#so many good paintings of judith beheading holofernes

[sciencelings-arts]

Kill your demons, Kill 'em dead in your mirror, in your bed, in your heart, in your head Don't you look good in red Slay your devils, Kill 'em all, Take your throne, Paint the walls, And if you make it out alive, Hold that bloody head up high

Good in Red

-The Midnights

Artists commentary below the cut

First off, here's the song:

Red version, anyway let's speedrun the symbolisms:

The sword of justice is Apollo and Trucy flavored with the eyes and the diamonds, also the guard is supposed to resemble the scales of justice. There's also Apollo's bracelet and Kazuma's hachamaki, I felt like including a bit of him for the vibes. The halo of stars is used as a crown of immortality which goes with Phoenix's whole thing.

different version of the halo, more sharp and stabby and feathery. Anyway, I wanna ramble about what I was going to do with the background. So, with the theme of 'Kill your demons' I was going to try to include the silhouettes of heads on spears of the people that Phoenix dethroned, like Redd White, Manfred von Karma, Damon Gant, Matt Engarde, and Dahlia Hawthorne. As you can tell, that didn't pan out and no matter how I tried to work it, it didn't look good so I just didn't do it lol. Also, I guess the heads on spears would've gone past the point of being a little too gruesome for me, just in general.

This whole piece is based on one of the many paintings of Judith slaying Holofernes, which is why this specifically takes place in my Fem!Phoenix AU, I thought it hit harder, especially after learning about the version by Artemisia Gentileschi that's implied to be inspired by her own sexual assault. While I followed the versions where it's mostly just 'pretty lady holding a head', her version was more brutal and actually depicting the act of beheading Holofernes which was rad as hell. I just liked the Perseus and Medusa-esque pose of triumph more in the end.

My initial inspiration was Perseus and Medusa but then I stumbled upon the absolute tsunami of Baroque and Renaissance art depicting Judith and Holofernes and I just went crazy. Sure there's the whole vibe of 'cutting off the head of the snake' but there's like one statue of Perseus and it's not very interesting but people really went off on Judith. I love you women committing righteous acts of violence, and obviously, so many painters had the same thought bc holy shit.

And I drew the whole sword of justice and was only a little lazy with the blade because I knew it would be completely hidden

[cerseiwexler]

tagged by: @selfproclaimedunicorn 💖

favorite painter: will admit to not being the most well versed in art, but artemisia gentileschi's work has always spoken to me. her renditions of judith beheading holofernes is a classic for good reason, and was the first painting i saw that really captured that restrained yet infernal rage women can be so capable of.

favorite poet/author: poet is e.e. cummings -- i also enjoy a lot of modern poets but none come to mind. cummings wrote two of my favorite poems of all time: i carry your heart with me and i like my body when it is with your. as for authors, gillian flynn really gets me. sharp objects especially hit me right in the heart.

favorite singer: ethel cain. i became a fan a few months before the release of preacher's daughter, then the album solidified my love forever. it was exactly what i needed in my life, exactly the words and sounds i needed to help me process some of the things that had happened to me. i love her lyricism, it's lush and evocative and lays out the story she's telling so well. love a good concept album; love a good concept.

favorite band: see, this one is harder!!! is florence + the machine still technically a band or have they become florence's solo project? if the former, i choose them. you just can't beat those heavy beats and cosmic sounds, and her voice is to die for -- we love alto representation.

favorite meal & drink: i have to choose just one??? okay dinner would be some sort of pasta for sure. perhaps a nice ravioli in a lemon cream sauce? and then if that's what i had for dinner, i'd want something light for dessert, so how about a fruit tart with vanilla cream? yes i think that would do just fine. (that said, i have many favorite meals and it all just depends how i'm feeling at the time lol)

favorite outfit/aesthetic/style: funny you should ask! because i'm currently in the middle of revamping my aesthetic after not having much of one for quite some time. i'm going for bright colors and summery silhouettes and plenty of skin and lots of light layers when it's cold instead of big puffy ones. all in shades of pink orange yellow and purple, with wide-leg jeans and platform shoes to accessorize!

favorite item you own: beyond things like my pet snake and wedding ring, i would say my phone or laptop. gotta stay connected to the world!

favorite perfume: confetto by profumum roma. exorbitantly expensive but ohhhh so delicious. i have a travel size and luckily a little goes a long way bc i've been able to make it last pretty long!

tagging (if you want, of course) @eldritch-historian @avenger-ashley @wearetheunholyfamily @bookcersei

[slaveofimagination]

Jacopo Amigoni, Jael and Sisera, 1739.

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Artemisia Gentileschi, Jael and Sisera, c. 1620.

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Gregorio Lazzarini, Jael and Sisera.

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Giuseppe Vermiglio, Jael and Sisera, c. 1621.

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Artemisia Gentileschi, Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, c. 1610–1615.

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Guido Reni, Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, c. 1630-1635.

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Artemisia Gentileschi,  Judith and her Maidservant, 1625.

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Artemisia Gentileschi,  Judith Slaying Holofernes, c. 1614–1620.

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Orazio Gentileschi,  Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes, c.1624.

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Andrea Vaccaro, Judith with the head of Holofernes, c. 1620.

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Valentin de Boulogne, Judith and Holophernes, 1624.

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Jan de Bray, Judith and Holofernes, 1659.

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Cristofano Allori, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 1613.

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Peter Paul Rubens, Judith with the Head of Holophernes, c. 1616.

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Giorgione, Judith, c. 1504.

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Adam Elsheimer, Judith Slaying Holofernes, c.1601–1603.

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Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1598–1599. 

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Elisabetta Sirani, Timoclea Kills the Captain of Alexander the Great, 1659.

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Paul Baudry, Charlotte Corday after the Assassination of Marat, 1861.

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Gregorio Lazzarini, Orpheus and the Bacchantes, c. 1710. 

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[thewriterowl]

Because of yojr anons I am developing an obsession with historical AU.

My favorite is painter!Din and model!Luke.

Luke could be both a prostitute or a tavern boy.

Caravaggio used many prostitutes as models, even to paint holy figures like virgin Mary (do you call her that in the United States? XD).

Even in the paint "Judith Beheading Holofernes"

He often portrayed his lover, Mario Minniti, making him "interpret" the god Bacchus.

When it comes to Caravaggio I am so proud to be Italian.

Any canons about painter!Din?

Painter!Din...hmmmm...

Din is a famous painter but no one knows what he looks like. His paintings are bought through a third party (probably Boba or Greef) so he can have his anonminity. Recently he has hit a terrible snag with his inspiration. Nothing is right. He needs to figure out how to get his inspiration back. Last time he did so well was when he adopted his son. So, maybe he needed to get out find his muse?

He suppose it couldn't hurt...even though he hates being around people.

Off he goes to figure out what he needs but nothing is hitting right. Until he sees a mysterious blond.

So, yeah, Luke could be either fo those...he's struggling with money but then Din comes in (hires him? is tended to him at the tavern? who knows? either is good) and Din HAS to to paint him. He just has to. He has never seen someone who looks like a literal angel before. So he grabs Luke and says he will pay him if he would come home with him that moment (try not to be as creepy next time Din...). Luke, suspicious but desperate agrees...and then is brought to this amazing studio, gently pushed into a position, and then the handsome man just starts painting him like he's possessed.

Din finds he couldn't part with this first painting of Luke, so he needs to get him again. He makes a second picture and it sells and becomes rather famous. Soon, he has to put Luke in anything he does.

Of course, Luke talks with him and Din finds he enjoys the conversation (when he normally doesn't). Din goes as far as to hire Luke to be a permanent model (and maybe nanny for his son) and each painting his done with Luke is always beautiful and just a bit different (cause Luke is finally getting healthy and happy).

They fall in love, to no one surprise, and he continues to be Din's inspiration...but Din doesn't sell the art with Luke in them anymore. It felt wrong to know others are viewing his husband in such a way.

[ginnyggginny]

Francoise Gilot painted “Adam Forcing Eve to Eat An Apple” in 1946, the year she moved in with Picasso to become his young muse. In a New York Times article, Alexandra Schwartz quotes Gilot saying that this is no accident. The painting depicts a woman looking at the viewer with an apple forced into her mouth by an angry man with furrowed brows, and the Biblical title implies a sense of lost innocence and hindsight realization of her own unfortunate situation. The description of a “forced” act calls to mind descriptions of sexual assault, a nonconsensual penetration. Gilot is keenly aware of this connection, as she compares Picasso to the monstrous pirate Bluebeard, who 

… didn’t cut the heads [of his wives] completely off… he preferred to have life go on and to have all those women who shared his life at one moment or another still letting out little peeps and cries of joy or pain and making a few gestures like disjointed dolls, just to prove that there was some life left in them, that it hung by a thread, and that he held the other end of the thread. (Schwartz)

Gilot clearly delineates the emotionally manipulative tactics that Picasso used, with his desire to keep all his women at arm’s length. Her description of him keeping his muses “hung by a thread” (Schwartz), which he holds in his hand, shows the way Picasso treated her and others as doll-like objects that he could use however and whenever he wanted, and that he had a sense of entitlement towards their bodies, due to a successful career and an inflated career. Even today Picasso is cited as one of the most famous artists in the world, with Guernica and Weeping Woman being some of his most well-known. It is worth noting that Francoise Gilot was a painter in her own right, and she became a muse in an effort to make connections within the art world that would improve her own career by association. She expected that working with Picasso would bring her artistic opportunities, though likely did not expect the mistreatment she received. And yet she is not famous. The tradition of the muse is named after the Greek goddesses who blessed men with inspiration, but it is most famously used referring to the women who posed for portraits, dating back to the Renaissance when classical-style realistic paintings came back into fashion. The essay “Sexual Violence: Baroque to Surrealist” by John Loughery claims that the proliferation of nearly-nude women in Renaissance painting, so ubiquitous in art museums, comes from a more sinister tradition, describing that the paintings “speak volumes about the power factor inherent in the post-Renaissance tradition of the female nude, and, with their riveting straightforward glance, they point ahead to Manet’s Olympia, Zola’s Nana, and an avalanche of prose and imagery that affirms women’s comfort with their own sexuality, or male projections about that level of comfort” (Loughery 299). This essay sees these centuries-old masterpieces not as ethereal works of art that transcend sexuality, but as works of pornography that were designed to titillate the viewer and bypass the highly religious era they came from with their classical setting. Putting aside the oil brushstrokes, Edouard Manet-- and Pablo Picasso-- are simply depicting the nude body of a young woman. While in many cases this situation may have been consensual, Loughery claims that it would be hard to put aside the inherent power dynamic. Like a high-ranking executive of a film company taking advantage of a young woman, a famous and well-connected artist would certainly hold sway over an ambitious young girl. It would be hard to ignore the age difference between the muse and the artist, the often married man and the often-underage ingenue. Also, the idea that “male projections about that level of comfort” discounts the assumption that the women involved would be comfortable with her depiction. Women are often expected to be beautiful and available, Andrea Pino-Silva argues in the essay “I Believe You, Como Eres”, with their “success determined by the boys we charmed at our quinceaneras, of the lengths we took to prepare ourselves to be wives (Pino-Silva)”. There is a clear gender division, visible in every situation from a muse sitting for a portrait to a girl in a ball gown at a quinceanera. The man is expected to have power, he is masculine, the one who asks the girl to dance, the one who moves his model into the position he wants to paint. The woman is just beautiful and must work to keep herself that way. Not only can the artist use his own power and position to take advantage of the muse, he can choose to make her appear however he wants, like a posable doll-- he can make her look like she deserves whatever attention she gets.

Nowadays, the world of artist-and-muse shows itself differently, as the prominent art forms have shifted with time. The familiar story of a man exploiting a woman for creative gain is now most often associated with the film industry, in particular with director Harvey Weinstein and his actress victims. In the case of Weinstein, this is put in a very sinister light with Salma Hayek, who wanted to star in a movie about the artist Frida Kahlo but was forced to include sexual scenes in order to appease Weinstein’s own sexual desires. The muse and the model are very similar, in age and in public perception-- being a beautiful woman paid to look good and inspire works of art. One such model/muse is Kaori, a sitter for the Japanese photographer Araki Hirohiko. During the time of the #MeToo Movement in 2018 and 2019, when millions of women came out with their stories of sexual harassment and assault, Kaori told her story to the New York Times, describing how the photographer emotionally abused her. She describes Araki as treating her “like an object (Kaori)”, when “he asked [her] to do abnormal things, and [she] did them as though they were normal. (Kaori)” Kaori described an incident in which the photographer took nude photos of her, and then published and distributed them without her permission, as described within the New York Times article . It is clear that Araki has taken advantage of his position of power, both as an elderly man in a patriarchal Japanese culture, and in his successful career as an artist allowing him to take liberties with the normal steps of asking for permission and consulting her. This is an extremely similar scenario to Salma Hayek’s experience with Harvey Weinstein, as along with his sexual harassment, Hayek endured extreme emotional abuse. Hayek states in her op-ed for the New York Times that “the range of his persuasion tactics went from sweet-talking me to that one time when, in an attack of fury, he said the terrifying words, ‘I will kill you, don’t think I can’t.’” Like Picasso pushing the apple into Gilot’s mouth, and treating her like a poseable doll rather than a real woman, Kaori and Hayek face emotional abuse from creative men. In fact, the distribution of Kaori’s images could be compared to revenge porn, in which images that have been captured with consent of the body depicted are released without permission, usually for spiteful reasons. Revenge porn is considered a Class A misdemeanor in many states and is considered a form of sexual harassment. The fact that this is such a widespread problem, to the extent where it has been banned by Ireland, shows that the idea of distributing non-consensual nude images has evolved far beyond the Victorian boudoir images of young women resting in nothing but a necklace-- the “male projections about level of comfort” that Loughery mentioned, where male pleasure in viewing a woman’s body is more important than her own comfort and consent.

Women throughout history are often disbelieved, ignored, and left to their own anger and rage. Francoise Gilot channeled her anger into her own Cubist paintings, following a tradition started by Artemisia Gentileschi among other underappreciated female artists who suffered from sexual abuse. Gentileschi is best known for the iconic painting Judith Beheading Holofernes, another example of a Biblical motif being used to convey another meaning. In this image, Judith is bent over the man’s helpless body, her sleeves rolled up over her elbows. muscles outstretched to drag the sword through his neck. Blood spurts out gorily, as Judith is attended by her maidservant. Though the woman in the painting is Judith, it is likely Gentileschi as well-- a woman who was raped by her father’s friend as a teenager, and who was subjected to a humiliating rape trial, according to John Loughery’s essay. The story of Artemisia Gentileschi’s life shows how little her life differs from that of a modern-day rape victim, although Judith was finished in 1621. The painting becomes a revenge fantasy, a way for Gentileschi to release her pent-up rage, visible catharsis as Holofernes becomes her rapist, and her maidservant holding the basket for his severed head becomes a metaphor for the women who unite over a shared enemy. Pablo Picasso and Gentileschi’s rapist were both artists who took advantage of their success and power, in addition to their position as creative men-- as art has been considered a feminine pursuit, creative men may compensate for their choice of career by acting with masculine bravado.  Rebecca Solnit writes about the patriarchy’s discomfort with women, and desire to erase feminine attributes among men. 

If emotion must be killed, this is work that can make women targets. Less decent men hunt out vulnerability, because if being a man means learning to hate vulnerability, then you hate it in yourself and in the gender that has been carrying it for you. Girl and pussy have long been key insults used against boys and men, along with gay and faggot; a man must not be a woman. (Solnit 30)

[bird-in-a-cage]

Confession I ~ Confession II ~ Confession III ~ Confession IV

Confession V

Hargrove’s thigh was hot against Steve’s as they sat in the pews surrounded by their peers. Weekly mass. Candles flickered. Incense burned. It was too warm. Even though the chapel was always cold with the stone floor and endlessly high ceiling, Steve was sweating under his collar. Trying not to pay attention to the Devil on his left slowly bouncing his leg up and down, friction through two pairs of slacks. Steve had purposely sat near the back, to be alone and try to pay attention. Try and find the piece of him that felt missing lately. Hargrove had been late. Just slid into the empty seat and sat uncomfortably close.

Steve closed his eyes and rolled his head back. Blinding himself to everything but what was being said. To feel that light again. To have it come shining through the dark of his eyelids. To fill the hole bright and pure.

He’d always been told the Devil would be a temptation. Would try every trick imaginable to taint him. Turn him wicked. Get him banished and deaf to the word of God. He was trying to resist. Still trying to be good. Trying to feel whole again.

Trying to ignore a hand on his knee. Just resting there. Nothing more. But it was heavy. Fingers brushing around the shape of his kneecap like a whisper. Steve knew he could move. The rest of the pew was empty. He could shuffle along silently and end it. Carry on trying to concentrate on the teachings from the priest up front. He could resist.

