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innuendostudios · 3 years ago

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Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

#film noir #neo-noir #criterion channel

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fatehbaz · 4 years ago

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aw i swear i reblogged a post of yours with a reading rec and now i can't find it. :( but i was interested in learning more about indigenous vs colonial/imperial relationships with nature (especially in terms of nature as a food source) and was wondering if you had any books (or other resources) you could recommend? thank you for all the resources and information you share!

Thank you for the kind message. :)

Are you thinking about the new book on how the US, despite formally occupying the islands at the time, also simultaneously flexed some so-called “Soft Power” (which is, of course, violent and never actually “soft”) and asserted itself in the Philippines by messing around with food culture and changing food traditions? Taste of Control: Food and the Filipino Colonial Mentality Under American Rule. From 2020, by R. Alexander D. Orquiza. (The book focuses on the period between 1898 and 1940s.)

Maybe you’d be interested in these? These are some posts from me. Each post contains short excerpts. (Like, the juicy bits and short enough to not be overwhelming, y’know? Then, if the subject seems cool, the author names and full citation are included. Some of the posts contain maps, photos of plants/animals, other visual aid, and direct links to read the longer full articles for free.) These are posts about local food sovereignty; differences between worldviews of traditional food systems and settler-colonial food systems; difference between traditional and imperial relationships to plants; Empire’s use of food, plants, botany, and scientific institutions to undermine Indigenous autonomy; and contrasts between imperial and traditional human-plant-animal relationships.

-- Manoomin, the imperial plot to domesticate wild rice, “cottage colonialism” in Canada, imaginative control, the power of names and naming plants, different understanding of food contrasted between Empire and Indigenous knowledge. (Covers 1880s to Present.)

-- Pineapple, domestication of breadfruit, and plantations “doing the work of Empire” in Hawaii. Difference between Indigenous Polynesian respect for plants/food, and imperial/industrial food extraction.

-- Leslie Marmon Silko: Gardens. Food sovereignty and imperialist use of food to gain control. Settler-colonial theft of Indigenous plant knowledge. She says: “It wasn’t too long before I realized how very political gardens are. I had actually stumbled into the most political thing of all – how you grow your food, whether you eat, the fact that the plant collectors followed the Conquistadors.”

-- “We don’t need to know what starfish know”: Aboriginal knowledge-holders of Bawaka Country discuss contrast between traditional and settler-colonial understandings of food harvest and multispecies communities.

-- Anna Boswell’s discussion of endemic longfin eels of Aotearoa as example of contrast between Maori worldviews and settler-colonial understanding of ecology; and the problem with making “land-water” distinctions in Euro-American agriculture and land management.

-- Robin Wall Kimmerer speaking frankly about paying attention to plants, and the differences between kinds of inquiry, difference between settler-colonial institutionalized knowledge compared to Indigenous/land-based “ways of knowing”.

-- Native food and imperial appropriation of food/plants: “The Nineteenth-Century Garden: Imperialism, Subsistence, and Subversion in Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes.”

-- Mapuche cultural autonomy, Valdivian temperate rainforest, and European plots to dismantle the rainforest to create “Swiss or German pastoral farm landscape” in Chile.

-- The debris and ruins of imperial sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and modern Caribbean art

-- Easy-to-access compilation of audio recordings and oral histories of bioregional foodsheds, from 13 Native food autonomy advocates. (New England maple syrup. New Mexico. Louisiana’s Gulf Coast. Abalone/acorns in California. Salmon in PNW, etc.)

-- “Ghostly non-places; settler-colonial hallucinations and fantasy visions; monstrous plants and animals; hiding, destroying, re-making ecological worlds; permanent cataclysm; the horror of settlement”: Anna Boswell on settler-colonial agriculture and ecology.

-- Some fresh annoying OC from me. Vegetation as a weapon: On soil degradation and the use of non-native plants to change landscapes and sever cultural relationships to land; extinction of megafauna; and on the dramatically under-reported but massive scale of anthropogenic environmental change wrought by early empires and “civilizations” in the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and ancient world (including the Fertile Crescent, Rome, and early China)

-- Indigenous Sami reindeer herding contrasted with colonial/industrial resource extraction; “eternal catastrophe”; power over death; “disaster as a form of governance”; apocalypse. From the great writing of Hugo Reinert.

-- Anna Boswell on stoats; native plants/animals of Aotearoa; and how settler-colonial environmental management targets species (and humans) for persecution or sacrifice.

--- Calcutta Botanic Gardens abduction and use of Chinese slaves; Kew Gardens (successfully) plotting to steal cinchona from people of Bolivia to service their staff in India; botanic gardens’ role in large-scale dispossession to create plantations in Assam and Ooty (1790s - 1870s).

-- The role of grasslands, deforestation, and English grasses in ecological imperialism in Aotearoa, early 20th century.

-- “Forage wars” between Native food harvesters and California legal institutions: Abalone, native foodsheds, and food harvesting in Pomo, Yurok, Coast Yuki, and other Klamath Mountains and coastal Northern California communities.

-- Zoe Todd discussing connection to local place, traditional ecological knowledge, and knowledge appropriation: “Not all knowledge is for your consumption.”

-- The grand tale of breadfruit domestication, the mutiny on the Bounty, and plantation owners plotting with Kew Gardens to domesticate crops to undermine slave gardens in the Caribbean. (Also includes comments on the under-reported central role of media/PR manipulation and slavery in the “mutiny on the Bounty” story.)

-- Conflating women with “bloodthirsty” and “flesh-eating” plants, and the dehumanization of Indigenous cultures through scientific illustrations of imperial scientific agents and artistic depictions of plants from colonized ecosystems (Euro-American art and science of botany in1700s to early 1900s),

-- Robin Wall Kimmerer: Paying attention to plants and her love for strawberries, from Braiding Sweetgrass.

-- “Coyote’s biota”: Comcaac (Seri) and O’Odaham food, plant knowledge, and the ascribing of special names to native plants and Euro-American plants to distinguish between types of food.

-- In the Falkland Islands: Intersections of extinction; the “Antarctic wolf”; colonialism, whiteness, racism, “invasion,” indigeneity; environmental history; decline of penguins; introduction of non-native European sheep, cats, cattle, pigs and ecological reinforcement of settler-colonial culture, etc.

-- Bogong moths and ethics of killing insects in settler-colonial Australian imaginary

-- “The British Museum was built on coral, butterflies, and slavery”: Hans Sloane, Caribbean ecology, museums and curiosity cabinets, and how plantation money and slavery built British scientific institutions

-- Human relationship with bees; use of insects in imperialism

-- Racism in depictions Melanesia; the mapping and naming of Polynesia and Melanesia

-- Records and details of extreme deforestation in ancient Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia around 4500 BC; extreme landscape modification in Asiatic steppes in first millennium AD.

-- Zoe Todd on human-fish relationships in Alberta, prairie, and boreal forest.

-- Dandelions, other non-native plants, and settler gardens changing soil of the Canadian Arctic. (Late 1800s and early 1900s.) From Broken Frontier: Ecological Imperialism in the Canadian North.

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And some of the so-called “classic” authors:

-- Zoe Todd: Might be most famous in popular media for her criticism of the Eurocentrism of the “Anthropocene concept; for writing about racism and anti-Indigenous prejudice in academia; and for her 2014 essay, a retort to Euroamerican anthropologists. But aside from her advocacy, her academic research is often concerned with fish, food, plants, and traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous communities in Canada (she is Metis, from Alberta). You’d be able to find many of her articles online, though I linked some above.

-- Neel Ahuja: Pretty famous scholar, “leading” author on biopolitics. References foodsheds and contrasts local and imperial food production, but also more broadly addresses interspecies/multispecies relationships; entanglements of race, gender, speciesism; health, medicine, and control of disease; control of food and personal bodies as sites of colonization.

-- Robin Wall Kimmerer: Wonderful. She’s a botanist, she loves moss, and she’s concerned with traditional ecological knowledge. (She is Potawatomi.) She does explicitly contrast imaginaries, like the difference between Settler-colonial/imperial perceptions of plants/ecosystems, and Indigenous/local/”attentive” perceptions of plants/ecosystems.

-- Vandana Shiva: She has many, many lectures and publications available. Her politics aren’t always great, but she might be most famous for advocating food sovereignty and resistance to corporate agriculture and food giants. Often speaks of development, industrialization, and gender hierarchies. But one influential text was Biopiracy: the plunder of nature and knowledge from 1997.

-- Anna Boswell: Perhaps most famous for writing about the plight of the endemic Aotearoa longfin eel, she specifically focuses on the contrast between, on the one hand, Indigenous/local perceptions and Maori knowledge of landscape/living creatures, and, on the other hand, settler-colonial and industrial/extractivist perceptions of land. She uses some certain animals/plants of Aotearoa as case studies to clearly demonstrate different treatment/perception of land, to criticize settler-colonial “world reordering” (landscaping, pasture, plantation, etc.) as a form of “deathwork.”

(1) Aotearoa longfin eel and devaluing species; (2) tuatara and colonial environmental change; (3) non-native stoats and persecution; (4) settler-colonial landscapes, fantasy-visions, and ecological apocalypse.

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Something I mentioned in the tags on that post about food in the Philippines was that an early formative learning experience for Young Me was when I met a teacher who had worked with ecology and horticulture in Southeast Asia, who stressed that, even after Euro-American imperial powers formally end their colonial occupation of a place, we have to ask: What avenues of food sovereignty are available, if plantation monoculture has destroyed the soil microorganism lifeforms and traditional knowledge systems have been deliberately dismantled or subjugated? Soil is dead, local traditional knowledge has been appropriated and undermined (and traditional knowledge is deliberately targeted during campaigns of erasure and overt violence). And so, even “liberated” places might be forced to drink corporate soda products. There might not be a military occupation, but corporate entities and financial institutions can now act as de facto occupiers. Destroy somebody’s food garden, and you force them to shop at your supermarket. Words like “independence” and “post-colonial” are haunted, because Empire continues, reasserts, finds “new” ways to dominate. But are these tactics really “new”? Just like in earlier historical periods of power consolidation, Empire seems to achieve great power by disturbing, changing, or severing connection between people and their local landscape/environment.

And food is at the center of that human-environment relationship.

If soils are damaged and people are dispossessed, no longer with access to a backyard garden; people of a Caribbean island might no longer be able to grow staple tubers, and instead the US-owned grocer franchise becomes the food source, entangling people involuntarily. Instead of eating Louisiana’s gumbo or the Pacific Northwest’s huckleberries, you can instead eat the same standardized meal at a fast food restaurant in New Orleans and in Seattle, at opposite edges of a continent, which has the effect of undermining potential regional cultural practices situated in local landscape, local plants, local food.

You know what I mean? Anyway.

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Hope these are interesting. Sorry for all of this, an overwhelming amount of text. :)

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writtenvisionary · 3 years ago

Text

Rooftop Riddles

Read on Ao3

WC: 5.1k

Summary: One riddle changes everything. Dramatic identity reveal, oneshot, ladynoir/adrienette | trigger warning - depression, self-harm, abuse/neglect

The breeze was nothing short of refreshing as she sat next to her partner in crime. He was silent for the time being, but she knew it was only a matter of time before he would start saying something stupid. So she took in her surroundings while there was still silence between them.

It was dark; street lights illuminated all of Paris. Shadows bounced from wall to wall as civilians took their nightly walks, either from work or just around the block to get some fresh, cool air before they go to sleep. There are also those pathetically trudging toward their place of employment for their overnight shifts, and Marinette felt for them. Being Ladybug was all too taxing on her, and she often felt like she worked 24 hours, but in reality it was just all of the extra exercise that made her so exhausted every day.

Looking over at Chat Noir, she takes in his appearance. His hunched back, drooped cat ears, slow breaths. He’s looking straight ahead, seemingly lost in his own train of thought. Her eyebrows furrow.

She opens her mouth to speak, but her partner beats her to it.

“Wanna hear a riddle?”

“Uh, sure.”

“Okay. What do you call a sad watermelon?”

Ladybug had to think. Biting her bottom lip, she pondered an answer.

“Um... I don’t know, what?”

“Melon-choly.”

A smile lit up her face.

“Oh!” She laughed.

“Here’s another. It’s kinda long, so get ready.”

She nods, shifting in her seat.

“A single father took care of his baby, and he was rich so the baby had a lot. Food, clothes, excessive stuff. What didn’tthe baby have?”

Marinette frowns, some weird feeling rushing through her veins. She sits up, narrowing her eyes at the boy clad in a black leather suit. He sits with his legs pulled up to his chest, looking straight forward. Not even a tiny upward lift of his lips, making her worry.

Something about the way he delivered that riddle was… ominous. It didn’t seem like he was disconnected from the story he was telling. It’s almost like he could relate.

She gulps.

“A mother?”

He nods, then hangs his head for a moment before pulling it back up and flashing an obviously fake smile in her direction.

“Bingo,” he says dryly.

Her frown deepens.

Why did that riddle sound like something personal? Is he rich?

That sounds like someone she knows. And the riddle boy’s mother was gone… that sounded like him too.

No, there’s no correlation. It’s just a random riddle.

“Alright, last one.”

“Okay,” she nods.

“I am twisted from what I was, to hold the weight of others. Yet tie a knot, and my use to this world is gone.”

Her heart plummets down into her stomach. She loses her breath and has to look back at the city of Paris to think.

If it was possible, this riddle sounded scarier than the last. Chat Noir must really be in a bad mood because normally he puns, not riddles, and the jokes he tells are stupid and funny. These are just... depressing. Her concern is growing by the minute.

She needs to give an answer.

Twisted… Hold the weight of others… Tie a knot… My use to this world is gone.

Tie a knot? What?

“I—“ she licks her lips and shakes her head.

“I’m at a loss. I don’t know.”

Chat hesitates before whispering the answer.

“A noose.”

Her eyes widen and she suddenly feels like she’s been punched in the face.

“Just kidding, it’s a paperclip.”

But he didn’t seem like he was kidding. She was officially scared.

“Chat, you’re worrying me.”

“What do you call a dead pine tree?”

“Chat.”

“A never-green.”

“Minou, I —“

“What do you call a broken pencil?”

“Chat Noir.”

“Pointless,” he laughs darkly.

“Chat Noir!”

Finally, he looks over at her and her mouth falls agape.

His complexion is so pale, lips are pressed into a thin line, and his eyes are glistening.

“What?” He asks, voice breaking on the word.

Carefully, she places her hands on either side of his face. She stares directly into his eyes.

“You’re worrying me,” her voice shakes. “Please tell me whatever’s making you upset so I can help.”

“… I-I’m not upset.”

“Kitty. You just told me a riddle about a noose.”

He shakes his head, scrunching his eyebrows.

