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thanksjro · 4 years ago

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More Than Meets the Eye #31 - Ammo and the Anti-Glowup

So, the Lost Light disappeared, stranding all the crew in space in their little escape pods. 200-some robots just lost their homes and worldly possessions. That’s absolutely horrible. What a devastating thing to happen.

Anyway, here’s Drift with a flashback sequence.

No hips, fingers all the exact same length, hockey pucks embedded in his forearms- Rojo, this is a crime you’ve committed. When will the long arm of the law stop your sinful, pancake-shaped hands?

About two years prior to current events, Drift, Riptide, and Pipes- yes, Pipes!- were wandering around trying to find a ship for the space yacht trip. The gang’s here to see who owns the big honkin’ ship outside. Problem is, Drift is unintentionally terrifying because he has a great deal of swords.

Now, you may say to yourself “isn’t it a bit odd that the species that has members who literally turn into guns would be nervous around a guy with swords?” This is a valid critique, until you remember that at least some of the folks who turn into guns were born that way, and Drift was very much NOT born bladed the fuck out. There’s an entire miniseries devoted to explaining this, it’s called Drift. The swords are a choice, one that he makes every day.

Drift is willing to pay an honestly absurd amount of money for the ship, if he can just find the dude with the paperwork- don’t ask where he got the money. Pipes isn’t being terribly helpful in finding them, so Riptide decides that now is the time to start practicing being proactive and pulls a Coyote Ugly.

No, no, he doesn’t.

He does climb up on a table and start yelling for the ship’s owners to reveal themselves, though. Which they do.

Now it’s time for the world-building portion of our comic issue. Let’s learn about chirolinguistics.

Drift, staying true to his Mary Sue nature, uses his near-perfect Hand skills to strike up a deal with the owners of the ship. This would be impressive, if it didn’t just look like the most convoluted hand-holding session in the friggin’ universe.

Still, Drift is rich enough to make Jeff Bezos weep with envy, so the arrangements are made and the lads go on their way, talking some mad shit about the original name of the ship as they do.

So it is revealed to us that the Lost Light is named after a festival for honoring the dead and disappeared, which makes the fact that Rewind and Chromedome were there all the more sad.

Back in the present, Megatron tells Riptide to shut up so they can figure out what the hell they’re going to do about this whole “our home and also ride has ceased to exist” situation. He’s putting an awful lot of distance between himself and the rest of the Autobots as he does it, something that isn’t lost on the more bitter people of the crowd.

But why were we even talking about the Lost Light in the first place? Not to reminisce, believe it or not. See, it’s time for Nautica to get a little panel time, and she’s going to use it to be a massive fucking nerd and explain how the quantum engines work. As she does, Ratchet notes that his hands feel funny. Must be the weight of his hand-stealing sins manifesting itself in his joints.

Nautica explains that the engines run off of improbability- it is highly unlikely, but not impossible, that the ship can reach light speed, and riding the fine line between what can happen and what can’t, results in the creation of power for the engines. If this sounds familiar, it’s because Brainstorm gave us a watered down version of this explanation back in issue #2. If it sounds familiar for a different reason, it’s because this is how the Heart of Gold runs in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Again, I’m not sure why it is that the British love this concept so much, but there you are.

Oh, it appears someone has a question. Let’s see what they want to know about, shall we?

…Rojo, what the fuck is this.

Our muppety friend here isn’t too keen on how much of a smarmy asshole Nightbeat is being right now, though I’d assume it actually has something to do with the fact that Nightbeat got smacked around with the pretty-boy stick while Getaway very much did not. While the two bicker- there’s a lot of bickering in Season Two- Nautica presents a theory on what happened to the ship; it went too far in the direction of “can’t” and made itself cease to be.

Megatron gives not a shit about quantum improbability, though. He only cares about how they’re going to get out of this mess. Which, y’know. Valid.

Blaster picks up a radio from Rodimus, who tells the gang that they’re to meet up on a nearby planet to regroup and figure out their next move. The call drops before he can get more than a couple Megatron-directed insults in, however. Megatron, in response, tries to be the bigger person, and almost immediately fails. We do get a headcount though, which is good, logistically speaking. This information is communicated to us by way of a splash page full of character head shots. We’ve got 20 ‘bots on board this ship.

Yep. 20. No more, no less.

As our friends approach the planet, we’re informed that it’s actually a Lectureworld- a planet devoted to the study of a single field. Except it’s actually a Smartplanet now, and it’s been privatized by the Galactic Council, so you’ve got to pay to go there. Cyclonus thinks that that’s bullshit, and I can’t help but agree. Crosscut tries to network with they guy about his play, probably because word got around that Cyclonus is rich as hell, when the lights cut out. When they come back on, Crosscut is nowhere to be found.

It’s time for a Whodunnit.

Tailgate immediately pegs Megatron as the culprit in this disappearance, and breaks out a gun over the matter. Megatron thinks that this is absolutely adorable, which only serves to further infuriate our marshmallow friend. I guess he’s still mad about the whole “I was a Decepticon for five minutes and got brainwashed over it” thing, and wants someone to pin the anger on who’s socially acceptable to hate.

Cyclonus and Ratchet both think that Tailgate’s not going about this the right way, but the guy is simply too het up to listen to them. Tailgate suggests that they lock Megatron in the engine room for the time being and-

OKAY WHO LET HIM HAVE THAT

Riptide breaks out his gun, and soon we’ve got a standoff going between the three of them. Cyclonus tries to deescalate, which makes Gears and Huffer break out their guns. Then Hound breaks out his gun, though he seems to be doing his own thing, by pointing it in Nautica’s direction.

Broski, I think that might be animal cruelty.

Megatron manages to shoot Ravage “unconscious” and catches him by the friggin’ throat, stating that he has zero idea how this guy got here. With the heat off the two of them for a moment, Megatron communicates to Ravage to play ‘possum for the time being. Ravage responds, and I wonder exactly how he’s doing that, considering I don’t think he has enough fingers to effectively utilize Hand as a language. Or fingers at all, really.

While this is going on, Cyclonus snatches the gun out of Tailgate’s hand, admonishing him for being reckless about picking his fights. Generally speaking, you don’t want to try to go toe-to-toe with a guy who’s responsible for the deaths of literal billions. Getaway swoops in to comfort Tailgate, calling him gutsy. I wonder if this will become a trend.

Swerve says a thing, as he is wont to do, and it’s made known that multiple folks have disappeared during this incredibly brief standoff.

Wow, Chromedome just fucked off, huh? He wasn’t even in that sequence, just left.

Everyone’s positively baffled by the current happenings. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to who’s being taken. I guess we’ve got a mystery on our hands.

And who better to solve a mystery than a detective?

Nightbeat wrangles all the leftover folks into a corner of the room, so they can figure out what the common denominator is with all the disappearees. He starts with the easy stuff.

And by “easy”, I mean the super-special racism Tyrest subscribed to.

If you’ve read Eugenesis, you know that Nightbeat was also part of the first wave of cold-constructed bodies there. However, the general populace wasn’t nearly as chill about it as they were in IDW. Also, Wheeljack was his dad. No word on if that particular tidbit made it into IDW lore.

It’s at this point that we learn about M.T.O.s- made to order soldiers. They were cold-constructed ‘bots created en masse during the war in order to keep up with the demands for troops. Pretty fucked up, if you think about it, being born to die like that.

Now where have we heard that name before…

Chromedome, can your love life not be part of the plot for five minutes, my guy?

Nautica makes the honestly horrific claim that a lot of folks owe their existence to Megatron being a warmongering fuck, and even Megatron himself seems rather uncomfortable with the idea. Some thoughts we keep to ourselves, Nautica, even if they might be technically true. And even if Ammo wants to tack on his two cents on the matter.

What did they DO to you, Ammo? You’re supposed to be hot! Where are my three-paragraphs of description as Hound stares slack jawed the entire time? I miss Polyhex Wars.

Anyway, it’s Megatron’s turn to get poked with the questioning stick, and he’s not having it. He claims that by revealing his mode of creation, he’s risking a repeat of Functionist ideology. This would be valid, if people weren’t literally disappearing without any sort of explanation as to why. As it is, he’s being a stubborn asshole, but I guess he didn’t get his reputation by being a decent person who knew when to back down, now did he?

It’s at this point that Ratchet remembers he knows all the info Nightbeat’s looking for, and the conversation on Megatron’s birth is shelved for another day. I’m sure it won’t be a major plot point later, not in the slightest.

As it turns out, Nightbeat’s theory doesn’t hold water, and folks are still popping out of existence. We get another splash page, this time with everyone’s mode of creation listed under their names, and we move on to other theories about what the fuck is going on. While Nightbeat has a minor crisis over what the answer could possibly be, the MTOs in the group reminisce on the Ten-Step Program, a series of tests they were put through to make sure they worked well enough to get handed a gun and shoved out the door. Riptide wasn’t a fan.

Riptide has more wood panelling than a 70’s-style ranch house, and I think that’s very brave of him.

It’s at this point that Ratchet remembers it’s been quite a bit since he last shat on religion, and takes the time to do so while informing the reader about Information Creep. This is a concept we’ve seen mentioned previously, during Chromedome’s runaround in Overlord’s brain, but it’s here where we get the juicy implications.

Because memories can become corrupted in the brain due to extreme age, what ought to be objective fact has to be reinterpreted due to missing pieces. This is why nobody knows what the Knights of Cybertron got up to, or if they’re even actually real at all.

The lights go out again, and when they cut back on, Cyclonus is missing, leaving only his sword behind. Tailgate is extremely distraught by this, but Nightbeat gives not a fuck about Tailgate’s impending breakdown. He only cares about the truth!

And then a giant eyeball shows up.

It’s Ultra Magnus, coming to us live from his shuttle, via holomatter avatar! He shrinks down to a far more reasonable size, in a panel reminiscent of the first time IDW readers saw Megatron.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a neat parallel, I’m just… not terribly sure why it’s happening. One could say it reflects a reversal in power dynamics, but that theory gets tossed out the window when you remember that this isn’t actually Verity. I suppose it’s just a cool little thing.

Because the comms aren’t working, Ultra Magnus has been forced to use this avatar to communicate with the folks in the Rod Pod. Megatron asks just what the hell is going on, but unfortunately Magnus isn’t sure either. Then his shuttle disappears, and it’s bye-bye grunge girl Magnus.

It’s at this point that Nightbeat decides it’s time to stop pussyfooting around and get serious. He tells Ratchet to throw HIPPA directly in the garbage and write down everything he knows about the Autobots who crewed the Lost Light. And he does mean everything, as we get the splash page again, this time with lots of neat info on our friends, including spark type.

Spark types will become plot-relevant in the storyline after this, but for now let’s focus on some weird gender essentialism that got slapped into the first print of this issue.

As we know very well by this point, Transformers as a franchise has a tumultuous relationship with the idea of women existing. You would think that the awkward introduction of other genders we got in “Dark Cybertron” would have been the end of things being weird in IDW. However, you would be wrong.

In an effort to explain why genders exist, Roberts had the idea to make it spark-based. Nautica, in the solo print of this issue, has an estriol-positive spark. Estriol is a type of estrogen, which is the hormone that develops and maintains feminine secondary sex characteristics, when present in certain levels, in conjunction with other hormones. Biology

This “spark = gender” idea is, generally speaking, not a great idea to be presenting us with, especially when the writer is a cishet male, because it implies biological essentialism- the idea that a personality trait/quality of a person is innate and predetermined by their biology, as opposed to social, cultural, or individual experiences. Because this story doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s irresponsible to reduce the experience of being a woman to a single, physical, unchangable asset, especially when all other assets of the same class have zero effect on one’s gender identity. You don’t exactly see many nonbinary robots running around, now do you? And there are definitely more than two spark types, despite the Transformers as a species being... very binary.

It also makes female Transformers into an “other”, which is a problem that has existed from the very start of the franchise, in some form or fashion, and really doesn’t need to be perpetrated anymore than it already is.

The estriol spark type was removed in the trade edition, and Roberts has expressed regrets over its inclusion, having realized that it was potentially offensive.

Getting back to the story, Swerve, Tailgate, and Ratchet have disappeared, though Ratchet seems to have left his hands behind. His stolen, Pharma-original hands.

That’s still fucked up to me. I don’t think it’ll ever not be fucked up.

Riptide reveals the reason that he wasn’t in Season One of MTMTE was because when he went back to grab a receipt for the ship two years prior, he’d discovered that the original owners were worshipers of Mortilus, Cybertronian god of death, and knew about the nasty little problem that was the sparkeater from the first storyline. When Riptide went to confront them about it, they beat him up so bad he was unconscious for two solid days.

Which is a long-ass time to be unconscious. That might have been a coma, Riptide. Jesus, I hope someone got him to a hospital after this beatdown happened, or at least scraped him off the floor.

With this last piece of the puzzle, we finally have the common denominator in this big ol’ mystery. Everyone who disappeared was on the Lost Light when it took off from Cybertron in issue #1, and everyone left behind- Skids, Getaway, Nightbeat, Nautica, Megatron, and Ravage- didn’t join until afterwords.

Of course, having the answer doesn’t do us much good when everyone is still missing, and Megatron seems to agree with me, because he’s about to throw hands, when Nautica lets them know that they’ve arrived at the rendezvous. Problem is, so has something else.

...

I’m sure it’s fiiiiiiiiiiiiine!

#transformers #jro #MTMTE #issue 31 #maccadam #Hannzreads #text post #long post #incoming analysis #overthinking about robots #comic script writing

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elfyourmother · 3 years ago

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So Alamo Season Pass finally resumed and I reupped mine today and went to see the new Dune film after work finally, because this was the perfect thing to use my pass on (something I’m quite iffy on but what to see on a big screen rather than at home). Thoughts under the cut because I know some of y’all have been asking me, a notorious dork for the novels, about this movie.

I…didn’t hate it? It was dreadfully boring at times and hampered by some very strange casting decisions (Saskia Reeves is still the only Jessica for me) but it tried to be true to the novel, much more so than the terrible Lynch one. It was visually stunning and really deserves to be seen at a theater, the set design and visuals were breathtaking and I really felt like I was seeing the book come to life—the thopters being more like dragonflies than birds was an inspired change and I absolutely adored what they did with Kynes.

But it felt…soulless. Very much style over substance. Dune at its heart is a Shakespearean tragedy masquerading as a space opera. For all of the politics and world building Frank did, it’s a very character driven story, driven by very human emotions—greed, ambition, love, etc. And I got none of that from this film. Leto and Jessica’s great romance was non-existent on screen when it was the very impetus for the story—that she loved her Duke so much she defied the Sisterhood and gave him the son he dearly wanted rather than the daughter she was supposed to according to the breeding plan, thus making the Kwisatz Haderach come a generation early? Is really important???? And was totally glossed over?????? I don’t know, for a film that was trying to be a thoughtful sort of epic rather than spectacle it really fell flat on those character moments. Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho was the casting I was most groaning about beforehand but he was about the only one I really felt brought any emotion to things. I bought his friendship with Paul. Everyone else? Oof.

I texted a friend when I got out and said that if we could get the acting and writing from the 2 2000 Sci Fi miniseries (and Brian Tyler’s composing!) with this budget and visuals we would have the perfect Dune adaptation, finally. I will still see part 2 if it happens because I want to see how they handle the Fremen and cautiously liked what I did see.

(but, like, why are we walking in the desert with our stillsuit masks off lmao why does every Dune adaptation do this it drives me insane)

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ahgaseda · 5 years ago

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enough | six

even if everyone else leaves me, you’re enough for me, you’re my only one, stand by me forever, only you, just you...

summary : to survive as a single woman in the big city, you resort to letting rich men pay for your company, but never anticipated that your first client would be the boy you once loved, Jinyoung.

warnings : strong profanity, explicit dialogue, references to prostitution, mentions of gang activity, graphic sexual content, potentially triggering elements involving mental health, panic attacks, etc.

miniseries chapters : one / two / three / four / five / six / seven

It wasn’t until you stepped inside your condo that your heart began to calm. Arguing with Jinyoung still excited you like hell, made something reckless rush through your veins. The two of you were just as hot-headed and stubborn as ever.

Sometimes, you were desperate to get a reaction out of him. No matter how big or small. Especially when he was guarded, which was almost always. It was then you realized that regardless of how many years had passed, you and Jinyoung were still the same two kids wildly and hopelessly in love with each other.

It didn’t matter what was said and done, there would always be the push and pull. You would always find your way back to each other. Your fates were intertwined, destined to tangle despite the distance between you. In a way, you and Jinyoung were doomed to be stuck with each other forever.

With a shake of your head, you chuckled quietly to yourself. Less than an hour had passed and you already missed him. It was pathetic and deeply wounded your pride.

Striding toward the bedroom, you stopped in your tracks when Jackson proceeded to make himself comfortable on the living room sofa.

Brows stitching, you asked confusedly, “Um, what are you doing?”

Jackson glanced at you and flashed that grin of his, replying coolly, “Oh, Jinyoung asked me to spend the night.”

You rolled your eyes and retorted, “Why? To make sure I don’t fuck anyone?”

“Of course not,” Jackson scoffed. “Don’t be a brat.”

You snorted. Under the circumstances, only Jackson could get away with calling you that. Then, a dark thought crossed your mind and you asked, “Am I in some kind of danger?”

“Absolutely not,” Jackson said, like a seasoned politician. It technically wasn’t a lie, he reasoned. You were perfectly safe with him in the next room.

“Okay,” you sighed, knowing neither Jackson or Jinyoung would ever readily admit anything of that nature to you.

In the penthouse, Jinyoung sat pensively by the fireplace, a glass of hard liquor in his hand. He rattled the ice cubes before taking another swig.

