#those two kids did great in that role!! i was impressed

[homoquartz]

i don't really watch doom patrol but i have seen enough clips of the dead boys in it to know i have a favorite line, which is edwin saying "i don't need charles to protect me" and charles saying, casual as anything, "yeah but i do it anyway, don't i?"

[tarjapearce]

Hear me out the book of life x bbg miguel 😍 it could either be like La muerte reader and xibalba Miguel and if that’s to ooc for Miguel then Manolo Miguel and Maria reader🙏 I feel like it’s a little ooc either way but PLSSS😞🙏

🤭 It's fine dear. I think, Miguel would do a great job as El Catrin, I feel his personality is more inclined to go with it, and the reader, well, Xibalba. Mischievous, kinda tricky but still so so loving and a softie for him :')

No proofread, just randomness ahead

"Why would I want to rule the Land of the Forgotten?" Black wings tucked behind your back as you stared at Miguel. Red eyes blinked unamused at you.

"Why can't we share? I could do a pretty good job too."

"Mi cielo, Who would watch over the land? You have the talent for it."

"You're just saying that cause you don't wanna share. The Land of the Forgotten is boring! With capital B! Nothing ever happens. It's so depressing all the time. No colors, nothing!"

"It's your realm. You're there cause you cheated on a wager." His finger flickered your nose.

You groaned in annoyance. Of course you would try and ask but to no avail. His decision absolute.

"Let's make a wager then." Smirking you planted yourself before him, his nose flared softly but waited for you to finish.

"A wager?"

"Yes. A wager . See those two boys there? They're always fighting for that girl's attention. And you and I know that only one of them will come out victorious."

"And?" His eyebrow quirqued.

"If my boy wins, I'll have your land. If the other boy wins?-"

"You'll stop meddling with the affairs of men" He caressed your cheek before disappearing.

"But it's the only fun I have left, my dear! You scared of not winning?" Your fingers walked over his chest and smirked.

-----

The wager was on. He had blessed the boy he rooted for with a pure heart, but you on the other hand had given the little jerk of a kid, an ominously beautiful looking black and green medal. The Eternal Life Medal. Whoever wielded it could be no harmed not killed. Your plan had been on a roll without any signs of stopping. Now everything you had to do was wait.

----

The two boys turned into men, both persuing their passions. Yours turned into a respectable and famous soldier that always ended up living to tell the tale thanks to his magic medal none knew about. And Miguel's boy had grown into a famous bullfighter. Even though both were different the love they had for the girl, now a lovely looking woman, remained the same.

But you had seen the hesitation in Miguel's part of the bet. Despite him being a famous matador, he didn't wish to inflict any more pain in the poor animal. He wanted to sing.

The woman seemed impressed by his act of mercy. You would have to step up in your game if you wanted the Land of The Remembered.

----

A two headed sneak had bitten Miguel's boy, he had gladly took his role among the dead if that meant to rescue his beloved.

A rare sight among the perverse humans. A pure heart. Of course it was cheating, but it'd make you one step closer to be the ruler of such wonderful and colorful land.

---

Your name echoed through your old realm as Miguel roared, full of anger. He had discovered what you had done.

"Repugnante hija de burro leproso! Hiciste trampa. Otra vez!" ( You misbegotten daughter of leprous donkey. You cheated. Again!)

"I did not do such thing!"

His boy was there, facing you, needing answers. And so was Miguel.

---

You had put Jim through his worst fears, a maze that somehow he was able to decipher, and the final test. El Toro. (The Bull)

A manifestation of every single bull slayed by his ancestors.

-

Miguel's boy had won the wager. You were to return to your realm.

"I believe you've won the wager again mi amor. Just like my heart, all over again."

His eyes softened and a bony finger was brought to your chin.

"I'm really sorry my love. Would you ever forgive me?"

"I do"

He pulled you closer to give you a deep kiss as the skies exploded in colors.

-----

(Love this movie btw 🥹❤️)

[rosakuma]

Feelings on FOPANW S1 Finale

Okay so the finale dropped…….that sure was a finale….Alright, let’s discuss this in full detail. Spoilers for Fairly Oddparents A New Wish finale, DO NOT READ BELOW IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN IT OR CAUGHT UP YET!

Okay so this finale is a big mixture for me for a few reasons, to which I’ll explain in detail of listing out the good and bad, before then listing out personal thoughts and what I think they’ll do for S2(if we get one, to which Y’ALL WE GOTTA LOCK IN AND REWATCH THIS SERIES IN NOVEMBER ON NETFLIX OKAY??)

The good~✨:

▪️I absolutely love that they brought back most of the new characters Hazel’s befriend and seen throughout the season come back to help Hazel in taking back fairy world. ▪️ANTI-COSMO AND ANTI-WANDA ARE BACK! It was definitely a short time, but I’m just glad they reappeared and them with Cosmo and Wanda was so funny. I love them exposing their weaknesses like Cosmo being afraid of big words or Wanda not standing seeing someone read a book upside down. ▪️THANK GOD DEV WASN’T TURN EVIL! The boy definitely mess up, but I am happy he listened to Wanda and help out in the end despite the consequences of it. It shows that despite Dev doing all of this to impress his dad, he realizes that his dad not going to change and that he’ll just overlook Dev for other people or things. Plus it nice to see that he didn’t want any the fairies lock up or to blow up, he just wanted to get back at Cosmo, Wanda, and Peri(speaking of him). This definitely marks a great start to his redemption arc that I feel next season will go into more.

▪️You don’t know how much it means to me seeing Peri fricken dying and yet, he’s still worrying about Dev. The fact he still cares about him and just only was strict on the rules because he wanted to do right by Dev..MY HEART AGHHH! THAT’S HIS DAD RIGHT THERE, HIS REAL DAD! I swear they better reunite. Le bad~⚡️:

▪️Dev losing both Peri and his memory of fairies….WHY!? I get punishing him to teach him what he did was wrong, but he recognizes it and also, HE’S NOT GOING TO IF HE DOESN’T REMEMBER WHAT HE DID WRONG! Not to mention that Dev still needs Peri, he still needs a fairygod parent because he’s stuck with a neglectful dad who thinks boots are better than his own kid and doesn’t know how to make friends with him having trust issues! Plus Peri still cares for Dev and I doubt he wanted to give him up! THATS HIS FIRST GODKID, GIVE HIM BACK HIS SON 😭 ▪️The point above gets worse when Hazel could’ve prevented that from happening by including Dev in her wish for her friends to keep their memories of her fairies and magic OR that Dev keeps Peri(which is a two for one sale as he gets both his fairy and memory). I understand Hazel is probably still upset at Dev and does think that he needs to learn a lesson, but she clearly still cares about him. Enough for her to look sad at the end when he gets poofs away and to thank him for doing the right thing. Not to mention now Dev’s growth at the end for realizing he did wrong will disappear and he can’t reflect on himself now to grow from it. ▪️Speaking of memories. So Hazel decided to let Winn, Jasmine, and her brother Anthony keep their memories of all of this. I won’t lie, I am conflicted on this as while I don’t mind too much of Winn and Jasmine to know about her secret as that allows them to join more adventures and develop from there with Hazel now that they know! But…why Anthony? I can understand Hazel wanting to share her cool fairies with him, but girl you got those fairies in the first place BECAUSE he’s away at college. Even if Anthony currently visiting right now and she can have fun with him, he’s still going back to college sweetie. Heck Anthony might not worry too much of needing to visit a lot because now he knows his sister being taken care of by Cosmo and Wanda(which is good thing, but to Hazel, she might be upset to think Anthony will spend less time with her now that she has fairies to fill his role).

Alright, I definitely got that out of my system. Ultimately despite these problems I have with this finale, I still enjoyed it and this season entirely. And I feel like the writers with what they did with Dev wasn’t to be mean spirited of taking away Peri and his memory. I believe they wanted to show Dev starting to reflect on what he has done and grow with realizing his mess up, which is why he even admits that he does deserve this and Hazel agrees. And despite Hazel not including him in the wish or wishing for him to keep Peri, she does still care about him. She’s glad he did the right thing in the end and she does look sad when Dev gets poofed away after being memory wiped. And honestly….this might be good for both of them in terms of being able to rekindle their friendship. Now that Dev won’t remember the the arguments that happen when he had a fairy, it means that his jealousy toward Hazel having Wanda and Cosmo and knowing that Hazel wished to be friends with him(to which he took personally because it seemed like their friendship was based off of just wanting to get something out of him he feels and it’s fake). The only problem is thanks to the memory wipe, we don’t know exactly how much Dev remembers. Does he only remember his fight with Hazel at Founders Day or their fight during his birthday? If the former, then did he forget Hazel being at his birthday? And if not and it’s the latter, then does Dev still remember project H but without the knowledge of Hazel’s fairies? Is he still upset at her for his father paying attention to her? Does he think they’re still friends??? Really the problem is since we’re in the dark of whether we’re getting a season two and we don’t know these details, we’re stuck unsatisfied since there’s clearly more to explore and explain here. But all we can do for now is just wait and watch the show again on Netflix when it drops while spreading word of the series. We can do this and get that season two for everyone! Seriously Netflix you better listen to Peri and greenlit season two.

[absolutebl]

This Week in BL - 2 GREAT Shows but everything else is kinda blah

Organized, in each category, with ones I'm enjoying most at the top. Happy new year, BLabies!

Jan 2024 Wk 1

Ongoing Series - Thai

Last Twilight (Fri YT) ep 9 of 12 - This show is really earning its chops, and these actors are executing beautifully. I think this is a great BL, and it reminds me quite a bit of ATOTS, only the physical comfort between the actors is more genuine and easy to watch. Unfortunately a guitar came out. Nice communication tho.

That was a very lovely romantic sex scene. Very prettily done. Classy boys, very classy.

Gah what a beautiful final scene with Day saying the last thing he wants to see is Mhork. Pure unadulterated romance of the highest order.

The Sign (Sat YT) ep 7 of 12 - If killer, why hot? Poor Tarn compelled to try to rescue everyone else from their fate, because he cannot save himself from his.

Meanwhile Phaya is finally learning that you catch more water snakes with honey lube than vinegar.

Stellar confession from Phaya brutally honest and very fated mates.

And another lovely sex scene, so I guess that was a vision and not a fantasy Tharn had.

Lets be clear those two shows were GREAT everything else this week was kinda blah.  

For Him (Thurs iQIYI) ep 6 of 12 - I find the backstory very odd. Are they twins? What happened to Blue? Am I meant to care? Do I care? 

Twins the series (Fri GaGa) ep 10 of 12 - I mostly just feel sorry for First. He’s so rightfully confused. Zee/Sprite keeps blowing hot and cold because they two different people! The after sex cuddle was cute. 

Pit Babe (Fri iQIYI) ep 8 of 14 - Love getting more JeffAlan. Also I switch favorite character allegiances in the trash watch happening here.

Cooking Crush (Sun YT) ep 6 of 12 - Didn’t air this week and I hardly noticed. 

You and My Stars YT 1 of 2(?) - school kids, love triangle, it’s cute enough.

My Universe (Sun iQIYI) 1626 ep 20 of 24 - Just so boring. 3/10 

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

VIP Only (Taiwan Fri Gaga) ep 8 of 10 - I’m not into the love triangle. Although I kind of like the new suitor, he’s honest and a good communicator. I appreciate these things in a BL boy. But I begin to wonder if triangles should be left for KBL. Also, this should have been an 8 epper, 10 is too long.

Sahara-sensei to Toki-kun (Japan Fri Gaga) ep 5 of 8 - No ep until Jan 12 

I Became the Main Role of a BL (Japan Sun Gaga) ep 1-3 - AKA BL Drama no Shuen ni Narimashita: Crank Up Hen - A rising star is paired with an (older) former child actor (doesn’t think he’s good enough) in a BL series. It’s fun, built on a dynamic of off screen paralleling the on screen, so near constantly meta. All the tropes are there but are as a result of the filming process. The star turns out to be obsessed with the former actor and very dorky about it. In fact, everyone in this show is a little gremlin weirdo (affectionate). There’s tons of scenery chewing miscommunication drama, slapstick, voice over head hopping, and eccentric sides characters. “And he comes with feathers” applies to a number of my friends. You know I don’t like stories around fan obsession, but otherwise this was enjoyable. 8/10

A nice start to the JBL year. Keep em coming, Japan.  

It's done I Need to Catch up

What Did You Eat Yesterday Season 2 AKA Kinou Nani Tabeta? Season 2 (Japan Gaga) 10 eps - will binge when I have a spare day.

It's Airing But...

[INTERNATIONAL] Cherry Magic (Sat YouTube) ep 3 of 12 - yeah Japan put the smack down on our boys. Sadness. You can use a VPN if you like. Read all about it here.

