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eijispumpkin · 4 years ago

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On Allegory, Imperfection, and Inadvertent Subversion: A small essay about Akimi Yoshida’s Banana Fish and Salinger’s “A Perfect Day For Bananafish”.

In the story of Banana Fish, Yoshida references Salinger’s short story “A Perfect Day For Bananafish” (which henceforth shall be addressed as “Perfect Day” simply for ease of reading) several different ways, both in-universe and out. It is exceedingly evident that the character of Ash Lynx is heavily based on Seymour Glass, and one might surmise that Banana Fish is an allegorical retelling of “Perfect Day”, especially given that in the original story, Ash Lynx dies of what is arguably a “passive suicide” – that is, when faced with an injury that isn’t immediately fatal, he chooses to bleed out rather than seek help, which when framed as a suicide, parallels the much more violent and sudden suicide of Seymour Glass.

However, this surface-level allegorical reading ignores a very important variable in the story of Banana Fish, namely the counterpart to Ash’s Seymour: Eiji’s Sybil. While Ash and Seymour share many similarities (both are traumatized, troubled geniuses with partly-Irish roots who grew up in New York City), the similarities between Eiji and Sybil are very few. Eiji does symbolize a world of innocence to contrast with Ash’s world of horrors, but unlike Sybil, Eiji is an adult with agency of his own, and though he retains some of Sybil’s childlike innocence and is able to connect deeply with Ash as a result of it, Eiji’s agency and decisions ultimately change the narrative and its meaning.

That is to say, by introducing Eiji as an imperfect Sybil, one who has agency and can actually provide Ash with understanding and support of the kind that Seymour never got from Muriel or others around him (and which Sybil, being three years old, was in no way equipped to provide), Banana Fish directly subverts “Perfect Day”’s original message of cynicism in the face of a material world unconcerned with the horror of lost innocence and its resulting isolation.

To understand what this means, it’s important to first understand the meaning and context of “Perfect Day” and the circumstances in which it was written. “Perfect Day” is a story written first and foremost as a critique of American materialism in the wake of WWII; Salinger echoes the concerns of the Lost Generation before him, in a way, by really driving home the alienation from modern adult life felt by those who were exposed to the horrors and traumas of the battlefields in wartorn Europe, only to return home and find a culture completely removed from it all. Seymour Glass is a stand-in for Salinger himself—Kenneth Slawenski, in his 2010 biography of Salinger, notes that on returning from the European theater, Salinger “found it impossible to fit into a society that ignored the truth that he now knew.”

If that sounds familiar, good, because it should! This is precisely the motif of “Perfect Day” (as well as some of Salinger’s other work featuring members of the Glass family, such as Seymour’s younger brother Buddy, which, as an aside, is a name that might stick out to Banana Fish fans. Whether this is an intentional reference or a coincidence, I can’t say for certain, but given the depth of other references within this allegory, I’m inclined to think it’s intentional).

As a quick summary for those who may need a refresher, “Perfect Day” is a story about a deeply traumatized man who feels isolated from the rest of society because of the weight of the horrors he has been exposed to. Muriel Glass, Seymour’s wife, is the epitome of this: she represents the materialistic culture that Seymour feels so alienated from, always talking about brand-name things and luxuries and upward mobility. Seymour rejects her company in favor of playing the piano for children and spending time on the beach, where he tells three-year-old Sybil Carpenter a story about bananafish, fish that gorge themselves on bananas in holes under the sea until they’re too fat to escape the entrances to these little banana dens, and then they die. Instead of dismissing this story as something bizarre, Sybil claims she sees a bananafish in the water, which endears her to Seymour, until she leaves, at which point he returns to his hotel room and shoots himself in the head.

In “Perfect Day”, this interaction (between Sybil and Seymour) is the center of a set of dualities. Sybil represents the state of childlike innocence that Seymour longs to return to, and because of her innocence, she can “understand” him in ways that the material adults like her mother or Muriel do not. Seymour’s isolation is a product of his society and the lack of support and understanding for traumatized veterans returning from war, and it shows in the way that adults his age cannot connect with him, and he cannot connect with them. This disconnect between worlds is what eventually results in Seymour’s suicide—he can fit neither in the world in which he wishes to be, nor in the one in which he must reside, and it ends in his death.

The question is, then, how does this relate to Banana Fish?

As mentioned previously, Ash Lynx is a very clear parallel to Seymour Glass. He’s a young man faced with immeasurable trauma from which he believes he can never recover, and there is a clear motif of duality in his entire character arc: his world (one of violence and trauma) versus the “normal” world (where innocent people who have “regular” lives may reside). Like Seymour, Ash feels trapped in a world he can’t escape, knowing “the truth” that he knows, about the horrors that people are capable of.

It follows, then, that Eiji Okumura is a parallel to Sybil Carpenter, who represents childlike innocence and a world that Ash longs to be part of but can’t reach. And to an extent, this is true: Eiji is sheltered and innocent, comparing real-life to TV shows and being completely unexposed to kidnappings, drugs, guns, and violence. However, there is a sharp contrast between Eiji and Sybil, one that fundamentally changes the relationship between Eiji and Ash and makes it radically different from that between Sybil and Seymour:

Eiji is an adult, and as such, he has agency of his own.

Unlike Sybil with Seymour, Eiji can make his own choices and face Ash as an equal. Where Sybil is a child who runs back to her mother after playing with Seymour at the beach, Eiji actively and consistently chooses to stay with Ash, over and over. He even explicitly tells Ash “you are not alone”, which is a huge and direct contrast to the message of inevitable, devastating isolation from “Perfect Day”. Whereas Sybil’s innocence serves as a reminder to Seymour of what he’s lost and cannot regain, Eiji’s innocence is a beacon of comfort and companionship to Ash. Eiji is someone with whom Ash can relax and be playful like a boy his own age, as noted by Max and Ibe watching them interact.

This communication and connection are present between Sybil and Seymour, but in a very different way. Seymour prefers to play make-believe and tell silly stories to kids, because he went from being a wide-eyed innocent to being traumatized and longing for a place to belong, and Sybil as a child represents what he wishes he had, while the adults around him (most notably Muriel, his wife) are a world he doesn’t understand that feels false.

This is not the dichotomy of worlds that Ash faces. Ash faces a world of trauma and suffering that he sees himself as trapped in, and a world of peace and security that he thinks is beyond his reach. Where Seymour yearns for a return to innocence, Ash yearns to escape his pain, and the combination of this subtle difference with the effect of Eiji’s agency and the narrative structure of Banana Fish results in a subversion of the themes in “Perfect Day”.

Banana Fish is a long-form narrative, while “Perfect Day” is a short story. Part of the inherent structure of a long-form narrative is character growth and development, which for obvious reasons is much less prominent in short stories. As a result, Eiji’s impact on Ash is clearly visible over the course of the narrative, and it becomes impossible to declare that Ash is firmly rooted in the world he sees himself as trapped in. By the end of the story, even Ash wavers on this assertion; although he ultimately succumbs to suicide, a narrative choice that been criticized ever since its publication, in the moments leading up to his stabbing, he does believe that Eiji is right, or at least right enough that he wants to see him one last time (this is ambiguous and open to interpretation, of course).

Why did this narrative choice spark so much controversy and outcry from fans? Not every story that ends in tragedy is criticized as poorly written for it; examples range from Shakespearean tragedies to “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story”, a film in which the entire cast dies in the climax. Yet just about all fans agree that it fit the narrative. Clearly, then, it is possible to craft a story that ends in death and tragedy but still feels well-written. What makes Banana Fish different?

I would argue that the answer lies in this imperfect allegory. By creating a Sybil-esque character that can interact with the Seymour-esque character as equals, can stay with him, and can listen to him and support him through his grief and pain, Akimi Yoshida inadvertently turned “Perfect Day”’s message on its head. The tragedy of “Perfect Day” is Seymour’s isolation. By giving Ash a warm, compassionate relationship in which he is assured over and over that he is not alone, Yoshida upturns this entirely.

Ash is led to believe in this dichotomy mostly by his isolation. He believes that since Eiji is in mortal danger as a result of being special to him, he needs to send Eiji to safety, i.e. somewhere far from him and far from the reach of those who would hurt them both. This isn’t a miscommunication issue or anything of the sort; this is Ash being afraid for Eiji’s life; Eiji isn’t averse to returning to Japan itself. Eiji is averse to returning to Japan without Ash, as he mentions when he talks about how Ash could be a model, and tells him about kami. In establishing this as a consistent tenet of Eiji’s character, Yoshida ensures that Ash is not isolated in the same way that Seymour was.

In addition, Eiji can move freely between both worlds set up in Ash’s perceived dichotomy, a motif made explicitly clear when Eiji leaps the wall to freedom and light at the beginning, leaving Ash (and Skipper) behind in captivity in the dark. Despite this escape from the world of violence and crime, Eiji returns of his own volition and stays with Ash, experiences his own fair share of horrific traumas, and still leaves in the end to return to his world. This makes it clear that the dichotomy is less stark than Ash is led to believe, unlike the repeated validation of his isolation that Seymour receives, and is another reason that the ending of “Perfect Day” is inconsistent with the ending of Banana Fish

A quick sidebar: Banana Fish has no real Muriel, but if pressed, I would posit that the closest parallel to Muriel that exists is Blanca, whose main purpose in the narrative seems to be to reinforce to Ash that he can’t escape the world he feels trapped in and longs to leave. But where in “Perfect Day” Muriel symbolized the materialism of American society after WWII, Blanca has no real established reason to be so invested in keeping Ash down, and in conjunction with the fact that despite his own traumas, he can retire peacefully to the Caribbean, his role in the story falls to pieces entirely. Where Muriel represented a lifestyle that Seymour fundamentally could not reach, thereby reinforcing his isolation, Blanca is supposed to parallel Ash to a degree, but his words to Ash do not match his actions whatsoever.

Therefore, if anything, Blanca’s assertions serve only to strike a contrast with Eiji’s (and Max’s, to an extent, since Max and Eiji both agree that Ash can escape this and they want him to heal). Moreover, Blanca’s relationship with Ash is that of a mentor and a student, a relationship that is shown to be fundamentally unhealthy, given that Blanca willingly worked for Ash’s abuser, a mafia don who he knew trafficked children. Some argue that Blanca was blackmailed into this service, but given that Blanca chose to betray Golzine at the end and work with Ash with seemingly no real provocation or change in his relationship with Golzine, this supposition seems flawed. Blanca’s assertions about Ash and his ability to forge bonds and leave his world the way Eiji does, and indeed the way Blanca himself does, are simply incorrect, and the narrative itself provides us all the tools we need to realize that Blanca is wrong, even without the extended context of a parallel to Muriel Glass.

Returning to the main issue at hand, i.e. that of the imperfect allegorical connections between Sybil and Eiji, and the dichotomy between worlds that Ash perceives, it’s clear that in creating a positive, nurturing relationship between Ash and Eiji rather than a one-off encounter, Yoshida inadvertently created a story about connections rather than isolation. Ash’s attempts to keep Eiji safe from harm by sending him home are countered by Eiji’s assertion that he only wants to go to Japan if Ash comes with him, which is a kind of selfless devotion that reaches through Ash’s isolation until he decides that he won’t try and separate himself from Eiji anymore, which is a massive blow to the dichotomy of his supposed two worlds. This is the narrative acknowledging that both worlds can coexist.

Not only this, but also Eiji, who has his own trauma—he’s kidnapped several times, shot at, drugged, sexually assaulted, attacked with a knife by a drugged friend, exposed to several deaths, shot at people in fights himself, and ultimately nearly killed by a gunshot wound—despite all of this, Eiji is still allowed to exist in the world of peace and regularity. Eiji’s innocence is sharply tempered by traumatic experiences, and he can still walk between worlds. If Eiji, Max, Ibe, Jessica, Sing, Cain, and Blanca can all experience traumas, why is Ash the only one who cannot escape? Is there some kind of magical bar of “too much” trauma, like an event horizon on a black hole?

Obviously, no.

So it comes to this: Essentially, the reason that the ending is so controversial, and why I personally believe that the open ending of the anime is an improvement to the original story, is that the allegory between Banana Fish and “Perfect Day” falls apart because of Eiji’s agency. Ash wants to protect Eiji, and to protect Eiji’s innocence and light, because he feels that it’s beyond his own reach, but Eiji forges a bond with him that is rooted in mutual respect and care, and in doing so, undoes the devastating, painful isolation that led to Seymour’s suicide. This is why Ash’s death can feel so hollow—it doesn’t follow the pattern of “Perfect Day”; after the entire story is about Ash’s bonds and those who love him unconditionally, it feels almost like a shock-value plot twist tacked on, rather than a tragic inevitability.

I don’t believe that Yoshida intended Banana Fish to be a subversion of “Perfect Day”. I believe she meant it as a one-to-one allegory, and this is why she kept the ending as Ash choosing death. However, due to the changes in themes because of the characters and their relationships, Ash is not isolated in the profound way Seymour was, and his death is therefore not nearly as impactful.

#this is 2600 words i am so fucking sorry but also im not sorry im just verbose #banana fish #banana fish meta #asheiji #ash lynx #eiji okumura

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jamespotterthefirst · 4 years ago

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October 31st (Ethan x f!MC)

Pairing: Dr. Ethan Ramsey x F!MC (Dr. Lilac Allende) Word count: 2.3K Warning: Language Premise: Ethan Ramsey doesn’t do costumes... except maybe for her.

A/N: A pointless Halloween fic

A/N2: For Day 28 of @choicesoctoberchallenge2020. The prompt is “Costume”.

1. Intern Year

Ethan resisted a groan as an atrocious, remixed version of The Monster Mash blared through the speakers, eliciting a cheer from the drunken crowd. Characteristically, he pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes shut as he wondered why he decided to venture out on the worst night of the year. Perhaps he needed a drink that badly after another full day of dealing with interns.

“Time for a refill, Dr. Ramsey,” a voice said over the music.

Ethan hated the way his pulse quickened at the sound.

Doing his best to appear collected, he shot what he hoped was an impassive glance at the figure now standing beside him at the bar, the floral notes of her perfume already caressing his every sense. One single glance at her, however, was enough to shoot all efforts of appearing aloof straight to hell.

She leaned casually against the bar, clad in a sensuous, forest green number that molded to every curve of her body and ensnared every bit of his attention. Dark green leaves embellished every surface of the sinfully short dress, tapering off into delicate, curly vines along her exposed shoulders and arms. Her glossy, dark hair was hidden away beneath a cascade of long, auburn waves that made her eyes appear greener still.

“Wig,” she explained with a small laugh when Ethan continued to stare.

At last, he pried his eyes away, feeling his neck flare with heat. Unsure of what else to say, he feigned indifference as he asked, “And what are you supposed to be, Rookie?”

Aside from fucking irresistible, his idiotic, addled brain added on impulse.

He could see Lilac's jaw go slack in a way that was almost comical but somehow managed to be entirely too adorable.

“You're kidding, right? I'm Poison Ivy.”

Ethan had known that. He had been, after all, a comic-book obsessed teenager once. If someone had told him back then that he would one day witness the sexiest version of the character imaginable, his head would have caved in on itself. Adult Ethan, it seemed, was no better because his eyes fell on her once again, unable to resist her magnetic pull.

Lilac, however, was too busy looking at the dancefloor. She nodded toward her group of friends, dancing, laughing, and contributing to half of the noise in the bar.

“We were all supposed to be Batman villains but Bryce and Landry got lazy. They put on a Thing One and Thing Two shirt and called it a day.”

Ethan followed her gaze to where the young surgeon had peeled off the aforementioned shirt, relishing in the attention that decision was earning him from a gaggle of girls nearby. The other one Lilac had mentioned stood awkwardly off to the side, too pale and and gangly to ever be Lahela's counterpart.

“More like tweedle dee and tweedle dum,” he muttered.

Lilac met his eyes at once and to his delight, she laughed, the sound sending his stomach into a dive. It was already maddening enough that the sound was entirely too attractive, but Ethan felt a swelling sense of satisfaction at being the one to inspire it.

When she sobered up, her green eyes remained on his, humor melting into a pensive expression. She continued to watch him with the conviction of someone discovering a new secret. He would have given anything to know what she was thinking at that very moment.

“What about you?”

“Hmm?”

He had been distracted by her full lips and by how fitting the damn costume was. Much like every weak-willed man in his comic books, Ethan would have risked absolutely everything to kiss her.

“No costume?”

“God no,” he spat, inspiring another little laugh.

“Never say never,” she told him in a sing-song voice.

“I can confidently say never.”

______________

2. A year later.

They paused outside the door to Bryce's apartment, the muffled sound of music and laughter making its way to the hall. Ethan briefly wondered if his neighbors would complain enough to derail the whole affair. It would mean he could go back to the peace and quiet of his home.

As if reading his mind, Lilac turned to face him, a knowing smile pulling at her lips. God, he loved it when she looked at him that way.

“You're not getting out of this,” she reminded him, her fingers moving to play with the orange Ascot tie she had forced him to wear.

“We're well into November. There was no need to dress up.”

As usual, Lilac rolled her eyes lovingly.

“It's hardly dressing up when all we did was put you in a white sweater you already owned, babe,” she explained for the hundredth time. Ethan tried to scowl at the pet name, but he was beginning to enjoy it. Instead, he relaxed into her touch, trying his best not to follow the lazy path her fingers made on his chest. “You wouldn't even wear a wig, so it doesn't count. As for the party being this late, it was the only night we all had off. And we'll be damned before we let a whole year pass us by without dressing up.”

She finalized that sentence with a searing kiss to his neck. His hands banded around her waist reflexively, pulling her soft body flush against his. In their time together, he had avidly learned the many ways to drive her just as crazy.

“You and I can still dress up,” he murmured darkly against her ear.

Lilac shivered, to his immense delight.

“Are you suggesting role play, Dr. Ramsey,” she returned in a poor attempt to mock him.

The formal mode of address, uttered in a low, breathy voice against his ear, made his blood buzz for her. More maddening still was the short, purple dress she wore along with the auburn wig that made a reappearance after a year.

“Got a thing for redheads?” she asked, correctly guessing the contents of his thoughts yet again.

Ethan smiled crookedly down at her. “I got a thing for you.”

The words rang with sincerity and an overwhelming sense of relief at finally being able to say them out loud, without any fear of consequences.

Lilac, for her part, looked as though she wanted to shove him against the wall and kiss him fiercely, but the erupting cheers from inside the apartment interrupted their exchange from advancing further.

“Mystery Gang in the house!” Bryce, dressed as a pirate, hollered as soon as they walked through the door. Everyone else cheered and hooted, the sounds no doubt fueled by the contents of the many red solo cups around the room.

“You guys look adorable!” Sienna commended over the music, greeting each of them with a friendly hug. “Fred and Daphne makes so much sense for you two.”

“Because we solve mysteries for a living?” Ethan asked, voice deadpan.

“Nah, because those two were a thing long before any of the others found out,” Elijah said as he joined them.

Lilac laughed out loud, the sound teetering on the edges of relief. She had been nervous, just like Ethan had been, that her friends would be awkward around them now that they knew of their relationship.

By the way they easily joked with him and included him in conversation throughout the night, their concerns had been for nothing. They even helped Lilac pressure him into dancing a modern pop song he had heard many times on the radio. Not that he needed much convincing when he would gladly do anything just to see her radiant smile directed his way.

By midnight, the party had dwindled down to drinks and board games. There was a raucous consensus to play Clue, which caused Bryce to roll his eyes.

“Of course the diagnosticians want to play the nerdiest game.”

Ethan rolled up his sleeves in preparation, which earned him a coy and borderline lustful look from Lilac. “You're just bitter that we're playing something other than beer pong, scalpel jockey.”

