger “What?”  He said “Oh you haven’t heard? If you find their service in any way lacking, you have to give them the oppurtunity to get their tips tickled back into them.  That’s why she wears a corset, her pits are her worst spot.”  She hissed “Damon!” So you weren't kidding on the website” Emily asked. “This really is a tickle club.” Damon said “Oh yes, but if you want to see come by when Sam brings my bottle of Dom.  She needs a good tickling to earn her tips back after that hiss…”  Sam gulped.  She’d done it now.  Damon slapped down a 20 and said “Whatever the lady likes is on me.” Sam fixed Emily a drink and grabbed a champagne bottle, but Emily hesitated as Sam left.  Sam looked over her shoulder and said “You comin? This is what you wanted right?”  Emily finished her liquid courage, and followed Sam to a door labelled “Barefoot Room”  Upon entering, Sam said “It’s quite literal, no shoes allowed inside.”  Sam quickly kicked off her pumps and went inside, and Emily removed her peep toed heels to join her. “You learn quickly Emily” Damon smiled as he smiled at Emilys little feet as she flexed her toes “Im just amazed” Emily replied blushing as she felt Damon's gaze on her toes “Theres nothing to feel scared about Emily" Damon smiled as he took a sip of his drink. “so tell me what brings you here”” Emily took a deep breath, and then she started “It all started when my friend Stephen tickled my feet a few months ago.  It felt...well I guess how a normal person feels being tickled.  Sure, the laughing was fun but when it was happening I just wanted him to stop after a few seconds...afterwards I couldn’t get it out of my head.  I tried forgetting it, distracting myself.  Anytime I was alone with my thoughts, I thought of that sensation and how badly I wanted it back.  So I found this place...and here I am.” “And here you are.” Damon said.  He saw Emily look down nervously and said “Emily, come sit by me.”  She came and sat down next to him hesitantly, and drew her feet behind her knees, where Damon couldn’t see them.  It was all she could do not to blush.  He asked her “Sam needs to be tickled if she wants her tips from me, where should she be tickled?” “Her underarms” Emily replied without hesitation.  Sam shut her eyes and raised her arms, beginning to breathe heavily.  She begged “Please be gentle.” Damon looked and raised an eyebrow “you answered that quickly for a newbie; I think we may have a little sadist here.  Sam, I think we should let your new friend here do the honors” Emily looked nervous again, and said “You want me to tickle her?”  Damon nodded silently and said “If you'd prefer I can tickle her.  The whole time you watch her suffer knowing that it's coming for you next…” She was up in an instant, and facing Sam directly.  Sam felt her breathe and winced, that gave Emily an inexplicable pleasure.  She pounced. Emily dug her nails into Sam’s underarms, and Damon smirked as she screamed.  Sam was able to hold her arms up for a few seconds, but within 15 seconds they came down reflexively.  Sam laughed like crazy but Emily wouldn't let up.  Sam tried to turn away, but Emily kept at it, and pulled Sam closer. The punishment became a wrestling match soon as the girls came to the ground, with Emily straddling her hips.  Emily leaned forward and pinned the poor bartender’s wrists over her head and blew on her underarms, which drove sam into a mad fit of giggles.  She begged “HEHEHEHE Stop teasing!” Emily couldn't tell you why she said this, but she shouted “This is club tease!”  Before she could sink her nails back into Sam’s smooth hollows, Emily burst out laughing “HAHAHAHAHA!” And lost her grip. Sam scrambled out from under her, and went to Damon, who was holding Emily’s ankle, with his other hand gently stroking her sole.  She giggled gently with each stroke of his hands.  He patted Sam on the butt and said “That’s enough sweetie.  Call me when you get off work.  For now I have some soft, pretty feet to break in.” This comment made Emily blush, and wiggle her baby blue toes.  As Sam walked out of the room and grabbed her shoes, Emily looked down, anticipating the tickling.  The tickling was slow, methodical.  He was really tickling her brain more than her sole.  Reminding her that he could do what he want, control her body against her will.  He could make her laugh whenever he pleased.  All it took was a foot and a finger.  He had the finger, and the foot may as well have been a plaything of his.  It was in his grasp and she wasn’t getting it out. Emily remained on all fours(or threes, not counting the foot that belonged to Damon at the moment), and giggled when Damon wanted her to, otherwise she just accepted the breaks and caught her breath.  Sometimes she would look back at Damon, nearly melting him with that forced smile.  Other times she looked away and tried to just take it. During a break, Damon rubbed her sole with his palm and commented “I see you took the website’s advice and got a pedicure.  How recently?”  Emily giggled “A couple hours ago hehehe.”  she heard Damon inhale deeply and felt his lips rub along her sole now. His lips tickled ever so slightly. She giggled “hehehehe are you smelling my foot?” She read many of the men here also had foot fetishes, but never expected to find herself here tonight… He replied “You used a vanilla scented lotion.  It’s my favorite.”   “EEP!” She squealed, something had pinched the ball of her foot, and one look back at Damon licking his lips told the whole story.  Could she really drive him so crazy with just her feet? This could add some fun to the tickling...but before she could finish that thought, her mind commanded her to laugh again. Emily fell flat on her belly as she felt a warm, wet sensation streak across her arch.  She turned her head to the side to release peals of laughter, and started pounding the carpet with her fist.  If Damon’s finger was mean, his tongue was just cruel.  Emily was at once suffering and feeling an indescribable ecstasy.  