#the direct parallels to my life are astounding

[pretty-idol-hell]

Idol Land PriPara 11

The final battle...

Oh yes. Before I begin my post this time, to save me yet another round of asks, this episode and all the previous ones are viewable for free in the movie theater on the Idol Land PriPara app. Please download Idol Land PriPara. It's in your app store. Please.

And now...

NEW CUT IN THE OPENING OMG OMG POLOLO IS HAPPY NOW possibly only one episode left this season (maybe ever) and they still threw this in there GEEZ.... so much love in this show.

(Wait is her accessory the wrong color uguu...)

The episode begins right where we left off of course! Amari has challenged Mario to a duel. If he wins, she'll join (or c...combine??) with him and he can do whatever he wants, and if she wins, he can never show himself in front of her again. Mario solemnly agrees.

After the opening, Mario is laughing and making fun of Amari for how serious she was in challenging him. But he also quietly asks, "Do you really want to erase me?" Well, whatever, Mario is glad Amari is finally acknowledging him head on. He agrees again and asks if they are gonna just punch each other or what.

No sooner than Amari answers with "What!? We're idols, of course we are gonna perform!" a stage rises from the ground with the Hysteric Bunny and Fullmetal Rabbit logos on it, and everyone is instantly transported.

This includes WITH and Dark Nightmare, who now have their goat costumes removed. Koyoi and Shogo acknowledge this duel will determine Yui's fate as well.

Everyone questions what has caused the stage to form (it's GaarmageddonMi's doing if you ask them), but Janice, still powerless, suggests the system itself desires Amari and Mario finally settle things. The future of PriPara (Amari's kirakira vs. Mario's dark power) is in the balance.

In Amari's dressing room, Amari vows to protect PriPara, and everyone says they believe in her. They all turn to leave, except for Laala. She turns back to Amari, and begins a very important conversation.

Laala asks Amari, "Amari, do you really hate yourself? Why?"

She's of course referring to the previous episode, when she heard Amari yell that out in a moment of weakness.

Amari states that since junior high school she'd always felt left out everywhere she went, but since finding PriPara she was happy she finally thought she had friends and felt like she belonged. But then Mario appeared and started ruining everything, and it was all her fault. Mario is the version of herself from the past that she hates, so she has to defeat him.

"Do you have to?" asks Laala.

Laala doesn't like that Amari hates herself, because well, Laala likes Amari. But if Amari doesn't like herself, "Is this a love triangle!?"

"There is love inside hate", Laala tells Amari.

Laala doesn't quite remember where she heard that, but she's decided that it must mean hate is actually love. As Amari is trying to comprehend this for herself, Laala suddenly hugs her.

"I love you, Amari-chan!"

Laala turns to go, smiling and waving back at Amari as she leaves her alone with her thoughts.

Back at the stage, the tournament is ready to begin...

Janice needs a seatbelt to ride the stage.

Amari and Mario stare at each other from across the stage. Mario is grinning but he has noticeable bags under his eyes. They decide the winner is the person who can take over the audience (with kirakira or dark power). (A large portion of the audience is already being controlled by Mario, as "whatever" zombies.)

Without any discussion of who will go first, Mario begins. After his performance, a lot more of the crowd is converted, including Fuwari, Mikan, Ajimi, Dorothy... (Shion notes that Dorothy rolling on the floor saying "whatever" isn't that different than usual.)

Amari begins her performance, and she actually sings the second verse of Chaotic Hurricane (!!!) the entire time wishing Mario would just disappear. DISAPPEAR, DISAPPEAR, DISAPPEAR.

Amari's performance starts to shatter Mario's dark keys, bringing most of the audience back to normal.

Pleased with her performance, Amari looks up to find that what she wished for is actually coming true. Mario really is disappearing. Distressed, he shouts that he won't let himself disappear. He desperately asks Amari again, "Do you really want to erase me!?"

Amari is genuinely shocked and just stares as she seems to realize for the first time that what she's doing is basically killing him. Mario stops disappearing.

"That's right, you're not really going to erase me. Are you, Amari?"

But now that Mario is stable again, the duel resumes. They walk towards each other where they meet at the center of the stage. A third Making Drama begins where they immediately clash.

MAN I love the Making Drama battles Idol Land introduced. It definitely feels inspired by the battles in King of Prism.

As the battle takes place, you can hear a new song playing in the background. A duet between Amari and Mario.

The Making Drama ends without a clear winner. Amari knows she has to save PriPara, but something is holding her back. She remembers her earlier conversation with Laala.

"REMEMBER!" shouts Mario. "Remember your TRUE SELF!"

Amari thinks back again to her junior high self, the day she created Mario. But, overcome with embarrassment, she screams as loud as she can:

"DISAPPEAR!"

As Amari's scream creates shockwaves over the stage, Mario begins to disappear again. But this time faster than ever. He falls to the ground, half gone already.

Laala shouts, just loud enough to reach Amari:

"You can't erase him!"

And then Amari remembers. Further back, to when she was in elementary school and dreaming about being an idol. Then getting older, meeting Laala, and all the lessons she learned as we remember all the character development she's had gradually over the series episode by episode (damn this was such a good show...) up until the present episode when Laala told her "hate is love".

Amari realizes everything is connected, and the version of herself she loves and the version of herself she hates are both what make her whole.

"Don't disappear! Don't disappear, don't disappear, don't disappear!!" Amari cries as she runs to embrace Mario. Mario weakly says how he's always loved her spirit (I think).

But, just when it seems like he's too far gone...

Mario is solid once more.

"So, you need me after all, huh?"

"SHUT UP! I HATE YOU!" Amari yells, lunging at him without hesitation.

And actually punching him square in the face. Turns out that throwaway line from the beginning... not a joke haha! But well, since Mario is herself, Amari sees no need to hold back, after all.

"There, I won," she says as Mario is knocked to the ground and all the other characters just kind of stare into space not quite knowing what to make of this.

(Except Dorothy. Judging by her face, she's like YEAH! Give it to him.)

(I actually only noticed this on my third rewatch of this scene. Love these reaction shots where only one character has a different expression. Also feels like a callback to King of Prism haha...)

"You fight dirty!" Mario yells as he gets up and they both lunge at each other again. But instead of punching each other, this time, each sticks their key in the other's mic.

And then well.......

THIS

HAPPENS

um

There is probably a lot that could be said about

this

a lot of analyzing

Honestly though, thinking from the Japanese perspective I'm not totally sure what might be intended by this, so.

Let me just say.

Whatever this is

I like it.

Wow honestly

Even though they threw around the word "combine" a lot I was not. I was not taking it seriously. Like AT ALL.

Until now obviously.

Well also we know why Amari and Mario have the same birthday I guess.

The stage is destroyed and everyone is blown around as the Amari/Mario duet plays again (or is this a different one?) as ... let's call them "Amario", takes to the sky, literally grabbing the fallen key and putting it into the Yumeme in the sky.

Edit: Checked the credits before posting. Two songs are listed with a similar name, and I guess the combined version of them is called "Amarion" officially, according to the titles. CD release WHEN??? Anyway.

It seems Amari is the most in control here, and Mario is just kinda coming along for the ride ("whatever") as she borrows his power, but he seems to be enjoying himself all the same. They have trouble turning the key, actually bursting into flames in the process, and Meganii suggests it's because Mario's dark power reacting to the kirakira. But, eventually they are able to overcome it and the key turns.

But, Amarion is then sent rocketing back down to the ground, still burning in flames. As they fall, Amari thinks that she'll have to leave PriPara after this, for all the trouble she's caused. In the end, she's still left out. "Whatever......"

Mario asks her (in their head) if she really likes PriPara that much, and Amari says yes.

"Well, guess I've got no choice then," says Mario.

Mario separates from Amari so that he's the only one burning now.

Amari tries to reach out to him, but with a last "Whatever..." Mario allows himself to burn away... into nothing...

Amari yells for Mario as she falls, only to be caught safely in Pololo's hands.

And back in the sky, from the Yumeme, finally falls... Yui.

Yui's normal self somehow falls through the Yumeme, is converted into a beam of rainbow light, and emerges from Takki as her full idol self.

The Yumeme power is so strong everyone gets yumeme, even Shogo.

Gaze upon yumeme Shogo.

The yumeme spread to Amari and Pololo as well, as Pololo converts more bugs (the last?) into happy flowers.

The others wave up to Amari as she sits cupped in Pololo's hands and Amari waves back. But Amari then looks up to the sky.

"Mario..."

The Amari/Mario duet plays over the credits.

So.... I guess........ I.........

I guess first I... I will

I'll get my game predictions out of the way um

Obviously I think Yui will be added soon.

It's also high time they added Believe My Dream I guess? If we have to get an older song?

And um. I said there wouldn't be a gatcha for the last episode and I was wrong so. There may be a gatcha for this one. I think we may actually be getting that crazy half Mario half Amari coord. It's clearly a cyalume that we only got to see lit up. So, much like the Evergold team SCRs, we'll probably see the unlit version for the first (only?) time when it is added to the game. I'm looking forward to it. I just wow.

So.

My thoughts on this episode. Yes. My thoughts?

I guess anyone still reading this for some reason might want to know.

.........................

When I was in Japan at the beginning of this month, I visited Prism Stone Tokyo Station several times. And on my last visit, I decided to buy an Amari plush doll.

I took her down from the shelf I had placed her on in my house upon unpacking, so that she could sit with me here right now as I rewatch the episode and write this post. So I could hold her, hug her, and poke her as necessary.

....During the time I was in Japan, I was of course sitting on the cliffhanger from the last episode. I was already having a lot of emotions about Amari and Mario and... for a brief moment, I considered buying Mario too after I decided I was getting Amari. I did think that maybe, just maybe, I might regret not buying him based on what might happen in the next episode. But, still, I decided against it.

I do regret it.

She's literally without her other half. Amari, I'm so sorry...

I shouldn't be that upset about this but I kind of am.

This episode had a very important message.

It's hard to accept some things about yourself.

It's hard to look back.

But your awkward past. Your cringe OCs.

The imaginary anime boyfriend you made when you were in middle school that also may or may not be you sort of experimenting with yourself as the opposite gender???

That's... that's all you.

And that's OK.

Because Laala loves you.

But really though.

This episode left me with this terrible, hollow, lonely feeling that I can't or rather won't go into full detail about here. I'm sitting here, playing with Amari's bunny ears as I rewatch scenes from this episode over and over again to edit and add details to this post

and missing a person who doesn't exist.

But in my case, I think he is too far gone. I deleted that novel. It felt right, at the time.

I'm sorry.

[leaderwonim]

꒰ 사랑𝐒𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐆: 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐤 𝐬𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐧. 🫀

002: she fell in front of her sunbaenim 🤓

It wasn’t until a week later that you met the other actors and actresses in the film.

Your manager, Hongseok, had cleared pretty much your entire schedule so the rest of PRISM was out promoting while you were waiting awkwardly at the film studio, straightening out your white skirt and thinking of what to say to Sunghoon.

After all, you did kind of audition for Belift as a joke. You were really into Enhypen and Newjeans, so you sent in your singing and dancing tape thinking you weren’t going to get picked anyway. You did, though.

“Hi, sorry I’m late!” The all too familiar Australian accent pops out of nowhere, and your breathing is 10 times rapid knowing exactly who it belonged to. Pham Hanni from Newjeans.

“No worries!” You say, almost choking on the piece of bread you were taking a bite out of. “Greetings sunbaenim!”

You bow but Hanni shakes her head quickly, “ah.. no need. I read your profile, you’re a year older than me, so if anything, I should be the one saying the formalities.”

You don’t get to say anything else before the Park Sunghoon and Kim Gyuvin walk in.

Oh my God. You internally think. You almost have to hold back from fainting because how the hell are you in the presence of Hanni, Gyuvin, and Sunghoon at the same time?!

“This is our main cast,” the director says, who your manager has told you to refer to as Director Jung. “We have a few more idols but they’ll be in and out between episodes.”

The four of you nod, you suddenly feeling so small when in the same room as your talented sunbaenims.

“Today is just introduction and get to know each other day since I know this was probably brought up upon you guys suddenly and it can seem overwhelming and uncomfortable.” Director Jung smiles, showing off his bright white teeth.

“The drama is a romance one, kind of like an American coming to age except Korean, you know? It’s called Parallel Love. The main character, Baek Yunhee is played by Yoon Y/N as you all know.” He then points towards your direction, making the other 3 idols all turn their attention to you. “Yunhee’s love interest is Min Suho, played by Park Sunghoon. The reason I chose the two of you was because you were exactly how I pictured Yunhee and Suho visually and I feel like you would astound me and the viewers with your acting.”

Your eyes subtly peek at Sunghoon, who looks absolutely glorious despite his messy hair and tired eyes. The engene inside of you screamed, but you masked it by biting the inside of your cheek.

“Now, the main female antagonist is Choi Sanghee, which will be played by Pham Hanni. The main male antagonist is Park Wooseok, played by Kim Gyuvin. Sanghee and Wooseok are somewhat love interests, but they’re also Yunhee and Suho’s biggest rivals.”

The rest of Director Jung’s words went from one of your ear and out another as he kept speaking, your vision instead focused on Park Sunghoon.

“Alright, that’s all I have to say! Any questions?”

There’s a few murmurs but no one says anything, so Director Jung hands the four of you individual scripts that were so thick you could slap a person with it.

“It’s time to take the poster photos so let’s get to work guys. Don’t disappoint me.”

Way to not pressure an idol who’s life is already hectic, you think.

synopsis. you’re a newly debuted girl group under belift, and in order for your group to gain more popularity, your ceo offered you the lead role in a new romance kdrama. this all seems great, so what’s the problem? well, for starters, your co star is your senior, park sunghoon from enhypen, and he doesn’t seem too happy about being in a romance drama. especially when your fans have started to ship the two of you!

masterlist | previous | next

taglist ( is open ) @isawritesss @rodygr @wonifullove @mrchweeee @nyfwyeonjun @yizhoutv @cupkiki @rikizm @jiaant11 @woninluv @brachioanton @seunnimg @jongseongslvr @luvswonyoung @laylasmother @akuspic @haechansbbg @haerinsii @mnxnii

[circuit-music]

2022 Music Recommendations

2022 – What an interesting year. Parts of it felt like maybe, just maybe, there was some progress and rebuilding being made from the fallout of a global pandemic.  Yet there was still that feeling of uncertainty and something else I can’t quite put my finger on.  A friend of mine said earlier in the year “I liked listening to music before my anxiety ruined it for me!”.  That elicited a mild chuckle, but sure, I get it - It’s a weird time. Events and life moving in multiple directions with music so often in parallel to that

Observations and listening habits: • Techno-ebm still ruling the majority of what I listen to and purchase.  In that genre, enjoyed the new releases from General Dynamics, Comfort Cure, Konkurs, GBxCL, Maedon, Yansyet, and Damaged Clock amongst others, • That new beat/Italo/future-synth sound had some absolute bangers. Pablo Bozzi remains such a skilled and incredible talent.  His own solo material and his collab with Hayden of Phase Fatale as Soft Crash were both remarkable. Tracks from Infravision, Fractions and Normal Bias all astounding. A fun and uplifting style. • Synthpop and Wave continued to be robust this year with releases from Minuit Machine, Figure Section, Boy Harsher (that “Machina” track was EVERYWHERE!!!), Sacred Skin, Handful of Snowdrops and more. My most favorite in this category included the “We Were Never Lost” album from Causeway that included an awesome cover of New Order’s “Your Silent Face”. • Alternative, Pop, Shoegaze, Post-Punk records from Hatchie,  Placebo, Mint-Julep,  The Present Moment, were welcome listens.   • The old industrial genre still churns and occasionally my ears will listen. New X Marks the Pedwalk was another sensational example of that projects superiority with future-pop. New Noise Unit came as a surprise and was a mish mash of styles/ideas that didn’t always work in my opinion but a track like “Alone Again” was a real gem. • The Serfs and Kubler-Ross get special mention for assiduously nailing the minimal analog industrial/ebm dance sounds of yesteryear with a modern touch. SO GOOD!!! • Essential reissues from Front Line Assembly and Delerium, Portion Control, Mentallo and the Fixer, and Dive were great to see. If you missed them the first time around now is your chance for rediscovery. The Sigbefia Five/Formal Defect was especially epic as prices for the OG were skyrocketing in value. • I need to think of a creative descriptor name for acts like Zola Jesus and King Dude. Two artist whose albums this year were among the most cathartic releases I experienced.  Uncommonly poignant, moody and so much more. I felt both drained and liberated after listening to each. • Biggest surprise of the year: Xpropaganda. 37 years after the masterpiece “A Secret Wish” Claudia Brücken and Susanne Freytag release the remarkable stunning comeback LP, The Heart Is Strange. intricately detailed it picks up naturally where “A Secret Wish left off – dramatic, soothing and peaceful.