Relentless and systematic, he had been undermining Jiwon. Turning his allies against him. Alerting his enemies to his moves. Jinyoung knew how to deal with potential threats, but that did nothing for the fact you were now in the line of fire.

Jiwon’s tactics had reminded Jinyoung why he stayed away for as long as he did, why he made sure to never link the two of you together. Until you forced his hand. It was a dangerous business, his line of work. And there was a reason why men in his position never kept lovers more than one night.

Jinyoung rubbed his forehead where a throb and ache were festering; a side-effect of thinking too damn long and hard.

He couldn’t protect you every minute of every day. You had a life to lead, a dream you had been working toward for as long as he had known and loved you. It wasn’t fair for him to control your every move, to make you live in a constant state of fear that at any moment someone could try to take you away just to punish him.

“I have to get out,” Jinyoung whispered to himself, running a hand down his face. For a long time, Jinyoung had been drunk on the power his status gave him. For once in his life, he had control in the hellfires that surrounded him.

But he wasn’t fireproof.

He could let it all go for you, couldn’t he? He wouldn’t think twice when it came to starting over for your sake. At this point, Jinyoung was ready to give up everything just for the chance to wake up next to you each and every morning.

The wheels were turning in his head. He mapped all the ties in his mind - the ones he would have to sever. Nothing could keep him tethered to this life. He would have to start from nothing.

When the phone rang and jolted him from his reverie, Jinyoung glared at the thing in annoyance, softening only when he saw your name and photo on the screen.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” he asked gruffly.

You frowned and wished you could stare daggers into his face. “Well, hello to you, too,” you smarted back.

Jinyoung felt his lip twitch with amusement at your tone and said, “I can’t talk long.”

You were agitated by his dismissal of you, which could only mean he was in deep thought and not to be disturbed, but you would be damned if you let Park Jinyoung tell you what to do.

Getting comfortable in bed, you pulled the blanket up to your chest and huffed, “Fine. I’ll keep this short. Do you think we will ever be able to move past any of this?”

Jinyoung chortled. “I’m an insufferable grudge holder.”

It went without saying you knew that better than anyone. “And I run from my problems.”

Jinyoung’s wrath flickered and he snapped, “I was a problem?”

You flinched, playful smile vanishing from your face as emotion bubbled in your chest, and quickly stammered, “That’s not what I meant…”

“I know,” he interjected, heaving a sigh. Jinyong realized one of these days he would have to let that go, but for now, it continued to burn a massive, gaping hole inside of him.

You felt small, like a child begging for forgiveness after running away from home with her head hung low. “You weren’t what I was running from,” you countered softly.

“You don’t have to explain yourself,” said Jinyoung. But I wish you would.

“Jinyoung, you saw me,” you replied, as if reading his mind. “Everyday I had to look you in the eyes and see how fucking terrified you were when you looked at me.”

Jinyoung remembered that, though he tried desperately not to. There were countless nights he tried to drown the image of you out of his mind, withering away before his very eyes. “We were in it together,” he whispered, hurt.

He wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t right either. Yes, Jinyoung was always by your side, but he didn’t know the battles raging inside of you. He would never know the agony you felt. “I was the only one in that car,” you spoke firmly.

Jinyoung moved the phone from his mouth, stifling his rage. He would never forget the day he almost lost you forever, but even though you were back safe in his arms, he saw the light had faded from your eyes. The girl he knew and loved had left him.

At his silence, you were finally given the chance to say your peace. “I became defined by my trauma. I was dying inside little by little every day. I was losing who I was. The girl you fell in love with was fading away until I was just this shell of a person I used to be.”

Jinyoung swallowed the lump in his throat. “You had to get out.”

You nodded, though he couldn’t see. “I did.”

“I respect you for saving yourself, but I resented you for not saving me, too,” Jinyoung confessed, his voice nearly breaking.

Tears welled in his eyes. The hurt was festering inside him again. He relived the day you left him over and over until it was branded permanently across his memory. He waited for the pain to dull, to fade, but time never healed that wound.

“I wanted to,” you murmured, a tear escaping down your cheek. “When I came here I had a plan. I would work my ass off by night and go to school by day. I wanted to make a life for us and I wanted to be the girl I always dreamed of being.”

Jinyoung straightened his shoulders and buried his emotions as he always did. He couldn’t dwell on them. The more he did, the more the hole in his chest deepened. It threatened to rip him at the seams. “So, we went different ways toward the same goal.”

Your first instinct was to argue, but you mulled. “I guess we did.”

“You weren’t the only one who changed,” Jinyoung spoke in a low tone, rising from his chair to top off his glass. “If you were defined by your trauma, then I was defined by my anger. I let it put me on paths I would have never gone otherwise.”

You often thought of Jinyoung after you left. Did he tear the house to pieces? Did he scream and cry until his lungs gave out? You imagined he burned every picture that ever existed of you and him together.

“Jinyoung, I wanted to take you with me,” you started, biting your lip.

He swallowed down the liquor, gritting his teeth at the familiar burn down his throat, and continued, “I know, but I joined the gangs. That’s not your fault.”

“You did it because of me,” you insisted. “Because of what happened to me.”

Jinyoung paused. The image of you in the hospital - bloodied and bruised - had broken the last of the goodness in him. Jinyoung had danced with the darkness, flirted with the danger, but you leaving him on that driveway was the breaking point; the moment the dance ended and he let the darkness consume him.

“I had always known I would die for you if I had to,” Jinyoung finally said. “When I realized I was willing to kill for you, it changed me.”

“I regret it,” you whispered, face tensing with more tears. “I regret leaving you.”

“Don’t,” Jinyoung replied levelly, though he wanted nothing more than to hold you in his arms. “We are who we are because of the choices we made. Like it or not, we are all defined by the bad shit that happened in our lives.”

You sighed loudly, rubbing at your tears with a fist. “You’re right.”

He laughed in surprise and joked, “Someone get that on tape.”

You chuckled, relieved to feel the humor cutting through the tension. After a short pause, you told him, “Goodnight, Jinyoung. I love you.”

“Sleep well, baby,” he said, taking another gulp. “I love you, too.”

You hung up the phone and curled back into bed. The weight of his words kept you awake, haunted by the depths of their meaning and their consequences.

When I realized I was willing to kill for you, it changed me...

You swallowed, imagining Jinyoung’s hands dripping with blood as they came to settle around your throat. But you didn’t cry out in fear, you moaned in pleasure.

Shaking the imagery from your mind, you eventually drifted to restless sleep.

The next morning, you woke to your phone ringing. Heart thudding at the prospect of talking to Jinyoung again, all things considered, you roused yourself and grabbed your phone from the nightstand. Excitement quickly dissipated when you saw the caller.

“Hey, Hoseok,” you answered sleepily. “How are you?”

“I’m sorry to wake you,” he replied, apologetic. “I was calling to ask you that.”

You rose from the bed, stepping toward the window to see what weather to expect for the day ahead. “I’m okay. What can I do for you?”

Hoseok shuffled on the other line and he couldn’t find his voice for a moment, but finally said, “This is really inappropriate of me, but would you like to meet for lunch?”

“Sure,” you responded, brow furrowing. “Why would that be inappropriate?”

“Since we don’t work together anymore.”

You rolled your eyes at his concern and replied, “I still consider you a friend, Hoseok.”

Hoseok was relieved to hear that, but it only worsened his guilt. “I want to apologize and make things right with you. Is that okay?”

The awkwardness from the night before was still clearly present, but it did nothing to undermine the past four years of having Hoseok as a faithful friend and protector. You tried to put him at ease as best you could. “You don’t need to do either. We’re fine. But I’m not opposed to grabbing a bite to eat with you, for old times’ sake.”

“Alright,” Hoseok said, and you could practically hear his smile. “See you at the usual.”

“See you there.”

You hung up and looked at your phone for a moment. Jinyoung had accused Hoseok of having some kind of feelings toward you. Hoseok didn’t deny it, but he didn’t really say anything either. You wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. Hoseok had done nothing but be good to you since the day you met him.

Stepping out of the bedroom whilst fastening your earring, Jackson glanced up and asked, “Well, where are you going all dolled up?”

The pleated skirt stopped just above your knees and the sheer white blouse was loose-fitting over your black tank top. It was supposed to be a beautiful day and you dressed accordingly.

“I’m going to lunch with Hoseok,” you told him nonchalantly.

Jackson’s countenance changed on a dime. It was the first time he used a heavy tone with you. “Is that wise?”

Preempting an argument, you countered patiently, “Jacks, listen. He was there for me when I had nothing and no one. Besides, he’s a bodyguard. He won’t let anything happen to me.”

Jackson’s gaze was stern, you almost faltered, but with a sigh, he relented, “I will be right outside the entire time. Non-negotiable.”

“Fine,” you said with a short nod, thanking him for his understanding.

Meanwhile, Yugyeom was thrilled to have something to do. He opened the back door to the Range Rover for you, whistling at your dressed up self. You waved him away with a grin and hopped inside.

Given it was still quite early in the day, the small restaurant was almost empty. You stepped inside, spotting Hoseok at one of the tables. He stood and greeted you warmly, waiting for you to sit before he returned to his seat.

“I hope I didn’t get you into any trouble with the boss,” you spoke quietly.

“Not at all,” Hoseok replied, waving away your worry. “Business as usual today. Some of the girls have been asking about you.”

Your heart clenched a little at that. You were grateful for the friends you made at the agency, but by the nature of the business, no one bonded too closely. “I miss them already.”

Hoseok shifted in his seat and began, “I, uh, asked you here for a reason.”

You assumed to clear the air, but something about his visible discomfort put you on edge. “Let’s hear it,” you said as the waiter set a glass of water before you.

Hoseok paused until the server was out of earshot to say, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

His eyes were heavy as they bore into yours and he spoke under his breath, “For what I’m about to do.”

Your brows stitched.

Hoseok withdrew a folder from behind him and placed it on the table before you. “You know nothing about Jinyoung.”

Your heart sank, but a wave of rage surmounted your disappointment. After a pause, you murmured softly, “I’m the only one that knows him.”

“You know the old him,” Hoseok told you with a shake of his head and proceeded to pull a photo from the file.

At the tiniest glimpse of blood, you slammed your hands down over his, eyes fixated to his face. You didn’t know you were capable of the level of anger surging through your body and your voice came out a low growl, “Hoseok, I’m warning you.”

Hoseok hesitated. You were seething before him, gripping his hands and keeping them on the counter, blocking the image from view. Slipping from your grasp and placing a hand over yours tenderly, he warned, “I don’t want you to get into bed with a man like that.”

You bristled and snapped, “Hoseok, I’m not naive. I know everyone likes to think I’m the little girl that’s just a plaything for a powerful man. Every girl in the agency gets into bed with bad men, worse men. The only difference is your feelings for me.”

Hoseok blinked.

Fear crept up your spine. Emotion gripped your throat tight. Lips trembling, you thought, Please don’t show me the monster I created.

Hoseok lowered his head, sighing loudly. Without another word, he pulled the photo from beneath your hands and tucked it back inside the folder.

Seeing him back down, you asked, “You know who told Seokjin about me and Jinyoung?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“An interested party,” came a voice behind you.

As you turned, the man sitting blithely at the table behind yours had moved to your side. He spoke your name in greeting, a sinister smile plastered to his face, and said, “I’m Jiwon, a former employee of Jinyoung’s.”

“Disgruntled, it would seem,” you deadpanned.

“Why don’t you hand me that phone?” he sneered, glancing down at your lap and holding out his hand.

Your phone had been in your right hand, concealed beneath the table, and you were attempting to text without looking, hoping to get a message off to Yugyeom or Jackson or even Jinyoung, for all you cared.

Shifting your gaze to Hoseok, you noticed the shame on his face before he hung his head.

“No, I think I’ll hang onto it,” you replied, hiding your phone behind your back.

Jiwon exhaled loudly for dramatic effect as he sidled into the seat next to you, pulling a switchblade from his pocket. The bite of metal was suddenly cold against your waist, even through the fabric of your shirt.

You looked down at the blade and swallowed the lump in your throat. It all made sense now. Jackson staying over. Being hesitant to let you go to lunch. You were in danger. And now Jackson was right outside, but had no idea you were at a stranger’s mercy.

Bringing your gaze back to his face, you asked, “Are you going to stab me in the middle of a restaurant, Jiwon?”

Jiwon leaned in and whispered in your ear, “Believe me when I say I’ve done much, much worse.”

You believed him. Trapped between him and the wall, there was nowhere for you to run, no way to escape. With a frown, you handed him the phone without further resistance.

“What do you want?”

Jiwon slipped your phone into his back pocket and sang, “I want to open your pretty little eyes. Help you see the light where Jinyoung is concerned.”

You tried to stay calm, appearing unaffected. Instead, you feigned annoyance. “If you have a problem, take it up with him. I’m just his toy.”

“Nah, sweetheart,” he crooned, stroking a finger over your cheek. “You’re his baby.”

Everything about this man repulsed you and you tried to lean away, but the switchblade followed, staying pressed to your side. “Then, you know you should leave me alone,” you warned.

Jiwon took your threat in stride and said, “He started off small after you left him. Guns, drugs, women. Easy to imagine Jinyoung as a pimp, isn’t it?”

Your eyes burned.

“With patience and dedication, he ascended the ranks. Made a name for himself. He’s ruthless and rightly feared in the underground.”

You knew you were on the verge of tears, but above everything else, you couldn’t risk crying in front of this man. “Stop,” you choked out.

“Don’t you wanna know where all the money comes from? How he’s able to spoil his baby girl like he does,” Jiwon taunted, spinning a lock of your hair around his finger as he toyed with you. “Rich and powerful people have problems that can’t be seen or they will lose everything. Jinyoung is the one they call to fix those problems.”

“You’re lying.” You were adamant, but anyone could tell you believed him. You knew he was telling the truth.

“Am I?” Jiwon questioned, motioning to the table. “Look at the file. I got it for you. That’s a government official file. Everything they have on him.”

You looked at the manila folder before you and the next words out of your mouth surprised even you, “I don’t care. Whatever’s he done… I still love him.”

Jiwon cocked a brow. “Anything?”

“I can’t stop loving him,” you muttered in defeat. “I tried.”

Jiwon sighed yet again. “Oh, baby girl. If I can’t turn you against him, then I have no choice but to take you away from him.”

“Jiwon,” Hoseok warned. That clearly wasn’t part of the deal when he gave his cooperation.

“You’re done,” Jiwon shot back with a pointed finger.

Your eyes widened as Jiwon tugged harshly on your arm and you exclaimed, “Hoseok, you would rather I be dead than with Jinyoung?”

Jiwon pressed the blade to your side, glancing around. “Get up and walk. Don’t make a scene.”

A phone rang in the background. The owner of the restaurant answered and not a moment later, he began yelling to close down the shop.

“Shit, he’s on to me,” Jiwon cursed, leaping to his feet and hoisting you up violently. “Let’s go, baby bird.”

You struggled - it was your body’s natural instinct - and yelled, “If you’re just gonna kill me anyway, I won’t make it easier for you.”

Jiwon weighed his options. He needed you; you were the only card left to play, but you had no intention of going quietly. The situation was devolving. The restaurant cleared out. And Hoseok was starting to move toward you.

“Jiwon,” shouted a familiar voice.

You caught a glimpse of Jackson barreling inside before Jiwon released you, turning tail and running as his life depended on it. You staggered with adrenaline into Hoseok’s arms, pushing him away angrily.

“Hoseok, get out of here,” you snapped, trembling with nerves. “For the years you took care of me, I can give you this one chance. I may not be able to save you when he gets here.”

Hoseok gave you a parting glance filled with regret before reaching for the folder on the table.

“No, that’s mine. Remember?” you spoke under your breath.

Hoseok looked between you and the file, then he left without a goodbye or an apology.

Though you expected neither.

You grabbed the folder and hurriedly stuffed it into your purse, plopping down onto your seat and grabbing your untouched glass of water with a shaky hand.

The door opened and by the slow, drawn-out footsteps, you knew exactly who was coming.

Jinyoung slipped into the seat across from you, trying desperately to conceal the turmoil on his face.

“Are you…,” he began unsurely.

“Don’t,” you interrupted, refusing to look at him. Your blood was boiling.

Jinyoung exhaled loudly through his nose and respected your wishes. For a moment or two, you sat there in silence until you finished your glass of water.

“Are you happy?” you finally forced the words out. “Is this what you wanted?”

He frowned.

Gazing down at your trembling hands, you murmured, “You know, that day they kidnapped me, I swore I would never go through that again. If anyone ever tried to take me, I would fight like hell. I would rather die than be taken to whatever horror they had waiting for me.”

“Baby…,” Jinyoung started, wanting to silence you. This was dangerous territory for him. He couldn’t bear to hear anymore.

You set your jaw. “We both know what was gonna happen to me, Jinyoung.”

Jinyoung rubbed his hands over his face. He couldn’t stomach it; he never could. Even at the hospital, he refused to listen when the police tried to tell him about the men who had taken you and what their intentions were. The town had been descending deeper and deeper into depravity.

And even though salvation had come, you still lost a part of yourself. Your peace. Your joy. From that moment on, you stopped seeing people. You only saw danger.

Jackson rounded the corner, approaching swiftly. “Jinyoung, we got him. What do you want to do?”

Jinyoung looked at you for a moment. You still refused to meet his eyes. In fact, your attention remained fixated on your shaking hands. And he was overcome with hatred.

“I’ll be right back.”

You stood sharply in dissension and called after him, “Jinyoung.”

Your lover rounded on you, speaking darkly and slowly, “Sit.”

Everything in you resisted for the sake of your stubbornness and pride, but your body obeyed him without a second thought. The Jinyoung standing before you was an entirely different animal.