Elijah let out a surprised yet impressed laugh, wasting no time to high five Ethan. Even Bryce couldn't help but grin.

“Trash talk all you want, old man. I'm more than just a pretty face.”

When it came to Clue, however, Bryce had no chance against Ethan, who analyzed every player with sharp precision and correctly guessed the murderer, the room, and the weapon. Several games later, Ethan easily proved victorious while Bryce only laughed graciously, raising his palms up in defeat.

When even the board games ebbed into quiet conversation at the end of the night, Lilac sat on his lap, circling her arms around his neck. They sat like that for minutes, enjoying the nuances of being that annoyingly cute couple at a party.

“Thank you for dressing up for me,” she said as she pressed a chaste kiss on his cheek.

Even that sent his heart into a tumultuous rhythm.

“Only for you,” he murmured. “And as a one time deal only.”

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3. Many years later.

Ethan plastered the fur-lined hat on his head, a perfect complement to the fur-lined everything else he was currently wearing. Luckily, fall time in Boston was cold enough that the ensemble would prove to be practical as they walked the streets. He stepped into the hallway, not bothering to check his reflection. There was no doubt he looked utterly ridiculous.

But he didn't care.

He would do anything for her and for the unbridled joy in the eyes he loved so much.

Lilac was already waiting when he entered the living room, her smile impossibly wide as she glanced him over. It was the exact reaction he expected and he couldn't help but grin too.

“Is this how it's supposed to look?”

“Yes!” she all but shrieked in delight. The magenta cape of her costume fluttered behind her as she rushed to him, her body crashing against him in an overjoyed hug. “I love you so much for doing this.”

The words still sent a thrill through Ethan, as strong as the first time he heard them. Heart thundering wildly at his chest, he leaned down to kiss her, just because he could.

When they pulled apart, she watched him through half-closed eyes, her teeth catching her lush bottom lip. All Ethan wanted to do was carry her to their bed and tear off the costumes they had spent so much time perfecting. Inwardly, he marveled at how everything had changed over the years, but there were some things that remained the same.

Instead, he captured one of her plaits between his fingers. “These people we're dressed up as,” he started, gently trailing the ridges of her braid. Lilac watched him, captivated by his every word. “Do they end up together?”

She allowed a laugh. “We've watched nothing but that movie for a week straight.”

Ethan shrugged, allowing a sheepish grin. “I tune it out thirty minutes in every time.”

More laughter and Ethan decided then that he could hear the sound forever and not get enough.

“Don't let Dolores hear you say that,” she warned with one final kiss. She moved to break apart from their embrace but he stopped her.

His wife looked at him expectantly and Ethan frowned, suddenly doubtful.

“Do you think she'll like it?”

Lilac's curious expression melted into a fond smile. “She's going to love it,” she assured him, leaning in to press a sweet kiss on the tip of his nose.

Not surprisingly, Lilac had been right because moments later, a delighted shriek of laughter announced the arrival of their toddler daughter. Her godmother trailed close behind, crouching over in an attempt to fix the blue tulle that trailed along the floor as the child ran towards her father. It was futile and Sienna sighed in defeat, shooting Lilac an amused look.

“It's pointless,” Sienna laughed. “There's no stopping little Lolly when she sees her father.”

Proving that point, his daughter flung herself into Ethan's arms and cried, “Dada!”

“Hello, princess,” Ethan laughed as she pressed her version of a kiss on his cheek.

“I'm Elsa,” Dolores corrected sagely.

“Yes, babe,” Lilac added with mock seriousness. “You are in the presence of Queen Elsa of Arendelle. Have some respect.”

“My apologies, Your Majesty,” Ethan said to his daughter with such formality that the child laughed. Sienna watched the exchange with a watery smile, failing to repress a squeal.

A loud roar coming from the threshold informed them that their son had joined them. Sienna laughed as Jonah ran around the room, the antlers of his costume bobbing wildly as he moved. At last, he stopped right before Lilac, who picked him up in her arms.

“I didn't know reindeers roared,” she laughed, swaying her son in her arms.

Jonah roared again to demonstrate that reindeers could indeed roar formidably, at least when impersonated by a five year old. “I'm a Halloween reindeer,” he explained. “He roars to be spooky, but just for today.”

The adults laughed. “You're a good big brother, Jonah,” Lilac informed him with a kiss, closely followed by a tickle.

“Lolly wanted to be Elsa so bad so I wanted to help,” their son said through a giggle, as though it was the most obvious explanation in the world.

It was for Ethan.

As Sienna ushered them together for a picture, Ethan looked at his family, everyone smiling radiantly and far more beautifully than the moon itself. Little Dolores clung to him, laughing and looking happier than he had ever seen her.

His wife caught his eye and shot him a knowing but proud smile. Ethan knew she was remembering the cynical, jaded version of himself who had confidently proclaimed he would never do this.

Ethan had never been happier to be proven wrong.

______________

A/N: I HC they name their daughter after Dolores and nickname her Lola/ Lolly

Once upon a time I used to write for another pairing who canonically dies on Halloween. You have no idea how happy I am to write for a pairing who’s alive and well lol.

Thank you so much for reading! I love these time hop fics so much. I wrote another one for Ethan x MC a long time ago that I will publish on my birthday in November :)

Finally, Chapter 10 of the Pictagram is coming soon. It might be two parts... Yikes. Thanks for waiting so patiently for it! Life has been crazy over here

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tags: @openheart12 , @takeharryandgo , @trappedinfanfiction, @aestheticartsx, @aworldoffandoms, @paulfwesley, @myusualnerdyself, @rookie-ramsey, @ohchoices, @colossalpainintheass, @enmchoices, @i-bloody-love-drake-walker, @choicesfanaf, @openheartthot, @octobereighth, @nazarihoe, @utterlyinevitable, @kites-in-our-skies, @maurine07, @schnitzelbutterfingers, @doilooklikeiknow, @snesdudes, @kingliam2019, @perriewinklenerdie, @cinnamonspongecake, @choicesstan1, @queencarb, @ethxnrxmsey, @missmiimiie, @jens-diamondchoices, @adamsdumortain, @apphia12, @kalogh, @lucy-268, @binny1985, @queenbirbs, @honeyandsunfl0wers, @newcolonies, @lilyvalentine, @rigatonireid, @interobanginyourmom, @parkerattano, @custaroonie, @nikki-2406, @lilypills, @chasingrobbie, @nooruleman, @lonely-mxxnlight, @ruinedbypixels, @shadynaturehilariouscookie, @tsrookie, @mvalentine, @professorkingslay, @drakewalkerfantasy, @casey-v, @helloblueeyedcat, @mysticaurathings, @blossomanarchy, @thegreentwin, @togetherwearerapture, @rookieoh, @ramseysno1rookie, @rookiemarsswiftie, @natashajaniphil, @mysticalgalaxysstuff, @hatescapsicum, @choices-lurker, @kiara-36, @junehiratas, @danijimenezv, @macy-ray85, @adrex04, @canigetanawwjunk, @sanchita012, @overwhelminglyaquarius , @scorpiochick8, @skylarklyon, @starrystarrytrouble, @mercury84choices, @drariellevalentine, @ethanrcmsey, @lion-ess24, @aarisa-frost, @kaavyaethanramsey , @udishaman, @a-crepusculo, @quacksonlover

#open heart #ethan ramsey #ethan x mc #playchoices #my writing #ethan ramsey fanfiction #ethan ramsey x mc #open heart fanfiction #choices fanfiction

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salvatore-moreau-is-perfect · 3 years ago

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Young Sheldon Rant (kinda long sorry also probably a whole bunch of spoilers)

Don't mind me I just spent the last 4 hours crying over Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory/Young Sheldon.

I have been trying to watch Young Sheldon recently but it's near impossible to watch season 4 anywhere in Australia for some reason.

I just keep thinking....that poor kid. He is clearly mentally ill and there is nothing wrong with that i mean I am for pete's sakes, but the way his family treats it is heartbreaking.

I know its set before the 2000's so the stigma towards mental illness was even worse than what it is now but for fuck's sakes he clearly needs help. In fact his family makes it worse.

One moment they are treating him like an adult, letting him get a job, go to college stuff like that.

But the very next moment they treat him like he is 5. His mother mainly does this and while I can understand it, the level of neglect her other 2 children must feel is scary.

Georgie (His older brother if anyone reading didnt know) even states it in the original show, So much was sacrificed just to make Sheldon happy and again.....it's his mum that does this. She accommodates him almost all the time, she treats him like a toddler despite him pretty much being 13 by season 4/5.

(Random fun fact my pet conure is named Georgie, not after him but after a pineapple duck character Moriah Elisabeth on youtube made)

In the main show it makes us believe that Sheldon's dad is the quote on quote *Bad Parent* while his mum was the good one. Honestly I think it's the reverse. Now don't get me wrong, neither of them are abusive or cruel. I am just saying that when grown up Sheldon talks about his father it's almost always about something bad. His alcoholism, the time he caught his father cheating on his mother, the constant fights the parents would have all the time (Often about money or himself).

Actually now that I think about it, Sheldon did say something that makes it sound like his dad hit him or at least threatened to. It was along the lines of "Stop crying or I will give you something to cry about" which I have heard plenty of stories from real people that talked about being hit. I highly doubt that he went through with the threat, he never gave off that vibe during the show and it's like the only time Sheldon brings it up to my knowledge.

His mother on the other hand oh ho ho (why did I type that?) was just all over the place. 1 moment she was the perfect Christian mother doing her best with a *ehm* "Gifted" son. The next she would be picking fights with neighbors, hiding money from her husband though this could be somewhat justified and refusing to let Sheldon grow up normally.

Now remember, I have seen next to nothing of season 4 and have only had what appear to be glimpses into his fathers' death/infidelity so forgive me if I have some facts wrong.

(Ha this was meant to be about Sheldon but I am mainly talking about his family....sorry)

Missy is also very similar to her adult counterpart but again less mature since she would be the only 1 of the 3 kids to not be in highschool. I love how they gave her a real personality and didn't just make her the stereotypical sister who loves girly things and boys and stuff. She is honestly very funny, has a wide range of emotions, likes to set fires and gets annoyed when Sheldon is being well...Sheldon. Now I am not sure if this was someone's headcanon or something the show actually implied and that I missed because I watched all 12 seasons of BBT in less than 2 weeks but I remember reading somewhere that she grows up to have a unhealthy relationship with alcohol just like their dad and I hope it's not true. I loved it when Mee Maw makes the Baseball coach give her a chance at playing and how despite her reason for joining was to get close to a guy Missy ends up really enjoying the game and it opened up bonding moments with the dad.

Mee Maw (aka grandma) was fine I guess. We only saw her once in the original show and other then being protective of her grandson we knew nothing else about her. So it would not be that hard to give her a personality and they gave her a great one. She treated all the kids the same and helped them whenever possible but she had a life outside of her family. My favorite scene with her though is when she tells Missy that the reason why her mum was so religious was because something went wrong when she was born and her mum promised to be the perfect christen if god would let Missy live and it worked (in her mind anyway.) It was so heartwarming and was such a good way to explain way the mum was so devoted to her faith. The whole "She dates someone with a lot of similar querks to Sheldon" thing seemed odd to me (All romance is odd to me lets be honest) I did enjoy his character.

Speaking of John Sturgis I honestly did not expect his character to get as dark as it did. Not dark as in "He was bad man that did bad things" I mean dark as in he had a mental illness (Dementia I think? correct me if I am wrong) that was affecting him so badly that he had to be placed into a hospital for a while. I am sad that Sheldon never brought him up in BBT and I assume it's because he didn't exist yet. He basically became Sheldon's second Grandfather figure since his bio one died when he was....I want to say between 4 to 6. After season 2 though he wasn't really in it as often anymore. In fact Mee Maw was dating a different man.

(Speaking of the second man is he dying? The most recent episode I saw which was the S3 final showed him acting super weird and suddenly becoming more religious so I think this is the case. I don't care about spoilers so please tell me.)

Also I just thought that I should say I resonate with Sheldon to a alarming degree. We have very similar quirks, we annoy anyone that talks to us, had complicated relationships with our fathers and overall were just the weird kids that nobody liked. The big difference being that Sheldon is a genius while I cried so hard during a maths quiz that I was cut from not only that class but my biology one as well, also I got put into a lower level english class. I passed by the skin of my teeth i'll tell you that much.

This is long as sin so I shall do a part 2 of just Young Sheldon himself.

If anyone actually cares please give me your opinions, any corrections I may need to make and tell me if you want me to talk about the minor characters as well.

#the big bang theory #young sheldon #sheldon cooper #cooper family #give me your opinion

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letbenfuck2021 · 4 years ago

Note

for the ship ask game: fiveya! ✨✨

ah!!! thank you!!! I love doing these!

fiveya - SHIP IT!!!

What made you ship it?

this is gonna be controversial but...canon ahahha canon made me ship it. specifically the first two eps. and when I first started shipping it, it was very much not a romantic ship. I think what really caught my eye was just the way that the show hinted at this hidden, nuanced, but ultimately tragic dynamic between two very unlikely characters. Five and Vanya are kind of opposites in a lot of ways. You have the golden boy, overachiever, high-functioning one and on the other hand you have the kid that....couldn’t even be an under-achiever because they weren’t even in the same class, wasn’t in the same zip code. And yet, from what we’ve been told, they were close. For whatever reason, Vanya is the only one of Five’s siblings that he trusts enough at the beginning of the series to be honest with. For whatever reason, despite him being grumpy, mean, and completely different form her, Vanya names Five as her sole confidant. And at the beginning of the show, we have these two people meeting again after a long absence, after being fundamentally changed by their experiences apart. and well.....the show did virtually nothing with that. Vanya never gets a chance to be angry with Five or express feelings of abandonment. Five never gets to work out his rage and anguish at the fact that in a way, all the suffering, all of the trauma he experiences in the apocalypse was due to his own sister. but that’s why we have fandom ahahah!! to fill in the blanks.

What are your favorite things about the ship?

I kinda like the core dynamic of the two characters, like their trope-y aspects. “Grumpy mean one + passive milder counterpart” and the classic “character A is softer and nicer but only for Character B” thing. But as a dark/angst writer, I like the more messed up aspects of the character dynamic and how stretched to a certain place or to a certain level, things can get dark and tragic. And that at the same time, there are a number of ways to write fiveya very fluffy and sweet. They got range! I like that.

also one of the best parts of the ship is the fandom around it to be honest. I’m not gonna sugar coat it. the tua fandom is.....difficult. and there are a lot of mean, nasty, vindictive people in it but for the most part, the ppl in the fiveya fandom are very nice and sweet. and I think that comes from the fact that fiveya is the shit ship. we get soooooo much shit for our ship and there was a time when even the other harcest shippers hated us (that time is still now arguably). lowest of the low but...I think that’s why our community is a little more tight knit.

Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

I don’t want to see it in canon. I don’t want there to be much else in canon than there already is because 1) from the very beginning, I’ve never wanted to see Gallagher have any kind of romantic vibe with Page. I think it would be a little different if they cast an adult to play Five or if they use TJ McGibbon but that leads me to 2) I don’t think the writers can write good romances. Sorry. Arguably, the best canon romance has been klave and I think that how good it is comes from just how UNDER written it is. Klaus and Dave’s relationship plays out in a few short scenes and a montage and I think that’s the only reason that it does so well, because it’s just a shell of a relationship. Because writing romance is HARD, idc what anyone says. Romance writing requires its own skill set and its own knack and talent and from what I’ve seen, no one on the tua writing team has either of those things for romance. so I have ZERO desire to see them try to tackle fiveya...like even platonically.

Thank you again!!!! I love doing these fandom ask thingies and now that I’m done with my thesis, I get to have more time to do it!!!

#fiveya

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dreamerwriternstargazer · 4 years ago

Text

In Defence of Team Purple Lion

Voltron: Legendary Defender and its final season remains as one of the most poorly received children’s shows in the past decade. The show was a reboot from DreamWorks of the popular Voltron franchise owned by WEP LLC (World Event Productions) who were responsible for the first version of the show Voltron: Defender Of The Universe (1984), an adaptation of the anime show GoLion by Toei Animation. It initially started strong when released in 2016, with a premise that of a typical mech-centric kids’ show; 5 pilots of 5 robot lions coming together to form one big robot (Voltron) to fight against a big bad alien villain in space, however despite the formulaic appearance it proved to be a captivating watch with detailed and beautiful animation as well as surprisingly deep subject matter. The themes and messages of the show touched on darker topics such as racism and genocide with the backdrop of a complex portayal of war while still balancing it with the light-hearted and goofy dynamics of the diverse main characters, played by a diverse cast. Produced by Lauren Montgomery and Joaquim Dos Santos, both of whom had worked on the acclaimed Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend Of Korra, the story set up promised an equally deep and intricate story for VLD as had been the case for ATLA and LoK, as a result the show attracted a large and varied fan base beyond just children, many fans adults eager to see how the story and darker themes would be resolved as well as how the minority representations would be treated.

The final season released on Dec 14th 2018 came as a great shock to fans, not only were they intensely dissatisfied with the ending, virtually no one from any area or sub fandom was happy with the season as a whole and at the time of this article’s writing it has lower than a 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The show and its producers faced massive criticism over insensitive representations of minorities, an unsympathetic and condemning end for an abuse victim despite redemption for their abusers and a disempowering arc for the main woman of colour character in which she was sidelined and dismissed by her male counterparts up until her sacrifice. The core themes and messages of love, forgiveness and acceptance regardless of race were completely subverted, instead conveying to an impressionable Y-7 and above audience the opposite; heritage and race define a person rather than their own actions. As well as fans, many parents of kids who watched the show expressed unhappiness with the final season due to the toxic and regressive messages it sent. Soon after the season dropped a petition emerged to “free the original season 8 of Voltron�� due to the belief that the final season was in fact an edited product of what the creators originally planned. This belief was sparked by visual inconsistencies in the season itself, the audio description not lining up with the action on screen (now fixed), one character not being played by her voice actor but her voice actually another character’s with the pitch turned up as well as comments from the cast and animators, now deleted. The strongest claims of edits were made by Tumblr user Leaking Hate in her initial meta Chasing The Ghosts Of Season 8 and the follow up, a more detailed breakdown, Seek Truth In Darkness in which she presented an alternative story that had been edited and cut down for reasons then unknown, with narrative and visual evidence from the season itself to support her argument. She and a few other fans officially came together in February 2019 to form Team Purple Lion, a team of analysts dedicated to finding the truth behind the disaster of the final season. However, since the fandom had had a poor history of harassing the show’s creators over ships (romantic relationships between characters) most attributed the poor story and resolve to an attempt to keep things neutral romantically between characters in a poor bid to please everyone. As a result the petition and campaign were merely linked to lack of shipping satisfaction for the fandom and dismissed as more toxic fandom behaviour that had been displayed previously by many fans.

Petitions and campaigns like these are not uncommon after a show or film’s ending, similar situations might be the HIMYM backlash in which fans were so unhappy with the ending of the show that there was a petition for an alternative ending, as well as the petition to Warner Bros regarding the Snyder Cut of Justice League. Both of these have actually succeeded with the Snyder cut of Justice League set to release in 2021 and the HIMYM DVD box sets containing the alternative ending, however what makes the Free VLD s8 campaign now led by Team Purple Lion unique is its claim that there’s an original finished product that the creators intended for release but was edited after completion to produce the poor final season that was released on Netflix. Often corporate meddling in creative works is common but it has not been documented before as a post production occurrence changing the finished work, it’s always taken place pre-production as was the case with Disney and Colin Trevorrow’s original script for ep. IX or during production, in the case of Justice League and Zak Snyder.