All she could do to cope was laugh, and between breaths beg “Hahahaha! Stahahahahap!” Emily got herself a momentary respite from Damon’s tongue, but only because he needed it to taunt her.  His fingers returned to gently stroking her arches as he taunted “Oh you don’t want this to stop.  If you did you’d pull your foot away.  Look.”  Emily flipped over and saw that his hand was open, only cupping her heel.  He tickled with all his fingers slowly, and she reflexively pulled back a few inches, then paused. Emily hesitated a few seconds, it tickled so bad but there was just nothing like it.  Her foot slowly slid back into his grip, and his hand closed around her ankle.  She gasped, what had she done? Damon taunted “See? I knew you liked it!” And he tickled her sole all over again with his fingers, making her laugh even louder, wondering why she gave her foot to him.  He lifted her foot up to his mouth, but there was resistance from her tight little dress.  Damon lowered her foot and said “Emily, your dress is lovely but if you want to have more fun, it may be best to change.” Emily blushed again and said “I don't have a change of clothes.”  Damon began stroking her instep and commented “Not to worry.  There is a private changing room in here with spare clothes, better for our activities.”  Damon helped her up, and opened a wall panel that led to a cozy changing room. Emily removed her dress and placed it on a hanger, then found a pair of little pink shorts and a white tshirt to put on.  The shirt was awfully short, and only came down to her ribs, leaving her midriff vulnerable.  The shorts were quite short, revealing her long tanned legs. She emerged a little sheepishly, but Damon gushed over her, making her blush for the umpteenth time tonight.  She came up to the couch where he sat and requested “Where do you want me?”  She felt his eyes combing every inch of exposed skin, searching for a spot to make her squeal.  She felt uneasy, but exhilarated. Damon grabbed her by the hand and sat her on the couch next to him.  He draped her legs over his...and once she breathed out he lobster clawed her knees.  Emily shrieked, breaking down in helpless laughter as she tried to sit up and reach his hands. After a few moments of squeezing her legs and knees, Damon began to gently scribble his fingertips all along her thighs and up towards her hips.  Emily’s laughter went up in pitch as Damon reached her hips and pinched, and he licked his lips looking at that bare midriff. Damon gave Emily a break to catch her breath, and breathing heavily she sighed “hehehe that was fun.”  Damon had an evil smirk on his face, she asked him “What is that look for?”  Damon said “I’m going to have that cute tummy of yours next.  But I’m going to give you a choice, my tongue or my hands?”  Emily’s eyes bugged out, and she couldn’t possibly choose between tortures for a moment.  She thought about her feet, and his tongue was much worse there.  She answered “Hands.” Damon smirked, had she chosen wrong? What was he playing at?  She didn’t have time to think any further as ten fingers began wiggling along her midriff, and her tummy exploded with ticklish sensations.  She let out a loud belly laugh, and cursed as her hands wanted nothing more than to seize his and make it stop.  Despite this desperate need, her mind would not allow them, making them twitch up and down her sides in a comical fashion.  The game changed utterly when Damon managed to wiggle a finger into her navel, making Emily scream like a banshee before breaking down in frantic laughter.  She tried to get him off of there, but her hands were swatted away by his free hand.  This was almost as bad as her toes, or that tongue! Maybe she should have let him use his tongue after all… After a minute or so of her navel being explored and prodded, Emily couldn’t take anymore.  Her begs became more desperate, and Damon heard it in her voice.  She cried loudly “Uncle! Hahahahahaha! Please! Mercy! Hahahaha!”  Damon stopped rather quickly, but Emily didn’t manage to stop giggling for another minute.  He rubbed her belly during this time, and at last she recovered.  She propped herself up on her elbows saying “That was wicked...I’ve never felt anything like it before.”  Damon smirked, and said “I bet not.” Before they could say anything else, a blonde woman and a brunette with golden brown hair came into the room dancing with each other, kicking their shoes off as they entered.  They plopped on the couch opposite Damon and Emily.  The blonde said “I told you if we danced Damon would get us a snack!”  Emily covered her face nervously as she blushed like a teenager, and would have curled into a ball had Damon not held her knees.  The brunette asked “Who’s the tickle toy?”  Damon said evenly “Girls, this is Emily.  Emily, that is Shay, and Blair.  Two tickle slaves of mine, who need to remember what happens when they don’t use their manners.” Damon continued “Emily is new, and I think she has had enough for one night.  Blair, why don’t you tie Shay’s arms over her head?”  They got to work, enjoying themselves and clearly under the influence a bit.  Emily asked “So what, just like that we’re done?”  Damon smirked and said “For tonight, after I do one quick thing.  If you want another session I’ll see to it that you can contact me.  Sit tight.”  Damon got up and tested Shay’s bonds, who was standing on her tiptoes in the middle of the room, suspended from a chain.  Damon produced two more cuffs and said “Your turn Blair.”  She giggled as she assumed position for her restraints. Once they were restrained Damon instructed Emily “Give me your sole” holding his hand out.  She placed an ankle in his hand, and he produced a pen.  He slowly and painstakingly wrote something on Emily’s sole, but she couldn’t tell.  All she could do was laugh and scream until he finished.  It felt like an eternity of that ball point pen stroking her arches, but it was bliss for her.  When he finally finished, he pecked each of her soles goodnight and she left for the evening.  She inspected her sole before putting her shoes back on, and it read Damon’s number and address.

