#this was meant to be a plotless one shot but i never found the time to write it so have the bullet point version instead

[sxvxrxssnape]

severus' sixty-first birthday

- minerva sends severus a birthday card every year and though she doesn't sign it or return address it, he knows they're from her. they worked together for years, he recognizes her handwriting

- he's not entirely sure how she found his address but maybe owls are just that good at tracking people. still, she never asks to see him or mentions how the rest of the wizarding world has long thought he's dead

- at this point, he opens his kitchen window in the morning and watches the sun peaking over the horizon as it starts to rise, sipping on his coffee, as he waits for the letter to arrive

- he'll read through it, smiling softly (though he wonders about the part where she mentions a gift on the way. shes never sent anything more than a card) before tucking the card away with all the others. he'll get dressed then and then walk into town. it's a quiet place where he's chosen to live and he's made friendly with a number of people and sometimes he misses the vibrancy of the wizarding world and the comaderie of being a hogwarts professor but that atmosphere had long fizzled out and going back would never truly mean going back. he's moved on and he's fine with that

- he prefers early morning to get the shopping done. it's less crowded and the world feels untouched, pure and magical, at this hour. he'll stop at the local bakery, buy himself a pastry and another cup of coffee, savoring sweet almond and blueberry, before continuing to the grocery store and picking up the few things he needs for tonight's dinner

- its his 61st birthday today and though he doesn't want to make a big deal out of his birthday, he's learned that it's okay to celebrate your own existence and indulge in the things that make him happy

- as it stands, a well made shepherds pie with good bread and red wine would make him very happy today

- his grocery tote is charmed to keep cool and feather light, so after gathering what he needs he'll head to the bookshop. this is one of his favorite activities and absolutely not reserved for his birthday. his favorite bookshop is old and quaint, hosting strange books with mysterious origins. a lot of the locals think its all false but severus has a trained eye and can recognize magical tombs when he sees them. the first time he came, he cleared out any that could be considered dangerous to muggles. now he likes to browse through the remains and pick up a new read or two; they're not all magical but they are all interesting. the shopkeeper is a very old woman who looks very out of place in this millennium, but he supposes he does too some days

- she wishes him a happy birthday, eyeing his black coat with a certain kind of scrutiny he's gotten used to from her. he was never able to give up his long coats and now he wears them unbuttoned over black turtlenecks. it makes him look less imposing, he supposes, although enough people have asked what he teaches that it sets him on edge

- he doesn't remember when she learned his birthday, but he pays it no mind. a few of the people he's come across here have learned his birthday by now. its the reason he'll get a free scoop of ice cream on his way home. she always looks at him like he's familiar but just can't place how, and part of him worries she's going barmy and starting to forget he's been coming here for years

- as he's paying for the two new books he's found, she says something that feels like its meant to be a warning but feels more like a threat: the aurors are in town today

- "pardon?" he asks, but she just smiles sweetly and waves him off like nothing was amiss, as if his blood hadn't just turned to ice beneath his skin

- he leaves the shop numbly, thinking it over. she couldnt have meant anything serious by it, although now he's kicking himself for not realizing she was a witch (or perhaps a squib?) he kept up with the wizarding world fairly regularly when he'd first disappeared. he knew potter had cleared his name posthumously and that he was hailed a hero, so whatever the reason for the aurors being in town, it has nothing to do with him. he decides to carry on as normal; too many years have passed for him to be known by this new generation of aurors.

- he does get his free ice cream, a scoop of vanilla caramel with a drizzle of chocolate, and he's sitting in a wrought iron chair outside the shop, under a carefully cast warming charm to keep him comfortable in the january air but with a cooling charm cast over his frozen treat, when he sees them

- there's two of them, fairly young and most likely born during the second war. they're dressed in the muggle version of their uniform he's come to recognize and watches them from his peripheral as they head down the street and wonders what they could be in town for

- he doesn't notice the third, older auror watching him with widening eyes, no longer paranoid enough to check who's standing behind him, as he swirls his spoon through the remnants of melted ice cream and gets lost in his thoughts

- he heads home after that, lights a fire, and makes a tomato and cheese sandwich for lunch. he catches up on a few episodes of his current favorite show (a historical drama this time) and enjoys his quiet afternoon

- when its time to start on dinner, he'll put something on the record player (he's got a soft spot for the record player alright, he's aware of what spotify is, he just enjoys the nostalgia of vinyl), and get to work. he's got a glass of wine and he's singing along to pearl jam as he cuts carrots and potatoes

- he grows wild thyme and rosemary in the front yard, right next to the white chrysanthemums, so he puts his spoon down and goes to fetch some

- he doesn't expect to find potter standing just outside the gate with a pink bakery box in his hands looking simultaneously like a deer in the headlights and like he's just seen a ghost. which he supposes he has

- he ignores him in favor of picking the herbs. once he's done, he glances once in the direction of harry potter before returning inside. he leaves the door open and waits. it isn't until the herbs are washed and finely chopped, being stirred into the stew, that potter finally enters the kitchen. he holds the box tightly and blurts out "i thought you were dead"

- "evidently not." severus responds, spooning the mix into a baking dish and begins to top it with the mashed potatoes. "how did you find me?"