Hargrove stopped moving his leg but it still stayed close, pressed firm, knew he had Steve's attention. Anyone could walk back at any moment and see them. Turn their heads and notice. Hargrove didn’t care about things like that. He didn’t want to be saved.

Slowly the spoken word just became a blur of noise, rumbling low under the thumping of Steve’s blood in his veins. Impossible to listen to. The word of God didn’t fill that hole inside anymore. But the Devil did. Hargrove did. Steve never felt so full before. Under those eyes he felt wanted and needed. He felt better than good. The world and its problems melted away, became nothing but ashes. 

Hargrove, Billy, was beautiful and dangerous. Like statues depicting Lucifer. Classical paintings. Daniel in the Lion’s Den. David with the Head of Goliath. Judith Beheading Holofernes. The Crucifixion of Saint Peter. Steve felt beautiful to be looked upon by him. How he used to imagine being seen by God would feel. How he used to imagine just having his prayers heard would feel. Hargrove listened. He listened every time. Every quiet moan. Every stolen sigh. Every bitten off cry. Every swallowed groan. Hargrove knew them all. Steve knew his too. Had felt them all vibrate through his chest when they had been pressed together. Knew what his lips looked like forming them. How his tongue shaped to say pretty boy and amigo. Had looked up every time Hargrove, Billy, made himself comfortable bouncing on Steve's lap and saw nothing but golden light bright through damp curls. Pink lip caught between white teeth so not to be heard. Impossibly blue eyes rolled upwards. Naked from the waist down. Assumption of the Virgin.

Steve opened his eyes to the ceiling. Nothing but grey stone. Cold. Hargrove was nothing but warmth next to him. He rolled his head down to face forward. Didn’t dare look anywhere else. Slowly moved his hand to cup Hargrove’s knee in return over his slacks. More than a barely there touch like so many before. This was intentional. Real. Matched Hargrove’s fingers, cupping around the bone that lay under layers of muscle. Filling the hole inside with something attainable. Something here. Something now. Something that wasn’t only a promise, or a wait and see, or a feeling. 

Something that made Steve feel good. So good it couldn't possibly be wrong.

He felt the Devil's, Hargrove's, Billy's smirk burning against his cheek but didn't turn to see. Stayed looking straight ahead. Stayed looking at stained glass. The Crucifiction. Always looking back. The sacrifice. Always there. Unforgettable. Depicted in every colour imaginable.

If God could create so many colours, so many people, surely there was still room for Steve in some way? Maybe this wasn't the right way for him. Maybe there was something out there that was a better fit. The perfect shape for his hole. To complete his jigsaw.

Maybe, somehow, Billy held that answer. Indirect as could be.

His hand moved slow along the inner seam in Steve's slacks, pressing the thin line of material into his thigh with clear direction and intent. Maybe planning to leave a secret mark. No one turned. No one looked. Even in public, in something so holy, they were safe. Didn't burst into flames. Didn't feel damned for all of eternity. Everything remained the same. Resisting the urge to tremble, Steve followed. Fingers pressing along the inseam against Billy's thick thighs. A silent confession. An admittance. He breathed deep. He wasn't afraid anymore.

God was responsible for everything. We are all made in his image. Not everything is black and white.

They were both good.

~FIN~

[throesofincreasingwonder]

Anything: Saint Sebastian paintings or Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi?

Like just Saint Sebastian painting in general? Ooh, that's a rough one. Because I mean like on one hand Saint Seb was a gay icon in the 19th century and like there are so many very good gay picture of him but like on the other hand I have very strong opinions on Artemisia Gentileschi.. . I'm gonna go with Judith Beheading Holofernes here but like it's close

Make me choose between anything and anything

[studywurfavwasian]

Studyblr Introduction !

Hello everyone! I’ve decided to convert this account into a studyblr! I haven’t really posted anything on here, so this is me writing an introduction for the community :)

Before I get into that I’ll explain why I added a painting without any context. This is one of Caravaggio’s paintings, and it’s called “Judith beheading Holofernes.” I first saw this painting when I was in Grade 10 and I had to study the Baroque era for my music class. We would study all forms of art, and Caravaggio was one of the painters that came up. Interesting fact about him that I learned is that he got so angry after losing a tennis game that he killed the man he was playing against. Anyway, I really like this painting. I think the way that Caravaggio was able to portray facial expressions so perfectly is outstanding, and the contrast between the light and darks are what really draws me in. So I just decided to include it for funsies.

Let’s jump into the introduction now :)

Basics

- My name is Miyuki (i’m going by my japanese name because i think it’ll help me feel closer to my japanese side)

- I’m 18 years old, (19 on February 2nd), and I’m in my second term of my first year of University

- My major is undeclared as of right now since my school has a general first year for all arts students, but I am most likely going to pursue either a Classics or Philosophy degree or a combination of the two. I would really like to do a double major between the two of them, but we will see where it goes!

- I’m an INFP (I don’t know what subtype lol)

- I’m Chinese, Japanese, Irish and German, but I am most culturally Japanese and feel closest to that side of my family

- I live in Canada currently but I would love to move abroad!

Interests and hobbies

- I love to write! I’m currently writing a full length novel that will hopefully be released within the next year or so

- I’m a novice in bookbinding, and I like to make hard cover sketchbooks for my friends and family members

- I play the sims 4, acnh, minecraft and osu

- I like to rug hook!

- Anything art related (painting, drawing, sculpting) I enjoy but I’m not very good at it

- My favourite actors are: Timothée Chalamet, Anya Taylor-Joy, Dakota Johnson (for her lovely personality), Robert Pattinson, Saoirse Ronan, Dev Patel and many more

- I love Kpop and my favourite group is Seventeen. My bias is Vernon, but Minghao is starting to ruin my life so we will see what happens. I also like EXO, BTS, Loona, Blackpink, EXID, Got7 and more! In terms of Western artists I like Harry Styles, Matt Maltese, MXMTOON, and Wallows. I’m a big classical music listener as well.

- I like reading even though I don’t read much

- I play the piano, trumpet, guitar and I sing. I would really like to learn the cello or another string instrument.

- I like art history, art conservation, history in general, and just anything that has to do with the humanities. This reason actually feeds in to why I decided start a studyblr in the first place!

Why did I create a studyblr?

For me, I haven’t always been a good student. I didn’t used to study at all, or even do any of my homework. I also never paid attention in class. I found everything boring and too trivial, so I just droned off and caught up on my own time. As I got older, I started to change how I view school and instead of viewing studying as a means to get good marks I started to look at it as a way to learn more and obtain knowledge.

I became more interested in the humanities. Art, philosophy, classics, history, etc. All of these areas of study became something that I was fascinated with because of their ability to reflect the state of the world and provide me with new perspectives on my life. I started to look at studying as something that is done for me to learn for my own sake.

Anyway, I just wanted to document my journey! I already posted my first picture today :) I can’t say I’m the most artistic, but I do my best and I think that’s what art is all about! 

Blogs that inspire me

I cannot remember any off the top of my head! But I’ll come back and list them as I see them pop up on my feed. (My memory is quite bad!)

I hope everyone is staying safe, and I’d love to make some friends so if you like what I like let’s connect!

[beyondconfessor]

The Infernal Contract

[1/16] Rating: Explicit

Pairing: Lilith/Zelda Spellman

Summary: "I will grant you the additional strength to your magic, but in turn, you must serve me at my request, no sooner or later than I ask."

After signing an infernal contract, Zelda finds that with great power comes unforeseen consequences. What at first seems like a win/win contract soon becomes an addiction, leading Zelda to lie, bespell, and manipulate those she cares about in an order to keep them away from the truth.

N.B.: Also posted on AO3

Zelda only had one addiction in life: cigarettes.

It was more than a necessity. It'd become a part of her everyday ritual, and in some days, her saving grace. More often than not, she would go for a cigarette first before any other tonic or spell. There was nothing like the smoke expanding in her lungs, nicotine rushing through her bloodstream, and giving a sudden, much-needed kick.

And after travelling from Greendale to Rome, she needed a cigarette.  

The royal suite was fitting to Faustus' new status, Zelda thought as she directed the bellboy to set the bags down. The baroque design, gold leaf against autumn tones. Zelda could feel the exhaustion of travel seep away as she moved through the rooms.

Setting the bassinette from her hand to the bed, Zelda looked over to where the supplied cradle was. Judas was asleep for the moment, and as there was no urgency to move him, she allowed him to continue resting in the bassinette.  

"Lady Blackwood?"

Zelda turned to the butler hovering outside of the room and forced a smile. She couldn't say why, but although she held the title of Lady Blackwood, there was still a discomfort to hearing it said.

It'd only been a day, and aside from a brief tussle with Faustus in his office to consummate their marriage, she hadn't done anything to signify the change from Spellman to Blackwood.

"This arrived for you this morning," the butler said, holding out a wrapped gift and a postcard.

Zelda frowned, before taking the gift. It was about the size of a standard ring box, covered in red wrapping paper. Zelda turned it in her hands, wondering if it was another one from Faustus or a belated wedding gift from her family (who had yet to supply one). Faustus had already given her a ring, so she doubted it was him, but it was far less likely to be from her niece.

Taking the postcard from the man, she looked it over. All questions left her as she chuckled at the picture on the postcard's front.

It was Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes.

On the back, in penmanship even she envied, was her name, written as Zelda Spellman, the address of the hotel, and a brief instruction: Wear this until I say otherwise.

Zelda looked to the box and, with her nail, cut through the wrapping paper to reveal a black poisonwood box, its interior containing a velvet pillow, with which a ring sat upon it.

Zelda plucked the ring and turned it over. She could feel the witchcraft humming through it, a faint glimmer in the citrine stone telling of deep enchantment.

Zelda placed the ring on onto her right hand's ring finger, feeling it sit snuggly in place. She didn't feel any immediate change course over her but knew well enough that not all enchantments showed themselves straight away.

"Was there anything else?" the bellhop asked, coming to stand before her again as her eyes flickered over the postcard's print.

"No, that will be all," she said, dismissing him with a wave of her hand.

He paused for a moment until her eyes drew away from the postcard, arching a brow at him. She knew he was waiting for a tip, but her purse was in one of the many bags he'd brought over, and she honestly couldn't be bothered to find it.

The bellhop's lips pinched before he nodded and left. The butler at least had the decency to feign unawareness.  

Zelda turned away, returning to the bedroom where she shut the door and removed her coat, sitting on the end of the bed. She ran her eyes over every inch of the postcard, looking for something she'd missed that would provide further insight, but it was otherwise a generic postcard, likely plucked from the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica where the original painting was alleged to be held.

Could she have meant to meet there?

No, Zelda surmised. There would have been some line towards the effort of meeting or seeing each other soon, but it did imply she was close by.

The very thought hummed through her.

She took the postcard and box, tucking them away with her toiletries. Then she went to her bags and began moving her clothes into the wardrobe, hanging them, so they didn't crease before doing the same with Faustus'. Satan knew he wouldn't, and then he would be in a huff about not setting a good impression because his domestic charm skills were abominable, to say the least.

Most likely as a result of his misogynistic attitudes, but Zelda wasn't going to push him just yet. A man like that required gentle guiding so that he believed he'd come to the idea all on his own. She would only suggest that it was unlike a man of his position to not know how to dress and cook for himself and go from there.

She wondered if Lilith ever had to gently persuade the Dark Lord. If she fussed with His clothes and organised His days around Hellish meetings.

It seemed too shallow for the demoness. More likely, she busied herself with more critical agendas for the Dark Lord.

Like visiting devout brides.  

Zelda shifted through the wardrobe, thinking about how it would be nice to smoke, but it was probably more appropriate to shower and change before Faustus returned from Vatican City. The ceremonies of the anti-pope would likely finalise soon. Something she apparently could not attend due to technically not being apart of the council. Despite being married into it.

No matter. Good things came with time.

She looked over Judas to ensure he was still sleeping, before taking her dressing gown and a towel into the bathroom and undressed from her travel clothes.

In the vanity mirror that sat over the basin, she could see the bruises and bite marks left from her pre-wedding night. No amount of concealer or magic had been able to hide the damned things, and she'd had to attend her wedding looking like a teenage girl after Lupercalia (thankfully hidden from sight under the high collar of her wedding gown).

With everything happening with her family, with Ambrose and Sabrina, the rumours that the Dark Lord himself had blessed the marriage placed some much-needed light onto the Spellman family name –– that was until her niece had publically accused Faustus of murdering the anti-pope at her wedding. It'd taken everything to prevent Faustus from throwing Sabrina's head on the block, too.

Hopefully, when they returned from Rome, his bloodlust would settle.

"Tell me, Zelda, what would you do if I told you it was the Dark Lord's will to extinguish the girl from your life?"

Zelda shivered. She dearly hoped she wouldn't find out, because Zelda knew deep down, to her bones, she would move Heaven, Hell and Earth to protect Sabrina. Even from the Dark Lord himself.

At any rate, it wasn't a problem now, and she had other matters to attend to.

Number one, trying to lessen the marks across her body. Hilda had given her a balm to encourage healing, but so far, it'd done very little in her opinion. Some of the bites had begun to turn purple, but others stubbornly remained a bright red.

The shower was hot against her body, stinging in places where Lilith's teeth and nails had broken skin. Since the other night, she already craved the return of the demoness, more than she wanted a cigarette, more than a whiskey, or even sleep at this moment.

She wanted her mouth on hers, her body pressed up against hers. She ached to look at Lilith and taste her and feel fingers inside her in a way Zelda hadn't felt since her first Lupercalia.

Zelda reached down between her thighs. She could still remember the smell of perfume against Lilith's neck, a faded, but rich scent. How thick and beautiful the woman's hair had felt in her bound hands as Lilith's tongue and fingers worked her through more orgasms in a single night than Zelda had in an adventurous month.

Zelda stroked between her legs, pressing her forehead against the wall of the shower as she felt the pressure growing.

She thought of Lilith's fingers, of how she rode them. Of her mouth and her tongue. Her teeth against her shoulder, the words in her ears, how Lilith had tugged at her hair and ran her fingers across her body and bit and sucked and pulled and thrust and ––

Zelda's eyes opened, gasping at the orgasm shuddered through her. Dropping her hands away, she leant for a moment longer against the wall and then pushed off, leaning back into the shower, feeling the warmth spread through her chest, momentarily satisfied at least.

It wasn't entirely what she wanted, but it would satisfy her for now.

Zelda showered, washing her body and hair, and then climbed out and dried herself off. She dressed in new clothes and accessories and neatly placed her soiled travelling clothes into the hamper set out for the staff to take.

She brushed her teeth, re-applied her face, and blow-dried her hair. By that time, Judas had awoken.

From there, she changed him and fed him and set him down in the cradle to play with his rattle while she flickered through the local newspaper and sat on the balcony with her cigarette to enjoy the afternoon air, at last feeling the tension ease.

It was another hour before Faustus arrived, grinning proudly with himself. "Zelda!" he called, coming out to the balcony. "I have the most excellent news."

Zelda folded the newspaper and looked up at him.

"It's been decided by the will of the Council, that I will be the Anti-Pope."

"Truly?" Zelda asked, feeling a rush of excitement as she rose to her feet before doubt crept over it. "Isn't there usually an election with the other cardinals?"

Faustus adjusted the sleeves of his coat, removing invisible pieces of dust. "Well, I am to be an interim Anti-Pope until such a time, but all the same."

"It is a good sign," she said, smiling.

He gave a sharp nod and a stiff smile in return. Zelda's eyes wandered over the expression, wondering how fragile his echo was to crack under her scrutiny. She drew in the last of the cigarette and then placed the filter out on the ashtray. She'd have to do something about that.

"We should celebrate," Zelda said, stepping forward to make her intentions clear.

"I think that's a good idea," he agreed, a genuine smile returning to his face.

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

Faustus had fallen asleep after sex, tussled in the bed's sheets. Yet, Zelda remained painfully awake, returning to sit outside on the balcony, smoking a cigarette into the evening wind. They'd been in Rome for three days now. Three days of the full honeymoon experience, and Zelda just felt...

The sex had been fair. Enthusiastic, even and passionate where required.

She inhaled the cigarette smoke, feeling the smoke fill her lungs before she exhaled it out into the wind.

Her thoughts were just otherwise occupied in each occurrence. Even at meals, she found herself drifting away as Faustus monologue his plans to reform the Church of Night into the Church of Judas (honestly, that was his grand idea).

She took another drag, before realising she'd reached the filter. Crushing the butt into the ashtray, she sat back and instead pulled the glass of whiskey to her lips.

Zelda didn't compare lovers, it was bad form. To look at a warlock and examine his performance against a succubus to a mortal was unfair. Although they had their similarities, they all approached sex in different ways.

And yet, over the past few days, she found herself comparing. No, that wasn't entirely true. She was fantasising in the middle of sex about someone else.

Setting the crystal glass down, Zelda rose from her chair. The balcony wasn't enough, she needed the fresh air.

