#this is Painfully Earnest and also Excruciating

[sevensided]

never wanted love, just a fancy car

Tom has his suit jacket slung over one shoulder and swaggers like a matador. Big dick energy. Then he catches Kendall’s eye and cringes into an affectionate, apologetic smile, and Kendall wonders just who Tom is, this ultra-cool arriviste with the Dionysian mask.

Or: the Tomken White Lotus AU that no one asked for.

AO3 Link / Spotify playlist

[queerfables]

And another episode! This is a 7x05 You Don't Know Me liveblog.

Last one for the night because EXTREMELY APPROPRIATELY, my brother is getting married tomorrow!!!! And I really have to get some sleep.

Oh look it's the atomic habits guy (more or less)

Hen trying not to laugh at Eddie's, ahem, misfortune

FIRST DATE FIRST DATE FIRST DATE

I wonder if there will be any emergency tracheotomies involved

Oh my god I don't think I have ever laughed harder than this moment. As if I wasn't already head over heels in love with him!! Evan Buckley, on a date with another man: "I'm an ally!"

No God listen though because it's just so painfully earnest and real. This is SO new to him, it came out of nowhere and blindsided him, and he hasn't quite had the time to process what it all means. It's like, he met this person and they had a connection and then suddenly he has to re-evaluate everything he knows about himself because of that. He doesn't want to do complicated self reflection he just wants to have dinner with this person who is hot and funny and makes his heart race. Ugh God it's Feeling Soft About Evan Buckley hours again.

Also I love Tommy for not having my reaction to Buck calling himself an ally and being totally chill about where Buck is in his journey. I don't think I could possibly have resisted the urge to be like "Is ally really the word for it?" Fortunately Tommy is a far stronger man than I.

Okay I knew Eddie showed up during this date but I was completely unprepared for Buck's deer in the headlights expression, oh hon.

OH GOD THIS IS EXCRUCIATING

I don't even have anything to say I just had to pause the episode to take a beat and hide from Buck's bizarre macho heterosexual posturing which signals IMMEDIATELY that something is wrong

Oh Jesus "Guess you can never have enough closet space." It's a little on the nose. Poor Tommy. Poor Buck. I think he might be praying for that tracheotomy right now.

Okay "ain't that the truth" I totally understand but the "right, Evan?" was pushing it. Don't get mean.

"BRO" are you serious right now Buck

Oh hon, his little crestfallen face when Tommy leaves even though five minutes ago he wanted to evaporate off the face of the earth rather than be seen with him

"I think you're adorable" wow I feel some kind of way about Buck getting called adorable by a hot older man

Oh I love Denny so much, being so friendly and welcoming with this girl

And she took the bear I'm gonna cry

"I couldn't stop it, it was humiliating" Well at least Buck recognises it. I haven't had second hand embarrassment that bad in years.

I am obsessed with the way Buck tells this entire story to Maddie making it seem like it's only about how he lied to Eddie, like he's not freaking out about the fact that he's into this guy and freaking out about getting seen with this guy and also freaking out about the fact that he's freaking out about it because it shouldn't be a big deal right? He's an ally!!!

And then Maddie's face when he lets the pronoun slip

Thank God SHE gently pointed out the obvious when Buck called himself an ally though because SOMEBODY had to

"Sure I'll check out a hot guy's ass but that's normal" "Uh. It's not abnormal..." lmfao Maddie I love you

CRYING WITH LAUGHTER "IT'S THE SAME TOMMY?" Maddie has gossip for DAYS and she can't tell anyone. No one on earth has suffered more than her.

😭😭😭 "So, tell me more about the hot pilot" and Buck's nervous but pleased grin

:( oh Karen, it's a little sad/disconcerting that Mara destroyed the bear but don't overreact, it doesn't necessarily mean anything you didn't already know ie that she's a traumatised kid struggling with her feelings

Never mind this girl killed her family

(I'm kidding)

"Like sea monkeys!"

"...no"

Buck saying to Eddie, "Which is why you're so... pent up. Well, wish I could help" I'll just bet you do

"That's actually good advice Buck" sound more shocked Eddie

Oh Denny is so soft, being so understanding about getting hurt and not blaming Mara

Bobby wondering if Eddie is having second thoughts about Marisol is interesting. It sounds like moving in together was pretty abrupt, I wonder if something triggered it.

Bobby saying he would want to piss of her ex, ie God!! That's amazing I'm in love with him

This scene with Buck coming out to Eddie is really interesting. I love the way he finally brings himself to say "It was a date". Just, it's a really powerful moment to me. And Eddie being like "wait, Tommy's gay?" as if that is the only surprising part lol. When Eddie says "This doesn't change anything between us" I feel like maybe for a second Buck looked... disappointed? but I wouldn't swear to it

Oh no the hug T_T soft

Wow, "Call Tommy" Eddie says, on his way out the door. I'm having such flashbacks to last episode. The parallel feels intentional but I'm not sure exactly what it means

Eddie and Marisol agreeing to take a step back and get to know each other. The flirty "I can't wait to move out" is a bit cute

Oh no the really soft way Karen talks Mara through everything T_T and Mara saying "night night" at the end

Buck what the fuck

No listen I adore you but you have gone directly from "I don't know what I'm ready for" to "Come with me to my sister's wedding" You guys have been on one date this is UNHINGED

"There's gonna be free food and I need someone to dance with" Oh my god it's soft

Honestly this relationship has me on an entire roller-coaster

Holy shit what a great teaser for the next episode

Final thoughts:

The way Buck is with Tommy reminds me a lot of his soft smitten demeanour around Abby. I really liked that side she brought out in him and it's lovely to see it showing up again. It also makes me laugh that he has such a type, and that type is emotionally mature and highly competent people with a few years on him.

(Eddie may not have any years on him but he for sure fits the other criteria)

Currently the game I'm having fun playing with myself is "how could Buddie happen in the most drama maximising way possible". My current favourite is Eddie impulsively kissing Buck while they're both still with other people and then panicking and running away, leaving Buck to bluescreen about it, but I'm pretty sure I can do better. Maybe something that starts with Eddie and Tommy getting kidnapped by exotic animal smugglers. I'll workshop it.

[kiigan]

«Smart choice. It does smell wonderfully.»

ㅤNone of this was a lie, either. It might be a silly situation, practically fallen from the skies above and in the complete absence of logical context, borderline an improvised comical sketch, but Itachi's praise was entirely earnest. Her hair did smell very nice, even with the lingering scent of the previous night's excess tangled with the shampoo, and it felt quite soft under his touch never mind the knots here and there. Knots that he would gladly undo for her, just as much [to be said of many things, that day]. And if the praise was improving Sakura's mood whilst so subliminally capturing her attention? Then all the better. Two weasels birds with one stone.

ㅤIt was curious, even, because... although the intention had come from a platonic place, help a friend because you care for the friend, at the same time it was also causing the gears in Itachi's head to turn. If there were romance experts on this earth he certainly was not one of them, but even he was not fully clueless. What was romantic love, at the end of the day? He refused to reduce it to sex and carnal pleasure, although he also wouldn't judge others who only sought that and nothing else. To each their own, and all that. From his perspective, however, there were two very particular things necessary for a true bond: be able to trust your partner without reserve and be able to connect with said partner in a deep and meaningful way. Then, yes, the added bonus of physical attraction, of course. A tasty [and why not spicy?] cherry on top of the wholesome cake.

ㅤAnd was Sakura too distant from any of those relationship goals, to call it so crudely? The two of them could not really be called childhood friends, something more along the lines of... childhood acquaintances? Childhood kind-of neighbors, in a way? Childhood you go to class with my little brother and I see you sometimes and we greet each other casually? Meanwhile, at present, they had not been close friends for too long a time, either. Yet, Itachi could say that he did trust Sakura without hesitation - and, hopefully, she did trust him back in equal amount. And how many times their purely professional check-ups, visit just for the sake of having your body temperature and heart rate monitored, had turned into chatting comfortably for an hour or two, changing impressions and opinions about topics that ranged from medicine to biology, from astronomy to physics, from village gossip to global politics? Not to mention, even in the absence of conventional sight, he was well aware of how much she'd changed with the years. That same soft and cute hair, the beautiful features of her face, the piercing green eyes, her shapely figure. One would have to be blind, and more than literally so, to not realize how attractive Sakura was.

Ah, seemed like he had more to think about later than firstly anticipated.

ㅤMuch later because, at the moment, that tiny little bubble of distraction was painfully burst the moment the bone was finally tended. Shifting, Itachi held Sakura's good hand with both his own, letting her squeeze at will - it wasn't like he could do much else to help with what he imagined to be excruciating agony, alas. One of those unfortunate things that had to feel much worse before it could start getting better for good. Trying his best to not smile at Sakura's threat to have her students write a report on the situation, then, because that would have been such a Captain Uchiha thing to do, he kept to himself a bit longer and only assumed a more informal stance again once the two young nurses left. No doubt, to go cry in a corner and rethink their professional life choices, but that much was out of his hands now. Shifting yet again, Itachi straightened himself up on the bed to 'look' at Sakura.

ㅤ«Done now? I suppose later we could sit together and write down a list with far more elaborate insults, but there are more pressing matters at the moment.» With a smile that spoke volumes both of how he would be glad to write said list [writing lists, one of the best things in the world!] and, at the same time, never allow Sakura to use it on herself, he reached with a finger to boop her nose with possibly frightening precision for a blind person. The forehead pokes might be reserved for Sasuke only, but Itachi was nothing if not resourceful - plenty of similar gestures to offer, just as lovingly. «Let me help with the situation, then - the same way you've been helping me all this time, and I'm not talking about the check-ups and meds only. Let me stay over and take care of you? And, of course, if you ever feel like my care is not up to standards, you're free to fire me at any moment. And to demand I also write you a ten-page report. Times New Roman, size 12, and double-spacing is the formatting I used to demand from my team operatives, but just let me know what you prefer.»

Sakura did feel so much more relaxed with Itachi’s arm around her waist, and him just being close to her. It made her feel safe and secure but didn’t save the nurses from her going teacher mode on them. She wasn’t being hard on them in a mean spirited way but in a way that she wanted to push them to perform at their very best. But also… She wasn’t used to having herself be worked on. Normally, she can heal and do everything herself. It put her on edge to have to rely on other people to heal her.

She was taken completely by surprise when Itachi’s face leaned in so close to hers. Sakura could feel his warm breath on her cheek making her once stern expression turn to one of fluster. Her cheeks growing red in response,

“E-eh??”

Her attention was completely pulled away from the nurses like he planned. Sakura was always so easily distracted but even more so with him. Especially with him being so close to her. His face inches from hers. It made her heart skip a beat and reminded her how much she was attracted to him, “I… I have actually…” Sakura stammered a bit, “I-i found a new brand that I liked the smell of and it makes my hair feel super soft.” She didn’t think it was that noticeable. 