Playboyy (Thurs Gaga) 14 eps - Dear Playboyy, it's not you, it’s me… I hate you. You’re about as deep (and as palatable) as a shot glass of cum. While I'm sure you’re someone’s kink, you're my weakest link. Goodbye. I DNFed this at ep 5. Frankly I'm impressed with myself for getting that far.

Night Dream (Sat YT) 6 eps - It’s a pain to track down and I really didn’t like the first episode so… DNF  

The Whisperer (Sun ????) 10 eps - Thai horror BL that ALSO involves cheating (what joy is mine). I don't think even the perfect single dimple can motivate me to watch. Word is... it's terrible.

7 Days Before Valentine (Weds WeTV) 10 eps - Giving me Luminous Solution vibes. I'm waiting to binge if safe.

Dead Friend Forever (Thai Sat iQIYI) - horror, meh, tell me if it's worth my time?

In Case You Missed it

All my year end round ups (so far) are as follows:

TOP 10 BL Trends of 2023

Top 10 BL Secondary Pairs of 2023

2023 BLs Best Trope Execution Awards! TOP 10

Best Back Hugs Thailand & Elsewhere

BL 2023 - Cute Bits of Domesticity

BL 2023 - Boys Feeding Boys

BL 2023 - BOOP!

All the BLs Announced for 2023 that didn't happen

Next Week Looks Like This

Starting This Week:

1/9 Time the series (Thai Gaga, WeTV, Channel 3) 10 eps - MFlow Entertainment brings us yet another "fix the past" narrative. After witnessing the gunning down of his beloved, a heartbroken actor uses a magic pocket watch to go back in time and discover the truth and maybe fix it.

1/11 Although I Love You and You AKA Sukiyanen Kedo Do Yaro ka (Japan Gaga) - Soga, who, after a divorce and relocation to Osaka, seeks solace in dining at 26-year-old Sakae's restaurant. Unbeknownst to Soga, Sakae sees him as more than just a regular customer.

More Coming Jan 2024

Beside You (Thai YouTube)

Love For Love's Sake (Korea ????)- based on the Manhwa ‘Love Supremacy Zone’ by Hwacha. A young man is dropped into a game based off a novel he loves. His mission is to make another player, YeoWoon happy. But then the game starts unfolding completely different from the novel.

Ossans Love Season 2 (Japan ????) - five years later, will anything have changed? This is Japan so... probubly not. I won't be watching this.

Upcoming BLs for 2024 are listed here. This list is not kept updated, so please leave a comment if you know something new or RP with additions.

THIS WEEK’S BEST MOMENTS

Yes, you SHOULD apologize!

This was a FANTASTIC moment! Last Twilight

Night Dream referencing the Shrimp Trope.

Some didn't like this bit BUT I love a claiming moment, even in a briefing room... especially there.

I ALSO love a good Grandma Moment in a BL.

Such a good sex scene. The Sign

(Last week)

[mswyrr]

Donald Sutherland wasn't offered the part of President Snow, he read the script and was so impressed by the story that he read the books and then campaigned for the role. This included a personal letter to the director. Full letter below. What a thoughtful and humane artist. Rest in peace.

Dear Gary Ross:  Power. That's what this is about? Yes? Power and the forces that are manipulated by the powerful men and bureaucracies trying to maintain control and possession of that power?  Power perpetrates war and oppression to maintain itself until it finally topples over with the bureaucratic weight of itself and sinks into the pages of history (except in Texas), leaving lessons that need to be learned unlearned.   Power corrupts, and, in many cases, absolute power makes you really horny. Clinton, Chirac, Mao, Mitterrand.  Not so, I think, with Coriolanus Snow. His obsession, his passion, is his rose garden. There's a rose named Sterling Silver that's lilac in colour with the most extraordinarily powerful fragrance – incredibly beautiful – I loved it in the seventies when it first appeared. They've made a lot of off shoots of it since then.   I didn't want to write to you until I'd read the trilogy and now I have so: roses are of great importance. And Coriolanus's eyes. And his smile. Those three elements are vibrant and vital in Snow. Everything else is, by and large, perfectly still and ruthlessly contained. What delight she [Katniss] gives him. He knows her so perfectly. Nothing, absolutely nothing, surprises him. He sees and understands everything. he was, quite probably, a brilliant man who's succumbed to the siren song of power.  How will you dramatize the interior narrative running in Katniss's head that describes and consistently updates her relationship with the President who is ubiquitous in her mind? With omniscient calm he knows her perfectly. She knows he does and she knows that he will go to any necessary end to maintain his power because she knows that he believes that she's a real threat to his fragile hold on his control of that power. She's more dangerous than Joan of Arc. 

Her interior dialogue/monologue defines Snow. It's that old theatrical turnip: you can't 'play' a king, you need everybody else on stage saying to each other, and therefore to the audience, stuff like "There goes the King, isn't he a piece of work, how evil, how lovely, how benevolent, how cruel, how brilliant he is!" The idea of him, the definition of him, the audience's perception of him, is primarily instilled by the observations of others and once that idea is set, the audience's view of the character is pretty much unyielding. And in Snow's case, that definition, of course, comes from Katniss.  Evil looks like our understanding of the history of the men we're looking at. It's not what we see: it's what we've been led to believe. Simple as that. Look at the face of Ted Bundy before you knew what he did and after you knew.   Snow doesn't look evil to the people in Panem's Capitol. Bundy didn't look evil to those girls. My wife and I were driving through Colorado when he escaped from jail there. The car radio's warning was constant. 'Don't pick up any young men. The escapee looks like the nicest young man imaginable'. Snow's evil shows up in the form of the complacently confident threat that's ever present in his eyes. His resolute stillness. Have you seen a film I did years ago? 'The Eye of the Needle'. That fellow had some of what I'm looking for. The woman who lived up the street from us in Brentwood came over to ask my wife a question when my wife was dropping the kids off at school. This woman and her husband had seen that movie the night before and what she wanted to know was how my wife could live with anyone who could play such an evil man. It made for an amusing dinner or two but part of my wife's still wondering. I'd love to speak with you whenever you have a chance so I can be on the same page with you. They all end up the same way. Welcome to Florida, have a nice day!

[archiveofkloss]

In conversation with fellow top model Christy Turlington, Karlie Kloss opens up on how being a muse and a mother unlocked the next great chapters of her life

Those in the world of fashion can recall the moment Karlie Kloss appeared on the scene at fifteen with feline, emerald eyes, and a smize that has made her a muse to many. 

A walking phenom since her early days of dominating catwalks, campaigns, and covers, the industry has been trying to keep up with Kloss as she makes leggy strides toward her next goals with intent, grace, and the guidance of her fellow supers in the business. For Kloss, that mentor position was filled by none other than Christy Turlington. “She is such a North star for me,” Kloss explains. “For what it could mean to be a model and also use your platform [to promote] things that make a real impact in the world.”

With Kloss now in her early thirties, her activism work and outspokenness echo that of Turlington. The two have walked uncannily parallel paths: both were discovered in their early teens, made the decision to step away from the modeling world to attend college in their early twenties, and now have two kids. Additionally, both have dedicated much of their efforts to their community-driven organizations like Kloss’ Gateway Coalition, focused on reproductive care, and tech education initiatives, Kode with Klossy, and Turlington’s Every Mother Counts. Most recently, Kloss has ventured into new territory, adding another title to her impressive resume by taking on the role of CEO of Bedford Media, overseeing the soon-to-be-revived publications, i-D and LIFE magazine. It seems nothing can stop the force of nature that is Karlie Kloss.

V MAGAZINE: How did you meet? Do you remember that first interaction?

CHRISTY TURLINGTON: You want to tell it, Karlie?

KARLIE KLOSS: The first time I met Christy Turlington, it was almost like a scene out of a movie because I’ve idolized Christy long before ever meeting her, and all that she stood for in the world and the industry. I remember many years of being on shoots and feeling like I got to know you by the stories other makeup artists or hair stylists [would tell me] about the legend of Christy. No Woman, No Cry[Turlington’s 2010 documentary] came out at that time, and you were running marathons…I was always a super fan. She was shooting in the Donna Karan studio over in the West Village. Donna invited me because she knew how much I admired Christy, and I remember walking into Urban Zen where the shoot was happening. I was standing face-to-face with Christy, and I just started crying. I’ve never had that reaction ever again with anyone in the world, but I was so moved and humbled to meet her, and so I just was bawling.

V: Oh, my God! What was your reaction, Christy?

CT: No, it was so sweet! We’ve talked about it a lot since. I feel like you were 15 or 16, you were at the beginning of your career, and you sort of started at the top, so you were very much everywhere. What I remember very specifically about you and Donna’s interaction is that you reminded me of some of my peers when I was around your age, where we would be so invested in the designers and the people we worked with, that every day after the show, we’d pick up WWD. You talked to Donna in a very sophisticated way, giving her commentary on the collection that you had just worn, which was very sweet. I was touched. Donna, I’ve known since the beginning of her career, she’s also such an incredible woman and leader. And I felt in the middle of these two worlds. It was kind of like the confluence of past, present, and future.

V: Do you remember what year that was?

KK: I think that might be in 2008 or 2009. 

CT: Yeah, I think it was before I was in school. I was at Columbia, working on my public health degree, and I feel like it was before Every Mother Counts, which was the beginning of my advocacy. But I had small kids, and [embarking] on a direction of where that step was taking me, so I was in a really important transition time, I would say.

V: I’ve seen many moments where you two were together—at events, in campaigns, and on covers—and I read in the New York Times that Christy actually wrote Karlie’s recommendation letter for college.

KK: Yes, for NYU!

V: How did that even happen?

KK: This was before ChatGPT, so she really had to write it! It was so generous of Christy to do that. Even knowing that Christy Turlington— who continues, over many decades, to have an extraordinary fashion career as an iconic supermodel—also cares about her education was so important for me. When I was in my early twenties, I was really nervous about the decision, because I thought, “If I take any amount of time away from my fashion career, will it all disappear?” and Christy was such an important sounding board to prove that [I should] invest in my own education. I couldn’t have done it—and wouldn’t have done it—without Christy’s example and encouragement.

CT: After we met, within a couple of years we started to get together and meet for lunch, and just talk about things. So, when Karlie mentioned that she was interested in going back to school, of course, I was ecstatic for her. When I decided [to get my degree], I was already making a conscious choice of stepping away and slowing down the career at like 10 years in. Karlie was still very much at the height. I think you were already recognizing that you were not as excited about all the things you’d already experienced. So I was really in support of this choice and also tried to give as much of a reality check of what it would feel like, and try to reassure her that the more that she did work on herself, the more in-demand she would be. The more you continue to evolve and invest in yourself, the more people want to be a part of that and want to get closer to you to learn all the different things that you’re now interested in. I think your curiosity, your earnestness, and your seriousness have always been, I think, what stood out to me. I’ve seen it in every phase since we first met. You just continue to evolve in the most natural, thoughtful, and purposeful way.

KK: Wow! This is like a dream. I’m glad this is being recorded. I think on days when I’m having a bad day, I need to look back at this.

KP: So with the both of you going back to school at the heights of your career, Karlie, did you happen to get any pushback at all from people advising the opposite?

KK: I think we all have that little voice in our head that is our own worst enemy, and as a young woman, I doubted myself in all sorts of ways. I was worried that if I made the choice to go back to school, this fairy tale of a fashion career that had happened quite quickly [would disappear]. I just had to trust my gut and kind of ignore what anyone else says. In modeling and fashion, everything changes from one day to the next, and nothing is promised. I had to take that leap of faith and believe that even if this all went away, I had a great time. I met a lot of great people, including my icon, Christy Turlington. Continuing the relationship we have with ourselves and being confident in knowing our power, our worth, and our potential—you can’t go wrong when you lean into who you are and invest in that. At that moment, that was the right thing for me to do.

V: Now at 31, having all that modeling experience and taking those investments in your education, you’ve gone on to start all these organizations. The same goes for Christy with Every Mother Counts, which Karlie has been involved in quite a bit. You went on a trip to Haiti a few years ago. I’d love to know at what point you had the ideas for those organizations.

KK: It’s so funny, I actually had a YouTube channel at the time [where I recorded the trip], I’m going to go back after this and rewatch those videos.

CT: Yes, I forgot about that!