Since the start of the campaign in Dec 2018 there’s been continuous investigation and action taken by TPL to provide proof for their claims and the movement has evolved into a fight for creators’ rights, still active now a year and a half on. Their investigation early on resulted in discovering the IP holder (those who own the trademark) WEP as the ones with control over the show and therefore responsible for the released edited season 8. They’ve since defended DreamWorks and the showrunners from criticism in favour of requesting WEP and specifically President Robert Koplar, self proclaimed “steward of the property” for the original season 8 by the showrunners that was not released. There’s also been strong advocation from TPL to keep the protest against WEP’s interference with the creative team’s work peaceful to avoid dismissal and belittlement due to prior instances of the VLD fandom’s toxic behaviour that often included harassment of showrunners and toxic fan behaviour ranging from abusive remarks online to death threats, after the final season rumours were flying and the EPs faced abuse from upset fans so there was an active effort to stay civil on TPL’s part.

TPL and the #FreeVLDS8 movement has continuously faced criticism and backlash since its start regardless, the response from fellow fans ranging from supportive to downright disbelief and even the showrunners stating publicly [March 28th 2019 Let’s Voltron podcast] that there’s no “alternate cut of Voltron” branding the idea as a “conspiracy theory”. Claims of harassment have been attributed to TPL and the legitimacy of their allegations questioned, one fan questioning the possibility of the edits’ execution as well as others categorizing them as fans creating a theory based on shipping fulfillment. The controversy and consistent campaign a year and a half on interested me greatly, therefore after being led back to the movement by the very comments discrediting them I approached Team Purple Lion for comment on the aforementioned claims as well as conducting my own research and investigation into them. 3 members of the team, Crystal Rebellion, Dragon Of Yang and Leaking Hate spoke to me openly about their campaign and my own research produced some interesting results as well.

The basis of their argument is set on the show’s final season being an edited product, when I asked about what pushed her to this conclusion and writing her initial meta Leaking Hate explained that a mutual friend of Crystal and her’s drew their attention to it through the story saying:

“It’s interesting, nearly ALL of the episodes had a moment or two in them where Lotor [male villain] COULD have reappeared, and didn’t. Do you think he was written in to be the savior all along, and it was the higher ups that said no, good boy Lance [one of the main characters]? It seems like, given the narrative, and even given this season, it should have been Lotura [Lotor and Allura ship name], and all that wasn’t just feels… off. And not as a Lotura stan, I mean in general.”

“And YES I had. There was a narrative gap where Lotor should have fit, but for some reason wasn’t.” Hate said, “The initial conclusion we jumped to was that Lotor had been removed in the writing stage.”

It wasn’t until another friend mentioned a key scene out of place in the story and she went back to view it that she started to suspect the season had been changed from its original state. The scene in question was one in which Lotor says “Follow me!” at the end of Allura’s dream sequence in s8 ep8 Clear Day, despite his death being established before and after this point in the story. “There was no reason for that Follow Me shot to be there,” Hate explained, “unless the action of the viewer following Lotor had been removed.” Having studied a Fine Art degree and therefore well versed in animation and visual art she was able to recognise scenes that had been edited unusually throughout the season once she actively searched for other visual evidence. The Follow Me scene as well as others she found are displayed in her Ghosts meta, all indicating a different story from the one told in the show, along with the evidence Leaking Hate presented some initial ideas on what the story was (a redemption arc for Lotor and several sub arcs for the main characters that resolved their stories and previously set up story beats).

[Image Description: A close up of Prince Lotor’s face from season 8 on Netflix, staring directly out of the picture at the viewer. There are subtitles showing his speech at the bottom of the image, saying “Follow me!” End ID]

After Team Purple Lion’s formation Leaking Hate went on to publish a part two to her initial Ghosts meta, a 21k word meta entitled Seek Truth In Darkness which contained all visual evidence of edits found in the season as well as an extrapolation of the initial story indicated by said edits. The original story appeared to resolve unfinished narratives and arcs that the released s8 dismissed and the treatment of the representations in the show better, from respect towards minorities to an empowering arc for Allura, the main female character. Despite the original season having a more positive story, negative feedback from fans has been more common than positive. When I questioned the team members on it Leaking Hate mentioned “most people who believe we’re wrong tend to think we’re wrong in our premise” Dragon of Yang confirming that “it’s usually the premise of “VLD was edited after completion” that people disagree with”. However the screenshots they present as visual evidence hint at some truth in their argument, the first screen cap shown below indicative of some poor edits made to the animation since 3 characters are essentially cropped out of the picture.

Likewise this screen cap shows a split screen visually unbalanced with 2 characters at the bottom partially cropped out as well as the character on the left side with a much larger screen space than the other characters.

[Image description: A split screen from season 8 on Netflix, featuring from left to right: top left Shiro, below him is Keith in a larger section and Allura in a small triangular section below and to the right of Keith’s section. In the middle is a section showing Honerva’s mech stabbing the Voltron-Atlas mech with purple lightning shooting out. On the top right is Hunk, below him is Pidge, and below her the top half of Lance’s face. End ID]

Seasons prior to the final had always had visually balanced split screens with each character centred in their frames appropriately, indicating these and other s8 shots like them as an anomaly.

Hate reconstructed both screencaps based on what she believed they were originally:

[Image description: A split-screen from season 8 on Netflix, featuring from left to right: an Altean pilot, Merla, Keith, Hunk’s shoulder, Pidge, the top half of Allura’s face, and the top half of Lance’s face. On the top, right, and bottom of this screencap is dark pink background with the black lines of the split-screen extending to the edges of the colors, marking out where the rest of Hunk, Allura, and Lance should be visible if the view had not been cropped. With the lines extending out, Keith’s portion of the screen is also extended, leaving a completely removed section of the split-screen remaining, which is highlighted purple in this image. End ID]

[Image description: A split-screen from season 8 on Netflix, featuring from left to right: top left Shiro, below him is Keith, below and to the right of Keith is Allura in a small triangle section, the bottom of her face slightly cut off. In the middle is a section showing Honerva’s mech stabbing the Voltron-Atlas mech with purple lightning shooting out. On the top right is Hunk, below him is Pidge, and below her the top half of Lance’s face. On the left, right and bottom of the screencap is a dark pink background with the black lines of the split-screen extending to the edge of the colours, marking out where the rest of Lance and Allura should be visible if the view had not been cropped. Keith’s portion of the screen is smaller and a small dark pink section to the right separates his portion from the middle. Below him where his portion originally extended to is a section coloured dark purple that extends a little further to the left of Allura’s portion. End ID]

Other noticeable examples include scenes with the female lead Allura where her proportions do not match with any prior drawings of herself indicating that she was another character redrawn, Leaking Hate suggested Lotor as his proportions fit each instance.

[Image description: 2 pictures of Allura in the Blue Lion from a front and centre angle side by side. On the left Allura has her eyes closed and her arms stretched out holding onto the controls, the entire cockpit is glowing blue. On the right Allura’s eyes are open with a determined look on her face, she’s slightly hunched with her arms gripping the controls, the cockpit is coloured normally. End ID]

The image on the left is of Allura from s8 ep13 and the one on the right from the same episode a few minutes later, scaled so the interiors (which are unchanging 3D models) are the same size. She is notably taller in the one on the right with her head reaching above the seat and her frame bigger, with wider shoulders and thighs.

These are just a few out of the many examples of edits made that Leaking Hate presents in her metas along with her reconstruction of the original season based on what each edit indicates. While the reconstruction is to some point subjective, the visual inconsistencies are clear and can be easily checked by watching the show at each point said to be edited.

The timeframe and possibility for the edits’ execution, called into question by a fan on a twitter thread (now deleted) stating “it’s not physically possible to make that many edits in 2 months and with leftover budget”, was also addressed by the team and their work. Leaking Hate clarified that “it wasn’t 2 months” that they took place in, “it was 6. The edits began in mid July”, a fact determined by voice actor Jeremy Shada mentioning in an interview released on July 23rd that he had gone in to record new lines at the time. Hate also said, “It’s less of a question of would they have time than it is, well. They did do it. It was nearly impossible. But the fact that it is done shows that they did.” She went on, “I think people misunderstand when we claim it was ‘edited’. They hear “it was reanimated”, but it wasn’t reanimated. There is NO new animation in the edited s8 at all. As far as I can tell, 99% of the edits are composed of tracing, clever cuts and sleight of hand.” This is backed up by all the visual evidence they present as well as their work, claiming absence of animation (making the story disjointed and incoherent in places) rather than new, additional animation changing it.

Crystal Rebellion added, “One thing that strikes us (I feel pretty confident speaking for everyone in this case) is that Studio Mir [responsible for animating the show] is impeccably flawless with their work. Their previous work before Voltron: Legendary Defender, and even Seasons 1-6 and most of 7 are beautifully animated. Stunning. Season 8... is not. Studio Mir also had a viewing party for VLD: S8 - and they reported that they loved the final product; so the animators saw Season 8 after it was completed. The season, however, that aired, was really shoddy animation, rough transitions, music mistakes, and what appear to be alterations to still images - it isn't their usual quality of work, and moreover, the animators have stated that they don't recognize what aired. Often we've been asked something like 'Maybe they just didn't know what scenes they were animating' or 'Didn't know the intended finished product' but in this case, it is documented that they saw the final season and that it's different from what was aired. The poor workmanship in what we see from S8 - all the edits Hate goes through to find and explain, coupled with Mir's disbelief, is indicative that the animation studio had no idea this happened. That means it 1) Happened post-production and 2) It wasn't the Studio that changed anything. Dos Santos mentions in an interview [March 4th ABTV] that they were cut and pasting mouths and moving frames around - no time, no budget, and no staff left. It was all them, after it had been completed - after Mir had seen the original rendition and loved it, that all this happened. The parallel point to that to further support it is, had this been written in the script from the beginning, we would've seen a flawlessly animated season with a painful storyline. We don't see that.”

Although Mir’s reaction to the season they viewed in October (before its official drop) has since been deleted, one animator’s response to the season 8 that was released on Netflix is still online, comparing the show to a house and stating that “every single brick of the last season is very upsetting” but “everything else is good” (translation can be found here), making it clear he was not pleased with the final product. Joaquim Dos Santos does also mention in the interview Crystal references that changes were made to season 8 after season 7 dropped, stating, “You can probably see it in the animation. If you really pay attention it’s like, it’s literally our editor cutting out mouths and puppeting different dialogue.” It’s documented that the epilogue was added to s8 late after s7 dropped however it does not have any dialogue, this statement paired with Shada’s about “still recording on Voltron” begs the question, what change was made besides the epilogue? Hate shows in her Darkness meta that Shada’s character Lance was used to replace Lotor as well as Allura in key scenes, if Shada was still recording lines (unusual since audio recording is done very early in animation production) then it would have been for these moments.

Not all criticism has been based on the editing premise however; the story they present as the original has garnered negative comments as well since it featured Lotor, a divisive character due to his moral ambiguity and previous condemnation as a killer, and predominantly focused on his redemption as well as relationship with Allura. The narrative makes it clear that Lance, the blue paladin and one of the main characters popular with fans, would not have been the focus as he was in the released season and would have been replaced by Lotor as Allura’s partner. When I brought up the claims of bias in their reconstruction Leaking Hate pondered on it.

“Do I love the story because it is Lotura, or do I love Lotura because the story makes me love it?” she mused, “I think it's all the same. I was able to pick out the original story because of my bias in favour of Lotor, Allura, and Lotura. Had I not been invested in those characters, and that ship, I would have had no reason to look. I am not reconstructing based on wish fulfillment, or what I want to see,” she asserted, “but the story I am finding happens to be a story that I love.” In regards to Lance and her analysis on him she stated bluntly, “I HATE Lance. Were I reconstructing based on wish fulfillment I would have him alone and miserable. But that is not a good story. The real story of OGS8 has Lance coming to love himself and to learn to accept Allura's friendship as equally worthy as her romantic affection. It has him grow into a good man, and it has him become Allura's right hand when he helps her save the man she loves. It is an uplifting and wholesome message for little boys and grown men alike. And I think it is equally important that we save S8 for Lance as it is that we save it for Lotor and Allura.” When I mentioned that some would find her dislike of Lance an argument against her she also added that “they are right to.”

“I would not trust someone claiming to have found the 'real' story if I knew they hated Lotor or Allura.” However she admitted, “I don't hate him all the time. I think, if the Lance we get in OGS8 is the Lance I believe is there, then I will find him tolerable, if irritating.”

While it’s true that Hate is critical of Lance and his character, the reconstructed story she presents in Seek Truth does reflect her words, giving him an empowering and sympathetic arc growing from his previous immature and womanising character into a selfless, respectful friend. The team have also put their efforts into creating and realising the story in their reconstruction of the original s8, Rise and Atone, and so far it has stayed true to what they’ve promised, addressing characters and their arcs, the only deviation made being a romance free conclusion in a bid to stay ship-neutral. Dragon of Yang explained the narrative decisions they made with R&A stating clearly, “If this was wish fulfillment, we would have stopped at one detail or another. Every character’s arc was halted and destroyed beyond reconciliation or catharsis. Every character deserves their story to be done justice, and open-endings give that catharsis VLD originally had while remaining respectful to everyone’s shipping preferences. VLD is a story of hope and growth, to deny that a character has grown since day 1 is to deny that there is a story there to be told, and that in turn denies a person out there - who likely identifies with that character - the feeling of being seen. The best thing we can do as scholars and as activists,” she concluded, “is try to recreate the vision the staff had originally made and do so with care and attention to the work they put into every line.”

As for the harassment claims attributed to Team Purple Lion by both fans and The Voltron Store on twitter, there’s not much to support them, and in fact a great deal to disprove them. The team has maintained a level of professionalism in both their work and in their conduct online, consistently citing sources and providing proof for claims as well as campaigning respectfully. Hate commented, “they seem to be conflating our protest with the general hatred being thrown around in the fandom. We've made a point to emphasize polite but firm protest and advocate reaching out through official channels.” While there is a lot of anger and hate from fans towards the show and the producers, none of it has been from Team Purple Lion. Their protest has continuously avoided and often defended the producers and voice actors, who have been regularly attacked by other fans during the show’s airing and since due to the poor conclusion, all of whom TPL have made clear are under NDAs and cannot comment freely (although it’s worth noting, they stopped actively promoting the show on their social media after the season 8 release). Instead their questioning has focused on WEP, the company who own the Voltron trademark, after discovering through a meta analysis of a VLD episode signs that they were meddling with the creators’ vision of the show and ordered them to change it against the producers’ wishes. While it was only a speculative piece, WEP’s quick reaction to the release of said meta by claiming through their Voltron Store twitter that they “do not have any influence over the creative direction of the show” despite ignoring fans for months after the season release suggests some truth to it. Twitter user Eros compiled all evidence of their involvement since then in a Twitter thread and the majority of it is damning, their denial directly contradicting statements from the voice actors and producers prior to and after s8 that confirmed they were the controlling party and had creative input, as well as the creators’ desire to tell a progressive and empowering story however not being able to because of “other controlling parties” outside of DreamWorks. WEP have also made contradictory statements to fans about the season, saying that “nothing was edited” yet agreeing with a fan that a lot was left out and a director’s cut would sell well, as well as mocking another who left a Facebook review (March 16th 2019) complaining of being hung up on, replying to them that an “imposter” answered their phones:

[Image description: A facebook review of The Voltron Store. Text from the top reads as:

Reviewer (name coloured out) doesn’t recommend The Voltron Store.

Review reads: Terrible customer service. They literally hung up on me mid sentence and it was clearly not a case of a call accidentally being dropped. Extremely disappointed by the lack of professionalism!

The Voltron Store’s reply to the reviewer: if you actually talked to us you would find we are very nice people! And we never hang up on anybody EVER - unless they make outrageous claims like Power Rangers is better than Voltron!

The reviewer’s reply: The Voltron Store I did speak to a woman who identified herself Stephanie briefly, but I will never speak to your company again. Thank you for the response but I don't appreciate being called a liar. Please see the attached screenshot for proof of my abruptly ended call back in January. I desire to have no further communication with your company now, I simply decided finally other people deserved to know my personal experience.

Below is a screenshot showing the reviewer called The Voltron Store’s number.

The Voltron Store replied: We do not have a Stephanie here. That must be the issue: you dealt with an imposter! We would review the security cam footage but it does not go back 2 months. End ID.]

In stark contrast to WEP, Team Purple Lion has responded to criticism and addressed it, as well as reaching out to media outlets to clarify and correct poorly sourced claims, however have been faced with no response. Their questioning of WEP and their requests for the original season 8 on social media have been civil; their replies to the Voltron Store posts on Twitter containing no insults or cruel remarks, the harshest only critiques on the company’s lack of tact promoting a show and its merchandise that many considered offensive and toxic due to the last season. “At no point did we set out as some kind of campaign to “attack WEP” or “demand a new season”,” Crystal Rebellion said. “We were a handful of people looking at what amounted to, to use a metaphor, a puzzle that had technically been assembled but most of the pieces didn’t match up properly. We eventually decided to take the pieces that didn’t line up and look at what the picture was supposed to be. There was no ulterior motive - we just wanted the truth. When we realised the truth and it became obvious early on that Mir had seen the original season, we became convinced there was an unedited s8, perhaps in Mir’s backup drives. People saw it, which means it was a completed product, so it became a campaign to ask for it, it’s what the fandom wants, it’s what is profitable.”

In the face of all the negative response and disbelief, Team Purple Lion have gathered an overwhelming amount of evidence to support their case, not only from the show itself but also corroborating statements from the production team and cast as well as WEP’s conduct in response to the campaign. As a result TPL have gained a great amount of support and followers from the Voltron fandom, and are still gaining more a year and a half later. “I gotta give a shout out to Cosmic Royalty,” Leaking Hate said, “a group of Russian fans who reached out to us asking if they could do translations of our work. We host their translations on our website now and there’s apparently a group 500 strong on the Russian social media site VK that supports the work we do together!” Violet Howler on Tumblr has also been a big supporter as well as new fans, recently revealing themselves in the wake of good news, the fight to get the original season seemingly won as Leaking Hate displayed in her most recent meta. In it Hate outlines evidence for the franchise’s ownership changing hands from WEP to DreamWorks and therefore the release of the original season, based on the recent repromotion of the show through articles, new merchandise from the store and the new store designs that all suggest the release, since there would be no other reason to promote a show that was a PR disaster, so universally hated. Regardless of all the opposition and discredit they have faced, confirmation of the truth of Voltron’s original season 8’s fate is expected this summer before the official art book is made available, in the form of the season’s release itself. Whether the fans will be happy with it is another story, however Leaking Hate emphasised firmly that fan satisfaction was not the point, or at least not entirely. “Nothing is perfect, and nothing will please everyone. Especially a show like VLD, with almost 35 years of legacy and fans behind it. There are people who will not like the original season, there are even some who will prefer the edited one - I’m sure the WEP executives are some of them. But it will be the season it was supposed to be, the one that was a labour of love. There is so much love and care poured into every frame of VLD, this was a story that the people working on it wanted to tell; it was more than just a job to them. It was created with love, and it was with love that we fought for it, and when it comes down to it that’s what VLD’s meta narrative was about: love.”

#articles #fandom #fandom culture #team purple lion #voltron #voltron legendary defender #vld fandom #freevlds8 #dreamworks

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path-of-my-childhood · 5 years ago

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The Rolling Stone Interview: Taylor Swift

By: Brian Hiatt for The Rolling Stone Magazine Date: September 18th 2019

In her most in-depth and introspective interview in years, Swift tells all about the rocky road to 'Lover' and much, much more.