Your eyes lingered on his back as he stepped out of your sight.

Jinyoung ambled into the alleyway, devoid of expression as he approached the dead end. Jiwon was there on his knees, Jaebeom standing over him with a fist in his hair.

“Jiwon, I knew you were crazy, but I never thought you to be stupid,” Jinyoung chastised, taking your phone from Jaebeom’s outstretched hand.

Jiwon spat blood from his mouth. Jackson had not hesitated to inflict punishment on him when caught, resulting in the busted lip and broken nose. “I’m flattered,” he grumbled, obstinate.

Jinyoung slipped his hands in his pockets and drifted closer, appearing almost indifferent. The bloodied sight was pleasing to his eyes, fanning the fires of his rage.

“I admit, you had me for a moment, but all you did was wake the bear.”

“I already screwed you, Jinyoung-ie,” Jiwon taunted, flashing a grin of crimson-stained teeth. “I gave them every shred of condemnable shit I have on you.”

Jaebeom clocked a glance at Jinyoung. He knew what that meant. Jackson clenched his jaw, enraged.

Jinyoung didn’t flinch, didn’t bat an eye. “Then, I’m doing you a favor. There is no life on these streets for a snitch.”

Jiwon laughed. “No point in killing me. You’re going to lose her. I won.”

“I win,” Jinyoung replied. “I’m the one keeping my life.”

The blood drained from Jiwon’s face. The rebellion left him and he exclaimed, “Really, Jinyoung? You’re gonna kill me in broad daylight over this shit?"

Jinyoung glared and retorted, “I would gladly kill you in the middle of Time fucking Square.”

Jiwon whimpered. It finally sank in what a mistake he had made.

Jinyoung crouched down, his eyes scalding. He never made decisions out of vengeance, only strategy, only necessity. Which was what Jiwon had been banking on. But there was a first for everything. Staring his enemy in the face, he whispered, “You put your hands on my girl.”

Jiwon swallowed.

Jinyoung lifted back to full height and gave a single nod to Jaebeom. “Do it.”

Jaebeom pulled the gun from his belt and cocked back the chamber.

“Yugyeom, I swear,” you said sharply, yanking your hand from his grasp. Poor Yugyeom had been trying to usher you into the waiting car and failing spectacularly.

Jinyoung emerged from the alleyway and onto the sidewalk. You overlapped your arms, ignoring Yugyeom’s pleas. Jinyoung took one look at you and knew that you had far surpassed furious.

“What the hell is going on?” you asked loudly. “Why haven’t you called the police?”

Jinyoung dragged his feet to you, outstretching his arm with your phone in hand.

You took your phone, staring down at the screen and seeing your own reflection. It hit you. Jiwon was dead. Threatening you had cost him his life.

“Baby…,” Jinyoung began, ready to face your wrath.

You took a step back at his approach and cried, “What did you get me into?”

Jinyoung lowered his head.

You hissed, gritting your teeth, “This is exactly the life I didn’t want for us!”

“I know.”

That infuriated you. He never sounded so indifferent, so unaffected by something that shredded the fabric of who you were, but you knew he was only hiding. Jinyoung devoted all of his energy to appearing strong on the surface.

“I can’t do this,” you whimpered. “I can’t live in that kind of fear every day. You of all people know that.”

“Come here,” Jinyoung crooned, sliding his hand to the nape of your neck and tucking you into his arms, your face buried against his chest where you belonged.

“No,” you snapped, pushing him back and storming away, wiping your tears roughly with the back of your hand. You had no idea where you were going, just that you needed to get away from him.

Jinyoung knew that, too, and he trudged behind you, always a few steps in your wake. “Where are you going?” he asked, annoyed.

You continued down the sidewalk, aimless and in denial, and shouted, “I’m not doing this. I’m not going through this again.”

“Through what?”

You said nothing.

Jinyoung felt his heart sink somewhere into his stomach. He quickened his pace, grabbing your arm and spinning you round to face him. “Stop and talk to me,” he yelled, afraid.

“You’re going to make me do this all over again,” you spat, shoving his hands away.

Jinyoung was at his breaking point and though he never dared raise his voice at you, this time he screamed, “What the hell am I making you do? Spit it out!”

“Leave you!”

Jinyoung paused, stunned into silence.

You staggered, covering your face with both hands as the tears began to flow. “It killed me last time. It really killed me. I won’t survive a second time.”

Jinyoung frowned and his voice was barely above a whisper when he said, “Then, don’t.”

You shrugged, running out of energy. “What choice do I have?”

“You have me,” Jinyoung snapped, clasping your arms like he was about to shake some sense into you. “We have each other. That’s enough!”

You lowered your gaze to the road beneath your shoes. “I’m sorry.”

Jinyoung refused to listen, refused to believe for a second you would do this. “No.”

“Let go of me,” you whimpered, trying to pry yourself from his grasp.

Jinyoung was too strong and he held you with every fiber of his being. “I’m not letting you leave again,” he hissed bitterly. “I was young and stupid last time, but not anymore.”

What a fool you must have looked; standing on the sidewalk yelling at your lover like something out of a second rate drama. “Jinyoung…”

Jinyoung’s voice was filled with conviction, it seeped into the air around you to the point you could feel his fire inside yourself. “You said it killed you before. Well, it killed me, too! When are you going to realize we can’t live without each other?”

It was a poignant question. You knew the answer the moment you left him four years ago. Without Jinyoung, a piece of you was missing.

Jinyoung softened, only a little. His hands slipped from your arms, moving to cradle your face as he stared into your eyes with longing and devotion. “I don’t care if this way of life gets us killed in the end. At least, we will have been together. You would rather be away from me and safe than with me and in danger? That doesn’t make any sense. Your place in this life is with me!”

“I know,” you sighed.

“Then, stop all this bullshit about running away,” he growled. “I know you’re scared. I’m scared shitless, too. But I know what I’m doing now. I take care of you and you take care of me. That’s it. That’s the bottom line. Nothing else matters.”

You had no argument and even if you did, you wouldn’t use it. All you knew was that you wanted to be with him. You never wanted to be parted from him again for an instant. He was where you belonged and you finally came to accept it.

But you couldn’t justify his way of life and you snarled under your breath, “You know why I hate the gangs. Why I hate everything about what you do.”

Jinyoung nodded and spoke diplomatically, “I know every reason why. I hate them for all the same reasons. But I learned a long time ago, if you can’t beat them, own them.”

You sighed and peered up at him with bloodshot eyes. The file in your purse felt suddenly heavier. “How many people have you killed?”

Jinyoung blinked, surprised by your question. But he answered without hesitation, “None.”

You tilted your head. “You have other people do it for you, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied, and not very well. In fact, Jinyoung didn’t even try to change his tone. He knew you would see right through him this time.

“Don’t lie to me,” you pressed; unsure what answer you wanted out of him and knowing damn well nothing he gave you would suffice.

Jinyoung leaned in, slipping his fingers into your hair, and whispered, “I have never taken someone’s life with my own hands.”

That was enough for now. You just wanted to be in his arms. “Take me back to your place,” you ordered stubbornly. “I’m not sleeping alone tonight.”

Jinyoung studied your face and ultimately nodded. His heart was racing. He recognized your fight or flight response - you were ready to bolt. The memory of him chasing that truck down the drive flooded into his mind. You never looked back as he screamed your name, begging you not to leave him.

The car was eerily quiet as Yugyeom drove. You and Jinyoung sat together in the backseat, but there may as well have been a wall erected between your bodies. Jinyoung turned to you only once, seeing your eyes fixated on the window as buildings blurred by.

Jinyoung knew in that moment he had lost. He would wake in the morning and find you gone.

You felt a storm raging inside you; a constant conflict and collision of emotions. The hardest thing you had ever done in your life was leave Jinyoung and for what? He still became what you feared, if not worse. You looked back in regret, wishing you had stayed with him.

Jinyoung called your name.

You turned reluctantly toward him, but he was looking pensively at his hands.

“It was never your job to save me,” Jinyoung said gently.

“Of course it was,” you replied, a little too sharp.

Jinyoung shook his head. “You made the right choice, baby. Now it’s my turn.”

You rolled your eyes and angled back to the window before tears could stream down your face.

If the car was quiet and tense, the penthouse was much worse. Jinyoung had your study materials brought from your house and then ordered food, not that you had much appetite. Then, he locked himself in his bedroom and didn’t come out again.

You studied as best you could, occasionally stealing glances of his door. Yugyeom did his best to alleviate some of the stress, but his humor could only go so far. You spent the afternoon on the verge of tears as you poured over textbooks. In the evening, you indulged yourself with reruns on the television.

By the time night fell, the bedroom door opened and Jinyoung stepped out, looking quite disheveled. He had clearly slept most of the day away.

“Go home,” he told Yugyeom.

Yugyeom leapt from your side without argument. He had a penchant for rebellion and teasing, but even he knew neither of you were in a lighthearted mood at the moment.

You said your goodbyes and watched Jinyoung for an explanation.

Jinyoung cocked his head toward the bedroom and said, “Let’s go to bed.”

You pursed your lips, narrowing your eyes at him. You wanted to be angry, perpetually reminded of the day’s events and the folder in your purse that could very well hold the fate of your relationship inside. Standing up sharply, you stomped into his bedroom and Jinyoung closed the door behind you.

Jinyoung rifled for a white tee while you unbuttoned your blouse. Your eyes were on his back as you tossed the shirt away, tugging your tank over your head and unclasping your bra impatiently. Jinyoung faced you, failing to hide the way his attention fell to your naked breasts.

You pulled your skirt down until it dropped in a pile around your feet and there you stood in only your panties. Jinyoung bit his lip, pupils widening at the sight before him. You grumbled under your breath and held out your hand.

Jinyoung tossed the tee to you, which you pulled on quickly, and watched you clamber into his bed. You settled on the mattress and made yourself comfortable beneath his messy array of blankets. On your side, you closed your eyes and buried your face against the pillow.

It smelled deeply of him.

“Should I crash on the couch?” Jinyoung asked bluntly a moment later. He was trying to gauge just how angry you were at him.

Your fuse was short and you barked, “Get in here, Jinyoung.”

Jinyoung didn’t hesitate to crawl into bed behind you, tucking to your back and curling an arm around your waist. It didn’t matter how furious you felt, being in his arms provided a feeling of safety and security you could never find anywhere else. When you were with Jinyoung, you were untouchable, invulnerable.

“I will never love anyone but you,” Jinyoung whispered into your skin, his breath hot on your neck. “I need you to know that.”

“I know,” you sighed, eyes fluttering closed.

Jinyoung flexed his grip, holding you tightly. He wanted to lose himself inside you, until only the good parts of him remained. If there were any left. Jinyoung knew he was far beyond redemption.

Not long after midnight, the emptiness of the bed woke you. Adrenaline snapped you to attention, threatening to keep you awake for as long as it took to find Jinyoung and bring him back to bed.

“Jinyoung?” you called out, striding to the bedroom door and expecting to see him sulking on the couch.

But then you heard a noise in the bathroom and stopped, approaching the ensuite and opening the door.

There, you found Jinyoung on the tiled floor, sitting across from the toilet as he proceeded to cry his eyes out. You took one look at him and collapsed, falling to your knees and reaching for him.

“What happened?” you exclaimed, flinching when he batted your hands away.

“Nothing,” Jinyoung snapped, covering his red face as the tears streamed down his cheeks.

He looked on the outside the way you felt on the inside - like a total, hopeless wreck.

“What is it, Jinyoung?” you asked frantically, attempting to take his cheeks between your palms. “Did you have a nightmare?”

“Yeah, I did,” Jinyoung shouted, his voice reverberating off the tiled walls. “I dreamt the love of my life threatened to leave me again and I had no one to blame but myself!”

You fell back as if you had been slapped across the face. Blinking through your own tears, you studied Jinyoung and how devastated he looked. The facade he paraded himself behind had shattered into pieces and you were determined to sift through the ruins.

“I won’t leave you, Jinyoung,” you whispered tenderly, cradling his face though he looked away. “You were right earlier. We can’t survive without each other. We never could.”

Jinyoung tilted his head back, resting against the wall, and merely shook from side to side as if his entire body was saying no. He blinked slowly, finally meeting your eyes, and hissed, “I don’t believe you.”

Bristling, you snapped, “Well, kiss my ass then.”

Jinyoung’s eyes widened momentarily in surprise before the slightest smile took over his lips.

Rising to your feet, you stepped over him and into the shower, turning on the water before returning to him. “Get up.”

He peered up at you and said nothing.

“I said get up,” you huffed, reaching down and grabbing him by the shirt with both hands.

Jinyoung allowed you to pull him up and drag him into the shower, but he growled your name in surprise when the cold water hit his skin. You held him tightly to you beneath the running water, both of you quickly drenched while clothed, and assumed he would try to escape.

You had no idea what you were doing. Naturally you had assumed the water would be hot, given how damned expensive his penthouse was. Perhaps you just wanted a diversion, something to alleviate the heavy emotions threatening to suffocate you both.

Jinyoung fixed his gaze to your face, looking positively annoyed, and both of you fell into laughter at the same time at how ridiculous this was. You were relieved to see him smiling, heart fluttering when he leaned his forehead against yours and let his hands rest on your waist.

Overcome with your feelings for him, you fell forward, colliding into his chest and smashing your lips on his.

Time came to a screeching halt. Jinyoung cupped your face and smiled against your mouth, pleased by the urgency of your kisses.

He indulged your tongue slipping past his teeth for a moment and then he was on you, tangling his fingers in your hair while capturing you in a kiss full of hunger. His body pushed against yours, backing you into the wall roughly. You cried out at the contact, but he silenced you with his tongue.

“Fuck, why am I still so in love with you?” Jinyoung groaned.

“I love you,” was all you could say, tears stinging your eyes.

Jinyoung leveraged you against the tiled wall, slipping his hips between your legs. His next kiss was gentle, his eyes open to see the heat on your face.

Water mingled from the shower into your mouths, but all you could taste was him. Every slow, calculated tease of his tongue had you reeling. Your heart was beating at a steady but accelerated thrum, anticipating what would follow these passionate kisses.

“Jinyoung,” you finally whimpered, running out of patience.

“Shh,” he quieted you softly, kissing the corner of your mouth. “Just you and me, baby. Always.”

You hummed when his lips drifted to your neck, sucking at the base of your shoulder. You gasped in a breath, slipping your arms beneath his to sink your fingers into his shoulders. He was going to unravel you, you could feel it.

“Don’t stop,” you told him breathlessly, letting your head fall back against the tile and hooking a leg over his hip.

Jinyoung marred your beautiful neck, sucking and biting. Without a word, he slipped his hands beneath your thighs and hoisted you up, carrying you into the bedroom. You panted softly against his ear, heart racing with desire and expectation. You thought at any moment your chest would explode.

Jinyoung set you down on the bed beneath him, hovering over you and returning his kisses to your neck. Every smack of his lips was wet on your damp skin, droplets of water still streaming down your bodies from the impromptu shower. Jinyoung pried your hands from around him and stood upright, dragging your hips forward to the edge of the bed.

You exhaled nervously, slipping a hand into your hair. Your face was hot. Your pulse raced. With his simplest touches you were ready to shatter into a million pieces in his hands.

Jinyoung grasped the hem of your shirt and pushed it upward until you sat up and made it easier for the garment to slip over your head. He pressed another kiss to your lips, trying to calm your racing heart.

You watched with bated breath as he slipped his fingers in the band of your panties and brought them slowly down your legs. You couldn’t help but squirm beneath his heated gaze.

Jinyoung roamed his palms down your soft thighs, kissing and tonguing his way down the inside of your thigh before giving a swift bite. You squeaked slightly at the sharp pinch of his teeth, but your core clenched with delight, betraying you entirely.

He traveled up your body again, cupping your face and kissing you hard. You held him desperately and moaned into his mouth, grabbing his shirt and yanking it off of him. Jinyoung parted from your lips with a chuckle and stood again, gazing down at you naked and bare for him.

You watched him begin pushing down his pants, meeting your eyes and whispering, “I’ll go slow, baby.”

All you could do was nod and swallow the lump in your throat. You dared not say anything. Part of you was convinced that at any moment he would leave you wanting as he had done so many times before. Your mouth watered when he discarded his pants and his hard cock came into view.

Jinyoung finally kneeled on the bed, grasping the insides of your knees and lifting your legs how he saw fit, spreading you apart. You lay there like you forgot how to function. You were entirely at the mercy of the overwhelming need for him inside you.

You gripped handfuls of the sheets in your fists, losing your mind with restraint. Jinyoung guided himself to your entrance, pushing the head inside and watching you tense beneath him.

Jinyoung smirked at your sensitivity and grasped his cock, slipping his shaft between your folds and coating himself with your wetness. He watched your reaction as he teased your bundle of nerves with the tip of his length.

“Jinyoung, inside,” you keened, your body taut with desire. If he only knew how badly you throbbed and ached for him.

Jinyoung propped over you, chest-to-chest, and kissed your nerves - and impatience - away. He teased his tongue in your mouth and palmed over your breast, rubbing his cock between your slit.

Then, you felt his hips shift and he penetrated you slowly, filling you at an agonizing pace. You had no choice but to feel every inch of him bottoming out. You pressed your eyes closed and moaned for all to hear, legs bending beside his hips.

Jinyoung let out a groan, sheathing himself inside your warm cunt. His lips parted with a shaky breath.

He was so big. You couldn’t fathom how he fit so perfectly, so tight without ripping you open. That first thrust was always the best, making your body shudder with pleasure as you stretched to accept him.

Jinyoung was not faring any better than you. His lips were back on yours, but he breathed heavily. You were a vice on his cock, kneading and pulsing around him with need.