[coffee-imagines]

Wrong Houses Pt 2

part one

Pairing: Draco x weasley!reader

Warnings: none

A/N: I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for this but then I got an idea and got excited so here we go :) I’m glad a lot of you liked the first part. Also can we talk about how iconic Molly’s howler to Ron is in the movie?

Summary: After a letter home an unexpected surprise arrives during lunch

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You’d started crying the second your face hit your pillow, the feelings from the past five years hitting you all at once. You felt overwhelmed, your body shaking when your cries turned to sobs. There was no way you could go home now, not after what Ron had told you. You felt like a bother to your family, and inconvenience that they had to deal with because of your differences. The sound of footsteps made you hide your face deeper into the pillow and try to calm your shaking, thinking one of your dormmates had come back to get something.

“Y/N.” Draco’s voice filled your ears, his hand softly touching your back. You couldn’t bring yourself to speak, knowing you would only cry harder. “I’m here, it’s okay.” He assured you, helping you sit up before he pulled you in for a hug. You clung to him, crying into his neck while he whispered reassurances in your ear and rubbed your back. It had taken a while but you finally stopped shaking, your tears falling silently, hitting Draco’s neck and sliding down wetting the collar of his shirt.

“I don’t… I don’t want to...” You stuttered out, trying to find your words but Draco shushed you, playing with your hair to try and calm you down fully before you tried speaking again. You took a few deep breaths, closing your eyes trying to focus on Draco instead of everything else. “I don’t want to go home.” You whispered in his neck. “I don’t ever want to go back home.” You sniffed, hugging Draco tighter.

“You don’t have to. My parents actually like you. I’m sure if I write a letter home my mom will let you stay with us.” Draco explained and you nodded, pulling your head away from his neck. Draco’s heart clenched when he saw your tear stained face, the complexion of your skin almost matching your red hair, your nose even redder and your bottom lip still quivering. “You’re going to be okay.” Draco reassured you, leaning down to kiss the tears away. You closed your eyes, and a small smile made its way on your face when Draco softly kissed your eyelids.

“I’m going to write a letter to my parents. They should know I’m not going to come home.” You explained softly and Draco nodded in agreement. 

You took a deep breath, reaching over in all of your belongings to get a paper and a quill. It took a while before the quill touched the paper. You were trying to find the right words to say. Writing the letter didn’t make you happy, it hadn’t been like you really wanted to leave your family, but at this point you felt like it was the only way it would make them happy and stop worrying about how you turned out. There wasn’t a day that went by that you didn’t feel guilty about how everything had turned out, and you refused to spend the rest of your life being reminded of something that was out of your control.

Molly and Arthur Weasley,

I know I don’t normally write home, but I have something important to tell the both of you that just can’t wait. I have suspected that I have been a disappointment to this family since my first day here at Hogwarts, and according to Ron’s words my suspicions are correct. It hurts to think that I have ruined the legacy of my own family and not been sorted into what we perceive to be the correct house. Although I’ve also upset everyone with my relationship with the Malfoy’s son, that I won’t apologize for. I refuse to apologize for something that makes me happy, but I will apologize for the mistake that was made by me being sorted into Slytherin instead of Gryffindor like the rest of the family. 

I unfortunately cannot change the past, but I will take it upon myself to change the future and not continue to burden everyone in the family with my presence. I will hopefully be staying with the Malfoy family, but if not then I will find another way. I no longer feel like I am a part of this family, and although I haven’t for a while, being called a disappointment to my face is where I have to draw the line. It doesn’t bring me any pleasure writing this letter. It pains me that I will have to leave my family, because although I care about all of you greatly, I guess that doesn’t go both ways. Any of my things that Ginny can use she can have, but the rest I will give to the twins to sell in order to help them with their plans for the future. I’m sorry I couldn’t be the child you wanted and I’m sorry that things had to turn out the way they did. I will miss all of you greatly, but I understand if you don’t feel the same toward me.

Good wishes always, Y/N Weasley

Your hand shook while you wrote, the words coming out in shaky lines, some tears falling onto the page that made the ink smear. You sniffed and bit your lip to keep yourself from balling all over again, squeezing your eyes shut when Draco placed his hand on your back.