Her gaze was completely pulled away from the nurses when he cupped her cheek, turning her head to look only at him. Focusing on how close he was instead of on what the nurses were doing. Sakura could just about melt when she felt his fingers brush through some of her hair, his free hand lacing his fingers with her good hand. For a moment, the entire world just melted away and it was just them, “I… I would like that, actually… I-i suppose I did let my hair become a mess.” And she always loved it when someone brushed and played with her hair.

Seeing that this was their opening, the nurses went straight to work. Acting fast, they shoved Sakura’s bone back into place with a CRACK! Sakura yelped out, “F-fuck! Y-you were supposed to numb me first!!” Her hand squeezed Itachi’s tightly, and her eyes teared up a bit,

“Sorry doctor!! I-i forgot!!” The blonde nurse stammered, panicking a bit. It was clear Sakura made them both a nervous wreck. They quickly used their chakra to ease Sakura’s pain, and refused the one back together so it could heal normally. Then they bandaged Sakura’s arm up in protective wrapping to hold it all in place,

“You both are sooo lucky I’m injured or I’d have you both writing me ten page essays on what you did wrong here.” Once it was over, Sakura pulled her injured arm back close to her chest. The two nurses knew they were in for it when Sakura recovered, 

“A-ah… D-doctor, you need to wear the sling too for at least a few weeks…” The brown haired nurse nervously approached her, “Can I please put it on you?”

“Ugh, fine.” Sakura looked displeased but allowed the nurse to put her arm in the sling and have it wrapped over her neck,

“How am I supposed to do anything like this?” Everything was going to be so much more difficult with only one arm to work with. Working was out of the question for now but she couldn’t help but think of all the mundane things that were going to be so much harder. Cleaning, cooking, bathing, getting dressed, and so on. She didn’t realize how often she needed to use two hands for everything. This sucked.

“You both can go now. Please tell Shizune that I will be needing her to take my place for a while. If an emergency comes up, fetch me immediately.” 

“Yes Doctor!” Both nurses said, quickly packing their bags, and leaving. Not wanting to remain longer under the hard gaze of their boss,

“I’m such an idiot for putting myself in this situation!” Sakura let out a defeated sigh, once again punching down on herself over a simple accident and moment of weakness.

[pepperful-qt]

Can you do fluff prompt #9 for Komori?? Congrats on 200!

Komori💞💞💞 yES please ! also sakusa cameo bc i miss him and he's hilarious. also also ik this isn't news but I have no idea what a drabble is 🙃 it's not this though

❈ 200 Event ❈

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» fluff 9: “Are we on a date right now?”

◈ length: ~850 don’t look at me

⊱ ━━━━

Summer Sweet

Komori Motoya x Reader

⊱ ━━━━

Blue skies dotted with fluffy white clouds and a gentle breeze to lessen the heat of the afternoon summer sun made for perfect walking weather. It was all too tempting to take advantage of chances like these, especially when your companions, Komori and Sakusa, finally had a day off from their constant volleyball training. The invite notification from the former filled you with a similar warm bliss as the sun above you, as you noticed they did quite frequently as of late.  

Pleasant conversation flowed easily between you and Komori as you walked while Sakusa hung back with sparse contributions, as usual. You rested now at a table in a pocket of shade outside an ice cream shop that you’d stumbled across. You both huddled over his phone and scrolled through the excessive number of photos he’d taken that day. Komori would make you laugh with a joke or teasing remark, the sound coercing a shy grin from the libero every time he heard it. Once he earned a playful smack when he revealed a candid unflattering photo of you, but he assured you that you looked great no matter how sweaty or blurry. Whether it was the company or the sweet taste of your treats, smiles seemed to be permanently glued to your faces.

Sakusa, however, was less than pleased. 

His tiny cup of ice cream sat on the table in front of him, untouched. Truthfully, it looked more like soup now. Underneath his mask his nose scrunched distastefully when you sampled each others’ cones seemingly without a care in the world. He shifted his seething glare between it and the two of you, who remained blissfully unaware of his annoyance. Normally Komori would notice his irritation, or else he would vocalize those feelings. The only reason he spared his cousin now was out of some remaining modicum of respect for him.

Just friends, sure. 

An opportunity finally appeared when you excused yourself to use the restroom after finishing your cone. Komori placed his chin in his palm with a content smile as he watched you vanish into the store. His eyes then fell to Sakusa’s ice cream soup.

“Sakusa, uh, your ice cream…” When he looked up, his cousin, who hadn’t even bothered lowering his mask or removing his hands from the pockets of his jacket, or showed any other inclination to eat for that matter, was drilling him with a look of utter disgust. Komori’s shock was brief before he simply sighed. “What’s the matter? We’re leaving soon, just--”

“Why am I here?” Sakusa grumbled, his voice in its usual low monotone. Komori cocked his head to the side.

“Huh? What do you mean? We always hang out like this.” He attempted a cheerful smile, but he gained no reaction other than Sakusa rolling his eyes in a painfully slow motion.

“This is the third time you’ve dragged me on one of your dates in less than a month.”

“Oh, come on, I know you--” Komori blinked once as the words fully processed. “Wait, date?! This isn’t--it’s not--what do you mean by that?!” He was almost completely red at this point, holding a hand over his mouth. 

After several excruciating seconds of silence, Sakusa just squinted at him before standing up without a word, his chair screeching against the pavement.

“Wait, where are you going?!” 

“Leaving.”

“Oi, the least you could do is take your trash with you, you jerk!” Komori called after him in an effort to suppress the beating of his heart, though there was still a slight tremor in his voice. However, his words fell on deaf ears as Sakusa disappeared from view without so much as a wave of acknowledgement. 

“Hey, I’m back!” You reappeared all too suddenly and glanced around curiously. “Oh, where did Sakusa go?” 

“y/n!” Komori shot to his feet, wetting his now dry lips nervously when you looked back at him startled. He could practically feel the red growing on his cheeks. Best to bite the bullet now, I suppose. “Is this a date?” 

You stared at him with wide eyes and blinked a few times.

“Huh?” was all you said, unsure if you’d misheard him.. Though taking in the seriousness behind his typically kind eyes and the visible blush dusting his features, you knew you hadn’t. Oh. “A date?” 

“Well, yeah,” Komori chuckled, albeit a bit dryly. His fingers were restlessly fiddling with the wrapper left over by his cone between his fingers, and his eyes flicked between you and the table. “N-not that I’d normally want Sakusa joining on a date or anything. I just--the thought popped into my head and, uh…”  

He trailed off again into nervous laughter, but this time you joined him.

“Do you want it to be?” 

Komori jerked his head to finally look at you. Your hands mimicked his, fidgeting, and your flushed face felt like it mirrored his as well, but the smile you wore was earnest. The tickling feeling that nagged his stomach for so long at last grew into a final burst of confidence.

“If that’s alright with you.” 

“Yeah,” you nodded, stepping forward and hesitating before taking his hand in yours. “Yeah, it definitely is.”

༻✦༺ 

[feynavaley]

Hetalia Fanfiction – Beyond the Breaking Point Ch 1

Summary: Caught between a rebellious teen fighting for his independence and an older brother struggling to be a parent, Matthew somatizes. Not drawing attention to his fake ailments seems the best way not to further stress the already precarious situation – but when Matthew takes his resolution a bit too far, all their lives are sent into a tailspin. (Human AU; ACE Family)

This story is the long-promised sequel of Arthur Kirkland’s Guide to Being a Big Brother [x] that I finally got around to writing, but it could be easily read as a stand-alone (plot-wise, the two stories aren’t related, they merely happen within the same universe). I hope you’ll like it, and any kind of feedback is greatly appreciated! (Full chapter under the cut, use your phone browser if you can’t see it from the app.)

AO3 | FFN | Next | List

———

Chapter One

On Friday morning, Matthew woke up to muffled yells coming from downstairs. He groaned, burrowing himself deeper under the blankets as if they could somehow block out the sound. The only accomplishment that came out of the movement was to increase the dull pain pulsing in his lower abdomen.

Matthew would have liked to call himself surprised, or even concerned, but there was no fooling himself. Over the previous months, the scenario he was facing had become a familiar companion to his days. Whimpering when his shifting once again made the pain flare up, Matthew turned to the side table and paddled for the phone before lifting it in front of his face. It was early, there was no need to get up yet – but Matthew knew that he wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep again, between the screaming in the background and the throbbing in his belly. He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, trying to gather the strength to face the day. Matthew was expecting it to be hard.

What he wasn’t expecting was the searing agony that pierced his lower abdomen as he sat up, making him double over with a small cry. White swallowed his vision, the acrid taste of bile singed his throat.

Matthew swallowed down and forced himself to take a deep breath before he attempted straightening up again – slowly, this time, and with his hands firmly pressed against his stomach. His body didn’t like it, once again rebelling with an intense burst of pain. Matthew frowned and looked down at his feet, nibbling on his lower lip.

In truth, he wasn’t new to random pains. He had started feeling ill and shaky the previous morning, with a dull pain pulsing around his navel that had ended up growing more and more intense over the course of the day. He had never imagined it could turn so bad, however.

How typical. Life’s always full of surprises, isn’t it? I don’t know how I could have forgotten this.

A couple of experimental shuffled steps told Matthew that standing straight was almost impossible, the pain intensifying with sharp stabs at each movement. He clenched his fists and took a deep breath, trying to collect himself. If his features showed any sign of discomfort, Arthur was going to notice. Not only he was going to keep Matthew home from school when he had already missed more days than it would be wise (his perfect grades weren’t suffering from it, yet, but for how long would he be able to keep it up?), Arthur was also going to worry to no end without ever finding a solution. Given his past history with illnesses, Matthew couldn’t blame his brother – and that was why avoiding the scenario altogether was imperative. Which was completely up to Matthew.

Trying to collect himself, he took his sweet time to prepare for the day. Half an hour later, he was cleaned up and dressed – presentable, in spite of the grey pallor that donated an unflattering ill hue to his already too pasty skin. Matthew elected to ignore it, just like he was desperately trying to keep his mind off the agonizing throbbing inside his abdomen, that hadn’t diminished.

I have had worse, and I was only a child. I can handle this.

Matthew kept repeating the words like a mantra, but once he got out of the room, his distress only intensified. That time, the pain only played a minor part in it – the ongoing argument was just too loud for him to push it to a remote corner of his mind.

“Just a stupid letter, Arthur!” Alfred was yelling, his voice heavy with all the disdain he was capable of. “What does it even matter? I cannot believe you’re making such a fuss over this!”