::: ::: :::

Ah, I could go on and on. I love writing and talking about music. Your comments and conversation are welcome, but let’s wrap this up…

This isn’t a top 10, top 25 or even a top 50. Instead, it’s an A-Z recommendation list encompassing many genres as those lines are getting more and more blurred. A good tune is a good tune, regardless of genre.  

HIGHLY encourage you to get out there and seek out new music; Visit the record stores, go hear a new DJ, fire up Spotify or another streaming service, check out some new music via podcast, DJ mixes, label sites, online retailers, even Facebook. One of the best sources for discovering new music is BandCamp – a plethora of discoveries to be found out there. If you do the work, you’ll be rewarded ;)     Speaking of Spotify – I made a playlist this year featuring plenty of the bands on my list. There’s at least a track or more from the artist who have a presence on Spotify. Sadly a few bands on this list aren’t on the platform but check BandCamp and you can have a listen. Here’s the link:   https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1kGOD6hX5NpsDtuglS3W5Y?si=bd8c29a32bb14267

As in years past I’m certain I missed a few things, ignored the hype on certain releases or just plain forgotten something. It’s a chore to compile this list, but I love to do it. There’s a ton of new pioneering music out there for sure waiting to be discovered and it’s the “what’s next” that keeps me a motivated music fan. There’s never a dull moment in speaking, writing, DJ'ing or promoting new music, so I’ll keep doing it and hopefully be a guide for you all ;).   If it needs mention and I overlooked it - I may do an addendum in the next week or so. Anyways, got your notepaper and plenty of beverages ready? Don’t be a TL:DR (Too Long: Didn’t Read) fool. Read up. Enjoy the music of 2022!

Alpha Sect - Internet Rebels (single) Blac Kolor – Roots (ep) Boy Harsher - The Runner (OST) Causeway - We Were Never Lost (album) Cold Cave - Godstar cover (single) Comfort Cure - Cuts the Line (Single) Comfort Cure - Rain on the Bar (Single)

 Comfort Cure - They Told You Wrong (Single) Crystal Geometry - I Stare Into Darkness Crystal Geometry - Thorned (ep) Crystal Geometry – We Are Not Alone (single) Cyan ID - Silent Past Wounds (album) Damaged Clock - Circulo Vicioso (album) Dive - Behind the Sun (album re-issue) Endless Nothing – Omnia Fert Aetas (ep) Evil Dust -Dresden (album) Extensive Infraction - Social Coma (ep) Faux Fear – Perfect Blue (ep) Faux Fear – Uncharted <<<>>> Legacy (single) Figure Section – Mirages (album) Figure Section – Trompe La Mort (single) Fractions – Daytona (ep) Fractions – Rize (single) Front Line Assembly - Corroded/Disorder
(album re-issue) Front Line Assembly - The Initial Command (album re-issue) Front Line Assembly - Total Terror 1 (album re-issue) Front Line Assembly - Total Terror 2 (album re-issue) GBxCL – Consensus Omnium (single) GBxCL – Exordium (single) GBxCL - Total Denial (single) General Dynamics - Weaponize Your Dreams (album) Halv Drom - Serpent Scan (album) Handful of Snowdrops - Hope TM (single) Hatchie - Giving the World Away (album) Hatchie – Nosedive (single) Infravision – That Beat In My Heart (single) King Dude – Death (album) Klack - Beat Unity (ep) Klack - Believe (single) Konkurs - Mind Stimulant (album) Krishna Goineau Feat, MCL – 80’s Tape (album) Kubler Ross - Kubler Ross (album) Leathers – Runaway (single) Leathers – Ultraviolet (single) Light Asylum - Dark Allies (Pablo Bozzi edit digital single) Lust For Youth – Accidental Win (single) Maedon - Now I am Become Death (album) Maedon - Now I am Become Death (Remixes) (ep) Maedon-X – The Lion and the Ram (album) Max Und Max - World Clash (ep_ Mentallo and the Fixer - No Rest for the Wicked 30th Anniversary (album re-issue) Mind | Matter – A Travers L’Acheron (single) Mind | Matter - les brumes de l'abandon (ep) Mint Julep – Covers (album) Mint Julep – Daydream (single) Minuit Machine – 24 (album) Minuit Machine – Follower (single) Minuit Machine - Lion in A Cage (single) Nasdrowie – Extract (ep) Nasdrowie – The Phantom Images 2 (single) New Frames – Ashes (ep)  New Frames – RNF4 (ep) NGHTLY - Il Venerdì Dell'Arte (ep) NNHMN – Arabische Ritter (single) NNHMN - For the Comfort of Your Exstazy (ep) Noise Unit – Cheeba City Blues (Album) Normal Bias - Normal Bias (ep) NZM 99 – Disaster (single) NZM 99 – Analogia (ep) NZM 99 - Requiem of Art (album) Pablo Bozzi - Ghost of Chance (album) Pablo Bozzi - Magnetisma (ep) Pablo Bozzi - Street Reign (ep) Placebo - Never Let Me Go (album) Placebo – Shout (single) Poison Point - Poisoned Gloves (album) Portion Control – Dissolve Plus (album re-issue) Qual – Re-animated (album) Red Deviil - Monster Room (ep) Rhys Fulber - Collapsing Empires (album) Sacred Skin - Killer’s Mind (single) Sacred Skin - The Decline of Pleasure (album)

 Schwefelgelb - Whirlpool-Gedanken (ep) SDH - Maybe a Body (ep) Sigbefia Five/Formal Defect – Behind Impuls Records (album re-issue) Silent Servant - Optimistic Decay (single) Soft Crash – Artificial Tears (single) Soft Crash - Your Last Everything (album) Spike Hellis - Spike Hellis (album) Termination_800 - Cyborg Remix (album) Termination_800 – Opfor Target (ep) The Present Moment - Enough to Drive You Mad (album) The Present Moment - News For You (single) The Serfs - Primal Matter (album) The Serfs – Stimuli (Kontravoid Remix single) Various Artist - Tartarus (with Alpha Sect, Facets, Gegen Mann and more) (album) Various Artist - Unholy Body Tempo (with Cyan ID, Red Devill, GBxCL, etc…) (album) Venon Vampires - Luxury In Deceit (album) WLDV – Lots of bandcamp singles X Marks the Pedwalk - New/End (album) XPropaganda - The Heart Is Strange (album) Yansyet – System 189 (single) Yansyet - Tears of the Motherland (ep) Yansyet – The Shining (ep) Zola Jesus – Alive in Cappadocia (ep) Zola Jesus – Arkhon (album)

[borat123]

Analysis Pro NH Anti NS

Naruto Manga Part 2

Part 13 Finale

The reanimated Minato appears on the battlefield. He asks Naruto out of the blue, if the girl healing him is his girlfriend. Naruto’s reaction to this is actually very flat and careless. He hesitates and fumbles his words, then he falsesly agree and says ”if you’re splitting hairs, i guess”. The defintion of splitting hairs is and i quote: to make often peevish criticisms or objections about matters that are minor, unimportant, or irrelevant.

So clearly Naruto doesn’t even remotly see her in a romantic light. Not that he ever did, his ”crush” on her was only a side effect of the rivalry with Sasuke. He only noticed her because she actively tried her best to get noticed by Sasuke and made herself as pretty as possible. And Naruto being the goof that he is, saw the biggest Sasuke fangirls attempt at getting his attention and got jealous of Sasuke and tried to get her attention instead of Sasuke so that he could be better than Sasuke at something.

Anyway Sakura becomes furious and immediatly punches Naruto (in the middle of healing him by the way) and he comments on how she’s supposed to heal him and that he’s suffered more damage now because of her (honestly if anything they are more like two siblings quarrelling).

Then Minato out of the blue just like his stupid girlfriend comment compares Sakura to Kushina. But he actually looks embarrassed that she resembles her not so positive side. Kushina obviously has her loving, caring and ambitious side and he certaintly doesn’t compare her to that, but only her temper (that sooo many girls share in Naruto by the way it’s not exactly a unique trait). Minato looks embarrased and nervously laughs and then says somewhat sarcastically ” i leave my son in you’re capable hands”.

So he doesn’t actually supports them as a couple as some have claimed. Naruto later tells him that he hasn’t found a girlfriend and he accepts that and supports him.

Naruto thanks Sakura for healing him and then tells her to rest. He doesn’t actually see her as a capable kunoichi and he never really believed in her strength. Compare this to how he treats Sasuke or Hinata where he willingly invites them into battle with him and it becomes blatantly clear that Naruto doesn’t respect her. Besides Sakura even comments on how he only sees her as a damsel in distress and she’s not exactly wrong.

The first thing Naruto thinks about when he sees Sakura’s new super strength is how she’s gonna ”turn him into a stain” if he makes her angry. Her physical abuse on him has obviously had an lasting effect if that’s the first thing he comes up with. Compare this to Sasuke’s reaction where he smirks proudly instead.

We get another perspective of Naruto’s and Hinata’s hand holding where we see Naruto squeeze her hand harder and him smiling at her. We also have more foreshadowing of Naruto and Hinata’s future relationship. She notes she wants to stay beside Naruto forever, while remembering Naruto, she is able to not only complete the Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms, but also combine it with Gentle Step Twin Lion Fists.

Naruto is later at the verge of death and Sakura uses her role as a medic Ninja to try and save him. She talks about how his unbeliveable dream is just around the corner and also does CPR on him (which a lot of people confuse with a kiss for some reason, i guess they’re either stupid or desperate for anything remotely close to NaruSaku). Besides it feels a lot more like Sakura is desperate to save her friend, who is much more like a brother to her than a romantic partner. Honestly the girl has been horny for Sasuke most of her life so why would that suddenly change just because she tries desperatly to save her friend who she only has nothing but platonic feelings towards.

When Naruto’s saved he doesn’t even thank her and just says ”lets go”. The depth honestly astounds me!

Later Sakura performs a very wise decision of rushing straight towards Madara with no plan or warning of her ingenious plan. This is very similar to when she decided to come back and stab Sasuke when he fought Kakashi. Typical case of narcissism, thinking she’s hot shit and can do everything herself even though Sasuke and Naruto (her much stronger teammates) saved her sorry ass. Naruto and Sasuke then help her and she doesn’t even thank Naruto for saving her and only despairs over Sasuke not caring. Naruto barely reacted at all to her getting stabbed. Compare this to when Hinata got stabbed when he went bat shit crazy and almost transformed into the Nine Tails.

Hinata is put under the Infinite Tsukuyomi and mentally calls out for Naruto...

And Naruto hears her mental call! In his protective nature he almost ran out of the Susanoo, leaving Team 7 behind. He is only just stopped by Sasuke. Let me really talk about this here, not only could he hear her mental call, but he also had no hesitation to rush out to save her even though he would leave Team 7, his ”family” behind. I mean hearing mental calls and seeing emotions through eyes, that’s some next level shit honestly!

This sort of validate the idea that Naruto and Hinata are connected. Both Naruto and Hinata constantly use words the other has said (for example Hinata says his Ninja way and Naruto makes a refrence to being ”selfish” earlier in the war. There are so many parallels between them that i cant list them all here). They also understand each others hardships, how they are both ”proud failures” who work hard to change themselves. They are kindred spirits. They both admire and respect each others will to never give up and that’s also ironically why they both start falling for each other. We know how in Naruto people are connected through blood, for example with the summoning jutsu. Naruto’s blood vow to Hinata was him sealing that connection between them.

Inside the Infinite Tsukuyomi, Hinata dreams of being with Naruto, while Neji and Hanabi watch. Which, incidentally, also discards claims that she cared nothing for Neji because apparently her greatest dreams was being with Naruto and Neji being alive.

Interesting how they show Hinata in this panel as it could be viewed as an in direct reference to Naruto’s and Hinata’s relationship and past.

We see Naruto and Hinata standing very close to each other at Neji’s funeral. It was implied that they actually got really close after the war. Hinata is also seen crying at Neji’s funeral so that debunks stupid claims of her not ”caring”. Honestly he was like a brother too her, of course she would care?! What’s wrong with people?

Besides i think that it’s very likely that the Last could have worked to be set shortly after the war. Both Naruto and Hinata have shown (atleast for me) that they both love each other and that they are ready for a relationship. But at the same time, Naruto, even though he’s matured a whole lot compared to the start of Part 2 is still oblivous to real romantic love, even though he has shown signs of it towards Hinata. That he thinks Hinata and Ramen are the same thing is actually somewhat believable since he confuses his love for her with his childhood comfort food that has brought him happiness. It’s actually a very Naruto thing in my opinion.

So it still makes sense to be set 2 years after, the characters need to mature and be older sure, but it defiantly could have worked earlier.

Anyway that will be all for these analyses. It was a lot of fun to write these and hopefully you learned something new by reading them. Hopefully this brought some new light towards NH and also some depth as to why NS was always a crack ship.

Naruto and Hinata’s relationship is something that had always interested me since the start. Actually NH moments in Part 1 are my prefered subject and i wouldn’t mind maybe doing analyses on them too. Thanks for reading!

Here are all the previous parts:

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12

[compulsivewriter]

General community quarantine with heightened restrictions thoughts...

Okay, so some theatre fans are once again on that never-ending argument over whether Next to Normal is way better than Dear Evan Hansen.

As someone who's eternally grateful to these two shows for saving my sanity at a time when I was ready to give it all up, I can't fathom where all the hate is coming from.

Was it because Dear Evan Hansen got all the hype?

Excuse me, from what I heard, when it opened in Broadway in 2009, Next to Normal, while not really being recognized at the Tonys, was THE talk of the town for its radical approach to portraying mental illness. It was also a best-seller at a time when theatre audiences were at a low ebb.

The complaint that it was "underrated," in my opinion, is possibly due to the fact that back then, social media didn't exist like we know it today. (Propos to the socmed team of Next to Normal, they knew how to take Twitter to its advantage and launched a campaign serializing the show one line at a time.)

Issue two: did Dear Evan Hansen rip off Next to Normal's plot?