“It was a paperclip, milady. Can’t you appreciate a good joke?”

“Chat, all of the jokes you’ve cracked tonight have been nothing short of depressing.”

Frowning, he pulls away from her hold, avoiding her gaze.

“So? New to dark humor?”

“No,” she shakes her head. “But that’s not normally the humor you have, Chaton.”

He’s quiet for a couple seconds before responding.

“Just wanted to try something different—“

“I’m not going to take these bullshit excuses, you know?”

Chat Noir raises an eyebrow, not used to such language coming from his lady.

“They’re not excuses—“

“YES they are!”

She softens her voice.

“Please,” she begs. “Talk to me.”

It’s almost as if she didn’t say anything, how he continues to stare into the distance, silently appreciating the view of Paris. She follows suit, not knowing what else to say. Instead, she decides to wait it out. Hopefully he’ll talk. Eventually.

And he does.

“My mother died about a year ago.”

Her jaw slackens, but she stays silent.

“Father has always been very… strict. But lately he’s been putting a lot on me. Stuff that… stuff that a normal, average sixteen-year old shouldn’t have to put up with,” he sighs.

He calls his dad father? The only other person who does that is…

Alarms go off in her head.

“He makes me take so many lessons beyond school. Chinese, fencing, piano— and he didn’t even let me go to public school until four months ago. I was homeschooled by my father’s assistant, I mean she’s a good family friend—“

Wait.

“And the only friend that was ever allowed over was the mayor’s daughter, and she’s snobby and hangs off of me like I’m her fucking property when I’m NOT and—“

Chloé?

“Father doesn’t even have dinner with me. I mean, maybe once every two months if I get lucky—“

Her eyes widen. He couldn’t be…

“But most of the time it’s just me and the family friend, and she’s not even eating! She’s looking over my schedule to make sure it’s as jam-packed as it was the day before. I swear I never get a break.

“Sometimes it feels like Father is always disappointed in me, no matter what I do. I feel like I’m trapped in his bubble, like I can’t get out. My house is like a fortress. Or a prison. Being Chat Noir is my escape but I just… It’s getting to be too much, milady.

“I don’t know how much more I can take.”

She feels like she lost her voice. Her brain is on overdrive.

If all the pieces are adding up, my akuma-fighting partner is also my crush who is also a world famous model and—

Focus, Marinette.

“It sounds stressful, A— uh, Chat.”

He intakes a sharp breath.

“Did I say too much?”

She bites her lip. Yes.

“No?”

It comes out as a question. He must suspect that she’s lying.

He tilts his head in admission, then looks down.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Um… I’ll always be here for you. You know that, right?”

Slowly, Chat Noir—Adrien—meets her gaze once again.

His response was hesitant. “Yeah.”

She has to sigh; she doesn’t seem to be getting through to him.

“Minou, you are loved and wanted and I want to make sure you know that.”

Chat Noir chews his bottom lip.

“Thanks, bugaboo.”

They fall into a comfortable silence, just peering down at the streets of their city. She wants to ask him more questions because it seems like there’s more he’s not telling her, but decides against it. She doesn’t expect him to tell her everything, especially since opening up that much was already hard enough for him (and she really shouldn’t have been able to figure out his identity because danger! but she supposes she’ll forgive him since he’s literally the love of her life and he needs someone to be there for him either way).

A small movement in the corner of her eye catches her attention. She looks in Chat’s direction, noting how he’s holding a hand over his left wrist. Her frown deepens. It’s not like she wants him to notice that she’s staring, but she can’t look away. Warily, she watches his face twist in pain.

“Does your wrist hurt, kitty?”

He startles, but shakes his head.

“It’s good.”

“But,” she challenges, “you’re holding it. Looks like it hurts…”

Chat Noir clenches his teeth, turning to look at his lady with fire in his eyes.

“I said it’s good, Ladybug. Leave it.”

Marinette flinches at the use of her superhero name instead of one of his usual nicknames for her. His tone is uncharacteristically harsh, as well.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

The last thing she wants to do is upset him more.

She clears her throat, at a loss for words. The atmosphere had suddenly turned tense and she wasn’t fully enjoying his presence anymore. Of course, he wasn’t dangerous or anything, but she really didn’t want him to snap at her again.

Ladybug likes a happy kitten, not a bitter one.

She wishes she knew what to do.

“Well,” Chat speaks. “I gotta head out; get back home before my father’s assistant notices I’m gone and I get taken out of school.”

He stands, getting ready to extend his baton and hop from building to building for as long as possible in order to procrastinate his return to the large, lonely mansion where he resides.

Ladybug hops up so quickly that her head spins, but she ignores it in hope of saying one last thing before he leaves.

“Hey, Chaton?”

Said cat boy looks in her direction, letting her know that he’s listening.

Instead of speaking, she just leans forward to press her lips onto his cheek. When she pulls away, she offers a smile.

“You and me against the world.”

He plasters a (fake) grin onto his face, “Thanks, bugaboo. See you later.”

Then he bolts away, leaving his Lady alone on a rooftop.

Life had gone on as normal for both Adrien and Marinette. For the next two weeks, the superhero pair had not spoken about Chat’s home life or his internal struggles. She wanted to give him some space and he simply wanted to forget that he even showed so much vulnerability around her.

Granted, Adrien didn’t care that she knew. In fact, he was pretty happy that she had been willing to listen. Usually she never allowed rants from the either of them because she knew that it was easy to slip up and say something that could lead an unwarranted identity reveal.

Marinette wanted to talk to him, come to a mutual agreement, and then officially tell each other who they were. She knew it was unfair that she knew and wasn’t telling him, but in all honesty, she wasn’t even sure her suspicions are right.

(She’s ninety-nine percent sure).

Her eyes had been on Adrien for those two weeks, subtly checking to make sure that there weren’t bags under his eyes (there were), that his smiles weren’t forced (they were), and that he was eating enough (she had no way of knowing, but he hadn’t asked for a macaron in a few days and she was starting to get worried).

He was doing somewhat alright, from what she could tell. She didn’t expect to see anything different today.

Boy, was she wrong.

She had been passing out papers to the class regarding their next class trip, explaining that they needed a parent signature, as well as forty-two Euros by next Monday, in order to attend. When she reached Adrien, she paused.

He was rubbing at his left wrist — the same wrist that Chat had been holding in pain that night two weeks ago. His face was contorted painfully; familiarly. This brought about her worries.

Subtly, she placed down the papers in front of him, to which he looked up at her and sent an oh so fake smile in thanks.

As she walked away, Marinette just barely caught a glimpse of some red, scratch-like marks on his skin as he picked the paper up.

Her heart dropped.

She hadn’t realized that him holding his wrist earlier was a sign of self-harm. Apparently he was worse off than she thought. Now, it’s a whole different ball game — one that can’t have secret identities interfering with. She has no choice; she needs to stay in contact with him.

He needs to be okay.

Marinette tried to wait until patrol that night. Really, she did. But she couldn’t resist zipping over to his house and knocking at his window right after his fencing practice had ended.

He jumps at the sound, quickly ushering Plagg to hide in his shirt, before turning around to look at the super-heroine.

“Hi, Ladybug!” He greets with a smile. “Anything I can help you with today?”

She takes that as an invitation to leap into his room, then she allows her yoyo to snap close as she lands in front of him.

Her hands stay in fists as she brings them up to rest at either side of her waist. She grins brightly in his direction.

“Hi, kitty!”

It’s almost comical how his smile drops.

“What?”

In lieu of a response, she drops her arms to rest at her side. Then she takes a few steps forward so that she’s standing much closer to him.

“Your father is strict… he has an assistant… he makes you take piano, fencing, Chinese lessons…”

His eyes widen slowly as she speaks, his heart beating erratically.

Ladybug scoffs, “Honestly, Adrien? You couldn’t have been more obvious.”

He gulps in horror.

Then he narrows his eyes.

“How did you know that Adrien Agreste takes Chinese lessons? I’ve never once mentioned that in an interview…”

She stiffens.

“Uh. B-because you told me before.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“As Chat,” she supplies.

The model scoffs, “I’m not Chat Noir.”

Ladybug shrugs, beginning to stroll around his room.

“Okay. So why did I see you rub your wrist in class today, hm?”

Now it’s Adrien’s turn to stiffen.

“Y-y-you’re in my class? What?” He asks incredulously.

“Yes. I’m the class president.”

She says it so confidently that it scares her. He’s sure to figure it out by now. She can’t look at him as he comes to the realization.

“But my class president is Marinette— wait.”

He huffs, smirking.

“Are you Marinette?”

Finally she casts her gaze in his direction.

“In the flesh.”

She watches as his eyes light up. He approaches her with a smile.

“Oh my god. Wait, then I’m totally okay admitting I’m Chat Noir.”

Her eyebrow raises, “Oh yeah? And if I was, say, Chloé… would you have admitted it?”

He immediately shakes his head.

Ladybug doesn’t even try to stifle her laugh.

“Spots off.”

Adrien watches in amazement as a magical, pink light engulfs her entire body, leaving Marinette Dupain-Cheng standing in his bedroom.

When she’s out of the Miraculous, the first thing Tikki does is call Plagg.

“Plagg, get out here! I need to talk to you!”

Plagg phases through Adrien’s over-shirt and glares at his counterpart.

“Well hello to you too, Sugarcube!”

The other side of the room is then occupied by two magical creatures, allowing for Adrien and Marinette to have some time alone.

An awkward tension fills the air for the first couple moments, as the two recently-outed superheroes stare at each other, letting everything sink in.

Adrien is the first to speak.

“Wow, uh… wow.”

Marinette only nods, unable to comment on his reaction as she is overflowing with concern.

“Adrien, we have to talk.”

His eyes dim and his lips curve downwards. He nods, hanging his head.

“Yeah,” he whispers, “we do.”

He leads her over to the couch and gestures for her to sit down. Then he gets situated right next to her, positioning his hands on his knees. Marinette takes a deep breath.

“So… I saw the scars in class today.”

She shifts her eyes to his left wrist, uncovered and visibly scarred. He follows her eyes, frowning when he meets their destination.

Adrien simply hums, staring at the abused skin but not saying a word.

“Why?” Marinette whispers.

He shrugs.

“I’m fine. It’s just… Chat Noir gives me freedom, but sometimes it’s not enough. I promise I don’t do it that often.”

“The amount of times you do it doesn’t matter, kitty, it’s the fact that you do.”

“What do you care anyway?” He scoffs. “You weren’t paying me much attention before I was in a sour mood that day.”

“I’ve always cared, Adrien. Always. Just because I’m super level-headed doesn’t mean that I don’t pay attention. I notice when you’re sad. I do. This time you were really worrying me, though, so I spoke up.”

Adrien rolls his eyes, “And it didn’t occur to you that maybe I wanted you to ask how I was feeling all those other times I was sad?”

She quiets at that.

“I mean, I understand that you don’t want to get in my way, but I appreciate people caring, Marinette. It means a lot to me. I feel like, if I never gave away too much information, you would still be assuming things about me. Things like, oh he’s okay because he’s loud and cocky and cracks jokes all the time — maybe it’s just a bad day.”

He shakes his head, allowing a bitter laugh to escape his raw throat.

“Every day is a bad day, Mari. I’m just a good fucking actor.”

Marinette soaks in every word like a sponge, letting each and every one hit her right where it hurts, because it’s true. He is a good actor; she’s not good at understanding the script.

I’m sorry, she wants to say. The words dance on the tip of her tongue.

He’s not finished, though.

“I want the world to suffer some days, you know? I want everyone to feel just as pressured and exploited as I have been for basically my entire life. I want all my friends with a good family to see what it’s like to live in this large mansion, with their father closed away in his room, never to be seen again by his own son who just wants him to say I love you.”

When had he started crying?

Well, the tears are flowing and he can’t stop the river now. Not when he has more to say.

“I have the power of destruction wrapped around my finger, Marinette.”

His lip trembles.

“You should be glad that I haven’t tried to Cataclysm any houses, or street lights, or cars, or busses, or-or-or—“

He breaks.

He meant to keep going — to finish his sentence — but he breaks.

There’s not much more that Marinette can do, other than pull him into her arms and whisper soothing words of reassurance as he sobs uncontrollably.

She rubs his back, softly shh-ing him as he lets it all out of his system. She allows him to drown for the time being, all while reassuring that she’ll be there to pull him back to shore.

Each one of his sniffles was a subtle reminder that she was there for him; that no matter if his father comes around to finally paying him some attention, or not, he will always have her shoulder to cry on. Simultaneously, though, her heart twists at how unhealthily he’s been dealing with the trauma.

She had heard stories upon stories of teenagers resorting to self-harm because they had no other outlet, and she had been so thankful that no one she knew had taken those measures. Now, a statistic has become personal. She would be lying if she said that she knew how to handle it.

But she knew that no matter the circumstance, it had to be dealt with.

That meant getting her crush some professional help. A therapist, some medication, and plenty of cuddles. (Cuddles arescientifically proven to relieve anxiety, right? It’s a professional technique).

A quiet sniffle breaks her out of her thoughts. She glances down at Adrien as he slightly pulls away from her hold, eyes red and puffy.

Maybe that can all be dealt with later.

She ruffles his hair.

“Let’s go get some ice cream, yeah?”

Adrien peers up at her in confusion.

She just smiles and wriggles out of their position on his couch, then stands up with her hands on her hips.

“Ice cream always cheers me up. We definitely have to talk more about this later, among other things, but I can’t bear to see you sad any longer. So let’s go!”

The left corner of his mouth perks up, albeit only for a mere second.

“My father—“

“To hell with you father,” Marinette reaches down to grab his hand and hoists him up from the couch.

“We are going to get ice cream whether he likes it or not. You need to do what makes YOU happy, ‘kay?”

He concedes.

After ice cream, they return to the bakery and consult with Tom and Sabine. It had taken a lot of convincing on Marinette’s part to get Adrien to agree, but from there began the journey of his recovery.

They explained his home situation and mental health struggles in full, only leaving out the part about them fighting akumas. Both adults had immediately started searching for a good therapist (and lawyer) that would help Adrien get on the right track.

In the end, Adrien was glad that they had told her parents. Their concern for him and dedication to his cause filled his heart with long lost hope and parental love. It had been so long since he felt cared for. And now that he’s felt it once again, he’s not ready to let it go.

Thank goodness the Dupain-Chengs’ weren’t going to let him go so easily.

It was a unanimous decision that, until he feels comfortable going back to the mansion, he would stay. He didn’t want to burden them, but they insisted. So he had no choice but to accept the offer.

Before he even knew it, another two weeks had passed. A new routine was broken in by the members of the D.C. household — Marinette was getting real annoyed with Adrien’s constant comparisons of her last name initials to Marvel (her father had taken a liking to his puns, however, so now she just lived in constant pain) — and suddenly it was like he had always been there.