Matthew flattened himself against the wall as he shuffled to the kitchen, hoping not to be noticed and dragged into the discussion. He shouldn’t have worried about that, nobody had the time to pay attention to him.

Arthur’s voice joined Alfred, trembling with rage.

“Only a letter? Let alone the fact that this is hardly your first failing mark, which is an issue itself, why did I have to learn it by going through your graded essays? You should have told me as soon as you got home! Instead I—”

Matthew had reached the kitchen. He closed the door to muffle the sounds and let himself double over, clutching his abdomen. The pain had intensified in agony during the short trek, it felt like a knife twisting into his intestines. Matthew was perfectly aware of the cause.

In the living room, Alfred resumed yelling.

Matthew resolutely turned a deaf ear to the sounds, focusing on the array of cereals into the cupboard and pretending not to hear the hurtful words Alfred and Arthur were spewing against each other. In truth, Matthew didn’t even need to hear anything to know what was being said. He could have recited the entire argument by heart: the words might change from time to time, but the meaning was always the same.

Matthew’s stomach made a summersault that brought bile to the back of his throat.

Breakfast was out of the question. The previous day, Matthew had skipped lunch and his dinner had ended up making acquaintance with the toilet not long after having been ingested. With the pain plaguing his abdomen, that morning wasn’t shaping up to be anything better.

Out of habit, Matthew cast a furtive glance behind his shoulders. He shouldn’t have worried, Arthur was still yelling at Alfred in the living room. He was at the ‘wasted potential’ part of the lecture – Matthew didn’t want to hear it. He methodically took out a bowl, poured just some drops of milk into it, and smeared them over the surface to give the impression of an eaten breakfast. A pang of guilt flared up in his stomach at the thought of wasting food, but it was still better than making Arthur realize he hadn’t eaten. Trying to drown the sound of the discussion, Matthew took to methodically washing all the bowls already inside the sink. He turned off the water just in time to hear the door slam closed with a thud that made the house tremble and Matthew’s stomach coil in discomfort, increasing the pain in his abdomen. He had to bite his lower lip to restrain a moan, willpower alone prevented him from doubling over.

Just a moment later, dragged footsteps announced Arthur’s entrance into the kitchen.

“Oh, Matthew! Good morning. Have you already had your breakfast?”

The forced colloquiality of the words couldn’t hide the slight tremble in Arthur’s voice. When he turned, Matthew’s gaze was immediately captured by the violet shadows that were painfully evident on the tight skin under his brother’s eyes. Another intense spike of pain stabbed his stomach, accompanying the clenching of his chest. Matthew stubbornly refused to double over.

“Mmh…” he muttered in assent, doing his best to offer Arthur a reassuring smile.

There was no way he was going to trouble his older brother over something as trivial as a bad – no matter how excruciating – stomach-ache. Arthur certainly didn’t need another concern added to his plate – even less if it was nothing more than a product of Matthew’s too anxious mind.

Arthur reciprocated with a tired smile of his own and a small nod.

“Good. I trust you’ve taken your antibiotic, haven’t you?”

A lump surged in Matthew’s throat. He nodded, using all his willpower not to let the smile slip from his face. Not only he hadn’t taken the antibiotic that morning – he was feeling too nauseous for it, he knew he wasn’t going to keep it down – the dose from the previous evening had joined the rest of the meal down the toilet drain. Arthur didn’t know. He was imperative that he didn’t become aware of that second instance, either.

The young man’s exhaustion was written as clear as daylight in his slumped posture and drawn features. On the top of the already taxing concerns of a twenty-year-old having to deal with running a family, the constant fights with Alfred were draining Arthur to the point that Matthew was surprised he hadn’t collapsed yet. And how could Matthew add another weight to Arthur’s shoulders? The mere thought made his lungs tighten so much that he could hardly draw a single breath.

Moreover, it had been more than six years since Matthew’s spleen had been removed. Other two, and he would finally live like a normal person and be free to stop taking his prophylactic antibiotic. Missing two doses wouldn’t cause any harm, no matter how much Matthew’s skin crawled with uneasiness at the thought of disobeying his doctor’s orders.

Any doubt evaporated in front of the tired yet unmistakably earnest smile that blossomed on Arthur’s lips.

“You’re such a good boy…” he exhaled, “I know I can always count on you.”

Shame crawled up Matthew’s stomach.

“I have to go, I’ll miss the bus,” he muttered, ducking behind Arthur to rush out of the kitchen and ignoring the painful jolts in his lower abdomen.

He couldn’t stop himself from noticing how a bit of tension seemed to leave Arthur’s shoulders, allowing him to stand straighter. Matthew felt sick at the thought.

A good child? This couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m just an anxious, selfish wreck.

If Matthew were a good child, he would fully understand that Arthur just had more vital concerns than constantly paying attention to him – it just wasn’t possible, in their situation. If Matthew had truly managed to convince himself of that, his body wouldn’t rebel that way in order to be noticed, making Arthur waste precious energy over silly concerns. Matthew was aware of that. And, at the same time, dwelling over it wasn’t going to help.

With a tired sigh, Matthew hauled up his school bags and headed out of the door after saying goodbye to Arthur. The cold wind that bit his cheeks made him shiver, bothering him far more than it should have. On the flip side, the combination of cold and heavy bags allowed Matthew to walk slightly hunched over without anybody questioning it. It was a small blessing, the jolts of pain in his lower abdomen were getting more and more intense and harder to hide. Matthew would have been ready to drop to the ground and cry in pain.

Instead, he gritted his teeth and trudged on to the bus stop. By the time he reached it, he was dizzy and out of breath, the throbbing in his guts so intense that he feared he would pass out. Matthew let himself slump on the bench and hugged his knees in front of his chest, trying to find a position that would give him some relief from the pain.

“Woah, you look miserable. Did Art yell at you, too?”

Matthew started at his brother’s voice. He hadn���t realized that Alfred was still at the bus stop as well, sitting at the other end of the bench with his legs spread open and his hands folded inside the pockets of his bomber jacket. He would’ve been the picture of carelessness, if not for the thin lines of anger still creasing his forehead and the barely repressed fury darkening his eyes. Matthew missed their limpid blue. Every time he looked at that foreign rage burning behind them, he felt like he was being kicked in the chest.

He shook his head.

“Arthur didn’t do anything, I’m just tired. And…” The hesitation lasted only a fraction of a second. Matthew couldn’t bear his family arguing any longer. “You know, he wouldn’t yell at you, either, if you just talked to him instead of just him having to find out everything on his own.”

Alfred snorted and gave an exaggerated eye-roll.

“Who, Arthur? Don’t make me laugh, Arthur doesn’t do ‘talking’. He just decides what’s the best for us and demands us to follow through it. He has already made up his mind, there’s no way to make him reconsider. Hell, it’s not even about getting him to change his mind – he doesn’t even get to the ‘listening’ part!”

Another sharp burst of pain squeezed Matthew’s intestines. He hugged his knees closer to his chest, trying to breathe through the agony.

“But… he does have a point, Al. I mean… not with everything, but… you’re really smart, if you just… studied a little… You’d have better grades, and it wouldn’t even be so much of an effort… You really are kind of throwing away this opportunity…”

Matthew’s voice trailed off in a whimper, his chest tightening at the recognition of the fury that warped his brother’s features.

“Of course,” Alfred spat out, gritting his teeth. His hands clenched into fists as his entire body tensed. “Of. Fucking. Course. I don’t even know what I was expecting from you. Always Arthur’s little bitch, aren’t you? For fuck’s sake, Matthew! Can’t you see he doesn’t care for you in the slightest? All that that matters to him is appearance – to be seen as the perfectly proper big brother who takes perfect care of his equally perfectly proper and boring younger brothers. There’s nothing deeper behind it! Why are you still snivelling at his feet? It won’t change anything. Arthur won’t magically start caring for you just because you’re an obedient little goody-two-shoes! You’ll always be invisible to him, always a second thought!” Alfred gave a violent shake of his head. “By now, you should know that I’m the only one who truly cares for you. Why are you still siding with him?”

Matthew couldn’t breathe, Alfred’s word pressed against his chest with the weight of a stone. With his head swimming and his racing heartbeat pounding in his ears, Matthew could only look at the utter disgust spelt out in his brother’s features.

“And you know what? I’m sick and tired of getting blamed for everything as I wait for you to finally develop some critical thinking skills. You’re no better than Arthur, at this point. Don’t fucking talk to me until you’ve got some sense back!”

Alfred jerked up from the bench and walked in swift strides to the road, just in time for the bus to appear from the corner. He got into it without sparing a glance at Matthew, the tight fists around his backpack’s strings quivering in rage.

Matthew was paralyzed. Only when the bus driver cast him a questioning glance, he was reminded that he had to get in. He got up on shaky legs and automatically walked to the bus. Somehow, he managed to ignore both the agony raging in his lower abdomen and the tears scorching against his eyelids and offer the driver a shaky smile.

Without meeting anybody’s eyes, Matthew found a spare seat and curled into it as he tried to compose himself. No matter how much he forced himself to even out his breathing, however, he couldn’t soothe the ache in his chest or in his abdomen. He let his head rest against the window, savouring the feeling of the cool surface against his clammy skin.

When did everything start going so wrong?

In truth, Matthew had a quite precise answer: the downfall had waltzed into their life in worn-out and faded tennis shoes along with Allen and Allyson Jones. Alfred had always had a rebellious streak, but hanging around those twins he had bonded with because they shared the same surname had turned it into a meaner, uncontrolled force that had slowly taken over their lives. Well-meaning and trusting as ever, Alfred hadn’t been able to recognize the real malice hiding behind the façade of innocent, misguided teens with a rough past. When Arthur had urged him to be cautious, he had retorted that Allyson and Allen deserved a chance like anybody else. When Matthew had reported that they were vandalising the school properties, scaring and bullying younger teens and smoking weed, Alfred had laughed and told him he shouldn’t listen to every rumour that went around, that they were nothing but stereotypes.

The Jones twins must have seen something special in Alfred, something that could be useful to them. They had initially acted tamer around him, only to slowly lead Alfred into the mindset that society and norms were oppressive, that going against them was the only way to truly help people. They had taught him that school didn’t matter and that the rules Arthur put in place were only meant to hinder Alfred from letting his true potential shine. And Alfred had swallowed everything, changing bit by bit until he was just a shadow of Matthew’s brother.

Eventually, something had happened that had opened Alfred’s eyes. Matthew wasn’t aware of what had transpired, his brother hadn’t confided in him in a long time; all he knew was that Alfred had abruptly cut his ties with Allyson and Allen and hadn’t regretted their departure at the end of the summer. For a couple of weeks, Alfred had even been nicer to Matthew, almost back to his old overprotective yet well-meaning personality. Allen and Allyson Jones, however, had left a strong, dark impression that had seeped into Alfred’s mind and planted its dark root into his heart. The fights with Arthur had started to burst out again, more violent and frequent than ever.