Reading the development of the former (Dear Evan Hansen started out as an exploration of how people tend to insert themselves in tragedies, especially on social media), I'd say that was very unfounded. Sure, the parallels are astounding, but remember that the two shows are directed by one guy, Michael Greif, so his experience with Next to Normal probably ultimately helped him guide Pasek and Paul fine-tune Dear Evan Hansen.

Also, creatives nowadays are facing a dilemma: where does one draw the line between inspiration and plagiarism? In today's climate where even a minor similarity can be misconstrued as plagiarism, creatives are now afraid to take originality to greater heights.

Issue number three: which play is the better representation of mental illness?

To me, the jury is still out on that question. Also, let me take note that Next to Normal has been criticized for exaggerating bipolar disorder and presenting a one-sided, negative view of clinical psychology and the use of shock treatment to cure mental illnesses.

To tell you the truth, I'm glad these two musicals existed, as they helped me through a difficult time in my life when I was considering chucking out my current career in journalism after some personal tragedies. Mental illness is still underrepresented in media, and these two shows, imperfect as they are, helped push what was once a taboo issue out in the open.

So, let me ask again: where does all this rivalry and hate coming from?

[stillinaincrad]

Aldnoah.Zero stole quite a bit of quite a bit from other anime that came before it in both the characters and in plot. It’s amazing to me how many parallels there are between the fight scenes of the second half and those from Sidonia no Kishi, which was released about the same time as the first season. The second season uses one of my absolute favorite songs as OP music, even though the op itself has no real life to it and is a tad too histrionic. 

And yet, none of that really matters to me, because here we are in 2021 and just over 7yrs from the day that Ep1 premiered, there are still very few shows that have matched the absolute beauty of A.Z as far as I’m concerned. The first half is astounding, the detail in the backgrounds and the crispness of the animation is still phenomenal. S2 has moments where the CGI blurs the lines of what is and isn’t fluid and sometimes looks like a cut & paste being dragged across a storyboard. And, in S2, when viewed from the side, the characters talk out of the side of their mouths and yet the other side is “closed off” from the background, which makes them look hella awkward at times, when they don’t look that way already from rounded and simplified facial features in the first place. Still, the sceneries and details are more than just a leap past noteworthy. S1 definitely looks worlds better, but S2 isn’t exactly vector art, it’s still quite beautiful. 

Ei Aoki directed Aldnoah.Zero. He had just come off of another project that he was the artistic director for, a little show called Fate/Zero. Am not going to hijack my own post talking about the two FSN series that I love so much, but part of the reason I hold both Fate/Zero and FSN-UBW so highly is that there is just nothing out there that looks like them - not before, not then, not since. The story and characters are plenty compelling enough, but the art in those two series is the true masterpiece. I’ll never get over it. And just like one of the axial plotlines of Aldnoah.Zero itself, the art production follows it’s bloodline. The visual feast is second to very, very few. 

I can’t really seem to get out of the rut of watching new anime just because it’s there but not really wanting to be a part of it like I have in the past. Dragon Maid is sweet and I enjoy the new episodes, Slime/Datta Ken is a truckload of fun, but they’re nowhere near submersive (if that was even a word) and are just something to watch. I don’t get swallowed whole anymore and become tied to the stories or characters. I don’t need these characters to be ok or to pay for their sins like I have with so many. So, I have to go back and watch the old stuff over and over again if I want that fix. I want to be wow’ed like that again, sure - it’s not like I’m that ‘everything new sucks’ hipster dbag who wears flannel in July and drinks canned PBR which tastes like feet but some article in Tight Jeans Monthly said it’s what trendy men who want people they’ve never met to think they’re trendy do. But I’ve wanted it for a while and it hasn’t happened, so sometimes I have to go back to a show like Aldnoah.Zero to remind myself why I love this anime stuff like I do. 

[hannahstarshade]

This has been sitting in my drafts since the 10th anniversary of Portal 2 but I still want to talk about it so here we go.

I have so much love for Portal as a whole. It's a first person shooter for people who aren't onto first person shooters. It was revolutionary, putting the spotlight on students doing something cool. It followed a lone test subject as she completed scientific trials before realizing something is truly amiss. Portal is a short game with an original concept, great writing, and a solid story. Portal 2 is a direct continuation as Chell attempts to escape the science facility a second time, uncovering the secrets that lie beneath along the way. The fact that a sequel was made at all is astounding; even more so that it dealt with greater themes and character arcs.

Greek mythology is a theme present throughout the game. By 2011, we had all read the mainline Percy Jackson books. We knew. The most obvious and well-know is the tale the turret tells Chell after being saved from the conveyor belt. The little robot talks about how Prometheus was punished for giving the knowledge of fire to man. This parallels GLaDOS’ journey as she is cast into the underground facility. Upon waking up in this forgotten wasteland, we see that this area has been named Tartarus. It fits the bill, as it resebles the darkest depths of the underworld. There is also a robot named Atlas, named after the Titan who holds the weight of the world on his shoulders. The ending finds Chell in a golden wheat field, a possible allusion to the paradise Elysium.

In the biggest twist of events, halfway through the game, you are forced to team up with your enemy from the previous game. Having GLaDOS along for the ride to offer advice or quips is refreshing after having faced her in all her glory. In her less powerful state, she's almost human. It's appropriate, seeing as GLaDOS' arc concludes with her finding the remaining memories of Caroline left inside her. I think it's safe to say we all appreciate her more after learning this piece of lore. Female friendships are important, even when you want to kill each other.

While I adore the old Aperture Science section and laugh along with how absurd and hilariously uncaring Cave Johnson is, it really showcases the horrors of early science. He lacks empathy, disregarding human life in pursuit of scientific discovery and recognition. When he is unable to convince astronauts, war heroes, and Olympians to return to test, Cave Johnson immediately begins testing on homeless people, orphans, and the elderly. He sees them as expendable. This carries over into the treatment of his own staff when he pushes them to test as well. I know a lot of history taught in the United States heavily glosses over the nastier parts. One of the biggest failings is in the scientific and medical field. It wasn’t until more recent decades that laws were put into place to help regulate human experimentation. 

Sound design is key with any piece of media. The soundtrack of Portal 2 brings to mind something from Tomorrowland, or a retro version of what the future could be. It’s bubbly and curious. This is thematically appropriate, as we visit the old Aperture Science and see this is exactly the mindset Cave Johnson went into the field with. Even in its more dire or relaxing moments, it has tunes to test by. “Exile Vilify” by The National is a fantastic mood setter for this game. We find it playing on a lonely radio, hidden within a forgotten corner of a test chamber. It’s bittersweet, both hopeful and desperate, encapsulating Chell’s struggle for freedom. The turret’s rendition of “Cara Mia” is out of nowhere but surprisingly effective. You feel like you’ve earned it by the end of the game. And, of course, “Want You Gone” sung by GLaDOS is an incredible follow up to “Still Alive.”

It’s only recently that I learned the term “liminal space.” These are empty places of transition that “[convey] a sense of nostalgia, lostness, and uncertainty.” Portal 2 has this in spades. From the very beginning, we enter the facility that has been abandoned for an undiscernible about of time. We play through familiar levels that have been overrun by plant life and deteriorated over the years. We get tastes of the scope of Aperture Science early on, but not until we fall 5,000 meters below the surface and witness its near destruction do we fully understand. It’s eerie how vast the facility is. This place was once brimming with life; test subjects solving puzzles, scientists running data. They’re all gone now. It’s just you and a couple of robots now.

The bottom line is that Portal 2 isn’t just a good sequel; it’s a great sequel. I know I’m kind of late to the game, and a lot of these points have been made over the past ten years. I already said this post has been sitting in my drafts since April. Even though a ton of things in my life have changed since then and I got really busy, it’s kind of funny to think I’d even be motivated to come back to this. And as we all know, comedy equals tragedy plus time. Even when I do get busy with life, this game is always there when I need it. It was back in the day, it is now, and it will be in the future. There’s something comforting about the way this game sparks a need to explore and experiment. I’m happy this game exists.

[mae-gi-writes]

Halloween Escapade | Jacob (The Boyz)

You and Jacob both dislike parties, so why not ditch it to get Mcdonald’s? 

Genre: fluff

A/N: I KNOW I’M ONE MONTH LATE FOR HALLOWEEN But I saved this in my drafts and forgot to post it. Nothing too intense, just a little cute Jacob. Enjoy <3 

-----

“You mind doing my makeup?" Looking up from your makeup palette, your heart does a little stutter at the sight of a dishevelled-looking Jacob decked in what seems to be a skeleton-themed shirt and pants. On the occasion of Halloween, the office had decided to close its doors early to celebrate. It was also a good excuse to order some good assortments of finger-picking foods and expensive cake. Being the artist that you were, you had brought along your entire makeup collection, ready to help out anyone in need of paint or decoration on their face.

But you had not expected Jacob, of all people, to be standing before you while shuffling his feet like a shy little schoolboy. He is obviously of a higher status than you are in the office, one of the Directors that has a certain percentage of shares, no doubt. You as a mere office worker that looked up to him in admiration, and had to admit that you had developed a little crush throughout the months of noticing his gentle and kind demeanour. "Uh--sure," you quickly stutter out before gesturing towards the seat, "you can sit here." He does so without complaint as you ask, "what kind of makeup do you want?" "Could you do a skull?" "Uhm--" that takes a long time, your brain screams out at you, "s--sure. No promises, though." "That's alright. The uglier the better anyway," he pauses, "not that your drawings are ugly, I--that's not what I meant." You chuckle softly signalling to him that it's all good. Opening up your palette and dabbing your sponge with white powder, you hesitate slightly before you start covering his face; his eyebrows, over his eyes, down the slope of his nose. He's gorgeous, you think to yourself while trying not to giggle at the thought of you two being so close in physical proximity. You hope that he can't hear the way your heart practically beats out of your chest, an excited hummingbird bursting out through your ribcage. "So...did you learn that yourself?" Jacob asks after a bout of silence. "Mostly. But I was always comfortable with painting and all that stuff," you start contouring his face with gray and silently appreciate the flawless texture of his skin, "I used to do makeup for halloween every year when I was still in school." "That's so cool. I wish I could paint like that," his eyes flutter open to momentarily gaze into your eyes, "the only thing I'm good at are numbers." "Well you know, I grew up wishing I was good at numbers." 'We always want something we can't have." "True," you start blending the black with the white, the makeup taking on a grey tone to create a shadow, "but if it makes you feel better, most people admire the ones who know their numbers well." "You sound like you know something about that." You just smile faintly, "I hope I don't sound too whiny. That wasn't my intention." "No, your honesty is...refreshing," he mumbles through closed lips as you brush over his face with the blender, "I mean, I don't really know how it feels because I'ver never faced this kind of problem. But I can understand how frustrating that might be, for people to judge someone based on their jobs." His compliment throws you off, so much so that you can't help the heat from spreading over your cheeks, "oh--uh, I hope that wasn't too rude. I wasn't trying to offend you or anything--" "No no, not offended," Jacob raises his hands in mock surrender, "I'd be frustrated too, in your place." His blunt sweetness makes your heart flutter and it makes you glad that his eyes are closed at this very moment, for it would've probably made you even more embarrassed to be looking at him face to face. Clearing your throat, you move to his eyes, applying soft dark smudges over his lids as he asks,"so, how do you find life here?" That's how it goes, with him sitting patiently and as still as a statue, and you painting the contours of his face while trying your best not to admire the beauty of the man sitting before you, a work of art you simply can't take your eyes off of. But the more you converse, the more you realize how much you have in common. And the result is astounding, to say the least. For starters, you would never have known that your superior hates socials the most, or that despite people at the office drinking their coffee black, Jacob prefers his coffee with lots of milk and sugar that is enough to cause him diabetes. Not that he's proud of it, mind you. It's not until someone coughs loudly behind Jacob that you realize he's been sitting there a lot longer than he's supposed to, jumping before quickly noticing the growing line of impatient people waiting for their makeup. "Oh sorry sorry!" He jumps up, as though startled he's stayed that long, "I'll leave you to it then, Y/N. Thank you so much for the makeup." "Oh no worries," your heart drops slightly at the thought that you'll never get the chance to talk to him like this again. But before you have time to dwell on that fact, another colleague is asking for a vampire kind of look. You lose sight of Jacob for most of the night, though small glimpses of his handsome figure is enough to entertain your little fantasy. You try not to feel so disheartened, knowing full well that there's not even a single strand of hope that he'll even look at you that way. Hell, he doesn' t even look at you. Stop being stupid, you tell yourself sharply. Nothing's never going to happen. He's probably already taken, idiot. "I'm going home," you mutter to your colleague as another song blasts through the stereo hall. The group protests but you shake your head and quietly slip out to leave all the noise behind, the night air welcoming you with its fresh chilly air. A soft sigh falls from your lips when you close your eyes for a brief moment. A car honks in the distance, you pay no mind. Let's go home, you think to yourself, body turning towards the subway station. You walk a few steps, only to hear another honk, closer this time. You stop and turn, a frown stitching your eyebrows together upon noticing a car pull up next to you. You're surprised to see Jacob's face greet you when the window rolls down. You blink at him. "Need a ride?" --------- That is how you find yourself sitting in Mcdonald's parking lot a few minutes later with warm food takeaways in your lap and the smell of fries wafting through the air, chatting with a man whom you'd deemed unapproachable for the past few months and realizing that there is so much more to what you see to him on a daily basis. You'd be lying to say that you don't feel your heart staggering every time he looks at you with those beautiful mahogany orbs that seem to hold galaxies. "I never used to celebrate Halloween," Jacob is saying as he pops a chip into his mouth, "my mother hates it, says it's useless to be celebrating an event that rouses the dead." "Technically, she's right." "Yeah, my five year old self didn't think so though." "You managed to celebrate in college?" He nods before pulling a face, "first and last time I drank till I puked." "That sounds fun," sarcasm drips from your voice before you laugh softly at the tongue he pulls out sat you. It's so easy to talk to him, too easy. It scares you, this foreign uninvited sensation of something fluttering through your ribcage as if you're constantly sitting on a swing that is going too fast for you. You talk about school, about where you come from, about how you sometimes miss your parents dearly and how hard it was at first, to be away from home for so long. And then he tells you about growing up, about his childhood dream of becoming a basketball player, one that broke the moment he realized it'd be much harder to actually get into the professional league. And then it quickly drifts to the troubles of life itself, to the nostalgia of losing friends when you grow up, to discussing multiple theories about what the future holds. "Woah, it's late," Your eyes widen in realization when you spot the time upon his dashboard. 3:30.a.m. "Oh," his own eyes go round, "shit I'm sorry. I didn't want to keep yo--" "No no, it's okay. I had fun," you smile softly at him while recalling yiur conversation, "I'm glad we got to talk." Relief breaks out as a sigh through of his lips, "that's good to know," his eyes find yours then, bathed in the reflection of the cheap streetlight hanging over your car, but you realise that it doesn't matter, for Jacob is ephemerally beautiful and carries that around with him wherever he goes. Your heart tugs when you realise that the night will have to end at some point, watching him pull out of the parking lot while asking you for directions to your house. The night started out with no expectations, with the sense that you can't breathe around the people you're surrounded with. Yet, this moment feels like a gust of oxygen bursting through your lungs. "Can I say something?" Jacob's voice pulls you out of your reverie as he turns onto your street, glancing over at you out of the corner of his eye. You hum for him to continue. He does after a few beats of hesitation. "You know you can talk to me, even if we're at the office," his murmur is so soft you barely catch it. You look at him in surprise, not expecting such words to fall from his lips. But the look he gives you is one that makes heat spread throughout your chest in parallel to the heat covering your cheeks. He continues, "I know that a lot of people are scared of me, because of what they think I might do considering my privileges. But take that title away and I'm just like everyone else." At this point, his vehicle wheels to a stop right before your front door and he turns his head so that your gazes clash, dark obsidian filled with a gentleness that you can't quite explain, though it causes your heartbeat to stutter. You gaze back though, trying to decipher the way his face softens and the tender way his lips are curved into a half-smile, as if you're sharing a private joke. "Well," you clear your throat, head whipping towards your door and hand finding the car handle, "I guess that's my stop." Biting your lip and debating whether to follow through with the aftermath of his words haunting your ears, you quickly turn back to him, "I don't think you're that kind of person. I don't think you could ever go behind someone's back just for the sheer fun of it," you see his gaze widen with surprise, "So don't worry about that." Jacob just stares at you in the pause that follows. You stare back, mentally debating whether you should just throw yourself out of the window for being so stupid or whether to ask the said man himself to run you over, so mortified at the prospect of having said such a thing that your orbs immediately drop to your lap. "I ...thank you," comes Jacob's whisper, "that...nobody has ever said that before." "A--Anyway, I should probably go--" you quickly scramble to open the car door only to be stopped by his hand swinging out to grab yours. "Wait," he says breathlessly, "I--Do you want to--you know maybe do this again? Sometime? I--" a shy smile dances across his lips, "I had fun, Y/N." Your heart swells. Your neck flushes with heat as your eyes drop to the ground, "I had fun too," you mumble, allowing his hand to slide down your arm until it reaches yours. His fingers, as soft as a dove's touch, gently twine around yours like vines and a breath catches in your throat. Jesus, he's perfect. "Yeah," your murmur, "I'd like to do this again." You don't want to look at him. You can't look at him, for you know that once you do there'll be no mistaking the blatant effect he has on you, and that is something you wish to keep to yourself a little longer. But that thought flies out of the window the moment you feel the softest of caresses upon your knuckles. Head shooting up to catch Jacob's lips skimming over the back of your head, a shiver runs through your spine the moment your eyes lock with all the feelings you've been attempting to cast aside for most of the night. "Great," he grins against your hand, "I'll pick you up at seven tomorrow?"