- he mutters some nonsense of working a case involving a local store selling magical wares to muggles (and severus frowns at this information, worried it might be imelda) and seeing him outside the ice cream shop. getting his address wasn't that hard and the cake he brought was simply a social nicety

- perhaps he hasn't been a professor for years now but he can still smell bullshit so he raises an eyebrow at the answer he's gotten. potter has grown in the years since he's seen him, no longer a strong-willed seventeen year old but now a tired looking auror of forty who's still just as bad at lying as he ever was. he thinks how he was around his age when they last spoke and that fact feels a little dizzying

- "you dont seem that surprised." severus muses, putting the pie in the oven and bringing down another glass. he has a feeling potter will be staying and the idea is already giving him headache. he thinks back to minervas letter and wonders if this is what she meant. perhaps its time to finally write back, he thinks, as he pours them each some wine; they have a lot to talk about it seems

[dxmichelle]

Writing Tag Game

I was tagged by my dear lovely @kaibacorpintern!

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 16!

2. What’s your total AO3 word count? 741,948! The majority of that is from Of Lost Swords and Shadow Magic.

3. What are your top 5 fics by kudos? Of Lost Swords and Shadow Magic: the ygo/hp crossover origin fic for my Wayward Wizardry series.

Murder Most Foul: the ygo murder mystery game fic. The silliest bit of writing I've probably ever done, spawned by late night joke sessions with @kaibacorpintern.

The Hogwarts Slice of Life: little random one-shots that fit in OLSSM's universe.

Nerdshipping Shenanigans: little random one-shots/mini-ficlets that fit in OLSSM's universe, but are all Seto/Hermione, my otp. ❤️

Lost and Found: my abandoned Person of Interest fic.

Bonus #6: Maiden with Eyes of Blue: a Seto Kaiba birthday fic that explores the tense relationship between himself and Pegasus.

4. Do you respond to comments, why or why not? I've since fallen off replying to comments, which is sad because I was fairly decent at it. I still do occasionally and I'm sure I will pick it up again someday.

In the meantime, whether I respond to them or not, know that I read and cherish every one of them.

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending? Oh...probably Guilt. It takes place right after Atem leaves and Yugi has many feelings.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending? Probably Let it Snow, the ultra-sugary Christmas Fic I wrote on a whim during an OLSSM hiatus.

7. Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written? I live in the ygo/hp crossover corner of the fandoms. But the craziest one I've ever written has to be Sapphire Road, because it's not only ygo/hp, but a Wizard of Oz/Return to Oz fusion. And it's Nerdship.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic? Not necessarily hate but I have gotten some rather...interesting comments over on FF.net. There's one guest user that keeps trying to predict when I'm going to kill off Seto, and another that kept wanting me to write nonsensical ships into OLSSM.

9. Do you write smut? If so what kind? Hard no.

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Not that I know of. Hopefully not!

11. Have you ever had a fic translated? Nope!

12. Have you ever co-written a fic before? I've co-authored jokes for a fic! Does that count?

13. What’s your all-time favorite ship? My Nerdship babies!! Seto and Hermione take up a nice roomy residence in my brain 24/7, and since I've essentially created said ship, it's a lot of fun to explore how it comes together and what the future for them would look like beyond each of their canon series.

Otherwise, I am more of a platonic shipper vs romantic in the yugioh fandom, and I have soft spots for both pride, rival, trust and peach ship!

14. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will? I really don't want to have any unfinished fic, but i know in my heart that my Person of Interest fic will never be finished.

I've also been out of sorts with Ghost in the Machine as of late, and while it's on a temporary hiatus right now so I can work on OLSSM and Murder Most Foul, I'm sure I will return to it sooner rather than later.

15. What are your writing strengths? Plotting and characterization. While I am not-so-good at sticking to my outlines, most of my fics are elaborately plot-heavy, and it is very important to me that the characters sound and act as you would normally expect them to.

Another strength is just...going. If I'm sitting down to write and the words are flowing, I can get a ton down on the page in one sitting, and it's helped break me out of funks before.

16. What are your writing weaknesses? Sticking to outlines, haha! But mostly being more of a descriptive writer. Sometimes I can tend to be very dialogue heavy, and while that's not terribly a bad thing, being more prose-y is something I am trying to work on.

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic? I've never done it myself, but wouldn't be against it.

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for? ygo/hp. Surprise, surprise. Back in 2005! It was the junky, plotless version of OLSSM, and the true, original Nerdship story. It's still online in the depths of FF.net if you choose to seek out terrible writing, and follows almost every rule in the "you know you were on FF.net in 2009 if you did this..." post.

19. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written? How dare you make me play favorites among my children! Probably OLSSM only because it's such a journey for me to take something that was absolutely terrible and completely redo it! It was my first child returning to the YGO fandom after years apart and has been such a labor of love to develop. And it's the longest story I've ever tackled, and my first real attempt at ship writing. :D

And cuz I love me my crossover fics.

But Murder Most Foul is a close runner up only because unlike everything else I've written, it is not a serious fic. It's meant to be silly, and that in itself creates a new challenge to keep it lighthearted, but keep the characters intact.

Tagging @bellamy-taft, @darksidechick823, and @lafeae!

[pandoraimperatrix]

randumbteahouse replied to your post “I’m in a bad mood and I want to write fluff people Please send me...”

BatCat babysitting little Mar'i and/or Jake Grayson?

 BatCat | DickKory | Plotless unashamed fluff | 1,8k | Read on AO3

“Hi, B!” Greeted Dick opening the door of his condo.

Bruce gave him his small barely there smile in answer to Dick’s huge all white teeth one.

“Hello, chum.”

Dick then turned to Bruce’s companion.

“And how are you, beautiful?”

Selina raised her gloved hands to Dick’s face, pulling him for a loud kiss full on the lips, to which he made crunched his entire face blushing horrendously to her delight.

“I’m wonderful, darling. So glad to see you. He’s so handsome, Bruce, look at him.”

“I’m looking.” Agreed Bruce with a glint of amusement in his eyes.

“Where’s the little kitten? And that gorgeous wife of yours?”

“They are in the nursery” Selina took her woollen coat off and handed wordlessly to Bruce, walking across Dick following his instruction, Bruce moved inside too, starting to undress from his heavy overcoat as well, but was interrupted, buy Dick’s arms hugging from the middle, he patted the younger man awkwardly on the head. “Thank you for coming.”

Bruce just grunted. Dick, freed his emotionally stunted dad and closed the door.

“Where…?” Asked Bruce holding the clothing.

“Oh, the coat hanger fell under the weight of Kory’s collection of handbags and I haven’t put the new on the wall, just throw your coats… Anywhere.”

Bruce raised an eyebrow to that noticing the apartment around him. Dick had never been an organized child, he had impeccable work ethics but his living grounds had always being a reason for arguments when he was growing up, and adding a baby in it… Well, he knew now why Dick invite Alfred to babysit yet. It was not a complete chaos, but it was far from acceptable by the butler’s standards.

“Come! We wanted you guys to see her while she was awake, but she woke up this morning super early for no reason, she was so full of energy, flying everywhere I think she crashed now.” He laughed.

“Flying?”

“Oh! I didn’t tell you?”

But they had reached the nursery door.

Kory was sitting on a very comfortable velvet chair, Alfred’s present. The baby on her arms had a darker shade of golden skin than her mother’s, and her long black eyelashes making shadows under her closed eyes and she suckled on her mother’s breast. Her little plump hand was holding firmly to Selina’s finger.

“Bruce, look how big she is…” Said Selina whispering.

“Greetings.” Koriand’r smiled to Bruce.

He nodded his head to her, approaching the women.

Bruce leaned in and with the back of two fingers, brushed softly the dark locks of the baby’s hair.

Selina turned her gaze from the baby to her husband, to others maybe he looked stoic as always, but by the way his Adam’s apple bobbed she could see the huge emotional response. She rubbed his bicep with her free hand.

“Isn’t she gorgeous?”

Bruce cleaned his throat.

“Yes.” He answered, his voice croaky and deeper than the usual.

Selina and Kory exchanged an amused look.

“Do you want to hold her?” Asked Kory.

“Aren’t you feeding her now?”

“Oh no, she is done.” Smiled Kory. “She is already asleep.”

“I don’t want to disturb her.”

“She sleeps heavily. No need to worry.” Kory pulled her nipple from the baby’s mouth and covered herself, floated so she was in level with Bruce, and gently put the baby in his arms. Her daughter looking so little next to her massive grandfather.

Mar’i cooed softly getting comfortable but did not wake.

Dick sniffled loudly and the eyes turned to him.

“I’m sorry guys, I just-” he choked; Kory and Selina hugged him by each of his sides. Kory giggled. “Don’t laugh at my expense, Kory, not cool.” She kept giggling but tried to muffle it by kissing his hair. “I still can hear it!”

“I’m going to get ready.” Announced Kory untangling herself from the double hug and turning to her parents-in-law. “Please let yourselves feel at home, and thank you so much for doing this for us.”

“You’re welcome darling.” Said Selina as they watched Kory float out of the room.

“She’s still flying.” Noticed Bruce. When Kory hit the fourth trimester – turns out half-tamaranean pregnancies were a lot longer than human ones – her feet were so swollen that she just flied everywhere. After Dick commented on that Bruce started sending soft tall pillows so, she could put her feet up, compression stockings which somehow were the exactly shade of Kory’s alien skin, and one time Dick arrived home to find a whole spa and masseuse staff that he had not booked.