“Don’t touch me.” You whispered softly and shook your head. You were trying too hard to keep it together, but you knew if he tried comforting you you’d only break down again and let it all out. Draco’s hand moved away from you and you let out the breath you were holding. Clearing your throat and wiping your face you stood up, grabbing an envelope you folded the letter silently before slipping it in. You wrote everything you needed down on the front and you turned to Draco. “Come with me?” You asked, your eyes soft showing how much you’d actually been hurting, but your face almost looked as though you hadn’t been crying, the only thing giving you away was your puffy eyes.

Draco nodded and stood up, walking as close to you as you allowed him. All the way to the owlery you would move a bit away anytime Draco brushed against you, walking in silence. You had nothing else to say, wanting to forget about everything with your family, you even went as far as thinking about changing your hair a different color so you wouldn’t resemble any of your family members, but you knew you couldn’t. A small pit formed in your stomach when you watched the owl take off with your letter, but you took a breath and brushed off the feeling, finally grabbing Draco’s hand when you both walked back to the Slytherin common room.

That night Draco had sent an owl home to his mom about your situation, asking if you’d be able to stay and start living with them for the rest of your time at Hogwarts. The following days you’d avoided your siblings like the plague, especially Ron. You were lucky enough to only have one class with your brother, and you both sat on opposite ends of the room. You’d felt his eyes on you during class, but you never looked in his direction, wanting to put as much distance between you and your family that you possibly could. You wanted to get used to them not being in your life anymore, and not living with you anymore. This had been the only time you were happy to be a Slytherin, being in different houses making it easier to not see them. The only time you had to actually see your brother’s were at Quidditch games, and you were glad that those were the only times, knowing you wouldn’t have been able to handle anything more.

Everything had started taking its toll on you, every day you would be mentally exhausted, a heavy weight seeming to hold you down. Draco wasn’t the only one who had noticed this, your entire house could see it, and it only made the rival between the Gryffindor’s and Slytherin’s thicken. Slytherin’s had always stuck by their own through anything and you’d definitely proved how much you belonged in your house over the years, shocking even the people who had thought the hat had messed up your first year.

You were resting against Draco’s side, picking at the food on your plate. You’d lost most of your appetite, usually eating when Draco would be with you, but today had felt different. It had been hard throughout the past few days, and the second you’d gotten up in the morning you felt more exhausted than you ever had before. You smiled softly when Draco started playing with your hair and you finally decided to start eating when you felt your stomach grumble softly. You kept your head on Draco’s chest while you ate, wishing you’d been able to stay in the common room with him instead. Owls started flying overhead but you ignored them, not expecting any mail to come from home since it never did.

“Ronald Weasley!” Your mother’s voice filled the great hall making your head shoot up from your plate. You watched in amazement, your family owl flying over and sitting on you after dropping a letter in your hand. “How dare you speak to your sister that way! I am absolutely disgusted! I want an explanation sent home and an apology to your sister right this instant! If I hear anything from her about you again I’ll have you brought straight home!” Your mother yelled in your brother’s face and your face turned red in embarrassment. The howler turned to the rest of your sibling but you drowned it out, looking down and opening the letter that had been dropped in your hands.

Y/N,

Don’t you even think about leaving. Your father and I care about you dearly, and we do not agree with what your brother has said. We will have a discussion as a family when you all come home for the summer. Let me know if they give you any more trouble.

Love, Mom

You smiled down at the letter in your hand. Although short, it had everything you needed to hear in it. You were pulled out of your thoughts when you heard all the Slytherin’s around you laughing, pulling your attention to the Howler that had barely finished scolding all of your siblings. Ron had been walking across the hall almost in shame, almost every student laughing to themselves at the scene they had just witnessed. You watched anxiously, wondering if he was going to come over and make your mother’s words seem like nothing. The rest of the Slytherin’s watched with you, surely making Ron’s nerves way worse because of all the eyes that had been on him. You’d been surprised to even see the teachers watching the scene before them.

“Y/N listen.” Ron started, rubbing the back of his neck, his face already red. “I’m sorry for being a prat. I was upset and shouldn’t have taken it out on you.” He explained, your attention averting to the sea of red hair that had been making their way over. “We all don’t care that you’re in Slytherin. It’s just weird to us, and we need time to get use-” He continued but you cut him off.

“Five years isn’t enough?” You asked softly, biting the inside of your cheek. You felt overwhelmed, feeling too many things at once made your bottom lip threaten to quiver.

“We don’t mind it.” The twins explained and Ginny agreed next to them. You knew they hadn’t cared, but hearing it seemed to make you feel a bit better. You turned your attention to Ron, waiting for his explanation.

“We used to do everything together, then we came here and separated and I didn’t like it.” Ron explained, shocking you. “I know I should have talked to you about it instead of pushing you away all these years but I never knew how. I just wanted my sister back, but instead I pushed you away and hurt you instead and for that I am sorry. Really.” Ron apologized, making you nod slowly.

“Thank you.” You whispered, looking down at your lap trying to think. “I need time.” You explained looking back up to Ron.

“How much?” He asked hopefully, and you bit back a smile.