His first therapy session wasn’t great. He was riddled with anxiety (no pun intended) and Doctor Benson was too nice for his liking. Well, it wasn’t that he didn’t like it. It was just so off-putting, considering he wasn’t used to being treated with such kindness even by his own father.

Doctor Benson told him that a lot of the things he’s been experiencing aren’t normal, but his response to that trauma is. At first he had been confused when he was told that his father was emotionally neglectful and verbally abusive. He didn’t understand what his father was doing wrong. Once Doctor Benson explained that, “Abuse is a violent, repetitive behavior that has a negative mental, emotional, and/or physical impact on the victim,” it became more clear.

It’s still a concept that he’s getting used to — that he’s a victim of abuse. The thought makes his skin crawl and a shiver run up his spine because he never considered himself to be part of a statistic. Now that he knows he is, he’s not sure what to do.

Marinette keeps telling him, “Even agreeing to go to therapy is a huge step in the right direction, and I’m so proud of you.” Then she goes on to tell him just how special he is to her and how important him and his life is and all of this crap about how he’s worth more than he thinks.

He has to believe her, too, because she’s the one that found him at his worst and instead of judging him, picked him off the ground and took initiative. She’s the one that brought him to her parents, helped him hide from his father, and even got him a part-time job at the bakery. It’s only temporary until he is able to access his earnings, but he will admit that he likes it way better than modeling; that had just been because his father wanted him to, anyways.

Everyone tells him time and time again that he should not be living for his father. He wants to disagree, because that’s what he’s been conditioned to do for so long, but he ultimately chooses not to. Because they’re right; he’s a young adult who should have the freedom to make his own decisions.

In the end, if he’s not happy, there’s always more opportunities. He knows that now.

And there’s no better way to figure out what he wants than to explore, and reach out for help.

A black cat and a ladybug sat atop a roof.

Marinette has her head tucked into the crook of her partner’s neck, eyes closed as she feels the wind blow past her. Adrien’s head lays on top of hers’ and eyes are trained on the full moon above them.

It had been a long day; one akuma attack and three tests, plus their friends wanted to hang out. Exhaustion had taken over hours before, and sleep was creeping up on them. They cherish the view of Paris at night while it lasts, before they have to go home and do it all again the next day.

When she lifts her head to look at her favorite kitty, she’s relieved to see a soft smile resting on his features.

“Whatcha thinking about?”

He glances at her before turning back to the stars, then hesitates.

“Can I tell you a riddle?”

Her face pales and stomach plummets.

“N-no, I don’t want to play this game again.”

“I promise its a good one, nothing too sad.”

They lock eyes. She can tell there is sincerity within those dark green orbs, so she reluctantly nods.

Adrien licks his lips, not breaking his gaze.

“I visit you every night, even if you don’t call me. I’m lost every day. What am I?”

Jokingly, she wants to say “Chat Noir” but their identities are known now, and she sees him every day (so, admittedly, it wouldn’t be that good of a joke). Then she looks up at the sky and she has her answer.

“The stars,” she whispers.

She’s not looking at him, but she can almost hear his smile widen. So she looks back to him, because she loves to see her kitty happy.

Sure enough, a grin — genuine, not forced — is playing on his lips. It’s human nature to copy social expressions, so she lets her mouth curve into a matching grin.

Then she leans in.

Their smiles fade as they inch closer, focused on the next task at hand. His gaze drops to her pink lips, and she stares into his eyes. She can see the thirst, the want, but she can also see his hesitance.

Experimentally, she pauses to see if he’ll close the gap, but he simply stops in accordance with her. She wants this so bad, but he’s very shy when it comes to romance; despite being so outwardly confident as Chat Noir.

He had told her that it was a mask to hide how scared he truly was. His advances towards her were genuine, although deep down, he was afraid of rejection (to which she will forever feel guilty for putting him through). He wanted to break his façade sometimes, but he chose not to for the sake of not worrying her. The media might have noticed his change in behavior, too; granted, he never cared what the public thought of him anyways.

So, to save them both the trouble, she takes the leap and closes the gap, capturing his lips in a fluid movement.

It’s pure ecstasy; electricity pulses through his veins, but at the same time… he’s calm. He’s not sure how to describe the feeling, in all honesty. It’s just perfect.

Well, not perfect, he corrects himself. Enjoyable, but not perfect.

They don’t move in perfect sync and his lips are chapped so she’s probably wondering why the heck are his lips so dry?and her mouth keeps opening and he isn’t sure if it’s a mistake or if he should do something but he’s not ready for the tongue yet, and so their heads are tilting at an awkward angle trying to make sense of the situation —

— but she smells like pastries and her lips are so soft and he can’t help but crack his eyes open because she is so beautiful in every single way oh my god I love her and nothing makes this better than cupping her face with his right hand and feeling just how smooth her skin is which calms him immensely and he just doesn’t want this to end.

When they finally pull away, with heavy breaths and big smiles, little giggles and red cheeks… he’s happy.

Maybe he’s not perfect. Neither is she. Nobody is, and Adrien is just starting to understand that.

Years of conditioning is hard to unlearn, but he is so grateful to have a support system he can count on. Marinette’s parents honorarily adopting him as one of their own, Doctor Benson offering coping mechanisms he hadn’t even known existed, his bodyguard protecting him from the father sperm donor he’s still afraid to talk to (one day soon, he’ll have to, but he’s planning on crossing that bridge when he gets there), Ms. Bustier’s unwavering faith in his abilities, and his friends’ insistence that he is more than enough — all of this support is overwhelming, to say the least, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Most importantly, there’s Marinette. She has been his rock for the past three years and it’s more true now than it ever was. She is family, in every sense of the word.

“Hey, Mari?” He says quietly, breaking the silence.

“Yes, Chaton?”

The nickname rolls off her tongue in a teasing manner, and he has to laugh.

“Thank you.”

“Always.”

#mlb #miraculous ladybug #miraculous fanfic #adrienette #ladynoir #ladynoir identity reveal #adrienette kiss #tw depression #hurt adrien agreste #adrien agreste needs a hug #marinette dupain cheng #ladybug and chat noir

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ayamari-no-goshi · 4 years ago

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DP and types of ghosts - animal spirits

If you're wondering, I'm still dealing with some things offline, so posts will continue to be sporadic. Onto the folklore!

There are actually not a lot data on this type of ghost. Dogs do seem to be the most commonly reported.

The majority of tales I know are of owners reporting being visited by the spirit of one their previous furry friends. Most of those tales are very positive, and the former pet just seems to be checking in.

However, there are several stories of the ghosts of hunting dogs and even horses appearing around some castles in the UK. Carew Castle in Wales is said to have the ghost of a Barbary ape which was formerly the pet of one of its owners. It is not considered to be a pleasant ghost.

China has a few subsets. One is called the maogui, which are the ghosts of cats raised from the dead by a person, and their task is to destroy a target. Hu Gui / Hu Xian are spirits of animals, usually foxes, that inhabit domestic objects like plates. They are considered benign and helpful. There are also several mythical animals that appear in Chinese folklore. There are too many to list here.

In Japan, there are the famous Inugami. These are spirits of dog who were ritually killed, and they're famously known to possess people. There are also several youkai which derive from animals or are animal-like.

Moscow, Russia has several tales of spectral cats, who appear to be benign. However, there is a tale of a spectral black cat called the black cat of Tverskaya Street which has various tales, but no known reports of attacks.

In the Caribbean, there are malevolent spirits called Duppy, which often appear in various animal forms.

In the US, the most common tales are again of ghostly dogs, some good and some bad, throughout the country. Then there is the tale of the black cat that haunts the tunnels of Capital Hill in DC which is only said to appear when something bad is about to occur.

Specific subsets:

Black dogs - I will make a separate post going more in depth later.

The most famous variant are the spectral black dogs that haunt the mores of the British Isles. They are either considered an ill omen or actively dangerous depending on location and have a variety of names. There are several other accounts of them around the world, and the majority also have negative connotations.

Church grims - another subset I will make a more in depth post about.

Most commonly, they are described as black dogs that haunt and protect graveyards, and the most well known legends are from England. The Scandinavian version can appear as other animals. While they are not evil, seeing one is usually an omen of an upcoming death.

#danny phantom #dp #folklore #types of ghosts #worldbuilding #dp theories #danny phantom theory

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tipsycad147 · 3 years ago

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Sleep Paralysis. Legends, Dangers and Magic

By The Alchemist

Sleep Paralysis sounds pretty modern as a term. However, it’s old as time. Nocturnal Witches, both ancient and modern, are quite familiar with both the term and the state itself. Priests and Priestesses of the Ancient Times, knew all about this pretty frightening state. What did they know back then? Do we know the whole truth? This article will try to shed some witchy light on this dark subject.

Sleep Paralysis and Nocturnal Witchcraft

The Nocturnal Witchcraft is full of surprises, dangers and opportunities. Although it’s not for everyone, the Craft of the Night is enticing and has so much to teach all of us. We’ve learned the Light is Good and Darkness is Bad. This mistaken belief is what tears us apart from the inside. You see, Darkness is as good as the Light. Both give us the balance we need. Don’t be mistaken. Darkness is essential. Do not mess Darkness with Evil. Don’t give in religious propaganda. Light can also be evil and deceiving.

Green Witchcraft II: Balancing Light & Shadow, by Llewellyn Publications, get it from Amazon here

In the Ancient times, priests of the God of Healing, Asclepius, used to initiate a sleep state for their worshippers in order to find the cure of their disease. Darkness was essential to find the cure. Moreover, priests of Hades, God of the underworld, went over a similar procedure in order to contact the Souls of the Dead and learn more. Darkness is equally sacred as the Light.

Sleep Paralysis in Witchcraft and the Old Religion

The first documented account of Sleep Paralysis is written on a Chinese book of Dreams in the 4th century b.C. Since then, ancient Greek and Roman doctors have written about this experience. Sleep paralysis was always linked with supernatural forces and entities from another Realm.

Sleep Paralysis ONLY occurs at Night.

This is quite interesting and it was noticed from the ancient times too. That’s where the word ‘nightmare’ comes from!

What Does ‘Nightmare’ means?

The world ‘nightmare’ which now just means bad dream, is actually a world for Sleep Paralysis. It comes from ‘night’ and the Scandinavian ‘mara‘, which is the female demon, a succubi, who loves to sit on a sleeping person’s chest, suffocating him or her. This creature is also known as ‘the Night Hag‘, ‘Old Mara‘ or ‘the Old Hag‘. It’s difficult not to notice the same word, ‘mara‘ is the sanskrit word to describe the Lord of Evil, similar to ‘Satan‘.

victim of sleep paralysis and astral demons

Astral Demons and Sleep Paralysis

All over the World, the same story goes on and on. In most cases a spirit sits on your chest trying to such your vital energy. Most of the times this is a female entity but in many cases it’s also a male or an animal entity. Due to Witchcraft, these entities might either be:

Astral Demons feasting on someone’s astral energy

Psychic / Astral vampires draining your vitality

Evil Witches attacking their victim causing a ‘psychic attack’, probably engaging in Witch Wars

An Evil Witch’s familiar attacking the witch’s victim causing a ‘psychic attack’, probably engaging in Witch Wars

Who is Old Mara. A Night Demon of misty Scandinavia

According to the Nordic belief, ‘Mara’ is a damned woman who is cursed to travel around at nights and sit on villagers’ chests, causing them nightmares while snuffing their vital energy. Hence, she is a succubus, a female astral demon of vampiric nature.

One of the oldest yet very famous artwork of sleep paralysis, is Henry Fuseli’s 1781 painting ‘The Nightmare’. This painting features probably all the infamous symptoms of sleep paralysis. In this painting we can clearly see a demon – ‘Mara’ – sitting on the chest of sleeping lady. What we can also see are several quite strange and otherworldly creatures sneaking in her bedroom.

The Astral Demon of the Night in Melanesia

Far far away from Norway, in Melanesian islands, sleep paralysis is interpreted as ‘kana tevoro‘ which literally means getting eaten by the demon. Again, this is a damned spirit who is somehow bound in the material plane becoming a hungry ghost to haunt the living relatives who keep grudge with.

According to their customs, this possession might get handy! Hence, people around should say ‘kania, kania‘ which means ‘eat, eat!‘ in an attempt to prolong the possession and have the chance to chat with the soul hence looking for answers in the matter of why he or she has returned. Here’s when it get’s even creepier. The individual awakening from the experience is asked to pursue the soul of the dead relative. This confrontation is believed to be the only solution. There is actually a 2014 short movie about that story!

The Astral Demon around the Mediterranean Sea

In Greece, it is believed that sleep paralysis occurs when a demonic old lady named Mora (again remember sanskrit Mara, the devil), sits on the victims chest trying to steal it’s breath and energy. A little South from Greece, in Egypt, this spirit is believed to be the spirit of an evil African Queen (probably one who possessed magical powers like Bilqis – Queen of Sheeba ). In Turkish culture, sleep paralysis is often referred to as karabasan (“the dark presser/assailer”).

Nightmare (1800) after Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781).

Night Witches, Witch Trials and Sleep Paralysis

Sleep paralysis was used as ‘evidence’ during the Witch Craze in Salem. In 1692 accused witch Susan Martin had told Robert Downer that “some She-Devil would shortly fetch him away”. About that night, Robert Downer said that “as he lay in his bed, there came in at the window, the likeness of a cat, which flew upon him, took fast hold of his throat, lay on him a considerable while, and almost killed him.”

According to these accounts, Evil Witches brought demons, who possessed these people causing them sleep paralysis.

What is Sleep Paralysis?

But first things first. Let’s give a definition. Sleep paralysis is the feeling similar to waking up, hence being conscious yet unable to move or speak from a few seconds up to a few minutes. Some people may also feel pressure on their chest, belly or a weird sense of choking. It occurs when a person passes between stages of sleep.

When does it Occur?

Most likely, Sleep paralysis occurs in the Nighttime. It usually happens during the Witching Hour, which makes things even more ‘magically’ complicated.

A Witch’s View on ‘Sleep Paralysis’

Sleep Paralysis is indeed a bewitching time. No matter how hard scientists try to explain what is happening, the stories speak for themselves. Yes it can be traced back to the transitions or REM and NREM sleep states, yet this does not excludes the magical phenomena which co-exist.

These hypnagogic states, were always useful in Witchcraft, as we have managed to isolate our senses, paralyzed our material bodies in order to have full access to our magical potential and astral energy. ‘Sleep Paralysis’ can be caused with Hypnosis as it’s such a powerful state of awareness. In fact, deep meditation tries to imitate this state.

