#trying to guess who choreographed which act without looking at the credits

[kyoupann]

Some odorites did the ACT motion for the vocaloid part of Cho Party

00:35 The Everlasting  Future / レノ＠自傷P (ACT. Melochin) *Odorites dancing in this: Ashibuto Penta, Asupara, Kamenliar-217, Tei☆in! Mariyan, Miume, Melochin, Lilia, ATY, Ry☆ , Pinopi, and Aikawa Kozue

02:10 ダンスロボットダンス / ナユタン星人 (ACT. Melochin) 03:48 キレキャリオン / ポリスピカデリー (ACT. ATY) 05:06 厨病激発ボーイ / れるりり (ACT. Ry☆ ) 06:24 DAY BREAK FRONTLINE / Orangestar (ACT. ATY) 07:47 二次元ドリームフィーバー / Polyphonic Branch (ACT. 217 and Sacchasso) 09:10 インビジブル / kemu (ACT. 217 and Sacchasso) 11:34 チェチェ・チェック・ワンツー / 和田たけあき(くらげP) (ACT. Manako) 13:27 はやくそれになりたい / キノシタ (ACT. Ashibuto Penta ) 16:01 バンドメンバー紹介 (ACT. Ashibuto Penta ) 17:38 透明エレジー / n- buna ( ACT. Manako ) 19:13 神のまにまに / れるりり (ACT. Miume) 21:18 フィクサー / ぬゆり (ACT. Miume) 23:17 Calc. / ジミーサムP (ACT. Usuke, Miume) 25:21 ロミオとシンデレラ / doriko (ACT. Miume , Asupara) 28:31 歌に形はないけれど / doriko (ACT. ATY) 31:44 Packaged / kz (ACT. ATY)

32:46 Tell Your World / kz (ACT. ATY. Special Thanks: Tei☆in! ) *Odorites dancing in this: Ashibuto Penta, Asupara, Kamenliar-217, Tei☆in! Mariyan, Miume, Melochin, Lilia, ATY, Ry☆ , Pinopi, and Aikawa Kozue

[tennessoui]

oh my god literally every single prompt on that list is gold and i'd love to see your obikin take for all of them. hmmm... if i had to choose i guess first 13. co-stars au?? thank you lots of love !!!

ah bless!! thank you so much!! i'm slowly working my way through most of the prompts on that list so you might see many many more before I'm done with my ask box. I think after two more, I'll put em on ao3 to keep em more organized too. this has been soooo fun!!

13. Co-Stars AU(/7. Fake Relationship AU)(2.5 k)

“No.”

“Ani, darling, you can’t say no.”

“Don’t call me that. And secondly, I can. I just did. This is my personal life, the company has no control over that.”

“While you’re filming its movie and it’s giving you money, you’ll actually find that it does, Anakin.”

Anakin sits down heavily on the bench outside his trailer, leaning forward until he can put his head in his hands. He wants to run his fingers through the mess on his head, but they’re in between takes right now and the make-up department will definitely kill him if they have to fix him up again.

“Asajj, please. You know how hard it was to get to come out as bisexual. If the first person I date after that is a woman, no one will remember! It’ll just be completely erased, and I’ll be Anakin Skywalker, Playboy Actor again.”

“But you do like women,” Asajj points out. “So either way, you’d be confirming your sexuality.”

Anakin sighs and leans his head back against the metal of the trailer. “And it would be different if I was actually in love with Padme, but she’s just my co-star and--”

“Anakin, she’s your co-star. You’re in a blockbuster movie where you dramatically save her life and then kiss her as the credits roll. This is just business. You like her. You’re friends. Think of it less like dating, and more like going to grab lunch together. And coffee. Maybe a fancy dinner. Several times a week.”

“For how long?” Anakin asks, resigned and despairing and hating the fact that he ever got into acting.

Asajj sounds relieved. “Just until the movie’s out and sales are doing well.”

That could be months. That would be months. “And I have to?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

Anakin doesn’t say it’s fine. It doesn’t feel like it is fine.

“They’re not looking for anything to be confirmed. If asked about your relationship with Padme, tell them you think she’s a great woman and you’re enjoying spending time with her. No comment on any sort of serious relationship.”

“Because a break-up afterwards might hurt the chances for a sequel?” Anakin asks drily.

“Exactly! We’ll get you a head for the business yet, Anakin. Okay, I have to go, but I’ll send you the information now, just so you know what you’ll be expected to do. We’re thinking a dinner tomorrow to start things off strong, and then slow afterwards!”

She hangs up before he can say anything else and he slumps back boneless against the metal trailer. God.

It’s not that he doesn’t like Padme. Ventress is right. They were friends before this project and Anakin knows they’ll be friends after as well. They genuinely get along, and it’s probably one of the reasons Anakin was cast in such a big name production: the chemistry between them when they’re acting is undeniable. She’s one of his favorite people in the entire industry.

“Anakin?” One of his other favorite people in the entire industry asks hesitantly from in front of him. “Are you alright?”

“No,” he says.

“May I sit?”

“Yeah,” he says.

Like he’d ever turn Obi-Wan Kenobi away.

“Are you wearing your costume?” he asks, without opening his eyes. Obi-Wan’s playing the villain of the movie, and Anakin has a hard time focusing on anything else when Obi-Wan’s around him wearing that skin-tight white turtleneck and cape combination, with his hair slicked back and fake glasses perched on his nose.

Obi-Wan sounds amused. “No, I’m finished for the day. Heading home now. You don’t have to see how silly I look today.”

Anakin smiles slightly, despite everything. In one of his better acting moments, he’d told Obi-Wan that his costume was distracting because it looked so funny on him. Really, it was just hot.

(Of course, Obi-Wan had taken his criticism seriously and gone to the director and the costume department. They had decided that it would make Obi-Wan’s character more threatening if he pushed up his sleeves in almost every scene to reveal heavily tattooed forearms. Anakin had hated himself and his big stupid mouth for days afterwards.)

“Is...there anything I can do to help, Anakin? I hate to see you like this,” Obi-Wan places a hand gently on Anakin’s knee, and Anakin has to fight a shiver at the touch.

They’d met at the script-reading for the movie, a handful of months ago. Anakin had set two clocks in his head the moment their hands grasped each other and Obi-Wan smiled charmingly up at him. “So you’re the one to kill me?” He’d winked. “Tall order.”

One clock signified the weeks it would take for him to fall in love with the older man. The starting number was pitifully small, but Anakin had been watching Obi-Wan’s movies and interviews for years before meeting him. He’d known something about the man, which of course had paled in comparison to knowing the man himself. They’d spent two weeks choreographing the steps of the final fight scene, just the two of them in a repurposed ballet studio.

Looking back, Anakin isn’t sure how he’d survived. And he had never wanted it to end.

Which is the other clock, still ticking down in his head. The moment filming ends, and they go their separate ways. They’ll probably keep in touch, but Anakin won’t see him constantly, won’t be able to lean into the weight of Obi-Wan’s hand on his shoulder, his knee, sometimes even on his cheek when he leans down in between takes to tell him how good of a job he’s done.

“Anakin?”

“Sorry,” Anakin snaps to the present. “Sorry. I was in my head. I. I don’t think so, no.”

“Oh,” Obi-Wan says, tensing his hand as if he’s planning to remove it, which Anakin wouldn’t appreciate in the slightest.

“My agent says that the executives want me to date Padme. To drum up hype for the movie. Because I guess people will think it must be good if the co-stars start fucking each other?” He runs a hand across his face. “Um. Sorry, excuse my language.”

“Anakin, I’m forty-one, I think I’ve heard someone say fuck before,” Obi-Wan sounds amused again.

“Yeah, I just. Don’t want to? I guess maybe--I mean you probably didn’t see, but I came out as bisexual a year ago, and I haven’t dated anyone since, and I just know the way the rags will write about me and Padme if we’re seen together. And it’ll be like I just. Never came out.”

Obi-Wan makes a sympathetic noise but doesn’t interrupt. It’s one of the reasons Anakin loves talking to him.

“And my agent just sent me this contract, or I don’t know, list of things I have to do because there’s no way for me to get out of this and it just makes me feel trapped. But they don’t even want me to confirm if we're dating or not dating, they just want to create rumors about it, but it’s my life. I want to do what I want to do with my life, date who I want to date.”

“Do you...have anyone you want to date?” Obi-Wan asks, hand stilling from where he’s been casually rubbing circles on Anakin’s knee.

“No,” Anakin says too quickly and then grimaces. Does he really get paid for acting? He’s always so terrible at lying.

Obi-Wan hums. “I could...take a look at whatever papers your agent sent you?” He suggests. “I’m obviously not really an expert, but I have been in the business a fair bit longer than you.”

“You’re not that old,” Anakin responds by rote, but hesitates, curious despite himself. “You wouldn’t mind?”

“I’ve nothing planned tonight except to have a glass of wine and pet my cat, Anakin. It would be a pleasure to help you any way I could.”

“Okay,” Anakin says, reaching out to lay his hand gently on top of Obi-Wan’s. He’s never done that before, never responded so openly to Obi-Wan’s touches. It’s an amazing thrill.

Obi-Wan flips his hand around until they’re holding hands, basically. In the middle of a public area. God, Anakin’s letting his crush get the best of him when Obi-Wan isn’t even gay. “Thank you,” he says, standing up and pulling away from the older man. It’s the right thing to do. The last thing he wants is for Obi-Wan to think he’s...predatory.

A harried looking crew member spots him as he stands and gestures to him to get back to the set. He smiles ruefully at Obi-Wan who gives him an unreadable expression but also a soft goodbye.

Later, in between takes, he forwards Obi-Wan the emails Asajj sent him, both the papers and the message at the top that says “dress nice for tomorrow at Delfino’s!” followed by a little smiley face he can’t believe she’d ever mean.

He knows nothing’s going to come of it, but. But he has to try.

----

Padme’s dressed to the nines in front of him. He’d compliment her outfit, but he’s already complimented her hair and her make-up, and he thinks she’ll scream if he continues to act as stilted as he’s being now.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs quietly after the waiter leaves with their drink orders. “I know I’m being--awkward. I just.”

They’re seated in the middle of the restaurant, and Anakin knows there’s two paps already outside, taking pictures through the windows. The rest will have arrived by the time they pay the bill and leave. It’s a circus and he’s the main event.

“I understand,” Padme responds, the angel that she is. “I don’t particularly want to be doing this either.”

Anakin presses his hand to his chest, jokingly wounded. “What are you trying to say, Padme, my beloved, my dearest?”

She laughs and he does too, but in the back of his head he can hear the sound of a camera’s shutter clicking. Everything feels fake, and he feels like he’s about to crawl out of his skin.

A hand lands on his shoulder with startling familiarity and for a second he thinks it’s a very brave member of the wait-staff, before Obi-Wan Kenobi is swinging into his field of vision, pulling up a chair from god knows where and sitting right in between Anakin and Padme, never once removing his hand from Anakin’s jacket.

“Sir--” someone says in distress, “This is a two-person table.”

Obi-Wan raises an eyebrow and looks down at the table. “Well it certainly can fit three, so I would go as far as to say that tonight it can be a three-person table. Anakin, what did you order to drink?”

“The house white,” Padme supplies when Anakin makes no move to respond, instead choosing to gape at Obi-Wan like a fish out of water.

“Excellent choice, darling,” Obi-Wan says, rubbing at his upper arm absent-mindedly. “I’ve never been here, tell me. Do you serve a good seafood dish?”

The waiter stammers. “We have an acclaimed oyster platter, sir--”

“Oysters?” Obi-Wan smiles at the man, all teeth. “The aphrodisiac? What are you trying to get these kids in the mood for?”

Anakin blushes. “Obi-Wan!” He hisses, aghast. Obi-Wan’s eyes cut to him for a second before he smirks back at the waiter.

“I’ll take the oysters for the main course,” he says dismissively.

Somehow it’s that sentence that tips Anakin off, more than anything else he’s done tonight. Obi-Wan spends hours talking to the people that run the crafts table. He would never be so cold or rude naturally. He’s...playing a character, one that Anakin recognizes as being the villain from their movie (although without all the blood and murder).

Anakin only recedes into personas when he’s nervous about something. Can the same be said for Obi-Wan?

Padme, at least, looks amused. “Hello, Obi-Wan,” she says. “I see you’ve decided to crash our very romantic date.”

“Well that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Obi-Wan replies, turning to face her but keeping his hand on Anakin, although it slides down to rest on the crook of his arm. “I had Anakin send me the paperwork, mild curiosity, you know how it is, and I realized the strangest thing while I was reading over it.”

“Oh?” Padme asks.

“It never states which co-star Anakin should be seen with, just that he must be seen with a leading actor. And I don’t want to focus on the numbers here, of course, but in the rough-cut of the movie, I have thirty-four minutes of screentime. And you, my dear, have thirty-two and fifteen seconds.”

“Tragic,” Padme says, taking a sip of her water. "You may be considered more of a leading actor than I am."

“Certainly,” Obi-Wan gives her a friendly smile. Anakin is still stuck on the fact that Obi-Wan is here, that he read the paperwork, that he’s arguing semantics for the purpose of--of--

“And I suppose you’re here to offer yourself as a replacement?” Padme asks, leaning her head on her hand as she watches the two of them.

“Only if Anakin wouldn’t mind,” Obi-Wan says, turning to face him.

Anakin isn’t sure what he’s thinking right now. “But you’re not interested in men.”

“I am,” Obi-Wan says.

“But...you’re not interested in me.”

“I am,” Obi-Wan says.

“You are?”

“Excuse me,” Padme says. “I’m going to go to the restroom.”

“We’ll wait to order until you come back,” Obi-Wan reassures her, without taking his eyes off of Anakin.

Anakin bites his lip and hesitantly brings his hand up to sit palm up on the table. Obi-Wan doesn’t hesitate to intertwine their fingers again, like they had been just yesterday.

“I’m a very private person, Anakin,” Obi-Wan says quietly, all traces of any sort of persona dropped from his voice. “I’ve never come out, never wanted to. But I was so proud that you had when you did. And I--well. I suppose. You already get to fake-kiss Padme on screen, I thought that perhaps you’d like to try to fake-kiss someone else for a change.”

Anakin ducks his head and gathers his courage. He can’t not ask. A fake relationship with Padme would be awful, but one with Obi-Wan? That would be torture. Cruel and unusual punishment. He’s still reeling from the information that apparently Obi-Wan does like men and apparently he likes Anakin enough to come out for him.

But does he like Anakin enough to touch him and mean it? He has to know. He looks up at Obi-Wan’s earnest face from beneath his eyelashes. “What if I want to real-kiss you?”

Obi-Wan blinks, and a smile breaks out across his face. “Then you don’t even need to have to ask, darling. Kiss me all you want, if you’re okay with a clingy old man in your bed.”

“Not that old,” Anakin argues, smiling so hard he’s afraid his face will crack in two. “But I don’t want to kiss you tonight.”

Obi-Wan turns solemn, although his grip on Anakin remains tight. “We can go as slow as you’re comfortable with.”

“Oh, you can have me later,” Anakin says, waving his free hand in the air. “I just don’t want our first kiss to be for the cameras.”

Obi-Wan catches Anakin’s palm and brings it up to kiss lightly. “You’re right, Anakin. That should just be for you and me.”

The rough brush of his lips over his skin causes Anakin to shiver. He’s never felt so on edge, as if his body is a live-wire. “Good thing you ordered the oysters,” he mumbles, blushing bright red as Obi-Wan laughs loud enough to fill the whole restaurant with its sound.

[thestarminstrel]

as requested, i am now considering figure skater au. would love to hear more thoughts on said au 👀

ohohoho 👀 let me absolutely indulge you on my nonsense

so i do have a sketch page with this au but i'll briefly summarize it here:

(also! if anyone wants to borrow this au plotline or concept, please feel free to :D just credit me and send me what you make!)

- nick is a hockey player for kingston lions and seiji is an olympic level figure skater

- they both use the same rink at kingston, and this ofc is where our conflict arises

- seiji frankly believes that nick's team is terrible since they have won 0 championships and calls nick "zero". because of this, he often begins his own practice early or lets it run late -- cutting into the hockey team's time reservation

- nick has tried numerous times to get the staff to do something but like, tf are they gonna do? seiji is olympic level and they don't wanna be the idiots who denied seiji his practice space and loose revenue (tho it should be noted that seiji is competing for the grand prix in this one -- not the olympics). so nick begins calling seiji "princess" since he's a giant brat :)

- the two don't get along at all -- and i mean at all. they're livid whenever they run into each other and are at each other's throats

- however, coach williams thinks she can get the boys to the connecticut state championships. since nick is the center (position that plays both offensive and defensive), she calls in a favor with dmytro and asks him to work with nick on his form so he can be extra speedy fast.

- guess who dmytro also coaches? that's right. seiji :)))

- they both find this out when dmytro introduces the two and says he doesn't have time to be coaching them separately. they are pissed to say the least (when nick complains to williams, she makes him do suicides which stops him from complaining anymore).

- couple weeks pass, seiji and nick are still not happy but they just barely manage to exist on the same ice. the kingston lions have their first game soon and seiji has first set of qualifying competitions to get through. the hockey team is getting their full practices in, and seiji just goes for some extra practice after they finish up -- despite the ice not being smooth enough for his liking.

- one evening, nick stayed later to sharpen his skates using the rink's equipment. as he exits the locker room though, he hears the sound of skates against ice and assumes that it can only be seiji, so he decides to sneak a peek. he's only seen portions of seiji's routine since he's super secretive about it.

- and his routine is absolutely gorgeous. nick's jaw hangs open the whole time, and he can't deny that seiji really is a talented skater. like he's never really given a shit about the sport, but he can see seiji's passion for it with every turn and contouring of his body. his face too, usually scrunched up in one of displeasure or superiority, was lax and blissful.

- nick disappears quietly, seiji being none the wiser, and he goes home haunted by the images of seiji dancing and realizing that this giant prick is actually kind of beautiful.