“I’d say about five years.” You tried saying seriously, but you and your other siblings ended up laughing at the look on Ron’s face. They turned to walk away and you nodded to Ron, knowing the both of you would most likely talk later that day.

“My mom said you can come stay with us whenever you need to if you still want.” Draco explained breaking the silence, holding a letter you hadn’t noticed before. 

“I don’t think I will just yet.” You smiled, watching your sibling walking back to the Gryffindor table turning and kissing Draco’s cheek softly.

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Tag list: Let me know if you’d like to be added

@mathletemadison @severuslovebot @izzytheninja @obsessedwithrandomthings​ @dogglefoggle @supermassiveblackhope @jealous-styles

[demonslayedher]

Any Kny character you've grown to love/appreciate more??

Thanks for waiting, Anon, I have been trying to really, really hard to narrow this down, but the answer remains: the vast majority of the cast. The only character I loved right away was Tanjiro and that love kept me watching, as with almost every new character I was like, "ugh, I hate this guy. Here I was, having fun being emotionally invested in a high quality anime, and this might ruin it for me." But then the instant I see a different side of their character, I'm like, "...Oh." To go into some examples...

Zenitsu: I could not stand him right away, I hate womanizers, and his conniptions would go on so long that they held up the story. But Gotouge/Ufotable strung me along perfectly, the first glimpse of Thunder Breath made me immediately pay attention and think, "oh, that was cool. I want to see more of that." Seeing him protect the box pretty firmly put him in the "I need to protect this child" box in my heart. And then the spider demon happens, and I'm sending desperate reaction messages to a friend like "NOOOOOO!!!! BABBBBBBBBBYYYYYYYY!!!!" And then he annoyed me all over again at the start of Functional Recovery, ahaha. It's hard to remember how annoyed I was because I'm such a Zen Stan now, and he was a very firm favorite of mine by the time I finished binging the anime up to the last couple episodes, which I waited for as they came out. Inosuke: He was one of the reasons I was curious about the series, I saw some promotional art and was super curious about Nezuko's muzzle (I was one of the people who thought it was some ancient scroll or something, haha) and the kid with the boar mask. The art I saw showed his face, and I assumed he'd be some kid with a cracking voice performed by a female seiyuu. As much as I love Matsuoka's performance now, initially, since I knew what his face looked like, I found it grossly off-putting the moment I heard it. Then every chaotic thing Inosuke did dug a deeper hole; I very quickly decided I hated him, especially when he started beating up on the kid I was starting to like. As his chaos subsided he just became a character I tolerated, and then this happened:

Images you can hear, am I right? This immediately flipped the "BABY" switch in my heart. It was also a lot of fun to understand the Inosuke memes I was seeing everywhere. So by the end of the anime, I loved, loved, loved, loved the Tanjiro/Zenitsu/Inosuke interactions and desperately wanted more (still didn't like how Zenitsu bothered Nezuko, though). I was so impatient for more, but the manga art looked disappointingly off-putting. I figured the anime was successful enough that there'd eventually be more of it, and I wanted to be patient, but then I poked around, read some spoilers, got back into Tumblr to look at fanart and memes, saw a spoiler image of Tanjiro affected by Muzan's poison and the binge-read began. (That's kind of a lie, but I'll get to that.) Let's back up a few episodes. There I was, having a great time, the guy who I forgot about from Episode 1 was back and haha, I guess everyone hates him, and the chick who I figured was going to be a medic who saves Zenitsu in the nick of time turned out to be savage, awesome. I was sending reactions to my friends who were ahead of me, and then we left off seeing the Pillars staring down Best Boy. And I...

Well. Uh. Here, I've dug up an old convo for you, my comments are in blue.

Immediately followed by a passionate vocal rant, which I have transcribed here:

“I feel like what happened was that the mangaka was sitting around with his assistants and was like, ‘welp, gotta make this whole cast of characters, they gotta be so-o-o-o many more levels of extreme than all the other characters I’ve had so far, which isn’t hard, because all of the background characters are cannon fodder and I’ve just gotta leave them all with black hair and no personality traits. So! Gotta go to the opposite of the spectrum with the BIG! POWERFUL! People so no-o-o-body can be normal.’ And so he and his assistants sat down, and they all wrote down just random words or traits, and them put ‘em all in a hat. And then for each character, they pulled out a few of them and said, ‘OK. We’re gonna put these things together, now we have a character.’ And he was probably also like, ‘Iiiiiiiiiiiii’ll flesh them out later. For now, they just need t’… be there, and make an impact. How do we make an impact? By making sure it’s super, super clear what their character traits are. Here, we’ll have this guy repeat the word //HADE//…. ////HA DEEE//// over and over and over… to show that he’s a /showy/ person. Because he /cares/ about that. And he //should// care because that is his character and that’s why he’s powerful.’ OH MY GOSH, it’s so dumb.”

......orz I feel like Genya looking back at how he acted at the end of the Final Selection. I'm sorry, Gotouge, I had not even encountered your love for these characters yet in your little alligator form. Nor had I encountered the yet unseen-sides of these traumatized dragons and tigers. ...*coughs* Um. So. I was pretty harsh.