You gave him a nod that you were ready and Jinyoung lifted, propping himself on his fists and drawing back his pelvis to thrust into you. You bit your lip and let your hands lay at opposite sides of your head. You stared up at him in reverence, whimpering after another hard smack of his hips.

Jinyoung glanced down, growling at the sight of your pussy stuffed full of his thick cock. He fucked you at a steady pace, pushing himself in and dragging back out.

It felt so good, even better than you knew it would. Your soft whimpers and moans filled the room, music to Jinyoung’s ears.

He only touched where your bodies connected and the sight was erotic. You bent your knees and angled your hips to accept him deeper, sighing loudly in ecstasy. Jinyoung watched your breasts bounce each time his cock drove inside your tight pussy.

You wanted to smile. Jinyoung was making love to you.

He had a penchant for being rough, dominant, but there were times he could be gentle. Jinyoung loved taking pleasure from your body and fucking you to orgasm, but for now he took his time, wanting to savor the feeling of finally being one with you again.

“Deeper,” you coaxed, voice raspy. “Harder.”

Jinyoung finally tore his gaze away from his cock disappearing inside your cunt to look at the hooded lust on your face. He brought a hand to your throat and gripped snugly, not enough to put pressure, but certainly enough to snare your attention.

“Take what I give you,” he growled, stealing a kiss none too gently.

You held his wrist, walls tightening at his total dominance over your body, and nodded your obedience.

Jinyoung was about to lose his mind. He could hear the wet suck of your pussy each time he pushed his cock inside. He knew he couldn’t last much longer. The harder he went, the faster he would finish.

The room filled with the sounds of skin slapping against skin. Given the weeks of tension and the years of distance, you knew this would be fast. You knew he would make short work of you.

Tears slipped from your eyes. From pleasure. From emotion. You cried for the years wasted without him and for how complete you finally felt now that he was buried inside you.

“Shh, it’s okay,” Jinyoung crooned, reaching up to wipe a tear with his thumb.

You clenched your fists in the sheets beside your head. “I missed you,” was all you could choke out.

“I know, baby,” he said, running his fingers over your nipple before giving your bouncing breast a hard squeeze. “You feel so good. So warm and so tight.”

You moaned. He never slowed his pace, never fell out of rhythm for even a moment. Every inch of his thick cock kept pumping deeper and deeper inside you. You didn’t want it to end. He truly owned you mind, body and soul.

Jinyoung lilted his head. “You gonna be a good girl and come for me?”

“Mm,” you hummed. By his tone, it was not a request.

Jinyoung braced a hand on your hip, pinning you to endure his quickening pace. You shuddered beneath him, throwing your head back as the mattress began to creak from his roughness. He pounded into you, hitting that sweet spot and driving you insane.

“Jinyou…,” was all you could manage.

Jinyoung leveraged both hands on your thighs, throttling into you harder and harder, fucking you good until stars burst behind your eyes. He glanced down to see where your bodies met, where his cock disappeared inside your swollen pussy.

“Come for me,” he said darkly.

You cried out for mercy, body jolting from the intensity of his thrusts. Another hard smack of his hips and you were over the edge, back arching on the bed as your mouth opened in a silent scream.

Jinyoung pinned your arms, wary of your fingernails, and watched your satisfaction with a smirk. Your cunt clamped down on him with a vengeance, making his movements stutter.

The moment you regained some of your senses, you pushed his chest, wrestling him off of you and shoving him to his back. Jinyoung watched you in confusion before grinning with pride, grunting when you straddled him and took his painfully hard cock back inside you.

You watched his mouth gape open, the smallest of moans lingering in his throat. You anchored your hands on his firm chest and bounced your hips up and down.

“F-fuck,” Jinyoung stammered, surprised at how eagerly you rode him, how tightly your innermost walls gripped every inch of his length.

You flipped your hair behind your shoulders and ground yourself down on his cock, wanting him to climax harder than he ever had before. The lines of Jinyoung’s face were tense and furrowed. He was holding back with every shred of strength he had. His chest heaved for breath and his body bobbed on the mattress with how rough you fucked him.

Suddenly, Jinyoung sat up with you in his lap, grasping your waist. “Stay still,” Jinyoung choked against your neck.

“But…,” you started confusedly.

“I don’t want to come yet.”

You giggled and sighed, “I won’t hold it against you.”

Jinyoung released a nervous chuckle and the sound made you shiver. By the weakness in his voice, you knew he really was on the brink of blowing his load.

Grinning, you kept riding him, grappling with his hands as he tried to get ahold of you. You arched your hips, pumping your velvet walls on his cock.

“Say you love it,” you whispered darkly, yanking at his hair until his attention was on your face.

He didn’t hesitate to pant against your lips, “I fucking love it.”

“Come deep, baby,” you spoke even softer.

The familiar swell and throb of him almost made you climax again. With a twitch of his cock, Jinyoung lost himself to pleasure and began to fill you.

“Fuck,” Jinyoung cried out, moaning with every burst of cum that painted your insides.

You held him tighter, shivering at the rapid hot and cold of his breaths on your neck. He overlapped his arms around you, squeezing with all of his might while gritting his teeth.

Jinyoung gave a final groan, utterly spent, laying you on your back and pressing you into the mattress with the weight of his body.

You roamed your hands across his sweaty skin; anywhere and everywhere you could touch. He was scalding against the pads of your fingers, like a raging fire burned inside of him.

Jinyoung stayed sheathed inside and pinned you between his muscly arms, gracing tired, wet kisses to your lips. “Are you okay?” he asked tenderly.

You offered him a nod, staring into the glistening black of his eyes. He looked so fucked out, you wanted to grin with a mix of arrogance and satisfaction.

“Say something,” he rasped, searching your face for an answer.

You raked your nails down his back, stopping only when your hands landed on his ass. “Catch your breath,” you warned playfully.

Jinyoung’s eyes flickered with surprise and arousal. Then, he smirked.

You took his lip between your teeth and tugged, and your voice was husky when you purred, “The night’s just getting started...”

← previous chapter | next chapter (coming soon!) →

a/n : this story was previously Lacuna on my old blog, minheoney. I’m really excited to finally finish it! This fic was my baby for so long and I’m ridiculously happy to give it a new home :)

Hey there, beautiful! If you enjoyed this, please leave a like or reblog or follow me! Or maybe buy me a coffee so I can keep writing? Or check out my masterlist here for more stories! Thanks for reading :) - Katya

This work is fictional and for entertainment purposes only, but is licensed and protected under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives 4.0 international license. Any instances of plagiarism will be dealt with accordingly. Do not re-post or translate without my permission.

#got7 fanfiction #got7 #park jinyoung #got7 smut #jinyoung smut #park jinyoung smut #got7 fanfic #jinyoung fanfic #jinyoung fanfiction #got7 scenario #got7 imagine #got7 reaction #got7 au

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joshjacksons · 3 years ago

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Joshua Jackson interview with “Irish Independent”

It was during a childhood visit to his granny’s house in Dublin’s Ballyfermot that Joshua Jackson smoked his first cigarette.

“My memories of those visits to Ballyfermot are quite sweet really,” the Dawson’s Creek actor recalls. “I was always running around with the neighbourhood kids, getting into trouble. Not bad trouble, just little-kid trouble. Although, technically it’s where I smoked my first cigarette, so that in itself isn’t the sweetest memory.”

Jackson’s handsome face surges with deep laughter lines and quiet dimples at the mention of mum Fiona’s home turf. “She might prefer I’d say she was from Chapelizod”, he jokes, before proudly pinning his mum’s allegiance to “Ballyer”.

Was the young Canadian treated like a shiny, exotic object by the local kids? “I was a bit, but I became less exotic the older I got. Culturally, I was so far away from an Irish kid but in a little pack of children, everyone finds their level. It also helped that I had my own cousins, my own blood, around with us. I had that family connection so I never felt too exoticised.”

An entry on his IMDb profile suggests his late grandparents Rosemary and Patrick were opera singers in Dublin, indicating that performance runs in the genes. The actor seems unaware. “Mum tells me they used to sing to each other a lot. My grandparents lived in council housing with a little kitchen out the back, garden right outside, and they would sing to each other through the window as he was out pottering about while she was cooking.

“But he was known more as a snooker shark around Ballyfermot. And my grandmother, she was known as a sainted mother of seven.”

Having welcomed his first child, Janie, with his wife, the actor Jodie Turner-Smith, last year, it’s obvious family is paramount for 43-year-old Jackson, as he Zoom-calls from a rich hotel suite with dark wallpaper and plump cushions in the background. It stems from an evident bond with his mum, whose presence lovingly peppers our conversation. Just 16 when she left Dublin, Fiona Jackson travelled through Paris, Amsterdam and Geneva before embracing the vibrancy of London’s Swinging Sixties and ultimately making for Vancouver in her early twenties.

In an entry on her blog, she speaks of falling for “the spectacular beauty of snow-capped mountains and the Pacific Ocean” and ultimately scoring an entry-level position at a Canadian talent agency. It led to a career as a successful casting agent, working on film classics including Carnal Knowledge with Jack Nicholson and McCabe & Mrs Miller with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie.

She met and married Joshua’s father, John Carter, and the young family moved to Los Angeles. Sister Aisleagh was born shortly before John walked out on the family, leaving a profound effect.

“My father, unfortunately, was not a good father or husband and exited the scene,” the actor disclosed last year, before adding it’s something he “will never get over”.

Young infants in tow, Fiona returned to Vancouver and, having found early success in casting, helped contribute to the foundation of the burgeoning “Hollywood North” industry on the Canadian west coast.

Accompanying his mum on set, young Joshua’s interests were piqued. “She introduced me to this world and saw from a young age that I enjoyed performing in a way that kids do. She allowed me the opportunity to step into her work world, but it was also very clear that it was work.”

He appeared as an extra on MacGyver and as a child actor’s double in The Fly II, and Fiona could see her son’s talent and genuine desire to impress. So she allowed him to audition. However, permission came with strict caveats.

“I don’t think my mum would have ever put me anywhere near the entertainment industry if I didn’t have something to offer to it. And not just for myself; she’s a prideful woman and didn’t want to be embarrassed by her kid.”

Casting 1991 melodrama Crooked Hearts with ER’s Noah Wyle, Fiona gave Joshua a chance to shine. Impressing the filmmakers, the then-12-year-old secured the part, setting him not only on a path to stardom but away from the troubles of his teen years.

“My mother gave me the guard rails I needed at that time and also recognised, being a working single mum and with me a young boy, transitioning into a teenager, I needed structure in my life. I needed something that I was passionate about and had a respect for, because I was kind of a typical teenage disaster.

“I look back on those times in my life and the two parallel tracks I was running on. On the one hand, getting into all sorts of trouble and, on the other hand, my professional life, where I showed up and learned my lines and did my job in order to be respected by the adults I was around. If I hadn’t had that professional side of my life, the other side would have taken over, and Mum saw that. Who knows where I would have ended up?”

So Jackson was a full-on teen delinquent? “Yeah, I was, to a certain extent. It was relatively innocent — nobody died — but I was a teenage boy who didn’t have a father in the home, didn’t have a man to be scared of, frankly, and as a teenage boy, I think that helps. My mum had to work and she wasn’t always in the house so I learned to get into more and more trouble. I got into just enough trouble to have a good time and learn some lessons but if I hadn’t had my work life, I might have tipped over into the kind of trouble that you don’t come back from.”

Three decades in and Jackson remains one of the hardest-working, most recognisable actors in the game. Hitting pay dirt at 18 as Dawson’s Creek’s Pacey Witter — the wisecracking, teacher-bedding antithesis to James Van Der Beek’s beleaguered titular drip — the actor was a revelation: the soul and bite of a seasoned character performer in the guise of relatable poster-boy idol.

Teens swooned, so did the industry, and alongside Van Der Beek, Michelle Williams and Katie Holmes, Jackson had Hollywood at his feet.

A string of popcorn offerings followed — Cruel Intentions, Gossip, Shutter, Cursed — some quality, others derivative, with the small screen ultimately best utilising his skills. A five-season run on sci-fi series Fringe was followed by an outstanding turn on Showtime’s The Affair. Last year, he maintained a brooding presence opposite Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington in Little Fires Everywhere. And this year, he takes on arguably his darkest work yet in Dr Death.

The new miniseries is based on the non-fiction podcast of the same name, and Jackson portrays Christopher Duntsch, a former spinal surgeon who maimed 33 patients owing to gross malpractice while operating in hospitals in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. Two of these patients lost their lives. Convicted in 2017, Duntsch is currently in prison and serving life imprisonment. He still maintains his innocence, with his defence arguing that he was merely a bad surgeon, not a criminal.

Exuding a simmering malevolence, the actor showcases Duntsch’s disturbing complexities and terrifying behaviour as a narcissist and sociopath with a keen insight. Did Jackson meet with Duntsch? “I wanted to, but that was going to be really difficult because he’s appealing his case and his lawyers would’ve advised against it. And as I got deeper into the materials and podcast, and got a better understanding of the man, I don’t think it would’ve helped because he still really believes he’s the victim of his own patients, and the lawyers and the legal system. I’m not sure asking a liar for the truth gets you any closer to the truth.”

When it came to the victims, Jackson wanted to maintain a respectful distance. “I didn’t need to drag them through those awful memories again and I’m always a little dubious about asking people to delve into the worst moments of their life just to satisfy my curiosity. The questions had already been asked thanks to the podcast.”

Dr Death came at the right time in the actor’s life. New baby daughter Janie offered a crucial respite from the intense, and often dark, six-month foray into Duntsch’s malignant psyche.

“Inhabiting Mr Duntsch was an ugly space to live in for six months. If I’d been coming home to an empty house every night, it would have been a pretty bleak existence. It was so much better to come back to a loving home. My one-year-old doesn’t give a damn what I was doing that day. She just wants to be loved and hugged and cuddled, and it was the perfect antidote when some days were particularly heavy.”

Recently Jackson confessed that the Dawson’s Creek cast won’t be returning for a retrospective reunion like the Friends stars did earlier this year. “If you put our mid-forties selves together on a couch now, with our creaking backs, it might shock people.”

Quizzed on an actual reboot of the drama, Joshua reckons he’s simply too old to replicate the iconic rapid exchanges of dialogue between the garrulous young characters. “We were like The West Wing for teenagers,” he laughs, referencing Aaron Sorkin’s hit political TV series, also infamous for speedy script delivery. “My 43-year-old brain couldn’t do a show at that pace. Back then, we were doing seven, 10 pages a day and, to deliver dialogue at that speed, you have to have a certain mental capacity for that, and I don’t have it anymore. That’s the real reason why we’re not doing a reunion — I’ve become too dumb to keep up with that script.”

He remains in touch with his DC co-stars, including Holmes, his one-time girlfriend of two years. There’s even a text chain. “It goes through spurts every once in a while. I’ll have a bunch of messages on it and then it’ll go dormant. We’re like college friends — there are moments we’re all in contact and then long, fallow periods as we get on with our lives.”

While maintaining a busy slate, Jackson’s overwhelming purpose continues to circle the women in his life. Turner-Smith is currently shooting a new movie with Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig, so he’s assuming full-time dad duties. It’s an equitable arrangement given the flexible needs of their individual commitments, and one he appears content with.

#joshua jackson #dr death #dawson's creek #fringe #the affair #jodie turner smith

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lingthusiasm · 4 years ago

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Transcript Episode 49: How translators approach a text

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 49: How translators approach a text. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 49 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the relationship of the translator and the text. But first, we’re heading into Lingthusiasm anniversary month! This is our fourth anniversary of doing Lingthusiasm, and we’re really excited that we’re still doing this four years later.

Lauren: We love a bit of reflection and nostalgia. The month of November is always an opportunity to be grateful that we have another year of Lingthusiasm. We have a whole 12 great main episodes. We have 12 more bonus episodes. As with every year, if you want to share a link to your favourite episode, November is an especially nice time to do it.

Gretchen: There are still people in this world who don’t know that they could be listening to a fun podcast about linguistics that makes them feel like they’re at a linguistics party instead of doing the dishes. You could help people find them. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth. Every year we’ve done this in November, we see a big spike in people listening to the show and finding the show. If you wanna share on social media, we are very happy to thank you if you tag us in things.

Lauren: If you want to share off social media, please accept our deepest gratitude non-publicly for sharing shows as well.

Gretchen: Or, if you share Lingthusiasm privately and you still wanna be thanked, feel free to tell us about it on social media. We will still give you a little heart thank you comment. Yes, thank you already for all of the support that you’ve given the show over the years.

Lauren: If you like things additional to podcasts, because we are coming up to the holiday season, it’s also a good time to think about some Lingthusiasm merch or a copy of Because Internet. It’s a pretty great book. I like it. It’s available in paperback now. These things make great gifts.

Gretchen: We now also have annual memberships on Patreon. That could make a great gift to gift somebody to listen to more Lingthusiasm episodes as well as access to the Discord for an online linguistics community.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was about honorifics as a way of being polite to someone either through the title you choose or a variety of linguistic strategies.

Gretchen: You get access to the honorifics bonus as well as 43 other bonus episodes and new bonus episodes every month by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, Lauren, I’m gonna talk to you about Beowulf.

Lauren: I know this because you have been messaging me for weeks about how we have to talk about Beowulf.

Gretchen: There’s a new translation of Beowulf. I’m really excited. This made me want to build an entire episode around the translator’s relationship to the text because this new translation of Beowulf does a really cool job of it, and I wanna talk about it.

Lauren: I don’t think you’ve been this excited about a translated text since Emily Wilson translated The Odyssey. I’m pretty sure that’s what motivated our 18th episode on word translation.