“Oh, she’s not in pain anymore… She’s just happy. Can’t keep her feet on the ground. My neck is cramping from looking up so much.” But by his thrilled tone he didn’t seen annoyed by his balloon wife at all.

“Where are you taking her, honey?” Asked Selina still hugging Dick and making little circles in his back.

“Nothing very fancy. We mostly just want to have an uninterrupted meal, then walk by Byke Beach a little before coming home to save you guys. And as Kory said, thank you so much, Mar’i a sweet baby and she was all we had to worry about it would be easy peasy, but things pile up and we could use a breather.”

“It’s our pleasure, darling. Bruce and I needed a break too, and you father have missed you so much, you should see him showing the pictures you sent us to everyone, he is so proud.”

“Is that true, B?” Asked Dick beaming.

Bruce cleaned his throat loudly and then looked down to the baby terrified he had disturbed her, but she didn’t even fuss. When he looked up again Selina and Dick were looking at him with glazed eyes.

He cleaned his throat again, this time in a softer tone.

 “I can’t stop looking at her, Bruce, she’s so cute.” Said Selina perched on Mar’i crib. Dick and Kory were gone, and with the baby sleeping, Selina found out that there wasn’t actually a lot to do.

“Let the baby sleep, Selina.” Mumbled Bruce typing something on his phone, he had extracted Selina five times from the nursery in the forty minutes Dick and Kory were gone.

“What are you doing?”

Selina clenched her eyes, Bruce looked away, guilty as hell and pocketed the phone.

“You were working on your phone wasn’t you?”

“No.”

“Oh my god, Bruce!”

“I wasn’t. Look.” He showed her his phone. “Tim sent me a photo of a frog in a skateboard.”

Selina’s face was completely voided of emotion for a fraction of a second before she let out a loud laugh… That was followed by baby cries.

“Shit.”

 The baby was not stopping crying. Bruce thought that she would recognise them from all the facetime calls, he was wrong. Mar’i knew that he and Selina were not her parents, and she was not happy about it.

“Is she is pain? Do you think she is in pain?”

“I don’t think so. Dick said she was in perfect health, but it’s hard to know without proper medical equipment.”

“Try feeding her again.”

Bruce took the warmed milk bottle – noticing the colour was darker than regular human milk supposed to be, it looked like light caramel. He made a mental note to take a sample to look to it in his lad later – and offered to the baby girl, but she slapped the bottle away with a strength no human six months old would have. No adult either. The bottle flew across the room and broke into the drywall.

“I’ll pay for that.”

“How don’t you know how to make a baby stop crying? You are a huge nerd, you know everything! Didn’t you raise like fifty-two kids or something?”

“They were never that young.” And to be fair, when they cried, he mostly handed them to Alfred and later Dick.

“We should call Dick.”

“No.”

“What?”

“We are solving this, Selina.”

“How?!”

Bruce took a deep breath and tried to remember everything he knew about pre-language children. He read some articles to try to communicate with Cassandra years ago, mostly applied to babies and was not useful to him at the time, but maybe it would be useful now. He recalled something about tonic dialogue, that meant the first form of communication was from touch. Basically, holding a baby while having a tense body was not good, because the baby could feel the discomfort and respond to this with distress. So, he tried to relax. Lower his heartrate. Mar’i didn’t stop crying, but her loud screaming and the fussing were gone.

“Good! Good! I don’t know what you did but it’s working.”

“Try to distract her.”

“By doing what?”

“I don’t know Selina, why do I have to know everything?”

“You are the Batman!”

“Not now, I’m not.”

“Ba mum” mumbled Mar’i between cried.

Bruce and Selina exchanged a shocked look.

“Yes, kitten. Granddaddy is Batman.”

“Ba mum!” The baby said angrily, her bluish green eyes flooded with tears.

Selina sent Bruce a terrified look. He just shook his head, also having no idea. Mar’i’s lip trembled and the crying returned with revenge.

“Hold her a little.”

“Me?!”

But before she could protest further, the baby was already in her arms, bright orange, sobbing against her shirt spreading snot and tears everywhere.

Bruce was calling someone.

“But you said you were not calling her parents!”

“I’m not. Alfred, finally, I have a predicament.”

He was silent for a while, his face rumpled in concentration, then he turned off with a “thank you”.

“What did he say?”

“Mar’i has a favourite toy. It’s a handmade Batman doll made by Damian. That’s what she mean by ‘Ba mum’.”

“I want to gush about how cute this whose sentence was but she is pulling my hair pretty hard, and I’m grieving my shirt, this was Prada’s limited edition. Let’s find that doll.”

 Half an hour later and no sign of the doll, Bruce was going mad, Selina’s head was aching, and Mar’i proved that her human-tamaranean hybrid lungs were very efficient. They fell heavily on the living room’s sofa.

“Bruce… What do we do?”

He just gave her a defeated look.

“Ba mum! Ba mum! BA MUM!”

“Oh kitten, I don’t know where your ‘Ba mum’ went.” Said Selina drying the baby’s tears then her head shot up. “I have an idea.”

“I’m willing to try anything.”