KK: Remember that? Oh, it’s probably so cringe, but I was such a nerd. I was so passionate and excited about being on this trip [to Haiti], it really was a turning point for me in a lot of ways. Christy was so kind to invite me on this trip with some other extraordinary women who have continued to stay in my life, including Sara Blakely, who is one of the most extraordinary, successful female entrepreneurs in this country, and has built a company that has done so much good in so many ways. I think it was such an important trip for me to physically see the work. [Because] we live in New York, it’s easy to kind of feel disconnected from these topics—you go to a charity event and you write a check. But actually going on this trip and seeing where Every Mother Counts was really changing the lives of women in Haiti in the most profound and important of ways, [especially] in that moment of when you’re most vulnerable: bringing your child into the world. I founded Kode with Klossy a year or two later. [That trip] set me on this path and helped show me what could be possible through my own natural curiosity. So after that trip, I went back to NYU and I started taking coding classes, which made me realize there are so many opportunities in the changing world that we live in, and for young women in particular— imagine the problems they could solve with this ability. It started simply like that with 21 scholarships, and next year is our 10th year.

CT: That’s big, that’s huge!

KK: It’s huge! We’ve had more than 10,000 young women and gender expansive teens in our programs over the past years. We’re going to probably have close to 4,000 scholars in our programs this summer alone. You never know the way that you can impact somebody else’s life. I don’t think Christy even probably knew inviting me on that trip would set me on my own journey in such a profound way, and I hope that our Kode with Klossy scholars have a similar experience of wanting to continue to light that spark for others.

CT: I’m a big fan of Bryan Stevenson [social justice activist], and I love the way he speaks about proximity. For me that’s really the truth. I would say through Kode with Klossy, similarly, you want to be with those kids. You want to be in the room where the lights turn on and everyone has that feeling of connectivity and you’re a part of a community. We’ve crossed paths once again in our parallel pathing and that’s through what Karlie is doing now with Gateway Coalition. I think to have younger moms and people coming from the communities that they’re trying to address continue to keep quality care and service [that considers] the full spectrum of reproductive health and rights, it’s going to be even more helpful. I think that’s one of the parallels that we share is the ability to build a community that will ultimately have a greater impact… I can see the multiplier effect happening between coding and technology and the community you’ve built, and also the commitment you’ve made to do this work at this moment. I’m even more excited to see it from this angle because that’s where we intersect more directly than we have in the last few years.

KK: Thank you, Christy. That means a lot. Even in this country, with the lack of access to basic resources and healthcare, I really continue to learn from Christy in so many ways. After I just had my first [child] and came back home, Christy and Grace [Burns], her oldest, came over and met my little guy, and it was just so crazy. Having the entry into motherhood, and having your first child, no matter the resources you have or where you live in this world, it is a profoundly life changing experience, and you have to have your community and village around you. I feel very lucky that Christy and Grace are now in my village.

V: I love that. You know, we actually recently photographed Grace for our V GIRLSseries.

CT: Yeah, that’s right. She loved that! In LA, right?

KP: Yes, that was it. We first saw Grace on TikTok, and I found out that she recently shot a campaign, too, for Tamara Mellon.

CT: Yeah, she’s doing a lot of shooting, and she’s shooting friends right now in Spain. I sort of marvel at Karlie, and how much she’s able to take on. Seeing her do all the things, it appears effortless, but I know it’s not. Then, with my daughter who’s 21 in October, it’s like really another full circle. She’s in class full time, she’s publishing books of poetry, shooting campaigns, and being shot in campaigns, I’m like, “Of course, you can do that because Karlie is your [role model].” So it’s a very direct correlation in the way that we’re all continuing to inspire and care for and support one another.

KK: Yes, I’m in that phase where my three-year-old at three in the morning last night was all of a sudden in my bed and I didn’t sleep, and I’m like, “Okay, this is my life.” 

CT: Aw! And the thing is, it doesn’t end, you know? Everyone had a mother in order to come into the world, and no matter what age or where you are, and what station you are in your life, your mother continues to worry, care, and be there ready for the call, just always there for you. I think that’s the part that’s so relatable, regardless of one’s decision to have a child or not have a child, which is why it’s so important to support that regardless. You see how important that is for the folks who don’t have it, and folks that do, and the difference that creates in terms of an opportunity for success and for people to thrive in their lives.

V: What are some of the ways you both see the results of all of your efforts through the mothers and the women that you’re helping directly?

CT: I get to hear a lot from mothers. We support mostly providers, from community-based folks that are community health workers, doulas or midwives, and also physicians. When I see people who are working at the community level—which is where we mostly are invested—they’re the people at the front lines. They’re the people who are not turning folks away, especially now that things are harder and more precarious, dangerous, and potentially riskier. They’re still there, and they are not going anywhere. Those are the people that give me the most motivation. I feel like our purpose really is to try to uplift them and give them the support and care that they need to continue to meet their communities where they are. 

KK: That’s why unrestricted funding matters. Because I’ve also run a nonprofit with Kode with Klossy, and I know when you put that trust in the leader of that community who is providing that care, they’re going to do what they can to allocate these funds in the most high-impact ways. With Kode with Klossy, there are more than 10,000 young people who are now in the world’s workforce, and they’re not just young teenage women with dreams, they’re actually pursuing their passions. It’s really for me what always has been most important: self-realization more so than like a technical skill set. Of our alumni in college, more than 70% of them go on to major or minor in computer science, which is crazy to me. That to me is such an indicator that Kode with Klossy really reaches them in a moment where they’re deciding what doors the world could open for them. Especially now with every industry being impacted and needing to evolve, this basic technical literacy is crucial. To see how that plays out in their lives, and also how they bring that back to the community of Kode with Klossy—they come back and help teach in our camps, and they go on to build apps and projects that are impacting their communities, and solving problems that reach many people that are far beyond even just Kode with Klossy.  So it’s pretty awesome. 

CT: I was just thinking about Haiti because I hadn’t thought about it in so long–you don’t have any photos from that trip, do you?

KK: I do! I’m gonna find those.

CT: If you do, that would be fun to revisit, because we have so many photos from events and things that aren’t that exciting and we’ve only shot professionally together, really, once.

V: Yup, it was your Cole Haan campaign.

CT: It was a while ago. Then we did Edward [Enninful’s] last cover [for British Vogue]. Otherwise, most of our life has been doing other things. But we’re connected through it and it’s really lovely. I love our story, Karlie.

KK: I love our story. Well, maybe we need to do a V shoot together.

V: Let’s please do it!

CT: Next Mother’s Day!

KK: Exactly!

[justforbooks]

Michael Caine wears two watches: an analogue for the time and an Apple for everything else. It even knows his pulse, he says, impressed. Right now, it’s telling him his flat is 26C: warm enough for his wife, Shakira, to pour iced coffee into his flask, but not hot enough for those balcony doors to be open: “It’s blowing a bloody gale in here!”

I slide them shut slightly. Is that OK? A bit more. Enough? Bit more. I close them completely. He’s happy now.

Caine lives in Chelsea Harbour: posh 80s condos and Princess Diana’s gym. He likes the security and tolerates the helicopters. His London penthouse has caramel carpets, 360-degree views, two Oscars and 5,000 photos of his grandchildren.

Below us lies Battersea Bridge, tide low, shore glittering. No, he shudders, he’s never mudlarked. Why not? After all, his first novel, out in November, is about binmen who find uranium down at the dump. “Well,” he says darkly, “other people do things and it goes all right. I do them and bad things happen.”

He looks at me. We’re waiting for his co-star, John Standing, who is stuck in traffic. Caine is a big man with whom to make small talk. It’s not just that your brain short-circuits each time he speaks (Michael Caine?!?!), it’s that at 90, he’s still 6ft 2in, undiminished and simply intimidating.

In 1987, he gave an acting masterclass in which he revealed the secret to being forceful on screen was a) don’t blink and b) mascara. It works face-to-face, too. The first one, anyway.

During the Blitz, says Caine, he watched the city get flattened from his dormer in Camberwell; from here, he’s seen it rise up again. He loves new-build and soft furnishings with the passion of a man raised in an attic with no hot water, one outdoor loo and rickets. Every time a bomb fell, the mattresses doiiinged. “Me and my brother would laugh all through the bleedin’ air raids!”

An update: Standing will be here shortly. I praise the pot-plants and Caine mourns his garden. He was evacuated to Berkshire, where he was fed a tin of pilchards a day and locked in a cupboard for the weekends, and then to rural Norfolk, where he discovered a love of horticulture – later energetically indulged at his own places in Oxfordshire and Surrey.

Less so in Hollywood. He sold up there after someone told him that if he wanted to grow daffodils he’d need to put the bulbs in the fridge for a fortnight. “That was it! Final straw!” But did he do it? “Oh yeah. It worked.”

In comes Standing, 89 but nimble as a debutante, all polish and apologies. They settle down, discuss the weather and a window is discreetly opened. Caine goggles at my iPad, which he mistakes for a phone: “Blimey, that’s a big one!”

The Great Escaper is brilliant, I say. Caine is surprised I’ve seen it, let alone enjoyed it. Didn’t he? “Yeah. But I’ve had films where I liked it but other people didn’t agree with me.”

No wonder it tempted them from retirement: meaty roles dry up as you approach 100. Caine plays Bernard Jordan, a real-life Royal Navy veteran who made headlines in 2014 when he travelled alone from his care home in Hove, East Sussex, to Normandy for the 70th D-day anniversary. The film – flintier than you might think, and very moving – fictionalises a friendship with Arthur, a former RAF pilot (Standing) he meets on the ferry.

Both actors did national service in Berlin after the war; Caine was then drafted to Korea – “a bugger”, he says (his memoir suggests this is understatement). “When we got there they said: the Chinese have just sent a million troops. What? But they were just young kids and old men to take all our ammunition. You shoot at them and then the real fighters come. And that was the Chinese in a nutshell.”

In the film, the pair make a pilgrimage to the war cemetery at Bayeux in Normandy. “What a waste,” cries Bernard as the camera zooms out to show the rows and rows of headstones. Caine doesn’t agree. “You had to have full cemeteries because you’d had to fight the German army, which was not a load of idiots. And the Germans had to be stopped.”

And Korea? Well, communism is “perfectly frightful”, says Standing. Caine nods. “It doesn’t take care of the working class quite the way they say. My father was a fishmonger in Billingsgate, so I knew when I saw the communists, they had no idea what it was all about. Do any working-class people want to live in North Korea?”

They both think national service should be reintroduced. “It gives you a whole new realisation of life,” says Caine. “I notice how different young people are today. They’re so free with everything. Military training makes you think about helping other people. My grandsons – all they do is play football.” (Still, he adds later, they’re also “incredible, unbelievable, and they worry about other people – which is handy”.)

Standing chips in: one of his daughters is “a bit woke” and cautions him about getting cancelled. “It’s horrible! We’re not allowed to say anything. I loathe it. My God, you’re not allowed to have mother-in-law jokes! It’s sort of barking.”

Then again, “things were far less complicated” 70 years ago. He smiles benignly. “Your telephone alone is the most complex thing anybody’s ever dreamed of. You’ve got all the information you ever want. You can chat to Henry VIII. Have you seen the man made of wood and iron playing the most immaculate game of ping-pong and thrashing the ordinary Briton at the other end?”

I haven’t. Caine confesses some concern over robots – that’s partly what his novel, a thriller, is about. “But I’m 90. I don’t worry about the future. I worry if I’m gonna make it to lunch.”

Caine and Standing first met on another hot day, in the summer of 1976, shooting another war movie, The Eagle Has Landed. Caine played a Nazi eager to assassinate Churchill; Standing a rather flaky vicar. Memories of the shoot seem thin on the ground, but they agree moviemaking hasn’t changed much.

“I make my own world,” says Caine. “And if they employ me, they gotta leave me to do it my way. Otherwise I screw it up. And even if I do it my way, I screw it up as well.”

They both chuckle. “Michael, darling!” says Standing.

Have they changed?

Standing sighs. “We’re just so bloody old.”

“And we’re still here,” says Caine.

“Which is incredible! All my mates are brown bread.”

“Oh, mine and all. Sean Connery, Roger Moore. Everybody’s dead. It’s amazing.”

How does that feel?

“Lonely,” says Caine. “I had dinner last night here with eight women. Shakira gets ’em. I don’t get ’em. They’re the wives of my friends. I’m often sitting with a table full of widows.”

Standing empathises. “Hundreds of women round one all the time. And you sit there thinking: give us a break! Ask me something, anything you like!”

Caine nods. “Ask me a question about football! But I’m perfectly happy with all the girls. I love them.”

Again: consult his memoir for more details, but this is putting it mildly. Caine spent the 50s, 60s and early 70s hoovering up hotties across the continents, pausing only for relationships with Natalie Wood and Nancy Sinatra and to refuel on vodka with Terence Stamp and Peter O’Toole.