Slipping into the bedroom, she dressed, placing on her fur coat for good measure against the evening chill, and gave a last look to the sleeping Judas. He'd been fed and changed recently enough that Zelda doubt he'd awake before she returned. After all, it was only for a short walk.

Taking her purse for good measure, she slipped out of the hotel room to the elevator and pressed the ground floor. Their suite was the top floor of the hotel, which made it all the more annoying when the elevator stopped on the floor directly below theirs. After all, it was nearly dawn, what possible business could a witch or mortal have?

The doors opened, and a woman stood before them. Similiar height, dark hair, and grey eyes. Difficult to say if she was witch or mortal, but whichever it was, she was intentionally staring past Zelda with a sharp smirk on her face.

Zelda ignored the woman in turn, pressing the close-doors button twice with an annoyed huff. She could feel the woman step behind her, a wave of expensive perfume filling the elevator that had obviously been freshly applied. No doubt, the woman was off to meet a lover.

The elevator doors clicked shut and began to head down. Zelda could feel the woman staring at her, however as she flicked her eyes to the mirrors on the sides of the elevator, she could only see the woman leaning against the back wall, playing with her nails.

The woman was dressed in a knee-length form-fitting skirt, stockings, and a pair of heels. She wore a white blouse that's neckline plunged well below modesty, and a thick, woollen coat was cast over her shoulders like an afterthought. If Zelda had to hazard a guess, she'd say the woman was either her age, if a witch, or probably in her early fifties if a mortal.

Were not for the fact that she was recently wed, Zelda would have considered asking the woman for a drink down in the lobby. As it were, she would ignore the pretence and continue on her way to clear her head.

She flickered her eyes to the door as it opened and watched as a man stumbled in. He looked to them both and adjusted his clothes, smiling with a drunken grin as he steadied himself against the wall. He looked like he was at the very end of his evening and reeked of bourbon and cigars.

Zelda found herself longing for another cigarette and wishing the elevator was express.

She looked to the mirror. The woman was now staring at the man like he was dinner. Admittedly, he was rather handsome in a very mortal-like way, though she preferred her men sober, or at the very least, on the same level, she was.

Finally, the doors opened to the ground floor, just as the man began striking up a conversation with the woman.

She left the lobby, listening to the warm, throaty laughter of the woman and exited to the streets of Rome. She had no idea where she wanted to go, but in the cold air, she craved a cigarette all the more.

She walked around the side of the building and looked up to where the balcony of her hotel room. There was a strange sensation in her chest, as if she'd made an awful decision and didn't know how to fix it.

Marrying Faustus shouldn't feel this way. She didn't love him, but the power he offered, especially if he became anti-Pope, was insurmountable. She was so close to everything she wanted, so as long as her niece stayed out of trouble.

Drawing in a deep breath, she moved to her purse and went to pull out a cigarette and her lighter.

The cigarette was easy enough to pluck from its silver case onto her lips, but the lighter was not where she'd thought it had been.

Flicking through the purse, it became apparent the lighter was missing. Zelda realised that she must have left it upstairs. Clipping the bag shut, she lifted a hand to take the cigarette from her lips just as a figure stepped before her.

"Here," the woman said, clicking a lighter in front of her cigarette. Zelda blinked before leaning forward and letting the flame catch at its end. As it lit, she drew in a deep breath and then exhaled the smoke away from the woman's face, looking her over.

"I thought you were off hunting the other gentleman," Zelda said.

The woman smiled. "He didn't seem very fun to play with. But you..." she trailed off and looked her up and down.

"I'm flattered but married."

"Tragic," the woman said before boldly taking the cigarette from Zelda's fingers and stealing a drag for herself.

Zelda's eyes narrowed, but as she went to snatch back the cigarette, the woman pulled away at the last minute and exhaled the smoke, laughing at her before she took another drag and flashed her eyes.

"Honestly," she huffed, deciding then that she would enjoy hexing the woman.

"Relax, if it means so much to you, you can have it back," the woman said, presenting it before Zelda. As Zelda went to take it, the woman slowly moved it out of reach. "But there is just one thing you'll need to do first."

Zelda took a step back to glare at the woman but instead found herself hitting the sandstone wall.

Of course, the woman had manoeuvred into such a position.

The woman leant a hand against the wall above Zelda's head, as the other took another inhalation of the cigarette, effectively pinning her in place. Zelda folded her arms, composing herself, so brunette wasn't aware of the effect she was having on her.

"Do you know how many years it's been since I smoked? Up here, I try to avoid it because it makes me rather homesick, but I do so enjoy that feeling of smoke in your lungs."

"What do you want?" Zelda asked, annoyed by her digression and further annoyed by how the domineering attitude was causing an unfortunate response between her thighs.

The woman smiled at her and leant forward until her lips touched against Zelda's ear. "Tell me you want me, witch."

Zelda's heart pounded as she turned to look at the woman, going from the eyes to the mouth as she realised who this woman was.

Her purse dropping against the cobblestones, Zelda leant forward, closing the gap between them to bring their lips together.

It was forceful and hungry kiss, involving teeth far too soon, before she opened her mouth and felt the demoness's tongue against hers, the taste of magic sparking against the smokiness of tobacco and nicotine. She could feel a hand in her hair, scrunching it up as the woman pressed her against the stone wall.

Then, Lilith's mouth broke away from her and kissed down her throat, nipping at spots until she came to the collar of Zelda's coat. Zelda felt the woman tug the jacket down her shoulders, dropping it to the ground before she returned to kissing over the newly bared skin, fingers undoing her shirt buttons with more decorum than she bothered with last time.

"So you can be gentle with my clothes," Zelda quipped.

Lilith laughed against her throat, running a hand over her breast and tweaking her nipples and making Zelda's knees feel weakened already as she let out a throaty moan and pushed herself into the woman's touch.

It was all so intoxicating. More than opium had been, more than cocaine and all of the other drugs she'd done over her centuries, but she didn't want Lilith to know how much she craved it.

The hand on her breast wasn't gentle. It grabbed and pinched as Lilith's mouth worked over her throat, going over all the marks with untamed ownership as if knowing who'd been there since.

A whine slipped out from Zelda's mouth before she bit it off with a hiss. "I bet you can't wait for me to bury my fingers inside of you," Lilith purred against her ear. "I hope nobody hears how fast you come undone."

Zelda blinked at the night air. The street was quiet, and they were pressed up against a rather dark side of the wall, the nearby lamps not quite reaching them.

A mixture of arousal at the idea of being caught and fear of someone seeing actually finding them squirmed in her belly in turmoil.

And yet, as Lilith's hand had rolled up her skirt and began stroking over her silk underwear, the fear became eclipsed by desire, and it felt as though the whole world was empty save for them.

Zelda's nails dug into Lilith's cloak, pulling her close as she rocked her hips over the fingers, feeling the material between them grow slick with arousal.

She squeezed her eyes shut, willing to not come undone too fast as the mouth sucked against the marks on her neck, and the fingers pressed firmer against her sex. It wasn't easy, and as she buried her face in the woman's neck, she couldn't help but let out a small whine at the touch.

"Miss me?" Lilith asked, kissing higher against her neck.

Zelda nodded and was remunerated with the underwear being jerked down her thighs and a hot mouth against hers. As Lilith began kissing, sucking and biting against her lips, Zelda moaned against her mouth, her breath shortening with the building heat growing low in her belly.

Lilith was right. She couldn't wait to feel those fingers inside of her.

One of Lilith's hands slid over her neck, holding her jaw up, and the other returned to stroking over her sex, against the hood of her clit, and then down until Zelda was trying to slide onto them.

Lilith laughed, pulling her hand back to slide over her labia and not where she needed her.

"Lilith," she groaned into the woman's mouth, feeling a wave lap low in her belly.

"Yes?"

"Fuck me."

"Fuck you?" The hand on her throat tightened, and Zelda was pushed back until the sandstone dragged on her bare ass as Lilith's knee pressed between hers, spreading her thighs apart. She could feel Lilith's mouth part and hold for a moment against hers, a small chuckle vibrating from the woman's chest to her own. "And why would I do that when you haven't done what I asked?"

Zelda's eyes opened as the lips drew away to see what was happening. Lilith was observing her with a strange fascination before amusement cut over the expression.

Zelda wasn't sure of what she was inferring. She could feel the ring on her hand, pressing into her index finger as she clutched at the woman's shoulders.

"Tell me you want me," Lilith said, her voice light and teasing. Zelda's breath hitched as another tremor pulled over her body in anticipation as the fingers played with her sex, hinting at what they could be doing instead.

"I want you," Zelda obeyed and was rewarded with three of Lilith's fingers entering inside of her.

Zelda inhaled, holding back the moan as she felt the pressure continue to grow low in her belly. She rode the demon's fingers, not caring for the scratches from the sandstone on her backside (which, truthfully she didn't mind at all) and held onto Lilith tighter, looking her into her eyes as she grew closer and closer, the hand on her neck holding her firmly against the wall.

Lilith's eyes were obviously not her own, but the glamour didn't hide the desire in them, the absolute fascination of the woman watching her come-undone.

Lilith wanted her, really wanted her.

It made Zelda feel all the more an exhibitionist to her voyeur and was the final piece that caused her to let out a sharp cry as her body rocked with the orgasm, contracting around Lilith's fingers.

"Good girl," Lilith said, and only grinned wider as Zelda glared at her (strangely, the words did cause an adverse effect; nonetheless, she did not appreciate the mockery).

As the muscles eased, Lilith slowly slid her fingers from inside of her, and Zelda pushed back, using the wall to prop herself up as she caught her breath.

Lilith had pulled out a handkerchief from Satan knew where, and began cleaning her hands with a rather annoying cocky smirk.

Drawing in a deep breath, Zelda pulled up her underwear and smoothed down her skirt before trying to fix her lipstick the best she could without knowing how smudged it'd been.

Her eyes drew over to Lilith's hand and then looked to the ground where the cigarette had fallen. Unfortunate, she thought, looking to wear her purse was about five feet away from her. She could go for the rest of that smoke now.

Zelda could feel a need building up inside of her again, but she suppressed it, moving instead to fix her hair.

"Is this what you look like?" she asked Lilith, flicking her eyes over the body.

"No, it's a glamour."

Zelda nodded. She knew, but the type of spell explained the taste of cinnamon on her tongue.

"What are you doing here?" she asked, rolling the taste of cinnamon on her tongue. Now she wanted a whiskey, and that was all the way upstairs.

"If I said I'd come here to see you, would you be excited or repulsed?" Lilith asked.

Zelda didn't know, but there was a pang of guilt that twisted in her belly. She wasn't sure if it was due to Faustus (unlikely) or something else she couldn't put her finger on (far more likely).

Lilith laughed at her, adjusting her coat. "Don't worry, mouse, I have business with the council and knew you'd be here as well."

"Business with- did you just refer to me a mouse?" Zelda asked, feeling outrage rise inside of her. She was many things, but mousy was certainly not one of them.

"Yes. Because you're my shiny new plaything."

"I certainly am not."

Lilith smiled rather cat-like, stepping closer. Zelda held steady, lifting her chin to glare across to the demoness, but as she watched her lean towards her ear, moving to kiss down her throat once again, Zelda's eyes fluttered shut.

A hand had begun to massage and squeeze at her breast as Lilith kissed sweetly back up her throat.

Fuck, came a small, tiny voice deep in her mind.

"Little mouse," Lilith whispered, giving her a last kiss before she pulled away.

Zelda sniffed, brushing her hair back over her throat before she began to button up her blouse again and tuck it back into her skirt. "What business does the Dark Lord have with the council?" she asked.

"You think the Dark Lord cares what a bunch of boring warlocks say? The business is my own."

Zelda stared at her, not entirely believing the words. "They commune with the Dark Lord regularly."

"So they say, anyway," Lilith said with a shrug. "Which reminds me, do congratulate Faustus. I'm sure he must be thrilled in his very prominent position with the Dark Lord."

Zelda shifted on her heels, uncomfortable with the discussion of her husband, as well as irritated by the implications of Lilith's previous statement. "Thank you, I'll be sure to pass on your compliments to him."

"I'm sure you will."

Zelda's eyes narrowed at her, but before she could snap a retort, Lilith was kissing her again. It was sincere and warm against the cold of the night's air, but as sudden as it had occurred, it was over, and Lilith was stepping away.

"I expect I'll be seeing you again soon, little mouse."

Zelda felt the flare of irritation rise again, but Lilith had disappeared into the shadows before she could think of what she wanted to do. Snatching up her coat, she slung it back onto her shoulders and walked over to her purse, taking out her cigarettes, before remembering that she'd left her lighter upstairs.

"Heaven's sake," she whispered and, once again, looked up to the hotel to where her suite was.

Zelda sighed and moved to head back inside, checking her make-up quickly with a hand mirror before she went inside the lobby. The last thing she needed was the hotel staff gossiping about her.

She pressed at the elevator button inside and looked over at the mirror reflection of herself. She certainly looked wind tussled at the very least, and there were new marks on her throat.

Zelda drew a breath and adjusted her clothes, wondering if this was going to be a reoccurring thing.

Satan save her, what was she going to do if it was?

[keeroo92]

Be My Nightmare Ch12

The Precipice

Warnings for rape/non-con, violence/murder and some steamy spice. Enjoy!