[gunnerpalace]

(These asks were reordered from bottom-to-top to top-to-bottom for clarity.)

Alright, so the first thing I want to say in response to this is actually best summarized in the form of a song:

You are somebody that I don't know But you're takin' shots at me like it's Patrón And I'm just like, damn, it's 7 AM Say it in the street, that's a knock-out But you say it in a Tweet, that's a cop-out And I'm just like, "Hey, are you okay?"

And I ain't tryna mess with your self-expression But I've learned a lesson that stressin' and obsessin' 'bout somebody else is no fun And snakes and stones never broke my bones

So oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh You need to calm down, you're being too loud And I'm just like oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh (oh) You need to just stop Like can you just not step on my gown? You need to calm down

I would like you to seriously reread what you’ve written here (and copy-and-pasted to others) and tell me that it doesn’t come across as more than a little obsessive and psychotic. "This may seem like hate, but it's not," you said anonymously, before going on a rant to strangers on the internet whom you had nominated as the representatives of "you guys." Sure, okay, Heather.

Well, regardless, let’s go through this. First, you don't understand 685/686. I've been over this before several times, but I will go over this one final time, as simply as I can. That said, I can't guarantee that you will understand it when I do. I was unable to successfully tutor 1st graders how to do addition because my perspective was, "Either you understand it or you don't," and I don't have the background in math to make such a simple concept exciting. The same might be true of this, because there is no way to critically analyze these chapters more succinctly than this, and so you still might not get it.

The point of 685/686, thematically, is that absolutely no one got what they wanted.

Renji wanted to surpass Byakuya. He remains Byakuya's Lieutenant and has to settle for being under his sister (figuratively and probably literally too) who now also outranks him as a Captain.

Rukia wanted to reform Soul Society into a more humane institution that protects all souls. It is the same as it ever was, and if anything has doubled down on its practices by rebuilding the Soukyoku (on which it tried to kill her) a hundred times larger, and she is one of its main wardens.

Uryuu wanted anything but to be a doctor, ever since he watched his mom being autopsied by his dad. He is now a doctor, and all alone at that.

Chad promised his grandfather to never hurt people with his fists. He is now a boxer, doing exactly that for money.

Orihime wanted to go out and have several different exciting careers. She is instead a stay-at-home mom.

Ichigo wanted to save a "mountain full" of people, be Superman, leave Karakura, and be a Shinigami. He instead appears to run Isshin's clinic now.

So, yes, you are correct: Kubo chose that Ichigo wind up with Orihime. It is exceedingly clear, from the context, that this is absolutely not a good thing.

That point is further reemphasized by Yhwach’s threat to come kill Ichigo and everyone else when they are at their happiest. And when does he reappear?

When Ichigo saw Rukia again.

Not when Ichigo asked Orihime out. Not when they started dating, officially or unofficially. Not when they were married. Not when she gave birth to his son. Not when his son said his first words.

Not when anything happened with Orihime or Kazui, but when he saw Rukia again.

That is your “Kubo-sensei” telling you directly that the happiest moment in Ichigo’s life was just simply seeing Rukia again, and not anything involving Orihime in any capacity whatsoever.

All of that should tell you that Ichigo and Orihime’s relationship is not exactly the stuff legends are made out of, because them winding up together is explicitly portrayed as a downer ending. A bad ending. 

If you cared at all about the characters—if you cared at all about their desires, or their happiness—or if you cared at all that IchiHime was presented as even merely good, let alone destined or fated or whatever else, then you would be offended by this ending too. 

Because the ending is “Kubo-sensei” straight-up unequivocally telling you that IchiHime is bad and tragic. It is something that one must demonstrate “courage” in the face of. It requires stoicism. It is a bad ending, but that’s life. That’s what the ending means.

He did you dirty too. You just don’t want to see it, because you are so obsessed with the concept of “winning.” Well, this was mutually-assured destruction: everyone lost. Especially you.

Moving on: no, Kubo doesn’t really get attention or money from us. I’m not really sure where this idea comes from.

I’m not an expert on Japanese intellectual property rights and licensing, but I know enough about them in general to know that very little if any money goes to Kubo personally from ongoing Bleach merchandise sales. For example, KLab more than likely has a contract with Shueisha (representing Kubo, hence why they’re put together on BBS’s title card), TV Tokyo, Dentsu, and Pierrot, wherein they pay those entities a fixed amount to license Bleach per year or per contractual term. It’s not like Kubo is making money off of every orb purchase or every figurine sold or something. These things don’t work like that.

As for attention, he’s still hiding from social media (for reasons of his own, unrelated to the fandom), and the people who give him attention are... you. People like you. “True Bleach fans” who can’t stop treating all his shit like it’s solid gold. We have made it fairly clear we don’t need him or care what he thinks.

Regarding BBS, maybe you haven’t noticed, but the majority of the imagery they use is IchiRuki-focused. The last title screen was IchiRuki. The Guild button is IchiRuki. The Events button is IchiRuki. The Chronicle Quest button is IchiRuki. Here, I’ve helpfully highlighted this for you:

While they do occasionally toss IH a bone, the last January event also ended on an IR note despite the ridiculous crowing about it being IH. While I’m at it, even the current supposedly “IH” title screen is anything but.

It doesn’t take Michelangelo or Da Vinci to figure out the composition here is not terribly suggestive. While Rukia is indeed off to one side, the fact Uryuu, Zangetsu, and the title card are between Ichigo and Orihime (and they’re looking in different directions) makes it pretty evident that they’re not being visually associated together. It is at best a “general” title screen. Uryuu is showing more visual interest in Ichigo than Orihime is.

I’ll come back to “the anime” in a minute. Let’s talk about their “tag-team move.” Do you mean the one that ended like this?

This one that didn’t work whatsoever?

This one where Ichigo wasn’t concerned at all that Orihime might be dead or dying as she lay there on the ground?

This one where he absolutely gave into despair?

How romantic. Truly, what an excellent battle-couple they make. Their combat effectiveness and synergy is just astounding. I for one would love to see it animated.

(Let’s not forget that later, Orihime can’t repair Zangetsu without some nonsense shenanigans from Tsukishima either. Just like how her healing abilities are useless against any sufficiently strong residual reiatsu. Ah, but that would require reading the manga closely...)

Finally, on to the idea of the anime returning. Here’s the thing: news about a trailer also doesn’t really mean anything. Sure, it could be TYBW. Or it could be The Honey Dish Rhapsody. Or it could be a thousand other things. I neither know, nor particularly care, what it actually is, on top of my explanations as to why animating TYBW would be a dumb business decision.

Here’s why: even if it is a TYBW anime, it will have to be an adaptation of TYBW. They will still have to follow the plot of TYBW. And TYBW was a pile of shit. It wasn’t just a pile of shit for IR, it was a pile of shit in general, and a pile of shit for IH in particular.

Perhaps you don’t recall that Orihime spends most of the arc off-panel, having been ditched in Hueco Mundo for most of it (chapters 500–586)?

Oh, but just think, you wouldn’t just get to see the Ichigo-Orihime “tag team” attack totally and utterly failing! You’d also get delights like:

Orihime and Chad utterly failing to believe in Ichigo! (Just like in the Xcution arc where it was demonstrated that Byakuya was a truer friend to Ichigo than either of them!)

Orihime being reduced to a pair of tits, each bigger than her own head!

Ichigo totally ignoring Orihime!

And who can forget the delight of Orihime selling out her dignity to dress slutty at Kisuke’s suggestion to try and get Ichigo’s attention, only for it to not work at all?

Yes, truly, TYBW would be a fantastic arc for IH that would surely win over the populace and convince everyone of the chemistry between these two characters!

Except it wouldn’t. Because they have no chemistry. And they didn’t. See, what’s really funny is that not only did TYBW not give you anything, but it was just following up on the Xcution arc not giving you anything.

Because ORIHIME VISION was played for laughs, just like say, Shuhei constantly is.

Because despite Chad and Orihime being about as important to Ichigo, he couldn’t even bother to say bye. 

Because he just didn’t have time to deal with her bullshit.

I could go on, but this post is already long enough.

You see, you’re real keen to dismiss "all the scene or poem shit or parallel or the hell else thing," but the truth is, that’s all there is to a manga. It is panels of art and text on a page. The rest is just in your head. And it is from those panels of art and text that animated scenes and spoken dialogue would be created. And the funny thing is... there are no IH moments in these arcs. They simply don’t exist.

So really, what you’re hoping and praying for is not just for TYBW to be adapted. Given your evident thirst, I doubt that the perhaps 5–10 minute epilogue of 685/686 at the end of 4–5 seasons would be enough for you. You’d need the animation team to decide to sprinkle in a whole lot of IH filler along the way too.

That didn’t work out so hot for the Xcution arc. How did that one end again? Oh, that’s right: they made up their own (better) ending for it. Are you really willing to bet your money on a TYBW anime going out of its way for IH, if you even get it? Or would you really be satisfied with those 5–10 minutes? Are you really so sure you’d even still get them?

Ultimately, I don’t care. You’re blocked. But, I will say this: in a way I almost kind of pity you. It seems really sad being a militant anonymous IH, desperately and eternally craving outside validation. You have so very little to cling to. It must be hard.

Good luck with that, Heather.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/8/2020: PELICAN BLOOD (2019)

If you are reading this and the present date is between October 8 and 11 of 2020, please consider buying a virtual ticket to see Katrin Gebbe’s PELICAN BLOOD, available on demand through the Nightstream festival:

https://watch.eventive.org/nightstream/play/5f6e7e78d6a9bf0036613fa3

I am about to discuss this movie and its conclusion in great detail, but it would be much better for a person to come to it in innocence--not because it’s so reliant on anything as gauche as surprise, but because it is so thoroughly excellent that wading through a movie review first would be like letting your dinner grow cold. And, it simply deserves our support.

When I saw PELICAN BLOOD last year at Fantastic Fest, it became one of my favorite movies before it was even over. I might admit that this was sort of a match made in heaven, as this movie checks almost every one of my personal boxes, but I don’t think my assessment of its value is a simple matter of personal prejudice. I’ve been haunted by it all these months, and deeply worried that somehow I might never see it again. When I discovered that it had landed on Nightstream, I was over the moon.

This is writer-director Katrin Gebbe's second feature, a fact that will astonish you when you see it. Last Blogtober, I wrote about her first feature TORE TANZT, which has the troubling english title NOTHING BAD CAN HAPPEN. That intense indie drama concerns a born-again christian punk who wishes for an opportunity to prove his devotion to god, and finds it in the form of a family that invites him in off the streets, and then proceeds to torture him. That's an oversimplification of what actually occurs, but it is a film that's hard to be brief about. It's cheap and a little rough around the edges, but it is deliberate, intense, and difficult to forget. (In fact it's supposed to be based on a true story, although I haven't managed to pick up that trail) When I first saw it, it certainly made me wonder what else that director might be up to, and I was astounded when I found out. 2019's PELICAN BLOOD emerged six years after TORE TANZT, with little in between besides a television episode and a segment in the anthology THE FIELD GUIDE TO EVIL, and yet Gebbe's artistic evolution is dumbfounding. Her themes are all unmistakably present--faith versus doubt, mystical versus metaphorical experience, and physical martyrdom--but exploded into a grand, elegant psychodrama that holds the viewer captive every minute of its two hours.

Celebrated german actress Nina Hoss plays Wiebke, a stable owner who trains police horses to tolerate the frightening conditions of a riot. She lives at the edge of her pasture, raising her tween daughter Nicolina (Adelia-Constance Giovanni Ocleppo) on her own. Wiebke has a talent for healing the wounded, or perhaps it's more of a calling; she raised Nicolina, a bulgarian orphan, into a bright, balanced, emotionally available tomboy, and the two of them joyfully anticipate the arrival of Nicolina's new adoptive sister. When little Raya arrives (Katerina Lipovska), she first presents as sweet, even solicitous, needing only a mother's love to fully bloom. However, as soon as she determines that she is welcome and wanted, she undergoes a disturbing transformation into a violent and unpredictable creature, possessed by an abject hatred. Wiebke recognizes that her new child is seriously traumatized, which activates her sense of purpose, and she pledges herself fully to the child's recovery--despite the admonishments of Raya's daycare, her doctors, and virtually everyone around them, that the little girl is beyond all but clinical help, and even that promises no guarantee of salvation. Refusing to give up, Wiebke makes a series of increasingly dangerous personal sacrifices in Raya's name, until finally she finds herself at the doorway to what some consider another world, but what is to others only madness.

Gebbe won Best Director in the main competition at Fantastic Fest, and it would have been a crime if this were otherwise. Her control over what are essentially forces of nature is humbling. Extracting a profoundly moving drama from a cast of adult actors is challenging enough on its own, but to get these terrifyingly convincing performances from children, evoking deep trauma and physical violence to self and others, is another level. As if this weren't enough, Gebbe adds animals into the mix, giving the story of Raya a parallel in the troubled career of a police horse who is considered a lost cause by all but Wiebke. The training scenes in which Wiebke guides the volatile animal through fire and smoke, while her own lifeforce is being progressively depleted by her new child, are as harrowing as anything having to do with parenthood, and Wiebke seems to take the horse just as seriously as her child. Friendly single dad Benedikt (Murathan Muslu) tries to flirt with the trainer by remarking on her unusual career, but she spits bitterly, "The horses are not the problem," giving us a glimpse of the philosophy that drives her.