Taylor Swift bursts into her mom’s Nashville kitchen, smiling, looking remarkably like Taylor Swift. (That red-lip, classic thing? Check.) “I need someone to help dye my hair pink,” she says, and moments later, her ends match her sparkly nail polish, sneakers, and the stripes on her button-down. It’s all in keeping with the pastel aesthetic of her new album, Lover; black-leather combat-Taylor from her previous album cycle has handed back the phone. Around the black-granite kitchen island, all is calm and normal, as Swift’s mom, dad, and younger brother pass through. Her mom’s two dogs, one very small, one very large, pounce upon visitors with slurping glee. It could be any 29-year-old’s weekend visit with her parents, if not for the madness looming a few feet down the hall.

In an airy terrace, 113 giddy, weepy, shaky, still-in-disbelief fans are waiting for the start of one of Swift’s secret sessions, sacred rituals in Swift-dom. She’s about to play them her seventh album, as-yet unreleased on this Sunday afternoon in early August, and offer copious commentary. Also, she made cookies. Just before the session, Swift sits down in her mom’s study (where she “operates the Google,” per her daughter) to chat for a few minutes. The black-walled room is decorated with black-and-white classic-rock photos, including shots of Bruce Springsteen and, unsurprisingly, James Taylor; there are also more recent shots of Swift posing with Kris Kristofferson and playing with Def Leppard, her mom’s favorite band.

In a corner is an acoustic guitar Swift played as a teenager. She almost certainly wrote some well-known songs on it, but can’t recall which ones. “It would be kind of weird to finish a song and be like, ‘And this moment, I shall remember,’'” she says, laughing. “‘This guitar hath been anointed with my sacred tuneage!'”

The secret session itself is, as the name suggests, deeply off-the-record; it can be confirmed that she drank some white wine, since her glass pops up in some Instagram pictures. She stays until 5 a.m., chatting and taking photos with every one of the fans. Five hours later, we continue our talk at length in Swift’s Nashville condo, in almost exactly the same spot where we did one of our interviews for her 2012 Rolling Stone cover story. She’s hardly changed its whimsical decor in the past seven years (one of the few additions is a pool table replacing the couch where we sat last time), so it’s an old-Taylor time capsule. There’s still a huge bunny made of moss in one corner, and a human-size birdcage in the living room, though the view from the latter is now of generic new condo buildings instead of just distant green hills. Swift is barefoot now, in pale-blue jeans and a blue button-down tied at the waist; her hair is pulled back, her makeup minimal.

How to sum up the past three years of Taylor Swift? In July 2016, after Swift expressed discontent with Kanye West’s “Famous,” Kim Kardashian did her best to destroy her, unleashing clandestine recordings of a phone conversation between Swift and West. In the piecemeal audio, Swift can be heard agreeing to the line “…me and Taylor might still have sex.” We don’t hear her learning about the next lyric, the one she says bothered her — “I made that bitch famous” — and as she’ll explain, there’s more to her side of the story. The backlash was, well, swift, and overwhelming. It still hasn’t altogether subsided. Later that year, Swift chose not to make an endorsement in the 2016 election, which definitely didn’t help. In the face of it all, she made Reputation — fierce, witty, almost-industrial pop offset by love songs of crystalline beauty — and had a wildly successful stadium tour. Somewhere in there, she met her current boyfriend, Joe Alwyn, and judging by certain songs on Lover, the relationship is serious indeed.

Lover is Swift’s most adult album, a rebalancing of sound and persona that opens doors to the next decade of her career; it’s also a welcome return to the sonic diversity of 2012’s Red, with tracks ranging from the St. Vincent-assisted über-bop “Cruel Summer” to the unbearably poignant country-fied “Soon You’ll Get Better” (with the Dixie Chicks) and the “Shake It Off”-worthy pep of “Paper Rings.”

She wants to talk about the music, of course, but she is also ready to explain the past three years of her life, in depth, for the first time. The conversation is often not a light one. She’s built up more armor in the past few years, but still has the opposite of a poker face — you can see every micro-emotion wash over her as she ponders a question, her nose wrinkling in semi-ironic offense at the term “old-school pop stars,” her preposterously blue eyes glistening as she turns to darker subjects. In her worst moments, she says, “You feel like you’re being completely pulled into a riptide. So what are you going to do? Splash a lot? Or hold your breath and hope you somehow resurface? And that’s what I did. And it took three years. Sitting here doing an interview — the fact that we’ve done an interview before is the only reason I’m not in a full body sweat.”

When we talked seven years ago, everything was going so well for you, and you were very worried that something would go wrong. Yeah, I kind of knew it would. I felt like I was walking along the sidewalk, knowing eventually the pavement was going to crumble and I was gonna fall through. You can’t keep winning and have people like it. People love “new” so much — they raise you up the flagpole, and you’re waving at the top of the flagpole for a while. And then they’re like, “Wait, this new flag is what we actually love.” They decide something you’re doing is incorrect, that you’re not standing for what you should stand for. You’re a bad example. Then if you keep making music and you survive, and you keep connecting with people, eventually they raise you a little bit up the flagpole again, and then they take you back down, and back up again. And it happens to women more than it happens to men in music.

It also happened to you a few times on a smaller scale, didn’t it? I’ve had several upheavals in my career. When I was 18, they were like, “She doesn’t really write those songs.” So my third album I wrote by myself as a reaction to that. Then they decided I was a serial dater — a boy-crazy man-eater — when I was 22. And so I didn’t date anyone for, like, two years. And then they decided in 2016 that absolutely everything about me was wrong. If I did something good, it was for the wrong reasons. If I did something brave, I didn’t do it correctly. If I stood up for myself, I was throwing a tantrum. And so I found myself in this endless mockery echo chamber. It’s just like — I have a brother who’s two and a half years younger, and we spent the first half of our lives trying to kill each other and the second half as best friends. You know that game kids play? I’d be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And Austin would be like, “Mom, can I have some water?” And I’m like, “He’s copying me.” And he’d be like, “He’s copying me.” Always in a really obnoxious voice that sounds all twisted. That’s what it felt like in 2016. So I decided to just say nothing. It wasn’t really a decision. It was completely involuntary.

But you also had good things happen in your life at the same time — that’s part of Reputation. The moments of my true story on that album are songs like “Delicate,” “New Year’s Day,” “Call It What You Want,” “Dress.” The one-two punch, bait-and-switch of Reputation is that it was actually a love story. It was a love story in amongst chaos. All the weaponized sort of metallic battle anthems were what was going on outside. That was the battle raging on that I could see from the windows, and then there was what was happening inside my world — my newly quiet, cozy world that was happening on my own terms for the first time. . . . It’s weird, because in some of the worst times of my career, and reputation, dare I say, I had some of the most beautiful times — in my quiet life that I chose to have. And I had some of the most incredible memories with the friends I now knew cared about me, even if everyone hated me. The bad stuff was really significant and damaging. But the good stuff will endure. The good lessons — you realize that you can’t just show your life to people.

Meaning? I used to be like a golden retriever, just walking up to everybody, like, wagging my tail. “Sure, yeah, of course! What do you want to know? What do you need?” Now, I guess, I have to be a little bit more like a fox.

Do your regrets on that extend to the way the “girl squad” thing was perceived? Yeah, I never would have imagined that people would have thought, “This is a clique that wouldn’t have accepted me if I wanted to be in it.” Holy shit, that hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, “Oh, this did not go the way that I thought it was going to go.” I thought it was going to be we can still stick together, just like men are allowed to do. The patriarchy allows men to have bro packs. If you’re a male artist, there’s an understanding that you have respect for your counterparts.

Whereas women are expected to be feuding with each other? It’s assumed that we hate each other. Even if we’re smiling and photographed together with our arms around each other, it’s assumed there’s a knife in our pocket.

How much of a danger was there of falling into that thought pattern yourself? The messaging is dangerous, yes. Nobody is immune, because we’re a product of what society and peer groups and now the internet tells us, unless we learn differently from experience.

You once sang about a star who “took the money and your dignity, and got the hell out.” In 2016, you wrote in your journal, “This summer is the apocalypse.” How close did you come to quitting altogether? I definitely thought about that a lot. I thought about how words are my only way of making sense of the world and expressing myself — and now any words I say or write are being twisted against me. People love a hate frenzy. It’s like piranhas. People had so much fun hating me, and they didn’t really need very many reasons to do it. I felt like the situation was pretty hopeless. I wrote a lot of really aggressively bitter poems constantly. I wrote a lot of think pieces that I knew I’d never publish, about what it’s like to feel like you’re in a shame spiral. And I couldn’t figure out how to learn from it. Because I wasn’t sure exactly what I did that was so wrong. That was really hard for me, because I cannot stand it when people can’t take criticism. So I try to self-examine, and even though that’s really hard and hurts a lot sometimes, I really try to understand where people are coming from when they don’t like me. And I completely get why people wouldn’t like me. Because, you know, I’ve had my insecurities say those things — and things 1,000 times worse.

But some of your former critics have become your friends, right? Some of my best friendships came from people publicly criticizing me and then it opening up a conversation. Hayley Kiyoko was doing an interview and she made an example about how I get away with singing about straight relationships and people don’t give me shit the way they give her shit for singing about girls — and it’s totally valid. Like, Ella — Lorde — the first thing she ever said about me publicly was a criticism of my image or whatever. But I can’t really respond to someone saying, “You, as a human being, are fake.” And if they say you’re playing the victim, that completely undermines your ability to ever verbalize how you feel unless it’s positive. So, OK, should I just smile all the time and never say anything hurts me? Because that’s really fake. Or should I be real about how I’m feeling and have valid, legitimate responses to things that happened to me in my life? But wait, would that be playing the victim?

How do you escape that mental trap? Since I was 15 years old, if people criticized me for something, I changed it. So you realize you might be this amalgamation of criticisms that were hurled at you, and not an actual person who’s made any of these choices themselves. And so I decided I needed to live a quiet life, because a quiet personal life invites no discussion, dissection, and debate. I didn’t realize I was inviting people to feel they had the right to sort of play my life like a video game.

“The old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Because she’s dead!” was funny — but how seriously should we take it? There’s a part of me that definitely is always going to be different. I needed to grow up in many ways. I needed to make boundaries, to figure out what was mine and what was the public’s. That old version of me that shares unfailingly and unblinkingly with a world that is probably not fit to be shared with? I think that’s gone. But it was definitely just, like, a fun moment in the studio with me and Jack [Antonoff] where I wanted to play on the idea of a phone call — because that’s how all of this started, a stupid phone call I shouldn’t have picked up.

It would have been much easier if that’s what you’d just said. It would have been so, so great if I would have just said that [laughs].

Some of the Lover iconography does suggest old Taylor’s return, though. I don’t think I’ve ever leaned into the old version of myself more creatively than I have on this album, where it’s very, very autobiographical. But also moments of extreme catchiness and moments of extreme personal confession.

Did you do anything wrong from your perspective in dealing with that phone call? Is there anything you regret? The world didn’t understand the context and the events that led up to it. Because nothing ever just happens like that without some lead-up. Some events took place to cause me to be pissed off when he called me a bitch. That was not just a singular event. Basically, I got really sick of the dynamic between he and I. And that wasn’t just based on what happened on that phone call and with that song — it was kind of a chain reaction of things.

I started to feel like we reconnected, which felt great for me — because all I ever wanted my whole career after that thing happened in 2009 was for him to respect me. When someone doesn’t respect you so loudly and says you literally don’t deserve to be here — I just so badly wanted that respect from him, and I hate that about myself, that I was like, “This guy who’s antagonizing me, I just want his approval.” But that’s where I was. And so we’d go to dinner and stuff. And I was so happy, because he would say really nice things about my music. It just felt like I was healing some childhood rejection or something from when I was 19. But the 2015 VMAs come around. He’s getting the Vanguard Award. He called me up beforehand — I didn’t illegally record it, so I can’t play it for you. But he called me up, maybe a week or so before the event, and we had maybe over an hourlong conversation, and he’s like, “I really, really would like for you to present this Vanguard Award to me, this would mean so much to me,” and went into all the reasons why it means so much, because he can be so sweet. He can be the sweetest. And I was so stoked that he asked me that. And so I wrote this speech up, and then we get to the VMAs and I make this speech and he screams, “MTV got Taylor Swift up here to present me this award for ratings!” [His exact words: “You know how many times they announced Taylor was going to give me the award ’cause it got them more ratings?”] And I’m standing in the audience with my arm around his wife, and this chill ran through my body. I realized he is so two-faced. That he wants to be nice to me behind the scenes, but then he wants to look cool, get up in front of everyone and talk shit. And I was so upset. He wanted me to come talk to him after the event in his dressing room. I wouldn’t go. So then he sent this big, big thing of flowers the next day to apologize. And I was like, “You know what? I really don’t want us to be on bad terms again. So whatever, I’m just going to move past this.” So when he gets on the phone with me, and I was so touched that he would be respectful and, like, tell me about this one line in the song.

The line being “. . . me and Taylor might still have sex”? [Nods] And I was like, “OK, good. We’re back on good terms.” And then when I heard the song, I was like, “I’m done with this. If you want to be on bad terms, let’s be on bad terms, but just be real about it.” And then he literally did the same thing to Drake. He gravely affected the trajectory of Drake’s family and their lives. It’s the same thing. Getting close to you, earning your trust, detonating you. I really don’t want to talk about it anymore because I get worked up, and I don’t want to just talk about negative shit all day, but it’s the same thing. Go watch Drake talk about what happened. [West denied any involvement in Pusha-T’s revelation of Drake’s child and apologized for sending “negative energy” toward Drake.]

When did you get to the place that’s described on the opening track of Lover, “I Forgot That You Existed”? It was sometime on the Reputation tour, which was the most transformative emotional experience of my career. That tour put me in the healthiest, most balanced place I’ve ever been. After that tour, bad stuff can happen to me, but it doesn’t level me anymore. The stuff that happened a couple of months ago with Scott [Borchetta] would have leveled me three years ago and silenced me. I would have been too afraid to speak up. Something about that tour made me disengage from some part of public perception I used to hang my entire identity on, which I now know is incredibly unhealthy.

What was the actual revelation? It’s almost like I feel more clear about the fact that my job is to be an entertainer. It’s not like this massive thing that sometimes my brain makes it into, and sometimes the media makes it into, where we’re all on this battlefield and everyone’s gonna die except one person, who wins. It’s like, “No, do you know what? Katy is going to be legendary. Gaga is going to be legendary. Beyoncé is going to be legendary. Rihanna is going to be legendary. Because the work that they made completely overshadows the myopia of this 24-hour news cycle of clickbait.” And somehow I realized that on tour, as I was looking at people’s faces. We’re just entertaining people, and it’s supposed to be fun.

It’s interesting to look at these albums as a trilogy. 1989 was really a reset button. Oh, in every way. I’ve been very vocal about the fact that that decision was mine and mine alone, and it was definitely met with a lot of resistance. Internally.

After realizing that things were not all smiles with your former label boss, Scott Borchetta, it’s hard not to wonder how much additional conflict there was over things like that. A lot of the best things I ever did creatively were things that I had to really fight — and I mean aggressively fight — to have happen. But, you know, I’m not like him, making crazy, petty accusations about the past. . . . When you have a business relationship with someone for 15 years, there are going to be a lot of ups and a lot of downs. But I truly, legitimately thought he looked at me as the daughter he never had. And so even though we had a lot of really bad times and creative differences, I was going to hang my hat on the good stuff. I wanted to be friends with him. I thought I knew what betrayal felt like, but this stuff that happened with him was a redefinition of betrayal for me, just because it felt like it was family. To go from feeling like you’re being looked at as a daughter to this grotesque feeling of “Oh, I was actually his prized calf that he was fattening up to sell to the slaughterhouse that would pay the most.”

He accused you of declining the Parkland march and Manchester benefit show. Unbelievable. Here’s the thing: Everyone in my team knew if Scooter Braun brings us something, do not bring it to me. The fact that those two are in business together after the things he said about Scooter Braun — it’s really hard to shock me. And this was utterly shocking. These are two very rich, very powerful men, using $300 million of other people’s money to purchase, like, the most feminine body of work. And then they’re standing in a wood-panel bar doing a tacky photo shoot, raising a glass of scotch to themselves. Because they pulled one over on me and got this done so sneakily that I didn’t even see it coming. And I couldn’t say anything about it.

In some ways, on a musical level, Lover feels like the most indie-ish of your albums. That’s amazing, thank you. It’s definitely a quirky record. With this album, I felt like I sort of gave myself permission to revisit older themes that I used to write about, maybe look at them with fresh eyes. And to revisit older instruments — older in terms of when I used to use them. Because when I was making 1989, I was so obsessed with it being this concept of Eighties big pop, whether it was Eighties in its production or Eighties in its nature, just having these big choruses — being unapologetically big. And then Reputation, there was a reason why I had it all in lowercase. I felt like it wasn’t unapologetically commercial. It’s weird, because that is the album that took the most amount of explanation, and yet it’s the one I didn’t talk about. In the Reputation secret sessions I kind of had to explain to my fans, “I know we’re doing a new thing here that I’d never done before.” I’d never played with characters before. For a lot of pop stars, that’s a really fun trick, where they’re like, “This is my alter ego.” I had never played with that before. It’s really fun. And it was just so fun to play with on tour — the darkness and the bombast and the bitterness and the love and the ups and the downs of an emotional-turmoil record.

“Daylight” is a beautiful song. It feels like it could have been the title track. It almost was. I thought it might be a little bit too sentimental.

And I guess maybe too on-the-nose. Right, yeah, way too on-the-nose. That’s what I thought, because I was kind of in my head referring to the album as Daylight for a while. But Lover, to me, was a more interesting title, more of an accurate theme in my head, and more elastic as a concept. That’s why “You Need to Calm Down” can make sense within the theme of the album — one of the things it addresses is how certain people are not allowed to live their lives without discrimination just based on who they love.

For the more organic songs on this album, like “Lover” and “Paper Rings,” you said you were imagining a wedding band playing them. How often does that kind of visualization shape a song’s production style? Sometimes I’ll have a strange sort of fantasy of where the songs would be played. And so for songs like “Paper Rings” or “Lover” I was imagining a wedding-reception band, but in the Seventies, so they couldn’t play instruments that wouldn’t have been invented yet. I have all these visuals. For Reputation, it was nighttime cityscape. I didn’t really want any — or very minimal — traditional acoustic instruments. I imagined old warehouse buildings that had been deserted and factory spaces and all this industrial kind of imagery. So I wanted the production to have nothing wooden. There’s no wood floors on that album. Lover is, like, completely just a barn wood floor and some ripped curtains flowing in the breeze, and fields of flowers and, you know, velvet.

How did you come to use high school metaphors to touch on politics with “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince”? There are so many influences that go into that particular song. I wrote it a couple of months after midterm elections, and I wanted to take the idea of politics and pick a metaphorical place for that to exist. And so I was thinking about a traditional American high school, where there’s all these kinds of social events that could make someone feel completely alienated. And I think a lot of people in our political landscape are just feeling like we need to huddle up under the bleachers and figure out a plan to make things better.

I feel like your Fall Out Boy fandom might’ve slipped out in that title. I love Fall Out Boy so much. Their songwriting really influenced me, lyrically, maybe more than anyone else. They take a phrase and they twist it. “Loaded God complex/Cock it and pull it”? When I heard that, I was like, “I’m dreaming.”

You sing about “American stories burning before me.” Do you mean the illusions of what America is? It’s about the illusions of what I thought America was before our political landscape took this turn, and that naivete that we used to have about it. And it’s also the idea of people who live in America, who just want to live their lives, make a living, have a family, love who they love, and watching those people lose their rights, or watching those people feel not at home in their home. I have that line “I see the high-fives between the bad guys” because not only are some really racist, horrific undertones now becoming overtones in our political climate, but the people who are representing those concepts and that way of looking at the world are celebrating loudly, and it’s horrific.