As previously discussed in our article on Astral Projection “…the Truth though is that, Sleep Paralysis is only a step before Astral Projection. While in Sleep Paralysis, your body is totally relaxed but the Astral Body is activated. Thus your magical and psychic powers are on alert identifying entities and creatures around you of the same essence, the astral essence. Of course it comes natural to get scared by a negative entity therefore wake up and remember what you’ve experienced in the state of Sleep Paralysis.”

In other words, sleep paralysis is much more common. You are just more capable of remembering a scary experience rather than a relaxing one.

Conclusions:

YES, these scary creatures you see are real. They are actually astral demons and vampiric entities. That’s why we have protection rites all over our magazine.

YES, these entities try to suck your energy either you’re sleeping or not.

NO, this is not what causes the paralysis. You are just transiting between sleep conditions. It’s a hypnagogic state EXTREMELY useful.

YES, thanks to your higher awareness due to sleep paralysis, you are able to recognize these creatures.

YES, you are safe! Especially when in sleep paralysis or while astral traveling you are more protected than usual because you are more aware of your spiritual self and you can conjure powers from your Guardian Angel.

Witchy Solution: In order to protect yourself from these entities, one needs to place a silver dime under his/her pillow. Silver is believed to keep vampiric demons away.

In conclusion Sleep Paralysis is safe and the doorway to the Astral Plane.

Have you Ever Experienced Sleep Paralysis?

https://www.magicalrecipesonline.com/2018/05/sleep-paralysis-legends-dangers-and-magic.html

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dangermousie · 4 years ago

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Heelo mousie! Love your blog! Do you mind recommending some of your favourite Chinese BL novels or shows?

I've seen the untamed and read it. I'm currently reading heaven's official blessing and I saw the donghua. Anything other than these two?

Awww, thank you!

Novels: I am gonna be lazy and literally copy/paste the entire danmei section of my top 10 web novels post (except MXTX’s stuff since you are already reading it.) Let me know if you need help finding any of these.

Lord Seventh - I am only partway through this so far, but it’s already on the list because it’s smart and somehow intense AND laid-back (not sure how this works, but it does) and is honestly just a really really solid and smart period novel, with the OTP a cherry on top of a narrative sundae. Plus, I love the concept of MC deciding he is not going for his supposedly fated love - he’s tried for six lifetimes, always with disaster, and he’s just plain done and tired. When he opens his life in his seventh reincarnation and sees the person he would have given up the world for, he genuinely feels nothing at all. (Spoiler - his OTP is actually a barbarian shaman this time around, thank you Lord!)

Golden Stage - my perfect comfort novel. Probably the least angsty of any danmei novel on this list (which still means plenty angsty :P) It also has a dedicated, smart OTP that is an OTP for the bulk of the book - I think you will notice that in most of the novels in this list, I go for “OTP against the world” trope - I can’t stand love triangles and the same. Anyway, Fu Shen, is a famous general whose fame is making the emperor antsy. When he gets injured and can’t walk any more, the emperor gladly recalls him and marries him off to his most faithful court lackey, the head of sort of secret police, Yan Xiaohan. The emperor intends it both as a check on the general and a general spite move since the two men always clash in court whenever they meet. But not all is at is seems. They used to be friends a long time ago, had a falling out, and one of the loveliest parts of the novel is them finding their way to each other, but there is also finding the middle path between their two very different philosophies and ways of being, not to mention solving a conspiracy or dozen, and putting a new dynasty on the throne, among other things. It always makes me think, a little, of “if Mei Changsu x Jingyan were canon.”

Sha Po Lang - if you like a lot of fantasy politics and world-building and steampunk with your novels, this one is for you. This one is VERY plot-heavy with smart, dedicated characters and a deconstruction of many traditional virtues - our protagonist Chang Geng, a long-lost son of the Emperor, is someone who wants to modernize the country but also take down the current emperor his brother for progress’ sake and the person he’s in love with is the general who saved him when he was a kid who is nominally his foster father. Anyway, the romance is mainly a garnish in this one, not even a big side dish, but the relationship between two smart, dedicated, deadly individuals with very different concepts of duty is fascinating long before it turns romantic. And if you like angst, while overall it’s not as angsty as e.g., Meatbun stuff, Chang Geng’s childhood is the stuff of nightmares and probably freaks me out more than anything else in any novel on this list, 2ha included.

To Rule In a Turbulent World (LSWW) - gay Minglan. No seriously. This is how I think of it. it’s a slice of life period novel with fascinating characters and setting that happens to have a gay OTP, not a romance in a period setting per se and I always prefer stories where the romance is not the only thing that is going on. It’s meticulously written and smart and deals with character development and somehow makes daily minutia fascinating. Our protagonist, You Miao, is the son of a fabulously wealthy merchant, sent to the capital to make connections and study. As the story starts, he sees his friend’s servants beating someone to death, feels bad, and buys him because, as we discover gradually and organically, You Miao may be wealthy and occasionally immature but he is a genuinely good person. The person he buys is a barbarian from beyond the wall, named Li Zhifeng. It’s touch and go if the man will survive but eventually he does and You Miao, who by then has to return home, gives him his papers and lets him go. However, LZF decides to stick with You Miao instead, both out of sense of debt for YM saving his life and because he genuinely likes him (and yet, there is no instalove on either of their parts, their bodies have fun a lot quicker than their souls.) Anyway, the two take up farming, get involved in the imperial exams and it’s the life of prosperity and peace, until an invasion happens and things go rapidly to hell. This is so nuanced, so smart (smart people in this actually ARE!) and has secondary characters who are just as complex as the mains (for example, I ended up adoring YM’s friend, the one who starts the plot by almost beating LZF to death for no reason) because the novel never forgets that few people are all villain. There is a lovely character arc or two - watching YM grow up and LZF thaw - there is the fact that You Miao is a unicorn in web novels being laid back and calm. This whole thing is a masterpiece.

Stains of Filth (Yuwu) - want the emotional hit of 2ha but want to read something half its length? Well, the author of 2ha is here to eviscerate you in a shorter amount of time. This has the beautiful world-building, plot twists that all make sense and, at the center of it all, an intense and all-consuming and gloriously painful relationship between two generals - one aristocratic loner Mo Xi, and the other gregarious former slave general Gu Mang. Once they were best friends and lovers, but when the novel starts, Gu Mang has long turned traitor and went to serve the enemy kingdom and has now been returned and Mo Xi, who now commands the remnants of his slave army, has to cope with the fact that he has never been able to get over the man who stabbed him through the heart. Literally. This novel has a gorgeously looping structure, with flashbacks interwoven into present storyline. There is so much love and longing and sacrifice in this that I am tearing up a bit just thinking of it. If you don’t love Mo Xi and Gu Mang, separately and together, by the end of it, you have no soul.

The Dumb Husky and His White Cat Shizun (2ha/erha) - if you’ve been following my tumblr for more than a hot second, you know my obsession with this novel. Honestly, even if I were to make a list of my top 10 novels of any kind, not just webnovels, this would be on the list. It has everything I want - a complicated, intricate plot with an insane amount of plot twists, all of which are both unexpected and make total sense, a rich and large cast of characters, a truly epic OTP that makes me bawl, emotional intensity that sometimes maxes even me out and so much character nuance and growth. Also, Moran is my favorite web novel character ever, hands down.

Anyway, the plot (or at least the way it first appears) is that the evil emperor of the cultivation world, Taxian Jun, kills himself at 32 and wakes up in the body of his 16 year old self, birth name Moran. Excited to get a redo, Moran wants to save his supposed true love Shimei, whose death the last go-around pushed him towards evil. He also wants to avoid entanglement with Chu Wanning, his shizun and sworn enemy in past life. And that’s all you are best off knowing, trust me. The only hint I am going to give is oooh boy the mother of all unreliable narrators has arrived!

The novel starts light and funny on boil the frog principle - if someone told me I would be full bawling multiple times with this novel, I’d have thought they were insane, but i swear my eyes hurt by the end of it. I started out being amused and/or disliking the mains and by the end I would die for either of them.

The Wife is First - OK, this one did not make my top 10 web novels but it’s a sweet, fun gay cottagecore fest. Our ML, a royal prince, and his spouse, a smart if delicate aristocrat, keep house, eat noodles, play with their pet tiger, make out and spoil each other rotten, while occasionally fighting battles and outwitting their court enemies. It’s so very mellow. That couple redefines low drama - they are both nice and functional and use their brains. It’s as if a nice jock and a nice nerd got together and then proceeded to be wholesome all over the place.

I mean, the set up could be dramatic - our ML the prince, lost his fight for the throne and is about to be killed. The only person who stayed loyal to him is his arranged husband the aristocrat guy who ML never treated nicely since he resented marrying him (marrying a man in that world is done to remove someone from the ability to inherit the throne.) And yet the husband stood by him not out of love but beliefs in loyalty blah blah. Anyway, he transmigrates back into the past right after their wedding night and is all “I got a second chance OMG! I don’t want the throne what is even the point? I want to live a good long life and treat the only person who stood by me really well!” And he proceeds to do so to the shock of the aristocrat who had a very unpleasant wedding night and generally can tell the man he just married would rather eat nails than be married to him. But soon enough (no seriously, it’s not many chapters at all) he believes the prince is sincere blah blah and then they get together and they pretty much become cottagecore goals.

In terms of dramas, I only do period dramas (or novels) so I am not the person to be able to recommend any modern BLs. There is a flood of upcoming (hopefully) period BL dramas but it’s relatively thin on the ground now. The two I will recommend is Word of Honor (which is AMAZING) and Winter Begonia (which I just started watching but which owns me already.) I have a tag for both - the one for the former is huge and I cannot recommend either strongly enough. I’ve heard good things about The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, but I am not big on mysteries so haven’t watched it for myself.

In terms of the upcoming BLs, the ones I am most looking forward to are Immortality and Winner Is King, but The Society of the Four Leaves also looks promising.

#asks #cdrama #cnovel

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xb-squaredx · 4 years ago

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Rise of the V-Tuber

As a platform, YouTube has gone through a variety of “eras,” wherein a particular trend catches on and defines the website for some time. In the early days, you had funny cat videos, then Let’s Plays of video games became rather popular, and now we seem to be deeply entrenched into a new era that has exploded in popularity as of late. If you’ve frequented the website at all in the past few months, it is almost inescapable. Cutesy, anime-styled avatars that play games, sing, chat with viewers, or even cook! What does it all mean? Where did they come from? Are they here to stay? Most importantly, how does one crawl out of the rabbit hole once they fall into it? All that and more will be revealed as we delve deep into the wacky, wholesome and sometimes worrying world of V-Tubers. (photo credit YuuGiJoou. Check her out on YouTube, Twitter or Twitch!)

THE ORIGIN

To begin properly, let’s define the subject. A “V-Tuber” is a “Virtual YouTuber,” someone who streams on YouTube (or any other streaming platform) using a digital avatar as a proxy. The streamer in question typically uses face-tracking software so that the avatar can emote (or at least attempt to emote) to match their own reactions as they provide entertainment for their audience. While it may seem as if V-Tubers are rather new, in doing research on the topic, you’d be surprised how far back things go.

For starters, the concept of a virtual celebrity has been around for a while, with one of the most notable efforts being Hatsune Miku, a Vocaloid voicebank program. Hatsune Miku is every bit as famous and beloved as a flesh-and-blood singer or entertainer despite being nothing but voice synthesizer software. Vocaloid got its start back in 2000, eventually being reworked into a commercial product in 2004, though it wasn’t until the programs started receiving anthropomorphic character designs that it took off, with Hatsune Miku’s own debut in 2007, and the rest is history.

Many will consider “Virtual Idol” Kizuna Ai as the true pioneer of what we call a V-Tuber today, making her debut in 2016, however one could make an argument that Ami Yamato, a 3D-animated vlogging channel debuting in 2013, beat her to the punch. Honorable mention of course goes to Any Malu, a Brazilian animated YouTube vlogger who debuted in 2015 and eventually gained her own show on Cartoon Network Brazil. While Ai may not be the first, she is undoubtedly considered to be the codifier that many later V-Tubers would follow. Ai’s entire shtick was being an AI program that wanted to connect with humans, playing games, singing or interacting with fans. Following her explosive popularity, it was clear that other companies would follow the model established by Ai, with their own spins on it of course.

Nijisanji, established in 2018, proved that this trend could be incredibly profitable, becoming trailblazers in their own right as they established various “branches” of their company in several countries with their own unique performers that could cater to a wider range of viewers. As of this writing, Nijisanji employs over 164 “Virtual Livers,” most of which come from their Japan branch, alongside their Korean, Chinese, Indian and Indonesian branches. Similarly, there is the Hololive corporation, which saw substantial growth throughout 2020 in particular. Established in 2016 originally as Cover Corporation, at first Hololive was the name of an app meant for use in 3D motion capture, though following Nijisanji’s success, Hololive was rebranded as a V-Tuber competitor and also features a variety of colorful characters spread across many different main branches. There is of course the Japanese branch, as well as Hololive Indonesia, the relatively new (and highly successful) Hololive English, a defunct Chinese branch and an all-male Holostar branch in Japan.

Other, smaller V-Tuber groups have sprung up alongside the corporate powerhouses, such as VOMS Project, established in March of 2020, as an independent trio of streamers, and more recently at the tail-end of 2020 with V-Shojo, featuring a group of Western streamers (who ironically mostly stick to Twitch). Outside of this of course are the countless independent streamers who utilize avatars for one reason or another across many different platforms. Even prominent Twitch streamers seem to be getting in on the act, such as Pokimane, though that one has not come without some backlash. So consider that a rough history of how V-Tubers got started in Japan but how did they gain a more global fanbase? Well, in a word…”memes.”

GOING INTERNATIONAL

I won’t deny there had to be at least SOME overseas fans who enjoyed watching V-Tubers before they became more well-known, but for many Western fans their introductions to V-Tubers in general typically came from viral videos taken from various streams that spread like wildfire, eventually getting people curious enough to check them out. For Kizuna Ai, her playthrough of Resident Evil 7 gained notoriety for her mimicking the cursing of the English-speaking player character, and for Hololive, arguably the first real Western breakthrough for the company came from a now infamous moment from Sakura Miko’s stream of Grand Theft Auto 5.

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Also from Hololive, Inugami Korone in particular had a variety of memes spread about her due to playthroughs from various games that even got acknowledged by the developers themselves. Her playthrough of DOOM 2016 resulted in a short-lived Easter egg implanted into DOOM Eternal, and her video on Banjo-Kazooie (and the animated Eekum Bokum fan video that spawned from that) got the attention of Rare, Xbox and even Grant Kirkhope, the composer for the original game.