Another of my favorite german films is Werner Herzog's 1976 short NO ONE WILL PLAY WITH ME. This funny and poignant story involves a bullied and neglected little boy, and it is preceded by a card displaying the adage "There are no bad children, only bad parents." This is the principle that drives Wiebke in work and life: Those who are seen as failures, have been failed by others. One has the sense that Wiebke sees herself in these wretches. She has no partner, and balks at questions about her relationship history, shying from physical affection even with people she knows and likes. A tell-tale scar graces one cheekbone; when she finally begins to welcome the benign Benedikt's advances, he strokes it instead of kissing her, acknowledging that he can see who she really is.

Wiebke tries to extend this same empathy toward Raya, refusing to let the child bait her into wrath and rejection. However, this show of pure faith and tolerance does not work, and the right approach becomes less clear as Raya begins to blame her mounting acts of vandalism, arson and assault on an evil entity that controls her will. A psychiatrist aprises Wiebke that this is the "magic period", in which the child uses magical thinking to divert feelings of guilt and responsibility. But, after a fashion, Wiebke begins to sense this malevolent presence as well. Is this etheric intrusion real? Or is she beginning to empathize with the child--with the experience of grappling with a damaged part of yourself--to the point of dissolving boundaries?

The title of the movie refers to a fable about a pelican whose chicks die, and she resurrects them by feeding them her own blood. This is a clear metaphor for Wiebke's trial with Raya, that becomes shockingly literal when, after endangering her home and relationships by prioritizing the new child, Wiebke places her own health on the line by taking an unregulated drug to give herself a bizarre advantage. When Wiebke discovers the shocking nature of Raya's original trauma, she experiments with the radical idea of treating the girl like a little baby, hoping to start from square one with her capacity to be mothered, and in the service of this dreadful proposition, Wiebke starts taking a lactation-inducing pill that proves to be an immediate risk to her health, and puts her in an even more perilous position with Raya.

Although it focuses on a preternaturally devoted mother, PELICAN BLOOD recalls what makes movies like HEREDITARY and WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN so potent. We have the idea that in becoming parents, we are perpetuating our own essence, extending our history and celebrating the precious connection of blood, which is supposed to impart an automatic same-ness. Unfortunately, this only shakes out to arrogance for many, denying the quirks of psychology, chemistry, and the unique impact of trauma--even if minor, or explainable as something benign--on a mind too young to fully comprehend the nature of the experience. Even without abuse in the home, anyone can have a child less like themselves than they could have ever imagined, for reasons beyond their own control. In all this, the child is innocent, and it is the duty of the parent to prioritize the child's feelings, over the vanity of wanting an heir to your own best qualities. Wiebke sacrifices not only her vanity, but potentially her very life, to show Raya love. When this blood sacrifice does not work, Wiebke finds herself facing the realm of alternative belief as a last resort.

The introduction of PELICAN BLOOD's folk horror element can seem a little left field, if you haven't noted the clues scattered throughout the film. Before the revelation of Raya's boogeyman, Wiebke begins to discover evidence of an old pagan tradition still being practiced around her proverbial neck of the woods. Soon, she tentatively entrusts herself and her child to a local witch, who puts them through a harrowing exorcism. Though the process is uncertain at first, its impact forces Wiebke into a direct acknowledgment of the entity harassing her daughter. And ultimately, it awakens in Raya a capacity for love.

While the reality of the supernatural in PELICAN BLOOD remains in question, I think the effect of this ambiguity is specifically meaningful. I usually scoff at any type of "was it all a dream?" nonsense, as this is a tactic employed by directors who think their greatest accomplishment should be getting one over on the audience. I don't see any inherent value in simply reversing the apparent meaning of things, just to make people feel stupid--and worse, this has trained modern audiences to try to defensively predict the least likely ending to any story, instead of just engaging with it emotionally as it plays out. For this reality-bending trick to be worth anything, one must be able to answer questions like, IF this was all a dream, THEN what meaning is added to the story?

In PELICAN BLOOD, the unresolved question of whether magic is real is of great relevance to the whole concept of belief. Human beings crave extranormal experience; we're deeply attracted to tales of ghosts, UFOs, mythical creatures, and parapsychological abilities. Even the skeptics among us enjoy arguing about these things, and many regular folks without eccentric interests read their horoscope "just for fun". Most telling of all is the enduring popularity of stories about the strange and unusual, which require no particular belief system from the audience; the fantasy of this extra dimension to our mundane lives is just so satisfying. Despite all the pleasure we get from these ideas, though, we tend to cling first and foremost to objective truth; we tell ourselves that if there is no "proof", then an outrageous thing cannot exist. But, this is actually contrary to many of our lived experiences. On the basest level, we delight at videos of insane parkour stunts, at the same time that we say these guys are "like" superheroes, but are actually just guys. My question is, what's the difference? If a person can achieve physical feats that most of us can never imagine attempting, then what difference does it make that this person was not bitten by a radioactive spider? If a fortune teller in a carnival is so good at "cold reading" strangers that she gives the effect of being able to read minds, then what is the appreciable difference between a carny and a "real psychic"? If a faith healer "just convinces" someone to become free from a chronic ailment, and the patient goes on to live a happier life, who cares if no "real magic" was in evidence? What is the difference between exorcism and hypnosis, if the end result is the same for a seriously disturbed child and her mother? The only difference appears to be some material confirmation of specific mystical forces and substances--which, admittedly, would be exciting on its own--but this would still only be an alternative version of the events that led up to the same "miraculous" result. We only worry about the existence of God and magic because our definitions of these things tend to be limited to what we think of as literal and scientific. But, if the correct effects manifest themselves, then all that is purely cosmetic. Belief is real. Faith works.

[tired-luxis]

Tomarrymort: Why it’s Such a Promising Ship

I absolutely adore Tomarrymort. It’s one of my all-time favorite ships, and I find myself coming back to it time and time again. Of course, it might take a bit of work to convince the quintessential skeptic about this pairing, so here are some reasons why Tomarrymort is a gold mine of content.

I. The parallels

J.K. Rowling painstakingly draws numerous similarities between Harry and Tom’s upbringing. For instance:

A. Childhoods

Although not explicitly stated by Rowling, Harry definitely grew up in an abusive home (starvation, overwork, belittlement, so on). Tom Riddle also spent his childhood in a bad environment, as he was born in 1926 at the height of global turmoil and England-specific class upheavals. As an orphan at an unforgiving home, he likely experienced harsh treatment for reasons even aside from his fear-inspiring magical abilities.

B. Unfit, Hostile Guardians

The Dursleys did everything they could to quash any freakishness in Harry. They systematically diminished his self-worth and sought to stifle his magical abilities in every way. Similarly, Wool’s Orphanage also treated Tom as an “other”. While Tom was by no means a saint, the Matron and his peers made no secret of their unease and borderline dislike for him, which likely only alienated Riddle further. 

C. Marked by Dumbledore from a young age

Since the prophecy’s creation, Dumbledore singled out Harry as a tool to win the war. Dumbledore may have cared for him and genuinely regretted the self-sacrificing role he would have to play, but regardless, he still passively and actively ensured Harry would be put in too many life-or-death situations that no child should’ve experienced. And while Dumbledore preemptively christened Harry a savior, he contrastingly damned Tom at the very start. Within mere moments of meeting Tom, he was convinced that this young boy was someone to be feared. Mind you, I’m not a Tom Riddle apologist; I fully recognize that he was a very dark villain as an adult and his actions could not be primarily attributed to the rejection he faced from adult figures. However, the way that they were both pseudo-predestined to play opposing roles is rather fascinating.

D. Why these similarities matter!!

On a surface level, children are objectively impressionable beings, and the way Tom and Harry were raised likely affected their behavior and character in interesting ways. Because they had similar influences upon their childhoods, it becomes even more intriguing to observe where their paths diverged and how they became such famous hero-villains. I’ll let Tom say it himself:

“There are strange likenesses between us, Harry Potter. Even you must have noticed. Both half-bloods, orphans, raised by Muggles. Probably the only two Parselmouths to come to Hogwarts since the great Slytherin himself. We even look something alike.”

There’s something uniquely attractive about characters who could’ve been like one another, and yet ended up as completely different people. It’s like looking into a mirror and seeing a twisted reflections  — rather incredible, isn’t it?

II. The magical ties

A. Horcruxes: Parseltongue, Occlumency, and more

This is probably the biggest addition to Tomarrymort’s intrigue. To start with, we have Harry’s Parseltongue abilities, which presented themselves early on in the first book and continued to appear in very memorable scenes throughout the series. While Parseltongue itself is a rather loaded concept rife with worldbuilding potential, its continued presence was a constant reminder of the soul relationship between Harry and Voldemort.

For, recall that Harry’s Parseltongue ability was a direct consequence of his soul relationship with Voldemort. He housed a piece of Voldemort’s soul for over a decade. This is astounding, given that there are several examples of other characters being affected by even a brief contact with Voldemort’s Horcruxes. The Diary possessed Ginny after just a school term, the Locket recreated Ron’s greatest fears after mere weeks of wear, and the shard in Nagini likely contributed to her complete obedience and lethality. That then begs the question — how could the piece in Harry have affected him? And if there was no effect, that just makes it all the more interesting with questions of why Harry alone was immune.

Bonus: ficwriters can play with the idea of soul magic or Horcrux-related worldbuilding. It’s wonderful seeing all these different interpretations of Horcrux events: restoring/rejoining pieces of Voldemort’s soul, establishing soul bonds, soul-based mind manipulation, and more.

B. The Prophecy

The actual prophecy has been re-interpreted by numerous fanfics in different ways. The last two lines are the most fanficable, in my opinion.

“And the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not...”

Consider the phrase, “mark him as his equal”. A mark in and of itself is an inherently possessive act of claiming, which ties back to Tomarrymort’s obsessive relationship. And, the pairing can be written with paradoxically imbalanced power dynamics despite their “equal” status.

“And either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives...”

Oh, would you look at that — predestined enemies, fatal tragedy, and more. It’s quite poetic, really. Imagine falling in love with your worst enemy in this scenario. For Voldemort, the prophecy ascertained Harry’s status as a threat to his greatest goal of immortality, which would make a romantic pairing between the two into a very emotionally charged concept. And for Harry, he would have already experienced pain for loving a creature defined by an inability to love, and this prophecy line would have been the final nail in the coffin. 

III. Fanfiction application

A. Sheer variety

Tomarrymort fics span across a wild spectrum. You can scroll just a couple fics down and go from a soul-crushing tale of beautiful angst to a gentle coffeeshop AU. There’s something for everyone here!

B. Depth

The nature of the pairing usually requires a good deal of buildup or context, and it can be pretty intense or achingly soft. Regardless, you’re guaranteed to get quite the vividly emotional experience. 

IV. Conclusion

Generally speaking, there are too many reasons in canon and in fanfiction application that make Tomarrymort amazing. The community itself is also so lovely, and I found some of my greatest friends here. Give the pairing a try if you’d like, and cheers to happy fandom experiences!

(If you’ve read this far, kudos to you! Check me out on ao3, where I write sometimes! Or yell at me on twitter.)

[teamkimsoekjinforever]

11 Questions

I was tagged by the dope af @karenpaage - thanks so much!

Rule 1: Post the rules. Rule 2: Answer the questions the person who tagged you asked, and write 11 new ones. Rule 3: Tag 11 people.

Your Questions

1.  What’s your favorite random fact that you know? Can be any subject you want, just teach me something new! 

Damn, I carry around so many it’s difficult to decide! Ummm, the name Wendy was created for the book Peter Pan. 

Fun fact you probs know but I like people who aren’t readers/lit nerds to know - The Three Brothers Story from HP7 was fucking ripped straight out of The Canterbury tales. It pisses me off to no end.

2.  If you could sit down and have lunch with one fictional character, who would it be and what would you want to talk about? 

Literally the most difficult questions! Probably someone like Elizabeth Bennett because we would have SO MUCH fun just being dicks to stupid guys. Jo from Little Women would definitely have to be with us though... so I’m gonna need like a fancy luncheon party. 

OR Vanessa from Atlanta. She is amazing - so gorgeous and strong and ok with not knowing how everything is gonna turn out and I want to be her best friend.

3.  Above question continued: same scenario, but with one real-life figure, living or dead. Who’d it be? 

Taika Waititi or John Boyega. No explanations needed.

4.  What’s your comfort piece of media? Can be a song, a movie, a show - something that brings you peace and/or that you go back to often. 

Doctor Who is the most comforting show to me, it seriously saved me from my depression countless times and I wouldn’t be alive today without it.

Sing Street is another, the music is just so amazing and it makes me cry in happy ways. Plus it’s my boyfriend’s favorite movie so I always think of the fun we have watching together.

5.  Favorite trope (either in fanfic or in actual writing/film)? 

I don’t read fanfic, otherwise this would be a way more fun answer, so I’d have to say the ‘meddling relative’/’misunderstood situation’. This seems lame but after reading Jane Austin it’s just so much fun! When I really fell in love with these tropes was reading/watching Atonement. What Briony does has such a horrible impact that I am so fascinated by the psychology behind it.

6.  Do you collect anything? If so, tell me about it! 

I collect books, vinyl albums, bluray steelbooks, and comics/graphic novels. I’ve also accumulated a lot of giant pandas over my lifetime because I love them.

7.  What’s one thing you love that people wouldn’t expect you to love? 

Newer pop music. I’ve always been such a music snob (media snob in general) so when I started college in 2011, One Direction just popped onto the US scene and people were astounded that I loved them. Sometimes I just want some fun junk in my earholes.

8.  What’s something you’d love to do but seems kind of ridiculous/out of your realm of possibility at the moment? 

TRAVEL! I am dying to go out of the country! I’d have to get a passport but I would love to see my friend in Sheffield and also go to Wales. I actually have a great job now and no longer living paycheck to paycheck but the fucking rona hit just when I got the job so I’m stuck in Kansas for now.

9.  If you could go on a dream vacation - all expenses paid, wherever you want  - where would you go? 

Tokyo. It is where my boyfriend and I talk about going the most. They have all our anime and cats and mountains, what else do I need!?

10. What’s your favorite/preferred streaming service? 

Hulu cos they got pretty much everything I need. However, HBO Max and Disney + are rising up as they add more content.

11.  Villains or heroes?

This is kind of a cop out, I’m so sorry, but it really depends. I LOVE an anti-hero but I would die for Spider-man (in any universe). Mostly, if it’s superheroes or sci-fi I love the heroes but in other films and books I usually love the villians - whether they are true villains or just assholes - people seem to give more thought to their characters so I always want more. Plus, I always feel I see my own thoughts/feelings paralleled in them.