So when he says he was tired of bachelor life by 1972, you can believe it – he must have been exhausted. He had a night in, saw a Maxwell House ad on telly and resolved to fly to Brazil the next morning to marry the woman with the maracas. No need, said a pal: she was Indian, not Brazilian, and lived on the Fulham Road in west London.

This is one of Caine’s regular chatshow yarns and he duly does it for us today: “I tracked her down! Incredible!” Caine is a bit of an anecdote jukebox – tales triggered by the briefest mention of Cary or Larry or Frank – but with material like his, it’s hard to object. Though charming, he also dominates conversation in general – about which Standing is a gent. Does he miss the 60s? “I don’t miss it, but I love having done it. I used to get into trouble all over the place.”

He and Shakira have been married more than 50 years. Ageing is less awful, he advises, “if you’re married to someone really beautiful who doesn’t grow old. I wake up every morning and there she is!” It’s true: Shakira, 76, does seem preternaturally patient and gorgeous. “What is great about her is that she’s very bright. She was the secretary in the … I forget which country she comes from [Shakira was born in British Guiana, now Guyana], but she was the secretary of the American embassy, so she’s a great secretary for me. She runs everything. It’s unbelievable.”

At the heart of The Great Escaper is another enduring marriage, between Bernie and Irene, played by Glenda Jackson in her final film. She and Caine first worked together 48 years ago. “She was very young and pretty,” he says. “Very attractive. Bloody good actress. But a left-wing socialist and I’m all for making money because I come from a very poor background.” They never talked politics – bit busy making the movies. He saw her five days before she died in June: “She seemed fine.” He’s relieved it was quick.

Bernie and Irene are a devoted couple who, though the film doesn’t discuss it, didn’t have children. Might that have changed their dynamic? “Oh, tremendously,” says Caine. “You don’t have any other separate thing to talk about. You talk about each other. And you don’t have to judge how people feel about someone else. Only you.”

It’s a sharp insight, particularly given that he’s personally “always had children around me like wildfire”. His eldest daughter, Dominique, was born when he was 23, during a brief marriage to the actor Patricia Haines; he and Shakira have another daughter, Natasha. Picking up his eldest grandson from the school is, Shakira tells me later, the highlight of his week. “I love kids,” he says, a bit wistfully.

Standing murmurs agreement. He’s also been married for yonks. The secret, he says, is “laughing with each other”.

Caine is less on-message: “Don’t argue. Don’t try to prove it with arguments or a row. Let ’em do it.”

“Women are No 1 anyway,” says Standing.

“It’s the only place you can get babies,” nods Caine.

“But I gotta say this, Michael: have you seen what women do now?” says Standing. A dramatic pause. He’s a West End veteran, light comedies a specialty. “Cage fighting!” He turns to me. “What possessed your sex to do something like that? For men to cage fight is unthinkable. For women – boom, boom, boom, on each other’s faces! Deranged! But that’s modern life.”

Has Caine seen that? “Oh yeah,” he says blithely. “On television.” And? “I was stunned.” Why? “I wouldn’t do that to anyone. Even if I didn’t like them. I’d just knock ’em out and walk away.”

The real theme of The Great Escaper is – perhaps not one for the poster – that the only escape from old age is death. Yet Caine and Standing continue to produce work that will live on after they’re gone. Caine wrote his first novel bedridden during lockdown, and is now writing a second. Standing is a professional painter. They have six children between them. Are any of these enterprises better or worse as stabs at immortality? There’s only really one, says Caine: “Kindness.” And maybe Alfie. And The Muppet Christmas Carol.

“Michael, darling,” says Standing, “I said to someone the other day: ‘Have you heard of Peter O’Toole?’ She said: ‘Well, I know the name.’ Once you are dead, you are dead. You think of Bogart! But young people only know Goose. What’s he called? Gosling. Big names in the theatre – Gielgud – mean nothing.”

That craft and that class is history, they reckon. When I ask Caine who today’s version of him is, he agrees there isn’t one.

“Because you don’t get young people now who are that far back in society. That had to come forward in great leaps. I think my type of person is extinct. I can’t think of anybody who had a life like mine.”

It wasn’t just the poverty, he says, it was Korea and then, six months later, malaria (he nearly died). “And so it never stopped, you know? Until it did.”

And yet it sort of hasn’t. Caine remains an icon of a time and an energy that feel increasingly exotic. He still calls himself working class and frets over any potential betrayal of his roots. The fate of his brother, Stanley, troubles him. “He just stood there and watched me become a millionaire when he didn’t even have a job. I turned him into someone who couldn’t move. I should have gone and moved him.”

Once, Caine was shopping for a sofa and Stanley – who’d been awol for a while – appeared as part of the team lugging it in from the back. “I grabbed him. I said, ‘You are outta here.’ Oh, it was terrible. I didn’t know where he was.

“He became an alcoholic. So I bought him two houses: one to live in and one to rent so he could have some money to buy some booze.” Caine’s eyes are rheumy. “He’s three years younger than me. And he’s been dead for five years.”

There was an older brother, too, David, born with severe epilepsy and confined to an institution. Caine only found out about him after their mother’s death – though she had visited David secretly each week. Caine then made him as comfortable as possible. His mother spent her final years living in one of the houses he’d bought her with a carer and her two young sons, “who loved my mum like a grandma. I was very happy with that. I did everything for everybody. So that’s it. I’m sitting here, I’ve done it. I can’t do any more.”

The Great Escaper has been widely described as Caine’s final film, just as Harry Brown was in 2009, and then – 24 films later – Best Sellers in 2021. It’s not. He’s shooting another in January: “It’s about someone who is so famous I’d never heard of him. Charles, Charles …”

“ … Darwin,” says Standing.

“Yeah. I play Charles Darwin. And that’ll be it. I won’t do another one after.”

He’s sure?

“No! But the point is, can you do it? Can you remember all the lines? I’ve got used to not working and staying in bed till 11am and staying out late at night. I love it.”

In The Great Escaper, Jackson has a line about life being fun when you’re young, but once you hit her age, “you’re basically buggered”. Present company queers that pitch. “Oh blimey,” says Caine. “I have a great time.” Standing nods. His one concession to old age has been to give up tap-dancing – though you suspect he might oblige in an emergency.

Neither man can think of a single instance in which they’ve been ill-treated because of their age.

“Nobody patronises me,” says Caine.

“We don’t look like we need help,” says Standing.

In Caine’s case, that’s not entirely true. His skin is smooth, his cheeks full – “I’m very lucky the whole face has not collapsed” – and The Great Escaper showcases them with loads of fantastic closeups. Yet he does use a walker and wheelchair. Never had qualms about being seen with them, he says. “Nope. It’s my life and I do what I want.”

“I think you are bloody brave,” says Standing. “Michael, man-to-man, it was an admirable thing to say: ‘Bollocks, I will do the film’, in spite of all those things.’”

I think he’s right. For someone with an image as familiar – and cultivated – as Caine’s, to visibly concede frailty feels courageous. It’s a shame, I say, that “mobility issues” were given as the reason the Queen didn’t attend various events near the end – as if being seen in a wheelchair was inconceivable.

Caine opts not to criticise the Queen. Instead he cues up the story of the first time they met, at a dinner, when she asked him to tell her a joke. He couldn’t think of a clean one. “She pointed to the man on her other side and said: ‘I’m gonna talk to him now. In five minutes I’ll be back and I want a joke.’”

I don’t know what I’d imagined Michael Caine’s Queen impression to sound like, but it’s definitely a lot more mobster. That was quite frightening, I tell him, once he’s finished the joke (long, about a chicken). Does he see any similarities between them?

“I think everyone sees a similarity between themselves and the Queen.”

Even Standing, an actual baronet, demurs at that one. But the fact Caine believes it adds weight to the idea they do share something – the ability, perhaps, to unsettle others through their presence alone. The Great Escaper taps that, too. Bernie prompts in people – Arthur included – profound reckonings, without really trying. Can Caine relate?

“I don’t know,” he says. “A bit, probably, yes. But it could be quite unpleasant. I don’t do things that are unpleasant.”

But you feel you have that power?

“Yeah, oh yeah.”

And what’s that like?

He grins. “Great.”

Our time is up. Caine checks his watch. “28C,” he says, “and that’s with the bloody windows open.”

© 2024 Guardian News, Catherine Shoard

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[shwoo]

Nearly forgot about the new Fionna and Cake episodes, (Destiny and the Winter King) and had to go to bed immediately after watching it, but now I have thoughts! About those two episodes specifically. Very overthinky thoughts in places.

I got tired and took all day writing this, so it might decrease in coherency as it goes on.

-It's nice to see Simon having motivation again. Even if that motivation is to... basically die.

-Simon is such a nerd, with his excitement about the library and his Ship of Theseus joke! I love him. Why did he not actually go into the library, though? :(

-I wrote a fanfic once when a Farmworld character comments on a normal Adventure Time style character's lack of nose, and the character covers it self-consciously! It was... weirdly validating to see the show make the same joke?

-Farmworld Jake is still alive... Did main world Jake not die of old age? I'm sure a normal dog wouldn't have a longer natural lifespan than a magical talking dog who is also half stretchy alien.

-Farmworld Finn's named kids have the same names as Finn's pillow kids in Puhoy! That was a cool callback, even though pillow Bonnie's name made more sense. Did Finn not name her after Princess Bubblegum in the pillow world, or did he also know a Bonnie in Farmworld?

-I thought Jay was a girl for most of the episode, until someone referred to him with masculine pronouns. I like living in this world where I could think that despite his thing for Little Destiny being obvious from the beginning. (I like that gay relationships are more commonly and casually depicted in fiction than they used to be)

-I like Farmworld Finn. He's a good person who's doing his best. I hope he didn't die in the end. It seemed a little ambiguous.

-Simon, you of all people should know not to talk positively about the crown to someone who was cursed by it. Unless he didn't realise Finn ever wore the crown?

-After Simon assumed that Jay's dad was another version of him, I was hoping he'd find out what did happen to him in this universe, but I guess the corpse was a little bit close to the giant nuclear bomb thingy.

-Cake apparently reads AO3, or at least something adjacent enough to know what enemies to lovers is, which is impressive for someone who was a normal housecat like a day ago.

-The next episode has a Gumlee subplot for some reason? Okay! And Gary's not wrong that Fionna flaked out on him. She could've at least tried to explain where she was once Winter King fixed her phone, but she didn't.

-Also I love that Ellis P was randomly at Fionna's apartment too. They only just met.

-I wonder how much of the differences between the Winter King and Simon are intrinsic to this world's Simon, and how much are a result of him using the crown. He's definitely still influenced by the crown, but I'm not sure what his line about Betty is implying. Did he start feeling that way because of this universe's point of divergence, or did the point of divergence happen because he never liked her as much as the main Simon did? He reacted so calmly about her that I don't think he was lying.

-Interesting contrast with Simon being fine in the snow while Fionna and Cake are clearly freezing. That's some superhuman cold tolerance Simon has.

-"How'd you stop being Ice King" "I just tried REALLY HARD and now everything's great!" "Oh, okay,"

-Was it winter in the Fionna and Cake world in the first episode? The world is obviously affected by Simon's mental state in some way, and now it's snowing over there.

-I'm not sure what to think about ice Marceline, but wasn't she older than that when she turned the family axe into some kind of lute? I don't know if this world's Marceline is supposed to be dead or not, but Winter King seems to have depicted her at that age for a reason.

-I thought it was a role reversal world when the Candy Queen showed up, but all her Ice King-like traits were just foreshadowing! Disturbing, disturbing foreshadowing. I thought it was interesting that she did the same leg kick thing while playing the piano that the Winter King did. Or maybe that was a just a callback.

-Simon seemed to legitimately like her song. He's so sweet when he's not marinating in self-hatred.

-No wonder the Candy Queen feels such a sense of kinship with the Winter King that she wants to mash them up in a blender. He's giving her all his negative traits so he doesn't have to deal with them.

-The Lemoncarbs were never going to like Gary's proposal. They're Lemongrabs and he's a Princess Bubblegum, and there's been multiple episodes about how incompatible their interests are.

-Fionna did that weird demagickifying Prismo thing like Cake did with one of the hot dog people in the second episode. Does that only happen when they're feeling happy and accepted, or was the timing coincidence? Also, I think it might have something to do with why Prismo's not supposed to create things, since it uses the same effect as his powers. Their world is probably inherently unstable regardless of whose head it's in, or something dramatic like that.

-I'm glad Fionna's rethinking her self-centred worldview. Maybe she can also realise that her own world isn't as boring as she thinks, because I'm pretty sure that's also a metaphor for Simon's self-hatred. Though would it still be a metaphor if she's not currently in his head?