Word count - 3,923

~~~~Previous Chapter~~~~

________

The exhibit featured reproductions of some of his favorites. The Blinding of Samson, Saturn Devouring His Son, Judith Beheading Holofernes, and several others. He kept his head tilted low, avoiding the cameras entirely where he could as he made his way deeper into the museum. While the other pieces were sublime, he was here for one reason only.

The murderous artist hid his tattooed hands in his pockets as he entered the room of his target, a small alcove off the main hall of artwork. Not many of the visitors bothered to view this piece, since no well-known names were attached to its creation, and it didn’t merit a large viewing area. Security for it was abysmal, to boot. 

Still, he waited a few minutes to be sure he wouldn’t be disturbed. This was private, not for anyone else to witness. Even his friends remained silent as he approached the wall where the canvas hung, barely two inches to spare on either side.

It always stole his breath to see it. A field of flowers on a mountainside, crimson petals a blanket under the feet of those gathered there. The figures all faced slightly away, so just a profile was visible. The composition hinted at the unreachable, that this group was somehow separate from the viewer. That they existed somewhere most people would never reach.

He recognized two or three faces, but only one mattered to his twisted heart.

Nero.

His friend stood on the edge of the field, a forlorn look on his face as his crystal-blue eyes gazed at the sky. Seeing his face again, even just his own meager attempts to capture it, brought the familiar tightness to his chest and throat. He remembered every stroke of the paintbrush as he crafted his friend’s likeness. 

All for this pale imitation of his kindness...

A rhythmic click broke his thoughts; footsteps. Who could say whose feet they belonged to? He needed to conceal himself, now. Whoever dared to interrupt him would pay the price.

The artist dipped into the shadows, choosing the corner he deemed most likely to be ignored by anyone viewing the artwork. The blade in his pocket greeted his fingertips like a lover, the same blade he used to craft his latest work. It sent a thrilling pulse of adrenaline through him to imagine what he might create here, in the same halls that held such classic works. Perhaps they’d inspire him?

A slim figure entered the room as he raised the blade. Female, with a pleasing shape. Lovely hair, and-

Wait…

Is that…?

It couldn’t be you, what were the odds? In such a vast city, for you to wander across his path was something he never expected. He’d imagined a multitude of ways to draw you out, but for you to simply appear? 

Yet there was no mistaking that face, those pursed lips and furrowed brow. 

“In Memoriam…” you murmured. “Why does each face… that’s odd.” 

V smirked and slid to the next shadow. What an interesting day this was becoming. Perhaps he could accelerate his plans, take the next step today since fate brought you to him? One must never waste opportunity. He licked his lips and stepped closer, lurking behind you like a bodyguard. 

“Hello, Y/N…” he purred.

Your eyes widened as you turned to face him, lips parting in shock. He’d missed that, how expressive your face was. No matter how hard you tried to mask your feelings, he saw them all. If anything, it became easier each time he saw you.

“V? What the hell are you doing here?”

---Reader---

You’d almost forgotten how the murderous artist’s eyes gleamed, the way his lips curled when he was amused. How damned tall he was. The intricacy of his tattoos and the poise with which he carried himself.

What the fuck?! Is he trying to get caught?

“Now what kind of greeting is that? Come now, doctor. Show some courtesy.”

The madman stepped closer, tilting his head to stare down into your eyes. You’d never stood this close to him before, so close you smelled a hint of musk from his skin. It sent a rush of dizziness through you. You worked with killers on a regular basis, why did this one in particular cause such powerful reactions?

He took another step, now only inches away. Your heart pounded in your chest, for what reason you weren’t entirely sure. The whole situation made you want to run away, but equally powerful was the urge to stay and finally solve the puzzle of his mind.

Too close, he’s too close! I have to keep it professional.

You shuffled back, trying to establish a boundary between yourself and the obsidian-haired artist. As if he’d pay attention to such things. Maybe you should just run, leave all this behind and never look back. 

No. You needed to figure him out, you couldn’t bear the thought of walking away now.

“Am I frightening you, dear Y/N?”

He closed the gap. You stepped away again, only to find your spine pressed against the extravagantly paneled wall. No escape: he had you cornered. The only question was what he planned to do next.

A tattooed finger rose to stroke your cheekbone, leaving sparks of electricity behind. You licked your lips nervously, battling the urge to lean into his fingertips. It felt alarmingly good to be touched. Even by the hands of a killer.

Am I losing my mind?

“No,” you finally replied, but your voice shook. Damn traitorous vocal cords.

He smirked and dropped his hand to rest on your shoulder, running his palm down the length of your arm to seize your hand. Logic screamed at you to run, break free and get security, but what had logic gotten you? Suspended and alone, friendless and isolated. Maybe logic wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Yep, I’m losing my mind.

“The truth is obvious in your eyes, my dear. Perhaps one day you’ll even be able to admit it to yourself,” he replied.

The heat of his body withdrew and your hand ached as he dropped it. Disappointment colored his piercing eyes and an apology crept up your throat, begging to be spoken. But why? What did you have to apologize for? You hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Seriously, though. What are you doing here?” you asked. A poorly disguised attempt to change the subject, but you honestly wanted an answer. 

He sighed and gazed at the strange painting, his face twisting into an expression you never expected to see. Guilt.

“I came to remember.”

You followed his eyes to find a white-haired figure in the painting. The very same one that reminded you of his unique style, something about the brush strokes…

No way...

“Did you paint this?”

A wry chuckle slipped from his lips. “Part of it, yes.”

And it’s called “In Memoriam”. Did he lose someone?

Of course. Grief was a powerful emotion, enough to break people or change them beyond recognition. You knew it well. The textbooks didn’t do it justice; the desperation and agony, the loneliness and fear that something would remind you of the loss and shatter you into a million pieces all over again, like taking a sledgehammer to a pane of glass. How every breath you took was one more the other person never would, and how much that hurt to know. Anything that eased the pain was a welcome refuge. 

The artist murmured a few words, so quietly you didn’t hear anything more than the rumble of his voice. In the next instant, you found yourself pinned once again, back against the wall and wrists held in an iron grip on either side. You twisted and writhed but he was too strong; you were helpless and vulnerable with no way out.

Well, almost.

“L- let go of me or I’ll scream!”

A single sentence, and the status quo flipped. No longer was he your patient, no longer were you the one with the power. In the facility, yes, but here? 

He can do whatever he wants to me and I can’t stop him. Shit…

A wicked grin split his face, taunting you with his enjoyment of your distress. He hummed and shifted to press his hips against your thigh, letting you feel the twitching length growing firmer by the second. 

“Why do you resist? What has your endless obedience brought you? Nothing but pain.”

You hissed as his hands twisted around your wrists. The automatic protestations died on your lips; how could you argue with the truth?

“Please, just let me go…” you murmured instead. 

The artist chuckled. “I think not. I’d much rather show you the alternative to your suffering, perhaps teach you to see through the lies of society.”

A quiet whisper echoed from the main hall, footsteps treading past the room you found yourself trapped in. For a moment you considered calling for help, but no sound escaped your lips. 

This can’t be happening…

“Let go, doctor. Surrender and be set free from all that holds you back,” he continued, rolling against you with a quiet groan.

Coils of warmth pooled in your belly at the sound, the first hints of need waking deep within. Your lips parted and heat gathered in your cheeks as he leaned closer, eyes glinting. Hot breath fanned your ear as his mouth neared your skin and a soft whimper slipped from your lips. Completely inappropriate, but how were you supposed to control hormonal responses? It simply couldn’t be done.

“Tell me, my dear. Why do you fear me?”

You thrashed your arms again in a useless gesture of rebellion. Whatever you were feeling, you knew it wasn’t fear. There was an edge of risk to it, a hint of vulnerability and danger, yet you were not afraid.

You were excited.

“I’m not scared of you,” you said. 

“Hmm… even after all I’ve done?” he purred.

More voices nearby reminded you of your precarious location. At any moment, another museum goer might wander in and discover the two of you. Or worse, security. You tried to break free again, but your efforts were in vain.

“Perhaps there’s hope for you yet,” he murmured, and then the murderer’s lips were on yours.

For a moment, you froze. How long had it been since you’d been kissed? Quite a while, but that was irrelevant. What was relevant was the texture of his mouth and the heat of his body, the sharp sound of your surprised inhale and the rough stubble scraping against your chin. 

Fuck! Oh, fuck!

Separating your biological desires from your logical ones was suddenly out of your capabilities. The flicker of heat in your core grew to a scorching inferno as he ran his tongue over your lip, demanding entrance you were powerless to deny. The sheer wrongness of your dancing mouths had your heart galloping and blood rushing in your ears. 

And damn, did he taste good.

The inner voice that guided your steps for years, the one that kept you in control and maintained the mask of normalcy, the force that insisted you could never show your true self…

That which once held such power over you, now seemed so frail and weak.

Playing by the rules and coloring inside the lines, what did it really get you? A job that bored you, false friends and the respect of fools. Nothing worthwhile or truly meaningful, a life devoid of joy and purpose.

Damnit, this wasn’t part of the plan! You were supposed to be whole by now, fixed and undamaged. It was the reason you studied for so many years, worked so hard and spent countless hours searching for new treatment methods. 

You were broken, but you could fix it.

Right?

You fixed murderers; your own life should have been easy. Yet it was the hardest case of all, and you were so tired of pretending. Enough of the lies, enough of the secrecy and hidden agenda. Enough blending in and trying to be like everyone else. 

Enough hiding, enough smiling at every face as if you gave a damn about them. Enough empty words and masked words. Enough doing what you were told, and enough ignoring what you wanted.

Enough.

---V---

That brief taste of your skin seemed so long ago. The palest reflection of everything hidden just below the surface. The full-bodied flavor of your mouth was infinitely more dazzling. 

As he’d requested, his friends were silent. This part was his alone, and they would not spoil it by breaking his concentration. No doubt they’d share their thoughts later on, but for now…

For now, he had you all to himself. The softness of your wrists in his grasp and the scent of your skin had him reeling, each caress of your tongue adding gasoline to the fire of his need. You were teetering on the edge of letting go, he could feel it. All you needed was the right push.

The artist ground against your thigh, easing the ache in his cock by a minuscule fraction. The answering whimper was a thing of beauty, especially when coupled with the twitch of your hips. Images from his fantasies flooded his mind, visions of all the ways you could satisfy him. Mouth and fingers and oh, the velveteen walls of your core…

No! Restrain yourself, she isn’t there yet!

He forced himself to break the kiss and rested his forehead on yours, sharing each panted breath. What a glorious expression you wore, glassy eyed and swollen lips parted. Yes, you were worth being patient and careful. No one else would do.

“You see, doctor? You see how I can set you free?”

The corners of your lips twitched into a sardonic smile. “You say you’ll set me free while you restrain me. You really are insane.”

She’s got a point, pal.

“Hush, Griffon! Not now.”

Despite the infuriating interruption, he couldn’t deny that the mouthy demon was right. His fingers opened, relaxing enough for you to at last break his hold if you desired. A risk, but a necessary one to gain your trust.

Indeed, you jerked away from his grip and glared at him, but he didn’t step back. Freedom wasn’t something he could truly give you.

You had to take it.

With a wicked grin he rolled his hips once again, bracing his arms on either side of you to support his weight. Your hair smelled so good, and just the right length for pulling…

“Fuck!” you whispered.

Then he stepped back, when your voice and body conveyed the need he’d drawn out. 

“You’re free, now. What will you do with it?”

Truly, you were a wonder. Only tiny changes revealed your thoughts; less attentive eyes might not have spotted the hesitation or the hunger in your gaze. Yet the conclusion was inevitable, and as he watched resolve harden those lovely eyes he couldn't help but grin.

“Fuck it,” you growled.

This time it was you who closed the gap, pulling his head down to meet your lips in a feverish kiss. Your hands pawed at his back, begging and pleading for more, and who would he be if he denied you now?

Tattooed fingers took hold of your ass and lifted. Lithe legs wrapped around his waist like a bear trap, forcing your core to meet his painfully hard cock. Sparks jumped from every nerve your hands caressed and flames devoured the last of his restraint as you mewled, tugging on his lip with your teeth.

The artist pinned you against the wall and brought one hand to your waist band. He didn’t hesitate and plunged his digits within, tracing the soft flesh hidden beneath. Positively divine, so soft and warm…

And wet…

He grinned and trailed kisses down your pulse, licking and suckling at the tender flesh as quiet moans spilled from your lips. A single fingernail scraped across your core, gathering the slick fluid as it traveled to the small nub of nerves nearby. 

“You see? You see what a delight it is to claim your freedom?”

“Fuck, please, just-“

He shattered your voice by pressing against your clit and rubbing. The lewd moan that rewarded him might become his favorite sound and he dragged his digit across again to hear it once more. 

Your small hands clawed at his back, hips rotating to rock against his hand. With his nose buried in the crux of your neck, he couldn’t see your face, but every stuttering breath you took guided his motion. A fine sheen of sweat broke out under his lips and he lapped at the salty fluid even as his hand drew more moisture from your body. 

Sinful noises filled the air, a symphony of pleasure his mind would play on repeat for days to come. He traced the silken flesh like it was the most precious canvas in the world, deliberately stroking and pressing into your most sensitive spots. 

“This is but a taste of what I can give you. Imagine it: total autonomy, each choice your own to make.”

“Ah-! Fuck, please!”

He hummed and sank his teeth into your shoulder, simultaneously burying two fingers in your wet heat with a lewd groan. Soon enough, it wouldn’t be just his fingers enjoying the welcoming tightness.

You scrabbled at his spine and keened his name, your legs pulling his hips closer on instinct alone. Obscene gasps and moans spilled form your lips as he curled his fingers and pistoned inside you. A tiny hint of copper leaked where his teeth cut your flesh, the perfect morsel for his depraved soul. 

“Ah-! Shit, I’m gonna-“

“That’s it, Y/N. Break your chains,” the artist hummed.

A final cry, the gentlest of flutters against his fingers. There it was, perfection in ecstasy. He lifted his head to watch your face, twisted in a mix of pleasure and pain.

He’d seen a face like that once before, the day his life changed forever. After the gunshots fell silent and blood soaked the auditorium floor. He was still trapped under Nero’s dead body, desperately trying to appear equally deceased.

A few feet away Becca lied on the floor, mascara-laden tears streaming from her eyes and terror painting her features. Drops of crimson splattered her cheeks. 

One of the shooters approached the poor girl and dragged her into position, splayed out across one of the larger patches of floor. Her blond hair reddened along with her face as the killer’s hands groped at her body. Her sobbing intensified and V’s heart clenched in sympathy.

I wish there was something I could do!

But to intervene would mean his death, of that he was certain. All he could do was bear witness. 

He watched in silence as the shooters took turns, each adding their own marks to her flesh. Not once did she beg for mercy, instead taking their abuse without a word. If only he were so strong…

The leader was last, identifiable by his swagger laden stride and massive weapon. He held the barrel to her neck and unzipped, gloved hands drawing out his hardened length. 

“Don’t worry, Becca. I know how to treat a lady,” the attacker growled.

Indeed, he took the time to guide her forcefully to bliss. His hands teased at her flesh and gently caressed the marks left by his comrades, praise and filthy phrases accompanying his touch. Even as choked sobs still leaked past her lips, moans and whimpers slowly mixed in. 

The artist’s heart broke for her. She was always kind to him, a vague sort of friendliness that was more than most bothered with. She didn’t deserve the cruelty she was receiving.

Nor did she deserve to have her body manipulated until a sharp cry broke through her tears. Only her face and part of her torso were visible, but it was enough. Her features twisted in ashamed pleasure, arms tightening as her spine arced off the bloody floor. Such a tortured expression, he’d never seen.

He closed his eyes, but there was no blocking the sound of the shot that claimed her life moments later.

---Reader---

“God damnit, V…”

Heartbeats after your peak, the artist’s face had lost all expression. He mumbled the same phrase over and over, in the grip of a powerful catatonic episode. Somehow, he didn’t drop you. Thank heavens for small mercies.

“Between two moments, bliss is ripe,” he murmured. Another small blessing – he didn’t shout.

Still. The longer he stayed like this, the more likely someone would wander across him.

And me…

With a few careful wiggles, you extricated yourself from his grasp to stand on the parquet flooring once more. The resistance he gave you was negligible; never had you seen him so helpless.

I could just… go.

He was a killer. He deserved justice, and all you had to do to make sure he got it was walk away. Leave him to his fate, abandon this strange man and let go of your fascination. After what happened, there was no chance he’d end up in your care again. You’d never have to see him for the rest of your life.

“Between two moments, bliss is ripe,” he repeated.

A sigh slipped from your pursed lips. There was still so much about him you didn’t know. To try to help him now would undoubtedly mean the end of your professional career, if it wasn’t beyond repair already. You knew where this road would lead; to death and blood.

But also to answers.

Is the cost too high? Is it worth it?

If only the court sent him somewhere else. Then, none of this would be an issue. The murderous artist would be someone else’s problem and you wouldn’t have to make such a ridiculous choice. Your life would still be on its planned trajectory.

Yet that life held little appeal, now. It was pointless to deny his madness, but equally so to deny the tornado he coaxed to life in your heart. Emotions more powerful than you’d ever experienced, not to mention what his lethal hands could do to your body. A single moment in his presence sparked more curiosity and unanswered questions than a year spent in solitude.

No. there’s no going back now.

With a muttered curse, you tugged his skull down to look at you. This was such a terrible idea. “V, I don’t know if you can hear me, but you can’t stay here.”

No response, as you’d expected. Plan B, then.

You took his hand and led him into the shadows, away from the beautifully painted canvas and bright display lights. It was fortunate he liked black, or the darkness wouldn’t hide him so well.

“Between two moments, bliss is ripe.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. C’mon, sit down.”

With a little prodding, he managed to take a seat on the floor. Time to get to work.

His glassy eyes refused to follow your finger, but his breathing sounded fine and there was no evidence of a seizure. Gentle taps resulted in appropriate twitches. Heartbeat normal. Physically, the man seemed completely fine.

Okay, all I have to do is wait and he should come out of it eventually.

Considering the last time he had one of these episodes, it lasted over an hour, you settled in beside him. Your jacket made a decent blanket and it was dark, hopefully enough to conceal you from prying eyes.

If it wasn’t, you knew you’d pay the price.

~~~~Next Chapter~~~~

[2dtcnjspring]

Emphasis/Focal Point

Focal point

Focal Point refers to the area of an artwork that demands a viewer’s attention. This is usually the subject of the artwork.

Intelligent placement of focal points can positively affect the overall composition of an artwork. Creating focal points in your artwork is one way to be in control of how your artwork is viewed.

There are very few artists or designers who do not want people to look at their work. Impasse centuries when pictures were rare,  Almost any image was guaranteed attention. Today with photography and the abundance of books, magazines, newspapers, signs, social media, the Internet, etc. all of us are confronted daily with hundreds of images. we take this abundance for granted, but it makes the Artist job more difficult. Without an audience is attention, any message, any artistic or aesthetic values, are lost.

How does the designer catch a viewers attention? How does the artist provide a pattern that attracts the eye? Nothing will guarantee success, but one device that can help is a point of emphasis or focal point. This emphasized element initially can attract attention and encouraged if you were to look further.

Even in purely abstract or non-objective patterns, a focal point will track the viewers eye and give some contrast and visual emphasis. There can be more than one focal point. Sometimes secondary points of emphasis are present that have less attention value than the focal point. These are called accents. However the designer must be careful. Several focal points of equal emphasis can turn the design into a three ring circus in which the viewer does not know where to look  first. interest is replaced by confusion: when everything is emphasized, nothing is emphasize.

Édouard Manet,

Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets,

1872. Royal Academy of Arts, London, England.

There are several devices that artists can use to ensure that subjects are seen in an artwork.  These subjects become the focal point(s) in the imagery.

EMPHASIS BY CONTRAST One way to create a focal point is through the use of contrast. Any type of difference in imagery will result in that element becoming a focal point. Difference or contrast can come in many different forms.  Color, value, texture, shape, and form can all create contrast.  By combining elements, you can increase the contrast that is created, thus strengthening the focal point.

Very often in art the pictorial emphasis is clear, and in simple compositions, such as a portrait, the focal point is obvious. But the more complicated the pattern, the more necessary or helpful a focal point may be in organizing the design. As a general rule, the focal point results when one element differs from the others. Whatever interrupts overall feeling or pattern automatically attracts the eye by this difference. The possibilities are endless:

-When most of the elements are dark, a light form break the pattern and become the focal point.