My questions:

1. Have you ever broken any bones? If so how many and how?

2. What is your favorite cartoon? It can be current or from childhood.

3. If you could live in any fictional world what would it be and why?

4. What is your favorite snack?

5. If you could spend a day with ONE band member/solo artist, living or dead, who would it be?

6. Share your heritage! Do you have any favorite traditions or customs? I’d love to learn!

7. What ‘extreme’ activity would you do if you were given the opportunity?

8. Who are your favorite social activists? Current or dead, it doesn’t matter!

9. What is your favorite article of clothing? Why do you love it?

10. Do you have any unique hobbies? (anything but reading and movies/tv lol)

11. What is your dream job?

I don’t think I know 11 peeps but I’ll tag @kaybakat @blossoming--flower @cryyptic-darling @bradschemicalromance

[mossyrossaliceinterviews]

Thao Nguyen Doesn’t Stay Down

Oct 8, 2020

By Mossy Ross

 Photo Credit: Shane McCauley

When I first listened to the title track off Thao & the Get Down Stay Down’s fifth album, Temple, I immediately hit repeat. After I finished listening to it the second time, I hit repeat again. And then again. And then again. I had a teenage urge to learn all the lyrics, so I could sing along at the top of my voice while cruising down the road. The song describes the pain of losing a home to war, an experience many of us haven’t lived through in America, and yet I still felt a deep personal connection with the song’s powerful message. Perhaps because this country is currently facing such extreme civil unrest, so the thought of experiencing war firsthand is increasingly becoming more real. But the song also touches on the turmoil we can sometimes feel in our own family lives as well. Thao Nguyen seems to be a master at crafting albums that exquisitely make complicated and painful matters a bit easier to bear.

Thao recently won a Sunny Award by CBS Sunday Morning (my most favorite of all morning shows) for the music video to her song “Phenom.” Not only is the video wildly creative and entertaining, it conveys an intergenerational rage that’s finally being collectively realized. It’s the rage of someone who has discovered it’s okay to feel sick of constantly being at the bottom of the ladder, and the message should strike fear in the hearts of corrupt politicians everywhere.

As if a timeless and timely new album and an award winning music video weren’t enough, I was triply astounded after watching the documentary Nobody Dies (available to stream Sat., Oct. 10), which follows Thao on a journey with her mom to Vietnam. The trip was Thao’s first visit to Vietnam, and her mom’s first time back since fleeing the country in 1973. It was a chance for Thao to see her mother in an environment where she wasn’t defined by being a refugee, as she often is in America. In both the documentary and the album, Thao paints a picture we don’t often see in American popular culture: the perspective of a child whose parents have lived through and escaped war.

Mossy: I watched your documentary, and it was such a beautiful tribute to your mom. Is there anything about your mother’s life and experiences that really stand out for you, that you think Americans could learn from?

TN: When I wrote Temple, it was because I wanted to offer a different narrative and rendering of someone who experienced war, and the idea of what a refugee is. And obviously in recent years, maybe throughout American history, how refugees have been reduced and the narrative that has been relayed. I think it’s really important to remember that there’s a distinction between an immigrant and a refugee. And also that someone is not just defined by this war that happened to them and their country. I think that’s why Temple was so important for me. I really wanted to capture my mom’s life before, after, and during; and just help enrich that community. I was raised in Virginia, and growing up, it was so stark the way people treated (refugees). I think that parents that are refugees or immigrants witness a lot of incredibly unfortunate encounters, where their dignity is dismissed. You watch your parents be dehumanized in either casual ways, or really serious ways. So this was one of my efforts to address and make peace with that.

Mossy: When I was watching your documentary I found myself smiling. And then I got to the story about your dad and I just started bawling. What parallels do you see between your father and the patriarchy at large?

TN: That’s an interesting question. My record before this one was about my dad. It’s called A Man Alive, and it’s just about our nonexistent relationship and all the bullshit. But what I started to understand when I was making that record, was just a facet of what it is to be emasculated in American society. And what that means for the families of the men who are emasculated. And I think that you see that a lot, especially in immigrant and refugee homes. And others, I mean, I’m only speaking from my experience. But what does a man do to assert power when he feels as though he’s denied power in society? I think it becomes a really personal and intimate, familial problem. And you know, it helps me understand his experience and what unresolved trauma that basically debilitates him, and renders him an irresponsible, reckless person. Patriarchy in general…I do think so much of it is people not knowing how to grapple with the expectations of masculinity. I could go on. (Laughs) I’ll just say it’s so detrimental in every direction, because if you’re not masculine enough, you will pay and then someone else will pay. And if you feel as though you’re  not respected enough, then the ways that men feel pressured to illicit that respect in our society is so deadly.

Mossy: You said in the documentary that when you went back to Vietnam, it helped you understand your dad’s temperament. That you understood it…but you didn’t. It’s like saying, “I do understand where you’re coming from and I empathize, but I don’t accept how you’re treating me because of it.” Which I feel is kind of where true healing from trauma can begin. How else do you deal with trauma?

TN: Well there have been different waves of awareness and lack of awareness of what I needed to be doing. I mean, I’ve done the typical things like drinking. (Laughs) I think touring helped. I’ve spent the majority of my adult life on tour, and it’s a refuge. But it also allows you to not deal with anything for a really long time. You could go your whole life without dealing with things. Of course, songwriting and making music. And really wanting to go there lyrically by being more specific with lyrics. Okay, and then therapy. But as far as music is concerned, I think it’s been really helpful to have these songs and talk about them, even under the auspice of promotion. But it’s also just connecting with people and talking about the songs. These levels of vulnerability make for a lot more humane experience. When we play live shows , if people get a chance, they’ll come up and tell me what a song has meant. And it really is so heartening and gratifying, and part of the healing.

Mossy: So you’re saying drinking didn’t work?!

TN: (Laughs) I still do it, so I’m not saying it doesn’t. Just don’t go crazy!

Photo Credit: Shane McCauley

Mossy: You have such a wonderful vocabulary, so I’m guessing you like to read. Who are you favorite authors?

TN: Thanks for saying that. Writing and reading favorite authors are how I prepare the albums and the songs. And when I’m writing songs, I never listen to music, and I only read. But I love, oh man, I grew up reading Toni Morrison and her way with language and the vivid pictures she paints and the way she renders people. Grace Paley is another writer who’s style I love. Marilynne Robinson. George Saunders. I typically am drawn to contemporary literature. And now there’s a lot of reading to be done to learn about how America has become what it is. And to that end, Octavia Butler and James Baldwin really influenced the writing of this record.

Mossy: So you’re like Kurt Cobain over here, writing songs inspired by literature.

TN: (Laughs) I wish I had a cool sweater.

Mossy: Ah, he had the best sweaters.

TN: He had the best sweaters.

Mossy: I saw on your Instagram that you support women prisoners and Critical Resistance. Why are you specifically interested in these causes?

TN: With the California Coalition of Women Prisoners, I’ve been involved with them since 2013. Originally it was because a housemate of mine was an amazing organizer, and has been with them for years. And I was home from tour for awhile and he asked me to join this advocacy group, where we went in to prisons and visited, and we were part of a legal advocacy team. So the album, We the Common is entirely about and in tribute to these people who live inside, and this organization.

Mossy: Do you need to have a law degree to do that? I wanna do that!

TN: (Laughs) You totally can! No you don’t have to have a law degree. So the people like my friend…they don’t officially have a law degree. They just know so much about the system, because they’re constantly trying to help people figure out their parole, and how to get their face back in front of a judge. So we went in conjunction with a lawyer. We were just a team that was basically working with a pro-bono lawyer.

Mossy: You mentioned connection and live performance in your documentary. How do you think the musical performance landscape is going to change since the pandemic?

TN: I don’t know what’s going to happen to the venues as they exist now. I don’t know what kind of modifications or concessions they’ll have to make. So I do think that there will be more unconventional and nontraditional venues that come up by the time we’re ready for crowds to gather. And I think there will be more multi-use spaces and art institutions and contemporary art museums. More of those kind of hybrid events. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the rock clubs. It’s so sad. But I do think that we were barreling towards a reckoning. And I liken the music industry to the restaurant industry in a lot of ways…how thin the margin is for survival. And I think people will play smaller shows, because they can happen more quickly. And I think there’s going to be a lot more direct to fan engagement. And those who have a preexisting fan base will lean more into those fans, and be less concerned with expanding.

Mossy: It’s almost like what’s happening in the music industry is symbolic of what needs to happen everywhere. More localizing and community building.

TN: Totally. And I think Bandcamp is going to take an even stronger role as leaders of a more ethical model. I think what’s happening right now with streaming services is, ah, (laughs) unbearable.

Keep up with Thao’s music and the organizations she supports on Instagram at @thaogetstaydown Stream the documentary Nobody Dies this Saturday at https://www.youtube.com/user/thaomusic

[fictionadventurer]

Can you share more about your story involving Alessandro and Floriano? It sounds very interesting!

I could share lots if I wanted to. I’ve been trying to write this story since 2008 (though my serious drafts are from 2013 or so). However, I’ll try to keep things brief.

A Beautiful Tomorrow is a fantasy set in a Regency-inspired fantasy world. It reads like a historical romance, especially since I never bothered doing any serious worldbuilding to take the setting beyond “vaguely old-fashioned land”.

Here’s a summary:

During her country’s civil war, Daniela spent the years in safe exile, attending and teaching at one of the continent’s most prestigious girls’ schools. When she returns to her native land, she meets the blind prince Alessandro and his younger brother, the newly crowned King Floriano, and is hired to serve as tutor to their much younger sister. As Floriano struggles to adjust to his new role, and Alessandro tries to find his place in a kingdom that no longer needs him as its king, Daniela finds herself drawn toward romance with Alessandro–only for everything to come crashing down when her father is accused of treason.

I love these characters, but since I never satisfactorily figured out the details of the war or the political intrigue, the personal and political sides of the story never came together. And believe me, I’ve tried. At this point, the stuff I’ve written is “set in stone”, so I have a very hard time changing the story so it actually makes sense and follows the rules of good story structure.

Ah, what the hey, have an excerpt. (With the usual caveats that this is a first draft, several years old, and I have half a dozen quibbles with the very premise of the scene). This is Daniela’s first meeting with the brothers, when she’s wandering the palace’s rose gardens to escape the crush of the king’s coronation ball. (This isn’t a Beauty and the Beast retelling, but it’s one of the scenes where I leaned into the unintentional parallels to the fairy tale).

Daniela contemplated, just for a moment, whether one bloom among thousands could possibly be missed.  She was startled out of her musings by a heavy step, very nearby, and she turned around.  Looming over her shoulder, close enough to touch her, was Prince Alessandro Carmazzio.  

She let out a startled yelp and stumbled back into a hedge.  

The prince started at the sound and asked, “Who’s there?”

Daniela calmed her breathing long enough to say, “D…daniela Decardi, your highness.”

He nodded in her direction.  He had a dark face full of sharp angles that made him very imposing.  His eyes were shockingly blue.  “And what brings you to the gardens, Daniela Decardi?  Have a fancy to steal a few roses?”

She remembered her fleeting thoughts of a minute before, and was glad he couldn’t see her blush.  “No, your highness,” she said.  “I’m here for the coronation ball.”

“Ah,” he said, and smiled. “Those are usually held indoors.”  He pointed his thin wooden cane over his shoulder.  “In that direction.  Lots of people and music.  You can’t miss it.”

“I know, your highness,” she said.  “But I prefer it out here.  For a while.”

“You prefer flowers to people,” the prince said knowingly.  “Not an indefensible position.  I’ve held it myself often enough.  Tonight, for instance.”

“Ah, yes, then, of course…I’ll just be leaving.”

His face hardened.  “Of course,” he said, in a voice tense enough to snap.  “The mad, blind prince is no one’s idea of good company.”

Daniela gasped, and felt her stomach drop into her kneecaps.  “No, your highness!  I meant no offense.  I only…I thought you implied…that you wished to be alone.”

His expression didn’t soften a bit.  “I’m not fond of the crowds of the ballroom, but I have no objection to your company.”  He added pointedly, “That is, if you have no objection to mine.”

“I…I have no objection, your highness.”

“Then there is no point in us wandering past each other.  Please, walk with me.”

The voice was perhaps too accustomed to giving commands, because though it was worded as an invitation, Daniela felt compelled to obey.  “That would be nice, your highness,” Daniela said.  She eyed the cane and the unfocused, unseeing eyes.  “Do you need me to guide or…”

He snapped, “I’m perfectly capable of navigating my own gardens.”

Daniela blanched, and thought perhaps she ought to have run back to the ballroom, regardless of whether he was offended.  

But he immediately softened and said, “I’m sorry.  That was beastly of me.  You hit upon a delicate subject, but you couldn’t know that.  My apologies.”

Maybe he wasn’t quite the fearsome monster he’d appeared.  “All is forgiven, highness,” Daniela replied.  

He gestured to a point on his left, indicating for Daniela to stand beside him, and they journeyed into the rest of the garden.  Daniela walked more carefully than she ever had in her life.  She wanted to stay close enough for polite conversation, but didn’t want to step accidentally in the way of his feet or cane. She feared what sort of anger a misstep might unleash.

The prince said, “You have the advantage of me, Miss Decardi.  You know everything about me and I know next to nothing about you.”

“I know you only from the papers, highness.”

“Creative journalism aside, you are in some manner familiar with me.  I know only your name, and that you are more fond of roses than ballrooms.”

[Skipping to the Floriano part]

Alessandro was about to reply, but he suddenly stopped, and turned his attention to a path on their left.  A few seconds later, they were approached by the only person that Daniela had seen today who wasn’t wearing blue or green—the newly crowned King Floriano.

The king still wore the gleaming white suit of his coronation, but the confident, regal composure was gone.  He was harried, practically jittery, as he cried, “There you are, Sandro!  The most important night of my life, and you sneak off for a stroll in the gardens!”  He rounded the corner, and stopped short when he saw Daniela.  “With a beautiful woman,” he added, confused.  

Daniela swept into a curtsy.  “Daniela Decardi, your majesty.”

Floriano’s nervousness melted like butter, leaving behind the king.  He bowed and said, “My apologies, Miss Decardi.”  He smiled, and his smile was like the missing piece of a mosaic.  It turned Floriano into one of the most handsome men that Daniela had ever seen.  

Floriano was the sunlight to his brother’s shadow, with his lighter skin and golden-brown hair and open, friendly face.  Their only shared feature was their brilliant blue eyes, though only Floriano’s were still useful as anything but ornamentation.

Floriano said, “I hope my brother has been kind to you, Miss Decardi.  He may be blind, but he is capable of astounding villainy.”  He gave Alessandro a pointed glare and added, “Such as family abandonment.”

“It’s a ball,” Alessandro said blandly.  “I thought you could manage without me.”

“My coronation ball,” Floriano replied, “Is quite a different manner.  Why did you leave?”

“The ballroom is…overwhelming,” Alessandro said.  “I needed some peace.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Try it with your eyes closed,” he retorted.  

“You need to come back,” Floriano said.  “I’m about to open the ball.” He turned to Daniela, “I doubt you’ll want to miss the dancing.”

Daniela didn’t think she would mourn if she did miss it, but she didn’t want to contradict the king. “No, I wouldn’t,” she said, and fell in step beside the king and followed him through the paths back to the ballroom.

Floriano said, “I hope my brother didn’t kidnap you to serve as companion.”

“We met on the paths,” Alessandro said.  “And we were having a very nice conversation before you interrupted us.  Miss Decardi was telling me about her experience as a teacher in Corlant.”

“Ah,” Floriano said knowingly.  “I should have known.  Always business before pleasure with you.”

[randomlynormalgirl]

Joker Movie Thoughts

this is a bunch of jumbled, unstructured thoughts about the joker movie because I can’t stop thinking about it and I needed to write at least some of my thoughts down. might add to it every now and then. hope you enjoy it anyway if you end up reading it :)

MASSIVE SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT!!!!!!

watching the ‘joker’ movie felt like a very visceral experience for me. the movie manages to hold and intertwine many complicated themes alongside the plot so eloquently that I am not surprised it received an 8 minute standing ovation. I will be personally outraged if Joaquin phoenix does not receive an Oscar for his portrayal of the joker character because he manages to perfectly display the descent into madness as well as the tragedy of the movie. This movie manages to make you want to sympathise with Joker because the course of events leading up to him becoming the joker is very tragic and given the right circumstances would turn any sane man mad, yet you know you shouldn’t empathise with him because you understand he is mentally ill and that he sees violence as the only way to exact his revenge. Every scene in the movie is a trailer moment yet I didn’t feel like the movie was spoiled for me in any way.