So this was my mindset, I went into the manga not caring about most of these characters and just wanting more Kamaboko squad interactions and wanting to hurry up and catch up to the battle with Muzan. And it's worth stating that I didn't mean to read it at first. I encountered a few spoilers, and just wanted to look for the context surrounding those parts, and then hunt for the (non-existent) build-up to those parts, and so... uh.........

I read a lot of the manga out of order, and yeah, that did affect how much I cared about what was going on. I didn't actually properly process a lot of it until later re-reads. But to try to state some things simply about each Pillar:

Giyuu: He was just 'ok' to me for a long time, I could see the appeal for why people I knew were fangirling over him but he didn't do it for me. His soft spot for Tanjiro was indeed endearing, though, and I firmly liked him by the time chapter 200 came out and I was properly heartbroken on his behalf.

Shinobu: She was intriguing, and then I liked her as soon as I saw her savage side, she was one of the characters I went hunting for spoilers for.

Rengoku: That stare really put me off at first, but I fell for him over the process of Tanjiro falling for him. When I first finished the train arc I sat back and said, "wow! That's going to make for a good movie!" and then in psyching myself out for the movie several months in advance, I fell hook, line, and sinker and was totally excited for him each time I saw the trailers. And then the movie was *stunning* and I love him even more. Uzui: He was the Pillar I hated most upon first meeting them. I blame the repeated use of his catchphrase. But then when he let his hair down to sell the kiddos the change in design helped warm me up more to him, like, "oh, there was a human in there." It took a long time for him to become more interesting to me, and an uncharacteristically subtle journey to becoming a character I liked. I am currently getting more and more psyched out for him and eager to see how much more I'm going to like him with the shiny Ufotable treatment. Mitsuri: At first I didn't remember her name, I had code-named her as "Boobs." But I kinda had a feeling she was going to grow on me quickly, and I was right, she's one of my easy favorites now. Muichiro: Who? Oh yeah, that kid who always kinda fell to the wayside in my attention. I'd see a lot of Muichiro-themed blogs and hear a lot of little girls looking at merch and showing a clear favoritism of him, and I'd like always react like Muichiro and just be like, "...", and then when I read his major battles I was more emotionally invested in things going on concurrently with other characters, and I was still like, "...", and then two days ago I revisited a Muichiro scene and was suddenly like, "......OH!!! MUICHIRO!!!!!" Himejima: I never really hated Himejima, even if I found his first impression kind of wimpy (haha... oh, I was so wrong). I had a pretty easy acceptance of him too, so I would generally count him among characters I like, but if you were to ask me why, I'd draw a blank. It's kind of a weirdly mature, subdued appreciation for him rather than passionate fangirling. But weirdly when I was daydreaming the other day I found myself thinking, "if I had to marry someone in the KnY cast, it would be Himejima." So like, not a fiery romance, but I see him as my dependable, sturdy rock to grow old with??? What is up with you, sub-conscious?? Iguro: My interest in him rises and falls. Being a Mitsuri fan helped warm me up to his character in the first place, which was the emotional tie I needed since his backstory didn't grip me much (I found it a frustrating distraction while I was desperately reading weekly updates). Reading more subtle details about his character in the fanbooks has brought me around and made me more curious about him, like I'd really like to be a fly on the wall for the conversation he had with Uzui one day about their pasts.

Sanemi: Hahaha, wow. He was so unlikable in the beginning, wasn't he? His character design (yeah, the eyes) was really off-putting too. But then I got to know him and there was no going back, I got totally played. He's a character I'm pretty fond of now and one of the characters I've enjoyed delving into most in fanfic. To keep this answer from getting too long, for the vaaaaaast majority of the cast, I was initially like, "meh" or "OK" or "ew" but now am like, "EEEEEEEEE, I LOVE THIS TOTALLY RANDOM UNIMPORTANT SIDE CHARACTERRRRRRR" so you know... times change. And the more time I spend obsessed with Kimetsu no Yaiba, the more I like them all, so even the characters I'm lukewarm on will probably have their eventual days when they take over my heart and smash it.

[prettywordsyouleft]

The Cowboy - Part 3

Summary: Leaving the city for a rural area called Blayne seemed simple enough. Your task was to convince the people to agree with selling their land for a resort redevelopment. But once there, you soon realise that your city ways are entirely different to theirs. Winning their trust was going to take some effort, and when you start to fall for a local cowboy, you wonder if you really needed Blayne more than the city life after all.

Pairing: Jung Jaehyun x female reader

Genre: cowboy au / drama / romance / if you squint there’s some enemies to lovers up in here.

Warnings: Jung Jaehyun is a cowboy, need I say more? (a bit of angst and drama, and it sometimes might feel like you’re reading a Nicolas Sparks book, so I’m told lol)

Word count: 2054

This series will be updated every Thursday and Friday.

Preview | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

“What are you handing me those for?” you asked when the man you had arranged to meet with at eleven shook your hand in greeting and then placed a pair of gumboots up on the hood of your car. You eyed the footwear and then looked back at Avery McConnell with interest.