- fast forward a week and nick has his first game. seiji is pissy bc it means that he won't get his evening practice, and nick makes the snap decision to invite seiji to his game. they're both surprised by it -- perhaps even more so when seiji accepts with a sneer. if only to prove his point that the lions are terrible.

- few hours later and seiji is in the stands: displeased at being jostled around so much by so many fans (which he is surprised that the kingston lions even have), but settles in to watch the game.

- nick is a speed monster on the ice, dmytro's coaching clearly having paid off, and the lions take home a 6-2 victory. and seiji isn't sure why, but for some odd reason, zero looks almost handome (in a rugged way) under the stadium lights with his wide smile and excited cheering with his teammates.

- he also goes home thinking of someone he was sure he would only think thoughts of malice of.

- another week passes by and seiji's first competition comes up. by some stroke of uncharacteristic brashness, he invites nick to come watch it. he fully accepts nick to reject the invitation, but surprisingly nick does accept it.

- seiji competes, places first, and nick sees the whole thing. even got seiji a bouquet of congratulatory roses and daphnes ("figured you'd win, princess. after all, there has to be some talent underneath that bratty and stuck-up personality of yours.").

- seiji immediately puts the flowers in water when he gets home -- if only to not let a gorgeous gift go to waste (he absolutely does not press a rose and a few daphnes when they start to wilt, not at all).

- more time goes on, the lions make it to the playoffs and seiji is preparing for the first competition of the grand prix series. the two of them are sort of warmed up to each other? def not best buddies, but they're not trying to tear each other's throats out with their skates. nick has been sneaking glances at seiji skating during that time -- his favorite time is during the evening when it seems that seiji skates for himself. seiji on the other hand, has gone to almost to every single one of nick's games without nick being aware of it.

- however, the plot must to go on, and seiji catches nick during one of those evenings nick stayed behind to watch seiji. nick fully expects seiji to blow up at him -- and for them to loose what tedious progress they had made -- but instead he gets an extremely rare blush out of the skater.

- for the sake of time, seiji is skating a different routine after hours and after being pressed about it, he reveals it is about a certain someone who he definitely likes a little more than just an acquaintance. and it's a routine he choreographed himself.

- nick's a bit "woah holy crap" with this information and it does pester his mind for a bit, wondering who tf this person is. but he does say that it's prob his fav routine of seiji's to watch (which proceeds to pester seiji's brain).

- then we get to the playoffs. the score is 7-7 and there's two minutes left on the clock. nick makes a final push through his stamina and get the last goal right before the clock strikes 0 -- making the score 8-7. however, nick falls on his arm, hard.

- nick breaks his arm, and he's out for the rest of the season. nick is obviously very, very upset about it.

- seiji does visit nick in the hospital before he hops on a plane to the grand prix final (since he made it there whee), and explains he saw what happened since he was there. nick interprets the visit as an act of petty charity and lashes out, taking out his anger and frustration on seiji.

- seiji lashes right back, and the two exchange some pretty hurtful blows. the thing that's important to take away is that nick essentially says that seiji's success as a skater only rests on the choreography of dmytro and his coaching. seiji storms out in a rage, and nick is left feeling like shit.

- a few days later, nick realizes that it's the free skate day of the finals and turns on the tv to the channel -- accepting that the reason he feels like shit is bc he misses seiji's skating.

- however, seiji's free skate is apparently very different from what was expected of him according to the announcers -- but nick recognizes it. it's the same routine that seiji does in his evening practices.

- seiji does place first and wins the grand prix finals (which he previously lost bc of a certain blond skater but that's a plot line for another time). nick realizes that he has to apologize, even if seiji said some nasty things, but what he said was seriously a d*ck thing to say.

- few days later, nick is discharged, and he spends every evening in the rink, waiting on the benches for seiji. who does eventually come after the grand prix final celebrations and resting for a few days. he decides to go for a quick evening skate to clear his mind of a certain hockey player.

- upon seeing nick, seiji is filled with rage and he gives nick the cold shoulder. whenever nick calls for him from across the rink, seiji pretends not to hear him. until eventually, nick decides to take matters in his own hands and make his way across the ice in his sneakers.

- obviously, this idea goes terribly, and he does fall a few feet away from seiji, who finally stops to give him the attention he's been asking for -- fully expecting an argument.

- nick apologizes for what he said and how wrong he was for saying it. he also mentions how lucky the person the routine is for must be. seiji is flabbergasted, not expecting this at all, and reveals that the routine was for nick, all this time. now it's nick's turn to be flabbergasted af :)

- nick starts laughing, which makes seiji extremely confused bc why tf is nick laughing since he was expecting rejection. but nick merely coaxes seiji down and kisses him softly -- and seiji understands.

- the lions do withdraw from the championship since nick is out of commission. they return the next season and do win first in a complete underdog fashion in case anyone is curious. seiji places first in the olympic figure skating event because he's seiji.

and just some other silly notes:

- eugesse is something that happens in this (much to nick's dismay)

- jesse and nick are half-brothers but they find that out down the line

- the lions are composited of the weight lifting bros and the one friend from nick's junior high who remains unnamed

[marvella15]

Astaire & Rogers Rewatch Part 9: The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle

• It’s 1939. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ partnership was box office gold and literally kept RKO from bankruptcy. But the magic has fizzled out and both actors are ready to move on. So for their last musical together you pick… a historical re-telling of another famous dancing duo?

This probably made sense at the time because the Castles were well known and who else would possibly play them in a biopic but the best-known dancing duo of the time. But it makes for a very blasé film.

• I’ll say this for The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, the relationship between Astaire and Rogers’ characters is far more relaxed. They’re a unit for most of the film, which is a nice change. A lot of their personal friendship and connection seeps into their scenes, I think. 

The relationship also feels like a glimpse at what a real-life partnership between Astaire and Rogers might’ve looked like. In her autobiography, she theorizes that she and Astaire might’ve become a serious item had she stayed in New York and they’d continued dating. But instead, she went off to Hollywood.

• Apparently, Irene Castle was a bit of a nightmare for Rogers to deal with. She was incredibly nit-picky about the clothes Rogers wore because she (Irene) was a fashion icon in the 1910s, and since this was a tribute to her and her beloved husband, she was intent on getting her way. 

Irene was also upset with the casting of white actor Walter Brennan as her faithful servant, Walter, who in real life was black. Irene and Vernon were responsible for making African American music like ragtime and jazz popular among whites and traveled with a black orchestra so the whitewashing of Walter possibly felt extra insensitive. 

• It’s likely that without the Castles there would have been no Astaire/Rogers. The Castles helped legitimize “close dancing,” which was previously seen as scandalous, because they were so classy and respectable. They moved dancing along and then Astaire and Rogers moved it even further. 

• Our characters/actors: Vernon Castle (Fred Astaire), Irene Castle (Ginger Rogers), Walter (Walter Brennan), Maggie Sutton (Edna May Oliver)

• I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: don’t waste your time trying to make someone like you who is not interested and terrible. Just move on.

• Ah, the 1910s, when men wore suits to the beach. 

• Is that dog the same one that Rogers had in Shall We Dance?

• Rescuing a dog at the beach is a special kind of meet-cute. Being harangued into spending the rest of the day with the other person’s overbearing family is less cute. Watching the woman you just met perform a weird af “Yama Man” routine while dressed as a clown is just freaky. 

Vernon is rather high and mighty about being a “theatre actor” and Irene being an amateur when he’s the second comic in terrible slapstick shows. In fact, his comedy routine is horribly unfunny.

• Astaire does look rather right in the 1911 attire though and the peck on the cheek Vernon gives Irene is quite sweet. 

• I really enjoy how well they look together when practicing at her house.

• The lyrics “I can see myself doing the things I never could do, It’s true, But only when you’re in my arms” is fitting for Astaire, especially to sing to Rogers.

• The kiss they share after getting engaged is sweeter than the kiss in Carefree. Fight me.

• I like how naturally she reaches for his hand and the way his thumb strokes her fingers. There’s a lot of quiet intimacy between them in this film. 

• They really do a great job with the audition dance. You can see Astaire and Rogers themselves peek through when he spins her a few times. Their faces are just lit up. Home movies from this dance show they were having a pretty fun time. 

• The idea that no one would pay money to see a man dance with his own wife is ludicrous. Obviously, the Castles were a successful married dancing team. But more than that, you’re telling me that if Astaire and Rogers were married irl no one would want to see them dance together? 

• I like how when asked whose idea it is that they dance together, they respond in unison, “Ours,” and then glance at each other. She turns back to the proprietor right after but he keeps gazing at her adoringly. 

• The actress Edna May Oliver plays Maggie Sutton but all I can ever think of when I see her is Lady Catherine de Bourgh, whom she played in the 1940 Pride & Prejudice film. 

Fun fact: The Castles real-life manager was an openly out lesbian named Elizabeth Marbury. One guess why that isn’t included in this 1939 film. 

• The way Vernon (Astaire) watches her while she opens the present is very affectionate and loving. 

• “Dance with me” is a line that’s repeated a few times in this film and it’s lovely. 

• The Castle Walk is the move they invent to dance quietly and it was all the rage. By the time the Castles returned to New York the following year, they were massive celebrities. As we see in the dance montage, they popularized many forms of dance including the tango and foxtrot.

Speaking of the tango, Astaire gives Rogers a few flirtatious up and down looks during that dance. 

• The dances in this film are all based on the Castles’ dances so it’s not the same as when Astaire rigorously choreographed routines specifically for himself and Rogers. However, they still manage to make the dances engaging and uniquely theirs. 

• In “The Maxixe” dance, you can again see Astaire and Rogers as themselves peek through the acting as they grin at each other in a familiar way and he watches her appreciatively during some of the moves. 

• While on the train, they sit side by side and his arm is looped through hers so his hand can rest atop hers. Sweet domesticity that we rarely get to see between Astaire and Rogers’ characters. 

• When he explains to their agent that they want to slow down, he starts out by saying, “We’re in love…” Rogers turns to look at him and doesn’t look away for several seconds. 

• Astaire gives a particularly athletic performance for the Royal Flying Corp. There are a lot of jumps and energetic moves and he nails them all. 

• Irene was right that Vernon would make a good soldier. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1917 and was later promoted to captain.

• Their dance when he’s in his uniform is another lovely duet (you can see some rare behind the scene footage above). It’s not like anything in their previous films, particularly because it is much more demur. But there are several gorgeous moments such as when he’s looking at her and she turns to face him and smiles softly. There’s also a stunning part where he lifts her from behind using only their connected hands and she leans back into his chest, laying her head on his shoulder. 

(gif credit)

• Vernon’s deadly crash was only deadly to him. The student pilot in the plane wasn’t seriously injured and neither was the pilot in the other plane. Vernon was 30 years old.

• In case it’s unclear, Vernon gave a list of songs for the orchestra to play and they are all songs that were meaningful to him and Irene. The ones we hear are: “By the Beautiful Sea,” which was playing the day they met, “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” which he danced to at the train station, and “Only When You're in My Arms,” which he sang to her before proposing.

• And so the Astaire/Rogers partnership at RKO comes to an end as their characters dreamily dance into the horizon together. But don’t worry. Thanks to Gene Kelly’s broken ankle and Judy Garland’s unavailability, we’ll get to see Astaire and Rogers on screen together one last time. The Barkleys of Broadway is next and last. 

[movienotesbyzawmer]

October 22: Friday the 13th - The Final Chapter

(previous notes: Friday the 13th Part 3)

I'm on movie number four in this eight movie project, and for the first time I'll be seeing one of these movies that I haven't ever seen before! When I do my watch-a-movie-and-take-notes projects, I generally do them for movies I've already seen before so that it's not too frustrating to simultaneously watch & type. But I'll make an exception for these Friday the 13th movies in light of the fact that they suck.

I remember this being out at my local theater in 1984, when I was 13, and even thinking it might be fun to see it, but I never got around to it.

It really must have been bittersweet for audiences at the time, knowing that this would be the final chapter. Each time they had a positive moment of enjoyment with this movie, they had to remember, "oh, I'm really going to miss this. It shall all be gone. Once the lights come back on, the days of new Friday the 13th movies will never return."

unless

Okay, watching this now for the first time ever.

Again beginning with a rehash. This time however, it's a montage of moments from the first two movies. Wait, now here's some of the third movie. But it's all framed by one of the monologues from the second movie. Much shorter and less of a cheap move than the last two movies did.

The title has a new title-plus-mask image… and then THE FINAL CHAPTER arrives to blow that image up with fire and splody-sounds!

The credits promise the likes of Corey Feldman and Crispin Glover, so that's exciting.

Okay, now it looks like we're at the ranch where the third one took place. They're hauling bodies out of the barn & other buildings. It looks like Jason's body is one of the bodies because hockey mask!

Actually, I think that first shot was a long-ish crane shot. Cinematically ambitious I guess.

We don't know yet what happened to the girl at the end of the last one. It's weird because this scene is at night, but the last movie ended with daytime paramedic activity at the ranch. I'm confused. Please help me. Please tell me that it will all be okay.

One of the covered up bodies has stirred! Jason is probably up to his not-be-dead-after-all tricks!

This scene is about a pair of frisky hospital workers in the "cold room" where there is at least one body, plus a television where the girl "just wants to watch the news". But 80s-style aerobics is what's really on the TV. And she kisses him after all and gets quite flirty, but then takes it all back because he is so insensitive or something. They show the aerobics a lot. It's all pelvic and prurient. Then Jason kills the guy with a bone saw and then goes and finds the girl and kills her with something else because diversity.

Then an abrupt cut to daytime joggers in the woods somewhere!

Now we are learning about the family of the joggers. They live in the country where there is a legend of a psycho, so I guess we're in the Crystal Lake area. The youngest child is Corey Feldman and his personality is "likes video games and wears a monster mask while playing them".

Now we are learning about the kids that rented a house across the street. Crispin Glover and another dude are in a car, talking about a girl and they clearly don't know how to have this kind of conversation, and the writers don't know how to pretend like they do so the other guy does a gag about how an invisible computer told him that CG is bad at sex. It is an unappealing intro to these characters. We even know there are a bunch of other people in the car, way too many honestly, but we don't get to know them. Just the two people who talk like broken robots about a woman.

Just to keep the mood where it ought to be, a hitchhiker they drove past gets impaled by Jason!

CF, a tweenager I should point out, is peeping-tom-ing at the canoodling couple in the rented house, and it is interesting to speculate as to whose idea it was for him to act the way he does when he watches them. He bounces excitedly and slams his head repeatedly into a pillow. Whose idea.

Now there's a skinny dipping scene. They definitely have arrived to the point in the series where they feel it's important to show pretty girls without any clothes.

For some reason, CF and the adult older sister drove to where the skinny dipping was happening, but they bolted when they realized that's what it was. There is ch ch ch ch ch ha ha ha ha ha on them as they have car trouble in the woods as they head home, plus also as two of the swimmers are hanging out. But they both turn out to be fakeouts! No one is dying at all! At least we'll always have the hitchhiker. They can't take that away from us.

The fakeout with the CF subplot is that it was just some handsome man that comes along to help. He says he is this deep in the woods because he is hunting for bear. CF totally calls him out! There's no way he's hunting for bear! No one is just like "it is bear hunting season and I am enjoying some leisurely bear hunting time". CF is no fool.

They decide to take Bear Hunter in as a guest for perhaps the afternoon. Because of the bubble of this movie, CF shows the Bear Hunter his monster toys and Bear Hunter shares in his enthusiasm.

0:37:13 - Now we are choking down this awkward scene where the young people are hanging out in their house trying to deliver dialogue that is not consistent with normal human psychology. The gist is that the men want to be sexual with the women but there are subtle social obstacles.

!!! Crispin Glover really is interesting! His screen presence absolutely towers above the rest of the cast, when he reacts unfavorably to being teased. But seriously all these interactions are so painful.

For our next murder project, we have an inflatable boat made of thin, vulnerable rubber for a person to get stabbed through. It requires assuming that Jason's magic powers allow him to just hide under water, waiting for a naked lady to lie down in the boat at night. This project was completed on time and under budget.

Seriously, the most terrifying scenes in this movie are the ones where the sexually frustrated young adults are hanging out and attempting to use words.

Another death just happened because the boyfriend of the recently-killed naked lady went to check on her, found her dead, then was Jason'd with some implements that I couldn't really understand. Something with a handle shoved into him somehow. It is filmed weirdly and then we just move on to Bear Hunter, camping nearby.

This is a disturbing turn… we're back on the uninteresting young adults, and one of them announces that he has found something very interesting! We see that it is old movie reels. They start watching them. It's old, old film of naked people. They laugh and laugh and laugh. Maybe this is art?

Pretty cool visual with this next death, we just see the shadow of Jason coming at her and killing her with a something. Looks cool as a shadow thing, plus it isn't "those stupid characters talking" which is a HUGE bonus.

We're back to CF's family; Mom saw something that startled her but we don't know what, and CF and Big Sister are… driving home in the car? Where were they, why did they drive somewhere, I forget. Maybe they had to run into town to pick up a packet of it-doesn't-matter-we-just-needed-Mom-to-be-alone.

Just like that, Older Sister went looking for Mom, but ends up taking shelter from the rain in Bear Hunter's tent. Bear Hunter, in a very predictable fakeout, slashes a hole in the tent because what is she doing in there anyway.

But we cut back to the young adults and CG gets a very ugly death! He's all "hey where's the corkscrew" and Jason makes his hand be corkscrewed and makes his face be stabbed!

Then he kills one of the other young adults just right afterward by being outside her second floor bedroom window and pulling her out the window SO HARD. Seriously it must be a hard job coming up with different ways to kill them, give them a break.

Back to Bear Hunter; he's fessing up to his true motive which is to hunt Jason. His story is hard to believe, and Big Sister is taking it in very diplomatically.