Another aspect of the movie I liked is that Joaquin Phoenix manages to use his acting skill so well that he can subtly show how the joker’s descent into madness builds to a crescendo so spectacularly. How the first dance he does after his first kills is slow and controlled compared to that when he is fully embracing his madness and dancing on the steps so freely, because in his madness he is set free. It reminds me of Midsommar in that way slightly. Also, Joaquin’s body during the movie was also a strange sight and the dedication he put into the role to make himself look that skinny and ill simply astounded me. also, knowing that Joaquin improvised the dancing in the bathroom after Arthur's first three murders makes the scene all the more eerie to me. i hope he looked after himself after he finished filming for the movie because i dread another heath ledger situation, i don't think my heart could take it

I also appreciated that despite the amount of violence in the movie, a lot of the deaths are actually not shown. I think it’s a sign of good acting and good directing when the audience can guess what’s happened behind the scenes just from a few context clues (such as the end of the movie when he leaves the therapists office trailing bloody footprints)

I saw someone on twitter say that the joker movie is just Marxism in practise and honestly I can't fault their logic. The working class leading a violent revolution against the top 1% because they want better than the shitty lower hand they have been dealt, the fact that the newspapers in the film literally call it the 'kill the rich' revolution, the fact that Thomas Wayne literally calls them all clowns and it only ends up spurring on the revolt further. i mean, i can definitely see it.

The story is heartbreaking because it is believable. Watching as a mentally ill man is pushed to the extreme due to funding cuts for his therapy which ultimately stopped him getting the medication he needed to stay sane, poverty, an abusive childhood, a mentally ill mother whilst also living in a classist society where the working class are oppressed by people like Thomas Wayne. A good example of this to me is his first trio of murders; he only killed them because the three Wall Street type guys were going to beat him to death had he not pulled out the gun to kill them, yet it is certain that if Arthur had been killed by those men no one would care because he was not someone worth reporting on in the eyes on the media. In short, anyone below middle class in Gotham were considered nobody and they had enough. Arthur merely sparked the rebellion.

I enjoyed how the joker didn’t plan to become a political figure in the movie. He unintentionally becomes a martyr to the people of Gotham and how that tied in with the origins of batman was a very cool moment for me as part of the audience.

To add to this, the ending of the movie being dubious was an interested touch. Throughout the movie we learn that we cannot always trust Arthur’s perspective. From his fantasy of being on his idol’s TV show, down to his delusion of the romance between him and Sophie. So, the idea that the end of the movie suggesting it was all in his imagination was interesting to me. I, however, don’t subscribe to such a theory because I think the final flash of Bruce with his dead parents was the director giving us that subtle hint that this time the joker wasn’t just dreaming of being successful and loved by many, it was real this time. A slightly less important note but the aesthetic of the whole movie was just very grainy and gritty and fit the film? like the old school format, the cinematography and the fucking SOUNDTRACK. 'that's life' by Frank Sinatra is one if my favourite songs and the fact is features so heavily in this movie was a really cool moment for me? i also really liked the whole riot scene; it just felt really raw and gritty and like a true climax to the joker's story as he finally becomes the persona fully and finds his new identity as the figurehead for this revolution in Gotham

Of course, I cannot talk about this film without mentioning my beloved heath ledger and his depiction of the joker, and the references and similarities between the two. Let me make one thing clear; phoenix’s and ledger’s joker are nowhere near the same. I remember reading that Joaquin and heath were very good friends, and that Joaquin did not in anyway want to impose on heath’s legacy. He understands how legendary that role was and said while he loves that portrayal he didn’t want to be a cheap imitation. I believe he has fully achieved such a feat but I cannot help but compare. Some ‘Easter eggs’ or possible homages to heath that I recognised were:

-the scene where Arthur is in the back of the police car reminded me very much of that scene in the dark knight where joker steals the cop car (ledger / phoenix). I realise that is is also supposed to parallel the scene earlier where he is sat all sad on the bus compared to how happy he looks in the police car but i didn't quite get it straight away.

-Arthur using his own blood to paint the smile on his face (x) after the car crash reminded me of the ledger makeup look

-Arthur saying to Sophie that he ‘had a bad day’ reminded me instantly of when heath ledger’s joker said something along the lines of ‘everyone is just one bad day away from being like me’

none-Ledger related Easter eggs I noticed too were:

-the protesters laying Arthur across the hood of the crashed cop car Jesus-style to signify that he's saintly to them was a nice touch -Bruce coming down the fireman’s pole was reminiscent of the Adam west batman series where they had to come down the fireman’s pole

-the joker being attached to the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents (although less directly in this depiction)

-the font of the late night talk show is the same as batman the animated series

-I’ve seen some people say that the backdrop of the talk show is the same during the titles of the animated series too

-joker killing the host was reminiscent of the dark knight returns where joker kills the audience of a TV talk show

-apparently the look of this joker is similar to that of one of his video game iterations but I can’t find that -the sort of reference to the inspiration behind the entire joker character by having Arthur have a condition where he can't help but laugh in certain situations, when the joker was based on the film 'the man who laughs' where a man is cursed to never stop smiling no matter how much he tries -major inspiration from taxi driver, which also features Robert De Niro so its a cool touch -some kind of reference to the movie 'the king of comedy', a movie centring around a person obsessed with a tv show host which has similar plot points and also features robert de niro again which is pretty cool

[kierongillen]

Writer Notes: The Wicked + the Divine 36

Spoilers, obv.

Well, this was a fucker.

I wrote the following while drunk a few weeks ago.

This is something I only found myself chewing over the way home from drinks in town when I select a Spotify playlist for fist-pumping tracks. And it's mainly stuff like Ram Bam's Black Betty and My Sex Is On Fire or whatever, but it also includes Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire. Which is out of place in such a playlist, but also welcome.

It's a song which came out during the brief period between me becoming someone who bought pop music and someone who was a hardcore metalhead. It's a song I bought, and intensely loved. It's perhaps not a surprise. It's in its deeply unfashionable way, entirely me. A pure burst of reference pop.

It's a gimmick song. A list song. It's a list of events from Joel's life – it gives the impression of building towards the present day, but really is pretty fucking random from across the timeline, selecting stuff as it would occur, a ramble. The song is so sleight to be sarcastic, but it's delivered with a frustration and attack. The words are all meaningfully chosen, with juxtaposition between huge events and trivia equally sang with commitment, but the context is so traditional a frame to be almost dismissive. Yet with this disengagement – and with tricks thrown in to maintain interest from its monotony and add towards a slowly build tension – it builds towards an apocalypse, before backing off to a statement of that is how life feels as it is being lived, and the sense of apocalypse is an illusion, and the real horror is that this will continue ever onwards.

So, I was listening to that, while thinking about this issue, and sort of smiling.

And I can see what drunk me was getting at.

Okay – this is a tricky issue to talk about, as you slice somewhere and its guts come falling out. I've written a lot, but I'm also aware that writing that begs more questions which begs more specific answers. As always with these notes I say "This is a collection of thoughts from the making of the issue, but not comprehensive." Even in one like this where I'm saying a lot, that still holds true. This could have gone on forever. And on and on and on and...

Yeah, you get the point.

Perhaps the most common request from WicDiv fans is “Are we ever going to get a list of all the pantheons?” or, for the more demanding, “are we ever going to get a list of all the gods.” The latter makes me blink, for reasons I'll probably segue into, but we did want to do the former, at least as best as we could within the limitations we've set ourselves.

But also, I always think of the nature of murder and plans stretching across time. “I have been murdering people for hundreds of years” is a cool line, thrown off, never examined. I kinda wanted to examine it, and play with what the human brain does with repetition.

I recall a critique of the brilliant (and highly influential on yours truly) Heavenly Creatures, of the considerable sympathy you hold for the titular teemage murderers despite the horror of the murder on screen. The critique noted that the murder on screen was highly sanitized, and the actual murder had forty-five injuries, over twenty of which were head wounds. So the three or so blows shown in the murder were bad enough. When we're forced to really live with the actuality of what the murder required, to not just hit thrice, but again and again and again and again and again and again and many more times, at which point does any sympathy we have evaporate in the face of the actual reality of the horror of what they did. Murder is ugly.

I found myself thinking of an aside in one of the WW1 episodes of Hardcore History, which describes American reporters sitting in Belgium, watching the German army march past on the first offensive. It's over a million soldiers. The reporters sit in the cafe, and it's instantly astounding. And then it goes on, and the effect deadens a little. And then it becomes almost comic. And then, hours later, when you realise it's taken an entire day for these people to stomp past, it becomes surreal, brains shaking at the sheer size of it. That.

Also, Modern art, especially music, is about an exploration of repetition with minimised variations.  Paul Morley's Words And Music posited all pop music as a line from Alvin Lucifer's I Am Talking In A Room to Kylie's Can't Get You Out Of My Head, from which a city emerges. That.

And a lot more – that's a selection of thoughts that went into this. It's idea rich, and frankly there's some stuff which – like any experimental piece – was a surprise for the team itself. We walked away with new stuff in our heads, learned from having a jackboot stomp on a human face across all human history, and what we saw when we juxtapose all these things together. I highly recommend trying the impossible, at least once.

When I first suggested it to Jamie, he was excited. The thought was that it'd be a whole issue, with three panels a page. This would have been an easier task, partially as it would be the only work required in the issue, and also the framing in a wide panel would require more detail, but less total research. In short, you wouldn't have to worry about what people were wearing on their legs in periods with scant research.

That fell by the wayside when I did the tight plotting for the arc. We couldn't afford the space, and I can only imagine what the response to the issue among the anti-this-kind-of-stuff readers if we had.

(The response was exactly what we expected it be, in terms of strong polarisation between The Best WicDiv Thing Evvvvaaa! and those who it had no effect at all, that its non-traditional form of comic narrative was essentially invisible.)

It was a few other things as well – in one way, I just wanted to give Jamie a guitar solo. I think he's the undisputed costume designer of his generation in the American field – even putting aside his work on WicDiv, he's responsible between three of the most influential looks of our time, two of which are going to be everywhere for the next five years at least (Miss Marvel and Captain Marvel being the Everywhere-ers, and Ameican Chavez being one of those period touchstones.) The idea of having half an issue devoted to 128 new and individually reseached character designs is absolutely a mike-drop. No-one's done this. No-one would try to do this. I wanted Jamie's peers to cry at the idea of even considering trying this. Admittedly, this involved Jamie crying doing it, but the cost of doing business.

So yeah – while arrogant and desperately overambitious, especially in the context of a monthly comic book (this is easily as much work as two monthly comics) this is one we're intensely proud of.

I have also promised everyone I will never do it to them again. Because once you've done it once, there's no need to, right?

Okay – let's do this.

Jamie/Matt's Cover

Continuing the theme of the arc in terms of covers of “Persephones” and “Anankes” and “Minervas”, and clearly set up to be a “Hey, here's a new interesting character.”

Babs Tarr Cover

God, Babs is a hell of an artist. As usual, we just asked what she's be interested in, and the Persephone on Bike seemed too good to resist, with the implicit MotorCross Crossover thrills. Wonderful stuff.

Page 1

Cutting this to the bare minimum is always the thing. Enough to treat the characters as iconic as the ones in the present – the three panels with 2/3rds main image is what we use for the vast majority of the traditional transformation, and with small tweaks we keep the same beats.

We'd normally do a LOC CAP or similar in this scene, but that would step on the effect as we start LOC CAP-ing on the next page.

Of course, by now, we know how this scene goes...

PAGE 2-12

I'm not going to go too deep into this, and try and talk about top level thinking and the choices you make when going on this kind of an endeavour, especially when you know that there's no ideal one. History is a mess.

If you want a panel by panel walk through of the periods, I direct you to Twatd's extensive 6000 years of murder. They've also just put it in an ebook for their patreon folk, if you want to throw them some coins. I'll be picking up some various bits of details.

First leg of this fucker was me, basically on my own with the history books and the spreadsheets.

The main part of that was simply positioning each one, for definite. Until now, I've allowed myself some flexibility, based into the nature of the recurrence. I didn't need to know the exact dates until I wrote a story in the period, so I didn't nail them down. As we set up in the first issue, it's every ninety years from the end of the previous pantheon. The Pantheon length varies between 1-3 years, depending how quick the gods die. A 1 year pantheon would be them all dying in two calendar years, and a 3 year one being a very slow one. There's few of them. Most Pantheons are across 3 calendar years (Therefore, a 2 year pantheon). I'd checked I could land a pantheon on 455 earlier, based on the squishiness in these math, but I learned how to actually work a spreadsheet, put the math in, and tweak.

On another bit of the spreadsheet I started doing the other half of the work, which works in parallel (but mostly separate) from the main thrust of history. As in, Ananke's story. Where she is at each point in history, what she learns there and what she's trying. There's some areas where the change in her tactics is quite obvious, and can be discerned from just what's shown in the panel. The ones where it's major but bemusing are likely the ones we'll be delving into in the future – either next issue, the final special or some other point.

Even writing this part was strange, entering the mind of someone who's been working on a project for 6000 years, and the waves of ennui and experimentation and strangeness. How to think like Ananke? It's hard. Every ninety years this thing happens. How she gonna play it this time? You occasionally get WicDiv readers asking “Why doesn't Ananke do X thing?” and this answer she probably gives would be “Yeah, tried it a few times, doesn't work nearly as well as you think it would.”

The biggest problem is choosing the pantheons, and the narrative it's choosing to tell through it. With the big list of pantheon dates the two core questions are...

What's the most culturally influential thing going on in this period that we know about?

How can we get the best global sampling that we can?

The latter is the fucker, because records are bad, and while history isn't written by the winners, history is written by those who write histories or at the least those who make things which historians can find or those historians have bothered to try and find. That warps the options for choices intensely, and often ways which frustrate our desires and choices. The script draft had multiple options for each category, and we chewed them over – there's a page in this month's Image+ which shows some of my notes there. Especially with the super-long-lived cultural empires, we looked opportunities to justifiably use anything other than them to just avoid 3000+ years of alternating between China and Egypt.

(Seriously, of all the many things this project has given me, a better understanding of the physicality of time, both its expanse (as in, HOW LONG HAS EGYPT BEEN THIS CULTURAL CENTER?) and its shortness (It is 66 full-lifetimes between us and the start of this mess. The last page skipping back from 2013 hits the majority of what we think of as history. It's a vertiginous book if you let it get beneath your skin, and we had to.)

Equally, we should unpack “culturally influential.” “Culturally Influential” normally means “invaded and killed a bunchy of other folks and made them take on your culture.” This is mainly a list of cultures who've dominated their locales. This has always been there in WicDiv. The 20th century Pantheon is primarily (though not solely) American. The 19th century one was primarily European. 455 is about the fall of Rome.

I'm not sure if I have to state the obvious: all the choices flow from the nature of WicDiv gods as cultural epiphenomenon (or, if not epiphenomenon, heralds. Or both. Either way, the gods dovetail with the rise of "civilization")

We map the gods to known history. If it's troubling, it's troubling because world history is troubling. And I do find that troubling.