You’re in this weird place of being a blond, blue-eyed pop star in this era — to the point where until you endorsed some Democratic candidates, right-wingers, and worse, assumed you were on their side. I don’t think they do anymore. Yeah, that was jarring, and I didn’t hear about that until after it had happened. Because at this point, I, for a very long time, I didn’t have the internet on my phone, and my team and my family were really worried about me because I was not in a good place. And there was a lot of stuff that they just dealt with without telling me about it. Which is the only time that’s ever happened in my career. I’m always in the pilot seat, trying to fly the plane that is my career in exactly the direction I want to take it. But there was a time when I just had to throw my hands up and say, “Guys, I can’t. I can’t do this. I need you to just take over for me and I’m just going to disappear.”

Are you referring to when a white-supremacist site suggested you were on their team? I didn’t even see that, but, like, if that happened, that’s just disgusting. There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. It’s repulsive. There should be no place for it. Really, I keep trying to learn as much as I can about politics, and it’s become something I’m now obsessed with, whereas before, I was living in this sort of political ambivalence, because the person I voted for had always won. We were in such an amazing time when Obama was president because foreign nations respected us. We were so excited to have this dignified person in the White House. My first election was voting for him when he made it into office, and then voting to re-elect him. I think a lot of people are like me, where they just didn’t really know that this could happen. But I’m just focused on the 2020 election. I’m really focused on it. I’m really focused on how I can help and not hinder. Because I also don’t want it to backfire again, because I do feel that the celebrity involvement with Hillary’s campaign was used against her in a lot of ways.

You took a lot of heat for not getting involved. Does any part of you regret that you just didn’t say “fuck it” and gotten more specific when you said to vote that November? Totally. Yeah, I regret a lot of things all the time. It’s like a daily ritual.

Were you just convinced that it would backfire? That’s literally what it was. Yeah. It’s a very powerful thing when you legitimately feel like numbers have proven that pretty much everyone hates you. Like, quantifiably. That’s not me being dramatic. And you know that.

There were a lot of people in those stadiums. It’s true. But that was two years later. . . . I do think, as a party, we need to be more of a team. With Republicans, if you’re wearing that red hat, you’re one of them. And if we’re going to do anything to change what’s happening, we need to stick together. We need to stop dissecting why someone’s on our side or if they’re on our side in the right way or if they phrased it correctly. We need to not have the right kind of Democrat and the wrong kind of Democrat. We need to just be like, “You’re a Democrat? Sick. Get in the car. We’re going to the mall.”

Here’s a hard question for you: As a superfan, what did you think of the Game of Thrones finale? Oh, my God. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. So, clinically our brain responds to our favorite show ending the same way we feel when a breakup occurs. I read that. There’s no good way for it to end. No matter what would have happened in that finale, people still would have been really upset because of the fact that it’s over.

I was glad to see you confirm that your line about a “list of names” was a reference to Arya. I like to be influenced by movies and shows and books and stuff. I love to write about a character dynamic. And not all of my life is going to be as kind of complex as these intricate webs of characters on TV shows and movies.

There was a time when it was. That’s amazing.

But is the idea that as your own life becomes less dramatic, you’ll need to pull ideas from other places? I don’t feel like that yet. I think I might feel like that possibly when I have a family. If I have a family. [Pauses] I don’t know why I said that! But that’s what I’ve heard from other artists, that they were very protective of their personal life, so they had to draw inspiration from other things. But again, I don’t know why I said that. Because I don’t know how my life is going to go or what I’m going to do. But right now, I feel like it’s easier for me to write than it ever was.

You don’t talk about your relationship, but you’ll sing about it in wildly revealing detail. What’s the difference for you? Singing about something helps you to express it in a way that feels more accurate. You cannot, no matter what, put words in a quote and have it move someone the same way as if you heard those words with the perfect sonic representation of that feeling... There is that weird conflict in being a confessional songwriter and then also having my life, you know, 10 years ago, be catapulted into this strange pop-culture thing.

I’ve heard you say that people got too interested in which song was about who, which I can understand — at the same time, to be fair, it was a game you played into, wasn’t it? I realized very early on that no matter what, that was going to happen to me regardless. So when you realize the rules of the game you’re playing and how it will affect you, you got to look at the board and make your strategy. But at the same time, writing songs has never been a strategic element of my career. But I’m not scared anymore to say that other things in my career, like how to market an album, are strictly strategic. And I’m sick of women not being able to say that they have strategic business minds — because male artists are allowed to. And so I’m sick and tired of having to pretend like I don’t mastermind my own business. But, it’s a different part of my brain than I use to write.

You’ve been masterminding your business since you were a teenager. Yeah, but I’ve also tried very hard — and this is one thing I regret — to convince people that I wasn’t the one holding the puppet strings of my marketing existence, or the fact that I sit in a conference room several times a week and come up with these ideas. I felt for a very long time that people don’t want to think of a woman in music who isn’t just a happy, talented accident. We’re all forced to kind of be like, “Aw, shucks, this happened again! We’re still doing well! Aw, that’s so great.” Alex Morgan celebrating scoring a goal at the World Cup and getting shit for it is a perfect example of why we’re not allowed to flaunt or celebrate, or reveal that, like, “Oh, yeah, it was me. I came up with this stuff.” I think it’s really unfair. People love new female artists so much because they’re able to explain that woman’s success. There’s an easy trajectory. Look at the Game of Thrones finale. I specifically really related to Daenerys’ storyline because for me it portrayed that it is a lot easier for a woman to attain power than to maintain it.

I mean, she did murder... It’s a total metaphor! Like, obviously I didn’t want Daenerys to become that kind of character, but in taking away what I chose to take away from it, I thought maybe they’re trying to portray her climbing the ladder to the top was a lot easier than maintaining it, because for me, the times when I felt like I was going insane was when I was trying to maintain my career in the same way that I ascended. It’s easier to get power than to keep it. It’s easier to get acclaim than to keep it. It’s easier to get attention than to keep it.

Well, I guess we should be glad you didn’t have a dragon in 2016... [Fiercely] I told you I don’t like that she did that! But, I mean, watching the show, though, maybe this is a reflection on how we treat women in power, how we are totally going to conspire against them and tear at them until they feel this — this insane shift, where you wonder, like, “What changed?” And I’ve had that happen, like, 60 times in my career where I’m like, “OK, you liked me last year, what changed? I guess I’ll change so I can keep entertaining you guys.”

You once said that your mom could never punish you when you were little because you’d punish yourself. This idea of changing in the face of criticism and needing approval — that’s all part of wanting to be good, right? Whatever that means. But that seems to be a real driving force in your life. Yeah, that’s definitely very perceptive of you. And the question posed to me is, if you kept trying to do good things, but everyone saw those things in a cynical way and assumed them to be done with bad motivation and bad intent, would you still do good things, even though nothing that you did was looked at as good? And the answer is, yes. Criticism that’s constructive is helpful to my character growth. Baseless criticism is stuff I’ve got to toss out now.

That sounds healthy. Is this therapy talking or is this just experience? No, I’ve never been to therapy. I talk to my mom a lot, because my mom is the one who’s seen everything. God, it takes so long to download somebody on the last 29 years of my life, and my mom has seen it all. She knows exactly where I’m coming from. And we talk endlessly. There were times when I used to have really, really, really bad days where we would just be on the phone for hours and hours and hours. I’d write something that I wanted to say, and instead of posting it, I’d just read it to her.

I somehow connect all this to the lyric in “Daylight,” the idea of “so many lines that I’ve crossed unforgiven” — it’s a different kind of confession. I am really glad you liked that line, because that’s something that does bother me, looking back at life and realizing that no matter what, you screw things up. Sometimes there are people that were in your life and they’re not anymore — and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t fix it, you can’t change it. I told the fans last night that sometimes on my bad days, I feel like my life is a pile of crap accumulated of only the bad headlines or the bad things that have happened, or the mistakes I’ve made or clichés or rumors or things that people think about me or have thought for the last 15 years. And that was part of the “Look What You Made Me Do” music video, where I had a pile of literal old selves fighting each other.

But, yeah, that line is indicative of my anxiety about how in life you can’t get everything right. A lot of times you make the wrong call, make the wrong decision. Say the wrong thing. Hurt people, even if you didn’t mean to. You don’t really know how to fix all of that. When it’s, like, 29 years’ worth.

To be Mr. “Rolling Stone” for a second, there’s a Springsteen lyric, “Ain’t no one leaving this world, buddy/Without their shirttail dirty or hands a little bloody.” That’s really good! No one gets through it unscathed. No one gets through in one piece. I think that’s a hard thing for a lot of people to grasp. I know it was hard for me, because I kind of grew up thinking, “If I’m nice, and if I try to do the right thing, you know, maybe I can just, like, ace this whole thing.” And it turns out I can’t.

It’s interesting to look at “I Did Something Bad” in this context. You pointing that out is really interesting because it’s something I’ve had to reconcile within myself in the last couple of years — that sort of “good” complex. Because from the time I was a kid I’d try to be kind, be a good person. Try really hard. But you get walked all over sometimes. And how do you respond to being walked all over? You can’t just sit there and eat your salad and let it happen. “I Did Something Bad” was about doing something that was so against what I would usually do. Katy [Perry] and I were talking about our signs. . . . [Laughs] Of course we were.

That’s the greatest sentence ever. [Laughs] I hate you. We were talking about our signs because we had this really, really long talk when we were reconnecting and stuff. And I remember in the long talk, she was like, “If we had one glass of white wine right now, we’d both be crying.” Because we were drinking tea. We’ve had some really good conversations.

We were talking about how we’ve had miscommunications with people in the past, not even specifically with each other. She’s like, “I’m a Scorpio. Scorpios just strike when they feel threatened.” And I was like, “Well, I’m an archer. We literally stand back, assess the situation, process how we feel about it, raise a bow, pull it back, and fire.” So it’s completely different ways of processing pain, confusion, misconception. And oftentimes I’ve had this delay in feeling something that hurts me and then saying that it hurts me. Do you know what I mean? And so I can understand how people in my life would have been like, “Whoa, I didn’t know that was how you felt.” Because it takes me a second.

If you watch the video of the 2009 VMAs, I literally freeze. I literally stand there. And that is how I handle any discomfort, any pain. I stand there, I freeze. And then five minutes later, I know how I feel. But in the moment, I’m probably overreacting and I should be nice. Then I process it, and in five minutes, if it’s gone, it’s past, and I’m like, “I was overreacting, everything’s fine. I can get through this. I’m glad I didn’t say anything harsh in the moment.” But when it’s actually something bad that happened, and I feel really, really hurt or upset about it, I only know after the fact. Because I’ve tried so hard to squash it: “This probably isn’t what you think.” That’s something I had to work on.

You could end up gaslighting yourself. Yeah, for sure. ’Cause so many situations where if I would have said the first thing that came to my mind, people would have been like, “Whoa!” And maybe I would have been wrong or combative. So a couple of years ago I started working on actually just responding to my emotions in a quicker fashion. And it’s really helped with stuff. It’s helped so much because sometimes you get in arguments. But conflict in the moment is so much better than combat after the fact.

Well, thanks. I do feel like I just did a therapy session. As someone who’s never been to therapy, I can safely say that was the best therapy session.

#uhhhh #just by copying and editing text I see it's gonna be good =)#can't wait...#taylor swift #interview #by taylor #lover era #Rolling Stone magazine #Brian Hiatt

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inorganicone2230 · 5 years ago

Text

Divine Intervention (Part 3) Yandere!Erasermic x Fem!Reader

Part 2 Part 4

Summary: Sometimes a little divine intervention is necessary to take back the ones we love… whether they want it or not.

Warnings: Suicide, kidnapping, forced relationship, emotional and mental manipulation, typical Yandere behavior, possible non-con in future chapters

Side note: Holy shit! I certainly hope you guys have some time because this one is LONG! I’M TALKING 5K WORDS!!! Hopefully no one minds lol

Please enjoy!

“And was that the newest one?”

You laid back on the couch and sighed, “Yes. I just wish I knew what it meant. I mean, why bring up this supposedly dead woman?”

Doctor Kayama looked down at her notes in thought, “Perhaps it's simply your minds way of filling in the blanks. You've been having these dreams for quite some time now. And as an adolescent you didn't question the details and the facts near as often as you do now that you're an adult.”

You let another sigh fall from your lips. “Yeah, you're probably right, but there already was an explanation for her, she’s dead.”

You had been seeing Doctor Kayama, who specialized in sleep disorders -insomnia, sleep apnea, narcolepsy and in your case, reoccurring dreams/nightmares- since you were 16 and in a way it was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because you had someone unbiased to talk to about them who you felt wasn't going to judge you, and a curse because by constantly talking about them, you could never really forget them or put them out of your head. They were always there, right at the forefront of your mind, just waiting for something in your day-to-day life to trigger a memory of them.

Doctor Kayama pursed her plump lips into a thin line, “The mind is a tricky thing, and dreams are even trickier. I can see that we are not going to make anymore progress today, our time is almost up anyway. And if I'm not mistaken, you have to be to work in an hour.” She said, standing up to put her things away and walk you to the door.

You followed suit, “Yes, I think I’m hitting a blank on how to think about it further. Maybe next week I’ll have some answers… or some ideas at the very least.”

Nemuri smiled at you in response, “I agree. Some time to think more will do you some good.”

You shook her hand and as always, you felt just a little bit better after your session, even if you didn't make much progress. Anything was better than nothing. Wasn't it?

“I'll see you again next week, same time as usual.” With your confirmation to return next week you were out the door and on your way to work.

--------

You were fortunate enough to have found a nice apartment that was within walking distance to both your work and the doctor's office. Right in the middle actually! The only downside was that you had to go further into the city whenever you needed to do shopping. You made decent money at the bookstore/cafe that you worked at, but the area didn't really have any grocery stores, just a lot of restaurants and gas stations. And while that was fine every now and then, you would prefer not to waste all your hard earned money on expensive meals and unhealthy junk food.

You were about halfway home though when something caught your eye, or rather someone… and it made you freeze.

‘Was that? No… it couldn't be? Could it…?’

For just a moment you could have sworn you caught sight of a familiar head of golden hair. Long and soft looking, it caught the glare from the afternoon sun on the fresh snow in just a way that it seemed to make the strands glitter in the light.

Without a second thought you instinctively began to head in the same direction. Or you would have, if your phone hadn't rang.

You scrambled to pull it from your purse. “Hello?” A brief pause, “No that's fine. I was going to stop at my apartment on the way but I can just head straight there, it's no trouble.” Another pause, “Sounds good. I’ll see you soon, bye bye.”

Hanging up and putting away your phone you took a look around, you had lost sight of whoever that was. “Oh who am I kidding, it was nothing! Just someone's regular blonde hair, my eyes and that appointment I just had are playing tricks on me.” You reassured yourself. It was a strange thing to see but there was no way it was real. With your pep talk over you began your trek to the bookstore.

In your haste you failed to notice the lime green eyes that watched you from the roof of the building beside you. Eyes that watched you with a predatory hunger. The bounce of your hair, the sway of your hips, the curves of you soft form. All of it was focused on you and you alone and the predator licked his lips in anticipation.

“Soon (Current Name), soon.”

--------

You made it to work with a few minutes to spare and after exchanging pleasantries with your coworker and going through the usual shift-change duties, you were ready to start your day.

It was a Saturday and with most people still in school or at work, plus the cafe being closed, it was proving to be a rather slow afternoon. You did the usual tasks of dusting the shelves, taking inventory and putting away new items, calling people to inform them of their special orders and just general basic things. You soon found yourself with nothing else to do. Not even a customer to hep out!

Luckily, the couple that owned the store didn't mind the employees reading on shift as long as everything else was done and no customers needed help. Taking a seat behind the counter you began to read your current book. A horror/mystery novel about a young girl who goes to sleep in her bed but wakes up in an old house with no windows or doors leading outside, she has to find a way out while being haunted by whispering voices and a tall pale figure with teeth for lips that watches her from the shadows.

You had only gotten a few chapters in when you heard a voice speak to you though. “Excuse me miss? Could you help us?”

Funny, you hadn't heard the bell go off when the door was opened, nor had you felt the draft from the chilly winter weather outside. But you simply wrote it off, thinking you were too engrossed in your book. None the less you mark your page and put the book down. “Of course! What can I do for y-...” You freeze mid sentence.

Standing in front of you are two very familiar looking men. Both tall and handsome in their own way, but as different as night and day.

The tallest one had black hair that brushed his shoulders and a serious case of five o'clock shadow. His eyes were just as dark as his hair, though admittedly, that could have been because he looked like he hadn't slept in a week. He was dressed in black jeans, a gray t-shirt and a heavy black winter pea-coat.

The other man practically radiated sunshine with his rather long blonde hair and bright green eyes framed by simple square glasses. Multiple piercings adorned his ears along with other jewelry, a silver chain wrapped twice around his neck and a few rings to match. He was dressed rather similarly to his counterpart but in tans and whites.

It was THEM! The one’s from your dreams… or at least... two men who looked exactly like them. And it scared you…

It took you a second to realize that you must have zoned out when you froze because they were giving you odd looks and asking if you were okay. You managed to give them an admittedly half-assed response. “O-oh yes! I'm p-perfectly fine, you just startled me is all! What can I help you with today?”

Both men exchanged odd glances with each other, like they were having some silent conversation. “Are you sure miss?” The black haired one asked, “Your white as a sheet and look like you've seen a ghost.”

“Yes! Absolutely!” You replied with a forced kind of enthusiasm.

The blonde snickered and gave a feral grin, first to you and then to his companion, “Aww, she's blushing Shouta! Maybe she's just flustered, what with having such good looking guys come in her store!” His insinuation and the wink he throws your way make your eye twitch in irritation. But he’s not done running his mouth, “Well if it makes you feel any better Sweetling, I’d be tripping over myself to if a lovely little thing you walked in on me out of the blue.”

You weren't quite sure how to respond to that. Luckily for you the other one -Shouta, the blonde said?- seemed to know what to do about his friends behavior since he reached out to yank on some of his hair. “Cut it out Hizashi. Can't you see you're making the poor thing as nervous as a wet kitten.”

Hizashi at least had the decency to look apologetic as he rubbed the spot his hair was yanked. “Sorry hun, my mouth gets the better of me sometimes, especially around pretty girls.” He held out his hand to you and grinned again, “Let's start over! I’m Hizashi and this here is my friend Shouta!”

You were still really put off -terrified actually- by their resemblance to the men from your dreams but you had a job to do still. You swallowed your fear and plastered on your best ‘Fake as Shit Face’ Before quickly shaking both their hands. “It's nice to meet you, my names (Fake Name)! What can I do for you today?” You hoped you sounded convincing enough. Your work had a policy about not using real names on the name tags, just better for the employees safety, especially in this day and age. Can't be too careful.

“We were hoping to find some books on religion… reincarnation to be more precise. Possibly even mythology and folklore.” He said it in such a strange way, like he was trying to explain something without going into too much detail.

You thought it was an odd request for sure, but you weren't really one to judge other people's taste in literature since you yourself had some weird ones. Right now all you wanted to do was get them out of the store ASAP.

“Sure! Follow me right this way.”

You lead them to a small section near the back of the left end of the store, no more than three bookshelves. Both sections were right next to each other since more often than not, both genres got classified under the same banner these days. “I’m not to sure if we have anything on reincarnation specifically but if we do it's over here. Feel free to look as long as you want, we're still open for a few more hours so take your time!”

Both of them smiled at you warmly and thanked you profusely.

“It was no trouble, please let me know if I can help with anything else.” You were trying to make a speedy exit. You needed to think, and breath, and process what was going on. But you couldn't do that around their confusing and suffocating presence.

“Oh don't worry Sweets, we'll be sure to let you know when that happens.” Hizashi said in a rather provocative way, obviously trying to get a reaction out of you.

You didn't respond, simply gave a nod and turned on your heel and began heading straight for the restroom.