The one guy in the group of the young adults who is the biggest asshole is also the one most amused by the old films. We see them a lot, these old films they are watching. It is the silent era's version of soft core porn - women dancing naked. Anyway, the asshole's death happens when he gets the idea to be close to the projector screen, enabling Jason to stab him through it and making it look kind of cool and be a scene that ends with the projector-still-running cadence.

New death - guy is taking a post-coital shower and Jason comes in and shoves his arm through the sliding glass shower door thing and very effectively crushes the guy's head against the wall. Then the girlfriend comes in and discovers him; she runs down to the front door, but she can't open it, she just can't open it, it just won't open, and it ends with somehow Jason axe-killing her through the door from outside. They don't show it very well and no one probably ever clearly explained to anyone how it was supposed to work.

1:09:20 - This is followed immediately by a scene that is also poorly choreographed - Bear Hunter returns with Big Sister but it's a fakeout because for some reason they break the glass of the side door to get in, even though CF is right there. They are all frightened as if they know about deaths happening, even though they don't know about the deaths. It's just that the power has been spotty; that’s why things are urgent, as far as they know.

They decide to investigate the house where the young adults are staying. They are gingerly surveying the living room, and they walk right by where the projector screen murder happened, but they see no evidence of that crime.

1:11:55 - Bear Hunter tells the big sister "you stay right here with Corey". I'm pretty sure that just happened. I think he was referring to CF, whose character is not named Corey and who also is not with them.

In a shocking piece of non-linear storytelling, a dog jumps out a window in slow motion. Art. ART.

Jason kills Bear Hunter right in front of Big Sister, and even though his mission in life has been to hunt Jason, Bear Hunter doesn't even fight him off, he just begs Big Sister to run as Jason pounds on him. Big sister does run, but each of the house's exits has a dead person surprise that's too scary for her to go past so she's stuck inside with Jason!

But CF has heard her screaming and comes across the street to be with her. Oh but wait, I think they are actually now back at their house. I missed how that happened. That chase ends with a moment where she has reason to think she might have killed him by hitting him pretty hard with a cathode ray television set with an approximately 15" screen. But no, he changes back from almost-dead to regular-Jason and chases them around some more.

1:21:45 - They must have felt like their secret weapon for this movie was slo-mo thrown-through-a-window situations because Big Sister ends a portion of being chased by Jason by throwing herself through a window and landing painfully on the ground outside. Jason's all "you won this round Big Sister, but I'll be back. This is not The Final Chapter of this story!"

Everyone seems to have wound up back at the young adults' house, and CF has come up with an ingenious idea - he shaves his head to confuse Jason! Then he and Big Sister stab Jason a lot and it's all very gory and climactic.

The way the movie ends is that Jason's body twitches a little on the ground after they mostly kill him, and CF freaks out and stabs Jason many many, many more times! Cut to later on when Big Sister is in a hospital bed being told it will all be okay by some Caucasian men in white coats. They suggest that CF was pretty crazy for a minute there but that will pass. CF comes to give her a hug… but he looks scary! You guys, look, he looks scary! The big finish is that CF has a sinister look on his face. Cut to credits.

We never saw what happened to the Mom. Or the main girl from Part 3. Also it seems like there were some other young adults that just stopped being in the movie. How dare they.

Okay so I am halfway through this ridiculous project. I have watched four of the eight Friday the 13th movies. I watched them all by myself at my home during the COVID-19 pandemic. These challenging times I tell you.

(next: Friday the 13th - A New Beginning)

[katalina27ua]

RAY SHARKEY

"The chemistry between me and Kenny, put together with the dialogue from Eric, David--all the guys, loaned itself to what was happening. Also, any director that would come up would see this on the first day of shooting and get really excited and stretch themselves a little farther. And production stretched themselves for us...a lot. They went the extra mile for us because they saw what was happening and they weren't pulling the plug after fourteen hours. They were giving us that extra half hour to shoot that extra take of that extra scene and everybody was into it."

"We could not have had a better place in time to do it because everybody on the crew, from the craft servicemen to the people in the production office, would all come to the set to watch the scenes being played. And then the screening rooms in LA were packed because they wanted to see it. It was really special. Kenny and I were just going at it. We were having a good time, we knew something was up, and we knew it wasn't going to last a long time so we just continued to do what we were doing. In fact, one interesting thing that happened is that when we were shooting the last episode, that was one of the worst weeks in Vancouver. We all knew Sonny was leaving and me for too, it was really gut-wrenching. I had made a deal to do this movie and I couldn't get any farther away from Vancouver than Greece, you know what I mean? I had already made the deal and it was really solemn. The vibes were thick." We started to shoot the last episode and every hour it would get better and better and better. Specifically what happened is that we shot the last part first. We shot all the exteriors, the chase sequences in the cars, and then we went into the theatre and we stayed in the theatre for five days. We used different parts of the theatre for different sections of the episode, so what we did was shoot all the end stuff first because it was easier to shoot it there. The wild thing is that everyone would come into the theatre, take their seats and watch this play. We were covering it from a lot of different angles because it was so well written that no matter how we played it, it got better and better. Naturally when that happens you shoot the shit out of it which was what was happening take after take. And then this funny thing happened. They had to shoot my death and naturally I had this stunt guy go and get electrocuted and I had to do the closeup. I actually watched myself die. It was really, really strange and really bizarre. Everybody in the crew started crying and it was really heavy. It was over." "The funny thing that happened is that they wanted to shoot an extra episode, so they had to shoot an extra episode the following week and the joke was that we were shooting a ghost. I was not Sonny anymore. I was Ray. Sonny was dead for all of us. We all watched him die and it was really insane." "The other thing that happened is when we shot 'Good Lovin'. We had a director named Robert Iscove and Robbie was a dancer and choreographer, and I being a dancer and a singer, it lent itself to what we did. We didn't have anything laid out on paper, but we would go to the specific sections of the song and set and say, 'Okay, let's break it up into four bars each shot,' and I'd say, 'I'm going to face that way.' We didn't know what we were going to do, but they would roll the camera, roll the song and I would destroy and do whatever in one section of the place and move on to other sections, and really wing it and we had it all together. It was really wild. Nobody had ever done it like that before. That's insane to do that and get away with it, but we were on such a roll at that point." It had come from Eric Blakeney's show, 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' and what had happened is that the show went on as usual, but the last fifteen minutes of the show was the bachelor party and the day after the bachelor party we started shooting the second half. That night we spent the whole day shooting the bachelor party which you never hear of in television. Even Cannell came up, sat at the top of a ladder so he could see the whole thing. Everybody was there and I remember doing that speech in one take and we moved on. By the end of the night we were in a lot of trouble. Everybody was in overtime, but nobody cared. Steven Cannell gave this great speech from on top of the ladder, 'There's magic happening tonight and I want to thank you guys for what you've done for me and what we've done for each other.' He gave this great speech like, 'Go ahead, knock yourselves out,' and everybody was into it. We had a young Canadian crew and they really got spoiled. Rarely in my life do those things happen; rarely are you on the set and looking in the eyes of the crew and you're aware of what's happening. Needless to say, it took six months for me to finally separate from everybody. We were all calling each other all the time. I had not had the opportunity to see the episodes because I was away. I called Kenny and everybody and found out that the show was great." "I really didn't realize the power that it had until I got back to America because I was traveling around and everybody was like, 'Good morning, Mr. Steelgrave.' I remember arriving in the New York airport and people went nuts over me. I was turning around to see who they were goggling over. When the reruns came on it was even worse. Boxes of mail arrived at the office addressed to me. It was insane and crazy time. I thought, 'Wow, we really must have done it' and it's been wild ever since."

"Half the people who are fans caught it on the reruns. CBS put me on this promotional tour which was unprecedented. Nobody ever went on a promo tour for reruns, but the mail was so incredible that we went out and did this tour and people were giving us these Sonnyisms. I was in Brooklyn over the summer and I had this guy come up to me...I always have people come up to me and they're always big fans, they know this and they know that, but this guy knew every line of every show. I'm telling you, I was impressed. He did Sonny better than I did. He knew every line, and I mean obscure lines, he knew all of Vinnie and Sonny's dialogue." "One thing that happened is that Kenny and I worked so closely together that he knew all my lines and I knew all his. So we would do impressions of each other of what we did because we didn't get a chance to watch dailies. We would start doing each other's lines from different episodes, and we would play a game in which we would try to guess what episode the dialogue was coming from. What you really wanted to see was Ray Sharkey doing Vinnie Terranova and Ken Wahl doing Sonny Steelgrave. Then we transcended that and took it to another level. This is something that has to be in the book because it wasn't on film. We were having such a good time and our creative juices were flowing, and in between takes we created these two old guys named Archie and Sam. They were really Sonny and Vinnie, but they were like 90 years old and they farted all the time, had bad manners, loved tits and ass, you know, those kind of guys. They were stuck in an old actors home where they would discuss their days in Vancouver on WISEGUY. Those were the *real* interesting guys." "I got an award from the Viewers for Quality Television and it was unprecedented. I look back at it now and it's really very simple. That's part of the reason I've got Eric Blakeney on my new show, because I understand that these guys understand the guys they were writing about, which was about the human dilemma. They were the ones writing about themes that came out of the Bible that were very simple. That's the truth, you know. They would take things out of the Bible and Eric would say, 'Well, this is Caesar's arc, this is the Caesar week,' or this is Jacob's week or Job's week. And he really would use very simple dilemmas in terms of betrayal, honor, honesty, just real simple things that happened between men and men or men and women. And it all worked for us, because no matter what happened in the scope of things, Vinnie Terranova was a liar and he was not brought up to be a liar. Here he meets this man and they fall in love with each other because of their common denominator: morality. When people become friends, it's like an unwritten law that they know that morally, they're the same person. They know that they would not cross that line and there really isn't a price that they are willing to pay; that they're not for sale, and that makes for a bond of friendship. I think we played with that bond every week. We tried to figure out how far we could take it and the reason that the last two episodes are so powerful is that we took it to the limit. *Betrayal* That's what made it work." "I remember a San Francisco paper that had this great quote. They called us, I don't remember the exact word, but it was real sexy and it dealt with love  between two guys without homosexual overtones. It was the first time you got to see that. It was the first time that two guys got to look at each other with 'Nights in White Satin' in the background, no dialogue and them just looking at each other with no homosexual bullshit. That's a testament to David Burke, Eric Blakeney, Steven Cannell, Steve Kronish, because they wrote the material. Really, all I had to do was act it. I would love to be able to say I deserve all the credit, but that's not true. It was all on paper for me." "Every week I would come down to LA and would battle with these guys about structure, about what we should be talking about, but I would never write dialogue. I would say, 'We should be talking about love and not about bullets.' And they would get that. Kenny and I would fight for different things in Vancouver, but it was never really a fight. It was something that they always understood to be real." "A DEAL'S A DEAL was supposed to show Sonny kicking the dog and I have a knack of kicking the dog and making you feel sorry for me. That's what acting is all about. That's just a little trick that I do, although it's not really a trick. It's something you're trained to do. I was constantly getting that, but listen, there was nothing they could do to get me to perform it a different way. It's not that I was stubborn, but that's just the way it was happening existentially. Hindsight, everybody's a genius. While we were doing it, everybody was just doing the best they could. We shot an alternate ending and I think it was to placate Kenny and I as our swan song together. When we did the episode, Kenny and I were always getting all this fan mail and we were saying, 'The audience wants to see Vinnie and Sonny have a good time. That's what they want so now we have an opportunity to do it.' A DEAL'S A DEAL was a whole new episode, so we figured we could do Sonny and Vinnie on the road. They pick up a girl hitchhiking and they both fall for her and it's guy stuff. Let's get out of the gangster mode and do a friendship episode and they were like, 'No, no, no, no.' They really wanted this episode to make Sonny look bad and it didn't work. What happened, though, is they gave Kenny and I a little crumb, which was that they allowed us to shoot a tag...we shot two tags. One that was in the show you saw, and the other tag was Kenny and I in an empty ballroom at night with two girls we had been up all night with. We were partying and having a good time. The camera would start at the end of the ballroom and eventually end up real close on us. We would laugh, we'd do bumps and grinds with the girls and we'd slow dance with them. And there was one guy up there playing the saxophone and that was it. Kenny and I would look at each other and then at each other's girls and he would get a feel, like kids, and we would laugh at each other. He was with a black girl and I was with a white girl who was like a real show broad. It was really the essence of who these two guys are. We'd look at each other, give each other the high sign and start making out with the girls, and then he walked away with his girl and said, 'I'll see you, Sonny.' It was like real schoolboy stuff. I think it was a little too risque for the guys in LA and I really think it was to placate Kenny and I." "I warned them. I said, 'Don't you get it by now? Nobody is ever going to dislike me. We're eight hours into this show already and it hasn't happened yet. Do you really it's going to happen in one hour? Let's go in the other direction and make it sloppy.' They said, 'But Sonny is a murderer. He's about to kill Patrice.' I said, 'I'm doing it because he deserves it. They're going to love me killing him.' 'No, no, no, no.' Well, sure as shit...." "It did have twinges of THE IDOLMAKER. I think David Burke went and took ideas from it. I remember saying to him that there were a lot of similarities, so what they did was add a subplot about my brother and my feeling bad about him with the rifle. So, again, I wouldn't let them paint me into a corner. As long as you've got the emotional stuff going, you're all right. And I think that in doing all of this, they've really found a way of making old shows on television. If you do back and look at PLAYHOUSE 90, BEN CASEY, and the early detective shows, they're really about people. What we did in the 70's was put in a lot of action and I think if you look at the top ten shows in television today, you'll see that they're people shows. If you write good dialogue and you have good actors, say it, then all you have to do is be on a nice closeup and you can get through an hour or half hour. We've explored that area in the action crime drama genre, whereas it hadn't been explored since the late fifties and early sixties. WISEGUY is an attempt to bring that back to television. I know for me it is. My new series, that's what Eric and I would like to do and nothing less than that." "I've got to tell you, a lot of what you saw in my performance was really Ken Wahl being so in love with Sonny, and he and I being such good friends that he really would give me these little directions. Sonny had most of the dialogue so Kenny was a listener when he was with me. If he had the time to listen he also had the time to see my performance and I would let him direct me. He would and I trusted him. He'd say, 'That take was better, I think you should do it that way,' and he'd give me these little things. He'd say, 'This isn't real, Ray,' Sometimes he wasn't in a scene and he would do that. I knew when I left Vancouver that I had left a little piece of myself with him and vice versa, and it was good that that happened. We probably could have gone on for a few more episodes, but I don't think so." "Once they killed me, it was over. In other words, after the fourth or fifth episode, Kenny and I came down to Stephen Cannell's office and said, 'Listen, we think we've got something. I'd like to stay for a little while.' Stephen said, 'I have sсript commitments, sets are being built, and I've got to bring in this new arc.' He was very nice to Kenny and I, came up to Vancouver one more time, took us out to lunch and explained to us how he would *like* to, but he couldn't take the risk then. From that moment on, I was gone; I knew I was a goner and just moved accordingly." "I was getting so much mail that I had to let people see Sonny again, only as an actor I couldn't come back from the dead. Kenny Wahl had a story that worked out perfectly for him at both levels [White Noise?]. For me, it was just about going up to Vancouver and having a good time before everybody broke before Christmas and it was a reunion. That's really, for me, what it was all about and for Kenny I think it was the same thing. I don't want to take a shot at it in any other direction." "You know, Ken Wahl's whole line in the entire show, the one that made me fall in love with him as an actor was when he said, 'This is about the law, man!' For one moment Sonny believed it. At that moment Sonny looked at him and knew it was over, like all the great heroes throughout history he was just waiting to die. That's the whole deal! That's all David Burke, and suddenly Sonny is talking like Abbie Hoffman and getting away with it." "Another thing that allowed me to know Sonny even better was, for the first time he talked about his old man, and they talked about their fathers. I remember when we were acting it out, I was like choking. I didn't want to cry, so I was choking, holding it in, but whew, it was real heavy. 'Last time I saw my old man he went to buy a cigar.' He's standing there telling Vinnie that even though his father had a bread truck and a route, that really there was no difference between both their fathers. It was *so* poignant. When I hear 'Good Lovin' I can't help but think of that scene; I sing it in my head. I remember we worked for weeks and weeks, David and I, trying to pick out a song. I remember the last one we found was 'Five to one, one to five, no one here gets out alive.' I wanted to sing that or a Doors song, something that to do with really deep dark stuff and David wanted 'Good Lovin'. I remember we argued about that for weeks, but then the one line made so much sense to me. Sonny was singing into the mirror, 'I asked my family doctor just what I had...I said, Doctor, Mr. MD, can you tell, what's ailin' me?' I said, 'Of course, that's the song. How stupid that I didn't see it.' That was an interesting thing that happened." "Remember THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL and the speech Sonny had made when he was walking around the table? Eric Blakeney had a whole other speech written. About a week before we shot the show there was something wrong with that speech, something that wasn't right. What happened was Eric came up to Vancouver with his wife and little baby. I went up to his room to visit him and I remember being so caught up in the fact that he had this little baby. I grabbed the baby, picked it up out of the crib and smelled its head and we started talking about life, and that that was what life really was. The smell of that baby's head and how it's interesting that old people's heads and babies' heads smell alike, so the closer you get to the void, maybe that's the scent that emanates from your body. We got into this discussion about life and the meaning of it. Whatever I was telling Eric the next day he wrote into a monologue, so that monologue was really a discussion he and I were having about his baby's head. That's what it was like; that's the artistic freedom you got on the set that day." "It was a great part and read like an old 30s gangster movie and I knew it was important for me as an actor, not necessarily for my career. I didn't foresee that or think it was going to be great. I just thought it was a great opportunity for me to act. Part of the reason people fell in love with Sonny is that I played him at a time in my life when I had no choices left as Ray but to be honest in my life and my work and it was new for me then. I had just gotten out of the hospital and been through an ordeal in my life, and this was fresh, new and honest. I had to find the honesty in every line and I had to play it real and truthful, so what happened is that a lot of who I was seeped into that part. My values, morally, politically, ethically, socially, and it transcended just being Sonny Steelgrave, it became this wonderful guy. It happened because I was at this point in my life where I had no more defenses; all the veils had been lifted from me and all the walls were torn down." --quoted material from THE UNOFFICIAL STORY OF THE MAKING OF A WISEGUY, copr. 1990 Pioneer Books PROFITT After the critical success of STEELGRAVE and the great press it brought, the WG staff was faced with trying to maintain the show's momentum. According to Les Sheldon, "We never try to outdo ourselves. We never wonder how we can top ourselves because we'll just get in our own way. We have gotten in a comfortable level of working as hard as we can with as much ability as each one can bring to the show and we'll continue to do that." But despite Sheldon's public voice of confidence there were some voices of concern. Stephen Kronish noted that, "The relationship between Ken and Ray was so comfortable and the show working so well that there were a lot of people saying, 'Well why are we getting rid of this thing? This is going so great.' But we felt that if we didn't do that, then what is Vinnie Terranova? He's not doing his job." Outspoken as usual, Eric Blakeney had his own opinion on what happened to WG after Sharkey left. "I thought after Sonny Steelgrave the series lost its edge and never got it back when we went into the Mel and Susan Profitt arc. I just felt that this was like writing for cartoons. These weren't people. These were psychological symptoms that had nothing to do with human beings whatsoever. We were putting on a freak show from that point on. I myself was never turned by helicopters landing on boats, James Bond cars and lunatic-psycho killers. They had nothing to do with people as far as I'm concerned. Everybody knows that the first arc was the best and there was no way to get it back, except to cast superstars, rock and rollers, Jerry Lewis, and so on. That's the only way they can get the P.R. and attention, by casting the flavor of the month. Someday you'll probably see Madonna and Michael Jackson as the arch villains." Now that Eric's mentioned it, Mel and his beyond extravagant lifestyle do bear a striking resemblance to the baroque villains from the Roger Moore BOND films. "The perfect analogy, you have to use sensationalism to sustain the series. Connery had the magic of the personality and the emotion. The series just doesn't have the emotion intact because Vinnie's not really forming those kinds of complex emotional relationships. His bad guys are clear cut to him. To me, the great thing about the series was the conflict between the good guys and the bad guys. You go undercover with a Mel and Susan Profitt, you know who the hell the bad guys are. Here's a guy who talks to his toes while his incestuous sister is putting needles under his toe nails. They're ordering everybody on the face of the planet killed and they make fifty million dollars a day with their drug empire. A DAY! There are many countries that don't make fifty million dollars a day. The whole thing was just completely fantastic and far-fetched." David Burke doesn't share his opinion. "There was a very strong reaction to the Steelgrave arc because this was new television. It was cutting edge and people were saying it was revolutionary and that whatever we did, we'd never be able to do it again. From our point of view, that's invalid. Why would we suddenly loose the ability to do what we were doing? I think what made the Steelgrave arc unique is that it was simply something we had never seen before. I think we've done much better shows since then, but television hadn't done what we had done before and that's what made the challenge, 'What's next for Vinnie? What is the natural growth of the character? It may not be as exciting, but if it's real, that's what important. Creatively we're the same people as we were in the Steelgrave arc. It wasn't something that we worried about." Director Robert Iscove observed, "No one quite knew where to go after Sharkey. He had become such an incredibly strong presence and everyone was saying in the reviews at the time that the show was so much Steelgrave, that they worried if you pulled him out of this, what do you have left of WISEGUY? Kenny proved them wrong."