-So we've had a revisit of Farmworld, where FInn was negatively affected by the crown's curse, and a world where Princess Bubblegum is negatively affected by the crown's curse. Is Marceline up next? She was at least as important a secondary character on the original show as PB was. And more important personally to Simon.

[yanderes-galore]

Well, time for my autistic hyperfixation skills to shine! Here's your cheat-sheet for what Halo EU media to skip to for the good parts (aka aliens):

Since you've already read The Cole Protocol, Envoy is a rlly good skipping point. Besides the greatness that is Rojka 'Kasaan, and it having a pretty notable Jiralhanae villain, it's also written by the same author and follows up on the Gray Team storyline introduced in the former book.

Hunters in the Dark also makes the top of my list for fleshing out the Halo 3 co-op characters N'tho 'Sraom and Usze 'Taham and giving us nice cross-species positive interactions. Also can't forget Broken Circle, as it's all Sangheili and San'Shyuum in the story, no humans for once. It's split between two timelines: the era of the Covenant's founding and the time of Halo 2.

The Ferrets series of books (Last Light, Retribution, and Divine Wind so far) features the reoccurring antagonistic faction the Keepers of the One Truth lead by the Jiralhanae named Castor. The Master Chief series also features Fleetmaster Nizat 'Kvarosee in the first two books (Silent Storm and Oblivion) and the Keepers in Shadows of Reach; haven't read them yet but I heard good things about Nizat so far and he seems to be one of the more unique in the lore, being kinda older than most Sangheili we've seen so far. Also can't forget the Halo CE novelization, The Flood, which featured the first portrayal of Covenant perspectives in canon I believe (and therefore some of the lore and characterization there is a bit off in comparison to the rest of the books, but it's fine). Zuka 'Zamamee and Yayap are a real treat in that one, even if the tone of their sections are a bit sillier than most (from my impression so far, haven't finished the book yet actually).

And I kind of have to include the Kilo-Five trilogy, although with the fair warning that they're a bit divisive amongst the fandom. You're either gonna like them or despise them. I think a majority people, regardless of how they feel about the trilogy as a whole, did find the alien sections fine though. If I had to re-read them again I'd probably skip to just those chapters. Jul 'Mdama is a prominent character in the first two books (Glasslands and The Thursday War), with his wife Raia 'Mdama having more of a spotlight in the second, but then the whole 'Mdama plotline wraps up and gets replaced by Kig-Yar Chol 'Von in Mortal Dictata (although she's a good character on her own and it's unfortunate her story never got picked up by other authors after the trilogy ended). Other notable aliens in the trilogy include Forze 'Mdama, Avu Med 'Telcam, Sav Fel, and probably the most concentration of named Huragoks in a Halo storyline ever. Thel also makes some appearances here too.

Speaking of the 'Mdamas tho; I haven't gotten to it yet but Legacy of Onyx does feature Jul and Raia's sons as major players post-Halo 5, plus I believe there is a Sangheili teacher character and maybe some rare alien kid characters. Ohhhh and I can't believe I almost forgot, but upcoming book Outcasts is gonna feature Thel as a main character again! Been waiting for it but it got delayed, we should finally be getting it in August tho. You may want to read the Master Chief books first tho since it looks like some lore introduced there will be featured here too, especially since it's the same author Troy Dennings.

Finally to round out the recs are the anthologies. I'd go for Fractures before Evolutions, as the former has Shadow of Intent with Rtas, Tul 'Juran, Vul 'Soran, Stolt, and Tem'Bhetek and Oasis with Jat (who existed for maybe a dozen pages but has captured my heart for years). Latter still has Henry (human nickname, we never learned his real name because of language barrier) in The Mona Lisa, some named Jiralhanae in Stomping on the Heels of a Fuss (which I forgot about so idk if it's because it's been years or if they did not have much of a role), and an unnamed Sangheili shipmaster who's the focus of The Return. The Return & The Mona Lisa also got "animated" adaptations in the form of voice-acted motion comics you can find on YouTube.

Those are all books but maybe I might as well throw in the comics. Obviously there's the Rise of Atriox miniseries. Also not as well known but there was a small prequel comic for the first Halo Wars which features Ripa 'Moramee's origin story; I got the physical copy as part of my game copy, idk if there's a way to access it digitally. The Halo Graphic Novel includes the famous Halo story The Last Voyage of the Infinite Succor feat Rtas 'Vadum and Thel in his Fleetmaster era. Haven't read it but Blood Lines has two Sangheili brothers as major antagonists. Tales From Slipspace has Atriox in Hunting Party and Avu Med 'Telcam in Knight Takes Bishop. Finally one of the more well known comics, Escalation has a few points of interest (note I haven't read all of 'em yet and going off Halopedia for this): Thel in Issues 1-3 + Jiralhanae Lydus, Jul 'Mdama and Sali 'Nyon in the Janus Key arc (Issues 13-16) and Absolute Record arc (Issues 19-24), and Ayit 'Sevi in Absolute Record arc.

And what the heck. let's get obscure: The Halo Wars Official Strategy Guide published by Prima Publishing includes some flash fiction featuring Ripa 'Moramee and The Prophet of Regret, because sometimes crumbs is all ya get. Halo: Legends - aka the official Halo anime - also has The Duel which shows an ancient Arbiter and why the title is considered dishonorable in modern Halo times.

Oh and... I guess there's the Forerunner trilogy, for like, Forerunners... tbh tho they're basically bootleggish humans to me, I rank them the lowest out of all the Halo aliens and don't really consider them most of the time when hyper-focusing on Halo aliens.

Gonna read this later

[monty-glasses-roxy]

Give me the sun and roxy dynamic!

Okay so in terms of the programming conflicts – which I assume is where this sprang from, if not feel free to correct me so I can better answer this – the relationship is very uh… uneven for a while.

Roxy, in her first few months in the Plex, is learning to mix her two conflicting language processors into one that makes her actually understandable to the people around her, and also dealing with every other conflict in her programming. So for a while? She does not understand that a toothy smile is a good thing. And what does Sunny always have? A big ol’ toothy grin!

So she’s under the impression he and Moon really fucking hate her for some reason. She looks at them and Monty with their teeth constantly on display and is confused why they’re talking in chill tones yet obviously telling her to fuck off, and sometimes straight up asking for a fight. She just met these guys! Why are they like this?? Did she invade their territory or something?? Fine! She’ll just stay in her own territory! Fuck those guys!

Sunny on the other hand, is also under the impression that Roxy doesn’t like him. Why else would she growl at them so quickly? Why else would she go rigid and snap her teeth at them when he got too close? Why else would she keep such a big distance between them through the entire one-sided conversation? The difference with Sunny though, would be that they’d probably have been told about Roxy’s lack of clear communication ability. They were just trying to be as comforting, supportive and encouraging as possible and yet that’s how she reacted?? What did they do wrong?? Did he mess it up? Maybe he missed something obvious? Or maybe he was too pushy? He’s heard they can be pretty overwhelming at times but they tried so hard not to be this time! Did it not work? Oh, he’s so sad. He’s convinced he’s just lost a new friend because of something they’ve done and really wants to make up for it but she’s giving him such a wide berth that he’s starting to lose hope he ever will.

However, things do change of course! You can’t just leave Roxy thinking every big smile is some sort of threat, right? Well, this is where the others come in.

I like to give Bonnie this role but it could be anyone you want it to be really, outside of Monty, Moon and Sunny. DJ Music Man would probably be a much better fit for it anyway but moving on. They ask her why she keeps getting into fights with Monty and she stumbles on her words a bit, but manages to get them to understand that she’s convinced he’s starting it. The very moment she mentions why, it’s explained to her that smiling like that is just a natural thing people do, even if dogs don’t. It… takes a good few difficult to answer questions before Roxy is able to kind of wrap her head around that but it’s still going to take some getting used to.

Now, back to Sunny. Bonnie passes onto him that they figured out why Roxy didn’t like him literally the second she saw him and they’re relieved that it was just miscommunication but also feels awful that anyone would feel like he was threatening them so of course they have to fix that. Their next meeting goes a bit smoother, with Sunny making sure to keep some distance between them and not to make any sudden moves towards her to make sure she doesn’t misunderstand their intentions again but also quickly learns that she’s not much of a talker. Or at least, she’s not comfortable enough to be a talker. Or maybe she’s still not great at communicating and thus, doesn’t want to do it all the time, which he can understand! They get all sorts of kids in the daycare, he can handle a new nervous friend! Even if her chomping would ordinarily get her banned from the Daycare…

Yeah, she’s breaking rules all the damn time. Does she know she’s breaking rules? Nope. Sunny hasn’t told her yet. He’s so desperate to make her feel comfortable and make himself out to be as friendly as possible that they’re overcompensating a bit. They’re too nervous to ruin what progress they’ve made by enforcing the rules and she’s not broken anything yet, right? It’ll be fiiiinnneee… Moon doesn’t have this problem ordinarily but Sunny keeps fretting so much that now Moon won’t do anything about it either unless it starts to get out of hand and well. You can imagine that when it does get out of hand, there’s probably going to be some problems.

Anyway, on Roxy’s side of things, the teeth still have her on edge. She doesn’t want to run around or anything because it’s just making her feel like she should be ready to rip this guy to shreds. Also he’s so loud?? And them giving her space like this is both making her feel better and worse because what if they’re scared of her? He won’t be the only one if he is. She’s not sure how to feel about that since the dog side hates the idea while the character side thinks it’s funny, but she does know she wants to jump in the ball pit and chew the giant Freddy plush to shreds. She will not though. She will just not notice as she starts chewing whatever she picks up instead. Chewing stim go brrr

The relationship here is a slow one, just like it is for Moon and Monty. Roxy has to work on unlearning that teeth are a threat and that’s really hard to do when it’s hardwired into your very being. It takes time, and once she makes her debut and has to deal with this exact problem all day from hundreds of people daily that’s gonna get overwhelming fast and she’s probably not going to want to keep dealing with it in her off time so yeah. Once she settles a bit more into everything, things get a bit easier. Well that problem does anyway.

This is just one of her many problems to deal with. Don’t forget the anger issues from the constant conflicts in her programming making it difficult to feel like she is acting as herself or as intended, the frustration caused by language barriers and no one listening to her when she’s asked for help with it, the fact she has to interact with Sunny and Moon who both put her on edge all the time and also don’t seem to get her… Getting past the teeth thing is merely a hurdle in the Grand National here.

Other problems? The side of her that was programmed as the cool, and independent wolf character doesn’t fucking like him. Why would it? She’s cool! She’s clever! She’s a star racer! Why would she want to play Blind Man’s Bluff or Hide and Seek in her free time? She has better things to do! And yet her dog side loves him. He’s the perfect match for her dog side. So add this to the list of frustrating things!

Sunny is so fucking nice and kind and she’s just this ball of fluffy anger and zooms. He can’t tell her to stop breaking the rules because he’s too scared to upset her and she’s  too stuck in her own problems to notice he’s desperately trying to distract her from the Freddy plush she’s absolutely obliterating. He doesn’t understand her, she doesn’t understand him, it’s all a massive learning curve.

Actually you know what would be really sweet? Sunny high jacking the internet for information about dogs to make her more comfortable. He seems like he’d overdo it a bit though or read like… the ‘dominance training’ bullshit and royally fuck it up. But if he does it in a funny way? Well, kudos to him for making her laugh! He’s trying so hard, probably harder than literally anyone else because the one thing he can always do, is make someone feel safe and comfortable and god damn it he’s gonna do it for Roxy if it kills him!

Anyway, some ups, Sunny makes her – and everyone else of course – little gifts during craft time with the tots, and calls her down to the daycare whenever she’s needed for a birthday or when they really need to find something. Roxy meanwhile, starts to really appreciate the bells on him allowing her to know where he is in the room since that helps her nerves a bit and once she’s comfortable, she’s more than happy to find a kid’s toy or something else they’ve lost as an opportunity to show off. Sunny is always trying to coax her into conversation and is insanely patient when she can’t find her words. Roxy needs all the patience – and practice – she can get but also learns how to trigger an infodump or rant so that she can just vibe in the same room and listen without having to work so hard in the conversation.

Also, Sunny is the only one that has the same high level of energy as she does. Moon thinks it’s funny to trigger the zooms in Roxy right before Sunny takes over and mentally sits there with the popcorn as these two lose their absolute shit together. Roxy will just bowl him over and Sunny will jump back up and try and wrestle a ball pit ball from her or something. He has yet to succeed but one of these days they will! Just you wait!

Sunny loves having someone to share fidget toys with and Roxy loves not feeling like the only one that likes them. They get a new one and they can spend all night trying it out before either going back to one they prefer or deciding who gets to keep the new one. They can race each other to see who can complete a Rubiks cube first or run each other out of energy by playing some new fast paced game Sunny came up with or something.