“You brought a suit, didn’t you?”

Bruce pretended not to know what she was talking about.

“I’ve brought changes of clothing, yes.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Selina…”

“So what we can’t find her doll? You are the real deal!” She said exasperated.

“That’s not what my suit if for, Selina.”

“I couldn’t care less what your suit is for” she covered the baby’s ears “we had sex plenty of times while you were in that suit don’t pretend you never abused its function before.”

He sighed.

 Two hours after Kory and Dick returned home to find Selina sleeping sitting on the sofa, Bruce in his full Batman gear also sleeping, but lying on his back and using Selina’s lap as a pillow, and Mar’i belly down on her grandfather’s chest, drool all over the bat insignia.

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tonic dialogue is a real thing I learnt on uni. I have no idea what the frog in a skateboard was about, I just like the idea of Bruce’s kids sending him random memes and funny pictures.

[notveryglittery]

mistakes are made

summary: maybe don’t prank your boyfriend’s brother, especially if he already doesn’t really like you. ships: romantic roceit, brotherly anxceit, rivalry (?) prinxiety / words: 1,500 warnings: technically, a character gets shot by what is technically gun, but no one is actually hurt. lemme know if anything needs tagging! notes: wrote this to bribe @sher-soc-the-famder​ into finishing homework >:3 human au, i guess sort of youtuber au, too? it’s kinda plotless, just some good old fashioned fluff!! enjoy!! (i know the tenses are messy lol sorry)

@fandersfic-roceit @fandersfic-anxceit @fandersfic-prinxiety

—   —   —   —   —   —   —   —   —   —   —   —   —   —   —   —   —   —   —

Roman thought he was perfectly charming, thank you very much! Why, it was right there in his last name. Roman Prince. Prince Charming. See! He was an absolute gentleman, if he did say so himself. And, well, if you didn’t believe him, you could always ask his big brother! Patton said it all the time! He said that Roman was kind and chivalrous and passionate. He said that Roman cared about the people he loved! 

If only all older brothers were as sweet as Patton was. 

It hadn’t even been Roman’s idea, first of all! … Mostly. Okay, so it hadn’t been his own original idea but it might have been his idea to give it a try. He’d done plenty of research, though, in making sure that it was safe and that neither of them would get hurt! He was far too attached to Damien to even imagine letting him get injured. It was going to make for a really cool video, okay? Both of their channels had been lacking in content lately, what with being busy with college; this way, they’d each have a video to post! The plan was that they’d be shot from very different point of views with titles that were just enough clickbait without actually being false. 

“my boyfriend shoots my brother” was true, technically, even if it was going to put Roman in Virgil’s bad graces for a little while. It wasn’t like it’d be all that big a difference, to be fair, since Virgil definitely still kinda sorta hated Roman on some level. No amount of insisting from Damien would convince Roman otherwise. Despite the fact that they’d been dating for nearly a year now (with even more time as each other’s closest rivals), Virgil still had yet to warm up to Roman. He wasn’t sure what he’d done to deserve the dagger-filled glares, to be honest, but Roman was nothing if not resilient! 

(And charming, in case you forgot. He’d worm his way into Virgil’s heart eventually!) 

“confetti cannon gone wrong” really didn’t even begin to cover the premise of Roman’s video. Listen, though, you don’t just find a pretty pink confetti cannon slash gun at the thrift store and not buy it. He’d checked online afterwards and found that they ran well over two hundred dollars and this one had only cost him fifty! The best part was that it actually worked. After he and Patton had cleaned up that mess, Roman had video called Damien and… Alright, well, between you and me, this really had all been Roman’s original idea. He wasn’t one to half-ass his vlogs but if asked, surely it had been done before by some other popular Youtuber, and look Virgil, it wasn’t all him, he’d just been inspired!

“What if I shoot Virgil with a confetti cannon? I’ll even get it in purple and black!”

Damien normally had a very good poker face but apparently the idea of messing with his brother had peaked his interest. Roman swooned at the grin that lit up his boyfriend’s face. “That is a terrible idea. Let’s do it and see what happens.” 

Which led them here, cameras hidden in Virgil’s room to capture every glorious second. It’d have to be quick, Damien had said, because Virgil was far too aware of his surroundings for them to successfully sneak around for long. Making the executive decisions to skip classes that day, Damien and Roman cleared enough space in Virgil’s closet for Roman to hide in. It was significantly more difficult to make sure there was enough room for the confetti cannon, but they managed. Somehow. Let’s chalk it up to the fact that they’re both dangerously creative. 

If Virgil was suspicious of Damien being home on a day he’d normally have rehearsal, he didn’t say anything about it. If anything, it was the fact that Damien was filming in the kitchen. Nothing good ever came from Damien’s vlogs. Virgil shuddered just thinking about the sibling tag video they’d done last year. Sure enough, the moment Virgil was kicking his shoes off in the entryway, Damien was sidling up beside him.

“Oh dearest brother, won’t you tell my darlings what antics you’ve been up to lately?” Damien asked, practically simpering. 