Honestly, the real unsung heroes of sorts for V-Tuber popularity might just come from foreign fans that would clip and translate various moments from streams that helped to build an international audience. There are dozens of Twitter handles and YouTube channels that specialize in spreading these clips around and if you factor in the YouTube algorithm, once you see one video your feed will be flooded with similar videos. It is no surprise fans call getting into the fandom “falling into the rabbit hole.” When you look at the more popular members of Hololive, often the ones with various viral clips have the higher subscription counts. In the case of Aki Rosenthal, one of the older members, her sub count exploded after a fan translated a section from a then-recent stream in which she talked candidly about her less-than-stellar growth as well as the difficulties of standing out in general. While at one point having the lowest amount of subscribers (well below 200,000), in the months since that video her sub count has more than doubled going past 400,000. Sometimes the talent needs a little push.

Now, within Hololive itself, I think Kiryu Coco is also partially responsible for expanding the fanbase, being one of the few employed talents with the ability to speak English (likely a native speaker), she gained a large international fanbase as she would work to translate what she or other members were talking about on the fly, and later on established an ongoing series where she would directly engage with fans over websites like Reddit and “rate” the various memes they would send in. Coco also pushed for establishing what would become Hololive English, which has proven to be a gigantic success, each member of that branch blowing past more established talent’s subscriber counts, with Gawr Gura becoming the first Hololive V-Tuber to pass one million subscribers and just recently passed the two million mark. So yeah, V-Tubers are a big deal now but…what is about them that makes people want to watch them in the first place?

THE APPEAL

So, right off the bat, if we’re going to ask why someone would want to watch a V-Tuber I think it’s fair to ask that of virtually ANY internet personality. The reason why someone would watch Game Grumps or Pokimane or Jojo Siwa or whoever else is the same reason they’d watch Kizuna Ai or Inugami Korone or Ironmouse: they’re entertaining. I guess that seems like a bit of a cop-out answer, right? There MUST be a reason why V-Tubers have blown up in popularity over the last few years, so are there things that make these particular Internet entertainers stand out from the crowd?

Undoubtedly, the fact that these streamers are playing a character is a deviation from the norm, though the dedication to staying “in character” seems to vary from person to person, and over time many V-Tubers tend to open up and are far more genuine. At any rate, even the best actor out there can’t possibly make up various daily happenings or childhood stories for their characters on the fly, day after day, stream after stream. Still, I’d imagine the decision to use a proxy as opposed to their real self can be liberating, a mask they can wear to speak more freely or a role they can play up for entertainment. For the most part, I think the persona aspect is mostly harmless fun that makes the streamer seem more distinct; ask yourself which is more eye-catching: some normal human playing a game and occasionally cracking a joke, or a one-eyed pirate girl discussing her raunchy past? Or maybe you’d rather watch the grim reaper practice her raps? Even talent that don’t really play up their character much still often have interesting character designs; we have princesses, dragons, devils, robots and more. A little something for everyone!

youtube

Speaking a bit more personally, I find it interesting to watch streamers from an entirely different culture and how they interact with fans or engage with games. I find it funny when Inugami Korone or Sakura Miko plays more Western-oriented games like the DOOM series or Grand Theft Auto V respectively. Often times they’re blown away by the culture clash, or they view these games through a different lens since it’s so different from what they’re used to. In particular, those two are just genuine goofballs that are funny all on their own. More chat-focused streams are an interesting view into daily life in Japan, such as the stories Houshou Marine tells, though obviously a given V-Tuber’s viewpoint isn’t a metric you can apply to the whole country, but she’s still interesting to listen to. Takanashi Kiara is also notable for her multilingual skills, which has helped her bridge the gap a bit more between the various Hololive members through her Holotalk segments where she interviews other V-Tubers. Outside of Hololive, Amano Pikamee from VOMS Project is just a bundle of energy that’s fun to watch as she rages in Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Sunshine. Her tea-kettle laugh is also just kinda charming. The V-Shojo group stands out for being super vulgar compared to the more corporate V-Tubers and while I don’t watch them all that much, there’s still some fun chaos to be had. Still though, I think there’s one big elephant in the room that would also help explain V-Tubers catching on at this specific point in time: the pandemic. Streaming is one of the few jobs not really affected by the pandemic, and with people stuck inside, they’re more likely to scroll through YouTube or Twitter and find a funny clip and then…well, you know… It’s one bright spot in an otherwise dark time…but I’d be lying if I said it was all sunshine and rainbows.

THE DARK UNDERBELLY

The overall idea behind V-Tubers, at least in Japan, seems to be an extension of Idol Culture…and uh…if you know anything about Idol Culture in Japan, it is all kinds of scummy. Exploitative, filled to the brim with harmful rules and regulations and largely catering to some vary unsavory “fans,” I’ll make it no mystery that I find it incredibly distasteful. Look no further than what happened to Minegishi Minami from the idol group AKB48. To keep a long story short, the obsession with “purity” and being this idealized Japanese beauty means idols are effectively locked into their work, unable to discuss or in many cases partake in romantic relationships, as that would make them less “desirable” to their audience. This unfortunately does at times extend to V-Tubers.

Take Tokoyami Towa, who was suspended for some time and forced to make an apology video for…having some male voices briefly heard over Discord during an Apex Legend stream. She even lost a lot of subscribers and support from Japanese fans following this, though once learning of this, Western fans flocked to her as a show of support. Hololive has also dealt with a variety of issues coming from Chinese fans; though that’s a particular hornet’s nest I don’t want to delve into here too much. To sum it up, fans can get obsessive and toxic, which can lead to the talent being harassed. It is for this reason, it is generally agreed upon by fans to not delve too deep into the personal lives of the V-Tubers, for fear of being doxxed and the illusion being broken. These kinds of issues certainly bring up some interesting questions regarding how talent should be treated moving forward.

Are these V-Tubers characters or just alternate sides of real people? Where does the fantasy end and reality begin? Ultimately, the lines are somewhat blurred. Talent certainly brings some of their own personality into the performance, but they are forced to remain anonymous and as can be seen in the case of Kizuna Ai, they are not always in control of the character they’ve been given. Kizuna Ai’s initial actress was for a time replaced, and “clones” of the character with different voices and personalities started to spring up, likely as an attempt to compete with the likes of Nijisanji and Hololive. In cases where V-Tubers retire from the industry, or “graduate” as some call it, all of their hard work cultivating a fanbase might end up being for nothing as they were forced behind a proxy that isn’t truly themselves and I imagine it can be hard to start over again from square one. Never mind the attempts to step out of the shadow of your older work. Man, Perfect Blue was downright prophetic at times, huh?

I don’t want to dwell on the negatives too much though. It’s worth noting for one thing that Nijisanji seems relatively lax regarding how their talent operates, whereas it seems Hololive is the standout for adhering to the idol ideal, though considering how some of the talent acts (in particular Kiryu Coco), one has to wonder if they’re softening their stances a bit. Many V-Tubers generally talk about the positive aspects of the industry and being given the opportunity to reach people from all over the world. Shortly after Ina’s debut in Hololive English, she was actually brought to tears when told her art streams convinced people to get into (or back into) the hobby, which had been one of her goals for becoming a V-Tuber in the first place. Ironmouse, now a member of V-Shojo, has an immune system disorder that keeps her bedridden and forced to stay inside, so the opportunities afforded by this particular type of streaming has allowed her to reach out to others and as per her own words, has changed her life for the better. While there are definitely “fans” that go too far, corporate practices that are outdated, or harmful and a slew of potential unfortunate implications, ultimately I think most people out there are just looking for quality entertainment, and these digital proxies give these entertainers an outlet to connect with fans in a way that they might not have otherwise.

CONCLUSION

V-Tubers are in a bit of a boom at the moment, though I can’t imagine it’ll last forever. We’re quickly approaching market saturation and after a point, people can only follow so many streamers at once. Hell, as I was editing this up, it seems as if prominent YouTuber Pewdiepie is about to step into the ring, so who knows what kind of shake-up that could bring. The bubble will undoubtedly burst and what becomes of V-Tubers then is still up in the air. Or who knows, maybe V-Tubers will endure and replace all entertainment and we’re just watching the beginning of a cyberpunk dystopia. Stranger things have happened! Considering the world is still reeling from the effects of the pandemic, that should largely have an impact on the popularity of V-Tubers for some time to come, though as we emerge into a “new normal” in the world, it’ll be interesting to see how these entertainers continue to evolve. Now, I suppose there is one question I never quite went over before now, isn’t there? How does one escape the V-Tuber rabbit hole? Well, I’m sorry to say but there is no escape.

Enjoy your new home!

-B

#xb-squaredx #blog #vtuber #v-tuber #hololive #nijisanji #VOMS project #korone #sakura miko #pikamee #kizuna ai #youtube #twitch #v-shojo #ironmouse #houshou marine #eekum bokum

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fyexo · 4 years ago

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201216 M-Pop star Lay Zhang tells us about his music, dreams, and starting his own company

Chinese Megastar Lay Zhang wants to bring ‘China to the world’ with his music. He talks to Don’t Bore Us about how he plans to achieve his dreams.

For most of us, our dreams are conditional. For us, they remain in the abstract most of the time, attached to phrases like ‘It would be good if…’ or ‘I wish I…’. Not for Lay Zhang. Lay Zhang speaks in dreams. In his mind, he picks them out of the abstract and parks them on the road to his goals. Then, he sets into motion a cause and effect cycle, where each step leads to the realization of that dream.

“The word dream is a strange one,” he wrote in his autobiography Standing Firm at 24. “You start with a dream, but you have to fulfill everything in reality. Of course, it’s not really that you’re dreaming, because someone once told me, a dream is actually what a person’s heart looks like.”

Despite his status as one of China’s most famous stars, it’s this spirit that still is the condensation of Zhang’s ethos as an artist. Born in Changsha in the Chinese province of Hunan as Zhang Yixing, he was no stranger to the world of entertainment as a child star. In 2008, he auditioned for trainee-ship at SM Entertainment, largely considered the progenitor of modern-day K-pop, and passed. Four years later, he debuted as EXO’s Lay, an act that turned the tide for K-pop in the 2010s.

Home, however, was never very far away — after flitting between South Korea and China for work for sometime, the lengthy schedules eventually made him shift base to mainland China, laying the groundwork for Lay Zhang. His first studio album, Lay 02 Sheep, broke five records on the first day of digital release on the Chinese music service QQ Music. His second, NAMANANA, ranked No. 21 on the Billboard 200 chart, making him the highest-ranking M-pop artist on the chart to date.

It’s an ideal trajectory for anyone with dreams as big as Zhang: every new release came with new records and renown. Eventually, however, Zhang realized what his work was missing: a piece of his roots. He wanted to show the world “what China is really about.”

And so he said: “Let there be LIT.”

Named after a play on the Chinese word for lotus, ‘lián huā’, LIT — released in two parts over the course of 2020 — puts Zhang’s Chinese identity at its core. As he weaves the sounds of the Hulusi, Guzheng and Gong together with hip-hop, R&B, and Latin, Zhang not only creates his own genre (which he calls “mixed Mando-pop”), but also nurtures a new dream: one where Mando-pop frees itself of the labels of being “vapid” and “vain” and presents new avenues of experimentation and cultural triumph.

“In the future, mixed will be king. Every work, every genre can be mixed with each other; every language can mix with another. That’s where we go.” he says.

The way to this “mixed” world might be long, but Zhang will soon have company on the way. Earlier in 2020, he announced the establishing of his own company, Chromosome Entertainment, with a set focus to not only train the next generation of Chinese idols, but also to include Chinese culture and history as an integral part of their artistry.

DBU caught up with Lay Zhang to talk about Chromosome Entertainment, his music, how he is going to take his company to ‘infinity’, and his adorable cats.

Don’t Bore Us: Why did you think this was the right time to start your own company?

Lay Zhang: I have always wanted to have my own company and leave my mark in the world. I feel I need to think less and do more. I wanted to do it no matter how difficult it would be. If I kept waiting for the right moment, I might never do it. So, I created the Chromosome Entertainment Group.

DBU: Is there anything that you’ll focus on teaching the trainees that you yourself didn’t get during your trainee years?

Lay Zhang: Our trainees will learn more and more about Chinese culture and Chinese history.

DBU: Speaking of your music over the past year, we have to talk about LIT. We saw you expand into genres that you had never experimented with before. While Part 1 was a mix of traditional Chinese sounds, Part 2 had more modern inspirations such as R&B, Hip-hop, Latin, and others. Which of these sounds comes more naturally to you, and which one is more difficult to explore?

Lay Zhang: I just tried a lot of genres. Since I was young, I have been singing in Chinese and listening to pop music, so I find writing R&B is easier, since it is similar. With traditional Chinese music, it feels like second nature, since I grew up with it.

Latin and Hip-hop is very new to me, but Latin caught my ear because it’s easy to dance to. I’ve been listening to hip-hop and trap in the past few years. I think no matter what kind, I want to do a new genre. I want to call it M-pop because I think in the future, mixed will be king. Every work, every genre can be mixed with each other — every language can mix with each other, and that’s where we go.

DBU: Speaking of the incorporation of your native Chinese sounds into the songs on the first album, what is the most difficult part while looking for a middle-ground between culture and modernity?

Lay Zhang: You always want to respect the culture. We owe a lot to the past for giving us today: I cannot stress that enough. I understand that people have new tastes each year, so you want to make sure that you match the energy and the vibe of the year.

It’s hard to explain how I find the balance. I ask my friends and collaborators, what they feel. I took that into consideration [with LIT], and checked my gut feeling. Did I feel [like] it mixed my Chinese sound with the present or modern without losing it? It’s [a] feeling I get after listening to the record time after time in my car or in the studio.

DBU: With reference to bringing “China to the world”. How do you think LIT did that, apart from, of course, being a mash-up of different influences?

Lay Zhang: I think this album is the first of its kind in a way. It’s very unique: we brought together new and legendary producers to create beautiful music. We had traditional and modern day stories to showcase the idea of the past and the present, to show the world that Chinese artists can be creative. They can think more deeply about music. I want people to know that we are improving everyday. We are working hard. This is what LIT shows.

DBU: Historically, western audiences have thought of Mando-pop as being “very vain or bland.” You have always wanted to push forward Mixed Mando-pop through your work. How do you hope to change this perception of Mando-pop globally through your music?

Lay Zhang: It is a work in progress. We are still improving and developing M-pop. Since I was a child, I have always had big goals and dreams. I want to show the world what China is really about, that we are respectful people trying to better ourselves.

DBU: Your current approach to your work makes me curious. The words “one of China’s biggest celebrities” are often used in your context. With the fan-base and work you’ve built over the years, you could very well have taken the safer route and stuck to the previous sounds you have experimented with before, because anything you make is guaranteed to be a hit. So why is it important for you to keep making the kind of music you do, in the way you make it?