Once inside with the door shut and locked tight, you suddenly felt the strangeness of this situation hit you all at once. You ran to the toilet and puked, small quiet tears running down your cheeks as you hyperventilate. ‘What the hell is going on here?!’ Why the fuck do those two look like them?!’

It wasn't just a passing resemblance either, it was like they stepped right out of your mind and into reality. You just couldn't handle this right now. “Maybe they'll have not found anything and left already.” You said to yourself hopefully and decided to give yourself a few more minutes of isolation before going back out there.

Your prayers went unanswered though as you stepped out to see them at the counter, one book in hand and warm smiles on their faces. “You okay there sweetling, you're looking a little pale?”

You waved off the concern and booked it to the register to ring up their purchase. The sooner they paid, the sooner they would leave. At least… you hoped they would.

“I hope you found everything you needed!” You sounded totally fake even to yourself.

Shouta gave a low chuckle, “No, not everything. But I’m sure we'll get what we need very soon.”

Something about the way he said that sent chills up your spine. It almost sounded like a warning. “W-well if you have something specific that you're looking for we can try and order it for you.” Your reply is automatic and as the men share a look, you feel like your being left out of an entire conversation that is taking place right in front of you.

“We’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”

“Well I hope the two of you have a good evening, please come again!” You gave a short bow to them both.

“Come on! No need to be so formal! You seem like a real sweet girl, you should give us your digits so we can hang out sometime. We know some pretty awesome places to go have some fun.” The blonde suggests, leaning across the counter space and ever closer to you, a large toothy grin on his face.

Without thinking you reply, “Sorry, my boss's have a strict policy about employee/customer relations. Immediate termination if fraternization is found. I like my job so I’d rather keep it. Sorry again.” There was no such rule or policy enforced, but they didn't need to know that.

They give each other that same look again. “That's too bad. We're new to the area and were hoping to meet some new people to hang out with.” Shouta replied, both wore the same dejected look. It almost made you feel bad for fibbing. Almost…

“The folks around here are really great, I’m sure you guys won't have to hard of a time meeting some new people!” You really hoped they would leave or that another customer would come in. Anything to end this weird conversation!

For a moment, the two men frowned, like you said something awful. But they quickly bounced back, “Well I’m sure we'll be seeing you around either way. We’ll be sure to come back here if we need anything else! Right Shouta!?”

Shouta gave a much quieter response then his friend, “Yes, I’m sure we're on the fast track to becoming regulars for you.”

‘I certainly hope not.’‘ You thought bitterly as you finished saying your goodbyes and watched them walk out the door. If you never saw these men again it would be far far to soon for your liking.

--------

Back in their home in the Heavens and laying in their bed, the two gods of Life and Death basked in the happiness they felt at being in your physical presence for the first time so long.

Hizashi himself was a literal walking bundle of sunshine. “Oh Shouta! I know we've been watching her all her life and sending her those dreams for years, but to be in her presence again after eons apart! The memories didn't do her justice, her voice alone was enough to make my mind go blank.”

Shouta also gave a lighthearted smile, “Yes, and the way she seemed so shy and nervous after she recognized us from the dreams. It really was so sweet and precious. She was such a raging spit viper in the past, I rather like this quiet, demure version of her. Almost seems a shame to waste it by giving her memories back.”

The God of Life nodded along with his opposites words. “Yes, she's going to be quite angry once she remembers everything. Why don't we just forget about the medicine and bring her here as is? Start over completely! New and fresh?”

“Do you truly want that? For her to not remember anything about our time together in the past? Because I don't, I want her to remember the day we met, the time we spent getting to know her, the first time we made love to her. I want her to be able to understand how hurt we were the day she took herself from us!” Shouta’s eyes were beginning to flash red as his hair moved in an unseen wind. “I want to know why she did it in the first place, so that we can do better for her, be better for her. And…” Shouta trailed off here as if he was unsure if he should continue or not.

Hizashi reached out to take his lovers face in his hands and promoted him to continue, “And?”

Shouta took a deep breath, “And perhaps I wish to punish her for it... we have suffered for five thousand years without her, and it just doesn't seem fair that she should get to live in blissful ignorance of what she has put us through. That's why I want her to remember Zashi.”

A mouth was on his as soon as he finished, a warm wet tongue tangled with his own as he readily responded. The kiss lasted a while longer before both deities reluctantly pulled back.

A smug Hizashi stared down on his other half with lusty eyes, “Very well, I can see your point, we will give her the medicine. But what do we do now that we've made her aware of us outside of the dreams? Do we simply bring her home, or do we wait and play it by ear? I want her here with us, so that she can be safe and happy. It took all my willpower in that shop not to just grab her and bend her over the counter. I can't wait to much longer Shou! So what is the plan? I know you have one.”

Shouta's smile was positively feral, “This is what we will do,...”

--------

The rest of the night went smoothly -despite your nagging fear over the two lookalikes- and you tried your best to be as productive as possible until it was time to close up the shop for the night.

Since you got all your cleaning done so much sooner than usual, it was a relatively easy close. All you really had to do was count down the till and check to make sure all the doors and windows were locked. Easy peasy!

You were excited to get out the door so quickly after such a slow -and admittedly frightening- evening. All you wanted was to get to the comfort of your home where you could relax and breath easy. Tomorrow was the start of your weekend and you had every intention of staying home the entire time!

After checking that the place was locked up you headed for the door. You felt the bitter cold air as soon as you stepped outside, it was a clear night so it was much colder than the overcast day had been. And quiet too, you noted. Not unusual for you, all the other businesses closed at least an hour or two before you, and no bars or restaurants for a few blocks meant that you rarely saw a single soul this late at night. You still kept a switchblade in your coat pocket and pepper spray in your purse though, just in case…

You locked the door and had just started walking when you heard it, the telltale sound of snow and ice crunching under heavy footsteps, two sets. You had a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that you knew who was going to be there when you turned around. You wanted so bad to be proven wrong.

“Well look who it is! Our new favorite bookstore worker! Just closing up shop sweetling?”

Yup, you were right... unfortunately. You turned around and there they were, still dressed in the same clothes and with warm smiles adorning their handsome faces. “Y-Yes, I was just on my way home.” You said, not bothering to put on the fake customer service enthusiasm you had earlier. You hoped they would take the hint and let you go on your way.

They were much closer to you now, only a few feet away, when Shouta spoke next. “You seem awfully tired there Kitten, and it's quite the hour for a pretty young lady like you to be walking the streets so late at night. We'll walk you home.”

Your eye twitched at the use of that nickname, you didn't know these two well enough for them to act so familiar with you. And they never would if you had it your way. “That's not necessary, I live close by and I'm used to walking this la-”

You were cut off by Shouta’s firm voice, “We insist. We'll walk you.” It was practically an order. And it made you bristle. You were just about to tear into him when you were cut off again, this time by the blonde.

“Sorry, what Shouta means to say is that we live in the direction you were going. We have to walk the same way anyway and we just wouldn't feel right NOT walking you this late at night. Come on, don't make us go home worried sick about weather you made it home safely or not. Pretty please?”

You knew this wasn't normal. Meeting two guys -at the same time- who look identical to the men from your dreams, the way they just happen to run into you as your getting off work, that they live in the same direction as you. You wanted so badly to tell them to fuck off and leave you alone, to hightail it and run as far and as fast as you could away from them, but you didn't. You weren't that kind of person, you overthink and over analyze situations that make you feel uncomfortable. Just like now, you couldn't help but think that maybe they really were just trying to be nice, that it was just a coincidence they looked so similar. But another part of you thought that if you did tell them what you really wanted to say, it could backfire on you at work, they could come in and say something to your boss and coworkers. Make it sound like they were just trying to be Good Samaritans and you were being a self-righteous bitch. You needed this job more than you needed your backbone, you thought. So you caved…

“W-well if it's not out of your way, than sure. I could u-use the company.” You know you've made a mistake the second the words leave your mouth.

Both men beamed at your agreement. “Great! Then lead the way Sweetling!” They each took a stand on either side of you as you begin to walk.

Hizashi fills the silence with chatter and small talk while Shouta chimes in every now and then. They ask basic and harmless things, things like; “Do you enjoy working at the bookstore? Have you lived in the neighborhood long? What kinds of things are there to do?” You answer some of them honestly, but some you fib on or give vague nondescript answers. They don't seem to notice, and if they do they don't mention it.

Soon -but not soon enough- the three of you are standing outside your building. It's a modest three story complex, relatively new and decently maintained and you live on the third floor in a small one bedroom flat. You refrain from breathing a sigh of relief while still in their presence. “Well, this is me. Thanks again for walking me home.”

“It was no trouble. Me and Zashi are always happy to help. Especially when such a pretty face is involved.” If this was any other man flashing you that sexy smile you would have gone weak in the knees, all you felt right now was a desire to kick them both.

“Yeah! It was so nice meeting such a cutie right off the bat! And we got to run into you again, that's gotta be fate, right?!” Hizashi says dreamily. Was it just your imagination or had they moved closer to you.

You chuckled nervously, “W-who can s-say? M-maybe, I don't k-know.” They were definitely closer.

“ I'm positive it was! We couldn't stop thinking about you all night! We're so happy to see you again (Y/N)!” Hizashi kept gushing.

You froze in absolute terror. How did he know your real name!? They were still taking turns praising you when you spoke. “How do you know my name?”

Shouta was the first to take notice of your tense tone. “What was that Kitten?”

You didn't bother being polite this time, “I said how the hell do you know my name?! I never gave it to you!” You took a step back and freaked when you felt the brick wall of your building behind you instead of the door.

They looked at each other in that same way from earlier, speaking without words.

“Calm down, you gave us your name when we introduced ourselves in the shop.”

“Yeah, don't you remember? It was even on your name tag.”

If you hadn't heard it so clearly you might have believed them, but you had heard it and you weren't buying their bullshit excuse.

“No! I gave you a fake name in the store, the one you just said is my real birth name! How do you know it?!” Your breathing was labored and you felt lightheaded. A panic attack maybe? You needed to calm down and think straight.

They looked at you for a moment longer, faces blank of any emotion. And then Hizashi laughed, scratching the back of his head like he just made a simple mistake . “Whoops, guess I kind of blew our cover. Sorry Shou, I got carried away and wasn't thinking before I spoke.”

Shouta meanwhile simply shook his head and cuffed him in the arm. “Great job Loudmouth, now we have to move things along faster thanks to your carelessness.”

You were dumbfounded, completely lost as to what was going on in front of you. “What the hell do you two freaks think this is?! Some kind of sick joke?! Because I'm not laughing! What I’m doing is going straight to the cops.” You regretted that last line as soon as you said it because both men's eyes were instantly on you. Bad idea to admit you were going to go to the fuzz. Now you felt like a cornered animal. Like pray. And when your flight or fight response kicked in, you ran to the left, your switchblade and pepper spray completely forgotten in your panicked state. Or tried to anyway.

Two sets of impossibly strong arms grabbed you and shoved you back up against the cold brick wall, a hand covering your mouth to block your screams. Not enough to truly hurt or bruise, but just enough to knock the air from your lungs. Your eyes fell closed for just a second and when you opened them again you were greeted by a sight you only ever saw in your dreams.

They stood before you in ancient but elegant robes, radiating a strange and inhuman aura. Hizashi was dressed in green and emerald, ornate jewelry catching the light from the street lamps above. Shouta was in simple gray and black. Where as before they had only LOOKED like them now they WERE them. They were still smiling like nothing was wrong.

“Oh you won't be doing that Songbird, those pretty little lips aren't going to be singing for anyone but us ever again.” The blonde leaned in closer to whisper huskily in your ear, his warm breath fanning over your numb ear and making you shiver. “You have no idea how amazing it feels to be touching you like this again. You feel so soft Sweetling, I could just devour you right here and now.”

You had gone into shock for a few moments at the drastic change in them, both in physicality and in personality. But as soon as you felt the undeniable press of his hardening groin against your hip, you absolutely lost it. Thrashing, shaking your head, trying to scream through the hand that still covered your mouth and kicking out your legs, but it did you no favors as you soon found yourself too tired to move.

It only seemed to egg the blonde on further when you heard him groan -not in pain- but in pleasure. “Keep that shit up and I’m not gonna be able to hold back.” He said, grinding himself against you harder. You ceased all movement.

“Enough. It's far too cold to be doing that here Zashi. We can enjoy ourselves once we have her safe and sound at home, and warmed up.” Shouta said as casually as if he was ordering a pizza. You began to thrash again with renewed vigor, tears ran down your face and you felt his hand become slick with your drool from your muffled screams.

Hizashi pouted and rolled his eyes, “Fine fine, but it will be a lot easier to get everything ready if she was asleep.”

“I'm one step ahead of you. Do you want to or should I?

“You. I don't think I could hold myself back if I do it.”

“Alright, just take your hand off her mouth when I tell you too.”

This was your chance! As soon as your mouth was free you could scream for help! Even if it was only a second, you had to try! You closed your eyes and waited with bated breath for the pressure on your face to ease up.

“Now.”

The hand was gone. “SOMEONE HEL-” The Hand was replaced with a mouth. Shouta's mouth slammed against yours in a bruising kiss and you felt some kind of bitter tasting liquid slide down your throat. It took you a second to realize that he was still kissing you, sliding his tongue against yours and groaning into your mouth, probably in an effort to keep you quiet while whatever he forced you to drink kicked in. Which wasn't taking long as you felt your mind going hazy and your eyes getting heavy. Well, you weren't going to just take it without a fight, the moment you felt his tongue in your mouth again you bit down. Hard!

He pulled back with a curse shot you a disgruntled look as he spat blood onto the street. “That wasn't very nice. Maybe I was wrong and she dose still have some of that fire left.”

Your mind was foggy and your knees gave out on you, Hizashi caught you before you could hit the frozen ground. “G-go f-f-fuck y-yourselves!”

Both of them just grinned down at you and reached out to stroke your cheeks and hair. Your arms felt heavy, you couldn't even fight back at this point. You were slipping away fast.

“Don't worry Kitten, we'll explain everything once we get you home and you wake up. Things will all make sense soon, we promise.”

“We’ll do better this time. We won't let you get away from us, we've worked too hard to get you back. But we'll tell you all about that after you get some sleep. Just rest for now, your perfectly safe with us Sweetling. We love you so much!”

That was all you heard before sleep claimed you. Your last thought was that you hoped your sleep would be black. The last thing you wanted was to dream and have to see their faces again.

I hope everyone enjoys this extra long chapter, the next one will probably be about the same length, if not just a bit longer! If you have the time please let me know what you thought. I was incredibly worried about the pacing I set for it. I feel like it was too rushed.

As I said before, thank you again to @jadepillar18 for the inspiration on this story!

Enjoy!

#yandere!erasermic #yandere!erasermic x reader #yandere!aizawa #yandere!hizashi #yandere!aizawa x reader #yandere!hizashi x reader #fem!reader #reader insert #aizawa x hizashi #yandere bnha #bnha #gods au #kidnapping #stalking #typical yandere behavior

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things2mustdo · 4 years ago

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On July 6th 1994, twenty-six year old Troy Kell, inmate and white supremacist gang member at Utah State Prison, killed Lonnie Blackmon, a black inmate, with 67 blows from a prison shank while prison guards videotaped the attack. The deed done, Troy wiped his hands clean of the blood and walked away, proudly yelling:

“Got some white power jumpin’ off around here!”

Later, in an interview with HBO for it’s documentary Gladiator Days : Anatomy Of A Prison Murder (2002), Troy explained his reasoning behind why he killed Blackmon.

TROY

“I went into the situation that I’m gonna hafta kill the guy – I’m not gonna…jus hurt ‘em, I’m not gonna stab him two times and say ‘yeah we’re even’, you know, cause the philosophy in prison is, you know, you stab me I kill you… I just stabbed the shit outta him, you know, until he didn’t move anymore.”

“I’ve seen guys hesitate…on not thinkin’ somethin’ was serious, and it was serious, and they get themselves stabbed up. Or they get themselves fucked off…they get themselves killed.”

A brutal view on life. Yet it’s not surprising to hear from an inmate who had been imprisoned for another murder since he was eighteen. Troy’s first murder was James Kelly [real name James Thiede], a twenty-one year old Canadian man in Troy’s hometown of Las Vegas. Troy, with the assistance of Sandra Shaw (fifteen at the time) and another friend, lured Kelly into the desert and ambushed him, where Troy shot Kelly six times in the face at point blank range.

Who was Troy? Where did he come from? What was the series of events that drove him to commit two murders, both of which placed him on death row?*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL_PlbqyLcI

One of the most startling aspects of Troy, from watching the documentary, is just how intelligent, almost proverbially All American he comes across as. Troy was not some trailer trash kid, doomed for eventual incarceration.

TROY

“I was raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, little middle class family. I’m the only child.”

“I think I was probably just an ordinary kid on the block, I wasn’t any different, or anything from anyone else that I noticed.”

“My father’s into horses, and kinda a redneck background, country boy kinda thing, and we had horses and stuff.”

“I was expected…to be successful, you know, my family, you know, they’re not losers.”

His neighbourhood was middle class, his school was middle class. Troy was thoroughly middle class. So why did he, at eighteen, kill James Kelly? For the answer to that, we have to turn to Sandra Shaw.

Sandra was three years younger then Troy. They met quite early, when they were children.

SANDY

“Troy’s been a part of our life, um, ever since I first came to Las Vegas. Um, since I was probably, like, six years old. We lived on one corner of the street and on the opposite street he lived at the other corner. And um, me and a couple of friends, two little girlfriends, were walking down the street and him and his little friends were sitting in front of their house on their bicycles and you know they were watching us googly eyed cause he’s three years older then me. So when we got all the way to the end of the street, towards the desert, you know, we turned around and said somethin’ real sassy and they chased us on their bikes and we ran and he jumped off his back and tackled me into the grass and you know it just became like a plaything. And since then he was like, ‘You’re gonna be my girlfriend’ and I was like, ‘No I don’t even like boys’.”

There was obviously some romantic tension going on between the two of them from a very young age. Though Troy and Sandy both refer to each other in a younger sister older brother dynamic, it’s clear that at least Troy felt a deep attraction to Sandy. Why shouldn’t he? After all, she was the quintessential girl next door whom eagerly spent time with him. Sandy was a cute little girl, and Troy was no slouch himself.

SANDY

“His father was really really strict, and um, I remember one time on his birthday, we were, he was turning thirteen and I believe I was ten and I rode my bike all the way to the mall and I bought him a Nike outfit and he had to sneak out in his back yard and climb up on the brick wall for me give him his gift, because he was on restriction – he was always on restriction – just, for absolutely nothing.”

That’s an almost classical scene of romance, and one wonders how many other secret rendezvous Troy and Sandy had over the years.

In many ways Sandy herself was the counterpart of Troy – the proverbial All American girl; pretty, a cheerleader, precocious and outgoing – though her family was struggling on the line between middle and lower class (Connie Shaw appears to be a single mother). By all counts, Sandy was destined for a typical middle class life herself. Perhaps even with Troy.

SANDY

“When I was thirteen years old I was spending the night at a friend’s house and her step father went into a jealous rage and shot and killed her mother and her mother’s two friends and then killed himself. It changed my life.”

That man was Alex Egyed, a budding computer entrepreneur who may have been a well recognized name today if he hadn’t gone on a rampage and left Sandy covered in blood, huddling in a bathtub with her friend. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only incident Sandy was going to have with extreme violence.

CONNIE

“Another episode happened to her; she’s walkin’ home from school, uh, sees this guy runnin’ up behind her, girl in front of her, sees the guy shoot…the girl, in the back of the head. She’s already gone through this. Now this is two. How many times – I mean, I’m forty-eight years old, I mean, I’ve never seen anyone, in my lifetime, get shot. She’s seen two.”