[dearlazerbunny]

Again, and Again, and Again

Pairings: Kylo x Reader

Genre/Ratings: dance!AU, warning for a short but uncomfortable sexual situation

Words: 7,500

Summary: You dance your way into Kylo Ren’s life, and suddenly you never want to dance back out. Literally based on a dream I had, and then I went overboard with it, per usual. Enjoy!

“Hey.” A boy is standing by the door to the dance studio, all in black, including his messy head of curls. “You’re Y/N, right?”

“Um.” You stop in front of him, hiking your dance bag farther up onto your shoulder. “Yes? Can I help you?”

“I was just supposed to catch you before class.” He pulls out his phone and unlocks it, apparently checking the time. “I’ll let my director explain.”

Director? “I have to warm up.” You gesture to the open door leading into the studio. “Sorry.”

‘Aw, come on. Give us two minutes. Promise it’ll be worth your while.”

You raise an eyebrow. “More than the pulled ankle I’ll get for not warming up?”

“Definitely. Well, probably. Maybe. Possibly.”

“Kylo, stop terrorizing the talent.” A girl walks up beside him and shoulders him with her backpack. “You’re such a menace.”

“Guilty.” He smacks the girl back lightly, whose got her hair pulled back into this tri-bun thingy. Looks cool. Not that you could ever pull it off, you think self-consciously, touching the bun wound tightly on the back of your head. That’s about the only hairstyle you know to do.

“So.” She turns to you and smiles. “Y/N, right?”

“Again, yes.” She holds out a hand for you to shake, and you tentatively take it.

“I’m Rey. Pleasure to meet you. And this oaf,” she jabs the guy next to her with an elbow, “is Kylo. Ignore him, he’s not right in the head.”

You glance into your classroom, which is beginning to fill with other dancers stretching out their legs and lacing their shoes. “This is really making me want to stick around and figure out why you’re cornering me.”

“Okay, okay, fair enough. I’m Rey,” she repeats. “I’m another art student here. Directing major. We’re doing short films as a senior project, and I need a dancer. According to everyone in the department, you’re the girl for me.”

Hm. “What kind of dance?”

“Pointe.” She grins, and points to the shoes tied to the strap of your bag. “Am I in the right place?”

You laugh a little. “Yeah, I’ve been en pointe since I was like, seven? But I’ve never been in a film before. I don’t know how to act.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. I want the dancing to be the main focus. There’ll be a little acting, but you’ll be surrounded by acting majors. I’m sure they can give you a hand. And Kylo here would be your partner, so he can help too.”

You glance at him- Kylo- and appraise him. “You a dancer?”

He grins a little sheepishly. “Um, no. Not really. But they needed someone strong and handsome to throw you into the air a couple times.”

Well, he does look strong underneath the black leather jacket. And handsome- well, you weren’t going to look him over too closely right here and now, but he’s not too bad on the eyes from where you’re standing. You finger a piece of pink ribbon trailing off your shoes, wrapping it around your knuckle and unwinding it again. “What’s in it for me?”

“Free food at the shoot, my eternal adoration, and a resume credit.”

You look sideways at Rey, who has a hopeful expression on her face. If she wants a ballerina, you probably are the most qualified in the department. Plus, this isn’t something you’ve ever done before. Might be fun.

“Okay.” You nod. “I’ll do it. Do you need my email?”  

“Oh, yeah, please.” She hands you her phone and you key in your name, number, and email. “I’ll contact you soon, okay?”

“Sure.” You give them both a little wave, ducking your head when Kylo waves back, and head into the studio with a bit of a smile on your face.

…

“Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking.” Rey is leading you an Kylo through the trees on no apparent path, pushing aside foliage and tramping through leaves with big ol’ hiking boots. Kylo doesn’t seem bothered in his similarly chunky combat boots, but your dainty little ballet flats are taking a bit of a beating. Luckily you’re good at walking on your toes. “You’re running through the forest, there’s a wide tracking shot following both of you coming from opposite directions, until you meet… here.”

She stops and surveys a clearing she’s just come to, dropping her camera bag onto a nearby branch so it dangles from the tree. You hike up beside her and stop, nearly bumping into her. She turns to you and grins. “Whatcha think?”

You’re prepared to put on a fake smile and tell her it’s nice, but it’s actually really pretty. It’s a pond, shallow by the looks of it but enough to reflect the trees branching out over it from the banks. There’s even a few growing from the middle of the water, giving it a ethereal feel. When Kylo crouches down and runs his fingers through the water, his hand can touch the bottom. You look around, but any ground you can see is covered in brambles. “So… where are we dancing?”

She looks up from her camera innocently. “In the water.”

“…oh.” You glance over at Kylo, sure he’ll be returning your odd look, but he just looks at you and shrugs. You raise an eyebrow at him.

“I’ve done weirder.”

“I… haven’t.” You’ve only ever performed in concert venues. Or practice spaces. You put a hand to your forehead, shading the sun from your eyes, wondering how in the world you’re going to be en pointe in the middle of a freaking lake.

“It’s okay if you can’t.” Rey is still fiddling with presumably her camera settings. “I don’t really know how, like, pointe shoes work? It’s pretty muddy.” She glances at the little lake. “So if they won’t survive or something I have another location picked out. But I’d really prefer this one.”

You sigh, toeing the water. New things. We’re doing new things here. “No, I think I can make it work.”

“Sweet. I just wanna get some test shots, you game?” You look at Kylo, who just shrugs again, takes off his socks and shoes, and steps into the water.

You laugh at his expression, all twisted up and cringing a little. “It’s a little… squishy,” he admits, wading his way to the middle.

“Your jeans are getting wet,” you say, still hovering near the edge.

“Come on, miss ballerina.” He holds out a hand and you take it tentatively. “The light is better out here.”

“Haha.” The few times you’ve met before now he’s always teasing you about being a priss or a princess or wanting the spotlight. Annoying, but harmless. You step out to meet him, trying not to wince at the thought of your satin pink pointe shoes being ruined in the mud. “You’ve really done weirder than this?”

“Mmm, maybe equal to? Acting majors man,” he points at himself jokingly. “The things we do for our art.”

“Huh.” He still hasn’t let go of your hand, and you’re grateful for it. If you’re jumping out of your comfort zone, at least someone’s there with you.

“Oh, that’s perfect.” Rey is looking through her viewfinder. “You guys look so good together!” Which of course immediately makes you want to step as far away from him as possible, but instead he grabs your other hand and pulls you a bit closer, making you look more couple-y. “Peeeeerfect.”

Kylo must catch your uncomfortable look, because he leans in and whispers in your ear “You know we’re playing a couple, right?”

You smile a bit. “Yeah, I know, I’m just… the boring, stick in the mud dancer. I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“Well that’s what art is all about right?” You look at him. His brown eyes are warm. “Trying new things. Doing weird shit.”

That does make you laugh. “I guess.”

“Well, that’s good, ‘cause you know you’re choreographing, right?”

You turn to Rey, wide eyed. “I’m what now?”

….

“Okay. Okay!” You reserved a practice room for the two of you to dance in, but now the empty space filled with mirrors is giving you anxiety. You typically do what the choreographers tell you, not make up your own stuff. “Rey, tell me again what you want?”

She’s sitting on the floor in the corner, playing with something on her laptop. “Aw, man, I don’t know, you’re the expert. Pretty stuff, some turns, some jumps. Make Kylo lift you off the ground. Use the tree branches if you remember where they are in the lake.”

You sigh, eyes closed. Why had you agreed to this? Someone’s grade is on the line, you don’t want to be responsible for that, and-

“Hey.” Kylo’s voice stops you in your tracks. You open your eyes, and he’s looking right at you, a small smile on his lips. “You’ll do fine. Just breathe.”

Breathe. Okay. You press play on your phone and the music that Rey’s picked beings to play through the speakers, filling the room with a haunting melody that instantly makes your bones shiver. “Well. We could start with…” you take a few steps onto your toes, do a pirouette, then let your leg extend out in front of you. You glance over at Kylo, who’s watching you intently. “Can you take my leg from here?” Delicately, he wraps a hand around your ankle. “Okay, on three, raise your arm. My leg will follow you, and I’ll go from a tilt into a turn where you can catch me between your arms.”

He looks a bit like a deer in the headlights. “Um. I have no idea what any of that means; I don’t want to hurt you…”

You smile. “You won’t, I’m pretty bendy. Just follow my lead.” Slowly, your leg moves up over your head and back down again, and you use the momentum to spin into Kylo’s arms. Face to face, you grin at him. “See? Easy.”

He huffs a little disbelievingly. “If you say so.”

The next hour is full of trial and error, with you basically making things up as you go along, backtracking and then re-dancing several spots until you get it just right. When you do the final bit for Rey, her eyes are wide. “Y/N. That was amazing! This is going to be fantastic!”

You blush. “Thanks, but it’s really nothing.”

“I think it’s pretty cool, anyways.” Kylo puts a hand on your arm and squeezes. “Nice job.”

Again with the blushing. You don’t know how you’re going to dance this intimately with this guy without flying apart at the handle. At least you’ve danced with worse partners before. “By the way, Rey, did you cast the part of that other guy you mentioned?”

“Oh, yeah.” She thumbs through her notes. “Some guy named… Armitage? We need an actual dancer for this part,” she says, giving an obvious call-out look to Kylo. “And he came recommended.”

You blanch. Speaking of worse partners. Armitage is a great dancer, sure, but he’s also a bit… obsessive. With his hair, with his turnout, and… with you. You’re pretty sure he’s been trying to go out with you since you were both thirteen and in class together. And now you have to dance with him playing your jealous wannabe lover? Fantastic.

Rey gives you a strange look. “Is that okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll just… need some time to rehearse with him.”

“Sure, I can set that up.” She jots down a note on her sheet. “When we meet tomorrow we’re going to go over the acting parts, just so you know.”

“Fantastic,” you say weakly.

As you’re locking up the studio. Kylo stops you. “Hey. You okay? You looked a little pale there at the end.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m fine.” You’re going to leave it at that, but as you put the key in your pocket, you have the sudden urge to trust him. “It’s just…. Armitage.”

“You know him?”

You nod. “Unfortunately. He tends to get all over me when we partner together. I guess he likes me or something…” laughing nervously, you tuck a stray piece of hair behind your ear. “It’s just kind of annoying.”

He’s frowning by now, listening to tell your tale with obvious worry. “Well, if you want, I can come to your guys’ rehearsal. That way you’re not alone with him.”

You glance up at him. “You’d do that? Really?”

“Sure. We’ll just pass it off as me trying to learn how to dance or something.”

“That’s… not a bad idea, actually.”

“See? It’ll be fine.” He shoulders his bag. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay.” He salutes as he walks off, and you can’t help but watch his retreating form for a minute before going on your way.

…

“So, you got all that?” The three of you are sitting at a table in the library, with Rey looking intently at you. “You dance with Armitage, and he wants you but you’re looking across the way at Kylo. You run off, cue the forest, you dance, big finale, and kiss. End scene.”

You sit there, not answering her. This is… a lot. Sure, you’re used to showing emotion on stage, but this seems complicated. “Sure… I think.”

“Awesome.” She checks her watch. “I’ve got to run, I’ll catch you guys later.” Kylo waves as she leaves and she waves back. You’ve never seen them, like, be intimate, but you’re pretty sure they’re a couple. They’re so friendly with each other, and always joshing around and teasing one another. You’re trying not to be disappointed by this conclusion.

“So, you’ve really got all this?” Kylo’s attention is now turned to you. “I know you’ve never done this before.”

“Yeeeeah.” You shake your head. “I think so? It’s just a lot…”

“I understand.” He sits back in his chair. “Walk me through it. Just so you can review it in your head.”

“Um, okay.” You lean forward and put your head in your hands, resting your elbows on the table. “So, I’m dancing with Armitage…”

“…which you choreographed today.”

“Yup. Thanks for being there, by the way. He was definitely better behaved.”

Kylo smirks a bit, but you’re not sure why. “Anytime. He did seem a little pretentious.”

You roll your eyes. “You have no idea. So, dance with Armitage, but I’m looking across at you the whole time. Once I break away from him we cut to running through the forest; I’m looking back over my shoulder and feeling worried. Then go to our duet.”

“Perfect. See? You’re a natural!”

You scoff. “Hardly. Hey, would you mind walking back out to that pond with me? I want to practice the choreography in the water.”

“Sure. Now?”

“I don’t see why not.” You’d packed a pair of old pointe shoes in your bag that you don’t mind getting ruined. “Might as well get it over with.”

“Oh, come on, I’m not that bad am I?”

You smile a little. “No. I suppose not.”

…

Back in the forest, you lace your shoes up to your ankles before stepping into the mud. Kylo follows, barefoot, jeans rolled up to his knees. He takes your hand and you carefully raise up on your toes, testing the stability of the pond’s floor. Surprisingly not bad. You can even take a couple steps. “Okay, ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.” Your start the choreography, slowly, making sure you can keep your balance, and end up making it all the way through with only minor stumbles.

“Perfect.” You’re ready to leave when Kylo stops you.

“Rey said she wanted something big for the ending, right? Do you have any ideas?”

“Oh, right. Um…” You look around. “She said she wanted to use the trees…” there’s a sturdy looking branch right above Kylo’s head and you eye it. “Spot me real quick, will you?” He nods and steps aside as you jump up and grab on to the branch, jostling it up and down to test its strength. Seems hearty enough. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. When I’m in the splits, you stand in front of me. I’ll fall, and my legs will end up wrapped around your waist. If your hands land on my lower back I can fall into a backbend. Got that?”

He nods and positions himself straight in front of you. You take a breath and let go, but Kylo is right there to catch you, and you end up wrapped around him, face to face. Oh. You hadn’t thought of the positioning of this, really. He’s looking at you with surprise, and to get away from his face you roll yourself slowly into a backbend, then back up. He’s still as close as before. Damn.

“And then, we kiss.” His voice is low, just for the two of you, and you feel like your stomach has dropped to your feet.

“About that.” You jump off of him and land neatly on the ground, concealing your nerves. “I haven’t really, um… done that. Before.”

He raises an eyebrow. “You’ve never kissed anyone?”

You shake your head nervously. “No. So I don’t really know what I’m doing there.”

“Color me surprised.”

“Excuse me?”

“I just thought- I mean, you’re gorgeous. I would’ve thought guys would be crawling all over you.”

You make a face. “Hardly.” He steps forward. You step back. He steps forward, you step back again. Giggling nervously to yourself, you aim for the edge of the pond where a clean pair of sweats and non-muddy shoes are waiting. “So, um, we have a date set for shooting?”