It takes a while to get that far in their relationship of course. Roxy’s more cool and stoic programming makes it a little difficult too since this is kids stuff and not for someone cool like her so that takes some working through as well, but she can’t deny Sunny can be a blast. It also makes her laugh when Moon comes out specifically to cause a problem and then fucks off again, only to return after she’s fallen asleep in the middle of the daycare, pretending he’s not moved away from her because he’s just taken over and hasn’t had a chance to sneak away yet.

Also, oh my god I just realised it would be really sweet if the bells became a stim for Roxy too so Sunny ties one of his belled ribbons to her spiky collar or around her wrist so she can jingle with him. It has been tied around her tail at least once and it makes it even more obvious when Roxy is happy, the jingles making them both happier until her tail wags too hard and the bell falls off and now they’re both sad :(

Lmao anyway, yeah. It’s a slowburn friendship for a multitude of reasons. The unintentionally threatening teeth, both of them giving the other space, getting over the ‘this is childish and weird’ thing, figuring out where the boundaries are, the initial communication barrier, the sheer amount of rules Roxy keeps unknowingly breaking in the daycare until Sunny grows a back bone to stop her… the list goes on! Most of it is on Roxy’s side of things, girl’s just full of problems but they get there!

Probably the last person to get a special Roxy howl for them but that just makes it extra meaningful, right?

[atamascolily]

princess tutu re-watch, episode 18

oh hey, it's the forest from the opening credits!

and we open with Fakir having a real KNIGHTmare, so to speak

Fakir: My subconscious can go shove it.

meanwhile, Ahiru, Pike, and Lilie are all excited about Fakir's return to school but for wildly different reasons

they are interrupted by a group of avant-garde theater kids practicing mime, one of whom (who identifies as "Shrimp") instantly pegs Ahiru as "duck".

[I am impressed by how long those two girls can hold her up in mid-air, that's quite a feat of strength]

They want Mytho to dance in one of their performance, but Ahiru correctly believes this to be a bad idea and so volunteers Fakir instead

this is Fakir's CALLING, by the way, I've been saying this for a while now, but is he grateful for the opportunity? Of course not.

Neko-sensei is unexpectedly helpful, calling into question whether there is truly such a thing as "impure" love, name-dropped Odile (the Black Swan, aka the inspiration for Rue) as an example

Fakir: This script hits a little too close to home. A ghost knight? And what happened to the ending? There's a pattern emerging and I don't like it… So, uh, where did it come from?

Drama Club: No idea! We just found it one day and figured we'd put on a show! And the fact that there's an actual ghost knight running around means more publicity! What can possibly go wrong?

Fakir touches original copy and has instant war flashbacks.

Fakir: Okay, I'll do it… but I sure hope this doesn't awaken anything in me!

Drosselmeyer: Hey, Ahiru, what about those heart shards? You had ONE job…

oh THAT's why Mytho was so dismissive about Rue's chances of capturing a heart… because the Raven's whole schtick is built on the premise that no one will ever love her but the two of them (and you can only capture someone's heart if they love you enough to surrender it willingly).

cut to a stellar sequence of Fakir practicing his role for the play, A++ use of animation budget

Drama Club: This is great! It's like he was BORN to play this role or something!

Fakir finishes his routine and is disappointed to discover Ahiru ran out halfway through to run errands, lololol

The Drama Club asks him to join them permanently and Fakir should totally say yes, but instead he's having PTSD and walks out and everybody chalks it up to him being a broody Byronic hero-type.

Mytho: I love your hair, Rue. It's just like feathers, which are objectively best, and like crows, which are better.

Rue: you need to work on your pick-up lines, dear.

The two of them decide to enlist the ghost knight to fuck with Fakir.

Fakir (walking through fog just like his dream): I HAVE A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS. To the stables! *horse neighing*

Ahiru: Wait, how did I end up in this creepy forest?

Fakir: HI-YO SILVER, AWAYYYYYY!

Turns out the Headless Horseman ghost knight has a heart shard, and Fakir's plan is to fight to the death and have Tutu deal with the aftermath. Ahiru is less than thrilled with this and jumps into the battle instead, forcing Fakir to tackle her to safety.

Tutu wins by her signature finishing move: a hug.

The ghost vanishes, Mytho gets his sense of Pride back, and Tutu collapses, and returns to duck form, leaving Fakir to cradle her in his arms and cry.

meanwhile, a hooded figure steals the original copy of the script out of the storage cupboard in the drama club room and walks off

Drosselmeyer: Oh shit this is bad, and I don't have anyone I can bully into fixing this! If only my puppets didn't sacrifice themselves… It's so hard to get good help these days… nobody wants to work anymore... blah blah blah...

the episode ends before the performance, so we don't get to see what happens there, but I still think Fakir should join the drama club. It would be so good for him!!!

[starlightshoals]

Link's Awakening DX (Review)

-Part 1: My History with the Series-

So, let's start with a bit of background. Before this year, I had never finished a Zelda game, or even played one for longer than an hour or two. I remember watching my dad play through the entirety of Ocarina of Time when I was a little kid, and I have hazy memories of trying out Wind Waker, Minish Cap and Majora's Mask. But for some reason, Zelda as a franchise never quite caught on with me. I had a mild interest and appreciation for the series from a distance, but certain aspects of the gameplay turned me off growing up. As a kid who loved platformers and Metroidvanias where fluidity of movement is vitally important, playing as Link in those games just felt awkward - he couldn't jump, he was sluggishly slow, it seemed as if you had to constantly go into your inventory to switch out items, and a lot of the puzzly elements felt obtuse, unintuitive, and dragged the pace even further to a crawl. For me it left the impression that Zelda simply wasn't a series I could enjoy playing.

As I got older, though, I can see how that may have changed. I got into more games where puzzles play a central role, like Portal and the Silent Hill series. In fact, Silent Hill's methodical lock-and-key based exploration isn't entirely dissimilar to Zelda's dungeon crawling! And a couple of my favorite games I've played in the past few years owe a massive debt to Zelda, wearing the influence proudly on their sleeves. The first, Nier Replicant, is structurally, narratively, and to some extent mechanically a twisted homage to Ocarina of Time. And my game of the year for 2022 (which I also reviewed!) is a little indie title named Tunic, which could not be more open in its reverence for Zelda if it tried.

My love for these two games, combined with my love for all the friends I have who've been pushing me to play some Zelda for ages now, is what finally got me excited enough to try Link's Awakening DX for the Game Boy Color.

-Part 2: In the Shadow of a Masterpiece-

Awakening is an odd little game and I'm coming at it from an odd place, too. You see, I started playing it a couple months ago, cleared six out of eight dungeons, got forcibly sidetracked by a heap of real life stuff, then two or three weeks ago I started on a different Zelda game that came before it, A Link to the Past, which I've now played, replayed, and even dipped into randomizer runs before finally coming back and finishing my Link's Awakening playthrough.

And I'm glad I did, because it threw into perspective just how much Awakening lives in the shadow of ALttP. It's a smaller entry on more limited hardware that serves as the follow up to a certified classic that laid the groundwork for decades of subsequent Zeldas and Zelda-likes to come. ALttP has not one but two sprawling overworlds that work in tandem with each other, and it marries exquisite combat scenarios with a strong puzzle solving element and an item based progression system reminiscent of Metroid. The items themselves are tremendously fun and addictive to use (the Pegasus Boots, the Hookshot, the Fire Rod, etc), with almost every piece of your eventual loadout remaining useful and serving an essential purpose in combat scenarios as well as exploration. A Link to the Past is jaw droppingly expansive yet compact, a tour de force of world and dungeon design where every piece fits perfectly in its place.

So why am I reviewing Link's Awakening instead, when it's a significantly weaker experience that never stood a chance against its wildly successful older brother? Well, for one thing, it's because there isn't much more I could say about ALttP that hasn't already been said better by other people, and I'd just keep gushing about how great is it for sixty paragraphs. And that's boring!! I'd rather talk to ya'll about a flawed, dinky little weirdo game that not as many people have played and celebrated.

And yes, I know there's a 2019 Switch remake of this game that rebuilds it from the ground up with new graphics and music, a better button layout, and even more secrets to find. (I've already dubbed it Link's Remakening when chatting with my friends.) But it was important to me to experience this game in an older form first to better appreciate its place in history and how that remake chooses to "modernize" it when I inevitably get around to playing that too. And hey, I think the way the best Game Boy titles made the most of their hardware is pretty neat! I find the "dated" graphics charming and it features a trio of composers that made excellent use of the sound chip, among them a brilliant lady named Minako Hamano, of Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion fame...or at least I wish she'd receive more fame and credit.

Because damn, when you first boot this game up you're hit with a stormy screen and a hauntingly foreboding piece of music, depicting Link on a raggedy little boat struggling to stay afloat in a violent sea that looks poised to swallow him whole. Then a strike of lightning comes down, the screen flashes, and we transition to a tranquil beachside while a far more mellow track plays. We see a lone girl walk down the shore to find an unconscious Link washed up on the sand. Then the camera pans up while the iconic Zelda theme kicks in and we see a distant mountain with a giant egg and a ring of clouds at its peak, as the title of the game appears at the top of the screen just like in the image I opened this review with.

-Part 3: An Island of Dreams-

This moody little intro immediately sets the tone and feel for Link's Awakening as a whole. It's a surreal, melancholy, dreamlike little game that appeals to the player's emotions through sound, subtle character moments, and imagery that will stay with you. While Awakening draws inspiration from ALttP in many respects, it also pulls away from it by telling a more intimate and personal story than the monomythic quest to save Hyrule.

That girl in the intro who rescues Link is named Marin, and the game proper begins with Link awakening (hehe) in her house. Her dad, Tarin, gives you back your shield and the two of them let you know that you're on Koholint Island and your sword should still be sitting around the beach somewhere.

Because Link is effectively you, the player, the game is trying to make you feel a couple things here. It wants you to like and care about Marin and her dad, so it has them be as nice and helpful to you as possible. And by extension, knowing there are monsters threatening them and their village gives you a reason to wanna protect this place in addition to solving whatever mysteries you may find here.

Awakening, you see, puts a lot of love and effort into its setting and NPCs. By injecting more flavor, sensitivity and humanity, with a cast of quirky oddballs, it left its mark on the Zelda series in a way that's still felt today. It even has an item trading sidequest that has you going around the entire island talking to people! And while most of the sidequest isn't mandatory, completing it is necessary to get an item that for most players will be needed to finish the game. In other words, Awakening really pushes you to get to know Koholint and its inhabitants, and hopefully grow to care for them and feel the weight of your main quest's consequences.

That main quest, as it turns out, is to wake the Wind Fish that slumbers in the enormous egg atop Mount Tamaranch at the north end of the world map. This requires collecting instruments from each of the eight dungeons scattered across the island...so let's talk about those dungeons.

-Part 4: Into the Labyrinth-

To reach most of them, you'll first need to explore the overworld and complete some random, often pretty strange tasks to find a key that will open the way to the dungeon. For instance, getting to Eagle's Tower requires you to bring a stone rooster to life and fly it across gaping chasms you couldn't cross with just the Hookshot. It's pretty weird.

The dungeons themselves deviate and elaborate on the structure used in ALttP in a few ways. Instead of finding a "big key" that gives you access to a "big chest" and unlocks the rest of the dungeon, more emphasis is placed on the central upgrade you find halfway through. The first leg of a dungeon typically has you wandering around, hitting lots of dead ends until you finally get your hands on the new item and suddenly the rest of the dungeon will open up for you, because now you can complete the environmental puzzles necessary to push further in. Likewise, where bosses in ALttP presented challenges mainly for you to resolve with your sword, bow or fire rod, the bosses in Awakening almost all demand that you use your shiny new upgrade as the means to defeat them, like the genie in Bottle Grotto whose bottle you need to toss at the wall with your new Power Bracelet. In some ways this creates for more gimmicky boss design, and most of them are pathetically easy compared to the genuine adversity ALttP throws at you, but it's an approach that allows each dungeon to more clearly identify with its central item. And I'm told that becomes the norm in future Zeldas!

This upgrade-driven progression also speaks to an overall shift more into the Metroidvania lane for Awakening. The fact that the game takes place in a smaller, tightly knit map full of roadblocks you'll need to use your full item kit to bypass contributes to this as well, with new shortcuts opening up as you go. And it's a good thing the overworld is pretty small compared to ALttP, because the screen size is also painfully tiny and thus so is your view of the immediate surroundings. With all the pauses for screen scrolling it has to do, it's good that the game doesn't bite off more than it can chew and for the most part avoids being too difficult to navigate (though I still got lost and turned around more times than I'd like).