Now, Matthew considered himself a quite forgiving person. Before casting any judgement, he always did his best to look into other people’s motives and try to understand their perspective. He would be able to say without hesitation, however, that he hated Allen and Allyson Jones. The mere recollection of those malicious smirks and those eyes, of such an intense warm shade of brown that they almost looked red, made hot fury surge inside Matthew’s chest. Allen and Allyson Jones had ruined his family and his life.

But, more than anything, Matthew was tired of getting caught into the crossfire. He was so tired that his body had started faking illnesses and pains in response. “There’s nothing wrong with him. It’s psychosomatic,” the doctor had said when Arthur had rushed Matthew to an appointment after four days of unexplained slight fever and stomach-ache (Matthew had tried to hide it from Arthur. He had done his best, but he hadn’t been expert enough to completely cover the signs of his too frequent vomiting and the weakness that accompanied it).

At that time, Matthew hadn’t known what the word meant, but he could perfectly recall how shame had crawled up his stomach as he lay on the cold bed, under the doctor's unforgiving stare. Later, he had realized why the doctor was judging him so badly: ‘psychosomatic’ meant ‘not real’. It was just Matthew’s body being whiny and claiming the attention its owner was so desperately trying not to ask for, knowing just how many more pressing issues Arthur had in his hands. Selfish. That was what Matthew’s illnesses meant.

Matthew gritted his teeth against another spasm of pain that was shortly followed by a wave of nausea. He refused to let even a moan go past his lips. In spite of the embarrassing display his body was giving, there was still one thing he had control over: his reaction. No matter how bad the pain might get, he wasn’t going to add other fuel to the fire.

Matthew’s resolve was thoroughly tested during the following hours. Normally, he would feel a bit better once he had left home, but that day, the pain wasn’t giving him a single moment of respite. If anything, it seemed to be growing worse. By midday, Matthew could no longer stand straight. He felt like a scorching knifes were embedded into his lower abdomen, twisting at every movement.

Matthew had never blessed so much his being unremarkable, he probably wouldn’t have been able to hide his discomfort from anybody truly noticing him. Fortunately, he didn’t share any class with Michelle or Emil that day, and Carlos was in Cuba visiting his grandparents. His luck extended to the fact that there wasn’t any test, but that was also where it stopped.

Matthew spent the entire lunch break curled up in a bathroom’s cubicle, getting rid of bile and doing his best not to bawl from the pain. He was quite sure he had never experienced something like that – and probably, the intense hockey practice he would have to face in the afternoon had something to do with it.

In theory, hockey practice should have been suspended as the coach wouldn’t be able to attend, but there was going to be an important match the following week; the team couldn’t afford to miss any training. Because of that, Ivan had elected to ignore the rules and follow with the practice even if there wasn’t any supervisor. The thought made Matthew’s chest tighten. He was uncomfortable with going against the rules, but he had already agreed to it, he couldn’t take it back.

‘You’re really trying to give up on me, aren’t you?’ he scolded his body, but he didn’t even have the energy to be truly angry anymore. He was just tired.

As he willed his churning stomach to settle down, Matthew let his head rest against the wall. The ceramic tiles felt icy under his skin. Matthew wouldn’t have been surprised to find a fever accompanying the general feeling of illness, it wasn’t unusual – but there was nothing he could do about it.

Somehow, Matthew found the strength to climb to his feet at the end of the break. With his head swimming and his abdomen screaming in agony, he dragged himself to his afternoon classes.

The following periods passed by in a daze. Matthew was hardly aware of his teacher talking, all he could think about was the pain consuming him. He mentally pleaded for it to stop, tried all the calming techniques he had even vaguely heard of, but to no avail. By the time the bell rang, the agony had only worsened.

Matthew wanted to curl up into a foetal position and sob out all the pain he was feeling. But that meant attracting the attention of the teacher. And feeling sick at school meant being sent to the infirmary. Then, the nurse would have to call Arthur, who would worry to no end. Matthew couldn’t forget how exhausted his older brother had looked that morning. He couldn’t do that to him, not over a fake ailment that shouldn’t have been happening in the first place. Matthew just couldn’t.

Mindful of that, he gritted his teeth, forced his body to straighten up ignoring the excruciating stabs of pain and walked with single-minded determination towards the changing room, trying not to pay attention to the way the floor seemed to tilt under his feet.

Fortunately, everybody seemed to be too concerned with the imminent practice to pay attention to the way Matthew wobbled into the changing room, and they were used to him changing inside the bathroom. Matthew didn’t like to think about the thin scar marring the left side of his abdomen, nor did he fancy the idea of other people seeing it – mostly, because it meant questions that would make his mind linger on something he only wanted to forget – but, for the first time, he was grateful for its presence.

Matthew had forgotten how many movements were required for an act as simple as changing his trousers, but he almost teared up several times when the agony raging in his lower abdomen increased to the point that it turned his vision grey. None of his teammates was there to witness that, nor did they see the several minutes Matthew needed to rest before he could even attempt straightening up from his crouched position, or how the searing pain when he finally accomplished the task distorted his features in a grimace.

By the time Matthew got out of the bathroom, everybody was already on the move.

“Come on, Matt!” called Mikkel, “On the ice! We need all the training we can get!”

In spite of knowing how important the upcoming match – and, consequently, training for it – was, Matthew found himself mourning the lost opportunity of a missed practice. Writhing in pain on his bed seemed a lot more appealing than a hockey match. At least, skating while slightly doubled over didn’t raise any question, and the headgear prevented his teammates from spotting Matthew’s pained expression, but that was about where anything positive stopped.

With each movement of his legs, Matthew drove a knife deeper into his abdomen. The searing pain was engulfing all his senses and narrowing his vision, it was all Matthew could think about. Not the game, the puck or the other players. There was only the fire eating him from inside.

Matthew was suddenly torn out of his stupor by a voice that rose above the general buzzing, calling his name in a panicked intonation. He raised his head to see Ivan coming at him at full speed, horror shining in his eyes.

There was no time to move away. Matthew barely managed to duck to his right. For a moment, he thought he had avoided Ivan – then, the end of the stick caught his left side at full force.

An agonizing fire exploded in Matthew’s lower abdomen. This time, the boy couldn’t restrain the raw scream that was torn from the depths his throat. He had no more control of any of his limbs, he couldn’t feel his legs or arms – all he could feel was the agony tearing his gut in half. Perhaps, that was exactly what had happened.

Mercifully, Matthew’s senses soon vanished in the black that swallowed his vision.

(word count: 4,299)

———

Notes:

Hetalia Human Names [x]

Allen and Allyson Jones are 2P America and 2P Nyo America (they won’t make any other appearance, they just belong to some key-elements of the backstory)

For people who hadn’t read the previous instalment – Matthew got his spleen removed after a car crash, when it was punctured by a broken rib.

Please keep in mind that the story is filtered through Matthew’s POV, and he has quite a skewed view of what ‘psychosomatic’ truly means.

English isn’t my first language. If you noticed any mistake, feel free to point it out!

Tagging: @ono-its-ryane (thanks a lot for asking me this, it’s really flattering!); @notice-me-hetasenpai; @aph-fanficchallenges (thanks a lot to you, too)

[spamzineglasgow]

(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 1

In the first instalment of a two part dialogic HOT TAKE of The 1975′s latest album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Maria Sledmere writes to musician and critic Scott Morrison with meditations on the controversial motormouth and prince of sincerity that is Matty Healy, the poetics of wrongness, millennial digression and what it means to play and compose from the middle.

Dear Scott,

> So we have agreed to write something on The 1975’s fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit/Polydor). I have been traipsing around the various necropoli of Glasgow on my state-sanctioned walks this week, listening to the long meandering 80-minute world of it, disentangling my headphones from the overgrown ferns, caught between the living and dead. Can you have a long world, a sprawling fantasia, when ‘the world’ feels increasingly shortened, small, boiled down to its ‘essentials’? Let’s go around the world in 80 minutes, the band seem to say, take this short-circuit to the infinite with me. I like that; I don’t even need a boat, just a half-arsed WiFi connection and a will to download. I’m really excited to be talking with you, writing you both about this; it’s an honour to connect our thoughts. I want writing right now to feel a bit like listening, so I write this listening. When my friend Katy slid into my DMs on a Monday morning with ‘omg the 1975 album starts with greta?????????’ and then ‘what on earth is the genre of this album ?!’ I just knew it had to happen, this writing-listening, because I was equally alarmed and charmed by the cognitive dissonance of that fall from Greta’s soft, yet urgent call to rebel (‘The 1975’), into ‘People’ with its parodic refrain of post-punk hedonism that would eat Fat White Family on a Dadaesque meal-deal platter ‘WELL, GIRLS, FOOD, GEAR [...] Yeah, woo, yeah, that’s right’. Scott, you and I went to see The 1975 play at the Hydro on the 1st of March, my last gig before lockdown. I’d been up all night drinking straight gin and doing cartwheels and crying on my friend’s carpet, and the sleeplessness made everything all the more lush and intense. Those slogans, the theatrical backdrops, the dancers, the lights, the travellator! Everything so EXTRA, what a JOURNEY. And well, it would be rude of me not to invite you to contribute to this conversation, as a thank you for the ticket but also because of your fortunate (and probably unusual) positioning as both a classically trained musician (with a fine-tuned listening ear) and fervent fan of the band (readers, Scott messaged me with pictures of pre-ordered vinyl to prove it).

> It seems impossible to begin this dialogue without first addressing the FRAUGHT and oft~problematic question of Matty Healy, the band’s frontman, variously described as ‘the enfant terrible of pop-rock’ and ‘outspoken avatar’ (Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork), ‘enigmatic deity’ (Douglas Greenwood for i-D), ‘a charismatic thirty-one-year-old’ and ‘scrawny’, rock star ‘archetype’, not to mention ‘avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance’ (Carrie Battan, The New Yorker). ‘Divisive motormouth or voice of a generation?’ asks Dorian Lynskey with (fair enough) somewhat tired provocation in The Guardian, as if you could have one without the other, these days. ‘There are’, writes Dan Stubbs for The NME, ‘as many Matty Healys here as there are musical styles’. So far, so postmodern, so elliptical, so everything/yeah/woo/whatever/that’s right. Come to think of it, it makes sense for The 1975 to draft in Greta Thunberg to read her climate speech over the opening eponymous track. Both Matty and Greta, for divergent yet somehow intersecting reasons, suffer the troublesome, universalising label of voice of a generation. Why not join forces to exploit this label, to put out a message? I’ve always thought of pop music as a kind of potential broadcast, a hypnotic, smooth space for desire’s traversal and recalibration. More on that later, maybe. What do you think?