“Yup.” He nods and follows your lead, seemingly unrattled by the surprisingly intimate moment that had just happened. “Wednesday we meet out on the lawn, and then we’ll film here. That good with you?”

Wednesday. You have until Wednesday to figure out how to somehow be okay with wrapping your legs around- and kissing- this guy. Who is sweet and tall and has great hair and- has a girlfriend, you remind yourself. You wonder if Rey will get uncomfortable seeing the two of you kiss. You’d be a little weirded out asking someone to kiss your boyfriend for a class project. But she had asked, so…

You breathe. You’ll cross that bridge when you come too it.

…

Wednesday comes much too soon. The days beforehand are interspersed with meetings with Rey, more practice in the woods both by yourself and with Kylo- though you always stop before the finish- and sadly, another rehearsal with Armitage. But Kylo continued to make good on his word and be there in the dance studio whenever you needed him to be, which definitely kept Armitage much more in check than he would have been if the two of you had been alone. You always tried to keep your focus on Armitage- he was your rehearsal partner, after all- but your eye kept being drawn to the boy in the corner, head in his hands, watching you dance. He’s mesmerizing. And having his eyes on you makes you a strange combination of nervous, giddy, and… maybe a little turned on.

He has a girlfriend, he has a girlfriend, he has a girlfriend…

You sit on a bench underneath some trees on the grand lawn of your campus, lacing up your shoes. Students mill around here and there, some in hammocks or on picnic blankets studying and enjoying the nice day. Rey and Armitage are already here, talking about something or other as Rey takes test shots with her camera. Armitage certainly looks the part of a romantic lead- red hair swept back to reveal severe features and cool blue eyes, dressed in all white in contrast to Kylo’s black ensemble. But still, the thought of him spotting you- which usually means his hands in semi-intimate places- makes your stomach squirm a bit.

But your thoughts brighten a bit when you spot Kylo heading towards your group, bag slung over his shoulder. You wave, and he waves back, making you smile. He may not be a dancer, but he’s the only one you want to dance with.

“What is he doing here?” Armitage’s voice cuts through the rustling of the leaves and straight into your skull.

Rey glances behind her, unconcerned. “Kylo? He just can’t leave me alone,” she teases, sticking her tongue out at the approaching figure. There’s no way Kylo could have heard what she said, but he nonetheless responds with his own stuck-out tongue. “Nah, he’s going to be holding another angle while you two dance. More interesting to splice together that way.”

The ginger huffs, arms crossed. “I thought it would be just me and Y/N. We’re supposed to be in love, being alone would make for much better chemistry.”

“Well, technically you’re in love. She’s in love with Kylo.” You know she’s talking about your characters, but the insinuation still makes your ears burn. “Don’t worry, he’s just another man behind the camera. You shouldn’t notice him too much.”

You can tell Armitage still isn’t happy, but he quiets down the objections as you approach, instead turning a brilliant smile toward you. “Y/N. You look lovely.”

You glance down at the flow gray dress Rey picked out for you. “Thanks, Armitage.”

He holds out one hand and you take it as gently as possible, trying to prevent as much contact as possible for as long as possible. But he closes his hand around yours and pulls you closer the second he feels your fingertips, almost making you flinch. Now’s not the time. Be professional.

Kylo wanders over with his own camera, Rey finishes her technical whatnot, and the two of you take your starting positions on the bench. “Ready?” Rey calls, and you nod. “Three, two, one. Go!”

The scene plays out smoothly, almost like you’re watching yourself through your own eyes. Armitage advances, and you retreat, eventually leading into a duet where he’s constantly pulling you in and you’re trying to free yourself. Every time you take a step opposite his direction, he finds a way to trap you into another spin or leap. As hard as you’re concentrating on the choreography, the most natural part of the whole thing is looking off into the distance, reaching for a Kylo who’s looking on, wanting him to come rescue you, wanting to run to him but something holding you back-

“Cut!” Very suddenly, your headspace is broken as you all fall out of position. You’re breathing heavily, loose hair sticking to your neck, and reeling a little from just how into the scene you got. “This looks awesome, guys, I don’t even think we’ll have to do another take.”

Small victories. You turn to Armitage, who is still looking flawless even after all the turning. Typical. “Thanks for uh, working with me again. It was fun.”

He nods. “Absolutely.” He takes your hand, and the second he does Kylo’s head shoots up from where he’s looking through the viewfinder with Rey, immediately aware of how uncomfortable you look. You don’t notice, though, you’re just trying to pull your hand away. “And please know I’m always available to talk, or practice, whatever you need. Maybe we could grab a bite to eat after rehearsal this weekend…”

“Maybe,” you reply weakly, finally wrenching your hand away. “I, um, I appreciate it.”

…

The cool woods, bathed in sunset, is a welcome change from the bright daylight out on the lawn. The trees are spindly and barren, making the whole place look like an abandoned forest, beauty hidden within the branches as the sunlight dapples through them. Rey had you run through the woods a few times, constantly looking back over your shoulder for ‘Armitage’,who might be chasing you. But finally you get to the pond, where Kylo is waiting for you just like a creature of the night, blending in perfectly with he shadows starting to darken and lengthen on the ground.

As you step out to the middle of the lake to meet him, the anxiety in your chest loosens, and you feel like you can breathe again. It even makes you smile a little. This, you can do. This, you can put your heart into.

This dance is a joy to do. You practically fly, not even the dense water holding you back as you twirl around Kylo, a steady presence among the shifting surface of the lake. The look on his face is one of love, of want, and slowly you find yourself mirroring it. Every time he touches you, it becomes electric. Every time your eyes meet, you have a hard time catching your breath back.

Finally, you spring up to grab the tree branch, still dangling overhead. As Kylo moves in to catch you, you close your eyes and let go, trusting that he’ll be there. He is, just like always. Your legs catch his hips, wrapping securely around his torso, and you dip into the deepest and most graceful backbend of your life, feeling safe with Kylo’s hand squarely on the small of your back. As you roll up, you only have a moment for the thought of oh crap- now what? To flash through your head before you’re suddenly face to face.

You look at him. He looks at you. Both of you are breathing hard, from the dance and something else exhilarating in the air you can’t quite name. Whatever it is, it’s almost tangible, dancing among the trees just like you were a minute ago.

The kiss is hurried, desperate- the kiss of two people who have wanted each other for so long but haven’t had their chance until now. It’s different than you thought it’d be. His lips are soft, and he smells a little like mint and a little like the trees of the woods, a heady combination that makes you want to burrow into his side and never come out. You’re not quite sure where to put your nose, or how to keep your teeth out of the way, but it doesn’t seem to matter all that much. After a few seconds something swells in your chest like nothing ever has before, a feeling usually reserved for taking the final bow after a long concert or perfectly breaking in a shiny new pair of shoes.

Almost simultaneously, the two of you pull away from each other, both staring wide-eyed as that tangible feeling begins to dissipate into the air, leaving a comforting sort of silence. Completely forgetting about Rey, the camera, and the project, you smile at Kylo, wondering if he had felt that magic something that had shivered its way through your body.

“Cut.” Rey doesn’t even yell it, she just states it like a matter-of-fact. The two of you startle, abruptly pulled out of your own little world. “That was…” Rey shakes her head slowly. “That was something else.”

“Cool,” Kylo whispers, responding to her but still looking wondrously at you.

“Yeah,” you whisper back. His arms tighten around you, just for a second, before letting you settle back onto the ground. You look around, where mud has been kicked up onto the bank, as well as all over your dress and Kylo’s jeans. Rey hasn’t escaped either, and is meticulously wiping a dirt spatter from her camera lens. You giggle. “We made a bit of a mess, I think.”

Kylo grins and offers you his hand, which you take, helping you back over to land. “All In the name of passion, right?”

Your cheeks flare, which you try to cover by leaning down and straightening the hem of your dress. “Something like that.”

“Guys, that was amazing. Like, seriously.” Rey climbs up to the bank.

“Can I see some of it?” Now that it’s finished, you’re genuinely curious at what you look like- and you’re sure that kiss looks horribly awkward. Maybe you should ask her to redo it…

“Nope! It’s gonna be a surprise at the final viewing. I’m editing it myself, so Kylo won’t see it either.” Kylo rolls his eyes and begins changing into clean clothes he brought from a duffel.

“Rey is all about the surprise factor.” He turns to you. “We’ll see it in a week, I guess. Have you ever been to Griffin Hall? It’s the big digitorium on the edge of campus. That’s where they’re hosting the viewings.” You shake your head. “Well, why don’t I pick you up then? Just so you don’t get lost.”

As much as you don’t want to admit it, seeing Kylo again would be… nice. Very nice. “Yeah- yeah, that sounds great. Thank you.”

…

You fidget with your hair, placing one last bobby pin into your braided crown when there’s a knock on the door. Kylo. You take a deep breath. You haven’t seen him in a week, not really, except for waving to him a few times going to and from classes. He was usually talking with Rey, and you didn’t want to disturb them.

Taking one last look in the mirror, you turn the lock and open the door, where Kylo is standing in a slightly more fancy version of his usual black ensemble, a smile on his face. He instantly raises an eyebrow. “Wow.”

You frown. “What?”

“You look amazing.”

You’re wearing a chiffon dress that floats lazily at your sides, tied in a halter by a satin bow. You even traded your ballet flats for heels that criss-cross up past your ankles, mimicking the ribbons of your pointe shoes. “Thanks,” you smile. “You don’t look to bad yourself.”

He sighs heavily, like his outfit is the bane of his existence. “Rey made me wear the tie.”

You laugh as you reach out to smooth out a bubble in said tie. “Well, it looks very nice.”

“Are you two done? We’re going to be late!” Rey appears behind Kylo in a cream wrap dress with a brown belt. “I want to get good seats!”

Oh. Rey is here. Of course she would be, though. You shake thoughts of being alone with Kylo out of your head and grab your purse. “Ready if you are.”

The digitorium is done up in lights, with students dressed in their cocktail best streaming through the double doors. You blanch a little when you see all the pizzazz. “I didn’t realize this was such a big deal.”

“I mean, the senior film festival always draws a bit of a crowd. There are awards at the end of the night that the audience votes on based on what films they like the best,” Rey explains. So, basically, everyone is going to see you crushing on Kylo- you might as well admit it to yourself- on the big screen. Fantastic.

“Rey!” A black guy in a tan jacket and another in a ridiculously vibrant orange blazer walk over. “Ready to get your ass beat?”

“You wish, Finn! Your little adventure plot is no match for my romantic thriller,” Rey says dramatically, but giving the guy- Finn- a hug nonetheless. “Besides, everyone knows Poe here can’t hold any attention on the big screen.”

“Hey now!” Poe, in the orange blazer, tosses his hair back from his forehead like a teen heartthrob from the nineties. “I’m a stud and you know it.”

“Oh, just come on already. May the best film win!” The three of them dash off towards the entrance, apparently in a race to get the best seats.

You raise an eyebrow at Kylo. “Friends of hers?”

He snorts. “More like partners in crime. Finn is another directing major, he and Poe did some sort of aviation adventure thing I think.” He holds out his arm, and after a few seconds you hesitantly slip your arm through the crook of his. “Shall we?” You let him lead you into the building, not sure how you’re going to get through tonight.

There are six films in total. Finn and Poe’s was indeed an action-adventure flick, featuring Poe crash landing on an island and having to do a man-vs-wild sort of challenge. You recognize the same forest you danced in with Kylo in the background of some of their shots. Everyone goes crazy when the credits roll, you included, and the two friends stand in their seats to take a bow, both trying to outdo the other. You smile- they’re clearly class favorites.

“I think we’re up,” Kylo whispers, and sure enough, Rey’s name in bold letters appears on a black screen. You hold your breath. Hopefully Rey worked some magic and you wouldn’t look like an idiot in front of all these people.

To your shock, you don’t look like an idiot. In fact, you look- almost beautiful. Armitage never looks away from you the whole time you’re dancing, but it’s clear your mind is somewhere else- on someone else. The screen cuts away from the dance a few times to show a serene Kylo standing in the distance, looking on at the two of you on the lawn. As you finally pull away from Armitage, thanks to a close up on your face, you can see a tear leak down your cheek. You put a hand up to your face. You don’t even remember crying.

Trees fly past as the two of you run through the forest from opposite sides until you meet eyes from across the pond. Kylo holds out his hand and you delicately take it, stepping into the water- the pointe shoes make it looks like you’re dancing on the surface, rather than on the muddy pond floor. The dance whirls and races and sometimes slows and wavers, but never loses intensity or drive. Rey has managed to capture all the best angles, every facial expression, every slosh of the water as you kick up mud in a way that’s almost graceful.

As you fall from the tree branch, you catch yourself sitting on the edge of your seat, holding your breath. Everyone in the auditorium is too, and even though you know what happens next, you can’t help but smile a little when you kiss on screen. The last lingering shot is of the two of you looking at each other with mirrored expressions- disbelief, release, and love. Lots of love.  

The screen fades to black, and for a few moments the crowd is silent, making you sink down into your chair a little. Did they not like it? You thought Rey did an amazing job-

Your thoughts are cut off by thunderous applause rising from the rows of people, and even some cheering and whistling. Across the way, Rey proudly takes a bow amidst all the noise, and you find yourself clapping wildly as well, smiling at her success. Suddenly, Rey gestures to you, and before you know it Kylo is pulling you up out of your seat, holding your hand aloft like you’ve just won the olympics. In shock, you laugh, and he does too, giddy and high on everyone’s well wishes.

This is so much better than any dance concert you’ve ever done.

…

After the event, Rey is posing on stage with her professors, a small gold trophy in her hand- Audience Favorite, apparently by a landslide. You and Kylo wait for her outside amongst the rest of the crowd, who are milling about, discussing the night and their opinions.

“Well? What do you think? Caught the acting bug?”

“Maybe,” you admit sheepishly. “This was… incredible.”

“Yeah.” There’s a wistful look on his face, and in his eyes you can see just how much he loves what he does. “You never get sick of it.”

“Come on, guys!” Rey comes bounding over with her friends, who are holding a certificate for best editing. “Are we ready for the best part?”

“The best part?” You look at her, confused. She gives you a wicked grin. “The afterparty.”

…

Not an hour later, you’re standing against the wall of someone’s house, drink in your hand, trying not to draw too much attention to yourself. The room is dimly lit, and music is blasting, but you can vaguely make out some of the people you recognize from the films you saw and their directors. Apparently the afterparty is what everyone is really waiting for at the end of the night.

You think you’d just rather go home. Parties aren’t really your scene.

“Y/N!” A familiar figure cuts through the crowd, and before you can dodge away, Armitage is standing way too close, pushing you up against the wall. “How great did we look up there? We should dance together more often!”

You roll your eyes, practically gagging at all the alcohol on his breath. “Sure, Armitage. I’m gonna, um, go to the bathroom-” you try to slip away but he grabs your wrist, hard, making you freeze.

“Come on, Y/N.” He has to shout over the crowd, but you can hear him loud and clear. “It’s obvious we should be together. We’re the best dancers in our program. We look amazing together. We’d be unstoppable.” His demeanor suddenly changes, and he uses his hips to push you against the wall once more, still holding onto you so you can’t escape. “I know you want me, Y/N. It was just a matter of time.”

“Armitage, let me go! I don’t-” you shove him off, a little scared. “I don’t like you like that, okay? I’m sorry!”

His face darkens. “What, who is it? Who else is there?” He stops. “It’s that Kylo guy isn’t it. You’re into him. Instead of me.”

“N- no, I just-”

“I knew it.” There’s a fury in his eyes that you’ve never seen before. “You need to be with me, Y/N. I’ll show you- I’ll make you see it!” He throws himself at you, holding you tighter than ever, and you’re struggling to pull away but you can’t, he’s stronger than you, and he’s so close you can smell him and his hips are against yours-

Suddenly, air. Without anything to hold you up, you collapse to the ground, hard, chest heaving. You taste salt, and roughly try to rub the tears off your cheeks. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Kylo is towering over Armitage, practically holding him by the neck. “None of your business, weirdo,” Armitage snarls, but Kylo throws him back so hard he bangs his head against the wall behind him.

Somehow, even though Kylo leans in close, you can still hear his voice over the music. “You touch her again, you’re dead,” he hisses. “If I see you within twenty feet of her you’ll have me to deal with.”

“Fuck off, you’re not-”

He suddenly goes silent, probably because Kylo just decked him in the nose. As drunk as he is, Armitage rag dolls onto the ground, out cold. It’d be almost comical if he hadn’t just tried to- no. Don’t think about that. You feel more tears, hot and painful, well up in your eyes, which are staring at Armitage’s limp body just a few feet away from you. “Y/N? Y/N.” It takes a minute, but you finally focus on Kylo, who has kneeled down in front of you. He holds out a hand and you cling to it, shaky, trying not to sob or scream or both. “Let’s get you out of here, okay?” You nod, but don’t move. Your legs won’t seem to work. Without saying a word, Kylo scoops you up as if you weigh nothing and begins to carry you through the crowd. Where, you don’t know, and you don’t care, as long as it’s away, away, away- you bury your head into his chest, trembling, curling in on yourself and closing your eyes tight as he brings you to safety.

Safety comes in the form of the backyard, cool and dark, big enough so that the music and the house is just a distant thrumming in the night. Kylo sets you down on the grass, gently, then sits beside you. You’re still frozen, so he wraps an arm around your shoulder and pulls you close to his side, and you wrap it tighter around you like he’s your lifeline.

He is, in a way. He just- he just stopped- “Thank you,” you whisper, and you can feel his chest rumbling as he responds.

“I don’t think he’ll be bothering you again.”

You shake your head, and fall quiet. The two of you just sit there, looking at the stars and hearing the din of the party in the background. Every nerve in your body should be on fire right now, but the longer you sit by Kylo’s side, the safer you feel.

“Can I tell you something stupid,” you say, and he shifts away from you a little so he can hear you better.