Gretchen: You are not wrong about this. I think there’s a similar excitement that I have which is old texts – texts that are a thousand-plus years old that have been translated so many different times by so many different people – it feels like it’s hard for someone to do something new with a translation of them. And yet, here people are doing that, which is exciting to me. This is the new translation of Beowulf by Maria Dahvana Headley. She’s done some really cool things with translating Beowulf as a feminist text. It’s a text that uses very modern style language in this thousand-year-old epic poem of Old English literature.

Lauren: I feel like when it comes to translating, before you even translate one single word, there’s all these decisions that a translator has to make. In Episode 18, we looked at translation, but we looked at word-to-word translation. And that’s definitely one part of a translator’s job, but they have so many more decisions to make. It is such an impressive job, and it’s why it’s as much an art form as it is a technical skill to translate something well. So, what are some of the big decisions that Headley made before even starting to translate Beowulf?

Gretchen: One of the things about Beowulf is, as an oral poem, it has this intricate rhyme scheme. The Old English rhyme scheme is based on half lines. Each line has two halves and there needs to be an alliterative bit in one half that is repeated in the second half.

Lauren: So, Old English is way more interested in alliteration compared to our modern English obsession with rhyming. That’s one of the stylistic features you find in Old English.

Gretchen: It’s all about the beginning of the words rather than the ends. Trying to figure out, okay, how much am I gonna use alliteration? How much am I gonna try to represent – because we can do alliteration in modern English – how much am I gonna try to represent the existing rhyme scheme? Where am I gonna try to put it in actual rhymes like you would do in modern English – if you’re writing a poem, you might rhyme it? What am I gonna do with the metre? She’s produced this really oral text that uses a certain amount of modern slang as well in ways that are really effective. One example is there’s a dragon in Beowulf, and the dragon at one point is described as “Putting the world on blast.”

Lauren: Nice.

Gretchen: To some extent, this is modern slang, but it’s also a very literal thing that a dragon can do. It’s not using modern slang for gratuitous – like, there’s no “lols” or “omgs” in this text. It’s not like here’s this facile text-speak version of Beowulf. It’s what are the bits here that actually work with the metre and the rhyme scheme but also not shying away from using a modern idiom where a modern idiom really works.

Lauren: It’s interesting to put this in contrast to the other most famous version of Beowulf in translation that I know of which is Seamus Heaney’s from somewhere in the middle of the 20th Century where I feel like he tried to capture the mythical grandeur of Old English and chose very stoic, solid sounding Old English words. I don’t think he would’ve had the dragon “putting the world on blast.”

Gretchen: Well, I don’t think he would’ve – I think it came out in 1999, this translation. In some ways his translation is fairly vernacular, but he tries to do that in a different sense. Can I read you the first bit of the Headley translation and the Heaney translation?

Lauren: Yeah. This is super fun.

Gretchen: Okay. A big thing about Beowulf translations is the first word which in Old English is “Hwaet.” That has gotten repurposed as a meme, which we’re not gonna get into much detail about. Some people translate that as like, “Lo!” or “Hark!” or “Listen!” or something like this. Heaney translates that as “So,” which has already got a certain level of vernacularity to it. His first three lines go, “So, the Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.” This is very stately and like, “Here’s this thing you’re gonna do.” If you compare that with the first three lines of the Headley translation, the new one, she translates this “Hwaet” as “Bro.”

Lauren: Hm, that’s a very different tone.

Gretchen: It’s a very modern tone. I mean, you could pick a whole bunch of very modern things like “Yo” or “Hey all,” but specifically the reason she picks “Bro” is because she wants to highlight the bro culture-ness of this entire story. You can see that in the next couple lines which is, “Bro, tell me we still know how to speak of kings. In the old days, everyone knew what men were – brave, bold, glory bound. Only stories now, but all sound the Spear-Dane song, hoarded for hungry times.” It just leaps off the page in a way that really excites me.

Lauren: Yeah, no “princes” there.

Gretchen: Right. “Kings who ruled had courage and greatness” – “The men were bold.”

Lauren: The thing I always love about Beowulf is that it’s a millennium-old oral poem that happened to be written down, and a millennium ago people were like, “Let me tell you about the olden days.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: Right, it still takes place in this semi-mythic space, and it uses a certain stylised language that we even think was stylised at the time. You’re always picking between some kind of stylisation. There’s no neutral choice that exists. All of the choices are recreations at some level.

Lauren: I mean, it is kind of weird to think you’re translating from English into English, but it just shows how much the language has moved on because reading Beowulf if you don’t know Old English is an incredibly uncomfortable attempt to just guess some words that have retained some familiarity. I always find it interesting that you have to translate. And then because English went through enough changes by Shakespeare, we kind of put up with all of the features of Shakespeare that aren’t immediately obvious to us.

Gretchen: Right. But Beowulf is really this alien text. Like, “Hwaet. We Gardena” – and “Gardena” is “Spear-Danes,” but we don’t have “Spear-Danes,” and “Gardena” is not obviously related to those. There’s this great miniseries from The History of English Podcast that does a very in-depth line-by-line reading of Beowulf which I enjoyed a while back.

Lauren: My one semantic anecdote from that series is “Gar-Danes” as in “Spear-Danes” – garlic is the “spear-leek.”

Gretchen: Yes, it is!

Lauren: Because it’s like a little spear.

Gretchen: It’s like a little spear-leek. I love that anecdote. It’s interesting to be reading Beowulf at the same time that my book club is actually reading The Tale of Genji.

Lauren: Ah, from like a similar – Genji’s also a millennium old, yeah?

Gretchen: Yeah! In some sense it’s like Beowulf and Genji are kind of contemporaries.

Lauren: But they’re very much not contemporaries. Beowulf is about warrior bro culture in the Old English setting, whereas Genji is a Japanese court drama.

Gretchen: I don’t think they would’ve gotten along. I think they would’ve just found each other completely incomprehensible. Genji’s also one of those classic texts that’s been translated a whole bunch of different times in a whole bunch of different ways. For one thing, you’re translating from a much older version of Japanese. There are modern Japanese translations of The Tale of Genji as well. And then you’re also translating into a different cultural context. But the cultural context for Beowulf is also very weird. Like, I don’t do going and fighting monsters under lakes any more than I do writing haikus about the moon. In fact, I’m probably more likely to write a haiku about the moon than I am to go fight a monster under a lake if we wanna talk about relatability.

Lauren: Everything I know about Genji is because one of my colleagues in the Languages Department at La Trobe is a Genji studies scholar. It’s one of those pieces of work that is so big and so canonical that it has its own literary studies tradition associated with it. I also really love my colleague because the other part of her expertise is cosplay studies. I think it’s such a great combination of Japanese cultural experience there – Genji and cosplay.

Gretchen: I mean, what more do you want? The neat thing about reading Tale of Genji at the moment is because I’m reading it as part of a book club through Argo Bookshop – which is a bookstore that did the book launch party for Because Internet and I really like them – they’re having this Tale of Genji book club, and we’ve been reading it throughout the year a few chapters at a time because it’s over 1,000 pages. It’s huge. So, we’ve been reading it section by section, and different members of the book club have picked different translations into English of the same work.

Lauren: Ah, cool! Are there radical differences between the translations? Or do they all try and go for a literal approach?

Gretchen: They’re really different. One of the big things with Genji is at the time in 11th Century Japan it was considered very rude in the court to refer to people by their actual names. None of the characters in the original Tale of Genji manuscript have names, except for maybe Genji. So, you can imagine reading a thousand-page book where none of the characters have names is a bit of a feat of the imagination.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: Different translations – and a lot of them have conventional names that literary scholars have used to talk about the characters. For example, Lady Fujitsubo lives in the Fujitsubo, which is the western pavilion, and so she gets called in the tradition “Fujitsubo” because that’s where she lives, and this kind of stuff. Or Murasaki gets called that after a flower, I think, the character. In some translations, they just use these conventional use names as if they’re the actual names of the characters. In some translations, they just use descriptions like the original text did, and they don’t really refer to characters by even pretend names or use names.

Lauren: So, one of them is trying to strive for cultural authenticity, and the other one is trying to just help the poor confused reader a little bit more, and that’s choices that each translator has decided to make.

Gretchen: Exactly. You also have other types of decisions like, “Are you going to try to” – because it’s a court drama, you have all these court positions. Are you going try to map those positions onto a western court so that people understand what a chancellor is? Or are you going to try to use those as a more direct translation of what the specific terms were at the time? That’s just different decisions that different translations can use.

Lauren: When you meet as a book club, is everyone following along, or is there a lot of clarifying across translations? Such an interesting little exercise.

Gretchen: Well, the nice thing is, is the division into different chapters is very constant, so we can be like, “Okay, we’re reading Chapters 6 to 10 now. We’re gonna talk about what happens in those.” But sometimes you do pull something up, and you’re like, “Okay, so this bit where this thing was said, do we think Genji is kinda misogynistic here?” And somebody will say, “Well, in my translation, it doesn’t actually seem like he’s misogynistic.” And here’s what’s going on in this particular translation versus that particular translation. And how much of it is the translator bringing their own preconceived notions of how people relate to each other? Because some of these translations are from the 1920s or something. People may have had different politics there. And how much of that is in the original text which was composed by a woman who we don’t know that much about? But it’s the first modern novel. It’s an interesting like, “How much are you going to try to westernise this book for a western audience?” Which some of the older translations do a bit more with the westernisation adaptation because people in the west hadn’t heard of Genji very much before. You do all this adaptation for your English-speaking readers. Whereas, more recent translators, people tend to have a higher degree of expectations of fidelity when it comes to a more modern translation. Sometimes they try to do that. And, you know, how many footnotes do you have? How much do you try to explain additionally? How much do you try to just make the text stand on its own as a story?

Lauren: So many choices to make as a translator. I’m eternally grateful to people who do this and make it appear so effortless while doing so much work bringing all of this context together.

Gretchen: It’s really neat. I’m not gonna read this 1,000-page book five different times in five different translations, but being able to experience portions of those translations vicariously through other people talking about, “Oh, here’s what happened in this one, here’s what happened in this one,” it does let you do this interesting comparative textual study.

Lauren: I’ve been thinking about translation in practice a lot lately because having worked with P. M. Freestone on their Shadowscent books, “The Darkets Bloom” and “Crown of Smoke,” these books have gone into translation in a whole bunch of languages, mostly European languages to date – Spanish, German, French, Russian, and Polish. I’m very excited about the upcoming Hungarian translation which will the first outside of the Indo-European language. But these translations involve a couple of things that are really interesting in that, in these books, I worked on creating the Aramteskan language, and for this language to work across different languages, sometimes it gets technically transliterated, or you need to add a different type of plural. For example, Russian has a different alphabet to English and so you need to fit this language into the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

Gretchen: You’re not trying to pretend that Aramteskan is always written with the Latin alphabet. Even when the book itself is in Russian, you’re like, we’re gonna transliterate it into Cyrillic?

Lauren: No, translators have very much done what they think is most appropriate. I have a habit of buying these translations now and checking out what they’ve done because they’re not just translating from English into another language, they also have to translate this completely fictional language and this fictional world into that language as well. It’s one thing to maybe study in-depth Old English warrior culture or Japanese court culture and decide what to bring across, but with a fantasy world, there’s all kinds of choices you have to make as a translator as well.

Gretchen: Yeah, like what are you gonna do with the magic system? Or if you’ve invented all of these words for different scents or something, then they have to figure out some sort of equivalent of inventing those words for the other language.

Lauren: There’s a lot of scent vocabulary even in the English that P. M. Freestone has written in, so really taxing that part of the translator’s repertoire. One thing that’s been particularly interesting and that there’s been some discussion on how to manage is that in this world, both in the historical part of the world and the contemporary part of the world, the culture and the grammar allow for gender neutral third person like the English modern use of “they,” which Kirby Conrod gave a great interview about how that works in contemporary English. In fact, I did a little historical evolution of the pronoun system that fits with the story of the world where originally there was no gender distinction in the pronoun system, which fits with the old religious system of the world. And the religious system evolved younger gods that are all gendered, and the pronoun system evolved genders at the same time while still having that scope for gender neutral. Without spoiling too much, but a character that pops up in Book One and is much more a part of Book Two is gender fluid within the world. That works for current English because we have gender neutral singular they, but there are some languages like Czech or like Russian that the book’s being translated into where there isn’t that flexibility in the linguistic system. So, decisions have to be made about how that is negotiated in the translation.

Gretchen: Do you know what they did?

Lauren: I don’t know what they did for Russian yet, but I believe the solution in Czech is at various times this character is overtly identified using masculine and at other times using feminine – being much more flexible about the duality of their relationship with gender.

Gretchen: This reminds me of a thing that I heard Ada Palmer talk about at a conference panel with her book “Too Like the Lightning” and the sequels, which are set in this far future of English – well, far future and they’re written in English – in which singular they is used for everybody except when you’re writing in this faux-archaic style with “thous” and “thees” and “hes” and “shes.” It’s very marked at that point. Ada Palmer was talking about how this was translated into French where in modern English the progressive thing that people do is like, “Oh, we can use singular they. That’s very progressive.” In modern French, the progressive thing that people do is they make feminine versions of all of the professions.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: You have feminine versions of “professor” or “doctor” or these kinds of things to try and make the gender more visible. And so erase the gender in the French version wouldn’t have the same effect – where you’d end up using the default masculine or something in the French version – it wouldn’t have the same effect as using singular they all the time in the English version. There are modern French pronouns like “iel” that have been coined to solve this problem of using a gender neutral third person pronoun, but it wouldn’t work to use them in this particular case because the style is supposed to be faux-archaic. What the translator ended up doing was digging out this French pronoun “on,” which in the modern form “on” is used like “we” or like “one does this.” It’s related to like, “One does this.” There’s an older usage of “on” which is like a non-specific third person pronoun as well that – I speak French, but I didn’t know about this archaic form. And the translator went and looked for what other historic pronoun things could I do and ended up doing with “on” thing, which is a really interesting adaptation.

Lauren: The thing I find interesting is if you were – 50 years ago, you didn’t have the grammatical resources in English to use singular they for a specific person. It’s something that’s really only emerged in the last couple of decades. I think the translator has felt frustrated to not have – you know, you sometimes feel like you’ve got this road block because you don’t have resources in one language that you have in another and you have to innovate. I did have a colleague in Italian studies tell me that they read a whole novel once where the gender of one of the characters was deliberately written around and avoided in a way that was an incredibly artful, thoughtful translation. It is possible that you could maybe do this with this character in the Shadowscent books, but it would be such –

Gretchen: But you couldn’t do it with the whole world in the Terra Ignota books because all of the characters would have to have that.

Lauren: Yeah. And you could do that amount of heavy lifting at the cost of some other things, but when you’re doing an efficient translation for a commercial novel, you don’t have the resources to really max out your art and strategy in that way. It’s interesting that, you know, translation is a really resource-intensive activity even to just do a good translation, let alone an incredibly strategic and thoughtful translation.

Gretchen: Even translating one word, like that word at the beginning of Beowulf, involves thinking about, “Okay, what kind of relationship do I want this word to have to the rest of the text? What am I trying to set up here in relationship to the whole text? Where do I see this attention-getting word as going?” Like, what the text as a whole is doing, which is this interesting question. I should say, speaking of translation news, this is very hot off the presses, but I have received news that there are gonna be translations of Because Internet into Persian, Chinese, and Japanese. So, all – well, Persian is an Indo-European language, but it has a different writing system, and then two non-Indo-European languages. I don’t know anything else about the details yet.

Lauren: This is news that I didn’t even know. This is very exciting.

Gretchen: It’s very recent, yes. It’s not – I dunno. I will have official links when they exist. They won’t exist for, I dunno, probably a couple years. I dunno how long it’ll take them to do. I know nothing.

Gretchen: The surreal thing about translation means that you will see you work and not be able to read it. There’s something so amazing and magical about that, that words you have created are finding new audiences – you know, there’s a lot of trust in the translator in those contexts.

Gretchen: Yeah, and I don’t know if I’m gonna get to have any say in who they get to translate it and how much they know about the internet or things like that.

Lauren: Translating non-fiction is an entirely different process because you’re not translating an internal narrative world as much as you are potentially translating something that explains how this world that we live in right now exists, or how a set of historical realities existed. That also takes deftness and skill.

Gretchen: And you’re potentially trying to translate technical vocabulary between one language or another, which isn’t necessarily the same as, “Okay, we need to keep the characters’ names consistent. It’s like, “We need to use this word that has a technical meaning in its technical sense.” Speaking of non-fiction translation, I dunno if you’ve been following in translation news relatively recently, there’s been a lot of things going on with the Scots language Wikipedia.

Lauren: Yes, I did read about this. So, Scots language is a language in the same family as English. It has a lot of similarities with English but is considered its own “variety,” using that very deliberate linguist term where you don’t commit to just how much it’s a dialect or its mutual intelligibility with other varieties that its related to. And it has its own Wikipedia.

Gretchen: Scots is kind of like, as an English speaker, I’ve always been kind of jealous of people who speak Dutch or German or something because they can kind of understand each other a bit. Or Spanish and Portuguese and Italian because they can kind of approximate understanding each other to some extent even if they haven’t formally learned the languages. I’ve always been like, “Why doesn’t English have some closer neighbours?” But I hadn’t been thinking about Scots when I was thinking that. Scots is probably English’s closest neighbour but is still a distinct language and, especially, there are grammatical differences and there are a lot of political reasons as well why people consider it its own language. However, [laughs] the Scots language Wikipedia, which has all of these articles written in Scots, had apparently been being edited for the last seven years by an American teenager who didn’t know any Scots and was just looking up the English articles in a Scots-English dictionary word-by-word and just picking the first word of the translation and subbing that in for the Scots word.