And I gotta be honest here, progression in this game can get pretty wonky. Sometimes the devs lean too far into the realm of dreamlike chaos and present you with puzzles and gating that just doesn't seem to have any intuitive logic behind it. One minor example is when the game expects you to open a locked door by...throwing a pot at it. This is not set up at all and you have no reason to think this particular door is so different from every other door up to that point which is unlocked by a key or by clearing out the room's enemies. Similarly, that thing I mentioned earlier about bringing a rooster to life takes a series of steps so bizarre and illogical that I was dumbfounded when I looked it up.

That's not to say Awakening is lacking in puzzles that were a pure joy to solve, because there were some amazing "ah ha!" moments that gave me the same sense of excitement and satisfaction that Tunic so often did. That lightbulb going off is the high I was chasing when I started my quest to play every major Zelda game, and Awakening sometimes delivered. Not to spoil too much, but there's a moment in the third dungeon, Key Cavern, where you realize you can combine the effects of two upgrades to do something super cool that you'll go on doing in various places for the rest of the game. And if you have a hunger like I do for "puzzle box" dungeons that require you to interact with the environment in ways that dramatically alter it and gain the spatial awareness to navigate it intelligently, then Eagle's Tower will be the highlight of your playthrough. It's been a few days and I'm still thinking about how brilliant that dungeon was. While ALttP is by far the better game overall, its steady consistency stands in stark contrast to the highs and lows of playing Link's Awakening.

There are other evolutions to the dungeon formula, too. A big one is the change in functionality of the compass - in ALttP, all the compasses would do when you found them is mark the boss room on your dungeon map. This was pretty useless since the geography of dungeons in that game will naturally lead you in the boss' direction regardless. On the other hand, Awakening's dungeons tend to be far more labyrinthine and confounding, so this basic quality to the compass is inherently more valuable. But wait, there's more!! In Awakening, the compass now also plays a jingle when you enter a room with a hidden key, and it marks every unopened treasure chest left to find on your map! This makes the compass so much more vital to finding your way and uncovering secrets.

And the last thing about dungeons I need to point out is the addition of sidescrolling segments, with some light platforming and even cameo appearances from Mario enemies, like goombas and piranha plants. Because yeah, this game has platforming. The first dungeon upgrade is the Roc's Feather, which lets you jump in a Zelda game that isn't Zelda II, almost 25 years before Breath of the Wild! You can only imagine how giddy I was to have this item and how much fun I got out of it across my playthrough.

-Part 5: Why This Game Sucks Actually-

However, speaking of the item inventory...this is where we have to address one of Awakening's most painful flaws. Inventory management in this game is excruciating. Because it's on the Game Boy, you can only assign items to the A or B button, and every item you obtain is bound by this system. Where ALttP had picking up pots and rocks as a context sensitive A press, Awakening has you go into the menu to bind the Power Bracelet to A or B every time you wanna lift anything up. Likewise, where the Pegasus Boots were just a press and hold A to charge up in ALttP, in Awakening you have to button assign it if you wanna use it. Every single time.

What makes this worse is that every time you brush up against a liftable object without the Bracelet equipped, you get a long, slow, unskippable text box telling you that you can't lift it. This is pretty bad at the start of the game when you don't have the item, but it becomes unbearably bad later on when you already know that, god game shut up!!

What makes it somehow even worse than that is the fact that the game's overworld seems tailor made to exhaust you with constant, and I mean constant dips into the menu to switch out items. There are so, so very many obstacles to get around. Rocks you need to switch in the Bracelet for. Pits you need to switch in the Feather for. Enemies you need to switch in your sword for. Blocks that can only be broken with the Pegasus Boots. Gaps you can only cross with the Hookshot. It adds up, and while you get used to it, it makes traveling from one end of the map to the other a tedious ordeal.

Fixing this issue, above anything else, is something I feel like Link's Remakening (2019) has to offer over the original. From what I hear, all your most necessary upgrades are generally already bound to buttons on the controller and stay that way, dramatically minimizing the amount of menuing you have to do. I look forward to re-experiencing the game in this way at some point, because good gravy is it a problem in the og version.

-Epilogue: I Love it Anyway-

Despite some frustrating flaws that hold it back, though - some of which are a consequence of the hardware, some of which are just questionable choices on the part of the dev team - I would still say Link's Awakening DX is a lovely little game that showed a whole new side of Zelda and maintains its own special place in my heart. Koholint Island is a setting I can't help having fond affection for, with its wacky characters, poignant story, whimsical locales and the fascinating risks and experiments the devs took in making it. The director apparently said he felt as if they were making a "parody" of Zelda, and I can see it. Parts of this game feel like a weird romhack more than a fully polished official product. But that's part of its enduring charm, and I'm thankful for the strange, dreamy journey I got to take with Link, Marin, and all the rest. They'll stay somewhere in my memory, like a sad and silly dream that lingers after you wake.

[anotherplaceintheuniverse]

and you wish you could live in between (part two to “i wish”)

broadway actress gina and future portwell

thank you for reading!

Gina sighed as she walked in the large theater when a familiar face met her at the door. “Gina?”

“Carlos? What are you doing here?”

“I’m choreographing this show. You?”

“I’m here for a chemistry read!”

“You’re the Giana they were talking about? I shouldn’t be telling you this but they’re really looking forward to it. Let me show you around.”

Carlos let an assistant director know Gina was there and showed her around backstage. As they walked by the lighting booth he asked, “So how have you been? I saw on Insta you and EJ got hitched!”

“Yeah, and we have a kid now. He’s in Kindergarten.”

“Is he going into the family business?”

“He loves to dance just like his mama.” Gina smiled widely. Gina loved that her son was a dancer just like her. “He’s been taking lessons since he could walk.”

“That’s awesome. Do you guys live nearby?”

“No, we moved out to LA right before Benji was born. Finally got EJ away from the Caswells.” 

“Is he still acting?”

“No, he’s working at his dad’s company. He manages their LA branch. He’s doing well and he’s so great with Benji.”

“Seb has been talking about kids but I’m still not sure.”

“Well, if you’re ever in California, I’m always looking for a sitter.”

“Hopefully, the family will move with you to New York and we can take you out to dinner.”

“Oh I couldn’t do that to them.”

“How will you do the show then?”

Gina laughed awkwardly “Well, let’s not count our chickens before they hatch.”

———————————————————————————————————

Gina pressed her phone to her ear as her cab driver took off towards her hotel. “Hey, Eej.”

“Hey! How was the callback?”

“It was great! The theater was beautiful-you would have loved it. Guess who’s choreographing the show?”

“Please don’t say Ms. Jen.”

“No!” Gina laughed loudly. “Carlos! We talked for a while. He and Seb are still going strong up here.”

“Small world!” EJ’s voice cut out slightly. “Hold on, I’m pulling into the pickup line…Benji!” EJ’s loud voice filled Gina’s ears. She heard a door open and close. “B, Mama’s on the phone.”

“Mama! Did you get it?”

“I don’t know yet, Bud.”

“But you did your best, right?”

“Yep, that’s all I can do. How was school?”

“Great! Emily invited me to her birthday party!”

“That’s great! I’ll text Kourtney when I get to my hotel and ask for details.”

“Mama, I’m gonna do a report on a planet-“

“Oh my gosh. I’m getting another call. It’s my agent. I’ll call you back, okay? Love you guys!”

“Love yo-“ The phone cut out before EJ could finish his sentence. EJ looked at Benji through the rear view mirror. “Pretty exciting for Mama, huh?”

“Yeah,” Benji sighed.

“What was the report you were talking about?”

“It’s nothing.” Benji sighed and looked out the window.

———————————————————————————————————

“Sarah! Hi!”

“Gina! I hope I’m not interrupting anything?”

“Not at all.”

“Well, I have some good news. They’re offering you the role of Cinderella in Into the Woods! They were so impressed with your audition and it didn’t hurt that your friend was the choreographer. Congratulations!”

“Oh my gosh! Thank you so much! Obviously, I need to call my husband and-“

“Oh, I bet, dear. Rehearsals start in a month so hopefully that will give you enough time to relocate.”

“Relocate…”

“We can negotiate a shorter run but typically those making their debuts prefer a longer run. At least a year.”

“Right. Well, thank you, Sarah. I need to discuss logistics with EJ-“

“How is Elton? And Benny?”

“Benji is great. They both are. Thank you, Sarah.”

“One more thing. Looks like this show will be more of a reunion. I just heard Elton’s cousin, Ashley-“

“Ashlyn? Is she involved?”

“She was also cast! Congratulations to both of you!”

———————————————————————————————————

Gina raced to Ashlyn’s apartment as soon as she managed to get off the phone with Sarah-which didn’t prove to be an easy task. Ashlyn opened the door with a startled look. “Gina?”

“Ash! I just got off the phone with my agent. When were you going to tell me you also auditioned for Into the Woods?”

“Come in come in!” Ashlyn hugged Gina. “Wait, I didn’t even  know you were here! New York is my turf!”

“Yeah, the second I got back from my reading, my agent called. She set this all up but I didn’t think it would actually happen! And Carlos choreographing? It’s like an East High reunion!” 

Ashlyn led Gina to the kitchen. As Gina spoke excitedly about her audition, Ashlyn grabbed two wine glasses from the cabinet. She quickly poured two glasses and handed one to Gina. 

“I’m sure EJ is excited to see everyone again! I’m sure glad I’ll actually get to see Benji!””

“Yeah, you’re the only one who knows right now. I need to call him but…”

“But?”

“I don’t know. He already moved to LA for me. I don’t know if he’ll be able to leave.”

“I’m sure he and Uncle Cash will work something out. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, G! You can’t just walk away.”

“I know. I just…I need to call him…I’m happy, Ash. Really. Just nervous about how it’s all going to work.”

“Well, our guest room is always available if that’s helpful.” Ashlyn put her hand on Gina’s shoulder gently. “Go call him and then we’ll have a movie night. I’ll tell Red to bring some food home when he closes.”

“You’re the best. You know that, right?”

[semper-legens]

65. Gleanings, by Neal Shusterman

Owned: No, library Page count: 426 My summary: The world is run by the Thunderhead, and kept in line by gleanings from Scythes. We’ve seen Scythe Anastasia and Scythe Lucifer’s stories. But what about the other stories we haven’t seen? The past, present, and future of this world - art contests, communities denying the existence of Scythes, a dog’s revenge, tragedy in space. This world is so much bigger than ever before. My rating: 4/5 My commentary:

I didn't know this book existed! It's a further novel in the Arc of a Scythe series; I say novel, it's a collection of short stories set across the timeline of the Arc of a Scythe canon. There's at least one story that takes place just as the Scythedom began, and at least one that takes place after the events of the series. I wasn't entirely sure what I was getting into when I started reading this one (see the fact that I didn't know it existed), but hot damn do I love Neal Shusterman's work, and this certainly did not disappoint.

Standard disclaimer: not talking about all the stories, just the ones that jumped out at me for whatever reason. And the first of those is The Mortal Canvas, featuring an early Scythe coming to an school and challenging four pupils to a contest - create the best art, and gain a year of immunity from gleaning. I'm of two minds about this one. I really liked the view of the early days of this world, where the younger generation have been born into immortality but the older ones still remember fearing death. I just wasn't too sure about the actual art contest element. See, one of the worldbuilding points in Arc of a Scythe is that humanity is just a tiny bit creatively sterile, everything being safe and standardised. This is encapsulated in the students, Wyatt being unable to create art without relying on formula and program, and Morty wanting to create something original. Morty ends up submitting an incredibly provocative oil painting of the Scythe that shocks the onlookers into silence. His is obviously the best art, though Wyatt wins the contest, but I'm not too sure about the messaging going on here. Much is made of the idea that a fear of death and mortality is an impetus for great art, but it smacks of the whole 'if you get help for mental health issues you won't be able to Create' mindset so common in reality. Then again, the issue is less of individual response than collective artistic stagnation - it's not that Wyatt is himself bad for not being able to create, more society's fault for prizing cookie-cutter copies of great art rather than something more creative and challenging. Hmm. I think I just did a 180 in my opinion on this one.