Avery chuckled. “I know how expensive those boots are.”

“It’s not muddy, though. I’ve come at the end of spring.”

“You’re in for an awakening, Y/N. Trust me, put them on.”

You took Avery’s advice and followed him over to his truck. Climbing inside, you then glanced at your guide. “Thank you for meeting with me today.”

“Hey, it’s my pleasure. Always nice to see a new face once every three or so years,” he teased, and you laughed with him.

“So I’m learning. Not many venture out here.”

“It would be nice if people did.”

“Right?!” you enthused instantly, gesturing to the mountain ranges in the distance. “This place has so much untapped potential.”

“You won’t get to un-tap it, Y/N,” Avery told you upfront as he swung the vehicle out onto the main road. “But I wish there was a happy medium. If we could create more jobs and better housing, it would improve our farming. It’s hard to get help to come out here when services like Amazon don’t.”

“Wait, they don’t?!” you groaned heavily at the concept of not being able to order coffee pods in bulk.

“You’ll have to set up a PO Box in the township over. And if you need to have any internet meetings, it’ll be best to do them there too. The internet reaches out here, but the signal drops so frequently that no one bothers.”

“Why hasn’t anyone asked for services to be improved?” you asked and Avery smiled at you knowingly. “What? You can request cables to be laid, and I’m sure if you pay half the cost-”

“There’s not a huge focus on the internet out here when the sun rises in the morning for outdoor productivity. Most of us just have mobile phones to ring one another when we’re out on our property. And even then, the signal can be dodgy.”

“But there could be improvements,” you insisted, and Avery nodded.

“You’re persistent.”

“Well, it’s not the primitive age. I appreciate there’s a historical factor and a tight-knit community here, but this land is capital, and you could all win from some modern intervention.”

“I’m not your enemy,” Avery admitted, parking the car up on the side of a country lane. “I went to the city to escape how plain Blayne is.”

“You did?”

Avery nodded.

“Then how come you’re back?”

“It’s my home. It’s strange. Not a lot of people get why we live like this, but to us, it makes the most sense. Plus my old man got sick and needed me to help take care of the steer.”

“Okay, I’m going to sound really ignorant for a moment, but is a steer some kind of deer?”

“You came out here without knowing your basic farm animals, Y/N?” he asked with a laugh, and you rolled your eyes. “Come on I’ll show you why we need gumboots around here.”

Holding your nose, you attempted to listen to Avery’s speech about how the pigs of Blayne were some of the best meat pigs in the country. However, you were overstimulated by the smells and the sounds of the barn that you couldn’t quite keep up with the knowledge he was passing on to you.

“Ah, so this is where you were,” a voice mentioned, and you spun around, letting go of your nose and gasped for air. The newcomer smirked, his dimples deepening.

God, you wanted to hate him for being so attractive.

“You know me. I’ve got to help any damsel in distress out.”

“Where is she?” he teased, and you rolled your eyes. “Oh! Miss City, are you getting snippy with me?”

“Thank you for the warning about the owl.”

He grinned. “You’re welcome. So, seen enough pigs and want to go back to the city yet?”

“Not a chance.”

“That’s a pity, should we take her out into the cattle fields, Avery?”

“No need to be that eager to get rid of me,” you bit back and Avery, who had been watching the two of you, started to laugh heartily. You realised then how similar it sounded to May’s laugh. You pointed at him. “Wait, are you two-”

“Sadly, I’m related to him,” Avery admitted dramatically, and you glanced at the scowl on the other man’s face. “Come on Jaehyun, who wants to be your cousin anyway?”

“I never asked to be related to you either but here we are!”

“Jaehyun,” you breathed, and the man in question blinked at you curiously. “Oh, I didn’t get your name last night, you see.”

“I thought you had,” he answered back, grinning again. “Mr Cowboy, isn’t it?”

“Well, you do look like the typical cowboy in the movies when you go around in your boots and hat,” Avery defended, which you couldn’t help but snort a little at.

Jaehyun folded his arms across his chest. “Cattle fields, next. Right?”

You followed them out onto the field, watching where you stepped. Now you knew the reason for the boots. If there hadn’t been enough dung and muck in the pig barn, you certainly had seen more than enough of it out in this field. Climbing up the hill after the two men, you huffed at how easy it was for them.

“I guess there’s no need for a gym membership out here,” you muttered, sucking in a deep breath.

Jaehyun turned and looked at you then. “Come on, Miss City. The cows are over here.”

“I never wanted to see a damn cow, I came to survey the land for suitable resort spots,” you grumbled out of earshot, grateful when the slope evened out, and you reached the top of the field.

Stopping to catch your breath, you blinked at the view. In every direction you looked, the mountain range was so beautiful. All you could see was an expanse of land, which held a lot of possibilities. A golf course, a swimming and spa resort were merely two of the possibilities for Blayne’s development. Being close to nature whilst enjoying leisure pursuits could really put this place on the map.