-When almost all the elements, whether light or dark, are vertical, a diagonal element is emphasized.

-In an overall design of distorted expressionistic forms, the sudden introduction of a naturalistic image will draw the eye for its very different style.

-When many elements are about the same size, similar but unexpected smaller ones will become visually important.

-When the majority of shapes are rectangular and angular parallelograms, round shapes stand out.

This list could go on and on, many other possibilities will come up. Sometimes this idea is called emphasis by contrast. The elements a contrast with, rather than continues, the prevailing design scheme becomes the focal point. Color is an element often used to achieve emphasis by contrast. A change in color or a change in brightness can immediately attract our attention.

Ceri Richards,

Major-Minor Orange Blue, screenprint, 1970.

John Baldessari The Duress Series: Person Climbing Exterior Wall of Tall Building/Person on Ledge of Tall Building/ Person on Girders of Unfinished Tall Building 2003

EMPHASIS BY ISOLATION A variation on the device of emphasis by contrast is a useful technique of emphasis by isolation. Whenever one object or element is separated from a group it becomes isolated and in turn, becomes a focal point.

John Trumbull, The surrender of Lord Crornwallis, oil on canvas, 1787-94. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

In the painting by Eakins the doctor at the left repeats the light value of the figures in the operating arena. All of the figures in this oval stand out in contrast to the darker figures in the background. An extra emphasis is giving to this doctor at the left by isolation.

Thomas Eakins, “The Agnew Clinic” 1889, Oil on canvas, 6′ 2 1/2″x10′ 10 1/2″

Something to think about is that a focal point place too close to an edge will have the tendency to pull the viewers eye right out of the picture.

Placement

Objects that are placed in the center of the picture plane or near center, will naturally become a focal point. Most of the time, a focal point that is not exactly center is preferred. By placing an object or element just off center, you can create a focal point through placement without affecting the aesthetics of the work.

Judith Beheading Holofernes 1598–1599. Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome

The placement of elements and the design may function in another way to create emphasis. If many elements point to one item, our attention is directed there, and a focal point results. A radial design is a perfect example of this device. Just as all forms radiate from the convergent focus, so they also repeatedly lead our eyes back to the central element. The central element may be like the other forms in the design, but the emphasis results from the placement, not from any difference in character of the form itself. Radial designs are more common in architecture or the craft area than in two dimensional art. In pictures perspective lines can lead to a point of emphasis and the result can be a radial design.

The placement of the most famous apple of all time is also near the center of the composition below. This is a busy, crowded painting and the passing of the Apple takes place at the intersection of the tree trunk and the lines formed by the arms of the Adam and eve. The composition has an equal balance to the left and right of the focal point and the key element is emphasized.

Lucas Cranach the Elder, “Adam and Eve” 1526, Oil on panel, 46 1/8x31 3/4″

CONVERGENCE

A fourth way to create a focal point in artwork is to use implied lines to direct a viewer’s eye to an object or element. This technique is known as convergence.

Mary Cassatt, The Letter, oil on canvas, 1890-91.

DEGREE OF EMPHASIS

A specific theme night at times call for a dominant even visually overwhelming and focal point. Do use of a strong visual emphasis on one element is not unusual.

In the graphic design of newspaper advertisements, billboards, magazine covers, and so on, we often see an obvious emphasis on one element. This can be necessary to attract the viewers eye and present the theme or product in the few seconds most people look casually at such material.

The very large scale X in the example below is also a bright white against a dark background that is primarily photographic. It is an immediate focal point, attracts attention to the page, and also conveys an idea of the theme of the article. A focal point, however strong, should remain related to any part of the overall design. The X is visually dominating, yet is related to other elements in placement and character.

In general, the principle of unity and the creation of a harmonious pattern which related elements is more important than the injection of a focal point if this point would jeopardize the designs unity.

THE UNUSUAL Another way to create a focal point in artwork is to introduce an object or element that is unusual to the scene. This object will stand out and demand attention thus creating a focal point.

ABSENCE OF A FOCAL POINT A definite focal point is not a necessity in creating a successful design. It is a tool that artists may or may not use, depending on their aims. Many compositions have an ambiguous emphasis, and different viewers will see different elements at the most important.

Robert Weaver, To Be Good Is Not Enough, When You Dream of Being Great, Poster advertising classes at the School of Visual Arts, New York.

A definite focal point it’s not necessary in creating a successful design. It is a tool that Artist may or may not use, depending on their aims. And Artist may wish to emphasize the entire surface of a composition over individual elements.

Mark Lombardi, George W. Bush, Harken and Jackson Stephens c. 1979-90, graphite on paper, 1990.

Sometimes the artist theme might such as the absence of a focal point. And Andy Warhol painting there are a hundreds repetitions of precisely the same image with no change, no contrast, and no point of emphasis.  But the repetitive, and relieved quality is the basic point and dictated the design. The painting contains a serious comment on our taken for granite daily lives. The design reflects life today, where we are bombarded with insistent and strident repetition of the same commercial images over and over. On a lighter note, it may also be commenting on the remarkable similarity of taste in every can of the beef noodle soup!

Some art forms by their very nature rule out the use of a focal point. Woven and printed fabric Generally have no focal point but consist of an unstressed repetition of a motif over the whole surface. A focal point on draperies, bedspreads, or a upholstery might be distracting. Including a focal point is provided by the design of the garment. Since the focal point is such a common artistic device, sometimes attention can be gotten by simply not using one. Consider a quilt, generally there’s no dominant element in a quilt. instead we are intrigued by the pattern of compelling items, with similar emphasis. Attention is dispersed throughout the grid of the quilt rather than on one particular focus.

_________________________________________________________________

What Kind of Focal Point do the following works have?

Allison Elizabeth Taylor,

Hank

, wood and wood stain on panel, 2007. James Cohen Gallery, New York

Zak Prekop, Untitled, oil on canvas, 14 x 18 inches, 2010. Courtesy the artist and Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL

Michelle Grabner’s paper weavings

Henning Bohl

Michele Abeles, plant, hand, paper, table, lines, numbers, archival pigment print, 26 x 31", 2009. Courtesy the artist

Nick mauss, Untitled, ink on paper, 26 x 19", 2007. Courtesy the artist and Gallerie Neu

Vlatka Horvat, To Go On (Around) (12), collage mounted on book binding board, 10 x 8", 2010. Courtesy the artist.

Darren Bader, part of installation for MOMA PS1 stairwell, dimensions variable, 2007. Courtesy the artist.

Homework

Emphasis and Focal Point Create 1 large scale image and you will have a couple options on how you can approach this assignment that utilize ONE of the Emphasis/Focal Points devices discussed in this lesson.

If you decide on making this a more hands on project, you will create it by putting together two pieces of bristol paper OR computer paper (depending on what you have available). 

If you decide on making your project completely digital, your minimum dimensions will be 11x17″.

This project must be collage heavy (whether digital collage using Photoshop and/or Illustrator OR hands on collage OR both) and be primarily black and white (very little color allowed - think back to Ellen Gallagher’s work). Additional materials used are limited to black and white magazine clippings, printed material, photographs, paint, ink, markers, micron pen and or graphite.

Make sure to activate the background and fill the white of the page in an interesting manner.

Charline Von Heyl’s work for further inspiration:

Charline Von Heyl collages

STUDENT EXAMPLES:

[centralkvetchmonolith]

Weird phenomenon: when ppl haven't read Livy/niche Shakespeare poems nor seen one-act plays about suicidal authors that their aunt wrote, and therefore don't know who Lucretia is, and they make jokes about Lucretia paintings Ironic phenomenon: when you yourself, who are aware of the implications, are like "haha yeah why does she look so sad" because you haven't looked at the title of the painting yet

[alexjoblingdvp]

Digital Video Production Week 3 30/9/19

Lighting

Three Point Lighting- This technique is a commonly used method within film which consists of a system which forms the basis of most lighting. Three point lighting is a key component to understanding all lighting.The technique uses three lights called the key light fill light and back light. Naturally you will need three lights to utilise the technique fully, but the principles are still important even if you only use one or two lights.

Key Lighting- This is the main light which will be the most influential in the scene and show the strongest of lights. This will however create shadows.

Fill Lighting- This lighting is a backup to the key lighting, it is used to counteract any shadows that the key will create and will be placed opposite to create an even amount of light within the scene.

Back Lighting-  Unlike the others, this type of lighting will be be shown directly onto a subject for the scene. It will illuminate from behind to create subtle features be more noticeable. It helps to provide more depth between the cameras and the subject.

Cinematography

The inspiration behind cinematography has been around for hundreds of years in the appearance of art. Painting were a brilliant way for artists to express themselves and show what they saw by portraying it through their perspective on a canvas. Rembrandt is a good example of inspiration for movies which I will discuss further. He was known to be the master of light and shadow by the creation of his paintings which give them a real life visual affect which is mesmerizing.

These artists had a heavy impact on film making, an example would be Martin  Scorsese who is a world known director for his films such as ‘The Taxi Driver’ and ‘ Goodfellas’. His work has been created upon Caravaggio paintings with the dark overtone and a serious and tense atmosphere surrounding it. In my opinion I think this edgy vibe the movies give off are what makes them such excellent pieces of directing. As Scorsese has been around for a while, many of his good films are older which means the cameras weren't as high tech as today. That being said some of the shots he produces in the films summarizes  his brilliance and how close to paintings they were and how good these artists actually were.

Task 1+2

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00hqprn

In the link above, there is an interview with Scorsese that discusses how his movies have been influenced by Caravaggio and more specifically the lighting,shadowing and realism.

He was introduced to the artist by the writer of the movie taxi driver Paul Schrader. He told Martin to look at him and he then began to love his paintings. He loved the use of colour and that movies may be black and white instead of full colour as they are still a combination of colours.

In this painting ‘The conversion of St Paul’ It is displaying Paul as being inferior and not the main focus point. He is being portrayed to be vulnerable with the dark shadowing being pushed onto him. In the interview Scorsese says ‘The horse is being made to be the image, the composition is brilliant and I must say moving’ I completely agree with his perspective as the painting has such attention to detail and accuracy of shadowing and lighting that it could even be a photograph. The painting’s features are excellent as they are being focused onto the horse whilst not excluding Peter from the scene. It creates a dark atmosphere to the painting and a cinematic overtone to it. This is a perfect example of the inspiration that has resulted in Scorsese’s work.

These images are of The calling of Matthew painting in 1599 by Caravaggio and then a scene from Goodfellas in 1990 by Martin Scorsese. Immediately you can see the similarities between the two with the composition. In Caravaggio’s the scene is a group of people sitting around a table in what appears to be a negative atmosphere and they are sitting in darkness but there is also natural lighting coming through a window by sunlight which is beaming onto them. I love this aspect of the painting as it is over 400 years old and has such detail to shadowing. It is pure excellence in my opinion and the fact that someone who created this so long ago and can still have such an impact on modern film. The second image in my opinion is a modern version of Caravaggio’s painting as the scene consists of a dark room with no lighting apart from one light in the center of the image giving that eery effect to it. Scorsese has used this inspiration very well as you can see the outcome of it and how he has used the same techniques and applied them to his work. The people are both sitting around a table in the dark and it is a negative influence. There is not a main focus point but the image still as a whole can be considered the focus. The shot type is also a factor between the two as they are both at a medium distance to see their upper bodies with a brief view of some lower body, provoking attention to that area.

With the analysis of both images, Scorsese has took the best out of Caravaggio’s work and applying it to his own. The dark and shadow aura that is applied to the films is what his movies are based around and make them into such edge of seat creations. The art of light and composition does not change as you can see from artists excluding Caravaggio also. Shot type and lighting can play a serious role on the mood of a scene and allow the viewer to feel a particular emotion associated with it.

Task 2

The Night Watch , Rembrandt 1642

This is a painting called ‘The Night Watch’ which was made in 1642 by Rembrandt. It consists of many men figures which are standing in what appears to be a town hall. The name of the painting suggests that it is associated with violence. More evidence to support this is a substantial amount of weapons in the painting with muskets and spears being the main focus of the image. The contrast of shadowing is well done as you can see the background having a more negative impact on the image where as the foreground has a brighter overtone contrasting with the figures in the image. The lighting has been placed to appear as sunlight coming through a window and shining onto them. Rembrandt has included some diversity within the painting through the various outfits the men are wearing. It is shot with a long shot to set the scene and capture the correct emotion. In my opinion I feel that the scene that is being set is the confirmation of an attack. A town hall in the 17th century would generally be used for trials or meetings with the locals which indicates that they are using the weapons for a violent reason. However, this adds to the cinematic effect making it dramatic and adding tension to the scene. I feel that Rembrandt has set the scene this way deliberately to create a mysterious yet curious effect to the painting. It has contrasting features but the viewer will not know what is fully ongoing within  the image.

Judith and Holofernes, Caravaggio 1599

I chose this painting by Caravaggio to discuss as it is not always one that would be discussed often and it is one that caught my eye during research. In contrast to Rembrandt you can immediately the relation between the two with the shadowing and composition. In the scene, it is showing a man getting beheaded by a woman in a dark room. They are the main focus of the painting but as you pay attention to it and look at the finer details you can see another male in the image who has a more aggressive look to him. With the expression on his face it gives you impression he is angry and suggest maybe is happy the other male figure is being executed. In my general opinion, I like this painting as I can visualize what this scene would look like in modern film and the emotion attached to it. As for the cinematic perspective to this painting, It can be attached to directors work like Scorsese for example as the previous painting has similarities to his work. Developing this, the people who are within the scene are made the focus point and the backgrounds are usually blurred or made plain as to draw attention away from them. The lighting is being put onto the two main people involved with this putting the intended attention on them. It has been framed to where you can see the distress in the mans face and the concentration of the woman. With the painting, I feel that Caravaggio was attempting to create an explicit yet time related environment. It is a situation you would not want to witness but this is the reality of the 17th century. This gives the viewer that spine chilling effect whilst creating a brilliant piece of work.

After we had spent time researching these artists and the modern day cinematography associated with them, we attempted to make our own modern recreation of paintings using photography:

Martha and Mary Magdalene (Caravaggio) 

With this painting, as a group we decided we wanted to modernize the image to apply it in today's society. We took the main components of the painting and applied it to our own photograph. An extra detail which may be subtle yet effective is the use of clothing over the chair and monitor. I feel that we have paid attention to detail and used the cinematography methods correctly to create this image.

Members of the Drapers Guild (Rembrandt)

This photograph was a bit more complex to create as it involved a lot of positioning which we wanted to make as accurate as possible within our own twist. We each had our own role to play and maintain our pose. We wanted to take this seriously also so we incorporated some LED lights and adjusted the CBK to give it a more warm composition recreating the painting well.

Task 3 - A Matter of Life & Death + Black Narcissus

In the image below which was shown to us with a presentation by our tutor is a still image from the movie Black Narcissus which is showing a Nun stnading over the edge of a what is most likely a church. The scene is implementing the use of high angle to show the subject but on a smaller scale to show the actual proportions of what lies beneath her. She is placed within the left side of the shot giving the majority to the valley which irradiates how big it actually is. It is a good shot in my opinion as the character must be feeling some emotion of breathlessness and being nervous. They have created it in this manner to allow the viewer to have empathy for her which causes us to feel similar emotions.

A Matter of Life and Death

In comparison to the previous film, I have chosen this particular screenshot from the 1946 film ‘A Matter of life and death’ as it has the same use of a high angle but in its own unique form. You are able to see a man standing on a ledge looking around him with many people below him which ties in with that sense of empowerment. They have set the scene like this for a reason to show his importance within the scene. The unique ability with this shot is to not make the subject appear inferior but to centralise him and to make the camera appear to be from the perspective of someone behind him.

Task 4 Vermeer & Tom Hunter

Pictured above are two images sourced from a presentation show to us by our tutor of a comparison of the two. In the first image is a painting called ‘A girl reading a letter at an open window’ Which was painted by an artist called Johannes Vermeer in 1657-59 estimately. It is showing an image of a woman looking down at a letter in a bedroom which appears to be almost empty which sets the tone of the overall painting. Straight away you can see her emotion is negative which is in align with the mood that has been set. The visual you get is that she is poor and has been given bad news with a letter. The painting as a whole is well made as the colour is contrasting well and is dark shadows with the open window being a natural light source which may represent hope to the subject.