> You can imagine Matty leaping out of a cryptic, post-internet Cocteau novelette (if not then straight onto James Cordon’s studio desk), emoji streaming from his fingertips like the lightning that Justine wields in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011); but the terrifying candour of the enfant terrible is also his propensity to wax lyrical on another (bear with my clickhole) YouTube interview about his thoughts on Situationism and the Snapchat generation. It feels relevant to mention cinema right now, if only in passing, because this album is full of cinematic moments: strings and swells worthy of Weyes Blood’s latest paean to the movies, but also a Disneyfication of sentiment clotted and packed between house tracks, ballads and rarefied indie hits. Nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975. Maybe more on that later, also.

> Where do I start though, how to really write about this, how to attain something like necessary distance in the space of a writing-listening? Matty Healy, I suppose, like SPAM’s celebrated authorial mascot, Tom McCarthy, poses the same problem of response: how to write about an artist whose own critical commentary is like an eloquent, overzealous and self-devouring, carnivorous vine of opinion?  

> Now, let’s not turn this into a discussion about who wears pinstripes better (we can leave that to readers - these are total Notes from the Watercooler levels of quiche). There seems to be this obsession with pinning (excuse the pun) Matty down to a flat surface of multiples: a moodboard, avatar, placeholder for automatic cancellation. He’s the soft cork you wanna prod your anxieties through and call it identity, you wanna provoke into saying something bizarrely, painfully true about life ‘as it is now’. Healy himself quips self-referentially, ‘a millennial that babyboomers like’. I don’t really know where to start really, not even on Matty; my brain is all over the place and I can’t find a critical place to settle. I’m lost in the fog and the stripes, some stars also; I haven’t even washed my hair for a week. Funnily enough, in 2018 for SPAM’s #7 Prom Date issue I wrote a poem called ‘Just Messing Around’ where the speaker mentions ‘pinning my eye to the right side / of matt healy’s hair all shaved / & serene’ and you don’t really know if it’s the eye that’s shaved or the hair, but both I guess offer different kinds of vision. Every time I google the man, IRL Matty I mean, I am offered a candied proliferation of alluring headlines: ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy opens up on his beef with Imagine Dragons’, ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy savagely destroys Maroon 5 over plagiarism claims’. Perhaps the whole point is to define (or slay?) by negation. Hey, I’ll write another poem. The opening sentence comes from Matty’s recent Guardian interview.

Superstar

I’m not an avocado, not everyone thinks I’m amazing. That’s why they call me the avocado, baby was a song released by Los Campesinos! in 2013, same year as the 1975’s debut. In the am I have been wanting to listen and Andy puts up a meme like ‘The 1975 names their albums stuff like “A Treatise on Epistemological Suffering” and then spends 2 hours singing about how hard it is to be 26’ and I reply being 26 IS epistemological suffering (isn’t that the affirmative dismissal contained in the title, ‘Yeah I Know’) I mean only yesterday I had to ask myself if it’s true you can wish on 11:11 or take zinc to improve your immune system or use an expired provisional license to buy alcohol like why are they even still asking I thought indie had died after that excruciating Hadouken! song called ‘Superstar’ which was all like You don’t like my scene / You don’t like my song / Well, if you Somewhere I’ve done something wrong it seems a delirious, 3-minute scold of the retro infinitude of scarf-wearing cunts with haircuts, and yeah sure kids dressed as emos rapping to rave is not the end of the world, per se, similarly I had to ask myself is there a life in academia is there a wage here or there, like the Talking Heads song And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here? Good thing I turn 27 next month Timothy Morton often uses the refrain, this is not my beautiful house this is not my beautiful wife to refer to those moments you find yourself caught in the irony loop and that’s dark ecology the closer you are the stranger it feels like slice me in half I’ll fall out with more questions you can plant in the soil like a stone or stoner, just one more drag of does it offend you, yeah? will I live and die in a band Matty sings the sweet green meat of my much-too-old -and-such-youthful experience of adding healthy fat to conference dialogue, like ‘Avocado, Baby’ was released on a record called No Blues I believe a large automobile is hurtling towards me now in negative space and the driver is crooning Elvis and reciting my funding conditions and everything feels like there aren’t not still people who believe the new culture of content is a space ‘over there’ and you can still have earnest power ballads about love if you want them =/ to cancel (too many tabs don’t make a tableau but in the future facebook has a paywall) and fame is a drag the pressure we put on the atmosphere, like somewhere you’re alive and still amazing asking wtf I’m reading this novel by Roberto Bolaño set partly in 1975 before we had internet it seems poets got laid a lot that year in Mexico City before I was born to pick up video calls with a spliff in one hand in the splendid, essential heat like a difficult knife in my side you can put me on toast, grind the pepper over me gently and say fucking hell this has taken forever.

> I guess I want or wanted to begin with this question of difficulty that rises when responding to Notes on a Conditional Form. How do you approach an album whose delayed release places it in a position of considerable hype, an album whose world tour and promotion is again delayed by global pandemic, an album shrouded in the ever-shifting controversy of Matty’s persona, an album whose length and sonic variety risks collapse into litanies of zany superlative and necrophilic attempts to revive musical category as vaguely relevant here? As beautiful as it is to catalogue the offbeat Pinegrove vibes of ‘Roadkill’, the shoegaze croons of ‘Then Because She Goes’ and the pop-punk, chord-bright euphoria of ‘Me & You Together Song’, I could keep going and going with this. I could just list and just list this. The album is a generous offering: a tribute to the album as form in an age where attention tapers away on high-streaming playlists set to conditioned, circadian moods curated by the likes of Spotify or Apple Music. The album is a Borgesian plenitude of multiple pathways, multiple timelines, infinite feed, choose your own adventure; a hypertext of cultural reference almost worthy of Manic Street Preachers at their Richey Edwards era of paranoid, intellectual peak; a metamodernist feat of oscillation between irony and sincerity, an extended tract, a drunk millennial ramble, a journey that loops from house party to club basement to the streams of sexuality repressed and expressed encounter...and yet. It is both more and less than these things. In trying to capture Notes on a Conditional Form with some pithy, journalist’s statement, I’m doing it all wrong.

> Sidenote: I recently listened to Rachel Zucker give a 2016 lecture on ‘The Poetics of Wrongness’ as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She makes a case for wrongness in poetry and critique, rejects the poem of pithy essence, the short, pretty and to the point lyric whose meaning is easily digested in a greetings card, or A Level exam paper, say. ‘Instead of the Fabergé egg of the short lyric, I prefer the aesthetics of intractability and exhausted exhaustedness’, the mistakes, lags or aporia made along the way in one of these long and winding poems. Notes on a Conditional Form is full of what some might deem mistakes, digression, exhaustion; but it is also peppered with the gloss of almost perfect pop ‘hits’ such as ‘Me & You Together Song’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’. A wrong poem should be, ‘ashamed and irreverent’, which feels like a decent description of The 1975’s general orientation towards artistic conception. There is cringe and incongruity, there is by all intents and purposes ‘too much of it’, whatever we mean by ‘it’. And yet, that is its beautiful poetics of wrongness, the sound of wrongness, which ‘prefers the stairs’ to the easy elevator pitch (as Zucker puts it), that ‘prefers a half-finishing crumbling stairwell to nowhere’. I like to think about this 1975 album as a kind of exhausting Escherian scene of shifting, crumbling stairwells, shuffling and reassembling against the glistering backdrop of the internet’s inverse void, where everything, literally everything is translated to a starry excess of 1s and 0s, our collective binary data, the white hot, unreadable howl of our noise. What do you think Scott, would Matty find this image agreeable? Does that matter?

> Pushing dear Matty aside, say what you like, let’s start (again) with the title: Notes on a Conditional Form. Following 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s fair to position these records as gestures towards philosophical statements ‘of the times’. Important to recognise the resistance to total or dominating knowledge built into the titles: these are not complete tracts or theses, but rather ‘a brief inquiry’ and ‘notes’. It’s obviously the ancient yet *hip* thing to do in capital-P Philosophy, to put out your statement on aesthetics and ethics, and I think The 1975 are playing with that tradition and its failure. You can imagine if his attention span were different, Matty Healy would’ve already written a PhD thesis on this stuff and published it as drunken bulletins on LiveJournal in 2007. As it stands, we have the smorgasbord sprawl of this eclectic record to get through in this cursèd year of 2020 — it’s not like we have much of anything better to do right now, when everything feels so futile, beyond reason and even the greatest human endeavour. Haha, woo, Yeah :’(((.

> Let’s stay in that conditional space between crying and laughter. Conditional form is interesting as a term, often used in grammar to refer to the ‘unreal past’ because it uses a past tense but does not actually refer to something that literally happened in the past: If I had texted him back, we would probably have gone to the gig that night. There’s something about the conditional as the ur-condition of the internet, the proliferating possibilities it offers and the hauntological strains of what could have been had we chosen x option over y, z, a, b, c, infinity...As millennials, we often make decisions by hedging, always caught in the conditional state of what it is to be. Hovering in the emotional shortcuts provided by dumb yellow icons, the poetics of abstraction. A verb form’s dalliance with uncertain reverb; and so we live our conditional lives.

> To push this further, we can say the internet is, as ever, Matty Healy’s natural habitat. In a recent podcast interview with Conor Oberst for The Face, Healy tells his favourite emo-country hero that ‘my natural environment by the time I started The 1975 was the fucking internet’. So how does that ecosystem play into the music? In a damning review for The Line of Best Fit, Claire Biddles concludes:

The 1975’s first three albums are ideal and distinct worlds to inhabit, each individually cohesive but situated in specific contexts — the anticipation of the small town, profundity in the face of vacuous fame, and the horror and isolation of late capitalism. Perhaps because of its broken genesis, Notes has no such common context, and ends up feeling flat, directionless and inessential, where its forebears felt vital, worthy of devoting a life to. For a band with proven dexterity in deftly capturing the nuances and quick changes of contemporary conversation, it is disheartening to witness them with nearly nothing of note to say.

That description — ‘flat, directionless and inessential’ — is kind of how I experience the internet right now, in the paradox of Web 2.0 becoming utterly essential, somehow, to how I live my life, how I love, how I am with friends. The internet as my ecosystem, my utility, my complete environment, my Imaginary — beyond the mere utility of a WiFi connection. Broken genesis might well describe the childhoods of those of us who grew up online, whose platforms collapsed around them, whose adolescent data was lost in the great ~accidental annihilation of the MySpace servers, whose identities were always already fractured, performed, anonymised or exquisitely personalised, deferred into only the (im)possible keystroke of utterance and trace, the fort-da play of MSN sign-ins. ‘My life is defined by a desire to be outward followed by a fear of being seen’, Matty says in a new short film for Apple Music, released in tandem with the album. The internet requires this chiaroscuro destiny: not to burn always with Baudelaire’s hard and gem-like flame (O to be an IRL flaneur beyond times of lockdown) but to endlessly flicker between the bright green light of presence and the shade of what once was called afk, away from keyboard. To live and burn in the gap between extroversion and introversion, to live in this conditional state of tendency. To express with emoji, send pics, is to both reveal and withhold something else, essential.