These episodes left Sandy a broken girl; a girl barely on the cusp of her womanhood.

SANDY

“I detached myself from my emotions, I didn’t have a sense of life or death, it’s all the same to me.”

Yet she was still a significant part of Troy’s life. And Troy really needed love in his life, since his own family had self destructed.

TROY

“My parents got divorced and I kinda bounced back and forth between them. It was kinda a struggle for me for awhile but, it’s nothin’ outta the ordinary… Any other kid goes through it.”

CONNIE

“His father must have been very tough on him, very abusive, I believe, with him. And his mother was never around. I know they were separated. But I don’t think his mother came around too much, I don’t know if it was because of the father…or what, you know, but uh, I guess he looked at me, more like a mother figure you know because he’s always sent me, even till this day, sends me a bouquet of mother’s day flowers.”

Troy and Sandy were both set adrift at a young age, both from broken homes, both experiencing severe forms of trauma – albeit Troy’s were less extreme. Because of his need for love, Troy grew ever closer to Sandy while Sandy threw herself into an abyss. Like many traumatized girls, Sandy began to slip down into degeneracy and self abuse. She began to hang around shady men and casinos while barely being a fully fledged teen, and at the age of fourteen she ran into James Kelly at the Circus Circus casino.

SANDY

“I met Cotton Kelly at Circus Circus eight months prior to this actual tragedy.”

“He ran some type of, um, adult entertainment business. He wanted me to pose nude for him.”

“He had started following me and calling my house constantly, harassing my family… And as a fifteen year old child, I made a very bad decision, a very immature request and I called upon Troy to beat the man up. To have him, leave me alone.”

A normal girl with a strong family could have resolved this situation with ease. A simple, hard talk by a good father with this James Kelly character would have spared everyone a lot of tragedy. Sandy, however, had drifted far away from being a normal girl and with nothing but a weak family at her disposal she allowed this situation to escalate and continue. Perhaps she even began to be sexual with Kelly, though she does not mention the full depth of their relationship.

In the end she turned to the one man she knew she could depend on.

TROY

“Me and a friend of mine from high school agreed to beat this guy up, because he was doin’ some things to some teenaged girls that we knew. She was a friend of mine, she was like a, a sister kind of, to me.”

“This guy, I felt, was takin’ advantage of a friend of mine, and she asked for my help… And…I…went, kinda overboard.”

Eight months. That’s how long Sandy allowed James Kelly to be a part of her life. How many nights did Sandy turn to Troy? How many nights did she cry on Troy’s shoulder, detailing the horrors that James Kelly inflicted on her – and which she allowed to be inflicted on her. How many times did Troy have to hear Connie, a powerless mother, express her grief and frustration over this older man taking advantage of her daughter? Troy loved both these women.

Troy decided to save them. He told Sandy to lure Kelly out to the desert. So one night, in 1986, Sandy did just that. She made Kelly stop the car, claiming that she needed to pee. She went out, came back, pretended to hurt her leg and when Kelly came out to help her Troy put six bullets in Kelly’s head.

TROY

“For a reason that I, uh, can’t really understand, I decided to bring a gun and shoot the man. And killed him.”

“I didn’t go to sleep that night.”

Troy Kell, eighteen, murdered a degenerate man. He did it because he loved the tragic but degenerate Sandy Shaw. Because they bragged about the murder, soon schoolmates were visiting Kelly’s body in the desert.

When asked if he thought about running Troy said; “Yeah, of course.” When asked why he didn’t, “I…I don’t know. I didn’t have anywhere to run too. I couldn’t just keep on runnin’ and runnin’.”

Troy didn’t run because everything he loved lived on the corner one street over from his house. There was nothing else in the world for him.

One of the children who visited the body in the desert told their parents, and soon the police had Troy, his accomplice and Sandy in custody. They would convict Troy.

Surprisingly, Sandy was also tried and convicted. These were the days just before peak feminism so women weren’t the infallible angels that they are treated as today but still, after hearing about her abuse and her tragic past, the jurors sent a fifteen year old girl to jail for over twenty years.

In order to survive in jail, Troy quickly joined up with the white supremacist gangs. Eventually this would lead to the second murderous ambush of his life. Troy and fellow gang member Eric Daniels attacked Lonnie Blackmon with Eric holding his legs and Troy stabbing Blackmon with a shank 67 times. For this second murder Troy himself is currently waiting to face death.

I reiterate once more; by all accounts Troy was a normal kid. There was nothing in his childhood that would have led anyone to believe that Troy one day would end up a murderer of two men while leading a white supremacist gang in prison. If he just had to weather a broken home, as far too many middle class children nowadays do, he may have had a chance to move on and become a man of worth; other men have suffered worse and managed to raise good families and live a good life. Unfortunately Troy had the tragic fate of loving a girl who also came from a broken home, and like most women from such situations Sandy did not have the inner strength struggle for normalcy. She gave herself to degenerates and came to Troy whenever she needed to use his love.

This is a theme all too familiar with young men today. Young men are struggling to find peace in their lives while having to deal with their broken female counterparts. Most men can’t help loving who they love, and far too many men pay too high a price for this once noble emotion. The tragedies surrounding Troy Kell and Sandy Shaw provide an extreme example of this – and in the case of Sandy her despair motivated self destruction is understandable – but the dynamic of good men who need love and the rotten women who use it is one of the great (and unnecessary) social plagues of the modern age. Perhaps it always has been, going back through every society since time immemorial.

It seems nowadays that there is an epidemic of men being destroyed because of single parent upbringings or broken women. Yet Troy was destroyed in 1986. Who knows how many potentially decent men in the past have been destroyed because of similar situations. Who knows how many more in the future we’ll have?

We know the symptoms – it’s time to cure the disease, or we can expect nothing but more and more unnecessary tragedies like Troy Kell’s to occur in the future. Do we really want to grow old and live in a society full of young men like that?

I end with a comment from the video’s youtube page,

Darrylizer1

“Troy Kell is one the one hand a despicable human being, a stone cold killer, a sociopath or near one and a racist. But he’s in some ways he’s likeable, even admirable: he’s articulate, intelligent and is absolutely honest with himself and for the most part unblinded by bullshit. I’m not saying that he should or shouldn’t be put to death. His circumstance is just a very sad waste of human potential.”

*As of this article’s publication, Troy is still awaiting his death sentence. He requested to be shot by a firing squad.

Read More: Sunday In The Park

Although it was written decades ago, Bel Kaufman’s Sunday in the Park remains just as relevant today, if not more so, to what it means to be a man. Her story centers on a family enjoying a Sunday afternoon at the park and is told predominantly from the wife’s perspective. Relaxing on a bench, the wife watched happily as her son Larry played in the sand box before her. Sitting next to her, while reading the ‘Times Magazine section,” was her husband Morton.

Morton. A man as nerdy as his name sounded. Who was, “So citypale, cooped up all week inside the gray factorylike university.”

As Larry played on, she noticed another boy digging in the sand too. This boy was fatter, more aggressive than Larry. And his father, a grizzly looking man, sat on the opposite side and “seemed to be taking up the whole bench as he held the Sunday comics close to his face.”

Suddenly the fat boy threw sand at Larry, making him upset. After hesitating a moment, the wife intervened;

‘Don’t do that, little boy,’ she said sharply, leaning forward on the bench. ‘You mustn’t throw sand!’ The man on the bench moved his mouth as if to spit again, but instead let her speak. He did not look at her, but at the boy only. ‘You go right ahead, Joe,’ he said loudly. ‘Throw all you want. This here is a public sandbox.’

She felt a sudden weakness in her knees as she glanced at Morton.

Morton was listening too. But he hid under his magazine. Seeming to hope the matter would solve it self.

It didn’t.

He put his Times down carefully on his lap and turned his fine, lean face toward the man, smiling the shy, apologetic smile he might have offered a student in pointing out an error in his thinking. When he spoke to the man, it was with his usual reasonableness. ‘You’re quite right,’ he said pleasantly, ‘but just because this is a public place….’

The other man cut him off, and an argument ensued until the large man said “Aw, shut up!” They both rose. Morton reluctantly. The wife nervously imagined the coming violence, about what she should do, how she should react.

Until…

Morton adjusted his glasses. He was very pale. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said unevenly. ‘I must ask you….’

‘Oh, yeah?’ said the man. He stood with his legs spread apart, rocking a little, looking at Morton with utter scorn. ‘You and who else?’

For a moment the two men looked at each other nakedly.

Then Morton backed down.

‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’ He walked awkwardly, almost limping with self-consciousness to pick up his son Larry and left with his wife by his side.

At first she was relieved. There was no violence. No one was hurt. But as they left the park, she began to feel something else, something…

Inescapable. She sensed that it was more than just an unpleasant incident, more than defeat of reason by force. She felt dimly it had something to do with her and Morton, something acutely personal, familiar, and important.

While walking to their car, Morton rambled on and tried to rationalize his defeat. But the more he did, the more distant she became.

Getting pulled further away from the sandbox, Larry’s cries grew worse. But once he started dragging his feet, Morton and his wife finally had enough.

‘If you can’t discipline this child, I will,’ Morton snapped, making a move toward the boy.

But her voice stopped him. She was shocked to hear it, thin and cold and penetrating with contempt. ‘Indeed?’ she heard herself say. ‘You and who else?’

—

At first glance Bel Kaufman’s story seems simple: There’s a stronger male, Morton backs down, he’s a wimp, needs bigger balls, women hate beta males, etc…

We know that already. But there’s another point to her story that’s hidden below the surface. Because Kaufman’s story isn’t just about lacking courage, it’s about what causes that cowardice; namely, apathy.

As a man, your first reaction to the story might be that she’s saying being a big brute pays off more than being a weakling. The big guy might have shown some dominating, alpha characteristics, but to think that way is to miss Kaufman’s point entirely.

The wife didn’t care that Morton was a nerd; that’s probably why she married him. Perhaps she was one too. But it was Morton’s lack of anger, his lack of pride in himself that bothered her. That he never developed the animal-like rage proving that he was the family’s protector in the most critical of moments.

…more than defeat of reason by force. She felt dimly it had something to do with her and Morton, something acutely personal, familiar, and important.

Morton’s cowardice proved to her what she knew deep down all along, that he didn’t love his family enough the way she did.

It is critical to realize that Kaufman never gave the wife a name in the story but did for the husband. By doing this she was trying to show that the wife had given her up identity to the family, and expected Morton do the same by being a man and fulfilling his end of the bargain.

That courage isn’t so much about standing up for yourself as it is about standing up for others. But he didn’t and that was the source of her resentment. So repeating the “You and who else” remark was a way of saying, “How are you going to raise your son to be a man if you’re not even one yourself?”

The great thing about Bel Kaufman is that she came from a time where women encouraged men to be what they are and not what they should be.

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poisener · 4 years ago

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bruh it’s been so hard trying to pin down some sort of family history or biography for elle because there’s so little to go on & the few things we do know i’m like hmm does that make sense? really??? espc with olivia’s height??? hmm sounds fake but okay society writers.

according to the s*ciety writers:

she wants to be a ballerina yet she is shown to go to a public school???? ( you think with them being in Connecticut , to my knowledge any area is a bougie area and if not like the ppl living in conn have plans to move to new york or go there for college etc, that they would be in a private or same sex education. or yk that she would be enrolled in a special artistic school or be going into new york or somewhere bigger for classes / trying to get early college credits / go to a performing arts school )

she wants to be a professional ballerina yet we never see her dancing? (*yes i understand if olivia wasn’t obligated to dance but like where is a body double to do that??? even referencing like a past dance partner or a dance teacher would have been cool??? her being involved in theater productions when it’s a musical if they need dancers? SHE EASILY COULD HAVE BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH ALLIE, CASSANDRA, HARRY, KELLY, ETC BY BEING A PART TIME THEATER GEEK BECAUSE EVERYONE & THEIR SISTER WAS IN THAT PLAY IN EP 1 )

***** I’M THINKING SHE’S HAD A RECENT INJURY THAT PROHIBITS HER FROM DANCING OR AT LEAST STRENUOUS PRACTICE?? OR MAYBE WHEN IN WEST/NEW HAM SHE DOESN’T FEEL LIKE SHE CAN DANCE???

she wants to be a professional ballerina yet she (* the actress portraying her ) is only 5′3. one of the french kings way back when admired some dancer and she became so popular that the height requirements of the aesthetic of the ballerinas changed to 5′5. now my perception of ballerinas were that they always had to be 5′6′-5′9 range or at least be shorter than their male counterparts but i know understand that the 5′2-5′8 range is ideal for female ballerinas.

her family moved from ireland to america when she was four but no reason is given nor any background info on her parents. (* this is discovered when she tells campbell about never celebrating thanksgiving even tho he points out she’s “lived here since she was 4.” ) so i think something happened in ireland with her family where they physically had to move ( * either family differences like a strain in her parent’s marriage or her dad’s work , possibility of financial troubles for her family, or her american family members wanting to be close with her side of the family,

when speaking with grizz she talks about crying every new school year which lead me to believe possibly her father or mother were in the military? idk it sent my m*litary brat signals flying or possibly that despite growing up with this kids from however young, she developed a social or generalized anxiety.

after confessing about poisoning the pie but having no ill intent on hurting anyone else but campbell, she admits that she only did it out of necessity because of their situation i.e. being stuck in “new ham”. and she says that if they were back home , “she would just get on a bus or train and leave.” not “ tell an adult or tell my parents.” which lead me to believe her relationship with her parents are strained or there is past conflict there???? or she was just hitting home the fact that she would not put up with campbell’s shit if they weren’t stuck in their parallel universe.

so my problem is that there are so many routes i can take with her past family history and i know that this is a mostly canon compliant when it comes to plot points blog but i still consider myself headcanon based but i want it to make sense ya feel???? so i feel like either her parents moved because of financial issues, strain on their marriage and wanting to be closer to the american side of her family, job opportunities for her family, moving because of elle’s ballet ( *going to new york for performing arts school and getting into theater. tho tbh they could have gone to the UK specifically London for that but obvi the show is set in conneticut sooooo ) . if elle talking about her life seems like it doesn’t make sense before west/new ham it’s because i have so many possibilities in my head so bare with me please.

#✉ . the society introspection — fuck off campbell #✉ . about the mun — the indie queen #♬ 06. ❧ insights — look a little bit closer & maybe you'll see .#about elle #ramblings #i feel like i needed to post this for my sanity & to let everyone know whats up with my verses #aka things i haven't properly written out yet cause idk about her fam #the only thing i know for sure are her parents are a little older than usual and she's an only child #also i feel like her mom is either musical herself and her dad possibly a lawyer??#cause according to becca everyone in west ham is a lawyer lol #long post*#long post /#long post for ts

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mysterious-prophetess · 4 years ago

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Age of Calamity feelings and thoughts

I did a review but this is going to be even more all over the place and full of speculation and theorizing.

Tl:Dr about the review-I liked the game despite a few things here and there that frustrated me. Like the divine beast sections.

So Feelings? The game did make me happy and I’ve had a really terrible setback in what I thought my life would be and that occurred two weeks before Age of Calamity was released.

I failed my Comps and therefore was dismissed from my doctoral program. I used this game, Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom, and Hades to cope somewhat.

So...if I’ve attached a little more of my emotions to this game, it’s because it’s helped me through this shitty time of my life.

Anyway. This game really made my inner ZeLink shipper so very happy. Yes, I know they’re never really going to go as far as they did with Skyward Sword, but it was still enough to get my little shipper brain going.

I also feel they made Revali more belligerent towards Link without him already starting as the Hylian Champion/Knight Who Wields the Sword that Seals the Darkness, and I think this is Revali’s own inferiority/superiority complex coming into play.

From what I’ve read into this, it seems like Revali thinks Link is just a knight sworn to protect the Princess and therefore doesn’t even compare to Revali-who is the best Rito Archer, invented his own quasi magic technique (Revali’s Gale), and is the Rito Champion chosen to be Divine Beast Vah Medoh’s pilot. Yet, this nobody is in the thick of it and being trusted to do stuff that challenges Revali’s image of himself at the top of the pile.

Never mind the fact that one of his fellow Champions is the Chieftain of her people nor another is a Princess of hers, Revali sees Link the Knight as a threat to his own perceived view of things where he-Revali-is top bird.

I think it’s because Link can used any weapon he come across, including the bow, with proficiency. Revali can’t stand Link because he thinks Link is a threat to his own perceived idea he is the BEST. In canon BotW, at least he could take solace in the fact that Link was a fellow Champion from the start and therefore, while not as exceptions as himself (from Revali’s perspective), he at least was the Hylian Champion. In Age of Calamity? Revali doesn’t even have that much for half the story.

Daruk doesn’t get much of an expansion beyond what we learned in the Champion’s Ballad. He’s steady and willing to indulge in some sassing at Revali whenever the Riot Archer’s arrogance gets to be a bit much.

My favorite moment was in the story Mission “Freeing the Korok Forest” when he made the comment “If only there was someone who could fly ahead and scout it out.” in the midst of Revali’s bitching.

His interactions with Yunobo were cute too. Honestly both Gorons got the short stick in this as far as their characterizations were concerned.

Doesn’t help that of all the Future Champions, Yunobo is my least favorite to play, tied with Teba. So, I was less inclined to do much with him.

On the other end of the scale, we get Mipha and Sidon. Mipha’s interactions with Daruk helped flesh out her crush on Link more as well as her own motivations for helping others AND seeing both baby Sidon and the adult he was in BotW was interesting too. It’s not often we get to see that in a game. Sidon’s desire to save his big sister resonated with me a bit more than the two descendants- Riju and Yunobo- saving ancestors they’d likely never have met regardless of them dying then or dying of natural causes later. Sidon, on the other hand, as a Zora is part of a very long lived race and knew her and this adult Sidon has lived longer mourning his sister’s death than with her alive. Mourning her and wishing he’d been bigger or stronger to save her. Seeing them together made me so happy because I’d always wished he’d gotten closure, even if all he’d seen was her ghost from a distance.

Teba? Aside from being tied with Yunobo as my least favorite future champion to play as, he only showed that he grew up idolizing Revali and was shocked to see Revali was a bit of a jerk. I remarked to my friend that it was sad to me that the only legacy Revali seemed to have was his flight range, but now with Teba’s hero-worship (and shock that Revali is a jerk), perhaps the legacy was also the legend of a fantastic archer and hero of his people too.

Teba does seem to understand Revali isn’t what he portrays himself to be, and that is what I think he means by “seeing the face behind the Champion.” He sees through all of that posturing to see Revali as he is: deep down a hero who does care about others and not just himself and his own glory but also has an image he likes to project (which is why I think he has both an inferiority and superiority complex a la Bakugo of BnHA).

Now to the character I have the most feelings about:

King Rhoam Bospharmus Hyrule.

Learning he married into the royal family, and therefore, is not of the blood of Hylia does make his lack of knowledge of how to raise an heiress to the golden power make a lot more sense. This was something I gleamed from across the two games and the DLC. If Zelda’s mother had the golden power, she is the blood of Hylia, ergo, Rhoam isn’t and married into the family.

I’ll go one step further. I think that despite being the “Kingdom” of Hyrule, the bloodline of Hylia is matrilineal and therefore only daughters of the royal family can inherit this power. Though, for some reason it’s still a patriarchal society.

Zelda’s dead mom died before she could start to teach Zelda, and therefore Rhoam ever saw the external stuff that his wife might have done. He also seemed to have little patience for the metaphysical despite knowing a lot of that was real (at least when he was alive).

His approach to it was wrong and it damaged Zelda to the point that her powers awakened too late to stop them.

Also, Rhoam was trying to be too clever by half. In trying to just replicate what their ancestors did, he missed the point that the ancestors had a full understanding of what it was they were up against and what they’d created. Rhoam thought Calamity Ganon was just this beastial force and that underestimation was why he had all his plans blow-up in his face and the collective faces of Hyrule.