Lauren: This has been such a difficult story to read because everyone throughout this process has acted in the best faith. This teenager wasn’t doing this for any reason other than a passion for sharing knowledge on Wikipedia and a passion for seeing the Scots Wikipedia grow but with a really uncritical approach to translation. You can see where translation really does require this understanding of vocabulary choice and style choice and how it can all go really, really wrong.

Gretchen: Yeah, it’s really painful because this person started when they were, like, 12, and we have all believed very foolish things about the world when we were 12. It’s just many of us didn’t write thousands of Wikipedia articles in a language that is just really not the way anybody who actually speaks this language actually writes because it’s cobbled together badly from a dictionary. It’s this very painful, “Oh, no! You thought you were helping.” And yet Wikipedia is used as the basis of a lot of machine translation, and language detection, various natural language processing tools, and so this has been potentially sabotaging the efforts to try to create other machine tools in Scots because they’ve all been in this weird dictionary-a-fied version of English.

Lauren: It’s been really heartening to see the Scots language community and the Scottish Wikipedia community come together to figure out a strategy for how to approach cleaning house – I guess it’s the biggest spring clean ever, right – how to approach this, like, thousands and thousands of articles with this very strange approach to translation.

Gretchen: It illuminates one of the issues with smaller language Wikipedias in general which is that they may only have a few active editors because to be a Wikipedia editor is to be a volunteer. It takes a long time to translate things or to write articles. If you’re a language like English, you can have tens of thousands of editors. But if you’re a language like Scots which has many fewer speakers, you may only have a dozen active editors of which maybe one of them is a well-meaning but very clueless American teenager.

Lauren: We’ve both done lots of Wikipedia editing. We have run LingWiki events to improve linguistics content on Wikipedia. It’s challenging enough to write these articles in one language that I am proficient in. I’m always in awe of people who choose to translate and support content in their second or third languages because it is a non-trivial task to translate really complicated information in a way that is really clear.

Gretchen: Translation is a technical task that is one of those things that looks at all of the different levels of language where you have some things at the individual word, or even sound, or if you’re trying to translate poetry and you wanna make it beautiful in a very aesthetic sense with the physical properties of language, all the way up to words and sentences and structure and these discourse-y particles like “Hwaet” at the beginning where you’re trying to picture a whole framing device for the structure of an entire tone of a narrative. Or if you’re trying to pick, “Okay, how are we going to treat technical vocabulary that maybe has been borrowed from English?” because its scientific vocabulary that was invented from English, how are you gonna treat that when it gets borrowed into Scots? Trying to figure out how to make these technical decisions is non-trivial. It’s this very interesting train wreck. It can go spectacularly right when you have this very clever decision for a dragon to put the world on blast, and it can also go spectacularly wrong when you just say, “Okay, I’m gonna look through a dictionary and then pick the first word I encounter.”

Lauren: One of the great things about appreciating a good translation is that language never takes a break. Culture continues to change, and we move further away from the era of Beowulf. We move into new cultural settings and new cultural expectations. It means that there is space for new translations that bring new approaches, or try something different, or aim for really capturing something about the language of the era it was created in, or set an old story in a radically new setting. Even when you find a really satisfying translation, you know there’s still possibilities for finding other interesting ways to engage with the text.

Gretchen: I think that’s a thing that’s exciting about both the translations of these thousand-year-old texts, whether Beowulf or Tale of Genji, where they go through lots of different authors who put their own spin on the translation. And also thinking of Wikipedia as a place for translation where you have multiple authors working together on the same shared text, and a bunch of different people – like Scots Wikipedia has been having these Wikipedia edit-a-thons to try to clean the place up. You have a whole bunch of contributors that are finding out about this need because of this story and coming in and working on the text together and contributing to the shared text. In many ways, even though each of these editions of the translations are published as their own book for book-length ones, it’s this very intimate relationship that you can have with a text when you’re trying to render it in a different language or in a different textual interpretation.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can access to 44 bonus episodes right now to listen to at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patron also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards as well as helping to keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include pangrams, honorifics, and linguistics with kids. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life, especially as it’s the anniversary month.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #episode 49 #transcripts #translation #translations #beowulf #tale of genji #maria dahvana headley #shadowscent #p m freestone #wikipedia #scots #japanese #old english #scots wikipedia

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naivesilver · 3 years ago

Note

top 5 adaptations of the Fairy from Pinocchio? (or maybe top 5 best AND 5 worst?)

I spent so long staring at this and wondering if I even KNEW five good Fairies, but it turns out I do, albeit mostly for asinine reasons. Anyway AHFAKKJKFHAHJKJA thank you <3

Ask me my top 5 anything

Obviously under the cut because I couldn't resist and did BOTH

The salt AKA the worst of the worst first:

1) Piccolino No Bouken

Surprised? I suppose most would have expected me to put the Disney Fairy first, and I did, too, for a while, but as I was sitting in my car pondering this ranking I realized I was SEETHING with rage about this one, so I had to rearrange things a bit. This, guys, is where my Fairy hate begins - not the book, not the Mouse's interference. This woman.

I hate her. I hate her SO MUCH, for all that I love this adaptation more than most things in the world, and that the choices made about her characterization were a huge inspiration for me. Not only does she not send Pinocchio to school, instead teaching him on her own, she is the only one to actively keep Pinocchio from his father - indeed, she makes the choice for them, saying to Geppetto's face that it would be best for the boy to be taught something before he goes back home. Who the hell are you to make this call, uh? You have known him for a day at most! You left him hanging from a fucking tree all night! I wouldn't trust you with a bloody lapdog, nevermind a child!

Also she lets Pinocchio believe she's dead UNTIL THE VERY END. She turns into a bird while he cries at her tomb. Are we fucking serious now? Leave him alone.

(Yes, this is elementary school me howling for revenge. I've been mad about this longer than reason would let me. Sue me.)

2) Disney's Pinocchio

Bane of my existence. I don't know if anyone remembers that pic of me at the Pinocchio theme park I posted a while ago, but basically in that moment they were putting up a little show to tell children a little bit of the OG story, and they asked the audience if they knew what color the Fairy's hair was - a few said blonde, and I, being on stage next to her, distinctly heard her mutter "dammit, Disney". I've been living with that mantra since then.

Nobody asked you to make that puppet sentient, ma'am. He doesn't owe you shit. Aside from that, just like Jiminy Cricket, she ruined her character in a good two thirds of future adaptation. And while we're speaking of Jiminy, WHY did she think it would be a good idea to entrust a little boy to a slime ball such as him? He's too horny to have an ounce of sense. Conscience, my ass.

Basically...begone, asshole.

3) Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night

This film is so horrible, the Fairy had no chance to be decent at all. A cheap copy of the Disney one, with the addendum that she turns MULTIPLE toys into living beings while holding them responsible for whatever they do after. Basically Victor Frankenstein, but make it a poorly dressed woman from a direct-to-TV movie that shouldn't have existed at all.

-100/10, at least you're pretty, but by God, SHUT UP.

4) Once Upon a Time

Honest to God if she doesn't keep her filthy hands off my faves she's gonna get a slap across the face so strong her Wish Realm self ought to feel it sting. I am not exaggerating.

Seven seasons in, she hasn't done ANYTHING useful that I can remember. She's not even good at her own fucking job! Not only that, she's traumatized and guilt-tripped a good chunk of the population of Storybrooke, including first and foremost my beloved son August. The Pavlovian reaction I had every time she appeared on screen can't be described in coherent words, only in eagle screeches.

She's wrong. On principle, she's wrong. Let's move on.

5) Luigi Comencini's Le Avventure di Pinocchio

Doesn't rank higher only because she's played by Gina Lollobrigida (my beloved). She's book accurate, which means she'd be annoying as fuck as it is, but what little they added only makes her worse.

She has the gall to tell Pinocchio she'd like to see him happier. Like, apart from the fact that the ghost of his father's deceased wife isn't exactly the most reassuring person to hear it from...Said father has been swallowed by a giant fish. You told that boy he's only going to see his father if he studies hard. You keep turning him into a puppet anytime he misbehaves. What did you expect, that he would do the Macarena every time he entered your house? I am honestly too shocked to say any more. What the fuck.

Okay, I've been enraged enough for a single night. Let's move onto brighter shores!

1) Enzo D'Alò's Pinocchio

Enzo D'Alò knows what the fuck is UP!!! The only one with the courage to let the Fairy be a weird little girl - not only for a short time, but up until the end of the movie! That takes guts! Balls of steel!

I've said before that this movie has nothing memorable to it, and it's true, but also...Pinocchio wanted a sister so bad, and the movie gave him one. And they even explained the plot hole of the medallion with Pinocchio's face in it! That's twice as good as the fact that they cut out the most awful parts of her story, which is already delightful.

Thank you, Mr D'Alò. You have my trust until the end of days.

2) The Adventures of Buratino

Speaking of weird girls, this one is officially balls to the walls enough to gain my respect. She's bothersome to Pinocchio, but she's bothersome to everyone and everything, so I'll let it pass. Her role is exclusively to appear out of nowhere and do batshit insane stuff for no good reason at all. A star.

Plus, other than having an handwashing obsession that I've felt very keenly in the past year and a half, she also has a boyfriend - her and Pierrot are the original girlboss and malewife, I'm not accepting any criticism on the matter.

(Fun fact: when I was a young kid I once dreamt that the Piccolino No Bouken Fairy was dating a big, buff and blonde farmhand. He wooed her by gifting Pinocchio a dog. Apparently I've always been very interested in Fairies getting a love life and staying the fuck away from my specialest little boy.)

3) Pinocchio miniseries

"Serena, but you said you were disappointed in this adaptation so many times!" True. But consider: I am also very, very queer, and Violante Placido being motherly and wearing wispy dresses stirred SOMETHING in 11yo me that I can't very well ignore.

In hindsight, she and the Cricket probably had something going on behind the scenes, which is a shame. Miss Fairy, I swear, you could do better than Luciana Littizzetto in an ill-fitting green suit. She's gonna break your heart and lose your puppet charge in a crowd of little idiots. Do me instead.

4) Pinocchio Vampire Slayer

This woman kills monsters - and she's damn good at it! Honestly, so badass, and such a good mother figure too, even in trying times. I don't want to spoil the comic much to those who haven't read it, but she and Cherry are the highlight of the first volume and I am very fond of them. A+.

5) Matteo Garrone's Pinocchio

This one's book accurate, too, but Garrone did something with her that almost burst in tears in a crowded theater. She's awful, and irritating, but she's...she's so human, too. I can't rage against a Fairy that's so impossibly human even during the smallest of scenes. It breaks me over and over again.

Look at her SMILING, for pity's sake, am I supposed to think there's some warmth in the dead lady? Fuck you, Matteo, what did you do to me? I am an honored Fairy hater. You're going to ruin my reputation if you keep this up.

#ask meme #bewilderemoth #pinocchio #the tag needed some more bullshit from yours truly didn't it

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legends-live-in-memories · 4 years ago

Text

I Have Too Many Opinions. ep. 1

lmao. i got encouragement to post my opinions on fandom things and now i want to make a miniseries doing just that. so here i am. doing just that.

im putting it under the cut cuz this was 4 whole pages including the disclaimer. yes i put a disclaimer and i explain why.

Anyways, here is the first piece in what inevitably will become fandom info dump, this time on thomas astruc’s writing on miraculous ladybug. but only some of my opinions cuz we would be here all day otherwise.

So… a disclaimer before I begin…

I do not hate Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Chat Noir (yes i'm using their government name). I am quite a fan of the show actually despite its faults. I am also older than the intended audience but was obviously younger when the show first aired which is how my interest was piqued (the fact that its been 6 years and only 3 seasons says more about the show than me being a fan for that amount of time but also i never want to rush content creators cuz they're doing their best) and due to my age, there will be inherent bias in my approach of what i'm about to say as there is in EVERY opinion. The fact that it is an opinion should imply the presence of bias but most people tend to lack the critical thinking skills required to draw that conclusion ANYWAYS…

If I did hate the show I would not have this blog nor would I be even writing this because i tend to not give more than 2 seconds of thought to things i actively dislike (some of yall should give this a try) and i'm allowed to like things that are designed for an audience that i was originally a part of but grew out of. (I don't suddenly stop liking things because I'm older despite what many younger fans seem to believe about older audiences. I also don't need to be ‘allowed’ to do anything cuz i wasn't asking for permission anyways.)

This will not be character bashing, astruc bashing nor fandom bashing cuz, again, that would imply i hate any of those elements and if i did, i would not dedicate brainpower to them. Analyses and criticisms of media are fun and engaging and required if you wish to produce good enjoyable content. Now most of this should be already assumed and self-explanatory but people on the internet like to play morality roulette roll dice on purity culture and I rather have documentation that I am in fact not bullying fictional 14 year olds or a grown man. But alas, people get trigger happy whenever someone has less than 1000000% positive opinions on something they like and will throw out words they can't define (gaslight, baiting, toxic, problematic, gatekeep etc) in an attempt to defend their blind devotion,

which is not needed, if you like something you never have to defend it, even if i don't like it. If you respond to anything I post saying you disagree with me, I will not argue with you. I won't debate back and forth and try to convince you that the things you like are wrong. Unless you are being absolutely tone deaf to what i'm saying, you wont get a negative reaction from me. So don't try to fish for a fight. Please. I got metaphorical hands for days and I'm mean, you don't want me hurting your feelings on the internet. Do yourself the favour. Difference of opinion is how we get diversification in media and is inherently a good thing. Now that that's out of the way, please don't ever let me have to say that again. I beg.

Now onto the fun stuff

I didn't know what I wanted as a first topic so my trusty internet friend @moonlitceleste suggested astruc’s writing…

AND BOI do i got some opinions on ole tommy boi. Again I don't hate the dude. In fact, he has worked on a few shows that had defined my childhood, including but not limited to W.I.T.C.H. (all eps available on youtube for those interested, 2 seasons, general fun time all around).

So I don't think he’s scum of the earth but I do think his approach to writing mlb specifically has more misses than hits.

The first big miss is that he has no idea how to write 14 year old girls. At all. Almost every girl he has ever written feels like some terrible archetype built entirely for marketability and childish projection and pubescent self-insert (kind of). He has never been a 14 year old girl. I have. In fact when the show first aired, I WAS around the (assumed) age of the mlb characters. The behaviour he passes off as quirky or awkward or just the character’s genuine personality tend to perpetuate harmful stereotypes of teen girls found in the media and are never actually addressed as harmful. they just get swept under the rug. Marinette’s exuberant collage of teen heart throb model boi Adrien Agreste and her very painful almost fan worship she has of him (which flip flops like a paper sandal in the rain) being portrayed as a cute school girl crush uwu, Chloe being the y7 Regina George, Alya being the token best friend of colour with her ‘sassy’ personality (i want y'all to imagine me eyerolling so hard i bust a vessel in my eye), Kagami being the very damaging Perfect Asian Child stereotype. And before y'all get on your dusty soap box and defend going on about “BUT IT'S FOR CHILDREN”,,,, know this.

i don’t give a solid fuck.

Not one.

Children arent stupid. Children are always going to remember the richy bitchy blonde who bullies the art kid, and the big kid, and the shy kid, and the non white kids, and was only nice to her equally rich white friend who she probably had a crush on or was only ever civil to her equally white lapdog. They're going to remember the half asian girl who was never allowed to actually be asian or the only black girl who existed solely as a soundboard for enabling bad habits or chastising the main character for the same habits she enables in the first place (boi aint THAT a topic for later). Like do i really need to explain that alya chastising marinette for taking max’s spot in gamer just to play with adrien rings absolutely hollow when she actively encourages her to sabotage the contest she’s in just so Kagami doesn't win?? Like I don't have to explain that right?? Again kids arent stupid and its quite something that Mari gets chastised for proving herself the best video game player regardless of her intentions just cuz it comes at the expense of max’s feelings/ego but is actively encouraged to sabotage not only kagami but herself by extension cuz kagami is ‘competition.’ Adrien is not a trophy to be won. And no I don't expect 14 yrs old to be perfect and to always make good decisions but these decisions are never addressed as being bad decisions. they get swept under the rug cuz those decisions were necessary for the ‘plot’ but astruc can barely keep characterization consistent and his characters suffer for it and it's the same children you preach are watching it that suffer as well. Cuz guess what? I KNOW 14 yr olds aren't like that cuz i've been there done that (this is the last time i'm saying that i promise) so I know astruc is just metaphorically throwing darts to figure out who says and does what without consideration for pre established personalities to drive the stalemate plot along. The same kids you say are watching this don't know that that's not how preteens work and will absorb and internalize those dynamics like baking soda and vinegar. Cata-fucking-strophically.

And I haven't even gotten to the boys yet. Which honestly doesn't require much explanation anyways cuz they suffer the same fate as the girls. Tired archetypes with nothing to give them life. Nino falls into Adrien’s person of colour token best friend who dates the female lead’s person of colour token best friend so they can have cute double dates uwu. Except the plot goes nowhere and we have no inclination of romantic development beyond moments that only act to actively convince me to anti ship the lovesquare (i don't want to do that so i self indulge in fanon that actually cares about the characters and plot. may i interest you in True Sight on AO3?). Max is the residential nerd but it doesn't matter (cuz he and everyone are dumbed down for the sake of ‘plot’), kim is the sports jock (which interestingly subverts the asian comedic relief stereotype but only barely) and luka is cute older guy ™ that wears black nail polish and is in a band. The point of all this is to say there is no depth in the characters. It's especially blatantly obvious with the characters astruc doesn't like (chloe). Again, it being a show for kids is not an excuse to be absolved of putting effort into the characters you make.

This is one of the biggest misses astruc has. I haven't even gone into all the nuances of this particular miss. And i havent gone into how that works against him in the plot either. Mostly because the plot itself hasn't gone anywhere and partially because I wanted to go into the plot (or lack thereof) separately as its own miss.