“Of course.”

You groan and pull your knees up to your chest, resting your head on them. “It’s so stupid. And embarrassing.”

“Y/N, it’s okay, really.” He taps one of your hands lightly with a finger, then takes it in his own and entwines your fingers with his. “You can tell me anything.”

“I really like you,” you admit, eyes squeezed shut so you won’t see his reaction. “Really really like you. And I know we basically just met and I know nothing about you and you and Rey seem really happy together and I’m glad, I really am, but-”

“Whoa, whoa, back up.” He shifts so he’s sitting in front of you, but you can’t bring yourself to show your face. “Me and Rey? What now?”

You sniffle a little. “Your girlfriend, dummy. You guys are great together and I know that, but I just had to tell you because-”

“Y/N, stop.” You do. He tucks a piece of hair that’s escaped your braid behind your ear, which gives you the courage to look up at him. The moonlight is glinting off of him in a way that makes him look unreal. Unearthly beautiful. And there’s a smile on his face- oh, god, he’s laughing at you, you shouldn’t have said anything- “you know Rey and I are cousins, right?”

They-

Cousins?

“Oh.” That’s all you seem to know how to say. You just sit there and look at him, dumbfounded, and also feeling incredibly, incredibly stupid.

“Yeah. We’re not- we’re not a couple.” He shudders a little, seemingly at the thought, and laughs a little. “We basically grew up together. She’s like my little sister.”

This time you say nothing, your heart thumping out of your chest. With embarrassment, yes, but way deep down, if you look closely, there’s also a little flare of something. Something that might be a tiny, tiny spark of hope.

You look at him. He looks at you. Then, ever so carefully, he reaches forward and pulls you towards him, settling you onto his lap. Automatically, your arms go around his neck, and your legs around his waist- a mirror image of your kiss in the woods.

And you’re very, very close.

“Tell me if this isn’t okay,” he whispers, and then he can’t say anything else because he’s kissing you.

This kiss is different than the other- soft, slow, and hesitant. Barely there really, just a whisper of something, a hint of admission. He gives you time and space to pull away, but instead, you pull him back towards you, take a breath, and kiss him back. You still don’t know what you’re doing, but he guides you through it was small touches and a tilt of the head- and when a pathetic sound of want escapes your throat, he kisses you deeper, until you’re flush against him and you can feel his heart beating in his chest. Your hand finds its way to his curls and buries itself in them, his wander to your waist and the small of your back. You’re as close as you can possibly be and it’s still not enough- but it’s also the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to you.

Eventually, he pulls away, because you’re breathing hard and maybe still crying a little. He wipes a tear away with the pad of his thumb, and you laugh breathlessly to yourself. “Sorry, I- I don’t know why I’m crying.”

“Hm.” He’s staring at you so intensely his eyes sparkle like the stars above. “There was something in the air, when you were dancing with me. I think it followed us here.”

“It wasn’t just me, then?”

“”Stars, no.” A small smile flickers across his face. “I couldn’t believe I got to be your first kiss.”

“And second.”

“And third?”

You giggle, feeling that magic swirl around the two of you, before meeting him in the middle again. And again. And again.

[blu-b]

Trying again to post my Ragnarok blabbering....

Let’s try and see if tumblr still thinks it has too many paragraphs. If so, I shall split it into two. Reminder that this is just me spewing out everything that bothers me because I actually have so desperately few Thor(ki) pals on tumblr that I'm basically jumping on any opportunity to actually talk to someone about it. Which is why you precious few who commented are now getting the full broadside of my entire jumbled misery. I apologize in advance. You really don't have to read all of it. I’m also not looking for a grand discussion or anything. I just need to get it out of my system.  

​I respect that there are people who liked the movie, and I don't mean to spoil it for anyone else, so what I'm going to say here is all just a very personal, subjective impression that is by no means anything else but an opinion. Also I feel kind of stupid because the film has been out for a year and...yeah well.

On we go.

upstartpoodle replied to your post “I’ve finally seen Thor: Ragnarok (yes yes, I’m late to the party, I...”

I haven't seen it since I knew from the various spoilers I've seen that it wasn't really my cup of tea, so I can't really comment about the film as a whole, but I've seen a lot of complaints from other people about inconsistent characterisation, too many jokes, dropping the ball on plot points established in the previous films, etc. There's an increasingly long post that keeps cropping up on my dash about it. 

calicoskatts replied to your post

I enjoyed it but for me it was jsut another entertaining movie from Marvel but nothing particularly interesting. I thought I was watching Guardians of the Asgardians personally. I’ve been put off from Marvel over the last bit tbh, so maybe that’s why? Like I said, I enjoyed it but I wasn’t wowed or anything.

nelioe replied to your post

*raises hand* I agree, I too thought the movie was awful

miusmius replied to your post

I honestly loved it!

hiko73 replied to your post

What? The movie was amazing from beginning to end, imho....I feel at a loss why you hated it so much.

So, before I say anything, I need to explain that I basically knew the film's plot from gifs and Youtube clips before I watched the DVD, although I didn't know all of it. I already thought some of the scenes sucked big time from the snippets I had seen (Get help, the obedience disk), but actually there were a few that I thought were bad and that turned out rather good in the movie. I’ll come to those in a minute.

So, I think seeing the movie in its entirety for the first time was what did me in. Really, my brain hurt after the end credits rolled off the screen, and I felt like brainwashed. I mean, I knew it was different, and loud, and colourful, and that’s not what I’m having a problem with. It’s rather…a conglomerate of things that just rub me the wrong way.

I’m not mentioning the inconsistent characterisation and the many loose threads that never get cleared up sufficiently (an entire fandom has been waiting for an explanation of how Loki survived Svartalfheim! I had expected it to be a major plot point early in Ragnarok, but it wasn’t even mentioned apart from ‘I thought you were dead’. Well yes, thanks Thor, me too. I’d like to know how he managed not to be dead!).

I’ll also not mention obvious plotholes because well, it’s Marvel we’re talking about, so things like that are expected, and I’ll neither mention obvious flaws on the technical side (too many rapid cuts, weird camera angles or frames) because artistic liberty and all. What does get on my nerves is how almost any serious scene is broken up by something ‘funny’. No two characters can have a quiet talk for two seconds before some joke is cracked that does or does not fit the situation. It’s…tiresome. Especially since most of the jokes aren’t really funny.

​Here's a thing: a have a weird humour, I Hate comedy with a capital H, and I despise nothing more than random comedic slapstick elements in an otherwise serious film. Why for heaven's sake can no one make a serious movie anymore? Argh. This film is literally titled "The end of the world" and yet there's a joke at every corner, and no it isn't a black-humoured jab at fate, it's the kind of knee-slapper that's only funny for half the time it takes, and not again afterwards. It makes me angry. Comedy has to be precise and on-point to work. There's a lot of well-placed comedy in the previous Thors and the Avengers; comedic elements that are funny even when you watch the scene a second and a third time. Now, Taika Waititi takes comedy to an entirely new level that isn't necessarily one I like. I also need to say that although I don't know him personally, he comes across as a very taxing person, taxing in a sense that his constant good spirits and giddiness and sort of bouncy energy would definitely wear out my social batteries if I had to be around him all the time. It wore out Tom Hiddleston's, as we can see in several behind the scenes footages where Taika takes to fooling around in front of the camera while poor Tom would just like to get on with his work.

​Anyway, back to the movie. Of the major things that rub me wrong is that it does have a very problematic attitude towards violence.

​It is rated for a viewing age 12 and up in my country, but I sure as hell would not let my children watch it. There are scenes that come down to nothing but random violence for…well, not even the sake of anything. Hela just skewering Fandral and Volstagg like that? What for? If it’s meant to establish an emotional connection and show just how dangerous Hela is, it fails spectacularly, because it is not given enough time, or enough emotional room. It’s just ZAP and they’re dead; if you don’t look closely you don’t even realise it’s them because they've never had a moment to being reintroduced. Half of the audience has probably already forgotten who they were.The scene with Hogun is gruesome as is the slaughtering of an entire army, and it does nothing whatsoever in terms of significance. Later on, we see many other characters just resorting to brainless mass shootings and seemingly enjoying the heck out of it. Valkyrie, Skurge, you name them. There's a very problematic message in having a character stumble off an enormous spaceship, having them fall off the gangway drunk because it looks cool, and then proceed to mow down a bunch of innocent and mostly unarmed scrappers on a trash planet.

​Now, I don’t have a problem with violence in general. I just don’t like the way it is presented here.

There were a few scenes that were actually good. 

Thor and Dr. Strange for example, even though the plot could easily have done without that sideline, and Benedict Cumberbatch is also only pouring 50% of his effort into his performance - still, it’s solid, classy acting. ​

​The scenes between Thor and Loki on Midgard in the very beginning stand out because both Hemsworth and Hiddleston are given enough time to actually act out their characters' emotions without being interrupted by a joke. I really liked the dynamics here and I wish the film would have picked up on that course.

Some of Hela’s scenes where a little background on her character is revealed were good as well, but overall I thought Cate Blanchett was alternating between gross overacting and doing minimal duty as per contract. It would have been nice to have her on screen some more, and learn a bit more about her past and her motivation. Revenge for being imprisoned by Odin? Sounds familiar. Hela, darling, how about a little talk about that with Loki over tea and biscuits? I'm sure the two of you could have shared some experience. (Also major kudos to Loki for NOT tearing into Odin like "Aha, so throwing your kids into a cell seems to be your standard educational measure, dad.")

​Anthony Hopkins was awful. He has never been good in any of the previous films, one of my main reasons for my major dislike of Odin, and I don't know if he's getting senile or what, he just was really really bad in this one. It only adds to the awful characterisation of Odin altogether. The last straw was his dealing with the Hela situation: "There's this threat that is coming for Asgard, born of one of my own mistakes, there's nothing you can do about it and I don't give a shit so bye and good luck, I guess." Good thing he disappeared, or I would personally have crawled into the TV and shoved the old man off the cliff.

​So, what little else I liked was actually any scenes with Heimdall - I wasn’t a big fan of Heimdall, ever, but he seriously kicks ass here, not only because of superb acting on Idris Elba's part but also because his scenes aren’t interrupted by hectic cuts or off the mark jokes.

​Surprisingly, Skurge’s story arc was interesting as well. Now, I don’t like Karl Urban - you've probably figured out by now that there isn't an awful lot of people that I like. Basically I think his character is rather unnecessary - why not use one of the established characters? Why not let Fandral or Hogun be torn between right and wrong? Anyway, Karl does play him well and I see why a character like that would be in there (his death though? More random, unnecessary violence).

​Bruce Banner / The Hulk really went on my nerves the entire time. The fight between he and Thor is well choreographed, but the entire sequence is too long *yawns* Some of the stuff with Thor in Hulk’s room is actually funny, but that was that. 

​And then Loki. Please prepare yourself for a rant of epic proportions.

Now, I do admit I'm biased because I love Loki; I've loved him in Norse mythology ever since I was a child. I went to study Old Norse for a bit mainly because of the Edda and Loki, and I love what Hiddleston has done with the character in these films. I also get that this is Thor: Ragnarok and not Loki: Ragnarok and that he is a supporting character just like all the others.

​That said, in the few scenes that he actually has - you don't really need Loki for what he does. Any random side character could have stolen the ship's codes, or placed Surtur's crown in the flame. That last bit was a bow to the original myth (and the comics, I suppose) where it's really Loki who releases Surtur and causes Ragnarök (which is why I -love- the 'saviour' scene because it's a reference to Loki arriving at the scene of the final battle at the helm of the ship of the dead, called Naglfar, in Norse myth). But - in the film, all in all, you don't really need Loki for all that. Valkyrie could have done it, or Heimdall, or Skurge for that matter (what a heroic plot that would have made for him!).

​And there's more to it than just lamentably little of Loki in this film. The entire film, to me, seems like a deliberate attempt to ban Loki to the background, give him as little screentime as possible, and make him look ridiculous altogether. Not only is his character basically replaceable in what he does, no - 

(I've seen quite a lot of the BTS stuff in advance, so this plays into it as well.)

Let's start with the small things:

- There's hardly any close-ups of Loki in the entire film, Norway being the one great exception (consequently, he rocks the scene).You can always see him do something in the background, but the camera is never close enough to pick up clearly on any emotions or anything. Best example is the sofa scene at the Grandmasters'. If that was shown correctly, you would be able to read the entire course of the fight from Loki's face - there's glee, there's worry, there's schadenfreude, there's hope and admiration and anger and frustration and everything you can possibly imagine he goes through, but we are shown only mushed images of it. The entire dragging long battle between Hulk and Thor would have been way more interesting if more of Loki's facial expressions had been cut into it.

- Basically all he's good for is delivering cues for Thor and being there as a projection screen for Thor's heroism.

- The camera always seems slightly out of focus; Loki is there but he's not, somewhere at the back or to the side. Even when he's meant to be in the picture, the camera frame is just this little bit out of focus or he's being filmed at a weird angle.

- Weird angles. It's a signature thing for Loki in this film. He's being filmed from behind, above, below - now don't get me wrong, it's a very interesting artistic device - and the scene where he appears before the grandmaster, filmed through the transparent floor is a masterpiece in terms of camera angle - but when it's 80% of these frames and the rest is 15% hovering in the background and 5% good, clear close-ups, it conveys a message about the filmmaker's attitude towards this character - and in Loki's case, this message is not doing him any favours. 

​- More weird stuff: time frames. As I said above, you only ever see Loki doing unimportant stuff. Sitting around talking to the Grandmaster's cronies, getting "captured" on purpose, trying to get through to Thor. We don't see him doing any kind of stiff like Thor does, nothing "heroic", we don't even see him do any significant amount of magic. The only heroic moment he has, at the very end, is again botched by off-kilter dialogue ("I'm not doing get help" just sounds soooo out of place at this moment) and weird framing. Like, Thor gets all these super-cool, physical fighting scenes, full-on frontal, kicking and punching the shit out of everyone. Again, I get that this is Thor: Ragnarok, and we also have the Hulk and Valkyrie who need their hero moments. But we do know that Loki is just as good a fighter as everyone else, he fights differently, but he's very capable of defending himself and others, as seen in Dark World. In Ragnarok, he's right there in the middle of the fight, but you never see him do anything. You see him close in on someone, cut, then you see him pull out a knife of a body or juggle his helmet or whatever, but never any real action that proves how capable he is as a fighter, not like Thor gets them all the time. You see him jump, and roll, and fall on his ass, or doing a pirouette and tossing his hair back afterwards. The focus is not on him doing his share of defending Asgard, but on how he's a weak and pathetic fighter (this post explains it with great visuals). The thing is, somewhat heroic  moments  have been filmed, but have been left out in favour of more ‘funny’ sequences.

- Talking about ridiculousness: There's a total of seven scenes where Loki falls on his ass, his face, or is somehow on the ground for some reason when it's totally not necessary. In comparison, in Dark World and Avengers, he was only ever on the ground when either defeated, or due to battle  action, not just for shit and giggles.

The one at Dr Strange actually makes me wince from the sheer impact with which he hits the floor, bouncing back two feet high in the air (can’t find the gif right now, but he does), and everyone in the cinema laughs. Actually laughs, like this is some funny one-liner. Someone's dropping from the sky and hitting the floor real hard and y'all laugh? Like no, this ain't funny at all, not to me.

​- What are these scenes actually good for? Why did the previous films set him up as a master magician who - as even Dr Strange says - is a force to be reckoned with, when everyone can just shove him to the ground like that? Why is nearly everyone suddenly more powerful than him?

- Shitty lines/shitty scenes: 'Safe passage through the anus'. Boy, it makes me cringe for poor Tom who actually had to say this shit out loud, or play stuff like the (thankfully deleted) portaloo sequence. Like, wow. I mean, I know I have a different type of humour from nearly everybody else, but this shit is just so not funny, and I really hate Taika Waititi for even including such lines and scenes in the script. I mean, I get that he favours Thor over Loki, but was that really necessary? It's so cringeworthy it makes my teeth hurt.

- (On a minor sidenote, can we talk about how it also speaks volumes that Hiddleston was given a costume that he can barely move in and that makes him visibly uncomfortable, yet no one gives a shit?)

To sum it up, I don't like how Ragnarok treats the character of Loki and ignores all of his potential in favour of cheap jokes. It says a lot if a script needs to make fun of one character in order to let its main character appear in a better light. Taika talks about how Thor's and Loki's relationship is at the focus of the film and how they finally get to resolve their problems. I'm sorry, but I don't see any of that. I don't see any brotherly moments or reconciliation or at least an attempt to make things right. And that brings me to the one character that I have the biggest problem with: Thor.

​Now, the general consensus was that Thor grows, he learns, he takes up responsibility, he has this great character development that makes him into a better man. I don't see that. What I see is a man who uses and abuses everyone in his path to achieve his own ends. He thinks he can command Valkyrie by repeatedly reminding her of her oath to the throne (the throne being a very prominent motivation for Thor, as we shall see) even when she's made clear that she gives a shit. When that doesn't work, he keeps trying to guilt-trip her, and when that doesn't work either, he fakes concern to get her attention, and once he has it, he cruelly pushes all the buttons that he knows will make her yield (basically telling her: you can either forget everything and rot on this planet, or you can do something about it and help me).

​He manipulates Banner in the same way because he needs the Hulk for his Asgard mission. I mean, telling Bruce he prefers him over Hulk, and telling Hulk he prefers him over Bruce - I get that it's meant to be funny, but when you think about it, it isn't. It's manipulative as heck and it's exactly the kind of shit he always accused Loki of: lying to get his way.