> I like albums to feel like worlds; I appreciate Biddles’ evocation of the cohesion experienced in the first three 1975 records. But perhaps it is a kind of violence to assume a world must have cohesion to exist. What is even meant by ‘common context’? What pressure are we putting on a singer, a band, a cultural moment to produce something familiar and harmonious, and to whom, at what scale? What does it mean to be the biggest band in the world...for a bit? How does that work when everything is dissonance, transience, noise, interference; both this and not-this; when life itself is lived as the flat traversal of a millioning existential terrains that seem to collapse into this nowness in which I feel myself sliding forever? Can anyone weigh-in on what it means to make music, art or writing that’s ‘worthy of devoting a life to’, because the gravity and force of that condition for good art, good pop, seduces me so.

> Maybe the point is to always be in the middle, to never quite start to write about The 1975, to find yourself always already writing about this album because this album was always already writing about your life. I have said nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975, but I was being coy, because the hottest twentieth-century philosophical double act, Deleuze and Guattari (haters gonna hate), do the interlude rather nicely. The point of a rhizome being ‘no beginning or end [...] always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ as they write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I see the musical interlude of a pop record, the instrumental moment without lyric, as a kind of middling gesture that places the listener in that conditional state of presence and absence, a hinge between songs, times and narrative moments. Maybe my favourite moment in A Thousand Plateaus is the statement: ‘RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous’. Painful or ponderous might be a fair critique levelled at the enfant terrible vibes of Matty’s lyrics and generic pick’n’mix, but isn’t this tactic a kind of swerving punch at the categorical violence that keeps people out of academia, that keeps academic discourse so often stale in the first place? Unlike most journal articles, let’s face it, pop reaches ‘“the people”’. Perhaps Notes on a Conditional Form is the rhizomatic sprawl of the myriad we need as an alternative to institutional hierarchy, ring-fencing and the language games of academia. Surely the title is a reference to the very ‘pseudoscient-tificity’ D&G mention? I’m gonna quote Richard Scott’s blurb to Colin Herd’s 2019 poetry collection, You Name It here (not least because the indie publishers, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, come straight out of Manchester, home to The 1975, and because Herd’s poetic spirit is pure pop generosity with a platter of theory on the side), because I want to say similar things of this album: ‘Colin Herd’s poems are masterpieces of variousness. They are talismans against Macho demons. They are snatches of theory operating under lavish spills of language’. The good thing about Herd’s poetry and Matty Healy’s lyrics is that the impulse towards romantic or florid expression is always tapered by an interest in the mundane and everyday. Healy is always singing about pissing or buying clothes online or, as on ‘The Birthday Party’, singing about ‘a place I’ve been going’ that seems to consist of the lonely, infinite regress of conversations about seeing friends and watching someone drink kombucha while buying, in the convenient life of rhyme, Ed Ruscha prints.

Ed Ruscher, Cold Beer, Beautiful Girls (2009)

> So what kind of listening does this rhizomatic sprawl demand — does it expand beyond the banal or find a holding space there, a heaven of affect chilled to late-modernity’s crisp perfection? ‘The End (Music For Cars)’ is a luxurious, Hollywood ‘soaring’ moment, all strings and swells, fucking woodwind, and comes as the third track on the album, where normally you’d place it as some kind of penultimate climax, the album’s landscape pan-out or big swelling screen kiss in three-dimensional rotation. The band’s ‘Music For Cars’ era comprises their two most recent records, and you have to take it as a nod to Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Matty recently interviewed Eno again for The Face, cool). The thing about cars is you drive around in them, you follow rules but also whims and desires, convictions; you choose to join others or you pursue the selfish acceleration (‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles’ goes the laconic teenage refrain in Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero). You only listen to music half-attentively; you don’t listen close enough to trade in souls. Are we being invited to experience this album as an ambient disruption of figure and ground, presence and absence, here and there, space and place, intimacy and despondency? Driving feels increasingly ‘directionless and inessential’ when the scale effects and obscenities of the anthropocene, of covid and other late-capitalist crises loom in our vision, when the sign systems we used to navigate our lives by seem to shimmer out of focus, or pixelate and deteriorate through endless memetic replication... You can’t help feel like Biddles review kind of misses the point.

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor (1959)

> What point would that be though, in a world of rhizomatic overlap and intersecting, middling lines, a direction without seeming end? I love the approximation at work when Biddles writes, ‘with nearly nothing of note to say’, because that seems to be a possibility condition for writing in the age of the internet. To write in a way that is almost less than zero and loop back upon some kind of infinity, yet keep it in 2-step. I think back to Rachel Zucker’s image of the half-finished crumbling stairwell, and feel an amiable sense of approval towards this band who always work between the registers of diary, confession, advertising, provocative sloganeering and faux-didactics, never quite settling in to specifically tell you this particular story. It’s all mess, and it’s awful and delicious, I’m sorry. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’ is the title of track 13 on the album: that movement between nothing and everything feels like the absolutist, absurdist conditions of ‘truth’ possibility in the Trumpocene/age of so-called ‘post-truth’. ‘Life feels like a lie, I need something to be true’, Healy sings with strained conviction in the song’s opening. But what is at stake in this truth? ‘I never fucked in a car, I was lying’, goes the line, referring back to the dramatic in medias res opening to ‘Love It If We Made It’, notable banger from A Brief Inquiry…: ‘We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it’. If lying is a pun on telling a mistruth or laying back, practically sexless in a passive state, there’s a deliberate play on apathy, agency and distortion here. It’s something Matty seems snagged on. On ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ he collapses aesthetic superficiality, capital’s lyric abstraction (‘Oh, what’s a fiver?’) and generalised crisis into this (un)conscious desire for shutdown, expressed in fragmentary bullets of needing-to-know-and-not-know: ‘Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?’ And then that impassioned refrain, processed through vocal distortion as if to enact the difficulty in clarity as overcome somehow by the sheer making of noise: ‘Belief and saying something / And saying something / And saying something’. It’s the endless, driving recursion of our lives online, online.

> Back to ‘The End (Music for Cars)’ which really is the middle of the beginning. It’s weird to listen to songs about driving and lying down in the middle of lockdown, drowning in the bloat of social media, on top of our ongoing climate emergency (yeah, remember that, it’s still happening), where high-carbon travel feels like an exhausted, almost impossible concept. A musician complaining about travelling is an age-old subject for a song, but this feels just as much about living in the in-between times of the internet (remember the sweet naivety of the information superhighway) as much as the great Road, for which Kerouac longed as much as Springsteen, Dylan, or Lana Del Rey. Is Matty Healy homesick though? ‘Get somewhere, change my mind, eh / Get somewhere but don’t find it / I don’t find what I’m looking for’. It’s all ‘(out there)’ as the parenthetical refrain goes, but maybe ‘out there’, outside, is the maddening supplement, as Derrida would say, to our lives online, thus revealing their mutual, entwined dependency. Imagine the M6 but tangled up crazily, zanily, like one of those Sylvano Bussoti scores. It’s not like you’re trying to get home, get back, exactly. It’s not like you can just click back on your browser and erase that trace of the touch that enacts it. That’s the weird-ass sensation of being an ecological being: ‘Wherever you go, there you are’, writes Tim Morton in Being Ecological (2018). We’re all pretty alien, even to ourselves.

> If life feels like a lie, as Matty sings, does it matter anymore whether it is or not? Or, to pose the question differently, how do we feel into, attune to something like ‘truth’, a shared reality or feeling? ‘Out there’ is only a state of ellipsis [...] a vine extended, something for the listener, user, consumer and/or human to cling to — or be strangled by. In the aforementioned Apple Music video, Matty takes away the canvas and presents the frame beneath, in a gesture that is comically overwrought with Duchampian pretention around the state and context of the artwork itself. ‘Sometimes I think what is the point of...it’s not my atheism coming out, it’s just my being human coming out’, he muses. The phrase ‘coming out’, with its connotations of closeting, shame and cocoon-like emergence is intriguing here. In a dehumanising, post-internet world of neoliberalism and its attendant microfascisms, its commodification of all kinds of art, its easythink translation of poetry-to-advertising, what would it mean to come out as human after, or better still, in the middle of all this? It’s significant that he trails off after ‘the point of…’, for surely the point itself (of the art?) would be to find yourself here, there, right in the middle of it all. And then in ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, it’s like Matty is calling us back from that epistemological and ontological boiling point of knowing and being, like in singing we could go along, we could feel present and ‘true’ again, even with friction and difference. We gotta take hold, cool ourselves down from the rhetoric and into warm emotion, the smell of paint, erotic vibration of bass, in a manner of speaking.

> What if the mode of inquiry were not to investigate but rather to follow the lines of flight, to riff on this world where narrative arcs and chains are replaced by the multiple possibilities of hallucinatory experience, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’? To just desire and trace it. This, Scott, is where you come in (and I finally shut up to listen). There is so much more to write about this album, echo for echo, and I feel like I’ve only begun the tracing which was already beginning: I want to know your thoughts on The 1975 and America, on gender and genre, on bodies and football and friendship, on political engagement, those house beats, on the beautiful, sultry appearance of Phoebe (fucking) Bridgers, on sincerity, on the question of ‘What Should I Say’...It’s been playing on my mind that I will never say what I want to, or should, or would say of this album, but this perhaps is what I would otherwise have said. I give you my notes in conditional form.

Read part 2 of our review in Scott Morrison’s response here.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order. 

~

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 23/6/20

[nerdonymous-blog]

The End of Prequel Hate

I don’t care whether or not you like the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy.  I am not going to attempt to persuade you to like films that you don’t (and wouldn’t, even if I believed it were possible for me to do so).  Based on the above title, it may seem that precisely the opposite is true.  But, while what follows does constitute a defense of the Prequels, that defense is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself…

Because there are a couple of things I do care about (which will become crystal clear before the end, I promise), and in order for me to effectively make my points, I need to attempt to cut through the bullshit of nearly two decades of Prequel hate and Lucas-bashing.  So, I will be addressing some common criticisms of the Prequels, and referencing the Mr. Plinkett reviews…

(For anyone who is unfamiliar with Mr. Plinkett’s Star Wars Prequel reviews:  They are feature-length YouTube videos, in which Mike Stoklasa, as deranged serial killer Harry S. Plinkett, explains in excruciating detail what’s wrong with the Star Wars Prequels, which, according to him, is everything.)