AND BOI is it a miss.

SO home boy astruc wanted to reap the benefits of a serial show with ‘engaging’ plot without putting in any of the work to make a linear storyline and relying on the episodic format for, again, marketability. You can't have the best of both worlds, you are not Avatar: The Last Airbender. Which btw has a lot less episodes and a desired end goal that didn't involve top dollar. Legend of Korra did but that's not the point and it had its failings with that too. I challenge you, tell me how many episodes actually contribute towards a plot point or introduce new thematic elements to the show? Can you name them? I can and I'm going to include the plot points that moved the story in some direction if only temporarily. Yes only temporarily for some of these and i will explain later. (if you're in the server you already saw this list *wink*)

25/26. Origins- self explanatory, the beginning of the story,

24. Volpina- introduction of the grimoire and Master Fu (kind of) and no, Lila is not a plot point,

28. The Collector- proper introduction of Master Fu,

37. Sapotis- introduction of Rena Rouge,

41. Syren- introduction of new aquatic power ups,

44. Anansi- introduction of Carapace,

47. Frozer- introduction of new ice power ups,

48/49. Style Queen- introduction of Queen Bee,

51/52. Heroes’ Day- introduction of Mayura and mass akumatization,

66. Startrain- introduction of Pegasus,

67. Kwami Buster- Marinette wears multiple miraculouses,

68. Feast- backstory as to how the miraculouses were lost,

69. Ikari Gozen- introduction of Ryuko,

70. Timetagger- introduction of Bunnyx,

71. Party Crasher- introduction of Roi Singe and Viperion,

73. Chat Blanc- alternate timeline that essentially means nothing but got a reaction out of fans anyways (myself included)

77/78. Love Eater/Battle of Miraculous- Marinette becomes guardian and other heroes lose their miraculous,

New York Special- other heroes exist and there is an American miraculous box,

That's 21 episodes. 21 out of a heaping 78 plus 2 specials. Everything else was just your typical akuma of the day episode and everything that happened outside that had no lasting consequences on the plot thanks to the miraculous status quo. Was it entertaining to watch Lila stir the plot of the class dynamic? Hell yeah. Too bad it meant nothing by the end of the episode cuz we were struck with miraculous status quo. She literally doesn't appear again until Heroes Day. that is from episodes 25 all the way to 51, she means nothing and yet she is treated with the severity of a b-villain/rival thing. She means nothing by the end of Volpina if I'm being honest. She is only relevant for 20 mins of episode time she’s in then it's back to magic status quo that undoes any shift in dynamics and relationships. It's like Spongebob who can't get his driver’s license. The worst part is I actually like Lila and I wish the story treated her with the seriousness we as an audience are expected to treat her with. Despite being painfully inconsequential by the end of each of the 3?? 4?? episodes she’s in, it's entertaining to watch a character create drama just because.

Too bad it means nothing.

Astruc is constantly building up suspense to something ‘important’ only for it to not deliver and fans are constantly having the rug pulled out from under us. Oblivio teased us with a reveal only that gets undone cuz memory akuma. Chat Blanc teased us with romantic development but that gets undone cuz time travel bullshit. Feast introduced more miraculous lore and the history of the guardians but that means nothing by the next episode or ever (i'm not including any reference to the season 4 trailer cuz i've been around the block a few times and im familiar with this lil dancy dance). Heroes Day teased us with a possible future team of heroes but that gets undone in Battle of Miraculous cuz ????? why?? (here's why; astruc was having a jolly ole time letting us know how irredeemable Chloe is at the expense of shooting his own stagnant plot in the foot. Again, discussion for later.)

Too bad anything that slightly swerves off course from the akuma of the day gets undone or ignored. Too bad nothing has any lasting consequence. I mean, if anything did, the episodes would have had a consistent order and release schedule so im not scrambling to watch the leaked ep in Portuguese or something while the french dub is two episodes behind while the english version hasnt even been dubbed. I really wonder how he plans to conclude the show when he’s so afraid to step out of the corner he painted himself in.

Again, not going into nuances. If you want you can ask for more specifics (i doubt anyone would) but this is really just a slightly detailed general overview of my opinions on astruc’s writing.

I was going to include another miss in his approach to this show but imma save that for another time.

How’s that for a ‘first’ post?

#mlb #opinions my guy opinions #i dont wanna tag this as salt #but mlb criticisms and analyses #IHTMO #the hashtag for this series #thomas astruc #miraculous fandom #miraculous ladybug #miraculous: tales of ladybug and cat noir #yes the government name again #come get yall juice #miraculous

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brodingles · 4 years ago

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Summary of Art 2020

It’s a little early, but here we go!

2020 was a…year, to say the least about it. Throughout that, however, I kept on trucking and making various art pieces! I’ll put the full pieces and a brief reflection below as we walk down memory lane of the last 365! Explanations and reflections under the cut

January

The year opened up with fanfiction readings from 2003 by my good friend Kristen Trawczynski! Who knew that Kingdom Hearts fanfiction’s greatest villain would be Lucifer himself? I just had to put her glorious early 2000s description of him to paper. Thank you, dearest Crimes, for this early year blessing.

February

I really got the itch to paint this month! I chose to use my character Junior from Discord Murder Party as the subject. This image is actually a companion piece to an image of the man while he was younger. I even made a speedpaint video talking about my process in creating the character! It was a Time to be Junior No-Last-Name.

The speedpaint in question

March

Technically this is cheating, I drew this earlier in the year, but I didn’t finish it for the show until March. This was for Vincent’s Breakdown in the Season 3 Midseason Finale of DMP. We had been planning it for at least a year, and it hit the audience hard. This is probably one of my favourite pieces I’ve done for Internet Remix. It’s just my job to bully Vincent Marshall Reid.

April

I didn’t do a lot of finished work this month. I’d say it was a bit of a lazy time for me. I did do a short series of couple-comics of my characters Emilio and Geon, but not much else!

May

This was….also for Vincent’s Breakdown? The timeline got really confused here. I drew this one closer to the actual live performance, and in order to get it done I had to create an actual map of the fictional Lounge we’d been using for three seasons. There was a decent amount of time blocking out characters and figuring out architecture, but in the end we got our first look at a place that only existed via description before this! Neat!

June

This is basically plagiarism, but the point is I actually spent this month doing a lot of jokes and memes in my excitement to start the miniseries Call of Cthulhu: Path of Perdition. We joked a lot about it really just being Sybil Cordova’s eldritch dating sim, even though it didn’t turn out that way in the end! Kiss Kiss Fall Insane!

July

Path of Perdition finally began airing, and each week I would make a piece of promo art for the next episode! The 1920s Disaster Gang went to jail! For crimes they don’t remember committing! Mystery! Intrigue! This isn’t exactly my favourite of the promos (Some characters are supremely off model and let’s just ignore the numbers on the side, shall we?), but it’s one that cause3d a lil bit of buzz!

August

This image is cursed and my buddy atwas now has it framed in their house. I’m not kidding. With Path of Perdition ending, I took a while to make more jokes and memes, and through a series of events I ended up spending hours with My Heart Will Go On on loop and drawing characters like one of my French girls.

September

You get no context. You can buy this on Redbubble (without the copywritten logo, of course.)

October

DMP was just full of tragedy this year! In October we bid a permanent goodbye to Yugo Hernandez. I haven’t previously mentioned this, but actually around this time my arms became inflamed and I couldn’t really draw anymore. However, I was the perfect candidate to do a Dramatic Bust, and begged to do this one. I like to think the emotion gets across.

November

My ability to draw was shot entirely this month. I did a series of sketches for the DMP Alternate Universe “Side B”. I was still happy with these sketches, and actually have a few! This one is just the most dynamic.

December

It’s the 9th as of writing this, and I only have so much I can share, due to both being unable to work and NDA’s. I took some Me Time and drew the CoC cast (Now Masks of Nyarlathotep instead of Path of Perdition——the show continues!!). My arms have officially become shot entirely, so this and one other thing may be all I do for the rest of this year.

Overall it was a generally fruitful year. The deterioration of my arms in the later month is very saddening. Even now I can’t really type what I want to, and this may be the last you hear of me until some sort of solution is reached. Looking back, at least I can say I did something this year.

#2020 summary of art #summary of art #summary of art 2020 #art #illustration #doods

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theradioghost · 5 years ago

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I don't know if you're still doing podcast recs, but if you are, I really like dramas, horror, sci-fi, honestly anything that gives you the feels (especially if it has lgbtq+ rep). I am not much of a comedy person though unfortunately. The only podcast I finished was tma and I really loved it.

The recommendations are always on tap here, whenever my askbox is open! You might wanna check out:

Archive 81, for a found-footage horror about mysterious archives of tapes full of encounters with otherworldly horror, dark rituals, cults, and a long-suffering archivist with the same name as the show creator who plays him, which despite all that could not possibly be more different from TMA and yet easily matches it as one of the best horror stories I have ever enjoyed. The sound design on this show is basically unparalleled – where TMA has fairly minimalist sound design, A81 goes all out. Quite a few lgbtqa+ folk also.

I Am In Eskew, for a surreal, Lynchian horror about the city of Eskew, where it’s always raining and the streets are never the same twice, as narrated by a man who is trapped there and the woman hired to find him. Take the most viscerally disturbing episodes of TMA as a baseline for how intense this show is, then imagine the Spiral built a city and invited all the other fears over for a party. Also right up there as one of my favorite horror things ever, and recently ended, so you can listen to the whole thing right now.

Within The Wires, for a found-footage scifi dystopia, telling stories from an alternate-history world. Three of the four seasons focus on lgbtqa+ leads, and the first season, a set of instructional meditation tapes provided to a prisoner in a shadowy government institution, is still some of my absolute favorite creative use of medium and framing device ever.

Kane and Feels, for a surreal noir-flavored urban fantasy/horror hybrid, about a magically-inclined academic (and sarcastic little bastard man) named Lucifer Kane and his demon-punching partner with a heart of gold, Brutus Feels. They share a flat in London, they bicker like an old married couple, and they fight supernatural evil. This show WILL confuse the hell out of you and you will enjoy every second of it.

Alice Isn’t Dead, for a weird Americana horror story about a long-distance truck driver, criss-crossing the US in search of her missing wife. Along the way she discovers that both of them have been drawn into a dangerous secret war that seethes in the empty and abandoned expanses of America, and that inhuman hunters have begun to follow her. Also finished! And as the title kind of gives away, the lesbians do not die!

Janus Descending, for a sci-fi horror miniseries about two scientists sent to survey the remains of a dead alien civilization on a distant planet, only to learn all too well why the original inhabitants have disappeared. You hear one character’s story in chronological order and the other in reverse, with their perspectives alternating, which is done in an incredibly clever way so that even technically knowing what will happen it still holds you in suspense right to the end. Also, it made me cry, a lot.

SAYER, for a sci-fi horror with a touch of dark comedy, and probably the single best use of the “evil AI” trope I have ever seen. Tells the story of employees of tech corporation Aerolith Dynamics living on Earth’s artificial second moon, Typhon, in the form of messages from their AI overseer SAYER. The first season is great, the second season is okay, and the third and fourth seasons are fucking amazing.

Tides, for a really interesting sci-fi about a lone biologist trapped on an alien world shaped by deadly tidal forces. It’s different from just about any other sci-fi I know, focusing more on the main character’s interactions with and observations of this strange new world, where she’s very aware that she is the alien invader. (Also I don’t think any of the characters are straight.)

Station to Station, for a thrilling sci-fi mystery where a group of scientists and spies on a research ship (the ocean kind) discover that the time-warping anomaly they’re studying might be causing people to vanish from existence. Corporate espionage and high-stakes heartbreak abound. (And once again I’m not sure anyone is straight.)

The Strange Case of Starship Iris, for Being Gay And Doing Crime IN SPACE! Or, decades after a war with an alien species leaves humanity decimated and under the control of totalitarian leaders, the lone survivor of a research mission joins up with a ragtag crew of rebels and smugglers to figure out why the very government she worked for tried to kill her, and to stop them from inciting a second war. 100% lgbtqa+ found family in space heist action and it’s glorious in every way.

Unwell, for the horror-ish Midwestern gothic story of a young woman who returns to her hometown to help her estranged mother after an injury, and discovers that there is something just a little bit wrong, not just with her mother, but with her mother’s house, and with the whole town. Subtle and creepy. The protagonist is a biracial lesbian, one of the other major characters is nonbinary, the cast in general is super diverse.

The Blood Crow Stories, for an lgbtqa+ focused horror anthology! The four seasons so far have been the stories of an ancient evil stalking the passengers of a WWI-era utopian cruise ship, a dark Western mystery about a group of allies trying to stop the mysterious killer known only as the Savior, a 911 operator in a cyberpunk dystopia who starts getting terrifying phone calls from demons, and strange and deadly goings-on at a film studio in the golden age of Hollywood. Everyone is Very Gay and anyone can die, especially in season 1.

The Tower, for a melancholy experimental miniseries about a young woman who decides she’s going to climb the mysterious Tower, from which no one has ever returned. Quite short and very, very good.

Palimpsest, for a creepy, heartbreakingly sad and yet incredibly beautiful anthology series. Season one is the story of a woman who suspects her new home is haunted, season two is a turn-of-the-century urban fantasy about a girl who falls in love with the imprisoned fae princess she’s been hired to care for, and season three is about a WWII codebreaker who begins seeing ghosts on the streets of London during the Blitz.

Mabel, for a part-horror, part-love story, the kind of faerie tale where you feel obliged to spell it with an E because these are the kind of faeries that are utterly inhuman, and beautiful, and dangerous. Anna, the new caretaker for an elderly woman, leaves messages for her client’s mysteriously absent granddaughter Mabel. An old house in Ireland has a life and desires of its own, few of them friendly. Two women fall in love and set out for vengeance against the King Under The Hill. Creepy, strange, and gorgeously poetic.

Ars Paradoxica, for a sci-fi time travel Cold War espionage thriller. Physicist Dr. Sally Grissom accidentally invents time travel, landing herself – and her invention – in the middle of a classified government experiment during WWII. As the course of history utterly changes around them, she and what friends she can find in this new time must struggle with the ethics of what they’ve done, and the choices they’ll have to make. An aroace protagonist, Black secret agents, time-traveling Latina assassins, Jewish lesbian mathematicians, two men of color whose love changes the course of time itself, this show says a big fuck you to the idea that there’s anything hard about having a diverse cast in a period piece and it will break your heart, multiple times. Also finished!

The Far Meridian, for a genre-bending, poetic, at-times-heartwarming-at-times-heartbreaking story about an agoraphobic woman named Peri who decides to begin a search for her long-missing brother Ace after the lighthouse in which she lives begins mysteriously transporting to different places every day. I can never forget an early review that described this show as “the audio equivalent of a Van Gogh painting.” Suffice to say it is beautiful, and fantastically written and put together.

What’s the Frequency?, for a Surrealist noir horror mystery set in mid-20th-century LA. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure I can really explain what goes on in this show, but it features a detective named Walter “Troubles” Mix and his partner Whitney searching for a missing writer. Meanwhile, the only thing that seems to be playing on the radio is that writer’s show Love, Honor, and Decay, which also seems to be driving people to murder. Fantastically weird, deliciously creepy.

Directive, for a short sci-fi miniseries about a man hired to spend a very, very long trip through space alone, which doesn’t seem all that sad until suddenly it hits you with Every Feel You’ve Ever Had, seriously I don’t want to spoil it so I won’t say anything more but listen to this and then never feel the same way about Tuesdays again.

Wolf 359, for honestly one of the best podcasts out there, containing all of the drama and feels, seriously this show ended over two years ago and I still cry literal tears thinking about it sometimes. It has definite comedic leanings, especially in the first season which reads a bit more like a wacky office comedy set in space, but it takes a sharp turn towards high stakes, action, and feelings and that roller coaster never stops. Take four clashing personalities alone on a constantly-malfunctioning space station eight light years from earth, add some mysterious transmissions from the depths of space, toss in some seriously Jonah-Magnus-level manipulative evil bosses, and get ready to cry.

or, may I suggest Midnight Radio? It’s a lesbian-romance-slash-ghost-story completed miniseries about a late-night 1950s radio host in a small town who begins receiving mysterious letters from one of her listeners, and I have been assured by many people and occasionally their all-caps tweets that it provides ample Feelings! (also I wrote it.)

#holy fuck when did this answer get that long?#anyway I uh. hope at least one of these sounds good to you!#podcast recs #bobbie recommends things #Anonymous #asks #my posts

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aaronmaurer · 4 years ago

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TV I Liked in 2020

Every year I reflect on the pop culture I enjoyed and put it in some sort of order.

Was there ever a year more unpredictably tailor-made for peak TV than 2020? Lockdowns/quarantines/stay-at-home orders meant a lot more time at home and the occasion to check out new and old favorites. (I recognize that if you’re lucky enough to have kids or roommates or a S.O., your amount of actual downtime may have been wildly different). While the pandemic resulted in production delays and truncated seasons for many shows, the continued streaming-era trends of limited series and 8-13 episode seasons mean that a lot of great and satisfying storytelling still made its way to the screen. As always, I in no way lay any claims to “best-ness” or completeness – this is just a list of the shows that brought me the most joy and escapism in a tough year and therefore might be worth putting on your radar.

10 Favorites

10. The Right Stuff: Season 1 (Disney+)

As a space program enthusiast, even I had to wonder, does the world really need another retelling of NASA’s early days? Especially since Tom Wolfe’s book has already been adapted as the riveting and iconoclastic Philip Kaufman film of the same name? While some may disagree, I find that this Disney+ series does justify its existence by focusing more on the relationships of the astronauts and their personal lives than the technical science (which may be partially attributable to budget limitations?). The series is kind of like Mad Men but with NASA instead of advertising (and real people, of course), so if that sounds intriguing, I encourage you to give it a whirl.