And when it comes to Thor's interactions with Loki,  he has not learned a single thing. He still treats Loki the way he always did: a scapegoat at worst, a convenience at best. In Norway, after Odin departs, Thor doesn’t hesitate to immediately accuse Loki of both Odin’s death and bringing about Hela as a consequence - as if Loki had any inkling that this was gonna happen. He wouldn’t be so stupid as to bring destruction to Asgard on purpose, remember it’s the only home he ever truly knew, so even if he did let things slip while posing as Odin, he surely never meant for Hela and Ragnarok to happen. He was just as surprised about the Hela revelation that Thor was, and as for Odin’s death - I doubt that this was intended. Especially since we still don’t know xactly how Loki got rid of Odin, but if he’d wanted to kill him, he could certainly have done so while Odin was weak and defenseless, but he didn’t - he just wanted him out of the way, not dead. Yet Thor completely assumes Loki is to blame for all of it, and as a consequence he falls back into his abusive treatment of his brother.

Yes, all I see is an abusive sibling who purposefully manipulates his mentally unstable younger brother. He knows what Loki has been through in the past; moreover, he has heard from Odin himself just how everyone in this family was played and lied to. He has seen what that did to Loki in the past. Thor knows exactly what's at the core of his brother's mind: the ambition to gain his family's approval, a fear of being abandoned, a deep-rooted sense of worthlessness and the ever-prominent desire to impress his older brother. Of course Loki sucks at saying all this out loud, and Thor probably doesn't know the full extent of the damage, but after the events of Avengers and Dark World he must at least have an inkling of what's going on inside that mind. 

​And yet he goes ahead and uses all of Loki's greatest fears against him:

"Our paths diverged a long time ago" - no they didn't, he just never let Loki catch up to him.

"It's what you always wanted" (never seeing each other again) - have you even paid attention to your brother, you big fool?

"But you, you stay the same", "you could be so much more" etc. - and being what, exactly? Thor's thrall, tagging along behind him, helping out when shit hits the fan, and otherwise keeping his mouth shut? To Thor, Loki is only acceptable when he behaves like Thor wants him to. He fails to see that it's Loki who's forced to change more than anyone else. He was forced to change almost first thing after being born, from a Jötun baby to an Aesir one just to please his new father. He's constantly forced to change to adapt to everyone's expectations: Odin's, Frigga's, Thor's own. And when he refuses to play along, he's the one at fault.

​There are two scenes in Ragnarok in particular that I find hard to watch in respect of Thor's abusive qualities. First, the elevator scene /Get Help.

​Loki tells Thor no three times, he even gives him a reason why he doesn't want to do Get Help (which, considering Loki and his difficulties to express emotion, to Thor no less, is a big deal). I don’t know about y’all, but if my sibling told me they found something humiliating, which is several steps up the uncomfortable scale from "I just don't like it", I would never force them into it. Thor has to respect his brother's feelings and stop right there. A no is a no, even from Loki, even in this situation, especially considering how the entire move is nonsense after all - but Thor doesn't stop. He disrespects his brother's wishes, he ignores Loki's feelings, and what's worse, he even belittles him for it and laughs it off: No, for me it's not.

​Yes, well, Thor baby, guess what? It's not always about you.

Even worse is the taser/obedience disk scene. It makes me physically cringe. And I will happily fist-punch everyone who tries to tell me it's just "a joke" or "friendly sibling barter" or wasn't "meant to hurt Loki" or that Thor "didn't know". I'm sorry, but nope.

​Thor knows exactly what the obedience disc does, how it hurts. He has absolutely NO reason to use it on Loki. Loki has been playing along to his plans, he has even tried to offer Thor an explanation and a possible way out, but at that time Thor decided to throw a tantrum and sulk. Did he really think Loki would go through with that half-arsed attempt of collecting the 'reward' for Thor's capture from the Grandmaster, when just some hours before Loki has told Thor that he Grandmaster is a lunatic and that he basically wants to leave Sakaar just as bad as Thor does? Did Thor even listen??? Not to mention that there never was a 'reward' promised by the Grandmaster; instead a threat of public execution looms over Loki if he fails, so the reward he speaks of is possibly, once again, getting away with his life (while using the time this buys him to come up with a means of escape).

​There was no reason at all to place the taser disc on Loki and leave him there - besides, Thor must have planned to use the disk even before he could be sure Loki was going to betray him, so it was Thor's plan all along to leave his brother there for whatever sick reason. How could he be so sure Loki would find a way to free himself? How could he be sure the rebels would be the ones to find Loki, and not the Grandmaster, or Topaz, or any of the hundreds of guards that swarm the place? Not to mention that time passes differently on Sakaar, so who knows how long Loki lay there writhing in agony. Thor walking off telling him "Good luck, I guess" while his brother is in obvious physical pain, and at the mercy of a crazy dictator, is the ultimate cruelty. But the throne is always more important, eh?

​How could Thor be sure Loki would follow him to Asgard and come to his aid? Seriously, Loki could just have taken that ship and flown to the other end of the universe for all he cared. He's the only Asgardian on a ship full of refugees, he has no reason at all to help Thor, not after the taser disc and the general way Thor treated him, and YET he comes after his big brother because he desperately seeks Thor's approval, and Thor knew that and manipulated his brother into exactly this behaviour back there in the elevator.

​And does Loki get a thank you? Not even! All he gets is a flippant "You're late" (everyone who tells me that's 'friendly sibling banter' again must have a truly fucked up relationship with their sibling), and then he's being ordered off to the vault to basically perform an act that could cost his life, without Thor even wasting a second thought to it. Well, we've already seen in Dark World how little Thor cares for Loki, as he just leaves his dead little brother behind to rot on a foreign planet. Doesn't even send anyone to come and collect the body or something. Doesn't even seem to care in Ragnarok whether Loki has made it out of Asgard alive or not (does he check frantically if his brother is aboard as they float off into space? No...but hey look, there's a throne, and people call him majesty, so all is grand).

​Not even the "I'm here" scene does anything for their relationship. How often does Loki have to prove that he will sacrifice himself for Thor, and how often does he get nothing in return but accusations ("You faked your death!", "You killed our father!"), dubious compliments ("Maybe there's some good left in you") or at the most Thor throwing him a bone of approval: "Maybe you're not so bad after all" instead of "Thanks for saving our arses".

​So, is this 'growing'? Is this 'mature'? Has Thor learned one single thing that makes him a better character? I don't think so. He takes up right where his father left, caring only for his throne, and manipulating his brother just the way Odin has always done. Yes, he became a little less uptight, and yes there's the new Thor who's sassy, nonchalant, doesn't give a fuck, doesn't let himself be played by his brother's schemes. I love the way Chris Hemsworth is playing this new Thor as opposed to the previous films. It's fun to watch him finally fill this role with a bit of spice. I really really like this new Thor. The problem is, I like how the new Thor is, but not what he does.

​All in all, I think what happened was that Taika and Chris Hemsworth decided it was time to put the focus on Thor and make his character the center of the plot - which is fine, with it being Thor: Ragnarok and all, but why does it have to be at the expense of another great character that could have been used in so many other, different, better ways for the plot? I think they tried deliberately to shift a bit of Loki's coolness and cunning to Thor who, let's face it, has been a rather one-dimensional character in the previous films.

​What I'm going to say now is unpopular, and probably mean, but it's the vibe I'm getting from day one since I started watching any Thor movies and BTS and interviews: All of this ties in nicely with Chris Hemsworth coming across as borderline jealous of Hiddleston and the success he gained for his portrayal of the Loki character, who was never supposed to steal Thor's spotlight. It's a shame Taika Waititi rolled with it in Ragnarok and actively added to this fiasco by way of bad filmmaking.

​On a final personal note: Just yesterday before watching the film I wrote a little scene post-Ragnarok where Thor finally gets to understand everything that bothers Loki, and finds a way to comfort his brother in a very gentle, caring way, because that was what I understood Thor had finally learned: true compassion, the ability to understand, the motivation to go and make up for every time he was a shitty sibling in the past. I can't see that now, not anymore after watching this film, not after what Thor has been made into and how he treats Loki :(

I'm sorry this got so long. I'll disappear for a while now and see if I can manage to un-watch this movie. Thanks for reading/listening.

[fytaem]

What drives SHINee Taemin to continue being a "Genius of hard work" - Behind Budokan concert through which he proved his true value【part 1】

{171101} Modelpress (tr: mredwardsanders — do not delete credits) Taemin (24), a member of boy group • SHINee, who made his Japanese solo debut last July. Growing from a cute young boy into a matured man brimming with sex appeal, and continually captivating his fans with amazing performances, he is of course [acknowledged] for his innate talents but is at times called a “Genius of Hard Work.” About his Nippon Budokan solo stage in July which showed the true value of “artist Taemin” and deeply impressed audience. And also about his Japanese drama which most likely was a new surprise (discovery) for the fans. He talked about his reasons for deliberately choosing a “super busy” path at model press interview. 

Taemin appeared to the interview room chatting with the staff(s). He was extremely busy having come to Japan from Korea after finishing filming a program that extended past midnight, but he greeted us with his [sweet] smile as usual. ― I heard that you arrived in Japan this morning. Taemin: Yes. The variety program filming lasted until late [at night] so I organized my belongings right after getting home, then I got on the plane after sleeping for about an hour. ― Thank you so much for your time despite your busy [schedule]. Taemin: Not at all. I just arrived from Korea so I’m sorry if my Japanese is a little weird / off (laughs). I personally volunteered to “be busy this year” ― Then I will begin by asking about the Budokan [stage] in July first. It was a dense hour and a half that condensed Taemin(-san)’s world-view, I was deeply impressed. Taemin: Thank you. ― I was told that you prepared within a very limited amount of time. What was your schedule specifically like during the (several) months leading up to the concert? Taemin: It really went by in a flash. SHINee activities, the drama shooting, and preparation for my Korean solo album…they all started together. I prepared while feeling the pressure of possibly not making it in time for Budokan, which was my first first solo stage. As expected, I do feel that I was a little short on time, but I feel relieved now after finishing it without any trouble. ― Didn’t you feel disarrayed with works/jobs in various genre starting all at the same time? Taemin: I told the staffs this year that “I’m okay even if I’m really busy.” I think I’m currently in a [state / position] where I’m the most excited and have the most energy so I thought if it’s not now, physically, I won’t be able to do it [in the future]. ― You’re still so young yet you already feel such a sense of urgency. Taemin: I wanted to do what I can while I can. I thought that I wanted to try my best. A stage that was completed by digging deep into “Taemin’s Identity”

― The show had 13 songs including the encore; the staging / production was quite elaborate for each song. You also said during the MC that “I had a hard time choosing because there was so much I wanted to do,” what were your thoughts leading up to the day [of the concert]? Taemin: First, even I wasn’t sure of how my color or image would turn out; so in a sense, as a way of introducing myself, I wanted to show a new (unprecedented) image as Taemin, a single individual, rather than as SHINee’s Taemin. When I thought that, there was so much I wanted to challenge. For example, for the song “I’m Crying,” the dancers are dancing and acting as if they’re in a musical; I tried to create a stage where even I, the person singing amidst all this can concentrate in its world-view. I also veiled my face with the outfit’s hood(ie) so [the audience] could better conceive the emotions in the song. ― You really put together (The stage / production was put together) really delicately. Taemin: I didn’t want to do something ordinary. I wanted create things no one had ever challenged before, things people haven’t really seen before in my own way. I prepared with with a lot of thought[*]. [*] with a lot of thought: having a hard time deciding, mulling over choices

― It takes heart to send out a new image to the world, you might have worries like “I wonder how people will respond?” Taemin: You’re right. Of course I do think that you need courage but I’ve been doing this challenge of changing my hairstyle many times when promoting as SHINee in Korea so…(laughs). ― That’s where [you point to] (laughs). [*] [*] As in “of all things you could have mentioned, you use changing your color as an example” Taemin: So I think there’s a part of me that’s used to (changing my image) (laughs). ― That was an unexpected point [you brought up] (laughs). Despite having the choice to have fun together with the fans at close distance, the constitution this time was one with a story and coherence as one show. I believed that this too was a huge challenge. Taemin: Right. Of course I thought that it was important for many people to sympathize (to connect with the audience) even more so because it was my first stage, but more than that, I fixated first on showing Taemin, the person distinctly in a relatively short amount of time. I did think, “I wonder if it was better if there were more songs where [I] could connect [with the audience]” ― No, it was very beautiful. Singing “Itsuka Kokode” with the piano at the end, you finished [the show] leaving a lingering feeling (afterglow). Taemin: That was also my idea. ― Purposely leaving out the MC, it was really beautiful how you ended in a way that stirred our imaginations. Do you have songs that you’re especially deeply attached to? Taemin: “Itsuka Kokode” and “I’m Crying.” “DOOR” is also cool but the ballads that I sing while focusing on my own emotions are memorable / unforgettable. Singing while playing the piano was a huge challenge for me. I wasn’t very good at it actually. My skills on the piano is still lacking so I couldn’t focus on singing. How can I do it well during the concert…I prepared feeling really pressured, but I finished it without problems. It became a challenge that I succeeded for me.

― That’s going to give you a lot of [self-]confidence. Taemin: Yes. I think I’ll be able to sing a lot more [*] while playing the piano from now on! (laughs) [*] more often ― Did you practice the piano until the last minute? Taemin: Yes. Really, until the very last minute. ― That means the most nerve-wracking time was waiting for you for the climax. Taemin: Right. Dancing and singing is something I can do / manage so long as I have energy but it doesn’t go that way with the piano. ― It requires a different skill. Taemin: Since I have to pay attention to the small details.

― For “DOOR” you were bound by ropes and bandages, it was a stimulating (exciting) stage. Taemin: “DOOR” was also a challenge. I think the presentation of the choreography that Nakasone Rino-san made was wonderful. She guided me so that I could express to the detailed parts [of the song / choreography]. ― How was the Budokan stage surrounded by the audience 360°? Taemin: It really makes me lose track of where I am! At first, we put “North” and “South” lables but once the [song] starts I don’t have time to look at them (laughs) ― Was that something you didn’t expect during your preparation period? Taemin: If I include [my activities] in Korea, it’s been about 10 years so I thought that if I tried the 360° stage, I would be able to do it right away (laughs). But when I actually [performed on the 360 stage] it was a bit difficult. There’s no reference so I would gradually but steadily go out of position (laughs). This was especially the case with “Sayonara Hitori.” ― It also became a new asset for the stage / performing then. Choreographer Sugawara Koharu, whom you worked together for “Sayonara Hitori” “Flame of Love” and your newest release in Korea, “MOVE” said on her radio program that there was a period when you were feeling down struggling with the mental pressure/burden while preparing for Budokan. Did you talk to her about your problems? Taemin: Right. She’s really kind and she would notice right away when I’m troubled / fraught. It’s hard for me to constantly stay happy so at times I would become sad and feel stressed but when that happened, Koharu-san showed me videos of my favorite [artist] Michael Jackson[*] and cheered me up. Casual words like “Do your best” also gives me a lot of strength. She’s someone I respect, of course in regards to dancing but also as a person. [*] It’s actually written “videos of Michael Jackson whom/that I like” My motivation is “myself,” I want to come through every challenge[*] and grow [*] all sorts of 

― After [completing] this Budokan, do you have any goals for the future[*]? [*] Goals: challenge, tasks Taemin: So I would have more stamina to spare (reserve stamina)[*]; it would be nice to ease on dancing, and take the balance towards singing. [*] Sorry I can’t come up with a good phrasing for this. He means that he doesn’t want to constantly be at his limit physically when performing. (I’m guessing it’s to give him more room to concentrate on other things so he isn’t as preoccupied on just pushing through a performance) ― If you were to give a score to this concert (Budokan)? Taemin: Eh, is 100 points the full score? ― Please go with that! Taemin:…Hmmm, it’s hard to give a score after all. ― Is it hard to express it in a number? Taemin: It’s really difficult! It’s just that, it’s always the same after finishing a concert but I’m always left with more desire than happiness. ― Like, “I want to do more next time!” Taemin: Yes, that’s right. ― Seeing your concert this time around, the fans were also saying, “Taemin is a genius of hard work” Taemin: No no…. ― It was a stage where we felt that strongly but where does your motivation (strength/drive) to constantly work hard in order to grow come from? Taemin: Hmmm…. I think I’m influenced by various things. For example, like developing your emotions and imagination by watching movies and seeing sceneries is one of them but I think it’s important to build experience outside of practice. I’m someone who regards both as important (treasures both). ― So [it’s important to] balance your ‘on and off’ (work and personal life)? Taemin: Yes. I don’t know exactly know why but when I take a short break from practicing dance and watch various videos, then practice again, there really are times when I improve even more. ― What’s your greatest motivation for you recently? Taemin: Recently, myself. Really! ― You are your own motivation. Taemin: Recently, I’m attempting various things in both Japan and Korea but I want overcome them and continue being “me” (someone) who grows even more. Should I say “myself” who’s grown more than myself from yesterday – a new “me”. It’s hard to put it in words…. Please help me! (and he seeks help from his manager) Everyone: (laughs) ― It’s fine, we all understand you! In Taemin-san’s case, is there an aspect where you grow as you draw in (engulf / involve / swallow up) everyone else around you? Taemin: I haven’t grown to that extent. When I see TVXQ-senpai, I understand exactly what that (“to engulf everyone”) means but I think I still have long way to go. ― I think it means… that people are struck seeing Taemin-san work hard, and are moved (to action) Taemin: I think it will still take me a long time to be like senpai (TVXQ) but..I would like to continue to grow.

[iris-sistibly]

4R’s: Encantadia Season 2 (April 12, 2017 mid week-ender episode review)

Episode 193

Recap:

Haliyah, goddess of two moons

Just as Cassiopeia hoped for, a beautiful goddess descended from the moon. Her enchanting voice immediately caught the attention of Cassiopeia, from the way she looks, Cassiopeia already knew that she was a goddess, and she’s none other than Haliyah. But when the latter saw her, she immediately went back to her home. Cassiopeia pleaded and tried to summon Haliyah back but failed, Cassiopeia heard another voice and told her she won’t be able to talk to Haliyah because she is elusive, she doesn’t like getting in touch with other creatures which is why she chose to live in the moon. Cassiopeia wondered who that was, not long after, a strange creature emerged from the stream.