The “Secret” Source of Prequel Hate

One major criticism, which is also a very common criticism, is that the Prequels were unexciting.  The question is, if they were unexciting, why were they unexciting…?

In his Episode II - Attack of the Clones review, in a segment called “the dissolution of tension”, it seems like Mr. Plinkett (Mike Stoklasa) is making an earnest attempt to answer this question.  Of course, it turns out to be a lead-in to the next item on his reasons-why-George-Lucas-is-an-idiot list.  But, let’s consider what he says…

“It’s because any time there’s a scene that could possibly have some tension and excitement in it, it’s dissolved away by its own internal contradictions.”  

Plinkett then offers three examples from Attack of the Clones, to clarify his point;

First, he cites the incredible aerobatics performed by Obi-Wan and Anakin in the speeder chase, at the beginning of the film.  

“The movie creates a dazzling environment of dangerous heights, nauseating speeds, and millions of things you can crash into.  Then, it totally ruins all of this by turning the rules of reality into a cartoony farce.  Thus dissolving all the tension away.”

Next, he points out the improbability of Padme surviving the perils of the droid factory.  

“I can guarantee you that if you threw a real person onto that assembly line, they’d get fucking killed, in, like, two seconds.”  

His third and final example is the low LDQ (laser deadliness quotient) of Jango Fett’s attempt to shoot down Obi-Wan in the rings of Geonosis.  

“Why can’t he hit Obi-Wan’s ship?!  He hits every single molecule around his ship but his ship!  Instantly, all the tension evaporates.”  

Obviously, this reasoning could be applied equally to the Original Trilogy.  One could offer innumerable examples of OT characters doing impossible things, surviving situations where a real person would almost certainly have been killed, and the low LDQ of stormtroopers, TIE fighters, and Star Destroyers…  But, Plinkett goes on…

“So much happens so fast that you can’t even process it with your brain.  You see, you just can’t start throwing tons of things on the screen because you can, and then make it go real fast, and expect your audience to feel tension.  Too much too fast will disconnect the audience from reality, and cancel out the excitement.  Because, they gotta project themselves into the scene.  We all understand the rules of physics in real life, and if you bend it too far, you sever the connection of the audience.”

So, anyone convinced…?

This “dissolution of tension” theory, like nearly everything Plinkett says, is wrong.  I’ll give him an E for effort, but in fact, the lack of tension in the Prequels has nothing to do with any of this stuff that Plinkett’s talking about.  Tension doesn’t come from not-too-much not-too-fast.  And tension doesn’t come from “the rules of reality”.  It doesn’t matter if those rules are bent, or broken.  It doesn’t matter if the characters have uncommon skill, or superpowers.  

Consider Superman.  If you want there to be tension in a Superman story, you’ve got to threaten someone Superman cares about (who he might not be able to save), or pit him against a villain who can match his power (another Kryptonian, Doomsday, etc.), or bring in the Kryptonite.  Because if you don’t do any of those things, the guy is invulnerable.  He can’t be hurt in any way, and he can’t be killed.

It’s true that in order for there to be excitement, there has to be tension.  And in order for there to be tension, the characters have to be vulnerable.  Tension comes from the vulnerability of the characters.  

That’s why, in the Original Trilogy, Luke Skywalker could move stuff with his mind, jump twenty-five feet in the air, deflect blaster bolts with his lightsaber, use the Jedi mind trick, and do a back-flip onto a catwalk that’s above his head, and we could still feel tension: because regardless of his fantastical abilities, he was still vulnerable.  He could still be shot, stabbed, chopped up, blown up, or lose someone he cares about.  The “rules of reality” don’t matter – only the rules of fantasy.  

So, regardless that, in the Prequel Trilogy, Obi-Wan and Anakin can perform impossible acrobatic stunts, they can still be wounded or killed.  Regardless that a dogfight in space may have a low LDQ, Obi-Wan’s ship can still be blown up.  Regardless that Padme has an uncanny knack for dodging stamping machines on the droid factory conveyer belt, she can still be squashed.  The characters are still vulnerable…  

Aren’t they…?

The extreme negative reaction to the Prequels, exemplified by Stoklasa’s reviews, is peculiar to the generation of people who saw the Original Trilogy for the first time as children, and the Prequel Trilogy for the first time as adults.  And it’s not a coincidence.  

First generation Star Wars fans, those who grew up with the Original Trilogy, are true fans.  To be clear, I don’t mean “true fan” in the sense of “one who is steadfast and loyal in appreciation”, but rather in the sense of “one who is authentically fanatical”.  And “fanatical” as in “unreasonably enthusiastic”, with extremely heavy emphasis on “unreasonably”.  

First generation fans have a quasi-religious devotion to the films of the Original Trilogy.  When they heard Ewan McGregor say, “They’re more than just movies to me”, no explanation was required.  The last thing the first gen fans wanted was to grow up to discover that Star Wars movies were, in fact, just movies…

It may seem like what I’m getting at is that Stoklasa, and other first generation fans, were disappointed in the Prequels because their expectations were too high.  Not precisely…

When people see a movie they absolutely love (especially when it’s also incredibly popular), there’s a strange tendency to look for the “magic ingredient” – that one thing that made the film so wonderful.  But, when we completely love a movie, it’s not because one thing worked – it’s because everything worked; the story, the characters, the acting, the direction, the editing, the effects, the music – everything.  

Typically, we don’t either completely love or absolutely hate a given movie (even a Star Wars movie), but rather, we like or dislike by a matter of degrees, for a wide variety of reasons.  If we accept that, it shouldn’t be too difficult to see that first gen fans’ disappointment in the Prequels had more than one cause – it wasn’t one thing.  

It’s been speculated … that fans’ expectations were so impossibly high that nothing could have lived up to them … that adult fans, who saw the Original Trilogy as children, didn’t make allowances for their own changed perceptions, nor take into account the effect of “nostalgia goggles” … that fans didn’t like the downbeat tone of the Prequel Trilogy because it wasn’t fun like the upbeat Original Trilogy … that fans simply weren’t interested in anything new, but rather, they just wanted to relive their childhoods – the way they might through a soft-reboot, like The Force Awakens…

I don’t doubt that all of these were contributing factors, but none of them were the reason for the disappointment.  None of them were even the primary reason…  

The primary reason was something so simple, and so painfully obvious, that, apparently, no one noticed it.  In the nearly two decades since The Phantom Menace, I’ve never seen or heard anyone mention it once…  

The Empire Strikes Back is exciting!  It’s widely considered one of the best Star Wars films, if not the best, ever made.  Imagine watching Empire for the first time … but imagine seeing it only after you’d already watched Return of the Jedi, and The Force Awakens.  That is, imagine beginning the movie already knowing; that all of the main characters were going to survive … that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father, and that Luke would eventually redeem Vader to the light side … that Luke was going to lose a hand, and have it replaced by a robotic one … that Luke was going to be trained by Yoda, that he would not turn to the dark side, and that he would fulfill his promise and return to Dagobah to complete his training…

…that Luke and Leia were (unbeknownst to them) brother and sister, and that this would be revealed to Luke by Obi-Wan, and revealed to Leia by Luke … that Han Solo and Princess Leia were going to fall in love and have kids, and that eventually Han would be killed by his son … that Han was going to be frozen in a block of carbonite, and that he would be rescued by his friends … that Lando Calrissian would help free Han, and then go on to destroy Death Star 2…

If you had watched Empire for the first time, knowing all this stuff, how would the film have played…?  How might it have seemed different…?  

And where exactly would the tension have come from?  

Certainly not from the heroes being put in jeopardy.  

Not from the potential that Luke might fail in his Jedi training.  

Not from Han and Leia’s romance.  

Not from the anticipation of seeing Vader unmasked.  

Not from Luke’s mysterious vision in the cave on Dagobah.  

Not from Yoda’s cryptic statement, “There is another.”

Not from Han being frozen in carbonite, and shipped off to Jabba the Hutt.

Not from Vader cutting Luke’s hand off, and then revealing that he was Luke’s father.

Not from the possible significance or potential consequence of Obi-Wan having lied to Luke, and Yoda having withheld the truth…

And not from the danger that Luke might turn to the dark side and join Darth Vader … or the Emperor.

It seems that if you’d watched the films out of order (Episodes VI and VII before Episode V), there would have been no tension in The Empire Strikes Back.  (No tension = no excitement.)  The whole thing would’ve just fallen completely flat.  The movie would have been … what’s the word…?

Spoiled.

Fortunately, you and I have absolutely no idea what that’s like, because we watched the films in their proper order.  We perceive Empire as we always have – as it truly is – a very exciting film…

Think of the six Episodes that constitute the complete Star Wars saga as analogous to the six reels that constitute the original Star Wars film (each reel being approximately twenty minutes of screen time).  

Hypothetical scenario:  Imagine that as a child, beginning in 1977, you had watched the second half of the original Star Wars film (Reels 4, 5 and 6).  You loved it, became a big fan, and watched that second half over and over until you knew it by heart.  Then, about sixteen years later, now (the Star Wars-nerd version of) an adult, you sat down to watch the first 20 minutes (Reel 1) of that same film for the first time - with the expectation that those 20 minutes were going to be the coolest thing you’d ever seen, blow your mind like nothing had before, and make you feel like a wide-eyed awestruck child again…  

Evidence supports that had you viewed the reels of the original Star Wars thusly, not only would you have been disappointed in Reel 1, but you would have spent many following years bitterly complaining about cutesy droid comedy and slow pacing, and that you would have developed an intensely passionate hatred for Jawas…

…and simple common sense should tell you that you would have found Reel 1 to be lacking in excitement, not because George Lucas royally screwed up the first 20 minutes of the movie, but because you severely underestimated the damaging effect of spoilers … or, had not considered it at all…

In order for excitement to be possible, a sense of immediacy is necessary.  In fact, the very reason that people hate spoilers is because they rob the spoiled film or show of this required sense of immediacy.  In case it’s unclear, immediacy is the feeling that what’s happening in the film you’re watching is happening right now (regardless that the film may take place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away).  It’s the sense that the characters are heading into an unknown future … that anything could happen…

And for those who viewed the Original Trilogy before the Prequel Trilogy, the Prequels had no sense of immediacy … because they’re prequels.  Turns out, they were completely spoiled decades before they were released…  

Spoilers handicap a film, of course.  It’s not the same handicap as predictability – it’s far, far worse.  When a film is predictable, you suspect, you think you probably got it figured out – when a film is spoiled, you just know for a fact.  You know for a fact what will or won’t happen, what can or can’t happen.  (Someone who clearly understands how much more damaging spoilers are than predictability is J.J. Abrams, considering how closely he guarded the “secrets” of the most predictable film ever made.)