As for the photograph, it is shot by a photographer called Tom Hunter who is London based and is most popularly known for recreating classical paintings such as this one. In the recreation of this painting, I can straight away see his approach to it which was to apply the same techniques as Vermeer but apply it to modern society. Taking this point further, you can see instead of a fruit pile it is a baby which could mean that the father of the child has wrote this letter to tell her he is leaving. It could also be an eviction notice as her living conditions look poor and London is quite notorious for having council estates. I feel that Hunter has recreated this painting brilliantly and has applied his expertise to create an accurate representation of the painting. The clothes are dark and gloomy aswellas the room being dirty with the window frames. Again only showing a light source from the window.

https://tarthead.com/2012/03/12/giving-a-horses-ass-carracci-vs-caravaggio/

https://arthive.com/topics/articles/8858

http://mentalfloss.com/article/67050/15-things-you-should-know-about-caravaggios-calling-st-matthew

http://www.dutchamsterdam.nl/139-rembrandt-night-watch

https://theculturetrip.com/europe/italy/articles/10-artworks-by-caravaggio-you-should-know/

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michelangelo_Merisi_da_Caravaggio_-_Martha_and_Mary_Magdalene_-_73.268_-_Detroit_Institute_of_Arts.jpg

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Syndics_of_the_Drapers%27_Guild

[amorremanet]

Seb: 07, 43, 48; Pete: 02, 29, 38; Margot: 22, 35; Lucy: 08, 40?

“get to know my characters” meme — and after a day that got unexpectedly stressful, I fell asleep on my keyboard while finishing this last night, but here we are.

02. What is one of your character’s biggest insecurities? Are they able to hide it easily or can others easily exploit this weakness?

Long story short: Pete’s biggest insecurity changes constantly, but the underlying fear is whether or not he’s completely unlovable, or if he’s only going to be loved if he changes literally everything about himself or massively censors his entire personality and spends the rest of his life pretending to be someone he’s not, the way he’s done for most of his life, in all kinds of contexts, from, “Playing up certain parts of his personality to the point of borderline distortion because it made people like him in high school”

…to, “Developing a problem with substance abuse for several reasons, many of which are at best complicated and messy, but one of them was that faking for other people’s benefit/approval felt a lot less awful and soul-destroying when he was sufficiently intoxicated, and if he got into what he called the, ‘Golden Zone’ of intoxication, then he could effectively pretend that some other, ‘better’ Pete who everybody likes better had come in and taken his place”

From, “Faking for his abusive shit paternal Grandmother because she was one of the few family members who didn’t compare Pete to his older brother constantly, so if he had to lie about everything and hate himself to keep her love, then so be it”

…to, “Lying to his parents about most things as a kid, because his dad was a nasty piece of work who berated his children for most of their interests and passions, berated them when they didn’t do well enough by his impossible, unreachable standards, punished them for some of their interests (meaning that he did things like destroying Salt n Pepa CDs that Pete had saved money for himself because Dad Arden didn’t approve of rap music), and punished them for lying but at least you could buy a bit of a lull in everything by faking like you were the model child he thought he wanted”

All of which can zero in on all kinds of different parts of Pete’s overall being, from his hair to his low tolerance for frustration to his dislike of being emotionally vulnerable to his weight or how his body looks

The mutability of his insecurities is actually one of the biggest things that gives Pete some protection here, which is a good thing because it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that he totally does care what people think of him. It takes paying more attention than his brother does, but even that isn’t especially hard because Jimmy and Pete are both guilty of taking each other at face-value. But have fun trying to pick out which specific part of himself Pete doesn’t like today.

07. Is there a catchphrase or sound that they tend to make a lot (likely without being aware of it)?

I don’t know that I’d call it a catchphrase exactly, but Sebastian says, “I don’t know” an awful lot. Which is sometimes fair enough, because he often doesn’t know things, but at the same time, he also says it by way of devaluing his own feelings on a not-irregular basis, so. There’s that.

He also says, “What’s the point?” and, “What’s the use of [fill in the blank]?” rather often, which is equally reflective of his problems, just different ones. In this case, the pervasive sense of helplessness and hopelessness that he hasn’t pegged as a symptom of depression until mid-morning of the day when he first turns into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man because of, tl;dr, internalized ableism.

08. What is, perhaps, their biggest flaw? Are they aware of this or oblivious to it?

Lucy’s biggest flaw is probably her habit of putting her ideas, ideals, and desires before those of other people, even when she’s trying to help.

Like, when I said that her Deadly Sin would be Gluttony, I had to clarify that I don’t mean Gluttony solely in the sense of eating all the things (which is a reductive understanding of the Deadly Sin that completely misses why it’s supposed to be a Deadly Sin, from a theological standpoint, and is pretty fucked up, from a humanistic standpoint, because it tries to make blanket statements about what all people should or shouldn’t eat, based on presumptions that can’t and don’t apply to everyone, which isn’t fair to anyone or actually going to help).

(Plus, historically speaking, the Catholic Church and some of the different Protestant denominations have used that definition of Gluttony to essentially shame poor people for wanting to eat because ~lmao if u were meant to have food, God would have given you food, duh doi!!~)

So, yeah, Lucy’s Deadly Sin is Gluttony because of how she willfully doesn’t listen in situations where she should, because she has such a strong moral compass and such strong commitment to her ideals that it can overwhelm her better judgment and lead to her doing shit that might work out in the short-term but that could create more of a mess down the line (and sometimes only doesn’t create that mess because she doesn’t get caught breaking the rules, or she manages to contain the mess before it spreads, or similar), because she goes, “DON’T WORRY, I TOTALLY GOT THIS!!” when she totally does not have this because she’s so determined to save everyone on her own or to at least play a major role in the saving people thing, because she wants to be a hero and doesn’t usually stop to think about what that means until after she’s already done something, because she’s doesn’t usually interrogate her ideas about The Greater Good or ask the right kinds of questions about what that means, and so on.

TL;DR: a lot of the less-than-positive aspects of why she’s such a little Gryffindor are why her Deadly Sin is Gluttony, and collectively, they make up her biggest flaw. She could stand to be more aware of this, but she’s also 23 and relatively sheltered, so she has a lot to learn in general

22. What kind of tattoos, piercings, birthmarks, freckles, and other such unique physical features do they have?

Piercings: Two in each ear, a “snakebite” set of lip piercings (option number four on this chart, the “two rings in the lower lip, around the locations of your canine teeth” one), and one in her left nipple.

She used to have nose ring and a septum piercing for a while, but she got sick of turning her septum ring up into her nostrils while at work and didn’t like any of the, “more professional” options for the side-of-the-nose piercing, so those holes closed up a while ago.

Strictly speaking, Margot isn’t entirely fond of the, “more professional” options for her lip piercings, either, but she’s a bit happier with wearing small, classy-looking studs on her lips than she was with wearing them in the fold of her nose, where it gets hard for people to tell if you have something on your nose or just a piercing.

Tattoos: She’s not quite as inked up as Sebastian, but yes, she does have tattoos.

Around her right ear and dropping onto her neck, she has a noose where the loop in the rope is shaped like a heart

On her left bicep, she has a Winnie the Pooh (Disney version, as opposed to the version from EH Shepard illustrations) that matches Seb’s tattoo of Tigger

“The two of you do quote-unquote, ‘extralegal imports’ — read: playing middleman to various smuggling operations — because you [*pointing at Margot*] won’t just let him (or really his parents) pay your tuition, and you [*pointing at Seb*] just nearly died six weeks ago because you took PCP and decided to fight five fucking skinheads at once — yes! I know you intervened to save the kids they jumped outside the bar but you got shot and you’ll understand why I might be a bit upset about that still! — and you just…… Neither of you notices any kind of oddity or disconnect here? Like, both of you can just shift, without missing a beat, from all that to making Todd take dorky pictures of you so you can show off your matching Winnie the Pooh and Tigger tattoos on Myspace and Facebook?” — Pete, right after Seb and Margot did that thing exactly, c. mid-September 2006.

She has a lower back tattoo of Judith beheading Holofernes, based on Artemesia Gentileschi’s painting of that scene

She has a clutch of violets on the inside of her left wrist (she’s thought about adding a line or two from Sappho to it, to make it more obvious why she has this tattoo, but she hasn’t been able to pick which lines, and as Pete’s pointed out, it might not be more obvious to most people)

And on her left ankle, she has the, “Darwin fish” variant of the Ichthys symbol (but without the word, “Darwin” in the center of it), with the subtitle, “this is not a ghoti” (the idea for which she totally and knowingly ripped off from René Magritte’s La Trahison des Images — the, “this is not a pipe” painting — and mashed it up with an alternate spelling of, “fish” that is only possible because English is a bullshit language)

Freckles, etc.: She does freckle in the sun, but they’re mostly faded at present because she doesn’t get a lot of sunlight. More noticeable is the mole on her left cheek, and the mole on her back, by her right shoulderblade.

29. What is one of the most courageous things your character has ever done for a loved one?

If asked, Pete would probably tell you that he is a grade-A selfish bitch who has never done a single courageous thing for anybody ever in his entire life and he is offended that you would even suggest such a thing

This is absolute nonsense, and the general response that he gets to it (at least from Seb, Stephen, and Margot) is, “*nods* Of course not, honey. Do you want your eggs sunny-side up today or something else?” or, “*nods* Of course, Pete. I’m sure that the people you’ve ever helped just imagined that” — so, deadpan at him and let him get it out of his system until he’s calmed down

Because he’ll be fine if you just let him get this shit out of his system and calm down, instead of trying to argue with him like Todd does

In fairness to Pete, though, this isn’t entirely coming out of him trying to overcompensate for his messy feelings re: self-worth. Part of this comes out of how his particular approach to being courageous isn’t always one that’s easily understood as such, because of how people tend to devalue things like emotional labor and more understated visions of bravery and being there for someone. So, it’s not right, but he’s working based on the ideas he’s been raised around

But some examples of Pete’s brand of courageousness for his loved ones include, but are not limited to:

Deliberately breaking one of his Dad’s old trophies in order to draw attention off of his big sister Cora, because she was sixteen and she’d just gotten dumped and the last thing that she needed was Dad Arden digging at her about everyone, and Pete was willing to be the scapegoat instead

Standing by Seb during the fiasco that ensued after he took the fall, outed himself at Catholic school, and made it sound like he’d seduced an unwilling Damian, rather than how they were actually dating on the sly — and more than just giving up most of his own popularity to stand by his friend, Pete did it without outing Damian, which was a lot of effort for him because he really wanted to do the “spiteful but satisfying” thing instead of the, “probably less wrong” thing

(Granted, Pete doing the right thing in this situation was less out of any moral or ethical objections to outing people, because he’s generally against it, yeah, and these days, he would probably smack his 18-year-old self for even thinking about it doing it.

But if you’d asked Pete for his opinion at the time, Damian threw his right to ask for consideration out the window when he decided to help spread it around the grapevine that he’d been totally unwilling in all of this when he’d usually been the one going, “Oh, who cares that we could get caught, just kiss me already” while they dated.

Really, Pete didn’t out Damian mostly out of loyalty to Seb — because it was important to him not to out Damian, since his parents were bad enough and his uncle was their school’s priest — and knowing that he wouldn’t want to get outed at Catholic school either)

Going with Margot during the one incident where Seb dropped off the radar and Todd eventually found him in the vicinity of a gutter, because she was enough of a mess that she really shouldn’t have been out looking on her own. After Todd found Seb and middle brother Ambrose dragged him up to their parents’ place, Pete then went to Seb’s place with Margot, again so she wouldn’t need to be alone.

Granted, he was high himself, and drinking from a hip flask while talking about how Seb had a problem, and she eventually kind of lost it and chewed him out for that, but:

1. Pete still tried to be there for her during a Really Bad stretch, when he really needed someone to be there for him too and unfortunately, the person he most wanted to be there for him was Seb, so…… that was a mess;

and 2. high and drinking though he was, Pete was also trying to moderate it and only get intoxicated enough to not start detoxing or be non-functional, which was a hard balance to find and something he only would’ve done for a handful of people

and going to rehab. Also, admitting that he needed help more generally, but going to an inpatient rehab took a lot of courage for Pete because there were a lot of reasons why it sounded like Hell on Earth to him.

35. Is your character afraid of death? If they got to choose how to die, how would they want to go?

Margot…… has a messy relationship with her fear of death. Like, she is afraid of death, and when she tries to sound tough, she says that her only fears are fear itself, “the crushing inevitability of death,” hypothetically being rejected by any of Seb’s dogs, and the possibility that the Loch Ness Monster might be real.

Which are, in order: a lie (Margot thinks fear is useful and valuable, its entire purpose is to help keep you from dying, so shut up and be grateful that your ancestral beings developed the capacity to feel fear) (which, context, she says as someone with an undiagnosed anxiety disorder); messy; a true fear for her, but none of Seb’s dogs has ever disliked her and Angel, his incredibly skittish “mutt with strong shades of Labrador Retriever and German Shepherd,” likes Margot better than she likes most other people, which is a big deal; and a straight up lie because Margot thinks Nessie being real would be cool.

If pressed to be honest, she would claim that that her fear of death doesn’t count as, “a real fear” because she allegedly only fears it in an abstract and primal way that she shares with most other animal organisms on the planet, because on a very deep level, right down to our genes, living things generally want to continue being alive and generally fight tooth-and-nail against death.

The biggest linchpin in her argument here is, “Well, but I haven’t been confronted with the reality of my own potential death” — which is a big lie. Margot has definitely been confronted with that. She just hasn’t had any experiences that ended in her nearly dying herself, in part because some of her confrontations with it were not actually that dangerous but they seemed to be at the moment, and largely because most of these experiences, for her, have involved her 6’3” best friend, who dives into harm’s way for her, gets her out of the way with the full intent to take a literal bullet, and otherwise lets the harm fall on him so it won’t fall on Margot.

So, ultimately, Margot’s, “I only fear death in a primal, instinctual way that is shared by most if not all living things” nonsense is something she tells herself to try and distance herself from how visceral the fear actually is here, and to try and get out of dealing with the fact that her fear of death applies more to someone else than to herself

(which, in fairness, it probably wouldn’t if her best friend had fewer near-death experiences and fewer self-destructive tendencies, but as it stands, Seb has racked up sixteen brushes with death, two of which did involve him briefly dying, and has a habit of putting his fingers in his ears and going, “La la la, I can’t hear you, this is normal and fine” when confronted with how this is neither fine nor normal)

If given the choice in how she dies, Margot would pick, “I don’t want to die, fuck you”

If she had to pick, then…… Nah, she’s fine dying at an advanced age, while asleep in bed but not after a prolonged painful struggle with cancer or something. You can keep your cool, heroic deaths, she wants to live and accomplish shit before she kicks it, thanks

38. What kind of weather does your character like? Cloudy skies, rainy days, sunshine, etc?

Sunshine, but not too warm. Pete likes spring, basically. He doesn’t actually mind the heat as much as he says he does, but he does mind that summer makes it harder for him to wear some of his most favorite pieces of clothing, like the longer and heavier and more dramatic pieces, and his, “totally not a hipster scarf because Cora made it for him, it’s not some fake pashmina bullshit like Todd wore for way too long a few years back” scarf

He won’t argue with a free excuse to wear some of his hot pants or booty shorts, though, even if he can usually only do that on the weekends because if he wore them to the theatre: A. he might end up getting hurt; and B. his boss, Mitch, would object because he could get hurt

40. Does your OC have any guilty pleasures they enjoy? Hobbies, past times, music, etc that they wouldn’t want known by others?

Long story short: yes, she does, but she also insists to most people that she doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures, and she also doesn’t really have any semblance of secrecy about any of these things

Like, she may not appreciate you finding out that she likes to binge watch Scooby Doo cartoons when she feels stressed out and sad, because she doesn’t want to be teased about it like her big brother sometimes does, but Lucy also doesn’t go out of her way to hide any of this

She’s way more likely to #Nope out of a situation where she really just can’t with this anymore by going, “Okay, I can’t do this right now, I’m gonna go play Final Fantasy 7 for a few hours until I either finish the game again or regain my ability to do this”

43. Does your character have a switch that changes aspects of their personality whether they are around friends, family, etc. Is there someone who gets to see their true self?

Eh, it’s less that Seb changes anything about his personality for the benefit of other people, and more that he emphasizes some parts of it with some folks while downplaying others, which makes him about as out of the ordinary as oxygen (which is to say, “Not at all”)

—I mean, think about it: do most people act the same around their parents as they do around their friends? their coworkers? friends of their friends whom they don’t know very well? random strangers on the bus? etc.

Like, I’m not trying to be an edgy mcedgelord and say that all people are lying bastards, or trying to channel Holden fucking Caulfield to call everyone ever a phony.

I’m just saying, as a human person who likes to make up stories about other human persons and write them down, that most people have different patterns of behavior around the different people in their lives, and it doesn’t make them fakes or liars or whatever. It means that people are, in general, affected by their environments and choose how to behave based on who they’re with, what’s going on, etc.

Someone doesn’t become a wholly different person just because they try not to cuss around their younger cousins or because they’re more comfortable with their friends so they can be less high-strung — but as I was saying.