Virgil squinted at him before turning the distrustful stare towards the camera. “You know, the usual. Putting the fear of God into freshies, inciting agitation in my professors for being opinionated, hacking Lyft reviews and fixing driver ratings if they got one star just for ‘not smiling enough.’ Nothing new.”

“Truly, a man of the people.” 

Virgil rolled his eyes. 

“And how’s starboy?” 

Damien delighted in the way his brother went red at the simple mention of his crush. 

“I’M GOING TO MY ROOM,” he announced loudly, disappearing from the frame so quickly, he might as well have been a cryptid avoiding being caught on tape. 

Which… isn’t entirely inaccurate. 

“Too easy,” Damien said, laughing under his breath. “Now, darlings, comes the fun part.” 

Now imagine with me, if you will, cutting to Roman’s video. Virgil storming into his room, muttering things like “stupid soft hair” and “eyes like glittering constellations.” Throwing his backpack aside and then throwing himself onto his bed and screaming into a pillow. 

Roman very nearly lost his composure at the sight of normally so stoic, so edgy Virgil having a meltdown over a cute boy. He would cut this while editing, of course, it wasn’t like he needed Virgil to hate him any more, but like hell he didn’t plan on using it as blackmail in the future. 

You might be wondering, “where does the ‘gone wrong’ come in?” 

Well, nowhere in their plans had they anticipated Virgil opening the closet doors himself. Roman shooting his boyfriend’s brother was supposed to be from a distance, maybe with him sitting at his computer, or while lounging in bed. He was not supposed to have shot Virgil directly in the chest while screaming half in terror and half in shock. Virgil was not supposed to stumble backwards, trip over his backpack, and fall onto the pile of blankets and pillows he’d shoved off of his bed and onto the floor this morning. This puts him entirely out of shot, by the way, leaving the viewer wondering whether or not he’s alive.

Roman, still screaming as he scrambled out of the closet and grabbed the camera, running out of the room would not ease any worries the viewers might have. 

Of course, Roman screaming was not part of the plan either, and so Damien had some concerns. “I wonder if my brother has finally murdered my boyfriend,” he would say, perfectly casual despite the sudden racing of his heart. 

“I SHOT HIM,” Roman shouted the moment his eyes landed on Damien. “Oh my GOD, he’s DEAD.” 

Before either could say much else, Virgil came stomping into the living room. “I’m not dead but you’re about to be.” (The threat didn’t carry much weight seeing as he was covered in confetti but we won’t tell him that.) 

“Now, now,” Damien said, stifling his laughter at the fact that Roman was cowering behind him. Oh, his poor sweet brave prince. “Maybe instead, Roman could do something to make it up to you?”

“Babe!” Roman hissed. 

Virgil crossed his arms over his chest. “He could break up with you so I never have to see his stupid face ever again.” 

Damien double checked to make sure his camera was still running. He couldn’t wait to use this to humiliate Virgil in front of Logan. 

“That’s hardly fair,” Damien responded, pouting. “I love him, you know.” 

Roman squeaked. 

“He owes me Chipotle for a month.” 

“Wh-!”

“Two months.” 

“I am a broke college freshman!”  

Virgil’s raised eyebrows and his slow lifting of three fingers shuts Roman up.

“I think that’s acceptable,” Damien concurred solemnly. He looked over his shoulder at Roman. “Is that alright with you, dear?” 

For a moment, silence followed as Virgil and Roman glared at each other. Damien would interrupt with a loud, over exaggerated sigh if he wasn’t getting such a kick out of this. 

“Fine,” Roman said finally, pouting. 

“Fine,” Virgil echoed, smirking. “Still don’t like you, though.” 

“I’m perfectly likable!” Roman cried as Virgil turned and left, brushing the confetti out of his hair. 

“Yes,” Damien hummed, finally turning the camera off. He turned to his boyfriend. “I’m inclined to agree.” Kissing Roman tasted as sweet as it always did, especially when he went and carded his hand through Damien’s hair. However, it could be made better… 

“I meant it, by the way,” Damien murmured, brushing his fingers through the curls at the nape of Roman’s neck. “About loving you.” 

Ah, yes, there it was. Roman blushed, bright and pretty, stammering through at least five responses before he finally gave up and just pulled Damien back in for another kiss. He had no doubt that Roman would have his own poetic declaration figured out eventually, but for now… Well, Damien had nothing to complain about.

[impressivepress]

Landmarks of Early Soviet Cinema

The 1920s was a miraculous golden age for Soviet cinema, both for features and documentary. 

The eight films included in this meticulously curated and handsomely presented collection convey the incredible excitement filmmakers felt at the opportunity to participate in the construction of the world’s first socialist state. Freed from the need to make money that drove the Hollywood industry, they could focus on “educating” the new Soviet population. Even Vladimir Ilych Lenin, the father of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the first leader of the country that would become the U.S.S.R., understood that cinema, an art based on technology and machines, was the most suitable one for a country founded on the transformation of humanity through industry and technology. Cinema was nothing less than “the most important art,” Lenin famously declared. Experimentation was the order of the decade. It was a brief but brilliant interlude, before Joseph Stalin came to power and cast a puritanical and paralyzing pall over all the arts, including cinema, in the early 1930s.