This is where my theories come into play.

After playing as him in Age of Calamity and finding his move set surprisingly effective, I’ve come up with a theory: The Magical Queens of Hyrule tend to choose men with extremely good Martial Skills as their husbands to create a balanced pair to reflect the first Zelda and Link who were Goddess incarnate and her Knight.

No, this isn’t just my Zelink shipper talking. Ok it IS partly but it would make sense. From a traditional standpoint (and Hyrule is steeped in tradition), the pairing of Goddess and Warrior being reflected in the Queen and her consort King makes sense.

It would also explain why Rhoam is so very military minded in attempting to get things done. I think he was nobleman who was either a general or captain or something similar. Which is why he’s so focused on training and getting rid of “distractions” from Zelda’s training (even if she’s a FUCKING CHILD and you shouldn’t do that to a kid who isn’t ready for such a regimented lifestyle).

Now, I don’t know that they were a love match or not, but either way, I think his prowess as a warrior was part of what drew Zelda’s Mom to him.

I’m saying it outright: I think Hylia, her incarnations, and her female descendants have a type and it’s men who kick serious ass.

Now I touched on this in my review of Age of Calamity but the story was very AU because in Creating a Champion it was revealed Link was TWELVE or THIRTEEN years old when he pulled the Master Sword free of its pedestal in the official canon BotW timeline and Link being around eighteen during the events of 100 years before and Age of Calamity, therefore should have had that sword but didn’t. It’s on page 376 btw.

Ergo, something affected this timeline and Link didn’t go into the Lost Woods and pull the sword.

In my review I speculated that this might have still been in part of Zelda’s wish that helped the little guardian go back in time. It might have had a ripple effect that allowed Link more time as just a knight and not THE Knight Chosen by the Sword that Seals the Darkness.

It also allowed them to have a much better relationship without Zelda’s resentment of Link achieving his destiny so much faster, and easier, than she was with her training amounting to nothing.

I also think after she and Link grew closer in BotW and she found out how much bearing the Master Sword for so long affected how Link viewed himself, she might have also wanted to grant him more time as another knight without the pressures that come with his destiny. (not that Age of Calamity really played that up).

Not going to lie, I loved the parallels between their awakenings in Age of Calamity. His with silvery-white light and hers with golden light. Both reaching for the other because they care....ah, that pleased the shipper in me.

I know Link doesn’t talk because reasons but I almost wish he did because I’d have loved to have seen a scene where the Future Champions all talk to him and he’s like “Uh.....do I know you?” or even some sort of silent version of that scene to preserve the lack of speech on his part.

The time travelers present a lot of funny moments of them speaking about stuff BotW Link did that his HWAoC counterpart didn’t.

The Future Champions, on the other hand, also present an avenue for angst. They’re from what is essentially the darker timeline. Their predecessors died lonely deaths and were trapped as ghosts for a century while Link awakened alone, without memories or his sword and Zelda lingered in divine form keeping Calamity Ganon at bay. They have to go back to that darker timeline after having gotten a moment to meet those they’d have-likely-never met or really knew well, with the exception of Sidon and Mipha.

It’ll hurt worse for Sidon knowing a version of him will get to have his big sister and all he has is some closure in knowing that in a version of events she got to live and he saved her. Sidon is a blinding beacon of positivity after all.

Plus, how would that conversation go down in the future?

“Hey, we’re back. We time traveled and saved our predecessors in a different timeline.” That just seems like a way to rub salt in the wounds of Link and/or Zelda depending from when they were pulled from into the past. Post-Game or just before Link defeats Calamity Ganon.

Again, there is potential here with this. It’s just not the angst a lot were expecting since we all thought this would be a prequel to BotW, major character deaths and all.

Instead it was an AU Time Travel Fix-it Fic full of everyone lives, no one dies except the bad guys.

Considering my personal circumstances, I needed a story like this where the past can be changed for the better even if it is in an alternate timeline.

Also, this being an AU Time Travel Fix-it Fic gave them more wiggle room than just following the events of 100 years pre-BotW. There they’d have to had either made the build up to the Calamity longer (and less fun) or just had a much shorter story. What they did instead was what was needed for a full game.

Maybe when I get some inspiration, I might play with these ideas in fic form.

Maybe I won’t. Either way, this game gave me a lot to work with.

#hyrule warriors age of calamity #age of calamity #spoilers #age of calamity spoilers #hyrule warriors age of calamity spoilers

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writtenbyhappynerds · 4 years ago

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FF102, Unit 7: That Good Emotional Shit

Some tropes and cliches work for fanfiction. Some don’t. You’ll see lists on Tumblr and Pinterest of whump prompts or cliches to use. Some of them are not worth your time. Others, that we will discuss, are. We’re going to rapid-fire this chapter. We’ll take a trope/prompt/cliche and explain why it works and in what context it works best.

A good cliche or good trope allows the audience to see the growth and development of a character. We have talked negatively of twin OCs and evil twins because those characters are always the exact same as their cast counterpart, just louder. A good cliche or trope will push your characters into development. An evil twin doesn’t do anything for your OC. An OC who’s been written as calm and in-control finally losing it and snapping? That shows the audience the OC has been pushed over the emotional edge. If the cliche can develop a character, it’s a cliche or trope worth using.

Angst and angst-fics are so popular because they are pure character development. They are a character coming to terms with themselves and getting past an event that continuously haunts and guilts them. It’s all character development, and we as an audience like to see that kind of journey. There’s nothing wrong with angst fics, and light angst in your own stories is good because it shows not only development for the character but more realistic consequences for a character’s actions. We’ve talked about realism before, and fanfics that aren’t rooted in reality will let horrors, trauma, and death roll off the back of their OC like it’s a Tuesday at Wendy’s. Life isn’t like that, and angst fics lean heavily into the recovery and grieving of loss. It’s what makes them compelling because we see how damaged a person can become, and how strong they are to heal themselves.

Fluff tropes or whump prompts work especially well if the character has been penned as someone who doesn’t trust others or struggles with being vulnerable. Seeing two people dance drunk in their kitchen, sick prompts, and scenes where one character has to be vulnerable works when that character isn’t comfortable there. It creates inner conflict with the character having to trust other people, and having to rely on others. It creates an exterior conflict where the character is incapacitated or becoming open with others. These fluff prompts can work when they’re placed later in the story. They can appear more organically if they’re used as a tool for character development and not an AU in a piece that is already fanfiction.

The Editor is a big fan of opposites attract. We’ll also combine this with enemies to friends to lovers prompts, which are popular for a reason. They are filled with character development. Being able to look past your hatred and find the beauty in someone you previously despised is a major representative of growth. It shows us how a character can mature and learn to let go of the past and be open to the future. Brooklyn 99’s Jake and Amy is a great example of friends to lovers, but beyond romantic interest, this works for companionship and friends as well. Look at Zuko and Aang’s relationship in Avatar: The Last Airbender. The growth and maturity from these two characters were monumental; it showed the ability to forgive and to be kind and to take the traumas of your past and not let them define you. Zuko is a fantastic example of character growth, and his entire arc can speak for the development that comes from being an enemy to a friend.

The Editor also likes slow burns. I do too, primarily for the realism they present. To quote Frozen, “You can’t marry a guy you just met!” Love takes time and effort and work. It takes so long for feelings to fester and grow and blossom into something more, that stories, where two characters fall in love in a matter of days, seem unrealistic. Not only that but in the real-world relationships like this are unhealthy and create characters that are co-dependent. Slow burns don’t have to go from hatred to love either. It can just start at indifference. If you look at Percy Jackson, Percy and Annabeth didn’t even kiss until the end of the Last Olympian. They had a friendship for 4 years before that, and in that time were able to figure themselves out before figuring out a relationship. That really represents the pinnacle of slow burns: we don’t want a character’s entire story or history to be tied to some other person. Slow burn fanfic lets the character blossom as a healthy individual and figure out who they want to be, before merging their ideals and their life with someone else. It’s realistic, and the time it takes for two characters to come together only lets your heart grow fonder. Your audience will feel more emotionally connected to these characters because they will have seen them go through so many personal struggles. There’s nothing wrong with taking your time. We want to see it.

I am a slut for hospital prompts. The hurt/injury cliches, where the character collapses and ends up in the hospital for an extended period of time. It’s sometimes not realistic but that’s some good shit right there. What can make these prompts especially juicy, is if the character is written as a strong or capable character. Seeing Sam or Dean Winchester end up hospitalized hurt the audience more because we know those characters A) don’t get hurt that bad that often and B) Have never relied on hospitals unless it’s really serious. So, when they did turn up in the hospital we knew that the stakes were increased and that the situation was dire. It offers tension, and it can show you how human even your strongest characters are. You can’t re-set a broken leg on your own. You can’t fix a bullet wound by yourself. So seeing these characters have to acknowledge that they don’t have all the answers and can’t fix themselves. It shows the audience how false a character’s confidence or competence can be.

I personally like little-kid prompts or genius little-kid tropes. That isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and it has to do with little children being poorly written. Usually, this trope is used so the writer doesn’t have to stress about writing a realistic child. If they make the child a genius they can have it brought up to the same speed as the adults. However, writing children is easier than you think (See unit 5) and a super-genius child can be smart, but not wise. What I mean is that a genius child needs to pick a struggle and commit to it. They can’t be both book smart and street smart because they still don’t have the life experience that adults have. So you can have a genius mathematician child, but that kid isn’t going to be of much help in your detective fanfic where your OCs are supposed to be busting drug rings, because what child knows about that? Now, you could have a child know about the criminal underground because maybe they’ve grown up in it and worked as a mule, but that child isn’t going to be a mathematician like the other kid. You need to pick a side of the line, and there are so many ways for a person or a child to be a genius. What makes it realistic is picking just one. Look at Damian Wayne. He was a child prodigy in combat. He was gifted because he had tutors and masters who taught him for his entire life. But he knew so little about the outside world and how it worked. He was gifted but sheltered. Jason Todd is the opposite. He was a street rat, who had an innate knowledge of the criminal underground but didn’t have as much of an opportunity to learn through academic outlets. He knew the streets but didn’t get to learn the books until much much later. Each picked a struggle to start out with. That’s not to say that you can’t expand their range of knowledge later on, but it comes with time is the key note: if your character starts out knowing everything there’s nowhere for them to go.

Speaking of little kids, the outcast/weird kid making a ton of friends is often used, and it’s an oldie that’s been around since The Lightning Thief. What this prompt represents is the ability of a person who doesn’t fit traditional molds to find their place and their happiness in the world. We all like content that makes us feel less alone, and prompts like this can even be cathartic for the reader to remind them that they themselves are not alone. Your writing should mean something to someone up to and including you, and these prompts warm us up and make us feel like somewhere there’s a place for us. No one likes to be alone.

What you should take away from this unit is that predictability is okay as long as it’s done well. Cliches are not going to kill your narrative. Tropes and whump prompts are not bad, they just need to be executed in a way that makes us feel like it’s genuine character development and not an out-of-body experience. We want to see development and growth because that truly shows progression not just of time but of a person, and if you can execute it well, you can pull off just about anything.

Next week we’re discussing research, and diving deeper into how you should be researching your settings, flaws, and how you should study your own field of work. We apologize for the delay. Unforeseen circumstances came up that life never prepares you for, and the Big Sad came over me for a while. We’ll see you next week!

Xoxo, Gossip Girl

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silyabeeodess · 5 years ago

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FusionFall Headcanons: Character Ages

From taking the canon ages of the various CN characters within their own shows into account to people noticing the... liberties, the game took to some of the designs for them in the game, I’m well aware that this is going to be a point of debate. Still, after some consideration, I’d like to cross reference some of these points to come up with at least a general sense of where these characters may be/have been in their lives. I probably won’t come up with specifics--moreso early/late this or that--for the ages. Now, I will bring up puberty a bit in this--definitely not heavily, but it is mentioned--so keep that in mind.

Dee Dee, Dexter, and Mandark

For these characters, I view Dee Dee, Dexter, and Mandark being in their late teens-early 20′s. We already know based on evidence from the show that Dee Dee is Dexter’s older sister by just a few years while Dexter and Mandark are only about two years apart themselves (as implied by concept art for “Ego Trip” as explained on the Dexter’s Laboratory wiki). It’s possible that Dee Dee might have at least a year over Mandark and/or for Dexter and Mandark to be the same age, since he is in Dexter’s class as far back as elementary school, but we also have to consider the high possibility that he was held back due to his parents’ lifestyles keeping him from going to school during his early childhood.

Since Dee Dee lives alone at their old family home and it’s already established that her and Dexter’s parents live up on the house on top of Dexlabs, she’s likely already an adult. She probably looks after the home not only for security purposes, but due to the massive success of Dexlabs making their family wealthy enough to maintain it and for her to live there despite being fairly young--meaning she wouldn’t have to get a dorm if she chose to go to college or something similar, but still has the liberty of living on her own. Based on how she continues to wear her dance outfit, her maintaining a slim physique similar to professional ballet dancers, and that she still goes to recitals as evidenced in “Dee Dee’s Dilemmas (Part 3)”, it’s also likely that she either studies dance or may even teach it to small children.

What makes me think Dexter and Mandark are in their older teens is how much of a foothold their companies have during the events of the game, enough so for their tech to be everywhere. It’s possible that their genius gave them a leg up enough to quit high school and form their companies early, but they’d still need a few years to build and develop them to the extent we see.

Numbuhs 1-5

For the operatives to still be viewed as official members of the KND (at least to public knowledge), this would mean that they’d have be younger than 13, so they’d be in their tweens. Given the extent to which the war has altered the KND’s operations, however, they may even be a little older--just with their decommissioning being the farthest from anyone’s mind at the time. We also know that at the group would remain a part of the KND well into adulthood based on the series finale as the issue stands, supporting this.

Furthermore, for Numbuh One to lead an operation in the war so far from the rest of not only his team, but other parts of the KND, as well as seeing him work with Plumbers like Grandpa Max, it’s possible that the war may take place after the events of the KND finale would--after Numbuh One would’ve experienced space-travel for himself through the G:KND, an expansion of the KND in sequel series that was never aired. What could also hint to the war being post-G:KND is the mention of bases within Earth’s solar system besides the moonbase--which the KND lose contact with in the official FusionFall comic, but were never mentioned in the actual show. All of this further points to a passage of time at which the operatives would be a little older than their original depictions, which already averaged at around 10 years old.

The Powerpuff Girls and the Gangreen Gang

Well, I’m gonna go ahead and say that the girls aren’t five unless the developers of FusionFall took a page from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure in their character designs. We also have the presence of Pokey Oaks Middle School in-game as opposed to Pokey Oaks Kindergarten from the show, acting as a subtle clue that the girls are at least middle school age within the FusionFall universe, but I’d like to take that a step farther:

In the show, we were given a general age range for the Gangreen Gang at 14-17 years, with Ace being the oldest and Lil’ Arturo extending that approximation according to his wiki page with a personal age range of 10-14 years. In FusionFall, we’re given aged-up versions of the girls, but not from what we can tell of the Gangreen Gang. Still, even if the ages are different, we have to take into the account the likelihood that the group is at least slightly older themselves as, in a sense, they have grown up a bit: They’ve moved on from most of their criminal ways to form a successful band, which couldn’t have happened in too short a time.

The point above, combined with the possibility given of Buttercup and Ace being in a relationship despite the massive age gap between their TV Show counterparts unless the OG developers had a, ahem, questionable idea of relationships like the kind the PPG reboot has gained attention for, make me think that the girls might be at least in their mid-teens in Fusionfall while the Gangreen Gang and in their late-teens or early 20′s.

Samurai Jack

Following the route the fifth season took, even if it was made after the game, I’m going to say that Jack is ageless due to the effects of time travel. Whether or not Season Five can be taken into consideration as far as Jack’s backstory would go in Fusionfall, it works more for the game that he be this nigh-immortal adversary to match Aku. First off, let’s say that the events of S5 were a part of the game lore: That would mean that, at some point, Jack did defeat Aku, went back to the past, and eventually time passed to reach the events that FusionFall would take place in with Aku potentially coming back in that timeframe similar to how he did after the Emperor first defeated him--only this time, Jack’s constantly ready to take him out again before he can reach full-strength. More likely though-- given that people still remember how Jack defeated Demongo--the timeline hasn’t been altered (barring that he didn’t defeat him a second time within the new timeline that we’d be unaware of).

Now let’s talk about it without S5: We already know that Aku isn’t the main villain here: Fuse is. Aku’s barely a blip on the radar in the game, mentioned moreso as a potential threat if he ever came out of hiding. Emphasis on if. This is weird given that, in Jack’s show, Aku’s already taken over the world. There is no ultimate evil beyond Aku, but that’s just not the case in FusionFall’s history. Instead, Jack takes both Fuse and Aku as serious threats, placing his priorities on the former only because he’s the most present. For Jack to set aside his life’s purpose to help battle Fuse, that has to mean he feels comfortable enough with his chances against Aku. Not to mention the state of the world looks pretty ok beyond the threat of Planet Fusion, meaning it’s more likely that Jack has already defeated Aku at some point prior to the events of the game, but for some reason chose to stay in the future and continue his long-standing battle with him. I know this cuts out S5′s rationale behind Jack himself being ageless, but bringing that idea into this as well fits with the context of this eternal battle between a hero and villain, two people who can embody an ultimate good and ultimate evil.

Ben 10 Trio

Given that the gang looks exactly like their Alien Force counterparts, this is pretty much a given. I doubt they’re that different in an age range with the exception of maybe a couple year: It would depend on how much context you’d take from Ultimate Alien. That would put Ben and Gwen at 15-16 while Kevin would be 16-17 years old.

Ed, Edd, and Eddy Characters

The characters in Ed, Edd, and Eddy already went to junior high in the show, placing them at least in their tweens. Granted, they still look like kids in the show while some of them seem to be a little older in the game. For example, the Kankers look more aged up than the Eds do, fitting both a passage of time and following the fact that girls tend to develop at a faster rate than boys (growth spurts, brain development, etc.) during puberty. It’s possible that they’re still in their tweens or early teens, with some of them being in their first year of high school within the world of FusionFall.

Billy and Mandy

Although Billy and Mandy were still in elementary school in their show as opposed to middle school, I’d place them in their tweens following the same logic I pointed out with the Kankers and Eds regarding development. Mandy looks like she’s still young, but has hit puberty, while Billy looks very much like a kid. They’re likely in middle school.

Frankie and Mac

Considering that Mac was only 8 in the show and still looks pretty young in the game, he’s probably still a kid. Maybe he’s aged up a little, but definitely hasn’t reached his teens just yet. He’s still got his baby face.

In the show, Frankie was 22 years old, and like Mac I don’t think she’s aged much, so still in her early-mid 20′s. She’s probably devoted herself to running Foster’s Home much like her grandmother.

Juniper Lee

While she was 11 in the show and the game doesn’t seem to have altered her design too much, I still get a feeling she’s more of a teenager--early-mid teens--in the world of FusionFall. She just strikes me as being a little more mature, more experienced with her powers and all of the forces she’s dealt with after a while as a the Te-Xuan-Ze.

Coop

Probably mid-late 20′s. He was already an adult in the show, but he doesn’t seem to have matured enough to have passed far into his 30′s.

Flapjack

He’s 7 in the show and based on his personally and appearance in the game, he’s still probably close to the age. Maybe just a little older, but the same situation as with Mac.

Ami and Yumi

(Mentioning them since Retro gave them a cameo and I loved this duo as a kid) The show’s wiki places them both at 13. Their FusionFall counterparts don’t look much older, so they’re probably still in their teens--possibly just a few years older in we wanted to account for time for them to develop as young teen idols.

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