Lay Zhang: I want to challenge myself and see what I can do. I admit, I don’t always succeed, but I’d rather try different genres and sing in different languages to see what I am capable of. Like any artist, I want my music to reach more people, so you have to branch out and try new things, but at the same time, not lose who you are. I have great fans that support me and allow me to dream bigger. I want to pave the path for the next generation to share their music with the world.

DBU: You’ve worked both in South Korea and China. With K-pop having a moment in the global spotlight, what are some things that you feel M-pop could learn or borrow from K-pop?

Lay Zhang: I think it’s great that K-pop is having its moment. In M-pop, we need to put ourselves out there more. We need to meet fans in every city and town to create that one-on-one interaction. I think there are enough artists with quality music to match the artists in K-pop: we just need to focus on sharing Mando-pop.

DBU: For the past few years, you have been heavily involved in music reality shows geared towards bringing out China’s next musical stars. There was Idol Producer, Youth With You, Street Dance of China: what are your hopes from the next generation, and why this interest?

Lay Zhang: The next generation inspires me. Their dreams and efforts inspire me to work harder and be a good role model. I hope they can focus on creating great art and work that they can be proud of. Their work should speak for itself. If everyone can do this, they can do this. If everyone can do this, we can push the boundaries of music and art. We can create works that leave people in awe.

DBU: In the larger context of your artistry, what impact has this year had on you personally?

Lay Zhang: COVID-19 slowed my life down like everyone else. We have all experienced difficulties, but I was able to think about my music and career more clearly. I decided that I should go after the things I want as soon as I could. For my artistry, I realized I needed to focus on music I made, my company, and make music that really carried the culture and vibe of my country.

DBU: Observing your trajectory from when you just started out to now, I was thinking about how it is very clear where your professional priorities lie. What about personal ones? What are you focusing on personally in the coming year?

Lay Zhang: I think about this a lot, and it’s hard to separate my work and personal life. But I think I only have that much time before I run out of energy. I am always thirsty (laughs), so I know I won’t be able to continue this forever. I want to keep pushing until I can’t. So, then I can focus on my personal life knowing I gave it all to my career.

DBU: I asked some fans if they had anything to say to you, and most of them wanted me to relay the same thing: please take a well-deserved break! Now that LIT has had its successful run, is it time for a vacation, or is there more to come?

Lay Zhang: My cats give me a lot of confidence and happiness. They make it easier to face each day; it’s nice to know you have someone waiting for you at home. But I will take a vacation when I turn 40 (laughs). Of course, there is more to come: the trainees we are receiving are so talented. I am excited to create something that will hopefully last a long time, and will improve and uphold the entertainment industry in China.

L Singh @ Don’t Bore Us

#exo #lay #t: interview

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fishylife · 3 years ago

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Street Dance of China, Season 4, Episode 7

- The figures make a return!!! I love them, they are so cute.

- Anyway, it’s cute that each of the teams have kind of a common room to chill. Helps with the team atmosphere, I think.

- Yixing playing the flute/pipe that has a gourd at the top. I recall seeing a video where he’s played it before, so the production crew probably got it so that he could show off a bit.

- The fact that Han Geng’s having a cooking class is just reaffirming my beliefs that Han Geng would be the best captain to have if I was a contestant. They have the most fun.

- Yibo is so super serious though. While the other teams are chilling, he’s already thinking of his redemption plan. I’ll be honest, it feels....a little too tense. As a captain, I think he needs to take time for his team to relax and regroup.

- My boy Yixing recruited my boy MT-Pop T_T He gave him the Baymax to accompany when he’s feeling lonely because apparently MT-Pop said that he missed home often T_T Also Yixing was watching for MT-Pop’s expression except he was emotionless and Poppin’C was like no, don’t worry, he’s always like this XD I thought that Baymax suited MT-Pop too because he likes monsters so I think it’s not a reach to guess that he likes superheroes and comics and cool characters. Also, like Baymax, MT-Pop is also friend-shaped. Anyway, I wonder if he was feeling emotional here because he missed home ;_;

- Yixing gave Momo the CUTEST cat lamp T_T

- In the captain interview, Momo asked Yixing if his stomach was alright. I saw in some behind-the-scenes photos that Yixing had a bad stomach that day, so I guess that was why he was so disappointed with his performance. I’d initially thought it was his back problems (because he was shown getting some back massages/chiropractic stuff done to his waist in other behind-the-scenes footage), but I think the back/waist stuff is something that’s been going on for a longer time.

- Lmao Nelson being like “I know girls, they love that cute stuff” XD And he noted how Momo seemed more comfortable with Yixing. To be fair, he’s onto something, I am girl and I love cute stuff and dudes that make me smile. (Though in the end, Momo chose Yibo)

- I thought it was cute that Momo was talking through the wall to MT-Pop, asking if he’d already chosen his team. I love the friendships between the dancer contestants v.v

- Yixing gave copies of his Lit physical album to the Gogo Brothers...all of the fans who couldn’t get their hands on a copy are gonna be mad haha.

- Yixing’s team tried to surprise Gogo Brothers when they joined their team ^^;;

- This is as wild as Yixing is going to go lol. He was waving the scarves being all “WOOHOO!!”

- Yixing and Han Geng’s teams shouting for Bozi across however many rooms made me laugh XD Especially because Bozi is such a stoic dude.

- Yixing’s relief at having recruited Bozi. As we know, he doesn’t have much confidence in recruiting dancers.

- When Bunta and Henry had their interview they were being all “HEYYY MY GUY!!!!” Very buddy-buddy. And then Henry to his team was like “I’ve never talked to Bunta.” The art of faking it gets you far.

- For the contestants who get to choose between two or more captains, they get an extra blind box with a little doll in it. I wonder what that is. It’s so cute, I want one v.v (I love dolls)

- The rejection on Han Geng’s face XD Is this the first time he’s been outplayed?

- In addition to getting everyone on his team to sign the card, Yixing also asked Rei from Gogo Brothers to come with him to recruit Bunta, and it worked in the end.

- Yixing turning the party into a concert being like “MAKE SOME NOISE!!!”

- Not gonna lie, the performances aren’t the best, probably because they’re just for funsies anyway. It doesn’t bother me that much though, at least they look like they’re having fun. As a wise man once said, fun must be always.

- OMG YES YIXING. He went full memery on this XD

- There’s so much going on here. The song they danced to was a famous song by Xiaohudui (a Taiwanese boyband). When questioned about their choice of music, Yixing was like “yeah, we’re an international boyband!” We know Yixing is super serious so the fact that they did this cheesy stuff is supremely surprising but also SUPER AWESOME. The other captains were like “you were too serious!” but the reason why this worked was because they were serious tbh. As Psy once said, dress classy, dance cheesy. Anyway, I’m a fan. Look at how fabulous they are.

- Yibo’s team danced to the Huluwa song. Look at Liangliang’s hair lol.

- You can’t see this very well but Bouboo carried Yibo away in a fireman’s hold.

- So this is how Han Geng’s gonna play it, huh

- There’s just A LOT going on here

- Henry getting lessons from Xiaoji on how to have swag (ft. Xiao Jie as the teaching assistant).

- Yixing kept being like “ge, watch the expression!!”

- You can tell who did and didn’t get their hair done just by looking at who is wearing the headphones properly. Also, I used to be super whatever about cat ear headphones, but now I am so down for them. I want a pair of cat ear headphones even though I never use headphones (prefer earphones).

- Ok this is cute. Xiao Jie is trying to explain the passage to Bouboo in English, but Xiao Jie’s English is a bit limited. At this part he was trying to explain a watermelon to Bouboo and was like “it’s an apple but it’s bigger and it’s green.” Han Geng and Yibo are just having a ball. Look at how big Yibo is laughing? Boy never laughs like that.

- Somehow Bouboo understood Xiao Jie’s English, and then Bouboo was like “your English is very Chinese” which prompted another round of laughs. He would know, he’s probably been around a lot of Chinese people trying to speak English to him.

- Yo, Rochka’s Mandarin pronunciation is REALLY good. He’s really good at replicating the tones.

- Henry, San’er, and Rochka turned their final answer into a song XD

- Yixing tried to game the system lol. Instead of reciting the whole passage, he picked the easiest words. It wasn’t totally perfect, but his method allowed the players to focus on key words instead of memorizing the small details and preposition words. Smartest catboi (y)

- We already knew Henry was good at piano (I know he has at least RCM Level 10, probably has his ARCT too), but he’s also appropriately showy about it.

- OMG ROCHKA SINGING 月亮代表我的心 (ft. Henry harmonizing)

- Now Boris!

- Of course this mf had to whip out the violin.

- Okay so I kept seeing that clip of Yixing dancing to the sexy dance with Ibuki and Qiao Zhi and I had no idea what it was from. NOW I KNOW.

- Henry is SO MEAN he keeps bullying C-Lil and telling him that if he doesn’t do well he has to go home. STOP BULLYING HIM!!!

- The captains keep roping in team members to do the dances with them haha.

- Waiwai was saying how she’s never seen Bozi and Qiao Zhi smile while breaking and yet they look like they’re having a ball learning the sexy dance.

- Yibo did some magic tricks. Something I’ve noticed is that Yibo is actually quite good at public speaking. He makes very few mistakes, barely uses any filler words. Anyway, his first magic trick didn’t quite work, but the rest of them did (y)

- Han Geng performed a dance that he said he learned when he was very young. I remember when he was still doing stuff regularly with Super Junior, people would ask him to show off the ethnic dances that he’d studied. This performance was exactly that, plus some added shenaniganery at the end.

- I really liked Ma Xiaolong and Rochka’s performances. Ma Xiaolong is such a good singer? Like it’s not just the skill, but he has creativity when he sings. As for Rochka, his performance was just so much fun. He was a good singer too but he also brings such charisma.

- Really sorry to hear about Zyko’s sister :( I can’t be mad, he needs to go home. He looked so down too when he was calling Han Geng. All the best to his family :( I did really love Zyko on the show. He was so open minded and so easygoing. All the best v.v

- I’m glad that the other contestants got to see him off (AC, Ibuki, Rochka, Ma Xiaolong). Rochka looked so sad. He strikes me as a sympathetic guy, so I don’t doubt that he was troubled by the news too.

- Not gonna lie, the news about Zyko kind of brought my mood down. It’s not that the show is “ruined,” it’s just the idea of his sister being so seriously hurt that’s hard swallow for me. I can’t believe how Zyko must be feeling. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still going to watch the rest of the show, I guess the news was just a stark reminder that we live in the real world.

#thinking out loud #cvariety #street dance of china #screencaps

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unsettlingshortstories · 3 years ago

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The Laughing Man

J.D. Salinger (1949)

IN 1928, when I was nine, I belonged, with maximum esprit de corps, to an organization known as the Comanche Club. Every school day afternoon at three o’clock, twenty-five of us Comanches were picked up by our Chief outside the boys’ exit of P. S. 165, on 109th Street near Amsterdam Avenue. We then pushed and punched our way into the Chief’s reconverted commercial bus, and he drove us (according to his financial arrangement with our parents) over to Central Park. The rest of the afternoon, weather permitting, we played football or soccer or baseball, depending (very loosely) on the season. Rainy afternoons, the Chief invariably took us either to the Museum of Natural History or to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Saturdays and most national holidays, the Chief picked us up early in the morning at our various apartment houses and, in his condemned-looking bus, drove us out of Manhattan into the comparatively wide open spaces of Van Cortlandt Park or the Palisades. If we had straight athletics on our minds, we went to Van Cortlandt, where the playing fields were regulation size and where the opposing team didn’t include a baby carriage or an irate old lady with a cane. If our Comanche hearts were set on camping, we went over to the Palisades and roughed it. (I remember getting lost one Saturday somewhere on that tricky stretch of terrain between the Linit sign and the site of the western end of the George Washington Bridge. I kept my head, though. I just sat down in the majestic shadow of a giant billboard and, however tearfully, opened my lunchbox for business, semi-confident that the Chief would find me. The Chief always found us.)

In his hours of liberation from the Comanches, the Chief was John Gedsudski, of Staten Island. He was an extremely shy, gentle young man of twenty-two or -three, a law student at N.Y.U., and altogether a very memorable person. I won’t attempt to assemble his many achievements and virtues here. Just in passing, he was an Eagle Scout, an almost-All-America tackle of 1926, and it was known that he had been most cordially invited to try out for the New York Giants’ baseball team. He was an impartial and unexcitable umpire at all our bedlam sporting events, a master fire builder and extinguisher, and an expert, uncontemptuous first-aid man. Every one of us, from the smallest hoodlum to the biggest, loved and respected him.

The Chief’s physical appearance in 1928 is still clear in my mind. If wishes were inches, all of us Comanches would have had him a giant in no time. The way things go, though, he was a stocky five three or four–no more than that. His hair was blue-black, his hair-line extremely low, his nose was large and fleshy, and his torso was just about as long as his legs were. In his leather windbreaker, his shoulders were powerful, but narrow and sloping. At the time, however, it seemed to me that in the Chief all the most photogenic features of Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, and Tom Mix had been smoothly amalgamated.

Every afternoon, when it got dark enough for a losing team to have an excuse for missing a number of infield popups or end-zone passes, we Comanches relied heavily and selfishly on the Chief’s talent for storytelling. By that hour, we were usually an overheated, irritable bunch, and we fought each other–either with our fists or our shrill voices–for the seats in the bus nearest the Chief. (The bus had two parallel rows of straw seats. The left row had three extra seats–the best in the bus–that extended as far forward as the driver’s profile.) The Chief climbed into the bus only after we had settled down. Then he straddled his driver’s seat backward and, in his reedy but modulated tenor voice, gave us the new installment of “The Laughing Man.” Once he started narrating, our interest never flagged. “The Laughing Man” was just the right story for a Comanche. It may even have had classic dimensions. It was a story that tended to sprawl all over the place, and yet it remained essentially portable. You could always take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub.

The only son of a wealthy missionary couple, the Laughing Man was kidnapped in infancy by Chinese bandits. When the wealthy missionary couple refused (from a religious conviction) to pay the ransom for their son, the bandits, signally piqued, placed the little fellow’s head in a carpenter’s vise and gave the appropriate lever several turns to the right. The subject of this unique experience grew into manhood with a hairless, pecan-shaped head and a face that featured, instead of a mouth, an enormous oval cavity below the nose. The nose itself consisted of two flesh-sealed nostrils. In consequence, when the Laughing Man breathed, the hideous, mirthless gap below his nose dilated and contracted like (as I see it) some sort of monstrous vacuole. (The Chief demonstrated, rather than explained, the Laughing Man’s respiration method.) Strangers fainted dead away at the sight of the Laughing Man’s horrible face. Acquaintances shunned him. Curiously enough, though, the bandits let him hang around their headquarters–as long as he kept his face covered with a pale-red gossamer mask made out of poppy petals. The mask not only spared the bandits the sight of their foster son’s face, it also kept them sensible of his whereabouts; under the circumstances, he reeked of opium.