In the thick booklet of detailed critical essays that accompanies the DVDs, curators Maxim Pozdorovkin and Ana Olenina write that their goal is to expand understanding of the early Soviet film industry beyond the relatively well-known work of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. (So highly respected was Eisenstein by the end of the 1920s that he was even invited to Hollywood in 1930 to work at Paramount Studios.) Pozdorovkin and Olenina sought to chronicle the development of Soviet Montage and to showcase “the many ways of approaching that mysterious moment between two shots…. Though the films collected here run the gamut of genres and montage styles, what unites them is a belief in the power of fragmentation, recombination, and juxtaposition. They take an active, transformative approach to the footage and display an acute awareness of the medium’s power over the spectator. They believe in cinema’s ability to transform the spectator.”

Four feature films and four documentaries make up the set. The directors are a who’s who of kino luminaries: Lev Kuleshov (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr.West in the Land of the Bolsheviks and By the Law), Sergei Eisenstein (Old and New), Dziga Vertov (Stride, Soviet), Esfir Shub (The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty), Mikhail Kalatozov (Salt for Svanetia), Viktor Turin (Turksib), and Boris Barnet (The House on Trubnaya). All the films were originally released between 1924 and 1930. Each has a nifty new musical score, using both previously composed and original material. Robert Israel compiled four of them; his score to the early morning Moscow street scenes inThe House on the Trubnaya makes ingenious use of Sergei Prokofiev’s piano cycle, Fugitive Visions, to set the mood.

The films of Eisenstein and Kuleshov are the best-known. In Old and New, completed in 1929 with his trusty codirector Grigori Aleksandrov, Eisenstein (1898-1948) was responding to the Communist Party’s appeal to artists in all media to create work that addressed the transformation of the backward Russian countryside. The film’s production was severely complicated by the frequent changes in official policy on economic development in the agricultural sphere, and Eisenstein had to several times reedit and retitle the film. The dominant theme (as in so many other Soviet films of the late 1920s) is the triumph of the machine over outdated traditional methods. In this case, a cream separator represents the apotheosis of progress and a symbol of the shining future. Eisenstein considered the playful sequence in which the cream separator springs into action, spewing luscious cream, an experiment in “cinematic ecstasy” resembling (in Olenina’s words) “an erotic or religious rapture.” Farmwork never looked so sexy. The failure of the excessively “formalist” Old and New, roundly booed by the party press at its premiere, left Eisenstein traumatized. For nearly ten years afterwards he failed to complete another film, despite numerous false starts both in Hollywood and in Moscow. Only with the simplistically propagandistic Alexander Nevsky would he resurrect his career.

Like Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970) not only made films, but also wrote extensively on film theory. His imaginative parody The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr.West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) upends negative Western preconceptions about Russians and Bolsheviks, even as it consciously imitates the style of the American action films he so admired. With an all-star cast that includes the manic, leering Aleksandra Khokhlova and cameo appearances by two directors (Boris Barnet and Vsevolod Pudovkin), Mr.West reaches its Buster-Keaton-like climax in a memorable chase sequence. “Placing a cowboy in fringed chaps on the snowcovered streets of Moscow and having him lasso an unsuspecting Russian coachman,” writes Olenina, “is a strategy that bespeaks Kuleshov’s pursuit of comic defamiliarization.” By the time he made By the Law two years later, in 1926, Kuleshov’s style had dramatically changed, becoming less artificial and more moody and psychological under the influence of German expressionism. This gloomy story (adapted from a short story by Jack London) of murderous jealousy and passion among three prospectors under extreme pressure in the Klondike packs considerable emotional power, with another hyperkinetic performance from Khokhlova.

Future director Boris Barnet (1902-65) began as a Kuleshov protégé, but they parted ways after Barnet nearly killed himself doing a stunt in the role of the cowboy inMr.West. Soon he had a successful career as a director in his own right. Barnet’s fourth film, The House on Trubnaya (1928), a witty social satire on life under the limited capitalism allowed by the New Economic Policy, made him famous abroad as well. Written by a stellar quintet that included the formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, The House on Trubnaya deals with one of the favorite topics of the era: the Moscow housing shortage. As thousands of peasants flooded into the capital, they resorted to all sorts of ruses to find a place to live, crowding into communal apartments that provided ample material for domestic comedy. Barnet uses an open staircase in an apartment building for lots of up-and-down action. “Chopping wood on the staircase is not allowed!” warns a poster, but some of the brawny barechested residents do so anyhow. Parasha (played with physical gusto by Vera Maretskaya), the country girl who has come to Moscow in search of her uncle, ends up as a domestic servant to a pretentious bourgeois hairdresser. But he gets his comeuppance when she joins the union and asserts her proletarian rights.