At the same time, the concept of the book also lets us create spaces for possibility. We are showing one god from the period - Persephone. There's another dozen elsewhere. While we've shown some pantheons work with a tight geographical focus (such as the London/UK one) others have sprawled across considerable spaces, covering at least a continent and sometimes more. Some of the pantheons shown in this issue imply that kind of gap, normally signified by Ananke dressed in culturally different garments than the Persephone. Equally, some of the more extremely positioned Persephones are a snapshot that implies that gods can end up that far afield, at least occasionally.

In other words, if we drop a pantheon anywhere on the continent it implies that in some of the pantheon are in areas other than the direct place we're putting them. Steppes People bar one Hunnic one. Africa South of Mali. Most of East Asia, bar China and Japan and one Vietnamese Persephone we squeezed in. A lot of South and North America. We just don't have the history to know what or when to pick, and the relevant reference to draw even if we could.  

(The exception we forced was Australia, as we didn't even have a single god on that continent. As such, it was key to show a god on that continent to show that gods could be on that continent and by implication they could in one of the other pantheons.)

The above grates, but this issue was one of a bunch of compromises and decisions. This

There's also an attempt in the Ananke/Persephone pairings to talk about various stories. Sometimes the Persephone prefigures a culture's dominance. Sometimes it prefigures its fall. Sometimes it prefigures an option simply not taken. There is an implicit complexity and ambivalence to what we're showing here, as human history resists easy answers.

The naming is the other major bugbear. After the above choices were made, I spent a clear week going back and forth for a standardised naming system to use. Having one which I felt made sense, I spot the couple of exceptions where it didn't, and flick back entirely the other way. There's been times when the whole thing had generalised “Africa” or “Europe” captions. There was times when I considered not even having any captions at all – but these sacrifice so much in terms of the thrill of the mystery of these names. When (say) “Uruk” turns up it's meaningful and interesting, and losing that seemed a huge cost.

The rules we went with were as followed...

If we want to place this Persephone to a specific locale that exists and I want to specifically set the story in that limited locale, we use that name. (e.g. Athens, Uruk)

If a cultural region exists, and I don't want to tie the story to happening to a specific settlement in it, I use the cultural region (e.g. Egypt). If I want to be a little more specific, we can include geographical detail (e.g. Northern China).

If nothing exists for sure, use pure geography (e.g. The Upper Nile.)

All this also ties into my own knowledge of any areas. Some areas I have more confidence in choosing where to place the implied story. Some, I'd rather step back and be broader. This is based upon the background knowledge in a section. To do otherwise, I'd have to do reading akin to a WicDiv special for every panel in this issue, and as each WicDiv special is basically 6 months work, I'd have to had spent 33 years on this one.

This has one eye on the future – if we ever go back and do stories in WicDiv's history when all this is open, I want as much room to manoeuvre as possible. Do not close stuff off we don't have to, while also leaving enough room for people's imagination to populate the world.

Christ – this is 2500 words already, and I haven't said anything yet. You should see the script. There's actually a page of it which is going to be in the next Image Plus. I was a little reticent, as any one page was either too long or too fragmentory. We included one, which includes a couple of notes in from various levels of the production. The basic structure is that the panel is split between a “What the interaction is between the Ananke and the Persephone” and the “What period is this set in or what choices do we have?” And then there's a mass of conversation, both online and in person, after that. We say that all scripts are conversations, but it was never moreso in this issue.

The main take away from the second half was wanting to give Jamie as much room as possible and cut as many corners as he needed to get through it.

This is Jamie. He's never going to cut any corners.

(There's sections at the start where I suggest doing things like dropping backgrounds entirely and making it symbolic or whatever, but Jamie! That guy. THAT GUY.)

The baton of the workload then passed to Jamie. This is simultaneously a much bigger workload and a significantly different. I was performing a great filter. He was digging into specifics.

To get an idea of the scale of this, hired a costume researcher for this for a week of solid work, and they managed to do about a quarter of the periods, and even then not completely. The rest were done by Jamie and Katie as they proceeded through the issues.

Our costumes and choices are most conservative in the periods we know least about, and are normally excused by “if we don't do this, we miss this culture out entirely.” The further back we went, the harder it was, but even that isn't on a level playing field. When we get past the history and into the quasi-myth it also becomes tricky. It's just tricky.

As this was all only completed right up against the hard deadline, it also left barely any time to actually do the level of due diligence we wanted. We were expecting that we'd have stumbled over something accidentally mortifyingly offensive by accident in terms of colour choices or something else easy to stumble over, but the surprise is that there's been relatively little about that. We were expecting to have to do a bunch of tweaking when we come to the trade, and just mea culpa. In fact, there's only a handful of things to tweak – one place name which, after due consideration, I think I'll change and one architectural mishap. Frankly, this is much better than we were thinking, though I guess there's time for more stuff to be spotted.

Right – let's do a quick tour through the pages, with me pulling out bits and pieces which spring to mind.

Page 3 – still dealing with regions-rather-than-places, with Uruk being a side-step. Also sets up the rhythm of things staying the same and then things changing – as in, repetition enough to let people know there's a pattern, then a subversion. As it's the opening, the pattern is pretty obvious – straight murder until a Persephone gets wise and fights back, and then a change of tactics. Er... I'm not going to go in detail on this stuff from now, as that's reading the bloody comic for you, and I'm not one of those comic reviewers who just do a synopsis of the comic and sticking a 7/10 at the bottom. Even when I was a critic, I was the type to write a synopsis and stick a 6/10 at the bottom as I was a big ol' meanie.

The thing which most strikes me as sad about the research is that any headwear is a total waste. Man! Decapitation is the worst.

Page 4 – Japan 2942BC is one of my fave Persephone looks. I also like Ananke Northern China.

Yes, the “Crete” one is very clearly a “Wait – what happened here?” one. More anon.

Page 5 – Watching Ananke across this period is the interesting one.

Wrangel Island is one of my favourite historical things, in that it's the last place Mammoths were alive on Earth, around this period. There's a story I've wanted to do that is set this period. Maybe one day I will. I want to do it as an OGN, but part of me thinks it's actually a 5 page short story.

Egypt shows the arrival of the Pyramids here – architecture in backgrounds is one of the trickier things we had to deal with, but something that big and iconic is hard to resist. This was one of the problems culturally speaking – that there's many cultures we couldn't get good (or any) reference for their houses, so they tended to be put in rural/wooded situations, which carries an implication we weren't fond of. Occasionally we pushed it as far as we dared with simple housing to avoid that.

Man, I love the movement Jamie does in the middle two panels – plus the treatment of colour from Matt. That's actually worth stressing – I said it was a huge amount of work for Jamie? It's equally hilarious for Matt. He normally gets to set up a palette on a scene, and then carries it to other panels. Here, he has to reinvent it every single time. Stuff like the transitions from Egypt to Wrangel Island is dazzling.

Page 6

I resisted the Druidic one for a while – the earlier Western Europe one too – but they were both also (I think) Egypt ones. Basically everything here which is us going “We can use this for another locale” is taking out an Egypt or a China. Egypt and China have done so much stuff, guys. It's kinda scary.

Australasia is clearly one where we played it particularly tight – by definition, Ananke will have travelled here, and we minimise as much of Persephone's clothes due to not knowing for sure what people would wear in the period.

Page 7

Honestly, with out own interest in decapitated head, we were hardly going to resist the Olmec heads, right?

I like the implication of the story with the Egypt one here. You can see Ananke taking the Persephone all the way beneath the surface for this scene.

Page 8

Any time I look at the Assyrians I think of taking my friend Sarah Jaffe – not someone who is into ancient history – around the British Museum. When passing through the Assyrian display, I tried to work out how to sum up the Assyrians. I ended up with “The Assyrians... well, the Assyrians were tossers.” I may have used a stronger word than “Tosser.”

How do we know this? They spent a lot of time carving pictures of how much a tosser they were, just so we all know thousands of years later.

I find myself wondering what looks Ananke most liked? Does she look back fondly at certain periods? Almost certainly.

Page 9

It's around this point the sheer size of ancient history starts to get to you. Especially in the earlier Egypt/China-duopoly drafts it was like being punched in the face. It goes on and on and on and on. Which is the effect we were looking for, of course.

I kinda wished I could find somewhere other than Macedonia to do this one, but I couldn't find anything that made sense.

Eturia is one of those implied-other-story ones. This is near Rome, but not Rome. Eturian culture was significantly different from Rome, and you wonder what a more Eturian influenced Roman culture could have been like. I mainly ramble by way of example in my thinking for some of these.

Page 10

Yes, I smiled at Judea. Into the AD!

The South East Asia one is Vietnamese, and one of the ones we had least to draw off, but when there was so many East Asia pantheons, having them all be China and Japan felt worse than doing one with minimal sources.

The Eastern Europe one is my one complete fuck up when scripting this – it was originally the Hunnic invasion of India, with Persephone as a Hun. Except I had just read a number wrong, and the Hunnic Invasion of India was a century later, at a similar time to the Fall Of Rome Pantheon. A quick last minute panic kept it as Steppes People, and just had it out there, in the regions were the Huns were pre most of this, foreshadowing.

454 is earlier in the Fall Of Rome special. One of my reads in my research on that one was that Roman failure to integrate Germanic peoples into the empire to rejuvenate it (as they had with previous migrant groups) was one of the prime causes for the western fall, so this seemed a symbolic way to go. And look at the dappling!

Page 11

Tikal is the one I'll tweak. That's a more modern name. I'll likely tweak to Yax Mutal in the trade.

The Constantinople panel is the architectural problem – that Hagia Sophia look is simply from a much later period.

The acting in the first four panels are basically my favourite thing in the whole issue. Yes, the fourth one is “that time with the Franks” as referenced earlier in this arc.

I did try to tweak numbers and end up with a 999 pantheon, but couldn't make it land, and I decided that the Nun Lucifer story would work better later, circa the Black Death. As such, doing a millennial pantheon this far from the AD timeline appealed. And look at the fashion!

Page 12

The next special is 1373, so close to the fourth panel here. More to come, etc.

First two panels are the Crusades, mirroring one another.

Page 13

When planning this originally, I thought 60 pantheons. I then failed to realise I did the math wrong, and if I started close to 4000BC, it'd be 66 pantheons – so we'd need 11 pages. I did have a draft with a slightly longer start, but I realised that I couldn't afford another page, when I had a lot of work to do in the latter half of the issue.

I also realised that it's not 66, as the first one is actually the one we saw in 34, which is by definition, not in this sequence. Which left us one panel at the end. We played with various options, but calling back to a sequence from issue 9 seemed a good move. It's a scene which, of course, reads differently now.

These are the most familiar pantheons, of course.

Page 14

Interstitial, a nod to the Kanye track. I originally had this as the interstitial at the end of last issue, but felt that it contextualised Baal in a crass and deceptive way, and made it more likely to be taken as literally without any nuance. By placing it between these two horror stories, applying the word to both Ananke/Minerva and Baal, there's more space to think about it.

Page 15

I normally do a tight synopsis for the whole arc before starting. I did for this arc, and it actually expands to next arc too. However, these always change. When I reached this issue, especially when I realised it would be 12 of the 20 pages, I did some reworking of plot threads, moving a couple of other beats either to a teaser for next issue or just to next issue – as next issue is one with much more space available for present day stuff.

I did it as basically Baal's origin (there's no other word for it – Baal is a classic superhero origin story, as pure as Spider-man's) requires the space. He's earned it.

Still – as there is one other key thing which needs space, the question how to approach it was there. The final choice was minimalistic and cleanly. Three panels here, into the flashback. Red colouring. Baal's colours now.

Flame fade out to flashback, ala all performance-storytelling we've seen so far. As in, Gods' signature segues to flashback.

Page 16-17

I love what Matt is doing here with texture and shape. It makes everything feels alive, like ornamental, pushing against Jamie's art. It's like a mural, it's art.

Not a back garden but a playpark. I imagine Baal on the way home, crossing across here, meeting the lady and...

2 page scene. This needs space, in its own way.

Page 18-19

A spread, but this is effectively one page in terms of page use. Trying to get as much story as we can from the limited page count available. This is almost all Star Superman in cutting to the basics – a single image showing a fragment of the fight, and one of Baal's line.

More red. You see where we're going, as it's building up.

“that night, I did it” just made me shiver.

Page 20-22

We talked about various approaches to this – on a single page. but we chose to burn pages. As always, these are free, and don't come from the page count of the issue. In this case, it lets us dwell on it, and hit it again and again.

Page 23-24

And a segue out, back into reality. This is where we crunch the details we feel people need to know.

Of course, this is why Baal has always taken the Great Darkness more seriously – not least he knows what he has to do if the Great Darkness isn't dealt with before another three months ticks over. You can probably chew over yourself how much is him believing it's saving the world and how much he believes it's just saving his family. I don't think you have to choose one or another.

“You don't need to know” is a very WicDiv choice, isn't it?

It's one of the things which is there, but never stressed – Baal, for all his bluster, has never won a fight in all of WicDiv, when actually fighting against someone who fights back. Here's the reason.

It's worth noting Baal had the necklace, at least occasionally, before issue 4 of WicDiv. Woden is completing it as he hands it back. As in, it's been tuned up for a while – obviously it needs to be completed with what Ananke suspected may be coming with Lucifer. Er... this is probably too much to say here? It just occurred. It's the sort of stuff we chew over.

I suspect “I want to die/but I want to live” is one of those axis which WicDiv is built around? I found it upsetting to write, which is normally a tell.

Page 25

I said this when asked about the pregnancy plot when the issue came out...

Thanks for your faith, but I understand cynicism. It’s not as if there’s much track record for media doing this well. I’ll probably write a little more about it in the writers notes - I just deleted a paragraph here as I want to chew over my exact wording carefully. The short version is, like everything we do, we take it intensely seriously and we didn’t go here lightly. I also have faith in the readers unpacking it and making their own sense of it as we continue - I think Pomegranate’s take is basically the best sort of response we could have hoped for at this point, really.

… and after chewing it over, I don't think there's much I can add to it, really. Further into WicDiv I'm sure I will, but it's too connected to everything, and any explanation just leads to questions I can't answer yet.

I do wish I had slightly more space here to push the pause as Baal chewed it over longer.

Page 26

The idea that Baal would burn down Valhalla only struck me as I was writing this sequence. Of course he would. It just made sense.

This is a great example of Jamie being an amazing storyteller. I put her outside, and Jamie asked questions about how far, what would be nearby and so on. So we end up with an image which grounds this melodrama back to reality, hard. We see this godly palace burn sown from a simple London street. The movement between the two worlds. And morning. This is real. We wake up.

Also – Matt follows him. After the mythic colouring we've seen earlier, here we have this very normal, very real dawn. He's wonderful.

Worth noting there is a considerable time skip. By implication, Baal's performance lasted much longer than it took to read.

Mildly frustrated the issue printed a little dark, so the message was nearly unreadable, and was missed as the cliffhanger it is. Namely, a message from someone (I suspect many will guess who) catching up on the nights events... and The Norns being locked up again after Cass has said stuff?

In the original draft for the text I used the phrase “Sectioned” but was informed it's something which wouldn't make sense for a North American audience. I suspect I'll tweak again to get a cleaner message out.

Anyway – mildly frustrated the information doesn't 100% land here, but next issue goes at it running.

Page 27

I wanted a simple title here. It's Baal's story.

And that's it. God knows how much I'll edit out of this mess. The next issue is out tomorrow, and hopefully you'll find it interesting.