This behavior on Seb’s part only gets to be any different from most people’s habit of doing the exact same thing because some of the contexts in his life make his patterns of doing this more unhealthy — not because the underlying behavior is inherently unhealthy, but because of how he uses these behaviors to hide things from people, including himself

One of the worst ways in which this comes out is with regard to Seb’s extroversion. Strictly speaking, he’s an extrovert less because he’s super-social and wants to be where the people are (though those things are also true), and more because he’s more attuned to the world outside of himself than to his inner life. This can be a problem because he ends up being hypersensitive to other people’s feelings (hyper-empathy, if not to the same extent as genuine mutant superpowered empaths like Josie and Julian), and he misconstrues a lot of things as potential rejections.

Between that, how much he does genuinely want to be where the people are and wants for people to like him, and how much he wants to make people feel better and avoid hurting them, he gets super high-strung when he’s talking to people. He used to be even worse about that, like back in high school, when it was easier for him to try and escape his undiagnosed depression

—and it led into one of the biggest reasons why he started drinking in earnest and liked it so much. Namely: when he was drunk, he was less high-strung and other people thought that he was fun to have around, instead of regarding him as, like, “well, he’s in the theatre club so we have to tolerate him, and he got matched up with Pete in Sister Mary Ignatius’s weird ass peer mentorship thing, and Pete kinda likes him, so we have to be nice”

—and because Seb was fourteen and already pretty down on himself as a general rule, and prone to assuming that there is nothing good or worthwhile about him, he concluded not that people liked him because he loosened up and stopped trying so hard to fit in and be just like them and doing a really bad job of it because, in that situation, he WAS legitimately trying to be someone he wasn’t (and he wasn’t as good at it as Pete)

Instead, he concluded that alcohol was a magical potion that made him cool and made people like him

(In retrospect, he is definitely ashamed of how he did exactly what he was warned not to do in all of the, “drink responsibly, here is how you do that, here is what alcohol is and isn’t, here is what it does and doesn’t, ffs don’t drink to make people like you, it doesn’t really work, etc.” talks he got from his parents, but he would also rather not talk about it, please and thanks)

Likewise, Seb doesn’t mean to be a manipulative little shit and often doesn’t even notice that he’s doing it, or think he’s manipulating any of his loved ones, but his attitude toward a lot of this is, “Well, okay, I didn’t tell the whole truth, but I didn’t lie” or, “Maybe I stretched the truth a little bit, but it’s still technically true, right” or, “Okay, I left out a lot of shit just now, but I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, so it’s not the same as lying”

Unfortunately, he usually justifies that behavior with rationale like, “But I only told them what they wanted to hear and what would make them happy. Telling them the whole truth wouldn’t make them happy; it’d just make them get upset and worried about things that aren’t their problems and that they can’t help with. Isn’t it better to let them be happy? Isn’t that what they deserve?”

Which makes it really hard for him to break this habit, for a lot of reasons, which include but are not limited to:

1. His rationale largely lets him get out of acknowledging and dealing with the “understandable but still selfish and potentially very Not Good” aspects of his behaviors (e.g., how his habit of letting people believe things are better than they are lets him off the hook for dealing with things that actually need to be dealt with; how he wants to connect with people, so he tells them what he thinks they want to hear, which doesn’t always reflect reality or allow a genuine connection to develop, so if and/or when things fall apart, he takes it as confirmation that he was right about being broken and unlovable, etc.)

—Like, there are a lot of reasons why he didn’t forge that many meaningful connections with anyone during the years that he would call his, “downward spiral” period (which ranges from either age 15 to age 28, or age 18 to age 28, depending on who’s asking and how Seb feels about it today).

Some of them are due to circumstances beyond his control and/or can’t really be termed, “his fault” without getting into victim-blaming territory.

For example, Seb didn’t make a lot of friends in his last two years of high school because he spent them at his Dad’s, Max’s, and Addie’s old boarding school, where he almost immediately got outed (thanks to some other students overhearing the faculty talking about it, because Seb was from a legacy family and his abrupt transfer at the start of junior year was a big deal)

……and where he spent a lot of time getting bullied for being gay and “imperfectly” masculine (not that his bullies used that term, but they also had a hard time trying to accuse him of being exactly feminine, and usually went more for the insults like, “sissy,” “queer,” and the homophobic slur that starts with F), accused of being a predator for not outing himself (which he really wasn’t keen on doing because he came to Saxon fresh off of getting outed at Catholic school), and most looking forward to the weekends when he could get on a train and fuck off down to Pete’s campus and spend time with someone who actually liked him

Or for another example: while Seb hasn’t handled the fallout from some of his abusive relationships well (which is to say that he largely hasn’t handled it and would rather act like these relationships had no lasting effects on him whatsoever), you can’t exactly fault him for not keeping in touch with any of those guys after the respective breakups (or after three of them wound up in prison for various reasons)

But otoh, some of the reasons why Seb didn’t forge a lot of lasting and meaningful connections go back to his bad habit of telling people what they want to hear in order to make them like him, not because he’s consciously being a manipulative little shit but because he wants to connect with people and feel like he belongs somewhere and have friends

Seriously, that is the biggest difference between him and Jeff, “I would say anything to get what I want and I want you to like me” Winger, when it comes to telling people what they want to hear. Both of them do it on purpose. Both of them do it because they care an inordinate amount about what people think of them.

But Jeff wants to control what people think of him so he can use it to his advantage, and even after being with the Study Group starts to open him up, he has a habit of devaluing interpersonal connections (largely because he’s terrified of them, yes, but still) and kind of continuing to see them as tools, rather than as relationships.

For Seb, those interpersonal connections are pretty much everything. He loves love, he loves friendship, he loves community and connecting with people and making people feel good by being friendly and kind, he just loves people in general. At heart, he is a big sap, a hopeless romantic, a marshmallow made of affection and rainbows, and a kids TV show platitude about the power of friendship given human form.

But because he hates himself and loves all of those things and probably venerates all of them more than is good for him, he feels like he doesn’t deserve any of them and like he has to constantly tailor how he presents himself until it perfectly fits what he thinks everybody else wants from him

Which makes it sort of hard to form connections with someone, especially when Seb was pretty good at deflecting suspicion, distracting people, and caring about them, but less than good at sharing himself enough to make the connections last, which often works for a little bit, but ultimately runs afoul of that Perks of Being A Wallflower, “you can’t just just sit there and put everyone's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love” problem

Like, you have to at least share something with other people so they feel like they’re getting something out of the relationship (aside from you always catering to them and to their needs, expecting them to be open when they have little to no reason to feel like you’re reciprocating)

You can even share something that is some kind of untrue, like Conrad (who mostly shares lies but doesn’t see them as lies because they have some basis in reality, they’re just ““enhanced reality””), Pete (who’s spent a lot of his life playing different versions of himself to get people’s approval, which is different from Seb’s approach because when Pete does this, it has the appearance of being open and sharing, rather than a lot of deflecting and hiding)

But Seb’s approach was more, “bury everything and pretend it isn’t there and try to make it look like I am exactly what these people think I am”

It doesn’t help that he has a lot of trouble knowing who he is without someone helping him, and easily slips into a way of thinking where he feels like he’s a blank slate and nothing more so why is it a bad thing for him to just let people project what they want him to be onto him

which is partly a depression thing for him, and partly the result of how Seb has spent most of his life denying, repressing, refusing, and trying to erase or ignore huge parts of his own identity and his own sense of personhood because he feels like he’d be better and everyone would like him more if he were someone else

which…… is a mess. Like, he figured out early enough that he’s not very good at being other people outside the context of the theatre club — the classic example for him is how much he’s hurt himself by trying to be Max and fit the exact same standards as Max, which has never worked because they’re different people, and they can do and need very different things

—but Seb’s still wound up with very little stable sense of his own identity and who he is, and a lot of his questioning tends to end up back at, “I’m a broken mess, I’m kinda like God spilled a person but considering how many things I’ve lived though, I’m too amusing for Him to let me die, I guess”

He’s working on it. But it’s still a mess.

This mess of shit is one of aspect of the bag of emotional and psychological wet cats that makes up, “La Bête” — i.e., the part of his mind that is vaguely analogous to the Hulk, except that La Bête isn’t really a separate personality inside of Seb like the Hulk is often portrayed with Bruce Banner, and superpowered though she is, La Bête isn’t fueled by anger and destruction so much as protective impulses, the desire to live, love and the desire to form connections and defend those connections, the pack-building impulse

Basically, La Bête is more like actual irl wolves than most ideas of how wolves are that you find in werewolf or werewolf-themed fiction. Destruction isn’t really her endgame goal or a thing she particularly enjoys, so much as a side-effect of some of her other impulses since, once she decides to go and do something, she is admittedly not quite so good at being 100% careful

If she ever seems to be fueled by anger (which, in fairness, she is going to do, early on), it’s less about actual anger and more about either that protective impulse again (such as when Seb’s first full transformation gets triggered by one of Conrad’s lackeys inducing three simultaneous heart attacks, which would manage to kill him if La Bête didn’t take over, so she wanted to save him, and then their immediate impulse was to run and get Margot out of harm’s way)

……or it’s like the story of St. Francis of Assisi and the Wolf of Gubbio, where the titular wolf only looks angry and violent and dangerous to the villagers he’s been in conflict with because he is starving and they’ve been treating him like a monster

Or, in other words, the whole, “hey, maybe your superpowered transformation is triggered by anger and fear, so maybe you need to do more work on controlling that” idea leads to Seb trying to muzzle La Bête, which goes Not Well, largely because it means he’s not learning how to control his transformations, while also being a complete dick to himself and her, which makes her feel threatened and then makes her lash out

Not that I have any particular issues with the literal millennia of misrepresentation that wolves have had to suffer in Western literature, art, and culture, or with how all of those gross caricatures have affected werewolf fiction, or with how different layers of sociopolitical nuance, usually involving shades of misogyny, homophobia, and/or ableism, have been more explicitly woven into the figure of the werewolf in recent decades, only to come up with deeply mixed messages, like JKR casting lycanthropy as an HIV/AIDS metaphor and making Remus Lupin a sympathetic character but also keeping up this idea that the thing that subtextually ties him GBQ men… has an uncontrollable appetite for destruction, makes him a complete monster one night a month and must be repressed and controlled, and otherwise perpetuating a bunch of homophobic bullshit (to say nothing of how she did that even worse with Fenrir Greyback)

……Except, y’know. I totally have issues with all of that stuff I just said, and a big part of the struggle in working out La Bête and writing her has been trying to keep it from getting too preachy and pedantic, whoops

(also, for the record: La Bête gets called, “she” and “her” because:

1. the French noun is feminine, and Seb starts calling her, “La Bête” because he decides to take, “Gévaudan” as his nom de spandex, so he figures, “La Bête” would be a thematically consistent name;

2. Josie gets assigned to help guide Seb through the, “how to have mutant superpowers and not kill people or break the law or anything” stuff, and they try to approach the issue of how to understand and control Seb’s transformation with a bit of a Jungian-influenced approach, so they try to examine La Bête through the lens of the Shadow and the Anima

—which Josie does admit is sort of a mess with regard to gender roles and ideas about how gender even works, since Jung was a product of his culture and his time period like that, but since the Anima is talked about in she/her terms, Josie slips into doing the same to La Bête, and neither Seb nor La Bête particularly object to this;

(personally, Seb doesn’t see it as being any different from Pete’s nickname for him being, “[my] Princess,” and to him, it’s all like…… okay, La Bête is a part of his mind and psyche that’s been rather abruptly crystallized into a more cohesive entity by sudden onset superpowers — though she hasn’t been rendered separate from him, the way that a lot of depictions of Bruce Banner like to imagine the Hulk being more or less entirely separate from him, just cursed to inhabit the same body — and we’re apparently going to call La Bête with she/her pronouns now, okay cool)

3. “I don’t know? She-wolves usually get a bit more sympathy when you look at how they’re depicted in art and stories, like? Yeah, okay, you can easily find them being just as maligned as he-wolves, if not more so, but you also have stories like the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, or stories of she-wolves adopting abandoned babies of other species, so like? I don’t know, it just feels nicer to call La Bête a she-wolf?” — Seb, before he’s completely put it together how his transformations work, but when he’s at the middling point of realizing that the overwhelming emotion that La Bête brings with her is never anger)

But anyway, I was saying something about him and his patterns of connecting with others

Like, seriously, here are the meaningful and lasting connections he’s made from ages 15 to 28(ish): Margot, Todd, Fr. Teddy (one of the priests at Seb’s cool, socially progressive LGBTQ church, who technically isn’t a priest in the Vatican’s eyes because he dropped out of seminary and hasn’t actually gone through the ordination process, but he serves at a church that the Vatican kinda doesn’t acknowledge anyway, so… yeah, that’s a thing), and Julian kinda (if you stretch your definition of “meaningful and lasting” a bit)

If you expand a bit, you could add Pete (though they got to be friends before Seb’s “downward spiral” period, i.e. most of his adult life and all of his late adolescence), Nick (his and Pete’s sponsor, who Seb technically met after the “downward spiral” period), Stephen (who Seb met after he met Nick, so…… yeah), and Genevieve (his and Pete’s therapist, who they didn’t start seeing until after both of them had been to rehab, so hey)

—apparently, before I went off on that tangent about how La Bête fits into all of this, I was working on a better organized list of reasons why it’s hard for Seb to break his habit of playing up the parts of situations that he thinks people want to hear while hiding all the stuff that actually needs to get dealt with

The other reasons I was going to go into sort of got danced around in that huge tirade, but to make them a bit more explicit here: despite the selfish parts of this behavior, Seb genuinely does want to protect the people who he loves and make them happy, and getting him to understand that it would make them happy for him to be well, which means he needs to stop hiding things like he does…… well, that’s been an uphill struggle for a lot of reasons, including Seb’s assumption that he’s too broken to ever be well and he’s probably never going to get better so the best he can do is keep the people he loves from realizing it and blaming themselves for his problems;

(which he has decent enough reason to be afraid of them doing, since everyone he loves has had at least one big moment of what I call, “acknowledging how they might have shaped circumstances here and didn’t exactly help, but are still not actually responsible for shit anything in this because Sebastian made his own choices” but Seb feels like it’s more, “blaming themselves for his problems, and unfairly so because he made his own choices and the burden of responsibility shouldn’t fall on them”

—the major difference between the two approaches here being that Seb wants to blame himself for everything, and feels like it’s justified because of the, “he made his own bad choices and now he’s accepting responsibility” thing, but he doesn’t entirely get the difference between, “really accepting responsibility” and, “using acknowledgment of his fuck-ups as an excuse to be an overly self-punishing dick to himself and cut himself off from most things”

and there are some circumstances that he legitimately can’t take responsibility for.

They’re largely situations that had problems but that aren’t anyone’s “fault” — like, how his parents tried their best with him and were unconditionally loving, supportive, and accepting, but they’re still only human and didn’t always know what the best approach was. So, they did things like overly praise him so he wouldn’t feel overshadowed by his three older siblings, or like he was terrible and they were all awesome — but instead of feeling reassured and self-confident, Seb noticed the disparity and felt like his parents were lying to spare his feelings because he was actually terrible, and then felt like he couldn’t tell them so because they loved him enough to try and make him feel better about being probably worthless, and it’d be super ungrateful of him to

Or they had situations where Abe and Marceline didn’t know that some of the things they accepted as, “just odd little Sebastian things” were really how depression can manifest in children — and frankly, given that it was the late 1980’s to early/mid 1990’s, they couldn’t have known this. Hell, juvenile/adolescent depression is still not understood very well and still faced with a lot of nonsense about how it’s not possible for kids to have depression because we don’t want that to happen to kids. (The same goes for pretty much all juvenile/adolescent presentations of mental illnesses, too.)

All of this was even less understood when Seb was a kid, and it would have taken a lot of ridiculously implausible shit for Abe and Marceline to even think that, “Maybe our youngest has a mental illness” was on the table as a potential explanation for some of Seb’s behaviors, most of which seemed different from other kids but nothing to call a doctor about.