Barnet uses lots of entertaining visual tricks and puzzles: stop-frame with reverse motion, reflections in puddles and mirrors, even a car seeming to move in a full circle with small stop-motion jumps. A scene of a workers’ march through the city streets becomes a symphony of flags and flagpoles floating disembodied in the sky. Unlike most Soviet films of the period, The House on Trubnaya illuminates human feelings and foibles within an ideological framework, in a manner reminiscent of Ernst Lubitsch. A highly original and versatile talent, Barnet later made spy films that have been favorably compared to Hitchcock’s.

In Soviet cinema, documentary film occupied a highly privileged position. As Maxim Pozdorovkin writes in his accompanying essay, “Nonfiction film was recognized both as an art form and as source material for the writing of history.” Many Soviet filmmakers blurred the line between feature and documentary; Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October provide only two of the best examples. In his ground-breaking Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov (his real name was the more prosaic David Kaufman) proved that documentary film could be exciting and artistic. In this collection, Vertov is represented by his informational “lecture-film” Stride, Soviet (1926), a plotless and heavily edited assortment of scenes from the daily life and labor of Moscow. Without the aesthetic integrity of Man With a Movie Camera, it requires patience (and probably some political background) from the viewer, but offers in its best moments a dynamic portrait of a “city-in-progress.”

Esfir Shub (1894-1959), one of the few female directors in the early Soviet film industry, had a less “activist” view of documentary than Vertov. Her masterpiece, The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), is a “montage of historical documents” that she found in newsreels, official film records, and home movies of the Tsar’s family. For Shub, montage meant allowing the original footage to speak for itself without excessive formal manipulation. Because the footage she discovered is so emotionally revealing, exposing the amazing indifference of the Russian aristocracy to the squalor that surrounded them during the horrific slaughter of World War I, what emerges is a powerful documentation of “living reality,” as fellow director Vsevolod Pudovkin described it. The pace of the editing is slower, more deliberate, than in most other Soviet documentaries of the period, but the analytical message condemning the evils of the old regime no less incisive.

Vertov and Shub paved the way for the work of two other directors who took documentary in a more artistic, impressionistic, and even ethnographic direction: Viktor Turin and Mikhail Kalatozov. Both explored the remote and exotic territories on the southern fringe of the newly formed U.S.S.R., in documentaries produced outside the mainstream Russian studios. Both also celebrate the progressive mission of the Soviet government in bringing technological improvements to the lives of people whose lives had been virtually untouched by modern civilization. In Turksib (1929), made by Vostok-Kino in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, Turin chronicles the construction of a new railroad linking the textile industry of southern Siberia with the wool and cotton producing regions of Kazakhstan. His treatment of the harsh beauty of the Kazakh steppe is breathtaking, its endless sandy expanses sculpted by the wind into weird abstract patterns. To illustrate the need for a reliable connection between the textile industry and its suppliers, he shows a long caravan of camels overtaken and submerged by a violent sandstorm. Pumping pistons and speeding locomotives provide the solution. Turin uses many of the same techniques (visual metaphors, striking informational graphics, allegorical montage) seen in other Soviet documentaries of the period, but with unusual taste and restraint.

The setting for what may be the most remarkable film in this set, Kalatozov’s Salt for Svanetia (1930), is an isolated village high in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. Made by the Georgian state studio with Kalatozov as cameraman, it bears an introductory quotation from Lenin: “The Soviet Union is a country so big and diverse that every kind of social and economic way of life is to be found within it.” So Kalatozov (who was himself of Georgian origin) spends most of his time showing the bizarre, vivid world of the Svan community, living a highly ritualized and brutal existence to which the cinematography lends a mythological dimension. The village’s problem is that it has no salt with which to support life for both humans and animals. Graphic images of death and suffering abound. Only the arrival of a Bolshevik brigade in the film’s final moments promises relief.

Several decades later, Kalatozov would become world famous for his searing antiwar film, The Cranes Are Flying, and for his sumptuous portrait of the Cuban Revolution,I Am Cuba. Salt for Svanetia prefigures both of them in its unorthodox and arresting visual imagery. Pozdorovkin calls it “the most visually liberated film of the silent Soviet era,” with its preponderance of crazy angled shots and exaggerated naturalism. The evocative new score by Zoran Borisavljevic, which draws on traditional Georgian music, only heightens the emotional impact.

The quality of all the films restored for the Landmarks of Early Soviet Film DVD box set is exemplary. All but two of them (Turksib and The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty) have the original Russian intertitles as well as easily read English subtitles. The critical material in the accompanying booklet gives extensive historical background and information on the films, but there is one odd omission: the running time of each film is nowhere to be found. But anyone interested in Soviet film, or the early history of documentary, will want to own this set.

~

Harlow Robinson 

Matthews Distinguished University Professor of History at Northeastern University

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Copyright © 2012 by Cineaste Magazine

Cineaste, Vol. XXXVII, No. 2