Why, why love?

Alena was angry at what Memfes did with the Adamyans and immediately searched for him. Memfes appeared and made a deal once again with the sang’gre, marry him in exchange for the Adamyan’s freedom, once again, Alena refused his proposal and fought him instead. Because of her anger, Alena unleashed the power of the water gem and accidentally hurt Memfes, Alena realized what she did and became worried about him. Turns out, Memfes was actually fine and was unaffected, the chief of the Gunikars vowed to make Alena fall for him.

Ariana has been training non-stop in Lireo. Ybrahim has been watching her every move, and it reminded him so much of how Amihan fights back then. Manik came and told him how proud he is for having a beautiful wife-to-be, something which surprised Ybrahim. Manik explained that Ariana was betrothed to him as part of following their tribe’s customs, Manik knew Ybrahim feels something towards Ariana and low-key stated to stay away from his woman.

The thief in Etheria

Pirena and Deshna went to Etheria, the younger Hathor warned Pirena not to make her a bait once again. Hitano came and found the sisters, he also found out what the two had been up to. Pirena and Deshna wanted to make it to Etheria without anyone noticing and came up with a plan to make Hitano a bait to trick the Etherian soldiers, Hitano agreed, but only in one condition, if the sisters does not make it back right away, he’ll follow them. The three proceeded with their plan. Hitano made the soldiers run after him while Pirena and Deshna sneaked inside. Pirena and Deshna already made it inside and fought the soldiers guarding Avria’s room, not long after, Asval and Andora came and called their queen to tell her that there was an intruder in Etheria—Hitano. Avria reminded Hitano about the deal Etheria made with Lireo, Hitano bluffed that he was just strolling around Etheria which Asval refused to believe and even accused him of being a spy. Andora suggested to punish him or kill him (which was impossible since Hitano is an ivtre) but Avria did not allow that and set him free instead, after all she made a deal with Danaya and she still has the water gem to obtain.

Hitano went back to Lireo and informed Danaya about what Pirena and Deshna has been up to, and through the help of Imaw’s cane they found out that Pirena wanted to obtain Etheria’s golden hourglass which has the power to turn back time, Danaya already knew Pirena wanted to go back to the time when Cassiopeia’s island was under attack to save Mira. But it wasn’t the time for Pirena to do such thing for it will ruin their plans and the temporary ceasefire will be voided.

The sisters went to Avria’s room where the golden hourglass was but Pirena got disappointed to find out that the hourglass was no longer there. Avria sensed that there is another intruder in Lireo and immediately ordered her soldiers to search the entire palace. Avria went back to her room and found out that the hourglass has been stolen and suspected that it could be the diwatas to committed the crime.

Pirena went back to the camp and was very frustrated, all of her hopes to save Mira has vanished. Deshna calmed her sister down and thought that Avria might have placed the hourglass somewhere else, desperate, Pirena went back to Etheria and confronted Avria. Pirena demanded for the hourglass and warned Avria of how their meeting will end up if Avria does not give her what she wants. Danaya came and stopped Pirena from whatever she was trying to do and apologized to Avria, Danaya took Pirena away. Another misunderstanding emerged between the eldest and the youngest daughter of Mine-a, Danaya reminded her that her decision to back out from the war was for the safety of everyone and told Pirena to stop being selfish. Pirena resented that idea, for all she ever wanted was to regain what she lost. Until now, she hasn’t accepted her daughter and Lira’s deaths and will do everything to get them back. Danaya and Pirena engaged in battle, Avria who has been watching them through her staff was fascinated at how the sisters were trying to kill each other, but still wondered who stole the hourglass.

In the woods, Hagorn was all alone, carrying something. Etheria’s most powerful tool, apparently he was the one who stole it for his own purposes.

Rave/s:

💛 I.love.Danaya’s blue and gold warrior costume! Reminds me so much of Amihan and Danaya’s sisterly moments together, is this a sign that Danaya will ultimately be chosen as the air gem’s keeper? What do you guys think?

❤ Danny and Piry are fighting again, although Danaya has a point, Pirena’s side is also understandable. She’s a mother, and she’ll do anything to bring her daughter and niece back. That aside, I love the pain and tension between Glai and Shai (Sanya), both queens owned the scene. Also special shoutout to Pirena and Deshna! More sisterly moments please.

💀 Hm…so if Hagorn is the one who stole the golden hourglass, I’m pretty sure he’ll make a deal with Pirena before letting her get a hold of it, surrender Hathoria most probably, or I don’t know, Hagorn seemed to be less of a greedy bastard lately and is more focused at eliminating Etheria, it’s hard to tell from his emotionless face.

💎 Guys, I think Avria has already summoned Odessa, Andora, and maybe Animus back from the past before the hourglass was stolen? Nevertheless, I’m excited to see Juvila, kind of curious about Odessa but she’s a bitch so…whatever, and Avisala to bathalumang Haliya! I’m familiar with Valeen but I wasn’t expecting that she’s gonna play the character, well, it’s not that I am that excited for the big reveal, actually I am no longer excited for some new cast member reveal because this tactic to win the audiences is so overused. The only thing that I want to see is Juvila, Raquim and Mine-a’s return along with Lira and Mira (hopefully).

Rant/s:

🤔 Don’t you guys think that Ybrahim is hanging out in Lireo way too much? I would understand if Lira was still there, like I haven’t really seen him doing some kingly stuff, like dude, I know you lost your beloved and your daughter but you have a kingdom to look after, I want to see more of Ybrahim as a king and a leader in action rather than a love sick man. I think this arc is getting way more Lireo-centric. I miss seeing Sapiro and I haven’t really seen Hathoria’s interior in Hara Pirena’s reign and I want to see that.

🙄 STIFF. STIFF. STIFF. Is how I would describe Arra in her training scene, she’s making it so obvious that the routine is choreographed, very unnatural, I’m not a martial artist and she’s not as well but she can always get away with the struggle with GOOD ACTING, understandably Kylie is effortless because she has been doing martial arts since childhood, but there are so many cast members who have no background in martial arts but they can still make people believe that they are excellent fighters, and she had lesser time to train but like I said, she would have pulled it off with acting.  Unfortunately she can’t even make her acting natural so why expect right? Her face was so blank, it lacks the determination, her eyes doesn’t scream passion, she lacks fire, her body language doesn’t tell people how badass she has become, but rather she’s letting everyone know that either sword fighting is not her cup of tea, or she’s just playing around. Honestly I would rather go for a Manik-Ybrahim bromance than this love triangle that only involves two actors.

Best performer/s for this episode: Glaiza de Castro 🔥 Sanya Lopez 🍃

Rating: 8 out of 10💎s

Mid-week thoughts:

Overall this week has been exciting but not EXCITING, exciting. I think this whole getting Haliyah’s attention will be prolonged to give way for new characters which is kind of annoying, and I guess the whole plot of the season 2 will revolve around Emre getting Devas back. It’s annoying how these so-called guardians have yet to prove themselves, if you ask me Lira and Mira are the only ones who deserve the title, what’s the whole point of letting the three others live yet they haven’t done anything to be of help? At least Deshna is doing something, but right now, I feel like Muyak, Pao Pao and the most useless of all useless Ariana are just mere scene fillers, this arc failed to emphasize the story of the new guardians and just like book 1, this second season is still more on the sisters’ stories rather than a transition from the four daughters of Mine-a as saviors of Encantadia…or Amihan rather to “passing the responsibilities” to the seven chosen. Narrative-wise I think that the seven guardian’s plot was just a mere arc filler.

Have a blessed Holy Week and enjoy the long weekend! E correi diu mga bes! As always, thank you so much for the love 😘

Overall best performer/s for this week: Gabbi Garcia 🌊 Sanya Lopez 🍃

Overall rating: 8 out of 10💎s

Photo credits: From Twitter: @GMAEncantadia (Encantadia 2016-2017 official twitter acct) @gmanetwork (GMA Network); official website: gmanetwork.com @GMADrama (GMA Drama)

From Facebook: Encantadia 2016; official website: encantadia.com.ph

Video credits: GMA Network via YouTube & dailymotion

[honestgrins]

klaroline prompt from tumblr - "The girl playing your wife went home early today and I’m her understudy so I guess I’m your wife now haha why are you looking at me like that au"

I don’t know how I feel about this one, and I hope I did the prompt justice. Thanks for the prompt, Anon!

Drama Queen || Klaroline

“Forbes!”

Caroline perked up from her stretches to find the student director waiting impatiently. If there was one thing every freshman knew in Whitmore’s Drama Department, it was that Katherine Pierce hated to be kept waiting. Gunning to be a star one day, Caroline wasn’t about to disappoint her program’s dictator. She scrambled to stand, anxiously picking at her dance leggings as discreetly as she could. “Yes?”

“Lucy needs a rest day and Nora has a test tonight so she can’t understudy,” Katherine explained in a bored voice. “You’re on for Belle if you can fit the costume.”

“I can!” Caroline’s neck hurt from the force of her enthusiastic nod, but she thought it was a bit more dignified than clapping in her joy. Most underclassmen competed for the chorus spots, and she had been lucky enough to understudy for actual bit parts in that semester’s production of ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ To take the lead, even only for a night, would be a major opportunity. “Absolutely, I’m ready.”

Pinning her with an unimpressed stare, Katherine tilted her head. “We’ll find out in rehearsal,” she warned. “Klaus has already scared off the first two girls I asked this morning. Because of that, I need you to get to wardrobe ASAP then to choreography. I’ll be expecting you to have the routines down before vocal warm-up at four o'clock.”

As the director turned on her heel to check the other rehearsal rooms, Caroline wilted. Klaus Mikaelson was a legend in the department, more for his grumpy commitment to method acting than his onstage presence, which was plenty legendary on its own. Most people expected him to pull a Brad Pitt and head off to Hollywood one semester short of graduation - but no, he was finishing off his senior year as the Beast.

Boy, was that an apt casting.

Being in the chorus, the only time Caroline really saw Klaus was onstage or during full rehearsals. Apparently, his need to foster and channel the Beast even out of performance had him shut away from everyone in the cast. What she did see, however, was always intense and a little self-important. From what some of the older girls said, Gaston would have been a more natural fit for the dramatic ladies man he usually was. To be playing opposite as his love interest? Caroline was more than a little intimidated.

“What’s wrong?” Bonnie asked when Caroline returned to the chorus warm-up to grab her things. “You’re white as a sheet.”

“I’ve got to do a wardrobe check for Belle, I’m filling in tonight,” she said, her voice weak with trepidation.

Bonnie refused the blonde’s earlier restraint and bounced happily on her toes. “Care, that’s amazing!”

“Klaus Mikaelson is going to eat me alive.”

Snorting, Bonnie covered her mouth at Caroline’s pout. “From what Greta had to say about their fling last semester, you’ll probably enjoy it. Twice.”

Caroline fought a laugh, though her expression did pinch in discomfort. “TMI, Bon, and that’s not going to happen.” It wasn’t for a lack of appreciation, the man was hot. But her last boyfriend had been hot, too - until she found him sexting an ex-girlfriend on a date with her. “I’ve had my fill of fuckboys this year. I really don’t need to be the latest notch on the jerk’s belt.”

“So you say,” Bonnie teased. “The Caroline I know would have that bad boy wrapped around her finger before the show is even over tonight.”

Shaking her head, Caroline smiled indulgently. “Yeah, yeah,” she sighed. “I’ve got to get going before Kat notices-”

“Forbes!”

Caroline rolled her eyes, quickening her pace to the wardrobe department. Anxiety aside, she couldn’t let this chance pass her by.

After a hard hour of choreography practice and vocal runs, Caroline was jittery with nerves as she was laced into Belle’s petticoats for a mini dress rehearsal with the Beast himself. Katherine had very unhelpfully described the exact conditions that caused the first two girls she approached to run screaming from the opportunity, and all the ways her big break could go wrong constantly ran through her mind.

“Relax,” the director ordered, picking up the iconic blue dress Caroline would be wearing for most of the night. “Klaus is just a drama queen, no different than yourself when the costume almost didn’t fit.”

Caroline cringed as her minor fit came back to mind; if that was what she had to expect, then maybe she should be scared. “My ego can handle the needling and temper, but will he really drop me during dances if I don’t meet his standards?”

“Only during rehearsal.”

“Helpful,” Caroline muttered, smoothing the skirts along her legs. Her chest raised with a deep breath. “Okay, let’s get this over with.”

Katherine smirked. “I knew I liked you.”

Giving her best pageant queen smile in return, Caroline’s eyes were decidedly cool. “Glad it only took you three tries to find the right understudy, then.”

“Don’t push it, Forbes,” the director warned, though her smile didn’t falter. “I just can’t wait to see how you handle Klaus.”

Caroline swallowed at the implicit threat. Back straight and chin high, however, she strode out of the room to finally face the Beast; weakness would not be tolerated.

Irritation buzzed around him like a mosquito, and Klaus knew he was testing the limits of his commitment to the character. When Katherine explained about the casting change for that night, it took everything in him not to lash out. Still, he realized his bad reaction might have been harsh to the poor girls meant to be filling in. Sent to his reserved dressing room for most of the afternoon, Katherine warned him to work out his anger before she brings the next Belle to work with him.

Lucy might have hated him, but at least she was used to his mood swings; Klaus pitied the understudy paired with his Beast.

“Oh, stop pouting,” Bekah snapped, working on the seams of his costume. His baby sister had happily played the nepotism card for internship credit in the wardrobe department, and she was probably the only person left in the building that wouldn’t completely avoid his act. “The self-loathing thing is your character’s worst trait, and it’s even worse compounded with your surly attitude. Get over yourself and try on this coat.”

Rolling his eyes, Klaus shrugged into the costume. He obediently stood still as Rebekah pulled at the lapels to straighten the lines, until a knock at the door distracted them both. “I want you onstage in one minute to run through the dance with tonight’s Belle,” Katherine called from the hallway. “You’ve burned through two already, and I’m out of time to prepare another. Make it work, Mikaelson.”

“Ugh,” Rebekah groaned. “What does Elijah see in her?”

Klaus just grunted in disapproval, sweeping out of the room to leave Rebekah pondering their brother’s love life. A part of him wanted to refuse the new girl just to spite Katherine, but their rivalry wasn’t worth ruining the entire night’s performance. He never knew who might be in the audience, especially as agents had been reaching out over the course of his final semester, hungry for an awarded up-and-comer. As he approached the stage, Klaus could only hope he actually had chemistry with the last-minute understudy.

The performance hall was almost deserted; the crew was probably grabbing a quick dinner before making final adjustments. A blonde woman practicing her choreographed steps was the only other soul around, and Klaus watched as the skirts swirled around her ankles. She was a bit robotic in her movements, clearly focused on landing them precisely. Her exacting frown endeared Klaus to the girl he thought he recognized from the chorus, and he felt drawn to join her.

Moving quietly, Klaus stalked toward her from behind and carefully watched each step she made. Just as she was about to turn, he grabbed her hand and twirled her into his arms. Her eyes widened as he continued their dance, and he rather got the impression she wanted to stomp on his toes for surprising her. Still, she fell into step with him, running her hand along his shoulder to settle against his neck.

Had he been wearing his Beast head, her hand would have appeared to intimately twine into his fur. Without the barrier, he could easily feel the stroke of her finger on his bare skin. It was a natural connection between their characters, and Klaus sensed the chemistry he had been hoping for.

Pulling her into the sweeping waltz, he couldn’t take his eyes off hers. With each turn he lead her into, a new spark would appear in her green eyes: confusion, an urge for control, or - his favorite - pure delight as he twirled her once more. She felt right against him, her hand fitting perfectly inside his. Blonde curls whipped around her shoulders and hit his neck.

Klaus itched to draw the breathless smile she gives on the final dip, her chest heaving that he could feel each gasp from the hand that held her up. He towered over her a moment too long, which she likely noticed when her eyebrows furrowed with tension. Coughing, Klaus raised her back to a standing position, his hand still lingering on her waist for no other reason than he didn’t want to stop touching her. He pulled back as though burned by the realization.

“Well, hi,” the blonde laughed, brushing her hair out of her face. “I’m Caroline, the understudy. Guess I’m your Beauty for tonight. Ugh, that sounded gross, but you know what I mean,” she babbled. When he didn’t say, she looked up in question. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Letting his face go slack, Klaus just nodded as he turned on his heel to stride away.

Caroline watched him go, a frustrated confusion overwhelming her.

Slow claps from backstage distracted her, however, from the infuriating man who just left their surprisingly charged rehearsal. Turning, she found Katherine smirking at her again. “What?”

“I’m congratulating myself for choosing well,” she gloated. “You really got under his skin.”

“Oh,” Caroline huffed without humor. “So that was the Beast I’ve been hearing so much about?”

Katherine shook her head. “Honey, that wasn’t the Beast. That was all Klaus. It’s about time someone broke his method ass, I was about to kill him. He’s inhuman enough as it is.”

With her skin still humming from their dance, Caroline wasn’t so sure.

Klaus stormed into his dressing room. The blood buzzed in his veins, and he needed to do…something. His thoughts were too frazzled for him to settle on a course of action.

Of course, he had forgotten his dressing room wasn’t empty for a bit of self-evaluation. Without looking up from her stitches, Rebekah sneered, “Are you going to scare this one off, too?”

“Leave me be,” he ordered.

Despite the grumbling fuss his sister put up, Klaus was pleased when she went without throwing so much as a shoe. She still had a parting barb as she dropped the costume she had been working on, though. “A little appreciation would be nice, Nik.”

The sentiment clicked for him, even if it would be directed in a different direction than Rebekah had hoped.

He pulled out his phone to look up the number for a florist. “Yes, hello,” he said when the call connected. “I’d like a bouquet for delivery, Whitmore Drama Department after seven p.m. Red roses in full bloom.”

He hears the florist typing, his heart beating oddly in his chest. “Anything for the card, sir?”

Thinking for a moment, Klaus licked his lips before answering. “'Thank you for the dance, Caroline.’”