Like, okay, he was very emotionally sensitive and he cried easily and did things like insist that they could only adopt dogs from the ASPCA anymore because he saw different news specials about how shitty puppy mills are and how some people abuse their dogs, who end up getting put up for adoption — big deal, some kids are just more sensitive than others, shaming him for having emotions would be a bad idea, and shaming him for caring about the welfare of other living beings just doesn’t make sense, doesn’t that mean they’re doing a good job of raising a kid who cares about others

(Well, yes, but the problem there wasn’t actually the caring so much as how distressed Seb got about this, but unfortunately, by that point in his early life, Abe and Marceline were already pretty used to him being sensitive and maybe a little bit dramatic, and his level of distress about abused animals who really needed loving homes didn’t actually register as odd by his standards)

So, yeah. Ultimately, Abe and Marceline could have done a lot of things differently while raising Seb, and they could have put his depression together sooner, and so on — but nobody can be faulted for the situation because based on the circumstances and the knowledge that they actually had available to him at the time, they tried to make what they thought were the best choices in raising their son, like not shaming him for having emotions or putting him in therapy that they weren’t sure he needed — since, to be fair, any of his early self-destructive patterns of behavior looked either like he was a curious, energetic kid who was just being a curious, energetic kid, or like he was a good kid who, being more sensitive than his siblings, needed a bit more approval, and worked hard at school because he wanted his Mom and Dad to be proud of him — which, if he hadn’t needed it, might have made him feel like having feelings was some kind of pathology, which would also be pretty bad

Either way, they can’t be blamed for that situation, and Seb can’t be blamed for it either, but this does not stop him from trying to blame himself for, “being ungrateful” or, “being too broken,” when the actual problem is that no one has gotten to the root cause of a lot of his issues until recently, so they’ve been throwing different solutions at all of this and cobbling together different ideas for how to help that don’t fully address the cause and will, as such, always end up being incomplete)

—also, there is the problem of how Seb doesn’t really have the best idea of who he actually is, and trying to make him reflect on that… has a history of ending badly.

Like, if he doesn’t end up going down a rabbit hole wherein he starts feeling like he might not be anybody and might not even be real, and then goes and does something self-destructive in the name of remembering if he’s real or not

……then he’s liable to hit the point of going like, “Do I like this thing because I really do enjoy it or because everybody else does? Do I act this way because it’s true to being me or is it because I’m trying to fit into this or that idea about how gay men [or any other identity marker he might apply to himself; it’s usually either gay men or, something like, “the best friend Pete deserves,” “the uncle Marie deserves,” “the son my parents deserve,” etc.] act, or because I realize that I can’t ever be that for them and do the exact opposite? How much of me is really me and how much of it is dictated by culture and other people’s expectations of me? Who?? Am??? I, really???? Who are ANY of us????? Are any of us real or are we all just ideas of each other interacting in a void onto which we project meaning that might not actually mean fuck anything??????”

And if he gets there, he is going to short-circuit

Personally, Pete doesn’t like it when Seb goes and does any of his old self-destructive shit, but in a way, it’s preferable to the latter option, because trying to talk Seb down or trying to clean it up if he punched out a window or cut himself? Sucks. And Pete isn’t going to deny that it sucks. Arguing about whether or not he should go to the ER sucks, picking glass out of his hand with tweezers sucks, all of it really fucking sucks.

But trying to get Seb out of an existential crisis that usually ends with him flopped out on his sofa, or in his bed, staring at the ceiling in abject terror, probably with music or the TV on but not really listening to it, and where any answer could potentially have really unpleasant effects, either now or at some point down the line, because this has gone beyond the realm of Seb’s own issues and his own demons, and while it is still really about those things, it’s gotten into debates about very the nature of existence, and before you can do literally anything else, you first have to drag him out of the ontological and/or metaphysical rabbit hole?

………Yeah, that’s way more stressful, if you ask Pete. Not that he feels he can really talk, considering how many times Seb’s ever talked him down from something, or pulled him out of one of his own rabbit holes, or at least come with Pete while he was doing something stupid and self-destructive so he wouldn’t be alone — and at least these existential crises have been getting much less frequent and less severe since Seb started going to therapy — but still.

Okay, I’ve lost the plot of this way too many times, I’m going to shut up now

TL;DR: Yes, Seb does kind of do the personality switching thing with the people he loves, but at the same time: 1. If not for all of the other pieces of context here about why him doing this is really Not Good, it would be no different from the typical amount of switching that most people do based on who they’re with and what situations they find themselves in;

2. In a way, it’s even less of a complete personality-switch thing — e.g., acting reserved and polite around your parents, but then being rowdy and snarky and party-happy with your friends — and more of a situation where he shows more or less the same behaviors and personality traits to everyone he loves, including the same pattern of “I’m not technically lying, I’m just not being 100% truthful either and that’s different,” and the variance comes from what he chooses to hide or not (e.g., he’s more willing to admit to his friends than to his parents that he’d really like to have a drink instead of dealing with any given stressful situation)

And even given that variance, very few people will hear him say something like, “Is, ‘I want to down six shots of tequila at once and go 90 MPH down an open stretch of highway’ a feeling? Because I think I feel that.”

A large part of why he does that is to make other people happy, but an equally large part of why he does it is so he can get out of dealing with shit that is scary and complicated and ew, how about no, why can’t he just repress it and fake a smile and act like everything is fine

and 3. He’s trying to hide his behaviors, feelings, and impulses, yes, but it would technically be inaccurate to say that Seb is trying to hide his true self from people, because in order to deliberately hide his true self, he would need to know who the fuck that is, and he is not entirely sure (which is one of the many bones that La Bête has to pick with him, but that’s another rant entirely)

Either way, Pete is consistently the best at getting Seb to be honest with himself and, consequentially, with everyone else.

True, Max, Adelaide, Ambrose, and their parents have known Seb longest and arguably seen his more of his tricks than Pete has…… but the funny thing about that idea is how it assumes that blood family will always trump found family, and how it assumes that, “We’ve known him for longer” is automatically going to mean they know him better when… uh, no.

Max and Seb prove that pretty well, given that they’ve spent most of their lives not knowing how to best communicate and deal with each other, which totally spilled over into Max kinda developing a resentment toward cousin Jeremy for a while, because Jeremy was between Max and Adelaide, age-wise, and he got on Seb’s level better than Max ever did, apparently without even trying, so from Max’s perspective, it felt a lot like he was getting stuck with all the crappy parts of being Seb’s big brother while Jeremy got promoted to Replacement Max and got all of the good parts

Bad parts meaning, like, having to take him to the ER because he didn’t listen about being told not to climb one of the trellises at their grandparents’ place and he fell off, and getting the, “why didn’t you keep a closer eye on him” talk when Abe got there — to which the appropriate answer was apparently not, “Have you EVER tried to tell Sebastian NOT to do something? Has he EVER listened to you when you did?” — until Seb backed him up and agreed that Max had done everything he was supposed to do and Seb climbed the trellis anyway

While good parts meant, like, having Seb confide in you. Having him trust you. Having him look up to you, but not in a way that turns you into some unreachable ideal that he uses to be a jerk to himself (though at the time, Max would’ve just said, “Having him look up to you” because he didn’t really get that Seb did look up to him, just… not in a good way).

And yeah, Seb was a weirdly honest teenager who asked permission to take some of his parents’ booze to theatre club cast parties, and who knew he was loved and supported enough at home to come out when he was twelve, but he also didn’t tell his parents about the shit that fell on him after he outed himself to spare Damian because he didn’t want them to think he couldn’t handle it on his own, and had it not been for Pete and Ambrose telling them some of it (though not all of it, out of respect for Seb’s wishes), Abe and Marceline might have remained ignorant of what was going on, beyond, “He says that he’s stressed about final exams, and for some reason, he doesn’t talk about Damian or Allison anymore, but won’t talk about why”

So, it’s not for nothing, because Pete does realize that Seb’s family is actually pretty tight with each other and that, for all they’re a bunch of human beings and thus messy by nature and prone to screwing up, they all actually love each other and try to more or less do right by each other — which he is totally jealous of, by the way, though he would be more so if not for how Seb considers him basically a brother and he’s pretty much always invited to Moncrieff family gatherings or parties, since the family inexplicably (in Pete’s mind) likes him

—but at the same time, he’s pretty sure that he knows more about his Princess and in more contexts than the blood family does.

And he’s right.

Not that this means Pete’s awareness and his powers of Seb-related deduction are literally ever perfect, but…… y’know. He’s working with a more comprehensive playbook than Seb’s blood family.

This was a really pathetic excuse for, “I’m going to shut up now, TL;DR summary time”

Whoops

48. Is there anything in particular that would ignite your character’s jealousy? Or does your character not get envious?

Yes, but also no?

I mean, I feel like saying that any character never gets envious is at best disingenuous, though I’m biased because I’ve literally never met anyone who doesn’t experience jealousy, whether it dominates them like it does with Todd or not, and like…… The fact that Seb isn’t as overwhelmed by jealousy as Todd doesn’t mean much

He definitely experiences jealousy; it’s just that he doesn’t really focus on it or do that much with it beyond let it simmer and possibly use it as an excuse to be a jerk to himself

(—which is also a bit because he usually doesn’t feel it strongly enough to do much with it, but that’s not really a, “Seb is a good person who doesn’t let his jealousy consume him” thing; it’s a, “Seb is seriously depressed and doesn’t feel most things strongly enough to do much with them, which is going to change somewhat when he gets medicated and his brain chemistry starts getting evened out, but that’s another matter”)

His biggest envy buttons tend to be things like:

“Pete and Todd have had it easier than I have at staying sober, why can’t I do that, what is wrong with me that makes it so much harder for me than it is them”

(To answer his question: neither Pete nor Todd has actually had it easy with their sobriety — which Seb does know and he feels bad about even remotely feeling like they’ve had it, “easier,” but asking emotions to be rational is a losing game for everybody — but they’ve had more success than he has because they haven’t been doing the psychological equivalent of trying to fight Ganondorf with a butter knife)

“My dumb older brother has a good relationship with his wife, who is a good person and loves him, and I’m never going to have anything like that”

“My sponsor and his husband are so in love with each other even after so long together and it’s so beautiful and I wish I could have something like that, but it’s never going to happen for me because why would it”

and so on.

And here we see one of the reasons why he’s spent the past year and a half doing the psychological equivalent of fighting Ganondorf with a butter knife: he looks at these patterns of thought and doesn’t see them as indicative of anything beyond him being, “broken,” so he hasn’t been entirely open with them, and his loved ones and therapist haven’t had all the knowledge that they need to figure out how to help him

Some of them have put it together that all involved parties have been missing something that means all of their approaches aren’t working as well as they could do, but most of them don’t know what that is. Pete has the best idea (because Seb’s too attached to all his denial to have an accurate idea and he pretty much stops at, “I am broken, that explains everything”), and even he isn’t entirely right

Right about Seb being a mutant, right about thinking like, “Maybe he’s depressed? I mean, we keep overlooking that option for all kinds of reasons, but maybe that’s part of it all,” right about thinking that Seb is more affected by some of the shit he’s been through than he wants to be, right about Seb needing to try something new since a lot of his previously attempted ideas haven’t helped in the ways he needs, right about going, “You’re flatbacked on the sofa, staring at the ceiling like it just threatened to kill your dogs, and listening to ‘Last Christmas’ in the middle of June. It’s not hard to figure out that something’s wrong”

—but Pete is somewhat less than right about, for example: Seb’s emotional trigger for kicking into Beast Mode probably being fear and/or anger (but in fairness to Pete, he hears, “my best friend can hulk out into a nine-foot-tall wolf-man” and concludes that it’s most likely going to work like the Incredible Hulk or in-universe heroes like The Myrmidon of the All-Stars and Dr. Lydia “Promethia” Yates of the Wardens); reacting to sudden-onset superpowers by going, “HI OMG I’M YOUR SIDEKICK NOW FUCK YEAH LET’S ROCK THIS BITCH”; Seb’s confused feelings after his date with Stephen (because Seb ends up genuinely unsure what he wants to do about his situation with Todd vs. starting something new with Stephen, and Pete’s initial reaction is, “Oh, bullshit, you’re just trying to chicken out on this because you’re actually interested someone NICE for once, you just learned that he likes you back, and now, you’re SCARED”)

……Granted, he’s also not entirely wrong on that last point, but Seb being scared doesn’t negate the fact that he’s also confused about his feelings

[floridaindependentblog]

Italy has an astonishingly rich history of art and culture stretching back thousands of years. Fortunately, many of these breathtaking artworks are still around for us to enjoy.

Of these scores of famous painters, Caravaggio stands out as one of the most revolutionary. He’s famous for his realistic portrayals of the human form using light and shadow to bring his works to life.

If you’d love to see some of these masterpieces in person, Rome is the place to go. Here’s where to see the best Caravaggio paintings during your trip to the Eternal City.

1. Caravaggio Paintings at the Vatican

The Vatican Museums contain some of Italy’s most treasured historical artifacts including art and sculpture.

You’ll find Caravaggio’s ‘The Entombment of Christ’ on display in the Pinacoteca along with some paintings by Raphael, Perugino, Giotto, and da Vinci.

Apart from these brilliant works, the Vatican is also home to the Sistine Chapel, the Borgio apartment and the Spiral Staircase. Now, those are things you can plan a vacation around.

2. The Borghese Gallery

One of Rome’s top art museums, The Borghese Gallery, has almost a dozen Caravaggio artworks on display. These include:

Boy with a Basket of Fruit

David with the Head of Goliath

The Caravaggio self-portrait as Bacchus

A portrait of Pope Paul V

St Jerome Writing

Madonna and Child with St Anne

St John the Baptist

You’ll need to make reservations to visit this elite gallery and your ticket gives you access for two hours only.

If you want to visit this gallery, it makes sense to buy your tickets online in advance. They’re in high demand.

3. Church of San Luigi Dei Francesi

This small church near piazza Navona has a few Caravaggio works on display in the Contarelli Chapel. These represent the artist’s “Saint Matthew” cycle and include:

The Calling of Saint Matthew

The Inspiration of Saint Matthew

The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew

This series is famous for the way in which Caravaggio used the existing lighting of the church to bring his paintings to life.

Instead of competing with the interior gloom, Caravaggio used it to bring suspense and drama to his work, using the only two rays of light in the room to highlight key areas of the paintings.

Entry to the church is free, but you’ll need to pay a small fee to activate the lights so you can see the paintings in all their glory.

4. Church of Santa Maria del Popolo

This unassuming Cerasi Chapel is home to one of Caravaggio’s most famous works–The Crucifixion of Saint Peter.

You’ll also find the “Conversion of Saint Paul on the Road to Damascus” in this small chapel on the north side of Piazza del Popolo.

Admission to the chapel is free.

5. The Capitoline Museums

The Capitoline Museums also house two Caravaggio works. One of these, “The Fortune Teller” is the first version of a painting that the artist created twice.

The recreation is in the Louvre in Paris.

The second Caravaggio painting located at the Capitoline is, “John the Baptist (With a Ram).”

You’ll find the Capitoline Museums at Piazza del Campidoglio.

6. Palazzo Barberini

The Barberini Galleri has famous masterpieces by most Italian artists within its walls. Caravaggio’s work includes the following four pieces:

Narcissus

Judith Beheading Holofernes

Saint Francis in Meditation

Saint John the Baptist

While you’re there, you can also see paintings by more than 40 other acclaimed artists.

7. Palazzo Doria Pamphilj

You’ll find this large gallery in a private palace between the Via del Corso and Via Della Gatta. It’s the largest privately owned palazzo in all of Rome.

Here, you’ll get to see the following Caravaggio artwork:

John the Baptist

Rest on the Flight into Egypt

Penitent Magdalene

The paintings are on display in staterooms and in galleries surrounding a courtyard. The Palazzo Doria Pamphilj also contains an interesting collection of Byzantine and Medieval art.

8. Galleria Corsini

This small art gallery has only one Caravaggio work, namely a representation of “John the Baptist” from 1604.

Galleria Corsini is along Via Della Lungara in an out-of-the-way location that doesn’t attract a lot of visitors. The entry fee is just 5 euros.

It’s a beautiful place and together with the Palazzo Barberini and Galleria Borghese forms part of Italy’s Arte Antica collection.

Along with the 16th and 17th-century artworks, Galleria Corsini has a large library of beautifully bound books to admire.

9. Church of S. Maria Immacolata

A single Caravaggio painting was recently authenticated at this small church on Esqilino Hill, close to Piazza Vittorio Emanuel.

The piece, entitled ‘The Meditation of St Francis’, dates back to 1605 and is a good example of Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro to convey emotion.

An almost identical version of this painting is on display at the Museo Civico in Cremona. At first, experts questioned the authenticity of both these paintings.

However, both are now accepted as legitimate Caravaggio paintings, although there’s still some dispute over which one came first.

10. Casino Boncompagni Ludovisi

This privately-owned villa contains ”Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto”, one of Caravaggio’s earliest works. It’s also the only oil wall painting he ever did.

The painting adorns the roof of what was once cardinal del Monte’s private study. It’s believed that del Monte allowed his protege to complete his first attempt at a wall painting in this enclave far from prying eyes.

Either way, it’s interesting to stand at the very site where this acclaimed artist once toiled away, brush in hand.

As the villa changed hands over the years, this painting was largely ignored until an Italian scholar brought it to public attention in 1969.

Find the World’s Best Treasures

If you enjoyed this article about Caravaggio paintings, you’ll also enjoy the rest of our travel section.

Keep reading for more useful information about how to make the most of your wanderlust, locally and around the world.

The post 10 Best Places to See Caravaggio Paintings in Rome appeared first on Florida Independent.