Another of the stories featured a young man who has emigrated to Mars and wants to return to Earth, study, and really make a name for himself there in a way that he can't do in a backwater like Mars. He applies for and, through an act of desperate murder, gains the role of a valet to a visiting Scythe. Who charges him with a 'great act' that will shock Mars out of complacency. See, Mars is out of the jurisdiction of the Scythes, not having a large enough population to necessitate gleaning of the populace. This leads to some complacency - without gleaning, the people quite literally cannot die outside of major accident. So he causes that accident. Blows up a damn nuclear reactor, and ends up impressing the Scythe so much that he gains an apprenticeship. And he wants to choose the name Goddard. I gotta admit, I was lukewarm on this story, but the twist at the end punched me straight in the chest. Knowing the backstory of Goddard was interesting enough; reading this story with full knowledge of where this kid is going to end up is delicious. Seriously, baby Goddard, you threw your friend to his death to get the valet role over him? What an absolute scumbag.

I'm gonna use my last paragraph here to be a little more general. One thing I always praise about Shusterman's work is that his worldbuilding is ridiculously expansive; he just commits to the bit, putting extra detail in, even if that detail is weird or kind of silly. Like retelling the Masque of the Red Death, for example. And this is a good way to see the parts of the Arc of a Scythe world that have been backgrounded to this point! Like what happened to Citra's brother, or the Dream shared by the people of one region, or what it's like to be an Unsavory, or getting a conclusion on the rockets sent into space at the end of the series. It's a way of broadening the scope of the series that doesn't bog down any of the novels' narratives, and it was greatly appreciated. If you read and enjoyed Arc of a Scythe, this is a worthy followup and welcome addition!

Next, more Junji Ito, and a man barely human.

[padfootastic]

hcs about miss pen coming right up—

(I'm so excited to type this cause it's like those art videos where they choose colours without light and then is skin is green kwim? )

1) can follow along with a recipe/good enough cook but don't do it often cause don't want to wash up (absolutely valid if tho– bartan are just not the vibe)

2) social actually like not daily put partying but have this group of 5-6 friends that you just have always have had you know

3) not teachers pet but also not a trouble maker. they used to have a soft spot for you but you were a bit sarcastic talkative in class or used to have longer nails or something that would make you occasionally get in trouble

4) either took 4 classes of art as kid or very good dancer.

5) I'm gonna go with favourite subject was EVS till 5th-6th

6) have never broken a bone but did have stupid injuries as a kid

7) type of person who complaints about it's too hot/too cold, says their favourite season is Mansoon but jab humidity hoti h you're like nah i think i actually prefer winter (it's a lie you don't like any seasons)

8) friends parents and relatives used to say like you're the role model (in the sense ki beta dekho ye kitni polite/ kitni achche se baat kar rhi h/ kitni helpful h/ basically auntie whisperer) and your friends/cousins would just look at the aunties that have they grown two heads cause ye ladki? ye — abhi do second phle hame aise harkaton ke ideas de rhi thi.

9) absolutely not a morning person (which If thai you are i would be so surprised cause your sleep schedule 😭)

10) like fashion to a reasonable extent like whenever you step out you're put together in an effortless way it's not a remarkable oh my god look at this person's style. but a second they notice you properly wow you look good today type.

!!!! omg ash, lowkey impressed at how right u are for some of these? like,,,now i’m frantically combing thru our conversations tryna figure out where i gave myself away lmao

1. is half correct—i’m a pretty good cook (if i do say so myself 💀) and i actually like washing dishes lol so that’s never stopped me—i am very chindi tho, so i reuse bartan all the time to minimise.

2. true!! i’m fully an extrovert and i have about 2-3 groups of solid friends from different periods of my life; 10/10 would recommend, esp girl gangs.

3. no but this is literally so on point?? i was a very well liked child but i also talked the heck out of everyone’s patience and i was always bouncing around to other classes + i’d exasperated many (including the principal) w my coloured hair & messy uniforms & general…rowdiness lol

4 & 5 are sadly incorrect :( i did take classes for almost everything as a child but i’m not great at any of it. and my fav class is and always has been english!! (until socio came & overtook)

6. beep! another winner!!! i have all sorts of scratches and cuts and scars bc i used to do so much stupid shit. i remember climbing this half-constructed structure once bc there were puppies somewhere inside and i rly wanted to see and ended up having this like. rebar rod thing fully slice into my forearm. u can still see the scar now, like over a decade later lol

and no yaar 😭😭 i like to think 7 is not me—i’m v accommodating and i try not to complain even when i rly wanna (growing up around whiny rich kids has instilled a fear in me to not be the same lol)

8 is very, very true. i take a lot of pride in being almost all my friends’ parents’ favorite; aunty whisperer is a v good name for it too bc grandparents love me ;) (and yes, i was also the one to corrupt almost every single of them. fun times)

u already know 9 is true lmao what can i even say

and 10–hmmmmmmmmmm i’ll give it a. 0.3. bc im a very. very staunch ‘grab whatever and put it on’ kinda gal which means i can (and have) live(d) off The Chair for months on end. it never looks terrible but yah. acceptable i’d say.

What do you think of me: HC edition

[martamatta95]

Referring to an earlier post of mine about a possible connection between Cobb and Korkie.

This is a preview of a One shot, it's just a few fragments scattered throughout the story.

Obviously the theme has to do with it is always Dincobb 😍

-------->

"We need more men...", she whispers with some ideas.

"We're rounding them up, but it takes time", Din replies.

The Mandalorian princess's thoughts turn elsewhere, while the others go about their business. There is one who could help her, who has stayed out of all this.

*

"Good morning Foreigner", Jo greets her cordially but handling the rifle with care, "Welcome to Freetown, excuse our mistrust, but what brings you to the city?".

“I'm looking for the marshal", she says bluntly and the young woman wonders if all Mandalorians are that blunt and if Cobb gives off some sort of aroma or hormone that draws them to him like womp rats with syrup.

"For what exactly?".

"He sends Din Djarin to me with a gift. My stay will not be long as I have duties to return to".

Jo looks her up and down with a raised eyebrow, she was under the impression of her that she had told him half truth and half lie.

"Mando's friends, they're ours too", Cobb's voice gets the two women's attention.

And the Mandalorian in blue is frozen staring at him, all the while the marshal approaches reassuring Jo and beckons the newcomer to follow.

The young woman curiously notes that the determined and relentless steps the Mandalorian has taken since she stepped off the ship have become hesitant and shaky.

*

She takes off his helmet wanting to observe that face so aged with his own eyes.

He doesn't hold back. She doesn't hide her emotions from him, it's been so long. And, from the marshal's expressions, she understands that they are a mirror of each other's emotions.

"Korkie...", Bo whispers thinking he must be almost 50 now, his parents were 18 when they conceived him, Korkie Kryze was born in 39 BBY.

Counting with his parents, Korkie was 39 when his father died. He's now he's 47, the age on his face roughened by desert life, giving him more wrinkles and years than he should have.

The marshal sighs, he was a boy the last time he saw her, now he's a man.

"I haven't heard that name for a long time, ba'vodu", Cobb smiles at her and now Bo-Katan is sure of it, it's her sister's same smile

*

And that I was hoping it was just a courtesy visit, but there never was any courtesy with you. Just duty and struggle,” sighs Cobb taking a long swig of spochtka, “Why do you need me? From the rumors that reach me of your war quite a few Clan have joined Mando and his cause".

"Do you know about his role as Mand'alor?".

"I try to stay informed, I never thought the past would come back to haunt me here too. I've tried to erase it and stay away from it".

Bo laughs shaking his head, "You're a terrible liar and a hypocrite. If you really didn't care, you wouldn't be listening to anything Mandalorian news and you wouldn't have taken Fett's armor beyond your need".

Cobb opens his mouth ready to argue, but then closes it forcefully baring his teeth. Why did he always find the right spots to hit him? Even his mother had a great talent in this.

"I don't want to go back for a people who allowed a woman like my mother to die, in a sense they killed her. And the Mandalorians never change, they are always there ready to go back to old habits and violence. They don't know how to do anything else".

Bo-Katan shakes her head, "Not all Mandalorians are like that, not even yours Mando or you would never have given him Fett's armor back."

"Why are you here, aunt?", Cobb cuts short.

"Don't you know?", the red-haired woman looks into his eyes, "Many remember you and your actions against Maul and some consider you the true heir of Mandalore by birthright. They also remember other feats that you accomplished in those years and you were just a kid, imagine what you could do now".

*

Cobb grimaces and bites his tongue not sure how to answer her. If there's one thing he wants to keep from each other it's the life of Korkie Kryze with the life of Cobb Vanth.

"This belongs to you, bury it or sell it. Do with it what you will, but I ask you only one thing, think about it".

Bo-Katan gets up from his seat, not giving him time to retort, "No one knows I came here, no one knows you are alive and deeply connected with the marshal of Freetown."

She puts on her helmet and nods to him, "Glad to see you again, Korkie. I'm leaving in a couple of hours. The rest is up to you."

Cobb waits for her to come out then sigh, now knowing that she is alive and doing what she has always done: fight.

His gaze rests on the bag and biting his lip, he opens it. There within it is his condemnation and his hope.

*

Quick and accurate Blaster shots echo through the hall and then lights in some corners of the large room explode, sending glass shards and sparks falling.

A sudden silence falls between the fighting, the movements frozen in alert to await any new danger. The Nite Owls make their appearance. Din was wondering what had become of them, but something is not right.

The blue, white and silver group commando has red armor with blue decorations and the Kryze house symbol is painted all over the chest in black, on the right shoulder pad there is a familiar symbol in white.

Din has never seen this armor and probably never seen this man who leads the group of the most feared Mandalorians in the galaxy. Bo-Katan joins him, each of them wearing helmets and holding their heads up with pride.

Grogu watches him with his mouth open and stretching his fingers towards him, Din doesn't know it's for some form of greeting or a call for attention.

The fact remains that silence remains in the great hall, while all helmets and faces are turned towards the group and the footsteps of the Nite Owls echoes through the walls like the beating of hammers in a mining tunnel.

“I return after 30 years of exile, following the voices of a faint hope for our people”, the voice echoes through the room, pitched neither too high nor too low.

The distorted voice from the helmet sounds familiar to Din's ears, but he's not sure who he belongs to or who resembles him.

"And here's what I find, massiff dazzling and biting each other".

*

"I know who you are, Korkie Kryze."

The pronunciation of the name unleashes groans of surprise and whispers among the other Mandalorian, while the Nite Owls are left behind in silence, including Bo-Katan.

"You judge us, but where have you been for the past 30 years? I understand you fled after the collapse of Darth Maul's business in Sundari"

If Din was curious before the stranger, now he has a complete interest in him. He didn't know there was another Kryze out there, what connection did he have with Bo-Katan? Is he a brother or a cousin?

"That's like The Armorer, I went into exile because I wanted to clear my mind about everything that happened then. It had to process a deep mourning that circumstances didn't allow me to focus on," explains Korkie calmly, "But there have been some events over the next 15 years that prevented me from knowing the fate of my people or what was happening in the universe. I fought my way to protect people in a place where there was no justice and kindness, I pretended that the past didn 't exist and neither did the blood that runs through my veins".

Korkie hadn't hidden the hatred in those words.

"And why this behavior?", Din does not realize that he has spoken, until the man in red does not turn his visor towards him.

“I hated my people for what happened to Satine Kryze,” he says sincerely and bluntly.

*

"The reason I'm here is you, Din Djarin".

Din doesn't know why, he's faced Dark Troppers or fearsome bounty hunters and imposing creatures, but now he shivers from the weight of that gaze.

Grogu looks out from the stage stretching his hands in Korkie's direction as if he wanted to get his attention, he has never behaved like this with anyone.

The Mandalorian in red, though he doesn't stop looking at Din, moves his hand to take something from one of the pockets on his belt.

"I'm not here for that cursed weapon or to ask you for a duel", he speaks bluntly and takes a chocolate bar out of his pocket.

Grogu's eyes light up as the treat is placed between his tiny fingers, but before he grabs it the little boy strokes Korkie's hand with affection.

Din is surprised by the small gesture of generosity and even more so when the stranger in red strokes his son's head with affection. He did all of this without taking his eyes off the Mand'alor.

"We have mutual friends, Din Djarin, whom I asked about you" .

"Ashoka Tano and Cobb Vanth", he adds resolutely placing his hands on his hips, in that damn familiar posture.

*

"But I want you to know one thing", Korkie's tone is stern, "If you go astray, I won't hesitate to kill you."

There is a heavy silence between the two, Grogu is completely indifferent to the threat that his new favorite has pronounced towards his father.

Korkie huffs a laugh, "Maybe I was too harsh, killing is a bit extreme, sorry".

Din smiles back, "If our roles were reversed, I would have said the same thing".

"I'm glad to know that we understand each other, but the threat remains, I'll kick your ass if you behave inappropriately towards our people or other peoples".

"Roger it, Kryze".

“Call me Cob… Korkie”, the man in red speaks so quickly that Din isn't sure he said anything wrong.

"Call me Din, Korkie".