The three enormous spoilers we call Episodes IV, V, and VI handicapped every action sequence in the Prequel Trilogy.  For example, when Anakin entered the podrace in Episode I, we knew that, regardless of the outcome, he wasn’t going to crash and die, and that he was going to leave Tatooine and become Obi-Wan’s apprentice … and fight in the Clone Wars, father a couple kids, fall to the dark side, kill Obi-Wan … and turn back to the light side shortly before his death…  So, all the while the podrace was happening on screen, however cool it looked, we were really just waiting…  

When Obi-Wan dueled Darth Maul, we knew he was going to win (or, at least, survive).  

When bounty hunters attempted to assassinate Padme, we knew they were going to fail.  

When Jango Fett chased Obi-Wan through the rings of Geonosis, we knew Obi-Wan was going to be fine.  

When Palpatine tried to lure Anakin to the dark side, we knew Anakin was going to succumb…  

These sequences were not undramatic and unexciting because they were poorly executed by George Lucas, it’s because it was impossible for them to be dramatic and exciting.  They needed a sense of immediacy that they did not, and could not, have.  We needed to believe in the vulnerability of the characters … but, because we knew exactly where the story was going, and where all the characters had to end up, they all may as well have been Superman … with no one to match their power, no Kryptonite, and no threat whose outcome wasn’t already determined…

It would be very easy to underestimate the extent to which spoilers influenced our perception of the Prequels, but it’s also virtually impossible to overestimate.  Because it wasn’t just as simple as knowing the outcome of action sequences.  The spoiler effect had a multitude of negative consequences, which resulted in a number of major criticisms…

The podrace in Episode I wasn’t just unexciting, it was also, in a way, irrelevant.  That is, in the audience’s present tense of the storytelling, this kid, Anakin, was already dead.  And so was every other character in the film.  This made it rather difficult to invest emotionally in their struggles … which led inevitably to the related criticism that George Lucas failed to create characters the audience cared about, regardless of the fact that everything necessary to make the characters sympathetic is present (i.e. the characters are; 1. good, kind people  2. courageous  3. good at what they do  4. in jeopardy  5. suffering undeserved misfortune, etc.).  

In order to have an emotional connection to the characters, the audience needs to hope and fear for them.  But, you can’t hope that Anakin will be trained as a Jedi, when from your perspective, he already has been …You can’t fear that Obi-Wan will be killed by Darth Maul, when you know for a fact that he won’t be … You can’t hope that Anakin and Padme will give in to their feelings of love for each other, when it’s inevitable … You can’t fear that Padme will be killed, when she can’t be, because she hasn’t yet given birth to Luke and Leia … You can’t hope that Anakin will resist the temptation of the dark side, when his destiny has already been written … You can’t fear that Palpatine will succeed in his evil plan to destroy the Jedi…

Further, our understanding of the need for the events of the story to play out in such a way that the Prequel Trilogy would leave off, narratively, more or less where the Original Trilogy begins made characters, their relationships, choices and actions seem mechanistic, or “forced”.  This compounded the problem of the characters seeming unsympathetic, and vice versa.

One way that we might have briefly felt an emotional connection to the characters would have been a vicarious experience of joy at the resolution to the conflict – you know, the happy ending.  But, there we ran into that little problem of having known from the beginning how it had to end … and “happy” wasn’t in it.

Even the pleasurable emotion we might have felt at the minor victories throughout the Prequel Trilogy was negated by our ever-present awareness of impending doom…

If you really want to know whether or not Lucas succeeded in creating exciting action sequences and sympathetic characters, you have to ask people who grew up with the films – people who saw the Prequels before they saw the Original Trilogy … if you can find any.  (I’ll come back to this.)  

The last person who could speak with any authority on whether the characters were sympathetic, or the action sequences exciting, would be someone like … well, Mike Stoklasa.

In addition to making the films seem unexciting, and making it difficult to connect emotionally with the characters, the audiences’ foreknowledge made the action of the Prequels play rather like exposition.  Excruciatingly detailed dry exposition … that, in a most protracted manner, was telling us things we already knew … or, didn’t care to know.  

Even the actual exposition in the Prequels was, in essence, telling us things we already knew (insofar as we had foreknowledge of the end it was meant to serve) … leading to the absurdly exaggerated criticism that there was too much “boring political dialogue”.  Audiences are impatient with being told what they already know.  They’re bored by it, and dismissive of its importance (and how it would play to an audience who didn’t already know) … which leads inevitably to the related criticism that the Prequels were “light on plot”, when in fact, relative to the Original Trilogy, the Prequels were plot-heavy…

Sadly, I could go on and on, because fans and critics have for years been grasping for an explanation, floundering in their attempts to explain why the Prequels were not exciting to them, when it seemed like they should have been.  (I know it sounds supercilious – but it just happens to be true.)  That’s exactly how we got Stoklasa’s brilliant “dissolution of tension” theory.

In a nutshell:  When you watched the scene, in Episode II, of Jango Fett trying to shoot down Obi-Wan in the rings of Geonosis, you were acutely aware of two things;  1. Obi-Wan can’t die, and 2. Obi-Wan is already dead.  If you honestly believe that this awareness didn’t profoundly affect how it felt to watch the scene … then, all I can say is…  

Congratulations.  You are invincibly stupid.  And you may as well stop reading now.

You would think that the spoiler effect would have been so obvious that everyone would have had it clearly in mind before seeing The Phantom Menace for the first time, but twelve years after Revenge of the Sith, it seems that critics and fans still don’t understand it: In the first Episode VII review I read, the critic claimed that there was more excitement in The Force Awakens than in the three Prequel films combined.  (No IQ prerequisite to be a film critic.)

The truth is that the Prequels were very exciting films, even if for many it was in a the-tree-that-fell-in-the-woods-did-make-a-sound-you-just-didn’t-hear-it kind of way.  (If you think I’ve over-explained and over-emphasized the point, just imagine that you were going to receive a dollar for every time someone has complained that the Prequels were “boring”...  It would be like winning the lottery, wouldn’t it?)  

This is a major advantage The Force Awakens had over the films of the Prequel Trilogy, the same advantage that The Last Jedi had/has, and the forthcoming Episode IX will have: the sense of immediacy that had been missing from Star Wars for thirty-two years … the sense that the characters are heading into an unknown future … that anything could happen…  This (plus the fact that the Prequels were framed by the perceived greatness of the Original Trilogy, while The Force Awakens was framed by the perceived suckiness of the Prequels) is one reason why the Prequels are hugely underrated, and The Force Awakens was so enormously overrated.

You could argue that we didn’t know everything that was going to happen in the Prequels…  That’s true.  We just knew all the things that it was crucial that we not know.  Even when it came to characters we had never met or even heard of before, it was all too easy to figure out what had to happen…  Be honest: Were you surprised when Qui-Gon Jinn was killed…?

You could argue that it’s possible to do a prequel that is exciting, that does have tension.  And I would absolutely agree with you.  It depends on what’s been spoiled, and what’s at stake.  

Take Rogue One, for example: we knew going in that the attempt to steal the Death Star plans would be successful, but the movie succeeds in creating tension by putting the characters (whose fates were unknown) in jeopardy. 

Just as, in The Clone Wars, the character Ahsoka Tano may be the most compelling, simply because we don’t know what happens to her.

Another successful prequel, so far, is the Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul.  (I know – it’s not Star Wars – but, it’s a really good example.)  What’s at stake in that show is Jimmy McGill’s relationships, to his brother, Chuck, and Kim Wexler – two characters not featured in Breaking Bad.  If Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould tried to create tension, week after week, by threatening Jimmy’s and Mike Ehrmantraut’s lives, the show wouldn’t work…

Of course, although Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are related, they are separate stories (unlike the Original and Prequel Star Wars Trilogies).  And it may turn out that the better, or more recommendable, viewing order for avoiding spoilers will be the order in which the series were produced, rather than the order in which they take place…

So, why was the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy done differently?  Did George Lucas not realize that he couldn’t create tension by putting characters in jeopardy who we knew couldn’t be killed…?  Consider this criticism from Plinkett’s Revenge of the Sith review:

“Lucas prematurely tries to create a thematic bridge between Jedi and Sith, by having a set that looks like the throne room of the Emperor.  In Return of the Jedi, everything built up to that showdown.  There’s a certain tension in the air.  You can’t use that imagery here and now at the beginning!  It makes no sense, and it’s confusing to us.”

It’s as if Stoklasa actually believes that the Episode III set is meant to function as a callback to the Emperor’s throne room in Episode VI, rather than the other way around.  

And then, referring to Anakin decapitating Dooku, Plinkett says:

“So, basically, as far as I’m concerned, at this point, Anakin is Darth Vader.” 

Exactly.  That’s how the callback is supposed to work.  The viewer will be reminded of when Anakin “basically” fell to the dark side in Episode III, and it will greatly accentuate that “certain tension in the air” when Luke is brought before the Emperor in Episode VI.  The parallels will lead the audience to believe that Luke will kill Vader, just as Anakin killed Dooku…  It does make sense, and it’s not at all “confusing to us”.

This is one of the most frustrating things about listening to the Plinkett reviews:  As wholly disingenuous and dishonest as he is, with certain criticisms, I can’t tell whether Stoklasa actually believes what he’s saying, or is just assuming that his audience isn’t intelligent enough to understand it…  And I can’t decide which makes him look more foolish…

Regardless, it’s apparent that Stoklasa suffers from that ridiculously self-centered Star-Wars-is-for-me delusion that plagues first generation Star Wars fans … adults, who became Star Wars fans when they were little kids, claiming that Star Wars isn’t for kids…  And somehow, incredibly, the irony is lost on them.  The utter lack of self-awareness is astounding.  It’s as tragically absurd as people describing the Plinkett reviews as “insightful”.

Something that George Lucas has stated repeatedly, and that has apparently fallen on deaf ears, is that Star Wars is meant to be seen as one film, one story, in six parts…  That is, when Lucas made the Prequels, he had to make a choice between two audiences; the audience comprised of adults who grew up with the Original Trilogy, or the audience comprised of every child, every person, who would ever have the opportunity to watch the Star Wars saga in its proper story order, from the completion of the Prequels until the end of time.  Obviously, he chose the latter.

Was it the wrong choice?  

Artistically, no.  

But, I honestly don’t think Lucas anticipated that the audience comprised of (ahem) mature adults would be so thoughtless that they wouldn’t understand what he was doing, so infantile that they couldn’t accept it, and such shamelessly hateful pricks that they would spend so many following years publicly trashing him for it.

And this is the source of Prequel hate – the simple truth that first generation fans didn’t understand, don’t believe, and still can’t accept:

Star Wars is not for you.  

Continued in Part 2...