Every morning, in his extreme loneliness, the Laughing Man stole off (he was as graceful on his feet as a cat) to the dense forest surrounding the bandits’ hideout. There he befriended any number and species of animals: dogs, white mice, eagles, lions, boa constrictors, wolves. Moreover, he removed his mask and spoke to them, softly, melodiously, in their own tongues. They did not think him ugly.

(It took the Chief a couple of months to get that far into the story. From there on in, he got more and more high-handed with his installments, entirely to the satisfaction of the Comanches.)

The Laughing Man was one for keeping an ear to the ground, and in no time at all he had picked up the bandits’ most valuable trade secrets. He didn’t think much of them, though, and briskly set up his own, more effective system. On a rather small scale at first, he began to free-lance around the Chinese countryside, robbing, highjacking, murdering when absolutely necessary. Soon his ingenious criminal methods, coupled with his singular love of fair play, found him a warm place in the nation’s heart. Strangely enough, his foster parents (the bandits who had originally turned his head toward crime) were about the last to get wind of his achievements. When they did, they were insanely jealous. They all single-filed past the Laughing Man’s bed one night, thinking they had successfully doped him into a deep sleep, and stabbed at the figure under the covers with their machetes. The victim turned out to be the bandit chief’s mother–an unpleasant, haggling sort of person. The event only whetted the bandits’ taste for the Laughing Man’s blood, and finally he was obliged to lock up the whole bunch of them in a deep but pleasantly decorated mausoleum. They escaped from time to time and gave him a certain amount of annoyance, but he refused to kill them. (There was a compassionate side to the Laughing Man’s character that just about drove me crazy.)

Soon the Laughing Man was regularly crossing the Chinese border into Paris, France, where he enjoyed flaunting his high but modest genius in the face of Marcel Dufarge, the internationally famous detective and witty consumptive. Dufarge and his daughter (an exquisite girl, though something of a transvestite) became the Laughing Man’s bitterest enemies. Time and again, they tried leading the Laughing Man up the garden path. For sheer sport, the Laughing Man usually went halfway with them, then vanished, often leaving no even faintly credible indication of his escape method. Just now and then he posted an incisive little farewell note in the Paris sewerage system, and it was delivered promptly to Dufarge’s boot. The Dufarges spent an enormous amount of time sloshing around in the Paris sewers.

Soon the Laughing Man had amassed the largest personal fortune in the world. Most of it he contributed anonymously to the monks of a local monastery–humble ascetics who had dedicated their lives to raising German police dogs. What was left of his fortune, the Laughing Man converted into diamonds, which he lowered casually, in emerald vaults, into the Black Sea. His personal wants were few. He subsisted exclusively on rice and eagles’ blood, in a tiny cottage with an underground gymnasium and shooting range, on the stormy coast of Tibet. Four blindly loyal confederates lived with him: a glib timber wolf named Black Wing, a lovable dwarf named Omba, a giant Mongolian named Hong, whose tongue had been burned out by white men, and a gorgeous Eurasian girl, who, out of unrequited love for the Laughing Man and deep concern for his personal safety, sometimes had a pretty sticky attitude toward crime. The Laughing Man issued his orders to the crew through a black silk screen. Not even Omba, the lovable dwarf, was permitted to see his face.

I’m not saying I will, but I could go on for hours escorting the reader–forcibly, if necessary–back and forth across the Paris-Chinese border. I happen to regard the Laughing Man as some kind of super-distinguished ancestor of mine–a sort of Robert E. Lee, say, with the ascribed virtues held under water or blood. And this illusion is only a moderate one compared to the one I had in 1928, when I regarded myself not only as the Laughing Man’s direct descendant but as his only legitimate living one. I was not even my parents’ son in 1928 but a devilishly smooth impostor, awaiting their slightest blunder as an excuse to move in–preferably without violence, but not necessarily–to assert my true identity. As a precaution against breaking my bogus mother’s heart, I planned to take her into my underworld employ in some undefined but appropriately regal capacity. But the main thing I had to do in 1928 was watch my step. Play along with the farce. Brush my teeth. Comb my hair. At all costs, stifle my natural hideous laughter.

Actually, I was not the only legitimate living descendant of the Laughing Man. There were twenty-five Comanches in the Club, or twenty-five legitimate living descendants of the Laughing Man–all of us circulating ominously, and incognito, throughout the city, sizing up elevator operators as potential archenemies, whispering side-of-the-mouth but fluent orders into the ears of cocker spaniels, drawing beads, with index fingers, on the foreheads of arithmetic teachers. And always waiting, waiting for a decent chance to strike terror and admiration in the nearest mediocre heart.

One afternoon in February, just after Comanche baseball season had opened, I observed a new fixture in the Chief’s bus. Above the rear-view mirror over the windshield, there was a small, framed photograph of a girl dressed in academic cap and gown. It seemed to me that a girl’s picture clashed with the general men-only decor of the bus, and I bluntly asked the Chief who she was. He hedged at first, but finally admitted that she was a girl. I asked him what her name was. He answered unforthrightly, “Mary Hudson.” I asked him if she was in the movies or something. He said no, that she used to go to Wellesley College. He added, on some slow-processed afterthought, that Wellesley College was a very high class college. I asked him what he had her picture in the bus for, though. He shrugged slightly, as much as to imply, it seemed to me, that the picture had more or less been planted on him.

During the next couple of weeks, the picture–however forcibly or accidentally it had been planted on the Chief–was not removed from the bus. It didn’t go out with the Baby Ruth wrappers and the fallen licorice whips. However, we Comanches got used to it. It gradually took on the unarresting personality of a speedometer.

But one day as we were on our way to the Park, the Chief pulled the bus over to a curb on Fifth Avenue in the Sixties, a good half mile past our baseball field. Some twenty back-seat drivers at once demanded an explanation, but the Chief gave none. Instead, he simply got into his story-telling position and swung prematurely into a fresh installment of “The Laughing Man.” He had scarcely begun, however, when someone tapped on the bus door. The Chief’s reflexes were geared high that day. He literally flung himself around in his seat, yanked the operating handle of the door, and a girl in a beaver coat climbed into the bus.

Offhand, I can remember seeing just three girls in my life who struck me as having unclassifiably great beauty at first sight. One was a thin girl in a black bathing suit who was having a lot of trouble putting up an orange umbrella at Jones Beach, circa 1936. The second was a girl aboard a Caribbean cruise ship in 1939, who threw her cigarette lighter at a porpoise. And the third was the Chief’s girl, Mary Hudson.

“Am I very late?” she asked the Chief, smiling at him.

She might just as well have asked if she was ugly.

“No!” the Chief said. A trifle wildly, he looked at the Comanches near his seat and signalled the row to give way. Mary Hudson sat down between me and a boy named Edgar something, whose uncle’s best friend was a bootlegger. We gave her all the room in the world. Then the bus started off with a peculiar, amateur-like lurch. The Comanches, to the last man, were silent.

On the way back to our regular parking place, Mary Hudson leaned forward in her seat and gave the Chief an enthusiastic account of the trains she had missed and the train she hadn’t missed; she lived in Douglaston, Long Island. The Chief was very nervous. He didn’t just fail to contribute any talk of his own; he could hardly listen to hers. The gearshift knob came off in his hand, I remember.

When we got out of the bus, Mary Hudson stuck right with us. I’m sure that by the time we reached the baseball field there was on every Comanche’s face a some-girls-just-don’t-know-when-to-go-home look. And to really top things off, when another Comanche and I were flipping a coin to decide which team would take the field first, Mary Hudson wistfully expressed a desire to join the game. The response to this couldn’t have been more clean-cut. Where before we Comanches had simply stared at her femaleness, we now glared at it. She smiled back at us. It was a shade disconcerting. Then the Chief took over, revealing what had formerly been a well-concealed flair for incompetence. He took Mary Hudson aside, just out of earshot of the Comanches, and seemed to address her solemnly, rationally. At length, Mary Hudson interrupted him, and her voice was perfectly audible to the Comanches. “But I do,” she said. “I do, too, want to play!” The Chief nodded and tried again. He pointed in the direction of the infield, which was soggy and pitted. He picked up a regulation bat and demonstrated its weight. “I don’t care,” Mary Hudson said distinctly, “I came all the way to New York–to the dentist and everything–and I’m gonna play.” The Chief nodded again but gave up. He walked cautiously over to home plate, where the Braves and the Warriors, the two Comanche teams, were waiting, and looked at me. I was captain of the Warriors. He mentioned the name of my regular center fielder, who was home sick, and suggested that Mary Hudson take his place. I said I didn’t need a center fielder. The Chief asked me what the hell did I mean I didn’t need a center fielder. I was shocked. It was the first time I had heard the Chief swear. What’s more, I could feel Mary Hudson smiling at me. For poise, I picked up a stone and threw it at a tree.

We took the field first. No business went out to center field the first inning. From my position on first base, I glanced behind me now and then. Each time I did, Mary Hudson waved gaily to me. She was wearing a catcher’s mitt, her own adamant choice. It was a horrible sight.

Mary Hudson batted ninth on the Warriors’ lineup. When I informed her of this arrangement, she made a little face and said, “Well, hurry up, then.” And as a matter of fact we did seem to hurry up. She got to bat in the first inning. She took off her beaver coat–and her catcher’s mitt–for the occasion and advanced to the plate in a dark-brown dress. When I gave her a bat, she asked me why it was so heavy. The Chief left his umpire’s position behind the pitcher and came forward anxiously. He told Mary Hudson to rest the end of her bat on her right shouder. “I am,” she said. He told her not to choke the bat too tightly. “I’m not,” she said. He told her to keep her eye right on the ball. “I will,” she said. “Get outa the way.” She swung mightily at the first ball pitched to her and hit it over the left fielder’s head. It was good for an ordinary double, but Mary Hudson got to third on it–standing up.

When my astonishment had worn off, and then my awe, and then my delight, I looked over at the Chief. He didn’t so much seem to be standing behind the pitcher as floating over him. He was a completely happy man. Over on third base, Mary Hudson waved to me. I waved back. I couldn’t have stopped myself, even if I’d wanted to. Her stickwork aside, she happened to be a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from third base.

The rest of the game, she got on base every time she came to bat. For some reason, she seemed to hate first base; there was no holding her there. At least three times, she stole second.

Her fielding couldn’t have been worse, but we were piling up too many runs to take serious notice of it. I think it would have improved if she’d gone after flies with almost anything except a catcher’s mitt. She wouldn’t take it off, though. She said it was cute.

The next month or so, she played baseball with the Comanches a couple of times a week (whenever she had an appointment with her dentist, apparently). Some afternoons she met the bus on time, some afternoons she was late. Sometimes she talked a blue streak in the bus, sometimes she just sat and smoked her Herbert Tareyton cigarettes (cork-tipped). When you sat next to her in the bus, she smelled of a wonderful perfume.

One wintry day in April, after making his usual three o’clock pickup at 109th and Amsterdam, the Chief turned the loaded bus east at 110th Street and cruised routinely down Fifth Avenue. But his hair was combed wet, he had on his overcoat instead of his leather windbreaker, and I reasonably surmised that Mary Hudson was scheduled to join us. When we zipped past our usual entrance to the Park, I was sure of it. The Chief parked the bus on the comer in the Sixties appropriate to the occasion. Then, to kill time painlessly for the Comanches, he straddled his seat backward and released a new installment of “The Laughing Man.” I remember the installment to the last detail, and I must outline it briefly.

A flux of circumstances delivered the Laughing Man’s best friend, his timber wolf, Black Wing, into a physical and intellectual trap set by the Dufarges. The Dufarges, aware of the Laughing Man’s high sense of loyalty, offered him Black Wing’s freedom in exchange for his own. In the best faith in the world, the Laughing Man agreed to these terms. (Some of the minor mechanics of his genius were often subject to mysterious little breakdowns.) It was arranged for the Laughing Man to meet the Dufarges at midnight in a designated section of the dense forest surrounding Paris, and there, by moonlight, Black Wing would be set free. However, the Dufarges had no intention of liberating Black Wing, whom they feared and loathed. On the night of the transaction, they leashed a stand-in timber wolf for Black Wing, first dyeing its left hind foot snow white, to look like Black Wing’s.

But there were two things the Dufarges hadn’t counted on: the Laughing Man’s sentimentality and his command of the timber-wolf language. As soon as he had allowed Dufarge’s daughter to tie him with barbed wire to a tree, the Laughing Man felt called upon to raise his beautiful, melodious voice in a few words of farewell to his supposed old friend. The stand-in, a few moonlit yards away, was impressed by the stranger’s command of the language and listened politely for a moment to the last-minute advice, personal and professional, that the Laughing Man was giving out. At length, though, the stand-in grew impatient and began shifting his weight from paw to paw. Abruptly, and rather unpleasantly, he interrupted the Laughing Man with the information that, in the first place, his name wasn’t Dark Wing or Black Wing or Gray Legs or any of that business, it was Armand, and, in the second place, he’d never been to China in his life and hadn’t the slightest intention of going there.

Properly infuriated, the Laughing Man pushed off his mask with his tongue and confronted the Dufarges with his naked face by moonlight. Mlle. Dufarge responded by passing out cold. Her father was luckier. By chance, he was having one of his coughing spells at the moment and thereby missed the lethal unveiling. When his coughing spell was over and he saw his daughter stretched out supine on the moonlit ground, Dufarge put two and two together. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he fired the full clip in his automatic toward the sound of the Laughing Man’s heavy, sibilant breathing.

The installment ended there.

The Chief took his dollar Ingersoll out of his watch pocket, looked at it, then swung around in his seat and started up the motor. I checked my own watch. It was almost four-thirty. As the bus moved forward, I asked the Chief if he wasn’t going to wait for Mary Hudson. He didn’t answer me, and before I could repeat my question, he tilted back his head and addressed all of us: “Let’s have a little quiet in this damn bus.” Whatever else it may have been, the order was basically unsensible. The bus had been, and was, very quiet. Almost everybody was thinking about the spot the Laughing Man had been left in. We were long past worrying about him–we had too much confidence in him for that–but we were never past accepting his most perilous moments quietly.