You turned again, smiling at the wondrous thought of redevelopment until you saw what had come upon you. Backing up from the impossibly large beast, you raised your hands in defence.

“Nice cow.”

“She sure is a beaut, isn’t she?” a voice mentioned at your side, and you yelped in surprise, slipping on a cow patty.

Strong arms reached out to balance you before you hit the ground and you looked up into the face of your saviour, Jaehyun washing his gaze over you momentarily.

And then he started to laugh. “Wow, Miss City, you sure are jumpy! Feeling a little scared, are we?”

“You scared me first!”

“Was it me or the cow?” he questioned with a chuckle, and you yanked yourself free from Jaehyun’s grip, skirting around the curious animal and dashing over to Avery’s side.

He seemed equally amused. “You sure this is a place for you?”

“I’m adaptable,” you muttered, blinking rapidly.

Even you didn’t believe your words now.

“Wow, I’m exhausted,” you mentioned when you arrived back at your residence, falling down onto the couch with a groan.

Jaehyun had joined you for the rest of your exploration with Avery, much to your disdain. Every time you got close to discussing some sort of loose plan with the man, Jaehyun would distract you or shoot down your ideas entirely.

You glared up at the ceiling. “Stupid Cowboy. What would he know?”

The phone rang then, and you whined childishly, hauling yourself up from the couch and going over to answer it. “Oh good, you’re there!”

“Ah, yes. You have a nice home here, June.”

“You think so? It was once the home I raised my children in until we built the one we’re in now. Ah, that’s why I called you. I’ve made extra food and wanted to invite you around for dinner.”

“That’s too generous of you.”

“It’s the least I can do after knowing how long the boys had you out for. I told them to take it slow since you weren’t used to our ways yet. I bet your feet hurt.”

“They do, I’ll admit it,” you confessed and June giggled down the line with you.

“That’s it then! I’ll send Jaehyun around to fetch you!”

“Oh, it’s fine. I can drive myself there if you give me directions.”

“He’ll be there shortly, dearie. I pushed him out the door long before making this call.”

“Well, he should be here then,” you mentioned, glancing outside the house with some unease. “I’ll get ready!”

“See you soon, Y/N.”

After placing down the phone, you dashed upstairs to freshen up your appearance, pulling out a floral boho styled maxi dress that you had bought specifically for your country adventure. Picking up a straw hat and accessorising your middle with a woven belt, you laughed at how carefree you looked out of your usual business attire.

“He should be here by now,” you guessed, looking down the drive for Jaehyun’s truck. Collecting your bag, you stepped out of the house and locked it, slipping the keys into your purse and then jumped when you heard a loud whinny.

Turning to the field adjacent to the drive, you gaped at the sight before you. Jaehyun watched you for a moment before leaping down from the wagon. “It’s a good thing I had to run errands for Dad and didn’t bring a horse for you to ride instead, huh?”

“You didn’t bring the truck?”

“You asked if it was legal yesterday. I doubt you would have gotten in it.”

You eyed the large animal warily. “And you expect me to get up there?”

“Miss City, don’t tell me you’re scared of a mere horse. Back before any car, they were man’s best friend.”

“I thought that was a dog,” you murmured as Jaehyun leapt back up onto the cushioned seat of the wagon, his hand reaching down for yours.

“Ever seen a dog plough a field for crops?” Jaehyun asked with a chuckle, his grip firm around your wrist as he helped you up.

You sat down and looked around yourself hopelessly. “Do I need a seatbelt?”

“You really haven’t experienced much in life, have you, Miss-”

“Y/N,” you interjected, smiling nervously. “Please, call me Y/N.”

Jaehyun stared at you again and then smiled, picking up the reins. “You can hold onto me if you get scared, Y/N. I won’t tell anyone that our city slicker is frightened to ride on a horse wagon.”

“Why did I agree to go out tonight?” you wondered with a groan, shrieking and grabbing onto the front of the wagon when it started to move. Jaehyun laughed at you before eagerly asking the animal to move faster, your hands gripping on more tightly to the bar. “You’re working too hard to get rid of me, Jaehyun.”

“Really? Is it that noticeable?” he wondered and smiled when he watched you loosen your grip. “You’re adapting to this pretty well, though.”

It was your turn to look at him, a smile forming on your lips. “I am, huh.”

He glanced at you and nodded. “Who knows, maybe you’ll last more than a week.”

“Talk to me again when I make it to a month.”

“You’ll be riding a horse by that time,” he suggested, and you scoffed loudly.

“No, thank you. I’m not here to play farm. I’m here to work.”

“Farming is one of the hardest jobs out there. I thought you were here to see how us Blayners tick?”

“Well…”

“I guess you better think about what you’ll wear for a horse riding lesson tomorrow then.”

“I never agreed to it,” you objected and then sat back in your seat when Jaehyun leaned towards you.

“I like your dress by the way. It’s pretty.”

“Still full of yourself,” you mumbled, fanning your cheeks with how hot they grew with his compliment.

Jaehyun grinned. “Still enjoying it, aren’t we?”

_________________

Part 4

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