9. Fargo: Season 4 (FX)

As a big fan of Noah Hawley’s Coen Brothers pastiche/crime anthology series, I was somewhat let down by this latest season. Drawing its influence primarily from the likes of gangster drama Miller’s Crossing – one of the Coens’ least comedic/idiosyncratic efforts – this season is more straightforward than its predecessors and includes a lot of characters and plot-threads that never quite cohere. That said, it is still amongst the year’s most ambitious television with another stacked cast, and the (more-or-less) standalone episode “East/West” is enough to make the season worthwhile.

8. The Last Dance (ESPN)

Ostensibly a 10-episode documentary about the 1990s Chicago Bulls’ sixth and final NBA Championship run, The Last Dance actually broadens that scope to survey the entire history of Michael Jordan and coach Phil Jackson’s careers with the team. Cleverly structured with twin narratives that chart that final season as well as an earlier timeframe, each episode also shifts the spotlight to a different person, which provides focus and variety throughout the series. And frankly, it’s also just an incredible ride to relive the Jordan era and bask in his immeasurable talent and charisma – while also getting a snapshot of his outsized ego and vices (though he had sign-off on everything, so it’s not exactly a warts-and-all telling).

7. The Queen’s Gambit (Netflix)

This miniseries adaptation of the Walter Tevis coming-of-age novel about a chess prodigy and her various addictions is compulsively watchable and avoids the bloat of many other streaming series (both in running time and number of episodes). The 1960s production design is stunning and the performances, including Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead role, are convincing and compelling.

6. The Great: Season 1 (hulu)

Much like his screenplay for The Favourite, Tony McNamara’s series about Catherine the Great rewrites history with a thoroughly modern and irreverent sensibility (see also: Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette). Elle Fanning brings a winning charm and strength to the title role and Nicholas Hoult is riotously entertaining as her absurdly clueless and ribald husband, Emperor Peter III. Its 10-episodes occasionally tilt into repetitiveness, but when the ride is this fun, why complain? Huzzah!

5. Dispatches From Elsewhere (AMC)

A limited (but possibly anthology-to-be?) series from creator/writer/director/actor Jason Segal, Dispatches From Elsewhere is a beautiful and creative affirmation of life and celebration of humanity. The first 9 episodes form a fulfilling and complete arc, while the tenth branches into fourth wall-breaking meta territory, which may be a bridge too far for some (but is certainly ambitious if nothing else). Either way, it’s a movingly realized portrait of honesty, vulnerability and empathy, and I highly recommend visiting whenever it inevitably makes its way to Netflix, or elsewhere…

4. What We Do in the Shadows: Season 2 (FX)

The second season of WWDITS is more self-assured and expansive than the first, extending a premise I loved from its antecedent film – but was skeptical could be sustained – to new and reinvigorated (after)life. Each episode packs plenty of laughs, but for my money, there is no better encapsulation of the series’ potential and Matt Berry’s comic genius than “On The Run,” which guest-stars Mark Hamill and features Laszlo’s alter ego Jackie Daytona, regular human bartender.

3. Ted Lasso: Season 1 (AppleTV+)

Much more than your average fish-out-of-water comedy, Jason Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso is a brilliant tribute to humaneness, decency, emotional intelligence and good coaching – not just on the field. The fact that its backdrop is English Premier League Soccer is just gravy (even if that’s not necessarily represented 100% proficiently). A true surprise and gem of the year.

2. Mrs. America (hulu)

This FX miniseries explores the women’s liberation movement and fight for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and its opposition by conservative women including Phyllis Schlafly. One of the most ingenious aspects of the series is centering each episode on a different character, which rotates the point of view and helps things from getting same-y. With a slate of directors including Ryan Bowden and Anna Fleck (Half-Nelson, Sugar, Captain Marvel) and an A-List cast including Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, Uzo Aduba, Sarah Paulson, Margo Martindale, Tracey Ulman and Elizabeth Banks, its quality is right up there with anything on the big screen. And its message remains (sadly) relevant as ever in our current era.

1. The Good Place: Season 4 (NBC)

It was tempting to omit The Good Place this year or shunt it to a side category since only the final 4 episodes aired in 2020, but that would have been disingenuous. This show is one of my all-time favorites and it ended perfectly. The series finale is a representative mix of absurdist humor and tear-jerking emotion, built on themes of morality, self-improvement, community and humanity. (And this last run of eps also includes a pretty fantastic Timothy Olyphant/Justified quasi-crossover.) Now that the entire series is available to stream on Netflix (or purchase in a nice Blu-ray set), it’s a perfect time to revisit the Good Place, or check it out for the first time if you’ve never had the pleasure.

5 of the Best Things I Caught Up With

Anne With An E (Netflix/CBC)

Another example of classic literature I had no prior knowledge of (see also Little Women and Emma), this Netflix/CBC adaptation of Anne of Green Gables was strongly recommended by several friends so I finally gave it a shot. While this is apparently slightly more grown-up than the source material, it’s not overly grimdark or self-serious but rather humane and heartfelt, expanding the story’s scope to include Black and First Nations peoples in early 1800s Canada, among other identities and themes. It has sadly been canceled, but the three seasons that exist are heart-warming and life-affirming storytelling. Fingers crossed that someday we’ll be gifted with a follow-up movie or two to tie up some of the dangling threads.

Better Call Saul (AMC)

I liked Breaking Bad, but I didn’t have much interest in an extended “Breaking Bad Universe,” as much as I appreciate star Bob Odenkirk’s multitalents. Multiple recommendations and lockdown finally provided me the opportunity to catch up on this prequel series and I’m glad I did. Just as expertly plotted and acted as its predecessor, the series follows Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman on his own journey to disrepute but really makes it hard not to root for his redemption (even as you know that’s not where this story ends).

Joe Pera Talks With You (Adult Swim)

It’s hard to really describe the deadpan and oddly soothing humor of comedian Joe Pera whose persona, in the series at least, combines something like the earnestness of Mr. Rogers with the calm enthusiasm of Bob Ross. Sharing his knowledge on the likes of how to get the best bite out of your breakfast combo, growing a bean arch and this amazing song “Baba O’Reilly” by the Who – have you heard it?!? – Pera provides arch comfort that remains solidly on the side of sincerity. The surprise special he released during lockdown, “Relaxing Old Footage with Joe Pera,” was a true gift in the middle of a strange and isolated year.

The Mandalorian (Disney+)

One of the few recent Star Wars properties that lives up to its potential, the adventures of Mando and Grogu is a real thrill-ride of a series with outstanding production values (you definitely want to check out the behind-the-scenes documentary series if you haven’t). I personally prefer the first season, appreciating its Western-influenced vibes and somewhat-more-siloed story. The back half of the second season veers a little too much into fan service and video game-y plotting IMHO but still has several excellent episodes on offer, especially the Timothy Olyphant-infused energy of premiere “The Marshall” and stunning cinematography of “The Jedi.” And, you know, Grogu.

The Tick (Amazon Prime)

I’ve been a fan of the Tick since the character’s Fox cartoon and indie comic book days and also loved the short-lived Patrick Warburton series from 2001. I was skeptical about this Amazon Prime reboot, especially upon seeing the pilot episode’s off-putting costumes. Finally gaining access to Prime this year, I decided to catch up and it gets quite good!, especially in Season 2. First, the costumes are upgraded; second, Peter Serafinowicz’s initially shaky characterization improves; and third, it begins to come into its own identity. The only real issue is yet another premature cancellation for the property, meaning Season 2’s tease of interdimensional alien Thrakkorzog will never be fulfilled. 😢

Bonus! 5 More Honorable Mentions:

City So Real (National Geographic)

The Good Lord Bird (Showtime)

How To with John Wilson: Season 1 (HBO)

Kidding: Season 2 (Showtime)

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy Vs The Reverend (Netflix)

#tv #television

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violethowler · 5 years ago

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A Farewell To The Clone Wars

Yesterday was the end of an era

After 11 years and 104 days

After a theatrical movie, a novel, a comic miniseries, 8 incomplete story reels, and 133 episodes

After 49 hours and 12 minutes of incredible, heartbreaking, beautifully animated television….

Ended, The Clone Wars have.

I watched all of the existing Star Wars movies on DVD when I was a kid, but I was never particularly enamored with them the way that others are. And then in August 2008, I went to the local movie theater with my grandmother to see an animated movie that – while I didn’t know it at the time – would chart the course of my future for years to come.

While a lot of the general Star Wars fandom looks down on the theatrical Clone Wars movie as weak and lackluster, 11-year-old me loved every minute of it. I’ve been obsessed with animation my entire life, and around 2 years before the theatrical release of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, I had just begun to explore the world of animation outside of my childhood Disney bubble, diving headfirst into SpongeBob and Avatar and Codename Kids Next Door. Whenever I saw commercials for an animated movie playing in theaters I would beg my family to take me to see it. It didn’t matter what the movie was actually about, all that mattered was that it was animated and I thought it looked fun.

So, when I saw Star Wars: The Clone Wars in theaters with my sister and my grandmother, I loved it. I enjoyed the movie so much that when I learned there was going to be a TV show following the movie, I was ecstatic. From the moment that the first episodes of Season 1 aired on Cartoon Network a few months later, I was hooked. From the very beginning I refused to miss a single episode. From middle school all the way through high school The Clone Wars became the axis around which almost all of my entertainment consumption revolved.

I started reading more Star Wars books and comics from all over the timeline. The Thrawn trilogy. Darth Bane. Fate of the Jedi. The Old Republic. Lost Tribe of the Sith. I devoured every piece of Star Wars media I could find as this show awakened in me an appetite for all things Star Wars. Whenever my parents asked for gift ideas for my birthday or Christmas, at the top of my list would be the latest season of The Clone Wars on DVD. Every summer I trawled the internet looking for news from Star Wars Celebration or San Diego Comic Con about the next season – trailers, clips, plot details, whatever I could find.

When the show was initially cancelled following the purchase of Lucasfilm by Disney, I was devastated. This show had such a staple of my life that the idea that it wasn’t going to be coming back hurt. As I started looking around at online Star Wars fandom to find someone, anyone, who felt the same way that I did, I discovered #SaveTheCloneWars, and joined the campaign. Through that first year after the plug was pulled, I wrote to Disney asking them to continue the show. I signed fan petitions and made posts on Facebook. It was my first real engagement with the wider online fandom.

Then came The Lost Missions and the Clone Wars Legacy releases – Crystal Crisis, Son of Dathomir, Dark Disciple… Having more Clone Wars stories helped soften the pain of the show’s loss, but the story still felt incomplete. Hearing about future arcs that had been planned for the show only added to the sense of incompleteness, knowing that there were more stories we didn’t get to see. When rumors had begun circulating about an animated Star Wars show set post-Clone Wars, resolving unanswered questions of The Clone Wars was at the top of my wish list for a future Star Wars show.

When Rebels was announced I was cautiously optimistic. I didn’t want to get attached to a new set of characters when the loss of Ahsoka and Rex and my other Clone Wars favorites still felt so raw. After Dave Filoni and the production crew of Rebels posted videos introducing the crew of the Ghost and the core cast of Rebels I reluctantly became more interested, I still was cautious about investing my time in this new show out of fear that it too would be ripped away from me without a proper conclusion just like The Clone Wars was.

So, when the final episode of Rebels’ first season confirmed that the mysterious Fulcrum was none other than Ahsoka Tano I was out of my seat cheering. There were still questions I needed answered about what happened to her after she left the Jedi Order, but the fact that she was there, back on my TV screen once more, was a relief. And when I watched the first trailer for Season 2 a month later, the words “My name is Rex,” made me scream and cry. I was overcome with tears of joy knowing that not only would my favorite Jedi be appearing in Rebels but my favorite Clone Trooper as well.

By the time Rebels’ first season had ended, I was getting ready to graduate from high school and planning where I would go to college in the fall. Taking art electives in high school, particularly a computer art class during the airing of Season 5, made me appreciate just how beautiful the show’s art style was, and when the time came for me to plan where I wanted to go to college, I chose schools that had programs for animation. I had originally wanted to be a game designer because of Kingdom Hearts, but The Clone Wars made me realize that the passion I truly wanted to make a career out of was animation.

I continued to follow Rebels as I went off to college, and by the end of Season 3 – with Maul dead for good, Ahsoka MIA, and Rex and Hondo as the only major Clone Wars characters left on the show – I had gotten attached to the Rebels characters as well. I was just as invested in their fates as I was for those of Clone Wars characters like Rex and Hondo. Season 4 finished airing at the end of my junior year, and the knowledge in the final five episodes that Ahsoka had not only survived her confrontation with Anakin at the end of Season 2 but that she was still alive years after the events of the original trilogy had me crying tears of joy as I went to sleep.

The trailer announcing the return of The Clone Wars had me in tears for hours. Long had I been dreaming of the remaining stories of this show being released in some form. I would have been content with more novels and comics like Son of Dathomir and Dark Disciple, but to have the show return in animated form was a miracle I had given up hope for years ago.

But within the last twelve months, my interest in Star Wars cooled.

I was never the biggest fan of the movies. Revenge of the Sith was my favorite because in the absence of a proper conclusion it functioned as a de facto finale to The Clone Wars. I enjoyed the original trilogy, but they weren’t movies I considered my favorites. I saw The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi in theaters and cried on my first viewing of both films, but on repeat viewings the magic of them faded and I lost interest. While I could understand why other fans liked them, there was a spark that was missing from most of the movies released under Disney that prevented them from really having any staying power for me.

And then The Rise of Skywalker came out and completely shattered any expectations I had that Disney really knew what they were doing with the franchise. Where before I was willing to trust that there actually was a plan because of how precisely Rey and Ben Solo’s arc followed the path of the Heroine’s Journey across The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, now I realize that what I initially believed to have been a carefully planned narrative arc was most likely JJ Abrams planning to set up a conventional Hero’s Journey which Rian Johnson used to try and tell a Heroine’s Journey instead. And even if there was a plan for Rey and Ben Solo that got screwed around by behind the scenes conflicts, there was clearly no plan as far as Poe and Finn and Rose were concerned.

For months after this, I started questioning and doubting my love of all the canon Star Wars media. How could I enjoy anything in the Original and Prequel trilogy eras knowing that all the hard work of dismantling Palpatine’s empire would be undone in order to rehash the same plotline with new characters and no concern given for whether the audience could follow what was happening or why these events and character decisions mattered if they hadn’t read every comic and novel and played every video game connected to this era.

Since the last trailer for the final season of The Clone Wars went up on YouTube, I vacillated between enthusiastically sticking to the shows I loved regardless of my problems with the film saga, and abandoning the franchise altogether and gifting my Clone Wars and Rebels Blu-Ray sets and associated novels to my college friend who had just gotten into Star Wars.

And then ‘The Phantom Apprentice’ Happened.

Ahsoka and Maul’s two-part duel in the throne room and the rafters of Sundari reminded me of everything I loved about The Clone Wars in the first place. The animation. The art style. The music. The attention to detail on every character and in every detail. The tragedy of what was to come. On my third re-watch of the third-to-last episode of Season 7, that was when I realized that despite my problems with the Sequel Trilogy, despite the many flaws in the writing of the Prequel movies, I could never give up on The Clone Wars, or on Rebels. These two shows have meant too much for me to ever walk away from either of them.

I have cried at least ten times in the last five days watching the final two episodes of The Clone Wars. The final of this incredible series was such a gut punch even though I knew what was coming and who would survive. I had and saw so many ideas about what the last episode would include. Would their be a montage of all the Jedi who survived Order 66 as a mirror of the death montage in Episode III? Would Ahsoka and Rex receive Obi-Wan’s recorded message from Rebels warning surviving Jedi to stay away from the temple?

But in the end, none of those things happened. The focus of the episode remained on Ahsoka and Rex. Their escape from the ship. The tragedy of their inability to save the other clones. And ending with a shot of Vader finding the ship some time later, all these symbols of the Republic buried beneath the winds of time as the empire rises. It was bleak and depressing and when the credits rolled I was holding back tears. But looking back on the entire series and the era of the war, knowing what was coming, there was no other way I could have expected it to end. The audience already knows that this is not the end, but Ahsoka and Rex don’t know that, and so the finale of The Clone Wars reflects this. The pain and despair. The tragedy and confusion over what will happen next. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Despite all the movies I’ve watched; the comics and novels I’ve read; the video games I’ve played; very few things in Star Wars canon or Legends have been able to match the magic of The Clone Wars in my heart. I have never truly been a Star Wars fan so much as I have been a Clone Wars and Rebels fan. The novels and comics and movies I enjoy are an extension of my love for the shows, but the shows will always come first. The characters these shows introduced have stuck with me more than any characters from the movies ever has. Clone Wars made me love Anakin and Obi-Wan and Padme and Yoda, but to me, my Star Wars favorites have always been Ahsoka, Maul, Rex, Ventress, Fives, Hera, Zeb, Thrawn, Sabine, and all the rest.

So, I just wanted to say thank you to Dave Filoni, Ashley Eckstein, Matt Lanter, Catherine Taber, James Arnold Taylor, Sam Whitwer, Nika Futterman, Dee Bradley Baker, as well as every single person involved in bringing this show to live for all the hard work and passion you have poured into this series. Your work on this show shaped the person I am today, and I look forward to seeing what you do next.

May the Force Be With You.

#star wars the clone wars #clone wars season 7 #thank you dave filoni #the siege of mandalore #victory and death #farewell to the clone wars #tcw spoilers #clone wars spoilers

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