In the third or fourth inning of our ball game that afternoon, I spotted Mary Hudson from first base. She was sitting on a bench about a hundred yards to my left, sandwiched between two nursemaids with baby carriages. She had on her beaver coat, she was smoking a cigarette, and she seemed to be looking in the direction of our game. I got excited about my discovery and yelled the information over to the Chief, behind the pitcher. He hurried over to me, not quite running. “Where?” he asked me. I pointed again. He stared for a moment in the right direction, then said he’d be back in a minute and left the field. He left it slowly, opening his overcoat and putting his hands in the hip pockets of his trousers. I sat down on first base and watched. By the time the Chief reached Mary Hudson, his overcoat was buttoned again and his hands were down at his sides.

He stood over her for about five minutes, apparently talking to her. Then Mary Hudson stood up, and the two of them walked toward the baseball field. They didn’t talk as they walked, or look at each other. When they reached the field, the Chief took his position behind the pitcher. I yelled over to him. “Isn’t she gonna play?” He told me to cover my sack. I covered my sack and watched Mary Hudson. She walked slowly behind the plate, with her hands in the pockets of her beaver coat, and finally sat down on a misplaced players’ bench just beyond third base. She lit another cigarette and crossed her legs.

When the Warriors were at bat, I went over to her bench and asked her if she felt like playing left field. She shook her head. I asked her if she had a cold. She shook her head again. I told her I didn’t have anybody in left field. I told her I had a guy playing center field and left field. There was no response at all to this information. I tossed my first-baseman’s mitt up in the air and tried to have it land on my head, but it fell in a mud puddle. I wiped it off on my trousers and asked Mary Hudson if she wanted to come up to my house for dinner sometime. I told her the Chief came up a lot. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Just please leave me alone.” I stared at her, then walked off in the direction of the Warriors’ bench, taking a tangerine out of my pocket and tossing it up in the air. About midway along the third-base foul line, I turned around and started to walk backwards, looking at Mary Hudson and holding on to my tangerine. I had no idea what was going on between the Chief and Mary Hudson (and still haven’t, in any but a fairly low, intuitive sense), but nonetheless, I couldn’t have been more certain that Mary Hudson had permanently dropped out of the Comanche lineup. It was the kind of whole certainty, however independent of the sum of its facts, that can make walking backwards more than normally hazardous, and I bumped smack into a baby carriage.

After another inning, the light got bad for fielding. The game was called, and we started picking up all the equipment. The last good look I had at Mary Hudson, she was over near third base crying. The Chief had hold of the sleeve of her beaver coat, but she got away from him. She ran off the field onto the cement path and kept running till I couldn’t see her any more.

The Chief didn’t go after her. He just stood watching her disappear. Then he turned around and walked down to home plate and picked up our two bats; we always left the bats for him to carry. I went over to him and asked if he and Mary Hudson had had a fight. He told me to tuck my shirt in.

Just as always, we Comanches ran the last few hundred feet to the place where the bus was parked, yelling, shoving, trying out strangleholds on each other, but all of us alive to the fact that it was again time for “The Laughing Man.” Racing across Fifth Avenue, somebody dropped his extra or discarded sweater, and I tripped over it and went sprawling. I finished the charge to the bus; but the best seats were taken by that time and I had to sit down in the middle of the bus. Annoyed at the arrangement, I gave the boy sitting on my right a poke in the ribs with my elbow, then faced around and watched the Chief cross over Fifth. It was not yet dark out, but a five-fifteen dimness had set in. The Chief crossed the street with his coat collar up, the bats under his left arm, and his concentration on the street. His black hair, which had been combed wet earlier in the day, was dry now and blowing. I remember wishing the Chief had gloves.

The bus, as usual, was quiet when he climbed in–as proportionately quiet, at any rate, as a theatre with dimming house lights. Conversations were finished in a hurried whisper or shut off completely. Nonetheless, the first thing the Chief said to us was “All right, let’s cut out the noise, or no story.” In an instant, an unconditional silence filled the bus, cutting off from the Chief any alternative but to take up his narrating position. When he had done so, he took out a handkerchief and methodically blew his nose, one nostril at a time. We watched him with patience and even a certain amount of spectator’s interest. When he had finished with his handkerchief, he folded it neatly in quarters and replaced it in his pocket. He then gave us the new installment of “The Laughing Man.” From start to finish, it lasted no longer than five minutes.

Four of Dufarge’s bullets struck the Laughing Man, two of them through the heart. When Dufarge, who was still shielding his eyes against the sight of the Laughing Man’s face, heard a queer exhalation of agony from the direction of the target, he was overjoyed. His black heart beating wildly, he rushed over to his unconscious daughter and brought her to. The pair of them, beside themselves with delight and coward’s courage, now dared to look up at the Laughing Man. His head was bowed as in death, his chin resting on his bloody chest. Slowly, greedily, father and daughter came forward to inspect their spoils. Quite a surprise was in store for them. The Laughing Man, far from dead, was busy contracting his stomach muscles in a secret manner. As the Dufarges came into range, he suddenly raised his face, gave a terrible laugh, and neatly, even fastidiously, regurgitated all four bullets. The impact of this feat on the Dufarges was so acute that their hearts literally burst, and they dropped dead at the Laughing Man’s feet. (If the installment was going to be a short one anyway, it could have ended there; the Comanches could have managed to rationalize the sudden death of the Dufarges. But it didn’t end there.) Day after day, the Laughing Man continued to stand lashed to the tree with barbed wire, the Dufarges decomposing at his feet. Bleeding profusely and cut off from his supply of eagles’ blood, he had never been closer to death. One day, however, in a hoarse but eloquent voice, he appealed for help to the animals of the forest. He summoned them to fetch Omba, the lovable dwarf. And they did. But it was a long trip back and forth across the Paris-Chinese border, and by the time Omba arrived on the scene with a medical kit and a fresh supply of eagles’ blood, the Laughing Man was in a coma. Omba’s very first act of mercy was to retrieve his master’s mask, which had blown up against Mlle. Dufarge’s vermin-infested torso. He placed it respectfully over the hideous features, then proceeded to dress the wounds.

When the Laughing Man’s small eyes finally opened, Omba eagerly raised the vial of eagles’ blood up to the mask. But the Laughing Man didn’t drink from it. Instead, he weakly pronounced his beloved Black Wing’s name. Omba bowed his own slightly distorted head and revealed to his master that the Dufarges had killed Black Wing. A peculiar and heart-rending gasp of final sorrow came from the Laughing Man. He reached out wanly for the vial of eagles’ blood and crushed it in his hand. What little blood he had left trickled thinly down his wrist. He ordered Omba to look away, and, sobbing, Omba obeyed him. The Laughing Man’s last act, before turning his face to the bloodstained ground, was to pull off his mask.

The story ended there, of course. (Never to be revived.) The Chief started up the bus. Across the aisle from me, Billy Walsh, who was the youngest of all the Comanches, burst into tears. None of us told him to shut up. As for me, I remember my knees were shaking.

A few minutes later, when I stepped out of the Chief’s bus, the first thing I chanced to see was a piece of red tissue paper flapping in the wind against the base of a lamppost. It looked like someone’s poppy-petal mask. I arrived home with my teeth chattering uncontrollably and was told to go right straight to bed.

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sapphicmsmarvel · 5 years ago

Text

Woman Like Me

hahahaha i love little mix and the avengers so any time I can mix the two im gonna do it.

(you should go listen to them, especially their newest album LM5)

song: woman like me by little mix

Carol: I can tell you're shy and I think it's so sweet. The thing about Carol that got you, was the fact that she was shy around you. With everyone else you noticed how she is always boisterous with the others, then with you she's quiet and doesn't talk much and she gets red.

At first you thought she didn't like you, but she'd always bring you gifts, your favorite flowers and candy. Or a couple times, she'll bring you a cupcake from your favorite bakery.

When you brought this up with Thor, Thor rolled his eyes and smiled, "Lady Y/N, she has feelings for you. That's why she's shy and keeps bringing you gifts."

You blushed at the idea, this goddess, this intelligent stunning woman had feelings for you? "No she doesn't." You shook your head, your cheeks flaming.

Thor nodded his head, "yes she does, she specifically asks me what you like so she can surprise you with it."

"Nope, nope, nope." You shook your head and Carol came in.

She laughed, "why does Y/N keep saying 'nope'?"

Thor looked at you, "I'll let her explain." He said and left the room, you scoffed and shook your head, that little shit.

Carol raised her eyebrow at you and you groaned. This was gonna be embarrassing.

"What is it? I promise I won't laugh." She said smiling, something in you blossomed, seeing Carol not get timid on you.

You stood up, "well, Thor thinks you have a crush on me," you didn't miss how her eyes widened and cheeks blushed immediately, "and I was saying nope because well...you're you. There's no way I'd have a shot." You shrugged sheepishly.

She walked forward, "well, that's what I thought when I first got to know you, about me not having a shot."

Your eyes widened as she stopped in front of you, you were at her chin. "Well, you're the only person shooting." You smiled.

She rolled her eyes. "I'm sure that's not true." And smiled, you were weak in the knees, you'd do anything to keep her smiling like that.

You laughed, either full of nerves or on some euphoric high of all the feelings you have for this girl. "Nah it's true, my vagina is probably full of cobwebs from not being used." Your eyes widened at what just flew out of your mouth.

Oh my god did I actually just say that? I said that, fucking shit she's gonna think I'm weird.

She let out a full laugh that you wanted to hear more, "I guess we're gonna have to change that."

You hummed, ignoring the blush that probably reached your toes. "Sounds pretty bold for a girl who hasn't kissed me yet."

She rolled her eyes, smiling, "May I kiss you?" "You certainly may."

Wanda: I always say what I'm feeling, I was born without a zip on my mouth.

You were arrogant, flirty, outgoing and didn't have a filter. Whereas Wanda was the exact opposite.

There was a meeting with government officials, everyone wore their best dress, you on the other hand; wore your signature all black, black jeans, with your dog tags and leather jacket. (Of course to Wanda, you always looked killer). There was certain politician/government leader that was in the room that you were famous for hating. Not a week went by without you mentioning him being a coward.

Everyone was on edge because it had to go well, it had to, but you could only keep your mouth shut for so long.

Wanda counted the minutes before you exploded; it was ten.

He mentioned something about the LGBTQ+ community, even went so far as to say a slur.

"Excuse me?" Your voice rang out. Deadly as the sharpest knives. Everyone froze, there was not a single soul in the room who was breathing, besides the prick. "You heard me," he said, in that man voice, the 'i do whatever i want, how dare you challenge me' voice.

Wanda could tell you were gonna knock him so hard his spray tan will evaporate off. "LGBTQ+ people are not awful people. And do not deserve to be electrocuted, if you think we're gonna accept that, you need to be impeached on the grounds of oncoming dementia." You snapped. "You got anything to say?" He shouted at Cap in fury. "We all agree with Y/N. I think she's handling our points pretty well actually." At that, Tony took his hand and Steve was smart enough not to look surprised.

You knew, they all knew for that matter, they weren't dating but it was quite the middle finger to give to the politician.

"This meetings over, we'll continue when you stop being a homophobic asshole."

She tried not to shiver at your tone, you've never, and will never, speak to her like that. But hearing that tone, the 'I'm above you' tone made her flustered.

You walked around to Wanda's shoulders and gently squeezed them reassuringly. Wanda hated being in the spotlight but she also wanted the asshole to know that he was in a room with LGBTQ+ members.

He looked at Wanda (which made you want to punch him in throat) and scoffed, he walked out without another word.

Maria: And baby just be mine for the weekend, We can get a takeaway and sit on the couch.

Keeping Maria to yourself for a weekend was difficult, she was always needed but you were selfish at times. This was one of those times.

You specifically told Fury that you claim her certain weekends, he admired the fact that you didn't even ask, you told him. Because of that (and he knew you made Hill happy) he allowed it. Unless you know, the end of the world was happening.

You guys always got take out, either chinese, italian or just plain pizza. You always tried to cook but most of the time she'd insist cooking. She got a thrill over seeing you happy over a dish she made.

The weekend is spent in pajamas, barely if any makeup, movies and tv. It's the few times Maria can completely let her guard down. She puts her weapons away in the gun safe that's in your shared closet, pets your guys' cat and cuddles with you on the sofa.

Your saturdays with her consist of a horror movie marathon, either super cheesy or regularly cheesy. Even some non cheesy ones. She loves your commentary on them and you love seeing her laugh at the stupid characters.

Sundays are the days where you guys wake up at 7 to watch the sunrise on your balcony with cups of coffee, blankets and the early morning dew or fog. It's a peaceful time, you have a whole playlist for it. Then you two would head in and have a big sunday breakfast which you would invite Fury too if he felt like it (which was often because he couldn't refuse your homemade waffles).

After Fury leaves you two spend the day in bed, soaking in the time you have. Most of the time you're doing naughty activities but after when the suns setting you just lay in each others arms with the tv playing some trashy show.

You two cherished these weekends and Fury would always remark how relaxed Maria looked after one of them.

Natasha: I like my coffee with two sugars in it, high heels and my jewelry drippin'.

You brought a lot of the "girly" back to Nat, because of her childhood being robbed completely she didn't have the same experimentation as other girls who were brought up. As in no dying hair, colorful clothes and playing with makeup (when it wasn't for a mission)

You introduced her to the "self care" days, where you broke out the face masks, bath salts and you two went radio silent (with a warning to the Avengers of course). You two spent the day watching disney movies and taking care of yourselves.

You took her shopping and she ended up liking a lot of luxury brands like Gucci, Chanel and many others. She bought you a Rolex which freaked you out because wow, expensive and you don't wanna break it.

She spoils you endlessly, buying you books when you have a hard day or even brand new fuzzy socks. You spoil her back of course (she's also a sucker for fuzzy socks).

You've created a monster, she is a bad and boujie girl and makes sure people know it.

Shuri: Insecure but I'm workin with it, many things I could get rid of. Ain't about to give it up.

Of course, you were confident in yourself and who you were. But when it came to being smart, that was when you faltered in your self confidence. Your girlfriend was the princess of Wakanda and designed nearly all the technology in the country.

You always pointed it out but Shuri always rolled her eyes, "your smart in your owns way, sweetheart."

"Oh what ways?" You asked, laughing, "I can't do this formula and building stuff."

"You know how to be safe."

"Oh, common sense." She threw a paper ball at you because of your response.

"No, you know war strategy, you know how to train someone who's never been trained in their life. You know weaponry and how to prevent war disasters." She came over to you and wrapped her arms around your waist. "We would be lost without you." She kissed your cheek and swayed with you for a minute.

You knew that wasn't true, because they had generals for all the stuff you do. But T'challa and Shuri have said that you're the favorite because you're compassionate yet stern with people. Talking with Shuri made you feel better as it usually did.

Eventually your insecurities faded, of course they were still there but not as prominent. You worked hard to learn some new things relating to building things. For example, knowing how to fix some stuff if Shuri was busy or out of the country.

But you would never give up your insecurities, because they made you who you were.

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